High Speed Monday Post

5 million things to do today. Quick lunch break post to say:

My friend Marcus is awesome. Go check out what he's doing. This is somehow really particularly wonderful because if I'm remembering correctly, one of the things that really inspired him to do the kind of paddling he's doing was reading Chris Duff's On Celtic Tides. There's a nice symmetry to this, somehow. He's so low-key about it too. Good guy doing a good paddle for a good cause. Go Marcus. I'm honored to call you a friend.

Not so good news: Unfortunately it seems I'm going to have to work a verse about banging into a freighter into my Ballad of the Schooner Anne. Obviously everyone's ok (I say obvious because I wouldn't have mentioned the ballad if anyone was hurt) - but I don't much like being anywhere close to a moving freighter & this has to have been really scary. There is some damage, badly bent bowsprit, no more roller-furling jib. You can read about that here, and the next post is a discussion with Reid that I don't have time to listen to right now. I was rooting for them to at least have a respectible go at it - will be interesting to see how they deal with it.

I guess I have to say that if it was me, I'd probably say "Well, we've only been gone 15 days, let's put into port, fix the damage, and then try again". But I'm pretty well known among my friends as being a bit of a stick-in-the-mud.


Plus I do wonder if there are pressures on Reid & Soanya that might weight their decisions - I found myself thinking of the Hokule'a's inaugural voyage (which was when Eddie Aikau died) when they left, for reasons I don't have time to get into & don't even know if I consider it my business to talk about, not being big into armchair quarterbacking (almost said Monday-morning QB'ing, but nobody's called the game here). Not the same setup, but the problem with attracting the public eye is that then the public eye expects a certain performance & if they don't get it...yikes.



I do know that we lost the bobstay on the Adirondack one September in a starting-line collision with the schooner Pioneer aone year, and continued to sail with no jib for the rest of the season, but when a boat's designed to carry a certain set of sails & then loses the ability to use one, the balance won't be what it's supposed to be. For 2 hour trips to the Statue of Liberty, that wasn't a big deal. Open ocean? Dunno.

At any rate, I wish Reid & Soanya luck & the courage to make the right decisions now.

I'm not a good enough sailor, and I don't know the Anne, or Reid, or Soanya, well enough to claim to know what those are. Whatever keeps them safe, mostly.