Happy Birthday to Scout!

Scout turned one year old yesterday, April 28. To celebrate the occasion, his doggie daycare people at the Animal Nanny (http://www.animalnannygj.com/) threw him a big party, the first one they've ever done for one of their clients.

I took a few photos when Nan and I dropped Scout off in the morning and then Colin, the owner of the business, took a bunch during the party later in the afternoon. I have put them all together into a slideshow, along with a soundtrack of the Monkees singing "Happy Birthday to You" from their old movie, Head. Here's the Windows Media Player version of the slideshow: http://www.whisperingjesse.com/scout.wmv. And here's the Apple QuickTime version, which is higher quality: http://www.whisperingjesse.com/scout.mov. Enjoy!

Sailing the Spanish Virgin Islands, Part 1

Captain John Kretschmer's original plan called for picking Nan and me up at the St. Thomas airport in his inflatable dinghy. Honestly. He was going to anchor in Lindberg Bay, which is right next to the airport terminal, so all we would need to do is lug our heavy baggage across the parking lot and down the rocks to the water. In the dark. With no predetermined meeting place. Fortunately, we received an email message from John's wife Tadji the day before we left indicating that we should meet John at Crown Bay Marina instead.

I called John from the airport to find out that he and the rest of the crew were waiting for us at the marina's restaurant. Crown Bay is just two bays east of Lindberg Bay, so the taxi ride was a quick one. As we passed the parking lot for the beach at Lindberg Bay, I told the driver that we were originally supposed to meet our captain in that vicinity. He looked over his shoulder at me and said in a serious tone that it was not a safe place to be at night. A look at the broken glass and empty beer cans littering the parking lot confirmed it. After a short drive through a marine industrial area, we came to Crown Bay. The driver pointed down a walkway bordering the water as he unloaded our bags and said that the restaurant was on the left at the end.

From a waterfront table, John stood up to give us both big hugs and then introduced us to Dallas Murphy and Genie Leftwich, who would be joining us on the five-day sail to Ponce, Puerto Rico. The three of them were nice enough to hold off on ordering dinner until we arrived even though it was almost 9:30 when we arrived. We ordered cold drinks and seafood dinners, and settled into conversation about our upcoming trip, sailing and writing. Dallas is an accomplished author of both fiction and non-fiction works, most recently of To Follow the Water: Exploring the Ocean to Discover Climate. His girlfriend Genie is the managing editor of Fitness Magazine. They live in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side. John, too, is a writer, the author of At the Mercy of the Sea and a columnist for Sailing Magazine. Nan mentioned that I was writing a book about Charlie, our golden retriever who died of cancer last April, and that turned the talk to dogs. Dallas and Genie were considering getting a dog again after having owned two dogs together in the past, but they weren't sure if they could handle the eventual loss of another one. It was clear that six years later, they were still mourning their beloved Pippa.

Quetzal, John's 47-foot Kaufman cutter, was conveniently slipped at the next dock over from the restaurant. She looked good with her stout new Selden mast, replacing the one that was lost in a tornado over in Grado, Italy late last summer. Nan and I tossed our bags in the starboard aft berth and unpacked a couple of gifts, a couple of sets of heavy-duty plastic drinking glasses for the boat and a loaf of Nan's home-made pumpkin bread to share later. With bedtime approaching, we thought of the sleeping bags we had packed, reasoning that it would still be cool in mid-April, but it was so warm that night and all week that we never needed them.

We were up early the next morning, excited to get underway. After cups of coffee in the cockpit, it was time to grab a quick marina shower, the last one until we reached Ponce since there is no hot water on the boat due to a persistent problem with the heat exchanger. While the rest of us wandered around the marina, window shopping and checking email, John went to get some final provisions and check us out of St. Thomas with the customs office. When everyone was back onboard, we cast off the lines and motored out into West Gregerie Channel. After reaching open water, we rounded up, raised the mainsail and unfurled the jib, and steered westward with the Trade Winds in a nice broad reach. We were off and sailing to our first destination, Culebra.

Ponce, Puerto Rico

Greetings from Ponce, Puerto Rico. Nan and I are off the boat after an enjoyable one-week cruise from St. Thomas.

We met up with John Kretschmer, Dallas Murphy and Genie Leftwich at the Crown Bay Marina on St. Thomas on Sunday night and set sail on Quetzal, John's 47-foot Kaufman sailboat, the following morning.

We moored and anchored at locations on Culebra and Vieques in the Spanish Virgin Islands and then sailed on to the Puerto Rican mainland, ending at the Ponce Yacht and Fishing Club on Friday afternoon. I will put together a description of our sailing trip, complete with photos, when we get back home.

On Saturday morning, John caught an early flight home, and Dallas and Genie opted to stay on the boat. Nan and I took a taxi into town and checked into the Hotel Melia on Plaza las Delicias. We wandered around the plaza, sat on a bench eating ice cream from King's Cream, and checked into trolley rides and restaurants for later. Dallas and Genie met us for an excellent evening of dinner and talk at Cafe de Tomas.

Today we will take the sight-seeing trolley around town, tour the Museo de Arte de Ponce, and maybe meet Dallas and Genie again for lunch or dinner. We fly home early tomorrow morning by way of San Juan and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Scout's Graduation

At Nan's prompting, Scout and I enrolled in a Beginner Education class at our local PetSmart at the beginning of February. Over the course of eight Monday nights, we worked on all the training basics, and he did pretty well for an eleven-month-old puppy. He still has difficulty with stays due to his extremely short attention span, but he's got the rest of it down fairly well, including sit, down, watch me, leave it, drop it, and heel, plus some that I taught him outside of class, like shake, this way, where's the ball/toy, and roll over.

What I learned was the magic of the clicker as a reinforcement tool and that Scout will do absolutely anything to get a treat, running through his entire repertoire of tricks when he can't figure out what I want him to do. We'll keep working on it and maybe enroll in the Intermediate class sometime soon.

Monday was graduation day. Scout and his classmate Greta donned their mortarboards and received their diplomas. Monday was also the first anniversary of Charlie's death. I couldn't help but think of him often that day and wonder if Scout will turn out as well as he did.

My father's regret

When we were back home in Wisconsin last summer, my father said something to me that has stuck in my mind. He said he regretted not getting more involved with sailing.

Naturally, my father was instrumental in getting me involved with sailing as a boy during our summer vacations, even buying the family an AMF Alcort Minifish in 1969. But he didn't really pursue it much beyond that level, except for a single terrible experience with seasickness on Lake Michigan while crewing on a friend's racing sailboat many years ago. I don't think he has sailed at all since then, but time seems to have changed his feelings about sailing now to ones of regret.

In thinking about my father, I am trying to figure out a way to include him somehow in my sailing dreams. Most of the recent effort in my "boat quest" has focused on the southeast coast for this reason. My parents own a vacation home on Skidaway Island near Savannah, Georgia, which would make a perfect home base from which to undertake retrofits and launch shake-down cruises in anticipation of a circumnavigation. If I could find the right boat and sail it to Savannah, I can envision my father and me working together on repair projects, and taking Nan and my mother on sailing trips to Hilton Head and Charleston. It would be an opportunity for me to help my father overcome his regret and to give back something meaningful to the man who has given me so much.

Sailing the Spanish Virgin Islands in April

Nan and I will be sailing with John Kretschmer again in April. Our trip this time will take us from Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas to Ponce in Puerto Rico, by way of the Spanish Virgin Islands. It's not a trip that's on John's regular schedule (http://www.yayablues.com/passages.htm), but he needs to get his Kaufman 47 sailboat, Quetzal, from where he ended his last trip, "Trans-Caribbean South to North: Trinidad to St. Thomas, via Grenada, the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Martinique" to where he will start his next trip, "Fountain of Youth: Retracing the route of Ponce de Leon from Ponce, Puerto Rico to St. Augustine, via Grand Turk, San Salvador, Hopetown."

Our involvement is the result of a trade that John and I made at the end of our Odyssey trip last year. He agreed to take Nan and me sailing again in exchange for me redesigning his website. I am an Internet developer by trade, and I don't normally do freelance work, but John's offer sounded like a good one so we shook on it. With his comments and content, the redesign went smoothly and the new website has been in place now for more than six months. It seems to be working well as a marketing tool based on how quickly his trips sell out, so he's happy with his end of the trade.

Now we're looking ahead to our end of the trade, with a departure date of Sunday, April 12. According to John, it will be a casual sail, with none of the overnight passages he normally plans, just daysails between marinas on St. Thomas, Culebra, Vieques and Puerto Rico. John has invited another couple, author Dallas Murphy and his wife, to join us but it will just be the five of us. I am in the process of reading Mr. Murphy's Rounding the Horn: Being a Story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives--a Deck's-Eye View of Cape Horn so I will have some topics for conversation. It should be a fun, relaxing trip. I will post updates and photos to my blog as we travel.

Golf-22

I have been suffering from what I call "Golf-22" for my entire adult life. Golf-22 is an expression I have coined for the condition where you don't play well enough to get excited enough to want to play more to get better.

A little history: I grew up playing golf, as did my father and his father before him. When I was four or five, I used to chase my dad down the fairways at Finkbine Golf Course in Iowa City with an old sawed-off wood, whacking a whiffle golf ball in a way that more closely resembled polo than golf. When we moved to Milwaukee in 1967 and joined Tripoli Country Club the following spring, my siblings and I played in the junior golf program. It was how we passed our summers. If you play enough golf in competitive situations, you will eventually become pretty good at it. By the time I was fifteen, I was shooting in the low eighties. But then I went through a growth spurt and the wheels came off. Whatever feel I had for the game disappeared. I couldn't even qualify to play on my high school's varsity team. After graduation, I stopped playing golf altogether. For almost ten years.

When I picked up the game again in my mid-twenties, at the prompting of friends and family, it was like starting over. I still had a decent swing, but every shot was a crap shoot. I could hit the shot I intended once in a while, but more often I sprayed the ball all over the place or chunked it badly. My scores were terrible. Golf was so incredibly frustrating that it was no fun at all. I once walked off a course in the middle of the tenth hole. I went home and cleaned my garage. And I had more fun.

I have been in that mode for about twenty-five years now, playing only four or five times a year in the hopes that a miracle will occur and I will play well for a change. Anyone who plays golf knows that this is ridiculous; you can't get better if you don't play frequently. But given how badly I play, especially when I once played so well, there is little motivation to play more: Golf-22.

All that is going to change this golf season. I joined the men's club at Redlands Mesa, and they play eighteen holes every Wednesday. If I play in every scheduled event, that works out to thirty-two eighteen-hole rounds. That's more golf than I have played in the last eight years. If I don't get substantially better, then there is no hope. The men's club season kicked off yesterday morning with a "1 Gross & 1 Net" event, and the four-man team I was on won it by six strokes! My handicap is so high that the three holes I somehow managed to par helped us secure a twelve-under-par net round. How's that for motivation?

No-go on sailing to Bermuda

Nan and I had a discussion on Sunday night about my planned sailing trip with Paul and Honey Caouette from Miami to Bermuda, the first leg of their trans-Atlantic passage, which is scheduled to set sail on May 16. In the end, we decided that I should not go.

The financial situation with my employer, Aspen Valley Hospital, is not good due to the slow economy and reduced skier numbers this ski season, so they are looking to do everything they can to reduce expenses short of lay-offs and pay-cuts. I would not have had enough paid time off accumulated to cover the almost three weeks the trip would take, and it would jeopardize my full-time status and benefits to take too many unpaid days off during these uncertain times.

I emailed Paul this morning with my regrets. I haven't heard back from him but I hope he understands. He and Honey have two other people lined up for the entire passage from Miami to Portugal, so they should have adequate watch coverage without needing to find a new fifth crewmember. I left open the idea of Nan and me joining them for a future trip, so there may still be an opportunity to sail with them aboard their Valiant 40, Wild Iris, if they don't decide to sell her in Europe at the conclusion of their adventure.

In the meantime, I offered to do whatever I could for them while they are in transit. Jeff, one of the crewmembers, has set up a Google Group, "WildIris", so I'll post updates from it as they come in, starting with the photo in this post, which was taken during the Caouettes' trip to the Bahamas last year and is the group's icon. Stay tuned.

Nan's good deed, part 3

This morning we were finally able to give Jerry his new used bike. We would have done it sooner but there were too many homeless people hanging out in the park whenever we drove by, and we didn't want anyone to take offense or for Jerry to be uncomfortable.

Nan and I parked across from the park and she called Jerry over. He seemed genuinely touched when Nan presented him with the bike and a good bike lock. He looked the bike over and said he had a plastic bread tray he could wire to the rack for Bear-Bear. In case there was ever a question about ownership of the bike, I took a photo of Nan giving it to Jerry. We could tell this made him a little uncomfortable, but he smiled and said we should come back after he had the bread tray in place to get another photo that included Bear-Bear.

To make sure the bike fit him well, we asked Jerry to take a quick spin around the parking lot. More smiles. Nan told him to be careful--"No more falls!"--and crossed the street to talk with Jerry's friend Scott, who was in the park with Bear-Bear. Jerry shook my hand and said, "Thank you. Thank you Jesus." I told him he was welcome and watched as he carefully pushed the bike across the street and locked it to a tree. Nan returned in a few minutes to say that she had told Scott it might take a few weeks but that we would get him a bike of his own to thank him for looking after Jerry. As we drove away, Bear-Bear was sniffing the bike like she wasn't sure what to make of this new thing in her life. We hope she enjoys her new ride.

Blogger posts using email: 2nd try

This is a second try at posting a blog entry using Blogger’s built-in Mail-to-Blogger feature. The difference this time is that I am embedding HTML tags in the text to see if they will provide greater control over formatting and links.<br><br>So this new post is also an experiment, sent from my regular email account, that contains another old photo of Charlie as a puppy, this time sized at 400x300 pixels, along with a Google Maps link to the exact location where he was sitting when the photo was taken: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=39.248880,-106.895943&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1">Google Maps link to Charlie</a>. Let’s see if it works any better this time…

Follow-up: In a word, no. It did not work any better. Blogger does not automatically interpret HTML tags from email postings, so I guess that means I need to stick to straight text from now on and just accept the formatting that Blogger puts into place. Lesson learned.