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Seabbatical and Clark James - Loose Cannon Alert

My apologies for bandwidth for all who aren’t out there doing it, so
to speak, because it’s very unlikely you’ll have an encounter. If
you’re not actively cruising in either the Bahamas, maybe the
Caribbean, or, perhaps, US East Coast, this will likely be of little
interest to you.

We (and those who see my postings) first met Clark in Normans Cay,
where he immediately and helpfully jumped in his dinghy when he saw
that we were not succeeding in ungrounding, kedging our 75# CQR and
chain out about 100’ three times before we gave it up.

He’s a bear of a man, imposing in his size and prodigious beard; when
he’s happy, he’s very happy. I have no doubt that until he otherwise
somehow forms a negative opinion of you, he’ll do the same for you, or
give you the shirt off his back, if you needed it.

On the other hand…

If he, somehow, figures that you don’t live up to some self-created
standard, you’re absolute dirt, and God help you if you later
accidentally cross his path or, worse, somehow cause him the least bit
of inconvenience.

My apologies for what is a bit convoluted, but it will help to start
at his burr under his saddle before telling you the story. You may
recall we'd had a great harvest of conch in Normans Cay. He’d been
looking for conch, and when we told him where he could find them, went
off looking. We later found him saying he’d gotten one. “Hm. Only
one??” “Yah, the others I found weren’t big enough.” When we had our
great harvest, and he was on the way by with another cruiser in their
dinghy, we called him over and offered him some of ours, he having
gotten only one. He took a look at what I was offering, and said,
condescendingly, it seemed, that he didn’t bother with ones that
size. Hmmm. Wonder what size he considers worth his while?? It must
be huge, as ours were all very mature, and plenty big enough for the
conch sellers we’d found selling conch salad and the like.

Fast-forward to Stocking Island. We arrived at Volleyball Beach and
threw out the hook. Nearly immediately I got a call from a boater
right next to us who informed me that when we arrived, his signal from
Harbour WiFi, a pay service, had evaporated. He’d noted that our on-
board router was on the same channel; would I mind changing the
channel? No problem, of course, and immediately having done so, he
was on with no problem. I’d taken a look at what other channels were
being used, and made sure I wasn’t on any of them, even those far away
and barely visible (all encrypted, but why possibly blanket their
signal?).

Once established in our anchorage, we went looking for wifi
connectivity and discovered that the only usable sites available were
2 pay sites. We went to the first, and very much stronger, site,
attempting to subscribe. They were oversubscribed, so declined to
sell other than minutes (no weekly or monthly) of time. As we tend to
be on nearly all the time, that wouldn’t do, so we went across the
harbor to Harbour WiFi and bought a week’s card.

Great connectivity – but marginal throughput for most of the day.
When I’d bought the first card, I confirmed that we could have more
than one computer connected at the same time. However, as I later
figured out how their system worked, only our mast-top unit signed in;
all our local (shipside) usage came from our inside router, so we
appeared as one computer to them. Also at the purchase of the first
card, the owner’s wife suggested we not use Skype or other voice over
internet protocols other than early morning or the evening, as it took
lots of bandwidth, and there were many business subscribers to their
system. Sure enough, promptly at 8AM, throughput dropped through the
floor, despite a very good connection to their system. Oh, well, the
vagaries of island bandwidth; it was still plenty to be able to do
what we wanted with it, and Lydia could talk to her kids in the
evening.

Fast-forward a few more weeks. I noted, while browsing around, that
the other pay site suddenly was open. It turned out that they were in
the middle of doing some reorganization of their system, removing what
used to be shown as “town” on one of their sites, to be replaced by
the hotel where they were located’s bar. For a short time, that, too,
was open, but both soon went back to pay-only sites. As we were
customers of Harbour WiFi, courtesy of not only our first several
bought cards, but several successive other donated cards, given by
cruisers I’d helped with their wifi or other radio connectivity, that
was of no concern, and only of casual interest to a geek such as
myself.

About that time people in the anchorage were noticing that Harbour
WiFi was very difficult to access. However, our local router, Flying
Pig, was also visible to many nearby boats. The way Harbour WiFi
worked was that it was an open site, but once you logged into them,
any attempt to browse was redirected to a sign-in page. We’d also had
difficulty accessing their system, in some instances waiting up to a
half-hour before the sign-in page appeared, and, once signed on,
sometimes having to log in multiple times before it “took” and we were
connected.

It was such a time, I later surmised, based on what happened later,
that we abandoned the effort, late at night, and shut our computers
down. A single switch controls our mast-top receiving and
transmitting unit and the router in the boat which provides our local
connection, and, until we block others, open to any who’d try. We
normally leave that on, as our computers are frequently on pretty much
all the time, and having to log in each time is a bit of a nuisance
(once logged on, it stays connected until you either log off or turn
off the units).

Fast-forward again to a day after my second on-the-beach seminar on
Wireless Communications for Cruisers. An attendee in another
anchorage asked me to come to his boat to see if I could sort out his
SSB mail system, his HF radio transmissions, and some other computer-
related stuff. Part of that computer related stuff was to set up his
email on Harbour WiFi over his high-gain adapter he’d not been
successful using. I got that sorted out and noted that his
connectivity – sign-in and otherwise – was much better than mine,
despite his having a less powerful, and much lower (“Height is your
friend!”), adapter than ours. I’d just finished that setup, and was
scratching my head over the anomaly of his better connection when I
heard Flying Pig being hailed by Harbour WiFi over his VHF radio.

I responded, and the owner asked me to go up a channel (see prior
posts about party-line characteristics of the net in the harbor). I
did, and was presented with a diatribe entirely out of character of
the owner, which had me further scratching my head. He’d said he’d
been riding around in his boat, checking who was on the system, and
saw that I had many people connected to him. He then made statements
out of character from anything I knew of him. I was literally
speechless, not only from the tone of his diatribe but from the
demands and accusations being made. Despite my knowing that not only
didn’t he have a boat, it was impossible for him to see, even if I
did, any others on our system, as our login is through the router at
the top of the mast, only, I just said, while I didn’t have a clue
about how that might be, I’d take care of it. Actually, it was a great
deal worse than that, but I didn’t understand why until we got back to
our boat.

As Lydia and I were sitting on the back porch, as we call the deck out
back, Clark roared up in his dinghy, dressed as he would have from a
crossing to town, confirming our suspicions – unidentified as to whom
until that moment - that someone other than the owner of Harbour WiFi
must have been responsible for the earlier diatribe He proceeded to
lay up alongside us, standing with fire in his eyes and proceeded to
threaten us, shouting, shaking his finger through the rails, and
terrorizing Lydia in the process.

To wit: “I don’t like you, and haven’t liked you since that bit with
the conch in Normans Cay. You’re pirating Harbour WiFi and I don’t
like it one bit. I haven’t been able to get on for more than a week,
and this morning at 4:30, all I saw was Flying Pig, so I logged into
your system, and was presented with a Harbour WiFi log-on. You lied
to him over the radio. You’re keeping me from the subscription I paid
for and pirating his system. YOU SHUT YOUR SYSTEM DOWN. NOW!!! If
you don’t, I’ll have the police on your boat immediately and have you
arrested for piracy. Don’t think I won’t! And you stay the hell away
from me!” Lydia and I sat there, literally speechless and astonished,
probably with our mouths hanging open.

Actually, that was the precis, sanitized for public consumption.
The actual was rather more of the same, and much louder and direct,
and, since the language about piracy and the police was exactly the
same as used over the radio, combined with his statement that I’d lied
to the owner, it was plain that he’d been standing in front of him,
essentially giving him the same treatment, but by accusation of me,
during that radio transmission.

You’d have to know me well to understand that to give offense to
anyone, let alone intentionally, troubles me greatly. To say that I
was troubled is an understatement. After I got over trying to make
sure that there was not only no way anyone would see Flying Pig on
wifi, but that there were no other sign-ons (there was a single
station who had logged on in my absence over the entire day when I got
back, and I added it to the other 30 or so I’d blocked over the prior
few weeks, before even going out to the back deck), and changing our
visibility (doing a factory reboot, which clears all memories, and
starting from a clean slate), I set about trying to figure out how
this could possibly have happened.

So, I went looking at what was available. Surprise! The other pay
site, with (being right next door) a hugely stronger signal, during
their re-do on their system, had, unknowingly, I’m sure, used the same
channel as Harbour WiFi. Unsurprisingly, then, to those who
understand how WiFi works, those in that anchorage were having Harbour
WiFi’s signal blanketed by theirs. Those outside of that harbor,
being further away, had less of a problem.

If Clark, instead of allowing his animus, somehow developed over conch
weeks earlier, had bothered to come to me about it, I’d have done the
same investigation, with the same outcome – but without his slandering
me to the owner of Harbour WiFi and causing that owner to threaten me
over an open mike. In reality, he should have been thanking me for
allowing him to use our system as a repeater. With our mast-top unit,
we could overcome the blanketing of the other signal; he’d merely used
our open router as the conduit… The outcome was my visiting the owner
of the other site that had innocently blanketed Harbour WiFi in our
anchorage, explaining what had happened, and asking if he’d be willing
to change channels. “Of course – so sorry that happened!”

Not surprisingly, immediately the problems with accessing Harbour WiFi
in our harbor disappeared. Also not surprisingly, despite our having
a remaining, paid, week on Harbour, I declined to renew, going to an
open site instead. I also visited the owner, after my upset had time
to blow itself out, explaining what had happened, and how, suddenly,
all his subscribers who’d said they’d only seen Flying Pig in our
harbor had come to him saying the problem had been resolved. When he
learned that I’d been responsible for that change, and that it had
nothing whatsoever to do with our system, he apologized for his
behavior earlier. In fact, after Clark had left his office, before
I’d left the other boat, he called back on the net channel, asking me
to have a blessed day. He allowed how Clark was pretty intimidating,
as I can well imagine, with him in his face making very assured
accusations of my “piracy” and blocking of his signal, standing in
front of him, doing essentially the same routine as he’d done at our
stern.

Not surprisingly, Clark refused any followup conversation, dumping my
email explaining what resolution, and how it was done, had happened,
and later telling an intermediary that he didn’t want to talk to me.

And, for the record, presuming, as he was so positive about it, that I
must have somehow misunderstood what was legal about conch harvest, I
went back and researched the law (again). We are allowed 10 conch per
person (the harvest being about half that), or 20 pounds of conch meat
(total) aboard – and at best that harvest which apparently so incensed
him might have yielded 5 pounds, much more likely 3, as it provided
only a couple of meals. Each and every one of the animals we took was
distinctly mature – easily the size used by the various conch vendors
we saw in Nassau and Stocking Island - but apparently not big enough
for his liking. Just how that, or a harvest yielding less than half
the allowed catch, equates to lawbreaking is beyond me, but that’s
apparently how he made it out.

So, cruiser bewa If you’re in an anchorage with Clark and
Seabattical, make sure you either avoid him or establish exactly what
he considers acceptable behavior, lest you find yourself on the
receiving end of a threatening tirade, and find yourself slandered to
others, perhaps, to boot. On the other hand, if you’ve done nothing
to set him off, I have no doubt that you’ll find him engaging, funny,
and helpful.

L8R

Skip, helpful to a fault