The Excellent Adventure

I believe, really, really strongly, that the time has come, in fact, probably come and gone, for us to start acting like the ancestors we want to be remembered as, instead of as good citizens. Our children and our grandchildren are not going to appreciate financial inheritance and “security” in a world where food is ungrowable.

So it’s in the spirit of encouraging you, my dear readers, to step up to the plate, that I point you to my Hero of the Week, Tim DeChristopher.

Tim DeChristopher, 27, faces possible federal charges after winning bids totaling about $1.8 million on more than 10 lease parcels that he admits he has neither the intention nor the money to buy — and he’s not sorry.

“I decided I could be much more effective by an act of civil disobedience,” he said during an impromptu streetside news conference during an afternoon blizzard. “There comes a time to take a stand.”

The Sugar House resident — questioned and released after disrupting a U.S. Bureau of Land Management lease auction of 149,000 acres of public land in scenic southern and eastern Utah — said he came to the BLM’s state office in Salt Lake City to join about 200 other activists in a peaceful protest outside the building Friday morning. But then he registered with the BLM as representing himself and went to the auction room.

There, he thought about the times he has marched, fired off letters to his congressmen, signed petitions and supported environmental organizations — all to no avail.

“What the environmental movement has been doing for the past 20 years hasn’t worked,” DeChristopher said. “It’s time for a conflict. There’s a lot at stake.”

Yes, there is. And while we’re all discussing buying cleaner cars (instead of eliminating them altogether) and we’re talking about reducing emissions and we’re talking talking talking and by Christ doing nothing, Tim went out there and did something. And it’s a big something he did. (And bonus points to those of you who recognize the Henry V quote I slipped in there; see, frustration with all talk and no action goes back a long way.)

At this stage, any action is better than none, and bigger action is better than smaller action. Figure out how to free yourself from petroleum use, and then teach someone else how. Figure out how to grow your own food, and then help someone else put a garden in. Fight greed, fight corruption, fight global climate change, fight whatever irks you the most, that you think you can make the greatest change about. And then teach someone else. But get going.

HT: Freewayblogger

Tags: Environment

I found this piece, from the BBC, fascinating to contemplate, as an American:

Iran sends ship against pirates

Iran has sent a warship to the Gulf of Aden to protect its merchant shipping from attacks by Somali pirates, Iranian state media has reported.

The Iranian force joins ships from the EU, US, India, Russia, Malaysia and others which are already patrolling in the area.

China has also said it is considering sending a defensive force to the Gulf.

In October, Iran paid a ransom to free the crew of a captured merchant ship, and an Iranian-operated cargo ship carrying 36,000 tonnes of wheat was seized in November.

Pirate attacks are a regular occurrence in the Gulf of Aden, with many countries blaming the breakdown of law and order in Somalia.

World leaders have called for greater action to deal with the problem and last week, the UN approved a resolution allowing foreign troops to pursue pirates on land in Somalia.

Amazing, isn’t it? All these countries that are politically, diplomatically, and culturally at each other’s throats over one thing or another are all managing to focus, team up, and patrol the Gulf of Aden to protect financial interest. I wonder if we’ll hear reports that the warships are working together, or if they’re just duplicating effort out there. In any case, this is definitely a story to watch.

Tags: piracy

This past weekend, we worked on the boat.

This is not substantively different from most of the prior weekends. As anyone who’s been on one, lives on one, or owns one, can tell you, boats are a continual maintenance project. But yesterday was a little bit different, because we’re finally settling in.

We’ve been living here for over a year. We’ve gone through several iterations of "do I need this? Do I want this? Can I find a place to put this? Will it break in a good swell? Could someone else make better use of it? Will I regret it if I get rid of it? Would eliminating its weight help the boat’s trim?" When you’ve never lived aboard before, these become critical questions, that take a lot more out of you to answer than you may have thought.

A while back, I threatened to go below while Jason was sailing, open hatches, and just pitch things out at random. Somehow, when you’ve got a noble goal of "peak sailing performance" (I can hear Toast snorting now, since this is a "condomaran" and not a competitive sailing vessel), it’s far easier to ditch the junk, than it is when you’re faced with condensing the entirety of a land house into a boat. The goal is "only what matters, but everything that matters" and it’s amazing to me how different that looked when I was packing the house.

Thanks to the mighty SFEB Freecycle, pretty much all weekend, as soon as I found a knickknack and posted it, someone popped up to rehome it. And some folks were really excited, really genuinely thrilled to receive our odds and ends. And a lot of those things were prized possessions, before I figured out that I had to keep them bubble-wrapped if they were going to survive, and if you’re going do that, what’s the point?

Rowan helped me empty, clean, rearrange, and cull the galley cabinets. They’re now completely gale-ready, and there’s finally a home for my cookbooks. Jason helped repackage and store the stuff from the latest grocery runs, and we can finally say we’re adequately provisioned. Kestrel encouraged my efforts at every turn, and moved stuff from one location to another. We all took turns looking at things, evaluating their real purpose, and making decisions about whether to retain or jettison.

I don’t think we did enough to actually impact the waterline or anything like that. But I think that for the first time, we were able to assess our living space here as boating space, instead of as a funny-shaped not-house space. And it made all the difference.

Tags: culling, Moving Aboard, organization

This piece on global warming, from the Guardian, is absolutely nauseating:

Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, he would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control - far above even the bleak scenarios considered by last year’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review. The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.

“As an academic I wanted to be told that it was a very good piece of work and that the conclusions were sound,” Anderson said. “But as a human being I desperately wanted someone to point out a mistake, and to tell me we had got it completely wrong.”
Watson said: “We must alert everybody that at the moment we’re at the very top end of the worst case [emissions] scenario.

It’s a scary time we’re entering, friends. And it’s just sliding downhill…

Tags: carbon emissions, climate change, Environment, global warming

Over Thanksgiving, we went to visit Jason’s folks, Mom2 and Grandpa Allen. It was a lovely time, and much goodness was had. By everyone else. Me? Upon being told that their aging Compaq had, um, issues, as we say in the trade, I spent two and a half days beating it into submission. The boys ran around in the cold, Grandpa Allen set the burn pile alight for them, cooking and whatnot was done… I literally ate my plate of holiday goodness while babysitting system update downloads.

Trying to bring some sunshine to my life, Mom2 popped in Waterworld to keep me amused for a bit. It’s one of her favorites, which is entertaining, since she’s not a water person in any way. I didn’t tell her that the movie annoyed the bejeebers out of me when I’d seen it originally. I was teaching scuba for a living at the time, and the diving scenes were just 100% wrong. But hey, when you’re cooped up on dry land in winter, arguing with Windows 98 fercryingoutloud, anything’s an improvement.

Did I mention, the diving scenes were full of fail? And there I was, all prepared for that. But here’s what I wasn’t prepared for. The Mariner’s Trimaran, which almost functions as a character itself in the film, was built by the very same folks who built s/v Excellent Adventure. And while we are a catamaran and that’s a trimaran, I found myself riveted to the screen, replaying certain bits (the transformation scene in particular) over and over and over, thinking "hey… we could do that… and try that… and and and…"

In prepping this post, I found Steve’s most excellent site on the Trimaran, and I have to say, it’s fun to see someone else as intrigued by the options that boat presents. Jason and I spent a decent portion of the drive home talking about stuff in the film, and things we could modify on our own boat. And we realized that because our expectations of Waterworld were so incredibly dismal, we were able to allow more possibilities, more "what if" speculation, and a better sense of fun, into our thinking about our own boat.

So many yachtistas spend all their time and energy trying to compete with the Joneses, making their boat look all Bristol and sharpish and glossy. There was something amazingly freeing about thinking so completely outside the box, and allowing some fun and some post-apocalyptic necessity creep into our "what ifs" about
Excellent Adventure. The Trimaran is a rusty, Rube Goldberg-ian conglomerate of single-handing modification… but is that really a bad thing?

Of course there were bits that were just goofy and unrealistic. The mainsail, for instance, is fully-battened, and I know for a fact that the necessary battens are rare as hen’s teeth and twice as expensive. I know that despite the patched-together look of the main, it’s got almost no cupping, which means it’s a newer and more resilient sail than I’m currently running with. I know that there’s no way that the tiny counterweight they used in the film would be enough to fully raise that sail. So clearly, some of that was just as goofy as the diving scenes (did I mention how wrong it was to have the Mariner’s gills behind his freaking ears? What, is he breathing through his brain???). But still, it was nice to free up the gears of our creativity, and look at the boat in a new way.

And if any of my marina neighbors are reading this, keep your hand off our limes, eh?

Tags: Lagoon, Maintenance, Waterworld

I‘m blogging this so I can prove I knew him when.

My dear friend Liz is mama to four incredible kids, but this post is about Donovan, the eldest. He and Jason hit it off hugely when we visited them in New Zealand three years ago, and we’ve watched him grow up from afar, his own American cheering section.

But that cheering section is expanding. Dono is doing competitive sailing down there in the frigid Southern Ocean.

Dono’s furthest back, yellow hood. Great shot of him, eh? LOL!

Here’s the goings-on of his last race, and in his words:

WEDS 19th - hey just a quick note to say we have arrived. Te flight was uneventful although we did fly through a jet stream which was 97 knots of wind. We have a training day today so it will be a chance for us to get used to the boats and sailing together as we haven’t quite done that yet, there has always been someone away.

THURS 20th - The regatta started today and we were drawn for the 2nd half of the round robin. Because there are 12 teams and 6 boats they decided to run two half round robins. We had the first 6 races off then 12 on then 6 off the wind went light and fluky so they were only able to get 5 flights away meaning that we didn’t get to sail at all.

We did manage to go out on a Sydney 38 with the people we are staying with for their twilight series which was good fun.

Tomorrow is forecast to be 5 knots easterly changing to 5 knots westerly in the arvo so basically no breeze.

FRI 21st - The day started off very light and shifty and our first race was rubbish as the wind was so fluky we lost that, and our second was called off part way through because of a 90 degree wind shift. The wind filled in about 12 and at the end of the day we were 6 from 8 which should be enough to get through and we have 3 races tomorrow. Forecast is 15 knots tomorrow and 30 on sun.

SAT 22nd - no racing today 30 knots.
More wind forecast tomorrow so its looking like tom spithill will take it with jimmy 2nd and we will end up 3rd or 4th, which is an unfair result for everyone with no semis or a final.

SUN 23rd - We went into the last three races in round robins in 4th and after a delay of an hr the breeze dropped and we completed the round robin.

We won all three of our races this morning and will jimmy losing three and will ryan losing one we had jumped up to 1st equal but 2nd on the countback we had three aborted starts for the final as the breeze was up around 30 knots the 2nd aborted start was the most frustrating as we where over half way through the race and leading by a good margin when they called it off so in the end we finished up 2nd as the final was not completed tom spithill from aus got 1st josh junior from wellington 3rd and will ryan from aus 4th

The race results look terribly disappointing, until you realize how many boats that entered didn’t even finish. I love how the race officials comment that “the race is the same and we can’t do anything about the weather”. Knowing what little I do firsthand of that water, I’m impressed these folks are in it in boats at all. It’s not friendly water by a long shot.

Tags: Competition, Donovan Neill, Southern Ocean

On Cap’n Richard Rodriguez’s superlative Bitter End blog, we find this:

http://captrichardrodriguez.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-piracy-news.html

A hijacked supertanker with two British crew members was being taken to a Somali port this afternoon after pirates seized their biggest vessel yet off the African coast. Acts of piracy in the shipping lanes of the Arabian Sea have become increasingly violent and commonplace in recent months, but this is the first time hijackers have seized an oil tanker.

The 1,000 ft-long Sirius Star was seized on Saturday around 450 nautical miles from Mombasa on the Kenyan coast. The supertanker, which can hold up to two million barrels of crude oil, is owned by Aramco, a Saudi company, but was sailing under a Liberian flag.

The original piece is here.

Somehow, I don’t think folks with this magnitude of daring are the least bit interested in my puny vessel. I really liked this observation:

They are typically well armed, well funded and well organised. Those who are attacked report gangs dressed in military fatigues and using satellite phones, GPS equipment, automatic weapons, anti-tank rocket launchers and grenades.

So it seems we have two flavors of pirate; the desperately poor and the thoroughly backed. I wonder when the media will figure out that these people are privateers, not pirates?

Tags: Bitter End, piracy

From the Geek Files, this seems thoroughly useful. You folks who are out in the world will have to report back and tell me if that’s so.

BareSite: Browse Faster

If you frequently browse web from dial-up, mobile phone or any other device with a slow internet connection then make sure to check out BareSite. This handy little website strips all unnecessary attributes from the webpages and leaves only the main content. No installation or download needed, simply go to BareSite.com and enter the URL of a website you want to access.

Tags: geek

The Navy gets to use all the sonar they want, because it’s a matter of vital national security. Right? Here and here.

Next thing you know, one of these myopic bastards is gonna make the whales remove their shoes before migrating.

HT: Jonathan and Franziska

Tags: Environment, politics, sonar, whales

From the site, http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/news-081002-1.html,

Sea Shepherd is very excited to announce that on Friday, November 7th Animal Planet will premiere Whale Wars at 9 PM ET/PT in the US, and internationally in early 2009.

During Sea Shepherd’s Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign: Operation Migaloo in 2007/08, Animal Planet had a camera crew on board a campaign that saved the lives of nearly 500 whales, leaving the Japanese fleet with less then half of their quota and costing them tens of millions of dollars.  This new seven-part, hour-long weekly series follows the crew of the Sea Shepherd vessel, Steve Irwin as they use non-violent direct action techniques that garner world wide media attention in an effort to shut down the illegal Japanese whaling fleet and enforce international conservation law.

It’s times like this I dearly miss having television. If anyone watches it, let me know how it is!

Tags: Animal Planet, Environment, sea shepherd, Whale Wars

Yesterday, a boat down the dock from us caught on fire, and burned pretty thoroughly. The hull might be salvageable, the contents are destroyed, and the owner’s dog, who was asleep inside at the time, died.

We’re all pretty devastated. Jason and I talked about it last night, and while I was not going to blog this, out of respect for the man whose home and best friend were lost, I changed my mind, because there are a few lessons here for anyone who lives in or around boats and marinas. I offer these thoughts in tribute to our friends. Some are things we got right, some are things we got wrong.

• Know Your Neighbors. We’re all pretty close here in this marina, so we were able to call the owner to come home almost immediately. We know pretty much where people work, and were able to find the right phone numbers. We had people to meet him at the gate so he wouldn’t walk face first into the destruction of his home without someone to catch him. But no one knew how to contact the owners of the boats on either side to call them. Naturally, the harbormaster will contact them today, but harbormasters are “during business hours” folks, and sometimes, that’s just not fast enough. They were lucky in that the liveaboards responded rapidly enough to prevent damage to their boats, but considering how the wind was howling yesterday, that was merely a matter of luck. And when all was said and done, a watch was established, so that someone would cruise by every half hour or so all night to make sure the boat neither re-ignited nor sank. Everyone knows who the night owls are and who the early birds are, so it was easy to establish a comfortable rotation.
• Test Your Call Boxes. There are big blue-lighted emergency call boxes at the end of each dock, and when one (of many) responders tried to use them to call the fire department, they did not work. I’m assuming it’s a problem 911 was having yesterday, because several folks reported not being able to connect to 911 with their phones either. Thankfully, at least one person got through, and the fire department showed up promptly. But people’s confidence in the call boxes needs to be restored.
• Do Fire Drills. We were so focused on the burning boat, we grabbed people’s dock hoses, and ran straight past the fire hoses installed on the docks. What’s fascinating is that the firemen reported that the small hoses have better pressure than the soakers, so it was probably A Good Thing that the little ones got used. Nice that the right choice was made, but would have been nice if it had been intentional. We also took this opportunity to figure out that the soakers won’t reach the boats at the end of the dock… like ours. Additionally, no one had an electric high-volume pump, so the feet of water in the bilge had to stand until the marina maintenance man could be called in (on his day off) to come pump it out. And it would have been good if we’d had a stash of tarps somewhere (other than our personal ones) to try to shield what was left of the boat from the weather.
• Batteries Can Explode. We all know to pay attention to our electrical systems, including batteries. What no one on this dock knew was that smaller batteries, such as those in your cell phone, can explode with equal destructive power, if they’re left plugged in to the charger. Additionally, when you’re a liveaboard it’s easy to get lazy about daisy chaining power cords and extenders. Don’t.
• Explore Any Odd Noises Thoroughly. Several of us heard the odd “pop” that was probably the battery exploding. But we all looked outside briefly, and went back about our business. And none of us went back up to check again later. Understandable, but in this case, not the right answer.
• Leave A Window Open. No one saw anything, until the canvas of the cockpit cover shredded, and a “blowtorch” of flame and smoke shot out into the fairway. By that point, there was little to save besides the hull. That’s because, as the fire chief pointed out, boats are designed to keep air in and water out, so all the normal signs of fire are suppressed until disaster. If there’s any way to leave a hatch or portlight open or at the very least uncovered, that’s ideal, so that people can smell smoke, see flickering light, and otherwise be alerted to the danger. None of us who heard the pop could have seen the flame, because the boat was sealed tight against yesterday’s rain, and had no portlights facing the dock.

Hopefully, there’s something there that someone reading this can use, to prevent the next boat fire, or help their marina become better prepared. We here are spending today being very sad, and we’ve taken up a collection to try to help.

And once again, I’d like to praise my neighbors here in the marina. Everyone showed up at a dead run, grabbing hoses, buckets, making phone calls, bringing hand warmers, and being useful in whatever way they could manage. And then after everything was handled, they gathered together in small groups in various boats to talk it over, reconnect, and figure out what else could be done to help. This is a fabulous group of people and I’m really honored to call them neighbors.

Tags: fire, living aboard, marina, safety

If you’re paying attention (always a question, since there’s so much going on these days in the world), the piracy thing is getting a lot of media attention lately. And people are genuinely freaked out. Everyone loves Jack Sparrow, but when faced with the reality of piracy, that there are scary folks out there on the high seas, with guns, tactics, and not a little desperation, they freak out.

Popular cruising magazines like Latitudes and Attitudes publish a piracy report. And the more commercial and online gCaptain also keeps track of piracy activities. Zac Sunderland just had a run-in with an oddly behaving boat off indonesian waters, and assumed pirates. When friends and family find out you’re planning on cruising, they immediately want to know how you’re going to protect yourself against pirates.

But here’s a piece from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book "Peace is Every Step" that stopped me in my tracks:

There are many young girls, boat people, who are raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries try to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continue to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate. She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.

When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we cannot do that. In my meditation I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, there is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we may become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

So many people assume so much. Cruisers assume they’re on vacation, sailors assume they’re immune to shore side problems. But here’s a wake-up; the horrid conditions that people are born into reach beyond the borders of nations, and across seas. I believe that we, the sailing community, have been incredibly remiss in our approach to the issue of piracy, which
Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, is actually an issue of poverty. And I believe that while prudence is called for in crossing waters known to have pirate traffic, I also believe that it’s worth our time and effort to assist in aid in those countries, whether through donation or direct action. Each one of the nations known to have heavy pirate traffic also has high levels of civil unrest and domestic violence. I’m choosing to donate to Doctors Without Borders, who are active in every one of those nations. Perhaps the baby you feed is the baby that does not have to resort to piracy in twenty-five years.

Tags: blog action day, Doctors Without Borders, musings, piracy, poverty, Spirituality, Thich Nhat Hanh

HT: The Amazing Jonathan

Check out this animation, that explains the phenomenon of “dead water”. Beautiful!

http://arxivblog.com/?p=669

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2008/10/introducing_our_first_sailing_partn.html

How is this for spectacularly cool!? You can bet this is one KML I’ll be downloading immediately and following intently.

More loveliness in our Bay:

Water Districts Fined For Bay Sewage Spills
(I’d post the article and discuss it, but the AP would fine my socks off if they knew, so I’ll just link and hope they don’t catch me)

And from Baykeeper, Oil Spill Bills Signed Into Law by the Governor

Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law seven bills improving oil spill prevention, preparation and response measures, including a bill sponsored by Baykeeper that will enable communities to protect local shorelines from the spread of oil. Baykeeper believes the Governor took the right first step to ensuring that we better protect the Bay from future oil spills, and we’ll be working to make sure these new laws are properly implemented.

Kind of nice to post good news for a change. Let’s see if I can keep it up…

Tags: Baykeeper, Environment, San Francisco Bay