Hey...speaking of helicopters we got R44's again....spend half the day riding the blade.

.... more economical and earth friendly then the BLM's  chopper

here's a small video of working the Kotlik project if you want to die of boredom

will add some photos soon...stay tuned.

June 23,  2007 

Amsterdam was a small holiday meet up with our dear arsehole friend Lee from England who traveled with us  across Africa many years ago.

Here's a small gallery of the Amsterdam trip.     Less Cultural trip this one around and more of an insight into local social studies. (whoops....I guess only 3 or 4 photos are Amsterdam...the rest are bits and pieces of Scotland)

Many men have come in search of the Tobermory Wiskey Distillery

Okay from Amsterdam we took off for Scotland and to          Sail the Inner Hebrides   around the Isle of Mull. 

There was an incredible amount of forces out to make us fail. There were unseen Wrecks and Rocks, Royal Navy Submarines, Storms and tidal currents, dragging anchors, reverse colour navigation buoys, curry dinners. Docks and navigation aids seemed to get in the way of the boats forward progress from time to time.  But we succeeded where others had failed (as recorded by official wreck symbols on British Admiralty Marine Charts)

Our first encounter with the wind in the Sound of Mull.

First Port of Call, Tobermory, Isle of Mull. ( panoramic photo)

Jonathan on the Isle of Coll

Mary and Birt initiate an Abrupt Diesel EngineTack

 Basking Shark. As motoring into the harbour at Coll...I looked to  aft so as to gauge the distance towards  another motoring yacht to find a very large dorsal fin  just off our stern, maybe 30 ft. ...not until it's caudal fin broke the surface did we realize it to be a Basking Shark.  And one that probably had tangled with a ships propeller cutting off the top portion of its dorsal fin. (found this photo below on the web)

Here's a little multi media ditty to round out the holiday.

June 7,  2007 3:00am

Happy Birthday Mare...congratulations....your a whole year older than I.

Cant sleep....all jet lagged out...everything is very quiet Mary is sound asleep and Lee is crashed forward. I'm alone in my consciousness...maybe I should wake somebody up....its not fair they sleep in bliss and I am trapped in awareness at 3:00 am....the boat has a gentle rock to it as it lies in harbor. The wooden planks creak softly now and then...The City of Amsterdam barely makes a noise outside. The inside of the boat looms large...it is 140 feet long and about 20 feet wide. All this space holding in all this silence....I have to suppress the urge to march up and down the inside of the boat stomping my feet in wooden clogs and clashing  together two large cymbals while  singing Hari Rama, Hari Hari Rama... at the top of my lungs. 

So I guess I'll just pop an Amstel and maybe try to write a story to go to sleep by about nothing in particular.........

They have been following me for weeks

We have been following him for weeks

Well here we are. Amsterdam. You gotta love Amsterdam. Conduit and collision of the worlds trade in business and pleasure. Grimy city unlike Netherlands proper. City of Lights. Should be called city of Transvestites....Thiefs, aging American hippies, terrorists, tourists and hacks. Johnny Black swilling jap businessmen....gays..lesbians...drifters..., cokeheads, mainlining junkies and other hopeless druggies, destitute alcoholic ghetto dwelling low life freakazoids.  And their all riding bicycles.

Well here we are. Amsterdam. you gotta love Amsterdam. conduit and collision of the worlds trade in information. Every political entity has his vermin crawling the streets of Amsterdam. Drugs, Guns, and wars....go to Islamabad if that's your gig....not here in Amsterdam...here the main commodity is  information. Everyone comes for information, the nobles, the spies, emissaries  of political states, scouts of terror organizations The Johnny Black swilling jap businessmen, and the tourist...the tourist always want information....providing the perfect cover.

...And what was I doing here?....I'm just like them...I came here to escape, to get away,...to get lost. And here I am lost  in a dark corner of the old style coffee shop near central station. A cappuccino and a Heineken on the table before me. next to a rolled up copy of the IHT. a Marley brand zig zag and 2 grams of Lebanese hashish. Its morning...And I'm working to get rid of the  mind fog from the partying the night before.

...And what was I doing here? I was a farm boy. And I don't mean I was raised with a tractor wheel in my hands. No buck wheat...I was raised with an automatic machine pistol in my mit. I was raised on the farm...yeah...but this ain't your Ma n' Pa Kettle farm. It was an ultra mega top secret organization within the CIA that even the CIA didn't know existed. It was codenamed "the Head"  because the Head is where the Intelligence is at....Git it? 

Amsterdam is where I first noticed them, business types. short haircuts, dark sun glasses, talking quietly amongst themselves. there appearance contrasted sharply with the surroundings of the Leidesplein Bulldog. These guys were not slim like Dutch slim.....they were not fat either....big, blocky, muscular. but with an air of sophistication adapted from experience. These guys were field people....and I am just realizing through the fog that last night these field people were in their field. And I was in their field too but I talk of their field of vision because of the many stares and glances of assessment given to me by them .

Amsterdam is where we reacquired him. it wasn't easy. He's one slippery little bugger. But the intelligence was good and spot on. He hasn't even seen us but then again we are experts at keeping a low profile. We are hoping to learn who it is he will be meeting but we are having to go through his little charade moving from bar to bar to throw of perceived tails. 

if I had only seen them in one nightclub last night then I would have only been mildly amused and it wouldn't have aroused my curiosity but I saw them in every bar and tavern on my walk back to the houseboat last night, entering 5 or 10 minutes after myself. But that last tavern on the Singel....when I walked out and down along the canal...boy that was weird....I am still trying to figure it all out and piece it all back together. How many of them were there?... 20?...30?....and did they burst from both the boat and the lorry?...how many were their repelling from that helicopter? They just exploded out of the woodwork ...they attacked me so fast and from every direction...I was left with no option so I killed them all.

The End

Crappy ending to crappy story........but I gotta go get sleep

********************

green thought for the day from magazine I find..

"By burning wood, coal, and oil humans liberated the carbon stored away by other forms of life. Viewed on a geological time scale it is as if a bomb went off..........

June 6,  2007

Never cared much for flying.....there's just something unnatural about filling a tube with people and having them  float about in the atmosphere.

And then there is what will from now be known as the Spartan Air factor....friends don't let friends  fly Martin Air

May 28,  2007

San Diego Sailing Academy. Just finished up testing for three sailing association certifications. Now I can Davy Jones a yacht with the best of them. Thanks Mike and San Diego Sailing Academy. 

Note to self: When Mary is yelling to me from the bow to "Release the Main" she is not yelling "Your the Man"....

Note to self:  There is an area between forward and reverse on the gear called    neutral

Note to Self: Five horn blasts from  a coast guard cutter is not a friendly greeting

Note to Self: A trans oceanic from the Canary Islands to the French West Indies takes about 21 days. 30+ with doldrums.

Here is a small gallery of photos from 7 days in a Marina.

May 12,  2007

Well..this week has been somewhat quite...home improvements projects and getting drunk has kept me quite busy.

just kidding about getting drunk. No your not!...Yes I am!...No! yes! shaddup! Just Shaddup!    Stoopid conscience. 

Mary came home friday with "the package" we have been expecting.  15.5 U.S. gallons Of Milwaukee's finest quality beverage. The liquid gold brew often compared to tigers milk. Yes...thats right....you guessed it...The one and only ........ Miller Highlife.

I spent the next morning going  about installing it into a format that could be readily downloaded and infused.

Hooking up high pressure gases and liquids reminded me of my days at Diving School in Seattle. So after it was all engineered we Dived in. 

Real life action of the first pour.

The scientific apparatus (action figure not included)

Historical Photograph of the The two first pints  (Dutch Style)

Heres  a     small photo album    of random shots I have taken this past week from around the house. Mostly birds....ones that normally don't visit us but this year  have taken up residence on the lot. I have also added another surveying video...alaskan surveyors no. 4...just click on the You Tube icon on the left to go to me own You Tube channel...yeah yeah....I know...get a job, get a haircut...heard it.

May 4,  2007

Cinqo de Mayo: Interesting week here....quite a bit of rain so bided my time adding adverts to the website and changing its dynamics. Have been getting around 800-1000 visitors a day, largely due to my posting  Harold Edgerton's Trinity blast photos on the site in Jan. of 2006. Well last Thursday I produced a flash gallery of underwater photos taken by a Russian fellow who had posted them on a Russian blog.  I also left a few links around the internet pointing to it, trying to emulate and produce a spike similar to one I had on April 10.

It was Saturday morning when I first noticed an enormous up swing of visitors to the site from my web stats to around 75,000 hits...which gave me the idea that I should cave in and start joining affiliation programs and throw their adverts on the site.

Come Monday morning I sit down at the computer to start contacting camera companies  when I receive this short email from my internet service provider:

Dear Client, We had to remove your subfolder Submergence since there were over 150 processes on that folder all at the same time and it took all the websites down on that server for several hours.

 Well, I checked my web stats and found the upward curve never came down. It skyrocketed steeper and steeper.....on Sunday the page reached 653,000 hits and on Monday when the east coast went to work thousands more visitors showed up and then before the climb could apogee the hosting company pulled the plug. I estimate it may have been 3 or 4 days before the visitor rate would peak and fall slowly to an above normal level. 

I share space on a server with 200 commercial businesses. And pay $30 a month for it. To experiment further with  spiking and manipulating demographics on the website I would have to get a managed dedicated server which would be around $300 a month. They have effectively stopped me from communicating with the masses by putting a financial cap on my ability to communicate and push the adverts. Buggers. So now I am working on a work around....stay tuned. By the way...here's the                      photo gallery   that brought em all down...I had to re-upload it, rename it, and not market it.

2007 March 31

Photos from this years Iditarod

Back from Nome. Have been working a month on month off schedule at the Rock Creek Gold Mine......

This is Nome here below on a splendid July afternoon....I'll update to present in near future. But meantime check out the conditions with this webcam.

Current Nome Temperature:

May 1, 2006

It's been a year since I was in Havana, Cuba.  Spent 4 hours with a seemingly healthy Castro...and about a million other people on May 1.

Cuban Weblog 2006

Havana Photo Gallery

Go here to   Photosig to escape

The animation experiments