More from Isla Mujeres, Mexico

As I said in my previous post, our last two full days in Isla Mujeres were action packed. Here are some photo highlights (click for full-size views):

On Friday afternoon, we took a boat trip with our friend Ariel and his wife Rosi aboard their boat Sol Zorro. They picked us up at the Ballyhoo pier and motored us around the bay and lagoon for an hour to check out possible anchorages for next spring when we sail Whispering Jesse down from Savannah. Here we are approaching the new house at Sac Bajo, where there is a cut between the bay islands and the sea. The old house was destroyed by Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

Nan, Ariel and Rosi cruising through the bay toward Sac Bajo. The bay anchorage is in the background. The sailboat visible in the distance is in a perfect location, anchored between the shallow central area of the bay and one of the mangrove-flanked bay islands. The snorkeling there would be very good.

Our friend Wbeymar, the owner of Brisas Grill, motored past aboard his new boat Lizardo while we were in Laguna Macax. He was on his way to the Villa Vera fuel dock after chartering a morning whale shark trip.

A water-side view of El Milagro marina, showing the pier, the beach and the palapa-covered office/bar. There are no finger piers, so most of the boats are slipped stern-to. This would be a minor disadvantage for us since we have a solid stern pulpit with gates on either beam at the forward edge of the cockpit. I might be able to figure out a long gangplank that we could mount at an angle so we wouldn't need to climb over the pulpit--easier for us and easier for Scout.

A water-side view of Brisas Grill, where our friend Juan Gomez works as a waiter. The restaurant is wide open in front and back, allowing cool breezes, as the name "Brisas" implies, to blow through. The outdoor seating is a great place to sip a drink and watch the sun go down.

A street-side view of El Milagro marina, taken from the island's main drag, Rueda Medina. It doesn't look like much from this angle but there are all kinds of nice amenities between the large, hangar-like building and the pier. Nan and I appreciate that there is a security gate, and also a small tienda, located on the other side of the Coke truck, for quick food and beverage purchases if we don't want to take the easy walk or bike ride to downtown.

Erika and Mike took a day from their vacation in Playa del Carmen to visit us on Saturday, before we left the following day. We rented a golf cart and showed them Isla Mujeres's many sights. Here they are at Punta Sur, the island's southernmost point, looking east across the turquoise Caribbean Sea. Mike will be my first mate when we sail down from Savannah next spring.

Our final sunset of the trip, taken from the balcony of our Color de Verano penthouse apartment. The turnaround at the end of Rueda Medina and the fishermen's memorial statue are visible below. Our favorite beach is located right across the street. Nan and I enjoyed our trip so much that we're already thinking of trying to squeeze in another quick week before the sailing trip next spring. Dream on!

Back in Isla Mujeres, Mexico

Nan and I are back in Isla Mujeres, our tenth trip here in fourteen years. We arrived last Saturday and return home this coming Sunday. It is off-season here and there are few tourists. Many of the shops and restaurants are closed, but we appreciate the mostly empty beaches and the quiet streets. We have reconnected with our many friends here, both local people and expatriates, and have engaged them all in talk, sometimes in halting Spanish with much gesticulating, about what it is like to live here. Because we are planning to join them.

Starting next spring, Nan and I, along with some friends, plan to sail Whispering Jesse down here from Savannah and live on the boat for an indefinite period at one of the local marinas. We have spent time this week checking out all of the island's marinas and believe we have found the best one for our needs, El Milagro (elmilagromarina.com). It is pet friendly, so Scout will be welcomed, and there are many nice amenities: a community kitchen, a movie theater, a small beach and a dipping pool. And it is easy walking distance to downtown. It is located on the bay instead of in the lagoon, so it is cooler and less buggy. But it is also more exposed, which means it would be necessary to move the boat to the safety of the lagoon in the event of a hurricane.

In addition to finding answers to our long list of questions, we have spent time exploring new places. On Sunday, we went to the newly opened Bahía Tortuga bar and restaurant, where our favorite Isla band, La Banda sin Nombre, was playing. Many of the patrons were expatriates we knew from past visits, including Doug Dorn, whom we met when we sailed to Isla from Panama with John Kretschmer in 2010 and stayed at Marina Paraiso in an adjacent slip. It was good to catch up with him as he was full of useful information about boating and bureaucracy.

We spent Tuesday afternoon with our friend Juan Gomez and his family at their home in the Miraflores colonia. We brought along dinner from the local pollo asado place and walked over to the local tienda with Juan to pick up some bottles of Sol beer. We ate and talked into the evening, and I was thankful I had my pocket English-Spanish dictionary to aid the communication. Juan's English is fairly good from his many years working with tourists, but his wife's is not so good and the kids are too shy to use the English they learn in school. By the time we left, I had agreed to tutor the kids in English and Nan had agreed to form an exercise group when we return next spring.

On Wednesday evening, we joined over a thousand local people on Playa la Media Luna for the release of over six thousand baby sea turtles. It was an amazing sight to see them all instinctively flap across the sand toward the water to begin their new lives. We helped flip over some upside down turtles and turned around a few who were going the wrong way. Eventually, they were all in the water, their little heads popping up and looking around as if to ask, Now what? It was a heartwarming experience.

Last night, we invited Roger and Garnette over for dinner. They are American expatriates, whom we met about five years ago after they moved here from the Denver area. Nan made a delicious chicken salad and served it with cantaloupe, croissants and salad. We ate dinner and talked for hours out on the patio of our Color de Verano penthouse apartment, watching the sun set and listening to a band playing across the street. Roger and Garnette have already been through all the experiences that we would anticipate in getting settled here, everything from upgraded visas and health insurance to medical treatment and theft prevention. They are a valuable resource and we expect they will become close friends.

Our last two full days here will be action-packed. Nan and I are going on a boat trip with our friend Ariel this afternoon to investigate possible anchorages out in the bay, with the idea of saving money by anchoring out during high seasons when the marina rates go way up. Tomorrow, our friends Mike and Erika from back home are scheduled to make a side trip here from their vacation in Playa del Carmen. Mike will be joining us on the sailing trip next spring and I want to see what he thinks of the place where we'll be making our final landfall. More later...

Defender - Marine Outfitter

While I was in Savannah last April working on Whispering Jesse, I made several trips to the local West Marine store. The people there were very helpful with helping me find what I needed and ordering what they didn't have in stock. But on my last trip to the store, they were unable to help me. I had thought of West Marine as having absolutely everything I could ever need for our boat, but it turns out that they don't. I had walked in with a damaged port navigation light and a somewhat melted--it's a long story--plastic scupper fitting to see about replacements. The young lady at the check-out counter pulled out her catalogs and searched in vain. She took my contact information and said she would do some further research and call me with the results. I never heard from her.

Back home, I received an unsolicited marine catalog in the mail from an outfit called Defender. The slim catalog's newsprint pages were densely packed with listings of every imaginable boat part. I didn't find my parts in the catalog, but fortunately, Defender also has a densely packed website (defender.com), so I went there on the off chance that they would have what I needed. And they did. I had nothing to compare their prices against, but they seemed reasonable. The last time Nan and I were in Denver, we checked out a Honda Marine 5 HP outboard motor for our inflatable dinghy and were quoted a price of $2000. Defender carries Honda outboards, so I did a quick comparison check: $1556! That savings offsets the freight with a few hundred dollars leftover. If the savings on the parts are anything like the savings on the outboard, then there's no need to search any further. This November, a few weeks before I head out to Savannah again, I'll be placing an order for both the parts and the outboard with Defender.

CORRECTION 9/24/12: I went back and read the fine print in Defender's listing for their Honda outboards. It turns out that they can only sell them either as a "boat package" that includes a small fishing boat or inflatable dinghy and requires delivery to a commercial loading dock, or by themselves if you go to Waterford, Connecticut to pick them up. Those are not good options. We already have a Zodiac dinghy, and Waterford is a little out of the way. It looks like we'll be looking for an authorized dealer a little closer to home. But I'll still order the other parts, and anything else the boat needs, from Defender. You can't beat their prices.

Life in Grand Junction: A Close Encounter

On Saturday night, Nan and I went to our local Red Robin for an inexpensive dinner out. It was a nice evening, cooler than it has been, so we opted for a table outside on the patio. We chatted about our upcoming vacation, sipped our wine, ate our burgers, and watched the sun slowly sink behind the Chick-fil-A across the street. Just a typical dining experience. But then it got weird.

The eleven- or twelve-year-old girl sitting with her mother at a table near ours stood up suddenly, went to the table across from us, where a family of five were seated, and yelled at the mother, "Stop staring at me!" Everyone on the patio stopped eating. It got very quiet. The girl returned to her table and sat looking at her mother. Neither said anything.

People looked around at one another with expressions of "What was that all about?!" on their faces. We made eye contact with the man of the family, who said, "She wasn't staring. She was just talking to her son and that girl was behind him." The mother looked shaken and close to tears.

The girl and her mother paid their bill quickly and stood up to leave. The man stood up and intercepted them. He asked why the mother would let her daughter speak to an adult with such disrespect. The mother said, "I don't f--king care." The man stared in disbelief as the girl and her mother walked quickly away.

As he returned to his table, the man announced to everyone within earshot that if he had ever spoken to someone in that way, his father would have whipped his ass right there in the restaurant. There were murmurs of agreement all around. Seated again, the man said, "Did you smell that woman's perfume? It was enough to make me gag! I had to go out and smoke a cigarette just to get away from it. If they thought we were staring at them, then that's why!" He took off his camouflage baseball cap, brushed his hair back with his hand, replaced the cap, and sat back in his chair with a deep sigh.

The man and his family paid their bill and stood to leave. At the exit, he turned and said loudly enough for all to hear, "Y'know, I don't vote Republican!" He paused. "I may be a redneck, but I'm not stupid!" He paused again. "I'm a union member!" He threw up his hands for dramatic effect and then turned to go. Nan and I cheered and clapped, joined by several others.

Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail

Our friends, the Shepherds, were in Colorado last weekend for their annual summer visit. They have a timeshare in Avon that they use twice a year, a week in the winter for skiing and another in the summer for hiking and biking. On Sunday morning, Nan, Scout and I met them at the Dairy Queen in West Glenwood, which is a fair distance compromise between Avon and Grand Junction. From there, we proceeded west on I-70 to Canyon Creek exit 109 and then doubled back on the north-side frontage road to where it dead-ends at the parking lot for the Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail's trailhead.

On July 6, 1994, fourteen firefighters died while battling the South Canyon Fire when high winds caused the flames to blow up suddenly, trapping them on an isolated slope. The memorial trail was created by friends and family wishing to visit the place where their loved ones lost their lives. It has since been improved by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, but it retains its original characteristics as a steep, rugged climb of a thousand vertical feet in a mile and a half. Hikers can't help but think of the brave young men and women who labored up this same slope, carrying heavy firefighting equipment, for the purpose of controlling a fire which threatened the nearby community of Canyon Creek.

The temperature was at least 93 degrees when we arrived at the trailhead in the early afternoon. We each carried CamelBaks full of ice and water, which we generously shared with Scout, who hurried quickly between shady spots while dancing over the hot dust of the well-worn trail. We stopped frequently to rest in the shade and to read the many informational signs along the way, which pointed out the sights and explained how forest fires are fought. The trail eventually leveled out and followed a hot, treeless ridge line to an observation point across from the deadly slope.

In my mind, I had imagined this place many times in the eighteen years since the fire, but it was nothing like I thought it would be. Instead of a canopy of evergreen trees, the steep slopes were covered in chest-high brush and junipers, and I pictured it engulfed in wind-driven flames, racing directly at the firefighters. There would have been nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Twelve of the firefighters died just below the opposite ridge and two others in a wash a few hundred yards away, directly below the peak of Storm King Mountain. If it had not been so hot, we would have continued our hike to those locations, where memorials have been erected, to pay our respects. We will need to return sometime soon to do so. You should too.

JK University

Back in April, when I was out in Savannah getting work done on Whispering Jesse and spending time with family, I took a few days to drive down to Fort Lauderdale for a blue water sailing seminar led by John Kretschmer. I planned to write an article about it for Cruising World magazine, and I obtained John's permission ahead of time, along with his assurance that he would contact the magazine for their approval. The idea was that John would benefit from the free publicity and I would earn another publishing credit. So I was surprised and disappointed when I received a polite rejection indicating that the magazine was aware of John's seminars and planned to write its own article about an upcoming one. I had been scooped!

Since it's not going to be published, I might as well post it here:

JK University’s Blue Water Passage Making Workshops

Suppose you’re an experienced coastal cruiser looking to take your sailing to the next level, to blue water passage making. Where do you turn for instruction and guidance? If you’re like most sailors, you get started by reading books by such noted sailing authors as Jimmy Cornell and John Vigor. But books will only provide you with theory. What about practical, hands-on experience? It used to come only from taking the risk on your own by making an actual passage, or by signing on as crew for an experienced captain. More recently, there have been instructional passage-making trips offered by outfits such as Mahina Expeditions.

Now there is a new offering, mixing classroom instruction with practical experience to fill in the knowledge gaps of potential ocean-going sailors: JK University, named in tongue-in-cheek fashion after its founder, Capt. John Kretschmer. John is best known for the book he wrote about his delivery captain days, Flirting with Mermaids, and for the passage-making trips he offers through his outfit, John Kretschmer Sailing. He has partnered with Bob Pingel, a contributing editor to Sailing magazine, and Rick Thompson, a marine electronics expert, to provide four-day workshops designed to answer all the big passage-making questions, with an emphasis on safety and self-sufficiency: What are the best methods for avoiding hurricanes? How do I splice a rope for an anchor snubber?

JK University’s Blue Water Passage Making Workshops are conducted three times a year in John’s hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida or in Solomons, Maryland. Both locations are close to water for easy access to ocean-going sailboats. Firsthand inspection of a well set-up vessel or two is one of the key components of “field trip Saturday,” along with the actual deployment of a Switlik life raft. Here is a typical workshop syllabus:

• Introduction: Myths and realities about passage making
• What makes a boat a blue water capable boat? Slideshow of 25 great boats
• Outfitting: Necessary, nice, extravagant – 10 important items for a serious boat
• Hands on – Rope
• Inspecting boats: Caribe, a Beneteau First 456 performance cruiser and retrofit project, and Tioga, a brand-new Hylas 56
• Hands on – The bullet-proof electrical system
• Hands on – Standing rigging, discussion of rigging emergencies at sea
• Passage planning, pilot charts, safety, weather, watch schedules, crew management, food preparation
• Communications at sea: Satellite phones, wifi, SSB, VHF, AIS
• Life raft launch
• What’s new in cruising sails? A plan for optimizing “manageable” downwind performance; sail plans for storm sailing; how to spend money on cruising sails
• Heavy weather: Dealing with storms, gales and squalls
• Chart work and celestial navigation in the digital age: Thinking like a navigator

Workshops run from early Thursday afternoon through late Sunday afternoon to help make scheduling as easy as booking a long weekend trip. The late start on Thursday and early finish on Sunday allow out-of-town attendees to arrive and depart without the expense of additional overnights.

To reserve your spot at the next JK University workshop, scheduled for February 7 to 10, 2013, please visit the John Krestschmer Sailing website at yayablues.com and click the Schedule link. In addition to a calendar of workshops, you’ll find all kinds of passage-making opportunities designed to help you build your confidence and broaden your experience.

Ute Petroglyphs

Scout and I, and sometimes Nan, have continued to hike the Grand Junction area's desert trails this summer despite the record-setting heat. My interest in petroglyphs has had us hiking new trails almost every weekend in search of ever more impressive examples of the primitive rock art.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Scout and I hiked in the Dominguez Canyon, starting from the Bridgeport end that is accessible from Highway 50, south of town about 20 miles. After crossing the Gunnison River on a beautifully designed steel pedestrian bridge, we passed through the river rafters' campsites and worked our way up into the canyon on a well-used trail. In addition to the petroglyphs I hoped to see, some people we met on the trail told me about an impressive waterfall we should be sure to see that was off the trail about five minutes before the petroglyph area.

The petroglyphs were pecked into rock surfaces immediately adjacent to the trail, so there was no difficulty finding them. I noticed right away that the petroglyphs in these murals seemed much more recent than the ones I have seen around Moab and other places. The contrast between the art and the background was much more pronounced, and the images were more distinctly recognizable as humans, animals and symbolic designs. The biggest clue, though, was that several of the images depicted humans on horseback. Horses were introduced into the New World by Spanish explorers only 500 years ago, so these petroglyphs would have been created by the Native Americans who populated western Colorado in the years since then: the Utes.

The most dramatic of the murals showed several humans on horseback hunting an abstract-looking creature that I interpreted to be a bear based on the paw print associated with it. The lead hunter appears to be wearing an elaborate headdress and riding a larger horse. As is unfortunately the case with most petroglyphs, idiots have added graffiti to the mural in the form of initials and a crude, scratched-in version of a horse. True petroglyphs are pecked into the stone, not scratched.

On our way back down from the petroglyph area, Scout and I kept an eye on the stream that runs through the canyon to see if we could figure out where the waterfall would be. There was a point where the stream appeared to run into a wall of rock, so we left the trail to investigate. We found a spectacular waterfall where the stream took a sharp right turn at the rock wall and the water fell more than 50 feet to the gravel below. The stone surface beneath the stream, leading up to the falls, was well-worn, leaving shallow pools that Scout felt obliged to swim in and cool off.

The following weekend was Nan's and my wedding anniversary, and we celebrated by hiking the Palisade Rim Trail, at the far eastern end of Palisade, east of Grand Junction off Interstate 70 and above the Colorado River. Even with an early morning start, it was a hot and buggy hike. There was a large crew of volunteers working to get the trail into shape for mountain biking, which is the trend in this area: Trails that have been used by hikers and horseback riders for years are discovered by mountain bikers, modified to accommodate their needs, and then overrun by them. I'm not anti-mountain biking, but there are riders out there who could stand to learn some trail etiquette. The main reason I don't ride myself is because I don't think it would be fair to Scout to have him try to keep up with me. So I hike with him instead, and he is happy.

The petroglyphs we found on this hike were not so impressive. The murals were smaller, and there were fewer of them. The petroglyphs appeared to be of the same vintage as the Dominguez Canyon ones and depicted similar scenes, so we guessed that they were also created by the Utes who inhabited the area and perhaps used this remote mesa above the Colorado River as a hunting camp. The primary difference I noticed was that these petroglyphs were mostly of deer and elk, while the Dominguez Canyon ones were mostly of bears and bighorn sheep, leading me to think that the fauna in the two areas were at least somewhat different even though the areas were only 30 miles apart.

On Independence Day, Scout and I returned to Dominguez Canyon, this time with Nan. I wanted to share the petroglyphs and the waterfall with her. It had been very hot since Scout and I had done the hike a few weeks earlier, and the stream in the canyon had dried up. The waterfall was not flowing, and there was only a single pool of water left. It was filled with tadpoles striving to become desert frogs if the pool did not evaporate first.

Nan was having issues with her hips, so the dried-up waterfall was her turnaround point. Scout and I proceeded quickly up the trail from there to snap some photos of the petroglyphs to show Nan what she was missing. When we caught back up with her, she spotted some desert bighorn sheep in the fields on the other side of the canyon. There was a flock of about a dozen, grazing and keeping an eye on us. They were a thrill to see. I found out later that they had been recently reintroduced to the canyon, presumably after being hunted out of existence by the Utes many years before and leaving only their images on the stone walls to show they had once been there.

Tides and Currents

This blog post is one I have been thinking about since I returned from my trip to Savannah back in mid-April. I almost skipped writing it entirely because it will prove to be a little embarrassing, but this blog is supposed to be about sailing, and sailing necessarily involves a healthy dose of learning from mistakes. So here it is:

Near the end of the Savannah trip, on the Friday before the weekend when family would start returning home, I invited everyone out for a sail on Whispering Jesse. My mother stayed behind, but my father, my sister Jane, her husband Josh, their twin sons Max and Ben, and my sister Susan were all up for it. So Nan and I spent some early morning time at the marina that day getting the boat ready: taking off the sail cover, replacing a missing mainsheet shackle, spraying the luff track with SailKote lubricant, and listening to the weather on the VHF. It was looking dark and blustery out to the east in the open ocean, and I was concerned that there might be too much wind for comfort. I checked the wind instruments and they were showing about 15 knots out of the east, counter to the prevailing westerlies.

When six family members arrived at a little after 9:00, we welcomed them aboard and gave them a quick tour of the boat. I had checked the tide table and the current would be running lightly against us as we backed out of the slip. With the transmission in reverse, we cast off the dock lines, and moved slowly back against the current, assisted by the wind. I put the transmission into forward and made a smooth turn to starboard to put us out into Delegal Creek, heading down the estuary toward Ossabaw Sound. We followed the line of channel markers out toward open water and were surprised when the depth meter continued to register single digits of foot depth under the keel. Slack tide would not occur until 1:00 in the afternoon, so shallow water was to be expected, but we were more than a half-mile from shore. In addition to being shallow, Ossabaw Sound is also prone to shoaling, and we lightly bounced the keel over a few sandy ones as we headed out to sea.

The current was flowing opposite the wind, creating significant chop and whitecaps and making for a bumpy ride. I let my nephews, who are learning to sail dinghies at home in Seattle, take turns at the wheel, but they didn't seem too confident with steering a larger boat in choppy conditions and willingly relinquished control back to me. We continued to motor out through the waves, spraying the people sitting up at the bow who were looking for dolphins. When we reached a depth where it would have been safe to head directly into the wind and raise the mainsail, I decided against it. It was just a little too rough for inexperienced sailors and I didn't want to scare anyone. Instead, we turned around and headed in for calmer waters. We followed the southern shore of Skidaway Island for a ways, spotting several dolphins in the shallow waters, until everyone was ready to return to shore.

I phoned Jimmy, the dockmaster, as we passed the channel's entrance markers, and asked if he could meet us at the pier to receive a dock line. He said he would, and he was standing at the corner of the fuel dock as we approached. It is difficult to judge current from a moving boat, so it did not appear that it was running significantly faster than it had been when we departed almost two hours before, but it most definitely was. To steer the boat back into the slip, I would need to make a tight 180-degree turn to starboard against the current. As I began the turn, putting the boat's beam to the current, the force of the water started pushing the boat sideways, leaving no room to complete the turn. I cranked the transmission into reverse, to back up against the current and get the bow pointed at the slip, but the little folding, two-blade propeller was no match for the strong current. The boat crashed sideways into a barnacle-encrusted piling and my neighbor's bow anchor, and there we were pinned. We quickly moved fenders into position to keep the anchor and piling from grinding against the hull and cap rail and causing further damage. And then we tried to figure out what to do. Jimmy had climbed over the neighbor's boat to see how he could help and said that he didn't think we would be able to move the boat until slack tide, still a couple of hours away. He then assisted everyone but Nan, my father and me in getting off the boat by way of the neighbor's boat. One of my sisters had called my mother and she arrived to take the rest of the group back home.

We were resigned to waiting for slack tide until Joel and his wife Bonnie, who own a Cat Ketch they keep at a slip across from ours, came over to see how they could help. Joel is an old salt and according to Bonnie, he has extensive experience with boat rescues. He suggested floating a long anchor line down from the adjacent pier, tying it off at the bow and using it in conjunction with a stern line, to control the boat's rotation, to pull the boat across to an empty slip at the adjacent pier. It worked like a charm. We didn't even need to use the engine; it just took Joel and a marina employee to pull the boat over while I steered. My father, Nan and I secured the boat in the slip to await slack tide and thanked everyone for their help. Joel said he would be around later if we needed assistance with getting the boat back into her own slip, and we told him that after the morning's experience, we would appreciate all the help we could get.

After lunch, my father, Nan and I returned to the marina to find the water almost motionless. Joel was expecting us, and he suggested using the anchor line again but as a safety measure this time. He tied it to a stern cleat and played it out like a leash as I backed out of the slip, turned the stern to port, put the transmission into forward, and turned to starboard to slowly glide into the opposite slip. Jimmy was waiting to receive a dock line, and we soon had the boat secured in her home slip. We thanked Joel and Jimmy profusely and headed for home.

Nan and I decided we owed Joel a thank-you gift and went to find a liquor store for a good bottle of wine. When we returned to the marina, Joel and Bonnie were working on replacing the portlights on their boat. We gave them the wine and thanked them again for their help. We got to talking boats, and Bonnie said that people walking on the pier frequently stopped to admire Whispering Jesse, that she is such a pretty boat. She asked if she could see what the boat was like on the inside. We said sure and opened her up for a little tour. Bonnie commented about the roomy cabin and its abundant storage space as I showed them around and answered their questions.

Back on the pier, Joel and I assessed the damage to the boat's starboard beam. There were some deep gouges in the teak cap rail and in the fiberglass below from the flukes of my neighbor's anchor, and some significant scratching from the barnacles on the piling, but it was all merely cosmetic and could be made to look as good as new. All in all, we were lucky that it wasn't much worse. Joel said he knew a guy who specialized in boat carpentry who could take care of the cap rail and any other wood-related issues. I told him I would get his phone number when I returned to Savannah, which is now starting to look like next Thanksgiving weekend.

I talked with Jimmy the next day when we sought him out to give him a tip for his services. He said that he would have been fine with me just pulling the boat up to the fuel dock and leaving her there until slack tide before moving her into her slip. How I wish he had suggested that when I called him to take a dock line!

The moral of this story: Tides and currents are serious forces, especially in tight quarters where they make maneuvering extremely difficult. Check the tide tables, and try to time marina arrivals and departures to correspond with the slack tide periods between ebbs and flows. When in doubt, stay put if you're already secure, and look for temporary alternatives, like anchoring or tying up at an easier location, if you're trying to dock. Most importantly, don't be in a hurry. Take the time to evaluate the situation and make a common-sense plan. Someday, I hope to have enough time to take my own advice.

Hole in one!

Yesterday was not an ideal day for golf. The afternoon temperature reached a withering 104 degrees. Few golfers were out on Chipeta Golf Course, but Nan and I were out there with our friends Kevin and Lesley, playing a 4-person scramble in the intense heat. The plan had been to play 18 holes and then go out for sushi, so the afternoon tee time had seemed like a good idea at the time. At least the best-ball scramble format and the gas-powered carts kept us moving quickly around the course.

We were playing pretty well up through the sixth hole, with a combined score of 1 under par to that point. I was the first to tee off on the seventh hole, a 174-yard par three with a pond right off the front of the tee. I have lost a few balls in that pond during past rounds, so I was playing a shag ball, a scuffed-up Titleist, but I pretty much play shag balls all the time since I lose so many. I had it teed down low and was playing a 4 iron. I took a well-balanced swing and made good contact. As I watched, the ball took a high trajectory with a slight draw that put it right on line for the hole. It bounced twice on the green and disappeared. I turned to Nan, Kevin and Lesley, sitting in the shade in the carts, and said, "I think it went in!" They had not been paying close attention and thought I was kidding, but they saw I was serious and hurried to take their tee shots so we could go see for sure.

I raced our cart down the path to the green, hopped out and rushed to the hole. Sure enough, there was my ball. A hole in one! I raised my arms in triumph and received high fives all around. We took some photos for posterity with my iPhone and then moved on to the eighth tee, now 3 under par. As Nan and I drove up the eighth fairway, she nudged me and said, "You're still smiling." I said, "I can't help it. I've been playing golf for 50 years and never thought I would get a hole in one. It feels pretty good."

Transit of Venus

Like many like-minded folks, Nan and I figured out a way to view the transit of Venus last Tuesday. We knew from our experience with the annular eclipse last month that binoculars would work to safely project the sun's image. The problem, when we tried them for the eclipse, was to hold them steady enough. The little dot that would be the projected image of Venus would be really hard to see while holding the binoculars with one shaking hand and a sheet of white paper with the other shaking hand. And it would take a third shaking hand to adjust the focus.

I came up with the simplest solution I could think of: I rubber-banded the binoculars to my camera tripod. This left my hands free to adjust position and focus, and to get the best possible projected image. It wasn't much to look at, as you can see in the photo (click for a full-size view), taken at 7:06 PM MDT, about three hours into the seven-hour transit. But it was our last chance to see a transit of Venus in our lifetimes, so it was worth it.

Growing up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, my friend Gene Hanson and I would spend summer evenings looking at the night sky through his Tasco 4.5-inch reflector telescope. Thanks to Gene, I have seen all of the planets, except for the recently demoted Pluto. If you know about astronomy, you know that this is not an easy achievement. Timing is everything. On the cold, clear morning of November 10, 1973, Gene and I woke up before dawn to lug his telescope down to Hoyt Park, where we would have a good view of the sun rising through a gap in the trees above the east-west oriented parkway. As the sun rose, we projected its image onto a small screen attached to the telescope, and there we saw a tiny spot, the elusive planet Mercury, near the end of its transit. For two geeky fifteen-year-olds, it was quite a thrill.

Gene has maintained his keen interest in astronomy through the years, getting bigger and bigger telescopes, and even arranging his life so he could live where the viewing is excellent north of Phoenix. His work with variable stars was recognized in 2002 when he was awarded the Leslie C. Peltier Award by the Astronomical League. For amateur astronomers, this is equivalent to being inducted into the hall of fame. Way to go, Gene!