Eric Bender

A clear, shallow body of water with a sandy bottom is visible. The water is textured by the light shining through it. In the distance, a sailboat is anchored between two small, green, rocky hills under a bright blue sky with a few clouds

#seascape #vis #croatia

Beach photo with viewpoint from very low near white sand, behind dozens of roundish, dark boulders, some covered by lichen, the green sea in mid-distance, low sandstone rocks on the right edge, and the sky filled with wispy white clouds. Kangaroo Island, AU

#SilentSunday #photography #seascape #Australia #kangarooIsland

Yellow Spirit jetliner coming in for a landing over a harbor with a sloop moored in the background. Logan Airport, this sunny morning.

#SilentSunday #Boston

Empty red plastic kayak tied up on the bank of an entrance to a lagoon with trees in the background, on a sunny day. This morning on Snake Island, Winthrop.

#SilentSunday #Boston

Map showing locations across the U.S. of the No Kings events that will bring millions of peaceful protesters into the streets on October 18th.

No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings.

On October 18, millions of us are rising again to show the world: America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people.

https://www.nokings.org/

#NoKings

Mourn, or Else

"The fusion of corporate control and government power that empowered this administration will need to be unmade. Courts will need to be reconfigured. Market power will need to be subsumed to electoral power. ... We will have to become far less complacent and far less scared. We […]

Large wooden tug with white hull and varnished topsides hauled out on a marine railway in Chelsea, MA on a sunny calm day. This is Luna, built in 1930, now outfitted with new propeller and rudder.

Luna, the first diesel/electric tugboat in Boston Harbor, celebrates her 95th birthday with a major overhaul.

#Boston #harbor #maritime #history

Room with a large loom-like structure on colorful rugs, in front of white decorated walls and below a wooden ceiling whose beams are also decorated. Photo by Sophie Poe, in the House Museum of Kamol Khujandi in Khujand, Tajikistan.

Here's another of Sophie Poe's beautifully written and photographed snapshots of museums I don't expect to visit...

in this case the House Museum of Kamol Khujandi in Tajikistan...

which includes a thoughtful microessay on the concept of home […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

‘Can You Print a House?’: God, Robots and the U.S. Housing Crisis

Jason Ballard, an entrepreneur who once thought he would be a preacher, believes 3-D printing is the solution to fill the affordable housing gap in the United States […]

One Hundred Years of Cotuit Skiffs This past weekend marked the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the oldest continuously operated youth yacht club in the United States: the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club. A weekend of races culminated with a parade of the fleet in order of sail numbers throughout Cotuit Bay out into Nantucket Sound and then back again. I was very happy to participate albeit in hampered circumstances. The CMYC was founded in 1906 by a group of teenagers who wanted to race their boats around the harbor. The rules were simple — voting members had to be under the age of 25 and unmarried. Their boats were flatbottomed skiffs designed by a gentleman named Stanley Butler, an innovator who made every boat faster than its predecessor, building an inexpensive, exciting design that has never caught on anywhere other than Cotuit. The original name of the design was Mosquito, hence the “M” in CMYC. Today the boats are simply referred to as Cotuit Skiffs. Here’s my speech to the dinner on Saturday night. Apologies for the long post. “Happy 100th to you all. Here’s to our great-grandchildren celebrating this club’s bicentennial in 2106, in the same boats, in the same harbor, with the same late starts. Before I begin I want to apologize for introducing an alien force into the skiff fleet. I’m not talking about plywood bottoms. The WEST system. The Fiberglas skiff. Not the custom of sailing around with our shorts pulled half way down our butts . None of these things were my fault. I want to apologize for introducing Doctor Dan to the Cotuit Skiff thirty years ago. Kidding Dan. Just kidding. It’s perfectly normal to own four skiffs. Not it’s not. Yes it is. When Chris Jackson asked me if I’d like to say a few words tonight I was flattered because I haven’t been a part of the fleet since the early 90s when I hung up my sailing shoes. I thought I’d talk about the reason i wound up in a Cotuit Skiff and that is thanks to my grandfather: Henry Chatfield Churbuck. A few of you here tonight knew Chat. He built 13 Cotuit Skiffs. I don’t think he was a skiff racer. His name isn’t engraved on any trophies. He preferred his big catboat, the V _as Ist Los_ , which he took Cub Scout Pack 52 out for sails on in the late 40s and 50s. Chat passed away in 1967 from a bad heart. But I knew him a little, and have a few vivid memories of the man, of sitting in his lap and helping him drive his Buick, of watching him launch spoons into water glasses during Sunday dinner, his cat named Willy that ran away every spring to live at the Santuit herring run, his naps in a wheelbarrow parked in the shade of the grape arbor. He was the only grandson of a great sailor, Thomas Chatfield, my great great grandfather the whaling captain, who i assumed taught him how to sail. During the Depression Chat needed a job. So he talked his way onto a carpenter’s crew at Camp Edwards, buildings barracks for the army. On his first day he had no idea what he was doing, and a man named Bucky Botello — who lived next door to this art center in the house at the head of the driveway — asked him: “Have you ever done this before?” Chat said he hadn’t a clue, so Bucky taught him how to frame and saved his job. That was the beginning of a life-long friendship and career working with wood. Chat joined the Coast Guard reserve in World War II and built wooden cases for glass meteorological instruments used by the Navy. Chat built the boxes in the shop and my grandmother lined them with velvet and padding. That work, a victory garden, and a chicken coop kept the family going through the war. After the war Chat decided to try his hand at boat building. The skiff fleet needed some help, demand was high, the shop was set up for woodworking, so he teamed up with Deke Crosby, Joe Burlingame and started building skiffs. The first batch was a failure. There wasn’t enough rocker in the bottoms, so he took them back and re–cut them. I own two of his boats. Number 36 — the _Snafu II_ , which my father Tony raced, sold to the Wrights and then bought back for me and my brothers and sister in 1969. Number 19, the old _Hayai_ , owned by the Scheers, which I had rebuilt in 2000 and which I have yet to get to go fast, perhaps because i renamed it the __Chugworm__ , after the nasty nickname bestowed on my father by one of the Sinclaires. Tommy Burgess sails number 12. The Morrill’s own one. Peter Field’s Dolphin and on and on. Most are still sailing today, restored out of the love of their owners, whom I like to think take some special pride in sailing a Churbuck. Only a privileged few of you, John Peck and his daughters, the Bodens, Conrad, and Dan Del Vecchio, know what it is like to sail in a skiff built by someone in your family or by your own hands. I can’t begin to tell you the joy I felt last Sunday, drifting at the back end of the fleet in the Biggest Skiff Race Ever, with my daughter and son aboard a boat built by my grandfather. That sort of thing is too special to take for granted, and without getting too sentimental, I think we’re in the presence of something rare in this world, a very simple but beautiful thing made out of Atlantic white cedar, oak, spruce, canvas, and bronze. To those of you who stuck by your skiffs in the darkest days of the fleet — the late sixties and seventies — here’s to you. When a big fleet was eight boats. When Day Sailors came and went. And Lasers came and went. We stuck by our skiffs, held them together with Marine Tex and can after can of Woolsey paint. And then a miracle happened. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know how it happened. Maybe it was Kip Gould’s Fiberglas skiff. Maybe it was Art Paine. Or Conrad Geyser. Or modern materials like epoxy and plywood. But eight boats turned into sixty-six in the span of twenty years, guaranteeing the most beautiful thing in this village will survive at least another hundred years, rounding the same buoys, in the same harbor, starting the same races an hour late like they do today. And then, as now, the most precious sight of all for me won’t be the size of the fleet or the trophies won, but the sight of a teenager on a Wednesday morning, giving his or her all to win a Junior Series, accomplishing something my grandfather, Henry Chatfield Churbuck said to me the day i came back from crewing with Evie Jackson in my first skiff race (where i learned several new words i can’t say tonight). “If you can sail a Cotuit Skiff, you can sail anything!” Have a good night. ### Save-Share-Print * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp * Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * More * * Click to share on Nextdoor (Opens in new window) Nextdoor * Click to print (Opens in new window) Print * ### Like this: Like Loading... ### _Related_ ## Author: David Churbuck Cape Codder with an itch to write View all posts by David Churbuck

@stepheneb I don't know who built this Cotuit Skiff, but the class seems quite strong in its home waters of Cotuit Bay on Cape Cod. Some background (not recent, unfortunately):

https://churbuck.com/2006/08/07/one-hundred-years-of-cotuit-skiffs-2/

Inside a brutalist, concrete church. This is the Église Saint-Joseph in Le Havre. We see an incredible tower of raw concrete with hundreds of small square stained glass windows in many colors. The support for the tower is shaped like a four pointed star. Unlike most catholic churches, the ground floor is not shaped like a cross with a nave, but as an X with the altar in the middle, underneath that tower. The altar has a small ceiling of its own that looks straight out of a 1990s Star Trek episode, all square blocks with some light coming down. It is stunning, even for an atheist like me. A lot more beautiful than any raw concrete building ought to be.

#SilentSunday #LeHavre

Varnished Cotuit Skiff catboat, with blue deck and raised centerboard, on a mooring in front of a wooded beach.

#SilentSunday #CapeCod #sailing

Small white Cape Cod catboat tied up on a float on a sunny day with puffy clouds.

#SilentSunday #CapeCod #sailing

Monochrome 1876 print of a paddlewheel steamer making her way out through a canal cut through thick ice, with a crowd cheering her on.

In the winter of 1844 the merchants of Boston cut a 7-mile canal through the frozen harbor so that the Cunard liner Britannia could make it out to sea.

More on the century of close ties between Boston and the Cunard line […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Very large white schooner yacht tied up on a gray day (profile view).

Very large white schooner yacht tied up on a gray day (bow view).

Very large white schooner yacht tied up on a gray day (stern view).

The 210-foot superyacht Athos, claimed to be the largest privately owned two-masted schooner in the world, was up for sale a few years ago for around $50 million. This gray morning she was tied up on a Charlestown dock .

See […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Farewell to the great David Baltimore, genius and mensch:

David Baltimore, Nobel-Winning Molecular Biologist, Dies at 87

He was only 37 when he made a discovery that challenged the existing tenets of biology and led to an understanding of retroviruses and viruses, including H.I.V […]

White wooden sloop Eowyn, on a mooring with her rigging taken off for winter, pointed toward a small red wooden catboat and the sunrise.

#SilentSunday #sail #CapeCod

16-foot Cotuit Skiff catboat, white with blue deck, moored in front of a beach with two people on a sunny day.

#SilentSunday #sail #CapeCod

Science Under Siege: A Talk With Peter Hotez and Michael Mann

Lysenko comes to America

Vaccine expert Peter Hotez: "We now have the technology to make a vaccine to pretty much any pathogen we wish to, because we have a whole armamentarium of different technologies.. [But] how do we combat the […]

White wooden Cape Cod catboat on a white-and-blue mooring buoy, on a calm sunny morning with a wooded shore in the background. Catboat is Rugosa, in Cotuit Bay.

White wooden catboat Old Sculpin tied up at a dock on a calm sunny morning, with vacation houses in the background.

Veteran Cape Cod catboats in their native environment.

#CapeCod #sail

Osprey flying away from its nest on a platform at the edge of a salt marsh in Stage Harbor, Chatham.

Stern view of sailing catamaran "Osprey" on a mooring on a sunny day in Stage Harbor, Chatham.

Ospreys in Stage Harbor.

#CapeCod

A Cotuit Skiff (14-foot sailboat with a large gaff mainsail) with white hull and blue deck, on a mooring in front of a beach on a sunny day.

Stern view of a varnished Cotuit Skiff (14-foot sailboat with a large gaff mainsail) on a mooring in front of a beach on a sunny day.

A Cotuit Skiff (14-foot sailboat with a large gaff mainsail) with lavender hull and white deck, on a mooring in front of a beach on a sunny day.

A Cotuit Skiff (14-foot sailboat with a large gaff mainsail) with varnished hull and blue-and-yellow centerboard, on a mooring in front of a beach on a sunny day.

Labor Day ends the racing season for Cotuit Skiffs and I've still never seen any under sail, but they look almost absurdly picturesque sitting on their moorings.

https://churbuck.com/2006/08/07/one-hundred-years-of-cotuit-skiffs-2/

#sailboat #CapeCod

Slim white sloop tied up on a wooden dock leading toward a summer home, on a sunny day in Stage Harbor, Chatham.

#CapeCod #sailboat

Small red-orange dory, varnished inside, anchored in a salt marsh in front of a small hill with a house. This morning in Stage Harbor, Chatham.

#SilentSunday #CapeCod #boat

@ericphelps yes, sometimes those were called "barndoor" rudders because of their size. They are traditional on Cape Cod catboats, which sometimes need a lot of rudder to control things given the large mainsail and no jib.

Cape Cod catboat "Sunday Morning" with bright red hull and boomtent, moored off a wooded shore on a sunny day.

#SilentSunday

Midsize fireboat, gray with black rail and red stripes, tied up in front of a long brick building. This is Massport's Marine 32, a 43-foot aluminum fireboat.

Bumper boats, East Boston, August.

https://ericbender.co/safe-harbor/

#Boston #harbor #maritime #boat

Two women in a museum storehouse; the woman in front with short white hair is Deborah Douglas from the MIT Museum.

Deborah Douglas, a woman with white hair, blue shirt and white pants, in an MIT Museum storage area, pushing a panel hung with marine paintings.

Insanely Curious: Preserving MIT’s Past to Inspire the Future

A snapshot of the world of Deborah Douglas, senior director of collections and curator of science and technology at the MIT Museum. I've had the deep pleasure of working with Deborah on many […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

White superyacht SPECTRE tied up on the Charlestown waterfront in Boston harbor on a sunny day.

Promotional photo of Daniel Craig as James Bond in 2015 movie Spectre.

Superyacht SPECTRE in Boston harbor--owned by an international criminal gang, or just another billionaire?

#Boston #harbor #superyacht

Three white skipjacks, traditional sailing workboats with clipper bows, tied up together on a sunny day on Chesapeake Bay. Photo by Glenn Thompson.

Skipjack Races Return to Sandy Point after 35-Year Hiatus

https://www.chesapeakebaymagazine.com/skipjack-races-return-to-sandy-point-after-35-year-hiatus/

"For the first time in decades, the majority of the Chesapeake Bay’s surviving historic skipjacks will […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]