Fractals of Change

Has the Financial System Disconnected?

Before finding any Internet access – and so before we had any news in English – we found an ATM. Tried Mary's card and it failed authorization; tried mine – Oh oh: same problem.

Our first thought was that the world financial system had simply disconnected at the retail level! Maybe I should'nta been so antibailout. Now there's personal panic; conserve cash at all costs. Eat only at restaurants that take Visa. But is Visa working?

Tried our Visa and it still worked for purchases. Not a complete disaster yet.

Tried another ATM machine and it took both cards fine. Panic over.

But we do depend on a lot of stuff working. Hope when the banking system is put back together (if it doesn't become a government agency) that it is much less concentrated and centralized – sort of like the Internet. Not what's happening now at all with consolidation despite the fact that "too big to fail" entities caused the current problems.

First Lock

Blogging offline. To be posted when connected.

We shouldn'ta watched the DVD before starting our canal boat adventure. All of the easy docking demos showed at least three crew members. One's at the helm; two (always a man) jumps ashore; three (always a woman) throws lines to two. That's all easy.

But son Jarah isn't joining us until six days after we begin. Mary and I are going to have to do a lot of docking before that. Doesn't matter that just the two of us often dock our own boat or rented boats; Mary saw the video and there are three people doing the docking. She does have a point that the helmsman of the canal boat is high on the upper deck with no good way to throw or cleat lines. A coupla times Mary asks me are we sure we can do this; a bad sign.

Plan was to just spend the first night aboard at the place on the River Siles where we picked up the boat; after all we're old enough to be retired; have six hours of jet lag and got what sleep we did on our transatlantic flight. But it turns out there's nowhere to provision there; next day is Sunday when stores in Italy are closed; got to go just a mile downstream to Casier. And dock!

The boat boy from the place gets us out of the crammed boat parking lot. I take the helm and halfcrash, halfland the stern on a dock so he can hop off with his bike. We're on our own. This thing is about forty feet long; it's wide. Doesn't steer in reverse but does have a bow thruster (side facing prop in the front of the boat that can push the bow left or right. Should make everything a piece of cake). We're festooned with bumpers.

"I think that's the place," says Mary pointing out a concrete wall with some pilings in front of it and steel ladders imbedded in it.

"I don't think so," I say. "It's not far enough."

"I think it is."

Well, I think, we have to dock sometime. Might as well get it over with. "Ok." I remember that it's best to dock heading upstream; current about two knots; no wind. We've already discussed that she wraps the first line around something onshore; cleats it back on the boat; then does the same for the second line.

"Do you want me to do the rope in the front or in the back first?" Mary asks.

"Back, because then I can use the bow thruster to push the bow in and you'll be able to grab that." Bad decision. I don't get the stern close enough to a piling so Mary somehow leaps with the line to a ladder and wraps the line around a rusty rung. She's onshore now; the bow is pushed out by the current. I can push it back some with the thruster but Mary's stuck on the ladder and I'm at the helm.

"Tie the line to the ladder," I try to say in a calm voice of command which isn't quite calming. "Then I'll throw you the bow line."

"How'll you do that?" Mary asks still clinging to the ladder. "You're up there." She doesn't remember the part of the DVD that says one person is chosen as captain and everyone does what he (sic) says.

I leave the helm and go to the bow so I can throw that line. "Where are you?" asks Mary. "Are you OK?"

But we get it all sorted out and the boat safely docked. Turns out it's the wrong place and there's no store. It's getting dark.

Look, we're experienced now. Untie. Go downstream another half a mile; turn into the current; pull up to the concrete quay. Do the bow line first this time because the current'll swing the stern in. Piece of cake. We ignore the laughing little boys who want to help us. Even get to the grocery store before it closes.

Oh yeah. The first lock. The lock tender laughed at us a little when we rammed the side of the lock. But we're on the other side now in the Venetian Lagoon proper. That's what happens when you're a good team.

UPDATE: whoops. Hubris. Really screwed up docking in Burano in a small space between a houseboat and a dredge with deadly protrusions. Ok, though.

Trains and Planes

At 1PM, someone trusted by our driver at the train station in San Rafael, Mexico “knew” that the 1:20PM train to Chihuahua wouldn’t arrive until 2PM. In fact, it didn’t arrive until almost 3PM. No one seemed to know about the full delay since there were both vendors and railroad employees waiting for the train from 2PM on. Such delays are common on the Chepe Express; two days before the train hadn’t run at all.

While we waited on the platform, we had plenty of time to notice that only one wire went from the utility poles on the street to the houses and businesses. There was power but no telephone. On top of the train station there is a mast for radio telephone which some people use. Along the railroad track there are old telegraph wires, but they are apparently no longer in use since they hang to the ground from some poles and make a trellis for vines. The trains spend a lot of time on sidings of the one rail line, waiting for each other to pass.

“Communications problems,” I said with a superior air knowing that Telmex’ effective monopoly has retarded telecommunication development in Mexico.

Almost exactly a day later we were in O’Hare waiting for a flight to Burlington. Half an hour prior to the scheduled 7:05 PM United departure, all the fancy displays at O’Hare said “on time”. When we got to the gate, a big LCD with Burlington weather said there were just two minutes until boarding. Mary has this habit of looking out the window instead of at the electronic screens; “there’s no plane here,” she said. She was right.

“Minutes until boarding” disappeared from the display; I had sort of thought it might go negative.

“The plane is coming from the hanger,” the gate agent announced. “It’s had some maintenance but it’s on its way over now.” She had lots of communication equipment: a landline phone, a computer, two cell phones one of which also had walkie-talkie capabilities, and a PA system to talk to us with.

Half an hour later there was still no plane at the gate. O’Hare’s big but it’s not that big. I was going to question the gate agent more closely but noticed that she was looking out the window the same as I was to see whether anything was parked at the gate. On the LCD, new departure and estimated arrival times were posted every ten minutes – always ten minutes later than the previous post. Once the boarding clock ticked down from fifteen to one again but that didn’t bring any plane. Twice the agent told us that she had been told that the plane had now left the hanger. Once, inexplicably, she’s said it just landed – maybe it flew across O’Hare.

Finally a plane did arrive. We boarded quickly and were assured that we would get a speedy clearance and have a speedy flight because of stronger than usual tail winds. What the pilot didn’t know and couldn’t tell us was that a problem with the evacuation slide indicator lights had been fixed but not yet tested. Not sure I want to go down a slide into Lake Champlain in January but no one asked me. That test (which didn’t involve deploying the slide) took forty minutes. Then we went home.

So, with all the modern communications technology in the world available, United didn’t do any better at telling its passengers when they could expect to depart than the operators of the Chepe Express did. Anyone who flies frequently knows that this isn’t an isolated failure.

Moral is that both Mexico and the US have a lot of modernizing to do if we North Americans are going to compete in a global economy. I know the Chinese railroads had there own problems last week but China is getting better fast at the information technology needed for a huge economy and its infrastructure to function. Trains and planes ought to run on time; the whole economy suffers when they don’t. When they’re late, people need to know. I think we’re buying a lot of gadgets but don’t have the will to put them to good use.

Escape from Copper Canyon

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.

Kindle Travel Test

I could read books on my Amazon Kindle even when the bright sun was over my shoulder, not just when it was in front of me making me squint as in the very posed picture above. Like a book, Kindle isn’t backlit; it has crisp black type on a grayish surface. At night the gray is slightly less reflective than pulp paper so I couldn’t read Kindle quite as far into the evening as Mary could read her traditional books; had to give up and turn on the light slightly sooner which mattered on our vacation because we were either draining the house battery of a boat or using the last few watts of solar-generated electricity in a rain-swept cabin on land.

Although I did have an opportunity to recharge, Kindle’s own battery – since it’s not providing light and since I wasn’t using the radio – seems as if it would have easily lasted through two weeks and the two books I read on it.

Kindle was more than worth its 10.3 ounces in books I didn’t have to carry. Running out of things to read is not acceptable on a vacation and outdoor adventure-type vacations both make it difficult to predict how much involuntary down (reading) time you’ll have and make it undesirable to carry a lot of extra weight.

I needed to bring one book to read during takeoffs and landings when airlines don’t allow “anything with an on-off switch” to be on. That was Vito Dumas’ Alone Through the Roaring Forties, a good read for someone doing a little tame sailing in the Sea of Cortez. He went around the world single handled in the “wrong direction” (West to East) around all three fearsome southern capes, usually at forty degrees south latitude.

While still in the US, I loaded Kindle with The Immaculate Deception by Iain Pears, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  Only read the first two so Kite Runner was backup.

The reading experience was very similar to reading a paperback: better in some ways because, if you leave Kindle next to your plate and use your hands to eat, it doesn’t spring closed like a paperback wants to. The pages (at a typesize I can read) have less words on them than a book and there’s a slight pause and flicker at page turn which takes a little getting used to, not much though. The design is flawed in having active controls three-quarters of the way down both sides of the case: it’s almost impossible to avoid accidental page turn in one direction or the other – especially when using the cursor or trying to turn Kindle off. BTW, when you turn Kindle back on, it knows what page you were reading.

My crew was in to word games and Kindle’s onboard copy of The New Oxford American Dictionary was invaluable in solving disputes which would have been tough otherwise with no way to access wiktionary.

Other Kindle posts on FOC:

Kindle – Web Browsing Reviewed

Kindle – Book Reader’s Review

Kindle – Free Internet Browsing for Just $400

Kindle – Shape of the Web to Come?

Kindle – Reader Questions and Comments

Pam’s Poem

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 Curse of the Tarahumara

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.

tSolar Use and Disuse

On the Island of San Francisco in the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) there are salt pits, an ancient marvel of solar engineering. The pits are rectangles of about fifty feet by twenty five and dug two or three feet into sand which is slightly below sea level. Salt water percolates up into the pits (not a good place to drill a well which is why no one lives here). The water evaporates and leaves the salt behind. This keeps happening until the pit is crusted over with a foot or so of salt. The subsistence fisherman from nearby Coyote Island scoop up the salt and use it to preserve their catch. The pit is ready to make the next batch.

Ironically, electricity for La Paz, Mexico, which has over 300 days of sunshine/year and is only 24 degrees north of the equator comes from a sprawling 600 megawatt natural-gas fired generating plant proudly opened in 2002. The plant is on a shore surrounded by desert and bare hills, great place for solar collectors. Oil and gas prices were low when the plant was planned and built and Pemex may have been looking for markets for its natural gas. But I suspect that gas would now find a ready market to the north if solar power displaced it here during sunny days as an energy source. Fortunately, the world is full of such opportunities.

Remote communities off the electric grid here are beginning to use solar desalinization and also harvest commercial quantities of salt as a byproduct.

BTW, I realize that people who fly in jets to sail in plastic boats and motor for four out of seven days are scarcely in a position to lecture anyone on energy use. These are meant as observations and not as rants.

Small World at Sea

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.

Out of Touch

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.

Out of Touch

If you see this post (and there's a good chance that you will), it means that I really couldn't find a good Internet connection in the Sea of Cortez north of La Paz and resisted the temptation to sail to connectivity.

In fact, posts have been on autopilot all week.

Going Sailing

Going be in the Sea of Cortez where cell coverage is rumored to be sparse. Can’t quite go cold turkey on communications so I rented an Iridium satellite phone that should work almost everywhere outside. DIDN’T get the data attachment, though. Too slow and too expensive so I’m gonna have to live offline – scary.

Even a phone needs peripherals. Pictured above are an AC charger, a DC (cigarette lighter) charger, a remote mounted antenna so we can talk from below decks, an extra battery, a carrying case for all of this, and a soft folding solar charger. Of course should be able to charge from DC on the boat but always need a plan B. Besides, running down the batteries on a sailboat gets me nervous and running the engine seems contrary.

The solar charger puts out .6 amps at 15.4 volts so should be able to charge any cell phones that do work, cameras, iPods etc. assuming we have DC adapters for them. Don’t think there’s enough amps here for my PC and I’m pretty sure it won’t be able to drive the inverter I use for devices that we don’t have DC adapters for (will try, though).

Sat phone is NOT a low cost way to communicate. The phone itself is only $24.95/week to rent but airtime minutes (in and out) are $1.59 each even in prepaid nonrefundable bundles of sixty. Voice mail is extra. People can call you for a cost of a call to Arizona (cost to them – you’re still going to pay the airtime).

Good news is that inbound text messages are free and outbound “only” $.59 for 160 characters or less.

Got it all from satellitephonestore.com who called to correct the mistakes I made in ordering and delivered on time as promised.

Kindle – Book Reader’s Review

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader came and got buried among the holiday packages. But it emerged from post-holiday pile of cardboard, wrapping paper, and ribbons. Since we were planning a three day trip, it was a good time for a road test.

Not surprisingly, there is no access to the Sprint network – the network which underlies Amazon’ WhisperNet - in ruralVermont so couldn’t download any books before leaving home. Contented myself with reading the introduction already loaded onto Kindle and with practice page-turning.

The electronic ink IS amazing. As you “turn” each page by pressing a next page bar on the side of the unit, there’s a flicker as the ink drops rush from their old positions to their new ones. Reminds me of the Harvard University Marching Band which, in my day, eschewed marching; a pistol was fired and each player ran from his current location to wherever he was supposed to be in the next formation.

Once the ink drops reassemble, the look is much more like good ink on good paper than dots on a screen. You read by reflected light; no light comes from the screen – just like a “real” book.  Better in some ways because you can change the font size on Kindle to suit your eyes. Black ink on a white screen is the only option – just like the first Macintosh.

This architecture not only makes Kindle pages very readable, it also prolongs battery life since there is no backlight and energy is only required to move the dots, not to keep them in position.

Kindle travels in a felt covered case about the size of a paperback and clearly designed to say “book”. Only quibble is that there’s nowhere for the Kindle charger in the case so it goes with the rest of the tangle of wires in your computer bag.

At Burlington airport Sprint was four bars and, immediately, my novel hackoff.com:an historic murder mystery set in the Internet bubble and rubble and Fractals of Change – both of which I’d ordered when I ordered Kindle – downloaded. Whole download took no more than a minute or so. Note excellent Amazon customer experience: didn’t have to register because Amazon knew I’d bought the unit; didn’t have to register for the Sprint service because it comes with the unit; didn’t have to ask for what I’d already ordered to be downloaded. Got a nice thank you letter from Jeff Bezos, too. Device can hold 200 books BEFORE you add expansion memory AND everything you buy is archived forever at Amazon for redownload in case you lose or have to delete some.

I looked for books for the trip in the Kindle Store, which is never more than a click away. Naturally Amazon’s suggestions based on my past orders and promotional fees paid my publishers were there just as if I’d been on my computer. I downloaded Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks and, once I noticed that I had the option to do this free, the first chapter of No Country for Old Men.

Weak Links appears not to have been formatted correctly for an electronic edition (more on this when I post on implications for authors). Some of the letters are incomplete; there are spaces in the middle of words and hyphenation in the middle of lines. I wrote Amazon and asked for a refund (book content seems interesting though). Update: Amazon responded to my email to customer service within 24 hours, verified what I saw, apologized, and gave me a credit

No Country formatted well and was a pleasant reading experience except that the pages are a little smaller than those of a paperback, the lines a little short for the way I read, and the flicker at page turn a little distracting. My guess is these are all things readers’ll get over quickly and we’ll retrain ourselves. Decided not to order the book based on its style but that’s a plus for the first chapter free policy.

Noticed that all three books on my Kindle opened in strange places when first accessed although it’s easy enough to get back to the cover or table of contents. I suspect this is a problem in book prep seeing how much trouble I had with this when preparing the e-book edition of hackoff.com. Still annoying.

Reading Fractals of Change as a paid subscription ($.99/month) was a good experience on Kindle. Formatting was right; color pictures rendered well into black, white, and grey; links were live. However, reading Fractals and other things in the browser (which provides FREE Internet access), is problematic. See this post for a review of Kindle’s browser for more on that and even more in an upcoming author’s post.

The flight attendants say “the cabin door is closed. Please turn off all devices with an on-off switch. We will tell you when it’s safe to turn on approved electronics.” Of course this means that you have to carry at least a magazine to read during taxi, takeoffs, and landings. Else you might find yourself talking to the person next to you.

Kindle does have a simple switch to turn off its radio for use aloft where radios are forbidden.

I give it a B+ as a book reader based on initial experience.

Impressions of Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is an excited beach-front city, quite secular with few people in either Jewish or Muslim religious garb. This is a high-tech city, home of Silicon Wadi, a late night city, a city with a building boom and the construction cranes of progress perched on the fairly low skyline. Late model cars jam into rush hour traffic – annoying but not as bad as many major cities.

There are solar panels for hot water on top of some of the houses; I thought I’d see more. No sign of photovoltaic or windmills. The country is a leader in geothermal energy. This part of the Middle East isn’t where t