Farewell to Dr. John, Wherever You Is Now

From The Paris Review

Farewell to Dr. John, Wherever You Is Now: Even in a city of characters, he stood out, wrapped in his own language. “You speak Spanish?” a journalist asked him. “No, man,” he said. “I don’t even speak English.” - by Brian Cullman

Late bloomers - Lilacs in Maine

When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd* is Walt Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln. 

*[The Walt Whitman Archive CC license]

North River 2 Launch 2019

D Day Addendum | The New Yorker

American soldiers, including New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford

D Day Addendum | The New Yorker: Footnotes to A. J. Liebling’s account of action off Normandy Beach that ran in The New Yorker in July, 1944.

by Roger Angell

Roger Angell (by Karen Green)

I have a few footnotes to hang onto the bottom lip of A. J. Liebling’s “Cross-Channel Trip,” the remarkable first-hand account of action off Normandy Beach that ran in The New Yorker on July 8, 1944, a month and a bit after D Day. The first of these might as well be an urgent memo to all the directors of all the graduate writing programs in the land commanding them to tack up this piece in their “Must Read, Then Reread” curricula for this year and every year. As an assignment they should require each student to count up the quotes and names and sights and details and passing thoughts and rushes of burning interest that stuff each paragraph to the gunwales and over.

I know one detail that Liebling leaves out, however: the fact and apparent wild coincidence that Lieutenant Henry Rigg, the commander of the Navy LCIL (Landing Craft Infantry: Large) from which Liebling gets his closeup look at the D Day action, had been known in boaty circles of civilian life as the fabled yachtsman H. K. (Bunny) Rigg, and in New Yorker circles as our Yachts and Yachtsmen columnist. Belay those snickers, all hands. The magazine’s columnists covered almost everything back in the easeful issues of the nineteen-thirties—fashions, tennis, Ivy League football, horseracing, dog shows—and Rigg’s suave writing made you feel at ease during each tack and luff, whatever the hell they meant. 

He lived in Annapolis and sailed its waters and just about everywhere, becoming a three-time winner of the coveted Bermuda Cup and, while cruising, the cause for extra rounds of gin fizzes in yacht clubs up and down the Atlantic Coast and pretty much around the Caribbean. His actions under fire on D Day brought him subsequent Silver Star and Legion of Honor awards, but, as he would say, never mind that now.

KEEP READING

130 foot maxi My Song lost at sea during transport ~ GCaptain

https://gcaptain.com/superyacht-my-song-lost-during-transport/

Stage 4 lung cancer and a mountain to climb

She Had Stage 4 Lung Cancer, and a Mountain to Climb https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/sports/cancer-mother.html

Cousins, and siblings - Our new family - thanks to Ancestry.com

Today my first cousins Curt and Karen met their sister (my first cousin) Donna for the first time.  Thanks to a DNA search Donna learned the identity of their father - my uncle Walter - by finding that Curt and Karen are her brother and sister.  Curt and Karen came in from Santa Barbara to meet Donna.   Taisy and I met our cousin and her family for the first time; and they all met Marilyn too!

Lending a hand at The Apprenticeshop - Launching Spirit

Russ and I stopped by The Apprenticeshop to check the progress of the mahogany planking on their current big project - building a 24 LWL Dublin Bay 24.  We were promptly shanghaied by owner Susan St. John into lending a hand for the launch of her 32 foot six oared pilot gig  - recently returned from the Australian Wooden Boat Show.

Cleopatra - matriarch of Kenyan elephant herd dies at 54

1. Cleopatra, the matriarch of a famous herd of elephants in Kenya known as 'the Royals' has died at 54. She leaves behind seven children & her sister Anastasia who was co-matriarch of the herd

Cleopatra's 9-month-old daughter (in the video above) has been taken to an orphanage pic.twitter.com/NsWWz3ALpK

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) April 10, 2019

The Full Story - Dr. Stanley Paris now home in St. Augustine after aborted 4th attempt to Solo Circumnavigate | Stanley Paris & Kiwi Spirit II

A few years ago Kiwi spirit sat on the bank of the St. George river in the Lyman Morse lower yard in Thomaston, Maine.  It waited for its owner Stanley Paris to make his first stab at being the oldest person to complete a solo circumnavigation.  Now his 4th attempt - this time hoping to be the first octogenarian - has failed.

I feel about him the way I felt about Francis Chichester aboard Gypsy Moth.  He made it but I jumped ship in New Zealand.  There something annoying and much that's impressive about this guy.  I'll leave the allocation to you. 

- gwc

The Full Story - Dr. Stanley Paris now home in St. Augustine after aborted 4th attempt to Solo Circumnavigate | Stanley Paris & Kiwi Spirit II: 

The last blog contained the paragraph “Never in my over 100,000 sea miles have I had so much go wrong so soon. Major problems include loss of bilge pumps, loss of two starboard hydro genators, so necessary for power. In addition, diesel fuel leaks into bilges and fresh water system failure.”

I suppose that’s explanation enough to some, but for sailors like myself you just might to want to know a little more so that like me you learn each time something goes wrong and how it was fixed or accommodated – or why not fixed. If that should interest you then read on.

First to answer the question of what made me finally quit just north of Brazil after some 4,929 miles since the start. It was the calculation that somewhere soon after the half way mark, I would run out of sufficient means to generate electrical power so necessary for navigation, communications, cooking, pumps and most importantly to solo sailors – power for the auto pilots which steer the boat. It’s just not possible to physically sail a boat by having to steer it 24 hours a day, without an autopilot. They worked just fine but they consume electrical energy and I lost the ability to generate enough such energy.  Losing these critical functions at any time during the voyage would have been serious enough but to loose them in the Southern Ocean could be disastrous.

But let’s tell the story in the sequence of what happened including an issue or two not raised in the first paragraph above.

We Begin with Item One:

The departure was fine.