Below I am practicing to supplant pigs and toasters as a screensaver.
In case that doesn't work, I could always be a demo dolly (what's the masculine of that?). I'll buy a BUG like the one I'm demoing below for anyone who can correctly identify the polo shirt I'm wearing in this picture before the end of April.
If all else fails, it's back to email.
All pictures are from Kinnernet 2008. Great fun as usual.
There are about 250 nerds gathered here at Yossi Vardi’s Kinnernet camp on the shore of the Sea of Galilee; there couldn’t be a better place to introduce the BUG to the Israeli development community. By the grace of the demo gods, the BUG worked flawlessly and I didn’t make any mistakes I couldn’t recover from and I avoided a shower (more on that below).
The BUG is going to revolutionize consumer electronics; it’s going to enable a huge wave of innovation in consumer devices just as the PC unleashed software innovation I’m an investor in BUGLabs, BTW; not only because I believe in the product but also because, once I heard about the BUG, I realized it’s something I always wanted.
See the BUG lets software hackers who can’t solder become hardware hackers; now we can invent and build new gadgets as easily as we’ve been able to program personal computers. I’m building the world’s best anchor alarm so sailors can sleep at night in an anchorage knowing they’ll be awakened if the anchor drags or even might drag. Every cruising sailor’ll have to have one.
So what’s a BUG?
It’s a 128MB Linux box about the size of a pack and a half of cigarettes. What makes it special are four ports onto which modules can be snapped – that’s where the hardware building capability comes from. The four modules available today are an LCD, a GPS, an accelerometer/motion detector, and a camera; many more are coming soon. Until BUG, you couldn’t get a consumer-usable box put together with the components you need for your application unless you were willing to order 100,000 of them or so – that’s limited innovation in consumer electronics pretty much to companies which can take gambles of this size and have the marketing muscle to make at least some of them work.
The pieces I need to build my gadget cost me $525 – early adopter price. Presumably once am buying in some quantity, I can get these kits for even less per unit, load my application on to them, and sell to my sleepless sailor market at a price point below $1000 and pay for ads and marketing and still make money.
My plan had been to demo my own app at Kinnernet – that would be cool and re-earn my nerd credentials before my younger peers. The BUG software developer kit (SDK), which I’m doing a workshop on at Kinnernet, is easy to use (if you know Java) and even features a virtual BUG so you can test without hardware. Both BUGlabs and the growing developer community are helpful. Everything is open source and interface specs published so anyone can develop software or hardware for the BUG. There are lots of sample apps and my Hello World app was running in just a day or so (I had to learn Java).
But Baby Jack got born early and got priority (good excuse, huh?) so my app not ready. Quickly BUG coding genius John Connolly put together an impressive demo using the camera, LD and accelerometer – shake’n’show. It was fun; it made the point; and, above all, it worked.
On stage here is a little dicey. Thirty seconds before your time is up, there’s an ominous roll of thunder; at fifteen seconds a shower above the presenter’s head starts to mist; at zero time there’s a deluge. I might have been willing to take a shower to make a point but couldn’t afford to get the BUG wet. Just stepped forward towards the audience in time to avoid the flood and still deliver a closing line.
I’ve been doing small demos since. Most frequent reaction is “where do I get one?” (remember, this is still a nerd device; it needs to be programmed to do anything; and this is a very skillfully nerdy group). The fun thing is watching people immediately come up with cool gadgets that they’ll now be able to build. Next week I’ll get back to work on mine.
We’re here in London now, Jack; will introduce ourselves as soon as hospital rules allow. Strange as it’ll seem to you, your mother was once a baby, too. Here’s what I wrote about her when she was a newbie.
A few weeks ago my daughter Katy was born. She started out terribly; grey, streaked with blood, and with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Central Vermont Hospital took care of all that very well and now she is less the worse for wear than I am.
But she is helpless, incredibly helpless. It’s been a few years since I’ve had an infant to watch and I’d forgotten. She can’t hold her huge head up; she can’t use her hands; and her eyes discover the world piece by piece at random.
No other mammal has babies nearly as helpless as ours. Even blind puppies walk to their first nursing. And the reflexive curling of Katy’s toes reminds me that, if she were a monkey, she’d already be able to hold onto a branch.
One theory is that the head is the problem. For better or for worse, humans have brains proportional1y far bigger than those of other species. The head built to contain this giant brain has run into an evolutionary trap. It’s almost too big to be born.
That is why humans have more trouble with childbirth than other species. And so, the theory goes, in order to be born at all, humans must be born prematurely. In other words, human babies are so helpless because they are still in an advanced state of fetal development. If they waited until they were as developed as other mammal babies, their heads would be too large for delivery.
I think there is another reason in the grand scheme of things why our babies are born with so much to learn.
The babies of other species come preprogrammed. They already have most basic motor skills. In general, the lower down the evolutionary ladder a species is, the more adult skills its babies have built in.
Our babies know how to nurse. Everything else they have to learn. It seems very inefficient that we have to learn to lift our heads, then learn to roll over, then creep, then walk. But I think this inefficiency serves a purpose.
While my daughter Katy is learning the simple task of making her hand touch what her eye sees, she will also be learning how to learn. As she tries and fails and tries again, her mind will learn how to retain experience. As her left hand learns what her right hand knows, her mind will learn to reason and extrapolate.
As Katy takes a year to learn the motor skills a monkey is born with, she will be preparing herself for the great task of mastering a spoken language. As she struggles pitifully to make a rattle work right, she will he learning to learn to read and write.
Above all, we are nature’s best learners. We have very dull eyes, puny teeth, a weak sense of smell, and we don’t hear very well. Our physical prowess is probably the laughingstock of the animal kingdom. But we can learn. We learn how to learn while we learn how to walk.
Welcome, Katy, to a genuine learning experience. And good luck.
And welcome, Jack, from Grandpa Bear and Grandma Mimi.
Jack Isaac Morris was born today, our first grandchild courtesy of daughter Kate and son-in-law Hugh. Three weeks early but over seven pounds, he, she, and he are all doing fine.
Mary and I are overjoyed and about to board the flite for London where he is granting his first audiences.
Guess which one of us is Irish.
It was just like the old days on the trade show circuit except I finished the software a comfortable twelve hours before show time instead of on the plane coming out.
Mary and I got to the Stowe High School about 7am and set up our booth (really a table) in a great location that everyone had to pass right next to the Girl Scouts and their cookies and on the way to the polls. Mary used to like to get a booth location on the way to the restrooms because of the traffic although I did convince her that some people ought to be left alone until they were on their way out.
She taped her posters to the wall while I fastened my EVDO antenna to the window and set up my computer and the big monitor facing out. Polls were open so we had people coming by immediately. I was supposed to just be there for setup and then go on my way but there was too much traffic for that. Besides Mary never stays in the booth or behind the table; her position is always out in front buttonholing the prospects and this was no different.
“Hi, we’re helping the town committee which is working for better Internet access,” she said. “We’d like to ask you a couple of quick questions .”
“I don’t have anything but dialup,” some people said.
“Great,” she said. “You’re just the people we want to help. What’s your address?”
I’d key in the address if I wasn’t already working with someone else in which case she’d write it down for later inputting. The EVDO connection worked fine and, almost instantly, a new pin white pin (white was for dialup) would appear on the Google map of Stowe on my monitor. “Is that where you live?” I asked.
“Yes,” they’d say. “I hope you can help us get better access.”
“We already have broadband,” some other people said to Mary.
“Great,” she said. “If you tell us where you live, that’ll help us help other people get access.” Their pins would be red for DSL, blue for cable, green for wireless, and orange for cellular (like my EVDO).
Pretty soon the map was well enough filled out (see below) so that we were often able to say “Look at this; your neighbors on both sides seem to have DSL. Maybe you can get it to.”
Sometimes they’d say back “I’ve been calling Verizon every week and they keep telling me not yet even though they send me an ad for DSL with every bill.”
We asked the people who had recently gotten DSL (of which there were quite a few) how they’d managed to get it. Quite a few times the answer was “I was obnoxious” or “I started talking to a technician in a Verizon truck and he told me we could probably get it and helped me out.”
Some people said they had satellite access. We didn’t talk to anyone who liked it; they all wanted something better. They complained about stringent limits on the amount that can be downloaded, slow display of web sites, pathetically slow upload – especially for those with home-based businesses – and not working in rain or snow. But they said it was better than dialup and what else could they do.
Often people told us that they couldn’t find a tenant for an apartment or a buyer for a property because of lack of broadband availability.
If you look at the upper left hand corner of the map, you see no color; only white pins for dialup and black pins for satellite. That’s an affluent area called Robinson Springs; it’s a huge opportunity for some provider despite the fact that the large, expensive houses are spaced out. In the lower left, the string of white dots is Nebraska Valley; not even any satellite, perhaps because mountains obscure the southern sky. It’s a beautiful place to live with great hiking but you can see that cable (blue) didn’t go very far down the road and DSL didn’t make it at all. The telephone poles march down the street; clearly another line needs to hang from them.
You can see how cable and DSL peter out at the end of the roads away from the center of town. “Yeah, they got to my neighbor,” people said about cable; “but they want $10,000 to continue to us.”
Our hope is that the map above and maps like it that people in other towns might fill in will show providers where the opportunities are, help neighbors band together for better service, and help the State Telecommunications Authority (of which Mary is the chair) achieve their mission of 100% cellular and data coverage for Vermont by the end of 2010.
Twelve hours later we broke down our equipment, packed the car, and went home. I hadn’t eaten all day and Mary’d had just a few Girl Scout cookies. It was fun and the software didn’t even crash.
Faithful readers know that I promised Mary to have an app ready for her to beta at town meeting tomorrow to collect information on who has what kind of broadband in Stowe and from whom they get it.
I used the Google maps API to build this. It runs as an application on my laptop rather than as a window in a browser because it’s not until my next project that I figure out what many of you already know – how to configure a server to receive all this information. The survey results are saved as an XML file which can go into Excel and lots of other places.
Took me at least forty hours of work to do this simple app. But that’s not a reflection on the Google tools; it just shows how much I had to learn about many things that working programmers already know. Reversing the usual, the first 10% took 80% of the time; the last 90% was a lot easier because I increasingly knew what I was doing.
I could do a new task with these tools of similar complexity in three or four hours.
BTW, the Google sample code was very helpful and got incorporated wherever I could.
At the last minute it looked like we might not be able to use the app. Town Meeting (oh yeah, and primary day, too) are at the High School. No way at the last minute to get my Internet access through the school. Oh, oh. We went up to the school to test today. Despite the fact that cellphone coverage is marginal there (ask the kids), Verizon EVDO with my new battery-boosted USB modem AND the antenna I bought managed to see a bar or two and that was enough for this to work as long as I don’t put the maps in bandwidth-hungry satellite map view.
Wonder if it’ll crash on its first real outing. Did put lots of care into making sure data will not be lost in that case; I’d be in lots of trouble if that happened.
My friend Jeff Pulver was just telling me that it’s a great time be a nerd. Right on cue I walked past the poster above which I think advertises a new TV show.
On the same theme, Mary asked the other day what all us nerds would’ve done for a living if there weren’t computers or other electronic devices for us to play with. It’s a very frightening thought. I thought I’d be a writer like my father but met my first computer, an IBM 7090 mainframe, in the computer lab at college when I was nineteen (1962) and found this was a much better way to make a living. Didn’t get around to writing fiction again until a couple of years ago when I wrote hackoff.com: an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble – not surprisingly, nerd Dom Montain is a major character of that book.
So what would we have done? Took some thought. Not many of would have been gymnasts, super warriors, craftsman (takes fine motor skills), or very good farmers.
We would’ve counted, added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. Before there were computers, there were lots of numbers that had to be crunched by hand. When you go over the George Washington Bridge or ascend the Empire State Building, remember that the only mathematical tools for all the engineering calculations were adding machines and slide rules (easy to use for a nerd); presumably the calculations were done at least twice.
All the accounts of everything had to be done by hand. All monthly statements manually totaled (at best on an adding machine).
So we would’ve been accountants or engineers or employed by such.
It’s much more fun to teach computers to do all that work (what programming is all about); we never have to do the same thing twice – at least until we reimplement it for a new computer or operating system. And we get great toys to play with.
Jeff’s right.
In Vermont we get to choose which primary we vote in. It now looks like that choice and how we vote might still make a small difference on Town Meeting Day, March 4, which is when our Democratic and Republican primaries will both take place. It’s an interesting decision for me.
On Friday I was convinced that John McCain (whom I like) had safely wrapped up the Republican nomination. But the Republican nominee could well end up NOT being president, so a vote in the Democratic primary would be a vote for my second choice in case I don’t get my first choice. That seemed like a good strategy, and I’d tentatively decided to vote for Obama although I’ve been put off lately by his preachy generalities without many specifics.
Yesterday results in Kansas and Louisiana, which McCain lost, and even Washington, which McCain has apparently won, made clear that there are a large contingent of Republican primary voters and caucus goers who’d like to keep the party on the evangelical right or have it move even further in that direction. That’s their right but it’s not my preference. Did more moderate GOP voters stay home because the race is “wrapped up”? Have moderates left the GOP so that they no longer vote in its primaries even if they sometimes vote for its candidates in the general election?
It would be an unfortunate result of complacency if moderate Vermont Republicans left the Vermont GOP primary to be won by the right wing minority of the party here. Time for a change in strategy. If Mike Huckabee is still in the race, I’m voting for McCain in the primary.
This Republican primary season is turning out to be a fight for the direction of the party; it’s a fight that’s overdue. I’m an American first and a Republican a distant second. The nation is poorly served when either major party strays too far from the center where ideas can be debated rather than ideologies shouted.
Pictured above is the hike we wanted to take, down into Copper Canyon. Instead we’re playing cards and dominoes in a lodge perched on the rim at 6500 feet and tantalized by five-minute clearings between downpours. The road we came in on is now at least partially impassable for vehicles.
The hike we ARE, apparently, going to take is six miles out to San Rafael where we’ll catch a train to Chihuahua.
The road is GONE- washed away! We’re edging along fragments of crumbling cliffs with a sheer 7000 foot drop! We have to scramble over huge, gelatinous mudslides; boulders cascade down around us; raging new rivers cut our path!
Not really; that’s just Mary’s nightmare. But we do have to hike out because the road is no longer fit for cars (see the van in the ditch below).
As you can see, I’m wearing a garbage-bag poncho that certainly isn’t Gore-Tex. The lump on my back is thirty pounds of computer (naturally), batteries, sat-phone, more batteries, Kindle, mobile phone, chargers, portable solar charger, more batteries, and other essentials. Brother Bill was kind enough to take the smaller back of dry clothes Mary was wearing under her garbage bag. My assumption is that we’ll never see the rest of our luggage again.
First part of the climb is up seven hundred feet. Since we’re starting at 6500, we can feel the altitude and my pack doesn’t help. I’m drenched under the garbage bag even though the rain has stopped right on cue as we began our escape.
The road didn’t really disappear anywhere; it’s mainly cut into limestone cliffs and so is essentially natural concrete. Parts (as above) are impassable to vehicles because slippery mud washed onto steep grades. Turns out we could’ve gotten a ride for all but the first part but now we’re determined to have at least one hike and we have plenty of time to catch the train.
Only one stream cut the road and we found a fording place with well-placed rocks just a little upstream. Almost – but not quite – toppled over with all my electronics into the stream. The fog lifted and let us see beautiful side canyons; the rain held off to make sure we left the land of the Tarahumara; would have certainly started again if we tried to stay.
Plan B – the horse I thought would carry our bags out – disappeared on an errand the day before we left and never came back. But good news: there are plan C burros. Our suitcases are in those garbage bags on their backs.
On our recent sailing trip, we swam with the sea lions off their rocks in the Sea of Cortez. Friend Marc got scratched or bitten by a playful cub; same cub bit my flipper, just as my puppy Bruiser would have, when I used it to block his rocketing attack from below.
But my sister Pam Zino – nurse/writer/Neried at heart – was swarmed by the sea lions. She disappeared in a crush of them for a frightening moment. She handled them wonderfully and wrote a poem about that and more which she has given me permission to post here.
Without Even Closing My Eyes
I feel the world rocking.
A bright blue rocking
into sandy bights of red spine
rising from the Sea of Cortez.
Wind propelled, cradled by swell
the cat’s hulls cleave
the leeward sea of the red range.
Windward of the cliffs, the waves
pound rock jetties in their wake.
We forge a saltwater river in
a mangrove thicket to the far shore.
Beaks folded like bayonettes to their chest ,
Pelicans guard the way to a clear lagoon
braced by a warm wall of rock
from crashing sea.
Which, days on land, I still feel rocking me
as it rocked when I spotted sea lions cupped in its peaks.
“There! At one o’clock,” I yelled. “rising ‘fore the bow.”
We searched the waters. Was that one? More there?
Undulating crests dazzled with water and light
mirroring phantasmagoria, or actual sight?
Then suddenly their bray bounced off a long shelf
of jagged pinnacled rock
They cavorted, snout to snout, trumpeting at play
slapping flippers, rolling about, posing on steep inclines
smooth young pups yelping , huge bewhiskered elders bellowing
The island a riot of sound and form.
I dove into the sea.
Surfacing, a pup breached before me
Another lion torpedoed beneath
I donned snorkel and mask
had them in place, and just as I did
All sight was erased
By a swift silent eddy of lions inspecting me
They circled about
Prodding, nuzzling, brushing, gumming
Their current whirled in
an exquisite softness of water and flesh
an inquisitive stream of motion and press
And a worry of possible biting
- Of welcome to fighting -
Do nothing to disturb them, I thought
Make no sudden move causing fear
Be one with their curiosity
This is what you dove to be near.
Will one breach beneath me, I wondered
Will I be carried on a back?
As if divining my thoughts
a lion did just that
But instead of coming from beneath,
mounted me. I was underneath.
I could feel its length, feel its breadth
yet it was weightless:
a muscle of gently suspended flesh
The gesture so exhalted me
it broke my reverie. I called out
and the circle dispersed to the depths.
Yet still I feel their water rocking me
See the sea-furnaced igneous range
with sandstone surface gargoyled by wind
its coves of shelled beach
its sere of cactii - silent witness to blaze and gale
And still I feel the water rocking me
though now I hail so far from its reach.
The old man with the slim-hipped body of a boy did a rain dance for our entertainment. He was once a world champion in the 100 mile super-marathon. The Tarahumara Indians run rather than walk; they live in steep canyons – at 7000 feet in the summer and in the valleys much lower in the winter. He and his friends drove to Leadville, Colorado to compete in the 1993 when he was already in his fifties; he won then. He was second to an American when the race was run in his native Sierra Tarahumura. Now he dances traditional dances, sometimes. His feet and legs are still strong.
He lives in his hut on land belonging to the local Tarahumura council. The hut, which has nether running water nor electricity, is surrounded by his corn field, his peach orchid, and the fenced in area where his bull grazes. The cows are free on the range. They don’t keep goats anymore because of the damage they do to the thin soil of the plateau. When he ran competitively, he wore sandals made from old tires. When he dances the rain dance, he wears rattles on his ankles made from dried butterfly cocoons filled with dry seeds.
Trouble is the rain dance worked during what should be the dry season. It was raining when we got up the next morning (yesterday). In the village before the village where the train station is, we found out that the trains were not running – no explanation, just no trains.
For a not-so-small fee the driver who was taking us to the station said he would take us to the next station (that’s as far as we planned to go on the train yesterday) and rendezvous with the driver who was already arranged to take us from that station to Uno Lodge, our next destination. We changed to a pickup for the ride over the rutted, wet, and occasional steep gravel road to San Rafael, suitcases in plastic garbage bags in the back. At San Rafael, we switched vehicles with an ashen-faced couple, clearly in shock, who had just come from Uno Lodge and were headed back the way we’d come. “Interesting ride,” the man said but didn’t unclench his teeth.
It’s only six miles from San Rafael to Uno Lodge; in good weather the drive takes an hour and there’s usually a four-wheel drive vehicle but that’s in Chihuahua being serviced. And it’s not good weather. The small-wheeled long van with rear wheel drive slips alarmingly on the wet limestone and occasional clay or mud. Some of the canyons at the edge of the road carved into the cliff are a five thousand foot sheer drop. Mary doesn’t look and I only pretend to be brave.
Finally the women revolt and with some relief I accompany them walking the last precipitous mile in a light drizzle. The lodge at 6600 feet overlooks a canyon at least as picturesque and on the same scale as the Grand Canyon. At a mere thirty million years since its fiery genesis, this landscape is only a quarter the age of the Grand Canyon and correspondingly much more jagged. The views are beautiful when we get glimpses of them through the now driving rain and swirling fog. The guest book talks about the best hikes ever and we’re stuck inside playing dominos and hearts.
We have yesterday’s forecast but the promised afternoon clearing hasn’t happened. The lodge has a little solar-generated juice left in its battery and is recharging the radio telephone so we may get a later report. We’re the only guests and not quite sure if we’ll be able to leave as scheduled tomorrow since the road is no longer fit for the vans even by local standards and snow was in the old forecast.
There’s a horse I call Plan B. It could carry most of the bags. We can walk six miles if we have to if we can keep dry (it’s cold) and we did save the garbage bags our suitcases were in to use as panchos. Not the hike we had in mind but people do come to Stowe to ski and sometimes find no snow. No use complaining.
Too late I read in the guide book that the Tarahumara like to be left alone. With hindsight that’s clear from their isolated huts spread through the canyons. My advice is don’t accept rain dances from strangers unless you want to get wet.
Resource conservation and tactical tradeoffs were a sub-theme of our sailing week on the Sea of Cortez. Unlike the Caribbean and other places we’ve rented boats, there are no restaurants or stores to stop at where we were cruising. Knowing this and thinking through the implications are two different things!
A day into our trip we noticed that we’d used a quarter of our fresh water. Whoops! And nobody had even showered yet. We hypothesized that profligate rinsing of dishes and pots was the culprit. We’re used to having dinner on shore and easy breakfasts and lunches aboard. Good luck is that friend Marc turns out to be a great chef. Bad luck is that, even though Marc used the grill for the main course every night, there were still pots, pans, and dishes to be washed.
There was also a zip lock bag problem. We hadn’t brought enough of them onboard somehow so they needed to be rinsed to be reused for leftovers. But rinsing takes water. Tough decision; don’t save what isn’t worth saving. Better yet, save the rinse water to use as presoak for the pots from the next meal.
I’ve read from different sources that both Chinese and British captains could tell when women had been smuggled aboard by the sudden alarming increase in fresh water usage. Apparently, although men’s hair can be washed in salt water, women’s hair can’t. Four of our crew of seven are women – less chauvinistically, four of our crew have significantly longer hair than the other three.
I tried to set a good example by using the slightly warm water spurting out the side after it cooled the engine to wash my hair while paddling around in the surprisingly cold water but couldn’t convince anyone, male or female, that this was a good idea. Finally, after explaining that this water didn’t actually touch any greasy engine parts, I got permission to use it for dishes presoak so long as I leaned over and gathered it in a pot. (warning: on some boats this water is really hot; be careful.)
The harbors were remarkably empty. In the one crowded harbor (by Sea of Cortez standards), we didn’t use sea water because we knew none of the boats were equipped with holding tanks; heads flush into the sea. Yuk!
Back to ocean-bathing, two hints: 1) jump in the water and get wet, then climb onto the swim platform and soap up, then jump back in to rinse; soaping up while swimming doesn’t work well; 2) dish soap (environmentally friendly, of course) suds much better than bar soap in salt water.
OK. Women do get to shower; boat shower which means you don’t leave the water running. But what about running the water so that the tap turns warm before using the water. Lots of waste; I had visions of running dry. Someone’s smart suggestion: save that pre-hot water for drinking or cooking or dishes. Problem solved.
The boat was supposed to be equipped with garbage bags. It was – one! That was good for about two days. Fortunately Mary has a habit of saving the little plastic bags groceries come in. We bought lots of groceries before we left so we had lots of little bags. Now, at the end of the cruise, I’m about to haul the tied but leaky and smelly things out of the spare anchor locker and throw them away. Good thing we never had to use the spare anchor in a hurry; we would’ve drowned in garbage.
You know what? It was all part of the fun.
As faithful readers can tell from my lack of posts, there really are no Internet connections available north of La Paz in the southern Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) – or at least I haven’t found any yet. We haven’t been to any villages which might have Internet cafes; but, of the only two possible villages on our itinerary, one is famous for its single satellite phone for rent by the minute and has no electricity and the other is perched on a rock and is known in the cruising guide for its enterprising fishermen’s wives who supplement diminishing fishing income (blamed on Japanese and Korean factory ships) with sales of shell-based home-made jewelry. With twenty-two kids in school, the latter is the second largest settlement on an island in this Sea so maybe, maybe… Tomorrow we’ll find out unless the wind is blowing too hard and the seas are too high.
[update at posting time. No Internet access there; no kids or shopping either. Kids and women are on the mainland during the week. Three fishermen live there alone other wise and sold us some very fresh fish. They live on the rock because there are no mosquitoes there, they say.]
Which brings me to the weather and communications. Wise sailors in this region get their weather forecasts daily at 8am on VHF channel 22 where a local net links liveaboards together. But the forecast is broadcast from La Paz and we’re now forty miles north under the horizon even for our masthead mounted antenna. Didn’t get the forecast yesterday either because we were in a cove with high blocking walls. But the weather’s not supposed to be very interesting this time of year anyway; one of the reasons we booked now. The wind blows from the north or northeast between ten and twenty five knots, can get a little blustery and uncomfortable when a dry cold front trails through hanging from a low in southern California.
That’s why we were surprised at the 10 knot wind from the southwest this bright and clear afternoon. Also a little disconcerted to see the anchorage we’d shared with four other boats last night deserted when we came back to it late this afternoon. It’s known to have great protection against northerly winds and swells; not recommended in the summer because it’s open to the southwest.
We anchored in the spot we’d coveted yesterday but come to late to claim, nestled up against a cliff to the north and with a salt flat protecting us from waves if not wind from the east. Just as it was getting dark, the gentle rollers from the southwest steepened and sometimes even broke under us where the water shelved rapidly to fifteen feet. The wind accelerated to 20 knots with higher gusts. Uncomfortable.
Brother Billy used the dingy to discover that the southern part of the bay was smoother but just as gusty. Should we pull anchor and move in the near dark? Risk is we don’t get it set well or make some other mistake. Now the lack of weather information makes a good decision tough. Why’s there a southwest wind anyway?
We try calling other boats on both channels 16 and 22 to see if anyone else has the weather forecast. Not a peep back. Have I mentioned that we don’t have Internet access?
Sister Pam calls her super Internet literate son on our satellite phone (see picture in last week’s post). As we knew he would be, he’s back with us in five minutes with the morning forecasts for both northern and southern Sea of Cortez. We’re south middle but an interpolation makes sense.
Two lows moving through the north will cause very strong northerlies there starting tomorrow and moderate northerlies in the south. Today mild south to southwest winds were forecast for the south. The barometer (analog) has been dropping. With interpolation it all makes sense.
A cold front is approaching. It’s strong enough to induce southerlies ahead of it even against the prevailing northerly flow. We’re north of the moderate southerlies so we have mildly immoderate southwesterlies. Answer: don’t move the boat!
Why? Because the anchor is holding (we did let out some more chain). It’s almost a certainty that the northerlies which trail the front will be stronger than the southerlies that proceed it – especially since they’ll be reinforced by the seasonal flow rather than diminished by it. If that happens, our anchor has to hold against much more force if we go to the currently calm the southern bay and leave the protection of the cliff to the north of us. Didn’t want to move anyway and now it’s truly dark although there’s a half moon illuminating some mares tails high in the sky.
Both the depth gauge and GPS say the anchor is holding. Almost on cue, the wind starts to drop: 20 knots, 16, 14, 15, 12, 14, 12, 10, 13, 8… until the wind direction indicator is spinning directionless around its dial. The barometer is now steady.
Now can we go to sleep?
Some of us can but we’ve got to take turns standing anchor watch. The northerlies are certainly coming. We should have good shelter but we’ll be pulling the anchor in the opposite direction from the way which it was initially set. If we pull hard enough it’ll flip over and no longer be dug in. It SHOULD reset in the sand but there’s some slippery grass below us as well.
At 0200 the wind out of the northwest, even in our sheltered location, is over 10 knots. No big deal but it does hold us sideways to the persistent swell so our rocking becomes a more unpleasant rolling (we’re in a catamaran). My watch, obviously, or I’d be sleeping instead of writing.
Tomorrow morning we WILL get the new forecast even if we have to call the place we rented the boat from on sat phone.
