Evanston: fine weather; hard times
Evanston: fine weather; hard times
Perhaps South Africa should pay me to stay away.
When I was there in 2002 the rand had recently gone from seven to fourteen against the U.S. dollar, and during the seven months I was in Cape Town usually traded at eleven. In the intervening years the rand strengthened to six to seven against the dollar; but not long before I sailed into Durban in September of this year, it began to weaken. On my arrival it was just below eight and is now at 9.4. Although I’ve bought most of the boat stuff I need here, I will still have several significant expenses when I return, including two new deck hatches, a haul-out for antifouling, a rigger’s bill, and probably the fabrication of a new radar mount. They may all be significantly less expensive in January than they would have been in September.
The Australian and New Zealand currencies, too, are falling against the U.S. dollar. Both have been unsustainably high U.S. for several years and their steep declines have only been to traditional levels.
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Despite a fear of heights caused I believe by my father’s committing suicide by leaping from an eleventh story hotel room window--while I have gone to the edge of human experience, I do not go to the edges of buildings--I have often felt that my sailing has more in common with mountain climbing than with the way most people sail. RIDING GIANTS, a documentary we watched the other evening, has caused me to think that perhaps there is even greater similarity with big wave riding.
I was a body not a board surfer. Because my skin has had way too much sun, I don’t spent time on beaches any longer, and caught the first and last waves on my sixties in Brazil in 2002. Surfing down a wave in a 37’ boat in the Southern Ocean doesn’t count.
I’m not sure at precisely what height board surfers consider a wave to be big. From the movie it appears to be about 20’. And on the north shore of Hawaii and at a place called Mavericks south of San Francisco and even a spot near the south end of Tahiti, they go up from there. Some of the footage in RIDING GIANTS is truly astounding. The attitudes of many of the surfers, who too are experimenting with the edges of experience, are close to mine about sailing.
The very biggest waves move too fast to be caught by a man paddling a board, and so a recent innovation has been to be towed onto the face of the wave by a jet ski. Once on the wave, the risk has not been diminished; but I identify more with the man who surfed Mavericks alone for fifteen years before anyone else discovered it.
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All the windows and doors are open. The sun is shining. The temperature is in the 70ties, and due to go above 80 tomorrow and Sunday. Chicago is paradise. Well, perhaps not. But it is pretty nice now.
I walked down to the lake and took the above photo near the entrance of a nearby residential building. Halloween is a big deal here.
There were many “For Sale” signs, though perhaps they were always there and I just did not notice before.
Friday, October 10, 2008