Thomas Nay

A few weeks ago I sailed down to Martha’s Vineyard with Martha’s Dad. We had a good time sailing, filled with a little bit of everything. At one point in the trip we had no wind and the water was like glass. This was from Scituate, MA to the Cape Cod canal. We timed getting to the canal just right to where we had tide & current going with us and were motoring right around 7.5 knots. Buzzards bay was very choppy and breezy as we made our way to Red Brook Harbor. We spent the night at the Kingsman Yacht Center then made our way thought Woods Hole, MA to the Vineyard Sound. Woods Hole was exciting then with the current with us we put up the sails (sailing at around 9 knots) and made our way to Edgartown, MA for 2 nights. We went for a sail, ate on the boat and explored Edgartown a little bit. Parts of the Vineyard were right out of a movie set. Which is kinda funny when you think of it because the movie Jaws was filmed there. One evening we made our way over to Oak Bluff’s for dinner. Everyone was setting up to watch the fireworks show but we were just there to eat and wanted to beat the crowds back to the boat.

I had a great time and I now understand the vineyard! There were a bunch of amazing boats there and I’m not sure if I could go back in the future with out sailing in. I’ve really been spoiled. :-) 

I can’t wait to go back. 

Some pictures from my recent trip to Florida. I got to see some old buddies from all over Florida and the South. I’ve always liked the views. 

This past saturday at #Fenway Martha and I got our picture on the video screen by sending a tweet to @RedSox 

We had some of the best seats we’ve ever had about 20 rows behind home plate. Good time and the Sox beat the Yankees.

I went on a trip to the British Virgin Islands we rented a 46 ft. catamarain sail boat. We stopped at many islands some of the highlights were the Bitter End Yacht Club (BEYC) where we had a view of  Necker Island which is owned by Richard Branson. I don’t know if he still hangs out there but, its a pretty nice place. The BVIs were amazing and no trip would have been complete with out a trip to Foxy’s. Living on a sailboat for a week was a good time.  

The Extreme Sailing Series came to #Boston this 4th of July. I was able to get a unique view of the racing that was going right here in Boston Harbor. I also watched the USS Constitution do its annual trip for Boston HarborFest

The 2010 - 2011 Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup! 

My Trip to the Gulf Oil Spill

This past weekend, when returning home from a cruise that left out of Mobile, Alabama, my girlfriend and I decided to take a detour along the way. Rather than stare down boring Interstate 10 for multiple hours in a row, we decided to drive along a stretch of 182 from Gulf Shores Alabama to Perdido Key, Florida..  Given the current gushing oil in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and the reports from CNN to NPR to Facebook about the damage the oil is doing to the pristinely white beaches of Alabama and Florida on the Gulf Coast, we decided to make a decision for ourselves and ask the risky question: is it really THAT bad?  We quickly determined that it most certainly was.

Arriving at our first beach, a Gulf Shores, Alabama public beach offering “free parking until further notice” (a desperate cry for would-be beach-goers), we had expected one of two things: either hoards of volunteers and government officials cleaning up our nation’s normally undisturbed beaches, or nothing at all.  Shockingly, at first glance, we found the latter.  Walking up to the beach people sunbathed, kids swam and babies played in the tidal pools with their parents.  Sunblock was being applied by the masses and boats were zooming by just off the shoreline, and it looked like an otherwise perfectly normal day at the beach from the edge of the parking lot where we stood, searching for evidence… evidence of anything —- but, something caught our eye. A few hundred feet off the shore was a bright, construction-cone orange snake-like thing floating on the surface of the water, what I knew to be a “boom” from my many hours glued to the TV watching the coverage of the spill.  Oddly enough, we were disappointed to not see any real evidence of the spill on this beach, so we decided to walk to the water’s edge. There we were hit with a smell - a faint smell, but smell enough that our first piece of evidence.  Then, after carefully studying the water that beach-goers around us were splashing around in, we detected a sheen to the water.  With me living on the beach now and my girlfriend having grown up an avid sailor, we quickly looked to the other and agreed that something was definitely not right about the shine radiating from the ocean surface.  At that point, we agreed to travel on, east on 182, to see what more we could find. So determined to conduct our own investigation on BP, we had forgotten that it was well past 1 pm.  Continuing to ignore our grumbling stomaches was no longer an option.  So, we stopped at the Wolf Bay Lodge in Orange Beach and had lunch.  The restaurant was not busy on a Thursday at lunch, but the food was great.  With 75% of their menu offering seafood, and at least 50% of that hailing from the Gulf Coast, I opted for a pulled pork sandwich, and my girlfriend a non-local white fish.  Given what we saw, or didn’t see for that matter, at our first beach stop, it was still a bit too soon to be digesting Gulf Coast-native sea food. From lunch, we continued east and stopped at the first public beach we saw - Gulf State Park.  Taking advantage of the public beach access, we stopped expecting much of the same as it was not more than a mile up the road from our first stop.  Now, I will say that what we saw here was nothing worse than any image I’d seen in the news.  Somehow what we found on the beach at Gulf State Park seemed worlds worse than anything we’d seen before for the simple fact that we were there, experiencing it - seeing, touching, smelling - for ourselves.  The double red flag was waving in the wind, and yet we discovered four people laying out just as they had on the previous beach.  No one was in the water, but I’m not certain that was by choice - the water was in accessible from the shore, unless one committed to trudging through a barrier of “tar balls” to get to the water’s edge. A word about tar balls… there is nothing ball-like about them.  ”Tar ball” is saying it gently - what we saw spanned from dried up globs to boiling, bubbling puddles of fresh oil, each running a few inches wide and multiple inches deep.  This scene spanned for as far as the eye could see to the west, but to the east, just beyond a pier a few hundred feet away, people were, again, playing and splashing in the water.  Less than thirty yards off the shore, waves of oil were inching toward the beach.  No matter where you looked out to the surf, you could see multiple-foot-wide pockets of oil making their final approach to the beach.  Small boats lined the shore, each appearing to be official in some capacity - whether they be testing the water or taking pictures.  We watched a beat up old pick-up truck from the Alabama State Parks drive by and stop. Inside was an aged park ranger.  Appearing to have been on the job for sometime, it was clear the look of helplessness on his face had everything to do with the oil that painted the crest of each wave nicotine-brown as the broke on the shore. After snapping pictures and standing in silence for quite some time, we decided the 115 degree heat was too much to handle, and we walked back to the car. As we were backing out of our parking space three school busses of clean up crews puled up to set up shop and begin the manual cleaning of the beach.  Each dressed head-to-toe in denim, gloves, hats, and long-sleeved shirts… if 115 degrees was too much for us to handle, we certainly didn’t want to have to watch them work in the heat.

As noted earlier, seeing this on TV and seeing this in person are two different beasts.  I don’t live on the Gulf Coast, and neither does my girlfriend.  It’s unrealistic to think that either of us could be walking off one of those busses, dressed head to toe, to do manual labor - we have full-time jobs and families in other parts of the country.  What we are committed to doing, though, is spreading the word.  CNN can post all the photo stories and conduct all the interviews in the world that they choose, but having the opportunity to see this first-hand and tell the story to our friends and families in other parts of the country who are otherwise disconnected from the true gravity of the situation is the only way that awareness will be turned into justified outrage and hopefully action.

- Thomas Nay & Martha Henderson

Sunsets and Sunrises..

#daytona beach had some cool wildlife..