Curlew

I hate it when sailboat pages go a-missing.  The Internet Archive comes in handy sometimes, but it isn’t always reliable.  Thus, this is my mirror post for Curlew, an Alden Schooner.

*** update ***

Actually, Curlew changed owners, and her new owner (Robert A Harrison Jr., of Newport Beach CA) has an even better website (http://www.curlewchartersinc.com/) with even more history, and more detailed graphics.

A shot of trim.  Someone spent a lot of time varnishing. . . .

Curlew‘s history, cont’d Built in 1926 at Fred F. Pendleton’s excellent shipyard in Wiscasset, Maine, for Charles Andrews of the New York Yacht Club, Curlew has had a long and active career. She originally raced successfully in the New York Yacht Club’s ocean cruising class in the 1930s, competing often in the Newport to Bermuda race. Curlew raced with other famous schooners such as Teragram, Nina, and Mistral. Curlew was donated on the  31 of Jan 1940 to the Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point, New York where she served as a sail-training vessel and saw coastal submarine patrol duty for the Coast Guard during WWII. After her military service she became one of the pioneering vessels in the Caribbean charter trade, where she gained fame in 1962 by surviving a hurricane, ( see A Curlew Adventure for more details) after being abandoned by her crew, in a storm that claimed 144 other vessels. She later cruised extensively in the Central and South Pacific, putting many thousands of adventurous miles under her keel. In 1976 she was meticulously restored in New Zealand and then sailed to Hawaii where she was engaged in inter-island charters. In the 1980s, after a voyage to San Francisco, the well traveled Curlew was found to be in need of extensive repairs. She was retired and placed in dry storage in the state of Washington, where she was discovered in 1989 by Pat and Marlene Russell. After an intensive 18 month restoration Curlew was sailing once again, stronger and more graceful than ever. The boat is essentially 75brand new, with all re-construction and systems installation completed to the highest standards, surpassing the stringent United States Coast Guard safety requirements for carrying passengers for hire. Curlew is a classic wooden boat, as close to a living thing as a man can build. Her strong and graceful hull is sheathed in long leaf yellow pine over sturdy frames of white oak. She is a fast and able sailor, taking first place in Class A division at the America’s Schooner Cup in 1992. Fully inspected and certified by the Coast Guard, Curlew is ready for a relaxing coastal cruise or a major offshore voyage. In July of 2002 Curlew changed owners once again, this time as the end result of  a ten year search for a John Alden  Schooner, to her current owner, Robert A Harrison Jr., of Newport Beach CA.

from http://www.curlewchartersinc.com/

2007 New Year’s Resolutions

My husband and I are the kind of people that most marketing folks hate.  The idea of Veblen and Giffen goods means nothing to us.  I have never understood why someone would buy a “luxury” car.  I’m told it represents a status symbol — a symbol of intelligence and riches.  What does a “luxury car” tell me?  It tells me the owner is a moron, who will end up spending the rest of his income on car insurance and registration, for an “investment” that depreciates before he can even hand over the check for it.

I have neither ever understood why women request a ring with a worthless piece of carbon on it, and this was before I even heard about “conflict diamonds.”  Again, I see no need to get uptight about colorless rocks whose only good uses are as the head of a phonograph or to cut steel.  I don’t use phonographs anymore, and if I want to cut steel, I had better have a good workshop. . . . which brings me to my New Year’s Resolutions.

1.  To pass my Board exam.
2.  To find a job with some rational hours.
3.  To find more time to sail. (This goal entails making sure #2 is achieved.)
4.  To find more time to build a boat.  (This goal also entails making sure #2 is achieved.)

Christmas Gifts

One of my colleagues is on-call tonight.  Our floor is packed, and our PICU is as well.  I hope people don’t make her get up at 3:00 AM to call a code or to monitor a child’s ventilator or pressor drips because someone decided to drink and drive.  It’s always inevitably the people that drunk drivers hit who get the worst of the accident.  God saves fools, but not always little children.

And even if you don’t drink, please sign your organ donor card, because tonight is the night that drunk drivers make some people’s Christmas wishes come true.

Failure to Launch

Last time I went sailing with my neighbor, she mentioned a movie called, Failure to Launch.  I remember when this movie came out, I really didn’t care to see it, since the whole premise was about a loser who lives at home with his mother.

But my neighbor was so enthusiastic that I *must* see this movie, that I went out and rented it.  And she was right.  It really wasn’t that bad.  Incredibly unrealistic, and I wouldn’t have wanted to marry Matthew McConaughey’s character even if someone had bought me the Spike Africa.  But it was refreshing to see a sailboat incorporated into the movie.  (Even if most of it was just boats sitting at dock.)

What exactly are they looking at?

And why is it always the males who have the dream of owning a sailboat?  And the women who don’t know anything about it?  (The only thing she asks about is the galley — cuz, you know, that’s where all women work, when they’re on a sailboat.)  It’d be nice if someone submitted a screenplay about the opposite situation.

Oh wait.  Someone did.

The Grand Imagineer is the 64-foot sloop in which Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey sit to “eat lunch” in Failure to Launch.  The story of the sailboat’s name can be found at http://www.grandimagineer.com/boat.html.

One of the quotes from the movie. . . .

I believe that marriage and sailing are fine institutions.  And institutions are for crazy people.

To Socialize or Not to Socialize — Gee, I’m Glad I’m a Doctor!

I have been reading through some of the news articles about health care and all the trends towards socialization.  It’s very interesting to me, now that I’ve been working in health care and learning about Medicaid and private insurance.  My viewpoints are biased by the fact that so many physicians I work with have come here from other countries because they couldn’t stand how socialization limited their treatment options — for both their patients and their families.

Socialism (everyone pays taxes, the government decides how the tax money is spent for your health):

PROS:  Everyone gets healthcare.

CONS:  The government doles out health care, which means that it will decide what it will spend money on and what it won’t.  If it saves money to ban junk food, the government will ban junk food.  If it saves money to euthanize retarded people, it will (see the Netherlands).  If the government saves money to ban trans fats, it will (see New York City).

Capitalism  (people pay for what they want, if they have the money to afford it):

PROS:  If you want to save your 499.5g baby, and you have $4 million dollars to pay for the nitric oxide and high-frequency oscillator ventilation, go for it!  (In France, any neonate less than 500g is dead.)  If you have polycystic kidneys, and want to stay alive on dialysis for months, nay years, and can afford it, go for it!  If your child has spina bifida, and you want a Mitrofanoff procedure for her, go for it!

CONS:  If you can’t afford it, it doesn’t happen.

The best place is always that fine middle ground between having choices in your health care and having public policy in place to help those who are less fortunate, without bleeding the government (and thus the taxpayers) dry.

An example is trying to save one 22-week NICU baby, versus using the $4 million Medicaid dollars to protect hundreds of thousands of other children from meningitis.  Personal choice (“It’s *my* baby!”) versus public policy (“Your baby is legally dead.”).  If thousands of taxpayers are paying to keep *your* baby alive, versus getting *their* babies immunized, you will lose.

A lot of people operate under the assumption that the government is always the answer when it comes to obtaining money to help the poor and the less fortunate.  That money, though, comes from some place.  And that place is me.  If I’m paying taxes to treat an overweight kid for his type 2 diabetes (Does anyone remember how much it costs for daily Glucophage for a 9 year old boy?) — I’m going to want a say in what kind of food he puts in his mouth.  Socialization breeds public policy.  (See upcoming ban on TV junk food advertising.)

I smell a ban on junk food entirely in the near future.

Medicaid is a socialized medicine of sorts.  The only requirement for Medicaid is that you fit below a certain income bracket, and that you have the wherewithal to make sure you renew it.  (Which sure beats my deal of actually having to work > 8 hours a day and get my income subtracted to pay for medical insurance for myself and my family, in addition to the taxes that go towards paying for others’ Medicaid bills.  So it beats me all to heck, why mothers can’t remember to renew their children’s Medicaid.  Perhaps it has something to do with why they’re on Medicaid in the first place.)  Plus, with Medicaid, I am fortunate in that I don’t always have to choose between treating one child, or letting 4 others die.  Medicaid lets me treat a child for pneumonia, and still have money to treat 4 others.

In other countries, doctors must decide if it’s worth it to treat a child for pneumonia, or to use that money to buy vaccines for the others who aren’t sick.

I know this matters little to people who are involved in the day to day details of working and making a living.  But, public policy is encroaching more and more on individual freedoms in health care.  And it’s just a matter of time before more and more laws are passed for our common good.

I feel public policy has its place.  I admire the advocacy that went into the ban on lead paint.  I also love the recommendations for universal vaccinations.  (I have never seen HiB meningitis as a result of the HiB vaccination.  I have seen one non-typable Hi, but not HiB.)  But the debate on junk food adverstisements is a tad disturbing to me.  I see less and less accountability by parents, and more of a “doctors know best” attitude.  And I’ll be the first to admit, doctors don’t know everything.  And having a doctor decide what is junk food and what is not seems awfully totalitarian to me.

It’s enough to make me adopt a pro-Pringle attitude, envisioning posters with toddlers gripping a Pringle with the captions:  from my cold, dead heads.

Doctors don’t always know best.  I mean, for years, people advocated taking antioxidants — vitamin A and vitamin E.  You didn’t hear about the study that showed that mega-doses of vitamin A actually increased lung cancer?  (Could it be because the body’s immune system actually *uses* free-radicals to kill foreign cells? — Immunology 101, people.)

Or the big egg debate. . . . “Don’t eat too much eggs.”  And now eggs are okay.

“Medical knowledge has a half-life of about 4 years,” one of my attendings said.  And it’s true.  What is common knowledge now, will be disproved in 4 years.  And statistics can always be skewed, because with humans, n-values can’t always be significant.  You can only do so much blood work on a 2.5 kilogram kid before you exsanguinate him — so repeated blood tests are not ethically practical.

The good thing about public health, though, is that it promotes research to back treatment modalities.  The bad thing is that public policy doesn’t do anything about the money needed to implement treatments.