Kaimusailing

You can take the Mediterranean diet too far, especially with the wine consumption. The noodles are OK if you are burning up the calories, but otherwise they will put on the pounds. So you are left with antipasto, not much else, salad? Chicken Parm? Yes, the chicken parm is probably in itself pretty healthy, it is usually served with pasta or on a sub sandwich roll, carbs. Other dishes can be healthy, but at least in America, there are a lot of bread crumbs, breading, cheese sauce that can be literally heart stopping, or my mind now comes up with the ultimate, Chicken Marsala. A mushroom sauce flavored with marsala or madiera, mushrooms, chicken cutlet, breaded or not, not an unhealthy meal unless you have it with linguine, etc.
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I had spent most the week cooped up in the boat while daily thunderstorm warnings made it unwise to go out on the bicycle. I was fine with food. Steak salad, tuna salad stuffed sweet pepper, I even had one of the clam noodle florentines, I hadn’t thrown that away yet. I’m glad I had another taste of it. It’s not great, but tasty if you avoid the burnt bread crumbs. Finally I had had it, despite the thunderstorm warnings I went out to the grocers and the Legion.
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Somehow I managed to make it to the Legion, including a shopping stop at the grocers, in about a half hour. I wasn’t even pushing it. I hydrated with Saddlebred pinot noir at a high top at a window facing East. Cuddily showed up with a vodka drink. Teri arrived with a glass of chilled white wine. I kept referring to the weather app on my phone. It showed thunderstorms on their way here from the Southwest. The question was When?
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After walking halfway around the building to see what the weather looked like to the Southwest I met a pleasant couple on the patio and we chatted, they were from DC and had bought a place in Crisfield to get away from it all. I returned to our table and mentioned the conversation. Cuddily and Teri went out to see what was out there. I finished my excellent grilled chicken over garden salad with italian dressing.
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At some point I headed out to grab my grocery bag and bring it under cover. There were some nice photo ops in the late afternoon light. Raindrops began pelting down. The storm was quick and severe. After it passed I went out and got shots of rainbows and a magnificent sky. What a nice evening.
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I departed with my grocery bag on the bike and had an easy time biking to the marina. I felt a little unsteady when I got to the dock, so I walked the bike to the boat. A fellow from another boat on the dock stopped me and gave me onions and apples he had just harvested and had too much of.
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Cuddily was next going to make dinner with the frozen shrimp we had purchased with the 10 bottles of wine at Sysco. The wine is almost gone already. The shrimp dish would be scampi on linguine. I was allowed to cut up vegetables. Two shallots, minced fine, two cloves of garlic, likewise, a bunch of parsley, rinsed, dried, and finely diced, all on the cutting board along with tomato pieces. Cuddily began her efforts sauteing the shallots, then the garlic, then spices and citrus. The linguine was boiled to perfection. We had salad with vinaigrette dressing. I prepped cucumbers for the salad by running a peeler down the cucumber making green and white stripes, then thinly slicing it.
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The frozen shrimp were thawed under cold water for a minute or two, then mixed into the sautee. Gourmet for less than 5 bucks a person. I’ve been shredding parmesan with a cheap dollar store grater, but Cuddily has a nice small plastic rotary grater, like a miniature chef’s tool. I want to get one. Scampi is one of my favorites and sometimes it’s very good, sometimes not so good, but it almost is never bad. A restaurant in Kingsland, GA, made a bad example. Seagle’s in St. Marys has been excellent. Eve, the artist, made an exceptional scampi. Cuddily’s scampi was damn near perfect, no way to improve on it, just eat and be glad.
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Then next day I had to get more wine and decided to cycle down to the city dock and make a little ride of it. Model RC autos were set up for racing in the street in front of the dock. I snaked my way through and on out to the dock, to the end of the dock. The weather was just about perfect with a light breeze from the WSW, temperature was about 80, the sky was scattered puffy and high wispy clouds. I stopped at the wine shop on the way back.
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I stopped in the old Red Shell Shanty, which was today unlocked, it’s now the Boater’s Lounge. It should be unlocked every day. I went inside to see how it was set up. They had ROKU tv now, no dish or cable. I looked for Formula 1 qualifying from Montreal, but they wouldn’t be carrying it, of course. Still, the ROKU works, maybe an NBA final game is in the works for me. I like watching the playoffs of any sport.
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It looked like I would be fending for myself, no notifications from the survivors of last night’s feast. I had plenty of fresh food to cook for dinner. Do or die. Cook or throw out. I would make a steak (london broil) salad with romaine and spinach.
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Pour a glass of pinot noir and think about how to construct the salad. I can prep the london broil and marinate it after thinly slicing. Then I can prep the sweet red pepper and avocado, and the destitute green onion sitting in a cup of water in the cockpit.
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The green onion had morphed into something alien, however I stripped it and chopped it up for the salad. I prepped the salad veggies first, while the Coleman Camp Grill was coming up to temperature, then began laying out the thin slices of beef, some with a little bit of garlic stuck to them. They need to be grilled on one side for less than a minute, then flipped for the other side, you just go from one end of the grill to the other with the raw slices, then come back and the individual slices will be ready as you take them off to put on the salad.
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You really can’t start the steak until the salad is ready. That means you have to have salad dressing, and I was nearly out. Eloisa called and I had her on speaker phone while I mixed up another batch of Italian vinaigrette dressing. A cup of EVOO, a half cup or even a little less of balsamic vinegar, and about 1 or 2 teaspoons of: fresh ground black pepper, onion powder, Italian spice mix, and garlic salt to taste. I mixed them and tasted while conversing.
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The meat was grilled as described, and the avocado was longitudinally sliced, then thin sections, meat placed on the salad, then garnish with the avocado pieces. I had a nice glass of pinot noir and a sunset was happening out West. Good time to be at the Legion for a photo. Cuddily sent me one, she was there.
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I searched for photos of Waipio Valley in Hawaii, Eloisa wanted a photo of where the mountains come down to the sea. I ran into one of my own photos of Waipio on flickr.com. There were also photos of Oahu’s North Shore, and some sights like Makapu’u. My daughter and her partner were enjoying Hawaii on vacation back then. I sent the link to the photos to my new son-in-law, Father’s Day is coming up, and he is the father of my new grandson.
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I wasn’t done quite yet, I was getting set to watch a YouTube video about Cuba. It was for Eloisa. I had told her that Cuba was a mess, gonna be like Haiti, after watching an alarming video a month or so ago. This new video was current, it was not the Castro Cuba, it was what Cuba folk are doing now. The presenters were very artistic, if I can say that. They did their job and visited all over Cuba and documented it all very well. It looked like Old Hawaii, and the spirit of the people is similar, instead of saying Aloha, they say Ola. They have interesting ways of cooking pig.
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I thought about Cuba, the mafia, the Kennedy’s, Castro, who knows if the people are better off without the underworld and the quick money. Atlantic City, need I say more. Las Vegas, I hate it, too far from the ocean. Cuba is precious in a way.
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I was researching Cornelia Marie’s Suzuki 25PH outboard. Could it be converted from manual start to electric start? Complicated. Her outboard is a DF-25 V-twin. Mine, on Kaimu, is an inline twin. I had a downloaded owner’s manual for a DF-25, but it turned out it’s 3 cylinders. Very peculiar. They made the 3 cyl model up to 2006, then the V-twin, maybe for one year, then the parallel twin like I have. I ordered the service manual for the V-twin.
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The manual start Suzuki’s do not need a battery at all. They could probably be converted to electric start simply by adding a starter motor and electric power to turn it over. You would need battery and electric cables. Or, one smart DIY’er used a cordless drill with a hex socket drive to spin the motor from the bolt or nut at the top of the flywheel.
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I keep thinking back to why they only made the V-twin for maybe one year. It is an attractive engine with a Y shaped intake manifold and a single carburetor feeding the twin Vee cylinders. It has that Vee twin rhythm, like a Vee twin motorcycle. The V-twin replaced the 3 cylinder inline engine because it was lighter, just as the 3 replaced an earlier engine, because it was lighter and more fuel efficient. Suzuki was getting away from carburetion and going with fuel injection, the main reason being more toleration of ethanol fuels, which are brutal on a carburetor. There are operational benefits as well, fuel injection can be “mapped” to provide more accurate mixture and results in an overall increase in performance and fuel economy.
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More research, the v-twin was made from ‘06 to ‘11. Adding an electric starter is inexpensive and easy, but there is one catch, the starter is bolted to a simple bracket that is bolted to the engine. Probably not difficult make a DIY version. CM says she just wants to get it running properly without overheating or whatever fault was shutting the engine down. The faults light a warning light and shut the engine down to 3000 rpm or less. We need to keep track of what warning light comes on to see if it is a coolant problem or an oil pressure problem. There is an overspeed fault that doesn’t light a warning light, but shuts the engine down to protect it if something like a broken sheer pin happens. In that case you would throttle back, but the overspeed protection does it for you. If you are cavitating the propeller, it could trigger the overspeed protection.
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Recently at the Legion an old acquaintance was there and although he had moved away, he had to be back in Crisfield for some realty details. We hob nobbed with Cuddily and Teri, and he continued throughout the Legion, meeting with old friends. Suddenly there was a commotion and we saw a brawl at the kitchen end of the bar, quite far from us. Someone left out the front of the building. I went out the side door to see if I could catch sight of the getaway. Nothing out there. I came in and our old acquaintance was the one assaulted. The side of his face was what they call a contusion. We nervously continued to hydrate with wine.
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The image is of a rainbow above the Legion.