When you live and work full time on a relatively small boat, you become acutely aware of all the sounds. If something is not right, you’re awakened from a dead sleep. There has been a scratching noise that has been driving me nuts. It’s the scraping of metal on metal of the fasteners that secure the boat’s ensign to its pole on the stern of the boat (you are required to fly the flag of the country in which your boat is registered). Despite exhaustion from the sail yesterday, it woke me up an hour after I went to sleep. I got up and took the flag down and in the morning I fixed it by replacing the metal fittings with Dyneema cord. Small victories. Footnote: there is a large fish next to the boat that has jumped out of the water a dozen times as I wrote this … trying to break my concentration.
