Locks (no bagels, just locks)

Hi kids!

We busted another interstate barrier today. We are in North Carolina
now. We are traveling in the Intracoastal Waterway, brought to you, as
I said before, by the big, benevolent federal government which means
so much to us all. The waterway runs through swamps for long periods.
Swamps are wet lands. If you were to try to walk through the swamps
you would get stuck in the mud. The waterway is a big, big wide ditch
dug through the swamp in a lot of places. The water in the swamp is
brown and yucky. It's like sailing your boat through miles and miles
of tobacco juice. Yeesh.

We had a new experience yesterday. We went through a lock. In a
waterway a lock is a place where the water level changes. On one side
the water is high. On the other it is low. The lock itself is this
giant tub with doors at each end. You sail in one end, tie up to the
wall of the lock, then wait. The lock guys close the door you just
sailed through, fill the lock with water then open the door at the
other end and you sail out. In this picture Angel Jen is tying a rope
from the front of theboat to the yellow thing, a cleat, on the wall.
We tied another rope at the back end. This keeps the boat from
flopping around when they pump all the water into the lock. There were
six big boats in the lock at the same time when we went through. It
was big!

Ok kids. We've learned about swamps, tobacco juice, locks and,
tangetially, Archimedes principle. That's enough education for one
day. So let's all sing our ABC's and numbers up to ten, just to show
the teacher we can do it. And maybe, just maybe, she'll go into
Archimede's principle if we're good.

Back on the boat!

Hi kids!

It was nice to get to meet you kids when we stopped at the school last
week. After we left school we went to have Thanksgiving dinner with
family on Spring Hill, where there is a crooked road then it goes
straight, you know the place. Then on Friday we headed back to
Virginia to get back on the boat and continue the trek south.

When we arrived we found the wind blowing WAY hard and cold. We had to
tie more ropes to hold the boat to the dock. We huddled under all the
blankets we had and listened to the ropes creak and groan all night.
We figured creak and groan was good. If we didn't hear that it meant
they had snapped!

Today the wind had stopped, the sun was warm and we began to go down
the intracoastal waterway. That is a system of canals and rivers
created and maintained by your friend, the federal government, so
folks can go up and down the coast without going out into the big
ocean. Thank goodness for the federal government!

Today we went under or through thirteen bridges. Some were high enough
to sail under. Some were lift bridges that lifted themselves way up in
the air to get out of our way. Some were swing bridges that turned
like if you had your arm in front of you and swung it to your side.
Some were 'bascule' bridges that swing up like if you had your arm in
front of you and lifted it over your head.

This is a picture of a bascule bridge opening. Sweet, huh? Big ole
Pirate John, coming through. Get outta the way, bridge!

So, kids, see if you can count to thirteen. It's not hard, if you do
it often enough. Let's see. One, two, thirteen. Is that right?

And remember kids, the teacher is what? That's right. The teacher is
ALWAYS RIGHT. Got it.

Fw: Reflectivity! Wow

This just in from Melvin the master moose hunter who gets the weekly prize in physics research from Cahaya Institute.  Way to go Mel.  I expect to see a little more from the rest of you! Hemispherical spectral reflectivity: where Grefl(λ) and Gincid(λ) are the reflected and incident spectral (per wavelength) intensity, respectively. When did they invent that? :-))  I missed that one in school. I like your blog. Waiting for the next one. Later Mel

Plaque at the customs house

Plaques

Reading

Hi kids!

Here's a picture of Angel Jen reading a plaque in Yorktown. The
writing talks about the colonists, how they farmed tobacco, trades
with Indians and argued with the Englishmen back home who had sent
them over to Americain the first place. Yorktown is covered with these
plaques. You can't swing a cat without hitting a plaque in this town.
If you can read them they tell the story of the history that happened
here. If you can't read, you, little friends, are just out of luck.
So pay attention when your teacher tries to teach you how to read.
Maybe someday you can read about French naval guys and exploding
statue heads and stuff.

Plaque

Hi kids!

Just in case any of you cynical little doubting Thomas' were
questioning my story about all the Frenchmen at the battle of
Yorktown, here's a picture of the plaque placed in their honor by the
Daughters of the American Revolution, a group not known to prevaricate
in favor of the French. It's right by the monument with the lady whose
head took the lightning bolt.

Liberty monument

Hi kids!

We are in Yorktown, Virginia. This is the site of the final battle of the Revolutionary War. The general on the American side was George Washington. The general on the English side was Lord Cornwallis. The Americans also had help. They had signed a treaty with our old friends the French and the nice French had sent an army under their general Rochambeau to help the Americans. They had also sent a fleet of French navy ships under their admiral de Grasse all the way from the West Indies, a thousand miles away, just to help. There were just as many French soldiers there as Americans and a lot more French navy. Man, those French guys were great. That's why the Americans still love the French. Cause they're always there when you need help.

Well, in the end the Americans and French surrounded Cornwallis on land and sea. The British had to quit and we had a new country.

Right after that the congress authorized the building of a big monument at Yorktown. But they didn't authorize any money. The monument didn't get built until a hundred years later. I am not making that up.

The monument has a statue of a lady on the top of a spire of granite from Maine. A few years later the statue got hit with lightning which blew the lady's head off. They had a picture of the exploded head. It was very cool. They made a new head and put a lightning rod in it this time.

They have plaques with the names of the American and French dead. Angel Jen found the name of one of the Frenchmen that was the French form of her mothers family name. He might be one of her ancestors!

Yorktown got destroyed in the fighting but the National Park Service, another great branch of your friendly, benevolent federal government, restored many of the homes and made a museum to teach people about the history of Yorktown.

Well, kids. That's your history lesson for today. So what did we learn?  The America you love was greatly aided by the French and lightning will surely blow the head off a statue if you put it up in the air.

Now be good and listen to the teacher today. Do what she says immediately, and say, 'Yes, teacher!' enthusiastically when tasks fall your way.






John from the boat

Potomac River

Hi kids!

We are steadily sailing south. Today we went from Kent Island,
Maryland, to Reedville, Virginia. In the process we crossed the mouth
of the Potomac River. This is the river that the nations capital,
Washington, DC, sits on. Washington is about 90 miles up the river.
Up there the river is narrower. Down here it is six and a half miles
wide. That's farther than from your school to Mark Dietz's butcher
shop in Wyalusing! When we were in the middle of it we couldn't see
land on either side. Woof!

There is an apocrophal story about George Washington that says he
tossed a dollar coin across the Potomac. 'Apocrophal' stories are old
stories which probay aren't true but they are good stories, people
like them and keep telling them anyway. Like the story about the
dollar. It's meant to be about how strong he was and how far he could
throw things. Well, I hope he tried to throw that dollar up in
Washington because he sure couldn't throw it far enough to reach the
other side down here!

It was so wide I couldn't take a picture of it. So I'm including a
picture from Maine taken by my friend, Melvin. Mel is a great hunter.
He shoots birds, deer, moose, whatever flies, crawls or runs, basicly.
When he goes hunting he takes a camera, too, and takes pictures. This
is a picture of a lake in Maine. See how the trees and mountain are
reflected in the still water? This is possible, of course, because
the wavelength of the light is greater than the surface roughness of
the liquid, as the astute young physicists among you have already
concluded. For the rest of you, see if you can get teacher to dig up
some material on reflectivity, surface irregularities, wavelengths and
incidence. She's a pretty hot physicist when she gets going.

Well, kids, I'm off. Tomorrow we go to Yorktown, Virginia to see where
George Washington accepted the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to end the
Revolutionary War. 'Here ya go, Lordy Boy. Just sign right here.'. Ha!

Dredging

Hi kids!

While we were sailing down the Chesapeake Bay we ran across one of the
machines that keep the waterway passable. It's called a dredge.

This thing is huge. It is a big, big steam shovel. The big scooper
gets chomped down in the water to the bottom. It bites a bite of mud
and sand from the bottom, picks it up and dumps it into the barge next
to it. Then it does that again until the barge is full. A tugboat then
pushes the barge off someplace else and dumps it.

Why, you might ask, would our beloved government spend money moving
dirt around the bay? Well, kids, they do it to make sure the water is
deep enough for the big ships to pass through as they bring stuff into
the cities and take other stuff away.

Man, it looked like fun to sit and move mud around all day with a big
steam shovel. I like being a traveling pirate but if I was going to
have a job, that's the one I'd want.

So kids, be good and be thankful you have a big, benevolent government
taking care of your waterways making sure your scrap iron can be
exported and your toys can keep coming to the stores near you.

The biggest bridge in America, almost

Hi kids!

Well, Angel Jen and I are a sailing down the old Chesapeake Bay like a
couple greased hogs sliding on wet ice, or something.

Whoa, Angel Jen! Slow this buggy down! (She was driving the boat
today. I worked on ropes, tied Turks head knots on the shrouds and
generally attended to serious sailor stuff.)

We passed under this bridge today. It's the biggest bridge in America,
almost. There's maybe one bigger or something but it's huge. I
measured it on a map and it's three and a half miles long. That's like
from your school to the Taylor meat plant! Woof! What a bridge! The
picture is only half the bridge. It's just as long on the other side,
too.

We kept on going down the Bay. We are anchored off Kent Island on the
eastern shore. Angel Jen is up in the vee berth waiting for me to come
to bed so I better get moving. We gotta get rolling early tomorrow.

You be good kids, now. Remember, you're going to need good references
from your teachers to get into college and it's never to soon to start
learning how to get along with these people who hold the keys to your
future.

We are not dead

Hi kids!

We are not dead! It's been so long since I was able to write you I
suppose you figured we were dead but we aren't. We sailed from
Atlantic City to another town in New Jersey, Cape May, and my phone
died. With no phone I couldn't update the blog or call anyone so we
had to just sail on.

We sailed up the Delaware Bay and through a big canal (it was almost
twenty miles long!) into the Chesapeake Bay. We went to a city called
Baltimore. This was the town where the Colts used to play football
until they were abandoned in the middle of the night by the traitorous
club owners but don't get me started about THAT.

This is also the city where Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that
later became our national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner.

Our country was in a war with England at the time, 1812. We got in a
war because they used to kidnap Americans into their ships to be
sailors for them. Needless to say the Americans weren't too
'impressed' with this idea. (Get it? Kidnapping people to be sailors
is called 'impressing' them. It's true. You can look it up. )

The dirty rotten English managed to invade America and burn
Washington, DC, during that war. (Do you know what 'DC' stands for?
Da Capital, that's what.) They were up in Baltimore attacking there
next. Mr. Key was watching the ruckus all day and when he got up the
next day and saw the flag still flying over the fort in this picture,
he knew the dirty rotten Englishmen had been kicked out. He was so
happy he wrote a poem, being a man of unbridled passions. He published
it in a newspaper, people started singing it (to the tune of a
popular drinking song of the time) and eventually the government made
it the national anthem.

We hung out in Baltimore for a couple days getting my phone fixed,
visiting friends and resting up. Now we have sailed on and the next
update will be from the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. Be good, kids,
and make sure you tell the teacher how much you enjoy being her
student since she's the greatest teacher you've ever had, pretty close.

Atlantic City

Hi kids!

Well, we made it from the top of New Jersey to Atlantic City. We had
to wait at the top of New Jersey to get a new computer chip for our
chartplotter. Then we had to wait some more because a gale was
blowing. (The astute meterologists among you will recall that a gale
is defined as winds from 39 to 54 mph. ) after that I was READY TO
GO! I had spent too much time just sitting around.

So we got up at four am and started sailing to the south. We had to go
a long, long way to the next harbor. By the time we got there it was
dark, another storm had kicked up and the boat was thrashing through
the biggest seas I had ever seen. We made huge splashes and crashes as
we limped forward at half our usual speed. The winds and seas were
holding us back.

At last we saw the harbor! It was dark, our charts were wrong and the
buoys inside were all different from what our charts said. But we made
it. At 11:00 at night! We got stuck on a sand bar before we managed
to anchor successfully but Jen got us off by putting up the jib sail
to make the boat lean over so it didn't stck so far down in the water.

In the morning we could see better so we left that harbor at maximum
flood tide by looking for big ripples in the sea. Big ripples mean
fast water which means deep channel, see. Deep enough so we wouldn't
hit any more stupid sand bars and get stuck again!

Then we sailed further south to this town, Atlantic City. The coast of
New Jersey is an almost unbroken stretch of sand beaches lying low in
thecwater. You go for mile after mile and that's all you see. Then you
see Atlantic City with all its bright lights and huge buildings rise
up out of the sea.

Tomorrow we will go further south again. But right now we are tired.
Angel Jen was too tired to even eat her supper last night. I've never
been THAT tired!

Leaving New York

Hi kids!

We spent several days in New York City. We visited with my son who
lives there, went to see an aircraft carrier and walked along the
river in a park. We went shopping for new charts for our boat and
spent time in a Starbucks coffee shop so we could use the Internet.
(Man, are those coffee shop workers ever nervous! They drink WAY too
much coffee!). But now it's time to leave and sail south.

On our way south we sailed past the Statue of Liberty. This is a giant
statue of a lady in a Greek gown with a crown on her head holding a
lamp up over her head and standing on a pedestal. It was a gift from
the people of France 123 years ago. (The astute mathmeticians among
you will deduce that the gift was made in 1886.) The statue is in a
national park. Another part of the same park is Ellis Island, a place
where immigrants were let into America in the old days. Almost all
American people are immigrants or descended from immigrants. There is
a poem at the base of the statue that talks about how America welcomes
immigrants and promises a land of freedom awaits them.

These are great sentiments and they have inspired people for over a
century.

So that's why all good Americans love France and welcome immigrants.
Right, teacher?

Well, kids, our next report will be from place south. We have headed
out of New York, breaking another interstate barrier by sailing for
New Jersey shores. Sandy Hook will be first. Then, who knows, Barnigat
Bay?

New York's Big Buildings

Hi kids!

We spent a few days in New York City. This city is full of huge, tall
buildings. These things are really high. How, you might ask, do they
build them so high?

Well, here's a picture of one of thebuildingsbeing built. The bottom
is mostly finished and they are still building the top part. The
inside steel structure is in place and there is a crane beside the
building lifting parts up to finish the top part. At the middle of the
crane is the place where the crane operator works. He has to climb up
there and sit in the cab to run the crane. He's like hundreds of feet
up in the air running amachine to lift stuff from the ground up to
hundreds of feet over his head. Man, I'll bet he has a good view up
there. He's right beside the Hudson River overlooking the harbor. But
I hope he has a radio to listen to. No one is going to climb up there
to talk to him. It's too far!