Sunday May 24 Green Cove Springs

Written by Jack van Ommen on May 24th, 2009

# 3 daughter wondered why I was not updating the blog every day. I will once I am on a passage. But ashore I will only report on items of interest. And who wants to hear about me being cooped up in the cabin for a solid week in a steady downpour? Friday the rains let up for a couple hour periods, long enough for me to ride into town for groceries and laundry soap. Yesterday. Saturday, I managed to sand down the first coat of finish paint, do my laundry and go to the evening mass with my Latin brothers and sisters.  It is an about 20 minutes bike ride and I got into church just before a heavy cloud burst. Next weekend, Pentecost, will probably be the last time I get to go to the old Sacred Heart Church and I’ll miss these hermanos y hermanas. There are only about a 100 people attending in this tiny old church. The new church, in the suburbs, where the angloes worship,  holds clopse to a 1000 souls. But it is a poorly designed structure, impersonal and when I was able to ride in there last year with Howard and Susan, from the marina here,   I seldom came away the way I do from this little mission church. I love the priest and the Mexicans have an uncomplicated faith like I encountered in the Pacific and beyond. The men are real men and the women are real women. I am getting off on my soap box again. Bear with me. I love the men and women here at the marina but there are so many weird/twisted soap opera relationship acts playing out here that would blow the minds of most.         This morning Randy Register dropped by. I saw him last on March 1st in Boqueron, P.R. , he treated me to my birthday dinner and then that night my folding bike was stolen.  His boat is in St. Thomas. He’ll be back with Debbie his girlfriend later in the week. We had good times together here last year.

Progress: To-day I applied the second coat of the finish paint. And if the weather does not throw me another loop I should be back in the water on Tuesday June 2nd.  If there is a good one week weather window I’ll sail to Chesapeake otherwise I’ll rent a car and drive up to Virginia to get my winter clothes and my European charts/guides at the McDonnells.

Web Site Maintenance: While I was cooped up in the cabin during the one week monsoon I did some web site maintenance. All links that were directed through www.cometosea.net have now been changed back to www.cometosea.us so, in case you had directed others to the old NET links, you’ll need to change them.  I have also started to break down the long slide shows of the Circumnavigation. Right now the slide shows of the 2005/2007 circumnavigation are in three parts: a) California through the Philippines b) Vietnam through Bali c) Christmas Island to Virginia. These three slide shows run for about 45 minutes each and because they have backgrounbd music take a while to download from the internet.     I have broken off VIETNAM which is now just a 16 minute slide show at www.cometosea.us/albums/albums/Vietnam.pdf go take a look. (I will upgrade the audio to this file as soon as the Adobe experst have figured out what went wrong with my Photoshop Elements software)

I plan to break up the rest as well eventually so that you can see the slide show at the same time that you are reading the country Log.

 

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