Slow Life Chronicles

A few years ago I did my longest solo, self-supported bike trip: nine days from Boston to Niagara Falls. When I approached the Niagara River, I crossed into Canada. The border crossing was on a multi-lane divided highway in front of a bridge across the river; there was no way around it. So I merged into the highway, feeling somewhat out of place among all those cars and trucks. The Canadian border guard looked at me and my bike with a clear suspicion.

Great Brewster Island sits in some eight nautical miles away from Boston, and belongs to the group of islands called the Boston Harbor outer islands. They take upon themselves the fury of the elements from the Atlantic. They shield the harbor with their bodies, so that the city could sleep well. Or, at least, better than if it were wide open to the ocean.

In quantum mechanics, there is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: it is impossible to know the position and the velocity of a particle at the same time. As soon as we measure one of these two properties, the other one magically vanishes, melts into uncertainty.

I am asked from time to time to recommend a sailing book, so here is a short list of books on my shelf (to be expanded later). I am not including specialized topics (such as celestial navigation), history books and travelogues (with one important exception below).

A couple of weeks days ago I helped to deliver a boat, a relatively small Pearson 26, overnight to Provincetown, some 45 nautical miles away. We had very good south-west wind most of the way, and the boat was happily making six or even six and a half knots, which frankly feels to me over her top speed.