Slow Boat

Charleston is lovely this time of year-- unless you're spending your days  in the engine room

We're back in Charleston, and our airport trip brought up this memory.

When our son Ben was two, we wanted to place him in a local daycare center.  As part of the admissions process, the director came to our home, to observe us interacting with him.

It was a warm day and we were in the back yard.  With his blond curls and blue eyes, Ben looked angelic, the model child.  We figured we had a place in the school all wrapped up.

Ben dug round in the sandbox and pulled out a twig. Then he toddled over to our lawn chairs, twisted his sweet little face into an approximation of a grimace, and  pointed the stick straight at the director. "THIS is a weapon!" he exclaimed. (This from a child who had never seen a TV show or a toy gun.)

Who could resist the cuteness?

When we meet people along the way, they generally ask a set of predictable questions. "How much electricity do those solar panels make?" "How fast can you go?" And "Whatever possessed you to make this trip?"

It all started quite innocently. Here's the story:

Bill (he wasn't the Cap yet) wanted to give his parents a little treat--a fun vacation. Mom and Dad lived not too far from the Erie Canal. And they liked to bird watch. So in the summer of 2009, Bill said: "What if we rent a houseboat and take Mom and Dad for a cruise on the Erie Canal? They could go birding right from the boat!"

Berge said: "That would be OK. But I don't want to rent a houseboat. I want to rent a boat that's CUTE!"

Bill turned to his computer and started tapping. Twenty minutes later, he spun the monitor around. "Is THAT cute enough?"

On screen: An old-fashioned barge with curvy lines and a scalloped canvas canopy, like a circus wagon. She was gaily painted in shiny maroon, green, and gold. Click, click. Inside, she was fitted out with knotty pine panelling, like an Adirondack cottage. She had a small but complete little kitchen. Cozy-looking bunks. Even her name was sweet: the Honeyoe ("Honey" for short.)

SlowBoat Flashback: Jan Berger's in the kitchen in Florence, Alabama Jan sez: Plenty of room to scrub pots!

We're visiting Cap's parents. A friend asked, "Does it feel strange to be in a house?" He spread his arms wide. "Do you feel like you you finally have room to move?"

Well, yes and no.  It's nice for the crew to get out of bed without scrambling over the Cap's recumbent form.  It's nice to hang coats in more than four inches of closet space. It's nice to take a shower in a space larger than a phone booth.

Other than that, well, humans are remarkably adaptable. When we're on the boat, mostly everything just seems  . . . normal.

Checking the news this week I learned about a solar boat that's been setting records. While we've been traveling around the Great Loop, the S.S. Turanor Planet Solar been traveling around the WORLD, the first solar boat to attempt this circumnavigation.

We left in June, they left in September, and this week, as we reached Charleston (4,300 miles into our trip) they crossed into the Humboldt Current and set a record: "Greatest Distance Ever Traveled by a Solar-Powered Vehicle" (9,904 miles).  The previous vehicle to hold this record was a solar-powered car.

We're in NY. Boat is back in Charleston, makin' watts.

The Dragonfly is docked in Charleston this week; the crew is in Upstate NY visiting Cap's folks. We lugged our broken flex coupler with us on the plane, and Monday we drove up to Macedon, NY and our home port on the Erie Canal, Mid-Lakes Navigation, where joy of joys, we picked up a replacement.

It was surreal to be transported so quickly to the place our adventure started last June--the place we're  spent 8 months sloowwwwly traveling AWAY from.

We said hello to the other canal boats, hauled out on shore and propped on stilts and wrapped in plastic against the winter ice, and laughed about Cap's weekend adventures this time last winter, climbing up a ladder through the snow and ice to work on the boat. His first trip to Macedon, the local police pulled up just as he was crawling headfirst through the plastic cocoon. Good thing he had ID and the bill of sale.

The crew of the Dragonfly are off the boat this week, but we're bringing you some SlowBoat Flashbacks.

Preparing the helipad? No, just boat chores

First, a status report on the War of Boat-Crew Oppression against Spiders. Early in the trip, our decks were thickly occupied with web spinners, and I don't mean Toby McGuire in a stretchy suit.

At the Looper Rendezvous in Alabama, experts assured us that once we made it to salt water, the landlubbing spideys would vanish.

SO not true!  Those suckers parachute in!  On little strands of spider silk! Which one reason is why we need . . . .

A boat-top helipad and a remote-controlled helicopter to sit on it.  As you know if you've been reading the blog for a while, Cap's been Jonesing for one for months.