Review: The Curious Human Knee

 The Curious Human Knee is a book about the knee. I borrowed it from the library expecting to learn about the knee's architecture, why they are so easily damaged, and how to prevent injury and what the process of fixing a damaged knee is. Instead I got a curious mis-mash of knee information and weird fashion segmentations. The author feels like she suffered from a case of ADHD, jumping from one random topic to another.

I've long thought that the human knee was a particularly good example of poor engineering. Han Yu instead explains that the reason the knee is so easily damaged is because it's so flexible and offers so many degrees of freedom of movement:

Dynamic freedom comes at a terrible cost. The knee is flexible because it is fundamentally unstable. It is, essentially, a few pieces of rigid, ill-fitting bones bound up by rope-like soft tissues. Nothing is fused in place, so the knee can move in just about any direction. For the same reason, it can also twist, misalign, overstretch, or simply fall apart. (kindle loc 508)

Ok, so what can we do? She mentions  that there are training programs that can help prevent injury:

In one program, female high-school volleyball players were drilled in various jumping tasks: broad jump, vertical jump, single-legged jump, squat jump, and more.98 The emphasis was placed on maintaining good techniques: keep the spine erect and shoulders back, point the knees forward, jump with the chest over knees, and land softly with bent knees and toe-to-heel rocking. After six weeks of training, the participants were able to reduce valgus collapse stress by about 50 percent, increase hamstring power by up to 44 percent, and reduce landing force by 22 percent.99 In another successful program, female soccer players completed, among other things, leg stretching, jumping tasks, and strengthening exercises.100 Similar emphasis was put on correct landing techniques. Compared with soccer players in the same league who did not enroll in the program, those who were enrolled saw an 88 percent reduction in ACL injury in the first season and 74 percent reduction in the second season. (kindle loc 1826)

Details? How to do it yourself? Nada. That kinda sucks. She does debunk several myths. For instance, icing does nothing, and neither do prophylactic braces. In fact, both might cause more problems:

 Compared with using a stationary bike to cool down, immersing legs in cold water after strength training reduced muscle mass and strength.34 Researchers have speculated that this is because muscle protein synthesis depends on blood supply, and icing, by reducing blood supply, suppresses protein synthesis. In other words, icing can negate the benefits of exercise and reduce long-term muscle development, quite the opposite outcome for people who ice for sports recovery. (kindle loc 2506)

 prophylactic braces were not able to reduce knee injuries; in fact, they seemed to make players more likely to hurt themselves.81 Alarmed, the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Sports Medicine issued a statement in 1990 recommending that these braces “not be considered standard equipment for football players.”82 (kindle loc 2709)

 Then suddenly the book would switch into a discussion of skirt length and fashion. It would then come back and tell you interesting things about Osteo-Arthritis:

Despite their relatively lower body mass index, Asian populations have more knee OA than Western populations.58 In Malaysia, for example, an estimated 25 percent of people over the age of fifty-five suffer from knee OA.59 In Korea, 38 percent of people over the age of sixty-five do. (kindle loc 3488)

It turns out that many Asian cultures do a lot of kneeling, and that's not good for your knee. The book then jumps back into fashion and discusses ripped jeans and other distressed clothing that are part of fashion nowadays. Sure, I'm concerned about the environmental impact of fashion and the irony of rich people wearing clothes that are deliberately made to look worn out (my wife had to tell me to throw out swim shorts because they were starting to develop holes in all the wrong places), but does that really belong in this book?

I really wanted to like this book, but I think in this case the author needed a much better editor than the one she had.

Review: Garmin Edge 840

 The Pro's Closet had open box Edge 840 for under $300 before Black Friday, and at that price it was too good to resist. The big feature that I wanted that's not available on the Fenix 5X is Freeride Climb Pro, which Garmin has said that it will not bring to watches because the watches have to deal with runners and Freeride Climb Pro is just too hard to do for runners. The other feature is that it now charges via USB-C, which saves one more cable type to bring (though unfortunately most of my bike lights are still micro-USB, so I can't avoid having a few adapters when I travel with the bike) 

Ok, coming from using my Fenix 5X as a bike computer, the Edge 840 feels like it's a giant screen. Garmin has also revamped its UI, so you get choices between Road, Gravel, Commute, MTB. In addition, the Edge 840 has both buttons and touch screen, and I found myself using both UIs! The map display is excellent, and Garmin no longer tries to rip you off by charging for European maps if you happen to buy a US unit.

The 32GB storage is not enough to store both US maps and European maps at the same time! I was quite disappointed by that. Storage is cheap, and you would think that Garmin would take $10 out of its profit margins to give me both US and European maps at the same time. The nice thing is that Garmin with its new UI can now display graphs, so you can get a nice climbing graph or power meter graph.

Climb Pro behaves as I expect, giving you its best guess as to what hill I'm going to ride, and despite some friends telling me it wasn't accurate, it seemed to work just fine for my favorite hills. For grins I tried the structured workout mode and it told me after the workout that I did a horrible job of complying with the workout.

I rarely follow routes, but when I tried it as an experiment, whenever I go off route (which I invariably do) the UI now gives me an option to pause navigation (if you know where you're going) or to route back onto the route. Sweet!

Charging is fast, and battery life is good enough that I never have to charge it more than once a week. Syncing to Garmin connect is fast as well, and it brings over all the sensors from my old Fenix 5X no problem, including HRMs, speed sensors, cadence sensors, etc. Stay within the Garmin ecosystem and everything works great.

Startup is also superfast. I can no longer play the game of starting up the computer and taking off at rocket speed to keep the GPS confused for as long as possible. All in all, it's a great device and I'm looking forward to touring with it!

Review: Democracy Awakening

 Democracy Awakening is Heather Cox Richardson's history book with an emphasis on recent history (from 2016 to 2022) and a deep perspective on American history and context. The recent history part of the book is a good reminder of how quickly Trump moved to consolidate power and try to dismantle democracy and delegitimize elections, and how he quickly used the authoritarian playbook to great effect:

Trump purged officials who accepted the findings of the Intelligence Community from his administration. He replaced Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates, a well-regarded former Republican senator who maintained that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. Trump also fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, replacing him first with Sessions’s loyalist chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who became acting attorney general without Senate confirmation, and then with William Barr, who had been President George H. W. Bush’s attorney general when Bush pardoned those involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Barr took office on February 14, 2019, just as Mueller was finishing his report. Before letting anyone else see it, Barr spun the document as a complete exoneration of the president. The media repeated his misstatement. In fact, Mueller’s report established that Russia had illegally intervened in the election to benefit Trump and that the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller publicly complained to Barr about the spin he had put on the report, but it was too late: Trump crowed that he was exonerated, and his supporters not only bought it, they accepted it as proof that the institutions of government were persecuting their president. Barr then appointed his own investigator, John Durham, to prove that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had hacked the election (the investigation closed in 2022 without any proof of those allegations).[10] Republican lawmakers helped Trump’s disinformation campaign, using their positions to mislead the public and legitimize his lies. House Republicans, especially those in the right-wing Freedom Caucus, along with a bloc of right-wing senators, backed the president. Since the Republicans controlled the Senate, their chairing of key committees helped them legitimize his allegations. Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, and Rand Paul of Kentucky echoed Trump in calling for investigations of Democrats. (kindle loc 1612)

The look back into history further away from  the present day presents some much needed optimism. The history of the American republic has been one of imperfect equality and ideals, but also that the citizenry does eventually opt for freedom over oligarchic rule. She points out that the arguments used by right-wingers have always been used by slaveholders to deny women or black people the vote, and it's always been the task of ordinary people to fight back:

it is ordinary Americans like Harriet Beecher Stowe turning her grief for her dead eighteen-month-old son into the story of why no mother’s child should be sold away from her; Rose Herera suing her former enslaver for custody of her own children; Julia Ward Howe demanding the right to vote so her abusive husband could not control her life any longer; Sitting Bull defending the right of the Lakota to practice their own new religion, even if he did not believe in it; Saum Song Bo telling The New York Sun that he was insulted by their request for money to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty when, three years before, the country had excluded people like him; Dr. Héctor García realizing that Mexican Americans needed to be able to vote in order to protect themselves; Edward Roberts claiming the right to get an education despite his physical paralysis; Stormé DeLarverie, the drag king who was identified with the first punch at the Stonewall riot that jump-started the gay rights movement. (kindle loc 2418)

Much of the description of the pre-civil war era sounds very familiar:

 To maintain their power, southern leaders made common cause with southern men who defended local government, and for whom opposition to the federal government had become the core of their political identity. In the 1840s, when northern leaders began to try to stop the expansion of slavery through federal law, southern white leaders insisted that such action was an attack on democracy, which they were coming to define as states’ rights. By the 1850s, southern leaders had narrowed that definition of democracy even further. They insisted that the Framers had never intended for democracy to mean that voters got to influence policy; they could merely vote to change their leaders. Indeed, they argued, the Framers had set up the system so that it could never come under the sway of a mob. Federal lawmakers could do nothing that was not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution; the Framers had limited the government so it could do nothing but protect property. Even if an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted the government to do something more expansive, it could not...Leaders outlawed possession of books and pamphlets that questioned the slave system—those that urged solidarity among poor white men as well as those challenging enslavement—and they provoked violence against those they called agitators. By closing off access to factual information, enslavers could use the media, churches, society, and politics to spread their worldview first in the South and then nationally. Their worldview was taking over the country. In the 1850s, Southern elites who controlled the government of their states took over first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the Senate—where each state had two seats regardless of population—and the White House. Control of those two institutions meant they also took control of the Supreme Court. (kindle loc 2818-2828)

 The book is a quick and easy read, and provides much perspective on the chaos of the present day. It's going to be a very uncomfortable next few years, but despair never provides any solutions, and Richardson's book provides a much needed reminder that it is possible to fight for democracy and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people:

In 1858, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience: “I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments . . . are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. . . . Whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” (kindle loc 2789)

 

Review: Garmin Rally XC200 Pedals

I acquired a bunch of Garmin stuff at an employee discount, which meant that rather than jumping on the XC100, I paid $700 for the XC200 pedals. Coming from the powerpod, these are an astounding improvement: they're not finicky --- install them on your bike, pedal backwards and unclip, and the units calibrate and you're finished. No 10 minute test ride. From then on, as long as you don't swap the pedals over to another bike, all you have to do is ride.

Despite warnings from others, I've found that my existing SPD shoes and cleats mesh perfectly well with the Rally pedals. They behave just like regular SPDs, except that you have to swap batteries once in a while and they're heavier. But they feel solid and just as indestructible as the stuff Shimano produced.

The data from the pedals are much more accurate than from my old powerpod. No more bizzaro spikes to 1200w (which I'm pretty sure I'm not capable of doing) when they're out of calibration. In fact, now I know that my old powerpod numbers were inaccurate, I have to go back and delete them. That's how bad they were.

There are two ways to use power meters: to train, or to pace yourself. I loaded up a training program to try to train and discovered that it's much harder than you expect to actually use structured training. It's very easy to overshoot or undershoot what your training program asks you to do. After my one session, the Edge 840 declared that I was only 15% compliant. Ok, I'm never going to win any races.

The dual leg nature of the Garmin pedals let you know whether your legs are balanced (I'm 1-3% off, depending on the day). If your legs are grossly unbalanced you might have one leg longer than the other and might want to see a podiatrist to get prescribed orthotics. But mine were fine. The power meter also lets you know if your perceived effort is much higher or lower than usual. The way to use that is if you go out cycling and your perceived effort is much higher and your watts aren't responding you should actually call it a day and go home and rest more. OK, I hardly ever do that --- which is another reason I'll never be a good bike racer. Cycling time is too precious to waste!

Finally, the pacing yourself thing is worth thinking about. In practice, this is how I will use the power meter. If you're working too hard, slack off a bit. Oh wait, you're climbing a 20% grade? You're already in your lowest gear? Too bad. Just kill yourself and get it over with and rest. Ok, so maybe a power meter isn't going to help you.

Finally, one of my long distance randoneuring friends told me this trick: just use the power meter to gauge progress and motivate yourself. If your power has plateaued, go climb some hills and do some intervals. The rest of your time, just relax and take it easy. Sounds like a good idea!

I wasn't going to move the pedals from bike to bike But it turns out that now that I have them I do take the trouble to move them to the Roadini whenever I do a gravel ride on it. I guess I do like the info! But now that I have them, I suspect I'll probably take the trouble to pack them into carry-on luggage and bring them on tour, as well as spare batteries, just because those big blocks of riding means you get lots of data. I'll probably try them on the gravel bike once in a while to see how they go.

Do I regret buying them? Not at the price I paid --- though in retrospect I probably only needed the single sided power meter --- I would have been better off buying 2 pairs of the single-leg power meters! The better data alone tells me that while I can't improve my VO2max much more, I can improve my power quite a bit. I just have to have a plan and motivate myself to do so. These cost much more than the crank-arm based ones, but I think the fact that they're easy to move from bike to bike means I'll have power data much more often, and that's worth something.

2023 Bahamas - What I learned

 Someone during the trip told me that Bahamas comes from the Spanish phrase "Baja mar", shallow sea. And this trip definitely highlighted that. There were many places on the chart that said: "shifting sands", meaning that the chart was unreliable and you shouldn't keep going. Similarly, this was the only trip I've been on where I've actually had to change direction during a channel crossing when I realized that the bottom was too shallow. Couple that with tides and unusually difficult anchoring and harbor entrances and this is definitely not a sailing location a beginner should visit.

The snorkeling on Sandy Cay was nothing short of amazing, as was Snake Cay, which surprisingly was hardly mentioned in the guide or chart briefing! Mermaid Reef was meh, and the wrecks near Rat Cay were ok. Fish Hotel was definitely a disappointment, as was witch point. We discovered that Fowl Cay is probably a summer/late spring destination, as all mooring balls described in the book were missing and the surface so rough that the dingy was taking on water. That was probably why the local dive outfit wanted $1200 for a visit!

This visit completely destroyed my view of the Bahamas. I thought that it was a popular cruise ship destination, and that the place would be crowded and full of parties. I don't know how much of the Abacos was popular before Dorian, but years after Dorian it's clear that cruise ships don't visit the area, and the sailing is so challenging that 5 boats at Sandy Cay constitutes a crowd. We saw plenty of sail boats, but it's nowhere as crowded as the BVIs, and nobody even tried to anchor near us in a crowded anchorage or in an anchorage where there was only room for one, indicating that most of the sailors knew what they were doing.

I'm curious as to what the rest of the Bahamas is like and whether it's quite different from what we experienced. On the other hand, as skipper the Bahamas isn't quite a chill-out experience so you'd pretty much have to have your act together all the time. The water is cooler which made mosquitoes less of a problem but when the wind dies you get biting gnats which can be just as bad!

All in all, when I think back about it this was a very good trip. While we backtracked more than necessary and wasted time at bad places, we made very good decisions such as not staying at Little Harbor overnight. We probably should have spent more time at Hope Town and Snake Cay, and I should have pre-planned the route on the dinghy tour at Snake Cay better, but all in all we had a great time!

Review: The Delusions of Crowds

 The Delusions of Crowds is the latest book by William Bernstein, a retired neurosurgeon turned financial advisor with some success. The book covers both religious delusions and financial delusions. Bernstein, of course, is very credible when it comes to financial delusions, from the housing bubble to the dot com bubble, to Enron's collapse. I wish he'd write an addendum covering the crypto insanity that's obviously full of fraud, though maybe Molly White has it covered well enough.

The religious delusions are, believe it or not, quite new to me, despite having grown up in a methodist mission school that couldn't wait to propagate hell-fire-and-damnation, anti-D&D propaganda, as well as telling growing kids that Star Wars was evil because Yoda's explication of the force was inspired by Zen Buddhism. (Growing up surrounded by Buddhists, the school's religious authorities lost their credibility with me on that last bit --- I've had a deep suspicion of the Abrahamic religions ever since)

What the book taught me that I didn't know is the prevalence of the dispensation Christianity end times narrative, with a large number of the religious right having bought into it. If you've ever wondered why the most anti-semitic population on the far right nevertheless are such strong supporters of Israel, this is why:

The current polarization of American society cannot be fully understood without a working knowledge of the above dispensationalist narrative, which strikes the majority of well-educated citizens with a secular orientation as bizarre. In contrast, for a significant minority of Americans, this sequence of prophesized events is as familiar as Romeo and Juliet or The Godfather, and the appeal of televangelists such as Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart rest solidly on their dispensationalist credentials...The centrality of Israel, and particularly the rebuilding of the Temple, to this belief system has profoundly affected U.S. Middle East policy. Uncritical American support for Israel’s expansion of West Bank settlement and its apparent abandonment of a two-state solution can be traced directly to the advocacy of evangelicals, so-called Christian Zionists, who now exert far more influence than Jewish Zionists. Indeed, the opening and closing benedictions at the May 2018 dedication of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem were given by two dispensationalist ministers. One of them, Robert Jeffress, once claimed that Hitler had helped plan the Jew’s return to Israel; and the other, John Hagee, had deemed Hurricane Katrina God’s punishment for New Orleans’s sinfulness. (kindle loc 228, 234)

The book covers the start of the dispensationist religious movement, its roots in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, various Christian sects (including that of David Kouresh), and of course, Islamic extremism, which is the mirror image of Christian extremism:

Given that the roots of apocalypticism are found in both the New and Old Testaments, and likely have earlier roots in Fertile Crescent polytheism, it is not surprising that the doomsday scripts of both extremist Israeli Jews and the Islamic State have more than a passing resemblance to that of Christian dispensationalists, differing only in who plays the heroes and who plays the heavies. Today’s Muslim apocalypticists almost uniformly consider Jews to be the Antichrist, and the remarkable ability of the Islamic State to attract recruits from around the world to the killing fields of Syria and Iraq rested in no small part on an end-times narrative drawn directly from the hadith, the sayings of Muhammad. (kindle loc 254)

 Some of the earlier dispensationalist works actually predicted the creation of the state of Israel, which obviously makes their other random prophecies sound more likely to be true. The author does point out several examples of cases where end-times prophecies failed, and the so-called prophets doubled down multiple times over several years only to be discredited at the end, so not all end-times prophets get what they want:

The dispensationalists had already identified two occurrences that would mark the end of this hiatus and the resumption of time and God’s renewed attention to the Jews, and so bring about the end-times: the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the reassembly of the Roman Empire into the Antichrist-led European ten-nation confederation. While Darby left behind dozens of volumes, his unreadable prose confined his readership to a small core of literate and determined true believers. On the other hand, not only did Anderson’s prose go down like fine claret, but his accurate prediction of the return of the Jews to Palestine in The Coming Prince electrified his later twentieth-century readers...Even today, Anderson’s prediction of the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine astounds. The same, alas, cannot be said of his prophecy of a renewed Roman Empire, which has embarrassed Christian fundamentalist prophecy ever since. For example, a century and a half after Richard Graves identified the post-1815 rise of European constitutional monarchies as the new Roman Empire, dispensationalists would do the same for the European Union, which has thus far failed to produce the Antichrist or form a strategic alliance with Israel, let alone invade it. (kindle loc 4759, 4771)

 You might be tempted to believe that this type of fantasy is restricted to the kooky far right, but the book points out several republican presidents actually appeal to the people who believe this stuff:

President George W. Bush’s address to the nation announcing military action in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 nicely illustrated this divide. To the secular ear, it struck a tolerant, anodyne tone almost devoid of religious content, and mentioned Islam only in terms of American open-armed acceptance of and good wishes toward its nearly two billion adherents. Evangelical listeners, on the other hand, heard a rather different message in phrases such as “lonely path” (Isaiah), “killers of innocents” (Matthew), and “there can be no peace” (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Chronicles, Isaiah) that suggested the wrath of a Judeo-Christian God. Religious scholar Bruce Lincoln observed that such phrases were “plainly audible to portions of his audience who are attentive to such phrasing, but likely to go unheard by those without the requisite textual knowledge.”540 Bush’s speech was a loud and piercing dog whistle; as put by Christianity Today after Lincoln published those words, “Sadly, we’ll no longer be able to secretly nod and wink to each other as Bush talks.”541 (Bush himself is noticeably silent regarding dispensationalist beliefs; officially a Methodist, most observers classify him as mainline Protestant.)542 The prevalence of the dispensationalist delusion in the United States also separates this country from the rest of the developed world, and carries with it the potential for catastrophe. (kindle loc 5487)

 This book was published in February 2021, more than 2 years before the Oct 7th atrocities committed by Hamas. Ordinarily you would expect Americans to not care (Israel has no oil, neither does Palestine), but the book clearly points out that even as far back as Jerry Falwell's time, there was a religious movement to support the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank:

Asked why Israel had the right to occupy Gaza and the West Bank, he answered simply, “God said so.”596 The piece ended with Falwell, who remarked, There are about 200,000 evangelical pastors in America, and we’re asking them all through e-mail, faxes, letters, telephone, to go into their pulpits and use their influence in support of Israel and the prime minister.597 No one, though, exemplifies the shift of fundamentalist influence onto the potentially cataclysmic arena of geopolitics as does Pat Robertson, whom diplomat and journalist Michael Lind labeled “the single most important purveyor of crackpot conspiracy theories in the history of American politics.” (kindle loc 5827)

 Why are Americans so susceptible to religious crackpot theories and conspiracy stories? Bernstein doesn't hesitate to point out that the Americans are easily the worst educated of developed nations, and unlike our closest analogues, the British, we do not supply educational public programming as a counter-weight to the entertainment industry. So our public is particularly ill-informed:

The United States consistently ranks near the bottom of developed nations for the OECD’s PISA international educational evaluations, and when compared with the citizens of other developed nations, Americans know depressingly little about both their own country and the rest of the world. The latest PISA cycle, completed in 2015, showed American students ranked fortieth, well behind the likes of Slovenia, Poland, Vietnam, Russia, Portugal, and Italy, let alone top scorers like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea.618 A study from 1994 throws this problem into sharp relief: fully 37 percent of Americans got all of five representative basic facts about the world wrong, versus only 3 percent of Germans. (Of Spaniards, 32 percent got all five wrong; of Mexicans, 28 percent; of Canadians, 27 percent; of French, 23 percent; of British, 22 percent; and of Italians, 18 percent.) Italians and Germans who didn’t attend college outscored Americans who did...“American television is noteworthy for the cognitive busyness of its jump cuts, advertisements, and staccato style, and cognitive busyness makes it harder for some people to absorb information.” The authors dryly noted that American researchers are “generally reluctant to ask too many factual questions for fear of embarrassing the respondents, who might terminate the interview or become too flustered to answer other questions.” This may explain why the Germans did so well, since they were far more likely to be regular newspaper readers than those in the other six nations studied...In the United States, the media’s mission centers more on entertainment than education, whereas Scandinavian governments vigorously support high-quality news and informational programming. The U.K., which possesses both a prestigious and well-endowed public news outlet, the BBC, and a prosperous private media sector, occupies a position midway between the United States and Scandinavian nations....the knowledge gap between Americans of high and low educational status was much larger than in the other three nations studied: A poorly educated Briton, Dane, or Finn knows far more about the world around them than a poorly educated American.623 It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the poorly educated in the United States, relative to those in other countries, are uniquely susceptible to dispensationalist narratives that even the most educationally disadvantaged in the rest of the developed world resist because of their better grasp of everyday facts. (kindle loc 5962, 5972, 5983, 5988)

What's worse, in recent years, evangelicals have increasingly had a prominent role in America's military as well as political establishments. 

You might be wondering why I put so much emphasis on the religious delusion part of the book, as opposed to the financial delusions. Well, the financial delusions (such as bitcoin or cryptocurrency) might cost you to lose your money and your retirement, but it's unlikely to destroy the world. The end-times delusion, however, can easily cause people to believe that it's their religious duty to bring about the end times, and of course, our modern technology allows us to bring about the end times through nuclear or other means. I'm surprised that this book doesn't get more attention, but that's probably because of Bernstein's writing style --- he is turgid and never uses short words when he can use long ones, and I believe the financial delusions part of the book fully dilutes the impact of the warnings he brings about religious delusions. After all, the dot com bubble collapse did gift us a ton of dark fiber that was later put to use by Google and follow-on companies. But there can be no recovery from an end-times plan put into action by religious people believe themselves to be doing God's work.

I consider this book important and well worth reading. It explains much in American politics as well as America's attitude towards Israel amongst the far right.

2023 Bahamas: Nov 27th Man O'War Cay to Marsh Harbor

 The wind shifted overnight and was now blowing from the West instead of the East. This killed any hopes of sailing back as it would mean tacking back and forth using up a ton of time. Arturo, Marcie, Bowen and I elected to swim to shore (I'd talked Bowen into doing it by betting him $100 on a race with him wearing fins and me without --- I lost)

, and there, Arturo blew the conch one last time.Turning on the engine, we weighed anchor and headed straight against the wind towards Marsh Harbor, encountering rain and seeing a rainbow for the first time on the trip.

It kept raining all the way into Marsh Harbor and the wind strengthened. At the fuel dock, it must have been blowing 20 knots! I struggled to place the boat just saw, and the crew of Navigare Yatchting watched me harbor until the man in charge took pity on me, and boarded the boat and took over, revving the motor into red line to back the boat into the wind while the Katja pivoted against the dock just like I'd been taught in my certification class. I was no longer in charge and I could pack!

We paid up at the fuel dock, let the crew move the boat back into the slip and plug in the shore power cable. The debrief was easy, though they gave us a hard time about returning the boat with the septic tanks uncleared. They didn't charge us for the broken deck brush, and then we went off to the coffee shop and then lunch. It was Xiaoqin's birthday, and Bowen and Boen picked out some chocolate flowers for mommy's birthday.

We were all on the same flight back to FLL except for Niniane, who opted to stay at Hopetown for a few more days to do more snorkeling and exploration. At FLL, Arturo and Marcie joined us for pizza dinner at 3 sons, a brewery next to our hotel serving detroit style pizza. Our flight the next day went exactly as scheduled. Our trip was over.

Review: Remember

 Remember is Lisa Genova's book about memory. What hurts it is that I've read about most of the topics she covers in various other neuropsychology books (e.g., the need to do spaced repetition in order to learn something permanently, the unreliability of eyewitnesses, the difference between episodic memory and flashbulb memory). I'd say that what distinguishes this book from other books is that (1) it's short, and (2) there's an emphasis on practical ways to help yourself remember what you want to remember, and (3) there's also short sections about forgetting stuff you want to forget.

One interesting titbit is that if you're blocked and forgotten a word ("tip of the tongue" situation), it's OK to use Google find blocked words:

Many people worry that if they use Google to find their blocked words, then they’re contributing to the problem and actually worsening their already-weakening memory. They consider Google a high-tech crutch that’s going to ruin their memories. This belief is misinformed. Looking up the name of the actor who played Tony Soprano doesn’t weaken my memory’s ability whatsoever. Similarly, suffering through the mental pain and insisting on coming up with the word on my own doesn’t make my memory stronger or come with any trophies for my doing so. You don’t have to be a memory martyr. You are not more likely to experience fewer TOTs, resolve future TOTs faster, better remember where you put your keys, remember to take your heart medication tonight, or prevent Alzheimer’s if you can retrieve Tony Soprano’s name without Google. (kindle loc 1324)

Similarly, her practical advise about prospective memory (intention to do something) is to just use checklists as an aid, as well as cues (e.g., put the stuff you need to remember in front of the door so you literally have to trip over it to forget it as you leave your home)  The advise to forget something is basically "don't keep repeating the story of your painful incident or it'll be seared into your memory --- don't talk about it other people, and don't ruminate on it!" Hm... That's probably much harder advice to follow than to give.

Practical advise about avoid dementia and Alzheimers are pretty straightforward: eat a mediterranean diet, exercise, and sleep well, and get plenty of vitamin D.

Aerobic exercise has been associated with a significantly reduced risk of dementia in many human studies, and it decreases amyloid levels in animal models of the disease. Exercise improves sleep (it decreases the time it takes to fall asleep, increases the quality of sleep, and decreases the number of times you wake up in the night). And as described earlier, sleep improves normal memory and reduces your risk of Alzheimer’s. Even a daily brisk walk has been correlated with a 40 percent decreased risk of Alzheimer’s. That’s not a small impact. Exercise works. (kindle loc 2325)

Another interesting thing she notes is that building a cognitive reserve doesn't mean stuff like sudoku and crosswords. You actually have to learn new skills:

Building up a cognitive reserve doesn’t mean doing crossword puzzles. There is no compelling evidence that doing puzzles or brain-training exercises does anything to decrease your risk of Alzheimer’s. You’ll improve at doing crosswords, but you’re not building a bigger, Alzheimer’s-resistant brain. You don’t want to simply retrieve information you’ve already learned, because this type of mental exercise is like traveling down old, familiar streets, cruising neighborhoods you already know. You want to pave new neural roads. Building an Alzheimer’s-resistant brain through cognitive stimulation means learning to play piano, meeting new friends, traveling to a new city, or reading this book (kindle loc 2352)

All in all, the book is short, easy to read, and practical. I'm not sure you can find a higher recommendation than that! 

2023 Bahamas - Nov 26th: Anna Cay to Man O'War Cay

I got up at 5:30, cooked and ate a quick breakfast, and hurried to grab the paddleboard before the kids got hold of it. It turned out I didn't have to worry --- they were feeling too lazy to fight me for it. I paddleboarded around the area, visiting houses along the shore as well as Ana Cay, where a huge mansion was under construction with piers already there marked "Private".

The plan today was to visit Fowl Cay and make another attempt to snorkel there. The book listed no less than 16 mooring balls, with 6 of them marked missing to give the air of confidence. We started motoring and then realized that the wind had stiffened to about 15 knots, which meant we could sail! As we sailed we passed Man O' War Cay and started scouting locations to spend the night.

Anchoring at Fowl Cay, things looked promising as there were already two Catamarans anchor'd out there. The dive checked felt good as well, there was still surge but nowhere as bad as what we felt a few days earlier.

Getting out the dinghy, we loaded everyone and the snorkel gear into the dinghy, coaxing the kids as well. We turned the corner on the island after passing all the anchor'd Catamarans and discovered that the waves were still so high that the dinghy started taking on water. We looked for mooring balls but didn't see any. Eventually we took on so much water that we gave up and turned around. One of the other Catamarans had weighed anchor and was leaving, but at the other one which looked like they had a professional crew, they told us that all the mooring balls were gone. "You have to go all the way out to the reef where the big waves are and drop a dinghy anchor. If you wait, we'll go out there and you can follow us." We didn't have a bailer so we had to go to the Katja to get bucket out to bail the dinghy sufficiently to the point where we could get it onto the davits! We were discouraged, as it didn't seem like it would be safe to do this even with a professional crew out there to mark the way. I also had no confidence in the dinghy's puny anchor holding up against the surge.

The kids were elated as they had decided they didn't enjoy snorkeling. We raised the dinghy, taking the time to drain it out as much as possible while we debated what to do. We still had time to go to Snake Cay or Sandy Cay, but that wouldn't leave much time. We were all pretty tired. I proposed we visited the main town (XXX) in Man O'War Cay. It being a Sunday everything would be closed, but there was a path to the Atlantic side where we could take a look.

The habor entrance was incredibly narrow, requiring precise alignment with the "No Wake" sign inside the harbor. There were no depth concerns as the approach was deep, but this was not something for a novice --- fortunately in my youth, docking in narrow Sausalito slips in difficult conditions at night on a monohull had given me confidence.

We made it into the harbor, picked up a mooring ball, ate lunch, and then dropped the dinghy for a visit. This town was nowhere near as picturesque as Hope Town, but there was a street to the Atlantic, and we took it. Once again, we had the beach all to ourselves, walking the length of it and back. The town had a big shipbuilding business, and had been one for more than a couple of centuries.

After the walk, we made the call to just anchor in the northern most cove of Man O'War Cay, where we had seen a beautiful beach at the narrowest point ono the island. It looked like it could be a good place to spend our last evening with a Beam Reach back to Marsh Harbor to return Katja the next day, There were 3 other boats anchor'd out at DIckie's Bay, but there was nothing in that location to do, so we opted for the difficult cove instead.

Doing all this was easier said than done, of course. First off, the exit from XXX harbor was just as difficult as the entrance, and at close to low tide, more than a little harrowing. I relied on Arturo and Mark to help guide me while exiting. The northern most Cove on Man O' War Cay was difficult because there were powerlines that you had to avoid hitting with your anchor, which was why you had to be inside the cove before laying down the hook.

Even laying down the hook once I was done with difficult manuevering was not easy. We tried 3 times in 2 different anchoring spots before the anchor caught. However, Arturo had so little confidence that he told me not to join him in the dive check. "This feels like that time at Witch's Point!" he said. "Then if it doesn't work out, swim around and identify good anchorages. "How far in can we go?" "Not that far!" Arturo swam out to the anchor and immediately crossed his hands in the air. He swam around the cove and identified a patch of send that could serve as good anchorage. I waited for him to come aboard before we weighed anchor one last time. Arturo's judgement was sound: this time the anchor caught with no ado.

I noticed that the other side of Man 'O War Cay was marked with reefs. "Maybe it'll be good snorkeling there!" Katie and Mark went first, swimming to the beach and then walking over. By the time I got to the beach, Mark had scoped it out. "No good. Surge too much and there's really nothing to see." We settled in for some relaxation. Boen first paddleboarded to shore, then Bowen did. There was a bunch of shells that had been polished and left in the shelter straddling the Atlantic and the Sea of Abacos. One of them could be blown like a trumpet and Boen succeeded in doing so.

Once Bowen heard about that ashore he decided he would paddle to shore and pick up the conch to bring home. He actually succeeded in doing so but not without help from Arturo. The wind and waves were just strong enough to make maneuvering and pointing the paddleboard challenging.

We all made the best of our last full day, relaxing and eating the rest of the food aboard. We started sorting out all the stuff in the salon according to who owned what and started backing up photos to the laptop we had brought for that purpose.

2023 Bahamas Index Page

 From November 18th to Nov 27th, we chartered a 42' Lagoon named Katja in the Abacos, Bahamas for an 8 day sailing cruise. It was our first time in the area, and my first time in the Bahamas for any reason whatsoever. This is the index page for the day to day travelogues as well as photographs, thoughts and various equipment reviews.

• Link to Photo Album
• Sunrise Conch
• Manta Ray on Nunjack Cay
• Reef Shark at Sandy Cay

Day By Day Trip Report

• November 18th: Prologue
• November 19th: Conch Inn Marina to Baker's Bay, Great Guana Cay
• November 20th: Baker's Bay, Great Guana Cay to Rat Cay
• November 21st: Rat Cay to Coco Bay, Green Turtle Cay
• November 22nd: Coco Bay to Mermaid Reef, Great Abaco Island
• November 23rd: Mermaid Reef to Snake Cay
• November 24th: Snake Cay to Lynyard Cay
• November 25th: Lynyard Cay to Anna Cay
• November 26th: Anna Cay to Man O'War Cay
• November 27th: Man O'War Cay to Marsh Harbor

Reflection and Reviews

• What I learned in the Bahamas
• Fenix 7 Pro Sapphire Solar
• Long Term Review: Anker Battery/USB Adapter for Resmed AirMini

2023 Bahamas: Nov 25th - Lynyard Cay to Anna Cay

 

In the morning, the kids played Uber a couple of times while I swam and looked through the book. A snorkel spot named "Fish Hotel" caught my eye. Sandy Cay was on the way there, and I suggested that as our first stop. Wind was light, and despite the early hour, there was already a sailboat anchored off the island. I eschewed anchoring in the deep water and parked at the same place as the day before, where I was the only boat. It took 3 tries to get the boat to anchor, but a dive check upon the successful attempt turned out nothing untoward.

We scrambled to get the dinghy out but the boys balked and Xiaoqin elected to stay with them. This time, we remembered to start the generator and water maker during our snorkel. Taking the dinghy out, we parked at the same mooring ball before as Arturo said it was the best one.  Upon getting into the water, some other snorkelers waved at us and made the sign for a shark! Indeed there was a shark! We watched the shark chase two mating fishes around --- he probably wasn't hungry enough to really nail one to eat them --- all he was was disturb their mating behavior.

Marcie cried "Turtle!" and indeed a curiuos turtle had swam up to her. This turtle was the least purturbed by people that I had ever encountered --- it even let Katherine and I touch him. This was shaping to be a fabulous snorkel --- the surge was less than the day before and I wasn't cold at all. We swam around and explored more of the reef. "Every mooring ball is good!" said Arturo. After a while we realized that we didn't know where Niniane was. It was about 20 minutes into the snorkel so I suggested we started heading slowly towards the boat. I wasn't worried about Niniane --- she'd explored reefs on her own before and was a certified open water diver. But accidents can happen. We made it into the dinghy and looked around a bit before someone spotted Niniane. She saw everyone on the dinghy and started heading back.

With everyone back on the Katja, we put up the dinghy and were off just as more boats descended onto Sandy Cay. Fish Hotel was on Tilloo Cay, a narrow strip of an island that boasted many treacherous channels. We drove in and anchored off Tavern Cay. The dive check went well, but when we swam in search of the Fish Hotel, we saw a couple of tree trunks with a bunch of inverted jelly fish and some fish using the dead trees as a coral. Visibility was terrible and the surge was none too comfortable. After that disappointing snorkel, we debated what to do next. We were originally going to visit Hopetown the next day, but since we were all snorkeled out, a visit to hope town for lunch seemed in order.

We turned on the motor and started motoring up the straights but were soon in shallow water. A quick look at the cruising guide suggested that there was a way to get through, but I no longer trusted the book. We turned around and raised the sail, and started sailing to the other side of the straits. Once on the other side, I discovered that the Katja didn't do a good job sailing into the wind, and the straits were too narrow to keep going. After a little bit of attempting to sail in light wind, we gave up, dropped the sails, and motored into Hopetown harbor at 3:15pm It took several tries to pick up a Mooring ball, but we did pick one up and used the public dinghy dock.

Hopetown was picturesque in the little bit we explored, finding Vernon's grocery store. Vernon was an old man who was proud of the store and was famous for his key lime pies. He didn't display those, however, only bringing out one when we asked! We bought banana bread and Boen and Bowen each got a muffin. On the way out we bought a six pack of diet coke at $1.10 each, which seemed absurdly expensive but keeping everyone caffeinated seemed like a good idea. Niniane said she was going to stay in Hope Town for 4 days after the sailing cruise was over and took the opportunity to explore while Arturo, Xiaoqin, Bowen and I took the treasures back to the boat.

"How long do we have?" "We should leave by 4:30pm, latest." "OK, everyone staying, please be at the dinghy dock by 4:15pm." We took everything back, and then drove to the dinghy dock to find no one there and dropped off at the Elbow Cay Reef lighthouse. Then we saw others waiting at the dinghy dock and drove over to pick everyone up.

Arturo went to get ice (despite the closed sign on the marina office), while the rest of us walked up the Elbow Reef lighthouse from whence we got glorious views of the area in the late afternoon light. The lighthouse was the last manually operated kerosene lamp lighthouse in North Ameica. The mechanism had to be rewound by hand every 2 hours, and the light while dim by modern standards was still useful.

Leaving the lighthouse reluctantly by 4:30pm, we maneuvered out into the harbor after dropping mooring ball. It was getting late and I didn't feel like risking visiting Man O'War Cay right away and getting to do a dive check in the dark. Instead, I headed to my backup location, which was right off Ana Cay at about 6' of water. We anchored with no problems and the dive check revealed a solidly held anchor.

We got out the paddleboard and while there was a current it wasn't too bad --- the kids could play in this in the fading light. Dinner was Louis and Arturo's special --- Pasta, Sausages, and Vegetables mixed. I was still hungry after dinner and opened up a can of spam and ate much of it.

Stargazing was marred by clouds, a nearly full moon, and missing meteor showers. But since we were so close, we could see the Elbow Reef Lighthouse operating in its full glory, bright enough to be seen but not blinding.

Review: Number Go Up

 After being disappointed by Michael Lewis's Going Infinite, I read on Molly White's blog that Number Go Up was potentially far better. I checked it out from the library and finished it in two days, simply because it was such compelling reading.

There's a very rudimentary explanation of how blockchain works, and Zeke Faux doesn't shy away from explaining how blockchain is far from anonymous:

the way the blockchain database works, transaction records are never erased. And while it doesn’t record names, it does assign a unique address to each wallet. If any wallet can be tied to a specific individual, then an investigator can easily see every transaction that person has ever made. Investigators could tie a person to an address by making a purchase from them, just as they might buy drugs from a dealer before arresting them; or they could watch for transfers to exchanges, like Bankman-Fried’s FTX, then send subpoenas to the exchange for user records. Once the FBI busted Silk Road, the dark-web drug market, it was able to track down many of the dealers on the site. As the writer Andy Greenberg explained, “Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals.” (kindle loc 1736)

 The profiles of the various characters is probably the most boring part of the book --- to me, all the scammers kinda look alike, with very iffy backgrounds and not very interesting bios. None of them can explain why their coin or NFT token or whatever should be worth anything more than zero. I guess many of the crypto investors are betting on the bigger fool theory to be able to unload their stash at non-zero values. There's an aside where Faux watches Michael Lewis interview Sam Bankman-Fried:

the author’s questions were so fawning, they seemed inappropriate for a journalist. Listening from the packed auditorium, I started to question whether Lewis was really writing a book, or if FTX had paid him to appear. (Lewis later told me that he had in fact come to report for his book and that he was not compensated.) Lewis said he knew next to nothing about cryptocurrency. But he seemed quite confident that it was great. The writer said that, contrary to popular opinion, crypto was not well suited for crime. He posited that U.S. regulators were hostile to the industry because they’d been brainwashed or bought off by established Wall Street banks. I wondered if he simply hadn’t heard about the countless crypto scams, but the thought seemed preposterous. “You look at the existing financial system, then you look at what’s been built outside the existing financial system by crypto, and the crypto version is better,” Lewis said. (kindle loc 2292)

Then he gets into the crypto scheme in the Philipines during the pandemic called Axle Infinitie. The ending of that bubble is both comic and tragic:

Crypto bros and Silicon Valley venture capitalists gave Filipinos false hope by promoting an unsustainable bubble based on a Pokémon knockoff as the future of work. And making matters worse, in March 2022, North Korean hackers broke into a sort-of crypto exchange affiliated with the game and made off with $600 million worth of stablecoins and Ether. The heist helped Kim Jong Un pay for test launches of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. officials. Instead of providing a new way for poor people to earn cash, Axie Infinity funneled their savings to a dictator’s weapons program (kindle loc 2251)

There's a section in there where he replays an interview between  Matt Levine and Bankman-Fried, where Bankman-Fried essentially describes a Ponzi scheme:

Levine asked a simple question about “yield farming,” the investment technique Jason Stone had used at Celsius. As Bankman-Fried attempted to explain how it worked, he had more or less laid out the how-to of running a crypto pyramid scheme. “You start with a company that builds a box,” Bankman-Fried said. “They probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks in thirty-eight days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does, or pretend it does literally nothing.” Bankman-Fried explained that it would take very little effort for this box to issue a token that would share in the profits from the box. “Of course, so far, we haven’t exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don’t know, you know, maybe there will be,” Bankman-Fried said. Levine said that the box and its “box token” should be worth nothing. Bankman-Fried didn’t disagree. But he said, “In the world that we’re in, if you do this, everyone’s gonna be like, ‘Ooh, box token. Maybe it’s cool.’ ” Curious people would start buying box token. And the box could start giving out free box token to anyone who put money inside, just as Axie had rewarded players with Smooth Love Potions. Crypto investors would see they could earn a higher yield by putting their money in the box than in a bank. Before long, Bankman-Fried said, the box would be stuffed with hundreds of millions of dollars, and the price of box token would be rising. “This is a pretty cool box, right? Like this is a valuable box, as demonstrated by all the money that people have apparently decided should be in the box. And who are we to say that they’re wrong about that?” Sophisticated players would put more and more money in the box, Bankman-Fried said, “and then it goes to infinity. And then everyone makes money.” “I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person,” Levine said. “And that was so much more cynical than how I would’ve described farming. You’re just like, well, I’m in the Ponzi business and it’s pretty good.” (kindle loc 2359)

The big reveal in the book actually isn't about SBF. In the last third of the book, Faux discovers that the various internet crypto scammers (these are people who would tease you that they have a sure-fire way of making money on crypto using their special app, get you to download the app, and then use that app to siphon money away from you) are part of a global human-trafficking ring that essentially used human slaves to scale up these crypto scams. (In this day and age of AI, you might imagine that they'd use chatbots, but obviously machine learning models are still much more expensive than human slaves)

And the problem was large enough that it could account for a serious amount of Tether transactions. If Chinatown held six thousand people scamming like Vicky Ho, and each had to meet a quota of $300 a day—the number I’d heard from some victims—that one compound alone would generate more than $600 million a year in illicit proceeds. From what I had learned, it seemed that this scam slave complex would not be able to operate without crypto. And the benefits of crypto to the rest of the world seemed to be limited to enabling a zero-sum gambling mania. (kindle loc 3281)

 The conclusion the book comes down to is that Tether and Bitcoin have sufficient real world applications (not legal ones, given the extremely high transaction fees associated with conversion from crypto to legal tender) that countinue to fund its existence despite the crypto crash . What's more, with high interest rates being paid out by T-bills and Treasury Bonds, Tether can now make money legitimately:

In May 2023, Tether announced that it had converted most of its holdings into U.S. government bonds. It said that due to the high interest rates, it had generated $1.5 billion in profits in the first quarter alone—an insane amount for an unregulated offshore company. That number would be a good quarter for corporate giants like Raytheon, Nike, or Disney. Tether had, if its numbers were trustworthy, become one of the 150 most profitable companies in the world. (kindle loc 4208)

The author likes to give the government regulatory agencies a hard time  about ignoring the problem of crypto scams. But given the international scale of this problem, and how lightly funded the various agencies are, I can only imagine that it would be very hard to fund an investigation. But now that crypto is dead maybe at least the scammers are finding it harder to operate.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book, learned a lot from it, and it actually had insights I hadn't found anywhere else. Recommended.

2023 Bahamas: November 24th Snake Cay to Lynyard Cay

In the morning, while waiting for others to finish breakfast, I realized that the winds were calm enough that breaking out the paddleboard made sense. I got it out and pumped up the paddleboard and took it for a spin around the area. Paddle boarding is like having a bicycle on the water, with wind and current taking the place of hills. To my surprise Bowen and Boen (especially Boen) took an interest in paddle boarding and took it out for a spin as well. They had shown little interest in paddle boarding in previous years but I guess they finally felt comfortable enough to try it!

The dinghy tour had to be done before low tide at 10:00am, so we departed promptly at 8:00am around the corner where the cars were. Even at mid-tide, there were still many shallow spots. But this place was amazing --- there were turtles galore, and a sting ray jumped out of the water 3 times during our visit. I had tried to memorize the route the night before, but what I should have done should have been to create a course on Garmin connect and download it into the watch. Nevertheless, while we got lost several times, we managed to backtrack and make our way out of there by 9:30am after being much enamored by the sights of the salt marsh.

The boys took some time playing with the paddleboard again, and then it was time to pick up anchor and motor over to Sandy Cay, which promised good snorkeling. We anchor'd on the leeward side of Sandy Cay, where there were already 2 boats waiting. We noticed that on the other side of the Cay, where the sand was deep (25', necessitating a 150' anchor rode), there were more boats and lots of dinghys tied to various mooring balls. This place was crowded but that usually meant great snorkeling. We put down the dinghy and loaded everyone with their snorkel gear on it, and once the first few swimmers were in the water they all said "wow". This was the best snorkel spot we would find for the entire trip.

The others saw spotted Rays, but I missed it, since we had to spend much time convincing the boys to go into the water. Even then, it didn't take 20 minutes before they headed back to the dinghy.

When we were all done we debated what to do. We looked at the tide tables and realized that we could make mid-tide entry into Little Harbor and get out again and not be trapped in there overnight. We made with haste to the harbor entrance, though not without observing a couple of coves on Lynyard Cay that looked like it would make for a good overnight spot. At Little Harbor, we negotiated the entrance with 3' of bottom to spare, picking up mooring balls for the first time. The boys made use of their new found skill with the paddleboard to paddleboard to Pete's while the rest of us dingy'd over. The walk to the ruined lighthouse was recommended by the book as was snorkeling off the beach, but when we walked to the lighthouse we were disappointed by the views. I'd say that the visit only netted us the opportunity to leave a couple of garbage bags for the hefty price of $10 each.

After departing Little Harbor, we debated between Bridges Cay, the Bight of Old Robinson, and Lynyard Cay, but decided that the conditions were settled enough that Lynyard Cay was likely to net fewer mosquitoes than the alternatives. There were two other boats already in the cove, but we settled in between them with plenty of sea room between us. The wind and current were so calm in the cove that the kids could get out the paddleboard and row to the beach, scaring away the poor folks who had it all to themselves prior to our arrival. The kids played an elaborate game of Uber, where Boen would pick up Bowen, drop him off at the beach (where he would look for coconuts or conch shells), and then Bowen would shout for Boen, and Boen would come and pick him up in the paddleboard. Bereft of transportation, I got out my goggles and swam to shore without fins just for a workout.

The sunset was gorgeous. The stargazing was marred by the increasingly bright and full moon.