JohnHuth

Carl still does repairs. He did some nice work on my skeg back in June. He's all set up for all kinds of repairs at his house.

One main issue with the tides is the concept of resonance. It's like pushing a swing on a playground with someone on it. The swing has a natural frequency if you just displace it and let it swing back and forth. Now think about someone pushing that swing. If you push the swing well below its natural frequency, it doesn't go so high. If you push it well above its natural frequency, it doesn't go as high. But if you push it at its natural frequency, it goes really high. Bodies of water that are partially trapped have different natural frequencies, depending on their volume, depth etc. The 'pushes' come from when we rotate under both the lunar bulge and the solar bulge. Some places have a twice daily high tide - like most of the east coast. Some places have a once daily high tide. Some places, like Puget Sound have unequal high tides - maybe twice a day, but very different heights. The Bay of Fundy has a natural frequency that's very close to the frequency of the lunar bulge, which is why the tides are so dang (an industry term) high. When considering tides and making predictions, each body of water has its own susceptibilities to the different driving frequencies or pushes. The way the tides are calculated is that they're broken down into "how much of this and such frequency - like the lunar bulge" affects the tide in a given place. Once those susceptibilities are known, NOAA or whoever can crank out the predictions. In the case of the East Coast, although we're mostly in the "twice a day" mode (yes, I know it's 12 hours plus some change....but for this discussion) - but we aren't precisely in a twice-a-day mode, and there's some uneven high and low tides, depending on the body of water, and then you also get into whether the moon is at a closest approach or it's at a different declination etc. Maybe this is more complicated that you wanted to hear, but that's what's going on.

Hi, All - I have a new boat (yay!) - but browsing the web, I found that deck-mounted compasses seem hard to come-by. I saw one website 'said' that the popular Brunton model was discontinued. Maybe I need to do some more digging, but any suggestions would be most welcome. Worst case scenario: I cannibalize an old kayak that I probably won't use much, but I thought I'd ask if anyone has been up against this recently and has a solution.

Any word on how he's doing? Ribs, shoulder, and lung injuries sound pretty serious. Hopefully, recovering.

Thanks for posting all the photos and descriptions of each day. I just talked with Dan about the trip too, and he agrees that the day 13 was quite something. It's an amazing trip - I'm glad you had that experience!

Well, that's scary. It reminds me of the Jack London story To Light a Fire, except he made it out to tell the tale.

Thanks, Ken. That makes more sense. I definitely saw ads for the cigarette lighter jammer, too.

Thanks for alerting me to the link. That article is pretty spot on. In my navigation class, I devote a lecture to radio triangulation and GPS, and ultimately the GPS interdependencies and vulnerabilities. It's pretty sobering to realize how much we rely on GPS: power grids, bank transactions, shipping, and the like. One amusing item I came upon was a GPS jamming device that can fit into your car cigarette lighter/power source. Now, it's illegal to jam GPS, but it's legal to buy these items (unless that's changed since I last checked). You can also build your own GPS jamming device, if you're so inclined.

It could be the southernmost of one of the old cuts, but I just don't remember seeing waves breaking there.

Hi, All - I'm currently hunkered down (mostly) in Harwich Port, thanks to Zoom. I *think* I'm seeing ocean waves crashing on what appears to (maybe?) be a new cut on Monomoy. There was an area in the mid-section that was getting thinner and thinner. I'm wondering if the recent nor'easter cut through. Currently, there is not enough wind on Nantucket Sound to produce big swell, and I'm guessing that it's ocean swells breaking in the shoals of the cut. I'll do some detective work and report back. It's a bit too much of a paddle for February - I'm checking sources. If anyone has info, please pass it along.

The eye witness accounts made it sound pretty hair raising.

Oh, this makes more sense. So, the perhaps she was expected in Chatham, presumably getting there by car?

On the Carole Madru story. I was out paddling the same day, on Nantucket Sound - so not precisely the same location, but pretty darn close (about 6 miles away). I don't know what happened to her, but the air temps were warm, and the day was mostly calm, but the wind really picked up late in the afternoon. Water temps were about 55 deg F. The 50 mile drift onto the point where her body was found was odd. The newspaper reports gave a street address, which made it look like the body rounded the north tip of the outer Cape, and then into P-Town Harbor. State Police, apparently, were/are investigating. There was also a fatality off York, ME, last weekend: https://www.pressherald.com/?p=5454914

I do have measures of the winds for each of these, but they're from an anemometer on the roof of my house. Since I'm on a bluff, the effect of height and the funneling of winds up the bluff tend to skew the readings high. I have a hand-held anemometer, and I'm going to re- calibrate to surface readings.

Fourth wind video (more to come)