Vendee Globe: fleet stretches from Falklands to western Australia

The hazards of single-handed ocean racing are many.  On December 21 Sebastien Destremau was sailing in 30 knots with three reefs in the main when his boat was "knocked down like a dinghy".
A glance at the race tracker shows that 51 days out the fleet is strung out along a line from the Falkland Islands east of Argentina to Cape Leeuwin - western Australia.  Nineteen of the twenty nine boats are still racing.  In fifteenth position is Rich Wilson aboard Great American.  Leading is Armel Le'Cleac'h aboard Banc Populaire, making 16.9 knots with Brit Alex Thomson (Hugo Boss) 281 nm behind and 5,900 nm to the finish line.  On Christmas Thomson rounded Cape Horn just a mile or two south in variable southerly and southwesterly winds of 16 - 40 kts. He still managed some Christmas cake.
Wilson is at 55 S, 97 E - south of New Zealand.  He trails Le Cleac'h by 5,900 nm and has 11,650 nm to finish.  Another 2,000 nm behind is Pieter Heerema aboard No Way Back.  He is limping along at 3 knots.  Is there a way forward?

S. Newman Darby, Inventor of the Sailboard, Dies at 88 - The New York Times

It's a long way from 1963 and the first sailboard to today's kite surfing.

S. Newman Darby, Inventor of the Sailboard, Dies at 88 - The New York Times

S. Newman Darby, a sign painter whose passion for boating led him to invent a sailboard that is widely acknowledged as the first windsurfing craft, died on Dec. 3 at his home in St. Johns, Fla. He was 88.

His daughter Wendy Darby Brown confirmed the death.

Mr. Darby created his sailboard in 1964 out of frustration because the waves on lakes, like the one near his home in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., were not big enough to surf on.

His solution was to attach a sail to a surfboard, and the combination worked. But it was flawed: It could not turn sharply or go well against the wind. So he created a universal joint using a nylon rope to link the sail to the board. This enhanced his control of steering and speed.

Mr. Darby’s enthusiasm spilled over into an article he wrote for Popular Science magazine in 1965 about his invention.

Joel White, 66, Designer of Wooden Boats - The New York Times

Today was a special day.  I visited my buddy Arthur-  up and about 9 days after a successful heart transplant - his second.  The first - as a young man - held up for 25 years +/-.   I brought him a copy of the 2017 Calendar of Wooden Boats by Benjamin Mendlowitz - the house photographer of the wooden boat community in tiny Brooklin, Maine - a center of superb craftsmanship.  I introduced him to the great sailboat designer Joel White who died 19 years ago.

The great essayist E.B. White wrote about the Maine lake where Arthur's family has a cottage - and On Golden Pond was filmed. - gwc

Joel White, 66, Designer of Wooden Boats - The New York Times

by Richard Goldstein

***
'There's a certain amount of dewy-eyed enthusiasm about wood that gets a little sticky sometimes,'' Joel White once said. ''People can get so caught up in the Zen of the thing, they sometimes forget what a boat is really for.''

Mr. White was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., the son of the essayist and author E. B. White and his wife, Katharine, who was fiction editor of The New Yorker. The family moved to a farm in North Brooklin, Me., in the mid-1930's, and the son became immersed in a lifelong love of sailing Maine's coastal waters. He built a 19-foot boat named Martha, in honor of his daughter, that his father sailed after adding his own touch -- carved dolphins, four on each side of the bow, decorated in gold.

One of E. B. White's most enduring essays, ''Once More to the Lake,'' written in 1941, tells of a trip with his son back to the freshwater lake where the father spent vacations as a boy.

Mr. White attended Cornell University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he obtained a bachelor's degree in naval architecture in 1953. After working on boat building in Newport News, Va., and serving in the Army, he returned to Maine and assumed ownership of the Brooklin boating facility in 1960. His son Steven has been owner and president of the boatyard since 1986.

He was the author of ''Wood, Water & Light: Classic Wooden Boats'' (Norton, 1988) with photographs by Benjamin Mendlowitz. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it a ''lovely work'' that was ''untainted by snobbery.'' Mr. White read from his father's essays, poems and short stories in a recent audio cassette, ''White on White.''

The editor and writer Roger Angell, Mr. White's half-brother, said that ''he really was a Down Easter. He was reserved in his emotions and instinctively modest.''

Vendee Globe - 42 days out - 22 still racing, Great America IV in 17th place

The Vendee GlobeTracker  shows the fleet spread out across the Indian Ocean the trailers are approaching western Australia while the leaders are half way across te Pacific. the Pacific.  Leader Armel Le Cleach has 8,800 miles to go.  Brit Alex Thomson trails him by 484 nm.  The two leaders are more than half way across the Pacific. A few weeks ago Thomson lost one of the foils, but has been on a favorable tack.

Making 11 knots at the moment, the sole American entry Rich Wilson is 5,300 miles behind the leader in 17th position.  22 of the 29 starters are still racing.  The others abandoned the race due to equipment failures,

Ellen's scallops

As for the scallops,  I kind of “wung” it but here are the basics:  bread crumbs, lemon zest (1 lemon),  fresh herbs (parsley, thyme), parmesan cheese (tablespoonish or more), some shallot, salt and pepper, paprika,  red pepper.  Mix it all together.  Dredge the scallops, put in hot oil (I added a little butter too but probably not necessary) and brown quickly on both sides (crispy surface is good). Serve with lemon. - Ellen

Peppercorn halibut

Vibrant Peppercorns (and Their Impostors) Brighten Fish Fillets http://nyti.ms/2h6YmN5

New wave height. Record ~ 19 metetd

http://gcaptain.com/19-meter-north-atlantic-wave-sets-new-world-record/

My sister Candy

My sister Kathryn - who we called Candy - was born sixty four years ago today - December 14, 1952.

This is my favorite picture of her - the big smile, the energy.

No loss in my life matches this one.  When Candy died two days after my mother in February 2015 she had long been diminished in health, the old buoyancy gone.  She left behind Molly and Max, and her two grandchildren - Ella and Clare, named for our mother and her aunt Ella Curtis Steel to whom we were very close as kids and who  baked great butter cookies.  I hope she is enjoying one now.

An Old Hand Once Again Tries His Luck at an Around-the-World Race - The New York Times

An Old Hand Once Again Tries His Luck at an Around-the-World Race - The New York Times

by Christopher Clarey

An Old Hand Once Again Tries His Luck at an Around-the-World Race

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREYNOV. 3, 2016

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Rich Wilson in his boat as he prepares for this year’s edition of the Vendée Globe. Wilson, 66, placed ninth in the race in 2009. CreditTheophile Trossat for The New York Times

MARBLEHEAD, Mass. — When José Luis Ugarte, the oldest sailor to finish the Vendée Globe yacht race, finally arrived back on terra firma in 1993, he soberly pronounced the solo, round-the-world race “an inhuman event” that should be done no more than “once in a lifetime.”

But here is Rich Wilson, back for more at age 66 and in position to break Ugarte’s age record by two years. After placing ninth in his first Vendée Globe in 2009, Wilson, an asthmatic American educator from this yachting hub near Boston, will again set sail alone from France on Sunday. Taking nearly three months to complete, the Vendée Globe remains a singular test of character that allows no stops or outside assistance and too few hours of sleep as the weeks and months pass by along with the swells and storms.

“The last time, I slept two times in that race for four hours straight, and both were accidental,” Wilson said last week in a Skype interview from France. “They had a 120-decibel alarm clock on the boat, and I slept through that, and that sort of defines the fatigue.”

A chain saw, by the way, typically registers 110 decibels, but there was more delight than dread in Wilson’s voice last week as he prepared to depart with the 28 other competitors from the Atlantic port of Les Sables d’Olonne.ading the main story

“The Vendée Globe,” Wilson declared, “is the greatest sailing race in the world.”

There is certainly nothing nautical that rivals it in France, where the Vendée, a quadrennial event that began in 1989, remains a major cultural happening, one capable of inspiring Sunday sailors and lifelong landlubbers alike and of appealing to the adventurous and iconoclastic niches in the French psyche. Despite a growing international contingent, a Frenchman has won every edition of the race.

The start is one of the great spectacles in sports, as each of the 60-foot yachts is towed out to sea through a narrow channel lined with hundreds of thousands of spectators. Then, quite abruptly — after the cheers and the commotion — there is solitude, or at least a modern approximation of it, with all the satellite phones and other means of communication now at offshore sailors’ disposal.

“The first trans-Atlantic passage I did, our communication was through ham radio,” Wilson said. In that race, he said, communication with anyone involved muscling a simple antenna up the mast and hoping for the best.

“The way it is now changes it, certainly, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” Wilson said. “I think you get to maybe tell the stories a little bit more immediately to whomever it is you are going to tell them to. And I think it allows other people to participate in your adventure.”

That is the point of all this peril for Wilson, who values education above adrenaline. He was a math major at Harvard who later got a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School and a graduate degree in interdisciplinary science from M.I.T. A high school teacher in Boston in the mid-1970s, he later worked as a defense analyst, consultant and investor. Divorced and with no children, he has been using his ocean voyages as teaching moments since the 1990s, reaching students initially via newsletters and more recently through the internet.

Blackjack - a Friendship Sloop

A friend and neighbor  rebuilt Blackjack a 115 year old Wilbur Morse-built Friendship sloop at the Sail Power and Steam Museum in Rockland, Maine.  Only the transom, keel and stem are original.  Every other plank is new - cut and fitted by Jim and volunteers.  Every rib steam bent - like the old days.  This video shows the boat as it looked when it came into the shop.

Lessons & Carols - Fordham Christmas Concert

Sunday, December 4 - the Fordham Combined Choirs - at the University Church

A Tiny Home That Floats - The New York Times

I hadn't seen Jane Clegg in nearly twenty years when I bumped into her on the deck of Richard Hudson's Issuma a couple of months ago.  Clegg  has the skills of a quartermaster  and keeps a tight ship. as one might expect from a former stage manager.  A veteran of the Women's Royal Naval Service she surprised me when I first met her and told her about the 15' Snipe I had sailed from a silted in marina -the Light House Boat Club just across the river from the 79th Street Bot Basin.  "Oh, she said in her British boarding school accent, I too learned on a Snipe - in the Great Bitter Lake!  Which I soon learned is a wide spot in the Suez Canal. The Times has a nice profile of one of the highlights of the New York waterfront - Captain Clegg, - gwc

A Tiny Home That Floats - The New York Times

By Kim Velsey

As far as places to live go, Jane Clegg considers hers nearly perfect.

“I have a beautiful view and no one bothers me — it’s just sometimes hard to get back on,” said Ms. Clegg, who lives aboard a 39-foot schooner docked for much of the year in one of the choppiest, if prettiest spots, at the 79th Street Boat Basin on the Upper West Side.

On a recent afternoon, a light wind was rippling the Hudson River, jostling Ms. Clegg’s schooner such that pens and cups and visitors slid about the cockpit. But she seemed oblivious, moving nimbly around the cabin in search of her outdoor seat cushions.

“Oh, this is nothing,” she said, popping her strawberry-blond head out of the hatch. “Sometimes I roll!”

Ms. Clegg, who is 83, started living on a boat in 1987, at the age of 54. She had been residing in a large rent-regulated studio on 75th Street near Columbus Avenue since the late 1960s, paying just $300 a month. But after new owners bought the building and moved aggressively to vacate it — they even sent a private detective to Albany where she was stage-managing a theater company one winter, she said — she decided a buyout was preferable to being trailed every time she left town. She received $23,000 and a year to leave.

She funneled the money into building her boat, the JFS Salignac, which cost about $90,000, designing a two-masted schooner that she could sail alone and lining it in mahogany — Honduran, as opposed to Brazilian. “I wanted it more red so that it would be cheery,” she said.

Ms. Clegg, who was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and spent part of her childhood in England, learned to sail in the early ‘50s in Egypt, on the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal Zone, while serving as a wireless operator in the Women’s Royal Naval Service.

Anuna in Beijing: Scarborough Fair and Greensleeves medley

The Irish chamber choir Anuna traveled to Beijing in 2015.  They performed at the National Center for the Performing Arts.  Last year I heard the spectacular 80 piece National Traditional (Folk) Music Orchestra in the same room.

Voyages>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·...¸><((((º>: Anuna in Beijing: Scarborough Fair and Greensleeves medley

Anuna in Beijing: Scarborough Fair and Greensleeves medley

The Irish chamber choir Anuna traveled to Beijing in 2015.  They performed at the National Center for the Performing Arts.  Last year I heard the spectacular 80 piece National Traditional (Folk) Music Orchestra in the same room.

Rich Wilson - sole american in solo race - crosses the equator //Vendee Globe, week 2

 Rich Wilson aboard Great American IV has  crossed the equator
Maybe the ocean is not a country for young men because the younger, better-funded skippers have newer foiling designs create new risks.

The sole American skipper, Wilson is doing well in his non-foiling monohull holding in position No. 21, heading south in 94 F weather. Only 2, 382 nm to go
Alex Thomson - the leader hit a submerged object at 22 knots, fracturing the hydrofoil.  With 19,731nm to go he's going to be weakened on port tack.  Hard to believe he can hold onto the lead.  You can't carry a spare stabilizing foil.

Whale Spotted Near George Washington Bridge | NBC New York

Whale Spotted Near George Washington Bridge | NBC New York

At Sea With New York Harbor’s Channel Masters - The New York Times

At Sea With New York Harbor’s Channel Masters - The New York Times

by Emily S. Rueb

Aboard the Pilot Boat New Jersey — A speed of 7 knots at sea is equal to about 8 miles per hour on land, which doesn’t sound very fast.

That is not how it feels 15 miles or so southeast of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where the Queen Mary 2 is heading out into the Atlantic.

Capt. Thomas J. Keating Jr. emerges from a door in the belly of the vessel, an ocean liner that is about the length of the Empire State Building if it were turned on its side.

The wind is whipping on this Tuesday in August, but Captain Keating’s purple tie is securely fastened under his vest as he climbs down onto the bow of a 53-foot aluminum boat riding beside the larger ship, like a minnow next to a whale.

Vendee Globe - approaching the Cape Verde Islands

Approaches to the Cape Verde Islands blue wind shadows stretch 280 km
Yellow marks wind acceleration

One week out Brit Alex Thomson leads the 29 boat Vendee Globe fleet, threading his way through the Canary Islands, approaching the doldrums (the ITCZ - inter-tropical convergence zone).

Tanguay De Lamotte (Save the Children) is the only one to have suffered major damage.  His carbon fiber mast snapped a foot from the top.  Now he's got a sail wrapped around the keel as he tries to make his way to a safe harbor for repairs.  This being the Vendee Globe he has to do it himself,  Bonne chance.

Vendee Globe - approaching the Cape Verde Islands

Approaches to the Caper Verde Islands blue wind shadows stretch 280km
Yellow marks wind acceleration

One week out Brit Alex Thomson leads the 29 boat Vendee Globe fleet, threading his way through the Canary Islands, approaching the doldrums (the ITCZ - inter-tropical convergence zone).

Tanguay De Lamotte (Save the Children) is the only one to have suffered major damage.  His carbon fiber mast snapped a foot from the top.  Now he's got a sail wrapped around the keel as he tries to make his way to a safe harbor for repairs.  This being the Vendee Globe he has to do it himself,  Bonne chance.

Vendee globe starts Sunday, November 6

The 2016-2017 Vendee Globe race starts Sunday, November 6.  The rules are very simple. One person on a boat, no outside assistance.  Leave from Les Sable d'Olognes, France, circumnavigate the globe, leaving the great Capes to port: Good Hope, Leeuwin, and Horn.  Return to the point of beginning.

On the hard

At Barron's Boatyard, City Island.

'I was left speechless': Bob Dylan breaks two-week silence over Nobel prize | Music | The Guardian

'I was left speechless': Bob Dylan breaks two-week silence over Nobel prize | Music | The Guardian

“There’s a certain intensity in writing a song,” he added. “You have to keep in mind why you are writing it and for who and what for.”

The singer also tied songwriting to his interests in painting and sculpting, though he recognized that not all of his ambitions would achieve the same success as his music.“I’d like to drive a race car on the Indianapolis track. I’d like to kick a field goal in an NFL football game. I’d like to be able to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball. But you have to know your place.” he said. “There might be some things that are beyond your talents.

“Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.” 

Let's celebrate Dylan's Nobel //David Remnick ~ The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/lets-celebrate-the-bob-dylan-nobel-win?mbid=social_twitter

Good day for the Patriot League

Good day for the Patriot League.
Fordham 41 Yale 34
Holy Cross 27 Harvard 17

A Few Thoughts on Dylan's Big Day // Josh Marshall

A Few Thoughts on Dylan's Big Day
Barack Obama:

Barack Obama being interviewed in Rolling Stonetalking about Dylan's performance at the White House in February 2010 where he performed a recognizable but re-candenced version of the Times They Are A Changin'. 

Here's what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you'd expect he would be. He wouldn't come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn't want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn't show up to that. He came in and played "The Times They Are A-Changin'." A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I'm sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That's how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don't want him to be all cheesin' and grinnin' with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.

These are both important people to me. This is how I'd prefer both of them be.

Bob Dylan Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature - The New York Times

Sage advice from Robert Zimmerman from Mr. Tambourine Man (1964):

"...Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow."

Bob Dylan Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature - The New York Times

So put me down as a YES on Dylan's honor.  He really is a great writer.  Chronicles is excellent.  But it's for his poetic lyrics that he will be rightfully remembered.  Literary critic Christopher Ricks Dylan's Visions of Sin persuaded me that Dylan can hold his own with writers from Shakespeare to Browning, to Keats.  As one reviewer, Andrew Motion in the Guardian writes:

Dylan's Visions of Sin is a labour of love, and a proof that he's won (though not by himself) the argument about his man. These days no one would think - would they? - that it's doubtfully transgressive or suspiciously cool to call Dylan a genius. Perhaps for this reason one of the most exciting things about the book is its air of vindication. "I've told you before, and now I'm going to tell you good," it seems to say at the outset, before unspooling at great length and with a mixture of skittishness and seriousness heady even by Ricks's standards.
The rewards are just as one would expect: a bracing attention to artfulness, a wonderful sensitivity to nuance, and a particularly brilliant sympathy with the purpose and effect of Dylan's rhymes. The big figures in Ricks's pantheon - Empson, Eliot and (yes) Keats - are repeatedly invoked to give a context other than the ones in which Dylan usually appears, and generous attention is given to less familiar songs as well as the more famous ones.
The overall structure, too, is appropriately fixed and capacious: realising that "the word 'sin' haunts [Dylan's] songs" Ricks gives seven chapters on the deadly sins themselves, four on the virtues, and three on the heavenly graces. In each case, he discusses lyrics that illustrate the theme in question - "Song to Woody", "Positively 4th Street", "Blind Willie McTell" and "Handy Dandy" for envy, "Gotta Serve Somebody" and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for covetousness, and so on. Just as the governing idea of embarrassment in his Keats book allowed him to keep a clear end in view and also to wander, so these divisions maintain a definite shape while making space for diversions, asides and elaborations.

Bye bye Big Papi

BUT WHAT NEXT for the Red Sox? The idea of finding a replacement for Ortiz is daunting. He hit .315/.401/.620, leading the majors in slugging, extra-base hits (87), and OPS (1.020), blasting 38 homers, and leading the majors with 127 RBIs. Who else can be that sort of DH?

“I don’t know that that hitter exists right now, to be honest with you,” said Manager John Farrell.

If you are a Red Sox fan, subscribe to the daily email by the brilliant baseball reporter Alex Speier at the Boston Globe.

Rutherford on Greenland

http://oceanresearchproject.org/phase-2/

Indian Harbor Y.C. Classics Regatta - 2016

Shot from a drone by Graham Ornstein.  We come into view at 8:15. - gwc

So maybe the arctic summer isn't that much fun

http://oceanresearchproject.org/phase-2/

The Auld Triangle //Glen Hansard with Bono - New York 2012

Glen Hansard w/ Bono "The Auld Triangle" from Patrick Glennon on Vimeo.

Entering Georges Harbor

Storm Surf 6 Robert Moses State Park

Storm Surf 6 Robert Moses State Park

Ferry Collides with a Group of Kayakers on Hudson River - Old Salt BlogOld Salt Blog

Update: Recreation and Commerce Collide on NY Waterways // NY Times
I am disturbed by the press accounts which suggest that the Manhattan Kayak company guide did not have a marine band radio.  For many years I sailed a seventeen foot keel boat  on the Hudson (North) River from the George Washington Bridge to the harbor. The dangers are many on the busy river with a swift current.  I always kept my VHF on channels 16 and 13 (emergency and commercial) to hear the many "securitay" calls as vessels announced their position and intentions.   Whenever I feared that visibility was not good I too made a "securitay" call.  The news accounts do not report that the kayak guide made such a call as the squadron approached the 39th Street terminal.

As I recall New York Waterway captains announced their intention when underway .  I always gave the NY Waterway terminal a wide berth because the ferries back out swiftly and their ability to see the kayaks  (or low freeboard boats like mine) was limited. There is a reason why the lobstermen in Maine refer to kayakers as speed bumps.  Neither bright colors nor pennants flying from the stern is sufficient.  A guide such as the one who suffered injury should not have crossed behind the ferry terminal without announcing his squadron's position and intentions.

Ferry Collides with a Group of Kayakers on Hudson River - Old Salt BlogOld Salt Blog

by Rick Spilman

...On a personal note, which may or may not relate to the collision, having kayaked the Hudson for the last 25 years or so, I always carry a waterproof VHF radio clipped to my vest whenever I paddle the river.  I keep it turned on so I can here where the traffic is and to let others know where I am if need be. Paddlers individually and in groups are not specifically required to carry a radio. Nevertheless, a radio can be a lifesaver. I know that it may not have necessarily be common practice for individuals or groups of kayaks to make Security calls when crossing near a ferry terminal or other similar congested areas, but perhaps it should be. As the smallest and the slowest boats in a very busy harbor, we can’t always rely on others to see us....

L. Francis Herrreshoff - Patent US1613890 - Sailboat - Google Patents

L. Francis Herreshoff designed my boat - a Buzzards Bay 14.

L. Francis Herreshoff Patent US1613890 - Sailboat - Google Patents

DESCRIPTION  (OCR text may contain errors)

1,613, 90 11 1927' L. F. HERRESHOFF 8 SAIL BQA'I Filed Dec. 11, 1925 3 Sheet's-Sheet 1 Jan. 11 1927.

1,613,890 L. F. HERRESHOFF SAIL BOAT Filed Dec. 11 1925 3 Sheets-Sheet 2 INVENTOR.

fl; ATTORNEY.

Jan. 11 1927.

| F. HERRESHOFF SAIL son Filed Dec. 11,

1925 3 Sheets-Sheet 3 INVEN TOR.

6 ATTORNEY.

Patented Jan. 11, 1927.

UNITED STATES 1,613,890 PATENT OFFICE.

LEWIS FRANCIS HERRESHOFF, 01' BRISTOL, RHODES ISLAND.

SAILBOA'I'.

Application flied December 11, 1925, Serial lilo. 74,728.

This invention relates to various types of sailing craft, hereinafter referred to as sail boats, and is more especially concerned with such craft designed for racing purposes.

The invention has for its chief object to improve the mast and sail construction of sail boats with a view to increasing their efficiency.
The nature of the invention will be readily understood from the following description when read in connection with the accompanying drawings, and the novel features will be particularly pointed out ll]. the appended claims.

In the drawings- Figure 1 is a perspective view of a sail boat embodying its invention;

Figs. 2 and 3 are diagrammatic views, partly in cross-section, showing the position of the sails and mast in tacking;

Fig. 4 is a cross-sectional perspective view illustrating certain details of the mast construction and the means for securing the stays and sails thereto;

Fig'. 5 is a vertical, cross-sectional view through the step bearing for the mast- Fig. 6 is a horizontal cross sectional view showing another method of fastening the sail to a mast; and

Fig. 7 is a vertical cross-sectional view through the hearing at the lower end of the spar which serves as a stay for the mast.

Rudy Van Gelder - DVD from "Perfect Takes" Blue Note.avi - YouTube

The great sound engineer Rudy VanGelder has died.  Many of the great jazz recordings of the '50's and '60's were recorded lived and engineered at his Hackensack and, later, Englewood Cliffs studios.  As Peter Keepnews notes in his Times obituary:

The many albums he engineered for Blue Note, Prestige, Impulse and other labels in the 1950s and ’60s included acknowledged classics like Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” Miles Davis’s “Walkin’,” Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage,” Sonny Rollins’s “Saxophone Colossus” and Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father.”

Rudy Van Gelder - DVD from "Perfect Takes" Blue Note.avi - YouTube

Rescue at sea: Etah and the Danish Navy assist| oceanresearchproject.org

What the hell do you have to do to get away?  When Ault (Matt Rutherford's Ocean Research Project boat) reached Etah Greenland (700 miles south of the pole, 78 N 68 W) they bumped into an adventure cruise ship.  ORP had finished its work for NASA so they had headed another 100 miles north on a pleasure cruise to the abandoned settlement once used as a jumping off point for the pole in the age of exploration.

But sometimes it's good to have company.  Despite a parachute sea anchor and bare poles they were knocked down in a gale when a stray line wrapped around the propeller.  Now that is a problem.  You might even hope for a tow from an adventure cruise ship.  But they did better.  A ship of the Navy of the  Kingdom of Denmark was conveniently at anchor 100 miles south near the Thule Air Base at the top of Baffin Bay.  Bound by the law of the sea to respond to mariners in distress, the Danes headed north, put Ault under tow, and brought them back to safe harbor where they were able to cut the line wrapped around the propeller.

But don't take my word for it read Matt (Red Dot on the Ocean) Rutherford's first hand account:
NASA, Etah and the Danish Navy | oceanresearchproject.org

Etah or bust has been our motto since the boatyard in Sisimiut. Etah is a fjord in the far north of Greenland roughly 700 miles from the North Pole that was used by various explorers during the great age of exploration. It’s a beautiful area, very green, which is abnormal that far north.

Going to Etah was the prize for completing the survey on time. If we didn’t complete the survey or if we didn’t get it done early enough we wouldn’t go. “Etah or Bust” was our rally cry, our motivation; it’s what we all looked forward to.

Etah is only 80 miles north of Qaanaaq and Inglefield fjord so it wasn’t that much further north than we already were. It only took us 24 hours to get there. Unfortunately our timing coincided with an adventure tourist cruise ship. I hate adventure tourism.

North River 2 - GoPro

Sailing single-handed as usual on Saturday evening, August 20 on Eastchester Bay. Westbound from City Island. Bronx, NY.  Learning to use the GoPro.

What are the best remedies for seasickness?

What are the best remedies for seasickness?

`Walking the dog' on the Back River - GoPro video

James is a Labrador Retriever, so he is a natural swimmer with paws that fan out like paddles.  His hind quarters are above the surface and his tail seems to act like a rudder.  Swimming looks easy - he actually seems to be walking in the water.  James swims long distances, following us as we row - mostly swimming, sometimes running along the shore to get ahead of us.  When I got the Monhegan skiff seven years ago he wanted to get in the boat.  Not now.  He prefers to `walk'.

Ram Island - Saturday evening