Charlie Sheldon's Blog, page 4

How old might the high trails in the Olympics be?

Up high – that is, above the thick forests – the terrain in the Olympics is entirely different. Up high lie meadows filled with grasses and clumps of trees, or acres of broken shale and flowers, rocks and cliffs, broad basins that lie open below the sky. These areas, usually above 4000 to 5000 feet, … Continue reading "How old might the high trails in the Olympics be?"

A sea story, sort of, about Watergate and January 6th…

This weekend I’m thinking about Watergate, the scandal that began when some operatives burgled a Democratic office and got caught. That happened in the run-up to the 1972 election, which Nixon won hugely, in June I believe. I was fishing then, off New England, chasing offshore lobster in Lydonia Canyon out on the edge of the shelf, maybe 120 miles from Nantucket. My skipper, Sten, who passed away in 2000, was an avid reader of Doonesbury. He had a close friend, David Martin, also long gone, who had worked on Elliot Richardson’s staff back when Richardson was instrumental in establishing the Cape Cod National Seashore. Sten followed politics, sort of, which we learned in the coming two years as you will see. I have a very vague and dim memory of reading about the break-in. The “Plumbers,” I think they were called. We had a very tough summer, that summer, because we had switched from long lining for cod and haddock to the lobster fishery and we were making every mistake you could make, plus fighting for bottom with other lobster boats in the deep canyons off Massachusetts. However, by the fall we started to make some money, land some big trips. We had 600 traps, in 50 trap strings, out there and we would fish those traps for a week or ten days before coming in. We had a flooded lobster hold with refrigeration. In the late fall, November, we chased the lobsters up into shoal water, 30-50 fathoms, Continue Reading →

Humans reaching the Americas…discussion

A Growing Understanding?

This article about modern humans and the last ice age is well done and approaches what I personally think is a thesis that might explain how human behavior changed around 70,000 years ago and we became “fully modern”, whatever that means. My concept is that during the last ice age different hominins mingled and interbred somewhere, and something happened in the brain wiring of their offspring that created we modern humans, ie changed the anatomically “modern” human to a group that was very flexible and capable of surviving. I believe it was both language and the ability to tell stories, and thus carry culture. This article, though, misses a key point, which is that there have been many ice ages, all through the two million development of the human line. The climate has changed and changed again, always, and greatly. I believe throughout that time humans were kept small, isolated, and barely hung on, not even the apex predator. Something happened 70,000 years ago, maybe after the Toba eruptipon. https://www.discovermagazine.com/plan...

How did humans reach the Americas?

The article below continues a series of findings and speculations that humans arrived in the Americas long before the end of the last ice age. For decades the prevailing view was that humans made it to the Americas by crossing the exposed Bering land bridge and then racing south to the rest of the Americas when the ice began to melt 14,000 years ago. However, recent discoveries have pushed those dates back. The oldest human remains found to date anywhere in the Americas are perhaps 14,000 years old, in a Mexican cave. The oldest clear evidence of human hunting anywhere in the Americas was discovered in Sequim Washington, at the foothills of the Olympic mountains – a spear point was discovered in a mastodon skeleton shoulder bone. This was dated to 13,800 years ago, and can be seen today in a little museum in the center of Sequim with the mastodon skeleton. However, within the last year fossilized human footprints were found in New Mexico that were 23,000 years old – the height of the great ice time. Additional sites are suggesting humans arrived in the Americas at least 33,000 years ago. Dogma held that ancient humans could only travel over land. Only relatively recently has the field of human origins accepted that perhaps ancient humans were capable seafarers, able to transit long distances over the ocean, island to island or along the coast. There was evidence found in Timor of deep-sea fishing for tuna 40,000 years ago – a Continue Reading →

Why anchored ships don’t divert elsewhere….

I highly recommend this video discussing why ships are choosing to wait for days and days at anchor rather than divert to another port, perhaps an east coast port closer to the main markets for many containers off-loaded at the LA-Long Beach port complex. The Chief MAKO Seaman Vlog is an excellent source of other information about the container shipping business, from a sailor’s perspective, and in this video here he explains exactly why ships are choosing to sit at anchor. This morning I read in the New York Times that the supply chain problems are now going to make life harder for farmers exporting food and grain. This of course is true for those foodstuffs sent via container (there are some, for example fruits requiring refrigeration in refrigerated containers), but by and large most agricultural products are sent in bulk cargo ships, not container ships. Here in Tacoma there is a large grain terminal and nearly always I see three to five ships at anchor awaiting their turn, but this sort of back-up is normal and has not changed much in the four years I have lived here. Maybe there are shortages of truckers to carry grain from farms to silos and rail heads, but the congestion and panic expressed about the container business is not, or should not be, placed on farmers as well. Bulk ships are totally different than container ships and the two are never interchanged. Bulk ships have big open holds with huge hatches into Continue Reading →

Reviews for Totem

Author Katherine D. Graham: In a masterful work combining historical fiction with a touch of fantasy/mythology, Sheldon’s newest epic novel Totem beautifully marries the best aspects of time travel and reincarnation tropes with modern-day real-life stakes.Sarah is a troubled teenager whom grief has plagued, and is set up to continue that unlucky lot into the newest (third) volume of Sheldon’s Strong Heart series. Having not read the prior two volumes, I can happily say that no prior knowledge of the series was needed for me to be drawn into and captivated by this book.I should also point out, in fairness, that while the 500+ page count is daunting at first glance, Sheldon has written Totem in “books” within the book itself (similarly to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, where multiple “volumes” are housed within one cover). This read is a fast, page-turning read that doesn’t let you go even with the historical and political backstory woven in, so the 500+ pages goes by fairly quicklyPartially due to its length, and partiall due to tragedy, there is a heavy turnover of characters in Totem. As this is a spoiler-free review I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that loved ones are not guaranteed fulfilled lives or happily-ever-afters in all cases in this book (though some are happier than others).The twists and thrills of surviving in the wild are some of the most exhilarating moments of this read, and the chapters where we experience life Continue Reading →

Water dowsing discussion – the truth!!!

This podcast I did a few weeks ago mainly about water dowsing, telling some true tales of my experience with it. You can decide whether this is true or not. It is ALL true, I promise. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

Perspective….

I’m still out here on the north side of the Olympic Peninsula and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. That container ship that was burning sits about 20 miles from me, north, across the strait, near Victoria, fire now contained, perhaps even out. That monster storm that came through was a big one but no catastrophe, and it seems whatever struck all those waiting ships off California did not blow them all onto shore. There is snow in the higher elevations, creeping lower and lower as the air cools.. There has been a lot of rain. This has been, in fact, a fairly typical last week of October weather pattern for these parts. We’ve been staying in a cabin not far from the Elwha River, maybe 10 miles west of Port Angeles, way up an old road near the end, among scattered houses, fields, trees, hard next to National Forest land and the national park. The other day the local herd of Roosevelt Elk, over 40 animals, wandered into the field behind this place and visited for an afternoon. They were magnificent. This area, off Highway 101, just west of the river, was once called Elwha, one of the many forgotten local towns settled by pioneers before 1900. The little schoolhouse, built in 1908, still stands, now a community center. There is a long history of some local families here, written by a woman in 1993, now surely dead, about her ancestors who came to this country when it was Continue Reading →

Closer to home

Closer to home…A huge storm is bearing down on the entire U.S and Canadian west coasts, with record low pressure. Not a hurricane, exactly, but a monster. It’s likely California will be drenched, totally. A storm like this carries winds of hurricane force, and these winds kick up an awful sea state and swell. If you go to the Oregon coast right now you might see 30 foot surf. A relatively small container ship, the Zim Horizon, came through this storm on her way to Vancouver, surely pressing her speed to make her schedule and hold her place for a berth to unload (otherwise she would be anchored and waiting for days) and she lost 40 containers, the seas were so big, swept away. Then, once in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, near Victoria, Canada, containers in the third stack aft of the bow caught fire, surely cargo contents igniting somehow. The fire grew fast and became bad fast, the captain evacuated some of his crew, some local tugs appeared to fight the fire, there are concerns that water to fight the fires might interact with chemicals in the containers and make the fires worse, the Canadian Coast Guard has strongly suggested the captain abandon shop entirely, which of course the captain doesn’t want to do because then he loses the ship, the engines shut down, pressure for fire pumps is lost, and nobody is left aboard to fight the fire on the ship. A ship fire is a Continue Reading →