San Diego: reflections
San Diego: reflections
What a serendipitous grace to have had these days here where much of my life was centered when I was younger, where I began two of my voyages, the one in CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE only a few hundred yards away on the other side of this basin.
Despite the occasional brain lock, I usually feel so good, so full of life. Old age is no excuse. You can still live passionately beyond seventy.
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When I biked along Mission Beach on Saturday, saying good-bye for a while to the ocean, the waves breaking near shore were unusually green and clear, long curls of translucent jade glass.
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This time on GANNET has been decisive.
I’ve been aboard longer than ever before, and pleased, as well as slightly surprised, how easily I can live aboard her. Contemplate reducing your life to a crawl space. I have. I’ve written of entering the monastery of the sea. GANNET is the perfect monk’s cell.
Yet I offer you an odd fact. The person you know who has been most alone, hundreds and thousands of miles beyond any other human being, beyond any possibility of contacting any other human being, for years--I don’t actually know how many; but three or four or five or more--is also probably the person you know who has been most married.
There was a closure in getting the new rig in place.
(I look up from where I am typing on my laptop at Central and see a black crowned night heron sitting on the spreader of the sailboat astern. Five pelicans fly by. Pelicans, who look prehistoric, fly badly, but glide well.)
I sailed GANNET farther than I had before. Her performance gives me pause. At times she moved better than I thought she would. I anticipate that when I get twenty or more knots aft of the beam on a passage I will enter a whole new realm.
I also learned that I am going to have to be careful about the insidious effects of fatigue.
I’ve long known that we break down most quickly from lack of water and sleep. Food is a very distant third. We need sleep and water within two days. Food weeks.
I didn’t think I was that tired as I ended the Guadalupe sail, but obviously I was. That night back in the slip, I slept for ten hours. I don’t recall when I last slept that long. And I slept almost as much the second night, after which I was again myself.
It should not come as a surprise that I cannot push as hard at 71 as I did at half that age. I tell myself that I’m coming down from Everest and I’m not yet at base camp. But perhaps I am.
That’s all right. Once this world was clearly not enough. I needed a bigger planet. Age and the prospect of sailing GANNET father than anyone ever expected a Moore 24 to sail make life interesting.
The heron is still on the sailboat’s spreader. The sun has set, and in this dim light I can’t make my camera focus on the bird, rather than GANNET’s main sheet in the foreground. How can it be that my deficient one-eyed vision is superior to the best modern electronics?
The Rings of Saturn, or Laphroaig from above.
Monday, August 12, 2013