2021 Life Logs, Day 85: Zoom Presentation, Editing, Writing
Date: Friday, March 26, 2021
Weather: Misty, then Windy and Foggy; High 58, Low, 42 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
By the time I got up, got dressed, made a breakfast smoothie, and took Shadow for his Morning Mile walk, it was time for my 10:30 Zoom presentation on The Voyage of Windbird. People signed up for this through the Lifelong Learning Program sponsored by the Friends of Snow Library in Orleans. The PowerPoint presentation was an hour long and the Q & A was another half hour. A couple of people from my book club signed up as well as friend Olga Mitchell. Since I didn’t know any of the other people, it was great to see faces I knew. The presentation got a very positive reception, but if I am ever going to get this book written, I think I’ll have to shy away from presentation for a while. It just takes too much preparation time. But I did get a question today that gave me another job to do. One woman asked if I had other videos from the voyage. I answered that I have many, but that they have not been edited. Mark was always my editor, and I just don’t have the time. She suggested I give that job to a grandchild. I thought that was a great idea! And I also got to reconnect with Barbara Semple from Chatham. I didn’t know she was going to be attending, so it was a fun surprise. Barbara saw the presentation a couple of years ago and then I went to see her make her presentation featuring the history of her sailing family. She has the original diaries of a great aunt who traveled with her husband who was a sea captain. It was a fun morning for me.
After lunch, I finished editing Chapter 12 on the Marquesas Islands and am now writing Chapter 13 on the Society Islands—Tahiti, Moorea, Raiatea, and Bora Bora. In doing so, I went back to read my logs from that time. When we left the Marquesas, there was a four-day passage to the Tuamotus. We had some unusually rough weather on that passage that I wrote about in my log. Heather wrote back to us with a rant about Cape Cod weather that June. This was on June 9th in 2006. Today I found it a little depressing to be reminded that summer is not just around the corner. We have a long, unpredictable Cape Cod spring to survive first. Here are some excerpts from the 2006 log.
Day 235, Year 1: Lumpy, Bumpy Ride
Date: Friday, June 9, 2006
Location: Marquesas to Tuamotus Transit, Day 4
We are having a lumpy, bumpy ride out here, but we are both fine. I remember reading “Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day” over and over to our children and I think Pooh would agree that this passage has been blustery. We have periods of sunshine with puffy white clouds and then all of a sudden one of those clouds starts to darken, the winds increase, and we get a mix of high winds and rain. Things just begin to settle down, and it happens again—squall after squall after squall.
Our daughter Heather wrote her version of a “Captain’s Rambling” to us yesterday, but she admitted it was more “ranting” than “rambling” about the weather back home. Here’s part of what she had to say: “I’ve decided that Cape Cod is on its own very special tectonic plate that moves around the globe randomly. For a couple of winters, when Buzzards Bay froze shore to shore, I was convinced we were in the Artic Circle. Now I believe we’re in Bangladesh during monsoon season. It has been raining for weeks, with the exception of Memorial Day weekend. I actually had to wade to and from my car today as the entrance to the parking lot was flooded 4+ inches deep and the ‘puddle’ had no edges. It just connected a marsh to a stream. Rivers around New England are at or above flood stage, and we’re due to get 4 inches of rain tomorrow … 4 inches in one day! Not to mention gusts to 40 knots and thunderstorms.”
Well, I hope we don’t get 4 inches out here today, but we will probably have 40 knots. And I feel more like I am in the North Atlantic than the South Pacific. We have the warm weather, but not the steady trades. Today we were getting winds north of east again. But I don’t think I’ll get any sympathy from anyone from the Northeast. Hopefully we will be safely tucked into the atoll of Ahe by mid-morning tomorrow and snorkeling in the clear, warm waters by tomorrow afternoon. Sorry, Heather!
Note: The next day in my log, I had to write an apology to Heather for rubbing it in a bit. The weather got even worse and we had to abandon our stop in the Tuamotus and sail on.
