Someone once said that sailing is the perfect marriage of art and science.
I think it is the marriage of art and science and..self realization.
It's a three-way.
It's true, that there is an awful lot of math...and I'm very glad yo soy es only the Marinaro on Pura Vida and not El Capitan because if we were relying on MY calculations, we would be off course, out of diesel, up you-know-what's creek and dragging anchor with a boat on the beach.
But where there is art, there is room for some interpretation and where there is self realization there is room for some intuition.
I am cook and therefore responsible for the feeding of our crew. Traveling as we are there can be many weeks between stops and re-stocking, we have limited supplies of water and cooking fuel, our refrigerator is run by solar when we are at anchor we cannot ask more of it than a good chill. It's 110 degrees and we can only run it twice a day . These are all things that can require math skills- which i lack in the most comprehensive sense. Never-the less, we have been out for three weeks and a bit, without seeing a single grocery store or a resturant and we have never had the same meal twice. I do not make numerical lists when I provision, I just eyeball things and think about how much milk so and so drinks and how many times I will probably bake muffins. Just as I don't quickly compute scope (anything multiplied by seven has always vexed me) but usually I can set an anchor and approximate how far she will swing by the feel of the boat when I back her down and look around-although Jon, who has no trouble with equations, especially ones that even Hunter can do, is always the final word on scope.
There is a renaissance aspect to sailing. Most things aboard a sailing vessel serve a function and are in their nature also graceful. The turkshead knot on our steering wheel, helps us center the rudder and at the same time I never tire of the Escher-like symmetry of it's continual braid. It took patience and skill ( and a few hours with the knot book on his lap) for Jon to make it. The rushed and the sloppy have no place here. There's an old cruiser's rule that one should never do more than a single project on a given day. There is a certain "chill" required to achieving attention to detail. When i watched the Mandala painters in Lhasa, saffron-robed monks, bent over their silken canvasses creating masterpieces of multilayered imagery from deep meditations I doubt they were thinking...
'Oh, Lotus-Born, I gotta hurry up and finish this mandala and get over to the temple to translate some scripture before dinner" .
Nope. They weren't stressing. They didn't have like a huge "to do" list.
Just one thing, done well, that's enough for sailors and monks.
They know, this moment, is everything and nothing.
No beginning, no end. Like Escher and the Turk's head on the ship's wheel.
I think it is the marriage of art and science and..self realization.
It's a three-way.
It's true, that there is an awful lot of math...and I'm very glad yo soy es only the Marinaro on Pura Vida and not El Capitan because if we were relying on MY calculations, we would be off course, out of diesel, up you-know-what's creek and dragging anchor with a boat on the beach.
But where there is art, there is room for some interpretation and where there is self realization there is room for some intuition.
I am cook and therefore responsible for the feeding of our crew. Traveling as we are there can be many weeks between stops and re-stocking, we have limited supplies of water and cooking fuel, our refrigerator is run by solar when we are at anchor we cannot ask more of it than a good chill. It's 110 degrees and we can only run it twice a day . These are all things that can require math skills- which i lack in the most comprehensive sense. Never-the less, we have been out for three weeks and a bit, without seeing a single grocery store or a resturant and we have never had the same meal twice. I do not make numerical lists when I provision, I just eyeball things and think about how much milk so and so drinks and how many times I will probably bake muffins. Just as I don't quickly compute scope (anything multiplied by seven has always vexed me) but usually I can set an anchor and approximate how far she will swing by the feel of the boat when I back her down and look around-although Jon, who has no trouble with equations, especially ones that even Hunter can do, is always the final word on scope.
There is a renaissance aspect to sailing. Most things aboard a sailing vessel serve a function and are in their nature also graceful. The turkshead knot on our steering wheel, helps us center the rudder and at the same time I never tire of the Escher-like symmetry of it's continual braid. It took patience and skill ( and a few hours with the knot book on his lap) for Jon to make it. The rushed and the sloppy have no place here. There's an old cruiser's rule that one should never do more than a single project on a given day. There is a certain "chill" required to achieving attention to detail. When i watched the Mandala painters in Lhasa, saffron-robed monks, bent over their silken canvasses creating masterpieces of multilayered imagery from deep meditations I doubt they were thinking...
'Oh, Lotus-Born, I gotta hurry up and finish this mandala and get over to the temple to translate some scripture before dinner" .
Nope. They weren't stressing. They didn't have like a huge "to do" list.
Just one thing, done well, that's enough for sailors and monks.
They know, this moment, is everything and nothing.
No beginning, no end. Like Escher and the Turk's head on the ship's wheel.
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| Jon tests our watermaker |
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| laundry day |
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| lookin for stuff |
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| stingray-shuffle your feet! |
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| The "hook" in Isla San Fransisco |
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| how we almost got a cat |
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| NO roads lead to Nopolo |
Nopolo definitely looks like my kind of town. Though clearly it's normally 150 degrees in the shade, if there were any.
ReplyDeleteI want to hear the story on the cat!!
ReplyDelete