Bandon showed us a good time. We'd opted for a more southern hidey-hole than Coos Bay which, it had been rumored, didn't offer the sort of shore life that at least ONE of Andante's crew was looking for. The moorage was cheap, if a little shabby, and the marina management was among the friendliest we've encountered before or since. We enjoyed good restaurant food, a lively Celtic band, and innumerable walks along the nautically-themed waterfront, beaches, and the rocky shore.

I spent much of my time working on Mabrouka. My biggest challenge was to find out what the heck was wrong with the charging system. In the end I was unable to develop much confidence in the system, suspecting a defect in the smart box as the culprit. I even tried to change out the alternator, but was stymied in that attempt by a mysterious system that locked the wrong pulley on the shaft of the new unit. I ended up just rearranging power leads to be sure the critical systems were supported and left it at that.

We also fixed a fuel leak, put some stop blocks on the actuating valve for the autopilot, tweaked the lee cloths, and fiddled a few other odds and ends. Laundry got done and showers were had. Beers were drunk and pool cues wielded.

I've had a specific and very earnest request to relate the story of Ed's bird. I'm sorry, Ed. I have to tell, even though I fear that it may hurt your feelings to have something that you were obviously so intensely interested in turn out to be an item of entertainment for others. But then, maybe seeing it from "our" point of view will tickle your fancy as well. Just know that this is only one of many examples that illustrate how your enthusiasm for life gives us hope for our own when we, too, reach our late seventies.

So, we'd been safe and sound in Bandon for a day or so and Ed, anxious to get his blood pumping with vigorous placement of one foot in front of the other, went for a run. Some eleven miles later, part of which obviously included a foray along the seashore, he returned to the boat. I think he actually asked me if he could bring it aboard and, if so, where he could put it. This was a bird carcass he was talking about.

You should know that Ed became our resident ornithologist. We fully accepted his credentials on this subject by virtue of his claim to having been the president of a local Audobon Society chapter somewhere or other and by the fact the he was the only one of us to spend any appreciable amount of time thumbing through the Sibley's book I had aboard covering the avian residents of the Pacific Northwest.

This bird was a streamlined, black and white affair. To me the wings looked a bit stubby and underdeveloped, and its webbed feet vouched for its nautical heritage. Against my insistence that it was a newly discovered variety of Oregon penguin, the most northerly of its species, Ed laughed at me. Of course, that's what I intended, but Ed's disdain appeared serious.

Ed browsed through the book. Ed turned the bird over back to front and front to back, each time grasping the tip of a wing and letting the flaccid body hang to its full extent. Ed looked through the book and flopped the thing over again. "Nope, it's a bastard." It looked to him like it was part something-this and part something-that, so he'd concluded that birds of two different species had had ungodly relations somewhere in the dark, seedy recesses of bird-dom and produced the devil's spawn of birds.

When Ed first brought the deceased aboard, he'd placed it carefully in the footwell of Mabrouka's cockpit, but moved it after I expressed my anxiety that someone would very likely step right there and turn the poor thing into a pulpy grid of bird-ness that would have to be washed out of the well's teak grating. He then moved it up forward and laid it out gingerly on the foredeck next to the anchor winch, but became worried that it would attract famished seagulls into dive-bombing for an easy meal. The carcass had apparently lain undisturbed on the beach for some time, so I didn't share his worry, but he eventually put it in a large ZipLoc bag nonetheless. Thus encased, I worried aloud whether the bastard bird would become a permanent member of the crew.

"No," Ed reassured me, he'd conduct burial at sea. I have to say that I was relieved when, noting its absence to Ed the next day, he admitted to having ignominiously delivered it to the trash on shore. Thus ends another edition in the Tales of Ed.