Author name: ozweaver

It’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted anything here—for various reasons.  I have been pretty productive over the past weeks, so it looks like I will head home with three new sweaters, and I have made enough progress on my Portuguese Man of War tapestry to feel that I know where I’m headed with that.  I set aside my third lace heart a few weeks back and have not touched it since.  And I made one, very fun, sock from Cat Bhordi’s Insouciant Knitting book.  Although that sock was fun to knit, I am not that smitten with the sock style and probably will never get around to knitting the second one….  Ah, well….

Here is that interesting sock…

And current progress on tapestry:

 There have been some unsettling moments over the last few weeks, and that is usually what takes me away from blogging.  We have had some sad news from several friends who are having health issues.  I am so worried for each of them and waiting for news is so stressful that it is very hard for me to concentrate on anything else.  I hate to even bring up this kind of thing here, but it has taken up so much of my daily thoughts I will just say that I am willing good friends to regain their health.

Also, we recently had two very frightening sailing incidents.  I hesitate to spend time describing what happened—this is, after all, a blog about weaving and other handwork, not about sailing!  But sailing is a major part of my life each year, and while sailing, Pandora is my floating studio.  Every sailor encounters bad situations.  I’m often reminded of the old adage:

Good decisions come from experience.  Experience comes from bad decisions.

After 40 years of sailing together,  I hope that we have gained enough experience, and made enough bad decisions, to be guaranteed in only making good decisions now.  Alas, not so!

Bad decision #1 is not one that carries much blame for us.  I will always take the easy route to get somewhere, so if it were up to me, I would spend our whole trip motoring and sailing up and down the Intra Coastal Waterway and never go out in the ocean!  Bob, on the other hand, would always choose to be out in the ocean, so he tries to pick the days that will cause me the least stress.

Going out in the ocean from coastal US below New Jersey involves using inlets because the entire southern coast has barrier islands.  Inlets are a sailor’s challenge.  Some are better than others, but since they are all dicey,  it’s better to avoid the bad ones entirely and to be cautious of the ‘good’ ones.  We have used Ft. Pierce inlet over the past few years since it is well known as one of the ‘good’ ones.

However, about a month ago, there was an accident in this inlet where a barge in tow sank and one person died.  This sunken barge is a significant hazard in the inlet, and the inlet has been closed since the accident.  We recently heard that the inlet is now open during certain times each day as salvage operations have begun.

So when Bob wanted to have a good day of sailing up the Florida coast from Key Largo to Ft. Pierce, he contacted the Coast Guard to see what the situation is with the Ft. Pierce inlet.  The Coast Guard told him that on the day in question there would be divers working on the wreck during the morning, but that the inlet would be open to small vessels by 11am.  We hit the high seas to make passage to Ft. Pierce.

When we arrived about 2.30 in the afternoon, we called the Coast Guard again for instructions on how to proceed into the inlet.  We had been told that the wreck was marked off with buoys to prevent boats passing over that part of the inlet.  But the Coast Guard then informed Bob that the inlet was closed until the end of the day because salvage operations, including divers, were still underway.  Ugh!

We noticed two other sailboats nearby us; one was a boat we have crossed paths with several times over the years in the Bahamas.  In fact, they had just sailed overnight from Chubb Cay based on the same information about going through this inlet by late morning.  They had arrived at Ft. Pierce at 11am and had been anchored off the beach all day.

This was one of those times when there were no good choices.  It’s never a good idea to anchor on a lee shore, which is what they chose to do.  But the other options were not good either: to sail back and forth near the inlet waiting for it to reopen which is exactly what Bob and I did.  For our friends, who had already been up all night for their passage from the Bahamas, this was not such a good choice.  Another option would be to keep sailing to another inlet.  The next inlet north is Cape Canaveral, and it was closed for the upcoming rocket launch.  So, given this lack of good choices we all did the best we could.

The third boat waiting for the inlet was not known to us, but after a chat on the radio we learned that he was onboard alone and had sailed from Miami with the same information that the inlet would be open by late morning or noon.

It was 6pm by the time the divers were up and the salvage barge with a large crane aboard had been up-anchored and moved to a safe location inside the inlet.

Here are the guidelines we always use for entering inlets.  It is best to go at slack tide.  Water does not like to be restricted—and that is exactly what inlets are.  The water approaching the east coast of the US has come all the way from Africa and is suddenly coming in contact with shallow coastal areas and then being funneled into a tiny inlet.  Just imagine what happens to all that water—it gets very agitated.  So it’s best not to add any further agitation such as flooding or ebbing tides.  Slack tide will have the least additional agitation. Wind also plays a significant part at inlets.  Never go into an inlet when the wind opposes the tide.

We planned our 2.30 arrival to coincide with slack tide.  There was moderate wind out of the east (yes, all the way from Africa), but with no tidal activity we should have had a reasonable transit through that inlet. It is almost impossible to get all these variables to be in sync with each other, but we do aim for as many positive players as possible.  But at 6pm in the evening, when we were allowed through, a number of things had become rather worrisome.  First, the sun was low in the west, right in our eyes, so it was quite difficult to see the obstructions that were marked in the inlet.  Second:  now the tide was at full ebb and the wind was from the east—bad situation.  The water was very confused.  Third:  I really hate to admit this—I have the highest regard for the Coast Guard– but on this day they were not giving out the best information.

Our friends on Five and Dime entered the inlet first, followed by us, and then Morgana, the boat that had sailed from Miami.  The Coast Guard advised all of us to ‘hug’ the north side of the inlet and proceed close to that jetty.  The wreck was on the southern side of the inlet. The waters were so confused we were all sluicing around and heeling over quite significantly in both directions.  Pandora was heeling about 30 degrees, first to port and then to starboard, so we were heeling a total of 60 degrees every minute or so.  We needed almost full throttle on the engine to keep her going forward; otherwise, she just sluiced around from side to side.

Shortly into the inlet Five and Dime ran hard aground in the area we’d been told to go.  She was right in front of us, so it seemed likely that we would run right into her.  It was harrowing to watch her pounding repeatedly on the bottom.  She was heeled over quite far, so she was pounding on the side of her keel and hull.  It looked terrifying.  They made an immediate distress call to the Coast Guard who, along with the local harbor police, came out to help within a moment.  A few big waves hit all of us then, and Five and Dime came off the bottom and managed to get back underway.

During this time, Bob saw no other option to avoid hitting Five and Dime than to turn around and head back out a bit.  The marked area we were to transit was a bit too narrow for turning around, so we ended up going over the sunken barge a bit, luckily with no incident.  By the time we did an entire 360 degrees, Five and Dime had progressed enough for us to continue forward.

Morgana did not have enough engine power to get through the inlet on power alone, so the captain, who was alone, had to go up on deck to put out his jib.  Boy, did I suffer a heart stopping moment watching him do that.  Our boats were all heeling and sluicing around, and I don’t know how he managed to stay onboard.  But after a tediously long few minutes, we were all safely in.  Five and Dime went to anchor near the Coast Guard station in order to be near help while they assessed any possible damages to their hull.  Morgana and we went further in to a protected anchorage.

The winds had freshened quite a bit during the late afternoon.  We set our anchor, but now neither of us remembers how thoroughly we backed down on the anchor to set it.  Clearly, not well enough.  At just after midnight, which meant it was now Friday, March 13^th, Bob got up to check things.  He often does this at least a couple of times each night.  To his horror he found that we were no longer even in the anchorage.  We were dragging quite rapidly toward the bascule bridge that was just beyond this anchorage.  He called me to come up on deck as quickly as I could.  I also was horrified as I came up the companionway to see the bridge rapidly approaching our stern.  Of course, it was entirely the other way around, but it did look like the bridge was bearing down on us, instead of us bearing down on the bridge.

I took the wheel while Bob went forward to assess the anchor.  As he left the cockpit he warned me not to run over the anchor.  Yikes.  I set the throttle at a moderate speed hoping it was not too much to overtake our anchor.  Then I looked back at the bridge and was terrified to see that we were now very close to one of the huge abutments.  Fear took over and I pushed the throttle to full forward.  I can think of only one other time in my life when I was this scared.  I could actually feel us hitting the abutment and our mast striking the bridge–although it never actually happened.  I was in quite a state!  Pandora felt the kick of the full throttle and began making slow progress forward.  I guess we were in quite a current pushing us toward that bridge.  It was deadly dark, except for the excruciatingly bright lights on the bridge, as we tried to re-anchor in this overly crowded anchorage.  This time we backed down good and long to make sure the anchor was well set, but neither of us felt confident enough to go back to sleep.  It was a long night.

I do not blame us for the harrowing experience of getting through Ft. Pierce inlet.  We did our best to choose a safe sailing day for the trip, and we did due diligence by contacting the Coast Guard about the use of that inlet before setting out.  Sometimes things just conspire against your best efforts.

But the anchoring fiasco was entirely our own poor doing.  And the danger of dragging rapidly back to that bridge was quite a bit higher than even the experience of a bad passage through an inlet.  It still haunts me, two days later.  I think it will haunt for me quite a long time to come.

Over a decade ago Bob and I edited and published a book about a man who sailed the East Coast of the US in a very small sailboat.  He had a marvelous ability for understatement and often referred to these harrowing experiences as a “busy cup of tea.”  The whole day was indeed a very busy cup of tea for us!

And I’ll end with another old adage:

Boating is hours and hours of pleasure, interrupted by moments of sheer panic!

Frankly, I often feel it is the other way around….

 

It’s almost here, and I hope it comes in like a lamb!  We just got word from our oil company that we are dangerously low on oil and that the truck cannot get in our driveway due to the closed gate.  No one can get that gate open when there is so much snow piled up on either side of it!

There is not much to report here.  The weather window for heading out of Florida has closed so nobody is leaving which means we are still anchored back in the mangrove swamps.  The herons and egrets and pelicans have good hunting back here and are wonderful to watch.  It seems that everytime they strike at something in the water they are swallowing a tasty morsel.  The juvenile eagle ray swims by Pandora at some point every day.  I think he must also find good feeding back here.

Our older son Rob came for a visit this week after having some business in Miami.  It was wonderful to see him!  We spent a day together in Key West, using his rental car for the trip.  As you know there is only one road that runs down the Keys, US 1, and that road has only one lane in each direction.  Much of it is causeway going over water.  When there is an accident it pretty much closes down the ability to move in any direction.  If you are stuck on a causeway there is no getting off.  That is what happened to use on the trip back up to Marathon at the end of our day in Key West.  It was a bad accident and had the road closed for most of the day, so in the long run we were pretty lucky.  I’m sure lots of folks never got to their destination that day.

Here are Rob and Bob enjoying some cool refreshment on a pretty front porch in Key West, at a bar called “The Porch.”

I have a good crop of mint growing in my window box– along with cilantro and bright red geraniums– and we used the first mint harvest to make mojitos!  Yum!

It was quite hard to say goodbye to Rob, not knowing when we will see him next…. and quite hard to learn the news that Chris has decided to move to San Francisco temporarily in order to make some connections out West for his banking start up.  This vagabond life is a little hard at times like this.  It’s hard enough to get enough time with my kids without also disappearing off the grid for months and months.  Sigh…

Our dinghy got damaged several weeks ago, and although Bob bought a repair kit, the fix was not to his liking.  We decided to have it re-done professionally.  Here it is going back in the water after a day at the shop.

We had to stay ashore for the day while the repairs were done–no other way to get back to our boat.  I found a beautiful spot for us to pass some time while we waited….and have lunch as well! This lovely resort is on the other side of Marathon so we were looking out over the Gulf.  Some dolphins came near shore to entertain us during lunch.

Today will be a quiet day onboard.  I have plans to make bread and get back to weaving!

How do I account for the ‘fluther’ of Portuguese Man of War that drifted into our little mangrove creek yesterday?  It has to be serendipty.  Bob jumped in the dinghy and got lots of photos for me.  Now I have plenty of good images to draw from for my tapestry.

The poor things will die back here as they tangle with the mangrove roots.  We will have to be very careful going under the lines we have tied in the mangroves as we go to and fro in our dinghy, as well as when we leave and Bob pulls in those lines. At low tide the lines droop down in the water, so there is a good chance the lines have poison on them and can sting Bob’s hands when he pulls them back aboard in preparation for leaving. We’ve put dishwashing gloves on our provisioning list.

The water is a very weird color back here in the mangroves–a milky green.  We think that it’s caused by something the mangroves themselves produce and leech into the water, but we have no certain knowledge about this!

What I do have certain knowledge about is the collective word for jelly fish: fluther! A fluther of Portuguese Man of War.  I love collective nouns; they are so evocative.  A ‘murder’ of crows is one of my favorites.  A “bloat” of hippopotamuses, a  “kindle” of kittens, a “parliament” of rooks. Last night when I went searching for a collective word for jelly fish, I found that a ‘gaggle’ of geese is for geese on the ground.  When they are flying they are called a ‘skein’ of geese.  I love that! Ducks also fly in a skein.

Just now Bob called me up on deck to see a small spotted Eagle ray– a juvenile.  Isn’t he beautiful?

I’ll end with a shot of Bob I took yesterday.  He was attempting to befriend a pelican.  Not successful!

Those are big concepts…. and words that come to mind for anyone who is at the beginning of a new project.  Excitement for the new idea and the commitment to try it jostles with the anxiety of entering the unknown and doubts about one’s ability to tackle this new idea.  In the case of weaving, and especially weaving tapestry, there is the calming process of making the warp, spacing the warp threads and weaving a header.  This process involves relaxing repetitive movements with your hands that help chase away the negative doubts and worries.  If you are very lucky–and I am!– you are holding a bobbin made by John Moss, a beautiful tool that you know was made with great care and precision and feels good in your hand.

I am trying a continuous warp this time, where I have all the warps on both front and back of my copper pipe loom and will advance the warp around the loom as I progress.  Normally I make a continuous warp that has half the warp on the front of the loom and half on the back and I bring the two together with a shedding bar.  Making a warp the way I have this time allows me to weave something twice as long as my small loom.  The downside is that when I advance the warp around the loom I will have to be very careful about keeping things straight!  I have been meaning to face this fear for years!  I also have to keep the back warps from distracting me so I have inserted a card so I will only see the front warps!

There is just nothing so soothing as the look of a brand new warp.  There is no other time in life when things are so neat and tidy and every warp thread is perfectly parallel with its neighbor, with even tension across the whole surface.  Life is certainly never as even as a warp!

Several weeks ago I made an acquaintance with a tapestry weaver from the Baltimore area, Ann Booth, whose works I’ve enjoyed seeing online.  I’m using up a data this year keeping myself inspired by looking at artworks online and staying in communication with other weavers.  Next year Ann and her husband may be out here sailing down the coast and across to the Bahamas.  I hope our paths will cross.  Perhaps we can even weave together!

When I mentioned that I had only met one other weaver during our three years of cruising (and that woman, a Canadian, had left her looms behind and brought only knitting along for her trip), Ann introduced me to Doris Florig, who is currently living on her sailboat in Guatemala.  Doris is such an inspiration!  She reminds me of the enthusisam and quest for knowledge of my younger self, when I was so intrigued by learning everything from the ground up: spinning my own yarn, dyeing, weaving cloth.  It was in my young adulthood that I learned these techniques.  Somewhere along the way I have lost the wonder of these things.  I still spin and dye and weave, but over time that original awe and wonder has left me.  Doris is still cultivating and nurturing that spirit of adventure.  The main saloon–or cabin– of her boat is not very different from my own on Pandora, and she has set up a large tapestry loom in that space.  Wow!

I can tell Bob is worried I’ll want a set up like this soon!

We sailed from Miami to Marathon, with a one-night stop at Rodriguez Key near Key Largo, over the past couple of days.  The wind has been extreme but mostly at our back which is far better than sailing into the wind.  It was a hard couple of days for me since I get seasick easily, but even Bob found the long days hard going.  He has to do all the hard work by himself.

We are now in Marathon, and it is the most crowded harbor I have ever seen in the US!  You’d think every boat from the US and Canada is here.  There are no moorings available for rent, which is no surprise.  We are #32 on the waiting list for a mooring, and I thought that would mean we had small hope of getting one before June, at least! The bigger surprise was that there is no room to anchor in the harbor.  We arrived late in the afternoon, not long before sunset and I was quite worried when I saw how crowded things are.

Here’s a layout of all the moorings, now full.  All additional space is taken up with boats on their own anchors.  Sheesh!

We motored up into a creek off the harbor that leads into a mangrove swamp.  There were already about a dozen boats up there “Med-moored”–short for Mediterranean moored– to the mangroves.  This is a technique where you put down your anchor in the middle of the creek and then back the stern of your boat toward the mangroves and tie your stern onto the trunks of the mangroves.  The boats end up lined up next to each other like in a parking lot.  There was less room than we’d like between boats, but we managed to squeeze ourselves in.  Luckily the two boats on either side of the spot we chose were very welcoming! We barely got ourselves settled as the sun went down.

Tied to the mangroves!

The wind is still howling, but we’ve learned that once the wind stops there will be gazillions of no-see’ums.   I guess I hope the wind stays up! There are some cautiously optimistic weather predictions that March may come in like a lamb this year.  If the weather truly does get milder many of the boats here in Marathon will head off to the Bahamas.  We do not plan to go yet, so that may leave us room to move into the harbor. Maybe we’ll even get a mooring!  Early next week we plan to meet up with old friends who have a 2nd home down here, and our older son is planning a visit next week after he finishes a business meeting in Miami.  I am really looking forward to that!

On our first trip to shore yesterday we encountered this manatee.  Shortly later we saw a group of four floating together in one of the small canals.  Amazing creatures! The water is very green in this harbor.

So, now that I have done all the preparations I will start weaving today.  I want to explore some ways of depicting water in cotton thread, and attempting the Portuguese Man of War that we saw in Boca a couple of weeks ago.  For those of you who have seen my past postings you know that I plan to weave a large tapestry of a Portuguese Man of War.  I’m looking forward to playing with water images today! Hopefully I will gain some insight on what I can do with the larger tapestry that is waiting for me at home.