Housekeeping

This is a sort of maintenance, catch-up entry; odds and ends that need to be tied up.

First a follow up about the replacement of our home's roof. After a couple of weeks of delay, partially related to weather, the ordeal is finally over, somewhat anticlimactic as now when I look at the house, it seems like the new roof has always been there. But its guts are very different, with the underlayment and the Polyset roofing system designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. The house might be gone but the roof will be levitating!

Now the rest of the house speaks to me for repair and upgrading, particularly exterior painting. The eves are a high priority as wood rot was replaced while roofing, and bare wood needs to be primed and painted. As some of the eaves are at a second story level, that will have to be done by a professional, but the rest of the house, in particular the courtyard and the courtyard walls, call out to me so I've slowly started to prep and paint. Elastomeric paint is very forgiving, allowing coverage of narrow stress cracks that would have to be filled otherwise. I thought I would despise painting and repairing, something I haven't done in some time, but I find it somewhat satisfying, and doable if I take it in small doses each day. Not the same feeling as when I was younger and routinely did repairs and even undertook larger scale projects on our homes, but fulfilling nonetheless. Maybe it's just being relieved that my life is back to normal after a year of health issues.

Next, I wanted to experiment with posting videos directly to this blog. Although I've posted to YouTube, this is new to me so I just filmed a couple this past week or so. These are not very remarkable, but they are mercifully brief.

The first was taken when Ann's friend, Arlene, was visiting from Tampa, and we went on our boat and up the Intracoastal to look at the Christmas lights. The Palm Beach boat parade was only a few nights before that so I thought most homes would be finished with their decorations, but that was not the case. Nonetheless, one of the homes in Palm Beach Gardens that has a fairly spectacular display, perhaps about a half mile north of the PGA bridge, had their decorations finished. The video is a little muddled as I was trying to steer our boat while filming with the other hand.

[Well, this first experiment failed. The video will not upload. Will keep trying but as the narrative is still valid, I am posting without the first video.]

Christmas in Florida reminds me of the Diane Arbus photograph "Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, LI." -- the sterile living room consisting of a couch with fringe hanging from the upholstery, a lamp, a clock that looks like a star on the wall, a TV set and an end table, with a heavily decorated, but unlighted, Christmas tree shoved in the corner with wrapped gifts under it. There is a certain sadness that Arbus captured and she would have had a field day in Florida during this time of year where the juxtaposition of Christmas decorations and tropical weather seems to have the same effect as her photographs of the bizarre. To the right is a typical December Florida scene, a Great Blue Heron sunning himself on our sea wall. It just does not say "Christmas!"

The next video might interest local boaters as the Munyon Island docks were just completed and it is a pleasant destination for smaller boats in the Palm Beach area, with floating docks, and an effective breakwater to protect boats from the wakes churned up by the larger vessels traversing Lake Worth north and south. Munyon Island itself was slightly developed to accommodate visitors to the docks with a few small pavilions and grilling facilities, as well as a slightly elevated walkway through the native growth of Munyon where it dead ends into a pathway which I followed only to be greeted by a spider the size of a B-29, so that is where my reconnoitering ended. But the tropical environment is lush on the island and well worth visiting. Here is a history of Munyon and of the restoration project.

We're fortunate to have such a facility so near us (ten minutes by boat) as well as the more elaborate ones of Peanut Island but Peanut can be crowded, particularly on holidays and weekends.

Besides occasionally adding videos to the blog, I want to begin to label the blog entries as I've written more than 250 entries in the four years I've been doing this and while there is search capability (upper left corner) and of course contents and images are searchable via Google et. al. as well, there is no structured index, something that bothers me as an ex-publisher. That is going to be an ongoing job and I'm not sure about the approach at this point but there might be some strange entries in the future to test the labeling capabilities.

Moving on to some family stuff, earlier in the year our son's friend, Jeff, was married and the wedding was sort of a reunion, five friends, boys we've seen grow up from the innocence of childhood, through the terrible teens, and now into manhood, each going their own way in life, but coming together as if no time had passed at all. Uniting them is the love of boating, water skiing and swimming as each grew up on the water, spent summer weekends out at "our" Crow Island and a part of their summers together on Block Island.

So today, this is the motley crew (picture courtesy of Jeff's Mom, Cathy)

and here they are in photographs from years ago:

Finally, one of my fellow bloggers, is "graduating," having used his blog to pursue a dream (starting his own mutual fund) and after several years writing about the market (and maintaining a "virtual" portfolio, providing complete transparency), his blog will be moving to a web site as his "Paladin Long Short Fund" has been approved by SEC (the proposed symbol, not yet approved, is PALFX) I predict Mark will be a very successful trader and offer him my congratulations, bringing his dream to reality -- yet another instance of how technology has been used as a fulcrum for entrepreneurship.

Block Island July 4 Weekend

Gone, but not forgotten, Block Island days.

My friend Cathy, through her friend Richard Lemish, forwarded a reminder of our earlier boating years, when our families were young and our appetite for adventure and carousing knew no bounds. Here is a view of Block Island boating life during the past 4th of July holiday looking north from “dingy beach” over New Harbor showing a huge 18 boat raft as well as smaller raft ups, at anchor. Imagine being the first boat at the dock in a raft, people crawling over your boat in the middle of the night to get on and off. How did we put up with that? We were young.

Block Island Days

Perhaps some things are better left alone. For instance, I recently visited the offices where I used to work. The building was brand new in 1979 when I leased those offices, at first the 2nd floor of the three story building, eventually occupying the entire building and the one next door as well. The last time I was in the building was about eight years ago. Since then the interior was reconfigured leaving a maze of cubicles and now the company has changed ownership. The offices are being closed and there remains just a skeletal staff in the transition phase. So, it was a bittersweet return, seeing a few people with whom I had worked, reminiscing about the “old times.” As I left the building this one last time, it was with a sense of sadness I thought I had already overcome.

You can’t go home again. There are certain memories you should put away in the museum of your mind, leaving them perfectly preserved in their protective cases.

In a sense, the many days we spent boating to Block Island have become such a treasure. Perhaps that is one of the reasons when we last left the Great Salt Pond of Block Island a few years ago, I suspected we might never return. Not having gone back, that sense of not wanting to revisit what had such an impact on our lives, has been reinforced with each passing year.

Those were our adult to later middle years and now, with our children grown, and with the rigors of boating becoming more challenging as we age, not to mention the explosive expense of fuel and dockage, Block Island is now just a wonderful memory.

For us the journey began in our little 28’ boat in 1984 -- ‘Spindrift’-- equipped with not much more than a compass and a VHF so our ninety mile trip from Norwalk, CT through the infamous “Race” with its frequent fog, turbulent water and numerous fishing boats to navigate around, into the Block Island Sound, exposed to ocean swells, and finally into the Great Salt Pond of Block Island, was an adventure. We relied on compass headings and visual sightings of certain buoys, zigzagging our way there.

The first couple of years of venturing to Block we tried the docks at both Champlain’s and the Block Island Boat Basin, the advantage of the former being its salt water pool that our then 8 year old Jonathan loved, and the latter their floating docks – easier on and off the boat and no rafting (boats tied together, strangers trouncing across your boat to get to the dock).

Here I must detour in the story of our Block Island days. At this time we befriended Ray and Sue who have a son about the same age as Jonathan. Then we were at the same Marina, Norwest Marine in Norwalk. I briefly mentioned Ray in my article on Crow Island but I failed to mention how critical he has been to the story of our boating life.

Ray was my boating mentor, and there could be no better one. Ann and I have joked that if we were marooned on a desert island, he would be the one person we would want at our side. Give him a roll of duct tape, rope and a few other materials and he will build you a cathedral. In boating you can find yourself in unpredictable situations and Ray has frequently bailed us out. One time we arrived at Block taking on water because one engine’s muffler had burst and in the infinite wisdom of the boat manufacturer, this was below the water line. No problem for Ray, who immediately sized up the situation and decided to temporarily plug the exhaust with a large plastic coke bottle, a perfect, secure fit, stopping the leak until we could replace the muffler.

Continuing the story, my friend John was flying over to Block where he had left his boat with his wife Cathy and their two children, and he said, no problem, picking up a replacement muffler and between Ray and John, the repair was made, a perfect example of boating camaraderie and cooperation.

Ray showed us the path into Crow Island, long before the GPS made it a more accessible destination and it was there that our families spent countless weekends. Due in large part to his encouragement, in 1985 we bought a 37’ powerboat, and as a much younger man, I fearlessly took our new ‘Swept Away’ all over the Long Island Sound and its ports on Long Island and Connecticut sides, plus Newport, Cuttyhunk, Edgartown, and Nantucket for several summer vacations in subsequent years.

We cruised to those ports without Ray and his family as by that time he was convinced that there was only one port really worth going to, settling down for his summer vacation on their 44’ ‘Rascel’, at Block Island, and, specifically Payne’s Dock.

So, on our way back from one of our more distant ports we would stop at Payne’s to visit for a few days and, gradually, like Ray and Sue, we found ourselves spending more and more of our vacation time at Block until, we too, found ourselves going there for our entire summer vacations.

Payne’s is an enigmatic place, a community like no other we’ve visited on the water. It’s not just a dock, but an ongoing event, the same boaters showing up at about the same time, and settling into routines as mundane as hanging around waiting for the coffee to be made at the top of the dock, ordering a few or more of the homemade donuts we lovingly referred to as “sinkers”, sitting around the ancient wooden picnic tables sipping coffee in the frequently fogged in morning, to the evening libations at rickety Mahogany Shoals. Payne’s rafts boats during the crowded weekends but always seems to be able to match up compatible boaters. To watch Cliff Payne and his “dock geezers” move around boats, slipping them in and out of tight quarters was to watch a comical, sometimes nail biting, but effective chorography.

One weekend our older son, Chris, surprised us by biking 75 miles from Worcester, MA to the Block Island Ferry at Point Judith, RI, arriving with enough energy to join us and friends at Ballard’s in Old Harbor for lobster and then we all danced the chicken. Chris clucked and flapped his wings, none the worse for wear after his long bike ride.

After morning tasks, our families would dinghy to the eastern side of the Great Salt Pond, leaving our little boats, cross the Corn Neck Road causeway and settle in at Scotch Beach on the Atlantic Ocean for the day. Block has been called the Bermuda of the north for good reason, the water crystal clear, the waves perfect for body surfing which the kids did most of the day (OK, the adults too when we could grab their boards). Then, back to our boats, shower, and its cocktail time and pot luck dinner on someone’s boat.

We called fluke fishing at the mouth of the harbor “meat runs” as we were sure to catch that night’s dinner. Again, Ray was the leader of the pack, both in organizing those fishing parties and filleting the fish like a surgeon, squeezing every drop of edible fish leaving the waiting seagulls disappointed with the remnants tossed off the dock after surgery was completed.

Then there might be a “cook off,” the ladies preparing the fluke different ways, or sometimes as teams. To watch my wife, Ann, and Ray’s wife, Sue, cook in the galley was exhausting, pots, pans, plates, being passed back and forth in tight quarters, those beautiful, sun baked faces, flush with a cocktail or two, we expectantly awaiting the outcome of their culinary skills. Frequently, meals were served to accommodate an entire boatload of friends, everyone balancing plates and drinks in the cockpit. These feasts continued night after night, always with high praise heaped on the amazing kitchen crew!

Once we went tuna fishing off of Block. But I was the “accidental fisherman,” mainly going along to photograph the activities. The party thought it might be a good joke on our way back, after everyone had caught a yellow fin tuna in the 80 pound range, to watch me try to reel in one, using a stand-up belt (no fighting chair on the boat). They laughed as I struggled with the reel and the belt kept falling to my knees as my waist was too small, but I had the last laugh as I finally reeled in a 200 lb blue fin tuna. I couldn’t lift my arms for hours. Most of the tuna was sold at the dock at Montauk but we filleted one for ourselves and grilled it on the dock at Payne’s that night.

When not cooking up, we would pile into one of the cars that one of the family’s brought over on the ferry (this became the main means of transportation to the beach after our boys turned driving age), and went off to one of the many joints on Block Island, ending up at the one and only Ice Cream shop, which brought us to the Old Harbor, where the shops were. And when not at the beach, there was always a bike ride around Block, challenging because of its steep hills.

At one point we figured out ways of staying longer at Block, leaving our boats and families, taking the short flight to Westerly Airport where we would leave a car to commute back to our Connecticut offices for a few days to attend to business. On a couple of occasions we charted planes to Bridgeport Airport to attend to business, stretching out our Block Island stays.

Over the years we became part of the Payne’s “family.” Our son Jonathan thinks of Block as a second home and many of his friends are from the Block Island experience. At first Ray’s boat and mine were in the “pens” with easy on and off via our transoms, but later we went to the end of tees, our transoms facing each other. In our last boating days at Block we were rafted to Ray’s boat, the one they live on now, their 56’ ‘Last Dance.’

While our own boating lives have changed considerably these last few years, Block Island remains the prized destination in our boating memory.

Block Island Sunset

My father was a professional photographer and I learned much about photography from him. Over the years I had the advantage of having some excellent equipment ranging from the Speed Graphic of my youth to a number of Nikon 35mm cameras. But like everyone else, my equipment has migrated to the digital world.

For some twenty years we visited Payne's Dock at Block Island for our summer vacation on our boat. Block Island is a photographer’s paradise. I took this late 1990’s picture of a BI sunset with a very early digital, a Sony Mavica that allowed pictures to be saved directly to a floppy disk but with a limited number of pixels. Consequently, this photograph, a favorite of mine, is only detailed enough to display on a computer screen.

I remember looking out the window as we were getting ready for dinner, seeing this intense sunset and I grabbed the only camera that was readily available, the Sony. The photograph’s colors have not been enhanced. Block Island sunsets can be spectacular. This won an award sponsored by the Weather Channel, and was featured on their cable TV station.

In addition to the colors, the silhouettes of the dock, and the three individuals engaged in “dock talk” ostensibly oblivious to the sunset, enhance the drama and serenity of the scene.