Here is the latest Appa video. We took the boat up to Desolation Sound up in British Columbia Canada. You can see how hazy it was during the beginning of the video. This was from the forest fires that have ravaged our area this summer. Once we had a spot of rain, it cleared the skies up and you could finally see the mountains.
I shot the video with my DJI Mavic Drone, old ass HTC phone camera, GoPro 4 Silver and a Panasonic camcorder. Edited everything in Cyberlink Director studio.
Opening photo is courtesy of Lee Youngblood.
This is the 2017 Bi-State regatta. Chicago to St. Joseph Michigan and back. Fifty miles as the bird flies each way. Held over Labor Day weekend and my brother's birthday. Arne and Gordon have done this race many times. Now that they are both gone, my brother and I use this race as a memorial of sorts to our dad and uncle. God we miss you two!
While racing back from St. Joe, we had some hitchhikers. Two little birds landed on board and proceeded to get into everything. One landed on my beer-can, went in the cabin, ate a spider, and in general was hanging out, I named him Arne after my dad. The other was on Kristopher, the steering wheel, the spinnaker sheets, the jib sheets, everything. That is Gordon. Funny little birds.
We came in last for the race to St. Joe. I'd like to think that we did so poorly because of the rigging slowly loosening itself as we raced. The port side turnbuckle had two more spins and it would have come out resulting in a lost of the mast possibly. We caught this once in St. Joe. The Bi-State is a night race there on a Friday and a day race back on Sunday. It was so dark and windy that we didn't notice anything amiss other than it getting increasing harder to make the boat sail close to the wind. Dummy me should have checked the shroud tension when that started to happen. Stupid.
But basically, I think my tactics might have been suspect. The other boats went close to the Michigan shore and then tacked north. The wind was right out of the direction that we wanted to go, meaning we had to tack back and forth to get to St. Joe. In retrospect, we should have gone into the shore more and then tacked. This would have alleviated some of the waves that were causing the boat to almost come to a dead stop at times. That tactic of banging the shore and tacking goes against J24 racing where you never hit the corners of a race course. The difference between long distance racing and buoy racing I guess. I am more of a driver than a tactician but we had fun. Next time...
The race back to Chicago, I shut my mouth and just had fun. We tacked right at the right time and the wind started to back to the SE from the E. The wind backed a bit more and we were able to hoist the chute. We also put the finish line coordinates in Garmin correctly. Some boats had the old coordinates in and they paid dearly for that. We took a bullet (meaning first place) for the race home. Kristopher and Peter did the driving. I was kinda sulking about my poor performance on Friday night. I am good at sulking.
The songs used in the video are Eric Clapton Sweet Home Chicago (YouTube didn't allow the Blues Brothers version), Van Morrison Into the Mystic, John Hiatt Gone, and Nickel Creek Ode to a Butterfly.
Hope you enjoy the video. I am still learning how to photograph interesting stuff and trying to find my way. I think finding the right music is almost as hard.
On the cancer front, I had my 6 month checkup and am clear. The spot on the right lung has shrunk considerably after radiation and that means it was cancerous. We will check it again in 4 months to make sure. So far so good.
Next week is my CT scan and then the following day is with Dr Pollock the colo-rectal surgeon. Pretty nervous about this I must admit. I haven't slept well for about a week and my jaw hurts from clenching it all the time. Teeth ache as well. Hopefully it will be all good and I can wait for the next 6 months and do it all over again.
Going sailing to Poulsbo tomorrow. Parents, kids and friends. Cooking mahi-mahi on the boat and doing a bit of tequila/margarita tasting.
Here is the link to the BVI video I made about our trip in February.
It is a bit long and I decided against doing small short vids. But the kids enjoy watching it and that is all that matters to me.
Snow in Seattle. What a winter. This is my buddy's boat after our most recent snow"storm". Schools closed and then next day, even though all the streets were clear, we had a two hour delay for all schools.
I have all but given up on blogs. I used to follow almost thirty blogs and now that number is down to two. I watch vlogs almost exclusively and I imagine that the viewership of this blog has dropped off dramatically especially as I hardly post anything here anymore. I never did this blog for the viewers though, it was and is my personal record of my life that is whizzing by. Will my kids read it? Maybe. I doubt it though. But at least I won't saddle them with a ton of photo albums and stacks of papers that they will have to dispose of when I die. And people say I'm self-centered...
Tomorrow (Feb 9th) we go to the British Virgin Islands for a bit more than a week. At 2200 tomorrow we will be wheels up to JFK and then to St. Thomas. The flight to JFK is overnight and then, hopefully, with the kids in a sleep-deprived stupor, we can catch the flight to STT. Catching this flight depends almost exclusively on the snowstorm (not the kids) that is barreling towards NYC as I type this.
Airports. I love them. When I am at work and talk travel, I get the usual backlash about wait times and all that stuff. I am old enough to remember when you could RUN through airports to catch your flight! No security lines. Nothing. Get out of your car and run to the gate. It really wasn't that long ago. Thinking of travel as a privilege helps. Pay your fare ( it is cheap as hell compared to what it was), be nice to the stewardess or steward and sit in a chair that eventually reaches 36.000 feet into the sky and wait till you land. I mean it is damn near magical! You are sitting in a chair, in the sky!!!
Not that I ever showed up prepared. Winged flight and I have had a rocky relationship. It wan't that long ago that I had almost a 50/50 chance of making my destination back in my wild and woolly days. Berlin? Passport with no wallet. Galapagos...well, I only talk about that when I'm face-to-face. Generally though I was better at international flights than domestic. Las Vegas was particularly hard for me to fly into and then out of. No idea why.
Had my three month checkup last week. Just me. I think I swore that I would never do another checkup without someone there with me but things change. It is a weird place that I am in right now. Family here, friends here but yet...well, everything is fine so far as cancer goes. So far. Gold says CT scan in three months and we will see about that "spot on your liver and lung." Both of which have grown in between scans. Nothing to be done about that though.
So I will post a youtube link to the videos that the kids and I make during our trip here. I think I might make three or four small videos about 4 minutes each rather than one large one. My son Ben seems to want to do some video taping and I'll encourage that. He asks me about me editing software and I'll include him on that as well. Not sure if we will do voiceover, "live" voice or just music with subtitles. We will see. What the kids want and what they help with are two different things. Here is our video channel
