Tag: Shortcut

New Year Awakenings!

January 15, 2025

All those New Year resolutions and good intentions! 

Walks: We led members of the Albuquerque Chapter of American Pilgrims on the Camino on a trek along the Rio Grande Bosque on New Year’s Day.

Reading: First, not exactly reading, we indulged in Netflix’s gripping One Hundred Years of Solitude, based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel.

Our reading has included books by three New Mexico authors, starting with Hampton Sides’ fascinating and much honored The Wide Wide Sea centered on the third and final journey of Captain Cook. I am impressed with the way Sides holds the readers’ interest by telling a complex story through short passages and vignettes without overwhelming us with his research.

We’ve also read Rebecca Reynolds’s Thresholds of Change, which we will share with our little EAR (Elder Activist Readers) book group, and we have enjoyed our friend Rosalie Rayburn’s third book in her Digger Doyle Mystery series: Windswept, set in beautifully depicted New Mexico landscapes.

Writing:  Kent is writing and expanding on more stories, some left out of We Ran Away to Sea, and some new ones. Here is the beginning of one:
A Shortcut and a Close Shave

Shortcuts can save time and effort, but sometimes there are unexpected complications.

Sailing to the Atlantic side of Florida from Ft. Myers on the Gulf Coast requires a long trip, but…

Read more …

Book News

Shortly after we learned that We Ran Away to Sea  was a finalist for the Global Book Awards, we received notification that the book had won a Silver Medal in the category of Biography/Memoir.  There are still more award announcements awaiting in the next few months. I expressed my reservations about awards, still it is nice to be noticed and to learn that someone (beisdes our friends and family) thinks highly of the book.

See Kent in a short video:  Are Book Awards Scams?

Please check out our blog jacanapress.com for more stories and updates.  

A Shortcut and a Close Shave: A Short Story

Shortcuts can save time and effort, but sometimes there are unexpected complications.

Sailing to the Atlantic side of Florida from Ft. Myers on the Gulf Coast requires a long trip south to the Florida Keys, then east and north around Miami, but if a boat is small enough there is a shortcut via the Okeechobee Waterway that runs between Ft. Myers and St. Lucie. The limitation is that mast of the boat has to fit under a railway lift bridge that crosses the waterway.

Coot’s mast was short enough to fit under the open bridge, but with little room to spare. We approached the open un-attended bridge with a strong current in the narrow channel pushing us forward. Just before we were going to pass under it, suddenly, without warning, horns blared, lights flashed and instantly the bridge began to descend.

Too late to stop or turn around, I hit the throttle, envisioning our mast caught between the rails and shaved off by the oncoming train like a whisker in a Norelco razor. We made it with inches to spare—I heard the ting, ting, ting of the masthead antenna as it scraped beneath the descending bridge.

We were heading home, and although we didn’t know it then, this would be one of our last narrow escapes on Coot.

drawing of a lift bridge

Drawing of a lift bridge