Funny thing about sunsets, a naturally groovy phenomenon you tend to see a lot of while traveling onboard a boat like my relatively slow, leave-at-dawn-arrive-sometime-after-the-moon-comes-up  trawler Betty Jane. On the one hand, there's a certain similarity amongst most of them I suppose, but on the other, most all have their unique characteristics, their foibles.

"So just climb in there, Bill," Marc Deppe of Triton Subs told me. "Yup. Yup. That's right. Operating this sub is about as intuitive as breathing."

After a second or two, there I was, seated at the helm of the Triton sub simulator in Vero Beach. With the surface of some computer-generated water dead ahead at about eye-level. And a few computer-generated fish cruising past. And then a shark. Yikes! A hammerhead!

Okay. I'm probably going to create a little controversy with this baby, but what the heck. Over the years, here and there, I've had the opportunity to operate any number of large watercraft, often at night, during bouts of rather snotty weather, and (with what seemed to me like) the highly inconvenient absence of a flying bridge.

Rain Check?

Bertram Yachts' 50th Anniversary Was One Helluva Party, Despite The Weather!

I shot the photo shown above while solo-cruising Betty Jane just this past weekend. I say solo-cruising because my wife BJ did not exactly declare that she wouldn't join me but somehow, at the last minute more or less, found an excuse for not going along. The reasoning behind her decision was an elemental one, I suspect, albeit quite common in the Sunny South this time of year.

Just recently,  I had the good fortune to be cruising along the Amalfi Coast with my wife in an altogether lovely Maestro 82 motoryacht. The day was a beaut, of course. The weather tends to be warm this time of year in Italy, or at least along her shores. But it's seldom what you'd call hot, at least by North Florida standards.