Well, the air quality has gotten back to pristine! We are all rejoicing and giving thanks here! I don’t know how far south this extends. Steve-O in Ashland, OR was in the worse air ever and I haven’t heard for him recently. Check in Steve-O.

And in the all our news is the death of RBG. What a beloved individual. My Rebecca cried and cried. I’d like to write more but then I would have to apologize for being a guy and not understanding the depth of her accomplishments.

On a lighter side it is the home opener of Seattle Seahawks Football this evening. Everything will stop around here. Go Hawks!

So some great comments have come in concerning the sailing stories and maybe I have one more post in me. It has been fun for me to dig up those memories. And one thing that I have realized is the idea that this project started in someone’s “backyard”. That sort of says a lot around here anyway!

On the trip there were six of us, five guys and one woman and that seemed perfect. Two from California, two from Oregon and two from Washington. That divided up the day so that we each had a two hour day watch and a two hour night watch. The day watch was fun as everyone was up and around doing chores or playing pinochle. But the night watch was AMAZING. Just you and the universe overhead. The air was so clear and the darkness so dark that every darn star was out. There were amazing visits by dolphin friend then too.

The boat had a tiller and not a wheel. That is a long lever that the person steering turns the rudder with and thus steers the whole deal. It was such a powerful feeling to do that. As you stood there feet apart the point at which the boat rotated was directly below you. It is hard to describe how that feels other than to say the boat was you and you were the boat.

One of the weird happenings for us was that after a while it was hard to separate an awake state from a sleep state. Did I see that or did I dream that? Very woo woo! Maybe because of the constant movement sleep was relative. And the night watch played with your head so.

Sometimes at night ships were encountered and we would shine a light up on the sails to announce ourselves. We had an owl visit us once way out in the middle of nowhere. It sat in the rigging and rested and then took off to where I don’t know. We saw whales occasionally. We netted lots of Japanese glass fishing floats, great souvenirs. Very occasionally there were areas of floating plastics maybe hundreds of yards across. They were alive with life like floating islands. Those were the forerunners of things to come.

I remember reading a novel by an early American writer and his characters were letter writers and they would write back and forth to each other. And on the top of some of the letters there were dates and on some there was the phrase “of the instant”. It took me a while to understand that. But if you were answering in the same month it was “of the instant”. In other other words one month was an instant. And that was the way time was for us on the nineteen century boat. We had major cultural shock trying to cross the street in Sausalito.

Well, I am over 500 words and out of time.

later alligator loves, Felipé.