Sort of a blog post in the ancient classical sense; a log of a trip in cyberspace; a weblog.
Trundling through the Revolutions podcast, in the middle of the very long one in France. The host begins to limn the counter-revolutionary uprising in a western province. It sounds very much like he’s saying the name of the region is Vaudet, a word I like the look of muchly.
But it turns out it’s spelled Vendee and he’s just omitting the very soft N. South of Brittany by the way. Good to know.
Wikipedia confirms that the population is insular and leans royalist to this day. The external links make reference to something called the Vendee Globe, and I click through.
The Vendee Globe is a sailing race; the “Everest of sailing” because the course of the race is all the way around the world, starting and beginning on the coast of Vendee, and because it’s a solo event, only one sailor allowed on the boat, and outside help of any kind is disallowed. It’s been going on every four years for a couple of decades, and there have been plenty of solo deaths and disappearances.
The 2020 edition is still scheduled to happen starting in November, the virus permitting.
The thing that really grabbed my eye was this, from an article about the technologies involved and how much they’ve changed since 2016:
“It is therefore very likely that the reference time established by Armel Le Cléac’h in 2016 (74 days and a few hours) will be significantly beaten since the new 60-footers are capable of maintaining averages of around 30 knots for several hours.”
—sailingscuttlebutt.com
It is vaguely distressing to me, that sailing is now about hydrofoils and speeds that would have seemed insane to the sailors of the Aubrey-Maturin age of sail, and that circumnavigation all alone is now a trip of less than three months. The article continues:
The variable now is the stamina and durability not of the boats but of the skippers who must live with the noisy whistling of the appendages, the shock of the waves – and above all the extremely violent movements of the boat between “take-off” and “landing”. It will not be easy to keep everything going well on a nine-ton sailboat, alone.
It doesn’t sound like much fun at all
It’s progress surely, but it makes me dubious about the whole notion of progress itself.
I’m living in a place out beyond revolutions of bernie, out beyond janky modern notions of the ‘progressive’. I’m old and I’m not always well, yet I love life more than ever.