Kaimusailing

While biding my time, waiting for my cold virus to ease up, I went to the Food52 site, which is an excellent repository of recipes. I would select my category and apply “Contest Winners” filter. I looked at about 50 recipes each of stews, soups, and finally Italian. My appetite which had gone away when I first caught the cold was coming back and I was craving comfort food. In particular I wanted to remake my lobster ravioli recipe, which I may have somewhere on one of the thumb drives, but I have been unable to find it.
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I remember using frozen lobster ravioli and making an Alfredo sauce which turned out too cheesy and salty. I slaked the sauce with tomato puree, I think, and the end result was sublime. Why was I looking for a recipe when I knew what I wanted and knew how to make it? When you get older and forgetful, a recipe is a blueprint to help jog the memory, it is also like GPS driving directions, it tells you what to do and when to do it. I usually jot down a timeline and make revisions on my notepaper. The shopping list is made up also.
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My appetite is returning, proof of which follows.
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Sometime in the afternoon it started lightly raining and I was hungry for some hot food. I didn’t have much in the galley. There was ramen soup. I had some tuna. Eggs were on the endangered species list. I could make ramen soup and throw tuna in it. I had instant tom yum paste. That would add to the flavor. I had made it with that a few times before. I had also used peanut butter in tom yum soup. I had peanut butter right in front of me. I put a half liter of water in the soup pot and heated it. I used an ordinary spoon to put one spoon of tom yum paste, peanut butter, corn starch, liquid from the can of tuna, and the contents of the ramen flavor packet into the soup and kept stirring as it heated up. I tasted the concoction and dusted it with garlic powder. Can’t hurt. When it began boiling I added the ramen noodles. The soup was well combined and thickened. I turned off the heat, added the tuna, stirred some more trying not to break up the tuna any more than it was already. After a couple minutes I tried it. Not too spicy, nice spectrum of flavors, forget how it was made, it would pass in some of the local asian restaurants here.
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A steel ketch that had been deposited in our corner of the boatyard was moved away, not far away, and I befriended the owner, a year older than me, and we had several conversations. He loaned me a book by Bernard Moitessier, “Tamata and the Alliance”, translated from the original French. As soon as I started to look at the opening passages I could not put down the book. I was very thankful and in turn found a copy of Eric de Bisschop’s “Voyage of the Kaimiloa” that he could download on his phone and read.
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The book by Moitessier was his final work. He is quirky, but he is French, you know? He spent most of his early life in French Indo-China, and his account of those times is mesmerizing. It was all well before the Americans became involved in Vietnam, but ends when the French are driven out by the Viet Minh. He goes on to sail off, away, and we have his books of “Sailing to the Reefs”, “Cape Horn: The Logical Route”, and “The Long Way”. The Tamata and Alliance book fills in the gaps, and if you, like me, had read the other books, we have answers to the questions we might have about a lone sailor who accomplished more than anyone else but left us with those questions, why did he not complete the Golden Globe race, which he was well in the lead of, what did he do afterwards, was he a burn out, did he go crazy with his obsession. In my opinion he was demon driven, very creative, and lived a magical life.
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In a sense he fulfilled Webb Chiles definition of an artist, whose task is to go to the edges and report back. Moitessier went way beyond the edges and reported back, but how can we understand ideas that come from a world we can’t comprehend.
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The other book, the Voyage of the Kaimiloa, also involves a Frenchman, between the wars, and I have to reread it now. It involves China, France, Hawaii, and an epic sail halfway around the world.
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I found that Henrick de Velde died of colon cancer last November, he was around 2 weeks of my age. He had also sailed on a Wharram catamaran around the world.
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So we don’t live forever. Chichester was the one who put the fire to the round the world solo yacht thing. He went on, spurred by a cancer diagnosis, and set the stage for later races, his passage was ½ way to New Zealand/Australia and back to England. Moitessier sailed from Tahiti to France, the longest yacht voyage. The stage was set for the Golden Globe Race. Moitessier was getting ready for a solo circumnavigation, no stops, and the Globe newspaper wanted him to compete with some English sailors. He refused. Then later he accepted.
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Chichester died later of cancer. He was a great navigator with both aircraft and sailboats and received awards for his insight and solutions for the problems aviators and sailors both encountered. Now, with GPS, it’s hard to comprehend the problems of taking sextant sights on a rolling sailboat or up in an aircraft.
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The Golden Globe race spawned a few books, “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst”, outlined a sailor going mad at sea and ending his life with an anchor tied to his leg as he leapt overboard. Other sailors authored other books, but it was Moitessier, who left the race to sail on to Tahiti that wrote “The Long Way”. He dismissed the race and sailed around to Tahiti. When he tied up after all those months at sea, no one to talk to, the dockhand asked him how was it going, and he replied, “Not too bad”. But that would have been in French.
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While I was reading, New Year’s Eve happened and I missed a music set down the road by one of the boatyarders. The next day was warm and I was feeling better, somewhat. I decided to make bread in the Optima oven. I had made a lot of dough and a lot of pizzas, but never bread.
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I started the dough the same way as pizza dough. To make the story short, the bread came out sort of like French baguette but the Optima oven resulted in a sort of large donut shaped loaf which couldn’t be used for normal sandwiches. Nice try though.
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Big Dave called me early in the morning asking if I wanted to go with him to see a doctor about our illness. I was slowly getting better but he was slowly getting worse. I begged off seeing the doctor. There is a great deal of respiratory illness in the entire country now, much more than last year at this time. I looked at a chart of respiratory symptoms to see if I could determine what we had, but it looked like we had caught maybe two different viruses, which would be unlikely that two different people would come down with two separate viruses at the same time.
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Because of illness I did not have pizza night and had unused ingredients including a box of mushrooms. Other ingredients such as flour, mozzarella, and pepperoni can keep for a long time, but mushrooms deteriorate. Thus, I purchased a quart of half and half and some Irish butter. I made cream of mushroom soup. Along with the half and half I used a half liter bottle of water, large spoon of Better than Bouillon, roast chicken flavor, a stick of Irish butter, ½ cup of flour, some garlic salt and ground pepper. The butter is melted and mixed with the flour to make a roux, the water is slowly added while the roux is whisked smooth, the mushrooms and spices are added, and when the mushrooms have wilted a bit, the half and half is added. It is taken off the heat when it just bubbles. Yummie.
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My first chance to see the new big crane operate in the yard came and I took one photo, but then had to run an errand and when I returned they had finished with it. The chief crane operator lifted a monohull, a ferrocement yacht that is extremely heavy, but not exceeding the crane’s 50 ton limit. Kaimu, at its worst 10 tons, would be like a feather for that crane. The photo was taken while the crane was preparing for the lift.