Buckethead, Hashing and Jerk

I forgot to mention that I had the privilege of seeing Buckethead a week or so ago at a tiny venue here in Lauderdale. The opening act was a guy called That One Guy. We played this crazy harp thing that he made out of stainless steel piping, one bass string and some effects buttons. He could make a bunch of music for just being one guy. Later, he came out and played with Buckethead. It was good.

Last night, I went hashing for the first time. Basically, its a loose club of people who like to drink beer and run around. Its fairly weird but really fun. This is all the information that I had before I showed up last night. I had looked it up on the internet and found a hotline to call for info about upcoming hashes. There are usually about 5 or so each week anywhere between Palm Beach and Miami. So I called the number and found out about Hash. I learned that it costs $2 to pay for cheap beer and that we were supposed to meet up at a Library parking lot at 6:30pm in Hollywood. So I got my running shoes and showed up. When I got there there were already a few people standing around drinking beer, waiting as more people showed up. From what I could tell, there was not any sort of commonality among the hashers other than the fact that they enjoyed running and drinking beer.

At this point, people welcomed me as "Virgin Louis" and explained how things work. Basically, at each hashing event, there is one organizer called the "hare." This position rotates every week. The hare is responsible for bringing coolers, ice and some beer. We each gave the hare $2 bucks this time, though normally these things are BYOB + 1$ for the ice and beer for the beer stop. The hares are also responsible for setting the course. At around 7pm, they took off, reminding us to look for baking flour and banana peels to stay on the path. We followed 10 mins after. The hares left different kinds of markings that indicate different things. A single blob of flour is called a "plop" and generally signifies that you are on the right track. If you have found 3 in a row, then you are definitely on the right track. An "X" in the road signifies that the path could have turned in any direction. At this point, people split up and search for about 100 yards in search of more "plops" This makes it a bit more challenging, and because the guys in front are doubling back at the Xs, it also serves to keep the group together. A few of the guys ran with whistles and would blow it to help others find the trail. One guy ran with a conch shell in a side holster and another had a bugle. Some of the costumes were funny as well. Because this particular hash was a Banana theme, most wore yellow, one guy had a banana costume, a girl had a cub scout uniform "pub scout" and one guy wore only a banana hammock. The trail took us through many different side streets, across a bridge, through a hotel lobby and a beach bar. So the scene is 20 or so adults in strange outfits running absently through the streets and establishments of Fort Lauderdale sounding whistles and shells. Also at this point, i had one of those 3rd person views of my own life. Not in a negative way, but "How did I get here?" Eventually, we saw "BN" written in flour on the road, which means "beer near." We rounded a corner to find a a couple of the faster ones already at the beer check, which was a parking lot near the inter coastal. A 15-20 beer break ensued. At this point, Banana Hammock jumped in the water.
The whole group caught up and a few minutes later, the hares left again to make the trail, which led us back to the original parking lot for the ceremonial part. it involved singing, chanting, dancing and the eventual naming of Chiquita Mussolini. You will have to go to figure out what goes on. That ended at 9:30 or so and those who chose went to the "on after" at a bar for some late dinner.This is from the "On After." Everyone in the photo was along on the hash with the exception of the woman in the front. She is a nice stranger who joined the party.

All in all, I am very surprised that this exists and I had not previously known of it. It was very fun and I will definitely be back. Some of the hashes can get really intense and take the better part of a day to complete.

In other news, i rode my bike 12 miles to a Jamaican jerk chicken festival. It was really hot and I popped my tire, but the music and the chicken were both good. coconut water, on the other hand, is not delicious.

Boat Show

Heres a giant goose that protected the house at which we bought Mike a bike. The owner says that he just showed up one day.
Michael Neder and Beth Rowe got married. Ben began celebrating before the church ceremony.Brett post-wedding, pre-waffle house
This thing (a mudskipper?) tried to attack Luc as we waited for a ride the first night we were in town. It just kind of flops around to where it wants to go. This one wanted to cross a divided highway.


The past few weeks here have been hrd work as well as a lot of fun. We have been getting the boat ready for Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. The work has been waxing the paint coat, acid washing the teak wood, bleach cleaning the cushions and other tiring physical labor. We have had a good group of help on many of the jobs. My friend and former boss Tony from Steverino's pizza in Athens now lives down here and was a big help. The other two kids are day workers from a crew house and are a good time. Hard Timin' Simon is a kid from Oregon who recently got arrested for getting drunk and falling into the New River. He learned his lesson in jail. John is the other dayworker from texas and is quite possibly the funniest story teller that I have ever met. He has a great perspective on life, a great texas drawl and hundreds of phrases like "Man that engine room is slicker than boiled okra" and "Stand up straight, boy! A crooked spine is the Devil's rollercoaster" I've been over to the crew house a couple of different nights. It is a crazy place with 13 kids from all over the world living in a 3 bedroom house.

Mike and i have continued to visit South Beach with Lb for some good cuban food, surfing, kayaking, and topless beaches.

I made it up to Atlanta for the wedding of Michael
Neder and Beth. Ben and I made it up to athens for a night to see some friends and drink some beers. I was really only there for 9 hours or so and therefore didnt get to do all of the things that I would have liked to do. I'm gonna try to make it back soon.

We've been mostly stationary so that we can do work on the boat. We did make it out for a sea trial after we had some work done on the engines. This is the result of 8 foot seas that day. Everything that was not stowed was somewhere else by the end of the trial.We had a good time on the top deck trying to hold on as we occasionally burried the bow of the boat into the crests of some of the waves. We were about 35 feet above the water line and were still getting wet. Getting tossed around is fun for a bit, but days at sea like that would be pretty unpleasant. 35 foot seas, on the other hand, would probably not be fun at all.

The boat show happened and we were ready for it. we had worked through the weekend to finish everything. At the show, our boat was situated next to two other identical boats in the Westport display. The boat show was fun as there were plenty of cute girls and free food and drinks. Each night a different Marine/Yacht company threw a big parties. I got to see a lot of familliar faces that I had worked with in Newport. We gave a bunch of tours to potential buyers, byt we only had one guy with serious interest. He has been back and forth with the broker so many times that I have no idea what to think about weather or not hes gonna buy this thing. If it doesn't sell, it looks like the boat will stay in palm beach for the winter. As much as i have enjoyed this boat and the crew, I got into this whole thing with the hopes of seeing the world, so I might persue other options. Either Ill look into other, busier boats or Ill go somewhere where I can ski. The alps would be good, and I could hop on a boat in the Med for next spring/summer. I'd love some advice.

Mike and I just signed up for an Open Water SCUBA certification class. We also bought the movie "Open Water" about a disaster on a SCUBA vacation. We should be ready to dive after next weekend.
Luc makes the best of a calm wave day in Miami
LB and I find a treasure in a sweet nearby park called secret woods. Its a mangrove swamp filled with cranes, giant spiders and butterflies.

This is the city in which I live. I have found frisbee, some good friends, warm weather, the sea, and a free-sushi-during-happy-hour-place. So life is good. I hope that all is well every where else in the world.
This is from Peter Dempsey. My old team plays in the Classic City Classic in Athens this weekend. If you are around, try to make it out. It is the best college ultimate happening this fall. Sorry for the gap in posting. While I have been having fun and working hard, there haven't been any epic stories to record. Warm Winds and Following Seas

Fairhaven to Fort Lauderdle

On Monday night, the six of us and our boat pushed off from Fairhaven and began cruising south. The plan was plotted to follow along the continental shelf, keeping
us anywhere from 25 to 200 miles off shore. In order to continue traveling around the clock, we split up into three groups. I had the 12pm to 4pm and the 12am to 4am shift with
Mike's friend Chris from Boston. Luc got the 8-12 shifts with captain Mike and Peter and Mike got the sunset/sunrise shifts from 4-8. While it is nice to watch the sun rise and fall, 4am
is a hell of a time to begin anything. A watch shift involves watching the radar and charts for potential hazards, namely buoys, shallow water and other boats.
It is fairly empty once you get more then fifty miles off shore, but we have had to chance course to avoid some other fishing boats and cargo ships. Watch also involves
engine room checks every hour and plotting the course on a physical chart. Aside from the eight hours of watch each day, we are free to read, watch movies, play games, sleep, etc.
There have been some cool encounters with wildlife along the way. On the first morning just after sunrise, those awake were joined by 40 or so porpoise playing in the wake and jumping at the bow. Check out the
video. Later that day, we saw a smaller pod of porpoise, a jumping marlin and a jumping dolphin. Mike, who missed seeing all of these aquatic animal displays, claimed to have seen a mermaid.
The next day, we caught some 30-knot winds coming from a storm blowing off of Cape Hatteras and spent around 18 hours in 5-foot seas. This is very exhausting. No one got seasick, but no one really enjoyed the experience.
The next day, we found that we had two small finches that stowed away on the boat. They must have gotten caught in the heavy winds and were lucky to find a place to land. Luc was able to catch one of them a few moths and feed it.
We passed within 20 miles of Cape Canaveral and were able to see the two shuttles scheduled to launch on October 12th to fix the space station. On Friday morning, we arrived at the new river in Lauderdale and met up with the towboats to pull us up the river. We got in, did a four-hour wash down to remove all of the salt and finch poop. The shipyard is Roscioli and roughly 3 miles from the downtown area. It is a fairly industrial yard and has only covered slips. Our boat stays in a big enclosed room. This is good because it keeps it cleaner, but it also means that we are unable to work on the boat in the sun.
This weekend, we made it out to the bars, found treasure in a cool nearby park called secret woods and visited LB in South Beach for some surfing and surf kayaking. It was great and we will definitely be back to visit her. Peter left this morning for Atlanta. I really enjoyed getting to hang out with him. I think he might try to get into the industry as well. Luc, Mike and I are going to spend the day looking for a bike for mike, playing some ultimate with the local pickup group and watching some football. So, life is good and steamy down here. I will see many of you in a week for Mike and Beth Neder’s wedding. My car made it safely to Atlanta, which is good, because many people were convinced that it was going to get stolen and disassembled in a chop shop somewhere.

South

Tonight is the night that we depart for warmer waters. Luc Strickland and my cousin Peter have come along to help with the delivery. We leave tonight at 9pm and will go straight 1100 miles to Fort Lauderdale. It should take us 3 and a half days which would put us in Lauderdale on friday morning. Heres a last look at fairhaven. We went in to Boston when Luc first arrived for an incredible house party with Mike' s friends. They had a live band on the deck in the middle of south boston that could be heard from 4 blocks away.

Sea Bass

Heres some giant striped bass that we caught drifting just outside of boston. The bait was live eels.

Live every week like it's shark week

The summer season is coming to a close and it is beginning to get a bit crispy up here in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. It usually 60s or 70s, but with a bit of wind, the dewy mornings are chilly. Tomorrow, we will have our last trip of the season to nantucket. After that, we will prepare to head south to Fort Lauderdale to the big boat show. There will be 200 yachts in the show, with the biggest topping out at around 200ft with helicopter landing pads. With big boats come big crews, and from what i have heard, the boat show sponsered parties are always a good time. After that, however, our future is uncertain. The boat is for sale, so it could sell in Fort lauderdale, which would mean one of two things. Either the new owner has another boat with a full crew and will transfer his crew over to the kaleen, or he does not have a crew and will chose to keep the crew aboard as we already work together well and know the boat. If the former is the case, then I get a vacation and a chance to look for a new job on another boat. If the boat doesn't sell, we will probably go to the bahamas or the carribbean and do chartered trips down there. Either way, I am not worried. The worst case scenario is that I will move out to steamboat with Luc and Brett and spend a season skiing. So life certainly doesn't suck. In fairhaven, it has been more of the same. keeping the boat proper during the day, and then geocaching, sea snake snatching(eel hunting, no luck yet, but when we get one, we are gonna catch one hell of a striper), throwing a frisbee and some night time excursions to boston and newport. Yesterday I ordered a camera. Its the upgraded version of the one waterproof one that I had before, so hopefully I will be able to post some snorkling/scuba pics in a month or so. As for now, here is a geocaching picture of Ashley and I. She and chef Alex left yesterday to go to farmAid and then to Oklahoma before going down to Ft. Lauderdale.

Photos of my new house

Here are some fotes of the M/Y Kaleen. This past weekend, the owners came on board and we cruised over to Nantucket. They are a nice family with four kids in their late twenties/early thirties. As a deckhand, it was my job to help with the luggage and wash all of the salt off of the boat. Since the owners don't want us running around washing the boat while they are on it, we just have a few odd jobs to do, like filling the freshwater tanks and uncovering the cushions in the morning. Other than that, we had most of the weekend to ourselves. We walked around the island, found some treasure and went out to the bars at night. Since the owners have a couple of houses on Nantucket, theydon't sleep on the boat. They just come aboard for Alex's meals, all of which were 6 or 7 courses of five star restaurant quality food. It is really impressive to watch him work in the kitchen.Picture of the tender


At night, we would go out into the downtown bar scene, which is almost completely covered in pastels and seersucker. It reminded us of a little Disneyland. One day, Alex and I spent a couple of hours walking around the town in search of a seersucker cape. No luck, but I think we will make one for a return trip and it will be a big hit. The best outfit was a pair of slacks or chinos(definitely too expensive to be called pants) that had a salmon pink right leg and a canary yellow left leg and was covered in embroidered whales. This is where Matt Bledsoe will go when he dies.
On Sunday, there was a party hosted by the dock master to thank his crew and all of the boats who were around all summer. Raw oysters, tons of appetizers and a few kegs of beer ( I highlyrecommend Whale Tail, I think its local NE beer). This went on until dark, which was about the time that a drunk guy fell backwards off of the 10ft. dock into the water. We rescued him swiftly. After, Mike and I went out to a music venue only to find that they was no live music. there was, however, a couple of cute girls from Poland and Russia. I will send out wedding invitations when I clear the dates with my parents. The cruise back tofairhaven was a bit choppy but otherwise uneventful. We are waiting to hear if we are going back this weekend. If not, I might try to make it down to NYC or maybe to the much closer Newport for a night out.