Adventure in the Pacific

 

         The surf and warm sun had worked me toward a meditative trance when a flash of red, ripping through my view had me ambling for the camera.

        The kite surf rig was in free drift. We had noticed a couple aloft just up Highway 1 north of where we parked to walk across a bench of land to the beach.

    In a moment I saw the rest of the gear, the pilot, ocean swimming in a steady surf. I thought he must be exhausted as he alternated between a back stroke and breaststroke. We wondered if we should alert beach rescue as we trained our attention on him.

        He stood up, saw his rig traveling south in a stiff breeze so it was back into the swim.

        He caught a kind of break- the rig was headed toward a cove further south.

        He was able to walk the shore watching as the gear moved toward a landing. What he may not have expected was playing the game of chase amongst a few elephant seals snoozing on the shoreline. 

        I thought he must be drained. Keeping the kite aloft while surfing would be demanding enough. The extra output of ocean swimming and then a long beach walk may have been more than he bargained for.

    The frame below is from his relative position as he came ashore. The rig was heading for the cove at the end of the beach in this shot.

        If you look carefully you can see it nestled to the left of the frame below.

        Below he has his back to one of the larger elephant seals who is letting loose with one of their snort roars.

        Sorry for the soft resolution and fuzziness of the shot, but it places the red rig in the collection of molting elephant seals.

In the frame below you see him at the far right retrieving something. 

        In the shot above a couple of the elephant seals appear to be taking an interest in that new red visitor to their domain.

            I was trying to decide what to do as we hiked back to our car, thinking I'd drive up to where I had seen the other rigs.

        We met a guy in a wet suit heading toward the beach. He said he was there to help a friend. I told him we had been a bit worried as his buddy had been stroking and chopping hard in the surf.

        "Oh, he's not happy, I can tell you that," he said smiling.

        "That's a lot of hard work for a sport" I said.  He just chuckled as he continued his long hike. 

                I suspect the story will be told a few times.

          Stay safe.

          See you down the trail.

TO THE RESCUE

   "...these are the days of miracle and wonder, this is the long distance call..."

     Those Paul Simon lyrics meander across the mind a lot these days.

      Washington is to blame. Here we are in bucolic beauty while dream killers, planet killers and child killers conspire their ways. We'll return to that thought after first we witness a rescue. There are still plenty of good gals and guys riding this blue marble.

   One look into his eye tells you quickly this poor fellow is in deep trouble. He's miles from the colony and his mother who probably has already departed for hunting grounds. He's left on his own in the primordial drama of learning to swim, survive and orient to where he must navigate to find life sustaining food. Presently he is beached and frightened. 

   Discovered by the citizen on the left who stood guard protectively until help arrived.

   The marine mammal rescue crew traveled up from Morro Bay headquarters to the Lampton Cliff access in Cambria. 

    After consideration the experts decided the best course of action was to post a kind of "please stay away" warning while they logged his location. On this day the tide was extraordinarily low and the best hope is that when the Pacific reclaimed this rocky reef, the little fellow will be revived by the big blue and resume his seaward journey.

inhumane humanity

   The Trump toll mounts as he presses the idea the US can bomb anywhere. 

•     As many as 200 Iraqi civilians were killed in air strikes in Mosul
•     Dozens of Syrian Civilians were killed when we targeted a school in Raqqa
•     Dozens were killed when we targeted a mosque in Allepo
•     30 Yemenis were killed in the SEAL raid gone bad that also cost the life of a US combatant

    War is hell and innocents die but the toll of civilian deaths in less than two months of the new administration is appalling and worth remembering because as a candidate the President vowed to kill families of terrorists. As Commander in Chief women, children and other non combatant innocents have died, under his orders.

full speed nowhere

     the republican speedwagon

    People I know who are traditional, establishment or legacy Republicans are just sick. Their nominal party controls the House, Senate and White House and they can't spit straight.
    The embarrassment of the failure to pass health care reform exposes the bankruptcy of what has been leadership and Republican philosophy the last 6 years.
     This President didn't need Mitch McConnell's vow to put a wrench into government gears as he did to Obama. The Republican regime failed so miserably by self destruction. Do they have no capacity to govern? The failure reveals their obstructionism in the last 8 years as the betrayal of the American people it was.
    One has to wonder if the ideologues, egoists and zealots have eaten traditional and practical Republicans. 

is redemption possible?

      This is not something Democrats, liberals or progressives want to hear, nor do regressives, or that strange breed of Trump supporter-be they the angry, the betrayed, easily fooled or the true deplorable-but there is a way the Republicans can recover their decency. In fact they could do more than that, they could engineer an American power grab almost without precedent. 
     There are actually two ways forward to power. 

• Someone like James Baker could gather former Senators, Cabinet Secretaries, Senators and other Republican apparatchik, storm the Oval Office, sit the buffoon president down, kick Steve Bannon off the grounds, fumigating behind him and preform a kind of cultural/political lobotomy and soul graft onto the "first fool." Hold him for 6 months if that's what it takes to see the first evidence of competence. In all seriousness, Trump is most influenced by the last thing he saw, heard or person he talked to. Republican adults should make a policy house call.

• The other is to play the 25th Amendment clause 4 card and declare him as the deplorable incompetent bully child he is. (Read the 25th Amendment.)  Mike Pence could govern as an adult. Further, he could bench his own evangelical right wing ooga booga and he could act like a pragmatic Republican conservative. The GOP could then cobble together a mainstream, fully adult, political strategy. 

when republicans had ideas

       Democrats won't want to hear this either, but if Republicans behaved as rational politicians and statesmen, a post intervention Trump or a post-Trump Republican consensus could advance an agenda especially if they authored a jobs bill and an infrastructure repair road map. Before the current crop of self identifying Republicans get all worked up, consider these facts.

• Eisenhower built the interstate system, a huge project employing many and costing much for years. 
• The Reagan Administration fostered the Jobs Training Partnership and later a Jobs program. 
• George HW Bush Signed a Fair Labor Standards Act that raised the minimum wage, even though Democrats had pushed for more. Signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. Signed the Clean Air Act. Signed a Civil Rights Act. Extended unemployment benefits.

      That sort of Presidential mindset is in the Republican DNA, despite the Roger Ailes Fox News era republican pea brains. 
       Is it fantasy land to think Republicans and Democrats
 could:

• retool our economy, seeing it as a matter of national security?
• prepare for a future with increasing automation? 
• rebuild roads, sewers, bridges, water plants, schools and other public facilities
• streamline and modernize our military profile?
• fix a health care plan? No one might be fully satisfied but could both camps get a little of what they want, both sides leaving something on the table? It used to work that way.

republican house cleaning 

     Republicans could do this. They are sitting the edge of chance to control government for a long run. But they probably won't because they "souled out." How else do you explain Trump/Bannon and the nut squeezing power of the so called Freedom Caucus of politically brain dead or Paul Ryan trying to sell his Randian approach to politics. 
     Does Ryan not realize Ayn Rand, really Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum was a fiction writer of moderate talents. Her Objectivism is not a sacred text, it was the stuff of a novelist's creative mind. It is no more valid nor sacred than Sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics that followers turned into Scientology. Maybe his own party sent Speaker Ryan a loud message about the validity of his stingy political assumptions based on his allegiance to a fictional fabrication of a worthless "pseudo philosophy."
      There is more, any Republican quoting Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Alex Jones should be drummed out of the party and into the corner where they await deportation to Syria. These guys are not political gurus, they are bull shit artists who got rich pretending they know something, loudly. 
      In the meantime we've moved from the gridlock and partisan warfare of the last several years to Republican intra party warfare, ideological thuggery and knife fights, while the Democrats look for a compass and a soul.

       
       Staccato signals of constant information
       A loose affiliation of millionaires
       And billionaires and baby
       These are the days of miracle and wonder
       This is the long distance call
       The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
       The way we look to us all, oh yea
                  The Boy In The Bubble--Paul Simon

            
        Yep kids, the good old days happen this way.
     

     See you down the trail.
     

     

VOCALIZING

MEN AND THEIR OATHS

Photo Courtesy of Coast Guard, California Highway Patrol and the Associated Press

     It sounds as though the 77 year old pilot and his son were pretty cool as they waited two hours to be pulled from the sinking pontoon plane.

     The AP reports the son says his dad landed it well, in the Pacific, a mile off shore of San Simeon, north of Cambria.

They were on their way for an annual Alaskan fishing trip when the engine died.  Their locator beacon worked and in a couple of hours the Coast Guard chopper was at work pulling them up, just as the plane was beginning to sink.

      What do you think a dad and son would have to say to each other as they bobbed amongst elephant seals, great white sharks and took the waves in a dead plane? Few conversations get that kind of setting.

COACHING YOURSELF IN OUTBURSTS

AND OTHER OATHS

    It was amusing to hear what came from other tennis courts as our group took a break between sets.  Guys were being vocal with them self, berating their own play or lack of control.  Since the courts are on a school campus there is a club policy against profanity. In that context I heard a few God    Bless Americas! being hurled in that voice that seems as if it struggles with control.  Mostly, guys talking to themselves, like a coach; keep your eye on the ball (insert name), stroke it, don't poke it (insert name), oh!, where were you going with that shot (insert name)? 

     In a few minutes I was back on the court, and probably 

fully engaged in that "hybrid coaching" well.

     We love our games don't we?

     See you down the trail.