I pretty much walked away from this blog 14 months ago when I got the opportunity to co-author a book, the topic of which was within my interests. That book is now being printed and shipped to distributors and so I thought I'd return to the blog to see if anyone's home. Right now, Zippy, our 9-year-old black cat, is on the desktop in the loft, and when I try to use the mouse (he doesn't recognize it for its namesake, thank goodness,) he licks my hand. The girls -- Lexi and Samantha -- are down in the living room, lying on the couch, the first real estate they seized 20 minutes after they first entered this house two years ago. The cat and the dogs don't socialize unless I invite them to have play time. Samantha thinks Zippy would make a good lunch, although Lexi wiggles a friendly wiggle when she gets close to him. Outside, there are still significant traces of the most recent snow storm. In the 44 years I've lived here in New Jersey, the ground has never been so white. It's odd that global warming would in fact give us record snow cover -- odd, but pretty. The Christmas wreath with its red bow tie is still up on the Paladian window on the street end of the house. It's too cold today to take it down, and most days I don't notice it up there. Too cold to give the girls their aftrnoon walk, too. Well, it's not really that cold -- I think they said the high would be 21. But the wind was blowing the last time I was out and I'm using that as an excuse to vegitate a bit more. Zippy's vegitation -- we've kept him inside more days than not -- is costing him his once-sveldt figure. I just had trouble lifting him to my lap, and he probably couldn't escape Samantha's snapping jaws should, in a careless moment, I leave down the gate at the bottom of the stairs. The book project was energizing while it lasted. The first draft was done by the end of May. The publisher, Scribner, had set publication for April 1 at the beginning, and the fact that we were quick changed nothing. Working with co-author Mike Tougias was a pleasant experience. We agreed that I'd write the first part of the book and he the second. This division of labor kept us out of each other's hair and I suspect that if you didn't know there were two authors, you'd never guess it. Now I'm trying to organize myself for what comes next. I have writing projects in mind, and I still haven't rewired poor Robin, whom I abandoned in November and will only revisit once the ice melts.

We attended a performance last night at the Philadelphia Orchestra of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I won't pretend to know the violin soloist's name. He was a middle-aged Italian man, tall and slender. Nor will I attempt to judge his effort. It sounded wonderful, and I know too little to qualify as a judge otherwise. But his work reenforced my belief that to play a violin very well has to be one of the most, if not the most, fulfilling of human activities, particularly when the instrument is one of the finest ever made. A violin, cradled in the arm and tucked under the chin, seems to be about as intimate as any musical instrument can be. I imagine that the vibration, the resonance of the thin, curved wood, the maple and ash and spruce, has to be like the breathing and pulse of a living being, and to hear those sounds so closely, to physically envelop them with arms and hands and chest and cheek, seems as if it would be the equal of -- and perhaps superior to -- the best love-making. The  violin whispers, it swells, it soothes and stimulates. In another life . . .

A purpose of the Maine voyage this summer was overcoming a long-standing issue: Trips haunted by schedules. The fact that Robin stopped in Boston resulted in a conscious decision under way not to push to make a Maine landfall by the time Monica's plane landed in Manchester, New Hampshire. As a result, we got to discover a port we'd never visited and a unique marina. Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina is actually in East Boston, across the harbor from downtown Boston. There the price of a slip is about half the going rate on the Boston waterfront. And we got a view that we would have missed were Robin at a waterfront dock.
But wait. You get more in the shipyard and marina, where mjm boats builds million-dollar power boats, a Navy destroyer was berthed for repairs and you see the sun set behind the Boston skyline.
You get art. More precisely, sculpture.
Thanks to a number of sponsoring non-profit groups, every building in this sprawling shipyard and most spaces between building are decorated with sculptures. Monica's favorite was the mermaid.

Welded out of what appeared to be scrap metal, she flows atop one of the many buildings that abut the old, sometimes rotting piers in the shipyard. A representation of barnacle tracks or perhaps coral descends the brick siding of the same building.

But wait! There's more. Catching your eye first if you visit by automibile has to be the cod, also welded from scraps.

                 

We would recommend that anyone visiting Boston take the short drive through the tunnel to East Boston and there drive to the end of Marginal Street for a free art experience. Then you could have a meal at Rino's place a few blocks to the north, where you might sample the coconut sorbet, the absolutely best desert I've ever consumed. But that's another story.

Robin arrived on the Boston waterfront to great fanfare.

Turned out there was another celebrity in the harbor, the USS Constitution, out for a parade with all hands on deck.

In late May, Tom Gilmore agreed to help me take Robin to Newport, R.I., for the start of the 2013 Bermuda 1-2, which I had entered. It was only after we had passed through Cape May and were on the  Atlantic that I realized that I really didn't want to race this year. So that night, we docked in Atlantic City and   couple of days later, we headed back to the Chesapeake.
I'd had too much on my plate. Monica had told me as much all spring. Trying to complete the first draft of a manuscript and prepare for an ocean race were more than I was prepared to do. But I didn't like the idea of bailing out on a voyage, and with time to think about it, I had some regrets -- particularly the following Friday when the race started and Robin was 300 miles away. As it turned out, I missed one of the roughest 1-2s on record, one in which several boats did not finish and one actually sank.
By mid-July, my psyche was healed and I asked Monica if she wanted to cruise in Maine. She did. So I asked Tom if he wanted to resume our voyage. He -- surprisingly -- did.
He stayed with me through New York City and Hell Gate on the East River. When he stepped ashore in Port Washington, Long Island, I was one contented sailor, with a good cruise ahead of me.

I created this blog in 2009 in order to have a place to write regularly once my work at Soundings was over. Since February, I've been devoting my efforts to the book Rescue of the Bounty. That work is almost complete. At the end of next week, I'll send back the copy-edited pages and will have no more to do. Publication by Scribner is scheduled for April.
Writing that book with Michael Tougias has been consuming and has affected the rest of life. But we've had some other advetures tucked into the nooks of the weeks and months. I'll take time now to remember some of those events, like the passag through Eggamoggin Reach in Maine in late August, when we saw New York 30 #1, Alera, above, ghosting off Brooklin, Maine.

The Coast Guard hearing investigating the loss of the tall ship Bounty has taken some intersteing turns over the last week. The most intersting came Friday in the testomony of third mate Dan Cleveland.
Commander Kevin Carroll, as he has with many other witnesses, asked Cleveland his impression of a statement made by the Bounty's captain, Robin Walbridge, to a videographer in Belfast, Maine. The videographer had posed a question about sailing Bounty in foul weather.
Walbridge replied that there is no such thing as bad weather.
"We chase hurricanes," the skipper told the videographer.
Most mariners -- even amateur sailors like I -- thought that statement was absurd.
Carroll wanted to know what Cleveland thought.
The answer demonstrated how gray the area of "facts" can be.
Cleveland said in the four years he had sailed aboard Bounty, he had never heard Walbridge make a comment like that.
But, Cleveland said, what he thought Walbridge was referring to was not chasing hurricanes but following them. [I'm not attempting to quote Cleveland directly. I'm trying for the sense of what he said.]
If Bounty could tuck in behind a hurricane after it passed, it could "chase" after it in fair, strong winds on a smooth sea, Cleveland suggested. In fact, he had done just that under Walbridge's command, he said.
To me, the explanation made perfect sense. Walbridge's glib comment wasn't looney at all.
The hearing has three more days to go. Then Commander Carroll will have months to sift the information his has gathered, to attempt to find black and white in all that gray.
Still to be decided: Was there as sane reason for Walbridge to leave New London and, three days later, sail across the path of an historic hurricane. I'm waiting to see.