Evanston: relative; small boats; patient
I walked down to the lake yesterday. It is just at freezing here. I don’t understand why, even with goose down comforters, these geese hang around. Maybe they are Cubs fans.
A sign of climate change is that the lake is not frozen. Contrast the above photo with this one taken of the same place, our South Beach, three years ago. What I called Mount Evanston was about my height and composed of ice and snow. 
I managed to climb to the top, but then had trouble getting back down the slippery slope, old sailor as treed cat. As has been pointed out, you don’t see many cat skeletons in trees and I, too, did manage to extricate myself.
There is freezing and there is freezing.
Kevin, my friend and neighbor at Driscoll’s Mission Bay Marina emailed, “It’s been freezing here (50s and 60s) and finally getting into the low 70s today.” It was 74ºF in San Diego yesterday.
When I wrote to a friend in New Zealand that temperatures are due to drop to -18ºC, which is 0ºF, here next week, he replied asking if that was a typo. Ah, the innocence.
There are many things to love about New Zealand, among them that it is not possible to be a thousand miles from the sea, and that Aucklanders who are not skiers can’t even imagine real cold.
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I’ve had correspondence about small boats recently and been thinking about why I especially like them. One reason is that keeping the sailor close to the water--CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE had 14” of freeboard; GANNET about 24”--the experience is immediate and direct. And another is that they are often capable of much more than most people expect.
Steve Earley sails a Welsford Pathfinder, an 18’ open boat similar to CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE, that he and his father built. I’ve not seen his boat, but I have seen a sister ship built by Tom here in the flatlands and sailed out of North Point Marina. They are lovely craft.
David teaches a class for young people who have built two boats. This slim and elegant one sports an excellent sea serpent/dragon.
I suppose the difference is that being wet, sea serpents can’t breathe fire.
From Florida I received an invitation to go sailing from Kent who said that his wife, Audrey, owns a Drascombe Lugger. She allows him to work on the trailer and be ballast while sailing.
The Lugger is named ON KA HY E, Seminole for “Dancing Feather.” 
Audrey’s great-great grandfather, Benjamin Hunter, was captain of a mail schooner with that name in California in the 1840s and also took a 30’ longboat up the Sacramento River carrying supplies to John Fremont.
To have sailed California in those days would have been wonderful. (So would sailing California today, he muttered ruefully.) I’m going to have to download and reread TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST again.
A happy coincidence is that Ben Hunter and I share the same birthday, he born 120 years earlier.
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The wind is whistling around our building.
The whales are migrating off San Diego.
The ocean waits.
Patient has two meanings.
Neither comes naturally to me.
Friday, January 18, 2013
