Hold Fire: TCR at Sea
I had never heard of an American warship blowing away an American yacht in a heavily-used American waterway, but I felt relieved there had not been an incident.
By Sacha Mardou
Our Insidious Fuels: TCR at Sea
Chris continued to worry about why the boat would not come up on plane. He was willing to have her pulled from the water for inspection, but that could not happen before Monday, and we could not know how long she would need service. He had begun to suspect the fuel—either contaminated fuel at the last slow fill-up, or that the dregs at the bottoms of the tanks were stirred up in the grounding or the prop strike and had clogged the filters.
The US Navy’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and Their Warehouse Adventures
We tend to think of the armed services for their main mission: ‘warfighting’ (and preparing for it). On the face of it, remembering seems to come more slowly. The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) serves as the Navy’s institutional memory by preserving, acquiring, producing, and disseminating history and heritage products. Its vast warehouses testify to just how rich the history of the US Navy is.
Aground: TCR at Sea
We headed up the Pungo and quickly ran into the line of thunderstorms we had been trying to beat. Visibility was zero, and the wind high enough that we had to retreat from the river to wait it out.
Choose Your Trip: TCR at Sea
Chris paid a lot of money for the boat. It was the trip he wanted to take, a way of life. So far, over several weeks of hard work, first high and dry in a boatyard in a Florida summer, then on this “shakedown cruise,” he has gotten everything coming to him.
Apocalypse Another Day: TCR at Sea
I tried to imagine what I would do if I was suddenly alone, since I do not have the experience to dock this boat in a falling tide among 80-foot yachts tight in their slips. If it was the apocalypse I could figure the range based on fuel in the tanks and choose where to ground it. The boat did not cost me anything, and after all it would be the apocalypse.
Do Not Tempt the Universe: TCR at Sea
The bigger the venture, the more the universe messes with you.
Transiting The Ditch: The Common Reader at Sea
A friend texted recently to say he had bought a new yacht. He asked if I would like to help him transit it from Fort Pierce, Florida, to his home port in Maryland, a trip of about a thousand miles up the East Coast. “I can probably do that,” I said, spilling my coffee.
Matching Style for Style in Politics
What I have been wondering—as I have for years—is why Dems cannot seem to counter crude schoolyard putdowns and the verbose, word-cloud attack called the Gish Gallop.
Mother Jones and the Graveyard of Labor History
Macoupin County, Illinois, which holds Virden and Mt. Olive, has other important labor sites. But Mother Jones’s grave and two-story granite monument on the outskirts of Mt. Olive might be seen to mark a split in the soul of working-class America that is still evident in our nation’s division.
Anubis Lives, Thanks to Joanna Karpowicz
For an image of death, Joanna Karpowicz’s Anubis is a figure of calm, even stability; of seeing and listening; of endurance. He has power. As someone said of Chekhov’s narrative voice, it is as if he watches human life with great sympathy from somewhere very far away.
Damn the Torpedoes, We Have Bigger Problems
Symonds’s book “The US Navy: A Concise History“ surprises, as it is also a history of technology and its political effects, showing, for example, how shifts from sail to coal to oil to nuclear power each affected our national capabilities and global ambitions in ways no one foresaw.