A Day Abroad in Montreal- June 2010

Poutine - tres jolie!

Trying on butterflies at the Cirque de Soleil

Place d'Armes

Montreal waterfront at Night

In Amesbury, we are blessed to be situated approximately equidistant from The City and Montreal. This weekend we choose Canada over the Big Apple. (n.b. in New England, ‘The City’ is always New York and never Boston.)

After all, Canada is a foreign country. One needs a passport to even get in! Plus, the people speak a different language, the highway signs are in French, and the inhabitants cover their ‘pommes frites’ with cottage cheese and brown gravy. This local Quebecois delicacy is called ‘poutine’ and can clog small coronary arteries at thirty paces.

(P.S. - what a shock to realize that French fries, French braids and French toast do not exist anywhere in metropolitan France. But that – along with French courage and French letters - is another story.)

We stay overnight in Malone, NY with our friends John and Margaret. John is the friend who got mugged by a monkey in Kenya’s Amboseli Park last year - http://daktari-mark.blogspot.com/2009/08/africa-2009-mugged-by-monkey-part-3.html

Next morning, we embark in John’s Nissan for the Canadian border.
“Hey John, do you think we will have any trouble getting through customs?” I inquire from the navigator’s seat.
“Only if they ask for money,” chirps Marg from the back. “John didn’t bring any!”
“They have ATM’s in Canada,” returns John. “Besides, on this trip we need Canadian money and not US.”

The comely border guard looks at our passports and levels her steely gaze at us. Then, disregarding the fact that the photos bear no resemblance, she casually waves us through.

John has no luck with the ATM at the bank of Canada.
“I always have this trouble,” he complains loudly.
“It’s because your credit card doesn’t speak French,” I explain. “Use mine, s’il vous plait.”
I insert my card. The machine gives a few electronic burps and contentedly coughs up a fistful of multicolored moolah plus a one dollar and a two dollar coin.
“Voila!” I exclaim. “ Mi visa es su visa!”

I examine the coins. Both coins have a likeness of the reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, on the front. A picture of a loon is on the obverse of the $1 while the back of the $2 displays a bear. Native Canadians call the $1 coin a ‘loonie’. And the $2 coin is ‘Queen Liz with the bare behind’. (Foreigners are forbidden to do this, as the loon is a protected species and Queen Elizabeth is still the Canadian head of state.)

In Montreal, we drive straight to the ‘Vieux Montreal’ arrondissement on the St. Lawrence riverfront. We have tickets for the new Cirque de Soleil show “Totem: the Odyssey of the Human Species”. I love the circus, especially the flying trapeze (see http://daktari-mark.blogspot.com/2009/02/mature-gent-conquers-flying-trapeze.html)
and Cirque de Soleil is the absolootal best circus on the entire planet!

John and I try on butterflies in the Cirque gift shop, while the girls “cherchez les toilettes.”
“Do you think these wings make my ass look bigger?” I inquire.
“Bigger than what?” John deadpans.

I’m a member of the Cirque Club, so we check in at the ticket counter and upgrade to the front section. The closer the better works for me!

C’est magnifique! Totem is the best! It begins as a creation story with the stage in the shape of the carapace of a primordial turtle. It ends with Mayan cosmonauts moving out into the universe and beyond! Everywhere in between there is a sublime mix of legend and science, myth and evolution. Through the use of projectors even the stage environment evolves – from a spring, to a lake, to the ocean, to interstellar space. My favorite acrobats are the Native American Hoop Dancer and the Duet on the Fixed Trapeze.

After the show we go to an enclosed courtyard off the Place d’Armes for dinner and live jazz. We find ourselves distinctly underdressed. The Canadians, especially the women, are well coiffed and elegantly robed. Cheek kisses are of course ‘de rigueur’. The local desmoiselles are not averse to sizing up available males with a gaze both bold and sensual. Ah, the allure of the Gallic female. “Toujours l’amour.”

(The French word for ‘young ladies’ is the same as the word for ‘dragonflies’. Les demoiselles – those aggressive and beautiful fliers whether in the skies or at the cafe.)

After dinner, Marg and Rena lead the way to the riverbank for the evening’s entertainment. The Montreal International Fireworks Competition, the largest pyrotechnics competition of its kind in the world, takes place at 10 PM on certain Saturday nights in the summer. Each night a different country does it’s very best to outshine the competitors.

The shows are launched from Le Ronde- an island in the St. Lawrence and are visible all along the waterfront. Best of all, the show is absolutely free! Tonight is the Italian team’s turn. We are serenaded with arias from Verdi’s Rigoletto as the heavens burst with beautiful chrysanthemums of colored light. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPJqjd2EBuw

Then it’s “au revoir Montreal”.
What a terrific day it was! Alas, one day in Montreal is never enough.

DAKTARI

Lucy's Love Bus

Kat & Courtney carry baskets of butterflies

Butterflies fly free!

Danaus plexippus

Butterfly traveler taking a break

Daktari has not taken any trips lately, and his blog has been on summer vacation, too.

However, that doesn’t mean nobody from Amesbury has been traveling this summer.

On Sunday September 12th some 1200 Monarch butterflies took off from Amesbury's Woodsom Farm headed south. Their final destination – Mexico. My friend Kat and her daughter Courtney were butterfly wranglers for the event so I got some excellent blog photos of these itinerant lepidopterae and their keepers.

Monarch’s are colorful orange and black butterflies which live on common milkweed and migrate South to Mexico in the winter. No single individual can fly all the way. It takes 3 or 4 generations for them to complete the migration. The grandchildren of the butterflies we released in Amesbury will hopefully arrive at the buttefly trees in Michoacan in December or January.

The butterfly release was a fundraiser for Lucy’s Love Bus (www.LucysLoveBus.org). an organization named for Lucy Grogan. Lucy was an Amesbury elementary school student who died in 2004 from complications of a bone marrow transplant for acute myelogenous leukemia.

Friends of Lucy are now students in Amesbury High School and they are helping Lucy’s mom, Beecher, raise money so that other kids with cancer can have integrative therapies like massage, Reiki, acupuncture, etc for comfort and control of their symptoms and side effects. Most of these services are not covered by insurance and they are not free.

You can help too! As you read this blog, please take out your cell-phone and text 102459 to Pepsi (73774). That will register one vote for Lucy’s Love Bus. Text every day from now until September 30th. If Lucy’s is in the top 10 vote-getters on Oct 1, then Beecher and her teen leaders will receive a $50,000 grant from PepsiCola to help kids with cancer.

You can also vote on-line at http://www.refresheverything.com/lovebus .
In fact, you can do both – vote on-line and then text also. That’s two votes per day for Lucy and her friends! The dream lives on.

DAKTARI

Retired MD Changes Lightbulb in Record Time

BEATING THE HEAT

CLINGING TO THE WILD SNAPPER

CASTOR CANADENSIS

RELAXING POOLSIDE

ANACONDA!

How many retired doctors does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Only one but you have to wait at least a month for an appointment.
This is no joke - it is literally true. But that as they say is another story.

Daktari has been on permanent recess for two months now and loving every minute of it.
After entertaining Grandma Gerry and completing a road-trip with Rena to Maine and Cape Cod, I’ve settled down at home to enjoy my best summer ever.

New England summers vary tremendously but this one is spectacular -- early, hot, and a helluva lot of sun with hardly any rain. The yard is browned up nicely so I haven’t had to clamber aboard The Snapper - my adolescent (17 year old) ride-on (or should I say hang-on) lawn decimator - very often. The swimming pool is percolating cheerfully at 34.3 degrees C this morning. (Normal body temp being a mere 2.7 degrees higher!) I water my veggie garden daily and it surprises me with pods and pods of, can you believe this? Okra! It’s so hot that I’m even starting to talk with a Southern accent - y’all.

This week I have a new visitor in my back yard - a.k.a. Lake Gardener. I’m out early one morning doing Qi Gong exercises wearing only my pirate boxers when a large-headed water mammal comes swimming up to the dock. I stare silently at his/her head and she stares back. She calmly munches a yellow water lily. I slowly and quietly gong some more Qi. She/he seems to enjoy just watching me as I gather up balls of Qi and pass them through my belly button. I’m moving sooo slowly but a sudden creak of the wood under my feet raises the alarm and whap -- a large beaver-ly tail slaps the water at least 3 feet behind the submerging head of my backyard visitor. This causes me to jump back about 3 feet myself - an equal and opposite reaction. The darned thing is big. Beavers are BIG rodents!

I may have to paddle upstream sometime and try to locate Beaver’s lodge. It may take a little longer than changing a light bulb. But so what? I have all the time in the world. My neighbor Bruce is an amateur naturalist, too. Maybe we’ll go together. (You may remember Bruce from our Christmas Coyote hunt and a more recent stargazing experience during a fly-over by alien spacecraft.

Bruce has enlisted me in a new scientific endeavor - sampling Lake Gardner for nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen content, pathogenic bacteria and pollutants. It’s another mad-scientist adventure funded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Lots of plastic containers, thermometers, pH meters, weights, calibrated poles, ropes and trekking through the swamps looking for storm drains. I surely do enjoy mucking around in the name of science! It reminds me of my hail-chasing days at NCAR. Plus it gives me something legit to tell those skeptics who believe my post-retirement schedule is composed of: a.) absolutely nothing, b.) whatever I feel like c.) some variation of ‘up to no good’ or d.) all of the above.

Here is yet another weird science encounter of the too close kind:
Lucky for me, it turned out to be a false alarm.

On Tuesday, my friend Kat and I are walking toward Lake Gardner dam for a Mono-fin practice session. Suddenly I spy what looks to be a very large serpent between the forest edge and the footpath to the town beach. There, on the very brink of the town swimming-hole, is what appears to be a 40-foot orange and black striped python. And young Kat is an ophidiophobe of the first water!

“Don’t look now,” I exclaim, whipping off my cheap Walmart sunglasses to get a closer look. “Do you see what I see?”

This time, we both give a Newtonian leap backward of at least three feet!

However, after the initial startle response, it turns out that Amesbury’s answer to Anaconda is merely a cleverly disguised straw barrier to protect the local lagoon from runoff from a recently constructed walkway. But boy, did it give Kat and me a start! If we had beaver tails instead of Mono-fins the other beach-goers would have been treated to two very large Whaps of alarm.

Which all goes to prove that you don’t have to go far to have unusual adventures and/or mad science experiences, at least on this planet. Be it ever so humble there’s no place like Earth.
“What is the good of having a nice home without a decent planet to put it on?” - Henry David Thoreau. I say, Amen to that.

DAKTARI
(P.S. Any readers with a good gumbo recipe using homegrown okra please forward to Daktari!)

Whales as Swim Instructors - May 27, 2010

WHALE WATCHING

DIVING DEEP

THE MONO-FIN

LOOK MA - NO HANDS!

BOTTOMS UP!

Whaling, whaling over the bounding Maine.

Actually the ocean today is not very bounding – not even very bouncy. And we’re not even in Maine- we’re in P-town on Cape Cod. We have just embarked on the whale watching ship Dolphin IV with about 150 other passengers including sister-in-law Josephine and her friend Peter. The sun is bright and temp in the 80’s. Looks like smooth sailing. But just in case, the Dolphin Fleet operators are offering free Dramamine at the snack bar before departure. Peter and Jo avail themselves but Rena and I are good.

It doesn’t take long to spot the whales. Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are feeding all around us as soon as we reach Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. I’ve seen whales many times before but they never fail to impress. One female has a calf but she keeps her distance and it’s not easy to get pictures.

We enjoy several displays of cetacean behavior including blowing, breaching, fluking and the famous ‘tails-up’ dive maneuver. The whales seem to enjoy their diet of krill and are very, very frisky.

Seeing all these Humpback shenanigans reminds me of my newest obsession. Swimming with a “Mono-fin”.

About 10,000 years ago or so, people got tired of falling in water, sinking to the bottom, running out of air and dying. Finally, someone got the bright idea of imitating dogs, horses, goats or what have you, and began paddling arms and kicking feet, and managed to get back to dry land without drowning. She called it swimming. This doggie-paddle technique did work, if somewhat awkwardly. However, the paradigm of swimming on all fours has not changed noticeably over the last ten millennia. The basic stroke is still called the Australian crawl. (And even Michael Phelps who can swim rather well, would appear to the unbiased observer to be ungainly while doing it.)

Now, imagine if pre-historic men and women chose to imitate the dolphin, the shark or the whale instead of the dog and the goat. Imagine further that they had the technology to fashion fish-tails out of sticks, skins and bark. Just think how much better and more graceful swimming would be today!

All that is water under the bridge, of course.

Not until the tail end of the 20th century did the folks at the Finis corporation actually design an artificial terminal appendage based on a cetacean blueprint which enables homo sapiens to undulate effortlessly through stretches of water without drowning- The Mono-fin!

The Mono-fin is a plastic swim-fin shaped like a whale's tail with a place to snug both feet together at the base. The fin is held in place with a strap around both heels. Once firmly strapped-in, one has successfully converted from a crawling terrestrial to an aquatic power-swimmer like the dolphin, the whale or Mr. Phelps after he makes an underwater turn!

No need for any other appendages to propulse through the liquid medium - just use your strap-on artificial tail. Also, no need to coordinate breathing and strokes. When you feel like breathing - push hard with your 'tail' until you 'breach' the surface, leaping out of the water, blowing out the old air, sucking in the new and diving under again in one fluid maneuver. Just like a humpback whale!

I went to the local Aqua-spa last Wednesday to get a one-hour lesson in this new way to swim. That and some practice is all it takes! For Father’s Day I’m giving myself a present of a Mono-fin Wave (the blue one). I’m looking forward to using my new toy in the Powow River and in the Atlantic this summer. (UPS tracking assures me that my tail is in the mail!)

By the way, the Mono-fin is great exercise for abdominal, back, thigh and leg muscles. (Hip action in the Samba and Rhumba is also enhanced.)

The only down-side is a possible encounter with real whalers while Mono-finning the Seven Seas. An accidental harpooning would be distinctly unpleasant. I will just have to risk it, I guess!

Now if only someone would invent the artificial blowhole, I would be all set. I suppose I could mono-fin underwater on my back and use my nostrils for a spout – hmmmm. Sounds like another mad-science experiment for Daktari!

DAKTARI

Chez Sven, Wellfleet, Cape Cod- May 26, 2010

WELLFLEET STREET

FISH PEDICURE

GLOB OF OPHYRIDIUM VERSATILE

BEWARE STAIRS!

Cape Cod is basically where all the soil from the melting glacier that scraped Vinalhaven down to bedrock was deposited in one giant ridge of sand. We drive 5 hours from Rockland, Maine to Wellfleet, Mass where we are staying two nights at Chez Sven bed and breakfast.

Chez Sven is on the Old Kings Highway, which turns out to be a track in the sand going uphill into the forest. The B & B is a restored 18th century sailor’s cottage. We access our room on the top of the house by grabbing onto the rigging and hauling our luggage hand over fist up some very steep stairs.

Rena’s face blanches when she takes a look back down the way we came.
“How will I ever get down?” she asks.

“Same way you came up,” I reply cheerfully. “ Just grab the rope and let yourself down the companionway backwards. It’s what able body seamen do on whaling ships.”

“Don’t tell me we’re going to have to do this when we go whaling tomorrow?” she exasperates.

“Not whaling - whale watching,” I explain. “There’s a big difference - handrails instead of rigging for one thing. And no sharp harpoons.”

It’s about 1 PM. After unpacking we ask our hostess Alexandra Grabbe to recommend the afternoon’s activity.

“It’s hot enough,” she recommends. “So why not go for a swim in the kettle hole.”

“Kettle hole?” we ask simultaneously.

Kettles are blocks of ice calved off the receding glaciers which got buried in the outwash of sediment from the meltwater. When the buried ice blocks melted, circular depressions called kettle holes were left in the sand . They filled with water, becoming sandy swimming holes, usually less than 2 km in diameter.

Alexandra gives us printed directions of how to find Dyer Pond, the nearest of these fluvio-glacial landforms. The path is not marked but we don’t get lost. The hills are covered with white pines and some oak scrub. Delightful sharp smells of pine pitch and hot sand fill the air.

We are the only bathers today at Dyer Pond. Our own private Kettle hole. That must make us Ma and Pa Kettle! The sand bottom is very gentle on the feet and the water incredibly warm for a day in late May. Tiny fish gather round my feet as I wade in the shallows and nibble at my toes. My first fish pedicure! (It’s a Chinese thing.)

I also note some blobs of what looks like lime jell-o sticking to the kettle’s submerged vegetation and underwater logs. I pick up some of this primordial ooze and examine. It’s not frog eggs and it definitely has chlorophyll. Hmmm- unclassified jelly blobs. Later I find out that the blobs are gelatinous colonies of a single-celled Proctista species of ciliate called Ophrydium versatile. The colonies can be from 2 to 30 cm in size and are found in spring in the slightly acidic waters of bogs and ponds.

I swim back and forth across the kettle, trying not to get nibbled by perch or globbed by Ophrydia, and then lay out in the sun while Rena goes wading. Yesterday, abandoned quarries and today, kettle holes filled with toe- eating fish -- it’s a post-glacial water park adventure for Daktari.

After climbing the stairs to the crow’s nest at Chez Sven, we change into long pants and tee shirts and take a stroll on Wellfleet’s main street. There are many beautiful art galleries, a nice marina and lots of flowers everywhere. What a lovely way to spend an afternoon.

At 5 PM we meet our sister-in-law Josephine and her friend Peter for dinner in Provincetown. Whale watching tomorrow! It’s our last day of the vacation.

DAKTARI

Vinalhaven - May 25, 2010

LOBSTERING ON THE 'SHITPOKE'

OSGOODVILLE

QUARRY SWIM

QUARRY PICNIC

FIREFLIES

Today we’re on another boat - the ferry boat from our home port of Rockland, Me to the island of Vinalhaven. The Maine coast is peppered with islands, of which Vinalhaven is the largest. Vinalhaven is home to lobster fishing. As the ferry pulls into Carver's Harbor, we are overtaken by the ‘Shitpoke’ a typical lobster boat, operated by two burly men in orange pants and tee shirts.

“Why do lobstermen wear orange pants?” I inquire to no particular purpose.

“Perhaps, their red ones are in the wash.” suggests my equally speculative spouse.

Lobsters, it seems, were not always a luxury item.
In the 19th century, lobsters were considered poor peoples’ food. They were what Mainers ate when they were on their uppers and couldn’t afford beef, fowl or even fish. In Portsmouth, NH in 1857 the prisoners at the local jail went on a hunger strike to protest being fed lobster six days a week. (On Sundays they got salt beef.) De gustibus non est disputandum.

Before lobsters became valuable - rocks were the principle product of Vinalhaven

About 10,000 years ago a mile high glacier descended from Canada and scraped the coast of Maine down to bedrock. Bedrock on Vinalhaven happens to be a very fine grained and very hard pink-grey granite which is perfect for county seats, federal courthouses and commercial buildings. So in the 1840's quarrymen from Europe were imported to harvest this granite from Vinalhaven‘s exposed geologic substrate. At one time, over 3000 workers were employed in the quarries.

When lobster became a luxury food, the quarrymen all became lobster fisherman, lobsters being much easier to harvest than bedrock. The quarries themselves have filled with water and make excellent swimming holes.

It’s over 90 degrees today and I am inclined to go for my first and earliest swim of the season. Rena and I rent single-speed bikes at the Tidewater Motel, which is the most happening place in downtown Vinalhaven.

After some hard peddling (there are hills), we pass through Osgoodville (pop.50) and pull off the road at Booth Quarry Town Park. The park is fairly basic. One abandoned quarry, three picnic tables and an orange life preserver with no rope attached. I pick up the life preserver.

“Safety first!” I reassure Rena and as I toss the circular safety apparatus into the quarry.

It actually floats!

Rena acknowledges that the bright orange ring will probably keep my head above water long enough for help to arrive, and I strip down to my shorts and dive in. The water is not exactly balmy but it’s not freezing cold either. I’m able to swim a few strokes before returning to the quarry lip and crawling out on the warm rocks.

I towel off and Rena breaks out the hard-boiled eggs, trail mix, celery and carrot sticks.
We spend some time lazing on sun-baked granite, and then clamber back on the bikes for our return trip.

All in all, it’s a relaxing way to spend a day. The sun is setting as we arrive back in Rockland. We split a dinner at the The Boat House Restaurant. Poached salmon slathered with cream cheese and chives, wrapped in puff pastry and baked-- Yum!

At night I take a hike on the golf course that surrounds our resort. The moon is almost full. I enter a small dale, where dozens of fireflies are winking a welcome. Their green/white fairy lights are a sure sign of summer! New England’s best feature is surely the slow progression of her four seasons --Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter -- each more beautiful than the next. Truly we are blessed.

Tomorrow we leave Maine for Cape Cod.

DAKTARI

Schooner Olad - May 24, 2010

SCHOONER DOCKS

WATERFALL AT CAMDEN HARBOR

THE OLAD UNDER FULL SAIL

TIDEPOOL GEESE

Today we are going sailing in Penobscot Bay.
Captain Aaron Lincoln, a trim and ruddy 40 year old with a coppery beard, welcomes us aboard his two masted schooner the Olad, built in 1927.
It’s a bright sunny day with air temp about 75 and water temp about 30 degrees less.

This is one of the schooner’s first voyages of the season. Captain Aaron has spent the winter polishing and painting the Olad until her fir spars are alight with fresh varnish, her teak deck is smooth as silk and her canvas sails a startling white. What a beauty!

I’m not a sailor but I love the sea and have always been intrigued by the physics of boats.
Specifically how do sailing ships sail against the wind.? A fore-and-aft rigged two masted schooner is the ideal boat to see just how this works.

Physics, however, is the last thing on the minds of our fellow travelers.
The first challenge for your average landlubber is figuring out where to sit.
This problem is solved for us, as I am in the loo when the call goes out to board the Olad.
After debarking from the local mews, I join Rena at the end of the line.

“Sorry,” I apologize. “A full bladder and a long sea voyage are a bad combo.”

My tardiness turns out to be our lucky break, because all the other passengers lined up ahead of us decide to line the forward railings. By default, we join Captain Aaron and the life preservers in the aft cockpit. We’re the ones with soft cushions and back rests to lean on when the deck gets slanty!

“Well bless my bursting bladder,” I whisper to Rena. “I think we’ve commandeered the POSH seats for this voyage!”

(POSH, by the way, is a 19th century acronym for Port Outbound, Starboard Home. On the long sea voyage to India from England, it was best to have a cabin on the Port (left) side of the ship because the Atlantic waves arriving from the West battered those passengers on the right or Starboard side. Vice versa on the way back.)

The Olad’s crew, one broad-beamed Maine lass named Chrissie, casts off the land lines and we motor past a waterfall, through Camden harbor and onto the open sea.

The triangular sails on the foremast fill first, receiving the wind at an angle and scooping it behind the two larger quadrilateral sails - one on the back of the foremast and the other on the mainmast. This current of fast-moving air flowing in front of the big sails creates a vacuum. The vacuum sucks the large sails forward giving them a pleasing curved shape while propelling the boat forward against the wind. It’s exactly the same as the moving air over the curved top surface of an airplane’s wing lifting the entire plane up into the sky. The powerful forces of moving air overcome the clutching drag of seawater. Soon we are scooting along into the wind at about 7.5 knots or 10 MPH.

It’s all physics and the result is so beautiful it takes my breath away. A sailing schooner close-hauled to the wind is a miracle of grace and a pleasure to behold.

Captain Aaron loves his work. He bought the Olad 6 years ago and is now her indentured servant.

“In nine more years the mortgage will be paid and I’ll begin to make some money,” the Captain proclaims cheerfully.

“What do you do in the winter season?” I ask.

“ I used to sail the Olad down to the Florida Keys or the British Virgins and do the same job there,” but now I’m married with kids and so I stay here and work on the boat.
“My wife’s not a sailor,” he adds a bit wistfully.

All kinds of questions spring to mind. “How exactly does that work?”
But it doesn’t seem the time to discuss why opposites attract and whether Captain Aaron’s spouse is jealous of his lust for the sea. Family dynamics is not my favorite field of physics.

We play tag with a bank of thick fog which alternately conceals and displays the lovely Maine Coast. The deck slants in the brisk wind, sometimes at 25 or even 30 degrees. (For comparison, a black diamond ski slope is rarely more than 22 degrees.)

It’s a jouncy, fun ride. Luckily, neither Rena nor I are prone to seasickness!

“Here’s something interesting,” says Captain Aaron. “Do you see that wide beach over there just beneath the fog bank?”

We both stare at what looks like a generous expanse of sand.

“That’s an optical illusion,” explains our Captain. “The low fog bank acts as a giant lens that bends light and makes far away objects look closer. The beach is really quite narrow and only appears larger because it’s magnified by the fog.”

We enter the fogbank and can see nothing on either side.

“How do you tell which way to go in this fog?” I inquire.

“ Well,” replies the Captain. “ The compass always works. But right now I can see the sun overhead so I just tack until the sun is about 90 degrees from my present line and as long as the wind holds true, I’m moving on approximately a straight line.”

“Then, there’s always GPS,” he adds - glancing at the electronics to his left, as if the 21st century is something of an unwanted companion for sailing captains. (Celestial navigation is yet another lovely pinnacle of applied physics which has fallen out of favor thanks to satellites and the electronic age.)

“Will we see any wildlife along the coast?” we ask.

“Our last trip we saw dolphins and seals. Sometimes we’ll even see a whale!”

We, however, see nothing but the sea and the birds.

“Do you see those birds with white backs?” asks our captain.
“Those are Eider ducks. They were hunted almost to extinction for their soft down but now they are fairly plentiful again.”

The mention of Eider down brings back memories. My first research paper ever was written in 3rd grade and was on the Eider down duck! I remember the World Book Encyclopedia where I did my research. Also, a down mattress in a small hotel in Switzerland. But that as they say is another story!

We arrive back at port all too soon and Captain Aaron shows off by not starting the Olad’s motor. She arrives at the dock under full sail with nary a scrape or a bruise on the schooner’s pristine finish. Just like the old days!

On the way to the car Rena and I agree that sailing is not a sport for us.

“Too boring,” says Rena.

“Yep,” I agree.

“Unless you’re either the Captain or happen to love physics,” I think to myself.

DAKTARI