2020 Life Logs, Day 227: Visit with Sailing Friends
Date: Saturday, August 15, 2020
Weather: Overcast and Rainy; High 74, Low 65 F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, Falmouth, MA
Jim Hammitt and Susie Klein are sailing friends that Mark and I met while we were preparing for our sail around the world. We met Susie at a weekend HAM radio class in 2005, she introduced us to her husband Jim, and the friendship has endured.
Reveille is the name of Jim and Susie’s sailboat and I got a call from Susie last night saying they had just arrived in Quissett Harbor (Reveille with the blue sail cover). We decided to meet in Woods Hole this afternoon to visit. We hoped to get take-out for lunch and find a place to sit and talk. Then this morning I got another call from Susie delaying the time of our get together. She said she could explain the reason for the delay with two words, “head explosion.” On a boat, a toilet is referred to as a head. When you flush, the waste goes into a holding tank if things are working properly. It was really their holding tank that had the explosion and the clean up process is not pretty. Jim had decided to stay onboard and deal with the issue, but Susie would still meet me. At this point, I asked if she would consider riding in my car’s backseat, both of us masked, of course, rather than her walking to Woods Hole to meet me. She agreed and I picked her up at 12:30 pm. Jim came ashore to say hello and then Susie and I headed off. Since she was riding with me, instead of walking, we decided to go into downtown Falmouth and pick up lunch at the French bakery. Jim and Susie just bought an apartment in Toulouse, France, so celebrating with a lunch from the French bakery seemed just the thing to do. Jim is a Professor of Economics and Decision Sciences in Harvard’s School of Public Health and he is the Director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. He collaborates with the Economics Department at the University of Toulouse and Jim and Susie spend enough time there that buying an apartment made sense. They both really enjoy their time in Toulouse, but after buying the apartment in January, Covid 19 took over the world. Unfortunately, they can’t visit their new apartment until Americans are once again allowed in the EU, so Susie really enjoyed our visit to Falmouth’s boulangerie to get a little taste of France. We took our lunch across the street and ate on a library lawn bench in the drizzly rain. We then walked down Main Street which was too crowded with people to be comfortable. But Susie saw a shirt that she loved at a sidewalk sale. We then drove to West Marine where she bought a new pair of deck shoes. She hasn’t’ been shopping since the lockdown in March and she felt like she was on a mini afternoon vacation. We ended with a walk through Spohr Gardens and then back to Quissett. It was a great afternoon reprieve for both of us.
