Dinosaur Tracks

My friend Sam recently got me into dinosaurs. This is a woman who can geek out to some sci-fi, hike the Sierras and forage for edible foods like a bad-a$$, and is super into dinosaurs. As in, people give her dinosaur-themed items as presents. She had raved about the book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte more than a few times, so I decided to check it out. And when I say check it out, I mean I devoured this book like a t-rex to a triceratops. I even read the T-Rex chapter aloud to Conor while sailing (it’s so good!). It turns out that dinosaurs make me feel the same way about time that the universe and astronomy makes me feel about space — full of wonder and awe.

My most favorite takeaway from this dinosaur book, which I knew but didn’t *really* grasp until reading about it: today’s birds are living dinosaurs. Bird lungs that efficiently breathe oxygen in on the in and out breaths? Dinosaurs had that first (and not just the winged dinosaurs). Air sacs in lungs to make their mass lighter? Dinosaurs. Feathers? Dinosaurs had proto-feathers that evolved into actual feathers. Birds, from the prehistoric looking pelicans all the way to your little chickadees and everyday seagulls: they are dinosaurs.

It is with this fabulous dinosaur framework that I am so pleased to present dinosaur tracks on our boat!

We have had to chase dinosaurs off of our boat when we hear them (seagulls being a prime culprit, and also Great Blue Herons/GBHs love to sit on our flat, wide solar panel). And this GBH must have come while we were out and left these amazing tracks on the boat. We’ll look forward to more dinosaurs on board as we keep going.

We’ve been hanging out in Redondo Beach and San Pedro in Los Angeles for the past few weeks — we had a beautiful wedding in Colorado we went to with a concert at Red Rocks under a full moon rise as part of the wedding (!), then once we were back we got to see some dear friends in LA for breakfast/lunch/dinners, and have generally been working to slow our pace down a lot. This slowness is also being imposed on us as we wait for some autopilot parts to arrive from Europe. Rest is new for us, as we were working at a breakneck speed with so many projects and responsibilities, and this forced rest has been a huge realization with how fatigued we really are. Recouping our energy and taking it slow is the name of the game.

Here are a few snippets of the slow(er) life:

We’ve been hanging out at Brouwerij West, one of our all-time favorite breweries, right here in San Pedro (not our first time sailing here!) — we first had their Picnic Lightning at a place in Reno while visiting family, looked up the brewery, realized it was next to a marina and we could sail there, and lo and behold — we did just that, once in 2021 and again now. San Pedro (pronounced: San PEE-dro) has been good to us, including providing group ukulele lessons and private tours of the USS Iowa with ham radio aficionados !

Conor, the man who has put macaroni and cheese into a tortilla because why not, made an offhand comment back in June about swearing off Mexican food until we got to Mexico so that we “wouldn’t get tired of it”. This resolve lasted approximately one and a half days. And here’s how that’s going: yesterday, we ate tacos for breakfast, quesadillas for lunch, and burritos for dinner. Buen provecho!