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Everglades Challenge: On Line

3/3/2020

Not unexpectedly, Twobeers has his hands full with plumbing and physics: the core elements of any last-minute boating design challenge.

One asks oneself: How many pounds of foot pressure is required to move a gallon of water up a pipe of diameter x?

What is the likelihood of the West Marine store producing a promised y-valve?

How long does it take to drive from Davis Islands to St. Petersburg and back during the tourist-enhanced afternoon rush?

These are not particularly difficult questions, but add the element of time tick-tock-tick-tocking to the starting line only four days hence...

Times like this, nobody knows how tempted I am to rush up to my favorite skipper and exclaim, "No man, the BLUE wire! The BLUE wire!"

Of course, he's the hero. A single drop of perspiration may slide down his face as he hesitates with the wire-snips, but he manfully clips the red one and saves the world regardless.

But be that as it may.

Here's a link to the Watertribe Challenger Tracking site (or just click on the picture!).

The event starts Saturday morning at dawn. Charlie "Gaajii" Clifton will be official shoreside support, chasing the team by land as they sprint down the state.

We keep our fingers crossed...

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Everglades Challenge: Once More Unto the Breach, My Friends, Once More

2/25/2020

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As Click and Clack Tappet used to say, "Well, it's happened again."

Another eleven and a half months have passed and it's time for the annual Everglades Challenge race. Which is, as I suppose most of my dear readers know, an unsupported adventure race that sends a flotilla of human-powered water vessels down the left coast of Florida from Fort DeSoto beach in St. Petersburg all the way down and across the Everglades to Key Largo.

Don't know about this? Want to waste a perfectly good period of time? Go over to the right, scroll down and click on "Everglades Challenge" and read all I've had to bibble-bable tittle-tattle about it.)

My favorite skipper (and boat-builder), known as "TwoBeers," heads a team of friends who designed, built, sailed, modified, sailed, modified, sailed, and modified yet again a boat called Spawn of Frankenscot.

The boat is a sloop of 22 feet designed by OH "Ningee" Rodgers. TwoBeers sails with Jahn "Moresailhesaid" Tihansky. He's supported by Amy Smith "Bookworm" Linton, Mark "EnsignRumsDOWN!" Taylor, and ––new this year!–– Charlie "Gaagii" Clifton.

The sweet sloop has changed over time, but the current freshness involves the water take-up system.

Photo credit Tom Ray, 2019

This chapter begins on a dark but not-too-stormy night.

The setting: a fantastic oyster bar (the kind that serves beverages, not the kind that plagues our team's path to Key Largo). BTW, if you like lively viands such as oysters on the half shell, go to Eustis and check this place out: The Oyster Troff.

As we perched at the Troff, enjoying our second bucket of freshly shucked bivalves and our icy beverages, a rendezvous occurred.

Ostensibly an opportunity to catch up with mysterious engineer and former neighbor Jamey Rabbit, the social event had a darker purpose. Keen observers like myself witnessed a surreptitious handoff.

A bedraggled sack that patently did NOT contain lucky groceries switched hands.

Some words were spoken. Hands were shaken. Technical explanations followed.

Knowing glances were exchanged. Ironic laughter rang out. The deed was more or less done.

Next thing you know, the take-up system for Spawn's water ballast (see here and here for last year's explanation) has been finessed so that the team doesn't have to pump water into the ballast tank by hand.

Instead, H2O will be scooped up by ingenious plumbing. Jamey used a 3-D printer to fashion the spring-loaded cartridge that allows our team to lower the PVC pipe so that gallons of ocean shoot right into the system.

That salty goodness whooshes up a hose to the cross-beam.

Then it flows into the tank, where it provides a righting moment at 8 pounds per gallon. The 35-gallon tank is roughly the equivalent of one hefty but non-complaining, non beer-drinking gurgling dude.

The water intake is not connected in this image, as the wings are folded for transport.

Jamey created a super-nifty, bling-y, customized air-vent for the tanks, since, as we know, a vent can provide an unexpected way for water to make its way into the tank. If things were to get, you know, flippy-whippy, a person does NOT want water to fill one of these water wings.

Bling! It reads "SPAWN"

PS: here's the release flap for emptying the tank.

You might not be able to tell, but that vent is made of sparkly gold plastic.

Jamey claims that color plastic was the only material at hand for the 3-D printer, but I think we can all agree it looks pretty dang gangster. And that's good.

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Volcano, Iguana, Finch

2/17/2020

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According to Henry Nicholls in The Galápagos: A Natural History, part of Charles Darwin's inspiration for his Theory of Evolution came out of bad accounting.

Back in the 1800's, standard operating procedure for a naturalist was to capture and kill any number of small creatures. Pack 'em in salt, pickle 'em, pile 'em into boxes to ship home. All in the interest of scientific study.

So young Darwin, circling the globe as the resident naturalist aboard The Beagle, harvested hundreds of animal specimens and squirreled away crate after crate of fossils and plants.

But there were so many. As it happened, he neglected to properly label some carcasses from the Galapagos.

No doubt he'd never expected there to be much difference between, say, a dark little finch from Floreana and that other one from nearby Isabela.

Poor guy: back home in chilly England, unpacking box after box of corpses and he discovered the awful truth: his sparrows weren't labeled very well.

Or maybe not.

The story varies.

In any case, Galápagos mockingbirds are also distinctively different from mockingbirds on the mainland. And they are different from one Galápagos island to another.

Which leads, step by painful step, to Darwin's theory of evolution and the eventual publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Phew.

Sidebar drama: Interestingly enough, as a Christian, Darwin was troubled by the implications of what he discovered. However, when a naturalist pal of his, Alfred Wallace, came up with a parallel theory, Darwin's misgivings subsided enough for Darwin to polish up his own manuscript and send it to a publisher. It became an overnight sensation.

While we were doing our own exploration in the Galápagos (zero collection of specimens, thousands of photos, great guides, and a tidy ship thanks to AdventureLife), we stumbled across a little mockingbird family drama on Floreana.

I've got a theory or two (as usual) about this scene. It might be a long-held rivalry between the matriarchs who were born sisters but grew to their own greatest rivals. It might be a fresh incursion between an upstart gang and the Boomer family they rejected.

Or maybe it's a daily show staged to entrance the tourists –– 14:00-15:20 beached walrus pups, 15:20-15:40 mockingbird display, 15:40-whenever tortoise crossing.

References
lwww.aboutdarwin.com/voyage/voyage03.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0014-3820.2006.tb01113.x/full

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Spawn: Small Mods

2/7/2020

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After five Everglades Challenge campaigns, Team Spawn has grown, shall we say, more laid-back in the pre-race race.

Oh, we expect a last-minute Amazon or Sierra Trading Post order, and for sure a midnight run to for groceries, but the process of preparing for the event seems less daunting each year.

And as far as super-neat-o modifications? This year the focus has been on the water-ballast supply system. What is known in the biz as "plumbing." TwoBeers and I have spent some quality time contemplating white PVC elbows at the hardware store.

TwoBeers is working with a friend from the military-industrial complex, a former youth sailor and current engineer (Hi Jamey!) to speed up and refine the pump/drain system.

The Top Secret plans involve springs, 3-D printings, and the Home Depot. Glimpsed here are some of the highly technical and science-y parameters:

No, seriously, it's written in Sharpie on the back on an old envelope. As we followers of Spawn have come to expect...

Longing for more Everglades Challenge narrative? Have at:

Mead's story in Sail magazine. a

Joachim's story in Sailing World

Report from Spin Sheet

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The Would-Be Farm: Mulch

1/27/2020

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Ah, mulch.

Mulch is the collective noun for material that evolves into actual soil. It's organic material (leaves! bark! wood-chips!) that gets defined by function: it's used to protect tender plants, and add good stuff to the soil. By etymology, it comes from a word for "soft."

Wood chips are my preferred mulch at the Farm.

Neem oil in hand, she stalks the orchard...

It's super-neat-o how it works: you apply a layer of wood chips around the base of your plant.

It smothers weeds and –– rather faster than you might imagine –– the mulch turns into rich, light soil in a sweet ring around around young fruit trees and asparagus.

The mulch provides extra insulation over the winter, and gives emerging plants a little additional opportunity to stay safe in the chancy spring weather.

Mixed in with the native clay of at the Farm, these wood chips (plus whatever other amendments we can find) are the start of the most important rehabilitation of the farm: the ground.

First, understand that soil is made up of two things: minerals and organic material. Minerals can be in the form of a very fine grind like espresso, which makes for heavy clay soil, or a more coarse grind (sand), all the way up to, of course, solid rock.

The organic component includes leaves, roots, decaying matter plus soil microbes and other busy little creatures under the surface.

There's an ideal mix of minerals and organic material, and it's rare to find it –– especially on a neglected old dairy farm like the Would-Be. The very best soil is rich, airy, full of nutrition and microbial life.

Unlike most of the ground around the Farm.

First line of remedy: a compost pile.

The Would-Be Farm's main compost heap is slightly disguised by a stack of logs.

Where else to pitch coffee grounds and carrot peelings and used chicken bedding from the neighbors' coop?

Where else to pile grass clippings and weeds?

I took an actual composing class a few years ago. I'm not an expert, though I am a believer. Long story short: a smart gardener just keeps heaping stuff onto the compost pile, turning it from time to time, and using the finished, good-looking stuff from the bottom of the pile to improve the soil under the plants.

Lucky for my trees, a friend had an enormous pile of chipped tree –– the remains of a big ole maple –– to share for mulching purposes.

Truckload by squatting truckload, we've conveyed chips to the farm over the past couple of years. I used square yards of it to coddle my young trees and the asparagus. A few chips made it into the compost heap, along with mule-loads of grass clippings and eggshells.

Alas, all good things come to an end. Even the remains of a big ole maple.

With chips thin on the ground that autumn, I toted a couple of bales of straw to the farm to bed things down for the winter.

Always an experiment.

I figured straw was a better option than hay.

The terms are used interchangeably by some: after all, both are some sort of dry vegetation that come packaged in bale form and are used in animal husbandry.

But straw (like the plastic ones we now think of first), is generally the hollow, dry, stalk of an oat or wheat plant. The middle of the plant. Hay, meanwhile, is the tops of various grasses and plants –– cut green and allowed to dry. Hay might include clover, timothy, broom, alfalfa, and any manner of meadow plants.

Naturally, hay is full of flower-heads. Any gardener will tell you, the point of flowers is seed. So if you aim to smother weeds (and weeds are just plants growing where you don't want them to grow), you do NOT want to spread flower-heads around.

Ipso dipso facto macto, you'd think straw would be a pretty solid choice to protect plants and not compete with the resources at root...

Surprise surprise surprise.

The wheat straw made a miraculous rise from the cold soil this spring.

Instead of simply blanketing my sleeping plants and giving itself over to the forces of bacteria and mushrooms, the straw followed its own generative agenda.

Full disclosure: It did seem odd to see actual heads of wheat in the bale last fall, but I didn't take the time to investigate.

It's always hurry-up time when the cold weather is coming.

Alas.

via GIPHY

Wheat is a lovely crop. I am not knocking wheat. I'm good with gluten, and I admire wheaten gold waving on an autumn field.

But as a crop, it's not a good match for the Would Be Farm. Or a good mulch. I'm guessing it will continue to pop up around my daffodils and plum trees for years. Probably not enough, however, for even a single loaf of artisanal, hand-ground-grain bread.

I vowed not to be caught chipless again. I've been checking Craig's List a little too regularly. So far, none of the chippers are just right for our needs.

Until I find the appropriate tractor-powered equipment –– somewhere between "wimpy" and "Fargo" sized––I am obliged to hunt chips where I may. The county maintenance guys have not panned out, nor is there a lively tree-service economy nearby.

Sadly, in June, I ended up paying good money for a truck-load of funky, treated commercial stuff from the local wood-pellet operation.

via GIPHY

In the parlance of our friend Curt, the going rate for a pickup truck-load of dark brown landscaper's friend is a pizza and a half.

I'd rather have the pizza and make my own dang chips, but as Mumsie used to say, if wishes were horses, and horses could fly, there'd be nothing but horses in the sky...

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Lazing on a Saturday Afternoon

1/23/2020

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It's a thing we've enjoyed every now and then now for decades: an afternoon slouch on the couch watching whatever dope crap Jeff selects.

Back in our early courting days, we were en couchant watching some Voyage of Sinbad or another. You remember the kind of movie: claymation, sparkly costumes, "exotic" locales somewhere in the hills east of Hollywood.

In any case, our heroes were bundled to the teeth, trudging across a featureless frozen sea when Jeff pipes up with, "Oh-oh, watch out for the giant walrus."

Me: What?

Jeff can flatten the affect right out of his voice so while it seems like a warning, the phrase comes out completely without urgency. He spoke to the television screen again, "Oh, no, look out for the giant walrus,"

Me: What in the world are you talk ––

And at that moment, on the little rounded screen of my apartment's television, an enormous walrus broke through the styrofoam ice and speared one of Sinbad's less fortunate companions with a long tusk.

My astonishment was complete. I said, "You've SEEN this before?!" Honestly, watching it for the first time seemed faintly ridiculous, but it did have novelty value going for it.

Little did I know that Jeff's tolerance for ridiculous movies was nearly as deep as my own ability to grouse about them while nestled next to him on the sofa.

It's kind of a match made in heaven.

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Musical Selection:

1/16/2020

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I have a high tolerance for foreign language music. Here are a couple of selections that are fairly heavy rotation.

The first is from that marvelous animated film The Triplets of Belleville.

And, though it's hard for me not to reference John Prime's infectious Let's Talk Dirty in Hawaiian, some Iz cannot go awry. Especially when a person has been studying the uke for a few months now...

And to round out the trio, I was torn between a short documentary about Dancehall music in Japan (after all, I went down this rabbit hole, might as well bring back a treat...) and an Australian video that shows you how to sing Despacito using English words, which is, by the way a work of genius.

Remember the television ad, "If you can spell socks, you can speak Spanish!"? Somebody certainly has not been measuring out his life with coffee spoons!

Anyway, none of that is on my actual playlist. But this is:

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A New Year...More New Projects

1/2/2020

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My favorite skipper and I eloped when it came time to get married.

He'd been through a big wedding already and I wanted neither the pouffy dress nor to stand at the center of that kind of social attention.

The legalizing deed was performed at the Wee Chapel of Love, which used to lurk on Gandy Boulevard in Tampa.

On the way to the Wee Chapel, we did a quick pre-nup. "I'm going to buy boats and forget to tell you," Mr. Linton said.

After a considering moment, I came back with "I'll get fruity furniture, like chaise lounges, and I just don't want any lip about it."

We both found these demands reasonable. And so it has gone.

This fall, between Flying Scotting, Sunfishing, and warming up Spawn (and then repairing the damage), himself started sailing a 2.4 Meter.

As a boat design, the 2.4 Meter looks very much like the old school America's Cup boats: a classic pointy bow and sweetly curved belly. Those yachty yachts of Newport Rhode Island fame. Dennis Conner and that gang.

Only, 2.4 meters comes out to a diminutive 13 or so feet long. So it's an America's Cup boat considered from the wrong end of the telescope.

The boat is large enough for a single person, who sits inside the hull with not much more than a noggin showing above decks.

As if Paul Bunyan had taken to the high seas, or as if a person had inexplicably shrunk down into a shoe.

The boat has been used in the Paralympics, as well as for the able-bodied; it's difficult to sink or flip.

It's got a mass of spaghetti line controls in the cockpit and Jeff will be using his feet to steer.

Of course he's excited for the new adventure. The man does love a new sailing challenge.

He went halvsies on a 2.4 Meter owned by a friend and began working on it, as he does.

Gelcoat, fiberglass, carbon fiber, epoxy, refiguring hardware, rejigging lines...it's all good.

A bigger project maybe than he expected, but intellectually stimulating.

In December, he got invited to a regatta in Port Charlotte, Florida.

One of the 2.4 Meter guys had a nearly brand-new boat that he'd lend Jeff for the race.

A nice shiny new boat.

Mr. Linton came home with an particular, peculiar expression on his face (or maybe it's the way he holds his neck).

An expression I have come to identify.

I said, "Did you buy that boat?"

Yes. Yes he did.

Happy New Year!

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As the Bookworm Turns

12/20/2019

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My childhood bestie, Care, reminds me from time to time about how it used to go down.

She'd come next-door at the cottage on a summer morning and ask if I wanted to do something: swimming, running around á la wild mustangs, making miniature ballrooms in the field, catching rabbits.

I remember spending those summers perpetually in motion, but evidently there were too many times when my answer was the dreaded, "Nah, I'm reading."

From disappointing my running buddy, I quickly went on to wreck my eyesight (Or maybe not, nearly everyone in my extended family was nearsighted.) from hunching over a book in poor light. And boy, did the books help my high school social rep --!

Bibliophile. Bibliophage. Dear Reader. Freaky four-eyes book-worm. Whatevs.

Before my eighteenth birthday I got myself set for a four-year reading sabbatical that shaped the rest of my days.

So far anyhow.

Some years I read less, but mostly I read a lot. Quickly.

I go heavy on novels, light on memoirs. I snack on essays and take sparse sips of poetry. I almost never read biographies. (That 5th-grade assignment on Betsy Ross <shudder>)

Generalized history gets a pass, but I do like specific topics (The Black Death in 1348, anyone? Rats in New York? ) and anything natural history-ish.

Stacks of books sprout wherever I perch: volumes I mean to read, books I have started, tomes I use for reference.

When Mr. Linton and I downsized, I culled about a third of my collection and still needed to rent a scissor-lift to get the rest of them up the stairs.

Sidebar Truth: While waiting for the delivery of the scissor-lift, and knowing the advantageous tide would wait for no book, Mr. Linton trotted the literal ton of books up stairs on tireless feet without a single complaint. Bless him.

I have reading recommendations the way pharmaceutical reps have sample packs and cronuts -- with roughly the same goal. Minus the commission.

Goodreads, which is connected in the cross-platform sales way of the modern world to Amazon.com (which is to say, Amazon owns the "social cataloguing" website), has become my preferred way to keep track of titles.

Instead of jotting down book recommendations on scraps of paper and then scotch-taping them someplace handy, a user can type in the name of the book (or a close approximation) or the name of the author and save it to the shelf of Books to Read.

Were I a slightly more nimble consumer, I could obtain any book with a few keystrokes, but my connections are not so tight.

Diversifying my stream: I read physical books that I buy. I read physical books that I borrow from the library. My sister (bless her!) gave me one of her extra Kindles, so I read on that, or on the iPad. We listen to books on CD or as podcasts or digital files.

I whittled a few titles off the "Books to Read" list recently and discovered one of my favorite bookchoices for the year. Some friends may be getting a copy of

The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg

Fredrik Sjöberg is an entomologist. He's aware how quirky a profession that is. And his particular passion –– hoverflies –– is not especially showy or accessible to the general public.

"Of course I could name a number of very good, very sensible reasons why a person ought to collect flies, but I am not a missionary."

Indeed he is not -- ostensibly -- trying to get his readers interested in hoverflies, fascinating as they may be. In this memoir, he's writing instead about larger questions of obsession and nature (or the outdoors anyway, as he thinks people's passion for "unspoiled" wilderness is a load of hooey).

He's clever and funny, with an original turn to his thinking that startles and charms. (He points out in passing that the only place an entomologist specializing in forensic work on cadavers might have enough work to make a living would be the United States.)

Like all the best memoirs, the book –– slim, but promising to continue in another two volumes –– is not so much about Sjöberg's insects, but about what he has learned from his pursuit of them.

I should be more embarrassed at my giddy fan-girl response to Sjöberg's story, but as my companions will attest: I cheerfully read aloud whole pages for their enjoyment as well as my own.

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Migraine, O Queen of Pain

12/10/2019

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Who could do better than Joan Dideon on the topic of migraine?

Nobody.

And yet here I am, sharing my thoughts.

First, migraine. It's a headache, yes, but it encompasses a largish category of neurological symptoms and takes a variety of devilishly unpleasant forms.

"That no one dies of migraine seems,
to someone deep into an attack,
an ambiguous blessing."

– Joan Dideon

It starts, often, with a visual disturbance. Flashes or jaggedy streaks of light, tunnel vision, or small blind spots.

Followed by perhaps a period of violent sensitivity to light or sound or smell.

Alarming stroke-like symptoms sometimes show up: surred speech, vomiting, dizziness, for instance. Or weakness or tingling on one side of the whole body.

And –– o joy! –– migraines can last for days.

Migraines arrive as a result of some weird blip of electrical impulses and vascular spasms (or something) in the brain.

The mechanism is "not completely understood," though there is a strong genetic component. Every few years there's a breakthrough in understanding. I used to keep up.

via GIPHY

My father and his mother and her grandmother all suffered from migraines. My first came to me as yet another unwelcome side-effect of being a girl.

Age 13: here you go, missy, a bouquet of body changes that usher in decades of unwelcome public commentary and oh, bonus! a debilitating headache on either side of this other physical indignity that seems like an illness.

Gah.

For years, medical consultation usually ended with, "Well, you can look forward to having them diminish as you get older."

I am officially no longer a spring chicken.

I remember how it happened, actually, but the point is that I have waited patiently but the migraine train is still damn running on my tracks.

Oy.

Recently I found myself a new doctor. A young one, whom I can only hope to outlast.

And so begins the search for effective treatment. I am happy to report that the MRI reveals that my brain is right where I left it. Even better -- no inappropriate growths are evident.

Young doc and I have embarked on a series of prescription medications. We are steering away from the ones that make me numb, tingly, or which impel me ask Jeff to keep a close watch on me.

Young doc has updates and a handful of suggestions to try. Which we discuss by e-mail. Brave new world. We have high hopes and a neurologist to visit.

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