Monday, August 27, 2012

I trust the sanity of my vessel

I commuted by bicycle today, and got soaking wet. My gear (helmet, shoes, cycling shorts etc.) are still drip, drip, dripping... It was not raining everywhere, but one of the showers happened to be where I was, and it was pouring so hard that the street was flooding.

Paul Maxim wrote about his great, great grandfather Joshua Slocum, "the first man to ever sail around the world alone".

I borrowed Slocum's book of his trip from the local library, in a Finnish translation from 2005, and it was a great book indeed. I posted a book review (in Finnish) at the Valopolku blog. Slocum was not only a skilled sailboat-builder and sailor, he also knew how to write a story so that it hooks the reader.

My daughter started her guitar lessons today. We didn't buy a smaller-sized guitar after all, she is using an old full-sized one we had at home, and it seems to be quite ok for learning to play.

(Posting title is from the poem To the Harbormaster by Frank O'Hara.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might also like Bernard Moitessier's 'Un Vagabond des mers du sud'.

Juha Haataja said...

Thanks for the hint! I read an excerpt from The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, and some biographical information, and there seems to be something unique in this story. Pity that there weren't any books by Moitessier in the local library.