A few days ago, I stuck my nose in our Little Library and discovered a collection of 10 Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels. I hadn’t read any of these books since leaving Coot twenty-five years ago. The three or four books I read in the 1980s and 90s were acquired haphazardly in trades with other boaters and read without order or coherence. I set the stack of books beside my chair, took a look at the top one, started reading, and finished it the next morning. I arranged the books in order, starting with Master and Commander, and I am now on the fifth one.
I delight in the sailing descriptions. O’Brian manages to bring the life and times of the British Navy in the 18th century to life better than any other author I know. I just finished reading his account of a stormy crossing of Biscay Bay in Desolation Island, and it rang true to my own 1984 experience of that body of water. Despite the difference between a 74-gun ship of the line and a 38-foot ketch, extensive repairs were required in both cases.
More from Jim Sollars
Like Kent, Jim is from Sheridan, Wyoming, and became a sailor and a writer. Unlike Kent, Jim is prolific, with books published on Amazon in both October and November this year. Here is his latest thriller:
Friends from the Past
We are following the adventures of Ned and Kate Phillips on Instagram, the same Ned and Kate Pam and Kent met more than thirty years ago in the Chesapeake (October 1994). (See Chapter 11, Going South, pp. 109-11.) They are now sailing from England to the Cape Verde Islands and beyond. Coincidently, if all goes to plan, Kent and Linnea will arrive via the ninety-eight-passenger Corinthian at Santiago Island in the Cape Verde Islands on Christmas morning (one month from today), but we will almost certainly miss Ned and Kate.
Kate at the Helm
Happy Thanksgiving to one and all!
“Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”
—E.B. White, author
Reflection, Tingley Pond, Albuquerque Bosque, November 24, 2025
Kant is enjoying the spectacular views of the Grand Tetons — not!
Remember the days before cell phones? On road trips, we stopped at gas stations for directions, studied maps, checked our AAA books for motels and lunch spots, and looked for quirky kid-friendly attractions, like the National Museum of Roller Skating in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Thirty years later, Kent and I were returning to New Mexico from a trip to Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, where we visited friends and relatives. Three more overnights remained; one in Laramie and two with Kent’s childhood friends in Colorado. We’d left Sheridan, Wyoming (Kent’s hometown), and were nearing Casper when we stopped at a rest area.
“Let’s give the Reeds a call,” I suggested. “We need directions to their place. Where’s your phone?” It wasn’t in his shirt or pants pocket. A search of the car yielded nothing.
“You didn’t leave it at Dick’s, did you? How could you possibly leave your phone behind?”
I checked my phone and found a text message from Dick. He had the phone. I called him. No, we didn’t want to drive back to get it. He promised to mail it to us. Luckily, I found two numbers for the Reeds on my phone and a scrap of paper with their address.
I texted them, “Kent left his phone in Sheridan. So call and text to my phone. Send directions to your place.” They called while we were negotiating a detour around Casper. I juggled the conversation while trying to give Kent guidance.
“Oops! You missed a turn!” The phone call ended, and we got back on track.
Three days after missing our turn and spending two pleasant days with the Reeds, we stopped to celebrate our return to New Mexico by enjoying a simple lunch at the family-owned Mesa Vista Café in Ojo Caliente. We still had a couple of hours to drive, but crossing the line into New Mexico was always a homecoming. I checked my phone for messages and opened one of the many enticing notices from Overseas Adventure Travel. We fantasized about possible future exotic adventures. But now, we were looking forward to being home.
“I can drive now,” I said when we finished our lunch. “I know the way, and you don’t have to use my phone for directions.” I hopped into the driver’s seat and we continued along the familiar route past Hernandez, made famous by Ansel Adams, through Española to Santa Fe, and onto I-25, with its straight shot into Albuquerque. We congratulated ourselves on beating the rush hour traffic.
We were relieved to have finished the long day’s drive and happy to be home at last. I reached for my phone to let Mike and Susan, our friends and tenants, know that we had returned. But where was it? The phone was not in any pockets, under the car seats, or in my purse.
“Could I have left my phone? No! Not me!” I looked at Kent, the possibility of the impossible inevitably dawning on me.
“How could you possibly forget your phone?” he said, with a schadenfreude smile. I opened my laptop. “Find my phone” revealed its location at the Mesa Vista Cafe in Ojo Caliente. We’d have to drive back there tomorrow. I groaned, then searched for the restaurant online and sent an email and text. There was no reply, of course. I texted Susan, who came at once. She called the restaurant, although we knew it would be closed for the day. But, to my relief, someone answered.
“Are you calling about the phone?” they asked.
“Tell them we’ll come and get it tomorrow,” I told Susan
Alas, our travels weren’t over yet. I wasn’t looking forward to another trip to northern New Mexico this soon. We were still visiting with Susan, when her phone rang again. A person connected with the restaurant the Mesa Vista cafe would be heading to Santa Fe for some grocery shopping. Could we meet her in 2 hours at a gas station on Airport Road near the Relief Route? Oh, yes! Her name was Stacy, and we wrote down her number. Susan insisted we take her phone with us, or we’d have no way to get in touch.
Weary as we were, we got back in the car.
Traffic was backed up leaving Albuquerque. We didn’t want Stacy to have to wait for us. Could we get there on time? I took a shortcut—longer in distance, but we bypassed the bottleneck and arrived at what we hoped was the correct gas station ahead of schedule. Susan had given us her phone in case we’d needed to connect with Stacy.
The convenience store attached to the station was doing a brisk business that Friday evening, with construction workers picking up huge packs of beer and topping off the gas tanks of their big trucks. This was not the tourist’s Santa Fe. The men were unexpectedly friendly and polite as they dashed around us on their way in and out of the store. We tried not to block the door. We felt out of place and must have looked lost.
“Are you having car trouble? Do you need help?” one fellow asked. We probably didn’t fit the profile of someone waiting for a drug drop, so what were we doing there? Susan’s phone dinged with a text from Stacy. “Be there in ten minutes!” We had no idea what she looked like, but she’d be driving a black RAV Four.
We never saw the RAV Four, but here came a young woman – our angel! — holding my phone. She was the niece of our lunchtime server. She refused the forty dollars I offered her. I gave her a hug and profuse thanks.
“Just tell your friends to stop at the cafe,” she said.
I felt as happy as a child who’s found her lost teddy bear. I called Susan to tell her the good news – but the phone in my hand rang. I had her phone! By the time we headed south, traversing I-25 between Albuquerque and Santa Fe for the third time that day, traffic had lessened. We arrived home again, grateful for the help of the Ojo Caliente family, Susan, and the construction workers. They boosted my faith in humanity.
If you’re ever passing through Ojo Caliente, do stop at the charming Mesa Vista Café. If you leave your phone or any other belongings there by mistake, they will be in good hands.
Kent received his phone a few days later. He put a check in the mail to Dick, who was adamant that he didn’t want it. We reflected on how these phones, which are so much more than just telephones, and that didn’t even exist thirty years ago, have become essential in our daily lives.
Kent reads from a chapter of the book on the Wyoming Prairies. Click here for the YouTube Video
In case you missed it, here is a link to Kent’s interviews with Southwest Writers
And here is a bit more from the October newsletter:
News about the book (and other books)
Money for Mangos’ sailing blog has a nice short list of great sailing adventure books. When I contacted them about listing We Ran Away to Sea, I got a reply saying they had the book, and were putting it on their “to read” list and hoping to read it soon! Check this list out here:
We’ve been reading some other sailing books. I just discoveredChild of the Sea, written by Doina Cornell, the daughter of renowned sailor and author Jimmy Cornell. She circumnavigated the globe with her parents and younger brother in the 1970s, when she was between the ages of 7 and 14. I’m finding it delightful, gaining insights that will help me write my children’s books. It is available on Amazon, but I also found it on one of my favorite websites, the Internet Archive.
And Then We Hit a Rock by Greg BuenzliChild of the Sea by Doina Cornell
Another sailing memoir that caught my attention isAnd Then We Hit a Rockby Greg Buenzli. This family of five, a dog, and a cat sailed along the east coast of the U.S. and the Bahamas in a deluxe catamaran for a year. The breezy story is told with wit and humor. Predictably, the family encounters all the troubles common to inexperienced sailors, as well as the mechanical problems of boats. In that way, the book is similar toWe Ran Away to Sea, but these folks are not operating on a tight budget. They spend a fortune without having to sell their home and give up their jobs to fulfill the author’s dream.
My favorite line from the book description: Remember: If everything had gone exactly as planned….it wouldn’t have been much of an adventure.
I enjoyed the book, and you might too, but what shocked me was the fact that this book has over 4,000 reviews on Amazon and almost 3,000 on Goodreads. Kent’s book has just reached 80. Granted, quite a few of these reviews say nothing more than “Great book!” and that kind of thing, but still…
I wrote to the author, asking how he managed to do this, but did not receive a reply, so the success of this book remains a mystery to me. It ranks #1 in Amazon’s category of sailing narratives (Kent’s book was a respectable #6 last week), #2 in Travelogues & Travel Essays, and #6 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies.
So, come on, fans! We need to do better. We are still in the hole paying for Amazon ads.
Former philosophy professor George Kent Kedl gave up his 20-year teaching career for life on a sailboat with his wife and children. His award-winning release We Ran Away to Sea: A Memoir and Letters (2023) was written with a combination of his late wife Pamela Thompson Kedl’s letters and his own memories of their adventures. Look for Kent on his website JacanaPress.com, on Facebook and on Tiktok. We Ran Away to Sea is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.
At its heart, what is your memoir about? It is the story of my mid-life crisis, roughly spanning from 1984 to 2000, when I was obsessed with creating a life of cruising the world on a sailboat.
Kent with a parrot in San Augustin, Colombia in 2019.
When Kent and I volunteered as hospitaleros at the pilgrim albergue in El Burgo Ranero on the Meseta in Spain in October 2016, we had a morning playlist that got the pilgrims up and out so we could clean before the next pilgrims arrived. The final song was “Hit the Road, Jack,” and “don’t come back, no more more, no more no more, no more!” After the last pilgrim boogied out the door, we listened to this and other songs on the playlist while we cleaned the bathrooms, wiped tomato sauce off the kitchen tiles, and swept and mopped the floors. You can listen, too:
We’ll be hitting the road, too in the next couple of weeks. First, we have three nights enjoying the opera in Santa Fe, catching up with old friends and some favorite operas, La Bohème, Rigoletto,and Die Walküre (click to listen)
Beginning on Monday, August 25, we’ll be on the road for almost two weeks, with stops in Denver and Fort Collins, CO; an overnight in Lander, WY; then on to Big Sky, MT; Sheridan, WY; and Frisco, CO. We’ll be catching up with friends and family in most of those places, too.
If any of you are along the way and would like to see us, just holler or reply to this email.
We’ll have a copies of We Ran Away to Sea with us.
Big Horn Mountains, near Sheridan, WY
Good news about the book!
Earlier this week, I researched Amazon’s categories and keywords, making a few adjustments. To my amazement, in the past week, our sales have increased from just under one per day to two per day, and moved into the top 10 (varies from day today) in the Sailing Narratives category. Since then, I’ve also adjusted the keywords. We’ll see if that makes a difference, too. There’s a lot to learn.
Book, booklet, and medal
Recommended Sailing Books
Desperate Voyage
Kent has been writing book reviews (under name Kent on Amazon). He recently returned to the classic Desperate Voyage (1949) by John Caldwell, who sailed across the Pacific from Panama to Australia singlehanded after World War II to unite with his bride. He was perhaps even more ignorant of sailing than Kent was, and the book is a sometimes hilarious, always compelling read.
Cape Horn: One Man’s Dream, One Woman’s Nightmare
Kent also finished Cape Horn, by Reanne Hemingway-Douglass. Its subtitle: One Man’s Dream: One Woman’s Nightmareintrigued me. Kent’s review is under the name Kent on Amazon. I thought that would have been a great subtitle for We Ran Away to Sea. Or, maybe we should have subtitled it A Love Story? We found these titles on the Money for Mangos sailing blog which has a nice short list of great sailing adventure books. I suggested they add We Ran Away to Sea to a future list. See Money for Mangos list below, and enjoy reading!
One review of the audio book (available through Amazon Audible). We don’t know who CHS is, but thank you! 5.0 out of 5 stars, Great adventure. Impressed with AI narrator. As soon as the audiobook was available, I purchased it. Enjoyed going on this adventure with the authors. I learned sailing can be a lot of work. I was very impressed with AI narrator. — CHS
We’ve got more news … maybe some new books …but this is already long, so check back in September.
A mysterious heavy padded envelope arrived in the mail. What could it be?
“I think I won an award!” Kent said.
Sure enough. We unwrapped the package and inside was a heavy silver medal with a blue ribbon, a booklet listing all the 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and a sheet of stickers. It turns out We Ran Away to Sea was a FINALIST in the memoir category. This was not a high enough ranking to earn him an invitation to the awards ceremony that was held in conjunction with the American Library Association annual meeting in Philadelphia (wouldn’t that have been fun?), but we were pleased nevertheless.
We are done with entering book awards, although, I suppose we could consider entering a contest for an AI generated audio book, if there is such a thing.
We received nice review of the audio book (available through Amazon Audible) shortly after the audio book was published. We don’t know who CHS is, but thank you!
As soon as the audiobook was available, I purchased it. Enjoyed going on this adventure with the authors. I learned sailing can be a lot of work. I was very impressed with AI narrator. — CHS
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2025
Impromptu video from France
We carried a copy of We Ran Away to Sea during our walk in France, but seldom remembered to take it out of Kent’s backpack. But one day as we walked along a canal, we did. The video is on TikTok.
l-r: Jake, Pam, Andy, Kent on trial sail on Lake Superior in 1984, just before they left for England
In 1984, fed up with teaching philosophy to disinterested students, unhappy with American consumerism and politics, and dismayed at the values his children were picking up at school and from their friends, Kent and his wife Pam abandoned their comfortable life in a South Dakota college town for life on a sailboat with their two children. Life would never be the same again, as this father seeking a better life for his family made a bold decision that would change the lives of all of them forever. Happy Father’s Day, Kent!
Read all about in We Ran Away to Sea: A Memoir and Letters, available through your local bookstore (try Bookshop.org), Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Now also available as an audiobook.
Two Pilgrims: Linnea and Kent taking a break along the roadside.
We haven’t been doing much with Jacana Press and We Ran Away to Sea in the weeks since the audiobook was published. This is because we’ve been walking with backpacks on the pilgrim route Le Chemin de Vézelay, one of the four original pilgrimage routes through France to St. Jacques de Compostelle (also known as Santiago de Compostela) in Spain.
We walked for about 3 weeks, the amount of time we allotted. We carried a few bookmarks and one copy of the book, thinking we’d take advantage of photo ops, but, in truth, we forgot, except for one lovely morning along a waterway. You can follow our adventures on the blog posts that begin here on Caminobleu.com.
Meanwhile, book sales have picked up. I’m not sure if it’s the revised book description or if more people are looking to run away.
Below: Kent after reading a passage from We Ran Away to Sea near the conjunction of the Allier and the Loire, in Burgundy, France. I’m not able to upload the video, but you can view it on TikTok.
Amazon notified us last week that We Ran Away to Sea was eligible to participate in the beta digital voice program to create an audiobook. We’d wanted to do an audiobook forever, preferably in two voices, to mirror Pam and Kent’s parts of the book.
We picked out male and female American accented voices we liked, followed the directions, and voilá, like magic, with a pause of only fifteen seconds, the chosen voice read the Prologue with scarcely a hitch, not sounding at all like a computer-generated voice. I’m thinking of Hal from Space Odyssey 2001, which is from the last century. You can tell how old we are!
How we did it
Kent spent most of the weekend, when we weren’t at the Hands Off Rally at Albuquerque’s Civic Plaza, “reading” or perhaps “listening” to the book, chapter by chapter, and correcting pronunciation errors. We had special difficulties with the Spanish place names such as Málaga, Mérida, and Carasí, as well as the pronunciation of wind and wind — as in “blowing wind” and “wind up”. It was rather jarring to hear the title Wind in the Willows as “wined in the willows.”
We learned that although we could change male and female voices chapter by chapter, there was no way to change the voices in mid-chapter. So, Kent decided to have the entire book read in a male voice. We had to give up my original dream of having an interplay of male and female voices, representing Kent and Pam. We were able to use the pronunciation correction tab to insert the name of the person speaking by replacing the beginning words of a paragraph and including the speaker’s name in places where the switch in speakers could be confusing. In the printed version, we had initially considered prefacing each change in voice by inserting the person’s name, e.g., Kent: Bla-bla-bla or Pam: Bla-bla-bla, but in the end, we chose to indent the sections in which Pam is writing (speaking) to differentiate the two voices.
Strengths and Weaknesses
(1) It is amazing the way the digital voice picks up inflections and pronounces most words flawlessly, even ones I would have to think about or look up before saying them aloud. We did. have difficulty correcting pronunciations of Spanish place names, which were not pronounced consistently. A blind reader commented that the digital voice readings were much better than the usual text to speech applications generally available. I am sorry our blind friend Craig did not live to listen to our book.
(2) Although we initially hoped to narrate the book ourselves, we weren’t sure our voices would be good enough and the reading and editing would have taken an estimated 40 to 50 hours. Paying someone to do this would cost several thousand dollars.
(3) We found typos and mistakes that we had not previously noticed, even though we had read aloud to each other as we were editing. Good!
(4) We found the book surprisingly pleasant to listen to. Hey, it’s a good story!
(5) We were not able to eliminate things like names of the maps, and all the back matter, such as a timeline, glossary, and bibliography. Listeners will have to fast-forward or skip through these. It would be nice to have more flexibility in eliminating sections.
(6) The audiobook is only available through Audible, not accessible through libraries or other listening systems.
(7) In writing future books I will be more aware of formatting decisions that will impact an audiobook format.
We’d love your feedback, and we hope that Amazon will make some improvements, such as allowing switching voices within chapters and making the pronunciation of Spanish placenames more consistent. If you purchase the Kindle book from Amazon for $6.99, you can add the audiobook for only $1.99 more. If you want to buy the audiobook as a stand-alone, the cost is $7.99.
One of my favorite passages of Pam’s writing is the “The Dinghy Under the Bed.” Unlike her letters which were sometimes hastily written on a rocking boat, this was a polished piece, probably intended for publication. It is now included in Part 2: Between the Boats.
After listing the sailing paraphernalia stored in their South Dakota guest room closet Pam describes the inflatable dinghy that lives under the bed and is their most important purchase next to the “mother ship.”
My startled guests tell me it looks like the pale, flabby remains of some unidentifiable monster.
Although many readers feel that Pam reluctantly went along with Kent’s dream of returning to a life at sea, this passage expresses her longing, too. She was writing on a cold rainy day in October, not so different from early March, when winter seems to drag on forever, and we long to cast off on a new adventure as spring approaches.
After the mother ship herself, the dinghy, a lovely new roll-up, is our largest purchase and represents much more than a dollar value. Our future home, a 31-foot steel sloop pulled ignominiously out of the water in Duluth, Minnesota, is wrapped now in her winter cover. It would be a long seven-hour drive through uncertain midwestern weather to assure ourselves that our dream has some substance. But the dinghy is here, living quietly like a friendly, elderly dog beneath the bed. I sometimes think I can hear it sigh a little wistfully, just as I do, for the time we’ll both be at sea.
* * *
It’s a long and frustrating process to move from a landlocked South Dakota job and home to the sea. It’s also a lonely process, for none of our friends share or even understand our dream. But the dinghy, peacefully resting beneath the bed, silently encourages us to keep dreaming.
I recently watched In the Heart of the Sea, a 2015 movie directed by Ron Howard and based on Nathaniel Philbrick’s book of the same name, which tells the story of the whaling ship Essex, stoved in by a white whale and sunk in the Pacific in 1820. This story inspired Melville’s Moby Dick.
One scene in the movie resonated with me.
After the whale sinks the ship and wreaks havoc upon its crew, he later emerges from the depths and lies alongside a small boat of desperate survivors. Chase, the lead character in the story, an ambitious, dedicated whaler, grabs a harpoon and stands ready to thrust it into the whale: Chase’s eyes and the whale’s eye lock. Chase hesitates. The captain urges him to thrust the harpoon. Chase continues to hesitate, still holding the harpoon, eye to eye with the whale, and watches, transfixed, as the whale sinks into the deep and swims away to its own uncertain future, leaving the destitute whalers to survive as best they can.
In 1984, I gave up my profession, home, possessions, and the only life I’d ever known. With only a dream and the money freed by selling up, I took my family and set out to create a life at sea. Our first sail was across the Atlantic from England (where we found our boat) to the Caribbean. Between learning to sail and navigate, modifying and repairing the boat to make it deep-sea-ready, and trying to keep my reluctant family together, I had little time or energy to learn much about the creatures of the sea.
Halfway across the ocean, we were becalmed in an endless, flat sea. A swordfish as long as our 38’ boat surfaced next to us. It rolled on its side to study us with one large, round eye staring directly at us. It did not seem threatening or menacing, but what did I know? I had no harpoon at the ready. I was not afraid. Nor was I angry or seeking revenge like Chase. I watched, as after several minutes it sank quietly back into the deep.
A deep emotion welled up within me. When I stared into that eye, I was humbled, even ashamed, to have invaded the fish’s home in such ignorance. We humans confront nature with such arrogance!
Unlike Melville’s Captain Ahab, Chase gave up whaling and became an independent ship captain in the Merchant Marine. Perhaps, while staring into the whale’s eye, he also came to acknowledge his shameful disrespect for the natural world and its creatures.
Wild creatures’ eyes can penetrate deeply into the soul. Think of Aldo Leopold’s famous, life-changing story of watching the eyes of the dying wolf that he had just shot. “I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and the mountain.” (A Sand County Almanac). — G. Kent Kedl
A Memory, Moby-Dick, and a Song
After seeing the film In the Heart of the Sea and recalling Kent’s encounter with the swordfish, I remembered my first reading of Moby-Dick.
I was living in New York City and taking a class in American Literature with Nick Lyons at Hunter College. Do you know that sometimes the book title is written Moby Dick and sometimes hyphenated Moby-Dick? An internet search turns up intense discussions on this burning issue. Lyons, who later became a publisher known for his writings on trout fishing, preferred the hyphenated title.
While some people think Melvillle’s detailed descriptions of the natural history of whales interrupt the flow of the story, they were some of my favorite parts of the book. They sparked what has become a lifelong love of whales and other wonders of the seas.
During those years, I had a friend I hoped would be my boyfriend — something that never quite happened, an experience that haunted me until he found me again some fifty years and two husbands later, but that’s another story.
Bobby’s occasional, usually unannounced, visits would last for hours. We often took long walks through lower Manhattan from my apartment on East 7th Street, sometimes to the West Village to places he knew had been lived in or frequented by Dylan Thomas, Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, and others, or to the Staten Island Ferry, where we rode back and forth as many times as we wanted for ten cents. We recited the refrain of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” to each other and pretended to search for whales.
“We were very tired, we were very merry— We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.”
Bobby not only shared my love of literature and long, rambling walks, he was a poet who wrote songs and played the guitar. In those pre-internet days, we riffled through my collection of songbooks to find songs that one or the other of us knew. It was Bobby who taught me “Spanish Is the Lovin’ Tongue.” He also introduced me to the writings of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.
Our discussions of Moby-Dick inspired me to write a song. I was pleased that Bobby admired the Dick, flick, and trick lines. We sang it together.
Now and then, I sing snatches of the song to myself.
But, the other day, I could remember only two stanzas and the chorus. A little later, another couple of lines pushed into my brain. Was there more?
Surely, I’d saved a written copy? But where? I found two files labeled poetry in one file drawer and a loose-leaf notebook labeled “I am Eating Poetry” (from a poem by Mark Strand) that I had used when teaching, but they contained no poems I had written.
A search of the garage uncovered dusty boxes containing many files of treasures and many that should be thrown away. But, a folder labeled, “Poems – Mine!” delivered on the top of the pages a poem beginning, “Oh that stormy old weather…” and seven stanzas, four of which I’d entirely forgotten. Memorable or not, they form a much condensed musical version of Moby-Dick.
That Stormy Old Weather
A much condensed musical version of Moby-Dick. See also the video with me singing on YouTube.
Chorus:
Oh, that stormy old weather That windy old weather When the wind blows, boys We’ll all go together.
A fellow named Ishmael Related a wild tale Of how he went sailing In search of a white whale.
Perched high on the mast With the sea floating past Ishmael had his visions And dreams he held fast.
While Queequeg was often At work on his coffin Men knew by the sea-signs When whales were in the offin’.
Then up jumped old Ahab, Old peg-legged Ahab And said, “There she blows, boys!” “We’ll all go together.
“Look out for Moby-Dick He’s up to any trick We’ll all go down under When he gives his tail a flick.”
Entrapped in those great jaws No time to think or pause Were they the victims of Fate or Divine laws?
Ishmael alone Did not sink like a stone, He clung to the coffin That Queequeg had known.
Chorus (repeat)
-- Linnea Hendrickson
Do You Know These Facts about Whales?
Male Sperm Whales turn white as they age. The whiter the whale, the older it is. Moby Dick is not a myth.
Sperm whales sleep in a vertical position in the water. Unlike humans, they need to be awake to breathe, so while one-half of the brain sleeps, the other half remains alert, allowing them to breathe and watch for predators.
Depending on their pitch, whale sounds can travel 6000 to 10000 km underwater. Noise from the engines of boats and ships disturbs their communication patterns.
Whales can dive to a depth of 1 to 2,000 meters (more than half a mile to more than a mile deep) and can stay underwater without breathing for an hour or more, depending on the species.
Whales and dolphins are mammals who nurse their young and have complex family and social systems. Their closeness is one reason that when one whale is beached, others follow, even to their deaths.
The great blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived. Commercial whaling has been banned worldwide since 1986, except for Norway, Iceland, and Indigenous people. Still, many whales are killed by encounters with ships, and some killings are justified as “scientific.”
For more information on all forms of sea life, see Oceana.org For an excellent 50-minute video about one man’s intense fascination with Sperm Whales, see the PBS nature film Patrick and the Whale.
Jacana Press 