My cousin Tom Field kindly alerted me to this discover on Amazon: a custom publisher called “Forgotten Books” has scraped my transcription of Captain Thomas Chatfield’s Reminscences (I assume, since I invested hours in 2006 to type the manuscript and share it as pages on this blog while living the lonely-man life in Durham, NC) and is offering paper copies for $13.57.
I’m excited someone offers this service. When I looked into a custom publishing run ten years ago the cost per copy was over $50. This is a great alternative to schlepping disks to a local printer and will allow me to get some copies into the hands of the next generation of nieces and nephews with Chatfield DNA.
I’m pulling the big boat today, taking a personal day to get it done, and blogging in between the early morning mast-pulling and the actual haul-out later this afternoon. I got over to the town dock by 8:30 this morning, shrouds all slack and ready to be detached from the chain-plates; mast wedges, tabernacle boot, boom and all the lines detached and coiled last Saturday. The harbor has really emptied out in the past week, as if a light switch was thrown after Columbus Day when the launch service stops running and the boat yards and mooring servicers swing into action putting things to bed.
The timing couldn’t be better as the cormorants have found the boat and started to turn it into their personal guano depository. The splatter effects are as bad as past years, but the power washer will be working overtime this weekend before I wrap everything up, run some antifreeze through the engine, change the oil and put her to sleep for the winter. I’ll leave the motorboat in until the middle of next month, but thanks to the new dinghy rules that force me to get my tender off the beach by the middle of November, that will get yanked in a month as well.
I hate taking days off from work to get this done, but when Peck’s calls, one answers. Now I can stop freaking out watching Matthew and Nicole and the freak storm waiting in the wings and sleep solidly not worrying about my poor boat getting pooped on in the harbor.
