John Storrow

 This is my recently completed model of Wanderer 3 which is a famous boat that circumnavigated the globe in the early 1950’s. I got her glued up and carved out of layers of pine last winter, and just launched her a few weeks ago after doing everything else to get her ready to be wet.  I’m extremely pleased with how she turned out, she sails perfectly, is very well balanced, and the electronics down below in the cabin stay nice and dry and comfortable, much like the real crew did on their fascinating journey through countless pacific atolls and so many other places. I read the fascinating book “Around the world in Wanderer 3” by Eric Hiscock and got inspired to make the model. An interesting thing about the design, to me, is that you can more or less scale it to any size and you will have a good free sailing boat with directional stability. This makes sense because the real boat had a vane steering system on a later voyage I believe. Perhaps a working scale vane gear could go o...

 I went down on my hands and knees during my lunch break in the staff lounge to take a picture of the bottom half of an office chair. It looks like a space ship with black wheels, and it reminds me of these linear shapes  that I always drew with paper and pencil from my imagination. 

This boat is called the “Zebra” only because of her stripes. I carved and hollowed her out of  layers of pine some time in the late 1990’s. The reason I gave her colored stripes was to make people think she was Art with a capital A. At the time I made her, I didn’t think a mere model of a boat would be something people would want to put in an Art gallery, hence the colored stripes and the blue sails. To me, my “zebra” meant something more than a mere model of a boat, but I could never find the right words to describe what that meant, but I could feel it whatever it was, I definitely could.  “Zebra” is about forty inches long, she has a deep ballast keel, and radio control servos for steering and sail control. She’s incredibly fast when the wind blows,  Link to video- https://youtu.be/sbWbqXiy3Ns especially sailing to windward. I’ve sailed her a great deal Since I made her 25 years ago. She has a small persnickety leak somewhere which keeps coming back despite years of try...

  I spend a lot of time thinking about distinguishing between the act of creating a painting, and the act of finding an audience for a painting. Needless to say I have made a lot of paintings, and it’s much better to share them face to face with actual people besides myself than it is to post on social media, let alone allow the paintings to collect dust in storage. Of course Social media has its uses, but perhaps it becomes a crutch, or an easy out from the much harder job of finding a real brick and mortar gallery. Social media has not gotten me anywhere closer to a real show in a gallery. For me, the act of creating is what gets me out of bed in the morning. The act of applying to galleries is not something that motivates me but it needs to be done. I keep forgetting that I’ve sold 50 paintings as of this writing, but there are so so many more paintings left in storage that need to go on somebodies wall. They need to see the light of day. I’m not sure if the need for an audience...

  On Sunday March 6, Voyage number 2 of the 2022 season went well. The forecast was rain around Lunch time, to be followed by 20 mile an hour winds and warmer temps in the afternoon. I chose to go down to the lagoon early before the rain, and found near zero wind with fog slowly burning off. The yawl came well prepared with a better halyard arrangement to make rigging and un rigging easier with cold fingers. I used a hair clip to furl the jib around the bowsprit during transport to and from the lagoon. Hair clips are handy dandy things for keeping awkward bundles of rigging from flapping all over the place while walking past tall sky scrapers on windy days. The lagoon was at low water level so I put her in at my favorite deep spot at the east end. Several geese were making their presences felt, and they seemed totally un affected by my presence which is what geese do. I’m hoping they don’t poop up the pond this year too much so that the algae and weeds don’t appear so much. There w...

 I was lying in bed early on New Year’s Day 2022 and suddenly I remembered that the weather forecast was for low fifties and a period without rain. Why not take a walk down to the lagoon and do a little sailing I said to myself, it might be my last chance till after the spring ice. After breakfast I plugged in my transmitter and receiver batteries, took a bath, and did things around the house. My phone said the drizzle was supposed to stop around 1:00. Shortly before then I went outside to the front lawn to see if there was any wind at all which there wasn’t. Not even the slightest puff. No branch on any tree was moving at all. After smelling the damp air a bit I decided to grab the boat anyway and head down to the lagoon. When I got down to the river there was a beautiful mist rising from the mirror smooth water, and I mean mirror smooth. Not a ripple in sight. I knew from long experience that appearances can be deceiving, there might be a tiny breath along the ledge, just enough ...