Nothing

Today, Friday, August 31 I did not do a god damn thing all day long. Not even crack a book. Reddit. Looked at camping pictures. Tried to figure out why windows live movie maker won't use my mp4 high def movie from my phone, fer krissakes, my phone is too tech for my laptop. I made a nice sandwich.Went to the store for dinns, 1 lb Ambrosia from the deli.  I watched 1 episode of Breaking Bad, the one about the magnets. A Liam Neeson movie, the Paris skillset movie. In other words:
Not a blessed thing.
I may turn the air conditioning back on in a minute.
I feel a sweat coming on.

Don't Bug Me I'm Camping

After the excitement of that first glorious night, with the constantly developing panoply of river life, tugs to-ing and fro-ing, roaring diesels, flashing lights, froth of wake and fulness nearing of blue, blue moon I slept, in my toasty bed, soft, blessed, like a log.

This new air mattress turned out excellent must remember to get a foot pump.

 A vigilant log, to be sure. Every couple hours looking around to see where's the  dory, is the fire still out, where's my flashlight, everything's fine. As the night progressed my trips out into the sand away from the camp to seek nature's solace were shorter and shorter as I began to care less and less about anything but the shortest distance back to sleep.

That might be the Rebel pushing a grain barge down the Columbia as I camped like a boss and watched the world of the river go by.

 Then there was a slash of deepest blue among the dark charcoal clouds and it was soon morning and the greatest cup of coffee of my whole life.
When my kid was little and we went camping he was obsessed with sticks, picking and collecting and stacking and dragging every stick as if vastly important. I found myself in solidarity with the little tyke, who is now 28 and does not speak to me. That mattered not as I collected and dragged and then stacked all categorized the sticks of the beach, and then burned the most of them sweetly smoking in my little camp.

The Happy Camper

More cooking and eating although I have virtually no appetite nor capacity for very much at all it still was outstanding roasting a smoked polish link on a stick and then drowning it in clam chowder of which I fulfilled my self-promise to eat a little more. Easy. It was good.
All this camping equipment was new, the mattress and tarp and stove and cooler it all performed fully as advertised. It makes a boatload, but the more, it seems, you put in the boat, the better she goes. The longer each pull of the oars sends you forward, the less she wobbles and crooks her tracks, and the stronger you feel.

Under the blue lifejacket, handy but not actually worn, is the edge of brown tarp wrapping up all the backpacks and bags and softer stuff to keep it dry, and then all the extra ropes and floats and my new throwable PFD and that is just the front half of stowage.

 This  morning, Friday, having slept at home last night, I discovered many a skeeter bite faintly russet among the sunburn  and I wonder I never noticed there were bugs out there.

On The Way

We here at 3d world headquarters are all packed up heading out on a 3 day camping trip in the dory, parts unknown but including at least one bonfire on the beach and some swimming.
The wild end of Hayden Island looks likely, and maybe someplace on the Washington side if I get that ambitious.
I got slightly more than a metric shit ton of camping gear already on the boat thanks to my pal Maggi G schlepping Sunday afternoon.
This last external frame backpack has the groceries and it is a heavy sonofabitch for sure.
But it is all downhill from here, so, see you when we get back...

Tit-Bits

Tit-Bits was the name of an immensely popular English magazine invented and published by an upstart Canadian business genius named Max Aitken, who later went on to become, as Lord Beaverbrook, one of the richest men in England, and possibly the most powerful man of his time outside of government. He led a long and interesting life in the public eye, was friends at arms length with Winston Churchill, indeed with everybody who was anybody during the two world wars.

Lord Beaverbrook, a Baron actually, and his pal Winston Churchill, former First Lord of the Admiralty and, at the time of this photo, Prime Minister. Churchill recruited Beaverbrook to be Aircraft Production Minister in the early War Cabinet. His organization of the aircraft industry to maximize production was crucial in winning the Battle of Britain. Aitken was a genius at cutting red tape.

 I have a couple of Tit-Bits for you.

The first is a definition of the term Scientific Theory

A comprehensive scientific explanation of a phenomenon that takes into account all observed data and allows accurate predictions to be made based on its principles.

The word theory has another meaning, The other meaning of the word is:

A speculative explanation of an unknown event or phenomenon.

The two words are not interchangeable, although there are those in public life who would like us to think so, and who also refuse to acknowledge the difference.

They get away with it because of a growing plague in modern American culture, although it did not originate here, merely finding in American public life a veritable hot Petri dish of favorable nourishment. 

The term for it is this: Cognitive relativism.

The philosophic school of thought that says one idea is of no more value than another regardless of their correspondence with facts.That there is no objective truth and that a lie, that is to say, an untrue statement that does not correspond to the facts, is equal to a statement of those facts.

This mess is based on another weird thing, knowledge as a function of belief. That I "feel" a certain thing to be true, regardless of any objective demonstration of fact, and that "feeling of truth" comes from a set of beliefs that are not themselves subject to any proof. Such beliefs, a form of magical thinking come from, all too predictably often, religion in its stupidest most destructive form.

The stupid part is that you can't talk to these idiots, that your English language is not their English language, just like the Red Queen, and that the rules of logical thought that produce, for example, an accurate assessment of the distance from my clenched fist to your ignorant nose, based on visual perspective and knowledge of the basic principles of physics, is equal to the notion that if you fold your hands a certain way and say certain words in a certain peculiar tone of voice to an imaginary being that your ignorant nose will not, in fact, be broken immediately with accompanying blood loss and the sound of breaking bones by the rapidly moving mass of that clenched fist. Or the 9 grams of hollow point copper jacketed lead projectile from this Colt 44Magnum.

So the question becomes, in the words of Dirty Harry Callahan, "Are you feeling lucky?"

This is the ultimate confrontation between scientific theory and cognitive relativism. Truly delusional is the relativist willing to stake life and limb on the validity of a feeling derived from unproven belief in confrontation with the physical truth of a very large and extremely destructive projectile based on the scientific observation of that 44 Magnum's enormous black deadly cannon mouth coupled with a basic working knowledge of the laws of the conservation of energy. Science tends to come out on top. Statistically, that is.
There are two sad ironies that come from this. Among the relativists it is considered particularly chic to provoke this kind of confrontation. OK, fine by me. Less ass-hats to deal with.
The other, more offensive and to me particularly disturbing irony is that a certain type of relativist is working like a nasty pus-infected little beaver to make it the law of the land that their twisted and self-serving beliefs in the supernatural are legally superior to knowledge of demonstrable truth.
Hell no.

To The Slough

I didn't think it got that hot today but I was on the water or in it so I couldn't tell you.
According to Google Earth it is about 3 miles from the marina to Kelly Point Park.
Which turned out take a couple of hours. The current wasn't very strong either way, which really helped.

All the crap that has accumulated in three short weeks in the bow. I keep the buggy in there for two reasons, in case I need to portage, and I'm too lazy to haul it up the hill to the bus.

I do love to row slowly along the edge of the river an search for stuff washed up on the beach.
Also it turns out that you can actually swarm back aboard the Dory over the rail but you have to be decisive and not get hung up at the roll where you go from being supported by the water to being in or on the boat. The rail dips pretty far and you can ship a bit of water but not too bad.

Columbia Slough had a surprising amount of current, considering how brown the water is. Surprising because it doesn't have another outlet, but it does have tides, like all the sloughs of the coast. I wonder if there is a natural feeder creek somewhere up there by the Sandy River. Google says Columbia Slough is 19 miles long.

I was scared to try, but it finally got hot enough that I did it and its gonna be OK.
Back in the slough a little ways I nosed her up on the bank in the fine cottonwood shade and had some lunch and read my book.

Isn't this the most peaceful quiet shady place you ever saw?

I was back on the bus by 3:30, and  home, with sushi, by 5.

Why Isn't it OK?

Ok I did that...
But it was hard work.
In the first place bussing it out to the marina with my kayak cart folded up and strapped onto the pack frame.
Then figuring out how to get the motherfucking heavy ass dory high enough to get the cart under it.
Then pushing said cart with said heavy ass boat aboard up the steep ass ramp to the parking lot.
I was dyin', and getting hotter and hotter by the minute.

So I hosed her down and washed out some sand but it is tenacious stuff and I never did get it all. Enough, hopefully.
Sure enough, the paint had covered a major caulking failure around the starboard garboard plank-end, so I dug in there with a razor knife and my Nan Kitchens patented Florida Awl and managed to open her up enough to get some red-lead Brown30 in there.In the end I was confident because it did seem like this seam had been intended to receive cotton-and-paste caulking which had not been renewed when whoever idiot put all that rubber bullshit in the bottom seams.
The I tried to run a little bead of Henry's Wet Patch roofing cement in a caulking tube into the insides of the bottom seams to keep out the sand in future. The stuff behaved reasonably, considering that  it always goes everywhere but I did manage to make a fairly continuous job of it. Because wet-patch it has alcohol in it that dissolves any water that would otherwise interfere with the bond if you put it where there is still wetness down in there. It's great stuff you can patch a leak in an asphalt shingle roof in the pouring rain, that is if you can find the actual leak. Altogether I used about 2/3 of 1 tube.

Made a tripod out of oars and a 2x4 to hang a tackle from to lift things high enough to place the dolly and it almost worked but by this time it was 2 PM and I was burnt out luckily Jean, my new friend who owns the marina came home and she helped me place the dolly again after my apparatus finally failed and with her spotting ma and blocking the wheels for my frequent rest stops, we got the dory down to the water finally I was so tired and wanting to die from the heat and fatigue.
So to celebrate I rowed over to the other side of the channel and I shucked off down to my bikini and I got to swim around and around and cool off.
While I was at the marina somebody ran off the road up on highway 30 and creamed the bus stop sign, absolutely shredded into many pieces.
Then this painter dude gets on the bus in Linnton at 4:07, talking on his cell, pays his fare, talking on his cell, sits down across from me, talking talking, hoo hoo hoo, heh heh heh, fake phony laugh, jiggling his knees and slapping thighs and at 4:56 when I got off the bus at my house he was still talking.
Last time I went out to the boat a young jerri-curled extension-dripping bootilicious fingernail freak got on a near-empty bus, sat down behind, directly behind my seat, leaned forward to let her grease-locks hang free while she whipped out her cell and dialed in some thug-life cohort and talked at 96 db  within 9 inches of my left ear until I freaked out, utterly outraged and got the fuck off the bus 6 blocks from home. Fuck it I'll walk..
Why isn't it OK to shoot these mugs?

Some Things Never Change

After I got done with the work I did out at Bob Rivers' place with the caulking and sealing I was pretty sure I was God's gift to the traditional boat world.
Not so much.
It's true that the seams I did fix are completely watertight. Kosher. Chapter-and-verse street-legal.
As far as I went.

That's actually Bob Rivers in the background there striding purposefully with sander in hand. Helped a lot, and I gained a new appreciation for the kind of man that does things and helps you and is manly and plain spoken and honest.

But there is a lot more to the apple than the skin.
I need to get back in there and really do all the rest of the seams and it is turning out to be an enormous task way over my head.
The little tombstone transom, a lovely piece of wood, represents a different challenge and I don't know if I am up to it.
The seams on the bottom are one thing, between boards that are tightly fastened to the frames and futtock blocks, so the challenge there is to bridge between planks that are fixed in place and the variable is the swelling of the wood that moves the edges slightly closer together when they are wet, which is allowed for in the caulking process. Everything is slightly flexible.

This rubber crap was in all the seams I got it out of there finally on most but not all the seams, inside and out

Around the transom, a simple slab of thick wood, there is a different issue. The ends of the side planks fasten to the edge of the transom, and that joint shouldn't vary or change dimension, but it did.
Are the fastenings loose? Unstable? Or did the transom plank shrink so much that it pulled away from the planks and cracked the seal between  them? If I put some caulking in  that joint and some Brown30 seaming compound will I just pull the fastenings looser?
Is it too late? I've been running around on the river, and hauling up on the beach, and now there is a fine layer of river sand all over the inside of the boat. There is also sand suspended in river water. So the crack that leaks now has sand in it. Even if I were to draw the joint up tight with fresh fastenings it might still be compromised by the grains of sand in the crack.

The cracks go all the way through, and inside the boat they act like sand collectors so the plan was to run a bead of wet-patch roofing tar in there like the old timers talk about

I'm tempted to go the whole hog, bring her into a real boat shop and take the fastenings out and re-fasten plank-ends to the transom. Lay a strand of candle-wick into the joint and bed the ends with Brown30 or with blackjack roofing cement like Captain R.D. Pete Culler recommends in his book "Skiffs and Schooners."
What I think I will do first is to haul her out and turn over, and take a Stanley knife and cut the crack open just the tiniest bit, and then run some black jack or some  brown 30 into the joint and then paint that over and see if it does any good, on the assumption that the fastenings are ok and the seam just got started with drying out up in Ballard in that garage/tent thing where I found it.
Then there is the entire seam I missed on the bottom I didnt even see it but it is a full length seam that still has that latex crap in it. That's gotta go.
I always do what I can see as best I can but there is so much that I simply don't see, that never occurs to me until something rubs my nose into it repeatedly. That shit never changes

One Side or the Other

There is a nice sand beach on the east side of the Willamette near where Multnomah channel branches off. Giant power lines cross the river right there, and somehow the beach has been allowed to accumulate sand and driftwood and if you dont look straight up you will never know.
I sat in the hot sand sewing a new leather protector on an oar, which took the better part of an hour. I kept thinking to myself I should turn around and get some sun on the back of my legs but I never did.
Eventually it got too hot to sit there any more as the sun hit the meridian and the shadows left the sand marching up the hill behind what few trees there are on the beach. Cottonwoods grow anywhere there is sun and lots of water but not here, not yet.
So I loaded up and rowed across to the west side, one oar with a leather and one naked. There were a couple of teenage boys haunting the other bank staring out at the chick in the bikini rowing across, so I veered off and landed on the Sauvie side just above the channel, in the shade of a young willow cluster near the water.
It took a little less time to do the other oar, and have a snack, and drink a lovely cold can of orange mango juice and a sparkling water and then it was time to go home and park the boat and catch the bus.
When I got in the bathtub later I noticed that my new sunburn is a rather one-sided affair, kind of a mullet of a sunburn if you will, pink in the front and dead fish white in the back.

Lunch

I was sitting in Peet's downtown drinking a caramel late thinking about lunch.
I wanted a corned beef sandwich on rye bread with maybe a dill pickle and a side of cole slaw.
Portland is the lunch capital of the world.
But not that.
I looked at dozens of food carts.
Every exotic ethnicity from all over the globe and not that.
Elephants Deli, the "flying" branch in the Fox Tower. No Dice.
Elephant's in the park. Nope.
I rode the 15 bus up to 23rd, walking back to the big Elephant's on 22 by the good will. I talked to the sandwich guy, who said they made a pastrami on rye. Did not offer to make what I wanted, or even, for that matter, to give a shit. Fuck him and his yuppie shithole. What the fuck, is there a thing I don't know about? Why is it that this massive deli won't make you a sandwich. It's like a big, elaborate 7-11...
Kell's brewpub just opened on 21st, they had a Reuben, close,  but no cole slaw. I picked up a menu for later.
I, as a last resort, finally went into the Fred Meyer's where I do all my shopping to the deli, which can be a bum trip if it is busy with indifferent staff and geeky customers and dried out food in the case. Besides, by the time you get a quarter pound of corned beef, and a Deli pickle, and a loaf of rye bread you are down 12 bucks and stuck with repeats until you are sick of it. I don't eat bread any more, not for a couple months because of the medicine, and I don't want it stuffing up my refrigerator while it goes moldy like the last 2 loaves I got out of habit and never ate.
But sometimes life, karma, I suppose, will surprise you
I was instantly waited on by a very nice and helpful lady who gladly sliced me off 4-5 slices of nice moist corned beef with a free sample slice on the side and then found me a half a half pint of slaw and then, in a crowning moment, 2 slices only of beautiful swirl marbled rye bread. I just was asking because I didn't really think they would do that for a customer, but she grinned and put it together and I got out of there for 3.73.
I have a bit of sauerkraut left in a jar. For some reason I have been craving it lately, maybe it is the salt.
I am happy, and surprised, and pleased, and amazed again about how stuff happens.
Lunch