Lost Worlds by David Yeadon

Author:David Yeadon [Yeadon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Retail, Travel
ISBN: 9780061976681
Google: g521SCzpQqIC
Amazon: B002RNYGLW
Barnesnoble: B002RNYGLW
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

The storm finally died. A few more hours of declining fury and then the calm of a gray-pink evening while I cooked our first real meal in two days and Peter fixed the struts of the self-steering assembly and grumbled about his cracked casing and broken preventer lines, mumbling things like “One more go-around like this and we’ll really be in trouble.”

He tried to explain what he meant by “trouble,” but it all became too damned technical—all that gobbledygook about mainsheets, cam cleats, halyards, lifts, guys, reefing lines, winches, jibs, vang tackles, spinnakers, stanchions, bilge pumps, goosenecks, binnacles, luffs, clews, daggerboards, gilguys, gunwales, jumper struts, roaches and leeches, mizzens, mousings, boom vangs, and whisker poles. Another language—another level of communication—complete with such strange expressions as aback, abaft, broach, bear away, close-haul, full and by, heave to, kedge off, yaw, and, one of my favorites, wing and wing (which another colleague explained as “sailing before the wind with a jib and mainsail set on opposite sides” and left me even more confused).

My past sailing experience has done little to endear me to the practice. Back in my days as a city planner in Los Angeles I had once been invited by a more affluent colleague to join him for days on the ocean out of the Santa Monica marina. He was a tall, trim individual from an “old money” family whose ability to breeze through life and work in our office always amazed me. I even think I was envious. Prior to any meeting or major presentation I’d be sweating the details in my cubicle, checking the plans and schedules, rehearsing recitations of data and strategies, yellow-marking key phrases and buzzwords in my notes, and caffeining myself up to knife-blade sharpness.

John, on the other hand, would be bumbling along the highway somewhere in his souped up MGTC sports car, top down, music on, his tan deepening in the bright sun and sea air, always an hour or two late for work and barely aware that he had a job to go to at all. Little pink message slips would pile up on his desk (which was always empty—mine invariably looked like a garbage dump). And when he finally arrived, glowing with health and newly bronzed skin, he’d find a way to waste the last hour or so before lunch chatting with the secretaries and telling a few ribald tales to the technicians and draftsmen in the office, who were always eager for distraction and a good morning belly laugh.

“Just wing it,” he told me once before a particularly daunting presentation to a client known euphemistically to be “difficult” and a real “nitpicker.” “You know the stuff—don’t sweat it,” John told me. “Just get up and give ’em a smile and let it rip. If you don’t know the answers, wing those too. Most of the time they don’t know the difference. It’s all in the attitude!”

And he lived up to his philosophy. Five minutes skimming through a day’s worth of heavy

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