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A COMMITTMENT TO ACTION

It is two days before Christmas, 2012. The Mayan apocalypse has not occurred and there are no more excuses. I vowed to my wife last night that this time next year our boat ‘Seafire’ will be moored somewhere where palm trees grow indigenously.

This dream began thirty years ago when my then-new wife made it clear that she was not about to be persuaded of any of the joy of flight in light aircraft.

I was beginning to build a biplane which I intended to fly around the world. I rationalized that for the same amount of money and a lot less beaurocratic regulation I could own a small offshore sailboat which we could live in and leisurely travel wherever we wanted. It had been years since I had done any sailing but, with the inspiration of a friend who had built a boat in South Africa and sailed it offshore extensively, the notion was cast in stone.

Our first boat was a 21′ trailerable sloop which languished through a Northern BC interior winter. I remember checking the ice on a nearby lake on the May long weekend and deciding then that we had to move to the coast. The following spring found me bashing Northward in the late winter weather of March from Vancouver to Port Hardy. A small boat with squatting headroom and only a camp stove for comfort was a rude reaquaintance with the romance of the sea.

I beat the centerboard trunk out of the little boat on that trip. When I finally made it back south to Nanaimo, the first task was to remove the damage and design and build a permanent keel beneath the bottom of the boat. It was a huge job and if I were a sane man I would have turned my back on the sea forever but I was hooked. With memories of perfect minutes when the sea hissed past, the sails rumbled contentedly, a pod of dolphins rose and cavorted beside me and the last cold, wet, squall was now a rainbow retreating ahead of me, there was no turning back.

There have been seven more boats since. Each boat was offshore-capable. Each was a massive labor of love, intense effort and expense to refit and I never made a significant profit selling any of them. I can underline the ‘ Go simple, go now’ mantra of the fundamental sailor’s creed. At the time, there was always a good reason for my decisions but in hindsight, one only regrets what they don’t do. Go now!

All that having been said I am writing this morning for my own benefit. Today is committement day when I put a written pledge before my readers. Seafire is the eigth boat in twenty-six years. She is, incidentally, the second Seafire in my history but that is another story. She is a Downeaster 41, one of twelve motorsailors built by Downeaster Yachts in Santa Ana, California. Using their famous 38′ hull, they created a pilothouse boat with a large engine, a second helm inside, and a guest cabin, It is a perfect ‘Geezer boat’ and I intend to see a lot of palm trees through her windows as well as castles and pubs in the UK and Europe.

I’ll describe the boat and it’s refit and how I found her in future blogs. Today is the moment when I’m laying out the fleece. Despite being on the downhill side of middle-age, having some health issues and absolutely disastrous finances, the dream is alive.

Sterling Hayden once wrote that one should never begin a voyage when you can afford it. Only when you go out on limited means will you truly understand what sailing and life are really about. I know people who have sailed both with and without adequate means. Some describe their passages in miles and yet clearly have missed one passage of utmost importance. It is a distance of about six inches, the space between one ear and the other. It is the inner journey that endures over and beyond all others.

So today, I heave the lines aboard and point the bow toward the harbour mouth.

They’re Gone

So who’s gone? The lilies. Ils sont partis! Some rain, some wind, poof, not there anymore. Come again next year. This morning was a gusty day. With the wind rumbling in one ear, looking up showed the trees bending in the opposite direction as the wind on the ground. Aircraft, on a well-executed final approach to the nearby airport where we walk, suddenly found themselves trying to land downwind. This old pilot found myself looking up and muttering “Go ‘round, go around.” A Fedex flight forced its way on down. That’s awfully hard on the airplane, especially if you bend it. But commerce first, that’s what got us into this Covid mess. It’s another one of those pandemic days. Many of us seem to be making weird decisions. But in the woods berries are forming and any day now, the first wild roses will begin to appear. The planet’s life cycle goes on; whether we like it or not.

Bucky has breakfast. It is amazing to watch what, how much and how fast they munch.

For every one we see, there are dozens we miss.

Outstanding in his pond. It is difficult to take a bad photo of a heron.

After writing a blog, I usually let it sit for a little while, rather like making bread. Then I edit it, punch it down, and let it sit again. I don’t work under any deadline although sometimes I pretend I do and see what I can turn out in short order. Working under pressure can be a good thing. The last blog I posted was not a careless effort. My remarks, both about government and environmentalism, were a bit polemic and on the edge of being rants instead of simple amusement. In fact, I let it sit and ferment for a few days before deciding not to rip it apart and flush the whole thing. Finally the upload button was pushed. Then a few more typos appeared; it never fails.

The tattooed biker was a big man but he could not outlive the name his mother had given him: Hooker Fairybell.

In this time of special duress, I feel my best effort is comic relief. I certainly do not want to offend anyone. I want to help dispel anger and frustration, not add to what is already heaping up out there. But, that which has some folks doubled in laughter renders others livid with indignation. So, stir the pot, and review what you’ve got. Do your best, screw the rest. If you’re going to put it in writing be prepared to stand behind it, not like some politicians.

Arbutus Man. I suddenly spotted this wonderful carving while driving through nearby Chemainus. It marks a driveway and is executed in the trunk of a dead and seasoned arbutus tree.

T & J. Are they still together? Do they have children? Maple and moss, their love was not lost.

Now here’s a horrifying thought. Imagine finally winning a big lottery prize and sprinting off to the lottery office. There you find that to claim your winnings, you must first produce a receipt for your ticket. Well golly! Nobody told me that! I’ll just go buy tickets for another forty years. That’s a story I learned yesterday for a lady selling me a ticket. In these tense times, there are plenty of obstreperous people out there. “No, you didn’t win.” When push comes to shove we’re all at least a bit grumpy living under this overcast of doubt, and gloom and threat.

Found in thick beds, miner’s lettuce is a delicious wild green and makes a great salad.

A Field of Rape and Onions. Some images demand to be taken. Although it looks like somewhere near Yuma, AZ it is on a backroad here on Vancouver Island.

If some cheerless sonafabitch has not thought it up, another will concoct a worse yarn. There’s always a piece of information which can change a person’s perspective and stir their doubt bucket. Certainly the last few months have deluged us with new and often opposing information. Now there is apparently evidence that folks in North America were ill with Covid 19 as far back as December. That changes the whole picture. I’m arriving at a point where I don’t much give a damn about what any of it means. All I have is this moment and I’ll live it according to my conscience and as fully as I can so long as I am not endangering anyone else. That’s the best anyone can do, pandemic or not. “Someone to love, something to do, something to look forward to, while doing no harm.”

Poster Boy. Jack knew instantly that the new bed was HIS!

Last blog I mentioned the recent Michael Moore production, ‘Planet Of The Humans.’ Now videos have been posted which refute the claims made there. They point out that a lot of the information is severely outdated and skewed toward the sensational. Probably so. So are the ‘Think Green’ diatribes. One man’s truth is another man’s lie. It has always been so. So long as folks are urged to ask questions and can be inspired to take a personal responsibility about our world, perhaps the end does justify the means. It is not up to them to make a change, it is our personal obligation. Us, us, us! We need to get that into our Covid news-confused heads. Meanwhile, my dog Jack and I are going for another walk in the woods.

Mobile social isolation unit. I moved this beauty off the path before someone stepped on it. It was going as fast as it could.

“Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.” Henry Van Dyke

Graffiti With Comas

That title is a recent description which I heard about blogging. And perhaps so. This weary writer, who through the years, has produced a half-shelf full of manuscripts, and only managed to self-publish a few, is not sure at times why he bothers to continue blogging. No, blogging is not literature, but neither are some of the best-sellers I have read. Actually, I know why I blog, and the reasons are selfish so I will not openly admit them. I do truly like to think, however, that my noble ambition is to make people aware of the beauty all around us, of which so many lose sight in our rush through life. I also hope that a few folks are inspired to expand a questioning mind and not blindly accept all the slurry which washes around us. That’s all!

Here is the YouTube link to my latest video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcpvMIGUymY&t=47s

Those who have already seen it have been very kind with their remarks about my slowly- improving amateur efforts. If you will, please click the thumbs up button on the lower right-hand side of the video. Thank you. I have found videography to be a challenging, complicated endeavour, especially with my fumbling self-taught progress and low-budget equipment. I do enjoy completing a project and seeing a gradual improvement to the quality of my work. Hopefully I provide a gentle inspiration to a few.

Just a few days ago the mature corn provided cover and lunch for the deer.

Now…it’s hunting season. The corn, harvested and chopped into silage, will feed dairy cattle in the coming winter. That in turn will become the dairy products in the fridge and perhaps the roast in your oven.

The seasos progresses into autumn with our first gloomy, drizzling days. The rain is cold now. It is slashing down as I write. Jack lays by the glass door, exhaling great sighs in anticipation of going for our morning expedition. We will have some wonderful weather yet, but we all know that summer is over. I stowed the inflatable boat and focus on how to get myself south for a good part of the winter. The next time I inflate that dinghy, I intend it to be with Mexican air. Andalé!

Use it or lose it. Himalayan Blackberries, an aggressive invasive species and local enigma with wonderful berries and nightmarish brambles. The vines seem to reach out and grab you. If you panic and fight you become more ensnared. Hopefully brush cutter machinery will pass by to keep the road open until it all grows back again.

Grethe’s bloom. An exotic in the late summer rain. Enjoy it while you can.

Waterfront dream. Someone’s summer home, built at great expense languishes beside Porlier Pass as the flooding tide passes by. There must be comfort in knowing you own a place like this while you hurtle about in the city, trying to pay for it.

Sailing away from the sunset toward another dawn.

And then I found this; yet another link to YouTube, take this Ted Talk as you will. It inspired me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaRO5-V1uK0

“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.”

…Leo Tolstoy

BLOGGING ON

I still can’t get used to this bloggery bloggerty word BLOG! It sounds like something you’d find stuck under a school desk or a church pew or…something you’d do in a barnyard on a rainy day in your bare feet. Of course words like net and spam had a singular meaning not so long ago. Tweet, Twitter, Skype and Google are all terms with an unknown or very alternate meaning not so long ago. Language constantly evolves and so must we; like it or not.

Silva Bay, April 24th, 2012 — Silva Bay, April 24, 2012

Anyway, it’s another full moon tomorrow night. The forecast is for rain tomorrow so I grabbed this shot a few minutes ago. Already another month has jetted past. There has been little progress in getting this boat ready while other urgencies have kept interrupting. I do now have a new computer, a most appreciated early birthday gift from my wife Jill. No more vertical blank line in the middle of the screen and despite my apprehension I’m finding Windows 8 easy to assimilate….believe it or not!

I’ve fought and struggled to comprehend how to make WordPress work for me. Their people have sent some helpful e-mails and I’ve spent some quality time with a local cyber wizard named David Vincent, who has a brilliant little business here on Gabriola Island called Sleep Deprived Computer Techs. He did more for me in an hour than I’ve accomplished in a month.

Now I have things set up so I can post blogs with photos, set up links to other relevant sites and, I also now have a way folks can subscribe to my addled scritchings and receive then automatically by e-mail. What boggled me today was that wifi reception was, for some reason, quite spotty where David and I met for lunch but somehow he tweeked something on his cellphone which immediately produced a working connection on my laptop! I know it’s been a very long time since I built a crystal radio in grade school but I am absolutely amazed at some of the technology that I learn about and which other folks take for granted.

What’s all this cyber-musing got to do with anything? I recently offered an anecdote to a friend who was bogged down with trying to realize his dream. I said that when you climb to the top of a mountain, the first thing you see are more mountains. You determine to climb some of those but almost invariably you have to descend from where you are, cross a valley, and begin climbing all over again. So when you’re up to your ass in wormy mud in the proverbial swamp, wrestling nasty creatures, it’s hard to remember that you are actually mountain-climbing.

I am a writer, a frustrated one. All the books I’ve written are not producing any income. It appears that blogging is another way for writers to achieve some recognition. So with that ulterior motive in mind, I hope I can write inspiring and interesting bits for other people working towards fuller lives and their own personal dreams.

The swallows and purple martins have returned to the bay as well as brown-faced friends from their winter sojourns. The motivation is there and this beautiful boat where I sit writing is tugging at her lines. The days rattle by. We dive into another one as the rising sun warms the bay.

The First Quarter Is Gone!

It was full moon again last week and then, when the Easter Rabbit left his tracks, I realized that we’re already into the second quarter of the year. Bloody hell! Doesn’t time fly whether or not you’re having fun?

Plum blossoms and sailboat motoring toward Silva Bay — Hope, after a very long winter

It has already been a month since I was in Astoria Oregon reading some of my poetry and prose at the Fisher Poets Gathering. Fisherpoets.org will get you to their website. You’ll find my page ‘In The Tote’ and can actually hear me reading a couple of my pieces. They’re a great bunch of very talented people and I feel very honoured to be counted among them.

It was a great end-of-winter event which will leave me feeling affirmed and inspired for a long time after that special weekend. Soon however, reality sets in and one begins to bog down once again. I came back to a month that had my boss suddenly undergoing quadruple by-pass heart surgery. That has left us all in a muddle trying to help carry on in the shipyard. Of course that puts all of the personal plans in a spin and the ideas about new things to write are left on hold as just jottings in a journal.
Ah well, the winter weather hung on interminably so boat work has been set back for both me and my customers. Yet, progress on the great dream inches forward as the pages fly from the calendar. The dream is alive and ‘Inch by inch, every thing is a cinch!” I suppose it’s worth mentioning our last winter storm. Fifty knot winds with huge gusts through the night left one 41’ketch on the rocky foreshore here in the bay. I noticed her at first light and rushed to pull her off with the small shipyard skiff. It was a rising tide and I was inching her back into deep water with a minimum of damage when the local amateur pirates arrived. I eventually left the scene as they dragged the beautiful old hull across a rocky ledge incurring a huge amount of absolutely needless damage.
There were threats of violence from them but ultimately I have some great new story ideas. Such is life.

I live daily with the frustration that this blog site is not being developed as promised and required but hopefully that will soon fall into place. My very old and much abused laptop has developed a vertical stripe mid-screen which is slowly growing in width. It’s amazing how challenging writing becomes with those few letters censored out of each line. Hopefully with a new computer and perhaps a bit of tutoring about WordPress we’ll get this sailing/writing gig heading out of the harbour with a few sails up. Patience Billy, patience!

FRUSTRATED IN BLOGLAND

I’ll admit it. I am a cyber-Neanderthal. I decided to set up a blog/web site with WordPress because it was assuredly very easy, simple steps, nothing to it. It’s the way of the future, the perfect way for a writer to interact with the world. After initial frustration with the free mode, I paid money for the hold-my-hand level. NADA! So far all I’ve learned is that a dashboard is something to bash your head on, repeatedly. I can post text, unless I somehow make it ‘Sticky’ (What the hell ever that means) and an hour’s worth of writing is splift-gone into cyber space. Now I know that,technically, I am competent. I am able to operate most machinery, including boats and aircraft and I make my living fixing things mechanical and, in fact, most other things man-made. However I am suspicious of anyone who readily understands this cyber-babble with all the mutant language. I would not be eager to loan them my car keys, they live in a different reality than the one which has served my fairly well for the past sixty years. I think I’m glad I am closer to the end of my life than the beginning, My weary brain cannot comprehend what madness lies ahead with all this electronic enslavement. Let’s see what happens when I click here…
Blipft! What’s fatal error mean?
I’ve ordered a copy of WordPress For Dummies, perhaps there’s hope.

It’s interesting what one gets into on the way to a goal. What’s any of this got to do with going sailing? My last blog was full of grand intent and now I’m already nearly sixty days closer to the deadline I set. The refit continues, albeit at a winter’s pace. Phase one of the galley refit has been completed in the gloom of winter despite the rigours of living in the boat at the same time. For the time being, I’m back at work in the shipyard, I’ll soon move on, but for the time being that’s what is going on. In a few days, I’ll be in Astoria Oregon for a few days to attend my annual pilgrimage to the ‘Fisher Poets Gathering’. (Fisherpoets.org) It’s a raucous event where commercial mariners, mostly fishermen, gather to share their writing and music. The eloquence and genius there is amazing. It is an affirmation of blue-collar dreamers who belong to the sea. I’ll be back.

A COMMITTMENT TO ACTION

This dream began thirty years ago when my then-new wife made it clear that she was not about to be persuaded of any of the joy of flight in light aircraft.

So today, I heave the lines aboard and point the bow toward the harbour mouth.