The Continuing Saga of the Ten-Pound Bag of Pennies

For those of you who remember the penny story and have been keeping track at home...

I once again have posession of the bag of pennies.

Late at night under cover of darkness, Rich, BaBarbara, or one of their children managed to steal their way into my luggage and bury the whole thing somewhere deep beneath a couple of weeks worth of dirty laundry.  Because I'm not very proactive about that sort of thing, I didn't find them until right just now.

Bastards.

End of Operation Tomodachi. For me anyway...

In the beginning, Operation Tomodachi was huge.  But once the search and rescue missions were called off and there was no need for helicopters to deliver relief supplies to isolated islands and coastal communities, the US Navy's role in Operation Tomodachi had come to an end.

Returning to port, the Navy set the record for the largest number of US ships inport in Japan since the end of WWII or thereabouts.  I have my doubts about that, but the harbor was pretty packed all the same:


I volunteered to stay behind for a few days to help sort out the lessons that were learned in the course of the operation as well as handing off the few remaining chores to the active duty guys on the full-time staff.  This meant shifting to something more like normal office hours and actually getting a couple more days off in Japan.

Wandering around after hours, I snapped a few random Yokosuka Images.  Here's a Japanese Hell's Angel:


Here's a bank of vending machines in a local toy shop:


Many of them don't make much sense to me:



I also took advantage of the opportunity to hang out with my friend Rich and his family.  Rich is still on active duty with the Navy and has been stationed in Japan for a few years now.

At some point they took me to a secondhand store called "Off House."  Apparently it started out at "Book Off," a used bookstore, and then expanded to include much more than just books:

I'm not 100% sure what a "Hard-Off" is, but it sounds like the opposite of Viagra.

Inside the Book-Off there were all sorts of interesting things.  Even in the "Junk" section:


I didn't find anything I needed, but I did find this:



A few days later we headed up to Tokyo's Ginza district:


The plan was to hit up a particular restaurant, but we were pretty early for dinner.  While we waited, we decided to wander around the neighborhood and found a toy store.  Japanese toy stores are a mixed bag of really cool and really lame stuff all under the same roof. 

This is where I spotted LEGO ninjas:


LEGO NINJAS!!!


Maybe I've just been out of the LEGO loop for a while, but it seems like there's a lot more cool stuff available now than there was when I was a kid.  For example, check out some of this year's lineup of Star Wars minifigs:

There's a LEGO Wampa.  A WAMPA for Christ's sake!  My childhood suddenly seems pale by comparison.

I also made the mistake of noticing some very high-end collectible HALO: Reach action figures: 
I contemplated buying one or all of them for costuming references. I'm proud to say that I was able to restrain myself.



After a couple of hours of browsing, we headed over to our goal for the evening, the One Piece Restaurant:


I'm not an anime fan, but apparently "One Piece" is a fairly popular animated series in Japan about a group of pirates who have a flying pirate ship and seem to be predominately dressed in business attire.  I'm sure it makes sense if you speak the language.

Rich's wife and daughter are huge fans, so we made the trek, got tickets, and had a themed dinner based on all sorts of oddities that we didn't understand.  I'd imagine we felt the same way a Martian might feel if his first visit to Earth was a trip to Disneyland.  Here we are looking confused about the whole thing:


We were apparently underdressed too:


Still, Barbara and Jesenia had a good time:


The food was fun:



The souvenir shop was entertaining too:



By the time we'd finished with dinner, it was well past Ricky's bedtime:



A few days later, my role in Operation Tomodachi was completed and it was time to leave.
To underscore the end of my mission with obvious symbolism, here's a sunset in Tokyo:



Once I had my orders in hand and said my goodbyes, it was only a bus trip, a couple of plane trips, and an hour on the road before I was back on board the S/V Heart of Gold. Then I stopped being "LCDR Thorsson" and became "just some dude" again.

Next...


,

Sailing With Rich

Quite some time ago my friend Rich was bitten by the sailing bug. Some time later, I purchased the Heart of Gold. While he's asked several times to go sailing with me, he's been stationed in the Far East ever since I bought the boat and I'm not about to singlehand all the way to Japan just so we can dawdle around Tokyo Bay for an afternoon together.

Then a couple of weeks ago he called me and mentioned that he was going to be stateside for a bit. He planned to boondoggle a few days in the Bay Area and asked if I'd be up for going sailing. Given all of the little things that are wrong with the boat and all of the big things that are stacking up on my to-do list, I hesitated for a moment. Fortunately, reason found its way into my head and reminded me that I bought the boat for sailing and I never get to spend enough time with Rich anyway.

When I say there were little things wrong with the boat, I have to place emphasis on the word "little." The most significant concern was a dead light bulb in the anchor light. Fixing it meant going aloft all the way up to the tippy top of the main mast and unscrewing this little fitting:


It wasn't until I'd hoisted myself all fifty or so feet up that I realized that I went all the way up with the wrong size bulb. The bulb I had fit in the socket, but there was no way to put the cover back on over it. Good enough.

I was also having a few issues in the engine room. Here's a picture of me having issues in the engine room:


Other than that, the only things I needed to do before getting underway were replacing the little shackles along the foot of the main and mizzen sails and finding a new home for these little guys living inside the cover for my mainsail:


All too easy.

WEDNESDAY: Singlehanding to the South Bay

0630: Reveille

0720: Underway for pumpout station

0820: Departing Petaluma Marina under power

0850: Proceeding downriver under power/sail

1112: Passing channel markers 9 & 10:


1303: Moored at Loch Lomond Marina in San Rafael for fuel. I took on a total of 105 gallons of diesel fuel, so it gave me a few minutes to chat with the guy working at the fuel dock. Turns out he's a Vietnam veteran and he and his wife live aboard a sailboat there in the marina. Nice guy.

After settling the bill, I walked ashore to grab lunch. On the way I felt like somehow I was being watched:

The guy at the bait shop says this bird's name is "Nasty."

1400: Underway from Loch Lomond

1616: Passed the only commercial traffic I've seen all day:


As I passed Raccoon Straits, I got a good shot of the fog coming through the Gate:

1859: Entering Oyster Point Approach Channel

As I motored into the Oyster Point Marina, I found the guest dock completely full. With no other idea of where to go I went ahead and tied up at the fuel dock.

1914: Moored at Oyster Point Marina

When I had the boat tied up, I walked up to the harbormaster's office to find that there was nobody there. I called the number posted on the door and got a machine, so I figured I'd just stay at the fuel dock overnight and take off when they opened for business in the morning. At this point, the only thing I needed was a shorepower connection so I could charge my battery banks and call it a night.

For some reason it seemed that none of the shore power outlets that I tried were working. I was in the middle of trying to find a working outlet when I was interrupted by one of the more annoying phone calls I've received in years. It got me so spun up in fact that I completely failed to notice the rather simple detail that kept me from being able to plut in. Note to self: recognize the worth and value of caller ID.

At some point while I was messing up my shore power, I noticed that a harbor patrol officer had shown up at the harbormaster's office. When I walked over to check in, he pointed out that I needed to move to a different slip and it was time to cast off again. Somewhere in the conversation he expressed a bit of surprise/concern that I was moving such a large boat singlehanded.

"It's no big deal as long as you stay ahead of things," says I. I'm still convinced that's true.

So I shoved off and headed to the docks at the far end of the marina where the officer told me to find an empty slip. The only problem was that there was no empty slip. I didn't find this out until I'd turned into the 45-foot wide passage between the docks. This is where it's worth pointing out that my boat is 41 feet long. For a lesser mariner, turning a single-screw boat around in this kind of cramped space would be nigh unto impossible. For me it was just a matter of concentration and control.

Still, in the five minutes I spent backing and filling to turn the boat around, about a dozen residents of the marina started popping up everywhere to stand and stare and wait for me to collide with something. Several of them even brought out big rubber fenders just in case I crashed into their boats. I'm proud to say that I managed the turn without coming within 18 inches of any boats on either end. I rock.

Then it was time to motor to the other end of the marina where the harbor patrol officer emphatically assured me that there were in fact empty slips. As I turned down another row of slips I found him standing at the end of one of them. That's when he asked me how wide the boat was.

"She's thirteen and a half feet on the beam," says I.

"Oh," says he, "these slips are too small, but there's wider ones over that way."

So it was time to make another tight-squeeze-U-turn. Once again I ended up with an audience of paranoid boaters standing by to fend me off if things got too close.

As I headed back toward the main channel at dead slow speed, I was looking out for the officer to wave me into a slip. He didn't pop out anywhere until after I'd passed him. This meant that I'd have to back up, twist the boat to point toward the slip, and then keep control of the headway with the wind pushing me forward to prevent crashing into the dock. Meanwhile, another crowd had gathered on the dock, worried that someone with a big boat and only one person on board was about to wreck their floating homes. Fun.

Everything went well at first. I backed the stern into the wind, pointed the bow into the slip, and started creeping forward, checking the headway against the wind. In fact, it was all going perfectly. Then one of the marina residents "helped" me by grabbing one of my docklines and pulling my bow toward the dock on the starboard side.

With the unexpected spin, I didn't have time to keep the stern from swinging to port. Then the wind caught and swung me faster sideways as the stern was pushed. I ended up bumping the dock pretty hard amidships on the port side. It left a pretty noticeable skid mark, but at least there was no real damage.

2053: Moored. Again.

I can't really complain about the well-meaning folks who helped make up the boat once I was alongside. I had it handled all by myself, but I can understand why they'd be worried that something was about to go wrong.

Sometime later Rich called to let me know that his flight was delayed. His new ETA at SFO was 0045 on...

THURSDAY: Northbound with Rich

Rich got to the boat at about 2am. We sat and chatted for a while, but I can't for the life of me remember what we were talking about. I was well overdue for some rest at that point.

0400-ish: For no earthly reason, Rich is awake and alert.

0630-ish: The saner member of the crew wakes up to find a warm, calm, and overcast day with a bit of a breeze from the West.

0830-ish: Returned gate key to the harbor master.

0842: Main engine light-off

0851: Underway

0912: Main engine shutdown. Underway under sail.

It was a nice, calm day on the bay:

1410: Passing Under the Bay Bridge:

As we passed between the city and Treasure Island, we got a great view of the fog rolling in through the Gate:
The nice part about sailing the bay on a Thursday was that there were hardly any other boaters out there. Here's one of the very few (six at the most) sailboats we saw all day:
It was a great day to be out though, despite the whisper of fog:

It was a bit warm in the south bay, but the fog helped keep things cool as we crossed the slot. In fact, at some point we had to start adding layers of clothing to ward off the cold.

1543: Passed under the San Rafael-Richmond Bridge, to windward of Red Rock.


1759: Approaching Anchorage. We decided to end the day at anchor off of China Camp. Unfortunately the area is perilously shallow for a boat with the draft of Heart of Gold, so we had to make the tradeoff between potentially grounding in calm but water close to shore or in spending the night in choppy water farther off. We ended up with six feet of water under the keel when we set the hook, so I suppose we could've gotten closer in than we did.

For dinner, I grilled a couple of steaks. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting to buy a set of steak knives for the boat. Fortunately, I still have my KA-BAR combat knives that I picked up in Afghanistan. Rich didn't complain:

I used the bigger one for myself:

After dinner we sat around in the cockpit, telling stories, trading jokes, and finishing off a bottle of pinot noir.

It was a good day:
FRIDAY: Up the River

07??: Reveille, a nice, gray day:


The day started with me cranking out a couple of omelettes. When making omelettes, I like to impress myself by flipping them over with a deft flick of the pan rather than using the more pedestrian spatula method. Because I savor the opportunity to impress people with my trivial skills, I made a point to show off my omelette flipping for Rich

ME: Did you see that?

RICH [smugly]: Yeah. It looked like you were about to float test an omlette.

Some people just find no wonder in the world.

With breakfast finished and the dishes securely piled in the galley sink, it was time to get underway. Rich took the helm and I headed forward to drive the anchor windlass. On my way up I snapped this pic:


10-something: As we started heaving in, it became immediately clear that we were going to have trouble. The wind and the current were running in contrary directions. This meant that the wind was pushing the boat one way above the water and the current was pushing the other way under the water. As a result, the anchor chain was trailing from the bow under the length of the boat.

The first idea was to turn the boat around by hauling up the mizzen sail and pointing the boat into the wind. This proved impossible and all we ended up doing was going in circles around the hook as the wind and the current took turns as the main driving force moving the boat. After the seventh or eighth lap, we decided to just lower the sail, start the engine, and motor the stern around into the wind so we could haul in the hook against the current.

Once we had the anchor in sight, we turned toward the wind, hoisted the mizzen, unfurled the jib, and shut down the engine. The plan was to sail across the current and into the wind until the tide turned, then follow the wind and current up the river to Petaluma.

Rich spent much of this time at the helm while I kicked back and handled lines:


1418: Passing Markers 1&2, Entering Petaluma River Channel

1612: Passed an unorthodox boater in the river:


1805: Enter Petaluma Marina

1819: Give up on holding tank pumpout system, underway for berth.

1823: Moored.

1830: Main Engine Shutdown

In the end we managed to get there and back again with no major injuries or damage to the vessel or crew. I can't express how nice it was to be back out on the water for a little while.

Now back to my regularly scheduled life...

Unused Photos From the Past Few Weeks

Here's a few pics I intended to build blog posts around. Then I forgot what I was going to write and they've been sitting unused ever since.

First, a while back one of the less-capable mariners who volunteers with the Petaluma Sea Scouts had a problem with the steering gear in one of the motor whaleboats during the River cleanup a while back. He ended up drifting to a nearby dock where he left the boat and took the kids home, so at the end of the day, Matt Herman and I got to go back and salvage it. Here's a shot of us cruising back to the marina. Matt's at the throttle and I'm steering with the emergency tiller:


Somewhere around that same time, I was helping dad make new 75-year-old fenders for his International pickups. Here's the first one out of the mold bolted in place on one of the trucks:

I also got shanghaied into helping one of my neighbors in the marina move a sailboat that had a dead auxiliary engine. So here's a shot of me in swashbuckling pose:


This weekend I caught up with my friend Rich who was in the Bay Area on a layover while travelling from the Far East to New England. He was on orders from his wife and kids to visit Fenton's Creamery:


And visit we did:


Finally, for no reason at all, here's a rooster on a gate:

The Life and Times of a Ten-Pound Bag of Pennies

The Ten Pound Bag of Pennies.

This is the history (so far) of an eleven-year running joke.

I went to a college designed to train sailors for the Merchant Marine. So in addition to a very full academic curriculum, every summer after final exams, the whole campus would move onto the training ship Empire State VI and steam around the North Atlantic. The first time I went on one of these cruises was 1996.

I had just finished my freshman year in college and my friend Rich had decided to change majors so that he could avoid the maritime license portion and wouldn’t be obligated to go on these cruises. The night before I got underway I returned to my berthing space (there were 97 of us living in one room) to find a milk crate sitting on my bunk. It was filled with some of the most useless crap you could bring on a ship. This included a power outlet strip, a handful of odds and ends, and, most notably, a ten pound bag of pennies.

As a first year cadet at the maritime college I was entitled to very little real estate in the berthing spaces. In fact, I had my bunk to sleep in and a standing locker right around the corner. So when nobody was willing to admit ownership of the crate in question it took me some creative repacking to integrate this milk crate into my very limited living space.

The next morning, Rich came down to the pier to see me off. We chatted about the summer job he was taking and where I’d be going before he rather offhandedly asks me if I got the crate of stuff he’d left me.

“That was you?” I asked.

“Yeah, I couldn’t find room in storage for that stuff and I thought you might be able to use it.”

“Really?” says I, “There was nothing useful at all in there.”

“It’s all useful stuff,” says he, “there’s even some money in there.”

“What the hell am I going to do with a ten pound bag of pennies?”

“I figured you would need the money in Europe.”

I proceeded to explain to him that there’s no currency exchange in the world that accepts coins, not to mention pennies. In fact, even the ship’s store had posted a sign stating that they would not be taking pennies or giving them in change. Quite frankly there would be no use for ten pounds of pennies unless I was going to attempt suicide by overdosing on copper.*

So I spent the next two months with a ten pound bag of pennies under my pillow. When we returned to our home along the Bronx side of New York’s aromatic East River, Rich was there to meet me.

“Hey,” says I, “How would you like a ten pound bag of pennies.”

“No thanks,” says he, “You never know when you’re going to need the money.”

There were at least four other occasions over the next four or five months when I tried to give him this very same ten pound bag of pennies. Then along comes his birthday. This particular year he got a coin rolling machine for his birthday. So he does the first logical thing anybody would do in his situation. He goes to visit the guy who has been trying for months to give him a ten pound bag of pennies. He explains how easily he’ll be able to return these pennies to circulation and how he’d be willing to split the proceeds if I’d help him roll the coins.

After he told me all about this simple scheme to make a ten pound bag of pennies into actual folding money, I said the only thing I could say:

“Fuck you.”

By my reasoning, I had already tried on several occasions to return this ten pound bag of pennies to him and on each of these several occasions he refused. This means that it was now my ten pound bag of pennies and it was up to me to dispose of them as I saw fit. Furthermore, since it was good enough for him to cause a ten pound bag of pennies to be a minor nuisance to me for a number of months, I could only do well to return the favor.

Fast forward two and a half years.

I had just graduated and was working at the Naval ROTC office on campus for a few weeks before being transferred to Rhode Island with the Navy. Rich had re-evaluated his earlier decisions and found himself stuck going out on the training ship to catch up on his final training cruise. So the night before the ship set sail, I stole aboard and stealthily slipped the self same ten pound bag of pennies into his pillowcase while he was on watch.

The next morning he asked me what he was supposed to do with them.

I quaked with unfeigned mirth.

The ten pound bag of pennies found their way into my life again within about four months. I was a student at the Surface Warfare Officer School (SWOS) in Newport, Rhode Island. One day in the mail I received a parcel containing a bright orange US Army athletic shirt, a bright orange pair of US Army swim trunks (size XXL), and the ten pound bag of pennies. Cute.

So after I finished at SWOS and Rich had started, I stopped at the US Coast Guard training center just outside Petaluma to do some shopping. I sent Rich a USCG sweatshirt and coffee mug, a teddy bear in a Coast Guard Uniform, and the very same ten pound bag of pennies. Of course, I made it a point to send it to him at the school so that he’d have to open it with all of his Navy classmates around. Cuter.

Since then the ten pound bag of pennies has changed hands many times. Occasionally by mail, but more often by being planted in each other’s cars or homes or luggage during visits. I suppose in a lot of ways this whole story would be a lot more entertaining if it could be told accurately from the point of view of the ten pound bag of pennies. Some of the exchanges have been pretty entertaining.

Most notably there was an occasion when I had surreptitiously hidden the ten pound bag of pennies in Rich’s laptop case not long before he and his entire family were to board a plane for a cross-country flight. While waiting in line for a security checkpoint, Rich’s wife Barbara found the ten pound bag of pennies. As she pulled it from the laptop case, the ten pound bag of pennies burst, showering the concourse with ten pounds of pennies. Rich was in the bathroom at the time. I can only imagine the scene of apparent poverty he met when he walked out to find his wife and two children scrambling frantically to scrape ten pounds of pennies off the floor in the airport. I don’t know how much a ten pound bag of pennies is worth, but that scene would have been priceless.

The last couple of exchanges had Rich or his wife or one of his kids (he’s got the whole team to help him now) hiding the ten pound bag of pennies very cleverly in my dive bag. Then me not-so-cleverly hiding the ten pound bag of pennies in the center console of their Lincoln Navigator when they left town to put it in storage for their tour overseas. Then them discovering the not-so-cleverly hidden ten pound bag of pennies in the center console and condescendingly depositing it in the mailbox at the end of the driveway where I couldn’t possibly miss it or return it.

The next time I saw Rich was over seven months later when I happenned to visit him and his family in Japan where the Navy had stationed him. I didn't have the pennies with me, but that didn't stop him from tearing his house completely apart searching for them after I'd departed. To this day he doesn't believe me when I tell him I didn't have them with me.

It's been quite a few months now and I'm still stuck having to find a clever way to get the ten pound bag of pennies to somehow pop back up in Rich's life. At this point it's starting to look like I'll either have to fly to Japan without him knowing or I'll have to enlist the help of my network of navular friends. One of us will finally win this game when he clandestinely places the ten pound bag of pennies in the other’s coffin. Fortunately, Rich is just a bit older than me…

Stay tuned.

*This won’t work by the way. Modern pennies are made mostly from zinc. If you want to find out whether or not you can overdose on copper, you’ll have to get it somewhere else.