Saturday, January 27, 2007

Speedlinking Saturday

I thought I would share with you today some of the unusual and off-beat items I discovered this week in the bloggy world.

Someone called Doug Dougleson (which might not be his real name) recently started a blog and for some reason put a link on it to Proper Course. He has solved the problem of how to maintain a degree of anonymity in a uniquely bizarre profile. Check out
About Me.

Adam Turinas, from Messing About In Sailboats, like many of us sailors in northern regions is clearly suffering from cabin fever. He is reduced to playing a nautical drinking game called You shunk my battleshlip.

JP from London sounds equally desperate. Perhaps inspired by a visit to the London Boat Show he decided to write a boating related piece of fiction entitled Golden Balls and Boats, engineered to include all the top search phrases in Google's Zeitgeist. Absolutely shameless self-promotion and I am sure he has had thousands of new visitors to his blog as a result. I kind of wish I had thought of it first.

Yesterday I wrote about my crap sailing at a regatta earlier this month. So I was amused to find this post about crap surfing at Grandmas Gone Surfing in which Grandma ponders various excuses to end a crap surfing session from "time for tea" to "loss of appendage to shark bite". Classic!

My last link actually isn't about a watery sport at all but is kind of appropriate to my dogged and fatalistic approach to sailing. ProBlogger Darren Rowse wrote an Australia Day post about Australian speed skating icon Steven Bradbury entitled How Steven Bradbury Can Make You a Better Blogger. Bradbury is famous for winning an Olympic gold medal by hanging in there and waiting for others to make mistakes. Apparently he has even entered some Aussie slang dictionaries because "he did a Bradbury" is used to describe events where fortune seems to fall in the lap of someone. But as Darren correctly points out, Bradbury won a medal through twelve years of hard slog and by putting himself in a position to win. An inspiration for all of us whether bloggers or sailors... or both. Maybe in my next regatta I will do a Bradbury?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tillerman, your "buddy" Gustavo Lima who won the regatta in Cabarete, just finished first in the toughest fleet ever to sail in US waters, winning the 2007 Miami OCR. He really likes to train in Cabarete, and is planning to be back soon.
Next week if you come here, you will be able to train with Matias Del Solar and 11 other top 20 sailors.
But... i am afraid we are scaring away people from Cabarete. Most of the time the conditions are just great for any Laser sailing with light winds in the morning, gradually strengthening during the day. One can choose with the help of our coach the best time of the day for their own goals in improving.
Most of the people who come to sail with us, have not raced yet, and maybe own a bigger sailboat, but want to get the feel of sailing a dinghy.
Thank you for the kind words, and i am sure next time you will be surfing down a wave it will be a natural action and not an unnatural reaction.
see you in Spain. Ari.

Tillerman said...

Thanks Ari. I hope my stories don't scare people away from Cabarete. That certainly was not my intention. My next post about Cabarete will be about Wednesday at the clinic when the conditions were much easier.

Congrats to Gustavo on winning the Miami OCR. Now that's great publicity for Cabarete - "Train in DR and win the OCR".

doug said...

Hey, wow, somebody read my blog!

I linked to Proper Course because I enjoy reading it. I sail a little too, but since it's the off-season for me I haven't yet felt the urge to write anything about sailing. Fortunately, idio... I mean, guys like you who sail in the cold help me to live vicariously while I'm slowly rotting away at my desk. Thanks for that!

Doug

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