Evanston: affection; spring
Evanston: affection; spring
THE OPEN BOAT: Across The Pacific is now available in a Kindle Edition.
Although I didn’t reread it word for word as I did shadows, I went over the book more than a dozen times, trying to sort out the formatting and remove errors. I’m sure I didn’t find them all; but after four or five days, I acted on my words in the previous post and had a sense of what is enough.
As with most things, performance improves with practice, and I expect to have THE OCEAN WAITS, incorporating CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE II, in the Kindle store in a few days.
While working on THE OPEN BOAT, I came across several passages that interested me.
I did not recall that I liked Fiji so much on that first visit; but obviously I did.
My feelings about Fiji changed with the first military coup in 1987. There have been two or three more coups since then. Readers in New Zealand and Australia are aware that Fiji is presently a racist military dictatorship, but those north of the Equator probably aren’t. Anyway, I liked Fiji a lot in 1979-80.
One consequence of the passage of time is that prices that I once found so outrageous in Tahiti have now, with the exception of a $20 finger nail clipper, become normal elsewhere. Prices in Tahiti have, of course, continued to increase and maintain the gap.
I recall reading somewhere that “Drascombe Luggers are under-canvassed.”
Right.
On the first passage from San Diego to the Marquesas, I wrote: During that last week at sea CHIDIOCK covered 850 miles with day’s runs of 119, 125, 114, 115, 146, 113, 118, all verified by good (sextant) sights, and for that matter by our arrival in port so quickly. Not bad for a boat with a fifteen foot waterline.
I knew I had a few day’s runs of over 140 miles, but that I never reached 150. I thought 146 was the best, until yesterday when in the chapter in THE OCEAN WAITS about the passage across the Coral Sea I came across: The miles passed effortlessly beneath the hull: a best day ever of 148, a best week’s total of 861. And all so easy. Aboard a small sailboat there is no correlation between suffering and progress. Seldom did we take enough water aboard to enable the bilge pump to draw. And we had only five minutes of rain.
To that I would add that there is no correlation between suffering and progress on a bigger boat, either; or in life.
Elsewhere in THE OPEN BOAT I found a passage that I tried not long ago to find in STORM PASSAGE. Now I know why I was unsuccessful.
The terrible thing about the sea is that it is not alive. All our pathetic adjectives are false. The sea is not cruel or angry or kind. The sea is insensate, a blind fragment of the universe, and kills us not in rage, but with indifference, as casual byproducts of its own unknowable harmony. Rage would be easier to understand and to accept.
Obviously I like boats, but I don’t love them. I don’t love the sea either, although I like being at sea. My experience is that it is pointless to love something--or someone--that can’t love you back. Perhaps I would feel differently If I had built a boat myself; or had one of wood, which is alive, as plastic and steel and aluminum are not.
But I think it is probably easier to have affection for small boats than larger ones.
I’ve owned THE HAWKE OF TUONELA for almost eighteen years, and I’ve put more of myself into her than any other. But I don’t have the affection for her I felt for CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE.
When I learned that unexpectedly she had followed me over the reef onto Emae Island, I wrote:
Exhilaration swept over me. The moment was as joyful as had been my surfing uninjured over the reef in the dinghy and made up for much of what I had endured while adrift. Steadfastly I deny most of the myths of the sea. But I find ever increasing difficulty in not endowing the yawl Chidiock Tichborne with the attribute of character. If she is a thing, she is a wonderful thing, one of the finest creations of man.
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With temperatures above freezing, I shoveled the snow from our balcony yesterday, and we put the mini-Weber gas grill back out there so Carol could grill a fish for dinner.
For me summer is less than two weeks away; and spring is not far behind.
Sunday, February 13, 2011