Reality light...

Well, this pretty much sums all of that up, Scalzi on some folks being comfortable with both reality and math, and, I wonder, why I had to hear about this important election result from the BBC...

All this talk of elections of late has been reinforcing my view that a whole lot of people are working on the premise that you can simply delete facts that get in the way of your preferred world view... Now, I expect that is a needful thing for some folks of a certain political bent but where boats and sailing are concerned, it can be seriously problematic.

Sailing and cruising is a very reality intensive pursuit and basing plans on what you'd like things to be rather than what they are is a recipe that will bite you in the ass big time.

Back when we had Loose Moose 2 (a boat that drew a kiss over one foot) we'd find that a lot of people seeing a 38-foot boat at anchor would decide that they could anchor there as well and in spite of the chart or cruising guide which pointed out that the depth was less than three feet, water that was clear enough to show that is was real thin, and our jumping up and down waving them off screaming shoal draft, they'd still come up to anchor close and find themselves hard aground.

The fact that water is shallow in some places is a fact you don't want to ignore...

Same can be said for weather... Every year during the "H" season we note that a lot of people tend to think that they can somehow change the weather by shopping for a different weather service or computer models. My experience is that storms with names have a serious reality bias and are seldom deterred by wishing they'd be somewhere else. As it happens, a friend mentioned the other day that "H" season was now over and it was time to leave his chosen area away from storms now... I pointed out that "H" season still had a while to go but he feels that it's time to leave because he is bored and wants to get moving again...

Me, I'm not stowing away my storm tackle just yet...

Listening to It's a Beautiful Day

So it goes...