Kaimusailing

I’ve been thinking these numerous mass shootings are like sporadic mini revolutions. Each individual that has gone on a rampage had some agenda on their mind. They planned and then went out and took on the world in a military fashion. They were prepared to die righting whatever wrongs they perceived. You can’t blame the gun lobbyists for this new kind of social revolt. It is apparent our society is sharply divided racially and economically and the differences are thrust in our faces, reaction must be expected.
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I like the idea of having a boat that I can go to and cast off lines and sail out to sea. It is like an insurance policy or like the pressure relief valve on a pressure cooker. It seems odd to me that boats are very cheap now, yet they are very valuable as a means to escape real and perceived dangers. It is comforting to have a boat standing by ready to go just when things are getting dicey back in the ‘hood.
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In the boatyard we have a steady influx of would be sailors snapping up abandoned boats, left by stupid owners who maybe are unaware of why they got the boat in the first place. One owner died in a plane crash. Another had a well paying gig and wouldn’t be rehabbing that boat after all. I think is is a mistake to move away from the sea.
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What is difficult now is having a boat ready for sea but be on land, in a boatyard, up on blocks. There is inertia in everything and now we have to get the boat that seems welded to the land, into the water, and all the boatyard has to do is more 7 boats to get Kaimu on her way.
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I’d better film it and take a lot of photographs.
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It looks like I’ll be able to cajole myself into the water in the next few days. I’ve been taking it easy with the afternoon thunderstorms shutting things down and if not for the thunder clouds, heat indexes up into the hundreds. Tools I was going to toss came up looking like new with a pass through the boatyard’s electric wire brush. So I have been organizing tools again, brightening them and sorting them into their tool boxes. I have to deal with the work tables under the boat, bins that came from Trillium with extra stuff that maybe I don’t need, and it all has to go somewhere, into the boat or into the dumpster. There is also a “Free Pile” in the communal area where I will probably send my old TV camera, which I haven’t used for 13 years.
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There is also a bunch of stuff that has accumulated around Kaimu as other boats have come and went, their castoffs have somehow been put in our perimeter, as if they were ours. So, our pile of stuff is increased by their pile of stuff.
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I also have some unfinished business inside the hulls that can be done now or after launching. The donated freezer is working well, but is running on Radio Shack clip leads, and it needs to be permanently installed. All the stuff that can come aboard needs storage places, so that involves organizing the storage places on the boat, that are available, and moving a lot of stuff on board.
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Doc, who runs Doc’s Chop Shop, has agreed to take a palette that has my old 4 deep cycle batteries on it, plus I will add the old engine battery. Maybe he can use his fork lift to bring the outrigger canoe to the shore line where it will hit the water for the first time.
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The mini revolution might get bigger, so I have to be able to go to sea. There is tension between all the folks that won or lost the last election, and now I expect the mid-term elections will produce a strange government with a congress that is democratic and more liberal than previous Democrats and an executive department that is Conservative Republican, and a judiciary that is conservative. It’s like increasing the tension until something breaks. Maybe it will go on longer. Mere citizens in this society don’t feel like they belong to the USA, they feel like they have enemies, and there are many such factions defining their boundaries.
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I can’t talk about racial equality down here in South Georgia. Society has deep whirlpools that spin on their own and only go away after a very long time. The Civil War is still fresh in the minds of folk who lost their great grandfathers and their grandeur from that war. But the exploitation of another race also is fresh in other minds, so there is this hate vertex that won’t go away.
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I have hope that I can plan to sail into a port where I am not the enemy either of the government or the ethnic people who live there. I don’t like having a misogynist leader who alienates most of the places I’d like to escape to. But there are also ports whose governments have savaged the cruising sailors. Don’t go there either.
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Hola, the image is not from Nicaragua but from Russia, Lisa Evdokimenkova, and it’s called The Wind on the Ship. It is available for purchase at Saatchiart.com.