The Evolution of Cruisers

[sabray]

We used to go real slow in circles trying to find a floatie thing that was red or green and had a number on it. This could go on for hours. Once we saw a floaty we would look at a magnetic wiji board floating in a glass globe. Sometimes we put lights on the wiji globe so we could read the card even if it was dark. We had scrolls made of paper that we would unroll and prick it with pins. Kind of like a voodoo doll. Then we could move ancient parallel rules over the scroll. Mixed with sweat and curses we could ascertain our location.
Once we found a safe harbor we would go ashore and drink whatever even if it did not look like fresh water.
Sometimes we had clubs. Later these evolved to yacht clubs. they were heavy wood things that we would smash things with. Sometimes we smashed yachts. This evolved to yacht clubs. That were good at bashing yachts. We gave up the club and made up bars. They now have bars in the club and lawyer bars. The lawyers bars were heavy and beat all the wooden clubs. The guys with the bars made up rules. If you screw up with the rules you need someone at the bar. Before I sail I make sure some one in the bar knows me. I am trying not to be a prick.i just touch and tap now. My club is a friggin forum that thinks I am a pricker.
I am worried about my 0182 sentences. Did I punctuate proper like terminate the sequence. Confirm confirm are these glow lights talking to each other.
Good thing I have my club so I can beat this instruction manual to papyrus. Urghhh me like beaten tree pulp with colors and symbols.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[SaltyMonkey]

Originally Posted by sabray

We used to go real slow in circles trying to find a floatie thing that was red or green and had a number on it. This could go on for hours. Once we saw a floaty we would look at a magnetic wiji board floating in a glass globe. Sometimes we put lights on the wiji globe so we could read the card even if it was dark. We had scrolls made of paper that we would unroll and prick it with pins. Kind of like a voodoo doll. Then we could move ancient parallel rules over the scroll. Mixed with sweat and curses we could ascertain our location.
Once we found a safe harbor we would go ashore and drink whatever even if it did not look like fresh water.
Sometimes we had clubs. Later these evolved to yacht clubs. they were heavy wood things that we would smash things with. Sometimes we smashed yachts. This evolved to yacht clubs. That were good at bashing yachts. We gave up the club and made up bars. They now have bars in the club and lawyer bars. The lawyers bars were heavy and beat all the wooden clubs. The guys with the bars made up rules. If you screw up with the rules you need someone at the bar. Before I sail I make sure some one in the bar knows me. I am trying not to be a prick.i just touch and tap now. My club is a friggin forum that thinks I am a pricker.
I am worried about my 0182 sentences. Did I punctuate proper like terminate the sequence. Confirm confirm are these glow lights talking to each other.
Good thing I have my club so I can beat this instruction manual to papyrus. Urghhh me like beaten tree pulp with colors and symbols.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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ROFL!!!!! +1

[Coops]

Me too.

Coops.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by Pelagic

interesting post Mike and I agree that with increased popularity had come increased regulations

Also does a cruisers higher awareness of social risks and conditions mean that we now willingly follow those rules thus somehow dilute the experience?

How does the saying go? There's no one less free than the person who creates their own prison ... Something like that.

The biggest change might be that our societies increasingly extract more freedom from us, and in exchange we get more shinny bobbles, more security, and more meaningless distractions. I think cruising is one way people can kick against this darkness (until it bleeds daylight).


Why go fast, when you can go slow

[Pelagic]

Brilliant Sabray ....
A Meanderthal's Lament
Love it

[Cheechako]

Originally Posted by SaltyMonkey

you had a cold machine??? My GOD! You call yourself a sailor??

Haha... yes .... quite "cutting edge" werent we? Of course, with nothing but a 35 amp alternator and two group 27 batteries, we just turned the Cold Machine on to cool a couple drinks while motoring.

[sailorboy1]

I'm starting to wonder why it even matters what a cruiser was like in the "old days".

[SaltyMonkey]

Originally Posted by sailorboy1

I'm starting to wonder why it even matters what a cruiser was like in the "old days".

Because it shows a baseline of what we can get by with instead of procrastinating and desiring endless West Marine improvements and validation.

[sailorboy1]

Originally Posted by SaltyMonkey

Because it shows a baseline of what we can get by with instead of procrastinating and desiring endless West Marine improvements and validation.

Well it has been going downhill for 1,000s of years then!

[MarkJ]

Originally Posted by sailorboy1

I'm starting to wonder why it even matters what a cruiser was like in the "old days".

You are right. Its irrelevant.

If Capt Cook was here today he would be chucking the old balderdash overboard and using the highest grade electronics to help him discover new lands, chart them and do his scientific experiments. He laughed at the old fashioned ways by making his own instruments and utilising the latest like the chromoter... Which he was advised against using as it was a new fangled gadget!

But it want his only innovation, we all know about his fight against scurvy with citrus and sauerkraut. What would he do today thats different? Everything

Two chronometers the captain had,
One by Arnold that ran like mad,
One by Kendal in a walnut case,
Poor devoted creature with a hangdog face.
Arnold always hurried with a crazed click-click
Dancing over Greenwich like a lunatic,
Kendal panted faithfully his watch-dog beat,
Climbing out of Yesterday with sticky little feet.
Arnold choked with appetite to wolf up time,
Madly round the numerals his hands would climb,
His cogs rushed over and his wheels ran miles,
Dragging Captain Cook to the Sandwich Isles.
But Kendal dawdled in the tombstoned past,
With a sentimental prejudice to going fast,
And he thought very often of a haberdasher's door
And a yellow-haired boy who would knock no more.
All through the night-time, clock talked to clock,
In the captain's cabin, tock-tock-tock,
One ticked fast and one ticked slow,
And Time went over them a hundred years ago.

Five Visions Of Captain Cook, a poem by Kenneth Slessor. poets love Poem at allpoetry

[Andrew Troup]

So was Slocum necessarily a poorer sailor, because he chose to forgo a chronometer and revert to lunar distances?

[Andrew Troup]

I would venture to guess that the reason Cook used some of the available innovations was that they suited his needs better, given what he was tasked with achieving.

Not that they were newer.

[SaltyMonkey]

Wrong!

"Lunar sights became a standard method of determining longitude. Even after the invention of the marine chronometer in 1761, lunar navigation remained important. Captain James Cook had no chronometer aboard the Endeavor in 1768; all Cook's first survey of the South Pacific was implemented by careful lunar observation."

"Joshua Slocum left his chronometer behind on his 1895 solo circumnavigation, because he lacked the funds to have it repaired. Of all Slocum's feats of seamanship and navigation, perhaps the most famous is his precise landfall after navigating across the Pacific Ocean with nothing but a sextant and a tin clock, which he kept running by boiling periodically. Slocum used dead reckoning and a lunar longitude."

Lunars baby, its the future.

[Andrew Troup]

I wonder if we're talking across a bit of a conceptual chasm here?

Sailing is not something cruising sailors do for ‘hire and reward’; it's something we do for some mixture of fun/satisfaction, and travel.

OK: we’ve chosen a sailboat. It seems to me sailors generally lie somewhere along a distinctive spectrum.

A spectrum, perhaps, with the wish for some sort of connection with nature situated at one end, and the practicality of having one's own base, and one's own stuff, at the other.

Otherwise it seems to make no sense to elect to travel in such an inefficient, expensive and antiquated way.

And I think that what we see on forums like this is often that people near one end of the spectrum, for whom a sailboat is a means to an end, a mobile home capable of being repositioned to distant destinations, project their priorities onto people for whom a sailboat, and sailing, is an end in itself.

And vice versa.

People for whom sailing represents a search for simplicity, or is a source of fulfilment, or … or a way to grope towards understanding of things we can never understand … are mystified by those for whom sailing seems to be about getting the best of, and from, the latest tech products.

It seems to me the impatience which often boils over in our discussions is unnecessary and unproductive. I don’t think we can, or should, win people over to our particular tribe. And even if we can, I don’t see how putting down other tribes will help.


Pianos and drum kits remained a valid choice in the eighties, and synths and drum machines remain a valid choice now. Art vs utility is a false dichotomy.


And outside of commerce, the world is not at the service of modernity.
It’s the other way round, and it’s not mandatory.

Everyone needs to embrace some aspects of the modern, but it doesn't seem sensible to embrace them all, particularly if done without question.

[bornyesterday]

This is all very interesting but will somebody please tell me what any of it has to do with the evolution of trousers?

oops, sorry, wrong specs