Friday, December 15, 2017

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah « LRB blog

The era of theAlan Ginsburg's Howl, the  East Village Other and The Fugs is evoked here by Alex Abramovich, an occasional contributor to the London Review of Books blog. - GWC

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah « LRB blog

by Alex Abramovich



Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders met in New York City in 1962, in front of the Charles Theater, two blocks north of Tompkins Square Park. Kupferberg was selling issues of Birth, a mimeographed publication he’d started in the 1950s. Sanders, who’d just launched his own mimeographed magazine, knew a few things about him. ‘I’d seen his picture in a number of books,’ Sanders later recalled. ‘I learned a little bit later that he was the guy “who’d jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge”, as described in Howl. (Actually it was the Manhattan Bridge.) I later asked him why. He replied, “I wasn’t being loved enough.”’

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Half way to Melbourne - Volvo Ocean Race

Firehose planing in the south Indian Ocean. Halfway from Capetown to Melbourne

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Friday, November 24, 2017

Spanish boat wins Lisbon to Capetown // Volvo Race

The Spanish team MAPFRE took honors, winning the 7,000 mile Lisbon to Capetown leg in 19d 01 hrs about three hours ahead of  Dong Feng (East Wind).  The Chinese auto manufacturer sponsored boat took second in the seven boat fleet of the globe circling Volvo Ocean Race.  Each of the boats had two female crew.

AC-75 New America's Cup design

Don't like catmarans? Think monohulls are too slow?
You know the Kiwis love to sail.  Check out the new foiling AC 75 monohull for the next America's Cup.

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Why winter in Maine? Thomas Ricks / Foreign Policy



Military affairs writer - two time Pulitzer Prize winner - Tom Ricks explains why he and his wife gave up on D.C. and moved to Maine.

His description of wintering in Maine captures just how we feel about our spot. - gwc

Babylon Revisited: Melancholy Thoughts After a Short Trip to Washington, D.C. – Foreign Policy

by Thomas E. Ricks

The more time we spent in the new house, the more we liked it. And while in Washington, we always pined for Maine. One January, as we were packing up to leave Maine, we decided instead to spend the winter there, and see how it went.
We loved it. The summers are lovely, but there also is great beauty in the fall’s sunsets, the winter’s storms, and spring’s mists. I’ve counted nine shades of green from a spot on one of my favorite walks — in lichen, two mosses, a fir, a spruce, some granite, two types of seaweed, and the translucent sea. I revel in the panorama of nature. Almost every day, I see a wild animal — fox, deer, seal, heron, eagle, osprey, and so on. I follow the phases of the moon, partly because the huge tides affect how I use my boat, but one side effect is that when I awake in the night I can tell roughly what time it is simply by judging the angle of the moon shadows. I don’t have an alarm clock, I have chickadees and doves. In Washington, I felt every day was like climbing into the boxing ring for another few rounds. In Maine I look forward to my day with eagerness.
So, for the last several years, we’ve lived in Maine year-round. We enjoy the community here, especially in the winter, when many of our friends, preoccupied in the summer with taking care of visitors, or feeding or housing or teaching them, have time to socialize.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Volvo Ocean Race: Vestas wins Leg 1 Scuttlebutt Sailing News



Above Stacey Jackson is one of the two women among the nine members of the Vestas Wind crew which won the 1,450 nm leg 1 of the round the world Volvo Ocean Race.

The Volvo Ocean race 2017-2018 began a week ago.  Thanks to a rule change that allows larger crew if women are included on the team every boat has at least one women.  And SCA - Scallawag has five women and five men.

Like its predecessor known as the Whitbread it is a race to the southern ocean, then a circumnavigation of Antarctica.  the premier one-design ocean race.  It has the intensity of club round-the-buoys racing: but the buoys have names like Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. - gwc

Volvo Ocean Race: Vestas wins Leg 1 Scuttlebutt Sailing News: (October 28, 2017; Day 7, 14:09 UTC) - Vestas 11th Hour Racing have won Leg 1 of the Volvo Ocean Race, crossing the finish line in the River Tagus in Lisbon.  Skippered by Charles Enright the boat carries both U.S. and Danish flags.

2017-18 Edition: Entered Teams – Skippers

• Team AkzoNobel (NED), Simeon Tienpont (NED)

• Dongfeng Race Team (CHN), Charles Caudrelier (FRA)

• MAPFRE (ESP), Xabi Fernández (ESP)

• Vestas 11th Hour Racing (DEN/USA), Charlie Enright (USA)

• Team Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag (HKG), David Witt (AUS)

• Turn the Tide on Plastic (POR), Dee Caffari (GBR)

• Team Brunel (NED), Bouwe Bekking (NED)
Background: Racing the one design Volvo Ocean 65, the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race began in Alicante, Spain on October 22 2017 with the final finish in The Hague, Netherlands on June 30 2018. In total, the 11-leg race will visit 12 cities in six continents: Alicante, Lisbon, Cape Town, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Auckland, Itajaí, Newport, Cardiff, Gothenburg, and The Hague. A maximum of eight teams will compete.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Favorite fish food - Bunker, Menhaden, Pogies

Image result for menhaden fish
Bunker, Menhaden, Pogies - they're swarming all around our area.  Thousands in schools are favorites of foraging blues, striped bass, and whales.  Further north in the warming Gulf of Maine they are importing bunker for lobster bait.
I have seen waves pushed up by bunker fleeing marauding packs of bluefish.
This excellent short documentary tells the story. - gwc


Foraging the High Seas: a Menhaden story from Red Vault Productions on Vimeo.

Friday, October 13, 2017

Smithsonian Announces Artists For Obamas’ Portraits: See Their Work – Talking Points Memo

Smithsonian Announces Artists For Obamas’ Portraits: See Their Work – Talking Points Memo



Barack Obama chose Kehinde Wiley to paint his portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

Michelle Obama chose Amy Sherald to paint hers.

From lobsterman to oysterman -A Fisherman Tries Farming - The New York Times



Oyster farming has been growing in Maine.  Up river and in salt ponds they are said to be sweet.  Closer to the open sea they're briny.  Joe Young's spot above looks just like the Wadsworth Point public lading near us.  There on the Friendship River  a friend Barrett Lynde had the seed beds for Gay Island Oyster.  -gwc

A Fisherman Tries Farming - The New York Times

COREA, Me. — The boats start up around 3:30 in the morning, stirring the village with the babble of engines before they motor out to sea. They will return hours later, loaded with lobster.
Joe Young’s boat has not gone out lately. Instead, he puts on waders and sloshes into the salt pond behind his house, an inlet where water rushes in and out with the tides. After a lifetime with most of his income tied to what he finds in the sea, this lobsterman — and sixth-generation fisherman — is trying his hand at something new. He is farming oysters.***



Sunday, September 10, 2017

"Marco Island got pummeled by #Irma Liam Martin on Twitter:

Liam Martin on Twitter: "Marco Island got pummeled by #Irma. https://t.co/nDy9Vvq9aw"

There's a lot of good footage of Irma- but this video of straining palm trees on Marco Island capture the force better than anything I have seen.



- GWC


Monday, September 4, 2017

1967 - India - on the coast of the Arabian Sea Coast

Inline image 1
Ruins of Portuguese fort, Bassein (Vasai), India
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Fishing boats - Bassein  (Vasai) India
Like many people back then I got married straight  out of college.  We joined the Peace Corps.  It was 1967 and the peak of the Vietnam war.   At that time married men and grad students were exempt from the draft.  I do not claim that the two year exemption was unwelcome but it wasn't draft dodging but curiosity, desire to see something of the world, and doing some good that motivated me. 

Like an idiot 30 years ago or so I threw out the couple hundred aerogrammes my parents had saved, so my recollection of my two years in India from 1967- 1969 is faint  particularly since I never went back (though  my son Jesse visited Bassein abut 10 years ago).

We were assigned to a town about 30 miles north of Bombay - a fringe suburb then.  Some commuted to Bombay (the town Bassein was at the end of the electric commuter rail line.)  Others farmed sugar cane.  And many fished.

Margo and I accompanied deliveries of fish to rural schools - the price of the new marine engines provided by UNICEF as part of its Applied Nutrition Program.  We visited village schools and talked about nutrition - recognizing quickly that the local diet was much healthier than an American diet.

I was assigned to a fisherman's cooperative.  The township manager sent me to find Pedru, down by the ruins of the massive old Portuguese fort.  On my way I passed a Catholic school, then a Hindu fisherman's sahakari (cooperative) society with an ice factory and fleet of trucks.  The next building was the St. Peter sahakari society.  That was a turning point for me: Bassein (Vasai) was like the Brooklyn I knew from high school in Crown Heights- divided by clan.

High points of my first year (later for the second year) were fishing trips.  I stayed out as long as five days on open fishing boats using gill nets and bag nets.  The men wore lungis.  They chanted as they let the nets out and hauled them in by hand.  The catch was iced in the hold and we stayed out until it was full.  

We ate around a single huge platter of steamed rice with a brutally hot fish curry.  The bread was sorghum - dipped in salt water to soften it!  As a special treat the boy would clean and throw on the coals a pomfret.  But more often we ate skate which had little market value. (It's good BTW.)

There was no cabin - just a canvas tarp on poles for nap time and night time between setting and hauling nets - every six hours as the current reversed direction, and the tide rose and fell 3 meters or so.  We slept back to back on the teak deck - no mattresses.  I brought a cotton Sholapur blanket with me and spent some chilly, damp nights.

My Marathi was halfway decent so I could understand the chants - especially the teasing stanzas they made up as they hauled nets with  callused hands that protected them from stinging jelly fish.

When we landed - sometimes far from shore - trucks came out on the mud.  Women with wicker baskets on their heads took the dripping wet iced fish to the trucks for shipping to Bombay markets about thirty miles south There was no highway bridge across the Bassein river, so the trucks had to go about 25 miles east to Thane then south to the city.

- GWC

Saturday, September 2, 2017

Aboard the John J. Marchi - Staten Island Ferry


Northbound 15.8 kts.

Thanks Aly!




Thanks, Captain


Thanks, Evan



Friday, September 1, 2017

What Work Is - by Philip Levine | Poetry Foundation

What Work Is by Philip Levine | Poetry Foundation

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line 
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. 
You know what work is—if you’re 
old enough to read this you know what 
work is, although you may not do it. 
Forget you. This is about waiting, 
shifting from one foot to another. 
Feeling the light rain falling like mist 
into your hair, blurring your vision 
until you think you see your own brother 
ahead of you, maybe ten places. 
You rub your glasses with your fingers, 
and of course it’s someone else’s brother, 
narrower across the shoulders than 
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin 
that does not hide the stubbornness, 
the sad refusal to give in to 
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting, 
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead 
a man is waiting who will say, “No, 
we’re not hiring today,” for any 
reason he wants. You love your brother, 
now suddenly you can hardly stand 
the love flooding you for your brother, 
who’s not beside you or behind or 
ahead because he’s home trying to   
sleep off a miserable night shift 
at Cadillac so he can get up 
before noon to study his German. 
Works eight hours a night so he can sing 
Wagner, the opera you hate most, 
the worst music ever invented. 
How long has it been since you told him 
you loved him, held his wide shoulders, 
opened your eyes wide and said those words, 
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never 
done something so simple, so obvious, 
not because you’re too young or too dumb, 
not because you’re jealous or even mean 
or incapable of crying in 
the presence of another man, no,   
just because you don’t know what work is.
Philip Levine, “What Work Is” from What Work Is. Copyright © 1992 by Philip Levine. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Source: What Work Is: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)

Friday, August 25, 2017

Two Herreshoffs Launched at Barron's Boatyard City Island

Barrons Boatyard - Thursday August 2, 2017.
A 27 1/2 foot 'S boat'  and my 17 foot Buzzards Bay 14.  Designed by  Nat G. Herreshoff and L. Francis Herreshoff, respectively.



Sunday, August 20, 2017

Edward Allcard, Solo Sailor on the High Seas, Dies at 102 - The New York Times

It was so much harder for these guys - no GPS, no radar, no sat phones, no email, no shore crews, no sponsors, wooden boats more fragile than today's ocean racers (which have their own problems.)


Edward Allcard, Solo Sailor on the High Seas, Dies at 102 - The New York Times
by  Richard Sandomir
Edward Allcard, who was said to be the first person to sail both ways across the Atlantic Ocean single-handedly — save for a stretch with a young woman who stowed away on his return home to England — died on July 28 in Andorra, a principality in the Pyrenees Mountains, where he lived. He was 102.
His wife, Clare Allcard, said the cause was complications of a broken leg.
A bearded adventurer who loved life alone on the sea — he also circumnavigated the globe on his own — Mr. Allcard was a child in England when he first thought of sailing for America. When that time came, in 1948, he chose to do it aboard Temptress, a 34-foot yawl, built in 1910, that had not sailed for a decade.
To test the craft, he sailed first to Gibraltar, Spain. On the way, a storm sent water pouring into the boat.
“There was no escape,” he wrote in “Single-Handed Passage” (1950), his account of his trans-Atlantic voyage. As he braced himself in his galley seat, stirring porridge with a wooden spoon, anxious thoughts began to overwhelm him.
“The boat was untested and not ready for a gale,” he recalled thinking. “Were the fastenings all right? Would a plank spring? Would she spew her caulking? And so it went on. At each heavy lurch, I whispered, `Damn.’ Continue reading the main storyAfter reaching Gibraltar, Mr. Allcard spent the winter making repairs to Temptress before setting off for America.
During the crossing, which took 81 days, he survived fierce gales and squalls, one of which capsized his boat; a near-collision with a whale; and encounters with sharks.
“Sharks never came too near me when I was bathing,” he wrote. “However, several times in the calm, a shark came to scratch its back on the topsides, whereupon I would hold my revolver to its head and fire.”
A thousand miles before reaching Sandy Hook, N.J., he began to feel joy about soon reaching his goal. But he also wondered if leaving the comfort of the water would not suit his loner’s personality. What was there to celebrate?, he remembered thinking. “Getting near to the artificialities and impurities of civilization, where money was God?”

Classic Yacht Regatta - Indian Harbor Yacht Club



Classic Yacht Regatta - Indian Harbor Yacht Club

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Eggemoggin Reach Regatta 2017

The premier wooden boat race, the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta is a three day event with a 100 boat fleet this year!  Thursday - Castine to Camden, Friday Camden to Center Harbor, Brooklin Maine, Saturday the Eggemoggin Reach race - Center Harbor to Halibut Rocks and back to Naskeag Point, finishing at the Wooden Boat School.
A downwind finish featured a spinnaker run.  First over the line: Capt. Nat Herreshoff, the towering genius of American naval architects.