Kaimusailing

I have been corresponding with Webb Chiles for a few years. I figured he was older, about the same age as my older brother, and I wondered how long I could sail as I got older. We have had some email back and forth and now I realize I am not talking to someone who is remotely like I am. He is a physical phenomenon, he is now 80 and does, routinely, his age in pull ups, push ups, crunches, and maybe a lot more than that. I ride the bicycle sedately around a boatyard. So much for that comparison.
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He has circumnavigated, mostly in either a small open boat, or in boats that offer other hardships, such as a never ending bailing task off of Cape Horn. Go to his website: https://self-portraitinthepresentseajournal.blogspot.com/ and read his ongoing journal. There is a link there to his books, free, online, read Storm Passage, I have saved it on this computer and on kindle and other places. It might be on my lovely phone.
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Well, Webb was looking for a boatyard to do his stuff and asked around. He has done this before and I have always suggested coming here to St. Marys. Do it yourself, lots of help staff here for any problems, and it was only about 100 mile sail for him. No brainer. He says he will be here sometime the upcoming week. It will be the first time we have met.
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On one of our shopping trips I asked Eloisa if I could get a haircut and we did so, me getting the cut while she shopped at the Publix market. I was prompted by seeing myself in the mirror looking like a scarecrow. I hadn’t had a haircut in a long time.
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My little project of making bezels for 4 portlights continued. The basic rectangle shape was already glued together and now I marked the corners using a plastic wine/epoxy cup to trace out an arc. Then I cut the corners with a coping saw and saved the cut off corners.
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It was pizza night again and I had to clean up some old dishes, then I took a break and played a game called wordle!. Not the once a day NY Times Wordle, but a knock off app that you can play over and over again. So I did. One of my crossword puzzle clues was “First Wordle Word”. The answer was ADIEU. I tried it. The only vowels left were O and Y, so STORY became my second word, if not enough vowels came up with ADIEU. It works well. I kept at it, solving again and again, but at certain times I would be gobsmacked by solving 4 letters of a 5 letter word, but there were many words to be made with the 5th letter. It’s like, DINED, MINED, PINED, FINED, etc. So you have to put in a guess that is not your final guess, you are trying to see what letters are left. I had to stop, it’s difficult to stop, I had to continue with the pizza dough.
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The dough sits in a nice plastic bowl for 20 minutes. I was running late, playing the game. The dough was surging up over the rim of the bowl and cascading down onto the feculent counter of the condemned communal kitchen. I had to add 2 cups of flour to continue, but the dough was like some sort of plastic glue on my fingers and everything else. More flour. More flour. I probably added 2 cups of additional flour, which I never had to do before. I thought about my measuring, but I didn’t miscount or skimp on the flour or add too much water. It just was what it was. With enough flour the kneaded dough began to toughen up and stop sticking to everything. Nice. I cut it into 4 bambinos into olive oil bowls to let them rise further.
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Now I could continue with my bezels and glue the little inside corners that had been outside corners into the inside corners of the rectangles. I mixed 1 ½ ounces of epoxy and began gluing them in. I had already dry fitted them with clamps, so it shouldn’t take long, although I know that wood covered with epoxy can move unlike the dry fit, I worked quickly and didn’t have any problems until the epoxy started to go off. It was like 15 minutes, but it was 88 degrees in the shade, so I managed to get the last few glued in with epoxy that was like taffy.
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Time to prep the toppings, mozzarella, mushrooms, 3 kinds of sweet peppers, and an onion and a half. Chop, chop, chop. My newly sharpened knife made nice thin slices of mozzarella. Onion bits, chop, chop, chop. Yellow, orange, and red sweet peppers, chop, chop, chop. I set dough from the bowls they were rising in onto pizza pans and used the bowls for chopped toppings.
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I started the oven at 5:10 and made two pies right away. We had flies trying to partake of the dough, but also crafty blackbirds, iridescent in the sun. They had there eyes on something. Didn’t wait around after I drove them off. The bowls of pizza dough were metamorphosing right before my eyes. Today the yeast has gone crazy. I scooped dough back into their bowls, now heaped with it, still rising. In the end, the dough that needed more flour and made thicker crusts became a remarkable dough, 40% thicker, still airy and bakes to a crunchy crust. The first pizza was an ordinary mushroom, sweet pepper, onion, and maybe another ingredient. The second was a pepperoni with all the other stuff, just bake it flat. That’s what they say, the pizza bakers.
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I had trouble with the high heat, I made sure the oven was burning gas like a moon rocket. No trouble now. The temperature scale went up like a Cobra’s RPM scale. The first pie went in at 5:27. The oven thermometer was pinned at 1000 degrees. Eloisa and Blue showed up, then Helicopter Dave, then Big Dave, and Radio Bill. The pies were thick with a lot of toppings and there were 2 slices left over out of the 24 total baked. Radio Bill took the slices to have for breakfast. The crowd broke up and I cycled up to the Breezeway with Blue scampering along. I began taking photos of the setting sun.
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That night I awoke at about 3 AM feeling like I was getting a flu bug and had an uncomfortable night with little sleep. I finally dozed off and didn’t wake till 9:30. I didn’t feel like making breakfast but made coffee and then warmed up a leftover meatball and pasta and had that for breakfast.
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I continued working on the bezels. They looked pretty cobby but I intended to fair them with Wet/Dry 700 epoxy. It’s great stuff and can be used underwater. After schmooshing the epoxy on the bezels I washed dishes from last night’s pizza party. Eloisa texted me that she was at her favorite picnic spot, a small lake with a small fountain, and when did I want to go shopping. I cycled to the lake, about 2 miles, I was feeling better, and then continued to the gas station restaurant, then back to the boatyard, shower, get on board Eloisa’s vehicle and off we went.
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We shopped at Publix and then went to Southern River Walk, which we refer to as the Grill. The special was grouper tacos which I ordered and paired with dolmas, stuffed grape leaves. I had several glasses of pinot noir which was excellent.
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Back at the boatyard I once again began taking sunset photos with Blue following me around. I spaced the photos apart by taking the bike on a loop around the boatyard. Blue was getting his workout tonight.
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I checked the tracking page for Webb’s little Moore 24, Gannet, and I could see he was on his way down the coast. The image is his track.