The one on the water…
That’s what I did this weekend. 320 nautical miles, about 58 total hours of sailing. Leaving Thursday evening, we sailed 12 hours to Grand Marais, Minnesota to clear customs Friday morning, then immediately sailed another 12 hours south to Bayfield, Wisconsin. Then we slept.
On Saturday, we raced for 11 hours clockwise ‘Around the Islands’ (see the loop at the bottom of the picture?).
Then we slept again.
Getting up at 0500 on Sunday, we sailed continuously north-east back up to Thunder Bay, taking about 23 hours.
I am tired. And wind BURNED. I love it.
For the end of June, the lake is still EXCEPTIONALLY cold. We were in full offshore kit (read: layers of winter clothes) and we were still cold. Crazy, but kind of fun. It’s funny how quickly a person can forget how miserable he was, only hours before. Really, the cold part was only from the latitude of Grand Marais and north (on both trips). Anything south of that, we were still in full kit but comfortable. It rained like I had never seen before during our approach to Bayfield, which did not bode well for Saturday’s race and our general comfort, but Saturday was probably the best sailing weather I’ve seen since the Trans Superior last year. There was a little bit of everything, but it was mostly very windy (but not unmanageable, about 15-20 knots), and very sunny and warm. On the leg between Devil’s Island and Outer Island (the west/east line of the island loop), we clocked the second highest speed we’ve seen on Straight Jacket, 9.5 knots (the highest was 10.4 knots during our approach to Duluth in last year’s Trans Superior).
We did very well in the race. No official results that I can find yet, but from talking with other competitors after the event, along with our own shady calculations, I’d be surprised if we didn’t place top five – in a fleet of 19 mostly bigger, faster boats in conditions that do NOT suit Straight Jacket at all (she’s a light air killer, heavy air dragger). For a twenty-five year-old, 33-foot boat sailed by five guys, two of whom are new to sailing this month, in mostly unfavorable conditions… that’s pretty good. Granted, there was a little luck in our corner (the lead boats ran out of wind for 2.5 hours later in the race, allowing us to catch up), we still made some shrewd course decisions and sailed that boat at 100% all the time. We ran out of wind as well, but SJ loves the light stuff (and we know how to help her go fast in those conditions), and we passed five bigger boats during that time while putting extra distance on those behind us.
A good race. A good weekend.
…I’d probably hurt more people than just myself.
I built a picnic table today. That may not sound like much, but for someone who inherited my father’s carpentry skills, this is on par with building of the pyramids of Egypt.
All of them.
In one day.
And, I didn’t hurt myself. I can’t guarantee alignment with the sun during the summer solstice – or a single straight cut – but people can sit on it in relative comfort without out fear of your seat falling out from under you – or your food falling through the table top - which was certainly the case with our old one, ‘Browny’:
It was a good design, though. Really comfortable, with simple, classic lines. So I copied it.
Four 2×4’s, five 2×6’s, two 2×8’s, a handful of nails (should have used decking screws in retrospect, but nails will do the trick), possibly the oldest, rickety-est, but definitely the least safe circular saw in operation (my Dad’s), and a couple of hours on a sunny day gets you this:
… and very little waste. It’s standing up. Considering the ultra-reliable measurement method I used called ‘Close Enough’, I’m pretty darned happy. Well, no, I used a measuring tape, sqaure, and a pencil, but let’s just say it’s a good thing wood is so, ah… reasonable. All the angles and frame measurements are the same as the old table, but it’s two feet longer, owing to the absence of six foot pressure treated lumber at Home Despot.
The old table understood well what was happening and humbly disintegrated. I helped with its suicide, like the honorable samurai I am, with a hammer. Browny’s death was a good one.
Well, I suppose there’s good news all around:
Piers has been alive six years without seriously hurting himself, so we celebrated. Lobster-shaped chocolate cake with us during the week, and then lots of friends and family on the weekend.
I’ve been hired to lecture a full-year section of Introduction to Philosophy at Lakehead University for this coming year. That’s good. I’m much happier with Intro than with what the other most likely option was going to be – Biomedical Ethics (online). I’ve done both before and I much rather prefer Intro – it’s lecturing (not the mediated online format), it’s Intro (I’m a generalist), it’s easy (I’ve taught the class twice before, so most of the footwork has been done), and it’s worth twice as much money (it’s a full-year course, where Bio is only the Winter term).
In related news, the approval for the Advanced Institute for Globalization and Culture (AIG+C, or The Agency) has come, and so is no longer hypothetical. I’m hoping to be a part of this. And I quote:
Globalization and the increased and changing role of culture in economic and social terms means that the fundamental assumptions upon which the regional economy and society are constituted must be reconceived. The Advanced Institute for Globalization and Culture (AIG+C) offers a context for researchers to develop and communicate information, research results, and theoretical reflections on the forces that are shaping the problems and possibilities within the region.
Cool.
Finally, we seem to getting into phase on Straight Jacket. No wins yet – far from it. But we’re not last anymore, and that’s progress. This past weekend was the annual Spring Series – distance race on Saturday, three windward/leeward courses (Wednesday night style, but only 4 legs instead of the usual 5), and we are beginning to see just how fast SJ can be even shorthanded (we only had 5 crew, and SJ needs 8-9 to be fully functional).
SJ is a boat from an old design rule that requires some specific and even unique boathandling. She has a VERY large main, and a VERY small bow, and is VERY wide in the beam. It became so very clear to me this weekend (especially Sunday) just how much SJ sails like a Lightning – to be fast, first remember to ‘keep it flat when it doesn’t want to be flat, and make it heel when it doesn’t want to heel.’ Because of the design, when the wind is up, keeping her flat is very hard to to. With so few crew available to ’sit on the rail’ or ‘hike’ (sit with legs outboard on the windward side of the boat, or ‘high side’) to counteract the heeling of the boat by the wind on the sails, we had to take other measures. We reduced sail. You must understand, this is a very hard thing for a racer to do. It’s like installing a rev limiter in your Porsche – like self-inflicted castration. There’s just something ‘wrong’ about it, making no sense to the deeper parts of your soul. However, with the anenometer showing us only 12-13 knots (just over 20 km/h) true windspeed, we found that we were blazingly fast with a #3 (small headsail) and a reefed main (mainsail area reduced by lowering it to and securing it to predefined tying points). In those conditions with full crew we’d have a full main and the #1 (biggest headsail) because we’d have so many crew out hiking, keeping the boat flatter. But with only five crew, three of whom could hike out (driver and mailsail trimmer can’t hike), the reduced power allowed up to sit upright, showing more effective sail area to the wind with less drag on the sails, helm, hull, and keel. Fast. Fast fast fast.
One last observation – the boat ‘functions’ better upwind with less people. SJ has a lot of ‘controls’ that need tending to each time we change direction through the wind (tack or gybe), and that usually means lots of bodies. This weekend, there were less crew but maneuvers were quick and clean, very much unlike when we have full crew. Huh! Part of that can be attributed to the competency of the crew this weekend (four very experienced crew, one newbie). Even then, the only times, it seems, we actually need so many hands (the 8-9 mentioned above) is for weight on the rail and gybing the spinnaker (many, many more ‘controls’ involved than usual). Something for us to chew on.
I can’t remember who put me on to this, or if I discovered it myself, or if I heard about it on what was then CBCRadio3’s college radio-esque late night programming on Radio1 – whatever it was, I am truly thankful. I’m talkin’ about CBCRadio3 Magazine, quite possibly one of the most beautiful multimedia amalgamations of Canadian emerging and fringe culture ever.
Okay - it’s the only multimedia amalgamation of Canadian emerging and fringe culture (broadly conceived), but man, was it beautiful, and beautifully done every time. I’m going to venture this too - it was probably the best Canadian culture mag I’ve ever come across. It’s the only place I’ve been able to read about beer or hockey without rolling my eyes.
The magazine was an online offering from CBC’s ‘youth’ arm, CBCRadio3. CBCRadio3 had been for years a weekly late-night bleeding-edge Canadian independent music program, but between November 2002 and May 2005 it tackled a much broader role as Canada’s culture lens, using CBC’s massive influence to secure the very best Canadian media auteurs. The magazine in execution struck a mind-blowing balance compelling visuals, copy, and music – yes, a running soundtrack – sometimes matched with the story or event (like a band profile or session), or just in the background with the built-in player running a good representation from New Music Canada (NMC – basically Radio3’s former self) – and get this: they did it brilliantly every week. EVERY WEEK. 105 issues, all different, all great. Everything about the mag resonated without being nostalgiac. I’m going to ramble off a list of adjectives that I think fit: current, strong, smooth, funny, intuitive, familiar, quirky, relevant, serious, revealing…
What’s more, even though it shut down three years ago this month, I still read it and shake my head in admiration. Take the issue above – September 5-11, 2003 (Issue 2.01). I picked it randomly from the archives (which you can peruse by clicking this link or the one above, clicking Table of Contents, and then Archives – all 105 back issues are there). Here’s a breakdown of the contents:
- ‘12 Ounce Cameras: Canada Through a Beer Can’ by Cameron Andrews and Jessica Bushey, a photo essay of a road trip across Canada, but revealed through pin-hole cameras made out of regional beer cans strapped to the top of the car.
- ‘Bert: Nothing Lasts Forever’, a story by Sally McKay, narrated by Nora Young, about the anguish and coping of Sesame Street’s Bert when Ernie suddenly leaves without notice. Photos by Allan Sherwood.
- Profile of Pixies/Throwing Muses spinoffs The Breeders, with four live show tracks. By Trevor Zimmer.
- ‘Calling on the Past: Murmur Keeps City Stories Alive’ by Shahid Quadri (photos by Maris Mezuli), about a phone-based interpretive service for Toronto’s lesser-known landmarks.
- Profile of alt.country The Waco Brothers, ex-first wave British punk band members of The Mekons, with five session tracks. By Scott Lingley.
- ‘Fabric of the Past: Japanese Dresses Recall Darker Days’, by Sarah Efron, a photo/text essay about a collection of handmade dresses worn by women of the Japanese internment camp at Lemon Creek, BC, during World War Two.
- Photo collection ‘Nothing Specific’ by Tim Barber, placed through-out.
Terrific stuff. Pick any issue – you’ll find something new, something cool, something truly strange and happy. You’ll always be impressed.
I don’t know what happened to the magazine. It shut down, and they didn’t say why. It’s too bad. They were just getting started. When I think of the kind of magazine I’d like to publish, this is one I can point to and say, ‘Just like that.’
Of the many – many – different kinds of sailing, solo distance racing appeals to me the most, by far. In fact, if I were a younger man I would seriously consider trotting off to western France or southern England (but France is indisputably the kingdom of this kind of sailing – course au large, as they call it - and the French are the kings) to make a go of it, and not even as a skipper but as shore team or some other related job. I don’t care – I would just love to be a part of it.
For a couple of years, I’ve been following ocean racing in its various forms – there can be single, double, or fully crewed boats in classes ranging from 6.5 metre monohulls (called Mini’s) to 30 metre trimarans (called Maxi’s – there are maxi monohulls too, but no organizing body exists for them, and they tend to be privately campaigned). I follow five classes pretty closely – Mini 6.5’s, Figaro’s, Open 60’s, Volvo 70’s, and Class 40’s like the one in this video:
The Artemis Transat (single-handed Trans-Atlantic race from Portsmouth to Boston, Class 40’s and Open 60’s) is happening right now – the boats started on Sunday the 11th and are currently a third of the way across. One of my favorites, Michel Desjoyeaux, just retired from race due to damage suffered by hitting a whale, which happens more often than you think. (As a matter of trivia, one racer years ago in this same race had to be rescued when, after being surrounded by a pod of whales for days, they finally attacked his boat and sank it.) Apparently the whale was unharmed, and Michel is okay too. The boat didn’t suffer serious damage, but Michel decided it prudent to head back to his base in Brittany, 1000 miles away. By the way, Alex on FujiFilm is currently in 8th place among the Class 40’s, in a field of 11. My favorite in Class 40’s is Yvan Noblet on Appart City, currently in 3rd.
Class 40’s are a pretty new design rule – only a few years – and it has really exploded, not just in the typical places (France, England) but in North America too. The class rules are intended to keep costs down (but campaigning a Class 40 in the series would still run you over $1 million annually - peanuts compared to many millions for Open 60’s, of tens of millions for Volvo 70’s), so that has encouraged participation from a wide array of talent. What’s more is that these boats are FAST – keeping pace with Open 60’s in some conditions, and certainly considered many times the bang for the buck. It’s very exciting to see from a design perspective as well as a broader sport perspective. It’s always encouraging to see growth in something good.
These boats would simply rock on the Great Lakes. That’s the dream part, as it lives today. It would be possible to buy a used Class 40 (at the moment, about CDN$375,000, so not really an option for me any time soon!) and campaign it on the Great Lakes, likely scooping up the Mac races (Chicago-Mac, Port Huron-Mac) and the Trans-Superior without too much fuss, and relatively little cost - it most certainly would be a tiny fraction of the $1 million I said above. Now… where can I make a lot of money in a very short amount of time…
Last night was the first TBYC Wednesday night race, officially marking the beginning of summer for a tiny segment of Thunder Bay’s population – the yacht racers. (Haha! That sounds just ‘proper’ doesn’t it? In Thunder Bay, it couldn’t be farther from the truth – we are about as elitist as any dive bar.)
We didn’t do well. I could crumple up a stack of excuses and throw them at you, some of them actually valid, but that’s boring. The most important thing – as always – is that we had fun. That’s what we tell ourselves when we finish DEAD LAST. It hides the shame.
No, honestly – really – there ultimately wasn’t much we could do because how the race was set up (everything will be normal when the committee boat is in the water – next week), but there were still a ton of things under our control that were fumbled. When you get down to it, we just need to practice with regular crew. And I need to get my head in the game.
I do feel partly responsible. Sort of. The owner/driver of Straight Jacket needs to have one or two people who he can trust for course and crew management, and that’s not happening. That’s slow – any time a driver takes his attention off driving, the boat slows down. That was happening a lot last night. There are two people on Straight Jacket other than the driver who should be holding the crew and course management responsibilities, and I’m one of them.
Or, at least I know that now, because it was said to me last night in the bar after the race. This is a good thing. I’m ready to take my investment to the next level, and I’m interested to see how the boat will do when (if?) we get our crew and course management issues sorted.
Straight Jacket, after having so much work done to her, doesn’t feel all that different. But why should she? It’s funny, but I was expecting her to be almost like a new boat. I think I was even trimming differently. But when I asked the owner how the helm ‘felt’ he simply said, “Same as last year.” I’m so silly.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Halifax today, announcing a 20-year, $30 billion plan to beef up our military:
If a country wants to be taken seriously in the world, it must have the capacity to act. It’s that simple. Otherwise you forfeit your right to be a player. You’re the one chattering on the sideline that everyone smiles at, but no one listens to.
It sounds suspiciously like:
The only thing in this world that gives orders… is balls.
That was Al Pacino acting as our new foreign policy advisor, Tony Montana.
So, Harper wants to be a ‘player’, eh? Wants to be a hustler, a mack? Wants to puff out his chest in the school yard and be ‘the man’? Play Grand Theft Auto. You won’t hurt yourself that way, and you won’t hurt other people. Or your own people.
I think Steve needs to cut back on the movie rentals and rely on something else for policy direction.
I’ve been bothered for a long while – at least six years – about “what to do.” I put that in quotes to emphasize the very broad and general nature of the problem. Some people call it their ‘life’s work’, or their ‘calling’. I like to avoid both of those, because I don’t like to work (haha – making fun of myself there) and ‘calling’ sounds too… papal.
Whatever you want to call it, I’d some time ago concluded that whatever I do, I want it to be here in Thunder Bay. Then slowly I realized that it would be something related to our local culture, something developmental, something creative. Most recently, it’s been the idea of an online (and perhaps print??) social, cultural, and political magazine in the vein of Walrus, but with a strict emphasis on uniquely northern/rural perspectives and issues. I have no idea how to make that happen. But I like the idea, and I’m feeling some warmth under my backside, for once. Wheels are turning…
So, during a recent conversation with my department chair (who was also my MA thesis supervisor), talking about bringing me in to help with an online journal and print magazine for a planned ‘Advanced Global Institute of somethingorother and Culture’ at Lakehead, I guess I kept mentioning my preference for rural and northern perspectives. He wanted to keep it mostly global in nature, which is of course just fine. Then later in the same conversation where he was kind of pushing the idea of further graduate studies, he was urging me to apply to York or Western, or better yet Chicago or SUNY (better for opening job placement doors, not just providing education), or - best possible – L’Ecole Normale Superieure or Paris IV (Sorbonne), all places where I could really dig into social and political thought, cultural studies, all the interdisciplinary continental pomo artsy-fartsiness I could handle. I mentioned the PhD program in Rural Studies at the University of Guelph, to which he replied, after a pause… “You like that stuff, eh?”
I didn’t really have an answer. All I could muster was a “yeah, I guess so…”
I should have had an answer, not because it would have mattered him, but because I’ve been rambling on about my desire to stay and work in Thunder Bay, about developing or contributing to our social and cultural community, about how much potential there is here and how we can ‘do’ better. I should have had a reason for my preference that I could clearly state. But I didn’t – and it surprised me.
So, since then I’ve been not just bothered but plagued by trying to nail down, exactly, why I am seeminly hell-bent on thinking about and acting in rural and ‘northern’ spaces - ’spaces’ being all of those points of social, cultural, political, and economic interaction – and in Northwestern Ontario in particular. A few things came to mind:
1. I don’t like cities. At first when I realized that this was a motivation for my preference, I was tempted to pass it off as an emotional reaction to my unfamiliarity with cities, as if I had a fear of cities. But that isn’t true – yes, big cities are a sometimes incomprehensible pile of unfamiliar signifiers, but I’m not afraid of cities. I just don’t like them. To put it as plainly as possible (because I could easily get out of hand here) I think cities – as they have been designed [important qualification because I don't want to sound like a geriatric Mennonite - there is a great deal of economic, environmental, demographic, and possibly - possibly - social potential in increased urbanization IF policy and technology are developed accordingly] – are bad for people. I prefer rural spaces and so I want to know more about them and why I prefer them. Conversely, I do not prefer urban spaces and I want to know more about them and why I don’t prefer them. My dislike of cities is foremost an emotional response, where roots are deep, so I figure it ranks as the primary reason for my interest in rural concerns.
2. Generally speaking, all cultural spaces (rural, urban, and the grey area between) have been urbanized by means of popular marketing and media, which I think can be said to be a reflection of a general cultural or social ‘will’ – it’s hard to say which is the chicken or the egg, but my gut (and a marvelous one it is) tells me it’s more social ‘will’ than market invention. This pan-urbanization is happening for a perfectly good reason: in addition to cities being the natural economic centers, more than 80% of Canadians now live in cities as of 2006, and it’s in cities where the vast majority of growth is occuring in Canada. Globally, according to the United Nations Population Fund’s ”State of World Population 2007″ (subtitled, “Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth”) more than half of the world’s population now lives in an urban center of one kind or another. Urban spaces, therefore, are deserving of the market’s focus. Cities are the market. As a rural sympathizer, I don’t resent this at all – it’s merely a fact. But rural interests and cultural representation in the marketplace and media spaces are being left by the wayside as a matter of course. This concerns me, primarily because dominant media and marketing spaces do not represent the variety of rural spaces, nor can they – they don’t fit; urban social and cultural signifiers emerge in urban contexts and therefore only make any real ’sense’ in those urban contexts. But rural spaces are being dominated by urban signifiers and there’s little or no room for a local or rural perspective. I’ll grant that there is some ‘resonance’ among some elements of the rural demographic with urban ‘things’, but that is not the same as ‘making sense’. In fact, a lot of urban trends are passed of as ‘nonsense’ by rural folks – most notably fashion trends. Rural spaces need to be reclaimed (hence the magazine idea above).
3. Aside from my emotional bias (see #1 – a result of always having lived in rural areas), my studies have also formed in me an intellectual or theoretical bias in which I’ve become sensitive to the claims of some postmodernists (Lyotard, Foucault) and their precursors (Critical School via Marcuse, and of course Heidegger) who not only emphasize the role of our peripheral spaces and language in the task of ‘deconstructing’ persistent (yawn) Western meta-narratives (where I see urbanization in all its forms as having become a meta-narrative of sorts), but also raise a call in warning of the homogeneity that tends to emerge from an increasingly technical and technological world. That, my friends, was one sentence. In the Canadian context, John Ralston Saul has convincingly argued that more and more the ‘great divide’ in Canada won’t be East/West or English/French, but Rural/Urban. Roll it all up, and you get distrust.
So that’s a start, a kind of scratch. The question now is ’where?’ because I can’t study here. I have to go away.
To a city.
I received an email from the department chair today saying that it will be late in May before I hear about the recent sessional postings. I’m pretty laid back and objective, and so I’m usually a content person, but waiting for the department’s decisions is seeming like a cruel test. (I can’t actually ‘fail’ this test, but it’s hard for me to be patient about this!).
On a related note, the chair called and encouraged me to apply for more courses – a new first-year course called “Philosophy and Popular Culture” and a third-year Philosophy and Film course that I had initially passed on, purely because it was a third-year course; it’s not recommended that lecturers with only an MA teach anything beyond second-year. At first I balked, but the chair replied that he would support me in any way he could – nice. So I formally applied. Out of a possible six postings (I passed on Philosophy and Gender – I could probably do a fine job of it, but I don’t want to have to deal with the likely students), I’ve applied for five. I’ll be ecstatic if I get two.
Yes, Hawaii… I was skeptical, fearful of overdevelopment and cliches, but I clearly did not know a bloody thing about Maui! I know a little more now, and I’ll share a bit soon enough, on a separate page devoted to it.
Yes. Devoted.
In the meantime, I’ll tell you that Straight Jacket was painted while I was gone. My fears (those pesky fears again) have been MORE than waylaid upon viewing the final product – she is BEAUTIFUL! I’m tempted by really crappy metaphors and similies, I have to say, it’s that good.
But we’re not done – refitting has begun. We were hoping to have her splashing by May 4th, but that simply will not happen. So we’re aiming for the 10th, which means we’ll be tuning the rig as we head out the racecourse on the 14th. Ugh.
She is something pretty, though. Regarde!
