Longitude 60

I’m starting to feel more and more like Dorothy trying to find her way home from Oz. Perhaps I feel this way because it was two months ago today that we cast off the dock lines and sailed out of Narragansett Bay bound for Plymouth. It’s a lot of time to spend on the boat and a long time at sea, though I must admit that I’m starting to get the hang of this sailing thing. In any event, I don’t have a yellow brick road, just meridians of longitude. I have just passed 60 west and I can’t tell you how satisfying that is, particularly as I lost my windvane steering back at 54 West. Plymouth is at approximately 4 degrees west longitude and Newport just past 71 degrees west, so that’s the line. I’m certainly not in home waters yet, but pretty soon the bailout options will be Martha’s Vineyard or Block Island instead of the Azores.

I have rigged up a system of lines and bungees to help steer the boat. In fact, there are now more lines on my wheel than there are in the organization chart for the pentagon, but somehow it seems to work; the steering system that is. I think of it as my half quadrant steering system because it will generally keep the boat in half of the compass quadrant that I am trying to steer in. Not a precision system exactly, though better on some points of sail than others, but very helpful when you need to do something other than stand behind the wheel.

I was saddened to learn of Gianfranco Tortolani’s capsize and the terrible loss he suffered in losing his boat, though of course very relieved that he has survived that ordeal. Also, a note of thanks to my close friend and supporter Kevin Redden for his assistance to me in my adventure and also for his support for Gianfranco when he arrived in New Jersey on the Maersk Missouri.

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