Kaimusailing

Items came in from TEMU, the Chinese cut rate retailer. One was a nice little drone that cost about twelve and a half dollars. It looked like an easy thing to play with while I coughed and sneezed. I was fighting a summer cold, even though it is not summer elsewhere, it seems like it here. A nice old gentleman was sitting with me on the Pandemic Porch where I was placing the drone, preparing to take off. He was interested in the drone and babbled about his nephew or son-in-law who used a drone to make videos of properties for sale. I read the Chinese manual and started the drone. It flew in my neighbor’s direction and he camplained, it almost hit me.
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I tried again. The controller had a button to try to correct for the crazy flight. This time it soared off and I panicked, what could I do, it zoomed up and took a turn for Rocky’s shop. It crashed into it. Everybody laughed. I put it away.
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I was feeling poorly and didn’t have energy to continue with the drone. I regressed into hunker down mode.
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The news was that the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after a ship rammed it. From what I know now, the accident was a freak event, the pilot and the crews that man the ship have contingencies for almost anything that can happen. When they lost power and propulsion they were able to alert the local authorities about 90 seconds before the impact. Traffic was halted by the sheriffs and the only people on the bridge were a pot hole repair crew who ended up in the drink, in Patapsco River water that was frigid enough to kill anyone in minutes, this at 1:30AM.
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While I was under the weather I was under the weather. A storm came through with a tornado warning and I hunkered in. All my tools were under cover, mostly, and I lay down in my bunk to suffer. Eloisa called me, we are here. I had to get up and go down to see her. She was upset. Her windshield wipers were stuck. We had worked on replacing her spark plugs and that required removing the cowling that held the wiper motor and the wiper motor electrical connection had to be disconnected.
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The spark plug replacement on this vehicle, a Ford Windstar, is a nightmare, which continues afterwards.
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I took the windshield wiper arms off and Eloisa cycled the wipers. I put one wiper on and she cycled them again. I put the other wiper on. She cycled again. They seemed to mechanically be assembled correctly. Then she tried other settings of the wipers and they intermittently ran or stopped all over the place.
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I washed the grease off my hands and tried the wiper control myself. There was obviously a problem, but if you ran the wipers on speed 8 they operated normally, and you could stop them at speed 1, then shut them off. Other speeds were erratic. We had the company of Geoff, the genius phd chemist, who can also fix almost anything, and he looked at things. Eloisa went off for the evening. Geoff said, I think that little connector that you can’t find a plug for might be the problem.
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The front, with a tornado warning, came through, thunder and lightning, big rain, dripping from the same old drip on the overhead hatch. No tornadoes.
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The next day was wet and overcast. I stayed in and began the cure for the common cold, wait it out for a few days.
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Eloisa was up in the mountains to “take care of business”. I wasn’t up for any fun anyway. I felt like I had the flu and was coughing up phloem prodigiously. I had once had bronchitis during a bad allergy season and this seemed the same. It was difficult to sleep, so when I did sleep, usually in the morning, I stayed in my bunk and got the most of it. I could get no work done and the weather and gnat swarms didn’t help.
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Geoff was relaunching his beautiful yacht for the upcoming trawler fest in Fernandina and his near neighbor was in the yard with his trawler just 50 feet away from Kaimu. I hope I am well and can visit the event, even though I don’t have a trawler.
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The SailGP racing series went to Christchurch, New Zealand, and I found a synopsis of the highlights on YouTube. The announcers sound like they are calling a horse race. The racing is exciting and if you like watching sailboats race, and who doesn’t, try it out. The USA team has recently changed its crew and they are obviously learning how to handle the boat. New Zealand won the final race on their home waters.
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I had no appetite, didn’t go out to the restaurants, and didn’t go shopping, just lay low and let time cure the cold or whatever it is. I ran out of wine and coffee. I gutted it out for a couple days. I was running out of my already meager supply of food. I could still make a mean ham and cheese omelet sandwich for breakfast but when din-din came around I simply didn’t eat, I wasn’t hungry. Then I had a night of really bad coughing, etc. I was getting worried. If I went to the health clinic it would be the VA clinic and I would have to get permission from the Maryland clinic at Pocomoke to visit the one here in St. Marys. At least I have it available as a last resort.
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I was able to try some work on the dinghy. When the rains came I had to turn it upside down to prevent it filling up with water. The last storm dumped about 3 inches of rain. While it was upside down I worked on the bottom and the bottom edges of the gunwales. Epoxy fairing mix was applied to any divots. The next day I could smooth the patches with the angle grinder with flap disk and pad sander. The bottom edge of the gunwales was rounded with these tools after I marked where the oarlock sockets would be mounted, where the gunwale had to remain square.
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Next I turned the dinghy upright and began working on the top outside edges of the gunwales the same way. The ends of the gunwales at the bow and stern were blended into the shape of the hull. Work was interrupted by rest breaks which included flying the new little drone.
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I found on YouTube how to properly set up the drone. Unlike the fractured instructions that came with it, the video showed a gyro calibration button. If you don’t calibrate the gyro the drone immediately goes haywire and becomes a Japanese Kamikaze killer, not the cheap meek Chinese drone clone. It is, I think, a clone of the Mavik Pro Drone. Of course it isn’t as good, but I haven’t flown the real thing. The clone drone has 3 speeds. Supposedly on the higher speeds it will have enough power to fight the breeze, which my old Bugs2 could do, but I found even a light breeze would make it difficult to hold position. I’ve been meeting more boatyarders who are either annoyed that I’m flying into their air space or happy to have some entertainment at my expense. Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, I am told. The drone cost $12.98 from TEMU.
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I finally felt well enough to go shopping and Komputer Ken said he was going to the hardware store and he’d take me along. We had a nice chat, hadn’t been out on the road with him for some time. I chatted about clam farming. It was my new food obsession. When I was really low on available food and didn’t want another ham and cheese sandwich or peanut butter, I made a quick soup, like a Thai clam chowder.
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I put about a cup of water in a bowl with some instant tom yum paste, about a heaping teaspoon, and microwaved it till it was boiling. In a second bowl I scrambled an egg, then poured the hot water into the bowl. Instant egg drop soup, but then the clams went in as well as some sesame oil. It was surprisingly tasty, but maybe I was starving by that time and would eat anything.
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The YouTube clam farming videos were from Cedar Key, of course, and from Virginia’s Eastern Shore, just South of Crisfield. Another came from Vietnam or Philippines. They showed the process of incubating the tiny, microscopic, clam larvae, nursing them along, and then letting them grow up in the local waters. They need no food at this stage, they filter feed, and as a result, the local waters get cleaned up. Of course the local waters cannot be polluted.
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The image is of clam harvesting from the Associated Press, photographer Alvaro Barrientos.