and I seem to be more excited than horrified! It all comes from being married to an engineer, I suppose. And an engineer who loves to sail and also had a cottage on the Georgian Bay to spend summers at as a kid.
For reasons of luck and proximity, the cottage that I was lucky enough to spend summers at on Georgian Bay as a kid was neighbour to a cottage belonging to a professor who was a missionary to China of all things and won a Molson prize for Late Archaic Chinese: a grammatical study. One of his son’s happened to be just a bit older than my brothers and me, but we fell into friendly contact after awkward contact when we were little and our parents would interact. One of this son’s business ventures as a young adult involved getting Laser sailboats accepted as a class for Olympic sailing, and he had something to do with the initial design and construction of the prototypes I think. But one way or another, and it was sort of out of character, my parents bought one of the racing prototypes from him for me, when I was a youngish teenager. He would come out and laugh at how I had rigged it, because no one in my family was a sailor and I just tried to guess and remember [which is not a strong suit], and help me out.
And from these sort of Swallows and Amazons beginnings, we took advantage of my in-laws’ 22 ft Catalina for over 25 years. We took it on our honeymoon, and we took it on a beautiful 25th wedding anniversary trip up the Georgian Bay.
We took our children across the bay when they were little
and sailed with them in the Bahamas and British Virgin Islands. It just became a way of life whenever possible. Which wasn’t often enough.
But the Catalina is an old boat and frankly performs like a bit of a soggy bathtub, which is tough slogging for an engineer who happens to really like efficiency and has long been interested in sail and wing design. And then along comes a boat, with a long involved design story, that is efficient, and strangely safer than a mono-hull even though it is so much faster, a trimaran designed by Ian Farrier. But they are very expensive and while we have looked at them, and hubby has read much about them, it didn’t seem like a thing we were going to be able to really achieve. Not something we could actually live aboard and afford.
Someone else had a similar plan a while back though, and engineered the inside of this particular Corsair 31, the first aft-cockpit hull they made, so that it would be a functional cruiser, and they used the boat happily for years. But then it changed hands and after a while sat for some time in a boatyard in Wareham, Massachusetts. So we went and looked at it. And in a slightly odd twist it became ours. We are still stunned and that much closer to bankruptcy. It needs lots of TLC, but sweat equity is the name of the game, and I know it is going to clean up beautifully. And then maybe we can sail down the St. Lawrence and keep on going …. I will always come home though … my wanderlust comes in bursts, and one of the most astonishing things about the design of this boat is that it folds, even under way, and will make it through the narrows to Go Home.
When we showed a picture of a similar boat under sail to a close friend of one of our offspring, he said in a way that will forever endear him to me, “Oh, you bought a space ship!”
Here is the reality:
But here is how the dream unfolds:
We hope.
I know it is going to be a stretch to make it all happen but I am way more excited than I expected.
“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse.” 🙂
what i mean is that i just wanted to play a song about a boat.
this one even has a lighthouse.
And of course
Is it any wonder I dream of sailing?
“fate has smiled at destiny”….just love that for some reason.
prolly gonna roll some tunes.
unexpected and nice hand off from co-worker w/the
small sample.
ahh, friendship,…hi all.
add: dude, i’ve always liked that dylan tune too, just thought the video was odd.
old lowell was out of shape, confused and had great fondness for the white stuff.
would have liked to have met him. very cool and fascinating person apparently ( something I remember from an old jackson browne interview). anyway.
oh. the neil young line as well “as we rush ahead to save our time”
off to some steely.
some old vinyl. we really did play the record grooves out of this.
later all.
Great tunes.
Too bad about cocaine and heroin taking so many down. If you have an addictive personality you really have to run from strong substances. Wine and Monsieur Vert have caused me plenty of trouble … and brief brushes with the first two sent me scrambling for the exits. How anyone could watch someone shoot up and then want to do it is beyond me … but I have done lots of foolish things myself so I shouldn’t really be so judgmental … but blowing things up your nose or injecting them into your body is just not a good call.
and good morning!
And now I will get to take my metal detector to interesting sandy places …
which will be even more exciting if this were to happen, which RBC thinks might:
Gold is currently probing its falling 200-day moving average at the $1256 zone.
A sustained recapture would introduce further technical upside to the top of the larger weekly trading range highlighted at the $1350-$1400 zone.
sometimes my brain speeds up when it should be slowing down.
for EO and all.
Yes to speedy brain when quiet brain would be much appreciated!
Good late morning … slightly difficult night pain wise but rallying now. And the hot water tank started, well more like really got going, running dark brown water. Luckily a rental, unluckily can’t come until Sunday morning.
It is unusual to see the USD so strong and gold rallying.
The USD is strong because we bought a boat in USD and haven’t paid for it yet. But why is gold rallying?
gold is doing what it is supposed to do. it is acting as a safe haven. it has been rising faster in other currencies as the dollar has been acting as a safe haven also… so golds strength hasn’t been so obvious priced in dollars.
i assume you are aware that the Swiss National Bank abandoned pegging the franc to the euro. major blow to the perception of central bank omnipotence. also a major breach of public trust. they had been saying they would defend the peg to the ends of the earth. so they really dropped a bomb here, and wiped out billions of dollars of wrong bets that just the other day seemed like sure thing easy money. also there is/was a carry trade of sorts in Eastern Europe – francs were cheap to borrow. well oops, lots of mortgage holders in francs just went 30% more in debt in the local currency, euros or other. these people were simply average joes, not financial whizzes skimming profits, and are seething with anger, rightfully so.
there also are the Greek elections next week. a “Grexit” is no longer unlikely.
so things are NOT AWESOME! sometimes you wake up from a bad dream, sometimes just the opposite. we now wake up to the realization that all that central bank easy money only kicked the can down the road. and the little guys have never felt any of that “easing” anyway. but it is still our public debt!
but you know all this. and remember Exter’s pyramid. i have always believed that gold functions like a hard asset, not an inflation hedge. it is simply and ultimately base money. otherwise the central banks would not hold any, or game it like we all know they do! sheesh.
crazy last few days here. this needs to be edited. but i don’t have the time.
be back later hopefully.
oh, and life isn’t all bad. big warm up coming. well, relatively speaking, this is still Wisconsin. but i will be able to grill comfortably this weekend.