`Sailing Free' - one sailor's love affair with the Sea

Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.
-- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden

Journeys of the Heart

Journeys of S/V "Ulysses"

So far, my travels have been confined to the north-western Atlantic and the northern Caribbean. I left Annapolis, MD in November of 1993, motored and sailed down the Intra-Coastal Waterway, crossed the Gulf Stream between Florida and the Bahamas, spent about a year exploring the Berrys, the Exumas and the Out Islands - incredible diving and fishing! From there, I sailed to the Turks and Caicos, crossed to the Dominican Republic (despite all reports to the contrary, a most friendly and civil place); spent the next 6 years or so exploring Puerto Rico, the Spanish Virgins, the Virgin Islands (US and British), and Bermuda - and am now temporarily back in the States. Due to various reasons, I left St. Thomas a bit too late, stayed in Bermuda a little too long... and the passage to the Azores became a non-option: western Europe and England are nothing but gales and storms all over at that time of year.

2 Sep 2000 Sitting in Brooklyn, NY - how the hell does a cruising sailor end up on Flatbush Avenue? "What a long, strange trip it's been..." I'm here visiting my brother and various friends after making a long, looong series of passages up the US East Coast. Instead of making Charleston from Bermuda, I ran into middlin' rough gale in the Gulf Stream (about 180 miles from the coast) and went south - Bahamas and Florida - when it threatened to become a storm (life's too short for playing macho man and taking gratuitous ass-whippings). Broke a mast in Ft. Pierce, cruised down to Ft. Lauderdale, built myself a new spar - and stood it up without a crane - in St. Augustine, a friendly place in northern FL; took a couple of 200-mile offshore runs and watched dolphins making love while swimming at speed alongside "Ulysses"; ran another 200+ miles behind the Outer Banks ("The Graveyard of the Atlantic"), came up the Chesapeake Bay (hello, all my wonderful friends in Baltimore!), down Delaware Bay, and up along the Jersey coast. Whew. Here I am, logbook full of winds, seas, crusted salt, and deeply-etched memories.

What's next? I don't know. Maybe the Florida Keys - I hear life is pretty wild there - then, back to Bermuda and on to Europe; maybe I'll stick around the States and bulk out the cruising piggybank before taking off. I haven't quite decided yet - but whatever it is, it won't be in New York (I remember the winters here.)

Other Interests

Computers
In these days of insect-style specialization, the obvious question is "What specifically do you do with computers?" The answer happens to be "You name it, I do it". I learned these beasts in the Elder Days, when we had to walk thirty miles to the printer to see our output. Barefoot. In the snow. Uphill, in both directions (gravitational anomalies were common back then). So - programming, building hardware, repair, networking, Web page design, database management... as I said, you name it. The strangest thing of all is that I still enjoy it - it's an environment that keeps me learning!

Diving
Scuba is a passion with me. I don't get to go nearly as often as I'd like - there are lots of other calls on my time - but it's something that goes wonderfully well with a cruising lifestyle. The one thing that I wish I had, in this regard, is a high-pressure air compressor... but you can't have everything aboard a 37' sailboat. Ah, well... dive shops abound in the most interesting areas, anyway - and I carry two tanks of my own just in case.

Fishing
A great thing to do while on a long passage. Let out a couple of hundred yards of heavy nylon twine with a stainless wire leader and a weighted plastic squid, tie a loop through a convenient shackle, and forget it. Sooner or later, (rattle-rattle-rattle!, goes the shackle) some denizen of the deep - tuna, wahoo, or some mysterious whatever - will fall for your fishy offering. Ah, the freshest of sushi... don't forget the green wasabi!

Reading
All right, all right, I'll fess up; I'm a reading fanatic. I literally cannot live without books; as I've mentioned in my favorite newsgroup, alt.callahans, one of the major factors in buying my boat was all the bookshelf space aboard... I've also made hash of nearly a gigabyte of hard drive space (remember, this was several years ago - before the current prices of $10/gig) by downloading the entire Project Gutenberg archive and a number of other book repositories. At this point, I have over 3,000 e-books and ahem, several hundred of the bound variety.

My boats have all been named after poems - appropriate, as a boat on the sea is poetry in motion, to coin a phrase. "Recessional", my previous boat, came from Rudyard Kipling:

...
Far called, our navies melt away,
On dune and headland sink the fire.
Lo, all our dreams of yesterday
Are one with Nineveh and Tyre.
...
-- Excerpt from Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional"

"Ulysses", my current one, is from a different source, yet another poet whose words have stirred my heart:

...
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are -
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-- Excerpt from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses"

alt.callahans
My favorite newsgroup; in fact, the only one I read and post in (though I've been too busy and Net-deprived recently). Based around an idea created by Spider Robinson in his "Callahan's Bar" series of books ("The Callahan Chronicals", "Callahan's Legacy", etc.), the central idea of the Place is "Pain shared is halved; joy shared is doubled". My kind of place. I've been in and out of there over the past couple of years, given my wandering ways - and have always been greeted like a long-lost brother. This, despite the fact that a.c. is read by more than 65,000 people around the globe - true, the 'core group' of people who actually post at any given time is no more than a hundred Folx or so (at least that's my best guess), but it's still a wonderful Place to be. Given the number of participants and their average IQ/knowledge base, we even have a type of post called "Best Brains:" - a request for information about everything and anything. I've never seen a question go unanswered...

Latest Projects

Uh... well, anyway, an answer. I still have my laptop, and the fact that I have Linux installed on both machines has eased the process tremendously. I've solved the problem in a number of ways, learning a lot in the process: serial-to-serial TCP/IP, "rsh" and the related "remote control" goodies, the intricacies of telnet (yep, plain old telnet - gets pretty deep), "expect" scripting, mounting a remote system via NFS, SSL (very secure networking authentication plus a telnet replacement)... lots of stuff, all good learning material in the Linux/Unix world.

The Real Me

Journeys of the Heart

Journeys of S/V "Ulysses"

Other Interests

Latest Projects