last year I bought a ticket for the Rod Stewart concert Köln, Germany on December 2 so I had to plan my travels accordingly. I had originally planned a month in Ireland but my friend was visiting France for a week and asked me to join so I cut my trip to Ireland short. Then I made it down to Spain and then back up to Germany for the concert.
when I first got to Cornell in 1971 I was of course studying in the room when the fellow across the hallway, Steve, had his door open and he was blasting “Maggie May“ which was a new song from the up-and-coming Rod Stewart. I asked Steve to close the door and turn the music down so I could study. He did nothing. So I went out and closed his door after asking him to turn down the music again which he did not do. So for a whole week he opened up his door and blasted “Maggie May“ I came to hate that song and I won’t tell you what I thought of Steve. But over the years the Song did nothing but bring back memories and they became increasingly good memories of my college days back in the middle of Iowa on the hilltop at a small school in a small town where people became something close to family and at least close friends. After 54 years I really needed to see this concert and it was one of the best things I’ve ever done.
““we are sailing” needs an explanation. It was back in about 1998 when we went out on a boat with the famous underwater videographer Prasong who we worked for on the dive boats. He went with one of the TV channel crew to do a special on diving in the Similan islands off the West Coast of Thailand. On the second day we were up at 6 AM, got some breakfast and Marianne, a famous Danish photographer and videographer and one of our diving crew in Bubbles, decided to take a dive far off Christmas point which was a little deep but we had never explored that area. Since we didn’t have diving customers with us we were able to do some experimental dives in areas that were not really suitable for guiding customers. So the boat dropped us off and as we came up we had manta rays all around us. We came to the surface and the current was pulling us slightly away from Christmas point. We waved to the dive boat but since it was about 7:30 we were in between the boat and the rising Sun so the boat couldn’t see us with the sun glare. we were calling to the boat but we were too far away for them to hear. So we just relaxed, inflated our BCD’s and knew they would come and look for us anyway. After having a few discussions and jokes about nothing a Thai squid fishing boat came to us and asked us if we wanted to board the boat which we did. On these fishing boats they have Burmese (Myanmar people) on as crew because they’re cheap but also illegally on the boats as crew so they were hiding in the cabin. As we walked past the cabin these heads popped up with yellow powder on their face (prickly powder is used to reduce the effects of heat from sweat. the Myanmar people use a yellow powder as the Thai people use a white powder. So that’s how you can tell the Myanmar people from the Thai people especially early in the morning when the powder is most used.We told the captain about our dive and where our boat was. he was very happy to take us back to our boat. We asked him how his fishing was and he explained, “we haven’t caught much squid yet but we did catch a few foreigners“. We all broke out laughing. The whole situation was just so hilarious. As we got close to our dive boat Marianne and I stood on the front of the boat and we started singing “we are sailing“. I guess it was so entertaining the TV crew on our dive boat decided to film it and two weeks later we wound up on Thai TV coming back to our boat singing “we are sailing“ and explaining we saw a lot of manta rays, the first of this dive trip. So that’s the story of the song. After that we showed the TV crew where the manta’s were so we did a number of dives with mantas which became an extra episode on the four part TV series “diving in the Similan islands”.
