The weirdest, and for my money most delightful, publication in the boating world has ceased operations. Messing about in Boats, which began as a bimonthly journal in the early ’80s, covered a broader and stranger beat than any other regularly published magazine I’ve ever encountered. Named for a famous quote from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (Ratty says to Mole that “there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats”), the whole magazine was a sort of decades-long work of outsider art.

My first complete solo audiobook is now online and free for anyone to download at Librivox. The Track of the Typhoon was a book I read in serialized form several years ago, in the delightful zine Messing About in Boats. It’s a travelogue from a slightly insane sailing voyage in 1920, written by the aptly named chief instigator, William Washburn Nutting. Nutting was the editor of Motor Boating magazine at the time, but he was a sailor at heart.

Several years ago, I posted a description of a film photography hack I’d thrown together to develop Minox film. Make magazine picked it up and linked to it, and since then I’ve gotten occasional feedback from folks who’ve found it useful. Unfortunately, in my various site changes I broke the images that went with it. Thanks to reader Brian Wood for pointing this out to me. Here’s a new version of the post with the pictures restored.

It’s time once again to round up some Wesort news. For those just tuning in, this is a long-running arc on the blog, based on some of my earliest childhood experiences in boats. The first real post in the series is here, where my dad lays out the history of a small sailboat design called the Wesort, which I remember sailing aboard when I was very small. I’ve since posted a few more times about these nifty little boats, as you can see by looking at the tag.

The back door of our garage was in rough shape when we bought the house ten years ago, and we’ve been procrastinating its repair for just as long. Ordinarily I’d just go to the lumber yard, pick up a pre-hung door in the appropriate style, and install it by lunchtime. However, this particular door is a non-standard size, narrow and short to clear the garage roofline. Inquiring at the lumber yard revealed that custom size pre-hung doors start at hundreds of dollars and go way up from there.

I wanted to log a couple more hours of flight time this week, but couldn’t decide what to do. Practicing the same maneuvers over and over gets old, and I didn’t have a specific place to go. Then I remembered what Boeing pilots did recently when they needed to test the engines on their new 787. Given a much smaller, slower, cheaper airplane and only a morning, I built a virus nearly 20 nautical miles across.

While clearing out some old files, I found a folder full of strange artifacts from the late 20th century: personal letters. Being just barely older than the Internet, my generation was the last to use this medium as a standard means of staying in touch. Even when I was in my 20s, long-distance phone rates were prohibitive and only serious computer geeks at major universities and government agencies had email. If you wanted to find out what a friend hundreds of miles away was up to, you picked up a pen and some paper and wrote to them.

Modern parents have a fraught relationship with video games. The popular view, at least among many parents I’ve talked to, is that these games are harmful and that we’re supposed to feel guilty about letting our children play them. High-profile violent titles like the Grand Theft Auto series feed this perception, even though those games are clearly identified as being for adults only. Not everyone subscribes to the “video games are a barely tolerable evil” view, though.

None of the research blogging posts in my queue are quite ready yet, so it’s time for another update on the weird world of Wesorts. If you’re a Piscataway Indian reading that sentence, please don’t take offense - I’m talking about Wesort sailboats here, for the benefit of the six people in the world who’ve heard of them. And if you have absolutely no idea what any of this is about, hang on, because it’s going to get weirder.

Wayne sent this note through the contact form: I sailed a Wesort my family owned back in the 70’s. I was a sloop rigged sailing rowboat designed and built locally in the Severn River region during the 60’s. Mine had the number 127, but I’m not sure how many were made. It was made of plywood with a flat bottom and wooden mast with a closet dowel for a boom. It was rather slow, but since it was a sloop it gave a more complete sailing experience than the faster and smaller Penquins that used to race together in Severn regattas.

Boatbuilders come and go, so it’s no surprise that virtually all of the vessels in my earliest sailing memories are now out of production. Most of them, though, survive in boatyards and have fan clubs online, so information about them is never more than a Google search away. Not so the Wesort. Before I was even big enough to hold a tiller, I remember my father teaching older kids how to sail at Indian Landing Boat Club on the upper reaches of the Severn River.