03 February 2008

Bayliners


Bayliner Ciera 245 Express
Cruising: 22 mph @ 3200 rpm
 Maximum: 30 mph @ 4800 rpm     
     o      LOA: 24' 1"
     o      BEAM: 8' 6" DRAFT: 2' / 3' 4"
     o      YEAR: 2006
     o      TOP: Soft top
     o      HULL MATERIAL: Fiberglass
     o      HULL: Deep Vee DISP: 5284 lbs
     o      ENGINE HOURS: 75
     o      TANKAGE (approx):
           Fuel:     64 gallons
           Water: 20 gallons
           Cost: $35,000 (sic)

Groundhog day. The giant rodent saw his shadow, damn his eyes, and we are doomed to six more weeks of winter. I don't believe it, but a friend announced that they were going on a cruise as I contemplated working on a proposal over the weekend, and I thought of boats again, and warmth on the water for the first time in a long while.

It has been a while since I had that particular dream, or any new one for that matter. I recall vaguely the outlines of one last year, before being swept away to Australia and returning to find a pack of lawyers snarling near the entrance to Big Pink. That put any notion of much except survival on the back burner, and some hasty and improvised career planning.

I don't know why I was day-dreaming about boats again. I am not much of a yachtsman. I view them as things to get you from place to place, and the fierce joy that grips the sail people in the heat of competition has eluded me. I do think about the tranquility there is on the water, and this is a great area in which to have a boat. Congressman Cunningham had a nice one that he parked down at the marina near the Pentagon, before he went to jail. It was his answer to living in Washington, and I blush to think I have not thought of him much since he went away.

We all make our mistakes, after all, though mine were not nearly so grand as The Duke's. I used to sit in his office at the Rayburn Building when I worked the Hill, not suspecting for an instant what he was really up to. He had the prints of his famous victory over Col. Tranh, the North Vietnamese MiG pilot on the wall, and he wore his status as a Jet Ace on the lapel of his jacket.

That was back in the mid-1990s though, and times were interesting for the Defense Establishment. We were busy cutting back on all sorts of things, and it took a creative mind to make headway in a declining budget.

The Duke was too creative by half, and as sank into corruption, he acquired a yacht. I moved on from the Hill to other things and did not.

My Dad had a wonderful boat then, a gigantic blue and white cat-boat, beamy and swift that could sleep six with ease. He took great delight in his life on the Bay, nestling his yacht at the marina down the hill from his home on the bluff. My Mother tolerated the aberration, but sensibly had no interest in hauling on sheets or cranking winches,

I had no time or resources for that. Besides, I was too busy. In my experience in sailboats, the wind dies after the beer is gone, and the last mile to port is the longest of the day. If I was to have my way, it would be in a stout trawler with a working deck and a wheelhouse, or a swift cruiser with a forward cabin and a trim fiberglass hull shaped like an Earthshoe. Maybe a Bayliner, the Buick Roadmaster of yachts. When the beer is gone, you simply advance the throttles and go back to port.

I remember when I stopped dreaming, and began to have the nightmares. The change of the millennium brought with it a feeling of apprehension. I could not put my finger on it, exactly, though there was discontent that radiated from the daily swim against the tide from distant Fairfax to the Pentagon. I knew something nasty was coming, and that is not hindsight. It was as plain as the veins that are beginning to appear on my nose. It is documented in my notes.

When I was working my little slice of the intelligence budget, I asked the constituent commands to provide a package of counter-terror initiatives for the FY-00 program, just in case some cash became available, that is a matter of record. The embassy attacks in Africa and the USS Cole disaster had convinced me that something wicked this way was coming.   

No cash was available for investment in counter-terrorism, any more than I had the money to invest in yachts. We were lucky to have the base-line program intact. The summer of 2001 was a lovely one, though the tide and winds were rising. I have some notes taken during a meeting about something else that pensively wondered what we were going to do when the attacks came. I claim no prescience in that. I listed three cities, but only two of them were actually attacked. I was not smart enough to list the building where I had worked as one of them.

Of course I was not alone, and I will not claim to be the recipient of some mystic revelation. I'll leave that to the Sufis among us, though I could feel the tug of revealed truth. Dimly, I could see the future and did not like the shape of it.

Sufis claim they are neither a religion nor cult nor sect. They claim to exist in the traditions of the great faiths, though not in their dogmas. They claim that Sufism means wisdom, and their way leads to the door of Truth which is approached only through the heart.

If I could trust it, I would find it appealing. They say that the way to the door is the abandonment of the physical world and the trappings of possessions. Unfortunately, the way of all things in our world is that the mysticism is confused with fanaticism. At the beginning of things, they remind us that Buddha was no Buddhist, Christ not a Christian.

They extend that distinction further, but there I take my leave of the mystics. Meaning no offense to those who wish to destroy us, I think Mohammed was a Mohammedan, and knew it from the start.

But that was 2001, and my summer of Sufism in the heart of the buildings with many doors. All of them were guarded, with outer perimeters secured to protect cipher-locked chambers within.

Others were deeply concerned that summer, too, though the new Administration was still getting its feet on the ground, and their attention was overseas.

I recall marching into the office of a very nice lady who was in charge of formulating our part of the Quadrennial Intelligence Review to say that we had to wake up and do something. She looked at me over her desk, her eyes deep with concern. She had a corner office in the original headquarters building, and floated high above the vast parking lots and the cloak of green trees that embrace the steep drop to the Potomac.

Everything changed in the first week in September. I found myself suddenly purified by having nothing to my name but the contents of the trunk of my car, part of which I sold back to the bank to keep going.

The war started a week after that, and will be forever entwined with the end of the marriage. Along the way, I washed up at Big Pink, in a rental unit with a card-table and my lap-top computer. We invaded Afghanistan, and I got myself crossways with the people at the White House in an attempt to push them in a policy direction they were not prepared to take. They decided on the course to war without me around the time that my landlord turned me out, due to circumstances beyond both our control.

I scrambled to find another place to live, and was lucky to find one that left me in the lurch only for a few days. The uncertainty playing out before the backdrop of the war of Terror and homelessness stressed me out, even as I settled uneasily into another place in the vast mauve building. When the little place by the pool came up for sale, I bought it. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it, but that was purely secondary.

The desire to have a place I owned outright was not a dream as much as a biological imperative. I was determined never to be subject to the whims of a landlord ever again. In the time of the great bubble in real estate that was a challenge.

In my own place, I could make physical changes to suit my whim. Then came the Murphy Bed, so that the tiny place was not so oppressive. With dawn would come the ritual of making the place ship-shape: turning to and tricing up, folding the bed away, configuring the single room to daytime operations as I steamed into life alone.

It was my old life afloat that drove the concept. I decided that everything would fold, one way or another, the tables and most of the chairs, the desk with a drop leaf could be closed up to hide the work undone. It was very much the model of my stateroom on the stately USS Coronado, a project that took two years to complete.

If you have lived on a warship, you know that space for people is at a premium, since the platform is about mission, not comfort. The first space I had on the aircraft carrier Midway was a lower rack in a four-man stateroom up forward, on the 01-level. Later, I advanced to a two-man compartment on the mighty Forrestal, with two desks and bonus storage for my bicycle in the space behind the square bunk-bed where the hull curved out to form the edge of the flight deck.

Space was at a premium on the command ship Coronado, though by then my relative seniority entitled me to my own tiny room, with my own tiny door. It was a great privilege to have a door to place between oneself and the maniacal order of the Navy outside, and it was with great distress that I found I had to give it up. We embarked on a grand reconstruction of the ship that would produce the most advanced command-and-control capability that had ever steamed independently on the world ocean.

It was an expensive proposition, the conversion of Coronado, though it was not my money and I could afford to be expansive in stating the requirements for my mission area. Our ship had started life as an Amphibious Transport Ship- Dock, or LPD, in the Navy acronym. That meant she was equipped with a vast empty space on the after two thirds of her length, and had the capability to flood down the stern and open a great doorway to the sea, allowing the water to enter the well-deck and carry Marine landing craft toward the beach.

We did not use it, since Coronado was home to the embarked staff of the US THIRD Fleet. We had many other busy things to do, sending messages to one another, and raising a variety of flags and pennants. We were determined to do so more efficiently.   That meant taking other command elements aboard, the Air and Ground Component Commanders and their attendant horse-holders. they needed their own places to work in a Joint Staff environment.

So we filled in the Well Deck with steel, creating new decks and a maze of compartments connected by ladders. If those of us who were going to get new and larger compartments took special care in their design, who would blame us?

Coronado had been completed in 1966 in the shadow of the war in SE Asia. There was only one amphibious landing in that war, in 1965 when the conflict took a new and distinctly American turn. The Marines landed unopposed at Dan Nang to the stoic surprise of the residents.

Coronado's keel was laid the next year, but not commissioned until 1970. There appeared to be no immediate need for her services in amphibious warfare, and accordingly, Coronado was a low-miles warship as thing go, and her machinery was gently used.

Not needed to house companies of Marines and their gear, she was a roomy (if flat-bottomed) hull and suitable to embark hundreds of office workers like me. She had been upgraded with an advanced communications suite, or advanced for the time, and re-designated from LPD to Auxiliary General Flagship. As such, she served in turns as the home of the SIXTH Fleet Commander in the Med, participating in the ELDORADO CANYON strikes against Libya. Then she moved to host the Commander of the Mid-East Force in the Arabian Sea before eventually arriving at Pearl Harbor to take on the THIRD Fleet.

The flag had shifted to San Diego by the time I arrived in 1995 to participate in the most ambitious project of her life. She underwent numerous modifications, including the addition of two extra command centers, satellite dishes, secure vaults for compartmented information and sensitive planning, flat screen displays, a Flag Mess and all the appurtenances necessary for Staff Life at sea.

I paid close attention to where my stateroom would be. I visited daily when I could, seeing the plate aluminum welded and fabricated. I saw the piercings in the plate for plumbing made, and the bulkheads rise, and finally the modular furniture with the red folding coach that would serve for my staff to sit on as they updated the daily plan, and for me to fold down into a comfy nest at night, Coronado rocking me gently into dreamland.

I only lived there for a few weeks, but I doubt if any sailor appreciated it as much as I did. After all, I had been living with the Fleet Cryptologist as we awaited completion of construction, and life in a double is no way to live unless you are intimate, and that was a thought too awful to contemplate. We were not at sea that long.

I turned my office over to my relief in 1997, complete with the shower and the folding couch, and looked back at my last ship with a great deal of fondness as I hurtled over the soaring Coronado Bay Bridge for the last time, headed east toward the desert and back to Washington.

Ships are expensive things. In an attempt to mitigate the costs associated with her upkeep, in November of 2003, Coronado was transferred to the Military Sealift Command and her designation was changed to T-AGF 11. Her compartments were altered to provide the civilian sailors the same sort of amenities that once only the Assistant Chiefs of Staff once possessed, like our personal showers, and better. No fold-out couches for them, but full sized real beds.

But shortly afterwards, an awful legal snafu was discovered. The Department of the Navy required Coronado to be able to participate in belligerent operations. The technicalities of the Geneva Convention state clearly that only warships may do so. As a Military Sealift hull, she was classified as a non-combatant. With great embarrassment, a detachment of real sailors was ordered aboard to return her to status to that of a combatant, but that defeated the purpose of her conversion.

With the decline in resources available to anything except support to the war in Iraq, she was decommissioned at San Diego, on September 30, 2006, along with my personal head and folding desk and couch. They still exist, somewhere, since she is still a low-miles ship and will be stored up a brackish estuary for years, until she rusts so badly that she must be converted into something useful.

Imagine going to sea for fun! What a concept. The grog locker could be filled with whatever you please, and the end of the day would come with something on the grill on the stern and something cold in the glass.

I know that boats are just holes in the water that you attempt to fill with money. I further realize the truth in the adage that the happiest days of your life are the ones on which you buy a boat, and the one on which you sell it.

I think I am doomed to be a landsman the rest of my days. A house in the country cannot sink under you, and when the dog wants to go outside, there is no splash. But still, dreams are mystical things, and with the possession of one, all things are possible.

In this particular one, I have my own head, and a full-sized bed.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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