Author name: ozweaver

In the serendipitous way that living onboard can be, Bob overheard a woman talking about cruising in Cuba last spring while he was in the marina laundromat a couple of days back.  You just never know what you’ll find when you go ashore in a cruising community.

The woman’s name is Jules, and she and her husband have cruised the world in their Ingrid 38’ ketch named Bounty from their homeport in New Zealand.  They are interesting people (obviously!) and generously willing to share their knowledge with us as we make plans for Cuba. YET it’s never a good thing when Bob meets people who have done such extensive sailing.  Look out!

Jules and her husband Gary visited us that evening and carefully went through our charts of the southern coast of Cuba, giving us valuable information on various harbors and how to fit into Cuban culture while ashore.  There were some significant things that differed from what we have read.  There is nothing like information from people with first hand experience!

On the other hand, there is a lot of scary stuff (Bob would say ‘exciting’) hurtling toward us.  Where do I begin??  Like the Bahamas, we will only approach a shoreline in daylight hours with the sun high overhead.  This is good news to me because I really don’t like night sailing.  Even so, there will be a fair amount of night sailing—just not when we go into harbors.  Ugh.  The swells will be large, but the wind should be mostly on our backs, which is more comfortable than other directions.

We will need to be tucked into good harbors at night because Cuba is a mountainous country, with katabatic winds at night–quite strong katabatic winds.  (from the Greek: katabaino – to go down– is the generic term for downslope winds flowing from high elevations of mountains, plateaus, and hills down their slopes to the valleys or planes below.)

And speaking of winds–we have heard from good friends who have already crossed over the the Bahamas that there have been terrible winds there lately.  In particular, there was a cold front earlier this week that brought sustained winds of 105 mph through an area of the Exumas.  Our friends were anchored between Great Exuma and Stocking Island where the winds were 65 mph.  A number of boats were thrown ashore and badly damaged in this blow.  I was horrified to learn about this.  We’ve had some bad winds there the past two years, but nothing like this! At least there are protective harbors in Cuba, unlike in the Bahamas.  So—we will want to be well tucked in each night, or well offshore.  I’m hoping for the former!

Also, we will need to be sensitive to situations onshore.  Sometimes we will be welcomed and sometimes not.  We need to read the signs of whether we should be in a particular shop buying items that the Cubans want to buy or whether we’ll be welcome to eat in particular restaurants that are for the locals.  I’m so sensitive in this regard that I often over react.  I’m certain that Bob and I will run into differing impressions when these situations arise.  All in all, Jules and Gary gave us a wealth of advice and information.

A sobering bit of info is that our visas, which will only be good for 30 days, really cannot be extended.  We have to leave Cuba for at least 24 hours in order to get a new visa for another 30 days.  Since it’s impossible to sail the coast of Cuba in only 30 days we will have to face this dilemma.  I was hoping that we could just anchor off the mainland someplace safe, but that is not acceptable.  We need to check out of Cuba and check into another country to prove that we left.  The most obvious choices from the southwestern end of Cuba are the Caymans or Jamaica.  Either of these will involve another overnight sail in big ocean.  Can you imagine the kind of dreams I had last night?

So the next few days to a week will be focused on finishing up our repairs and provisioning.  High on my list is getting my cartoon sorted for my next tapestry.  I am going to weave the final line from a favorite Robert Frost poem called “Mowing.”  The culmination of that poem is “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”  This is moving to me on so many levels, and I envision that weaving this phrase will be quite enjoyable.  The piece will go to my son Chris when it’s finished, so I asked him to work on the font and the spacing of the letters.  After trying a couple of fonts, we both decided on Adobe Caslon.  Here is a small version of it.

This is what it look like printed out full size, spread out on the floor at Staples in Vero.  Don’t you like Bob’s foot for scale?

I made a little sample of the text in a different font some time ago.

In the real piece the background will be lots of blended neutral colors woven in small shapes.  I hope that will have an interesting visual effect, as well as being interesting for me to weave.  I hope to get warped soon!

It is now Saturday morning, and there is a large farmers’ market here in Ft. Pierce, so we’re off to check that out.  We’ve been told it’s the largest, and best, market in the state.  It takes place every Saturday all year long.  Also, it seems we had a new guest onboard last night:  a raccoon.  That’s a first!

I’ll end with this silly photo Bob took of me yesterday as we walked around Ft. Pierce. I could have fun with my own jewelry store!

This is the end of our first week onboard, and I am beginning to get used to boat life once again.  It was a HOT New Year’s in Vero Beach, which is a very odd experience for us!  We left our family in Baltimore on the very day that cold weather hit the northeast, where our part of Connecticut had its first snow.  This is the first year that I won’t see any snow, unless there is still some around when I return in May—unlikely!

Some hot scenes from Vero Beach…

New Year’s Eve lunch at Cobalt, the restaurant in the Kimpton Hotel that looks out at the Atlantic–quite a luxurious spot for a New Year’s Eve lunch.  I had no interest in going out to dinner because that would entail a late night dinghy ride back to the boat in a dark harbor.  It gives me the shivers to think about drunken dinghy drivers in an unfamiliar harbor.  I chose lunch!

Traditional holiday decorations look rather out of place down here to me.

But there are plenty of lovely sights to see, like resurrection ferns which are flourishing right now since there has been plenty of rain.

 Along one of the streets we walk  we saw these large shrubs in bloom.  What are they?

 I’ve spent some time arranging our things, especially Christmas gifts from our kids that I simply could not leave behind, in order to make our new Pandora look homey.

After 20 years of celebrating New Year’s Eve with our good friends Kari and Gerhard our current celebrations have not been nearly as fun and interesting.  Change is inevitable, and I’m not saying we didn’t have a very nice evening this year….I just couldn’t help also feeling such a fondness for our past New Year’s gatherings with dear friends.

During our second day here we visited a nursery and farm stand in Ft. Pierce called Nelson Family Farms where I bought some herbs and a pink geranium that Bob planted together in a window box. Nelsons is now my new favorite plant nursery in this area.  There were so many choices of plants, and the fruit and veggie offerings on display were really tempting–I wanted to buy way more than we could store in Pandora’s galley.  One thing I found really tempting was chick peas still in their seed pods.  I’ve never seen that before!

I bought a phalenopsis– a hybrid color break white/magenta, and a rosemary plant in its own pot since it needs drier conditions than the other herbs (parsley, chives and thyme) that I wanted together in the window box.  Along with these I also have some paper whites from home that were a gift from my friend Tina.  So we have quite a bit of garden going for a boat!  It makes me happy, and most of all I am always amazed at how quickly things grow in warm, maritime conditions–and how sturdy they get after a week or so in strong breezes.  It will only take a few weeks before I will be able to harvest as many herbs as we need everyday.  At home it would take from early May ’til mid-July before I could do that.

To bring a little holiday cheer onboard since it was not yet New Year’s, Bob picked some greenery with red berries from an empty lot, along with some long stemmed white begonias.  Rather festive–though certainly not in the vein of traditional ‘northern’ Christmas decorating.  We tried hard to come with something that would NOT  look as silly as a red bow and bells on a palm tree!

To put a fine point on the kind of slow internet we cruisers experience, I’d like to explain that every photo I included in this post took from 20 – 30 minutes to upload.  Then some of them just failed entirely and had to be redone.  One of them–the window box planter– has uploaded sideways, and I’m far too exhausted to fix it at this point.  I started this post at 8 am, took a 1 1/2 hour break to go out to lunch, and it is now somewhat after 4 pm.  Really, I wonder why I bother!  It’s got to be my maniacal stubbornness.

For this last photo, when I truly thought I would lose my cool waiting, I decided to untangle a mess of size 20, 6-cord cordonet that I’d like to use for a project.  Because of the high twist it had tangled into quite a mess.  How’s that for manical??  While highly frustrating with the internet I chose to use my downtime doing another chore that was equally highly frustrating…. For most of the time I was detangling it looked like the detangling event would win over the uploading-photo event.  At the last moment the photo won, and thank heaven, because I might have cried.

I have more news but no more patience.  So until I recuperate enough for another frustrating, slow internet moment I’ll stop here.

P.S. I fixed the window box photo.  Whew!

This evening I am celebrating that I finished winding on the warp for my next project: fabric with JOY’s Almaza in quite a vibrant colorway.  The warp is muted shades of colors from the cool side of wheel–somewhat greyed blues and purples, with an occasional stretch of an almost bright pink.  I wound 16″ of this in 2″ sectional pieces, 6 yards long. The vibrancy will come when I add the very bright peach painted weft.

I did encounter a problem–due to my hasty math.  I have three hanks of this colorway and should have made the warp 5 yards long in order not to exceed my 3,000 yards of materials (each hank is 1,000 yards long).  However, in my excitement to get started, I left my warping wheel set at 6 yard length.  Ahem….  I realized my mistake after the first 2″ section was wound.  I quickly revisited the math and saw that I would come up 456 yards short!  Yikes!  I quit for the day then and decided to sleep on it….

My warp would be narrower than I needed for fabric.  I wanted fabric 16″ wide for my project.  I was only going to get 14″ now since every thread was a yard longer than it should have been.  When I woke up the next morning the first thing I thought about was adding some single colored warp threads to get the full width I needed.

456 threads out of a total of 3,456 is 13% of the warp.  I decided to add these threads to the second back beam on my AVL dobby and then mix them evenly into the main warp when I thread the pattern.  I need an additional 72 threads added to the 504 threads already wound on.  The solid color threads are medium grey and, as I mentioned, will constitute 13% of the total warp.  I hope it will look good!  It was my best guess on how to get the width I need!

By the afternoon I had the  the smaller warp on the supplemental beam–just 12 threads each in six sections.  Since tomorrow is my last day here, and I have plenty to do to close up this house ’til next May, I will have to leave threading ’til I return.

The weave structure I’ve chosen is an overshot lace that I found in the book 60 Scarves for 60 Years from the Weavers’ Guild of Greater Baltimore. It was designed by Carol Bodin especially to use with a painted warp.  Her project uses a solid color weft, so I am really looking forward to seeing how my project will work with a painted weft in an entirely different colorway….it will certainly be an exciting project to come home to!

After bringing both warps around their back beams and putting in the lease sticks I tidied up my studio so it will entice me to get to work when I return.  Bob and I headed out for our last walk along the CT River until spring.  It is the first cold day of the season here, and the sky was a clear winter blue with large fleecy clouds.  Two sights surprised us.  First, there were two big draft horses with an open carriage on one of the quiet residential roads that leads to the river.  I guess these horses were giving carriage rides in the center of town earlier in the day.

And a last good bye to the sheep who live on the corner of the street that leads to the river.  They aren’t too sure about Bob and me, so every time we try to take their picture they generally run for cover into the barn! All our photos show them running away!

We’ll be running away ourselves on Monday.  Future posts will look much more tropical.

Each year the quest for 10 sheep presents is never far from my mind.  My sheep group has been meeting for 37 years now, and I have been a member for about half that time.  The group has renamed itself a number of times, but the most colorful name is the “Flockettes.”  As the years have passed we have now become rather good sleuths at finding sheep Christmas cards and sheep wrapping paper and ribbon.  I kid you not, this is major holiday sheep hunting and can make or break my mental stability!

So let’s start with the sheep tableau at the porch door to my house. They are a recent gift from my good friend Susan, who is not a member of the sheep group.  She just knew how much I would enjoy this little flock.

One of the most popular gifts for our sheep group is tree ornaments.  Most of us now have a ‘sheep’ themed Christmas tree somewhere in our houses.  Our mantles, front doors, and dining room centerpieces are usually based on sheep.  After 37 years of getting 10 presents each year we have a LOT of sheep!

This year, as Thanksgiving approached, I was getting fairly nervous that I still did not have my sheep presents OR any  appropriate sheep wrapping paper and ribbon.  What’s a sheep lover to do???  In a panic I may have come up with lamest gift ever–but at least I was not running around all the shopping venues in my area, or trolling  the internet.  I was home having a bit of fun with one of the gifts I got years ago from “Flockette” Karyn!  I made a desk calendar of “Lambie” doing various weaving and handwork projects for 2016.

Here are a few images of Lambie doing projects.  In February she is working on some bobbin lace hearts.

Lambie at the loom working on a boundweave project

Lambie learns to dye from some expert mushroom dyed gnomes (dyed and knitted by mycologist Susan Hopkins)

And Bob made Lambie some reading glasses so she could do close work like embroidery.

Do you think I’ve gone a bit overboard??

And in other holiday fun that did not involve sheep–but did involve kitties which I also love– I made a several of these little knitted bags.  My oldest childhood friend Lea Ann (oldest as in in how long we’ve known each other, NOT how old we are!) gave me a kit for this precious little knitted bag.  You can get these kits at Creative Fibers in Windsor, CT.  The shop owner designed the pattern and calls it “Button Jar’s Chump Change.”  You can also just get the purse frame  from this shop and use your own yarns and fabrics to make these little gems.  The only other thing you might need is Nicky Epstein’s book Knitted Flowers.

This is the first bag I finished for a gift exchange in my bobbin lace group.

These are the other two.  The red bag is from the kit my friend gave me, and the purple one is for my sister.  It’s a great little bag for knitting tools (I put a collection of stitch markers in my sister’s bag) or it could be a little project bag for small things like tatting.

LeaAnn included a little kitty pin to embellish my bag.  The kitty is encrusted in ‘diamonds’ and is playing with a ball of yarn.  Initially I attempted to embellish my bag with knitted balls of yarn unraveling across the bag, but I wasn’t happy with that.  Now he is playing with his ball of yarn in a flowering vine.

Front.

Back.

I hope each of you has bit of time for doing something you love during this busy, busy season.  And although there is no snow yet in this part of the world, I hope your holidays are beautiful.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was enjoying a holiday lunch with two of my dear friends from New York/New Jersey, Bob got word from the State Department  (specifically someone in the OFAC office–Office of Foreign Assets Control) that we have been approved to visit Cuba this winter.

I am now officially excited and scared to death.  There is a 350 mile ocean crossing from Turks and Caicos to the first landfall just west of Guantanamo, Cuba.  I know that’s only 1/5th of what our sailing friends do when they sail to the BVI, but it’s more than this landlubber is ready to tackle….

Meanwhile, here is a little Christmas cheer from the Delamar in Southport, Connecticut. Whatever you’re celebrating this month, I hope it’s wonderful….

 

Postscript:  I may have spoken too soon.  Bob and I have been approved to visit Cuba, but our boat has not!  And we need permission to sail on our boat as much as we need permission for ourselves.  Stay tuned.