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Everglades Challenging –– Spawn Update

2/26/2019

Headline: Nearly There.
Sunrise on the first Saturday in March is less than a week away.
We've started checking the weather.

The Spawn of Frankenscot team of my favorite skipper, Jeff Linton (WaterTribe name: TwoBeers) and his childhood pal, the offshore coach for the Navy sailing team in Annapolis, Jahn Tihansky (aka Moresailhesaid) are just about ready for the 2019 Everglades Challenge.

The OH Rodgers-designed adventure boat (OH's WaterTribe handle is Ninjee) has had some nice new modifications and seems positively panting to go...

Okay, maybe one more last-minute rush order of something to arrive –– we hope –– before the start on Saturday morning.

Gathering of the Tribe for the 2018 WaterTribe Everglades Challenge.

And alright, perhaps a skosh more work on the centerboard gasket.

Aaannnnd those shrouds can be refabricated. Again. Gahh.

Thank goodness for the support of Leslie and Paulie at Masthead Enterprises in St. Pete, Brian Malone at North Sails, and Derek Dudinsky at JTR Industries for helping with last-minute fixes!

Ooh, yeah, plus some food. I (WaterTribe name: BookWorm) will Betty-Jo Crocker a batch of toothsome morsels for the heroes.

....And Bookworm needs to apply a fresh bit of Sharpie-marker for the eyes of Horus* so they can keep a sharp lookout.

*The protective Eyes of Horus (or, exactly, an eye of Thoth and an eye of Rah) look ahead and behind in Egyptian mythology.

For the sake of aerodynamics, our Eyes look port and starboard from mast float. Same diff, right?

Updates? Why yes, absolutely!

Click on one of the map images below (from past years' events) for either the Spot individual tracker for Spawn, or for the WaterTribe competitors tracking map.

On the latter, our team appears as the familiar green Frankie logo.

Click for the individual track of Spawn.

Click here to link to the track of all WaterTribe racers.

As in past years during the Challenge, I will be pacing about and clicking "refresh" way too often. I'll attempt to report progress and adventure and photos in as timely a fashion as possible here and on the Spawn facebook page.

Hoping for a speedy and not too adventuresome a Challenge for the entire fleet of intrepid Watertribers.

Knock wood.

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So Many Unanswered Questions

2/19/2019

4 Comments

All happy families are happy in the same way, Tolstoy wrote, but every unhappy one is unique in its misery. Poke around in the high canopy of the family tree, and you see that unique as unhappiness may be –– still, patterns emerge. Familiar patterns even.

Abandonments and early deaths, illness and poverty, and of course, like smoke seeping from under the rafters, scandal.

Like this one:

My gr-gr-grandfather Newton had a bunch of siblings. I don't know much about them. It's a long time ago, and over years of research, I hadn't located half of their graves in our tiny farming hometown. But sometimes you return over and over to a stubborn nut, giving it the odd yank, and it will loosen.

One of those siblings was Cornelia Jane Newton. Born in 1837 in Dimock, Pennsylvania (about 15 miles from where I was myself born a few years later), she was buried in Nebraska in 1912.

First, okay –– Nebraska? That's worth thinking about.

Turns out she married late (at 34) to Joseph Blanding Sturdevant (another long-rooted family from that corner of Pennsylvania) and the two moved West with a group of like-minded Methodists in the early 1870s.. She and Joe had four kids (a son died at 14), and at the end of her 75 years, she was living with her daughter, Sarah Lorena Chittick.

Cornelia Jane's obituary paints a certain kind of picture of the former schoolteacher: "If sometimes in the stress of life's conflicts, the battle pressed sore, faith, courage and Christian fortitude enabled her to bear up."

So, not an easy life for Cornelia Jane, born in Dimock, died in Nebraska.

As I wandered around the inter webs, evidence pointed to Joeseph marrying her twice, once in 1872, and then again in 1897.

Or anyway, there was a second "Newton" bride for him. It might be trendy to renew one's vows now (Or is it? Renewing vows seems an indicator of heavy marital weather.), but it was not a thing I've heard about in the 1890's.

A bit more clicketty clicking, and sure enough, Joe marries a Newton gal from Dimock in 1897, but that would be Rosella Newton –– Cornelia Jane's younger sister.

Joseph and his new bride Rosella exchanged vows in Pennsylvania and then moved to the teeming metropolis of Kansas City.

It's easy to imagine Rosella as the youthful replacement wife, possibly a hussy, and that Joseph was more than a little bit of a creeper, but that's simply too easy a story. No matter how often it happens in real life.

Like they say, when the answer is too obvious, look closer: as I compare birthdates, I see that Cornelia is 12 years Joe's senior. When they first married, he was 22 to her 34. She was a school teacher. Oh lawsie, I wonder if she was his school teacher.

Turning the tables on who's the creeper, maybe.

But more: they divorced, according to one of their descendants, in 1880. That meant 17 years of bachelorhood for Joe before he swooped in for the younger Newton sister. Who was, at that point, 45 years old. Hardly an ingenue.

And Joe (that would be Professor Sturdevant, according to the Mead, Nebraska Independent News of 1881) doesn't seem a likely rake.

He was a railroad station agent. He organized a band in Nebraska and left a couple of pieces of religious music behind.

The imagination boggles. To divorce in 1880, and then –– a period of seeming quiescence, where Cornelia and Joseph both lived in the same small Nebraska town? Then for him to marry Rosella?

What truth could match these data points? Did somebody have a breakdown? Perhaps Rosella was the original object. Perhaps Joseph just liked the family. Perhaps Cornelia organized the hand-off. Perhaps there was a lengthy epistolary courtship with letters coming in the mail. Perhaps one or the other was merely a marriage of convenience.

I can see the new couple moving away from Nebraska. After all, Cornelia lived there, as did another older Newton sister, Catherine (and I wonder what she thought about all this), but why Kansas City?

And, finally, how would a researcher ever know? Rosella and Joseph had no children (Or did they? Joseph's youngest is named Rose Ellen, born in 1879. Though a dozen documents say otherwise, one outlying reference lists her as the daughter of Rosella, and that she was born in Pennsylvania, not Nebraska). But again, if the children were Cornelia's, the surviving generations necessarily favor Cornelia's side of the drama.

It's possible that there was no drama.

Except seriously, what happened?

4 Comments

Spawn: Countdown to the Challenge

2/12/2019

8 Comments

Just when I think my favorite skipper is finished with his boat-building, he comes up with one more cool refinement.

Aaaannnd then one more...

Well, and this additional thing...

Here's a round-up of some of these latest little refinements.

The water wings (here's the longer story) are hard.

Instead of sitting on a canvas trampoline-style rack, it's more a wooden kitchen stool situation.

Solution? How about fancy closed-cell foam designed for boats?

Cushy for the tushies. Also windsurfing style foot-straps to keep sailors connected to the boat.

Not the inexpensive solution, but Hydroturf sure looks sharp. The ocean blue might be a little warm in the sun, but it's cushy and –– so we hear –– UV resistant.

Then there's a nifty water-take-up contraption. Since the water wings act as water ballast tanks, of course, it's important to be able to fill and empty them rapidly.

There's a pair of whale-tail pumps in the cockpit, but how to convey water from the briny deep into those tanks?

It would be counterproductive for speed and safety if TwoBeers and Moresailhesaid had to throw a tube over the side of the boat or hoist buckets of water over the side.

This year's innovation involves a set of PVC pipe, plumber's clamps, and some bungee at the transom. A visual appears below. The inner tube is spring-loaded, retracting into itself at rest.

Water pump for ballast.

When one of the Spawnsters gives the little line on the right of the tube a tug, the inner section telescopes into the water, allowing for rapid water take-up.

Stowage is a universal question. It's all well and good to pack what you need, but what if you can't find it when you need it?

In the original boat (Frankenscot, a highly modified Flying Scot), Masthead Sailing Gear fabricated some big, roomy zip bags. In combination with plastic tubs and netting hammocks, it worked pretty well.

But after last year's watery portion of the trip (Short story: they flipped and stuff floated away. Longer version: here.), one of the goals was to have more secure storage for gear. Hence, new tailored Masthead Enterprise custom bags are tucked and snapped into place between bulkheads.

Storage solutions.

With luck the snacks and electronics will not become separated from the boat. Knock wood, knock wood.

And at Moresailesaid's specific request, TwoBeers installed a special Masthead-made splash guard. Made of Mylar sailcloth, the guard is meant to deflect spray for a drier ride with better visibility.

Splash guard installed!

Did I mention knock wood?

8 Comments

Bird Nerd: Next Level Twitchers

2/5/2019

2 Comments

I became a fan of the feathered flocks because Mumsie was a birder. She listened to the Audubon record of birdsong to tune her ear and when she saw a new bird, she ticked it off the index of her Roger Tory Peterson Guide to the Birds.

It's not much of a surprise that many in her circle became enthusiastic feeders and photographers of birds (Hi Sis! Hi Care! Hey Mary Jo!). She was inspiring in her quiet way.

Of course the interest came to her from her own mother, Norma, who spent many a pleasant morning lingering over coffee and watching birds at the feeder out her window.

But I wonder what they would think about Google Street View Birding.

Yeah, Google. Street-view. Birding.

No bird-feeder required.

Gooble Street View Birders are a group of very enthusiastic birders who comb the Goog for images of birds as captured by the street-view automated cameras that are busy around the world taking photos for Google Maps.

When the Street Level first came out, people hunted for their own faces. Others looked for Bigfoot. These people commenced prowling for birds.

They post the images on a Facebook page (here), where there's collective identification and commentary.

What a world.

The pastime seems to have started when a blogger (the Birdist, aka Nick Lund) let his personal hobby of surfing Google images out into a wider world.

Here's the start of it in 2014. The Birdist does a nice blog –– I recommend the browse.

Like many of the new members on the Google Street View Birding Group, I read an article and clicked on a link to get there. It's a very pleasant counterpoint to the hot-air blaring so common on the social media these days.

I mean, if you like birds.

2 Comments

Everglades Challenging –– Spawn Update

So Many Unanswered Questions

Spawn: Countdown to the Challenge

Bird Nerd: Next Level Twitchers

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