Bucking the Tide

[Art Haberland]

so far it is good. I am need to get through it till I can read "me, the boy, and the cat"

[Michel]

I finished reading "Little Breeze" It is a nice sailing story. A more extreme thing than what is in "Bucking the tide" but I liked them both.

I know that I would not try to make a voyage like in Little Breeze. I prefer more modest adventures more in the ways of "Bucking the tide" wich are quite something to me since I mostly day sail anyway.

Now I feel like reading "The compleat cruiser" again because it is what sailing and cruising in a small sailboat is about.

An other very good book that comes to my mind is " The trailer sailor handbook" by Bob Burgess. That one is so perfectly written that I could smell the water in the Florida Keys when I read it!

[lustyslogger]

I have read Compleat Cruiser almost as much as I have read Atlas Shrugged. Its language is a bit stilted and I have never known a 14 year old girl to be as compliant as "Miss Prim" but it is still a good book on what "cruising" is really all about

[Michel]

You are right! It is a kind of pedagogical fiction. Only some kind of artificial life form, a feminine android would be like that!

[lustyslogger]

You are right! It is a kind of pedagogical fiction. Only some kind of artificial life form, a feminine android would be like that!

LOL LOL

My impression of most teen aged girls is one with her hands on her hips saying "Whatever"


And for the record I have three daughters, three grand daughters and one great grand daughter so I speak from experience.

[Michel]

I also have two daughters and one grand daughter. We have similar Karma !

[lustyslogger]

Just finished another book, 500 Days by Sergio Tessa. It was his account of sailing around the world in an 11 foot boat. Although it took him three years to complete the circumnavigation he actually spend 500 days at sea doing it. It was a very good book in my opinion, well written and organized.

At first I thought, oh no, here we go again, rough seas, storms, etc etc. But then I remembered back on my two years at sea in the Navy. We sailed from Yokosuka Japan to the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Admiralty Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Hawaii and then back to Long Beach, over the course of two years. Now this was in a 365 ft World War II era Destroyer. The number of days where the seas were flat or nearly so were extremely few and far between. Most of the sailing was in 20 to 30 mph winds, with the ship rocking from side to side enough that the fan tail was rarely dry and had water rushing from on side to the other. The Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand was particularly rough and was the only time I got sea sick after having been as sea for any length of time (I would always be queasy the first day out after 10 days ashore but this was sea was up and down, up and down up and down). I have been in the Coral Sea, the South China Sea, the Tasman Sea, the Sea of Japan and the vast Pacific Ocean. None of these seas were particularly pond like in nature.

We were once caught in a typhoon off the coast of the Philippines. We were healing as much as 40 degrees on a regular basis. We took green water of the bridge and I cannot imagine what life would have been on an eleven foot aluminum sailboat!!

Anyway, it was a good book, highly recommended and now its time for another 3 or 4 of them.

[Art Haberland]

Lusty, you remind me of stories my father told when he was in the navy back in the mid-sixties.

his first ship was a ww2 era LST.. possibly one of the last in service as she was being used to test new engines and pitchable props. They went around the horn in a storm with the fleet.. He was the only helmsman the captain trusted to do that storm, so he was on the helm for 30 straight.. he remembers seeing the carriers going deck to the ocean with the waves..

later the carrier guys said the destroyer and LST crews should have gotten submarine pay, as most of the time they were under the water, not on it.

[lustyslogger]

Lusty, you remind me of stories my father told when he was in the navy back in the mid-sixties.

his first ship was a ww2 era LST.. possibly one of the last in service as she was being used to test new engines and pitchable props. They went around the horn in a storm with the fleet.. He was the only helmsman the captain trusted to do that storm, so he was on the helm for 30 straight.. he remembers seeing the carriers going deck to the ocean with the waves..

later the carrier guys said the destroyer and LST crews should have gotten submarine pay, as most of the time they were under the water, not on it.

If I thought tin cans were rough riders LST's with their flat bottoms must have been sheer hell in those conditions. I was in the Navy from 65 to 71 and saw a lot of those ships in Vietnam. We called them shallow water sailors since they could go right up on the beach. They were the Sea Pearls of the Navy.

[Art Haberland]

Lusty,

where were you at? My father was in Vietnam from 68 through 69 as part of the Riverine Forces. First in PBRs and later Romeo boats.