From the Poop Deck
Seaworthy Ideas and Stuff
Paul Kurkowski

Ahoy mates! A Happy Winter to you all, well almost. The winter solstice in nearly upon us. That’s good news. After the day of the shortest time of daylight, it is only like 130 days ‘til float the hull day. See, that is good news. Oh, in case you are wondering, winter officially starts this year on 12/21 at 1:35PM Detroit time. The sun at its highest point that day will only rise slightly less then 24 degrees above the due south horizon.

As sailors do, even in winter, we think, talk and sometime dream of sailing. There are even a few of us (lucky sons of sailors) that get to sail while on a winter vacation, in the warm tropics. That’s nice, been there and done it. Ah, ya gotta love that salty spray. I’m hoping to get the ol’ Ice Boat out. I sure hope we don’t get a lot of snow. Good grief, did I just write that? Let me re-read that…”sure hope we don’t get…”

Wow, I did!

I re-phrase, let us hope for lots-o-snow. Keels need breathing room. Whew, I nearly put the whammy on us.

In the news: I am sure all of us have heard of the red tides. Have you heard of the green tide? In case you have not, just to let you know, it’s only localized to Lake St. Clair, the Detroit River and the west end of Lake Erie. Are you getting the drift? Yep? Good. I won’t have to explain it. The Green Tide is a yearly algae bloom that occurs in the warm water of Lake St. Clair around the end of June. You may have noticed the water taking on a greenish hue. It eventually dies down as the water drops in temperature. Excessive algae death in late summer turns the water to that brownish hue, not to be confused with the brown of the Clinton. That is sooty run off from its banks.

LORAN is NOT dead! With the fear of terrorist signal blocking/jamming of the GPS System, the U S Government has given all 18 U S LORAN transmitters a solid-state upgrade. Yep, $22.5 million of or tax dollars at work, with up to $25 million more on the way. The government has found out that LORAN is virtually un-blockable. Better yet, integrated electronics will allow for a LORAN-GPS marriage giving accuracies of within eight meters. Look for the new receivers at a marine store soon near you. Ha, I recon the phasing out of LORAN by 2008 is gonna be on hold for quite a while.

Casting off all lines. Color me gone.

Paul Kurkowski “Space Hunter”

THE ADVENTURES OF CAP'M. JIM

TRADITIONAL

POINT OF VIEW

By Lorenzo Caricchio

We didn't know where we were going, how long it would take or what we would do when we got there. But Cap'm Jim was confident that if we held our course our destination would eventually make itself known. So I figured that as long as the scenery was pleasant and the sailing was easy I would just sit back and enjoy the ride. Doing anything else would only rock the boat and risk spilling my beer. A few hours earlier we had embarked on what Jim called an "Anywhere the wind blows" journey of discovery; and the shifting autumn winds had rapidly blown us to the northeastern end of Lake St Clair and were now apparently going to abandon us deep in Bassett Bay.

It was unseasonably warm for mid-October. Jim took off his jacket and went below to stow it leaving me to pilot the old battle scarred twenty-two foot boat in the faltering breeze. "Hey Jim" I yelled into the cabin as I saw weeds beginning to appear just below the surface of the water. "Either we turn around and head back out to open water or you should crank-up the keel a bit while you're down below."

We were approaching the southern shore of Canada's Walpole Island, inhabited predominantly by several Indian tribes. I had never sailed here before but I knew, from the charts, that it got very shallow, very fast.

"Hold your course" was Jim's answer, followed by the ratcheting sound of the windless as Jim cranked up the swing-keel. After fifty or so revolutions of the handle he came back on deck and added. “Let’s try to ride-out the last breath of this wind and see where it leaves us. Then we can drop the hook, make a sandwich and have a couple of martinis while we wait to see if sunset brings us a breeze to sail home on."

The wind left us in the shallows, close by the island, just west of where Chenel Ecarte' dumps into the bay. It was a picturesque spot near a patch of tall reeds where a family of ducks were grazing on algae. The rays of the low sun flashed briefly on the wings of a heron as it took flight from its hiding place, and the contrapuntal songs of thousands of tree frogs and crickets drifted out to us from the near-by shore.