Fine Craft

We are in Eau Gallie, Florida now and have spent four days here with a group called the Seven Seas Cruising Association.  Every December they gather here for socializing and learning from various well known sailors who volunteer to give seminars.  This year we were lucky to meet both Chris Parker, our weather router (guru) and Jimmy Cornell who has written a number of cruising books that are well known to sailors. We also met Jimmy Cornell’s daughter, Doina, who has written a book herself about growing up on a circumnavigation, Child of the Sea.

I’ve been hearing about this town called “Oh! Gollie!” or “Oh! Gallie” and wondering how on earth it got its name.  It turns out it is “Eau Gallie,” and since it sits at the water’s edge that explained the ‘eau’ to me.  But what about Gallie?  I’ve just learned that ‘gallie’ is French (galet) for rocky and the two words together are ‘rocky water.’  The town is named for the coquina rocks that abound here.  Still, it’s fun to say…. Eau Gallie!

This has been an exciting weekend for me!  I have met a weaver from Ontario! Her name is Lois, and she is sailing south to the Bahamas with her husband on their boat Astar.  She has a large 8-shaft LeClerc, a 10-shaft draw loom, and the same 8-shaft Baby Wolf that I have.  She knits and spins as well, so we had a lot to discuss!  One of her wheels is the same Lendrum (made in Canada) that I have.  We both had our knitting with us.  She has her OHS certificate of excellence in weaving and has worked in some capacity for that organization. She is a member of very large guild in the Ontario area. I can’t wait to learn more about that. She has heard of my regional guild, MAFA (Mid Atlantic Fiber Association), but not my new regional guild NEWS (New England Weavers Seminar). We both started weaving in the mid-70s.  It is so wonderful to have finally found another weaver!

Another woman mentioned to me that she knows of two weavers that she has met while sailing.  She promised to find them in her list of contacts and give me their names.  I made connections with these women and others during a seminar called Women and Cruising.  This seminar was for those of us women who are new to living aboard.  It was a time for us to express our concerns or fears or voice our hopes in finding other women who have similar interests.  There were birders and shell collectors and bridge players…..  One woman who has her sewing machine aboard along with bins and bins of fabric told me her wonderful experience from last winter.

In the Bahamas she likes to weave traditional baskets of local materials.  I think she called it ‘silver grass’ or something like that.  She said the local women taught her to weave these baskets.  At some point she learned that some of the women have no access to the basket materials they need because it grows in places that are only accessible by small boat.  She used her dinghy to harvest some of this basket fiber and brought it to the women who needed it.

What a lovely way to connect with the local culture, to make friends and learn something so precious!  I hope I will find opportunities like this! Doina Cornell’s tales of spending her childhood sailing around the world with her family were also full of the experiences she had living in such varied cultures from all around the world.  The weekend was rich with amazing experiences and valuable insights!

Walking about with my knitting led other women to talk to me about their own knitting projects.

 Oh!  I must not forget to mention that I finished my Ann Jacket!  Woohoo!  Just for the record I finished it on December 5th, in plenty of time to wear home!  And since I cannot let my needles lie silent I have moved on to the “Ruffle Wrap Cardigan,” and it is practically knitting itself.  Every time I knit what feels like a couple of rows an entire body section is finished.  If only all sweaters would knit up this quickly!  I have finished the back and both fronts, so yesterday I started the first sleeve while walking around the SSCA conference.  The sleeves are the first opportunity to use the fun ribbon that gets knitted into this design.  Wow!  That ribbon is really over the top….perhaps a bit garish?  I’m wondering if I have the guts to wear this when I finish….

We are homeward bound!  Today we will sail down to Vero Beach and will have dinner with our friends who have a house there and split their time between living on the Connecticut River in the summer, in Vero for fall, and on board their boat Camelot for winters in the Bahamas.  Then Monday I will get a rental car in preparation for our trip to the airport, and I’ll do our last minute laundry.  Tuesday we fly home!  I will have 1500 hundred miles under my belt and three full months onboard.  The first tiny drip of experience in what Bob hopes will be many, many experiences living onboard.

Day 90, December 9th: Eau Gallie to Vero Beach.

Who said it won’t feel like Christmas in the tropics??  I believe I said that….

Well, we are really getting in the spirit down here, in spite of palm trees, mangroves, and dolphins!  The lights of St. Augustine are about as festive as you could see anywhere, and in New Smyrna we were treated to a Christmas parade of boats!

During the afternoon and early evening quite a few boats passed us along the waterway on their way to the gathering spot for the parade.

I could see something sparkling bright blue long before we got close to this boat.  It was the flash of the mermaid’s sequined evening gown!  This boat wins the prize!  It was as much fun to see in daylight as it was to see in the parade after dark!

We think about 40 boats went by during the parade.  We gave high marks for the boat that looked like a sea monster (or perhaps Jules Vern’s “Nemo”), the pirate ship, and a sport fisherman decked out as an alligator.

Well, this will be one of those moments best left to memory!  We took a lot of boring videos with my phone, and a few still shots.  Have you ever tried to take photos of moving objects in the dark without a tri-pod?  Yeah….

It was a lovely evening at anchor in New Smyrna.  We were joined by friends from Mystic who are also headed south for the first time, just like us!  Ted and Ginnie are aboard Firecracker which is a sister boat to Pandora.  What a treat to be traveling with friends from home! We combined efforts for dinner, had lots of wine, and enjoyed the parade! Traveling together from St. Augustine we saw our first mangroves, lots of dolphins, and Ted reported that he saw a manatee!  Now we are really on the look out!

Along the way to Cocoa we traveled past Fort Matanza (I need to catch up on Henry Plummer’s visit 100 years ago), Daytona Beach,  and New Smryna which was originally settled by Greek immigrants.  Cocoa looks lovely, and I plan to find out shortly.  There is even a knitting shop!

Going past Daytona

We had been warned that Florida is the waterway of bridges, and boy, it is so true!  In Daytona we went through five bridges in the space of one mile, and three of them were draw bridges that required waiting for opening.  To get to Cocoa we went through three more.  And supposedly this is nothing compared to what lies ahead!

How nice to decorate a bridge for the sailors who pass under it!

 

Knit and Stitch in Cocoa, Florida

Day 82, Dec. 1st: St. Augustine to New Smyrna
Day 83, Dec. 2nd: New Smyrna to Cocoa
Day 84, Dec. 3rd: Lay day in Cocoa

Just a moment away from tales of our journey, and tales of my knitting on board, to share some great things I found online in the past couple of days.

Prince Charles trying his hand at tapestry at the Australian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne.  Really!  It’s not that scary! Actually, I’m sure he’s hamming it up for the press.  He is a wonderful supporter of the wool industry.

And this lovely image of a woman knitting….

Some highlights from the past week are all about food!  What better balm is there for terribly dreary weather?  We stayed on the docks in Savannah for a couple of nights and treated ourselves to some of the high spots of Savannah.

I discovered the Tea Room almost 20 years ago and have visited it each of the rare times I’ve been in Savannah since then.  In fact, I’ve been mail ordering their “Emperor’s Bride” loose tea for all those years.  This year I had “Red Fruits” black tea, and it is my new favorite. As you can see, there is a lot to choose from.

The store and the dining room is done with an “Arts and Crafts” theme that is really lovely!  I could live here…..

On another day, our friends from Brilliant recommended we all have lunch together at Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room.  What an experience!  You line up on the street with about a thousand other hungry people, and you are admitted to the dining room a table’s worth at a time.  Most of the tables seat between 6 and 12 people, so you are seated with others when a table becomes available.  You don’t order food; there is no printed menu.  Food just arrives at the table in large serving dishes, and you help yourself to what appeals to you.  I have never seen so much food on a table!  It’s more than Thanksgiving!  I think some of these dishes must always be on the menu:  fried chicken, black eyed peas, Brunswick stew, barbecued pork, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, rutabaga, squash, green beans, candied sweet potatoes…..I’m sure I’m forgetting at least a dozen other dishes.  It was amazing.  The only thing you have a choice on is your drink, which can be sweetened or unsweetened iced tea, or water!

This is the little alley-way that leads into the dining room.  When we arrived at 12 noon the line was already down the street.

And here’s a shot of the table!

Oh yeah….just looking at this photo shows several dishes I forgot to mention!  Baked bean,  cornbread, biscuits….. it was amazing!

I’m not going to mention the three days it took us to get to St. Marys, Georgia.  The weather has just been so dreary that it’s best not to talk about it….best for me to just put it behind me.  I will say I had another day with some rather severe homesickness….

St. Marys (and it is not St. Mary’s) is just over the border from Fernandina Beach, Florida.  I mean literally.  I think the two towns would be connected if not for the border.  Well, maybe that is a slight exaggeration.  They do share the same harbor entrance that splits before you reach either town.  And that means that moments after we leave here we will be in Florida.  Wow!

In the meantime, we intend to have a marvelous few days here, and it’s going quite well at the moment since today I awoke to sunny skies for the first time in about two weeks!  Every night leading up to Thanksgiving there is some kind of evening get together for sailors in this town, or morning coffee and treats at one of the local shops.  They have a tradition here of taking good care of sailors for Thanksgiving!  I don’t know how they do it, but each year they serve Thanksgiving dinner to about 200 sailors.  “They” supply the turkeys and the sailors supply all the side dishes and desserts.

I’m off to shop for my contribution so I can bake tomorrow.

….Oh! And last night I wore my Ann Jacket for the first time….sans sleeves, but still, I wore it!

It starts with a latte made by Bob.  It’s a great way to start the day!  I highly recommend it!

Then, of course, there is knitting.  I knit everyday.  And I plan meals… both those activities go without saying.

On this trip our new tradition is to read from The Boy, Me and the Cat at some point each day.  This is a classic cruising tale about a man, Henry Plummer, and his teenage son who sailed a small catboat down the coast from Massachusetts to Florida during the fall/winter/spring of 1912-1913…. exactly a hundred years ago!  Some things haven’t changed at all during the past century, and some things are light years different…

Henry started his journey a full month after we did.  So, after all my complaining about being cold, I’m now reading how he woke to mornings with icy decks and had to break the ice in the basin in order to have a wash up.  Yikes!  I don’t know anything about hardship, do I?

Some of most entertaining parts of the book involve the antics of Henry’s cat, Scottie, who was drafted into the trip.  She is a feisty little thing, and with no ‘kitty kibble’ onboard her meals are always interesting…

Eleven years ago Bob and I worked on a new edition of this book.  I edited the text and chose some of Henry’s original photos to add to his wonderful line drawings, and Bob worked on all the details of getting the book republished.  It came out in 2001, bankrolled by The Catboat Association, who are the repository for all of the Plummer family’s many treasures related to this book.  Our edition got very high praise from Wooden Boat Magazine, Elizabeth Meyer (founder of IYRS) and even Walter Kronkite!…among others.  We are very proud of this edition, and we worked hard to include lots of information that the previous editions (and subsequent editions too) could not.   This is the only edition that includes Henry’s photos and appendices that include his correspondence from that time, newspaper articles about him, and family information and what became of the Mascot.  It’s a great story whether you read our version of one of the others….but our edition has the most to offer!

So, as we sit anchored in Beaufort, North Carolina, we are reading about Henry’s visit here in early December of 1912.

Turned out at 5 to find all quiet, still and dark. So quiet that from the quarter I could hear the ticking of our little clock.  So calm that each star was mirrored on the water.  Away under power by 7.  Out into a golden sunrise the pride and beauty of the day.  Here was a morning for sun worshippers to kneel.  Sea and sky melted into one great glory in the east and behind us faded into soft pearly mists in which horizons were lost, and we seemed to be floating in air.  So flat the bosom of the sea that the meanest stepmother in the land would have been proud to call it hers.  The duck feathers floated on the surface as lightly as — well, I can’t think just how lightly now, but gosh-dinghed lightly.  We turned her on a 20 mile leg southwest at 8, and sailed all morning on this wonderful sea.  Why can’t somebody come here and tell people of the beauties to be found?

You can see why we look forward to each day’s installment!  Henry Plummer was one of the first adventurers to sail these waters for pleasure.

This evening we will have a little party onboard for other sailors we keep bumping into (not literally!).  We will finish the last of that peck of oysters!

 

I’m feeling a tad homesick these days…..so I can’t stop taking photos of houses…. these are  the lovely houses in St. Michaels.

Days 15 and 16, Sept. 25 and 26: St. Michaels

There is a yarn store here which I’ve visited in past years, Frivolous Fibers, which just might be the friendliest yarn store ever!  When I got there yesterday there was hardly room to peruse the yarn shelves because there were so many women lounging together working on projects.  It wasn’t a class; it was a gathering, and it happens every Tuesday! They invited me to find a seat and join them.   These are my people!  Women were working on sweaters and afghans, lace shawls, cowls….you name it!  They were discussing books, knitting, grandchildren, husbands.  It felt like home.  It felt like my wonderful knitting group from NJ… I miss them SO much!

Back on board Pandora for a little ‘wine and roses’ before dinner.

Then back ashore for dinner at Ava’s, a wine bar and brick oven pizzeria.  Wonderful!