Five O'Clock Somewhere

Welcome to Five O'Clock Somewhere, where it doesn't matter what time zone you're in; it's five o'clock somewhere. We'll look at rural life, especially as it happens in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, cats, sailing (particularly Etchells racing yachts), and bits of grammar and Victorian poetry.

Friday, December 23, 2005

Accidental Voyage

What is accidental, really?

I spent a large part of today in the kitchen, doing holiday cooking. I baked a loaf of pumpernickel bread (very successful) and a chocolate mocha mousse cake (far from perfect, but it was a new recipe, and I now know what to do differently next time), and of course, I made the tamales. Once they were steaming away, it was time for me to relax. I noticed in the newspaper TV listings that one of Fuego’s movies was on, but then I discovered that the channel it was on wasn’t part of the package we have from our satellite company.

I then noticed something called Los Gitanos del Mar (The Sea Gypsies) on one of the Spanish-language channels, so I decided to take a look. A lot of times, the Spanish-language channels will offer English subtitles on the second channel of closed captioning, but that wasn’t the case this time. My Spanish is rudimentary, so I couldn’t really understand the details of the plot, but at least I could enjoy looking at the pretty boat. However, the movie was also extremely hokey and unrealistic (kid falls overboard, rest of family doesn’t notice for some time, then father turns boat around without doing anything to the sails, amazingly, they end up back where the kid went over, pulling the kid out of the water is no problem – anybody who’s done proper MOB training would know it’s way hard even with a floating dummy head – and when the kid arrives on deck, he’s bone dry). So I went channel surfing and found this series called Accidental Voyage on the R&R Channel.

I’d been a wee bit miffed when the satellite company dropped the Outdoor Life Network and replaced it with R&R (I can’t remember exactly what the abbreviation stands for, but it’s something like Resorts & Recreation). OLN had been good about showing sailing; it carried nearly all of the racing in the last America’s Cup, for instance. R&R tends to focus more on things that go vroom, like hydrofoil racing boats.

However, Accidental Voyage is definitely NOT about things that go vroom. It is the chronicle of some sailors wandering around the South Pacific. The title comes from the history of the South Pacific: When a ship encountered an island that had not previously been charted, the incident was called an “accidental voyage.”

The cinematography is amateur, but the adventures are real – things like hiking up to a sacred waterfall on Nuku Hiva or visiting a black-pearl farm at Ate in the Tuamotus. I was pleased when at the end of the show, there was an announcement that there was a website to go to for ordering DVDs – I need to find one last, last-minute Christmas gift. Alas, the website appears to be under construction. Right now, it has one pretty picture and an email address to send comments to.

Oh, well.

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