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AMY SMITH LINTON

Everglades Challenge: Clearing the decks

6/30/2013

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            Having partly dismembered the donated Flying Scot, "Red Stripe," TwoBeers discovered that the boat suffered the classic signature of fiberglass age: not just dulling of the gelcoat and wear-and-tear crazing, but more serious structural issues. 

          Moisture had made its insidious way into the balsa core of the boat.  The telling detail? After he removed hardware from the area, TwoBeers saw water welling up in screw-holes. 

          There are two methods for removing water in these situations: either vacuum the moisture out using a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption with a shop-vac and Visqueen, or remove the damaged core surgically.

          Naturally, the Sawzall was called back into play.  And with a little help from Uncle Markie (Tribe name: Ensign RumDOWN, pronounced with a decided note of panic.), Frankenscot now sports a newly grafted-on floor section. 

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While an inner mad scientist is probably needed for this kind of project, it's important to give credit where Promethean sparks fly:  A modified Flying Scot over in Texas (Hello White Lake!) called "Turbo Pig" has plowed the way -- the YouTube video below shows how the souped-up Flying Scot really scoots in a breeze:
July 1, 2013. 
This just in: Rick Tears over in Texas sent a handful of photos of the Turbo Pig. This project, engineered and designed by Richard Wade, added a masthead spinnaker, subtracted decking, and added a foil rudder and a carbon bowsprit. Hey, that sounds smart! 
Photos below credit Rick Tears:
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Everglades Challenge: Welcome to the world, Frankenscot.

6/26/2013

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Oh, sure, we could take up sky-diving or marathon-running, but it seems like there's still plenty of derring to do in the sport we like best. 

My favorite skipper had been talking about the WaterTribe's Everglades Challenge Race, for instance. The event is open to wind- and human-powered vessels and starts at Fort De Soto Beach in St. Petersburg, goes along the coast south, across the Everglades, and finishes in Key Largo. 

            330 miles of saltwater, gators, and storms. Oh my! 

            It's been on his radar for a while: he's followed the adventures and mishaps from over the shoulder of his designated computer users, weighing tactics and considering strategies.  He got serious last year, when a boat-builder contacted him and offered him a sponsorship deal.  The deal came to nothing, but the seed germinated.

            “We need to get our tribe names,” he told me. Not following his train of thought, I responded with an elegant, “Huh?”

            “The teams all have tribal names. People follow you based on your tribal name.”

            “Okay.”

            “We need names.”

            “How about Pink Pony and the Captain Winnebago?”

             Long pause. Disapproving frown. "Maybe you should look at the tribe names."

            "Okay, fine."

            I looked. There are some great names: Sailsalot, SaltyFrog, Dances with Sandy Bottom, Green Mountain Girl, Passaic Paddler.

            So I considered a few of our favorite things.

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            Thus have we become TwoBeers and Bookworm.

            Nearly as soon as we had decided on these handles, Captain TwoBeers started shaking the trees for support and suggestions. Calvin Reed, who is an extended in-law, generously donated his elderly Flying Scot, "Red Stripe."
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A brief word on Flying Scots BEFORE modification. The Flying Scot is a one-design sailboat that’s had fifty+ years of happy use in North America. The boat is 19 feet long, with a single mast and the usual three sails of a centerboard sloop. It’s a wide, round-bellied, fairly simple boat, built –– according to builder Harry Carpenter –– with a 55-gallon drum’s worth of resin in every boat. A stoutly built, stable creature.

As an oceangoing vehicle, its downsides include the following:  it’s not self-bailing and it’s a little overpowered in breeze above 15 knots, and it has a plough-like front entry that lends itself to digging into waves.  Which can be remedied (we hope!) by the application of a Sawzall, elbow grease, and creativity.

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            We have boat-builder friends who can be relied upon to have lots of ideas. O.H. Rodgers (of Rodger 24 and Kiwi 35 etc. etc. fame) started doing calculations on paper napkins, estimating whether the old telephone-pole mast might stand up to the stress of supporting a hiking trapese. After all, the Flying Scot is built as of bricks, but the extra leverage of a muscular type -- or one us -- suspending our body weight out over the bounding main on a wire?  

          We’ll be testing that one pretty thoroughly.

          And what if we added a carbon bowsprit? A shaped centerboard?  Hiking racks? 

But first: the Sawzall.  Captain TwoBeers applied blade to fiberglass and FrankenScot emerged from a cloud of dust: 60+ lbs of deck and seat removed. 

FrankensScot resembles an escaped bathtub minus the plumbing. Squint and dream, and FrankenScot might resemble the awful cousin of an Aussie 18.

Mua ha ha!  Stage One is complete.  

The linked documentary below chronicles 2013's stormy Everglades Challenge, compressing the 80+ competitors and week-long adventure into an hour and a half -- with a charming rhyming narrative that calls to mind vintage newsreels.  

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Whirligigs and Mechanical Theater

6/23/2013

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File under: odd things other people like.



Dang! London's Cabaret Mechanical Theater has closed up shop. This is terrible news, not just because I sent someone to see it this spring (Oops! Sorry!), but because this little jewel of a museum in Covent Garden was a treasure-trove of wonderful wind-up automota -- the perfect, intriguing counterpoint to the bustle and noise of Covent Garden.

The good news, of course, is that the collection is still together, and exhibits are being curated all over the place. Tel Aviv, Baltimore, The Unicorn Theatre in London. 

Whirligigs have a long history of use, and not just to scare birds or amuse children... The smart folks on Radiolab looked at one automotic mechanical monk created as part of a bargain with God four hundred and fifty years ago. Here's the link. I recommend all their podcasts, but this one is especially interesting:
http://www.radiolab.org/2012/jun/29/ghost-machine/
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Whirligig:
 


Figurative moving sculpture with at least one spinning or rotating part. Used as whimsical decoration, art, child's toy, also as a make-work project for woodworkers, etc.


See also: pinwheels, weathervanes, gee-haws, spinners, whirly-birds, whirlies.
 

And for a historical perspective on these baubles, here's the link to an even longer YouTube video featuring hypnotic and intriguing (okay, disturbing) antique automata:
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A Ham by any other name

6/20/2013

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I’m not a fan of ham. 

Not much of a carnivore overall, but swine?  I raised pigs one summer --–part of my colorful 4-H youth -- and frankly, they were a lot smarter than my dog.

Toby and Mr. D were fast, clever, and deeply committed to their freedom. I often needed to hare off on horseback to retrieve them from the neighbor’s garden. When anyone drove up to the house, the pigs would come galloping from around the corner of the barn, oinking spiritedly. 

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I think we all know the single word that has the power to overcome scruples and grief both. That would be “bacon.”

And now let me add: "Prosciutto." 

            Prosciutto is a rustic ham, dry-cured and tender. I ate prosciutto and pecorino cheese and bread at least twice a day: for breakfast, lunch, appetizer, for two weeks when I was in Italy. Occasionally, cantaloupe would be involved. More than once it was simply a ribbon of prosciutto folded luxuriantly straight down the old gullet. Neither proud nor elegant, but yum yum yum.

After a week of pig- and pecorino- and bread-free days back at home, I lingered at the grocery store for a long time. I suppose pre-sliced prosciutto packaged in plastic would only disappoint. And naturally, I wouldn’t find a chunk of sheep’s milk peccorino without heading to a specialty store. But I did buy some rustic boule bread and serve bruschetta for dinner. More than once.

While in Italy, I didn’t develop a taste for porchetta, which does say something about my overall commitment to pork. Porchetta falls into the category of “Meat on a Stick.” More or less. 

Pork parts wrapped in pork belly (i.e., unsliced bacon) and cooked slowly, porchetta is served on a roll, often from a food truck on the street. My mom would have recognized the texture and flavor of chittlins in the mix, as well as fennel, rosemary, salt and pepper. The result is juicy, crunchy, savory, and very meaty. Some porchetta-istas might sprinkle a few mushrooms or chopped liver into the sandwich. One of my traveling companions was a fan, and while I appreciated her enthusiasm, honestly, I just miss the prosciutto.
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They liked to have their backs scratched, they enjoyed baths, and they picked up half a dozen tricks that the dog, a wonderful working retriever, could never quite manage. 

At the end of the summer, I sold the pigs and sent them -- screaming -- to the slaughterhouse.  Not that I had a real choice, as I had taken out a farm loan for the summer. And any farmer will tell you, if you have livestock, you are going to have dead stock. Hard work.

Still, I didn’t eat pork for years. 



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Scenes from Italy

6/18/2013

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In Passport Control: 
A uniformed passport officer in Fuimicino Airporto gazed at the long line of bleary-eyed travelers and said, in a blasé, beautifully accented voice, “I don’t know why you wait in line. Come through here.” We all came through there, only to be waved through empty booths. No one asking us suspiciously, “How long are you here? What is the purpose of your visit?” No one flipping passport pages, comparing face to photo. Spooky. Felt illegal and wrong.
          I fetched my luggage and then, driven by some sort of Hitchcock-movie based anxiety (“Mr. Linton, your wife never checked into the country.”), I went back to the glass booths. A nice woman in immigration stamped my passport–-- still not scanning it into her computer -- and said, “When it gets busy, we just send people through.”
          What’s the opposite of heartening?

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Railroad café: 
I confirm my national identity to a knowing barman at the café by carefully perusing the coffee menu and then ordering a curved red-labeled bottle of Coca-Cola. He looks vaguely disappointed, as if he’s saying to himself, “Ah, Americans.” Or maybe, “Hmmm. Americana.”
            Drinking my Coke, I eavesdrop where I can, wondering about the people around me:  the Chinese-looking girl shouting in Italian to her uniformed co-worker, the sharp French couple bitching at each other about their luggage, the British couple working up the nerve to use the ticket machine, the Eastern Europeans with the tight pants and the pointy shoes saying, Yan iss nie, Yan iss nie. I assume it’s the same as the Russian “I don’t know.” But, you know, yan iss actually nie...
          My college French is never so fluent as when I am trying to speak another language. It’s like a cuckoo hatchling trying to shove the others out of the nest. I brushed up on my 36-word Italian vocabulary, and I can follow quite a bit on a survival-but-not-philosophy level. But thanks to those years of drilling French, when I open my mouth, Buon giorno is followed by Ça va? And Que’st que c’est? comes out instead of Come? A good time to simply listen.

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Bad food: 
Impossibly, we discovered some bad food in Rome. One of my companions ordered pizza tunno. So he was kind of asking for trouble. Fact: tuna really has no place on top of a pizza. Luckily, gelato is the patent cure. 


Witnessed a motorcycle crash: 
Looked up just in time to see driver and cycle separately cart-wheeling into a light-post. Even with the driver up and shaking his fist at the car that had turned into his lane, it was horrifying. Impossible to imagine that he and his bike missed hitting a pedestrian. Unbelievable that he stood up and walked afterwards.

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Setting up the boat: 
We are here in Italy for a sailboat race, so my skipper’s boat and its attendant parts were shipped over from the States with a dozen or so others. Four Lightnings per 40-foot shipping container, and setting up the boat has a certain frustrating rhythm. The process was well organized, but it inevitably drags on small details that take a long while to resolve: Who has a hammer? Where is the third life-jacket? Do you have an extender for the lifting bridle?
             Getting done, we look out to find Lago Trasimino is flat. Comme un mirior. Or rather, Come uno speccio. Whatev. Sailboat racing has just a few requirements, wind being the primary one. We decline the long paddle to the racecourse for the practice race and instead maneuver close to shore to discover which bits still need to be connected: topping lift, vang, coarse halyard adjustment on the jib. 
          Gelato awaits us at the top of the hill in the tiny walled old city of Castiglione del Lago.

World Championship racing: 
Our scores were not as impressive as we hoped they’d be, and the sailing was both beautiful and ugly, smart and stupid, scary and boring. In other words, kind of the usual thing in this sport.  On the other hand, since it was a World Championship, we had pomp, circumstance, live bands, and a parade for both the opening and closing ceremonies. 

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Driving con brio: 
We rented a car -- what amounts to a midsize sedan in the form of a Toyota Yaris --–and spent our non-racing hours touring the Umbria side of Tuscany. Assisi, Sienna, Montepulchiano. As not much of a drinker, I drove after lunch. There’s a particular, fierce, mechanical joy in navigating a series of uphill and downhill curves with a zippy stick-shift. And with that scenery! Made me nostalgic for the sport cars of my past, and reminded me again why I drive a stolid automatic minivan.
            Of course driving con brio (with FEELING!) comes with a downside: like picking the toll lane at the autostrada that accepts credit cards -- only to discover some idiot had shoved coins into the credit card slot. Naturally, the slot spat the credit card onto the ground. The ground, mind you, being kind of inaccessible since I’d pulled into the toll stall with mere inches to spare. Con brio, indeed. 
          Ever back up on the Jersey Turnpike out of a toll booth? In Italian? With your co-pilots sleeping like innocent babes? And I'd really meant to keep my resolve about cleaning up my potty-mouth.   
          Never have I been so happy to survive a mere driving experience.

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Flying over the ocean And Back Again

6/17/2013

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I've been e-free for two weeks: no cell phone, no e-mail, no Twitting or Tumbling, very little television, and zero consulting of the Google. I carried an actual paper notebook, a smoothly-writing pen, and my camera.

It was only strange for the first two days. 

I could just as easily blame the strangeness on travel as much as having all that freed-up time and no pings of contact from the wider world.  Even though I won the economy-class lottery jackpot (a solo seat in the AB aisle meant that I was able to sleep flat, curled up tight as a bean on the flight from Philly to Roma), the change of location and time is still a shock to the system.   Not brag-complaining.  

It took a few days for my handwriting to regain some of its bygone neatness –– much typing in the past few months. Time stretched: without an online Scrabble game or random link to visit, it was just me and my paper, and my eyes looking around.

I gobble up books while traveling. Self-control for any bookworm requires an attempt to regulate the hours spent with a nose in a book. Trying to keep a lid on it, I permit reading on the treadmill, for an hour before sleep or at noontime, and, of course, any time on a plane or a train or when someone else is driving. Not having an e-reader, I prepared for this trip as usual: my carry-on bag is well stocked. I fear running out of words before running out of time.    

On the connection into Philly, I gulped down Gail Caldwell’s memoir Let’s Take the Long Way Home. It starts, heartbreakingly, with, “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died, so we shared that, too. “ I bawled my eyes out.
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As for the rest of the airplane time there and back again, it went in a series of swoops and flights: Kristin Cashore's Bitterblue and Vanesssa Diffenbaugh's The Language of Flowers, and my favorite of the trip, Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters. I've got a lot to say about that -- whole pages in my travel journal -- but it will wait for another day. 

Here in the real world, back on my own side of the big pond, my e-connections are buzzing and glowing. 283 e-mails. 14 voice messages. 22 Facebook notifications, 134 e-mails on the other address, and 12 voice messages on the other phone. Winnowed down: four good e-mails, six valuable phone messages, and a lot of gossip on Facebook. 

How many minutes would it have been for me to check these things during these e-free days?


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