Evanston: departure and thank you
Evanston: departure and thank you
Some of you may recall the above photograph, which I first posted a year and a half ago. It may become my official “gone sailing” photo. Soon a toy schooner sailing a sea of green granite will become a green sloop on the South Atlantic Ocean.
This may be my last entry until South Africa. Or it might not. We are presently between snow storms. A few inches fell last night and this morning. More is due tonight. Sunday, the day I am due to fly, is supposed to be clear, but I could be delayed.
Assuming my duffle bags and I arrive in Durban on Monday, and assuming the boat is intact, I have a few weeks of work to do before sailing for Cape Town around Feb. 1.
From there the rough schedule is to set sail for the Caribbean, probably nonstop to the Virgin Islands, by March 1. That passage should take six to seven weeks, making an arrival in the last half of April. As I have noted earlier, Carol will join me or I will fly back for a few weeks from somewhere in the Caribbean.
The Virgin Islands to Panama should take between one and two weeks.
I hope to be through Panama in June, followed by the 4,000 mile, roughly five week, passage to the Marquesas Islands, arriving in July. From there it is three to four thousand miles to New Zealand, depending on route. I’ll probably stop in Tahiti, but am otherwise undecided. I don’t want to arrive in New Zealand before the last half of September.
It all totals about 15,000 miles, which should be enough for a while.
I’ll update this journal and post my passage logs when I can, but obviously will be out of touch for prolonged periods.
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I prefaced my first book, STORM PASSAGE, with a few lines from William Butler Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”:
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds
And I ended the book with reference to an exhibit of Chinese art I saw in Auckland:
One of the objects was a figure holding aloft thirty-two concentric spheres, only the outer half dozen of which were visible, all carved from a single piece of ivory. The satisfaction of the artist upon completing carving all thirty-two spheres and knowing that each--even the innermost which would never be seen--was perfect, is the same as that of a man who completes a solo circumnavigation, who fulfills any dream, even though no one else knows.
Although I like to believe that I have lived that way, that I would have made my voyages and written my words if no one else had ever known, I want to thank those of you who read this journal and visit the other pages of this site. From time to time emails arrive from someone I’ve never met, often from an unexpected part of the world, such as a recent one from Sweden, that let me know that there are people out there who understand. They make an old man smile.
Friday, January 9, 2009