I once “taught” myself celestial navigation. I borrowed a sextant, studied the excellent and concise six-page how-to penned by the late William F. Buckley in his account of a trans-Atlantic passage, Airborne, and took it all aboard an aging 60-foot plywood catamaran I was silly enough to agree to skipper from Falmouth to Florida in the fall of 1980. What most navigators spend years learning I tried to master over the course of a weekend and on Loop Beach in Cotuit.

The crew on that voyage were all recruited from a classified ad in the Boston Globe and had no idea what was going on at any time, a situation which meant I had to pretty much steer and sail and navigate by myself bewcause the boat insisted on sailing WAY too fast for any one to be trusted on the wheel.

Somewhere south of Long Island, around the shipping lanes into New York City, I broke out the sextant, braced myself in the rigging, and took a noon shot to establish our position. This was 1980, way before Global Positioning Satellites. Oher than LORAN (which the evil catamaran lacked) or the notoriously flaky radio directional finder, there was no other way to accurately fix one’s position other than measuring the angle between the sun and the horizon the way Columbus and the Portugese did in the 14th century.

I took my shots — feeling all Melville and shit — gathered my numbers, and went down below to the nav station to work out the math. I got my cartesian solution, looked at the chart, and discovered my first attempt at navigation placed us somewhere in the vicinity of Troy, New York, about twenty miles north of Albany. Since the entire crew was watching — everyone more than a little terrified since we were way out of the sight of land and careening off of the top of immense winter Atlantic waves in a plywood boat creaking and groaning like a gut-shot moose — I realized that putting the point of the pencil down on Troy, New York was a very bad morale move. So I reached for my big plastic right triangle and pretend-extended the line southeast about 400 miles to a fictitious spot I figured was roughly in line with where we might be. With great conviction I made a little X, wrote down the data and time, and declared this was the spot.

An hour later I saw an outbound tanker on the horizon. I told the crew I was going to get a position check over the radio as that was standard maritime practice. I hailed the unknown boat by saying something relatively retarded as “Tanker heading east, Tanker heading east. This is the sailing vessel SinkaLot looking for a position check.”

The anonymous mariner on the bridge of that tanker responded and had a little fun with me.

“Where do you think you are Cap?” he asked over the VHF.

“Uh, about fifty miles south by southeast of Montauk Point Cap.” I replied.

“What’s your last fix Cap?” he asked. I thought I was the one asking the questions. But no, this Mass Maritime grad was going to have his amusement with the yachtsman in the silly sailboat.

All was well a day later when we sighted the beaches of Delaware and were able to grope out way into Chesapeake Bay. Two weeks later and I abandoned ship in Brunswick, Georgia, thoroughly cured of any desire to sail big cruising catamarans in the Atlantic in the late fall. I also sold my first magazine article because of that trip, receiving a massive $100 from Multihulls magazine for my trouble.

As I get ready to launch my sloop tomorrow, I’ve been elbow deep in everything from marine diesel water pump impellers to six coats of Epifanes varnish. The boat is 27 years old and has no navigational instruments to speak of. For the past two seasons I’ve owned the boat I’ve used the Navionics Android app on my smartphone to get the occasional fix on my position, using the phone’s GPS to zero in on whatever spot I happen to be sailing through on Nantucket Sound. But what I want is a big fancy chart plotter mounted on the binnacle. A nice electronic chart to steer my tall ship by.

Those things cost at least $1,000 and would be comparable to installing a $2000 stereo in a $50 car. In the grand scheme of things to throw money at aboard that hole in the water known as a boat, a fancy GPS chart plotter is low on the list. So, I have embarked on a mission to ruin my two-year old iPad in the service of DIY modern navigation.

Other than Navionics, who publishes excellent digital versions of the official NOAA charts for my Android (and the iPad) I am very fond of the iNavX app and have been busy plotting all sorts of waypoints and courses around my home waters …. from my armchair. The iPad has a faux GPS and internal compass, but to really enable it as a navigational aid I need to drop $100 on a little GPS dongle that plugs into the charging port. There’s the BadElf device, which looks perfect once I figure out whether or not my antique iPad is indeed a “66-channel, SBAS/WAAS, 10Hz” model.

Assuming that the GPS dongle will make the iPad plot my position, the next issue is how to protect it from the elements. I won’t ever submerge the tablet (unless I sink), but it will get splashed and rained on and saltwater is cancerous when it comes to anything electronic. I was conned out of my money by a clueless clerk at Radio Shack who sold me an Otterbox case — which I discovered won’t work with the original iPad and has since been bequeathed to my son who sports an iPad II. It looks like I’ll have to go with a plastic bag sort of solution (some online yachting and marine electronics forums say a big Zip-Loc is up to the task).

Once water-protected I have to mount the iPad to the stainless steel guard rail on the binnacle — the stanchion that supports the boat’s wheel, engine control and compass. That should be simple enough, as long as I stay away from the binnacle’s manufacturer — Edson of New Bedford — who is hideously overpriced and does its level best to uphold the nautical adage of ripping up twenties while taking a shower.

I’ve used RAM mounts in the past on the motorboat, so will probably go in that direction despite their proclivity to corrode and peel psoriasis-like over time.

I’m banking that this set up will get me fully chart-plotter capable for under $200. The advantages will be the relatively long battery life of the iPad versus the two-hour lifespan on my HTC Evo phone. The screen is big, but, as any beach reader knows, iPads are useless in sunlight. That means seeking out a glare screen — some matte finish film that will give me a hope of seeing the screen in bright light. I am concerned, on the flip side, of night brightness, as other sailors who have kludged together an iPad nav solution say the lack of a brightness control means they trash their night vision. The map software from iNavX does have a “red light” mode for night use, so I think I’ll be okay, indeed, given that 95% of my sailing is done within the sight of land, the only real need for the plotter other than amusement is for night sailing and in fog (no, I do not own a radar).

The entire effect of smartphones and iPads on the electronics industry is well understood by anyone who owns one. They manage to consolidate lots of dedicated devices into one handy package and in doing so completely kill the market for stuff like digital pocket cameras, music players, and dashboard navigation systems. These multifunction swiss army knives eat into any application they touch, hence I am amused when I read the discussion forums on the marine electronics sites and listen to the proud owners of $10,000 NMEA capable Raytheon or Datamarine navigation systems diss the iPad as a failed solution no one should consider.

They may not be advised to contemplate the solution, but the reality is they will, so I predict the market for dedicated marine electronics is going to rapidly erode over the next few years as Apple and the Android tablet makers address the daylight-screen issue and waterproof-ruggedness. I have my eye on the Panasonic Toughbook Android tablet, but the alleged price on the soon-to-be-introduced  device looks like more than $1000 which makes that a failure.

Once I figure out the iPad issue the next step is to install a WIFI station on the boat and look into integrating the depth, apparent wind, and knotmeters into the iPad display. I’m also fascinated by the AIS technology, which basically is a transponder system that overlays information about AIS equipped vessels onto the iNavX charts. Think of it as radar without the radar, giving me everything from vessel name and size, to distance, speed and bearing.

Oh, and I am still determined to get better at classic sextant based navigation as there is no doubt in my mind that when I need the electronics the most, they are sure to fail. And, when escaping the zombie apocalypse, one has to assume the GPS system will eventually fail and those with the knowledge of the ancients will survive.

Eels face poaching threat | CapeCodOnline.com.

There haven’t been many eels around in a long time. The Asian market for baby eels — or elvers — is probably to blame, what with prices up around $2,000 a pound and plenty of poachers willing to risk the law to cash in on the action.

Cotuit was infested with eels in the 60sthrough the 70s. A kid couldn’t fish off the Town Dock without hooking into one. My grandmother was a big fan but I never developed a taste until I experienced broiled eel in sushi form — unagi/unago – and have even tried to duplicate the recipe after my cousin landed a whopper a few years back in his crab pot.

My grandmother had an interesting way of skinning the things. A nail pounded through the head into the side of the boat shed, a quick slit around the neck with a sharp paring knife, and then a quick “un-socking” with two pairs of pliers gripping the slimy edges of the neck cut. This all while the eel went beserk and tied itself into figure-eight knots and spun around the nail like a pinwheel.

The joys of a Cape Cod childhood. The woman meant business when it came to food, even if she was allergic to hardshell bivalves.

Anyway, those mature eels — anguilla anguilla — or the European Eel, aren’t what the poachers are chasing. They are looking for the small fry heading  up the coastal streams from the ocean. Eels are “catadromous” fish: they spend their lives in fresh water (there is (or was) a mysterious albino eel in Thoreau’s Walden Pond that evidently crawled over land to get there) and return to the sea — specifically the Sargasso Sea south of Bermuda — to spawn. The elvers, or glass eels, make their way back from the floating rafts of seaweed in the Sargasso and take residence in the ponds of New England.

They make excellent striped bass bait when they are about a foot in length. Bluefish destroy them. They are an utter mess to try to hook and can literally tie themselves in a knot when provoked.

Now the eel is critically endangered, and with scarcity comes the cruel law of economics which means they are even more valuable to those who eat them, hence the extraordinary poaching price of $2,000 a pound. Hydroelectric dams and their turbines do a terrible number on them as well.

The Cape Cod Times today reported on the arrests of two poachers:

“The price spike stems from a surge in demand from aquaculturists in Asian countries who purchase the wild juvenile elvers, raise them until they reach a half-pound then sell them in the sushi market, explained Mitchell Feigenbaum, principal of Delaware Valley Fish Co. of Portland, Maine. A significant drop in recent years in the number of wild Asian glass eels, combined with a European ban on exporting their own wild stock, meant the U.S. elvers suddenly commanded high prices. Feigenbaum said the price increase really isn’t that large when you consider the profit farmers make selling the adult eels on the high-end sushi market. A good farmer, he said, could turn $2,000 worth of glass eels into $20,000 in sales.

A dozen years ago, the price for glass eels was $25 a pound. In recent years, it climbed to $325 and last year reached $900. Now at more than $2,000, the tiny translucent eels, less than 6 inches long, newly arrived in the Cape’s rivers and streams from the Sargasso Sea this spring, were particularly inviting to poachers.

Harwich police Sgt. Brackett had no way of knowing, but the 2 pounds of elvers swimming in those unpretentious buckets could have fetched $4,000 to $5,000 when sold in Maine, one of only two states where it is legal to harvest and sell them. With prices that high, competition for prime spots on Maine’s waterways has been fierce and the yields are nowhere near what fishermen get in Massachusetts, where the elver fishery is banned and the competition virtually nonexistent.

“I hear stories of someone coming in (to dealers) with 50 pounds of eels and I think, they must have been to Massachusetts,” said Gail Wippelhauser, a Maine Department of Marine Resources scientist specializing in eels. “There’s noplace in Maine where you can get that many eels in one night.”

If you see anyone creeping around a run at night, drop a dime to the police please.

In memory of the man and the band that gave me one of the best final-500-meter-sprint-to-the-finish-in-glory ergometer songs, one that has always been, and always will remain in that playlist simply called “Erg:”

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There’s a reason they call them “the Bumps….”

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What’s with the demented squirrel?

Some background from the man who wrote THE goddamn Book of Rowing:

The “Torpids” or “Bumps” are a traditional rowing contest conducted on the River Isis (part of the Thames) in England every Spring. Because the Isis is too narrow to permit side-by-side starts, the crew start about a length and a half apart, with the coxswains (the little people who steer the boats) holding onto ropes secured to the river bank. Everyone starts at once — when a gun or horn is sounded — and the object is to row as quickly as one can and “bump” the boat ahead of you.  If bumped you keep on rowing with the possibility of being bumped again. If you are the bumper, then you get to stop rowing and somehow advance up the ladder towards being King of the River. Or something like that.

You try to figure the rules out from Wikipedia. I can’t.

I’ve been mulling a side-project for a while. A separate blog that would profile 365 extraordinary people. I’m talking the lunatic fringe that lifts cars off of people with superhuman bursts of desperate adrenalin, survive grizzly bear attacks by biting the bear’s jugular vein, and hit Omaha Beach brandishing a Scottish broad sword.

The inspiration came to me from the once-awesome history blog — Axis of Evel Knievel — where every day saw a post relating some extraordinary catastrophe, natural disaster, or act of human mayhem that occurred on that date. Any blog with the tagline: “Another Day, Another Pointless Atrocity” and this banner image is okay with me.

Anyway — I thought I’d jump the gun and share four anecdotes of manliness. I’ll probably never pull the trigger. I’m keeping a list and only have 100 names (men and women, suggestions and nominations welcome)

The first is from Zach Galifinakis in the trailer to Morgan Spurlock’s upcoming film on modern manliness: “Mansome.” Thirty seconds into the video, Mister Galifinakis basically ends any tenuous connection I may have had with my Klout score when he destroys Twitter with the  quick zinger: “Real men don’t tweet.”

Just as Norman Mailer’s title Tough Guys Don’t Dance kept me off of any and all dance floors, Galifinakis just took the magic out of Tweeting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s to that.

Now, for a preview of the kind of manly men I would hope to bring to your attention if I were to stop procrastinating.

1. Mad Jack Churchill. British commando in World War II who went into battle with a broadsword. He had the only confirmed bow-and-arrow kill of the war when he shot a Nazi in the neck and was captured while defiantly playing the bag pipes. He is on the far right in the photo below. That is a sword in his hand.

2. Sandy Irvine: he died on the flanks of Mount Everest while climbing it with George “Because It’s There” Mallory. In the last year of his life, Irvine managed to: win the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, explore the arctic island of Spitzbergen, bang his roommate’s step-mother, and get invited to pull on a sweater and go for the summit with Mallory. A friend wrote: “ ”One cannot imagine Sandy content to float placidly in some quiet back-water, he was the sort that must struggle against the current and, if need be, go down foaming in full body over the precipice[ital.mine].” I think am going to adopt that last phrase as my motto.

3. C. Dale Petersen: killed a grizzly bear with his bare hands by sticking his arm down its throat and biting its jugular vein. Need more be said? The pic tells the tale:

It’s a tradition of sorts on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard to occasionally vent the salt ponds along the southern shores and let them “freshen” up with some new seawater. Sometimes the locals get in some trouble for bulldozing a gut through the sand, but all in all the ecologists seem to agree that its nature’s’ way to occasionally breach the beach and flush things out.

Here in Cotuit, at the southern end of the village, lies Rushy Marsh — a small brackish pond surrounded by big houses with spectacular views, but choked with phragmites and all but devoid of life. This pond was once a true salt pond, with regular tidal exchange with Nantucket Sound, but as Cotuit historian Jim Gould points out in his recent excellent history of the area, the shore began to change in 1910 due to human interference with the natural order of the coast — aka the littoral drift —  in the form of the Wianno Cut and the shoreside groins.  Eventually Rushy Marsh was walled off from the Sound and began to stagnate.

It hasn’t been open since 1911.

In 1999 some local residents banded together as the Friends of Rushy Marsh and were able to secure the permits and funding needed to restore the connection between the marsh and the sound. From the Cape Cod Times article of September 21, 2010:

“In the case of Rushy Marsh, Joanne Erikson, Gretchen Reilly and a group of neighbors started talking to the town more than a decade ago about re-opening the marsh to the sea.

“They were concerned about the spreading phragmites, an invasive species of grass that thrives in fresh water, and the lack of fish and other marine life in Rushy Marsh.

“They raised money to help fund a water quality study, the latest of which showed that their marsh was dying. They were also told that wastewater from their septic systems was adding too many nutrients to the marsh, causing runaway plant growth.

“They are hoping that the renewed tidal flow from the new project will flush out enough contaminants to prevent the need to install sewers. For the reopening of a collapsed sluiceway to the marsh, $271,000 is allocated.

“We’re looking forward to the day when people can fish there again,” said Erikson.”

Their work has come to fruition, and as my cousin wrote when he emailed me this photo: “Let the healing begin.”

I’ve heard this used to be an excellent place to catch white perch — a species found only in coastal ponds (the record has been caught on Nantucket in one of the island’s ponds) — maybe someday they’ll come back and be worth pursuing.

A lot of people deserve credit for making this happen. The town’s conservation commission, Three Bays Preservation, the Barnstable Land Trust, and of course, the dedicated band of neighbors who pushed it through. Here’s the new sluiceway from the marsh across Oregon Beach. Looking at it makes me imagine I can hear the pond smile and exhale a big sigh of relief.

The pond is at the top of the aerial photo below:

Links:

• Three Bays: their Rushy Marsh page.
• The 2002 study that kicked things off.
• Jim Gould’s blog post on Rushy “Russia” Marsh
• Cape Cod Times article on the ladies who saved Rushy Marsh.
• My post on the effect that groins and jetties have had on the beaches around Cotuit.

I have some catching up to do with my reading recommendations. A lot of my time has been spent in marine diesel and electronics manuals the past week as I get ready to recommission my sloop for the summer season. If you want to know how to bleed the air from a diesel engine’s fuel system or replace an AC shore power circuit, I am your man. Rather than dig through every thing I’ve read over the past two weeks — and there have been some great long-form reads — I’ll devote this edition of the Lit’ry Life to:

Digital Behavior Modification

Stephen Marche’s piece in the Atlantic Monthly, Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?  is a good companion to Sherry Turkle’s oped in the New York Times Sunday opinion section, The Flight From Conversation and Gary Wilson’s TedX talk on The Great Porn Experiment. Taken as a trifecta of content, it is a compelling and depressing sociological attack on the behavior modification the Age of Information Overload is having on our relatively slow-to-evolve brains.

Many other better informed critics have written at length on the alarming rise of a technically driven dystopia.   The argument that social/communication technologies from Twitter to text messaging are making us  more alienated from each other, not more connected is gaining empirical steam. Technology is blamed for everything from driving attention deficit disorder diagnoses through the roof to making men weird hairy-palmed porn addicts.

At my advanced age (soon to turn 54) I’m ready to plead guilty to technical senescence and invoke my AARP status as an aging luddite who just doesn’t get it anymore. Just as my parent’s generation was confused by blinking VCR clocks and the concept of “right click/left click” it may be my turn to lag the tech curve when it comes to location sharing, status updates, incessant liking, linking, curating and filming my skateboard disasters with a GoPro camera strapped to my hoodie. I may tag a food truck with my Google Glasses in a couple years, but ….if you haven’t noticed already, I’ve all but given up on Facebook as am astounded by my friends who post every beer, every Kony viral video view, every I’m-On-Vacation-And-You-Aren’t photo in the hope that someone will take notice and comment. I could care less about my Klout score. The only time I read Twitter is to check out some vile new comedian’s inappropriate 140-character quip. Going to LinkedIn is an exercise in who’s-viewed-my-profile narcissism.

The good news is I sense my own kids are indifferent to technically driven communications. One doesn’t have a Facebook profile and vows he never will. The other two dismiss Facebook as a 40-something loser haven. Only one has a Twitter account. They prefer text messages over phone calls and email. For the most part they look at technology as a platform for entertainment — be it a game or a song or a movie/tv show. So there is hope.

Read the depressing tales above then step away from the screens and get outdoors.

Peck’s Turbine May Spin Again – Barnstable – Communities | The Enterprise Newspapers.

I love wind power. The turbines around the upper Cape are things of beauty and I continue to look forward to the offshore wind farm that starts construction next year on Horseshoe Shoal.

Closer to home, at Peck’s Boats, the turbine that lost its blades two years ago may spin again.  I hope it does. The last one was destroyed in a storm, scattering broken blades around the abuttors’ property, and this effort to rebuild with new technology will probably face a great deal of opposition.

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One of the greats is gone. He was also a great actor.

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