I did this as a demo piece for some trade shows and it sails sedately in the back part of my studio now.
The princess is from far Cathay, but her crew are mercenaries, and not at all reliable, in spite of the vigilant old crow duenna. (with umbrella) The dolphins, of course, take nothing seriously, and don't care a whit about princesses nor destinations. So, the princess dreams on (about her lover? chocolates? unbinding her feet?) and willy-nilly, sails to a distant unknown port.
I love sailing as a metaphor, but get bored with the actual process. Also, I am a little vague about directional issues, so lee and port and aft confuse me.
After I got out of Peace Corps Philippines in 1967, I went to Manila and taught in a little nursery kindergarten....art and music, two shifts a day. During that time I tied in with the two Bello brothers, Walden and Dennis, and started going out to their island home in the middle of Laguna de Bay, a huge freshwater lake about an hour out of Manila. I would take a jeepney out of town to the town of Cardona and walk down to the end of the dock to the fisherman's tavern and ask someone to row me over to the Bello island (which they named Ceilito Lindo). It would be dark by then, but in the 15 minutes it took to get to the island, one of the brothers would see our light, and I could watch them swinging their own light as they stepped down the long stairway that led up from their dock to their stone house . Dennis would tie up the boat, and we would trot back up and up to the very tip of the island and the house. That night I would sleep under starched white sheets and look out an open window down onto the lake, and see the fisherman's sailing boats ...."armadahans", they called them, silently drift in the moonlight across the great silver lake like ghostly moths...their two sails swelling in the night wind.
Later, Walden and I and another friend, Dick Ng, went together on commissioning our own armadahan, and Dennis supervised the building of it. We picked out the proper keel in the keel making barrio (the knot holes had to be in the proper place since they were the eyes and the heart (corazon) of the boat) and when it was done, we sailed it for 2 years.
As I mentioned, I am an indifferent sailor and the boom kept knocking me in the water, so the guys tied a rope on me so they could drag me out of the drink easily, dazed or not.
Here's a picture (damaged) of our boat, and one of me doing my main job....going out on the outrigger to balance the boat.
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