Unexpectedly. we here in metroparkcentralis were blessed with a second glorious false Spring sunny and warm day that allowed us to witness the slow fading away of the moon. We are not usually so blessed when it comes to stellar phenomena and in 12 years the only things we've been able to see with our own eyes in the heavens are the last total eclipse of the sun and the transit of Venus some years ago just as the sun was reaching the horizon over the Great Lake we live to the Southeast of. Tonight we got to watch the full lunar eclipse. It was very nice.
As I said, it usually rains or snows whenever a comet enters the inner system or there is a meteor shower or those pesky attack ships catch fire....well you know where. At any rate, I include some Enya for good reasons and a picture of a book I read shortly after it came out. Interestingly, Manry was also from metroparkcentralis and his little boat is still located here in the Western Reserve aviation and auto museum.
I always liked the cover of the book because it brings to mind the original members of our flotilla. Our first was a bright red Optimist pram and the second was purchased about a month later from title holders of the Inland Navy in Kansas. It was a 13 foot long Flying Junior named Indomitable and the pram was named the Indefatigable. We drove them around the country from Kansas to Newport, RI with the bright red pram upside down in the FJ looking just like you see in the picture above.
I was thinking of the red moon we saw tonight and then of the problems one would have trying to teach celestial navigation in metroparkcentralis since it is always so cloudy and then what a pain in the butt it would be to swing an arc with a sextant in something as small as a 13 foot boat and then I figured I'd probably just use a compass and a radio direction finder if I was sailing to England in 1965. At least this time I could speak the language of the stations I was using to DF unlike the last time I did it in Mexico.
So yeah, I started sailing about 6 years after Tinkerbelle arrived in England and did it in a place even more removed from the sea. It got better though even if the later additions to the flotilla never did get longer than 14 feet. There is still one tucked away in the garage chastising me for not getting in a few hours on the water last summer. I'll have to try harder this year.
2 comments:
My sailing started with a 16 ft Hobie Cat purchased at Nas Jax in '90. No lessons just started and was quite bad at it. Cat got wrecked at the jetties in Mayport a year and a half later. Learned about seabreezes coming up strong in the late afternoons! Later on while on long cruise USS Deyo, me and two pilots talked mainly about sailing, we read all the magazines and books, Tanya Aebi's travelogue, "Maiden Voyage" was a big inspiration. I still boat... DC Barco Sin Vela II
We started young and persisted even after my dad thought we could learn a lot from frostbiting in National 10s at the Newport Yacht Club in November and January and craziness like that. I was amazed to find in my last week on LaSalle that the ship actually had a couple of Sunfish squirreled away on the Lower Vehicle Deck. We were anchored in Sitrah and me and an ET2 carried them up to the stern gate, dropped them in the water and sailed all around Sitrah and Muharraq. I wish I'd known about them when I first reported aboard....I found Latititude 38 long afterwards and hooked up with a girl sailing to Scotland via San Diego and the Sea of Cortez. Then I went to Desert Storm.
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