on not protecting your assets...

Just a few 47 bad apples people have to live with, a film I really need to see, and in the "I never thought I'd see an honest oil company ad" department...

In my morning news box I see that five people in Seattle were injured in three unrelated shootings which, by Seattle standards is not exactly surprising. Seattle, as things go in the US of A is a pretty safe place to live.

I mention this, partly because I used to live in Seattle so have a passing interest in what's going on there as well as that what passes for the norm  in terms of crime and violence in the US of A is of interest to me. 

As it happens, the Seattle news came to me at the same time as a current crime report from the Caribbean Safety and Security net had something about someone having their dinghy stolen in Aruba. The idea that someone stole an unlocked dinghy with an outboard was not exactly a surprise. Since outboard motors have become silly expensive and are easily sold (often to cruisers who seldom question a good deal on an outboard) but hardly a crime wave.

The fact remains that sailing and living on a boat in the Caribbean is, more than likely, a lot safer than living back where you came from. Fact of the matter is that most of the folks in the Caribbean inclined to villainy can be found in the local marine trades as there is just not enough profit in stealing your outboard.

That said, if it's unlocked and just sitting there, many will consider it fair game.

Listening to AJ Lee & Blue Summit

So it goes...

the downside of living with a fortess mentality...

Some disturbing numbers, bought and paid for, and in the "0h shit" department...

For a time I used to live on the beach right at the line that separates Venice Beach from Marina Del Rey. It was mostly a pretty great place to live.

If you noticed the qualifier "mostly" that's because we were burgled quite a bit so the whole coming home to find your stereo, TV, and anything else not nailed down missing sometimes dampened the mood. In the year we lived there we were burgled seven or eight time. To answer the next question of "why didn't you move?" it was simply that we were poor college students living beyond our means so breaking the lease and losing our deposits would have been financially crippling.

I mention this because having some up close and personal experience with crime, I seem to surprise a lot of people because I'm not phobic about the whole cruising and crime thing. Which is not to say I don't keep an ear open to places to avoid, listen to my spidey-sense when it goes in to "Danger Will Robinson" mode, and pay attention to situational awareness prompts.

I may not be phobic but, then again, Mom didn't exactly raise a fool either.

The last couple of days we've been rowing past a cruising boat on our way to the dinghy dock. Every time we get near them I can feel my hackles rise, my spidey-sense doing it's "Danger, danger, Will Robinson" in my head, and I find myself rowing in a dogleg around them while my situational awareness alarm is whispering accident waiting to happen and all because of the signs that festoon the boat...

Really, is this any way to live?

Sadly, I firmly believe that we mostly tend to find what we expect to find and those with very negative expectations get just that. Call it a harmonic feedback thing... I expect every villain on this island is tuned to the same harmonic scale and vibrating away like a tuning fork on steroids.

Anyway, something to think about.

Listening to Billy Bragg

So it goes...

ooh shiny...

Wage theft really is theft but somehow I don't expect to see Ronald McDonald doing a perp-walk anytime soon, something cool to watch for fans of "Deadwood", and ever wondered what sort of crimes qualify as lowest priority...

Crime is an interesting subject in boat circles and it seems to me there are a lot of folks obsessed with the subject.

Which is a little surprising since most of the people who are obsessed with the thought that they might be a target made a choice to buy an expensive boat, sail it to a third world country, anchor in front of people a lot less fortunate than they are, and flash a lot of cash. The surprising part is that they seem surprised that someone might consider them a target.

The funny thing is, after years of cruising and living aboard in poor places with high crime rates, I've only had a dive mask and a brand spanking new dinghy/motor stolen. The mask was pilfered and the dinghy was stolen in broad daylight in front of security and fellow cruisers.

So, in real terms, that works out to a negative factor on the budget of less than nine-dollars a month over the last twenty-five years. Not a lot when you think about it.

My main protection from crime, I expect, is that I'm surrounded by people with nicer things more easily taken and a complete lack of a spidey sense...

Listening to Bayou Roux

So it goes...

Much ado about very little...

Last time I checked the various forums were abuzz, online sailing rags were getting serious and not actually pimping something for a change... What, pray tell could be the cause?

Well, apparently, the south seas are rife with cannibals!

Now, as someone who grew up with "Tales of the South Pacific" and various pulp fueled dreams of the South Seas, I'll admit the idea of a scantily clad buxom blonde missionary in a big cooking pot was sometimes an idle daydream but the current manic reaction seems a bit over the top.

Yes, sadly, a cruiser was killed and his partner attacked but there is no real evidence that cannibalism was involved and that this was anything other than a simple botched murder and an attempt to hide the evidence. The cannibalism angle was introduced by a German tabloid (not unlike our own National Enquirer who, as everyone knows, is not the sort of rag to find news in...(unless you consider dog faced boys and aliens mating with Sarah Palin news...).

Yet everywhere I turn I hear questions and pronouncements such as this one from NAS...

"The possibility of cannibalism has shocked citizens of French Polynesia, who believed that such practices were long past.

Our thoughts are with Ramin’s family. And it looks as if another location needs to be added to the “do not cruise” list."


Latitude 38 on the other hand (always the best place in my opinion to get close to the truth on sailing related news and mayhem) looks past the lurid headlines and simply deals with the facts available with a researched and well done article. In other words, they cover the news...

L38 ends their coverage with this paragraph...

"If you were planning on doing the Pacific Puddle Jump and are now worried about personal safety in Nuku Hiva, our opinion is that this murder falls in the ranks of incredible aberrations. In fact, it reminds us of the case earlier this year when a young French woman on ultra-safe St. Barth inexplicably stabbed a harmless 57-year-old Haitian housekeeper to death on the main road into town on a Sunday evening. Apparently even the most serene and peaceful places are not immune to occasional mayhem."

Off hand, I don't think they were suggesting that St Barths should become part of the mythical "Do not cruise" list... Do you?

All that being as it is, I really do wish at least some of those pulp dreams might actually exist. You know the sort...

 Of course, with my luck, this would be a lot more likely...

Listening to Spirit

So it goes...

speaking of dumb and dangerous...

This guy is all about supporting the troops (not), villains in St. Vincent & The Grenadines, and a bit of dumb and dangerous project news...

Well, since I mentioned a "dumb and dangerous" laser that is powerful enough to blind someone and set things on fire (including human skin), and be cobbled from off the shelf bits and pieces, I should, perhaps, issue some sort of warning... 

Dumb and dangerous projects by their very nature are, in point of fact, dumb and dangerous and should not be done while drinking, otherwise impaired, or by those whose IQ tops out at less than the temperature on a brisk winters eve in Wisconsin.

That said, having an Iron Man laser on board is more than likely a whole lot safer and more legal than having a gun or guns aboard...

Just saying...

Now, if I were one to consider something akin to a weapon for defending a boat... I'd still give serious consideration to the medieval poleaxe (hey even Amazon has them). The poleaxe has both reach and pointy bits and was the medieval equivalent to the bazooka (the knight in armor being the tank). The downside is that pointy and sharp things needs some serious training...



... Of course, I should point out that the winners of altercations that involve pointy bits and sharp edges often wind up in the same emergency room as the losers, which you might want to keep in mind!

So, for the moment, my plan of action is still to stay as far away as possible from places where villains ply their trade on a regular basis, and hopefully getting around to building a "Bedazzler" because, maybe it's just me, but a little puke on the floor trumps blood any day...

Listening to Mr Buffett

So it goes...

Just when you thought it was safe to go shopping...

Yesterday we had to do some shopping and when we left the boat there was not so much as a breath of wind, the sky was an azure blue and the water was as smooth as glass...

A couple hours later, while we contemplated whether to buy a large box of Oreos or Famous Amos cookies, our cell phone rang.

The boat moored next to us was calling to tell us that a waterspout seemed to be forming less than a hundred feet away from us and that maybe we should know...

Being that we were in a store, and, at best, a half hour from our dinghy, this was something of a can't really do anything but pray to the PTB"s situation. So we got a play by play commentary of all hell breaking loose while we stood in a supermarket aisle powerless to do anything.

The next five minutes seemed to last forever...

The water spout formed between us and two other boats (So It Goes is just out of frame to the left in the picture). As we listened, we heard how one boat was enveloped and then that it appeared that one boat had come loose from its mooring (luckily it did not). The ensuing mayhem had all of the boats in touch with the spout in unnatural positions to each other. The spout then went through the anchorage nearly causing a collision between two boats as they were both sucked towards each other then it continued to the launching ramp and dissipated as it came into contact with the land...

"So It Goes" did not sustain any damage nor did anyone else in the anchorage but it was a very close thing and it could have been very ugly. After we returned I dived on my ground tackle to find that our bow was nearly on top of the anchor and that our chain was laid out in two nearly perfect circles around it... Pretty impressive considering I have nearly 150' of chain out.

Our cats (Buffy and Willow) were a little shell shocked having been inside while "So It Goes" did, or so I'm told, a fairly convincing imitation of a dradle. Both Buffy and Willow appear to believe this is not what they signed up for and can we spell c-o-m-p-e-n-s-a-t-i-o-n? It appears that many cat treats and string time is the order of the day.

Listening to a Buffet clone

So it goes...

This is just so wrong...

City of Dallas steals $2,000 from child

Lifeboat stations...

Speaking of triage and priorities...

Texas, a state with a 27 billion dollar deficit, is making deep cuts in education and government services while at the same time giving a big tax break to folks with yachts by capping the sales tax so that no tax would be collected on transactions over the $250,000 mark.

So, in short, if you buy a boat for $250,000 you'll pay the same tax as someone who bought a mega yacht for $250,000,000.00...

Listening to James McMurtry maybe you should too...



So it goes...

The sound of a head banging against a bulkhead...

The Daily Show
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There's even more to the story over here...

Anchoring thoughts of the day...

Back in the days when we had not succumbed to the lure of an outboard for the dinghy, folks would often ask us why we anchored so far out in spite of having extreme shoal draft of around fourteen inches...

Partly, the answer involved the fact that I simply enjoyed rowing and being on the outside of the anchorage allowed me a longish row as part of my daily regime. Plus, since I was CRUISING the fact that getting into the dinghy dock took ten minutes versus 90 seconds hardly seemed like a problematic affair. A slower pace of life being part of the plan... ya know?

Then again, anchoring at the outside edge of the pack meant that we had a little more privacy, a little less chance of someone dragging into us, and a little more time if it was us doing the dragging ting...

It would also be fair to point out that anchoring further out meant that every other boat in the anchorage became instantly more attractive to brigands and villains with pilferage on their minds and heinous deeds in their hearts... Having grown up with no shortage of brigands and villains in my younger years, an early lesson was that most will avoid anything even remotely like work and many would consider a long swim a akin to drudgery.

Method to my madness, if you will...

Which is not to say that distance is our only protection from the brigand/villain mayhem that is all too prevalent in too many places these days... Keeping a low profile is part of it, and we are more than happy to leave it to others to be the rich Americans (spelled prey) in an anchorage.

Situational awareness is also a needful skill and well worth working on. If our "Spidey sense" does its thing you might be surprised just how fast we can up-anchor and be somewhere else...

Of course, we keep a watch when needful and our night watch crew likes nothing better than to kick some serious ass from time to time...

Listening to Jo Jo Gunne

So it goes...