Summer in Mexico is a time of boat work; winter is our sailing season.
But as the end of summer rolls around and racing dates are looming if the boat work is not finished I begin to scramble and this year was no exception.
wingssail images-fredrick roswold
Hit the deck running
I did have a long list including a new bow pulpit (after a disastrous port starboard collision when we were on starboard and a boat to leeward decided to cross us on port. He didn't make it and I couldn't' avoid him, big OUCH) and propellor shaft and flange replacement. There was other work to be done on the topsides where the Imron paint needed attention and new epoxy deck paint with non-skid was also needed. There were new toe rails fore and aft to be crafted and winch revisions to be completed. The hydraulics needed attention and instrument upgrades were in the works. A lot of other projects were checked off including many interior upgrades (some of them major) such as important maintenance including keel backing plate replacements as well as a significant enlargement of the aft cabin berth.
Actually, the list this year was really long but I almost got through it.
Almost.
My trip to Oregon earlier for a short break was really fun but hadn’t helped me keep on schedule.
So here I was in in November about to start the 39th racing season with a to-do list which was still a little bit intimidating.
Fortunately my friend Rhonda came down to Mexico to pitch in. A day later a new friend Renee joined us. We got right to work and the progress with two willing hands was excellent. One of my regulars, Mark, spent a day too and I think the list was finally completed.
This year getting my crew in shape is also going to be a challenge. Some of my most loyal crew are aging out and replacements are hard to find. Neither Rhonda or Renee will be able to sail much this winter either, if at all. I recruited new people aggressively and fortunately I found some great new talent but bringing them to a high level will take time. We went sailing a couple of times for training.
wingssail images-fredrick roswold
Setting sail for the first time, Tressa and Al
But it is not all work. In Mexico we like to play too; there was music to be enjoyed and time at the beach to swim in the ocean and soak up the sun.
wingssail images-fredrick roswold
Sunset at the beach
Finally it all came together and we had our first race.
The people of Trinidad & Tobago have been making music with whatever they could get their hands on for a couple hundred years, maybe longer. They used bamboo poles, gin bottles, brake drums, and anything else which would make a sound. By the 40’s they had developed the oil drum as a musical instrument. They sunk the tops into a pan shape, figured out how to make a chromatic scale, and began seriously beating on them.
Bands formed and their rivalry led to street fighting as well as music.
The street fighting passed, we think, but the music competition just got more intense and the music better and better.
By 2012 Trinidad & Tobago’s Steel Pan Bands have long since become world famous.
We had to see and hear them for ourselves and on Saturday night we went to a concert.
It still had a bit of a gang flavor; the neighborhood was a bad one, but inside the concert venue it was all fun and music, wonderful music.
Our driver suggested we leave early to avoid the traffic jam. He said, “This was not a place to be stuck in traffic”, so we missed the last two bands but we saw seven of them and they were great.
I think we’ll go back.
Click here for more photos of Trinidad & Tobago's Steel Pan Bands
We’ve gone to hear music in many places. Last night the music came to us.
A Brazilian rock concert, “Uma Noite Caliente” (One Hot Night), which we could clearly hear from our boat, occurred overnight in a specially built venue on the grounds of the hotel where our marina is located. Chiclete Banana and several other Brazilian pop bands pumped out the amps until dawn and about five thousand young Brazilians danced and partied all night.
We might have wanted join the young crowd ourselves but the tickets started at $110 so we passed on that but I realized the day before, as the construction workers were putting the finishing touches on the stages, barricades and temporary walls, that we were already inside the perimeter. I thought it might be possible to walk directly from Wings into the concert grounds without passing any gate. They left us a back door.
Judy didn’t want to chance it but I thought I would give it a try.
So at midnight, when the music was at its loudest, I grabbed my Nikon and headed out. I expected to be stopped by one of the hundreds of security guards. After all not only did I look a little out of place but I also did not have one of the colored wrist bands showing that I had paid for my admittance, but no one gave me a second glance. I walked right into the crowd and right up to the stage.
I put up my big gun camera and banged off a few dozen shots, then beat a hasty retreat; I did not want a confrontation with these guards and most of all I did not want my camera to be confiscated. Anyhow, it wasn’t my kind of music.
During the early morning hours as the beat went on and on and the aid cars came and went there was a huge fireworks display right over our boat and a number of helicopter passes which we could hear from our bed. This was quite the event. We had prime seats but we didn’t get up. Let the kids party on, we’re sleeping.
At 06:00 I did another patrol: The kids were still there, the music was still going, but there was wreckage everywhere from the long night.
By sun-up it was all over.
Click here for more shots from Uma Noite Caliente.
In the 90’s grunge was in and Judy and I often visited Moe's Mo' Rockin' Cafe and the Crocodile in Seattle to hear bands that sounded like Nirvana and Pearl Jam where everyone wore black clothes and on Friday night the bands changed every twenty minutes. We were the oldest folks in the crowd and we were asked if we were the parents of the band, “or else why would you be here” but we didn’t care because we liked rock and roll and for six bucks you could hear 10 bands, some of which were actually good.
Since sailing out of Seattle we’ve kept a look-out for live music at the various ports we’ve visited and we’ve found it a few times.
In Mexico we could go to old Puerto Vallarta and hear Willie and Lobo. Not exactly grunge, but it was good music. We bought all of their albums.
In Papeete, Tahiti, during Fete’ in 1998, the sound checks from a rock stage near our mooring on the quay attracted us and we had a blast watching some young Polynesian punk rockers wail until after midnight.
Down-under there were lots of places to go in Auckland, Sydney, and Brisbane and we always preferred to find a venue where the band members outnumbered the audience and we’d have no problem getting up close. Intimacy was more important than a big name.
A real find was at the Gypsy Jazz festival in New Caledonia in 2003. We weren’t particularly fond of jazz but we thought we had to see at least one act as long as we were there. We chose one which was in an old warehouse converted to a club, reminding us of the venues in Seattle, and instead of jazz we found a USA rockabilly band with electric guitars and crowd all dressed in black. Hey, this is good! The French rock and roll fans just wouldn’t let the band leave the stage and even though we stumbled back to the boat at 2:00 AM I am sure that those guys played encores until dawn.
In Hong Kong we sat on the grass at Victoria Park for a couple of Rockit Festivals right downtown surrounded by high rise apartment buildings and neon signs and we wondered if the Chinese punk rock bands wouldn’t shake the windows out of some of them. Here the skinheads took the stage after midnight and the crowds got rowdy and we knew we were in for trouble when a couple dozen bouncers took up places in front of the stage to hold the barriers back against the crowd. Judy retreated from that mosh pit but I held my ground and got some good shots but barely avoided a fist fight when some asshole shoved me and said, “You don’t belong here, Grandpa.” I asked him, “You want to eat this camera?” His buddy backed him off, lucky for me. Those were the good ole days I guess.
In Bangkok there was Tokyo Joe’s and that was one intimate place; I had to turn sideways to keep from getting in the way of the bass player when I went up to get some photos. In Chang Mai, at one riverfront club after crawling through three others, we found where the action was and crowded our way to the front for some great Thai rock and roll. Memorable.
The next year at the Phuket Blues Festival I got bored at musicians who played sitting down so I plunked a full bottle of whiskey on the table and told Judy & Randy & Laura, “Let’s make our own action here!” Judy just shook her head; won’t this man ever grow up? But we drank the bottle, the bands somehow got better, and we danced until we dropped. I think that was the straw that broke Judy’s back however because after that we had to find a good surgeon for her.
Now, three years later her back is better and we are back at the hard rock and loving it more than ever. In Durban last week there was a blues festival and we somehow got tickets for the final show long after the event was sold out and we enjoyed a few great acts before a South African guitar player virtuoso named Dan Patlansky fuzz toned his way into our hearts. His style reminded me of Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, only unique in his own way, and we clapped ourselves silly when his show ended. The management wouldn’t let him come back out, something about an agreement they had with the local landowners, but we bought his CD and we have a few photos to remind us of another great night of music around the world.
We’ll be looking out for more.
Click here for more images from the Durban Blues Festival.
Fred & Judy, SV Wings, Durban, South Africa.
PS: Here is another band we ran across in Durban which we rather liked:
A night out with good music, good friends and a bottle of whisky: That’s what last weekend was all about when Randy and Laura from Pollen Path joined us at the Phuket Blues Festival. We had a great time.
Tracking down some little joint where live music is being played in a faraway exotic place has been a fun part of cruising for us and we’ve found some neat ones: a outdoor rock concert in Papeete where local kids rocked out all night. A converted warehouse in Noumea where an American blues rock band played to a packed house and the encores went on for hours. Judy dragged me home from that one at 2:00AM. And of course in Bangkok we’re often found crowding up to the stage late at night at Tokyo Joes’ to hear the Soi Dog Blues Band.
But the Phuket Blues Festival is not an out of the way exotic place to us anymore; by now Phuket is as familiar as an old shoe and we came to this event last year. Still, we like to be on the field on the grounds of the Phuket Arcadia Hilton on a warm tropical night and hear the live bands from around Asia and the world play everything from BB King to Chicago Boogie Woogie. This year, like last year, the night got off to a bit of a slow start: the first band was OK but the crowd was small and subdued. Sitting around the table waiting for some excitement got old for me in a hurry. I went to the bar under the tent in the back and negotiated a price for the whole bottle of whiskey sitting there.
Once I screwed off the cap and I plonked that bottle of whiskey onto our table things started looking up. Oh Johnny. The ice soon ran out but that didn’t stop Judy and I. Before long half the bottle was gone, a hotter band was playing and we were up front dancing on the grass. We never stopped.
After harassing the band leader for “faster, harder, louder” music he gave us just that and we ate it up. After exhausting all the batteries and memory cards on the Nikon I just waved it around while I danced.
And when the music stopped we were tired and happy and drenched in sweat.
We don’t know where we’ll be next year but if there is music, we’ll find it.
A bit ragged this morning; too long of a night at Tokyo Joe’s listening to the Soi Dog Blues Band; too much dancin’ in the street and howlin’at the moon, too much of the drop that I drink. But a good night it was for one and all, I’ll give it that.
We find the music scene, if we stay long enough and if there is one, in every place we visit and we found the music we like best in Bangkok at Tokyo Joe’s Blues Bar. Ranks up there with the warehouse that one lost night in Noumea and the stage in the park in Papeete, or the clubs in Brisbane, but none of them top Seattle in the 90’s. We went to Tokyo Joe's again last night.
The Fugitives were playing when we arrived and they pulled up some old Bob Dylan just for us, or that’s what we thought, since we’ve just finished reading Dylan’s autobiographical Chronicles and we’ve been thinking and talking about him and his music. They sang Just Like a Woman and gave it to the blues…“but she breaks just like a little girl”. And later a Beatles song: “one thing I tell you, you just got to be free”. Mixed in with some other old songs of other genre’s, and the swirling smoke and pints of Guinness and the crowd of fat white guys and laughing Thai girls; we got into it.
When the Soi Dog Blues Band started playing Judy started dancing, some Thai guy in the crowd joined her once and by the middle of the set she’d dragged me off my bar stool too and we didn’t care if we were the only people in the place on our feet; we were lost to the fun of it.
I don’t really remember much of it after that, just a few images and sounds, the jangling guitars and the rattle of the snare drums and the intensity of the singer who said he hasn’t given up his day job, the hooker in the corner with the Tina Turner hair and all the gold bracelets and a cell phone and a cigarette in her long fingers hanging behind her back to keep the smoke out of the eyes of her john; us talking to the band members when they went on break, and somewhere in all this we ordered tacos, and they were good too, but I can’t say what was in them.
I am a sailor, born of a nautical tradition passed to me by my father and my Grandfather Alfred. I’ve spent most of life on my passion which is the sea and the vessels which go upon them. I have had many such vessels and now I live on and sail on the sloop WINGS.
which I acquired in 1986 with my wife Judy
who shared my passion. For ten years we lived on Wings in Seattle and sailed, including racing. Then we left the Pacific Northwest and voyaged across the world, across the seven seas, to faraway places, and made them our own.
For thirty-eight years I have lived and loved this life. I still live on Wings, in Mexico, and sail and race often. Judy passed away in June, 2023 and I miss her but you can still join us and sail the seas as we did for all those glorious years. Fred Roswold, SV Wings, Mexico
First Beer Can Race
Steel Pan Band
Uma Noite Caliente
Dan Patlansky
Hong Kong
Blues Festival
Soi Dog Blues Band
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