Wednesday, January 30, 2008
January 29, 2008
Motored and sailed from Daytona for about 15 miles, went to an idle for a bridge opening and the oil pressure dropped so we went into a Marina at New Smyrna Beach to check it out. No loss of oil, no leaks, pressure is fine at speed and when the engine is cold. Seems okay, but put a call to my friends at our boat yard in Maine and they’ll think about the symptoms and get back to me.
Yesterday, we sailed and sailed and sailed due south, wing on wing, down the Indian River through Mosquito Lagoon, went east-west for a bit through Haulover Canal, back into the Indian River, and just made the bascule bridges in Cocoa Beach before it goes on what the bridge tenders call “curfew” at 3:30 to allow the thousands of rocket scientists to leave Cape Canaveral. For hours NASA’s giant shuttle assembly building loomed on the horizon. For the day the engine ran less than three of nine-and-a-half hours. A crystal clear, but still cold, high 50’s to low 60’s with the wind at 12 knots. We anchored and we crashed, something to do with fatigue – that’s a lot of downwind sailing – isolation, boat worry, pushing to get south, the constant cold north wind, still early darkness, tedium that is the other side of beauty of the waterway, the dicey economy that we’re not doing anything about, trying to coordinate a mailing to a general delivery post office from our daughter M. who is receiving and sorting the bushels of mail, and continuing our self- study of all the ins and outs of sailing to the Bahamas.
January 29, 2008
Last night, set the anchor alarm and went to bed early to sleep like logs. How puny the worries and irks of the night before are in the glory of still morning light graced by seabirds following in our wake to gobble creatures that we and Journey stir up.
The wind has shifted 180o, just off the nose, so we motor-sailed from Cocoa Beach to Vero Beach on the vast expanse of the Indian River, sticking to a ditch dredged in its bottom, our roadway for so many of the last 950 miles through these shallow inner- coastal waters. We don’t even think twice about three or four feet under the keel. Even though the wind is blowing hard, there is warmth and moisture in the air that makes it softer. Ran into again a boat being single handed by a fellow from Phoenix who radioed the first time he saw us a couple of days ago to ask about the whisker pole we were using. We asked him where he was heading, and he said he wasn’t sure because his chart blew away and his next one doesn’t start until mile 868. His boat was aptly named, Undaunted. He seemed in his same, exuberant fine form, although his engine was acting up so he’d slowed down a bit.
January 30, 2008
We’re stuck in Vero Beach which some cruisers call “Velcro Beach” because it’s a good place to stay and make repairs. Our refrigerator didn’t work this morning, again! We’ve asked around, found a fellow who can come on Friday. We’d like to get it fixed. If it can’t, to hell with it, and it will become an icebox like the one we cruised with for years on our first boat, Blue Teal.
The weather has turned, sunny and in the 70’s, short sleeve shirts in contrast to three layers of fleece for me (one for M.) and foul weather jackets. So plans are for a walk to the beach, a bus ride to a supermarket to stock up, inflate and clean the dinghy, touch up some varnish, change the oil, enjoy the warmth and again perhaps tonight enjoy a half dozen oysters at the local eatery. We’ll see how much we really get done.
Motored and sailed from Daytona for about 15 miles, went to an idle for a bridge opening and the oil pressure dropped so we went into a Marina at New Smyrna Beach to check it out. No loss of oil, no leaks, pressure is fine at speed and when the engine is cold. Seems okay, but put a call to my friends at our boat yard in Maine and they’ll think about the symptoms and get back to me.
Yesterday, we sailed and sailed and sailed due south, wing on wing, down the Indian River through Mosquito Lagoon, went east-west for a bit through Haulover Canal, back into the Indian River, and just made the bascule bridges in Cocoa Beach before it goes on what the bridge tenders call “curfew” at 3:30 to allow the thousands of rocket scientists to leave Cape Canaveral. For hours NASA’s giant shuttle assembly building loomed on the horizon. For the day the engine ran less than three of nine-and-a-half hours. A crystal clear, but still cold, high 50’s to low 60’s with the wind at 12 knots. We anchored and we crashed, something to do with fatigue – that’s a lot of downwind sailing – isolation, boat worry, pushing to get south, the constant cold north wind, still early darkness, tedium that is the other side of beauty of the waterway, the dicey economy that we’re not doing anything about, trying to coordinate a mailing to a general delivery post office from our daughter M. who is receiving and sorting the bushels of mail, and continuing our self- study of all the ins and outs of sailing to the Bahamas.
January 29, 2008
Last night, set the anchor alarm and went to bed early to sleep like logs. How puny the worries and irks of the night before are in the glory of still morning light graced by seabirds following in our wake to gobble creatures that we and Journey stir up.
The wind has shifted 180o, just off the nose, so we motor-sailed from Cocoa Beach to Vero Beach on the vast expanse of the Indian River, sticking to a ditch dredged in its bottom, our roadway for so many of the last 950 miles through these shallow inner- coastal waters. We don’t even think twice about three or four feet under the keel. Even though the wind is blowing hard, there is warmth and moisture in the air that makes it softer. Ran into again a boat being single handed by a fellow from Phoenix who radioed the first time he saw us a couple of days ago to ask about the whisker pole we were using. We asked him where he was heading, and he said he wasn’t sure because his chart blew away and his next one doesn’t start until mile 868. His boat was aptly named, Undaunted. He seemed in his same, exuberant fine form, although his engine was acting up so he’d slowed down a bit.
January 30, 2008
We’re stuck in Vero Beach which some cruisers call “Velcro Beach” because it’s a good place to stay and make repairs. Our refrigerator didn’t work this morning, again! We’ve asked around, found a fellow who can come on Friday. We’d like to get it fixed. If it can’t, to hell with it, and it will become an icebox like the one we cruised with for years on our first boat, Blue Teal.
The weather has turned, sunny and in the 70’s, short sleeve shirts in contrast to three layers of fleece for me (one for M.) and foul weather jackets. So plans are for a walk to the beach, a bus ride to a supermarket to stock up, inflate and clean the dinghy, touch up some varnish, change the oil, enjoy the warmth and again perhaps tonight enjoy a half dozen oysters at the local eatery. We’ll see how much we really get done.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Brunswick to New Smyrna Beach
January 26, 2008
We’re doing a day layover in Daytona Beach at the Halifax Harbor Marina. Enough of a week of showery, cloudy, chilly weather – lows in the 40’s and high’s in the low sixties – not bad for June in Maine, but we want 70’s which will return next week after this series of cold fronts that has brought strong north, northwest, northeast winds. We’ll go tomorrow when it’s supposed to be sunny and in the 60’s, still blowing from the north behind us which is the good part.
There’s resentment in the weather. The cold, north winds are like fists punched from a fat bully with feet stuck in the snows of Iowa and Ohio whose arms will only occasionally flail this far to where its green and he wants to make the most of each slug. Journey gets leaned over against marina floats and her rigging moans in protest. Judy and Bill convinced us to buy an electric heater when in Brunswick, and we are very grateful they did. It keeps the cabin a cozy 70 degrees and dryer than the propane heater.
We left Brunswick on the 22nd to catch high tide on Jekyll Creek where low tide drains the channel to three feet. It was a another twisty passage plotted on the Cumberland River, St. Andrews Sound, Cumberland Dividings to Cumberland Sound where we had planned to anchor off of – you guessed it – Cumberland Island National Park, but we had been hearing warnings all day of dense fog moving down the coast of Georgia and it caught us there, obliterating Cumberland Island and forcing radar, chart plotter navigation across the mouth of the St. Mary’s river – the dividing line between Georgia and Florida.
The shore of the St. Mary’s River is literally posted with “Keep Out” signs planted by the US Navy. Huge rectangular buildings rise out of the marsh to house part of the nuclear submarine fleet. A veteran of the waterway told us that if you’re near when a sub comes in, an advancing patrol boat orders you to turn your boat away from the sub and stop, about as reliable of a command as a lady wanting to change clothes in the open and saying to a group of teenage boys “turnaround and don’t peek." There were enough channel markers approaching the St Mary’s River that a submariner could find his way by brail.
We crossed the mouth of the St. Mary’s River into the Amelia River and had toyed with anchoring at Fernandina Beach, Florida. A cruising guide states: “For those who enjoy anchoring out, this spot delightfully combines the privacy of swinging on the hook with the convenience of having downtown Fernandina only a short dinghy ride away.” It mentions only in passing the two stinking pulp mills on the bank with roaring steam valves that equal the delight of anchoring in the marshes off the end of a JFK runway. We ventured on, passing the “lovingly restored” 1900’s Main Street a few miles on to anchor peacefully in a nook off of the South Amelia River.
The next day our goal was St. Augustine via Swampit and Sisters Creeks to the St. John River. As we approached the St. Johns River, luckily a bridge tender radioed that a bridge further down the ICW between us and St. Augustine was closed until 5:30 for maintenance work. Like salmon, we decided to return to the sea via the St. John River sail south for about 30 miles and come back in the St. Augustine Inlet. There was a light northeast wind behind, and five foot swells on the stern quarter. Journey sighed. We motor sailed, then motored to make the St. Augustine inlet before dark, our first inlet approach since Cape May.
St. Augustine Inlet
We’ve learned from listening to the radio that the best local knowledge is from the tow boat services, the kind that rescued us in Gloucester. St. Augustine Seatow told us via cell phone that the inlet had been dredged two years ago, but be sure to follow the buoys, the only strategy because we had discovered both electronic and paper charts are blank in the area of the inlet except to show two rectangles of dredge spoil ground with a channel between. They said reach the outer buoy then head for the landmark of the 220 foot tall stainless steel cross, the site of Our Lady of la Leche Shrine the location of the first Catholic Mass and mission on land that would become the United States.
The approach seemed like we were sailing straight at a beach with breakers. The wind and swells were from the north, the inlet runs east-west. We turned west into what appeared a maelstrom of breaking seas and eddies. The swells were breaking on the dredge spoil on the starboard side of the channel and on the beach in front of us. We surfed on confused swells that made their way into the inlet. A one knot current was against us. The red and green buoys marking the starboard and port sides of the channel were hard to spot in the seas, the fathometer ranged from 8 to 15 feet beneath the keel. As we went through the inlet we were within 200 feet of the beach on the barrier island to the south. Exciting.
Once inside we were in calm waters in front of the Castillo de San Marcos, a Spanish-built fortress constructed between 1672 and 1695 to protect St. Augustine from pirate raids, and to protect against the British encroaching on Spain’s interest in maintaining the offshore Bahama channel as a highway for its plunder of the “New World.”
We went south on the Matanzas River past the city marina and downtown water front, continued a mile or so and turned west and back north into the much narrower San Sebastian River to the boat yard we had called in advance to arrange to make a repair on the refrigerator. No need to bore you with the story of the yard’s inability to make the repair that resulted in our getting two free nights of dockage because they couldn’t live up to the promise, nor how the refrigerator seems to have healed itself, again.
St. Augustine’s Back Door
By being on the San Sebastian we walked into St. Augustine through its back door, an historic African-American neighborhood called Lincolnville, that had small houses, front porches, lots of churches and the warmth of coming in through the kitchen of someone’s home. We stopped at the Excelsior Museum and Cultural Center of Lincolnville, newly opened in the Excelsior school, a segregated school that closed in 1958.
As it happened, at the same time another white couple, even older than us, stopped in. The museum director and her assistant greeted us at the desk, delighted to have visitors and gave a personal tour of the museum’s collection that included numerous photographs of graduates who became nurses, entertainers and educators, a facsimile of a diploma that had the word “colored” in gothic type above the student’s name, and most striking was the painted wooden sign from the Monson Motel, the place where its owner was photographed pouring muriatic acid into the motel pool where black and white demonstrators swam, a moment of hate and fear that became an iconic image of the civil rights movement the day before the US Senate passed the Civil Rights act of 1964.
We walked by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Lincolnville where Martin Luther King preached in April, 1964. At his encouragement, northern whites came to St. Augustine, including Mrs. John Burgess, the wife of the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts and Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, wife of the governor of our state. Both of these elderly white ladies were arrested for eating with blacks at a restaurant, generating another national story that advanced the cause.
St. Augustine’s front door was installed in the 1880’s by Henry Flagler, the Rockefeller partner and primo Florida real estate tycoon. It included the Ponce de Leon Hotel that is now part of Flagler College. There is the requisite pedestrian mall of antique, clothing and gift shops.
St. Augustine to Daytona Beach was a long day, but allowed four hours of sailing with the jib on a whisker pole to catch strong northerly breezes dead behind us most of the way. We had two spectacular dinners at the Cellar Restaurant, and listened in the distance to race cars at the Daytona Speedway doing a 24 hour race. They were luckily quieted during the night by the wind building and shifting to the northeast and blowing the sound away.
January 27, 2008
Left Daytona Beach and sailed again with strong northerlies. Clouds rapidly dissipated, but it stayed cold. An engine alarm sounded as we were idling awaiting a bridge to open at its 20 minute interval and noted the oil pressure was low, but returned to normal when we increased RPMs. Decided to stop at New Smyrna Beach Marina, checked the oil level and leaks and all seems fine, but decided to stay as it would be too late to make the next safe anchorage. Our shortest day of the entire trip, 15 nautical miles.
Like all small towns along the waterway, New Smyrna Beach has the same, Sunday-deserted main street with shops and services that are the remnant of what has fled to outlying shopping centers. No grocery and only a mediocre cup of coffee was available, but laundry and blog updates are getting done and we’ll be out of here first thing in the morning.
We’re doing a day layover in Daytona Beach at the Halifax Harbor Marina. Enough of a week of showery, cloudy, chilly weather – lows in the 40’s and high’s in the low sixties – not bad for June in Maine, but we want 70’s which will return next week after this series of cold fronts that has brought strong north, northwest, northeast winds. We’ll go tomorrow when it’s supposed to be sunny and in the 60’s, still blowing from the north behind us which is the good part.
There’s resentment in the weather. The cold, north winds are like fists punched from a fat bully with feet stuck in the snows of Iowa and Ohio whose arms will only occasionally flail this far to where its green and he wants to make the most of each slug. Journey gets leaned over against marina floats and her rigging moans in protest. Judy and Bill convinced us to buy an electric heater when in Brunswick, and we are very grateful they did. It keeps the cabin a cozy 70 degrees and dryer than the propane heater.
We left Brunswick on the 22nd to catch high tide on Jekyll Creek where low tide drains the channel to three feet. It was a another twisty passage plotted on the Cumberland River, St. Andrews Sound, Cumberland Dividings to Cumberland Sound where we had planned to anchor off of – you guessed it – Cumberland Island National Park, but we had been hearing warnings all day of dense fog moving down the coast of Georgia and it caught us there, obliterating Cumberland Island and forcing radar, chart plotter navigation across the mouth of the St. Mary’s river – the dividing line between Georgia and Florida.
The shore of the St. Mary’s River is literally posted with “Keep Out” signs planted by the US Navy. Huge rectangular buildings rise out of the marsh to house part of the nuclear submarine fleet. A veteran of the waterway told us that if you’re near when a sub comes in, an advancing patrol boat orders you to turn your boat away from the sub and stop, about as reliable of a command as a lady wanting to change clothes in the open and saying to a group of teenage boys “turnaround and don’t peek." There were enough channel markers approaching the St Mary’s River that a submariner could find his way by brail.
We crossed the mouth of the St. Mary’s River into the Amelia River and had toyed with anchoring at Fernandina Beach, Florida. A cruising guide states: “For those who enjoy anchoring out, this spot delightfully combines the privacy of swinging on the hook with the convenience of having downtown Fernandina only a short dinghy ride away.” It mentions only in passing the two stinking pulp mills on the bank with roaring steam valves that equal the delight of anchoring in the marshes off the end of a JFK runway. We ventured on, passing the “lovingly restored” 1900’s Main Street a few miles on to anchor peacefully in a nook off of the South Amelia River.
The next day our goal was St. Augustine via Swampit and Sisters Creeks to the St. John River. As we approached the St. Johns River, luckily a bridge tender radioed that a bridge further down the ICW between us and St. Augustine was closed until 5:30 for maintenance work. Like salmon, we decided to return to the sea via the St. John River sail south for about 30 miles and come back in the St. Augustine Inlet. There was a light northeast wind behind, and five foot swells on the stern quarter. Journey sighed. We motor sailed, then motored to make the St. Augustine inlet before dark, our first inlet approach since Cape May.
St. Augustine Inlet
We’ve learned from listening to the radio that the best local knowledge is from the tow boat services, the kind that rescued us in Gloucester. St. Augustine Seatow told us via cell phone that the inlet had been dredged two years ago, but be sure to follow the buoys, the only strategy because we had discovered both electronic and paper charts are blank in the area of the inlet except to show two rectangles of dredge spoil ground with a channel between. They said reach the outer buoy then head for the landmark of the 220 foot tall stainless steel cross, the site of Our Lady of la Leche Shrine the location of the first Catholic Mass and mission on land that would become the United States.
The approach seemed like we were sailing straight at a beach with breakers. The wind and swells were from the north, the inlet runs east-west. We turned west into what appeared a maelstrom of breaking seas and eddies. The swells were breaking on the dredge spoil on the starboard side of the channel and on the beach in front of us. We surfed on confused swells that made their way into the inlet. A one knot current was against us. The red and green buoys marking the starboard and port sides of the channel were hard to spot in the seas, the fathometer ranged from 8 to 15 feet beneath the keel. As we went through the inlet we were within 200 feet of the beach on the barrier island to the south. Exciting.
Once inside we were in calm waters in front of the Castillo de San Marcos, a Spanish-built fortress constructed between 1672 and 1695 to protect St. Augustine from pirate raids, and to protect against the British encroaching on Spain’s interest in maintaining the offshore Bahama channel as a highway for its plunder of the “New World.”
We went south on the Matanzas River past the city marina and downtown water front, continued a mile or so and turned west and back north into the much narrower San Sebastian River to the boat yard we had called in advance to arrange to make a repair on the refrigerator. No need to bore you with the story of the yard’s inability to make the repair that resulted in our getting two free nights of dockage because they couldn’t live up to the promise, nor how the refrigerator seems to have healed itself, again.
St. Augustine’s Back Door
By being on the San Sebastian we walked into St. Augustine through its back door, an historic African-American neighborhood called Lincolnville, that had small houses, front porches, lots of churches and the warmth of coming in through the kitchen of someone’s home. We stopped at the Excelsior Museum and Cultural Center of Lincolnville, newly opened in the Excelsior school, a segregated school that closed in 1958.
As it happened, at the same time another white couple, even older than us, stopped in. The museum director and her assistant greeted us at the desk, delighted to have visitors and gave a personal tour of the museum’s collection that included numerous photographs of graduates who became nurses, entertainers and educators, a facsimile of a diploma that had the word “colored” in gothic type above the student’s name, and most striking was the painted wooden sign from the Monson Motel, the place where its owner was photographed pouring muriatic acid into the motel pool where black and white demonstrators swam, a moment of hate and fear that became an iconic image of the civil rights movement the day before the US Senate passed the Civil Rights act of 1964.
We walked by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Lincolnville where Martin Luther King preached in April, 1964. At his encouragement, northern whites came to St. Augustine, including Mrs. John Burgess, the wife of the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts and Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, wife of the governor of our state. Both of these elderly white ladies were arrested for eating with blacks at a restaurant, generating another national story that advanced the cause.
St. Augustine’s front door was installed in the 1880’s by Henry Flagler, the Rockefeller partner and primo Florida real estate tycoon. It included the Ponce de Leon Hotel that is now part of Flagler College. There is the requisite pedestrian mall of antique, clothing and gift shops.
St. Augustine to Daytona Beach was a long day, but allowed four hours of sailing with the jib on a whisker pole to catch strong northerly breezes dead behind us most of the way. We had two spectacular dinners at the Cellar Restaurant, and listened in the distance to race cars at the Daytona Speedway doing a 24 hour race. They were luckily quieted during the night by the wind building and shifting to the northeast and blowing the sound away.
January 27, 2008
Left Daytona Beach and sailed again with strong northerlies. Clouds rapidly dissipated, but it stayed cold. An engine alarm sounded as we were idling awaiting a bridge to open at its 20 minute interval and noted the oil pressure was low, but returned to normal when we increased RPMs. Decided to stop at New Smyrna Beach Marina, checked the oil level and leaks and all seems fine, but decided to stay as it would be too late to make the next safe anchorage. Our shortest day of the entire trip, 15 nautical miles.
Like all small towns along the waterway, New Smyrna Beach has the same, Sunday-deserted main street with shops and services that are the remnant of what has fled to outlying shopping centers. No grocery and only a mediocre cup of coffee was available, but laundry and blog updates are getting done and we’ll be out of here first thing in the morning.
Monday, January 21, 2008
On Board Again...
January 21, 2008
We are back at this odd life aboard a small boat. We boarded last Wednesday, January 16, having spent the Holidays in Boston and Sioux Falls, SD, in reunion with family and friends. (I put one end of a string on Sioux Falls on a globe at M’s mother’s house to confirm that it is equidistant to any coast, including Hudson Bay, making it the most land-locked of places in North America.) Journey was a bit musty and dirty, but in good shape. Oil is changed, a new head kit installed, refrigeration about repaired (the guy’s supposed to bring a new thermostat today), groceries restocked and we will be watered and fueled today in preparation to cast off tomorrow with a forecast of temperatures in the low 60’s, moderate winds from the east and favorable tides. M has been hoisted up the mast to the height of the spreaders, about mid way, to re-tape their rubber ends that protect the foresail from chafe.
A couple of days after we arrived, two brothers in their early 70’s named Lawson, were on the dock admiring Journey and we got chatting. One retired to Brunswick and said this place is sort of like Key West of the north. They were in a big protest demonstration the night before against expanding the size of the jail in town. Apparently town fathers were against it, but rather suddenly reversed themselves and became for it and the populace is not happy.
I was washing down the boat a little later and another protester from the night before stopped by, a fellow I recognized from last December. Lynn is a retired architect from Houston who has been living aboard his boat with Anne since 2000. For the last several years they have spent summers in Annapolis working for three months on the crew that prepares for the Annapolis Sail Boat Show held in early October. Lynn says he’s on the electrical crew and at 73 is the youngest member. They sail from Annapolis to Brunswick after the show and winter here, having bought three duplexes, rehabbed and rented them. Lynn left and soon Anne showed up, put-out that Lynn hadn’t offered to drive us for groceries, invited us to come for drinks that evening, and drove us to the store the next day. Their rehabbed duplexes are attractive, tiny, old buildings, gaily painted with bright red tin roofs. The units rent for $275 a month!
Brunswick has about 17,000 people, 60% of whom are African-American, and the balance mainly Whites. Thirty percent of the population lies below the poverty line. According to Wikipedia, “Brunswick is considered the most polluted ZIP code in the US. The county is home to seventeen identified hazardous waste sites, six actively polluting industries and four superfund sites.” This undesirable distinction is no doubt due to centuries of chemical, paper, and ship building. So far we have not broken out in rashes.
The main street of Brunswick is Newcastle Street. There is an old Ritz movie theater/now auditorium that had a string quartet playing and hosts other cultural events. There are three good restaurants on main street, a couple of pizza and sub shops, lots of antique and second hand stores, a coffee shop a half block to the side, and a tired Ace Hardware two blocks off.
The other night we were joined at the corner of a restaurant bar by a couple with all the trappings of having just left work late, both in dark suits, and we got to visiting. Turns out that he’s a Georgia boy through and through and she’s his wife and Gal Friday in a law practice begun when he moved from North Georgia to Brunswick more than 20 years ago, a prosecutor turned defense attorney for all kinds, including drug pushers, in support of his deep belief that “all are entitled to a fair trial.” His name is Crow and he told us a former assistant wanted to print-up a business card that said “Before you blow, talk to Crow!” Although we didn’t spot it on our walks, no doubt his office is one of the many old homes converted to law offices that surround the Glynn County Courthouse and the infamous, could-be-expanded, jail.
He and his wife were tired from people “thinking that you can magically solve all of their problems.” The Crows will get relief soon when they head to San Diego to board an “all blues” cruise ship departing from San Diego that is in such demand that they reserved a cabin before the same cruise ended last year. He became animated as he gave a litany of names of blues artists that would be playing nearly 24 hours a day in venues all over the ship. I had no idea who they were, but I thought about Crow and his clients and the people of Brunswick as I listened on the radio the other night to soulful, sad blues that should be heard on a screened-in porch cooled by soft breezes, but instead listened to on Journey with it 40 degrees outside, the electric heater humming, and we again about to cast off – more than lines – as we continue this odd way of being.
We are back at this odd life aboard a small boat. We boarded last Wednesday, January 16, having spent the Holidays in Boston and Sioux Falls, SD, in reunion with family and friends. (I put one end of a string on Sioux Falls on a globe at M’s mother’s house to confirm that it is equidistant to any coast, including Hudson Bay, making it the most land-locked of places in North America.) Journey was a bit musty and dirty, but in good shape. Oil is changed, a new head kit installed, refrigeration about repaired (the guy’s supposed to bring a new thermostat today), groceries restocked and we will be watered and fueled today in preparation to cast off tomorrow with a forecast of temperatures in the low 60’s, moderate winds from the east and favorable tides. M has been hoisted up the mast to the height of the spreaders, about mid way, to re-tape their rubber ends that protect the foresail from chafe.
A couple of days after we arrived, two brothers in their early 70’s named Lawson, were on the dock admiring Journey and we got chatting. One retired to Brunswick and said this place is sort of like Key West of the north. They were in a big protest demonstration the night before against expanding the size of the jail in town. Apparently town fathers were against it, but rather suddenly reversed themselves and became for it and the populace is not happy.
I was washing down the boat a little later and another protester from the night before stopped by, a fellow I recognized from last December. Lynn is a retired architect from Houston who has been living aboard his boat with Anne since 2000. For the last several years they have spent summers in Annapolis working for three months on the crew that prepares for the Annapolis Sail Boat Show held in early October. Lynn says he’s on the electrical crew and at 73 is the youngest member. They sail from Annapolis to Brunswick after the show and winter here, having bought three duplexes, rehabbed and rented them. Lynn left and soon Anne showed up, put-out that Lynn hadn’t offered to drive us for groceries, invited us to come for drinks that evening, and drove us to the store the next day. Their rehabbed duplexes are attractive, tiny, old buildings, gaily painted with bright red tin roofs. The units rent for $275 a month!
Brunswick has about 17,000 people, 60% of whom are African-American, and the balance mainly Whites. Thirty percent of the population lies below the poverty line. According to Wikipedia, “Brunswick is considered the most polluted ZIP code in the US. The county is home to seventeen identified hazardous waste sites, six actively polluting industries and four superfund sites.” This undesirable distinction is no doubt due to centuries of chemical, paper, and ship building. So far we have not broken out in rashes.
The main street of Brunswick is Newcastle Street. There is an old Ritz movie theater/now auditorium that had a string quartet playing and hosts other cultural events. There are three good restaurants on main street, a couple of pizza and sub shops, lots of antique and second hand stores, a coffee shop a half block to the side, and a tired Ace Hardware two blocks off.
The other night we were joined at the corner of a restaurant bar by a couple with all the trappings of having just left work late, both in dark suits, and we got to visiting. Turns out that he’s a Georgia boy through and through and she’s his wife and Gal Friday in a law practice begun when he moved from North Georgia to Brunswick more than 20 years ago, a prosecutor turned defense attorney for all kinds, including drug pushers, in support of his deep belief that “all are entitled to a fair trial.” His name is Crow and he told us a former assistant wanted to print-up a business card that said “Before you blow, talk to Crow!” Although we didn’t spot it on our walks, no doubt his office is one of the many old homes converted to law offices that surround the Glynn County Courthouse and the infamous, could-be-expanded, jail.
He and his wife were tired from people “thinking that you can magically solve all of their problems.” The Crows will get relief soon when they head to San Diego to board an “all blues” cruise ship departing from San Diego that is in such demand that they reserved a cabin before the same cruise ended last year. He became animated as he gave a litany of names of blues artists that would be playing nearly 24 hours a day in venues all over the ship. I had no idea who they were, but I thought about Crow and his clients and the people of Brunswick as I listened on the radio the other night to soulful, sad blues that should be heard on a screened-in porch cooled by soft breezes, but instead listened to on Journey with it 40 degrees outside, the electric heater humming, and we again about to cast off – more than lines – as we continue this odd way of being.
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