Circumnavigations galore going on these days!
Of course there's Derrick & Taino going around Puerto Rico (or should I say Boricua). That expedition ran into a little bumpy stuff, which unfortunately got a bit of an internet airing. Personally, I wonder what percentage of serious, multi-day trips get pulled off without at least one set of toes getting stepped on. There's always going to be somebody who wanted to go who gets left out, or people who start out full of excitement & best intentions & then find that the working partnership is not working out the way they hoped.
heck...that latter scenario...that's sort of universal, isn't it? The gift that us people-types have for imagining things the way we'd like them to be can turn out to be more of a white elephant when our imagined versions of things run afoul of other people's imagined versions of things en route to turning those dreams into reality.
Oops. Didn't mean to wander down some deep philosophical path here. Too much work to do this week. Year-end close here at Really Big Children's Publishing Co. Fun fun.
Main thing is that I wanted to send out good wishes to the Chasing the Ana folks (hope everything from here on is smoother sailing) plus I wanted to give a quick shout-out a couple of other friends of mine - Pier 63 folks -
First off, congratulations to O. & F. on successfully completing a full trip around Long Island! So cool. They just did it for fun; they'd planned what they thought was going to be a reasonably leisurely trip, no record shots or anything like that. Then they got slowed down by some steady headwinds; on Thursday O. had emailed me saying they wouldn't have rounded Breezy Point by Saturday evening (there was some talk of them using Sebago as an overnight that night, prior to paddling their last leg, up to Pier 40, on Sunday, and I'd offered to head out & play hostess if they wanted)...well, I was amazed to open up my email yesterday morning (Sunday) to see an email from O. saying that through determination and long days, they'd gotten back to Pier 40 on Saturday afternoon at 3:00!!! She also mentioned that Long Island is long, so if you had any doubts on that matter, you have the word of a couple of very trustworthy women.
Still can't get over the sheer amount of mileage they managed to make up. Even spurred on by the rotten forecast we had for today (let's just say I won't need to go water my garden tonight), that's amazing. Congratulations!
And in closing, here's TONS of good wishes going out to the paddler formerly known as "Sticks" - the one & only Marcus Demuth, launching on June 7th to paddle around Ireland! Go Marcus! BTW this is for a good cause, so if you feel like throwing a little money in the direction of some brave Irish lifeboat folks, head on over & sign up to sponsor him!
Boy, and the biggest thing I've circumnavigated lately was Carnarsie Pol.
Heh heh. Maybe I'll buy a cart & circumnavigate Coney Island!
Showing posts with label Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Show all posts
Monday, June 04, 2007
Monday, May 07, 2007
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.
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.
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