DAY ONE 6 METER NORTH AMERICAN CHAMPIONSHIPS

After the skipper's meeting we set out for halfway rock rendezvous with the race committee. I am skippering "Madcap" with Jay Sharkey , Jonathan Hough, and Bill Hartnett as crew. After a postponement waiting for the southerly to fill, which never happened, we started in a light northerly. We nailed the start, a general recall. I never imagined that the other boats would let me in again. Nailed the second start, and rounded the first windward mark in third place, beating many modern boats. This is where or problems started. we were four and a crew of five can make all the difference. We will try to have a fifth for tomorrow and for the world's, which start on tuesday.

SIX METER NORTH AMERICAN CHAMPIONSHIP

Tomorrow is the first of two days of racing for the North American Six meter championship; followed next week by the six meter world championship, here in Newport.

Boats are preparing and some still arriving. Sleipnir II arrived a few days ago and both masts were broken turning into the shipyard. Fortunately one is nearly repaired already. The Man in the Photo with Sleipnir is the grandson of Rassmussen of Abeking & Rassmussen

If you want to feel a fair bottom, go see Fokus 3, a blog is available recounting their trip from Seattle.

Penngrove California

How do you define an area either with the use of words or photographs? Choosing these photographs I may find I will with time revise my impressions. My son recently moved to Northern California, What I thought I knew and what I now think are very different. These are views from his house.

LUTHER BURBANK

I am related to Luther Burbank by my maternal grandfather. I never paid much attention to this until being in Santa Rosa, I discovered his house and Farm in nearby Sebastipol.

Revisiting his story, the contributions he made to society are remarkable. The care taken in the preservation of his legacy by the State of California and Santa Rosa are wonderful.

More Northern California

We have mostly been working on my son's house, with only a few interruptions for distraction, a trip to wine country, Napa, Sonoma, St. Helena.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

I am in northern California, by that I mean north of San Francisco. I had an idea of what to expect, I was mostly wrong. It is as diverse as the rest of California, with agriculture being the dominant feature. Being from the East I always fall back to the idea of the Pacific Ocean, surfers and people in Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is far more diverse and interesting than that.

Everything is big; the trees, the spaces, the vineyards. It is fascinating for me from the East. Although I am still without bearings.

My son moved here from Los Angeles, and we are here helping him settle. I had only just gotten used to Los Angeles.

Sharks

I just watched a 60 minutes episode about shark watching. It made me remember a summer, I must have been 8 or 10 years old. That particular summer the Gulf Stream moved very close to New England. Many beaches on Long Island and in Newport were closed due to shark sightings.

It is important to put this in context, it is the mid-fifties.

I spent my summers in Westport, Ma. with my grandmother. A fin was sighted in the Westport River; a group of my grandmother's contemporaries were there swimming. Try to visualize elderly women, in one piece bathing suits, with a skirt at the bottom, entirely in black, and all of them wearing bathing caps.

These were women of principal, seeing the shark, they swam out and grabbed it by the tail and towed it ashore. It was easily 15-20 long from it's nose to the end of it's tail. Looking back at the event, the shark must have been sick. The groundskeeper from a nearby estate arrived with a shotgun; put it to the head of the shark and pulled the trigger. I watched all this from the beach. and after the shark was dead, put my fist in the hole left in it's head by the shotgun blast.