Pics From Our Trip North

Rockland, Maine

No LL

Above. This buoy sits at the entrance to La Trappe Creek on the Choptank River. Year after year, the next on the walkway became bigger. Now is it too big for the osprey. A new nest appears on the top. There are two osprey couples in the nest. We never saw that before.

We are going to go to a SSCA gam this Friday and Saturday. In the New Bedford Whaling Museum, we learned the origin of this strange word gam. When two ships met at sea, they stopped and rafted up for a short time to swap stories and gossip. The artifact above is called a gamming bucket. It was used to lift the captain's wife to the deck of the other boat in a gam. It seems that SSCA found precisely the right word for their meetings of cruisers.

Also from the New Bedford sailing museum. Click on the image to see the large version that you can read. It seems that blogging was not entirely unknown in the 19th century. The media however was the street poster, not the world wide web.

Above is a strange object. If you recognize it without reading this, you're very good. It is a deck prism, seen from below. A deck prism is used to bring light in to the dark windowless compartments of a ship or a boat. From up on deck, the prism is flat and flush with the deck. From below, it is gem shaped to direct light in all horizontal directions. Even modern boats still use deck prisms. They are remarkably effective. Tarwathie has transparent hatch covers so she doesn't need a prism.


Below is a video from New Bedford Harbor. The audio commentary explains.