Nightwalk in Bermuda

When last in Bermuda, we stayed in the very historic village of St. George. This place is utterly timeless and can be remembered as the scene of many British Navy goings-on in over two hundred years or so of the age of sail. St George is also the landing place for the annual Newport to Bermuda Race, where all the uber-wealthy show up to drink beer at the White Horse Tavern after bashing over 600 miles of the Atlantic in their expensive toys. During our stay, Laura and I took a nightwalk through the crooked streets and ended up at Folly's Cathedral, an old church that was built upon in fits and starts over decades more than a hundred years ago- but never finished. We stood just inside in the pitch dark and looked at the stars shining through the open ceiling where the roof was never installed. A walk thorough a town as ancient as St. George is almost surreal, and at night one feels as if time itself is blurry around the edges.

Out of that evening came another poem...

Night walk in St George’s


We walked a crooked mile
Under age-cracked eaves and scattered stars
Suspended above the bay where mooring lights traced new constellations
Echoed in dark shimmering ink.
The cobbles polished by the storied footsteps of four centuries and more,
Wound among lime-topped roofs and pastel walls
Steeped in English propriety.
We walked quickly for the time we’d stolen,
For adventures shared
One more among the many
When hands are held against the next dark corner turned
And we together are all that keep us safe.
Safe to witness the onyx emptiness
Of stone piled high to no purpose but folly.
To feel the chill of time’s presence midst the yawning spans
that let in the night where joisted roof tiles belong.

Sometimes we need the space of aimless wanders
To teach ourselves out-loud what we may already know in whispers.
That it is times like these together,
strung like pearls
on the beach of this Atlantic dustmote,
That make up the lovely moments of our lives.
Like the tropic's stolen treasures,
We steal ourselves away so we can sense those truths.
And on a midnight streetscape we walk hand-in-hand,
Talk, lean together, and know
That we’ve glimpsed way more than just
our numbered years.
We’ve seen our lives joined
In moments hidden from the process of living.
Captured, mounted & framed instants,
Suspended brightly in the space of what we are
Together.

Fairhope Retrospective

In my first years as a professional after my graduation from Arizona State University’s School of Engineering, I made a decision to live and work in Pensacola, Florida. If you can imagine a boy who was born and grew up in Phoenix,AZ packing up his stuff and loading it into his metallic-blue Chevy Corvair (unsafe at any speed) and venturing forth, bound for the Deep South. Why would a Westerner choose to go to the Gulf Coast? Try visions of sailing on limitless blue horizons while teaching the art of trimming a foresail to soft-syllable’d, long-vowel’ed southern girls, while the background music of Bob Marley pulsed out of a boombox somewhere down below decks. Hmm. Uh, where was I?
Oh yeah, why I decided on my first engineering post on the Gulf Coast. I was 22- need I say more?

These were, of course, the salad days. I sailed mostly on OPB’s (other people’s boats). Due to my experience on dinghy sailing & racing during my college years on Interlake and Coronado 15 class boats, I found myself a crewmember in demand. I also enjoyed an associate (read that “cheap”) membership at the Pensacola Yacht Club. I quickly learned that the owners of the big boats always needed crew and rarely needed money. Virtually my exact opposite. I quickly learned one of the truisms of the yacht club nautical life: older skippers that won races were often ecstatic in victory to the point of limitless crew bar tab privileges! This world was where I was first exposed to a magical place called Fairhope, Alabama.

Weeks before my introduction to Fairhope, I began to hear about the mythical Dauphin Island Race. Due to be hosted that year by the FYC (Fairhope Yacht Club), it was spoken of with much enthusiasm, energy and not a few exchanged insider jokes. I was selected by my adoptive skipper for both the delivery crew and the alternate helmsman post for the race. All I knew about the DI Race was what I heard around the club docks. All of it was good. Two hundred-fifty boats on the line in ten starts bound for a straight line race from Point Clear, AL south to the non-descript sandbar called Dauphin Island. At the end of the line, a massive circus tent was erected that held a rocked-out reggae band, a Bacardi-sponsored open bar (to those that held the mystical talisman of the competitor wrist-band) and a rumored raft of winsome Mobile girls who were ready to dance and meet the victors of the lifting breeze (us). All was true. We believed that life could not get any better… we were right.

Since that storied time, I’ve often thought of Fairhope, Alabama as a place that stayed in its place as an unchanging icon of sun, soft accents and gentile style। And just last November, I went back and found it to be so। After walking through the flowered streets and exchanging polite greetings to the folks I met on the sidewalks, I found that it was not a place that I wanted to return to… it was a place from which I never wanted to leave! I now have a boat that would also find a favored place at the starting line in this year’s DI Race।
All I need are some young, energetic crew members… life is a circle.

Nauticus Poetica

This next post takes a bit of explaining. During a business trip to Cambridge, MD, my wife and I decided to take a small side trip to Oxford, a small town that sits on a perfect Chesapeake site on the Tred Avon River. This is a very old town (est. 1649) that is distinguished as the home of Robert Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a major financier of the Revolutionary War. Fully 67% of Oxford’s homes are on the National Registry of Historic Homes. Suffice it to say, Oxford is a powerful charmer. We walked throughout the town streets and lanes, which are mostly joined by the main avenue: Morris Street- named after you-know-who. As we strolled, I could imagine us living in this quaint little place. Eventually, the walk inspired this short poem…

Morris Street


The tender touch of rain
Cool patterns on breeze-kissed skin
Distracts us not at all
From the time-steeped taste of maritime flavors-
Oxford on Morris.
A cat on the passing porch
Switches time with an idle tail
A prince of his painted bead board domain.
Leaf-rustle hushes whisper
Contra point to the tympani of the halyard-clank.
A street that threads a fragile point
Of elegance and age rising from the wind-traced mirror,
Shimmered reflectance with a name,
Tred Avon.

We hold hands, walk and try to see
Our life-if-it-were-here
Chock-a-block with Hinckleys
And Adirondack chairs amidst the hydrangeas
A chardonnay tinkled toast on an ivy-bound sidedeck
Overlooking white-winged sail.
We talk in near-whispered voices
Afraid of visions flying away
In the sharp-set focus of where we must be
And when.

We know in heart’s mirror
Inside this lovely fantasy joined
Is the gentle outline of the love we match
And have matched for years.
Gentleness and a place to be
When sometime spirits
want to fly off the handle.
We find a calm breath taken
And realization wakes:
Beauty and desire is always there
Found now as we walk this street
And see these surroundings as a symbol of grace
Because we share it

Time-lapse Photograph

This is a story that I wrote a few years ago for Chesapeake Bay Magazine's Reader's Rondezvous. An old sailing buddy and I set out to recapture our fierce racing youth in a boy's long weekend...


A number of weekends ago, as my wife and I unpacked a seemingly endless number of cardboard boxes, we realized we were sorting through the accumulations of years of day-to-day life. We surveyed all those items that fall into that odd grey-zone of once useful/now useless, but too nostalgic to throw away... but was nostalgia that accounted for hundreds of pounds of relocation freight. We were in the final phase of moving, in response to the career winds, from Houston, TX (semi-landlocked) to Columbus, OH (absolutely landlocked). We were also wondering for the hundredth time how in the world we had accumulated so much stuff. I had been assigned some heavy moving task and was stalling by flipping idly through some old photos found in box 193. Suddenly I came across some shots taken in the early 1980’s of the rough crew of the Olson 30 “Impetuous”. Featured on one dog-eared photo were Greg, my longtime friend/foredeckman and me leaning shoulder to shoulder against the stern railing presumably after some furious round-the-bouys conflict. Man, we were young-looking! We had all our hair, broad smiles, dark tans and were in the midst of toasting a couple of cold beverages in green glass bottles. Whether we were celebrating some vast race victory or good-naturedly consoling ourselves over some idiotic strategic blunder eluded my memory. I suppose that it hardly mattered now. What did matter was the realization that, of all the crew of those racing days, I had lost touch with all of them save my friend Greg- and Laura, the lovely winch grinder that I’d married.

Suddenly, the idea hit me. Why not charter a sailboat on the Chesapeake at the tail-end of my business conference slated for the Maryland Eastern Shore and get Greg to steal a few vacation days for a “boy’s sailing weekend”? We could perhaps let a strong breeze and a nautical venue jog a few of the old brain cells into spilling out some forgotten sea stories. Maybe we could even reconnect with some of our racing glory days back before the twin priority trump cards of career and kids kept us tamed to the shore so effectively. Perhaps Greg could take some time out from traveling around the far side of the world starting-up complex chemical units to sail with an old shipmate for a few days?

Yes, absolutely he could! He e-mailed me his airline reservations the following day.

Some few weeks later, there we were, untying the mooring lines of a chartered Sabre 34 at a marina in Galesville and motoring out into a calm, still morning on the West River. Laura was to accompany us today on our first leg to St Michaels, there to pick up her rental car and drive south to a visit with friends in Virginia Beach. From that point forward it would be just us boys. Nothing on that lazy day brought to mind racing, unless it was a memory of those deadly, windless contests drifting slowly backward from the line while hopelessly rummaging through the icy depths of an empty beer cooler. Today was about auxiliary power, cool drinks, reading while leaning back on the companionway bulkhead, and snoozing with the Nautica hat pulled down over the eyes. All too soon, the familiar shape of the lighthouse at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum rose up out of the mirror that was the Miles River, signaling the end of charter Day 1. After a nice dip in the marina pool and a few crab cakes, I kissed Laura goodbye and she bid the boys fair winds on her way to Hampton Roads.
We were now officially unaccompanied.

Day 2 dawned over the breakfast eggs and coffee, with a few wind-traces promising a little real sailing. The wind would come, we knew, because the morning before had brought the landfall of Hurricane Ivan the Terrible into Greg’s hometown of Pensacola, FL. We knew that this would cause meteorological pinball across the entire eastern seaboard and that heavier weather was forecast for the Northern Bay on Saturday and Sunday. Greg had prepared his home as well as he could and had concluded that the die was cast. There was nothing to do, he reasoned, but focus on the sailing. The wind built all day as we headed for Kent Island Narrows. Once we were north of the bascule bridge, it was an increasingly brisk reach toward the breakwater at Rock Hall. Amazingly, as the breeze came up, we slipped into our old respective crew positions: me on the helm and Greg forward. We sailed, we tweaked, we called out speedo peaks and silently thought about knots-made-good. When the breeze faltered occasionally, neither of us even discussed the auxiliary. You don’t turn the motor on when you’re racing. It was an imaginary St. Michaels to Rock Hall regatta. Had there been any other boats anywhere near us, we’d have hammered them!

That night in the marina, the rains came. All night we listened to drumming raindrops, wind howling through the shrouds, the deep bass of thunder and twice heard the town’s tornado siren. The weather, it seemed, had arrived. Morning coffee was sipped to the metallic monologue of NOAA weather radio. The tide had raised our deck such that it was a heel-jarring drop to the dock finger pier far below. We were due to sail to Annapolis today and NOAA promised wind 20-25 kts with gusts 30-35 from the NE. Seas 5-7 ft in the bay with higher seas locally (whatever that meant). It was raining sideways. We’d eaten, put on our foulies, looked at the charts several times, inserted a waypoint or two and taken our Dramamine. No other excuses or delays were seemly (or manly). Nothing left to do but slip the docklines… gulp.
“Aw come on, Greg said. “we’ve raced an ultralight in winds and seas higher than this!” I quickly agreed and added that I wasn’t really worried… not wanting to show temerity by mentioning the lack of the other 5 crew and the intervening 20+ years.

In the next few minutes we were out of the breakwater getting plenty of personal data on how lumpy the Bay was. We steered 180 to get past Swan Point Bar and realized that the wind was going to give us a broad reach all the way to Spa Creek- at least it wasn’t going to be on the nose! As we left green #3 to starboard and came up to 240, things really got uncomfortable. We ran for a while on bare poles and the motor while the breeze tried its level best to rip the dodger off. Every time we took a big wave on our stern quarter, thoughts of mortality ensued. The wind seemed to be building, blowing lots of spume off of each wave top. Steering was getting to be a literal pain in the neck. Finally we remembered the old heavy-weather racing trick of unrolling a few feet of the headsail to form a storm jib. An instant, massive improvement! The bow stayed down and stiff, the waves weren’t kicking the helm quite as severely and, better yet, we began to surf – 7, 7.5, 8, 8.5 kts! Suddenly all thoughts of impending demise were gone and we were whooping like 8 year-olds. Looming out of the rain, the gargantuan towers of the Bay Bridge rose before us and then we were sliding fast under its massive spans. Almost immediately the seas and the wind backed off a bit as we came increasingly under the lee of Sandy Point. Holy smoke- we weren’t going die after all! We winched in the jibsheet a tad and rocketed into the mouth of Annapolis Harbor drunk on a rich cocktail of adrenalin and testosterone!

As we called the bridge tender on 13 for a lift of the Eastport Bridge to pick up a quiet inside mooring, we bought each other a cool one from the galley icebox. It was the first time we’d been below since we left Rock Hall. We were wet to the core, cold, and shaking from the strain of sheet and wheel. We were deliriously happy. We slid a music CD of The Cars into the stereo. My foredeckman tied off to the mooring pennant and I glanced up to see Greg leaning against the pulpit, his face lit with the identical smile I’d seen weeks before in that years-old photo.

“Never a doubt!”, he shouted.

When the harbormaster’s inflatable came by a couple of minutes later to collect our mooring fee, we were still laughing.

The Launch

This is the inaugural episode of my foray into the blogosphere.

GreenFlash Dreamer is all about those of us that find ourselves drifting away at odd times of the day into some internal world away from quarterly budgets, monthly reports, office politics and annual results reviews. These dry and lifeless icons of corporate life get replaced deep in our subdural cortex by the much more appealing daydreams of sandy deck shoes, Wayfarer sunglasses and lime-rimmed Corona bottles chilling our fingers. It's those images that tempt our fingers to tap out web addresses like Margaritaville.com or blowitalloff.net; all the while shielding our flat panel displays with a file folder lest the boss drift into our offices. There's something magic about an illicit mental escape from all fiscal reality into a vague future in which we are financially independent, 35 pounds lighter and relaxing in the cockpit of a sleek sailboat in a harbor town where a sixty-five degree evening is called "winter".

I hope to write a blog to appeal to all of you who, like me, needs a lifeline out of reality every now and then to hear stories, real and imagined, that briefly divert us from the ordinary, responsible lives we live.

I hope to write thoughts, spin stories, venture poetry and share pictures in a way that would resonate with others like me that focus on a sunset on the water to see something unusual... a GreenFlash Dreamer.