Means of Seeing what the eye brings

The new album by The Rebel Spell, “Days of Rage”. Blown away, and proud to have grown up with these guys/gals.

Today’s Book O’ The Week is Peter Nichol’s “Sea Change”. i’m just partway through, but really enjoying it. Interesting parallels with my own love- and life-style. Been thinking in similar terms lately myself, as have been some other friends. A fellow carpenter/sailor friend’s girlfriend just left him on St. John, and was feeling pretty exhasperated with the whole deal.
As he said, “Here, we have the boat, the work, the sun, the sea; we’re living the dream! But it’s never enough for the girls who always want something more, but never know what they want!”
Peter Nichols seems to feel much of the same exasperation, especially as he reads his ex-wife’s cast-off diaries and comes to understand how she was so quietly dissatisfied all along.
Oh yeah, it’s also also about a long-distance solo passage on a small engineless wooden boat. Gotta love that angle too…

Yeterday was the occassion of the WEYC’s 14th annual Firecracker Regatta. i took out a group of KATS kids aboard our newest IC24 “First Caribbean KATS” (gotta love the corporate sponsorship, eh?). In 5 races, we finished 1st twice, 2nd twice, and 3rd once, and came away with the overall class win. The kids sailed really well, coming together at a few close moments. The races were held around Little Thatch Island, where i frequently sail my own little dinghy, and it felt like we had a “home water advantage” over the other boats, who seldom, if ever, sail here in West End. The currents and winds suffer strange interactions in these channels, and it certianly helped to have some familiarity with them!
The kids are really geared up for the Chief Minister’s Cup next weekend, where the BVI hosts youth racing teams from around the Caribbean, and with the improvement they’ve shown over the last few months, they have a good shot at winning!

Okay, so this is really the “word o’ a couple weeks ago”, but it’s such fun anyways! The word is courtesy of my friend Peter (sadly gone from the BVI, back to Sweden), and is “baksmala”. it’s pronounced “boks MEL ah”. It’s a word verging on slang; the literal meaninmg is something like “something that hits you from behind”. According to Peter, hen outboard motors where first introduced in Sweden, the called a boat with an outboard a baksmala.
In modern usage, however, it is the Swedish term for a hangover. In the last weeks that Peter and Karen where here, we were sharing the Carrot Bay house, and more than a few mornings found us saluting one another, grimly cheerful, with a hearty “Baksmala”!