Open the BOX!!!

You know all the Shrinks say that its a normal emotion.....?
"What? what? what?" you say. "Whats this yahoo talking about now?"
The feelings of despair we get when we know that we lack something that we wish we had. Those feelings we internalize when we finally come to the conclusion that we are inadequate at something that we wish to be good at..............and then we finally realize that we could live as long Methuselah and that we would never acquire this thing that we wish that we possessed.  For me....its musical talent. I am totally devoid in any form of musical competence..........I'm tone deaf, can't carry a tune, suck at humming, can't remember or understand the words of most songs........I'm just a musical KLUTZ! Tana on the other hand sings like an angel! Actually, at one time, she was a performing professional musician and played venues with allot of biggies like Willie Nelson and Bob Hope and Dean Martin and Kristopherson and Captain and Tenile and the Cowsills and Soupy Sales.....I really don't know all the details but she sometimes talks about partying with Willie in his tour bus at the Houston Rodeo..............although she doesn't really tell me much..........anyways that's another story!
So how do I compensate for my lack of musical acumen? Well..........I'll tell ya......I listen to music and  appreciate and respect the marvelous talent of others.
"OK....good for you" you are thinking...."where is this going?"....you wonder.
We all have Internet access now.......I presume. Even our cruising comrades in the far reaches of the Bahamas and the Sea of Cortez and Mazatlan and Roatan and Belize and the Windward and Leewards now have Internet access. With the new generation of wi-fi boosters we can piggyback off of shore side wi-fi or off  the connection on multi million dollar yachts that are anchored downwind.
"OK Mr. 'IT' SO WHAT".....you're thinking. I'm thinking one of the greatest Internet inventions ever!!!
 PANDORA FREE INTERNET RADIO!! If you haven't already done so, check it out and if you really like it sign up for the premium version. Its only $36 per year. I've been giving the premium version as gifts............you don't need me to tell you how to find it online. Once you get there, you can play around and decide for yourself it this isn't the greatest music venue on radio and while you're there check out the music that these guys make: Walter Trout, Friends of Dean Martinez, Dick Dale, The Blue Hawaiians, Norman Blake, Peter Green, Calexio, and The Pizza Tapes by Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, and Tony Rice. If you're a music person, you should have many hours of fun on this site.
Seeya.................take care my friends

Dinner, Speed, and Disappointment

Every now and then we all get it I suppose.........what? you ask!!!  BLOGGER's BLOCK!! the inability to create something for your blog entry. Well I've got it. Trying to get rid of it but it's lingering....Well! lets see............haven't got any work done on ZOSHA for about a week.....the weather hasn't been cooperating......raining every day.....hopefully this weekend will be nice......Oh....ho-hum.  OK...how about this........Tana is really really disappointed today. Why?  I'll tellya.......about six weeks ago we were at a boating thing at a brokerage company and ran into an old friend of mine whom I hadn't seen in a few months. While BSing with my old buddy, he invited us to a party at his house on March 21, 2012 which is today. He said that we could meet Bob Bitchin who was going to be there........well let me tellya I thought Tana was gonna have a BIG O right there!  "Bob Bitchin!!!! OMG my dream man" she exclaimed..."Oh I can't wait." And it has been like this for the last six weeks. Almost every day she asks if I RSVP'd the date with my friend. She absolutely could not wait to shake ole' Bob's hand and visit with him and get her copy of Letters From the Lost Soul autographed by Mr. Bitchin himself. My friend's sweet wife emailed me this afternoon and.............you know where I'm going here don't you?.....yes, you guessed it........Bob won't be there! He got stuck in California and will miss the party tonight. Well Tana was devastated when I dropped this bomb on her!! She told me that she is going to stay late at work tonight so she will have something to keep her mind from her abject disappointment. "Why come home?"  she asked.
"Uhhh you gotta a cat here" 
"Oh its not the same not meeting Bob Bitchin! Life sucks" she bemoaned.
"We all gotta deal with life's disappointments" was my retort. "I never got my Vette or my 43' CABO Sportfish."
"Yeah I guess" said she.
On the sailing side of things......today I was surfing around the Internet and in between checking out the weather in the Caribbean, dropping in on my favorite cruising blogs, and looking for recipes for something different for dinner, I stumbled across a site that chronicled some boat speed records.
Check this out!!!!
1. Fastest 24 hour run in a sailboat:  Banque Populaire V -131' trimaran......908.2  miles !
2. Fastest all out speed in a sailboat: L'Hydroptere -  60' trimaran.....59.33 MPH!
3. Fastest circumnavigation: Banque Populaire V- 131' trimaran......45 days 13 hours  42 minutes!
4. Fastest monohull:  Mari-Cha IV- 140'........37.366 MPH
5. Fastest 24 hour run in monohull:  Ericsson-70'...........596.6 miles.....average speed....24.86 MPH
6. Fastest circumnavigation monohull: Fonica- 84'........84 days...average speed 12.41 MPH
7. Slowest circumnavigation monohull: SVZOSHA.....TBD
As for dinner??? still don't know what to fix tonight? I think I'll check in with Steve and LuLu at yodersafloat........they are always fixing sumptin' good.
Take care my friends..............seeya

Forum A-Holes..................

Is it me? In my vintage years have I morphed into a defensive, critical old fart? Hope not! let me start from the beginning: I subscribe to a number of online sailing forums as many of you probably do too. Alot of this information is useful, valuable, and well intentioned..however.....sometimes..... you encounter the "Know It All Forum A-Hole" who finds some kind of sick pleasure in attacking. A coupla of weeks ago I sent a query into one of these sailing forms asking if anyone knew the cost of bottled water in the Bahamas.....I didn't go into the fact that I can't afford a water maker and that I would have to supplement my meager H2O tanks with either jugged or bottled water.....all I did was post a inquiry....Well, the first reply was something to the affect that "people like you make me sick....trashing our environment with plastic bottles and polluting our beaches and waterways .....yada....yada...ya" this guy rambles on! Whats this all about? I thought. I'm a card carrying environmentalist.....I don't pollute.....I pick up other peoples crap!  Anyways, Only one guy answered the question. The other dozen or so counseled me on how I am not doing this right and I should do this or that...... Oh by the way ...the guy who led the attack....is a power boater on a 46' or 48' Defever which probably burns 20 gallons an hour at cruise......and adds unmeasurable fuel to atmospheric pollution as well as helping deplete oil reserves at an accelerated rate.....that boat is a seagoing Hummer I...........so much for this guys contribution to a green planet.  Ah well-I blew this off and probably won't do much with this forum. Down the road a ways, I'm on another one of these forums and some guy is blabbering about how my boat the Westsail 28 is the second worst designed boat in naval architecture!!!! and that it really was not designed by a naval architect at all. It was carved out of a Westsail 32 mold.....supposedly Westsail just cut 4 feet from the center of the W32 mold and stuck it all back together and Walla!! the W28 is born.  He didn't get into explaining how the differences in beam, draft, sheerline, etc came about!  Just another example of how anybody can put anything on the Internet. But I'm sure there are people out there repeating this nonsense. A number of the W28's have circumnavigated and many others have completed substantial offshore voyages....so if you hear this story about the W28, don't believe it......it's "Forum Know-It-All" drivel.  Oh! you wanna know according to this guy what the #1 worst designed boat is?  According to him its a MacGregor 26........hmmm.....I seem to recall a lady down in the Florida Keys who sails a MacG 26 all over the place......Marquesas, Dry Tortugas, offshore in the Gulf Stream and has video of these trips all over You Tube and, to me, the boat looks to be doing great......but then again I'm not a Forum Expert.......

SVZOSHA

Second worse boat design in history my A__ __!!! 
Take care my friends.........

Old Habits......

Old habits....!  Hard to break arent't they?   Some are very hard and almost impossible to dump. Just today while driving down the street headin' to the boat, it came to me that I needed some 80 grit wet/dry for the re-non-skid job on ZOSHA.....no big deal.... without thinking.....guess where my trusty F-150 automatically turned?   Into WEST MARINE.....still unthinking like a zombie  in a movie, I walked in found the sandpaper shelf picked up what I needed and looked at the price....$3.99 !!!!!! NOW!! that got my attention !! Four bucks for one piece of sandpaper.....you guys gotta be friggin' kiddin' me!!! No wonder West Marine  has had a 66% increase in the value of their stock since October 2011, $7.01 vs $11.62 as of today. ... Anyways I didn't buy the sandpaper but went ahead and looked at some plastic syringes for injecting epoxy into the screw holes on ZOSHA'S decks after the teak comes off, six bucks for three, oh yeah...I checked out some 5/16" galvanized proof coil anchor chain, $4.20 per foot!....so I walked out the door and hightailed it to the local hardware emporium about 5 minutes away and bought the sandpaper for $1.30 a sheet, got the epoxy syringes for $1.52 each and checked out their galvanized anchor chain at $2.52 per foot. Will I never learn? Two life lessons here: #1. When my wallet starts twitchin' at West Marine.....LEAVE NOW! and
#2.  Next time their stock gets around $7.00 or $8.00 I'm gonna buy some.  Oh the hypocrisy !!
I am truly ashamed......
Take care my friends.....thanks for reading my blog....seeya

"Lets keep looking for the light"......hmmm...hmm...hmmm....

Remember the old Jimmy Buffet song about the Poet and his ole' hound Spooner? .....and how after the poet died and left all his money to Spooner..........Spooner lived "on steak and bacon in doghouse ten feet round"......great song ...one of my all time JB ballads.......You know what happens when you live on steak and bacon dontcha?.....you get fat....your butt gets wrinkles.....you get lazy....you wear your fat-pants all the time.....well, this kinda describes my world right now...only difference is no one left me any money....and the "steak and bacon" part is of course a  metaphor for copious amounts of the old brewski and my "doghouse" is a situation where I am not making any substantial progress on ZOSHA towards getting outta here.....fat pants are fat pants.........AARRGHHH!!! Yeah I know its winter, its rainy, you can't work epoxy in the cold, the dog ate my wiring diagram, and some one took my bottom paint and..and..and yeah...Tana....where did you put that varnish brush? can't find it!! .....if I had a lawn.....you betcha I'd be out there yellin' at that those neighborhood kids to get offa it.......See what happens to a person suffering from Sun Deprivation?.........I think I'm going to que up on the
 I Pod player that all time favorite song of everyone sung by the awesome artist  Maureen McGovern from the epic film The Posiedian Adventure ..........The Morning After.......lets all hum it together readers.....................

This is Sophia.....my GD.....she's hummin' along.....cmon' everybody.....

"there is a morning after....hmmmmm....can't you see the light....hmmm...lets cross the bridge together.....hmm...hm..hm...we're moving closer to the shore....hmm..hmmm".......... AHH! I feel better..don't you....OH YEAH! man this is great isn't it??.......I'm revitalized  aren't you??.....I'm Invincible!!!  Bahamas here we come!.....Que tal Puerto Rico......St. Johns stand back!....look out BVI's!  ......get back Genedines! ZOSHA is on her way..........Just found out that Ms. McGoveren is re-releasing the song this year....lets keep that in mind for all the gifts that we have to buy in 2012.........you guys take care.....I'm gonna go play it again...............ABC's "you're mine"....................seeya.......

Correction to my previous blog.....sorry!!

The CUT OFF DATE  for entries to the 2012 Singlehanded Trans Pacific Race is May 1, 2012  NOT 2010!! .....Sorry..........seeya my friends..........take care.........

When do they stop being boats....???

Yesterday, there it was....just laying there in my PO Box waiting for me to pick it up, take it home, and eagerly tear thru its pages of nautical wonderment and expert sailing advice from a plethora of its staff  of world renown nautical pundits....Yes, you guessed it it is the March 2012 #1 Sailing Magazine in the WORLD....now that  is their editor's boast not mine but I'll take em' for their word.  Actually, in my opinion, this mag is becoming more and more like a monthly sales brochure for yacht brokers and boat builders than a real sailing magazine.....this months boat that we all must have has a spacious
U-shaped dinette in the cockpit that seats 6-8 people...WOW!....it has a hydraulic platform on the stern that lowers into the water to serve as a dingy dock/swim platform...WOW..WOW!...it has it has a spiral staircase up from the cockpit to a fly bridge where the "skippers business" can be performed...."skippers business??"...spiral staircase!!...DOUBLE WOW X 2!.....it has a "penthouse living room" with large L-shaped galley with a dishwasher, full size refrigerator/freezer, sole to ceiling wine rack, 32" flat screen TV on the bulkhead facing a settee than can seat 8 with a dinette table that lowers into a coffee table...TRIPLE WOW X 4!....it has 4 four staterooms each with its own head and shower.......GOGGLE WOW!!  Oh yes, there were 17 sentences in this feature article that mentioned that this was a sailboat and it had electric winches, a carbon fiber wheel, and a square-top main and there were mesh fronted boxes to stow sheet tails.....I wonder if the author really knows what a sheet tail is?? Oh Yeah...the article also mentioned the boat can get 6.5-7 knots @2000 RPM burning 1.3 gallons per hour on one engine......8 knots at @2200 RPM with both engines running.....Man what a boat.....right? this monstrosity is a sailboat isn't it?.....it has to be....it's in a sailing magazine....It never ceases to amaze me what a person can buy for $1,640,000.00......!!!!
In a couple of months, June 30, 2012 to be exact, the 18th Singlehanded Biennial Trans-Pacific Race from San Francisco, California to Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Hawaii will start. This race is 2120 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean...ALONE!!! and is sponsored by the Singlehanded Sailing Society.
I thought that you might like an introduction to the boats who are signed up for this event as of the date of this blog:
Pearson Triton 28' -Darwind;  Crowther Catamaran 33'-Rainbow;   Ericson 27'- Little Bo Peep; Westsail 32'-Tortuga;   PJ 50'-Scaramouche V;   Express 27'-TAZ;   Open 50'-Truth;
Cal 40'-Green Buffalo;   Moore 24'-US101;   Moore 24'-Rushmore;   Wyliecat 30'-Bandiloot;
Nauticat 44'-Galaxsea;   Finn Flyer 30'-Harrier;   Tartan 10, 33'-Slacker.  A couple of things to take note of here: 1. This is REAL sailing,  2. These are real sailors,  3. Notice how many of the entrants are under 30 feet LOA, 4. Notice how many of the entrants are 40 feet LOA or longer, 5. Its probably a safe bet to wager that there is not a spiral staircase, sole to ceiling wine rack, dishwasher, vibrating settee for 8 or walk-in refrigerator freezer in the entire fleet!!  But then again the cut-off for entries is May 1, 2012...............the sun is finally out today so I'm gonna go down to ZOSHA and ........pound a few brews...its Sunday!!!
Take care my friends.............................