windsend

Made in Maine

Just found out that Maine PBS will be airing a segment on our loft on Lou McNally's 'Made in Maine' at 8:30 pm on Thursday, October 21, at 8:30 pm. I'm afraid I'm going to miss the music of the Howard Fishman Quartet at PopTech.

Skype

I just (last night) made my first call on Skype. This is a free Internet telephony application that, as they say, just works. My friend Buzz turned me on to Skype. With my computer, a microphone and earphone, broadband Internet access and Skype, I can talk to any other Skype user anywhere in the world for as long as I want for free. I can also make calls to regular telephones in large parts of the world for about 2 cents a minute. The only missing part of the telephony equation is the ability of regular telephones to call me on Skype.

You can, incidently, do text chats and send files securely with the same software. Voice transmission quality is excellent, better than most land lines. And it's free - not $39.95 a month but free. I'm sort of wondering what the long term business plan is for phone companies...

Get Skype and give me a call. You'll find me as 'winfowler'. Be nice, or I'll put a caller block on you.

Carvin

This is my current bass guitar - a blue 1990 Carvin LB75 5-string. Mine is a fretless version, but you can't tell by looking, because it has inlays where the frets would be. In fact, I have to admit with considerable chagrin that when I first started playing it in Daddy's Junky Music store, it took me quite a while to realize that it didn't have frets. The inlays make it a lot easier to play for someone like me who has always played fretted guitars before. I picked it up because I really wanted the low B string.

The instrument very reasonably priced, so I thought it would be a good starter 5 string, but I now have no urge to buy another. The Carvin is really solid and sounds great - generally unobtrusive, but with a nice punchy, growl when desired.

I have also become a real fretless fan. Although your fingering has to be a little more precise for perfect pitch, you can always hit the note exactly, even if your tuning has gone a bit off in mid song. Also, if you happen to hit an iota high of the right spot you are not playing high by a full tone.

Last night, the Fabulous Icons (my brother Ben, Cleave Horton, and myself) got together for a practice session for the first time since playing at my sister's (non) wedding in August. Great to be back making music.

Eggs

Scheherazade wrote recently about how reading Angela's Ashes affected her enjoyment of eggs.  That got me thinking about my own feeling for eggs.

I was  immediately taken back to a time many years ago when I worked delivering grain to small farmers.  The really big farms got their grain delivered in a bulk truck and pumped right into a silo or some other big storage bin.  The smaller farmers got their grain in hundred pound burlap sacks.  That was the kind of delivery I did.   

I particularly remember one unpleasant old egg farmer I delivered to occasionally.  He was fat and ugly.  He had huge ears and a hairy nose pocked with giant pores.  His great jowls flapped when he talked, which he did in a high, poultry-like cackle.  He wore huge bib overalls and his limp, dirty looking grey hair stuck out in tufts from under a frayed, red and black plaid wool cap.

I didn't deliver him a few sacks every week, as I did to many small farmers, but about once month when he'd call in an order.  Then, my load usually consisted of fifty or sixty hundred pound bags of cracked corn, a few bags of a grain concotion called 'Hi-F Layer' and a few 50 pound sacks of ground up oyster shells (fed to the chickens to keep their egg shells strong). 

This man was very particular about where and how he wanted his grain delivered.  It wasn't just to be dropped off the back of the truck.  He wanted the sacks stacked just so, and he liked to lean against the barn door and watch me do it, critiquing my every move.  It was back breaking work, unloading and stacking five or six thousand pounds of grain, and I always ended up sweating profusely and cursing under my breath during that stop.   But once the work was done and I'd caught my breath and was driving away, I found the whole thing kind of humorous, and I never tried to avoid the assigment of delivering to this guy. 

I fancied this man lived entirely on a diet of eggs, because that's what he had, and I thought he was probably too cheap to buy anything at a store.  I know he fed his barn cats with eggs, ones that were cracked or he couldn't sell for some reason.  He'd throw them with shells into a big cast iron frying pan on the kitchen range (a wood stove of course) and when they were cooked hard he'd set the whole mess out in the barn, skillet and all.

I attributed all the things I didn't like about this man to a diet of eggs - his gross obesity, his ugly face, his cackle, his sadistic streak.  It took me quite a while to be able to enjoy eggs again myself, and never eat them more than a couple of times a week.

Morning Walk

My weekly exercise routine is three days in the gym and three days on one of my local four mile walking loops. That's the theory, at least. Today it was also the practice. I rolled out of bed at just before 5 am, threw on a sweat suit, a cap, and laced on my hikers.

Now, on the winter side of the equinoxes but still in daylight savings, the night lasts until well past 6 am, so most of the walk would be in 'darkness'. This morning, the full moon struggled to cast its glow through a thick haze. I carry a flashlight to alert the few cars I meet of my presence, but generally try to walk by ambient light.

Today, passing the 'Twilight Farm', I surprised a deer crossing the road, a dark shape that appeared out of the gloom and almost ran into me, then turned and leapt a fence into the roadside pasture and disappeared as quickly as it had come.

I often listen to BBC's World Update as I walk. I probably shouldn't. The mideast madness which gets most of the air time puts me at too much of a distance from where I am. I will miss an owl's cry or a flock of turkeys gabbling or just the wind sighing in the trees. After the deer was gone, I turned off my little Walkman, pulled out the earphones, and felt the better for it.

The last quarter mile of this morning's loop takes me onto a dirt road, up a long hill lined with wild blackberry bushes, and finally through a brief bit of woods where the road has been abandoned and overgrown. The woods section ends at my neighbor's wood pile, and from there it's a brief, down hill stretch to home.

The sweatband of my hat was soaked from perspiration and the morning damp. I sat to cool down for a few minutes on the old teak bench on our brick walk that we claimed from my parents' house, and watched the light come up in the yard.

Loft Report

Things have almost ground to a halt this week at MSP, due to a severe shortage of personel. Tomek has returned to Poland, Sam is back in the halls of academe, Rob is honeymooning in Hawaii, and Ken is at his dying grandmother's bedside. However, the Rob and Ken should be back in the traces before the week is out, and Sam's big brother Charlie is putting in some hours between classes.

Meanwhile, we are completing a Leisurefurl mainsail and furling genoa for a new 52 footer by Lyman Morse, and starting work on a new Cuben Fiber mainsail for Ocean Planet for the Vendee Globe. The latter is a project we undertook with many misgivings (that I won't go into here). Hopefully, we will learn much and also help Bruce Schwab on his quest...

Deletum Update

I just received the following e-mail. I don't know Senor Villalobos, but I have no reason to doubt his veracity:

"From: ADOLFO.VILLALOBOS@telefonica.net
"Subject: Deletum 5000

"I comment you that Deletum 3000 is available now in Mexico as antigrafiti paint, problem of this product is its brighness (shinning?) that is not suitable for many applications where a shinning finish is not appreciated.

"Other problem that is being solved now is a proper way to retire the product once you decide , there is no commercial solvent able for the job, so they have been developing a kind of ´soft´sandblast that is another patent in the process around.

"Deletum 5000 is still in development stage (industrial) and will be available soon, it is opaque and more suitable for aplications in arquitecture, same properties different finish.

"I don´t know about antifouling properties due the fact that it has no antivegetative components and mixing some could be difficult (molecule sizes), but is something we can find out.

"Actually my company is starting some testings and selling in Spain, and there is a firm using the product in Mexico and USA.

"Hope some of your questions are satisficed.

"Regards.

"AV"

My Reply:

"Hi Adolfo,

Thank you for the update on Deletum. I have passed your message on to my readers, so you may get some inquiries.

If you are looking for someone to test the antifouling qualities of Deletum, I would be interested.

Best,

Windsend"

Globalization

This spring my loft built three sails for a customer who was planning to sail his big handsome old wooden Rhodes cutter, named Thunderhead, on a circumnavigation of the North Atlantic. Due to various setbacks in his commissioning schedule, we never head the chance to do proper shakedown on the sails before his departure. In the end, he left before we ever got a good look at the sails. If we had done so, we would surely have caught the fact that the mast did not behave as we expected, and we would have had a chance to adjust the mainsail luff curve to match the real mast bend (or in this case, the lack thereof).

After the owner finished the first leg of his trip, the crossing from Maine to Ireland, he called to say that the yankee (a high-clewed jib) and staysail were excellent, but that he was not overjoyed with the mainsail. He expressed regret that he would have to live with the problems for the remainder of the trip. After looking at a digital photo we had taken when the sail when first hoisted and listening to his description of the problem, it was clear to me that the mast was much stiffer than we expected, and consequently that we had built too much luff curve into the sail.

The owner had taken the sail to a loft in Ireland to repair some minor damage inflicted on the crossing. I initiated an e-mail exchange with the sailmaker there to inquire whether he had the time and resources to make adjustments to the luff curve to my specifications and how much he would charge to do so. After a little negotiation, we settled on a price, and he agreed to do the work in the relatively short window of opportunity the owner had available.

When I asked the Irish sailmaker about how to pay him for the work (this was an adjustment that we would have done for free for the owner, were he still in Maine, so we felt we should pay for it), he said that just by chance he was about to buy a motorcycle suit from a company in Minnesota that was going to cost him just about what he had quoted for the re-cut, so, instead of paying him, I should call Minnesota and have that company charge the appropriate amount to my credit card and apply the payment to his account.

In the middle of the re-cut, the sailmaker emailed me a photo of the new luff curve before putting the sail back together, and we agreed that it looked just about right. The owner picked up the re-cut sail and immediately thereafter set sail for the Mediterranean. Normally, we would have been left to wonder whether our efforts had succeeded, but we were able to lean from the owner’s online log that the re-cut was a success.

This whole sequence of events would have been impossible just a few years ago for any number of reasons. It's quite an amazing new and smaller world we live in.

It's official

WSSR Newsletter No 77
The WSSR Council announces the ratification of a new World Record:
RECORD: Outright longest distance run in 24 hours
Yacht: Orange 2
Sailed by: Bruno Peyron
Dates: 22nd and 23rd August 2004.
Distance travelled: 706.2 nm.
Average speed: 29. 42 kts.
John Reed.
Secretary to the WSSR Council

Missing in Action

Sorry for my lack of posts recently. I have been busy sorting out a J/160 and watching US Open Tennis. I'll try to get back on track...