The middle of the state. The middle of the night. The middle of a large pile of gear.  

From the middle, ground-control for my Everglades Challenge team seems like a way of life.

It's probably sleep deprivation (I write this at midnight, over a bowl of dairy-free frozen dessert, in between reloading various tracking pages and checking the social media), but here I go again, blearily worrying, along with a clan of like-minded folks as we follow the progress of the 100 or so boats as they paddle, sail, and row down the left side of the Florida peninsula.

For those who haven't been following, here's the overview: The Everglades Challenge is a 300-mile unsupported expedition race put on by a gang called the WaterTribe. Competitors get a WaterTribe name. My favorite skipper –– AKA TwoBeers –– is racing with his childhood pal, the offshore sailing coach for the Naval Academy, Jahn Tihansky (tribe name Moresailesed). They set sail on the first Saturday in March at dawn from Fort Desoto in St. Pete, aboard a boat called Spawn designed by OH Rodgers (Ninjee).

​As expected, the WaterTribe tracking site is experiencing some kind of technological version of the vapors.

Raceowl.com is doing better, but it means translating four-digit numbers back into familiar names. Spawn of Frankenscot is 3092, Safety Dance is 2969, Spongebob is 3072, the German guy, Schappi, is 3068, Jarhead is 3154, Puma is 3134, SeadogRocket and BermudaBoy are 3104, Ccock 3043. Et cetera.

Yesterday started for the Spawn team at o'dark thirty, when Jeff and Jahn and I piled into Charlie Clifton's van with yet more piles of gear, and made our way to the beach at Fort Desoto.  Where we were met with a whole tribe of people wearing head-lamps and lycra-enhanced fitness clothing toting bales of stuff out to their various watercraft.

The Challenge begins, fiendishly enough, with the competitors needing to push their boats from the high-tide line into the water at the signal at 7 am. Some folks have wallowed in the sand for seemingly hours.  Not my fellas!

The launching of the fleet was relatively slow this year –– not much breeze. Still, the moment  passes in a twinkling of the eye.

At seven, the beach is packed, by a quarter after, only a lonesome boat or two and spectators are left on the beach.

I don't know what other ground-control people do, but given that Moresailesed was shedding virus and coughing like a consumptive,  I cleaned up with a vengeance. Seven loads of laundry, autoclaving the dishes, a possibly unhealthy number of Clorox wipes, followed by a quick nip around to the non-dairy frozen dessert section of my local grocery and a nice cat-nap.

My phone is buzzing more than usual: Spawn has a following, and even with the light wind there's an element of nail-biting suspense. Moresailesed send along a photo from onboard –– roughly, I am thinking, from the spot where they spent some time last year recovering from a bit of excitement.

Evidently the mosquitoes are making an appearance on board Spawn –– last year, the poor devils couldn't make headway agains the wind. Each Challenge is different, I suppose, and a new test of the competitors' varying skills.

​

"Chrysanthemum" comes from the Greek for "gold" and "flower."  

You know these flowers: big tidy pots of blooms that last for ages. They show up for sale in the front of high-end grocery stores and at the big hardware warehouse stores. Mums, as we call them in English. Mums at Halloween, autumn colors for Thanksgiving. In Australia, mums are the traditional flower for Mother's day. 

In China, they are the symbol of autumn and purity. The chrysanthemum is the official flower of Chicago. Who knew? 

In India, a girl wearing chrysanthemums in her hair is said to bring happiness to her family. And in Japan, they represent longevity. The royal family sits on the chrysanthemum throne. But also –– so I understand after reading one of the Sano Ichiru mysteries by Laura Joh Rowland –– it's a symbol of homosexuality in samurai times. Yeah, don't think about it.

But in France, they are the flower for tombstones. People put them in the graveyard on All Saints.

For years, I have mistakenly believed that Charles Baudelaire's famous book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal –– a chunk of which I translated in college, for pity's sake –– was both "the flowers of evil" (a metaphor) and also an actual flower: chrysanthemums.

Whenever I saw the cheerful round faces of chrysanthemums, my busy brain would supply the subtitle, "Les fleurs du mal!"

But nope. Baudelaire anyhow wasn't referencing these particular flowers in his poems about the pursuit of novelty and erotic decadence. 

How odd: such an infinitesimal and utterly trivial prejudice against an innocent flower, but I have held it for decades. Of course, it's worth remembering that one might also translate the title of that book (which I don't recommend, btw, as fun reading) as "the flowers from evil, or from suffering."  Or something.

Anyhow. They are long-suffering and colorful blossoms, no matter what I've mistakenly held against them. 

I'd like to be bigger and better than this, but I just kept hoping to find a more flattering match for my own face.

Time, I will not pretend, was laid waste in the mostly fruitless effort.  

​Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepard, Sigh. Portrait of the Danish King Christian. Heavy sigh.

Fine fine fine.  I didn't go so far as to put on make-up, which I hope explains why me and King Christian both look a little, um, fatigued.


Still, even when I went way, way, way back, to the passport photos that didn't turn into my first passport –– kind of a funny story. I was pretty sure I had been adopted after the passport office rejected my application MORE THAN ONCE –– guess who Google says I look like?

In a Gibsonian twist, this kooky effort to lure customers to buy more is all math; it's called a recommendation engine. I imagine it puff-puff-puffing trying to get up the hill.  (P.S., yes, I know he's Canadian.)

Facebook's friend suggestion of the month came with an unremarkable name and a North Country photo. I looked at it for a solid minute, thinking, really? Could it be? The boy who rode my school-bus all those years ago? The ricketty kid who captured flies against the smeared windows of Mrs. Gamble's Bluebird and ate their fresh-plucked wings in what may have been an attempt to impress the girls on the bus?  In truth, it did leave an impression.

​Again, wow, thanks anyhow!

And don't get me started on the social media's version of "news."

Oh, heckydoodle, it's too late...Believe that when you see another outrageous story about <fill in the heinous-mingus blank> it's not necessarily happening more often.  
​
Perhaps, once upon a cyber time, you clicked and paused for a nanosecond longer on a story in a similar vein. The recommendation engines chug on.

Gah, what a tangled interweb have we wrought.  Here's me avoiding it.
​


​

Even if you didn't know the name –– a combination of "article" and "list" –– you've probably clicked through one of these short articles.  They promise valuable content in a compact package, which seems ideal.

Formula? Take an integer + an over-the-top modifier and noun + a promise and Bob's your uncle. Like this:

27 Times Bacon Has Changed the Course of Modern History (Number 3 Will Make You Swear Off Eating in Restaurants!)

It's kind of addicting, actually, once you get going:

35 Things You Absolutely Need to Know about Roqueford Cheese

The numbers alone make me stop and think. I consider the cabalistic weight of them: are they prime numbers? is it whenever the data ran out? 

And I wonder -– is it better to have
17 of the Most Adorable Hedgehog Videos
or 13 of the Most Adorable Hedgehog Videos?

Trick question: There are not EVER enough adorable hedgehog videos in the world. 

A river of words is usually in flood. And while I write about nearly everything, my blogging impulse is toward humor. This spot abounds with absurdities and piffle. 

This week has thwarted me.  

Not on a personal level, but at the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket level. I'm not ready to josh around with words today.

I have high hopes. The sun'll, as Annie would belt out, come out –– tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun... Mashed up, inevitably, with the melancholic fall "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge. Be as kind as you can be out there.

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. 

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!

​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!

References
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-secret-life-of-bees-99559587/
www.goldengooseaward.org/awardees/honey-bee-algorithm
www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/24/136391522/natures-secret-why-honey-bees-are-better-politicians-than-humans
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/22/how-honeybee-research-improved-your-internet-experience/?utm_term=.01028bb510d3

I took this photo in Rome. I don't actually remember why I took it or what I was hoping to memorialize. Nor why I manipulated the color to make it pop like a 1970's postcard. 

But while flicking through the many images from that trip, this one struck me as asking for an explanation. A line of dialogue. Something.

So you tell me. Jot down your story, dialogue, caption, in the comments area below. 

Winning entrant to be determined not quite at random, as this is a contest. But he, she, or they has a darned good chance to win a plasticky prize of uncertain provenance and dubious value.

​Or maybe a pie. 

​Good luck!

To the sound of cheering crowds (modern-day crowds, that is –– the noise a swellign crescendo of plasticky key clicks) Spawn of Frankenscot arrived safe and sound in Key Largo 1 day, 12 hours, and 46 minutes after starting the 2016 Everglades Challenge. 

They were the first boat to finish and they broke the previous monohull record by 12 hours. Click-click-click hurrah! Social media applauds!

Here's a gorgeous short video of the team –– shot by Ninjee's cousin Simon Lew via helicopter over the Gulf of Mexico.

They were fortunate in the conditions. The wind stayed mostly abeam or aft, so that they were running or reaching about 75% of the course, with only a few chunks of rowing against the tide (like at the Indian River Pass), and short slogs upwind with crew on the wire. 

The Spawnsters barely had time to snack during the trip, though they wouldn't have starved: an unfortunate Spanish mackerel, leaping boisterously from the water somewhere out in the dark blue empty, landed with a surprising thud in the cockpit in the middle of Saturday night. The team trained their headlights onto the piscatorial visitor.  "What is it and where should I grab it?" Moresailesed inquired before flinging it (by the least harmful corner of its tail) back into the sea.

The mighty yacht herself landed with a thud from time to time in that last stretch of what navigators call "skinny water." Florida Bay (Rod Koch describes it as "lunar") is shallow and full of both mucky sand and hard coral.  Said boat designer Ninjee, "I didn't realize how much running aground we would be doing." Discussion of a stainless-steel leading edge on the centerboard followed. 

Spawn disturbed at least one hazard of the course: a 7-foot-long shark had the startle of its weekend when the boat passed over it in about 2 feet of water. "It looked like an explosion of mud behind us," said TwoBeers.

Special thanks to Ensign RumsDown, who IS a driving Ninja and generous friend.

As he announced to the team in a manly bellow from the shore of Chockoloskee (after Mary and I had warbled "I love you" across the starry, echoing darkness)  "I LIKE YOU!"  Really do.