春节好！情人节快乐！

爱人，朋友，女儿，儿子，同事，同学，学生：

我祝你们春节好！

情人节好！

我祝您和您的全家新年快乐！

万事如意

乔治

Ice Boating on the Hudson

From the Hudson River Ice Yachts Club
Thanks to Bowsprite, Frogma, and Tugster, a winter day on the Hudson

America's Cup - Livestream

Watch live streaming video from bmworacleracing at livestream.com

Grudge match set to start - The America's Cup

"I don't like him" said Larry Ellison of Ernesto Bertarelli, his rival, in the best of three grudge match in Valencia that is the most litigated America's Cup match in the race's 160 year history. Ellison wasn't even on stage at the owners pre-race press conference. It wasn't like this when Sir Thomas Lipton, the original tea bagger, wanted to take it from Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad baron.


In those days the Fife boatyard in Glasgow labored against the Herreshoff yard in Bristol, RI.


This one will be over soon.  I hope that BMW/Oracle wins so that the next race will be in San Francisco where they have wind, and the Golden Gate Bridge.  And mono-hulls.  Match racing in giant multi-hulls is no fun - close maneuvering is what makes match-racing.  And you can't do it with 90X90 catamarans.

Sir Ernest Shackleton: have another drink on me

 
Images: The New York Times

The Times reports that the estimable conservators at the Antarctic Heritage Trust have unearthed frozen treasure of the Austral desert left behind by the great explorers/adventurers who survived against all odds in the failed venture to cross the continent on dog sleds because, well, just, because why the hell bloody not.


And just what the hell would you want as you and your mates neared the last couple of hundred miles of your trek across the frozen continent on dog sleds, but a pause and a case of the best Scotch whisky?  The gentlemen at Whyte & Mackay, distillers of McKinlay's Rare whisky, made sure that Sir Ernest Shackleton and his fellow mushers  would have more than enough to wet their whiskers when they arrived at the supply hut provisioned by their crew on the far side.  Alas the Endurance was crushed in the ice of the Weddell Sea and Shackleton never got to put the dogs ashore.
Image: Frank Hurley


Image above: the voyages - as planned and as it happened from Wikipedia. The dark red line is the route of the supply depots laid down en route for the planned arrival of the continent-crossing dog sled teams.

High tides

Images source Keith Cool: HERE
The full moon was at 1:17 this morning, according to the Times.  What does that mean for the tides?   They will be at the high end of the range.  and that is the case according to the charts: 5.7 feet at The Battery, 8.7 at Kings Point, 11.4 at Friendship Harbor in Maine.  The high end of normal.


Notice in the animated image above that at the half moon the image is round.  These are the neap tides.  Tides are low.  At the full and new moon the oceans bulge out, attracted to the moon and sun.  Tides are high.


Last night a kayaker told us that today is a proxigean high tide (when the moon is extremely close to the earth and the sun is on the same side).  Maybe - but I couldn't find anyone predicting that we are at such an unusual astronomical event - maybe it's just the ordinary monthly perigee.


Another image from Keith Cool - Halls Harbor, Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy shows the dramatic (20 feet +/-) in a six and a half hour period:

Law of the sea: America's Cup may run aground again

The America's Cup - named for the great Sandy Hook Pilot schooner that beat all comers 'round the isle of Wight, is sailing's biggest prize - for lawyers.  The Cup was won by a great sailor who has the misofrtune to be from Lake Geneva, which is not, as the Deed of Gift requires, an arm of the sea.  The latest snag is that Alinghi's sails were not made in Switzerland, surprising given its history as a reat maritime nation.  


Now Ernesto Bertarelli says he may forfeit the race to fellow billionaire Larry Ellison if he loses in court once more.  Good, as far I am concerned.  He wanted to race in Abu Dhabi, where the racers might have been wrecked by a falling skyscraper or something. Best case scenario: Ellison wins on the water and brings the race to San Francisco where we can have photogenic races in lots of wind that people can watch from the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Regulars - James & George at breakfast

Credits: below - Manhattan Times; Top: Pete & Luis - waiter and counterman Susan Sermoneta

Minor celebrity has found me.  The Manhattan Times - the local freebie weekly -did a profile of the Greek coffee shop (nee Angela's now Vicky's).  It featured me: the guy who sits in the window seat with his loyal dog staring patiently, waiting.  Most people have commented on Vicky's reference to me as a "souvenir", and an "antique".  She tells me that is because I am valuable.  Hmm.


The Regular - 10 years in the same seat
by Adam Garrett Clark, Manhattan Times 

Every weekday morning for the last 10 years or so a little after 8:30 a.m., George Conk ties up his yellow Labrador Retriever, James, outside Vicky’s Diner on W. 187th Street, takes his usual seat in the corner by the door and has the usual: a bowl of oatmeal, glass of grapefruit juice and a coffee.

The regularity is good for his “Circadian rhythms,” he explains, eating at the same time everyday is healthy for the digestive system. For a long time the waiter, Pete Mousaeakas, knew Conk’s “usual” to be a fried egg, light over easy, on buttered whole wheat toast, but Conk is trying to watch his weight.  

Conk is what owner Vicky Limberis calls one of her “souvenir customers:” he’s like an antique she explains, a historical fixture in the restaurant whose daily appearances predate her taking over the business.

The rest of the story is HERE

Draggers in Upper NY Bay

  Nothing special about seeing a few fishing boats: until you learn that this is New York harbor - in January 2010.  the light house below is Robbins Reef - just north of the Kill Van Kull - the channel into the Port Newark container port.  On shore is Bayonne and the tank farm.  What's the catch?  Bunker (menhaden) is my guess.  For more pix go to Tugster, the leading chronicler of New York Harbor.

A Swampscott dory

It was a beautiful 40 degree Saturday morning.  We met these men launching a Swampscott dory at the nearby public landing on the Meduncook River.  That's  at the end of Wadsworth Point Road (around the corner and down half a mile from us).  It was wide open after a two day thaw.  That happens quickly here because the Meduncook is fed only by a mile long salt marsh.  It gets wide quickly and is  really mostly the Muscongus Bay, Gulf of Maine.  
The Swampscott Dory was a Massachusetts Bay fishing boat launched from the shore (like the Sea Bright dories once emblematic of the Jersey Shore).


Slideshow HERE