Catching up Before it gets too hot to Post

I gotta catch this thing up so I'm throwing some unrelated events together with some photos. I fully expect to be very busy quite soon now that it is summer and time for actual boating.

Some people can only go to the plan. Some, like my pal, like to see where that little road goes.

When I took this picture from a little wide spot along the road that goes down to the harbor in Port Orford Oregon I did not know that there was a little house for sale right behind me. $79k. Makes me wish I wasn't quite so humble in my life-plan. I would like to see this out my front window every morning, even with a highway in between. I would not, however, like to freeze balls when the north wind blows 40 mph all blessed summer long.

Maggi and I took a trip down to the South Coast for a 12-step (anonymity) convention in Coos Bay, after which we went on down to Gold Beach, returning to Bullards beach where we spent a restful night in a cute and comfy little yurt with a skylight and bunkbeds and quiet mossy trees all around.

Very comfy and relatively cheap at $30 a night and you can cook on the campfire and sleep on a bed.

Back in Portland I spent the next two weeks painting and adzing and generally messing about in the boatyard getting ready for the new boating season.

Under a thin veneer of mud and rotten bark beat a heart of oak. Simple, stout, and free, rescued from a throwaway pile mouldering under the pines above the gully.

Made with my trusty sharp as the dickens shipwright's hand-axe a new crossing mast-partners out of a crooked piece of tree.

Look at the photos above and below and tell me if  you see what this rotten old log turned into. I love my little hand-axe and my little folding saw. I feel like I could recreate civilization by myself if I had these and a forest.

 Then I bolted that thing on there with a  half-dozen galvanized bolts and good to go. The other one I made, pretty as it was, simply lacked the bomb-proof brutal strength to abide in that role of getting beat to shit in any weather and be stumbled and fallen upon with out shift or complaint. This new chunk of oak does all that and laughs.

Upshot being that she was ready to go in the water this past week.

Sorry about the lack of pixels, a screen capture from a HD video is pretty much Low Def, still you get the, ahem, picture.

Nice.