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Everglades Challenge 2017

2/22/2017

The drums have begun to pound. The bagpipes have begun their slow wheezing and skrilling. Piles of camping and survival gear have accumulated. Boats have been readied.

The beach at Fort De Soto has taken a deep, whooshing breath in preparation for the onslaught of small human-powered craft.

The first Saturday of March brings the annual Everglades Challenge: 300 miles of unsupported expedition-style racing down the west coast of Florida, across the Everglades, ending on the Florida-Bay side of Key Largo.

This is the third such WaterTribe adventure my favorite skipper has undertaken. It's the second year for Spawn of Frankenscot, the purpose-built Tampa Bay Expedition boat designed by O. H. Rodgers.

As a requirement of the event, each person has an EPiRB (an emergency beacon) and each vessel has a SPOT personal tracker. They also recommend a snake-bite kit, but that's a whole other story.

A quick overview of SPOT: it's a hockey-puck sized piece of tough electronics that the user can set to "ping" and as long as it has an unobstructed view of the sky, a satellite will pick up the signal and put the user on an electronic map. It also has a "rescue me" and "I'm okay" message that the user can pick as needed. This is the individual ping track for Spawn of Frankenscot and the team of TwoBeers, Ninjee, and Moresailesaid. (In real life, that's Jeff Linton, O.H. Rodgers, and Jahn Tihansky.)

To follow the action from shore as it happens, there are several options.

First is the WaterTribe tracking site, which has dots for each of the competitors and gives a pretty-close-to-realtime picture of the race. It's a touch glitchy. Spawn of Frankenscot's dot has the green Frankenscot head and the skipper is TwoBeers.

A screenshot from 2016's EC.

Spawn of Frankenscot's logo.

And in the interest of a better mousetrap, the competitors are also going to be tracked on RaceOwl, a tracking site that even has a smart-phone app. On RaceOwl, Spawn of Frankenscot will appear as boat number 2755. It's new to me, so I can't say how it will work, but for those of us who hit "reload" a LOT in the middle of the night during the event –– it's got to be good to have an option.

Finally, (and the least immediately gratifying) is the Spawn of Frankenscot Facebook page, which I'll update as I can as I chase the team down the state.

Thanks and fingers crossed!

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Would-Be Farm: Wilderness Encounters

2/16/2017

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We joked about the cave as we sat in the 4WD mule and looked up the rock face. "Nice spot for a bear, ha ha ha!"

The game-camera had already caught an image of a bear (a black bear! alive!) nosing around the beaver pond, so there was some basis for the comment. And my sister and I have a small history with bears.

In an earlier era, my sister was a Maine river-raft guide. While visiting her one Christmas, we startled a bear from its nap, the creature exploding out from under some brush in a mad flurry of snow and branches crackling as we three –– her big golden-retriever was walking with us –– stood frozen in shock.

As I remember it, the bear bee-lined it over a nearby hill and out of sight like a cartoon road-runner. And the dog, bless his golden heart, commenced barking then as if he –– and only he –– had saved us from the danger. Perhaps he had.

I don't know if I was witness or audience, but another time, at the municipal dump in rural Maine, one of my sister's Mainer pals refused to drop his box of Triscuits. It was a thing to do of an evening: drive down to the dump and watch the black bears sort through the leftovers. That night, one bear (it was the size of a sofa) was in the mood for Triscuit crackers. My sister's friend was likewise craving those woven wheaty snacks. There followed a longish moment of hectic excitement as everyone demanded that the Triscuits be sacrificed ("No way, man, I am STARVING! These are mine!") and the bear lumbered ever closer and closer...

Back at the Would-Be farm, the rock face cave turned out to be empty. It was a shallow little ledge, but with stone formations interesting enough to us that we cut along the base of the cliff to explore on foot.

"There's a path here," Sarah announced from a dozen feet ahead of me.

It was: a narrow strip of clear ground, the hard dirt not holding prints. "Game-trail," I agreed, savoring the tough, Land-Rover flavor of the word.

Twenty feet farther, I stopped to admire the tenacity of a tree growing out of the rock. Sarah was peering around. A gamey, musky scent hung in the air.

"It smells funky," she said.

"It smells like carnivore," I said, inhaling a big sniff. I turned downhill. "Maybe it's a bear."

My sister laughed, and then took a few more steps along the game-trail. "Ooh, do you see this?" she said, and then, noticing that she'd gotten into burrs, she began plucking at her fleece jacket.

"See what?" I called over my shoulder as I navigated down the rocky slope.

"A hole in the rocks," she said, tsking and plucking at her sleeve. "And it really stinks!"

"Sis, why don't you come down here? Like, now."

Catching something in my tone, she looked up from the sticker-burrs.

I found myself speaking carefully, "Maybe. It's. A. Bobcat."

Our sainted Mumsie used to say that it wasn't so much "Fight or Flight" as a response after she'd reached a certain age, but "Pee and Flee." This was one of the thoughts that flitted through my mind as I watched my sister back away from whatever she'd nearly stumbled into and then scramble downhill to me.

"You could've told me you were getting out of there," she said.

"I didn't think I needed to," I answered.

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Fowling Piece

2/10/2017

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The show-boating Boat-Tailed Grackle. Quiscalus major ("Biggie Quail", more or less) eats pretty much everything, including snails, fast-food leftovers, frogs, seeds, lizards, fruits. They are noisy and gregarious, and their song sounds like a metallic cross between some determined chirping frogs and a toy buzz-saw.

The iridescent males do a lot of squawking while they try to defend their harems. And according to the Cornell Ornithology Lab, the "harem defense polygyny" is only about 25% effective for the males who think they are ruling the roost. Ironic, but not surprising.

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Because Science

2/7/2017

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What's easier than saying, "oh phoey!"?

Not to be all Pollyanna, but frankly, it's effortless to belittle other people's passions, to simplify other people's problems, and make sweeping generalizations about groups of people that seem different from oneself.

I've done it. We all do it.

But it doesn't make anything better.

via GIPHY

For instance, scientific research.

I recently witnessed someone lathering on about Pointless Research and the Waste of Our Tax Dollars, et cetera. I believe the phrase "Real Job" was used.

This topic chaps my butt. What –– we've learned enough already and ought to stop?

And as if their great-grandparents didn't say the same damn thing about the egg-head scientist working on penicillin, chemo-therapy, seat-belts, gel insoles. Jupiter!

I have faith in the unlikely but happy uses to which scientific research is put.

Witness Biologist Thomas Seely of Cornell University, who won the 2016 Golden Goose Award for his "honeybee algorithm," a description of how bees organize themselves to gather nectar in the world.

What makes the research "Golden" is how Seely's insight has been used to great effect by systems engineer Craig Tovey* to to improve internet traffic flow. Pure science going toward a practical application.

Footnote:
*Craig Tovey was also named in the Award. He was working at Georgia Institute of Technology, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, collaborating with the government of the United Kingdom and big team of other scientists and engineers.

I skip these details on the off chance my readers will finish that above paragraph, but the amount of cooperation and the network of public funding this research involved? It's kind of staggering.

Bees and the internet, who would have foreseen that?

This seems science-wonderful: a biologist working quietly among the hives ends up helping improve the speed with which we check Facebook statuses, hunt Pokeman, read e-mail, and basically get through our connected lives.

The final funding kicker: Craig Tovey connected to Thomas Seely after another team-member heard a National Public Radio feature on Seely's work.

And that? That is one hard-working fractional tax dollar at work.