This cute Bubble Street comic seemed appropriate for the lovey dovey day that is Valentine's. The wife didn't get a chuckle out of this one as much as I did...go figure.
(image from Clifford Hawkins; The Dhow . Click to enlarge.) Tacking a dhow, with its huge and heavy settee spar, is apparently not as difficult as might be assumed, provided that a sizable crew is available. Clifford W. Hawkins, in his book The Dhow: an Illustrated History of the Dhow and its World , describes observing the process from aboard a small boat: "As we closed in on the sambuk [a common two-masted dhow of the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, South Arabia, and East Africa] I could see that some action was about to take place. The crew, rising off their haunches, casually sauntered to working positions; one right up int he bows at the mains'l tack, four at the shrouds, two to the yard's backhaul and a small group ready to handle the main sheet. These were the action stations for wearing ship, the preliminary operation for sailing on the opposite tack. When the critical moment arrived the helmsman threw over the wheel to bring the wind aft and the big mains'l was a...
Round boats are a fascination, and the quffa, a basket-built boat from Iraq, is among the most fascinating because of its well-documented antiquity, its common use well into the 20th century, and its sometimes very large -- occasionally immense -- size. A quffa in Baghdad in 1914 (Source: Wikipedia) Click any image to enlarge. Known also as a kuphar and by various alternate spellings, the quffa was described in the 5th century BCE by Herodotus, who stated that they were built in Armenia for one-way trading trips on the Euphrates. In his account, they were round, built of willow frames and covered with leather. The insides were protected by straw. They carried wooden casks of wine from Armenia to Babylon, along with at least one donkey and two paddlers. One paddler would pull from the front; the other would push from the rear. Upon reaching its destination, the boat was disassembled and the leather cover folded up, to be carried by the donkey on the road trip back home -- th...
It’s High Time Flying off Everest I just finished reading “Flying off Everest” by Dave Costello. His fascinating book is about the two Nepali men, Sano Babu Sunuwar and Lakpa Tsheri Sherpa, who decided to climb Mount Everest together, jump off the top and paraglide down to the confluence of the Dudh Khosi and Sun Khosi River. From there they planned to kayak to the sea. But there is a catch, or two. For one there were insufficient funds, and no equipment. Oh, and no permission. Then there was the small problem that Babu who usually lived at lower altitude had no technical climbing experience and suffered from altitude sickness. Not such an advantage for an ascent of the World’s highest peak. The other had climbed Everest before but couldn’t swim, and had never kayaked before. You just know it’s going to end badly. I enjoy discovering about people who quietly take off and do something, simply because they want to. They make something happen, even if it’s not always precisely...
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