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almarinesurveyors · 2 months

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Trust Skilled Boat and Yacht Inspectors Florida for Professional Assistance

In the heart of Florida's Gulf Coast and nestled amidst the tranquil water of Crystal River, Homosassa, and the inland lakes of Lakeland, boat and yacht inspectors play a crucial role in ensuring the safety, seaworthiness, and compliance of vessels navigating these picturesque waterways. With their expertise, professionalism, and dedication to excellence, these inspectors uphold the highest standards of maritime integrity and safeguard the interests of boat owners, buyers and insurers across the region.

Crystal River and Homosassa, renowned for their pristine waters, abundant marine life, and scenic beauty, attract boating enthusiasts from far and wide. Crystal River Homosassa boat and yacht surveyors in these coastal communities specialize in providing comprehensive inspection services tailored to the unique needs of vessels navigating the area's intricate waterways. From pre-purchase surveys to insurance assessments and damage evaluations, these inspectors offer invaluable insights into the condition, value, and compliance of boats and yachts, ensuring that owners and buyers can navigate the waters peacefully.

Lakeland, situated amidst a network of picturesque lakes and waterways in central Florida, is a haven for boaters seeking tranquility and natural beauty. Lakeland boat surveyors provide essential inspection services to boat owners, buyers, and insurers ensuring the safety and reliability of vessels navigating the region's inland lakes. Whether it's about assessing the condition of a vintage wooden boat or conducting a pre-purchase inspection for a modern motor yacht, these inspectors bring a wealth of expertise and experience to every inspection, delivering accurate, impartial, and timely assessments to meet the needs of their clients.

Boat and yacht inspectors Florida adheres to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity and customer service. With their thorough knowledge of maritime regulations, industry best practices and local conditions, they provide clients with the information needed to make informed decisions about their vessels. Whether it's about verifying compliance with safety standards, assessing condition of hulls and propulsion systems, or identifying potential issues that may affect the seaworthiness or value of a vessel, these inspectors play an indispensable role in supporting the boating communities of Florida's Gulf Coast and inland lakes.

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#Crystal River Homosassa boat and yacht surveyors #Lakeland boat surveyors #Boat and yacht inspectors Florida

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alaskamarinesurveys · 10 months

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Website: https://www.alaskamarinesurveys.com/

Alaska Marine Surveys is a highly experienced marine surveying company specializing in the Maritime Industry. With over 20 years of expertise, we offer comprehensive survey services throughout Alaska, including Voyage Preparation, Pre-Purchase Evaluation, Insurance Underwriting, and Financial Evaluation.

When it comes to purchasing a vessel, our Pre-Purchase Survey delivers a detailed breakdown and true assessment of its condition. Our marine surveyors provide recommendations categorized as essential, recommended, or advisory, in accordance with regulatory guidelines. Factors such as haul-outs and scheduling coincide with the survey time.

For insurance coverage, our Insurance Survey meets the specific needs of insurance agencies. We cover repairs, annual assessments, and policy renewals. We can assist in making necessary arrangements, including haul-outs and stability tests.

Alaska Marine Surveys also offers Post-Modification Surveys for vessels with significant modifications. We ensure your investments are documented and fully covered by insurance. We conduct surveys for compliance with regulations and specialized tasks. When contacting us, please communicate your specific requirements for tailored service.

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charminglyantiquated · 2 months

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So, I’m seriously looking into getting into tall ship sailing (waiting on follow-up from an interview rn) and I’m wondering for getting into it more long-term -

what do people do after sailing tall ships? Like, it’s a pretty physical job, and I’d assume there’s a point where your joints just can’t keep up with it.

Are there other jobs in the industry that people move to? I’m not really keen on the idea of moving up in the ship’s hierarchy- admin and being someone’s boss both aren’t really my thing. Do people retrain in completely different careers? Go back to whatever they were doing before they started sailing?

Anyway, I know your sample size might not be super large so I’d appreciate anything. Thanks a bunch!

This is hard to answer directly - on the one hand sailing tall ships is such a niche industry that there are limited pathways for straightforward advancement. But on the other hand, it overlaps with such a large number of other industries, and requires such a jack of all trades skillset - tourism, carpentry, history and preservation, hospitality, marine electronics, etc. etc. etc. - that there's a lot of ways forward for what I guess I'd call lateral advancement: moving to another job which uses most of the same skills. So there's no one answer, but if it helps, here's some things my tall ship deckhand friends have ended up doing, after no longer deckhanding tallships:

Get a captain's license and keep sailing. Captains often have it a bit easier physically (balanced out by the mental stress lol), and are paid better. Owning your own boat is optional; plenty of companies hire captains by the season to sail the boat, while the management of the company is dealt with by the actual owners. (This is what I did! I don't have the sail-hauling arms I did as a deckhand, but my knees and bank account are both in better shape).

Bosun, first mate, engineer, some other specialized non-captain crew member, usually involves licensing or other education that's useful down the road if you switch to an adjacent career

Racing yachts

Captain for hire on private vessels

Outward bound guide, other wilderness education programs

Harbor cruises, lobster tour guides, and other motor-powered tourist boats, both as captain and as crew - you have the patter and the safety skills but you don't want to deal with the hassle of sails

Water taxis, ferries and other passenger vessels

Lobstering, fishing, aquaculture, tugboats, other non-tourist waterfront industries

Marine surveyor, marine electrician, other specialized technician

Working in a shipyard - good fit for all the fit-out skills of sanding, painting, varnishing, covering and uncovering the boat

Cruise ship hostess

Train conductor (the passion for the early 1900s carried over well)

Working at a a museum focused on local maritime history

Tour guide for local buses, walking tours, etc

Boatbuilder (IYRS, Wooden Boat School)

Teaching the captain's license courses (nota bene: there were obviously some other steps between deckhand and teacher, notably ten years of being a captain in between. But this is what they settled into when they decided sailing was too physically taxing, so I want to include it).

Carpentry, house painting

Designing and selling custom made van-homes (apart from the technical skills, living on board a ship helps familiarize making use of every square inch of space)

Sailmaker

Of course there's other friends who went on to try something completely new and unrelated - I think because so many of the people who start sailing tall ships are here for something completely new in the first place, that's not an intimidating prospect so much as an exciting one. But many of them did make use of tall ship skills even when moving on from tall ships, so I hope the above list is helpful in giving a broad sense of what can follow!

#schooner bum life #i am probably forgetting some tbh #for fun. some unrelated post-sailing jobs:#artist #dog mushing in alaska #cheese making #sword maker #chocolatier #orchestra conductor #model #looking at that i think there's probably also something to be said for the confidence it takes #to pursue something you find interesting #even if it means starting from scratch #the same leap of faith that gets you on a tall ship can take you somewhere else

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indigos-stardust · 2 days

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Flicker

Hundreds of years ago the fire moth people, or Nari'shi, lived on volcanic Islands to the South. Unfortunately, there was a catastrophic period of forest fires in the nearby lands that spread from the wild, to crops, and finally villages.

The Nari'shi contain the ability to generate enough heat to create flames. This is because they naturally have a sixth sense to read energy through their antennae and have a much higher resistance to the natural heat from the volcano's they live nearby and depend on. Due to these factors, they can use their own stores of energy and release that through the friction their thick fur creates in fast movement. They even had group dances that would create sparks from the fast movements and touches.

However, that ability to create flame is why they were blamed for the tragedies that continued, even if they was no real evidence they had done those things. Due to complicated politics of the time, including the greed and power tactics of many leaders, they were used as scapegoats for not just the fires but many other things.

During their season of Dormancy And Rest, or Winter, many attacks were made against them using cruel techniques. IN the end their rule was dismantled and they were forced to pay for "retributions." Having no home and no wealth, they agreed to contracts that essentially trapped them and their families in generations of forced labor, abusive surveillance, and working conditions that violated many human rights.

Most work in the Fire Works, where their energy is used either to forge weapons with their fire or create magical energy capsules for a variety of purposes. It's a grim and gruesome reality. Schooling and any method for empowerment or escape from that lifestyle are banned using racist ideas to back it up.

Red, or rather Flicker in this au, worked and lived in those horrible conditions. One day, an older man who had taken care of him, was being yelled at by one of the surveyors. He was too slow. It didn't matter that he was overworked, exhausted, and slowed down by the years of intense labor. He'd be punished for his slowness anyways. Most of the time, the only reason it happened was just to make an example.

At a certain point, everyone reaches a limit. Even though it was stupid, and the elder man begged him not too, Flicker tried to defend him. Tried to make an excuse or aid him in some way, to make the pain less. Things only escalated unfortunately. Then other people were roped into it. More serious threats were made.

Flicker, well, he ended up determined to defend him. And with his own temper his own flame flared up. So hot it broke his own restraints. Apparently, he was "gifted" with a strong fire. People like that were sent down to the Tartarus Plant. No one ever came back from there. No one that ever went there saw the sky again. The beautiful sun would be a dead memory.

So he ran. Sure, it was a rather explosive escape. Sure, if he was caught he'd face a fate worse than death itself. Maybe he accidentally did cause several fires because of the adrenaline and lack of restraint paired with this "gift" (more like a curse.) Miraculously he manages to escape on a raft. Or well, he would've been shot down if Flicker did that. The Island was full of guards.

It's more accurate that they thought he died and then he thought he died when the small boat exploded around him. Flicker wasn't exactly sure what happened. A selkie folk, who knew the ocean and its depths, wouldv've realized that he'd been dragged off by a vicious rip current. And managed to survive purely because he was entangled in a boyyant piece of the small boat he stole.

As for the whole "drowning" issue? No clue on that, for all anyone would ever guess is that either some guardian spirit was watching over him or maybe he just was so near death and hot that he just created an air bubble from all the water he was heating up. Who knows honestly.

Of course, when he washed up in some small cave on the cliff side of some foreign land, he had to admit he was relieved. Sure, there was no way out due to the tides that blocked the exit of the cave. Perhaps, he'd never leave this place and he'd just starve inside, it wasn't like he could swim. Honestly, it was better than whatever fate was awaiting him at the Fire Works.

But then he noticed a frozen chunk of ice near the corner of the cave. At first, he thought it was a strange rock, he'd never seen ice before. There was even clams growing around it as well. He felt droplets melt as he touched it. While he observed the strange thing, he noticed a strange shape inside. So, he melted through it. And then...

A MEAL- Okay, it was probably some dead disease infested animal that died some unfortunate death- But cmon! It PROBABLY wouldn't kill him and honestly- Maybe he could make this work! He'd get enough energy from eating that weird freaky looking animal and maybe he'd learn how to fish! He could just- Drink the water dripping from the stalactites above! He'd survive!!

Well, that's what he thought before he was about to try to cook the dead thawed thing and then it suddenly opened its eyes and shrieked and bit him. Oh, and then it turned into a whole freaking man with weird white hair and crap.

Then the guy started screaming more! Sure, maybe it was because Flicker was screaming too- But in his defense he didn't expect his dead meal to just BECOME A RANDOM GUY?

Things calmed down and they established that they didn't want to kill each other. Then they both demanded what the hell was up with the other dude in the cave. Apparently "Buwe" was trapped in ice or cursed or something. He seemed strangely concerned for Flicker though, Flicker couldn't really understand why.

After a bit of peace and making up for the "accidentally trying to eat/bite you" scenario with some fish that Buwe had caught they chatted some more. Buwe was determined to take Flicker home with him. But the more Buwe talked.. Yeah, Flicker wasn't exactly schooled, but he started to realize everything this guy was describing.. From money and the state of the kingdoms and whatever else? He sounded like he was alive when the Nari'shi were free.

So, they started to put together that Buwe's entire family and tribe were probably dead because apparently he'd been frozen in ice for over two hundred years.

Buwe, brilliant man that he is, decides he's going to cope by adopting Flicker. Flicker, who doesn't want to die and is appreciative of this strange man who has provided food and protection find's himself accepting this agreement. Even though he's literally an adult but apparently, "Smol brother is smol brother" was enough reasoning for Buwe so this was just his life now.

They tried to go back to Buwe's old village, but after seeing the way the grief absolutely wrecked Buwe, Flicker encouraged them to find a new life elsewhere together. Buwe agreed and they set off.

#fs #fs au #four keys #four keys flicker #my art #four swords #four swords au

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dailyadventureprompts · 2 years

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Adventure: A Wager Among the Waves

Never try to cheat a dragon, not only are they sore losers, whatever game you’re playing you’re playing it by their rules.

Hooks

Having traveled to Port Sweldin in order to catch a ship, the party get to enjoy a few days enjoying the picturesque beachtown while waiting for a vessel known to be traveling to their destination. Sweldin boasts of lively boardwalk amusements, charming market streets, and a thriving artist community that caters to both tourists and wealthy folk summering

All seems to be going well until early on the morning of their fourth day when the party assembles to see their ship come in only to watch as it suddenly begins to sink out in the harbor. Rescue boats are dispatched ( which the party may be pressganged into) but the effort is interrupted when a grey scaled dragon launches from the waters below and delivers an ultimatum to those gathered to watch the chaos: His name is Xemplaris, and he is there to claim their shore by right of challenge as the town once challenged him long ago. Before he leaves, he claims that he will sink any ship he sees out on the water, throwing Sweldin into chaos and preventing the party from reaching their long sought destination.

No one has any idea how the port managed to anger a dragon, but when the party investigates a few miles up the shore they find that the chalenge they’re expected to meet him in is not combat, but an elaborate game. Xemplaris has smoothed out the beach and drawn in a grid, arranging his side of it with large stones and giant shells. Apparently he expects the party to source their own pieces before he tells them the rules, which will require them to go savaging above and below the tideline to find the assortment of oversized tokens needed to compete. The dragon will take great amusement in this, and may engage them in conversation as they thrash about in the surf. during which they may be able to piece together why the beast is doing all this beyond just draconic greed.

Setup: Several hundred years ago, Beryl Sweldin was a dwarven huckster entrepreneur in search of his next con venture, after being chased out to the coast after his most recent scam enterprise went belly up. Born the son of an imperial scout and surveyor, Sweldin knew a good patch of land when he saw it, and stumbled across a stretch of shore that with a little dredging and other sorts of management would make a fine deepwater port. The only problem was that this stretch of land was inhabitted by a young dragon, who’d grown up alone among the dunes, lairing in the shell of some massive sea-beast that’d long ago died on the beach. Already large enough to pose a threat, Sweldin cozied up to the young Xemplaris, offering him shiny trinkets to earn his trust and persuading the innocent creature that he was a friend. After that, the draogn was just another mark, and Sweldin was going to fleece him of everything he had. Sweldin devised a game and taught it to the dragon, wagering coins and baubles along each match and instilling the young wyrm with an undersanding that games like these were binding and one must always abide by their outcome. Naturally Sweldin was cheating, adding more rules and complications to the game each time that the dragon could get caught up in. After half a year of this grift, Seldin eventually tricked Xemplaris into wagering the entire beach and the giant shell which served as his home, and when the little dragon lost he went away weeping.

After that it was easy for Sweldin to bilk a few inverters into his new project, as deepwater ports were sure to be big business. His grand house still sits on a hill overlooking what he made, its floors and couryard tiled with fragments from a great leviathan’s shell hauled up from the shore.

The Shore game is played in an 8x8 grid, with players taking turns to deploy their pieces anywhere across the first three rows infront of them. The game is often played in sand, and while the grid should be as straight as possible the topography does not need to be even.

Pieces are as follows:

8 roundish stones, all the same color: the main playing piece of the game, these pieces can only be moved two squares at a time. They can also be “flicked” at another piece to remove it from play. If the stone lands its hit, the struck piece is removed and the stone stays in, taking the removed piece’s postion ,were as if flies off the board without making contact it is considered out. Xemplaris requires stones for his game to be large enough for HIM to flick, meaning that for the average humanoid they are improvised weapons with a range increment of 5/15

4 tall shells: These pieces serve as the primary goals of the game, with a player losing once all 4 of their shells have been knocked down. These Shells cannot be moved once placed, and after they fall, no piece can be placed on the spaces into 2 spaces into which they have fallen. Xemplaris uses the figureheads of different ships he’s salvaged as his point counters, and is very proud of them.

2 Flat shells: These shells move like chess knights, leaping over other pieces. If they land on an enemy piece (including a tall shell) that piece is out, but if they land on a friendly stone, that stone is protected and cannot be taken if struck ( the flat shell needs to be struck first to remove it). Xemplaris uses giant chunks of coral for these pieces.

1 Stick: The stick is three grid spaces long can be placed wherever the owner wants it provided there is not another piece in the way, including digging it into the sand at an angle. The stick is not removed when it is struck by stones, and stones cannot be placed into spaces the stick occupies ( though the flat shell can still remove it). Xemplaris uses an entire driftwood trunk as his stick.

2 Shiny tokens: Not placed on the board, these tokens amount to an attempted “do over” allowing you to retake a shot or force an opponent to retake one of theirs. If the do-over is successful, the one who called for the do-over has to give the other player one of their tokens. Regardless of the outcome of the game, whoever’s holding the tokens keeps them after the game is over. Xemplaris’s tokens are a pair of shimmering gems, and expects the party to ante something equally valuable which may require them to haggle with a jewler back in port. The dragon will also allow one of the challengers to ante their eyes in place of tokens, taking vindictive pleasure in making them wager something precious to them.

The players take turns moving two of their pieces at a time, though only the roundish stones can be used twice in the same round ( first moving, then flicking). Play ends when one player has all their pointy shells knocked over, or when both players are out of stones to toss, in which case the player with the most pointy shells standing wins. in the event of a tie, the player with the most tokens wins, after which the game is a draw.

Further Adventures:

The world was not kind to Xemplaris after he was evicted, and for centuries the dragon has nursed a shameful sorrow that slowly transmuted into hate when he matured and realized the dwarf had cheated him. Deeply hurt and fixated on winning his home back, the dragon has spent years codifying Sweldin’s nonsense game into something he considers fair, subconsciously convinced that if he could beat the long dead huckster he could undo the hurt he suffered after losing his home and fending for himself in the wider world. His wager is simple: if he loses, he won’t destroy the port in an act of draconic wrath. If he wins: The port is his, and everyone else needs to leave or risk being burned alive. Xemplaris sees this as justice for the exile he was forced to endure, nevermind how unbalanced the scales might be.

With his new found fortune, Sweldin married into the prosperous Stouthull clan, and used their combined influences over the newly forming town to invest heavily in shipping. The vessel the party were set to sail on belonged to the Stouthulls, which gives Sweldin’s decendants a perfect excuse to aim the party at Xemplaris in order to buy time to rally their defences and secure their assets. They knew the dragon was coming after all, Sweldin had told his children about the centuries long graceperiod he’d gotten the dragon to agree on before their next “rematch” and it was kept as family secret while they prepared various countermeasures. The Stouthulls promise the party a fortune to just kill the dragon if they can, or delay long enough for them to ready wyrmkilling construct and enchanted balista they’d had prepared for just such an occasion.

If Xemplaris loses his game, he’ll fly into a rage, a half millennia of regret pouring through him and spurring him to rampage through town, tearing apart buildings desperate to find the shell that was once his only shelter. If the party can’t talk him down, they or the Stouthulls will have to kill him, being hailed for heroes in their part but always being haunted by the wyrm’s last words: “ It’s not fair, I just wanted my home back, It’s not fair, It’s not fair”

If the party do manage to talk Xemplaris down ( what port city wouldn’t want to have a draconic protector on the naval payroll?) and eventually return to Port Sweldin, they’ll find that the populace has gone a bit mad for the Shore Game, playing a table-sized version on the boardwalk and at the biweekly tournament hosted outside the dragon’s new beachside lair. The heroes will of course have made an enemy of the Southull clan but honestly, who’d pick a pack of greedy, murderous merchants over having a boardgame playing dragon friend?

#dragon #villain #monster hunt #seaside #seeking transport #town #settlement #ocean #Merchant #minigame #dare #dnd #dungeons and dragons #adventure #5e homebrew #homebrew adventure

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smallcatsims · 11 months

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Regency Career Pack Part IV: Freetime Careers

And here are some defaults for the Freetime careers. These will replace the Entertainment, Dance, Architecture, Intelligence, and Oceanography careers.

Credits to @victoriansimmer, @simbury, @kidinthenight, @morgaine2005, and the Historical Sims discord.

More info under the cut, and here is the link

So, about the careers:

Entertainment: Replaced with a theatre career. Your sim will start off as a “Fan” working in a local pub that caters to actors, they will eventually become a theatre sweeper, extra, understudy, and so on until they are getting leading roles and possibly directing plays!

Dance: Replaced with a woohoo worker career! The previous versions I have uploaded have some pretty serious typos and errors so I would recommend this one. Performers in general were considered to be pretty low status and essentially the same as woohoo workers, so that’s why I chose dance. Your sim starts out as a street walker and eventually gets their foot in the door of a brothel, rises through the ranks and eventually is able to buy their own brothel, and potentially keep company with some very powerful sims and be paid accordingly.

Architecture: Replaced with an era appropriate architect career. Mostly new chance cards. It was hard to research this one but I did my best. Basically an architecture firm would hire a surveyor who would supervise individual craftsmen who worked separately from each other to build different parts of the building. So your sim starts out as a laborer to help the actual craftsmen fetch and carry things, then crafts stonework and woodwork until they are promoted to surveyor and then able to join the actual architect firm, where they can work their way up to senior architect, and then perhaps become the city manager or palace architect.

Intelligence: My spy career that I’ve uploaded here before, with fixed typos, errors, and pay. Lots of lore from the sims medieval.

Oceanography: Replaced with a Navy career. Your sim works their way through the ranks and does boat stuff that is actually legal. This was the one that made this particular career pack take so long because it was so boring to try and write stuff for this when I had already had so much fun writing ten levels of pirate content. But I got it done for our goodie two shoes sims who like the ocean but would rather not murder and rob sims.

#mycc #sims 2 #ts2cc #ts2 historical #ts2 #ts2 regency #default careers #historical defaults #default replacements

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ccohanlon · 7 months

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how i live

I woke at midnight, last night, to a hard sou’westerly and the floor moving in three directions at once — pitching, rolling, rising-and-falling. Now, six hours later, the wind has moderated. Everything is still. The rest of the world is obscured by grey mist and sporadic showers, as if the sky has fallen across the shore.

I climb up a short ladder to the companionway to check that all is well on deck — it’s the first thing I do every morning — then I return to my bunk to download email and read a couple of news sites on a laptop before my wife wakes and we have a cup of coffee together across the varnished teak table that separates our bunks.

We talk about what we want to do today and waste a minute or two trying to agree a time-table before giving up. For half a decade, we have scraped by with a minimum of routine or planning. We are singularly unadept at making lists or coordinating diaries. We end up doing most things together. Today, we will pick up some paint and shackles at a chandlery and find a local metal fabricator to repair or replicate a damaged stainless steel stanchion. We also have to buy some groceries. But first I want to repair our rubber dinghy.

My wife and I live on a 32-foot sailboat. It is a life-raft of sorts. It is also an island on which we are trying to regain an unsettled but sheltered freedom after several years of being homeless. Most days, we feel like castaways, with no hope of ever being rescued.

It’s hard to explain how we ended up here. Moving aboard was not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but an act of quiet desperation. We had dropped out of a life in which I had somehow ended up running two well-known, medium-sized companies, one of them publicly listed — before those roles, I had been a musician, gambler, seaman, smuggler, photographer, magazine editor, and governmental adviser — and we had taken to wandering slowly across Europe, the UK, and North Africa. After a year holed up on the southern coast of Spain, a few miles east of Gibraltar, riding out the worst of the pandemic, we moved to southern Italy, where we acquired, and set about restoring, a small ruin, part of servants’ quarters attached to a 16th century Spanish castle, in a village not far from Lecce, in Puglia. We had just completed the work, two years later, when the local Questura, the office of the Carabinieri that oversees Italian immigration, rejected our third application for temporary residence and issued a formal instruction to us to leave Italy — and Europe’s Schengen zone.

The boat was not something we thought through in any detail. I had spent a lot of time at sea in my youth and had lived on sailing boats of various sizes on the Channel coasts of England and France, as well as in the Mediterranean. Which is to say, I had an understanding of their discomforts. But the prospect of resuming a life that, before we ended up in southern Italy, involved moving every three months — not just from one temporary accommodation to another but from one country to another, so as not to contravene the terms of our largely visa-less travel — had exhausted us. I made an offer on a cheap, neglected, 45-year-old, fibreglass sloop I had come across online and organised a marine surveyor to look it over for me. He gave it a cautious thumbs up.

I won’t forget my wife’s dolorous expression, a month later, when she saw the boat for the first time. It was in an industrial area of Southampton, on a dreich morning in early spring — bitterly cold, windy, and raining. Around us, the Itchen River’s ebb had revealed swathes of black, foul-smelling mud. Raised far from the sea, on the plains of north-eastern Oklahoma, my wife told me later she had been praying that our journey to this glum backwater was part of some elaborate practical joke.

There is a whole genre of YouTube videos created by those who live on sailboats full-time and voyage all over the world. The most popular, the so-called ‘influencers’, are young(ish) couples or families with capacious, often European-built, plastic catamarans or monohulls. Their videos focus less on the gritty, day-to-day grind of boat maintenance and passage-making and more on sojourns in ancient, stone-built harbours in the Mediterranean, white, sandy beaches and palm-fringed cays in the Caribbean, or improbably blue lagoons and solitary atolls in the South Pacific, where they barbecue fresh fish, paddle-board, kite-surf and practice yoga and aerial silks for the envy of hundreds of thousands of followers. My wife’s and my life aboard together is nothing like any of this.

We are both in our sixties — I am just a year away from seventy — and we have spent more than a decade on the move around the world, at first following eclectic opportunities for employment then, when those opportunities receded, in search of somewhere we might be able to settle with very little money. Four months after moving aboard our boat, we still think of ourselves as vagabond travellers, our boat a shambolic, floating vardo that we haven’t yet managed to turn into a home. We’re not really ‘cruisers’, despite the sense of community we sometimes find among them, but we are seafarers — historically, a marginal existence driven by necessity. A recent, 150-nautical-mile passage westward along the south coast of England was a shakedown during which we learned how to make our aged, shabby vessel more comfortable and easier to handle and to trust her capacity to keep us safe at sea.

She bore the name Endymion when we bought her — after my least favourite poem by John Keats (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever…”) — but we re-named her Wrack. Depending on the source, ‘wrack’ describes seaweeds or seagrasses that wash up along a shore or the scattered traces of a shipwreck, either of which might be metaphors for my wife and me in old age. It is certainly how we feel when we’re not at sea. Life aboard Wrack is spartan — fresh water stored in a dozen polyethylene jerry cans, no hot or cold running water, no refrigeration and when the temperature drops, no heating either — so, from time to time, we concede the cost of berthing in marinas to gain access to on-site laundries, showers, flushing toilets, and wi-fi. Whether we’re berthed or anchored somewhere, we shop for food once a week — mainly vegetables, fruit, bread, pasta, and rice but little dairy and no meat — and eat one meal a day, cooked in the mid-afternoon on a two-burner gas stove.

The days we spend in close proximity to others’ lives ashore remind us how disenfranchised ours have become. We were homeless before we acquired Wrack, but now we are without a legal residence anywhere, even in our ‘home’ countries. We enter and exit borders uneasily as ‘visitors’, our stays limited to 90 or 180 days, depending on where we are. We have no access to banking, insurance, social services or, with a few exceptions, emergency health care. Even the modest Australian pensions we have a right to can only be received if we have been granted residence in countries with which Australia has reciprocal arrangements — and we haven’t. It’s hard even for other live-aboards to understand how deeply we are enmired in this peculiar bureaucratic statelessness. It’s harder for us to deal with it every day.

But life afloat provides consolations. We are ceaselessly attuned to the weather and our boat’s responses to subtle shifts in the sea state, tide and wind even when we are tethered to a dock. We appreciate the shelter — and surprising cosiness — the limited space below decks affords us but the impulse to surrender to the elements and let them propel us elsewhere is insistent. Our best days are offshore, even when the conditions are testing; the world shrinks to just the two of us, our boat and the implacable, mutable sea around us. Whatever problems we face ashore become, at least for the duration of a passage, abstract and insignificant. We sail without a specific destination — ‘towards’ rather than ‘to’, as traditional navigators would have it — and without purpose. Time drifts.

At least half of every day is spent maintaining, repairing, or re-organising the boat, an unavoidable and time-consuming part of our days, especially at sea. When we’re at anchor or berthed in a marina, we do what we can to sustain ourselves. Most afternoons are spent prospecting for drips of income from journalism and crowd-funding — a source inspired by those younger YouTube adventurers — or adding a few hundred words to a manuscript for a non-fiction book commissioned by a Dutch publisher, whose patience has been stretched to breaking point. Because of our visitor visa status, we can’t seek gainful employment ashore, and we have long since lost contact with any of the networks that once provided us with a higher-than-average income as freelancers. Our existence, by any definition, is impoverished and perilously marginal, we have little social life, yet we make the effort to appreciate our circumstances, even if it’s just to sit together in silence and absorb the elemental white noise of wind and sea, to do nothing, to not think.

Our precariousness burdens our four adult children, who have scattered to San Diego, Sydney, Berlin and Rome: “Where are you now?” our youngest asks. “How long will you be there?” We speak to each at least once a week. Not all of them long for fixedness but they do want desperately for us to have a ‘real home’, somewhere we can assemble occasionally as a family. We will be grandparents for the first time, soon. Like our few friends, our children worry that we might become lost — in every sense.

My wife and I are uncomfortably aware of our financial and physical vulnerability but at our ages, we can no longer cling to the faint hope that there’s an end to it. We have committed to an unlikely, reckless voyage. All we can do is maintain a rough dead reckoning of its course and embrace the uncharted and the relentless unexpected.

First published in The Idler, UK, 2023.

#life #living #poverty #sea #seafaring #memoir #theidler #uk #vagabondlife #liveaboard

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simexmarinesurveyor · 4 months

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Accredited Marine Surveyors in South Florida

Call Simex International Marine Surveyors at 954-854-8181 for all of your marine surveying needs in South Florida. Simex International Marine Surveyors also operates in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties. They also provide additional services like marine consultants, familiarization cruises, and yacht owner lessons.

#marine customs survey #vessel delivery #foreign boat evaluation surveyor #yacht delivery #marine customs surveyor

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boatingforbeginners · 28 days

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Marine Surveyor Fort Lauderdale - Why Should You Consider Getting Boat Insurance in Florida?

The state of Florida does not require boat owners to buy insurance for their vessels. However, this does not mean you should forego boat insurance. There are circumstances that may mandate you to get insurance coverage for your boat such as your bank when using your boat as collateral. There are also marinas that require boat owners to have insurance. In this case, you will most likely have to work with a marine surveyor Fort Lauderdale for an insurance survey.

While boat insurance is not mandatory in Florida, boat owners have to obtain a safety identification card, get a title and register the boat. They are also required to have certain safety equipment on board. If you are new to boating in Florida, a quick consultation with a marine surveyor Fort Lauderdale can help you understand what is needed.

Here are the main reasons you should consider boat insurance in Florida:

Florida has busy waterways. This increases the risk of accidents. Getting insurance protects you from out-of-pocket expenses.

The state of Florida experiences hurricanes and storms. These risks make boat insurance prudent.

Getting boat insurance guarantees peace of mind while operating your vessel.

Coverage provided by boat insurance includes:

Damage to the vessel or any personal property

Liability coverage for damage caused to other people’s properties

Medical coverage for injuries to you or guests on the boat

Uninsured boat owner coverage for when you are hit by an uninsured vessel

Towing coverage for times of emergencies

As you get boat insurance, keep in mind that insurance policies usually have specific navigational territory. If you are involved in an accident outside your territory, coverage may not apply.

#marine surveyor #used boat #florida #Fort Lauderdale #boat insurance

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tomorrowusa · 4 months

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South Carolina, where Nikki Haley was governor for six years, is just one of two states without hate crimes laws. So the feds had to pick up the slack when some blatant incidents took place in Horry County.

The FBI has searched a house in South Carolina after a white couple allegedly put up a cross that faced their Black neighbors and set it on fire. On Wednesday morning, federal agents searched the house of 28-year-old Worden Butler and 27-year-old Alexis Hartnett in Horry county for a “civil rights investigation involving allegations of racial discrimination”, WBTW reports the agency saying. According to Horry county police reports reviewed by WPDE, between 23 and 24 November, Butler and Hartnett, who are white, allegedly harassed and stalked their neighbors, who are Black, with “racially motivated words and actions”. In one incident, Butler and Hartnett reportedly erected a cross that faced their neighbors’ privacy fence. “The cross was facing the victims’ home and the suspect set the cross on fire,” a police report said. The neighbors have been identified as Shawn and Monica Williams, WMBF reports. Speaking to the outlet, Monica Williams said, “There was a cross burning about eight feet from our fence … We were speechless because we’ve never experienced something like that.” “He’s blatant with the N-word … He’s chased off our surveyors. He’s chased off people from the water and sewer department,” she added. Butler was also accused of publicizing the Williamses’ location on Facebook by posting a picture of their mailbox which has their address posted on it, one of the police reports said. It added that Butler posted on Facebook that he was “summoning the devil’s army and I don’t care if they and I both go down in the same boat”. [ ... ] South Carolina is one of two states – the other being Wyoming – without hate crime laws based on someone’s race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, national origin or physical or mental ability, according to the Associated Press.

While Butler and Hartnett can't be charged with hate crimes in South Carolina, Horry County (which includes Myrtle Beach) is charging them with second-degree harassment and third-degree assault and battery.

^^^ They sorta look the way you'd expect white supremacists to look. Hope they like orange.

#south carolina #horry county #hate crimes #cross burning #racism #fbi #worden butler #alexis hartnett #second-degree harassment #third-degree assault #lock them up!

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theangrycomet-art · 1 year

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Mermaid x Biologist AU anyone?

random AU that’s been floating around in my brain for a while for these two

- Kiawe is (roughly) 20-25 tall head to tail

- Akari’s one of the top surveyor for the Galaxy Research team

- when Akari was working with Iscan on trying to get rid of the tangled nets some other fishing boat, they found Mimo tangled in the nets

- after a few days Kiawe & co showed up (having been tracking/trashing the original fishing boat)

#Mermay #Akari #Shou #Kiawe #Kaki #Trial Captain Kiawe #Pokemon #PLA #Pokemon SuMo #Kiawe x Akari #Akari x Kiawe #Pokemon Legends Arceus #Pokemon Sun and Moon #TheAngryComet ART

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scotianostra · 1 year

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On the morning of February 5th 1941 the people of the Outer Hebridean island of Eriskay woke up and thought all their Christmases had come at once.

Part two telling the fate of the S S Politiain, which ran aground off Eriskay on this day in 1941.

At 10.30am on 5th February 1941 one of the ship's lifeboats left with 26 men and was washed ashore at the foot of the cliffs of Rudha Dubh, across the Sound on South Uist. Although the boat was smashed to pieces the crew survived without any injuries, but they returned to the 'Politician' by the Eriskay ferryboat later the same day. At 4.45pm the RNLI lifeboat came from Barra to rescue all of the 50 crew and land them on the Island of Barra. Chief Officer RA Swain recalls how the islanders were "very kind, replenished us with hot drinks laced with good rum, and generally made us very comfortable for the night".

The next morning, 6th February, Captain Worthington and his officers returned to the ship to see if there was any hope of re-floating her, but water had flooded the engine room and several of the ships' holds.

On 8th February the Liverpool and Glasgow Salvage Association tender 'SS Ranger' arrived with a party of salvage experts led by Commander Kay and divers, to survey the damage to the ship. The Ranger also supplied power to the winches to help the Captain and crew remove some of the 500 tons of cargo, which as well as the whisky included cars, bicycles, mail and cotton. The severe gales hampered attempts to remove the cargo and inspect the ship for salvage. It was not until 15th February that divers were able to inspect the ship's hull. Captain Kay, in charge of the salvage operation, decided to make no attempt to save the whisky as its hold (number 5) was flooded with water and fuel oil, and he believed it was contaminated. For this reason he didn't place an armed guard on the ship.

On 18th February the coaster 'Corteen' began loading the salvaged cargo, and four days later sailed for Glasgow fully loaded. The salvors had salvaged as much of the cargo as they could without diving and on 24th February the salvage officer, Commander Kay, signalled "Regret... diver's examinations shows salvage of vessel impracticable". The ship was declared a total loss and it was decided to leave the 'Politician' where she was. That same day, 24th February, the crew left the ship for the last time, and Harrisons gave notice of the abandonment of the ship to the insurers. On 12th March the Liverpool and Glasgow Salvage Association abandoned the salvage project.

Free whisky for all!

When the locals learned from the crew what the ship was carrying, a series of illegal salvage operations took place on the night of the stranding before the customs and excise officials arrived. The whisky was especially welcome because the island's had dried up due to war-time rationing. So the islanders helped themselves to some of the 28,000 cases (264,000 bottles) of whisky, or usquebaugh, as they knew it in their native laguage, Gaelic, which had been destined for the American market.

No islander regarded it as stealing because the rules of salvage meant that once it was in the sea, it was theirs to rescue. As word of the 'Polly' whisky spread, people came in small boats from islands closest to Barra, Lewis, Mull and the mainland. Rumours spread that the 'Polly' whisky even had magical qualities and didn't cause hangovers!

Unfortunately for the locals the customs officers, surveyor EI Gledhill and fixed officer Charles McColl based in Lochboisdale, didn't share the view that it was okay to salvage the whisky. Charles McColl, a teetotaler, saw it as theft, made worse by the fact that the whisky had never had any duty paid on it. He did not agree with Captain Kay that the whisky was unsalvageable, and that it was safe to leave it on board unguarded.

A second salvage company which later came to break up the ship, emptied hold number 5 and recovered 13,500 cases of whisky. The major part of this was transferred to storage in a customs warehouse on the mainland but some was drunk by the salvers themselves!

McColl began a battle to rally the local police into taking action to recover the stolen whisky. Village homes and crofts were searched and bottles were found hidden away in lofts, hideaways or just drunk to hide the evidence! Even today caches of 'Polly' whisky still come to light when houses are renovated.

Charles McColl and the local police caught many of the locals looting or hiding whisky when they searched households and hiding places on the islands of Benbecula, South Uist and Eriskay, between 15 March and 30 September 1941. They succeeded in recovering a considerable quantity of the goods stolen, including a wide range of whisky. An Inverness-Shire Constabulary report for the 15 March 1941 records that:

"Alexander O'Henley, crofter, Garryamonie, Lochboisdale, Isle of South Uist, and four others acting in concert were found in the sound of Eriskay in the parish of South Uist in the county of Inverness, in possession of the after mentioned goods suspected of having been stolen from the 'SS Politician' then aground on Calvay Island in the Sound of Eriskay:

15 cases of whisky,

3 bundles of cotton print,

13 packets of 10 capstan cigarettes,

2 cycle mudguards,

1 handrail."

On 26th April a group of Barra men stood trial at Lochmaddy Sheriff Court, where they pleaded guilty to theft and were fined between three to five pounds. Charles McColl was unhappy at the leniency of the sentence, and pursued more men, 19 of whom received harsher sentences of between 20 days and 2 months imprisonment at Inverness and Peterhead. This created resentment amongst the locals which lingers to this day. McColl estimated that the islanders had salvaged 24, 000 bottles of whisky and wanted to make sure they could rescue no more so he obtained official permission in October 1941 to blow up the 'Politician'

In April 1941 the Salvage Association of London came to an arrangement with the British Iron and Steel Corporation (Salvage) Ltd of Glasgow to carry out a second salvage operation prior to the towing of the vessel to the ship breakers. They arrived to find the 'Polly' in a sorry state, everything movable had been looted. Examination by divers showed there was great rock under her engine room, and number 5 hold, the engine room and stoke hole were completely flooded with the water level rising and falling with the tide.

Their first job was to lighten the ship so divers salvaged the bales of cotton and cases of whisky. The strongroom believed to be holding the banknotes was also hidden between decks in the number 5 hold but when it was opened the money wasn't there. Boxes containing £360,000 in banknotes were later found hidden amongst the whisky cases. Why it was hidden there and not in the safe is not known.

In May the salvage vessel 'Assistance' lifted and forwarded more cargo to Glasgow. An attempt was made to re-float the 'Politician' on 20th September 1941, to tow her to Lochboisdale. The attempt failed and she came to rest on another rocky outcrop concealed in a sand bank and broke her back. Customs officers Gledhill and McColl estimated there was still 1,000 cases of whisky in hold number 5 so they obtained permission to dynamite the hold. This was carried out in October 1941, much to the dismay of the islanders, their emotions summed up by Angus John Campbell, who commented;

"Dynamiting whisky! You wouldn't think there'd be men in the world so crazy as that!"

Salvage attempts continued on and off until July 1944. The ship was broken into two halves, with the forward section towed to Glasgow for breaking up and the sunken after section left where she lay. Today the wreck of the 'SS Politician' still lies off the coast of Eriskay, hidden below the waterline now, her deck and cabins long since destroyed by the wild sea.

The stranding of the 'Politician' would have been forgotten as just a minor incident amongst many occurring to the Harrison Line fleet of ships during the Second World War, when they lost 30 of their 46 ships.

During the war the incident was not reported to the public, but the rumours in the highlands and islands of the West of Scotland would have been heard by the author Compton Mackenzie on the neighbouring island of Barra. The story of the 'Politician' became immortalised in his 1947 novel, 'Whiskey Galore', renamed the 'S Cabinet Minister'. When this was made into the Ealing comedy film in 1949, her story became the stuff of national legend, a remake was released in 2016.

The 'Politican' continues to rouse interest with stories of whisky still being discovered on the Islands. In 1987 eight bottles found by Donald MacPhee from South Uist sold at Christies for £4,000, and in 2003 Bonhams sold a single lid from a Ballantine's whisky crate for £1,500. As recently as August 2010 one single Ballantine's bottle of whisky sold for £4,200!

In 1988 the island of Eriskay got its first 'legitimate' pub, named Am Politician, 'The Politician' in Gaelic.

In 1989 a salvage company, SS Politician plc, was founded to salvage whisky and other cargo. After moving hundreds of tons of sand they only recovered 24 more bottles.

As I touched upon earlier the Polly was carrying another valable cargo, Bank Notes!

Conspiracy theories prevail, mostly surrounding the reason she was carrying almost 290,000 ten shilling notes (£145,000), the equivalent of several million pounds today. Why was this amount of money being sent to Jamaica? Was it in case the government and royal family were preparing to evacuate the UK?

The Crown Agents for Overseas Governments report from 1973 describes how the government hoped that they would not get into circulation but they started turning up on the shore. Local children were seen playing with them on the beach at Benbecula but;

"the locals, most of whom are known to be incriminated in the looting, are too wily to give anything away"

An empty cash case was also found abandoned in the hold of the ship. By June the bank notes from the 'SS Politician' were turning up in bank branches in Liverpool and as far away as Jamaica, Switzerland and the USA. By 1958 the Crown Agents reported that 211,267 (£360,000) of the 290,000 notes had been recovered by the salvage company and a further 2,329 had been presented in banks in England and all over the world. There are still about 75,000 banknotes which have never been accounted for, their whereabouts remain a mystery.

The mystery is fuelled by the fact that government papers concerning the 'Politician' are still the subject of a 75 year old closure rule, which means we may not know the answer until 2016.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is how the 'Politician' came to be grounded in the first place? Why was she sailing full steam ahead up a narrow shallow rocky channel? The weather and black-out conditions of wartime certainly contributed and there is some evidence to suggest that she had changed direction to avoid a south bound convoy, which forced her west off her projected course. The locals have a simpler answer - it was the islanders calling for their whisky!

#Scotland #scottish #Outer Hebrides #Eriskay #shipwreck #maritime history #world war two #history #Whisky

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