Penultimate Week

Last Wednesday evening I was honored by Sue Hoover with a "sailing dinner party" at her home in Port Townsend.  My patron saints of rigging, Dan and Lisa of Port Townsend Rigging were there, as were Nancy Erley and her partner Lynn.  Nancy is a  widely respected double circumnavigator who runs a sailing school and Lynn is an IT expert who could talk my language about IT security and Oracle database administration.  Unfortunately Carol Hasse of Port Townsend Sails and her partner Nicki were unable to come because they had just returned from a business trip to the East.

It was a fun evening of good conversation and good food, all well lubricated by 4 bottles of white wine. Sue had been unable to see my "Cape Horn" DVD on her computer, so after the rest of the guests left she, Jean, and I sat at the computer and had a look at most of the videos on the DVD.  Jean, who has had a lot of boating experiences of her own, seemed a bit daunted by the conditions on the way to the Horn.

On Sunday afternoon Arnold, Sandra and I drove to Jean's place at Kala Point.  Jean gave us a tour of her large storage shed full of all sorts of interesting things and then took us on a tour of the large gated community with its big variety of houses and condominiums

After a long chat at Jeans's house Arnold and Sandra returned to their home in Kingston, but not before meeting Judy, a neighbor of Jean's, who had arrived for Jean's dinner party.  Soon Judy's brother John arrived with his wife Leanne after driving from their home in Poulsbo.  When I was introduced to them at the door I said "Oh, you are the two who tried to kill Jean and Burl."  Fortunately they took that well and in fact we all got along like a house on fire, as they say.

My remark stemmed from one of Jean's great stories of how she and Burl flew down to the Caribbean in the 1970's at the invitation of John and Leanne to sail with them on their 30 ft boat.  The simpler technology and minimal safety standards of the times must have conspired with the casual attitudes of invincible youth to place 7 people in a boat that wasn't quite ready for sea.  In a 40 knot wind a cap shroud failed at the upper joint, the mast snapped at the cross tree, and they found themselves floundering in a boat that had no radio, not quite enough life jackets to go around, and of course no EPIRB or GPS capability.  They eventually startled people at a resort by sailing in with a piece of sun screen jury rigged as a square sail on the mast stump.  We all had a lot of laughs about that adventure.  John and Leanne went on to build what I was told is a beautiful 50-ft ferro cement boat which they keep in a marina in Poulsbo.

Judy went home to get an early night  and not long after that I pulled out a bottle of Drambuie that I had brought for the occasion.  John prudently refrained because he was the designated driver, and I poured drinks for Leanne, Jean, and myself ... then another ... and another ... and ....  When the bottle was half gone I advised the ladies that neat Drambuie can sneak up on you, and leave you legless.  To prove that she was OK Leanne stood up solid as a rock. which seemed to deflate my argument.  In my defense I  held back on pouring more drinks but before I knew it the women had control of the bottle and the three of us managed to empty it in no time.  Along the way Leanne had to be helped to the bathroom by Jean and afterwards she was helped to the car by John's steady hands.  I write this with a light heart because no harm was done and we had a wonderful time talking about all sorts of things.  In those few hours we established a firm friendship and I hope to see them again (and visit their boat!) on my next visit to the area.

I was a guest at Jean's home that night and in the morning she drove me to Lytle's Auto Detail in PT to pick up Arnold's RX7 which had been in Paul Lytle's hands for the last few days.  This was the culmination of a project that I had been working on for weeks.  The RX7 had been damaged by a gang of idiot teenagers who had stolen the car in California about 15 years earlier.  On the left side of the car were white scars where one of the morons had keyed the door and rear panel, which was a stupid thing to do given that they had stolen the car for their own use.  They had also cracked the plastic covers under the steering wheel in a ham handed effort to hot wire the car.  With Arnold's permission I had the car detailed inside and out as a birthday gift.  The enclosed photo of the left side of the car shows no evidence of the keying damage, but the repair wasn't quite good enough because of difficulties with the drying and curing of the paint; so Arnold is to drop by Lytle's in about a month for another round of touching up while he waits.  The paint matching for both the body work and new plastic covers of the car was perfect.  Paul had a lot of good things to say about the genuine 1984 RX7 with a rotary engine.  He said that the later models were made with thinner body metal and tended to rust out.  Arnold's RX7 does not have a speck of rust.

Arnold's Spruced Up RX7

While we were in PT I asked Jean if we could shop for a flexible measuring tape so that I could monitor my waistline after I begin my diet in Brazil.  She told me that there was no need and donated a spare one that she had at home.  I told her that I would not use it to check my waistline until I got to Brazil lest my screams of shock and horror frighten those around me.  It will be a very strict diet founded on total abstinence from alcohol (sob!)  At times what Brenda has labelled my tell-all "blabber blog" will be more appropriately called my "blubber blog."


I checked my email last night and found a message in Portuguese from the marina at Brachuy stating that I had paid up for my boat only until the end of October, and to please reply to them quickly.  I responded using the Google translator with a quote from my blog entry of 20 August in which I documented the details of my payment to the marina to extend my stay until 30 November.  After sending my message I was still annoyed so I logged into my banking system and extracted my Visa account for October.  I then cut 'n pasted the Visa report into a WORD 97 document, highlighted the payment to Brachuy in red, and sent it as an attachment in a second message in which I also told them to expect me at their office on 10 November with my receipt in hand.

This morning I received from Brachuy the message "Ok, confirmado o pagamento do mês de novembro/12." ("Ok, confirmed the payment for the month of novembro/12.")  I'm very touchy about my reputation and get extraordinarily irritated when accounting offices make these elementary mistakes.