carwreck.com: around Boston harbor...

When I was in the Coast Guard I busted my butt to find Internet at every port call to check my email. Either I found a way to get my little PowerBook 520c to a phone line (I got busted in a BIG way for using Government phone lines once; was a total sham and the knew it) or I went to a place like an Internet cafe or library. Unfortunately there weren't too many Internet cafes in Puerto Rico in 1996. Now I get IMs from an old buddy who is bobbing around a hundred or so miles offshore. He says that most CG ships now have 24/7 Internet connectivity. How's that for morale! Awesome!

I was thinking: I like to ride in the rallycar and get tossed all over the place and bumped around, but I don't like rollercoasters. Why is that? Certainly the experience inside the rallycar is somewhat similar to riding a rollercoaster, yes?

Work has been going well. In fact I can firmly say it is awesome. I get to be out on the water, racing around “rescuing” people. I’ve pulled boats off sandbars when they run aground, towed stranded boaters home when their engine quits, assisted larger boats maneuver into a harbor when one of their engine stopped working, brought fuel and oil to boats which were running low, pumped water out of boats which were sinking, and more. Fun stuff!

The America's Cup is supposed to be the world's premiere yachting race. It has, for over a hundred years, been the ultimate test of sailing skill and knowledge. The Cup has evolved over the years and the level of competition has changed, putting a higher and higher emphasis on boat design, sail design and technology. Budgets have soared and it now costs in the area of hundreds of millions of dollars to put on a challenge to the America's Cup defender from the previous Cup. Is this yacht racing? Teams are now preparing to compete again, 132 years after the first AC, setting up compounds down in Auckland, New Zealand. And what are the biggest issues reaching the press about the preparations; lawsuits, Arbitration Panels, ineligibility for breaching Protocol, tribunals, and other assorted nonsense and bickering. This is yacht racing?

I have been totally negligent in my posting here. I apologize. But then again, as I stated when I redesigned the site, this would not be another one of those daily updated weblogy jammies. In any case, I went to NY to help my father deliver his new boat from the CT coast of Long Island Sound, around Manhattan and up the Hudson River to Shattemuc Yacht Club. We allowed ourselves two days to complete the trip, planning an overnight stop in the NYC area. But when we rounded The Battery by 2pm (we had left CT at 8am), we just couldn’t stop. The next 29 miles to Ossining took us about 7 hours thanks to an adverse tidal situation. All told, it was a wonderful trip!

Since then I’ve been back in Boston happily working. My brother is currently sailing in the Newport-Bermuda Race on his friend’s J-42. I once raced with them for the Annapolis-Newport Race in 2000. 62 hours underway can be grueling. I hope things are going well. You can check their position daily at the link above.

I know there was a ton of other things I wanted to mention here, but they will have to wait… until I can remember what they were. Oh well.

In the meantime check out a new pic of me at work.

I happened to be listening to some people talk about being able to see the International Space Station for 10 and a half minutes as it passed overhead this evening. Well as I got home from work and got out of my car, I looked up to where they said to expect it, and there it was: a tiny white dot moving VERY fast across the sky. Not nearly as fast as a meteor (shooting star), and not with the same charactersitcs of a plane. It was clearly something you don't normally see. Pretty cool if you ask me.

I'm back home after travelling to Wellsboro, PA for the Susquehannock Trail ProRally. I went to work for the rally since the car I would have raced in is currently broken (the engine is apart and getting fixed after shattering a valve bucket). STPR was fun as hell. I worked for the rally as a radio operator and was busy all day from 8am until 2am when the rally ended. This was after driving overnight from Boston since I worked until late Friday night. I slept a little Saturday night (couldn't miss the after-rally party) and headed back here today around noon. So here I am, basicaly 62 hours awake, with about 5 hours of sleep on Saturday night, 500 or so miles in the car, one rally and a boatload of fun!