Setting Sail will become a record keeping page of a particularly slow progress toward setting sails for anyone who thinks our fool’s errand, errant nights and days, might offer them the slightest grasp on received wisdom as it bears on damping down the standard life in preparation for launching into another life that is yet of this world. That’s fine. If watching S & me stick our collected fingers into electrical outlets might save you the bother of the doing the same, read on. If you’re more likely to get a charge out of narrative as I bother to write the story of what is driving this venture, then check out Sailing Daze. If you’re interested in what other authors we’ve explored in our researches, check out The Sailing Bookcase (and, now, it’s a magazine rack, too!) where I’ll offer titles, authors, and a few glib notes on seaworthiness. Glib, here, being offhand remarks, not insincere remarks, that is to say my considered, but brief, gut, reaction to a given work. I promise to have read anything I bother to write up if I type much more than title and author. Sailing School(s) is the spot where I’ll type up progress towards a formal sort of experiential education, which will almost certainly entail even more reading.
More blather forthcoming….
Here is a more formal stack of links to the sailing pages within Goatwaters:
Sailing School(s) – X marks the spot where I’ll be typing up our progress as we learn, hands-on, how to shift from casual (and far too rare in the counting of days) day sailors and guests aboard boats, to confident captains & mates.
Sailing Daze – a narrative approach to my boating adventures, beginning with The Wet Waking, which attempts to allow my word horde to reinhabit my mind as a youngster who sailed with a gruff but kind old man, my maternal grandfather, who was both maker and master of his own sailing yacht. This first bit is fictive, only because I never bothered to write until I was ten or twelve, and memory is an errant knave. This first bit is also as true as I can conjure it in my contemporary mind as it reflects back on my experiences, jogged by a few conversations with the living and some photos from my mother’s extensive collection of albums, which she assembled like a savant, or a pre-cog, knowing without knowing that she would lose her mind – or maybe it was a response to a rational worry, among all her irrational worries, about impending dementia from having watched her own grandmother step off the cliffs into oblivion long before she passed. I didn’t know her wall-length shelf of albums existed, hidden in her bedroom closet, until after she passed. No one else wants them, so they are about to become another of my own strange inheritances, alongside the mementos from within my father’s childhood curio cabinet.
The Sailing Bookcase – The boat & travel books we’re reading between now & setting sail. With recommendations…those to read for pleasure (most of which you’ll leave ashore when you sail, if only in consideration for your cramped quarters); those to bring along as references (get out those ziplock bags and preserve the words from damp and pests); and those which should be consigned to the give-away table at the next yard sale (in other words, words you shouldn’t waste your time reading, unless you have a particular fetish for reading illbegotten writings).
Sailing Links – Other blogs & websites S & I have discovered….inspiration, references, resources. The further I dig, the more I find. Some, like Never Monday, are a fairly short sequence of enlightening and entertaining posts worth reading start to finish. Others are a resource to which an inquiring mind, like my own forgetful one, can return as different data are needed.
Goat Waters 