You never know.

Ken Young, outbound St. Georges Harbor, Bermuda

This morning I found out a friend of mine is not dead. This is the second time I’ve found out he’s not dead, and I am no less happy this second time around than the first.

In fact, not only is my friend not dead, he’s doing much better than the last time I found out he’s not dead. He still can’t speak very much, but he can walk with a quad-cane and travel from Florida to Tennessee and Massachusetts to visit his children and grandchildren.

I’ll tell you more about my friend later, in the context of this post on (t)Radicalism that Alan Jacobs has on his blog, but in the mean time, I want to pull something out of the comments on my sextant post from yesterday. Commentor Jack has a sea story:

Few years back, admittedly before the proliferation of GPS (but well after beacon based and other electronic navigation had become ubiquitous) my navy frigate experienced a boiler explosion, leaving us without power or communications of any electronic sort. For two days we monitored our drift via solar and celestial navigation only. Didn’t exactly solve our larger problem, but it gave us sufficient warning should we need to drop anchor if we neared shoal water.

When we had our unpleasantness, it was only some very imaginative Electronic Technicians that managed to take the batteries from our laser ring gyro and rig them up to the MARS station (essentially, a ham radio) long enough to get hold of a civilian that lived near a Navy base, and have them deliver a hand written note to the security guards informing them of our, er, status. Then add the humiliation of having a Coast Guard cutter come and take our big bad warship under tow.

Back in the seventies my friend who is still not dead was a raw milk pirate. He never got caught because he didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. What he told me is the word would get around that you had the good stuff, and people would find you. He said he ended up with more cash in pocket on twenty cows he and his kids milked by hand than his neighbors with herds of 100+ and the machinery (and debt) needed to tend to that many cows.

To the boat now, for something a little more dignified than posting to the internet about how (t)Radical your friends are.