Humor lost and found

Let’s face it, sometimes life likes to lob grenades at you. You’re standing there minding your own business, trying to decide whether you would prefer tuna or egg salad for lunch, when, WHAM, INCOMING!

Having thrown yourself into the relative shelter of the basement, while you’re cowering among the moldy blankets, dirty unused pots, and old broken door bits, you wonder, did I do something so terrible that started an entire war?

All goes quiet. You wonder if it the worst has passed, and whether or not it is safe to come out. Maybe it would be better to simply shelter here for all eternity. Nice little spot, when not raining, which creates a little lake that covers the entire floor. After all, the sump pump usually drains the water eventually. Yes, maybe this is the best thing, to sit here forever, rather than exposing yourself to those bombs again.
But what the heck, it’s human nature to challenge the enemy and to dodge the bullets. When you finally dare to poke your head up, the air appears clear, although the basement steps have been blown to smithereens. Out you crawl, clawing your way back up, dirty, battered, but still alive. A good hot shower would make it all so much better.

In the shower, you realize that you have been hit, and that your sense of humor has been knocked off. You’ll look for that later, after a nice long nap.

Waking up, it’s time to go hunting that missing sense of humor. While you were still hiding in that hole long after the all clear sounded, leaving your sense of humor exposed on the floor, the four cats in the house came along and thought it was a new cat toy placed there for their entertainment. They batted it around for a while, chewed on it, argued over who got to whack it next, and then rolled it somewhere under a piece of furniture. If you’re going to be rearranging the living room to find it, may as well get the vacuum cleaner. You know there will be a lot of other crud to clean up as you search. Starting under the couch, where dust bunnies look like buffalos, you find forty two bottle caps, a human tooth, several pennies, hey, cool, a dollar bill, an entire walnut still in the shell, and holy crap is that a complete bat skeleton? But no humor.

Moving on to the coffee table, under which there are more bottle caps, what may have been a tomato in a previous existence, and a few moldy, well maybe it’s better not to know what those used to be.
Yes, there it is, under the chair by the TV, right between the hairball and the dead mouse. Excellent. Needs a good cleaning, so into the washer it goes. These things can’t be tumbled dry; they shrink. Hanging it outside to dry is a bit risky; the cat out there has recently been mutilating birds left and right. You don’t want him getting his claws in your newly refreshed sense of humor, so it’s now hanging safely on a hanger in the shower in the downstairs bathroom, drying out of reach of all creatures, except for maybe a passing spider. And there simply can’t be any harm in a little old spider, can there?

Flats and fire ants

Success! The engineless sailboat is now back from the Bahamas and in its home port on Florida’s west coast. Although we managed to make the trip without getting whacked by a major big windy thing with a name, we did get terrorized by squall after squall after squall. Some contained so much lightning that at night, it was almost like daytime. Dancing in the disco, with bolts hitting the water all around the boat, wind blasting rain sideways at us like someone pointing a high pressure hose, while we balanced on deck reefing sails.
I had been wanting a nice fresh water shower, but that was ridiculous.

We tied to the dock late at night, minutes before another massive squall screamed through. We sheltered below, snug, and laughed at it all.

The next morning, I headed north back to my own home port, after clearing as many fire ants as I could from the interior of my car. A large group had taken up residency in the two weeks I had left the car parked in the grass. I had probably unknowingly parked in their territory, so they decided to take advantage of the instant housing. During the battle of reclaiming my vehicle, I received a few wounds in the ant carnage I caused, but was by and large the victor. When I drove away with a few prisoners of war, I was headed for the scenic drive through the mountains. But the behavior of the car convinced me to alter my course to head for the more populated interstate 95, rather than deserted 81 with all those big hills. This turned out to be a good call, as the wobble in the front end worsened with each mile.

In the middle of South Carolina, the passenger's side front tire blew into shreds. Despite darkness and vehicles whizzing by at 800 mph, within minutes, I managed to replace the carnage with the donut, which itself wasn’t looking too healthy. I could see this pathetic excuse of a spare wouldn’t carry me far, so called AAA and located the nearest tire repair place, planning to drive there and sleep in the car with the remaining fire ants to keep me company. That way I would be the first in line when the shop opened in the morning. I almost made it, too, crawling along at 20 mph, when the donut broke. Always willing to experiment, I tried driving on the rim until that completely crumpled as well.

Thank heavens for AAA, and cheap digs nearby, where the tow truck driver insisted on taking me after dropping my car at the repair shop. It was now well after midnight, and I thought about walking back to the car after he dropped me off, wanting to save the cost of the motel. But the room rate was good, and the allure of a real shower and sleeping without fire ants was too strong.

I was on the repair shop’s doorstep before they opened at 7, and was on my way all repaired by 8:30.
Mechanic: “Have you been offroading this car?” Me: “Well, uh….maybe.”
My former vehicle had been 4X4 with high clearance. Road, no road, it didn’t really make much difference. Lesson learned: Ford Escorts are not meant for anything other than pavement. Where’s the fun in that?

My plan of driving overnight to avoid traffic having been foiled, while parked on the nation’s capitol beltway with the other idiots, I had to appreciate the irony that it turned out to be easier to sail an engineless sailboat across the Gulf Stream in prime hurricane season than it was to get a car 1400 miles up the road.

Back to the Sea, Sort of

Every time I think I’m finished with sailing, a few months living ashore changes my mind. Yes, it’s convenient to have unlimited hot running water at the turn of a tap. It’s nice not to have to haul a dirty smelly bag of laundry five miles down the road to wash it only to have it pour rain on your nice clean clothes on the dinghy ride back to the boat later in the day. It’s nice to sit on the front porch watching the lightening storm approach, without having to hyperventilate into a paper bag thinking about how much it’s going to cost to replace all those electronics when that one bolt lands atop your mast. It’s enjoyable sitting on the porch, knowing that in all likelihood it won’t move, nor will the neighbor’s porch drag into yours.

But after a while, seeing the same sight out the same window day in and day out, the same people coming and going at the same time, having the same drunken screaming fights every weekend, gets a little stale. Living aboard a boat, life swings with the wind and tide, and neighbors come and go almost daily. Often when underway, you change ports often enough to not even remember sometimes where you are upon awakening, especially if arriving in a new port in the dark, so it’s all a big surprise when you wake up in the morning. Geez I thought I was going into Key West, but this here is, uh oh, crap, we’re in trouble now, Cuba.

This current trip is not a pleasure cruise. We’ve been calling it the rescue attempt. The skipper tried to sail his boat to England in the spring, but a series of big messes, including but not limited to a blown engine, landed him back in the Bahamas with no choice but to leave the boat there for the time being.
The timing of getting it out has not been good.
It seemed like a good idea at the time
We are sailing, okay, trying to sail, a nearly engineless sailboat across the Gulf Stream from the Bahamas to Florida in the absolute height of hurricane season.
.
I say nearly engineless because we carried a six horsepower outboard motor on the plane as hand luggage. The guy at the airport in Ft. Lauderdale tried to give us a load of crap about it, which was just what we needed at six in the morning after driving all night to get there. But he was outvoted by the usual laid back Bahamian pilot’s attitude. “no problem, mon, load it here in the nose of da plane.” A day of labor and interesting contortions found the outboard bolted to the stern of the boat. We worked our way out of the sheltered lagoon with only two groundings, mainly because the boat wouldn’t turn quickly enough under half jammed rudder to follow the sharp curves of the channel.
Unfortunately, once out on the banks, there was one key ingredient that didn’t seem to be in the forecast for the foreseeable future: wind. Never mind, the longer we sat waiting, the more likely we were to get much more wind than we could ever use. Jokes of running to Nova Scotia in 150 knots were not so funny when listening to the reality of tropical updates. We decided to motor at less than three knots, nearly the maximum the outboard could push us, until we found a breeze. 70 miles later, we stopped for more fuel.

Nearly 80 miles after that, we found ourselves stressing about whether or not we would have enough gas to get to the next fuel stop. Our sailing had been limited to one good squall, although unfortunately that gave us a wind on the nose for several hours, before the seas transmuted back into a mirror glass finish with every detail of the bottom highly visible. No edible fish sighted, but there were lots of jellyfish, roofing tin, tires, bikes, cans, etc.

Finally, a breeze came up not long after sunset, allowing us to sail to anchor behind the island of Bimini in the middle of the night. The breeze held just long enough to get us into the harbor the next morning. We fueled up and are now ready to cross the Gulf Stream. Except that there is, you guessed it, no wind. And no way we can run that little outboard across the stream. And a low pressure system north of here that is ‘moving erratically’, and could possibly develop into something we would rather not sail into, like square waves in the gulf stream.

Who knows how long we’ll sit here waiting for wind. And who knows how strong it will be when it does finally get here.
It’s all good fun.