H2uh0 - Bonehead Moves on the Water from SF Bay and Beyond!
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Titanic - The ship that never sank!
This video will open your eyes as to what really happened with the Titanic.
Friday, December 29, 2017
My Favorite Race R2AK
I love the spirit that this race brings out in the competitors. Also the beauty that they encounter, as well as the reality that this may be one of the toughest races in North America. Check it out!
2017 - Year in Review
A crazy year was it not? Let's take a look and some of the highs and lows.
Looking forward to 2018 and our year to cut the cord and go cruising for 7 months! Happy New Year everyone!
Bonus Vid - 200 boats launched in one minute!
Looking forward to 2018 and our year to cut the cord and go cruising for 7 months! Happy New Year everyone!
Bonus Vid - 200 boats launched in one minute!
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Sail Goals 2018
Every year I write down some goals for the year. It's fun to look back and see how I did. Here we go!
Last year:
Sailing goals 2017!
x = completed
x We are departing for Australia in September of 2018. I plan to begin searching for the perfect boat in September of 2017. Result: I found her in Sausalito and completed the purchase on Oct. 1
x More night sails
x Finish Itinerary for our trip to OZ
x Research locations for our journey
x Sail on other friends boats
x Charter BVI's. Result: We did the West Indies (St. Barts, San Martin and Angullia) on a 60' cat with our best friends!!!
x Find the perfect boat! Result: Found her, 2001 40' Jeanneau!!
I think that is the first time I completed them all!!
Here are some additional highlights:
My last nine months on Addiction - our 30' Newport that we owned for 17 years
Buying my dream boat in September
My last weekend on Addiction, Tex and I sailed to Sausalito for an overnight that was spectacular
My swimming buddy visiting from Vegas for a weekend on the water
Afternoon sail to Sam's
Sailabration sails aboard Aquarius including Fleet Week
It was another great year! I left a partnership I had started in 2000 on our boat Addiction. I purchased Aquarius and have sailed her about 15 times since October. She is sweet!
Here is my list for 2018:
Outfit the boat for offshore sailing
Sail the ocean to Half Moon Bay and Drakes Bay
Get all the equipment I will need for the journey
Stay safe and keep the boat in great shape
Practice man overboard drills
Reefing lessons for the crew
Sail to the Farallones and back
Depart for the Channel Islands in September
It's going to be a spectacular 2018! Our trip to Mexico and back is on the horizon. Lots of work to be done in the next 8 months. The boat is currently in the yard for maintenance, upgrades and cruising gear. Should be back in the slip mid January. Looking forward to a smashing bon voyage!
Last year:
Sailing goals 2017!
x = completed
x We are departing for Australia in September of 2018. I plan to begin searching for the perfect boat in September of 2017. Result: I found her in Sausalito and completed the purchase on Oct. 1
x More night sails
x Finish Itinerary for our trip to OZ
x Research locations for our journey
x Sail on other friends boats
x Charter BVI's. Result: We did the West Indies (St. Barts, San Martin and Angullia) on a 60' cat with our best friends!!!
x Find the perfect boat! Result: Found her, 2001 40' Jeanneau!!
I think that is the first time I completed them all!!
Here are some additional highlights:
My last nine months on Addiction - our 30' Newport that we owned for 17 years
Buying my dream boat in September
My last weekend on Addiction, Tex and I sailed to Sausalito for an overnight that was spectacular
My swimming buddy visiting from Vegas for a weekend on the water
Afternoon sail to Sam's
Sailabration sails aboard Aquarius including Fleet Week
It was another great year! I left a partnership I had started in 2000 on our boat Addiction. I purchased Aquarius and have sailed her about 15 times since October. She is sweet!
Here is my list for 2018:
Outfit the boat for offshore sailing
Sail the ocean to Half Moon Bay and Drakes Bay
Get all the equipment I will need for the journey
Stay safe and keep the boat in great shape
Practice man overboard drills
Reefing lessons for the crew
Sail to the Farallones and back
Depart for the Channel Islands in September
It's going to be a spectacular 2018! Our trip to Mexico and back is on the horizon. Lots of work to be done in the next 8 months. The boat is currently in the yard for maintenance, upgrades and cruising gear. Should be back in the slip mid January. Looking forward to a smashing bon voyage!
Aja - The Greatest Album of the 70's (an audiophile masterpiece)
Here is a critical review of the album. One of my favorites!
As Michael Phalen famously comments in the liner notes of Steely Dan’s sixth studio album, “Aja signals the onset of a new maturity and a kind of solid professionalism that is the hallmark of an artist that has arrived.” Phalen, of course, was simply another illusion crafted by the ironic and somewhat bitter imaginations of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the two masterminds behind the enigmatic “non-band” who were gaining a reputation as some of the most difficult yet brilliant musicians of the 1970s. In late 1977 the pair had revealed Aja, an album which would come to define their legacy as a stubborn yet accomplished musical powerhouse, as they staked their territory in an increasingly fragmented and contradictory musical landscape. The album was a sumptuous and expansive collection of music; one that has rightly earned it’s reverence as an audiophile masterpiece.
Steely Dan had gotten off to a promising start with their debut album, 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill, from which the two hit singles “Do it Again” and “Reelin’ In The Years” Billboard charted at number six and eleven respectively. Guest vocalist David Palmer was often drafted into live performances to compensate for Fagen’s persistent stage fright, but the latter’s voice was clearly preferred by his band-mates, leading to Palmer’s exit during their first tour. This initial boom was followed by a notable downturn, as the group’s second album Countdown To Ecstasy, released a year later, failed to breakthrough commercially, with Becker and Fagen blaming a hectic touring schedule for its rushed and under-baked content.
Bouncing back with their most successful single “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”, which peaked at Number 4 on the Billboard chart, Becker and Fagen found renewed energy in their eagerness to recruit new and exciting session players. Their 1974 album Pretzel Logic followed a period of touring with keyboard player/vocalist Michael McDonald, vocalist/percussionist Royce Jones and session drummer Jeff Porcaro (who would eventually go on to form Toto with Katy Lied Pianist David Paich.) Porcaro proved a reliable and consistent collaborator over the years, but joined the group as a creative fissure between Becker/Fagen and the rest of the band was widening. Echoing Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, the pair were disillusioned by the obligations and restrictions of live performance, gravitating towards the creative reclusiveness enabled by the recording studio and it’s increasingly powerful tools. As the band’s creative directors they became harder and harder to please, often demanding that musicians perform around forty takes of the same recording.
Guitarist Jeff Baxter and drummer Jim Hodder, who remained particularly keen to tour, and felt insulted by their increasing redundancy for session players, eventually left the group along with the other core band-members, excluding Denny Dias who remained a member until 1980. Left to their own devices the pair revelled in their ability to assemble a rotating cast of musicians, each of whom they could draft in for minor or major contributions as they saw fit. As such, they began to decentralise the notion of Steely Dan as a solid group of musicians into something amorphous and indefinable, thus commencing the period of uninhibited creativity that birthed Aja.
Having cultivated a reputation as stubborn yet masterful songwriters, the pair now possessed a certain magnetism which allowed them to assemble a dream-team of jazz, r&b and rock virtuosos, who could actualise their sonic fantasies. Included on this list was legendary saxophonist and Miles Davis alumni Wayne Shorter (who rips through a solo on the album’s title track), drummer Bernard Perdie (responsible for the groove of “Home At Last”) and Steve Gadd, amongst many others. Far from assured by the proven talents of these musicians however, Becker and Fagen took their hairsplitting scrutiny to new and extreme levels, famously sifting through dozens of separate recordings of the same guitar solo for “Peg”, before landing on Jay Graydon’s pitch-perfect performance.
Considering the somewhat pressurised atmosphere surrounding these sessions, it’s easy to see how this ethos carried over into the album’s pristine sound quality. A truly lush and all encompassing audio experience, each instrument boasts a rich glossy veneer, penetrating and tessellating with an almost surgical precision. Far from clinical however, this exceptional clarity maintains the minuscule, if calculated, nuances of each musicians contribution, and ultimately serves as testament to their tight and disciplined performances.
Released in 1977, the year that both the lighting force of punk and the carefree abandon of disco were enjoying cultural hegemony, Aja found itself strangely out of time and place; an irregular jigsaw piece in an often polemic commercial environment. It was around this time that predominantly white rock fans where denouncing the perceived superficiality of repetitive black dance music. But Steely Dan had also been the subject of their ire. As Michael Duffy’s review in The Rolling Stone noted: “Aja will continue to fuel the argument by rock purists that Steely Dan’s music is soulless, and by its calculated nature antithetical to what rock should be.” Far from immune to this criticism, Becker and Fagen reportedly remixed the album around 13 times in the months prior to its release.
Listening to Aja, It’s hard not to see the album’s musical complexity as a riposte to the conservative rock sensibility. Becker and Fagen’s deeply intuitive use of chordal changes is central to the record’s shape-shifting character, as the pair eschew pleasantly resolved sequences and modulate to entirely new keys between sections. This imbues the album’s songs with a certain uneasiness which rubs against the polished surface of its smooth instrumentation – even music theory experts were left puzzled as to the direction a chord sequence was taking or why a specific harmony so strangely worked.
Rhythmically the pair had also dove deeper into the locked grooves of American r&b and soul. Their hiring of musicians who had worked with the likes of James Brown, Quincy Jones and Aretha Franklin provide some insight into their desires to maintain pop music’s infectious percussive drive. It was in-fact the most rhythmically focused songs, such as “Peg”, “Josie” and “I Got The News”, which proved most time-consuming in the recording process, as Becker and Fagen, of course, pursued the perfect backbeat with an almost maniacal attention to detail.
After a long year-and-a-half of production, Aja would become Steely Dan’s definitive commercial success-story, selling over a million copies (their only record to do so) and sustaining its presence in the charts for well over a year after peaking at number 3. It was perhaps a record that could only have existed in 1977 – one of the first platinum albums in a brief period of unbridled sales and incredibly generous recording budgets – which enabled the band’s expenses to run into the hundreds of thousands with no obligation to recoup the costs through live performance. As an audiophile masterpiece, it deservedly picked up a Grammy award for “Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical.” The group’s subsequent disbandment after 1980’s troubled Gaucho is perhaps testament to the insurmountable heights Becker and Fagen had reached – how could they possibly push further?
Aja is the remarkable product of an uncompromising decade spent by a pair of musical masterminds forging a path both at odds and in love with the pop establishment of 1970s America. To this day, the album’s lasting appeal across cultural and musical barriers serves as the true legacy of a deeply complex yet ultimately irresistible record.
And despite the numerous advances in studio technology of the last forty years, it still stands as one of the finest commercial recordings ever made – a holy grail for audiophile’s around the world. Its inherent and infectious smoothness coupled with its remarkable intricacy transcends the boundaries of taste and trends, shining as an example of uncompromising creative ambition, which nevertheless remains thoroughly grounded in the pleasure principle. Aja is truly Steely Dan’s monument to the joy of listening.
This review comes from classicalbumsundays.com
Head to Spotify to listen to this celebrated classic album.
As Michael Phalen famously comments in the liner notes of Steely Dan’s sixth studio album, “Aja signals the onset of a new maturity and a kind of solid professionalism that is the hallmark of an artist that has arrived.” Phalen, of course, was simply another illusion crafted by the ironic and somewhat bitter imaginations of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the two masterminds behind the enigmatic “non-band” who were gaining a reputation as some of the most difficult yet brilliant musicians of the 1970s. In late 1977 the pair had revealed Aja, an album which would come to define their legacy as a stubborn yet accomplished musical powerhouse, as they staked their territory in an increasingly fragmented and contradictory musical landscape. The album was a sumptuous and expansive collection of music; one that has rightly earned it’s reverence as an audiophile masterpiece.
Steely Dan had gotten off to a promising start with their debut album, 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill, from which the two hit singles “Do it Again” and “Reelin’ In The Years” Billboard charted at number six and eleven respectively. Guest vocalist David Palmer was often drafted into live performances to compensate for Fagen’s persistent stage fright, but the latter’s voice was clearly preferred by his band-mates, leading to Palmer’s exit during their first tour. This initial boom was followed by a notable downturn, as the group’s second album Countdown To Ecstasy, released a year later, failed to breakthrough commercially, with Becker and Fagen blaming a hectic touring schedule for its rushed and under-baked content.
Bouncing back with their most successful single “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”, which peaked at Number 4 on the Billboard chart, Becker and Fagen found renewed energy in their eagerness to recruit new and exciting session players. Their 1974 album Pretzel Logic followed a period of touring with keyboard player/vocalist Michael McDonald, vocalist/percussionist Royce Jones and session drummer Jeff Porcaro (who would eventually go on to form Toto with Katy Lied Pianist David Paich.) Porcaro proved a reliable and consistent collaborator over the years, but joined the group as a creative fissure between Becker/Fagen and the rest of the band was widening. Echoing Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, the pair were disillusioned by the obligations and restrictions of live performance, gravitating towards the creative reclusiveness enabled by the recording studio and it’s increasingly powerful tools. As the band’s creative directors they became harder and harder to please, often demanding that musicians perform around forty takes of the same recording.
Guitarist Jeff Baxter and drummer Jim Hodder, who remained particularly keen to tour, and felt insulted by their increasing redundancy for session players, eventually left the group along with the other core band-members, excluding Denny Dias who remained a member until 1980. Left to their own devices the pair revelled in their ability to assemble a rotating cast of musicians, each of whom they could draft in for minor or major contributions as they saw fit. As such, they began to decentralise the notion of Steely Dan as a solid group of musicians into something amorphous and indefinable, thus commencing the period of uninhibited creativity that birthed Aja.
Having cultivated a reputation as stubborn yet masterful songwriters, the pair now possessed a certain magnetism which allowed them to assemble a dream-team of jazz, r&b and rock virtuosos, who could actualise their sonic fantasies. Included on this list was legendary saxophonist and Miles Davis alumni Wayne Shorter (who rips through a solo on the album’s title track), drummer Bernard Perdie (responsible for the groove of “Home At Last”) and Steve Gadd, amongst many others. Far from assured by the proven talents of these musicians however, Becker and Fagen took their hairsplitting scrutiny to new and extreme levels, famously sifting through dozens of separate recordings of the same guitar solo for “Peg”, before landing on Jay Graydon’s pitch-perfect performance.
Considering the somewhat pressurised atmosphere surrounding these sessions, it’s easy to see how this ethos carried over into the album’s pristine sound quality. A truly lush and all encompassing audio experience, each instrument boasts a rich glossy veneer, penetrating and tessellating with an almost surgical precision. Far from clinical however, this exceptional clarity maintains the minuscule, if calculated, nuances of each musicians contribution, and ultimately serves as testament to their tight and disciplined performances.
Released in 1977, the year that both the lighting force of punk and the carefree abandon of disco were enjoying cultural hegemony, Aja found itself strangely out of time and place; an irregular jigsaw piece in an often polemic commercial environment. It was around this time that predominantly white rock fans where denouncing the perceived superficiality of repetitive black dance music. But Steely Dan had also been the subject of their ire. As Michael Duffy’s review in The Rolling Stone noted: “Aja will continue to fuel the argument by rock purists that Steely Dan’s music is soulless, and by its calculated nature antithetical to what rock should be.” Far from immune to this criticism, Becker and Fagen reportedly remixed the album around 13 times in the months prior to its release.
Listening to Aja, It’s hard not to see the album’s musical complexity as a riposte to the conservative rock sensibility. Becker and Fagen’s deeply intuitive use of chordal changes is central to the record’s shape-shifting character, as the pair eschew pleasantly resolved sequences and modulate to entirely new keys between sections. This imbues the album’s songs with a certain uneasiness which rubs against the polished surface of its smooth instrumentation – even music theory experts were left puzzled as to the direction a chord sequence was taking or why a specific harmony so strangely worked.
Rhythmically the pair had also dove deeper into the locked grooves of American r&b and soul. Their hiring of musicians who had worked with the likes of James Brown, Quincy Jones and Aretha Franklin provide some insight into their desires to maintain pop music’s infectious percussive drive. It was in-fact the most rhythmically focused songs, such as “Peg”, “Josie” and “I Got The News”, which proved most time-consuming in the recording process, as Becker and Fagen, of course, pursued the perfect backbeat with an almost maniacal attention to detail.
After a long year-and-a-half of production, Aja would become Steely Dan’s definitive commercial success-story, selling over a million copies (their only record to do so) and sustaining its presence in the charts for well over a year after peaking at number 3. It was perhaps a record that could only have existed in 1977 – one of the first platinum albums in a brief period of unbridled sales and incredibly generous recording budgets – which enabled the band’s expenses to run into the hundreds of thousands with no obligation to recoup the costs through live performance. As an audiophile masterpiece, it deservedly picked up a Grammy award for “Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical.” The group’s subsequent disbandment after 1980’s troubled Gaucho is perhaps testament to the insurmountable heights Becker and Fagen had reached – how could they possibly push further?
Aja is the remarkable product of an uncompromising decade spent by a pair of musical masterminds forging a path both at odds and in love with the pop establishment of 1970s America. To this day, the album’s lasting appeal across cultural and musical barriers serves as the true legacy of a deeply complex yet ultimately irresistible record.
And despite the numerous advances in studio technology of the last forty years, it still stands as one of the finest commercial recordings ever made – a holy grail for audiophile’s around the world. Its inherent and infectious smoothness coupled with its remarkable intricacy transcends the boundaries of taste and trends, shining as an example of uncompromising creative ambition, which nevertheless remains thoroughly grounded in the pleasure principle. Aja is truly Steely Dan’s monument to the joy of listening.
This review comes from classicalbumsundays.com
Head to Spotify to listen to this celebrated classic album.
Sydney Hobart Race Start
There has been a protest between Comanche and Wild Oats so we will have to see who takes home the prize. Racing starts after the 28min mark and the protest is at the 1:21 mark. Love this amazing race!
Update: Comanche wins after a successful protest. Wild Oats finished first but was given a 1 hour penalty. Congrats to the C-team, they had just purchased the boat this month from Jim Clark.
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
10 Great Tunes From One Great Year
Hello Music Lovers!
If you have been a reader of this blog, you know I am a music lover, DJ, and music aficionado. In the 80's, a station called KFOG formed in SF. It was my go to and I loved their World Class Rock format. They had a show called 10 at 10, that played 10 great songs from one great year. It was hosted by Dave Morey and ran for a good 25 years. The show featured great music from that year as well as numerous samples of political, historical and pop culture happenings. I ended up recording over 500 shows on tape and then digitally over the internet. I still listen to those recording today and sometimes all day! The show continued after his retirement in 2008, but it was never the same. Fast forward 10 years and I just discovered a new generation of 10@10. Dave is not at the helm but he has given his blessing to Dennis Willis to produce the new era of 10@10. Dave provides some sound bites (like Don Pardo did on the original program). To date they have produced over 250 shows! I wanted to share my favorite radio program with you and hope you will become a fan. The music spans from the mid 60's to the early 2000's. Some of the music played will bring back some memories for you and you may hear a song or two that you have not heard since that very year. I love the show and hope you will too! The show below is from 1971. Here is a link to all the shows that you can listen to anytime. Click here. There is an app for Mixcloud as well. Rock on!!
If you have been a reader of this blog, you know I am a music lover, DJ, and music aficionado. In the 80's, a station called KFOG formed in SF. It was my go to and I loved their World Class Rock format. They had a show called 10 at 10, that played 10 great songs from one great year. It was hosted by Dave Morey and ran for a good 25 years. The show featured great music from that year as well as numerous samples of political, historical and pop culture happenings. I ended up recording over 500 shows on tape and then digitally over the internet. I still listen to those recording today and sometimes all day! The show continued after his retirement in 2008, but it was never the same. Fast forward 10 years and I just discovered a new generation of 10@10. Dave is not at the helm but he has given his blessing to Dennis Willis to produce the new era of 10@10. Dave provides some sound bites (like Don Pardo did on the original program). To date they have produced over 250 shows! I wanted to share my favorite radio program with you and hope you will become a fan. The music spans from the mid 60's to the early 2000's. Some of the music played will bring back some memories for you and you may hear a song or two that you have not heard since that very year. I love the show and hope you will too! The show below is from 1971. Here is a link to all the shows that you can listen to anytime. Click here. There is an app for Mixcloud as well. Rock on!!
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Nightmare on La Vagabond
With their brand new cat almost going on the rocks, this lucky couple dodged a bullet. Happy they are safe.
Took Aquarius over to the boat yard for some upgrades, paint the bottom and some maintenance work. She will be in the yard for 3-4 weeks. We have also made the decision not sail to Australia. We want to retire in 3 years and if I took off for a year it would set us back a couple years financially. At this time, I will have 7 months to head down the Cali coast and deep into Mexico. My hope is that we can get the boat back to Cabo by April 2019. In July, we hope to sail her back to her home port in SF. We will save the Australia trip for retirement. It's a step back but it will allow me to keep the boat and once we return, get some partners involved and reduce our costs dramatically. It is still going to be an amazing adventure for my crew and I and they are both on board with the new plan. Merry Christmas everyone.
Thursday, December 14, 2017
More Pics
Thursday, December 07, 2017
The Big Ugly
Went out on a big wind day on Monday and got caught in some 40 knot gusts. Pretty scary but we survived. Our jib furler got jammed and we could not get all of the jib down. After an hour we tore a bit of the jib and she will need repairs. The boat did just fine in those conditions.
Saturday, December 02, 2017
Friday, December 01, 2017
Pics of the Week
