Opua: the good life and my right eye
Opua: the good life and my right eye
Despite my workouts, I am too sedentary in Evanston. Here I am not.
Yesterday I bent the jib onto the furling gear, pumped up the dingy, rowed a quarter mile ashore, walked a half mile around the marina, shopped, filled a water container, rowed a quarter mile back, lifted the water container and my groceries onto the deck, scrubbed mold, swept the cabin sole, moved the two big solar panels onto the deck and hooked them up.
Today I rowed more than a mile. Towed the rigid dinghy back to shore, carried it on my shoulder up to the dinghy rack, rowed through the marina to the Cruising Club dock, where I filled another jerry can with water, showered, shopped, and rowed back to the boat, where I lifted everything onto the deck.
After I finish this, I’ll pump out the bilge, maybe try to fix the wiring to the electric bilge pump, and remove more mold, of which I keep finding small obscure settlements. New Zealand has an excellent product called Exit Mold.
It is a good life; and I haven’t even climbed the Opua hill yet.
This is the first time I’ve spent on a boat since my eye self-destructed, not counting the brief powering through the marina for GANNET’s winter haul-out.
It does make a difference. Things aren’t quite where I think they are. I knew this from the condo. I’ve told Carol that it is inevitable that I’m going to spill a glass of wine. Not that I didn’t occasionally do that before the retina detachment. But on the boat it is a little more important. I make sure that I actually have a hand hold before I move and that my foot really has reached the side of the dinghy before I step down.
I use waxed twine to seize the pin on the shackle connecting the head of the jib to the top swivel of the furling gear. It took me several attempts to thread the twine through the oversize hole in the pin.
As I’ve noted here before, reportedly loss of vision in one eye affects depth perception only out to twenty feet, which on a boat means pretty much my effective world.
With that loss of depth perception, for me at least, also comes some loss of balance. I don’t know quite where I am, as well as where everything else is.
Sometimes my brain can combine the clear image from my left eye with the very blurred one in my right into one; but usually there is a fuzzy overlay. I have often thought, and still do, that I might be better off without the right eye at all.
Additionally since the surgery, that eye has been hypersensitive to bright light, and there isn’t much brighter than sun on water.
One partial solution to this is the pair of OverCast glasses Carol gave to me. I wore them last evening while sitting on deck watching the start of the Friday night race. And yes I was sipping a glass of wine that I did not spill. A complete solution is an eye-patch. I have one with me. I’ll experiment when I go sailing. There will be no Jolly Roger.
Practically the first words from every Kiwi I have spoken to since my return have been, “We’ve had a shocking summer.”
After several unusually dry and pleasant summers, so far this one has been filled with storms and rain. However high pressure is filling in and the forecast for all next week is good. I need to go into Pahia to shop on Monday; but Tuesday may find me on my first one-eyed sail.
----------
The above photo is in response to a request. I just went on deck and took it.
If you’ve been following this journal for a while, you know that it is taken facing the mostly empty land to the east. Opua is in the other direction.
Saturday, January 14, 2012