Dan and Jaye's cruising blog: Kumatage (reflections on the water)

Dan was born and grew up in southwest Kansas, son of a wheat farmer-stockman who was also born and grew up in southwest Kansas, as was *his* father, and so on. So what’s the trajectory that would lead him to become a sailor? It’s not like Kansas has a lot of seacoast to inspire his imagination from a young age… I’ll leave the actual “how he got hooked on sailing” for another post, but here’s a thought. There’s a surprisingly similar mindset necessary for success and happiness on the farm or at sea. Sailing the ocean’s blue waves, and growing the amber waves of grain, both remind you of how small a single human is, set against the scale and power of nature. You must always be aware of the weather; its moods dictate what you can do on any day. The same calm patience that turns potential boredom into a meditative state applies whether riding a tractor back and forth plowing every inch of a field, or sailing at 5 knots toward a distant blue horizon. Being at sea far from he...

When we needed a tow last Sunday, the first question they asked - after the obvious, what kind of boat, how many people, are you taking on water, kind of questions - was “where are you?” But what if I couldn’t tell them where I was? What if I didn’t know? We could at least see some landmarks. “Maybe a half a mile northeast of Thomas Point light” is a reasonable answer, but not very precise; it’s not like we were the only boat in the vicinity. The towboat could have spent a lot of time meandering about that general area looking for us, if that was the best location information I could give. To be more precise, I could use the compass built into the binoculars and get an exact bearing on several known landmarks, and plot a position on a paper chart. When Dan was working with the sailing program at the Naval Academy, and teaching this skill to midshipmen, I was in practice and could even plot that sort of fix quickly and accurately. Or, I could press a button on my trusty GPS and tel...