Tuesday, December 20, 2011

and on the subject of Skink...

The Girls' Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse makes a pretty good point, something worth watching, and nothing like this could ever happen at home... could it?

I'm currently re-reading "The Riddle of the Sands" again and it still happens to be my favorite sailing book... Of course, reading it on a Kindle (it's a $1 download at Amazon) adds just a bit of an odd "time marches on" vibe to the whole arrangement.

Fiction and sailing is something of a bad mix in most books I've read. Either they don't get the sailing right or, in those very, very few books that actually do have a passing understanding of sailing and boats, don't seem be able to tell a story you actually might want to read. Which is kind of surprising as you'd think sailing and cruising would lend itself as a vehicle for contemporary fiction...

Can you imagine the sort of books Robert Crais might do? I'm pretty sure Elvis Cole would be sailing a cherry CAL40 but I honestly don't have a clue about the sort of boat Joe Pitt would be sailing except you just know it's going to be wood and some kind of awesome...

Or, how about Randy Wayne White? Doc Ford's sari wearing cosmic cowboy sidekick  Tomlinson has a Morgan and, all things considered, he'd be a lot of fun to buddy boat with!

James W. Hall is most of the way there, as his mayhem magnet Thorne character spends a goodly amount of time on the water, knows his way around boats, and could easily support himself while cruising by tying flies.

On the other hand, the character I'd most like to see out sailing and cruising would be the  roadkill eating ex-Governor of Florida Clinton Tyree otherwise known as "Skink"  from various Carl Hiaasen books...  I'm pretty sure he'd know exactly what to do to that big sports fisherman that just waked us...

Listening to Distorted Penguins

So it goes...