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Boomer Ballads: Sailing

Because it’s not far down to Paradise and the canvas really can do miracles…

Or… in another more literal variation…

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  • ghostsniper January 14, 2021, 1:31 PM

    The only toon he ever did that I could put up with. Not bad, in a dozing in a hammock on a summer day, sort of way.

    But you can’t talk about boomer sailing toonz without mentioning:
    Cool Change
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bKwRW0l-Qk
    and
    Southern Cross
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw9gLjEGJrw

  • John Venlet January 14, 2021, 1:40 PM

    Off topic, but I like the new goings on at your Ka-Ching!

  • BillH January 14, 2021, 1:42 PM

    I had a sail boat when I was young (in my forties). Twelve foot sloop rigged with too-small a centerboard. It was great exercise. It would turn turtle, I would jump in and right it… it would turn turtle, I would jump in and right it….

  • Mary Ann January 14, 2021, 2:08 PM

    Thank you for this Gerard. The music takes me back to 1979 and the visuals made me laugh because I’ve always in my mind seen sails…and stretched canvases.

  • gwbnyc January 14, 2021, 3:11 PM

    I recollect some documentary film shot in the early 70’s, Stills was on stage in a full length sleeveless fur coat. A man, an audience member, started ragging on him for being greedy, “plastic” (quite the insult then), and a sellout. IIRC Stills came down off the stage and might have gotten into the chest-bump thing with guy.

    An aquaintence, a singer, related to a group of us what it was like walking into her mother’s living room on occasional mornings and seeing David Crosby’s whale-corpse-like form beached on the couch.

    Time passed and I wondered if the reason there were so many CSNY revivals was no one else would hang around with them.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/510fe09885ac4f3c0719513c5d59b6083ebd8f9a92c11ac07ef57b9bb461c55f.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/510fe09885ac4f3c0719513c5d59b6083ebd8f9a92c11ac07ef57b9bb461c55f.jpg

  • Stargazer January 14, 2021, 3:43 PM

    Sailing. Yup, used to do that a lot. Crewed on various sailboats on Long Island sound and Chesapeake Bay, year round . Ocean racing on a 62′ yawl. Transatlantic on a 3-masted barque (twice). Gentle breezes to full gales. Great memories…the song remembers when.

  • Missy January 14, 2021, 5:17 PM

    Honeymooned in 1973 for two weeks on our Cape Dory 25’ sailboat. Chesapeake Bay. Nothing compares to sleeping, anchored, under the stars with the sounds of the halyards chinking against the mast. A general idea of heaven. I was 24 and just married to an “older” man of 33 I both loved, and, more importantly, liked. So yes to the song.

  • ghostsniper January 14, 2021, 5:48 PM

    Missy sed: “I was 24 and just married to an “older” man of 33 I both loved, and, more importantly, liked.”
    =========
    Indeed. A lot of people never learn the diff no matter how many times they marry.

    Charlie Anderson: Do you like her?
    Lt. Sam: Well, I just said I…
    Charlie Anderson: No, no. You just said you loved her. There’s some difference between lovin’ and likin’. When I married Jennie’s mother, I-I didn’t love her – I liked her… I liked her a lot. I liked Martha for at least three years after we were married and then one day it just dawned on me I loved her. I still do… still do. You see, Sam, when you love a woman without likin’ her, the night can be long and cold, and contempt comes up with the sun.

  • Skorpion January 14, 2021, 8:41 PM

    Did someone mention David Crosby and sailing?

    https://youtu.be/VVxMnNN005s

  • BJM January 14, 2021, 9:08 PM

    Apropos to the 20th:
    https://youtu.be/LJxXu8MdL-A

  • gwbnyc January 15, 2021, 4:12 AM

    It was Crosby and whaling.

  • Gordon Scott January 15, 2021, 5:28 AM

    David Crosby may be an ass of epic proportions, but you kind of have to admire him. He *is* a very good musician, part of three legendary groups. He’s been living large since the mid 1960s. He’s snorted a pallet of coke, gotten knob jobs from ten thousand pretty girls, and still gets into the news whenever he wants. That utterly smug expression in the “family picture” when wazhername, the redhead singer who was as big a drunk as Dave, hired him to be the sperm donor for the singer’s wife to get pregnant. “Yeah, I’ve been overweight and addicted to everything in sight for my whole life, had to buy a new liver, and they STILL picked me as great DNA . . . .”

  • Dirk January 15, 2021, 6:49 AM

    Sailing is a disease, I to thought it romantic thirty years ago, I still own three boats. What was once romantic, is now a quest for speed, I still race my Santana525, wed nights here, in our beer can league. Back,then it as the leisure fleet, anything that floats, I, drove a Coronado 25, a beast of a boat, designed for the rough waters off of , it’s name sake.

    Although an older boat, my Santana 525, is a fast nimble boat, an A class racer. Not as nimble as the Express 27s, with her handicap, quite capable of winning. She’s a pocket racer, an open water jet. Capable of planing down wind.

    I have two others I pleasure cruise, a Hunter 25, with a bobbed keel and an Oday 28 for weekend adventure, big ,very roomy atomic 4 inboard, with a huge complement on sails. The cabin is standup for folks 6.2 tall, sleek and nimble, capable of taking me around the world.

    I recently sold my ocean boat, a Hallberg RASSY, 34, moored just south of Santa Cruz. A classic Swedish boat, with low sexy lines, built by sailboat masters. The Woodward was stunning, the craftsmanship Second to none.

    She’s currently on an around the world adventure, with the young man I GAVE it to. With my med conditions my Dr’s,talked me out of that same around the world adventure. A pity really.

    Dirk

  • Jack January 15, 2021, 9:40 AM

    Ghost, love your reference to Shenandoah. I loved that movie and met ‘the boy’, Phillip Alford back in the mid 60’s. He was a couple of years older than me, a nice cat and I believe he lives in MS or Alabama.

    Sailboats….Dirk, I envy you. I’m not a racer, just a lover of all things sailboat. Several years ago before health issues, I restored and sailed a Pearson Ariel for a few years, inland. I sure learned a lot on that old sweetie and I really do believe that I’d leave everything I own, or that owns me, behind to take off on an extended offshore adventure. A 34′ Hallberg-Rassey…..damn!!

  • James O'Neil January 15, 2021, 12:02 PM

    Dangit Boss! It’s around 14°F., the snow’s two feet deep, but after listening I might go out in the yard and do a little work on my Balboa 26.

    I tented her in the fall so I can work under the snow, it’s a wee bit cold for painting but the swing keel winch needs some work I’ve been putting off.

  • AA January 16, 2021, 2:34 AM

    Thank you for this, Mr. G. I have my own reasons for loving this song. Someone I loved — truly, madly, deeply — loved this song, too. And was a sailor.

  • ghostsniper January 16, 2021, 4:33 AM

    @Jack, he was also in To Kill A Mockingbird, as Jem.

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