Pirate Dog PDX

The Big Picture

I found the Oregon Women's Sailing Association at the Portland Boat Show. It was a big, MGM moment, as I wandered through the Portland Expo Center, surrounded by old guys in camo jackets and bad hats, looking at sailboats and trying not to smack brokers that would ask me if my husband and I were interested in a boat ... though I was quite clearly there alone. "Yes. If you could show my imaginary husband around, I'll just follow along and  get all giggly when we get to the galley."

It made sense that such an organization should exist. There are endless books that address the invisible sailor, women. What I only just learned, as a part of my introduction to editing the newsletter for OWSA, is that freaks like us are EVERYWHERE.

Doris Colgate founded the National Women's Sailing Association (NWSA)         in 1990, to provide opportunities         for women to learn to sail and sail and spit and go braless at sea with other women. 

And, you know, saving the planet:

In 1996, NWSA launched AdventureSail, a mentoring program for at-risk girls, was introduced         and has been a resounding success.  Life skills such as leadership, responsibility,         teamwork, environmental stewardship, respect for authority and the importance         of education are stressed to help these girls grow to successful adults.          NWSA offers scholarships to sailing, marine biology and local youth programs         as part of this rewarding program. Doris is visionary like that. Last night, my friend Oliver called and told me about his girl friend who crews for a Boston program that teaches sailing to survivors of domestic violence. Wow! And, natch, the Komen folks partner with OWSA for the "Sail for the Cure," a fundraiser for cancer research.

Who knew?

      

Pirate Manifestation

I am big ol' rookie, bebe, beginner sailor. Know that. Someday I won't be. To help envision myself getting better, I'd like to tell you a true story of an incredible group of sailors, their ass-kicking voyage, and use photos from my sailing class to illustrate what it would have looked like if my friends and I did it. Hippies call it manifestation. Psychologists call it delusional. Tomato. Tomahto. Moving on ...

Last Thursday, the French racing yacht Modern Gypsy broke a 135-year-old world record for the fastest sail-powered trip from New York to San Francisco. The new record set this week: 43 days, 38 minutes. Somebody didn't stop for tequila in Alcapulco. (Which is why I'll never set the world record.) As we speak, the Modern Gypsy crew is resting a bit at the Corinthian Yacht Club in Tiburon.

(As I said, this photo isn't actually victorious sailors resting at the Corinthian Yacht Club. This is our class learning to deal with the wind at the Rose City Yacht Club. You can't tell, but the "mast" is mounted on a Christmas tree stand. The helmsman, in purple, has turned to look at "the wind," a.k.a. Susan in a black sweater standing behind her to port.)

Modern Gypsy, a 110-foot catamaran and her crew of 10, battled 35-foot swells and 60 mph winds when they sailed from New York to San Francisco, beating the 1854 record of 89 days and eight hours.

The trip is 14,500 miles, and includes a clip around Cape Horn at the tip of South America--considered by many sailors to be one of the most dangerous chunks of ocean on the planet. On Gypsy's best day, she covered 640 miles, and at one point was clipping along at 40.3 knots. To give you some idea of how fast that is, most folks sail at 8 knots or less. Sailors on big circumnavigational trips are pretty pleased with themselves to make 100 miles in 24 constantly sailing hours.

According to Gypsy's skipper, the trip was virtually problem-free, except that the head (nautical potty) broke down. Asked if he would do it again, the skipper shrugged. "I don't know. There are many other races." How French. ("I am le bored.")

We have no shrugging photos. We're perky American sailors.

At the end of the month, Modern Gypsy sets sail for Tokyo Bay. The record for that passage is 14 days, 22 hours, 40 minutes.  Zippy. BTW, here's the real crew, celebrating in Tiburon. We need matching outfits.

Plan B

On the off chance that HGTV doesn't see fit to set me up in my Hemingway house, I may have mentioned that a live-aboard boat is my (far more likely) plan b. Currently, the objects of my affection include a hottie Beneteau in Washington state (which I linked to, yesterday) and this 31' Hunter.

Oh hey, we don't have to rely on the broker's page, WE got to sail on it with OWSA today.

Our skipper is Sharon, the broker representing the 31' Hunter. Here we are listening intently. (You can't tell that I'm listening intently, because I'm taking the picture. I should be wearing a bib, I'm drooling so much over this boat.)

Susan and Linda are pulling in the fenders as we head out on a gorgeous, not raining day. May I just say, that on days like this, I never want to leave Portland.

That's me! More impressively, that's Mt. Hood off the port side. It's about 60 miles away, and covered with snow, so against the blue sky, I haven't been able to get a great photo. In person/mountain, though, it's beautiful. We are surrounded by snow-capped volcanos, and it's 60 degrees. Ah, Portland.

Okay. The great thing about sailing on my dream boats is that I'm learning what I don't love. This boat has a furling main. That means that the mainsail rolls up into the mast like a window shade. It makes for a purty boat line, and a  minimum amount of flaking (stacking) the sail onto the boom.

However, as this photo shows, it also means that the sail isn't attached to the boom so wind is pouring out the bottom between the sail and that metal stick across the bottom. Theorhetically, that means I'm losing power that could be pushing me to my next port of call ... bar ... shower (depending on the sail).

Also because it's a furling main, the sail can't have "battens." Those are sticks in the sail that keep the sail stiff (I said "stiff") when the wind blows against it and therefore allows the sail to be larger than the triangle line between the mast and the boom.

Because the whole Hunter sail rolls into a tube, you can't have sticks in the sails--which sucks because it means my sail is little. I hate sail envy. And, being slow.

Anyhoo, it was a great day. And I learned a lot more about sailing and the boat I may or may not love.

Another key bit of news, this bad boy would cost more than $100,000. That's not much for a house, I know. But, it's a big loan to take on when so many shiny things are tempting me this way and that.

Ah, to be anchored.

"Red Sky at Night, Sailor's Delight."

Here's the red sky from tonight's first lunar eclipse of 2008. Word on the street is that it's the last total lunar eclipse of the decade. With luck, it's not the last clear night of the decade in Portland. Please, no.

The moon looked like this (though I didn't take this photo, for the record). It's from a NASA site. This is what it looked like at 7 p.m. when I was walking Rico.

For my pirate pals, it's worth noting that this isn't the kind of red sky at night that predicts a nice day tomorrow. In order to understand why the pirate term, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning” means something, we'll need to pirate talk about weather.

First, the basics. Sun: Sets in the west. Rises in the east. Weather moves from west to east, blown by  the westerly trade winds. This includes storm systems. Good. Now that the short bus kids are with us, we'll move on.

The colors we see in the sky are due to sunlight being split into spectral colors as they pass through the atmosphere and bounce off sky schmutz. At the earliest and latest parts of the day, when the sun is lowest, it transmits light through the thickest part of the atmosphere.

Red sky at night, sailors delight.
A red sky suggests an atmosphere packed to the gills with schmutz. We see the red because the longest spectral color is the only color capable of breaking through the buckets of space schmutz. Shorter wavelengths are totally screwed. Ain''t no way they can make it through all that thick stuff. It's such a high concentration of schmutz when high pressure is present. High pressure usually brings great weather. Ta da!

Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning.
If the morning sky is a deep fiery red, it means a high water content in the atmosphere. So, rain might be on its way. Less ta da. But, still. It's cool, huh?

Sailing with the Mafia

Today, we went out for "lab." OWSA, the Oregon Women's Sailing Association, includes on-water time for each student enrolled in their beginning sailing course. This was my first week on the boat, and lucky me, my skipper, Julianne, was taking her new boat out on the water for the second time. I think she was almost as excited as we newbies were to get out.

You can't tell from the photo, but she was jumping up and down, Rico-style, because she was so happy to be out on her new baby. Captain Adorable.

There was next to no wind, but we took turns at the helm, anyway.

And I learned the meaning of a luffing sail. It's this. And it's not good. (But, it's pretty.)

Thus ended a busy week with the fine folks at OWSA. David earned serious great guy points earlier this week by joining me for the OWSA monthly meeting. I could have missed it, except that the guest speakers were talking about their experiences bareboating in Greece and the British Virgin Islands. Except for a four-year-old boy, David was the only dude. Serious awesome points.

So wowed am I by the whole OWSA scene, I'm now editing their newsletter. This, sigh, makes me a board member. Nonprofit mafia, why can't I quit you?

"Sailing Women" Interpretive Dance

The Sailing class Superhero known as In-Class Photographer Woman, Heather Heaton took this photo of us last week in our sailing class, when we broke up into teams and became parts of the boat.

If you'll recall, my role was "shrouds," and bossy boss that I am, I'm holding the boat diagram and directing the forestay (cream sweater), bow (cream vest), backstay (red shirt), transom (aft gal in black), boom (slumpy gal in brown), and my personal favorite, (though I haven't yet draped over her in a shroud-like way) our purple sweater girl, a.k.a. the mast, spreaders, and you can't see her foot, but she's the keel, too.

Not to brag, but the lovely Heather had titled this photo, "Creating Sailboat BEST," so, well, do know that we're gifted sailors already.

Ahoy, the hippie pirate!

Every year, nearly 100,000 commercial ships, worldwide, suck up approximately 280 million tons of oil. These vessels produce as much nitric oxide as the entire land-bound United States.

That's not good ... especially given that, as a nation, we're doing a crap job of controlling our pollutants.

Fortunately, there's a greener pirate preparing to take sail.

SkySails is fitting huge commercial vessels with kites. Big-ass kites. Flying 160 square meters of fabric, the kite-fitted ships cut fuel costs by an average of 35 percent.  Depending upon wind conditions, of course. Like smaller kites, the SkySail is flown by ropes (which we probably call lines, 'cause we're boaty like that). Without a mast to contend with, not only is more deck space avaliable for cargo, the sail is not restricted to low-level winds close to the ocean's surface.

According to SkySails, wind speed at 100 meters above the ocean's surface can be up to 20 percent higher than wind at 10 meters. The sail is controlled by special computers that sense the wind speed and adjusts the kite's height and position, directing it in large swooping figure eights. With whip-like momentum it generates approximately 6,800 extra horse power. Seahorse-power, that is.

Ahoy, my hippie bretheren! Trading hard-tack for granola, and not a moment too soon.

The Bitter End (of a Good Sandwich and More)

I had two Weight Watchers grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner last night with a salad. In Weight Watcher-world, instead of eating 26 cumulative sandwich points (a la Tuesday), I ate 4 teensy points. Voila la difference between "food" and "Weight Watchers food."

Did they taste exactly the same? They did not.

Tuesday's yacht club sammies took me back decades, to my gramma's kitchen table when grilled cheese sandwiches were served on sourdough bread with cream cheese and avocados. Hey, we lived in California, where avocados are the LAW, dammit.

While last night's grilled cheese sandwiches are less delectable than Tuesday's version, I am enjoying my boat-lore at this moment just as much as I did at Tuesday's sailing class. Knot Woman taught us two knots, and we'll learn two more every week. This week, we learned the figure 8 and stopper knots. I'm practicing them right now.

By the way, this is a photo of me (as I look in my head right now) stalwartly securing my lines on my sturdy sloop at sea. (Lots of women have an inner grizzled, Greek fisherman. Shut up.)

Anyway. What do delicious childhood-cheesy sandwiches and knot-tying having in common? Bitter ends. In sailing, the "bitter end" is the term for the inboard end of an anchor line that's attached to the "bitts," which are the posts sticking up through a ship's deck.  And, since we're up-n-headin' that way, a sailboat's bitt is so named for the old Norse word biti, which means "cross beam," which would have been a good place to tie your anchor line. Nautical usage has somewhat expanded the original definition in that today the end of any line, secured to bitts or not, is called a bitter end.

So, the origin of the expression "bitter end" has nothing to do with the last stroke of long-lasting misfortune nor low-calorie sandwiches. It's about sailing. It took us kind of a long time to get here, didn't it?  Well. I've run on heavier fuel.

Cheese Sandwiches=Sailing Hazard

Tonight, I started the all-women's sailing course I signed up for at the Portland Boat Show.We gals filled the room. With almost 40 of us, all anxious to be better sailors, all for great reasons, we were an enthusiastic group. The  class has eight different instructors, each with a different superhero power. Among the Super Friends, we were collectively schooled by Nomenclature Woman, Knot Woman, Sail-on-Saturday Woman, Registrar Woman, just to name a few.

Pictured with the boat on her head is Nomenclature Woman. She's petitely adorable and a total bad-ass. Can Batman say that? Nope. Superman? Hell no. Save us, Nomenclature Woman!

We did physical stuff, too. Of course, I couldn't take photos when I was participating in team projects like acting as named parts of a boat. Fortunately, the superhero known as In-Class Photographer Woman will send me photos soon. For the record, I played shrouds, and thusly draped myself, suspension wire-like, across the gal who played the mast, with arms-as-spreaders, and a pointed toe for a keel. Nine of us, in all, were 17 different boat parts ... so, wow, understand that Mast/Spreaders/Keel Woman carried the group.

Since I don't yet have boat-part theater photos to share, I'll offer another lesson learned in sailing school: Grilled cheese sandwiches are a problem.

Being a women's class, one of the superheroes is Feed-the-Masses Woman. She made grilled cheese sandwiches that were, gosh, blissful third-grade memories-perfect and delicious. I had two, thank you. When I came home to dutifully write down what I'd eaten in my Weight Watchers log, I learned that two perfecly grilled cheese sandwiches exceeds my total food allotment for the day, and then some. (26 points, if you care to know) Since grilled cheese sandwiches were not the ONLY thing I ate today, I am pretty much done eating until Friday.

Week One of Sailing Class: I'm a wiser sailor already. Plus, I've got better ballast.

Sail through History

My dad is sorting through the family photo/art archives, which is a mammoth project that he's pulling together into a manageable collection of stories and artifacts. Basically, he's curating his own childhood and the fascinating concurrent political/artistic/journalistic career of his dad, Leo. Witness the following excerpted slides, and understand that:

1. We are a seafaring people.
2. My dad is supremely versed in the PowerPoint milieu. And, of course,
3. My grandfather Leo was an artistic badass.