Teen boat builder

 One clever kid

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2020/08/27/when-the-pandemic-shut-down-schools-this-naples-ny-teen-built-a-boat/5641945002/

Ian & Sylvia Reunion 1986

Four strong winds only carried Ian and Sylvia Tyson so far.  They divorced in 1975.  But did a reunion concert in 1986.  Ian is 86 now and still performs.  Sylvia is a member of the all-female folk super group Quartette.

Ian and Sylvia are joined by Gordon Lightfoot, Judy Collins, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt.

Four Strong Winds - Ian and Sylvia Tyson

 Many have covered this song, but none better than the great Canadian folk duo Ian and Sylvia Tyson.

Tomorrow is a Long Time - Keb' Mo

 

Sebastian Steudtner German pro-surfer catches 115 foot wave in Portugal

 Sebastian Steudtner at Nazare, Portugal

115 feet!  But how does it end?

Sebastian Steudtner — a German pro surfer — rode a wave over 115 feet tall at Nazare, Portugal.

I’m not this tough. Or brave. Or talented VIDEO: ...pic.twitter.com/b7p1RW8tTO

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) September 7, 2020

 

Swamped: At Least 4 Boats Sink During ‘Trump Boat Parade’ in Texas, Officials Say - The New York Times

This stupidity astonishes.  Lake Travis is fed by two dams which form Inks Lake on the Colorado River (NOT the one that runs through the Grand Canyon].  It's a sliver that looks perhaps 100 yards wide to me.  10 miles an hour by these boats is a lot of displacement.  Why these guys put these big boats in that river for a Trump parade is a mystery to me.  Hail to the Chief, I guess.  What coud go wrong?

At Least 4 Boats Sink During ‘Trump Boat Parade’ in Texas, Officials Say - The New York Times

Multiple boats in distress, sinking at Trump Boat Parade on Lake Travis | KEYE

Multiple boats in distress, sinking at Trump Boat Parade on Lake Travis | KEYE

Masked NYC — AJ Stetson Photography & Videography

Masked NYC — AJ Stetson Photography & Videography



NOT ME

The last year? For 100 years the Quinn Family has delivered the mail to Penobscot Bay islands

The Eagle Island Light is a landmark on the East Penobscot Bay.  Author Ben Howe's family maintains it, the sort of act of love for a place that makes Maine Maine.  Here he tells the story of the Quinns who have lived on the high mile square island a mile west of Little Deer Isle, one of a group of islands that make the Bay a mystical archipelago.  I'll let him Ben tell the story.  Be sure to click through to the whole piece in the Times.  - GWC

  The last year? For 100 years the Quinn Family has delivered the mail to Penobscot Bay islands

 By Ben Ryder Howe

• Sept. 3, 2020Updated 3:05 p.m. ET

HANCOCK COUNTY, MAINE — In blinding fog, an aging boat called the TM 2 zigzagged through the Cricket Hole, a shallow reef in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. The ocean’s calm surface concealed a maze of unseen ledges, around which the TM 2’s captain, Karl Osterby, cut a tight course. The boat soon approached an aluminum dock on Great Spruce Head Island, where a man in shorts and rubber boots awaited.

“Another busy day?” the man said, his sarcasm as evident — this being Maine — as the invisible bottom of the Cricket Hole. Mr. Osterby said nothing and held out an all but empty canvas bag of U.S. mail with one hand, as the TM 2 glided past the dock without stopping. There was a single passenger aboard (me). In the state that calls itself Vacationland, high season had just begun.

Normally, by July, the mail boat that serves six of the small and rugged islands of northern Penobscot Bay — Barred, Butter, Eagle, Bear, Scrag and Great Spruce Head — would be weighed down with letters and packages, plus a dozen or so passengers at $25 per ride. Some riders would have been sightseers scanning the reef-laden harbors for porpoises and harbor seals, and some would have been seasonal residents of the islands. Many in the latter group would be stranded without the mail boat — a lifeline delivering essentials like prescriptions, groceries and, this year, ballots.

Image

Karl Osterby, 63, a boat captain, caretaker of the Quinn family property, and sole year-round resident of Eagle Island, Maine, delivers the day's mail by boat to the several islands in Penobscot Bay.Credit...Tristan Spinski for The New York Times

Operating the route has been the responsibility of one family since 1905 — and this year is likely to be the last because of the hardships imposed by Covid-19.

KEEP READING

 

Life Lessons from a 97-Year-Old Lobsterman | Outside Online

For several years we rented a big old farm house on Maple Juice Cove, on the St. George River, in Cushing, Maine.  We hosted the annual family reunion there.  Just across the cove is the Olson House, a museum now, where Andrew Wyeth did his most famous work - a portrait of Christina Olson, the crippled daughter of a Swedish captain who married a local girl. The Olson family story is oft told, of course.

A couple hundred yards down the road is Sam Olson's Seafood a lobster buyer's wharf.  There Sam's father John - Christina's brother - fished his entire life. John, who told his story in a plain narrative to his daughter Virginia, died last year.  But before he did he told his story again to a writer from Outside Magazine.



We knew Sam - the kids jumped onto his dock to watch as the yardman put the "bugs" into a floating crate for us.  I met Sam a few times.  A small man with huge hands that had been hauling lobster traps for 70 years by then.  I liked his old wooden boat My Girl, classic high bow, low freeboard from the days before powered trap haulers.  One day, sorry to say, he forgot to put in the scupper plugs and the boat went to the bottom, frying the electricals in the salt water.  Easier to buy another boat than re-power the sunken one.

So John lies in the local graveyard near the Olson House, just a few yards from Andrew who made this typical Maine family famous.  - GWC



Life Lessons from a 97-Year-Old Lobsterman | Outside Online

by Suzanne Rico

If the definition of a true outdoorsman is spending more of your life braving the elements than seeking shelter from them, lobsterman John Olson may be the finest example alive.

On Halloween morning last year—the wind six knots, the temperature 38 degrees—Olson stands at the helm of a high-bowed wooden boat that shoulders aside the sea. Wearing rubber boots, brown work pants, and a navy jacket with enough dirt on it for him not to worry about keeping it clean, John has the straight-backed bearing of the World War II sailor he once was.

“My mother wanted me to work in an office,” he says, nudging the boat close to an orange and black buoy bobbing off Griffin Island in midcoast Maine. “But that wasn’t for me.” He snags the buoy with a duct-taped gaff, and the hydraulic hauler whines as it lifts a wire trap with a tangle of lobsters inside.

“How do you know where to find them?” I ask.

“It’s all in here,” John says, pointing a yellow-gloved hand to his head, which, after 97 years, is still covered by a respectable amount of gray hair. “I been over this bottom so many times, it’s imprinted.”

---

John Olson caught his first crustaceans nine decades ago. Born in 1922, he spent his childhood summers roaming Hathorne Point on Maine’s Muscongus Bay with his buddy Clyde. The boys spent their nights camping out and their days fishing, swimming, or working on Clyde’s father’s lobster boat.

“I couldn’t have been much more than six,” John says of his early start in the lobstering business. He digs through a box in the kitchen of the weathered saltbox house he built in 1954, his cat, Mia, rubbing against his legs, until he finds a faded photograph. In it, a young John, jug-eared and smiling, stands by a wheelbarrow full of lobsters, clutching one in each hand. “I started out paddling with oars. Then motors came along, and my father bought an engine for me—a one-cylinder—and we put it in a dory.”

John shows me the lobster fisherman’s license he received at age 16. Dated July 1, 1938, the creased and torn document is a remnant from the Depression, when lobsters sold for 15 cents a pound. After high school, he bought a brand-new boat, paying for it the Maine way: “I went into the woods and cut 100 cords of pulpwood with a bucksaw and ax,” John remembers. “There weren’t no chainsaws.”

DO KEEP READING