When I was a teenager my father owned a small aircraft freight operation in Central America. He had a succession of what are now antiques: Beech 18 "Twin Beeches," a couple of Twin Bonanzas, and even a Lockheed Lodestar. As such, I spent summertime unbolting, inspecting, cleaning, loading cargo, pumping fuel, and then riding along as unlicensed co-pilot and unpaid cargo master.

This was a much better way of spending a summer than mowing lawns and painting houses, and I even learned something about weather while watching the tropical summer succession of thunderstorms roll off the Pacific. Much of this knowledge could be contained in a single sentence, the motto of jungle bush pilots who lived long enough to die of natural causes: "It's better to be down here, wishing we were up there, than to be up there, wishing we were down here."

This wisdom could be easily applied to the weather that currently prevails in the English Channel. It is blowing screech out of the Southwest, while a huge low squats over Merrye Olde Englande. This is right on the nose for our trip to Lisbon, and would be very bad news in the Straits of Dover.  So here we sit. Yesterday the students went to the Greenwich Observatory and Docklands Museum, and are on another field trip today.

The crew is at work, getting ready for a fall passage across the Bay of Biscay, which is known for its autumnal gales and nasty sea conditions. Part of the program is moving as much weight out of the bow of the boat as possible, to give her more buoyancy forward and a better pitching moment. Today the crew has also replaced the foresail throat blocks, rigged stowage for the Zodiac rescue boat, and replaced the dolphin striker. That's the compression strut that sticks down from the end of the bowsprit, essential to keeping the jibboom and the topmasts up there doing their work, rather than joining us on deck. 

In the attached photos Chief Mate Paul Bracken is leading the jib stay while the figurehead eagle observes. In the other picture, Apprentice Seaman Skywalker overhauls the headstay against the peculiar backdrop of office buildings.

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