Like this:

At dawn I peeked out of the bedroom window and saw a bay with absolutely no wind. That condition lasted all through my beach walk with Sereia, all through the time I spent tending my poultry. ..AND, for the first hour and a half of my paddle today!  Not a breath of a breeze. I headed for Sandy Point Dyke which is 3.5 miles from our beach. turned right and paddled to the end which is another 1.75 miles. The gift of flat water had to come to and end, and did as I was backtracking from the outer end of the dyke. In the space of 10 – 15 minutes the water went from glassy calm to what I have become accustomed to as a Buzzards bay veteran. About an hour later, once I got past Long Beach Point, the paddling became fun again.

There was a large flock of Brant geese 100 yards west of the Tempest Knob pier but the Wildlife Moment of The Day caught me totally by surprise as I took a cruise up the Agawam. After you leave Merchants Row behind you the river does a lot of twisting and bending and around the corner of one of these sharp bends there are two huge boulders that are covered with water at the top of high tide but were two or three feet out today. Perched on top of one of those boulders was a harbor seal! I don’t think I’d have been more surprised if I’d seen a moose!

I’m anxious to have the GPS tell me the mileage of these past few days. I’m creeping up on a major milestone: 900 miles. That’s going to be a good feeling. I’m not going to “coast” when I hit that mark because I have a great distrust of the weather from here on. Even on “good” days I have to remember that the water has now reached a temperature that makes me try to avoid “short cuts’ that take me an unsafe distance from the shore.

Nine hundred miles. When I look at the places that a 900 mile long path would take me I am just blown away. I’m practically in Chicago! I’ll be doing jig saw puzzles with my grandson in a couple of days. I’m also closing in on St. Johns Newfoundland where I have lots of friends I haven’t seen for almost 2 years. I’ve already been to Bermuda and I’m more than a third of the way back. In my hypothetical southern route I’ll soon be out of Georgia and headed for a visit with an old friend form my Navy frogman days. In the real world I still have about a week of weary arms and a sore butt. We’ll get it done and then convert the resolve that made it happen into positive action that will get Wareham to a better place.

Our numbers are growing and we are learning from our mistakes.

In a lighter vein, here’s an old baseball yarn that sums up the challenge of dealing with the Power Structure of a Wareham town Meeting:

It’s the week before the annual baseball rivalry between Heaven and hell and. as they have for years. St Peter and Satan meet informally to talk about logistics. After they’d resolved the details St Peter, with a friendly twinkle of the eye, couldn’t resist a teasing remark. “It must be daunting for you to be facing a team that has players like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams. “Satan comes right back,  “Pete, It’s not a problem. . .You guys got all those stars but we got all the umpires.”