Posts Tagged ‘sailing’
Into boats?
Into boats? I am. Here is a link to boats that I have owned, chartered, and crewed on.
 Puget Sound – Sailing out of Shilshole |
36 Foot Ketch on Puget Sound
36 Foot Ketch on Puget Sound
Before discussing the sailboat, worth identifying are the mountain peaks in the background. These peaks are the higher two peaks of the southern end of the Olympic Mountains of Washington State, a peninsula. First is Mount Ellinor, elevation 5,924 feet (1,805 meters), and to its right is a higher Mount Washington, elevation 6,259 feet (1,908 meters). I used these mountain peaks as an opportunity for a backdrop in order to achieve an enhanced composition for when a boat would pass by. I was rewarded when this beautiful twin-mast sailor with clipper-style hull indeed arrived! This boat, a beautiful sailing ketch, glided smoothly past on the sailing position known as a reach – with wind hitting its port beam. A number (“36”) clearly visible below the peak of the mainsail indicates the length the boat.
Three Sheets Northwest – About Boating in the Pacific Northwest
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Sailboat at Rest, Westsound, Orcas Island, San Juan Islands
“My favorite Northwest boating destination is the San Juan Islands, because somehow I am drawn, impelled, pulled by some unknown force located there – perhaps a fantasy almost realized but yet, not quite. I try to shake it, even neglecting these islands for years, but alas, when I’m back, and I always seem to come back, the islands continue to exude their charm, their beauty.” – J. R. Hudson
“Wings” Under Sail – San Juan Islands
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| Summer 1987 | |
“Wings” Under Sail
San Juan Islands
We chartered “Wings”, a San Juan 34-foot sloop for a five day cruise through the San Juans, her namesake. On this trip we saw a pod of Orca whales, and had barbeque salmon almost daily. The weather was perfect – sun and wind!
See: pbase.com
When Did This Happen? 1 – The Setting
1 THE SETTING
As the dim steely-blue-gray light penetrated the window above the head of my bed, I crack one, then a second eyelid. I see the soft silhouettes of objects in my room with no comprehension. I struggle to awaken and my first thought was in the form of a question, “Why I was not running anymore like I did a few years earlier? It shouldn’t be too difficult to jump up, dress, get out and get running.” I also wish it is a few years earlier . . . I wish I could be a few years younger. Contemplating issues like running or simply just jumping out of bed is something I dwell upon lately. “Why don’t I do something about it?” That question prompts me to think about different places along my life’s path, and to contemplate those bumps on the road.
Thinking backwards, “Why didn’t I do sports in school? Was it because I wanted to spend more time pursuing girls?” Not really. I worked after school to pay for clothes, a car, and then dates with what little money was left over. I was young for the class and smaller than average. It did not appear I had any natural physical or mental inclination to be an athlete. Socially, I was a little awkward, later to be coined a “geek”, though I achieved modest successes at periodic relationships with girls back then.
I snap out of my backward thoughts, amble to the kitchen to grind coffee and feed it to our elaborate coffeemaker with many buttons and light-emitting diodes. The resultant product, my fresh ground coffee brew, will give me a boost of alertness for the Pacific Northwest freeway in the Pacific Northwest rain into which I was most immediately destined.
These days of the year are ubiquitously gray. So much so, we cannot really tell what month it is without recalling the actual month; “It’s November now?” Or reciting; “It is now February?” For there is no apparent difference between the two. One such year it started raining in October and it didn’t stop until mid-March. What a gloomy period, not only for the weather, but for a conglobulation of reasons. “Stop dwelling on it,” I command myself, aloud.
On a floating bridge of concrete that floats on a gray lake, beneath a gray sky, I try to keep an amount of safe space between the vehicle in front and my own. I do this in case I need to do a panic stop, but I try not to allow so much space that someone could take it away from me. But someone snuck in anyway. As my heart pounds an extra two beats, I project my complaint beyond the windshield, “We’re all trying to get to work at a reasonable time, buddy!” Soon following my moment of agitation, my thoughts go back to a time when this sky was blue and I was sailing on this lake. Sometimes after work, with friends, we would sail all night and watch the sun come up. When we would get back to work the next day, we would be wearing big smiles even though we bore no sleep.
When Did This Happen? 2 – As a Kid
2 AS A KID
We’ll experience some sunny hot days here. I worked with a Hawaiian near Seattle. During one of our summers he complained that it was too hot. I also remember that, as a kid, I could look down the long rectangular blocks of my town with the sharpness of a kid’s eye to see heat waves distorting the town’s brick drugstore at the intersection a half a mile away. That year could have easily been the year when I was in elementary school, when ‘The Witchdoctor’ was popular. The lyrics, “ooh, ee, ooh, ah, ah . . . ting, tang, a walla-walla bing-bang,” advises that you can win over your lover with a contemporary interpretation of a voodoo chant. What did I know about such things at the age I was?
In those summers, the other kids and I packed around like dogs around the neighborhood. We were comprised of varying ages, from four to eleven years old. We really were too young to be left unattended and to our own discretion. We fairly freely roamed from yard to yard, boundaries meant nothing. We knew all the secret passageways; fences with holes, garages with flat roofs to climb across, and trees to leverage travel without touching turf. Barefoot all summer, we could walk over gravel without pain, unlike I could now with tender business-shoe feet. By the end of each summer, our little feet were though as leather.
We threw hard green plumbs in the spring and squishy ripe plums in the summer at garage doors, over roofs, down streets, over houses. We developed great throwing arms which later were applied to little league baseball or rocks. One otherwise non-descriptive day while hanging around with neighborhood kids, I looked up and saw a plumb-sized rock on a perfect trajectory speeding right towards my head. I instinctively ducked thus averting a certain trip to the local emergency room. I didn’t see him throw it, I just saw this eight-year-old boy standing there at the apparent source of the trajectory, his arms down while while beaming a contented expression as if he had done something completely normal.
I never ended up in an emergency ward as a kid, an amazing fact considering all the haphazard, mischievous events in which I was part. I was attempting, though I was not fully aware, to let myself be killed growing up. In one of my more extreme phases, I routinely jumped from a second story door onto a lawn below. A door opened to open air. It was a former entry to a bachelor’s flat atop our old garage which boasted a dormer, and was hot in the summertime. The stairs had rotted away so my parents, considering the creaking rotting boards to be too dangerous to walk on, tore it down. Doing my free-form jumps, I didn’t break any bones perhaps because of God’s grace, or because I was made of sinew like hard rubber, or maybe just dumb lucky. Today if I were to fall just eight feet I would break bones. I did just that.
Forward to the freeway merge, I became engaged in a reckless ribbon of variable-sized hunks, of what may be described to someone prehistoric, attractively-formed boulders rolling on tires vying for position in a concrete clover leaf, either going south to downtown, or to north to the gateway of the city. A president of a local insurance company suggested to me that his odds of dying are greater driving around here than while sailing the treacherous Puget Sound, Strait of Juan de Fuca, or Georgia’s Strait. I ponder that he said this because I’ve been to those places.
I’ve sailed all these places he mentioned, and have come close to dying in a couple of those places. I sailed at night with just a flashlight when the craft’s running lights refused to work. I rigged a red stocking cap on the port side, and a green sock for the starboard side in a feeble attempt to keep with maritime law. I raced in fifty mile-an-hour wind in a twenty-four-foot sloop all the black night, surfing with whitewater wake as I plowed headlong down the faces of thrusting waves, and several boats lost one-ton masts that same night. I have ridden down a vertical wall of water at day in a twenty-one-foot sailboat, the grandest surfing I have ever done. I’ve sailed a three-ton sloop from behind it in a dinghy, no one on-board the mother ship.
Now, I pull into the parking lot. My office is a haven for me and I feel it protects is protected from my haphazard past, although the office has its own level of recklessness. I deal in millions of dollars for some thirty companies with hundreds of employees at the small accounting firm I head. The recklessness here is controlled, monetary, not physical. We balance the books for which we are responsible; recklessness is derived from people’s nature. Business owners are passionate about their numbers. Employees are passionate about their paychecks. Files get awry and then fixed. People’s feathers get ruffled and then smoothed. It’s “just business,” and it is my workday life.
When Did This Happen? 3 – Little Fish
3 LITTLE FISH
Dad loves to fish. He had been with friends from the plant where he was a manager and often times alone. As far as I could determine, Dad performed payroll functions, and he walked around the plant talking with the workers quite a bit. He made friends easily, and though he was technically a manager at the plant, he seemed to identify with the line workers.
Eventually he concluded on and acted upon the fact that I should experience trout fishing with him. I was at that time six years old. Dad had an eight-foot “pram” which is a small rowboat with a flat bow. It had three flat bench seats. Typically, the middle seat was for the oarsman, the back one for a passenger, and the forward one he reserved for a platform for his tackle box. He had two of these little prams, naming them “Pogo I” and “Pogo II”. The hulls of both Pogo’s were painted with several coasts of “marine” blue paint. Pogo I’s interior was a dark maroon color and Pogo II’s interior was grey.
My Dad was, and remains, a purest about certain things. While some of his acquaintances went for powerboats, Dad felt rowing was the more gentlemanly way of propelling along the surface of a body of water. While some fishermen used bait, he would not. He, instead, opted for artificial hand-tied flies or little spinners. He was a purist about artificial lures. Regarding the use power tools, he would lament that the way to produce quality woodwork was with hand tools. Anyway, he was this way about such things.
My Dad normally rose between four and five each morning, so, when we went fishing, he would get me up at the time I was in my deepest sleep – three AM. We would have a light breakfast, he would have his coffee, and I, hot chocolate. We would then travel out, being in the only car on the road for miles, driving to some obscure lake in west-central Washington State.
My first boat experience was in a mahogany sport skiff on the Columbia River. I barely remember it, but I believe I was crying. There are pictures reinforcing the experience. But the first time I rode Pogo out onto a lake with my Dad, he quietly rowed in the dawning hour and there were no loud noises, nor people taking pictures. The water made a swishing sound as the oars gently broke the glassy surface on the lake. A power line crossed the lake above and I recall the silence as we glided under it. I marveled at the progress we made on our little journey along the imaginary center line of the lake. We paid out our lines terminated with our artificial lures while he rowed, a well documented style of fishing called trolling.
I caught my first fish that day. It was a small rainbow trout about nine inches long. Dad gave me instructions, “keep his head up,” “easy now,” “now bring it towards me,” and chuckled as he dipped a green-meshed net framed in aluminum to encompass the fish. He then lifted the dripping animal out of the water and dropped it into the boat. The little trout flipped and flopped wildly, then it’s movements diminished until it just lied there with a big eye looking blankly at nothing. I was more thrilled about the camaraderie I felt with my Dad than at the actual act of catching a fish, but it made him happy, it made me happy.
A fellow joined my Dad with a similar passion for fishing. He was very enthusiastic and fairly boisterous. The two of them made a really excitable pair. They both loved being out in these little boats fishing. I was brought along with them one day and all that day, the fishing was slow. It took us all afternoon to catch a couple of fish. Long after I felt it was time to be packing up, knowing Mom would be concerned for us, but we continued fishing well into the evening.
After a long lull, my fishing pole suddenly jolted, jolted some more, and the tip bent downward towards the water. I started cranking on the reel handle while one of the men commented, “Son, you really had your line out a long way.” I reeled for a long time and then, with some assistance with the net, brought up a sizable trout. “Just when we were about to give up!” “Wow, what a fish!” “Ooh, baby!” “Yeah!” “Yeah baby!”.
I wasn’t prepared for their response. They were whooping, hollering, and laughing so loud that echoes came back to us from both shores. They laughed, and they yelled. They were very animated and loud. Having never seen grown men act like this before except perhaps when there was some kind of problem, I thought there was, but they were jubilant this time. I just stared at them. Though it was sixteen inches long, and weighing more than a pound, it still was a small fish. Later at a gathering where fish stories were exchanged, they told me, “At least you could have shown some excitement having caught the biggest fish we’d ever seen from that lake!”
When Did This Happen? 4 – Bigger Fish
4 BIGGER FISH
Fishing did become a part of my life. I fished in Tanawax Lake, Clear Lake near Tanawax Lake, Clear Lake in the Bald Hills, Lawrence Lake, Mineral Lake, Black Lake, Lake Rapjohn, Langlois Lake, Hearts Lake, Conconully Reservoir, Waptus Lake, Packwood Lake, The Potholes, Williams Lake, Snake Lake, Medical Lake and others.
I had seen pictures of big fish, mostly from the Inside Passage to Alaska. I wanted desperately to catch a big fish because the little trout didn’t excite me much. Fortunately, my Dad was interested in offshore salmon fishing and took me on a commercial charter trip on a forty-foot boat out of Westport, Washington on the Pacific coast.
We tried our luck for about six hours and we caught a couple of salmon. The most exciting part about this trip was being out on the big Pacific Ocean. Coming back, we went over an underwater bar, a shallow area where the waves pile high as they make their way towards land, and we rode them back into port. Sitting above the bow with my feet dangling out was the biggest thrill for me that day. While running with the waves, one moment we are high on the crest of a wave, then as the wave overtakes us, the bow would crash down into the trough with my feet planing on top of the water. The ride was fantastic! If I wasn’t before, I was hooked on boating for life on this trip.
I went charter fishing a couple times while a teenager. The second time I caught a silver salmon, about eight pounds and felt that I finally caught a real fish. A fish this size could feed a family of six a couple of times. Barbequed salmon is now one of my most favorite foods.
There used to be plenty of salmon in Puget Sound. Seattle is nestled on the sound, picturesque as it is, but the sound had been all but fished out by the late 1960’s. My friends and I would go down to the boathouse at Point Defiance, Tacoma, about thirty miles south of Seattle, and rent a twelve-foot skiff with an outboard motor for a day all for only eight bucks. We would get a couple of dozen herring for bait. These little silver fish are a salmon’s natural prey. We would proceed to each catch at perhaps ten sand sharks, which we call “dogfish,” though nary a salmon. The timing was wrong for us at the age we were and the year it was.
The salmon’s decline is the result of several major factors, most having to do with man’s development of the shoreline, demolishment of watersheds, commercial and tribal fishing, using technical means that were never used in past centuries. But, better fish management, improved stewardship of watersheds, controlled catches, and aggressive seeding have brought the salmon back in numbers not seen in a very long time. It took, and continues to take, painful sacrifices to nurture back this salmon fishery. It is an understatement that a lot of emotion has been stirred up in the process.
In recent years, I have been out on the ocean salmon fishing several times with my father-in-law who pilots a forty-foot vessel out from the mouth of the Columbia River each season. Each time I have come back with a couple of ten-pound Coho (Silver) Salmon, feeding my desire to catch a sizeable fish. I harbor thoughts of fishing in Alaska, though if I never make it to Alaska fishing, I will still rest satisfied. I really would like to pilot a boat from Seattle up through the Inside Passage.
When Did This Happen? 7 – Photography and Sailing
PHOTOGRAPHY AND SAILING
During my tenure as a manager of camera stores, the popular cameras of the day had shifted from European to Japanese cameras. Initially the stores were overstocked with brand-names such as Leica, Contax and Rollei and were being transitioned and replaced with names like Pentax, Minolta, Canon and Miranda. My shop had a European camera, Hasselblad, a precision high-end box-like camera which had three Zeiss-Tessar lenses to compliment it. The complete system was several thousand dollars. I took it out and shot images of the Seattle Space Needle. I wanted to have the experience of shooting what was one of the photographers’ cameras of choice. Hasselblad’s were selected for NASA’s Apollo missions because of their precision and ability to hold up under adverse conditions and I wanted an experience with what has been determined to be the world’s best camera and optics.
A dapper young self-employed photographer was interested in our Hasselblad. He came in a couple of times scrutinizing the system, and examined how the three lenses looked through the camera’s prism viewfinder. I asked him if he was really interested in the camera and he assured me he was. He indicated that once he sold his sailboat he would by the system. Having sailed a couple of times I was interested in sailing so I tentatively asked him about his boat. It was a small sloop named Clipper. Early one Saturday morning as we neared the end of summer, according to our plan, we rendezvoused at the shop. We groggily discussed logistics of cars and timing and finally made it down to Seola Beach just south of Seattle on Puget Sound where “Clipper” was moored.
It was a lot of effort and many miles of driving that early morning. The weather was dull and I was tired. I worked many hours at the camera shop and spent as much time as I could on getting out on photo shooting exhibitions. It seemed such an inconvenience when I found the little sloop moored nearly a quarter mile offshore in shallow water off the beach. We clamored into a little pram, a small dinghy, and oared the distance out to the Clipper, and crawled up onto her as she bobbed in the waves. She was a white fiberglass boat that was a little weather beaten, but she felt very solid and at peace bobbing in the short chop that was spread over the surface of the sound.
Her owner, Mike, placed the rudder into place, lowered the keel, and raised the mainsail and replaced the pram behind on the small buoy where she was connected and the wind carried Clipper away. Mike raised the foresail. We healed at a slight angle and I could feel the increase in speed when my body moved back a little. “We’re sailing” he commented. I was pleased. I was very pleased. The feeling was great. There was no engine sound. There was only the creaking and chiming of various parts on the sailboat. I knew I was hooked on sailing that moment.
Back at the shore I wrote him a check after a brief negotiation on price, and papers were signed. Clipper was mine!
The following Monday Mike came into the camera store and wrote me a check for the Hasselblad camera system. Being a careful businessman, I inquired into the validity of the check. “Is this good” I asked? To which he responded, “It’s only as good as yours.” And, in that way I made a sale and got my sailboat.
My Clipper sailboat became a great platform for many of my photographs. My lifestyle really then changed into that of a sailor-photographer. I added scuba diving to the mix and for the next two summers I immersed myself into life on and in the water.
Winter came and I continued to sail. I took two friends with me on a four-day sail exploring the southern Puget Sound past Tacoma and through the Narrows. In February, we were thickly dressed. Also, we were minimalists as it came to just about everything, including food. We ran short and resorted to eating rice and fried bananas the last day.
From Clipper’s log:
“ . . . and the small hatch popped open and a hot steaming plate was passed up through the opening without comment. Hmm. This was to my surprise since I had no idea they were cooking. Furthermore, I was under the impression we were out of provisions. I dug into what appeared to be a bed of rice and something fried. It was fried bananas. Fried Bananas and Rice! ”
The following summer I quit my job at the camera store which I managed nearly a year. Located in one of the two busiest malls in the northwest, it was exhaustingly active most all the time. The owner of the chain kept me under such a thin budget for personnel that I was stuck in the shop for 12-hour days nearly every day with only one or two other employees. I had no time for sailing and photography. Though I had no plan for income, except my wife’s meager retail clerk’s paycheck, I imagined that I would find money somehow. I tried earning money with my photography, but I limited myself because I refused to shoot weddings and take portraits which is where the money was for non-recognized photo-artists such as I envisioned myself as becoming.
Some people take summers off for snow skiing, others for surfing. I took a summer off to be a sailing bum. In early June I took off for a long cruise beginning from Gig Harbor, a beautiful little harbor with a stunning view of Mount Rainier, to north through the San Juan Islands near the Canadian border. Various legs of the trip were planned. The first one, just myself, from Gig Harbor to Seattle. By car, an hour and a half drive. By sailboat, a day’s trip.
After an uncoordinated departure from the dock which resulted in assistance from one of the other boaters, I sailed into the Narrows, then up Colvos Passage on the inside of Vashon Island to where the water opens up to become Elliot Bay, across from Seattle. It was mildly windy and the sky was gray. For sport, I got into the Sport-Yak dinghy, a bright orange plastic boat popularly used as a tender for sailboats in our region. The Sport-Yak, in tow of the Clipper with me in it fishtailed as I attempted to remotely steer the mother craft with a telescoping extension from the tiller connected to her rudder. I laughed in chaos of the wind and waves as the larger pilotless craft towed me forward in brisk wind, thus risking my life to be sure.
Disco was just becoming to be the big thing. I sailed into the Seattle waterfront and caught a taxi and met my wife in a nightclub. She had come up to meet me in Seattle to start her leg of the journey intended to take us through the San Juans. We discoed and crawled into the Clipper late that night and departed northward the next morning under cloudy skies and drizzle. Later that day we encountered some really rough water as thunder crashed over the shoreline in the distance. The weather remained like that for another day then the sun came out. We were in the San Juan Islands finally.
We spent the next week in the San Juans eating crab, salmon, oysters, clams, and mussels. We danced at two of the resorts. It was absolutely the most adventurous thing we had ever done in our lives to that point. Our time up there was filled with many mini-adventures, such as negotiating how to get a live crab into a pot of boiling hot water, how to cross channels churning with tidal currents, how to anchor in rocky harbors and so on. We hiked on the little islands and shopped in the gift shops that populated the little harbor towns. Tourism in these Islands was subdued in the period we were there, not catching on until several years later. It was really an idyllic time for us, and a discovery of our personalities. My wife, my high school sweetheart, and I separated at the end of that summer after little more than two years of being married.
I stayed committed to sailing. I bought another sailboat that was a little larger than the Clipper. Both were moored in Kirkland, on Lake Washington. I moved from my home town to Bellevue which was a shocking change for me. I went from my first world of weekend hippies, hikers, hunters, factory and post office workers to a world where money was plenty. Bellevue was the high-end bedroom community for Seattle. There were more Mercedes, BMW’s, and Porches than I had ever seen on any road anywhere.
In Bellevue I took a job in a photo lab next to an upscale mall. There I printed everything from absurd posters for drug-store promotions and portfolios for models. I made barely enough income to maintain my sailboat and pay for an expensive apartment in town.
Soon I was working in an upscale department store, which was promoted to be a “catalog showroom” for the Jaffe family from Seattle – Jafco was the name of the chain. I started off part-time in their camera department in Bellevue just before Christmas season hit. Disco was really big and I was lonely. Though I went out dancing weekend nights, I was very lonely. I drove what was becoming an older classic 1966 Mustang and I didn’t exude much stability or wealth so lasting female commitments were hard to obtain. But there was fun. I leveraged myself through knowing a guitar player in a popular band that was a friend in high school, and taking girls to dance with the band.
I became aware that most of all the people working at the department stores were in this “temporary” position of passing time until more profitable careers or partners came along. There was a kind of temporary hold ambiance around “so we might as well have fun” feeling. There were soon-to-be models, inheritors, and schemers alike. I became friends with some interesting people plus some very cold and indifferent ones as well. I met a lot of people and dated exhaustedly.
We did inventory counts at the large stores and afterwards go sailing until the sun came up, then go back to work having no real sleep. I had several people out on my boats. Some became pretty good friends, a couple of whom lived on the waterfront. We had barbeques and parties ashore and sailed quite a bit. Some girls took me water skiing. It was a good time, but I was still lonely.
Meanwhile, I still maintained contact with some of my old sailing partners from the old life and went salmon fishing with them. Salmon fishing was more salmon “wishing” as the Sound was pretty well fished out. Development in the area was directly responsible for the reduced the salmon runs. For every salmon caught, if caught at all, ten or more sharks would hook up. These “dogfish” as we called them were disliked because it was felt that they were eating all the salmon’s source of food, herring. These were silver large finger-sized fish and both salmon and sharks loved them. When a dogfish was caught, it was common practice among the fishermen to kill them.
The Clipper was still in Gig Harbor even though I had moved up to the Seattle area. I loaned Clipper out and when I saw the boat after their fishing expedition turned bloodbath for the sharks, the hull of the boat where the sharks were hauled in was covered in dirty brown dried blood. They didn’t clean up the boat, and I never lent it to them again. Things on the Clipper were broken, the boat was trashed. I guess it was this, the habitually stale poker nights, and a general shift in interest that caused me to divorce myself, not only from my first wife, but from my hometown as well. I had to do cut loose. I seldom visited my family for quite some time, which was all as well. They were quite despondent over my divorce. I had a new life.
I shared houses with some guys from the warehouse at work and taught them how to sail. Some of the trips were for fishing, some for scuba diving, and some for the sheer joy of sailing, winter or spring, the season did not matter. I would work retail most of the time and what time was left was used on sailing. But, I began to realize that the boats I owned were really quite small and I was wanted a larger, more adventurous boat. The job I held produced too little income for anything more. I began to realize that retailing was not going to be productive in the long run, not as an employee anyway. I was increasingly aware of economic limitations. Settling down was not a consideration, being in my twenties, I felt there was plenty of time, but a gnawing concern began during this time.
I dated quite a bit and often used the Clipper as a platform for diversion. A guy and a sailboat were an anomaly for them and, sadly, the novelty didn’t seem have any lasting effect. This was still during the disco era. Dancing and sailing were fun things to do, but there was a droning emptiness. I missed my former wife, and reconciliation was probably never going to happen. I had a lot of acquaintances but I really felt lonely.
I was in a rut driving an aging car, a Ford Mustang, a classic that needed constant repairs. My love was sailing. I had no home. I had little contact with family and old friends. I felt another change was necessary to break out. What will it be?
Soon I forgot my troubles. I was dating fairly exhaustively, and for the wrong reasons was taking out some fairly young ladies. Intellectual stimulation was lacking. There was no history to talk about. I was in what Jimmy Buffet called ‘bimbo limbo’. Some were pretty nice girls, but just as I realized that needed to class up my act, I met a very attractive lady.
My bachelorhood was in full swing. I was about to plunge into a relationship and was frightened about this prospect. Yogi Berra said ‘when you come to a fork in a road, take it’. I had to either turn right or left but instead I stood agape and frozen before the fork. I was about to quit my job in retail, sell the boats, go back to school and wrap up the college credits I had into a package that would enable me obtain a bachelors degree in business. I was thinking about computers, or accounting, or something along those lines. The lady I had just met wanted to go back to school also.
More later . . | Photos
Pacific Northwest | J R Hudson 