There once was a fellow named Jason,
Who learned that it’s bad luck to hasten,
Just a trip and a splash,
Can relieve you of cash,
When your eyeglasses now need replacin’.
Jason’s really a quite graceful lad,
Just a chip off the block, like his Dad,
Who has pitched a few phones,
Down to old Davy Jones,
But poor Jason’s Blackberry — so sad!
All joking aside, send your kind thoughts to Jason, who banged up his knee in the incident. Given the dunking his Blackberry got, I wonder if texting had something to do with his distraction?
There once was a lady named Jacqui,
And her taste in small boats was not wacky.
She knows quick as a jig,
With her fine Freedom rig,
She can rotate the wheel and yell “Tackie!”
It’s her birthday today, and I wish,
That the day brings some cake in a dish,
And a stroll down the dock,
Where she hears, to her shock:
“Happy Birthday To You!” sung by fish.
There is a fish I call Harvey who hangs out under our boat and makes funny “groink” noises. We suspect he is a “croaker” or a “grunt,” as his ability to hold a tune is limited.
In other news, we heard some strange noises in our dinghy this morning, and I thought it was just the wave pattern. A few hours later, as we went to row ashore, Barry discovered a beautiful 12-inch fish in the bottom of the dinghy! If we’d realized that was the source of the earlier noise, we could have had fresh fish for breakfast.
There once was a lady named Ann,
She’s an awesome friend with a big van,
For our carless existence
Required help and assistance,
To begin on our junk sail-rig plan.
Said our friend, as to Lowe’s we propel.
“Please beware of the dog-mothball smell,”
With that big engine purring,
We hauled plywood and furring,
Don’t apologize, Ann: Your van’s SWELL!
The term “elderly” isn’t the word,
For Da’oud, no, that’s much too absurd.
Though his birthday’s today,
If you asked, he would say,
The word “youngster” is greatly preferred.
This one is for my jeweler-artist friend, currently hanging his shingle at the Arizona Renaissance Festival. The twinkle in his eyes makes him look like a little kid with prematurely gray hair.
His name was so much fun to play with, I wrote a second limerick the next day:
A fellow I knew named Da’oud
Refused to eat all birthday food
He said, “I’ve been told,
…Eating cake makes you old.
And I’m an extremely young dude!”
We bought bottom paint, gooey and thick,
And we hoped that it would do the trick,
It was sold as “deluxe” —
It cost TWO hundred bucks,
‘Cause we didn’t want sea life to stick.
And that should be the end of the story,
But the grasses adhered in all glory,
Yes, it’s worse than I feared,
For her fuzzy green beard,
Means she now needs a depilatory.
I’m goin’ to a party
And I hope you are hearty
So please don’t be naughty
For it’s a punky reggae party (Bob Marley)
There goes the neighborhood... Flutterby in front of Vero Beach's posh homes
From Flutterby’s mooring to shore is about 150 feet. It’s a lot farther, if you measure it in dollars.
Tonight, there’s a birthday party at one of the houses on shore. The lawn is full of dressed-up people, and they’ve got a live reggae band. What I can’t figure out are the two chickens in the yard. I’ve never noticed those before. Perhaps they were a birthday present. Perhaps they’re serving really, really fresh chicken for dinner. Or maybe that’s the backup singers.
OK, that’s enough about the chickens. I must be hungry. I wonder what kind of people can afford to hire such a professional-sounding band for a birthday party?
No boring ol’ farts, no boring ol’ farts
No boring ol’ farts will be there
Singin’ no boring ol’ farts, no boring ol’ farts
No boring ol’ farts will be there (another verse from the same song)
My curiosity sends me to Zillow.com, where I look for information about our shoreside neighbors. The house with the party is just over a million dollars, but it’s not for sale. The one that is, though, is even closer; it’s the one whose windows we look right into. It’s a 3-bedroom, 2-1/2 bath rambler with a swimming pool. You can buy it for just over a million dollars. Or rent it for $7500 a month.
Or sit out here on a mooring and look into the windows, for $400 a month.
Turn your lights down low
And pull your window curtains…
(from another Bob Marley song)
It’s a good thing I like reggae, and the birthday party band in particular. I’m sure everyone over there is shouting, unsuccessfully, to be heard over the music, like this:
John: “Blah-de-blah-de-blah chicken?”
Mary: “No, I don’t want to dance with your chicken.”
John: “I said, blah-de-blah-de-blah CHICKEN!”
Mary: “You want me to to remodel your kitchen?”
Out here, we can’t turn the music off, but we can easily talk over it. It’s like our own private dinner concert (no boring ol’ farts here!). Because this is Vero Beach — known as Zero Beach to the younger set — the music stops at precisely 9:30 pm. I’m disappointed.
I once had a business trip to Semiahmoo, a stunningly beautiful resort near the Canadian border in Washington, with two coworkers. When the desk clerk handed out room keys, two of them faced the water, and one faced the parking lot. The two other women looked at me in consternation. I had the most seniority, so they were certain I’d claim one of the waterfront rooms, leaving them to fight over the other one. Instead, I picked up the parking lot room key, saying, “Enjoy the view. I’m going sailing tomorrow, and if you count both sides and the transom, I’ll have over 75 feet of waterfront property all weekend.”
That comment comes back to me as I listen to the reggae-chicken birthday party. Tonight, they’re enjoying their waterfront property and sharing it with their friends. But they are paying an awful lot just to be looking at us! And we are not paying very much to be looking in their windows, enjoying their music, and laughing about their chickens.
Let me tell you, it takes a joyful sound
To make the world go ’round
It takes a joyful sound
So come a come and rock your boat (one last verse from Bob Marley)
When our gigantic sails are all done,
Then you won’t sit around poking fun,
You’ll be wishing your rig
Was as tall and as big,
As we zoom past the race starting gun.
Barry’s just posted his initial drawings of the new rig for Flutterby. On the Junk Rig Association forum, a couple of folks remarked on the outrageous amount of sail area (50%) added to the boat. That inspired my response, above.
~~~
There once was a lady named Donna
Who said to her friends, “I’m not gonna
Eat your candy and cake,
I refuse to partake.
Blow those candles yourself — I don’t wanna!”
Happy Birthday, Donna! If they put one candle on your cake for each year, you could heat the whole house!
What's that white thing on the dock? A shoebox, a bookshelf, or a boat?
On the big day, when we launched Flutterby, I didn’t pour all the champagne over the bow. There was some left in the bottle, so a bunch of us went down the dock to where a little wooden shoebox, about six feet long, sat waiting. Kris and Barry picked it up and dangled it down to the water by its painter, letting it down with a splash. Way, way down there in the water below the high dock, it looked for all the world like an abandoned piece of furniture. Somebody tossed a couple of wooden oars into the shoebox-bookshelf, and then they all turned to me, expectantly.
Uh-oh.
There it floated, nine years in the making, waiting for the builder to test it. I felt like the ancient Roman bridge designer who had to stand under his bridge when the first load went across. What if I was too heavy? What if it flipped, or worse yet, slowly sank? I could hear the blub-blub-blub in my imagination. But it’s amazing what adrenaline and an audience can do. White-knuckled, I climbed down the ladder into the tiny vessel that I had given birth to from a pile of plywood.
I was still hanging onto the ladder with a death grip when Barry handed me the bottle of champagne.
It felt like a toy boat, something that should be christened with Kool-Aid. But I wanted the gods of the sea to take this thing seriously, so I poured champagne over the “bow.” (Since the boat doesn’t have a pointy end, it’s a little hard to tell which is the front and which is the back. It would probably row just fine sideways, if I mounted the oars that way.)
“I christen thee Flutterwent!” The name was Kris’ idea. It rolls off the tongue better than Flagondry or Rockcoach, two bug-based Spoonerisms that sound a lot worse than Flutterby.
Before I knew it, Barry was climbing off the dock to join me in the boat, I think because I had the bottle of champagne. Or maybe because he wanted to swamp it and go swimming. Surely this thing was not rated for two adults, was it? Thank goodness the Coast Guard wasn’t around to see the open container in an overloaded vessel with no lifejackets.
But she didn’t ship any water when he climbed in. We sat there, facing each other, grinning, and passing the champagne bottle back and forth. Meanwhile, the current was carrying us away from the dock. Whoops! Time to do something about that!
Using ridiculous 7-foot oars as giant paddles, we paddled through the marina and over to the ways, where Flutterby awaited us. The scariest part was getting back out again! I didn’t know how stable it was, but I knew how stable I was — not very. I guess the adrenaline got me out of the boat as well as into it, although by now most of our audience had lost interest and wandered off for happy hour. I was already plenty happy.
You might be wondering, why would anyone use such a strange-looking, tiny dinghy? Normal cruisers go back and forth from their boats in stock gray inflatables with stock outboard motors. Why not the Flutterbies?
For years, Barry wanted to build a 34-foot sailboat with me. This terrified me, because I was afraid of power tools. I’d had an accident in college with a bandsaw and nearly ended up eight-fingered Meps.
In 2001, our housemate, Sharonne, signed up for a beginning woodworking class. For the first four weeks, the students built toolboxes using a table saw, joiner, planer, biscuit-cutter, and sander. For the remainder of the class, they worked on their own projects. At the end of ten weeks, Sharonne proudly brought home the toolbox and a tall bookshelf that she had built with her own hands.
I signed up for the next session and built the same toolbox. Then the teacher sat down with the class and told us we were free to start on our own projects. He went around the room and asked each person to say what they wanted to build. “A CD rack,” said one. “Toys for my grandchildren,” said another.
I never checked to see if the toolbox would float. It would make a great dinghy for the dinghy.
When he reached me, I said, “A boat.”
“A toy boat?” asked the teacher.
“No, a real one.”
The rest of the class stared at me.
“This is Woodworking One. You can’t build a boat on Woodworking One,” said the teacher, with a smirk.
“Don’t you remember Sharonne, from last term? She built a bookshelf. I promise my boat will be just like a bookshelf.” He rolled his eyes and made me stay after class to convince me that I couldn’t build a boat.
The following week, I showed him the plans. Phil Bolger’s Tortoise dinghy looks a lot like a floating bookshelf, so he reluctantly permitted me to start. A couple of months later, Barry and I loaded my plywood dinghy on top of Peepcar and brought it home. I’d done the final assembly in Woodworking Two, with a more encouraging instructor.
The good news was, I still had all my fingers. (So did the instructor from Woodworking One, who’d nearly run his hand through the table saw helping me cut the framing.) The bad news was, it wasn’t a boat yet.
It was a thing of beauty, constructed of luan plywood with pine framing and copper ring nails. For the first year, it sat on our back porch. For the next five, it hung in my in-laws’ garage.
I was proud of my accomplishment, so I told people that I’d built a boat. But whenever Barry heard me say that, he’d correct me. “No, you didn’t. It’s not finished.”
In 2008, I painted it with epoxy resin to protect the wood, and we tied it on top of the Squid Wagon. We drove from Seattle to Flutterby in Beaufort, North Carolina, via San Diego, with that tiny, funny-looking boat on top of the van.
The ant and the elephant along the California coast (April 2008)
It looked like an ant on top of an elephant. All the way across the USA, we got reactions like the guy with the toothpick in his mouth who sauntered over to Barry, not noticing me nearby. “What is that?” he asked. “Some kind of storage pod?” “No,” said Barry, “It’s a boat.” The guy looked more closely and said, “Oh.”
Then Barry added, “My wife built it.” The guy cracked up laughing. He thought it was the punchline to a really funny joke.
The epoxy wasn’t UV-resistant, and by the time we crossed the country, it already needed sanding and painting. We didn’t have anywhere to store it out of the weather, so we rented a 5×7 storage unit and stuffed it inside, using it to store other items — just like a bookshelf!
For another two and a half years, when I said, “I built a boat,” Barry said, “No, you haven’t.” I’d glare at him. Couldn’t he just shut up?
That was getting really irritating, so last summer, I took the poor neglected dinghy out and put it under Flutterby. It was time to finish it, a job only I could do. If I let Barry help me, then, when I said “I built a boat,” he’d still have an excuse to correct me. “No, you didn’t. We built a boat.”
My sawhorses sat on some turf with boatbuilding history. Between 1983 and 1995, Bock Marine built and launched over 30 boats in that spot, including the 122-foot White Dove Too. Like the WDT, my dinghy was brought from another location and completed on that hallowed ground. But there are some differences. Their ships were steel, launched using a dramatic side-launching technique (this is a hilarious photo of people running from the splash) instead of our painter-dangling end-launching technique. I calculated the ratio of length-to-time-under-construction: At 6.5 feet and 9 years, Flutterwent’s ratio was 505. Knocking out a couple of 85-footers a year, Bock’s was 2.1.
I finished the dinghy in the heat of the summer, using all the woodworking, epoxy, fiberglass, and painting skills I learned on Flutterby. While I was working, I wore headphones and hearing protection. Not because of the power tools, but because I was tired of all the men in the boatyard wandering over to stare. I was tired of explaining that I was not building a hard dodger to cover the companionway.
When I was done, I said to Barry, “I built a boat.” Then he hugged me instead of correcting me.
It still wasn’t completely done, having no means of propulsion. But it’s past midnight, and I am done for tonight! Tiny boat, big story. I’ll put the photo essay below and save the rest for another time.
Barry and Kris drop the dinghy into the water, stern-first. "Yikes! Who's got the painter?"With nerves of steel, I step into the floating box. Ted, who has launched many dinghies, was there to help, and Barry had the painter and the champagne.You can tell from my hand that I am afraid to move, for fear it will sink or tip over.I haven't sunk yet. And I have the champagne. So I'm smiling.Oh no! Here comes Barry to see if he can swamp my dinghy.As the current carries us away from safety, I say, "You want some of this?"Giggling, we pick up the oars and paddle into the sunset. She tracks like a shoebox instead of a soapdish.Getting out is trickier than getting in. Barry made sure the champagne bottle was safe, but I think it was empty by now.Whee! Barry has fun scooting under Flutterby's bow line. At 6-1/2 feet long, the Tortoise dinghy is just long enough for a nice nap.
The weather’s been so beautiful in Vero Beach this week, Barry and I have just been riding, riding, riding our bicycles. With the exception of two 65-foot-tall bridges that span the Indian River, there are no hills. It’s all flat. Whee!
This morning, for the first time, Barry and I pedaled in separate directions. Barry went to a meditation group in town, and I headed for the farmers’ market on the beach. I filled my backpack with peppers and cucumbers and strawberries and brussels sprouts and giant crunchy red radishes. I sampled grapefruits and tangerine juice (yum) and carrot juice (not-so-yum).
Then I walked over to the beach and dipped my toes in the ocean. Life is sweet.
I was pedaling back to the marina, a few blocks later, when a big bus in a bank parking lot caught my eye: The Bloodmobile.
You may recall that earlier this week, on Valentine’s Day, we commemorated our friend Becky’s birthday by hugging people. One of the other things people did in her memory was to give blood, including people in the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Barry last gave blood about 20 years ago, and got a huge painful purple bruise all over his arm. That scared me so much, I never tried it.
Seeing that big bus, I thought of the folks who gave blood in Becky’s memory this week. Some of them were first-time donors. I’ve given my share of blood at the doctor’s office for tests. Surely donating couldn’t be much harder than that?
I rode back to the marina to meet Barry. “There’s something I’d like to do after lunch, and I’d love it if you’d do it with me,” I said. When I told him I wanted to donate blood, he was a little surprised. “You know what happened the last time I gave blood, right?” he asked. Nonetheless, he was willing to try it again.
We ate some lunch — they recommended that we eat a meal first — and then biked back to the big bus. On board, we each filled out a health questionnaire and had temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate measured, along with the iron level in our blood. We passed all those tests, so we were ready to donate.
The bus had four couches, and Barry took one on the right (so his left arm was accessible) and I took one on the left. I’m sure there’s a carefully established protocol for taking the blood out, but I’m a little squeamish, so I didn’t watch very closely. Besides, we were busy chatting with the three employees on the bus, two technicians and one woman who served as a sort of usher-organizer-cheerleader. She was the one who gathered up a whole pile of t-shirts, calendars, coupons, magnets, and pens, and gave them to us for donating.
It didn’t seem like very many minutes before there was a very loud “BEEP!” and Barry was done. I was done about two minutes later. It was easy.
Afterwards, I mentioned that we were donating in memory of Becky, and I hugged my technician. We’d been warned about adverse effects, including the infamous bruising, lightheadedness, and nausea, but as we got onto our bikes with our now-stuffed backpack of goodies, I felt physically fine.
Mentally, though, I was feeling better than fine. I felt super! Magnanimous, healthy, and proud. Glad to do something to help the world in Becky’s memory. Over and over, this lesson, the one about generosity, comes home to me: I gave up a little blood, but I got back way more than I gave.
Everything we do ashore starts with a row in the dinghy. Here's Meps, wearing a Becky's Hugs button, tying the dinghy painter.After the rowing comes the bicycling. Here's Meps and the Bike Fridays in front of the Bloodmobile.Afterwards, Barry shows off his new t-shirt, which says "2011, the year of the blood donor."
