all aKIMbo: July 2007

my kind of town (updated with pictures!)

this weekend i took a trip with a friend to chicago.

my friend sonja goes to the maritime academy in traverse city. she's from chicago, and used to work for Mercury Tours there, as the youngest captain on the river. she drove tour boats for 6 years in chicago, and in fact one of her trips made national headlines when she went under a bridge grating and got shat on when dave matthews' tour bus emptied their blackwater unexpectedly. more importantly, she knows all the maritime folks down in chi town, and tonight i ended up meeting about half of them too.

so we're spending a weekend at sonja's sister's house in the south side of chicago.

her sister works as a graveyard shift cop on the streets in this neighborhood. she's a really cool, pretty 29 year old woman. not at all what i'd imagined when it comes to a typical cop on the south side of chicago. but yeah, she's tough too. their whole family is made up of cops and boat folks, although her parents are pretty white collar. they don't act like it though. they let me walk into their house from the pool without drying off. hard to find folks like that these days.

we took the train to downtown chicago tonight

and met up with sonja's twin brothers eric and nels (think drew little times two).

nels drives tour boats downtown now. we went to bacino's for the finest chicago-style deep dish pizza, then we walked along the river to navy pier. navy pier is kinda like santa monica pier (am i remembering correctly? i think it was santa monica) or kinda like baltimore's inner harbor. lots of tour boats line the pier, and several crew came up to greet sonja when they saw her. we walked down to check out the big "traditional" schooner Windy and barquentine Windy II.

Windy was just pulling in - not the prettiest boat around, and the roller furling jib and staysl's weren't too impressive. I watched the crew get the tourists off and start wrapping up the deckwork and noticed that just one of them had a salty looking rig hanging off his belt, so I approached him and asked him if he'd worked on other boats. His name was Saul Lipton - a really nice guy. He'd crewed aboard Exy, Lady Washington, and hoped to crew aboard Lynx next year. I then pulled out a few copies of my mag for him and his crew, and he said "You put out that magazine?! I read it on Exy!" which made me very happy to hear. I gave him some copies of the new issue, and he told me his favorite piece in the first issue was by the I Don't Sail, I Yacht yachtsmen. I think he added a slight crotch thrust with that exclamation... he's not the only one who loves that piece...
So Saul gave me the quick tour of Windy. Her focsl is very much like Lady's, but the main belowdecks area is full of staterooms with a hallway similar to any cruise ship. And the galley looks like a plain kitchen you might find in a medium sized apartment. Nothing too romantic about Windy. Mostly a working tourboat. It was great meeting Saul, though.

Windy II was pretty much the same, so we headed on down the pier, and the captain aboard one of the tour boats recognized Sonja and invited us out for a 1/2 hour cruise. It was a foggy night and I took pictures of the Chicago skyline from out on the harbor.

after the sail we watched a rockin live salsa band and dance party happening on the pier, then walked back along the river to one of her brother's cars. eric drove us to where nels works nights aboard a tender, shuttling people to and from an immense mooring field right next to downtown. eleven hundred mooring balls! one of the other tenders pulled in, and the driver claudia hopped out, giving sonja a hug and nels a kiss on the cheek before running into the harbor tender office and grabbing us a few cans of beer. we all hopped in the tender and took a drunk couple having a marital dispute out to their beneteau. after that we sidled up next to a tug and barge next to the far jetty, where sonja and nels' uncle bob was crewing and maintaining a watch over the barge full of fireworks (something called venetian festival happens this weekend). bob left his other crew aboard and hopped aboard our tender and we went out to claudia's new ranger tug for some margaritas. along the way we spotted a beautiful little classic schooner named allegro. on the way back we picked up some rich kids off a yacht and made them give us ice for our margaritas. back at the dock we waited out our time before the last train out of town was to arrive, with claudia and uncle bobby. then we took the 12:45 train ride back to the south side.

sonja decided to give the loopy gargoyle-like hairless cats CATNIP and rubberbands to play with at 2 am, before we were to go to bed.

i made her lock the cats in the bedroom with her.

on our last day down there we went attended PIEROGI FEST in whiting, indiana:

time for a break

Had some great days of sailing over the last week. On Sunday a bunch of lobbyists/legislators chartered Manitou and had some pretty badass catering from a place here called "The House." "The House" sent a dude with a mohawk and a sweet longhair punk boy with a Decemberists shirt over to set up, then they ended up leaving us an insane amount of appetizers: steak on bruschetta, seared tuna and mango on rice crackers, tons of different cheeses and crackers, and literally a boatload of ganache covered strawberries which I gorged myself on.

I've been supporting my hometown by drinking about 3 frappucinos per day, and now they don't even give me a boost. My tolerance to caffeine this week is scary. Maybe it'll just jack up my blood pressure instead?

Today a professional yacht racer who is also a lawyer for a boat manufacturer sailed with us today. Wes, Glen and I were all fascinated by him and his wife and really chatted them up. He's sailed in the Fastnet and Volvo's. Been around the world a few times. Wes said the dude was his new idol - a law degree from Duke and a hot wife who works as a "pit boss" with the spinnakers in the forepeak, even while pregnant. Wes has hooked up with a passenger who lives near Detroit, and they're already planning their holidays together. I know he'd like to convert her into a sailor.

boat pron

sailing with sonja and justin

just started volunteering here on thursdays. 1750's era british armed sloop replica

traverse city as seen looking aft from main mast spreaders

things are looking up...

S.Dilley just showed up out of the blue and got me outta bed this morning. I guess there'll be some drinking tonight...

Welcome

Last night I checked out a Beatles tribute band at the Cherry Festival. It was early Beatles. A promise of late Beatles' music was made but never happened because a storm kicked up and the show ended. All the Fudgies ran for the beer tent, which meant lots of room to drink beer in the rain on the fairgrounds. After our beers we left to ride bikes to Bubbas, and I found that the ship's bike had been stolen. Considering our tips were stolen last weekend, I'm thinking Cherry Festival is not the time to be leaving things unattended. Bubbas was closed and we were all soaked as we pedaled to 7-11 for miller high lifes and I rode the back of Justin's Worksman bicycle. I crashed with Sonja and Joanne at the place they're staying. Always nice to sleep in a bed. Sonja happened to be selling her bike so I just bought that one to replace the ship's bike.

I spent this morning aboard the replica of the armed sloop Welcome here in Traverse City. The plan was to sail, but Captain Joe of Welcome, who is also our weekend Captain on Manitou, nixed the sailing because of the slightly high winds and the general green-ness of the rig and crew. Probably a good idea seeing as how the morning was spent rigging lifts and halyards (how had they planned to sail without THOSE?). I taught a few people how to properly belay a line to a pin. It's weird going to a boat where everyone is basically self-taught in the arts of a 1750's sailor. I suspected the last thing this group of mostly 60-something men would want would be a young woman in a skirt and leopard print sunglasses coming out and telling them how to do things on their boat, so I tried to keep quiet. Ah who am I kidding I got into an argument aloft with a cute Scot named Rory when he tried to tell me that technically no square riggers have halyards - that there's only jeers and lifts. Jeers are pretty much the same as halyards, but i'd never call these lifts halyards because they run at such a sharp chafing angle over the fighting top that at most they should be tended until the yard is all the way up. Anyway Rory and I ended up getting along well and talked about working on merchant ships and stuff like that...

Anyway the magazine has arrived! 300 copies and time for me to start addressing them!

FREEEDOMMMM

when i think of freedom in america today, i think of the important security measures being taken when i try to board a plane. i think of the armed coasties forcing the entire crew towards the bow while the vessel is searched after a 20 mile voyage across the straits of juan de fuca from vancouver island. for all this i say thank you, america, and happy birthday. lots of your people voted for dubya and many of those folks were out on grand traverse bay waiting for a fireworks show tonight... listening to pop country and playing with fireworks on the bows of their motor yachts. motor yachts like "happy daze" and cigarette boats like "Donzi," with bikini clad midwesterners yelping and blowing air horns.

but before all that my fourth of july first found me in a luxurious king size bed at the apartment where my friend sonja is staying. we woke up to an eddie murphy tbs marathon and made rice-a-roni and microwave perogies for breakfast (she's apartment-sitting for a boat-trash bachelor who's at sea currently). we then joined justin for coffee and later on met up at the yacht club for a sail on his boat, Salome. we put in some good sailing hours, listening to music and drinking the champagne of beers along with some dark and stormies. at the end of our sail justin sailed Salome within 3 boat lengths of the buoyed off swim area near the beach, amongst all the Donzi's, chachis and Happy Dazed motorboats anchored there and we pulled off a sweet tack in front of a few thousand folks on shore. he then sailed onto his mooring, whereupon we set off in his dingy "Bubbas" with a bottle of chardonnay, a bottle of pineapple flavored rum, and a bag of chips ahoy cookies. OH OH OH but before we left Salome, which is moored about 1/4 mile offshore of the yacht club, a sweet little amphicar drove up and chatted with us!

we actually followed the amphibious 1967 restored classic car to the downtown beach. we watched fireworks while floating just off the beach, loudly singing Lee Greenwoods all time favorite "Proud to be an American" and the classic theme song to "Team America." After all this we motored back to Salome and watched a bright orange moon rise in the east.