On the site www.oceanrowing.com, I found this memorial tribute to Curtis Saville:

Curtis’ other expeditions include exploratory mountaineering along the Virginia Glacier on the South East edge of Baffin Island in the High Arctic.  This was part of the Canadian Polar Continental Shelf Project.  In addition, Curtis Saville was a French horn player.  Educated a Juilliard School of Music (B.A.) and Yale University (M.F.A.);  he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in La Paz, Bolivia in the 1960′s and taught music and writing. 

Kathleen and Curtis Saville in 1987

Generally when someone has accomplished a remarkable feat, you’ll find other remarkable achievements along the way. In February of this year, John Fairfax, the first man to row solo across the Atlantic in 1969, died at the age of 74. Fairfax’s obituary in The New York Times reads like an early 20th Century adventure novel.

At 13, in thrall to Tarzan, he ran away from home to live in the jungle. He survived there as a trapper with the aid of local peasants, returning to town periodically to sell the jaguar and ocelot skins he had collected.

He later studied literature and philosophy at a university in Buenos Aires and at 20, despondent over a failed love affair, resolved to kill himself by letting a jaguar attack him. When the planned confrontation ensued, however, reason prevailed — as did the gun he had with him.

In Panama, he met a pirate, applied for a job as a pirate’s apprentice and was taken on. He spent three years smuggling guns, liquor and cigarettes around the world, becoming captain of one of his boss’s boats, work that gave him superb navigational skills.

In Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary film Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog visits McMurdo Station in Antarctica and meets a handful of extraordinary people for whom working in Antarctica is but one adventure they have experienced. When I first saw this film I thought it might have been partially fabricated (how could Antarctica attract so many daredevil poets and amateur philosophers?). But the more I learn about “seeker” personality types, the more I realize that their most publicized feat is usually far from their only one.

The "Marlinspike" off the east coast of Shelter Island

This past weekend we took an afternoon cruise with Charter boat Captain Anthony “Anton” Hagen. We anchored off Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island, swam to shore and pretended to hunt for buried treasure with the kids. Our booty included a Vidalia onion, a terry cloth visor, and a small deck cushion (a quality one that probably fell off a yacht). We used the cushion to float back to the boat, and took the onion home to cook (so we claimed), but the visor was a little too “salty,” even for us hard bitten pirates.

Captain Hagen was a superb, knowledgeable guide, having lived in the area for three decades. I highly recommend his vessel “Marlinspike,” with its swim ladder, abundant shade, kitchen and bathroom, for your next expedition in Sag Harbor Bay or the surrounding waterways. Email captainhagen-at-hotmail.com or phone 631-456-1823.

The "Marlinspike," a 36’ lobster yacht in action

…which in turn reminded me that Ridley Scott had directed this Chanel commercial of the same era. “I am made of blue sky and golden light, and I will feel this way forever.”

As a kid in the ’70s, I grew up with commercials and their accompanying slogans and songs etched in my mind. Thanks to Barry Manilow’s “Very Strange Medley,” I have an entire medley of jingles jingling around in my brain.

To this day, I inadvertently blurt out slogans for Avis (We Try Harder), Irish Spring (Clean as a Whistle), Cocoa Puffs (Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs), Rolaids (How do you spell relief?), Sizzlean (Move over bacon), and dozens more. It’s insidious that I can’t remember yesterday’s activities but I can remember the tune and lyrics to the commercial for “Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge” which has been closed for a decade.

It turns out that there’s a name for this condition, actually, several names. According to Wikipedia when a portion of a song or other music repeats compulsively within one’s mind, this is known as an Earworm, Musical Imagery Repetition (MIR), involuntary musical imagery, or a haunting melody. In slang, a tune wedgy.

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1956 short story “The Ultimate Melody” (written long before the term “earworm” was coined in English) offers up a science fictional explanation for the phenomenon. According to writer Michael Chorost on the website of aleph, the story is about a scientist, Gilbert Lister, who develops the ultimate melody—one that so compels the brain that its listener becomes completely and forever enraptured by it. As the storyteller, Harry Purvis, explains, Lister theorized that a great melody “made its impression on the mind because it fitted in with the fundamental electrical rhythms going on in the brain”. Lister attempts to abstract from the hit tunes of the day to a melody which fits in so well with the electrical rhythms that it dominates them completely. He succeeds, and is found in a catatonia from which he never awakens.–Wikipedia

UPDATE: 11/2/2011: My parents donated the canoe to the collection of the New York State Museum in Albany. They delivered it on a trailer a few days ago ($39 r.t. to cross the Throg’s Neck bridge they lamented) to what they described as “an enormous warehouse facility resembling the one in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.” They will be given a report on the canoe’s origins as further research is conducted by the Museum staff. Stay tuned for the next episode of “As the Canoe Turns.”

My dad is looking for an appropriate museum to become the steward of this dugout canoe that he “dug-out” of the mud in Milburn Creek, Freeport, New York, about twenty years ago. If you or anyone you know can help us identify the type of canoe this is, and its possible origins, we would be extremely grateful.

Even though the house was built in the 1930s, I like to imagine it as a “whaling cottage.”

Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.– Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Nautical kitsch dreams can come true. (See all boat posts.)

How "The Anchorage" got its name (click photo for album)

The Codfather is a popular boat name on Long Island

One of my childhood jobs at the family boat business included announcing the names of boats to launch, over a loudspeaker, at the marina. My brother Dante ran the “dry dock” operation, and customers (usually from Brooklyn) would phone in and say, “Tell ya brutha Dainty to launch [insert boat name].” This inspired me to amass a list of the world’s greatest boat names.

Here goes.

LAUNCH:
Sails Call
Aqua-holic
The Cod Father
Liquid Assets
Mom’s Mink
Odd A Sea
Out to Launch
Mast Hysteria
Nauti Buoy
Sea Major
Wet Dream
What’s Up Dock

As far as recorded history shows, the Egyptians were the first to name their boats. Today, while people rarely name their cars or motorcycles, most everyone names their boat. A name is not required for boat registration, but people carry on the tradition, and a boat without a name is considered an “orphan.”

People sometimes name their boats after family members, but in the US, there is a tendency towards wordplay. For example, the names “Seas the Day” and “Aquaholic” are quite common. People often choose a name that expresses a certain sentiment as well. According to BoatUS’s annual survey, the name ‘Obsession’ was extremely popular in the 90′s, and ‘Serenity’ has found it’s way into the top five names during the whole decade. (from http://wiki.name.com/en/Boat_Names)

Have a good boat name? Seas the Day and comment here.

Tide and Current Taxi: The Hutchinson River with Mary Walling Blackburn, Marie Lorenz

It’s hard to believe that just 100 years ago there were still world maps with areas marked “unexplored.” I recently read that the only uncharted places left on earth were the ocean floors. With the exception of those places under water or ice, every corner of the planet can be observed via Global Positioning Systems. Sophisticated vehicles and satellite devices make adventures, like those of legendary Amazon explorer Percy Fawcett, a romantic notion of the past. Even Fawcett’s mythical lost city of “El Dorado” now shows up on Google Earth.

Artist Marie Lorenz is a modern day explorer, though the territories she traverses are not uncharted, just neglected. Lorenz accesses commercial or disused waterways around New York City in her own custom-made small wooden boats. She visits the canals, rivers and uninhabited islands that form the invisible, industrial and archeological backside of the city. Traveling with one other passenger, Lorenz encounters more freighters and barges than fellow leisure craft. Her journeys have taken her along the Harlem River, Bronx River, Gowanus Canal, Coney Island Creek, and to abandoned islands like North Brother, where the infamous Typhoid Mary was quarantined in the early 1900s. Read my interview with Marie on glasstire.com.

Unnamed Skiff Project, Zach Moser

I’ve got nautical kitsch and art all mixed up in my head. As the daughter of a boat builder and an artist, I have a Pavlovian response to anything that combines art and boats. I grew up in a house that would have suited Captain Ahab just fine– stuffed marlins, whale bones, ships’ wheels, rope art, portholes, buoys, crab pots, fish lures, oil paintings of ships in storms, all that. Enter the Grover family residence and immediately feel like an extra in Mutiny on the Bounty. This posting has been a long time coming, but boat artists, you’re about to get your due. Look for future posts on Bas Jan Ader, Marie Lorentz, Roy Fridge, Swoon, Open_Sailing, Waterpod, and others. Suggestions welcome, mateys.

Art & Boats, Part 1: An interview with Houston (boat) artist Zach Moser

Zach Moser is a co-founder of Workshop Houston, an innovative art/education/community center based in Houston’s Third Ward. Moser recently conducted a boatbuilding workshop inside the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston as part of the exhibition, No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston. The project (conceived with Benjy Mason) was titled “Yacht Shop,” and invited the public to collaboratively build a boat over six months. Yacht Shop concluded with the ceremonious hull turning and launching of the vessel (by spontaneous night parade) down Montrose Boulevard. This was all primed with sea shanties and home brewed braggot, a kind of malt and honey beer. (You can imagine what the drivers on Montrose thought of this land-locked endeavor.) Moser, a graduate of Oberlin, has a keen interest in collaboration via unlikely platforms – “civic events, low income neighborhoods, dying industries.” And this was not Moser’s first foray into maritime collectivity; his earlier nautical-theme works include “The Shrimp Boat Project” (with Eric Leshinsky), “Voyages to the Unknown,” and the “Untitled Skiff Project.” Read the interview with Zach Moser on Glasstire.com.

I love nautical kitsch. While I was on Long Island, my parents were invited to a Bay House party, and I eagerly tagged along hoping to get some decorating ideas for my future houseboat. Bay houses (or Bayman’s Cottages) are small bungalows on the marshlands, originally built by fisherman, baymen and duck hunters, and they’re only accessible by boat. A few of the houses have generators, but most have no power at all, so it’s like camping. Around 1965, many bay houses on LI were moved to preserve the wildlife on the wetlands, but a handful like this one remain, to preserve the other wild life on the wetlands. That’s my dad “Capt. Al” sitting on the cooler on the right. He’s the one with the white beard, dark shades and the fat baby (my Gigi!) on his lap. Please also enjoy the stuffed marlin photo (hanging above the duck decoys and the beach glass).