Weather is gorgeous – as sunny as Mexico but without the corpses. Not going South for the winter is a lot easier when it is this lovely outside and that dangerous south of the US border. This is good. Fewer bullets to deal with when shopping for bread and milk, you know?
Sal and I may spend the day (January 1, 2011) log salvaging. The tides have been high and there is a lot of wood floating around out there. Some of it pretty good. We can start our ‘next year’s firewood haul’ early if we go snag a few now. Nothing like a polar bear boat ride log salvaging to ring in the New Year.
I may have bought an engine. Yamaha 50. Comes with a boat similar to the one I have. So, the fleet may grow. This is NOT good. Boats tend to gather like vehicles on a reservation. In clumps. It is not so much that the boat is no good or that the owner wants a heap o’ boats in the yard, it is rather more like they just get blown in like plastic bags to a fence in Arizona. It just happens. Resistance is futile.
As it stands right now, we have a dozen boats sprinkled around the immediate area. I have a sailing dinghy with a small hole in it that I keep meaning to fix. We have the inflatable with a few small holes in it that we are not likely to ever get around to fixing as they are ‘slow-leakers’ and we can still use it in a pinch. We have Sal’s boat, my boat and now, the new boat. That makes 5 not counting three kayaks.
Could use an engine or two, tho.
John has another batch. His big one, his two aluminum ones, three kayaks and usually one stuck on a beach somewhere that he salvaged until a high tide floats it away again. That’s a minimum of a dozen here at Sheer Heaven.
Go to anyone’s place on the coast and you’ll see their áu current bateau, it’s immediate predecessor half-filled with rain and no engine, an upturned earlier one on the beach, another one half-buried in the forest and maybe a few more here and there. It is like some kind of weird, unconscious habit we all have.
“Hey, a friend of mine wants to get rid of a nice little runabout cheap. Maybe free. You want it?”
“Gawd No! A thousand times ‘no’. I got boats up the yin yang. Nope. Can’t use it. Don’t want it. Don’t ask!………………………………………………..but, ah………………what kind of boat is it?”
And that is how it happens.
Our Off the Grid Home 
Bullets and corpses are not that uncommon around this homestead. Our most frequent visitor is a predator cat. Have had to walk my daughter to the school bus with a loaded gun as we listened to the big cat crunch sheep bones in the bush just off the road. This weather had me thinking of the Sonoran desert as well…but my dermatoligist probably agrees that sitting in the sun is best for 2 days out of 20 anyways.From Staywierd in the Salmon river valley
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As for boats, if your goal is self reliance and "the nature of machines is to fail" then if you need a boat(as in coastal homesteads) then you need two so one can break down. Then while going/waiting for parts you are dependant on the back-up which is usaully the less reliable…so you really should have three options! Here in the valley we are more dependant on a good truck but I have three boats anyways.P.S. "Sonoran desert" is not something Fern serves after dinner.From Staywierd in the Salmon river valley
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