Sailors Ahoy

There may not be anything better from our point of view that hearing from fellow sailors (boaters) as they travel along.

Imagine our delight this weekend, to hear from old Bradenton, Florida, boaters Jerry and Marsha who had brought their boat up the Chester River on the Chesapeake to the lovely town of Chestertown. We had visited this great place sometime ago as we were meandering through the Chesapeake.

We drove two hours up to meet with them to hear of their adventures aboard their boat. I might have written about Jerry a couple of years back when he ran his Hatteras powerboat onto a rock in the Okeechobee Waterway across Florida. The rock ripped the stabilizer fine off the boat and then push it into the hull, creating a Titanic-like slash on the back of the hull. The boat sank in the waterway, with its bow up on the bank. Jerry and Marsha escaped and their boat was a complete write off because the water got into their engines and ruined them.

Now, I thought that would be the end of their adventures in the water world. But Jerry and Marsha are tough stock. After licking their wounds, they found another Hatteras powerboat and began the adventure all over again.

And here they were, making their way to Long Island Sound for the summer.
We drove through the lush Delaware and Maryland countryside, with the hundreds of chicken houses that house millions of cluckers then eventually end up in American ovens or frying pans. The houses these guys are penned in are long and low. They generally have two huge (4-6 foot diameter) fans that suck in fresh air. Delaware is the home of Perdue Chicken, as well as a host of other markets. There are many processing plants scattered around the state. Quite surprisingly, you rarely smell the chickens as you drive by.

We sat on the banks of the Chester River with Jerry and Marsha and had a delightful lunch. A waterman came in with his crab boat and we watched as he untied Jerry's dinghy so he could tie up.
Jerry sent Marsha out to the dinghy (he has a weak leg and has some difficulty walking). When Marsha and Jo got there, a marine cop pulled in behind the waterman and cited him for something. He wrote out a ticket then turned his attention to the dinghy. He asked Marsha if she was the owner because the dinghy had an out-of-date registration sticker. Marsha said her husband was in the restaurant and the cop waited for us to come out.

He radioed in the registration information and the radio squawked after a few minutes that the registration had lapsed in 1901. I laughed when I heard that. But the cop didn't seem that amused.

He checked to see that Jerry had four life jackets aboard (he did) and then followed us out into the river and to the boat to check the registration. It was, in fact, expired and he wrote a ticket for $65 for the incident.

Then he stood on the back deck and chatted in a friendly kind of way about how he had arrested the waterman who had moved the dinghy last year for placing several illegal nets in the river. He had caught 25,000 lbs of some kind of fish. He said his fine amounted to $130,000 because the nets were a $30,000 fine and the fish were assessed at $4 a pound.

We waved goodbye to this fellow and then sat aboard as the wind blew at 20 knots, creating a bit of tempest in the river.

Marsha and Jerry returned us to shore when the breeze quietened down and we drove back to the campground, meeting thousands of cars heading the other way on their way home from the weekend on the shore.

Tuesday morning, we received a phone call from old friends and sailing buddies Corky and Sue. They had just sailed into Ocean City, Maryland, aboard their 47-foot catamaran. This is 32 miles south of us. Now we head down to have dinner with them on Wednesday before we head out of Leisure Point Resort on Thursday morning.

We found them lugging laundry back to their dinghy and we settled into a waterside restaurant for a four-hour dinner to hear their tales of cruising Bahamian crystaline waters... as well as stories of life aboard, weather horrors and future plans for their 47-foot carbon-fiber catamaran named Surprise. We'll meet up with them once we get to Connecticut since they still own a spectacular home that's been on the market far too long.

We had toyed with the idea of immediately heading for Alaska this year but have abandoned the idea because we really need to be on the west coast of the U.S. right now to make it possible to spend enough time in the remote northwest of Yukon Territory and Alaska in June, July and August. So we are now planning to head out from Delaware on today (May 29) and drive north to Connecticut to visit with our daughter and family. We'll spend a few weeks there and attend the graduation of our oldest granddaughter who moves up to high school in the fall. Then we'll move north to visit our younger daughter and family in Vermont for a month before setting out across the Maine woods and down to the shore during August.

Free at Last....

Yes. They put us out of our misery today. We knew our chances for continuing at Leisure Point Resort were shrinking day by day. We were terminally bored with our duties. Working the marina store ended up being a joke. I would sit outside the store for eight hours and would help a boater tie up when he wanted gas for his boat. I handed him the nozzle and chatted with him while he filled the tank and then spilled the gasoline into the bay - every time. I told the owners they were liable for a $10,000 pollution fine from the U.S. Coast Guard if someone reported the ongoing pollution. I suggested they provide oil-absorbing pads (retail cost 77 cents each) to prevent these spills. But they laughed at that idea.
Jo's job inside the store was to see that the coffee pots were filled regularly - not exactly brain-expanding.
We kept looking for ways to make the hours less boring. I would endlessly sweep perfectly clean decks, Jo walked around the store with a duster, flicking an invisible dust.
So we were just relieved this morning when Stu, the essentially useless and bumbling manager, called us up to the office and said the resort would pay us for the gas we'd used to drive from Florida. And they would allow us to stay rent-free on the site for two weeks while we got our ducks in a row.
Thank you, very much.

Now we are free to reconsider our options for the summer. So we'll let you know how the adventure changes.

On Staying in Touch

We've been Workamping now for one month...and we're surviving well enough. Work is not all it's cracked up to be, of course. But that, as they say, is why they call it work. We have done everything from weeding (ugh!) to cleaning bathrooms (hate it!) to vacuuming, painting, planting, sweeping up goose poop. Now we have started work at the marina store (the reason we were hired), things are looking up. We open the store tomorrow and folks will be able to come in by car or boat to get food, groceries, fishing gear and even gasoline. We're pretty excited about the possibilities.
We don't have to cook because the owners have hired a cook and he and we will make it happen after the first few days.
Now while all this is on-going, there have been lots of other interesting diversions. We've made the 320-mile trip north and east to get the boat uncovered and readied for sale. Now it's in the hands of a broker so we wait.
I also have been editing online the work of a wonderfully bright reporter in Namibia. Luqman Cloete has a good story he's working on about a handicrafts center in his town being told they will lose their funding and will have to make the crafts, market them and sustain themselves without outside help. I love the concept that Luqman can simply email me the story with a request that I edit it and come up with suggestions for improvements. All of this happens as though he is in the next office. Time and distance simply has no meaning because of the Internet.
And equally exciting, as I was reading the New York Times on Tuesday, I discovered that Hla Hla Htay, a brilliant, bright young woman who passed through the Southeast Asia Media Center training school while I was there in Phnom Penh, popped up with two pictures in The New York Times from Myanmar.
Hla Hla got her job as a reporter for Agence France-Presse when the Bangkok bureau chief called us in Cambodia one day back in 2004. She asked if we had trained any good Burmese journalists who might be candidates for the bureau position in Yangon (Rangoon). Hla Hla was in training with us at that time. She is a tiny woman but I felt she had the heart of a lion. She is smart, thoughtful, inquisitive. She was honest but she was oh-so-shy and self-effacing.
After I recommended her and the bureau chief in Bangkok said she would meet with her for an interview in Thailand on Hla Hla's journey back home, I sat down with her and coached her on the art of the job interview. She got the job and we kept in touch for a year. But then her emails bounced back as the junta in Burma cracked down on Internet use. I kept trying to reach her but without success.
So you might imagine my delight at finding her credit line on two pictures played across half a page in The Times on Tuesday. She clearly has established herself. I remember that Hla Hla made $50 a month as a reporter before coming to our media center. When she returned to Yangon, she was employed at $1,000 a month - an astonishing increase in pay.