Rain eased at 10:00 a.m. and I put on my foul weather gear and rowed ashore.  With no wind, temperature in the 70s F, and 100% humidity, it was too hot for foul weather gear.  I felt as though I were in the tropics.

        I showered, filled a jerry can with water, and bought a few things at the general store.  The young woman at the cash register said, “Looks like a nice lunch.”   I told her that what she was looking at was lunch, dinner, and snacks.  Unnecessarily I added, “I don’t eat much.”  To which she replied somewhat incredulously, “You certainly don’t.”

        I expected that this would be the sum of my conversation for the day;  but just after I rowed back out to HAWKE, a sailboat powered by with a couple in the cockpit and their son, perhaps four or five years old, standing on the foredeck in mini-foul weather gear.

        I called to them, “That is a great picture.”

        The reply came from the man in French accented English, “He is standing watch.”

        I said, “What a great childhood.”

        He said, “Thank you.”  Understanding correctly that I was complimenting the parents for giving the boy such a gift.

       

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        When visitors come aboard THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, they invariably comment on how uncluttered she is, on deck and below; the number of books aboard--HAWKE was my only home in pre-Kindle days and I had no possessions that were not aboard, and it has never been convenient to transport them to Evanston;  and how there are no trinkets that cruisers usually have in the cabins as souvenirs of places they have visited.  I have noted before that I am not a cruiser. 

        An outdated and moldy chart of my voyages is on a locker door--replacing it with a new version is on my to-do list--and the only photograph in the cabin is the one above, taken almost ten years ago at the west end of Horta, in the Azores, a month after we sailed from Boston.  Carol is standing in the ruins of a lighthouse destroyed by a volcanic eruption in, I think, the 1960s.

        Time and salt air are not kind to photographs, but I won’t take it down.