Captain "Jacobo"

There aren't many of us sailors here at the City Marina... nevertheless for better or worse, I have established a relationship of sorts with a fellow mariner. By all accounts he is in his mid-seventies but could easily pass for someone in his late eighties... How he managed to sail down from Maryland all by himself is beyond my comprehension.

Jacobo is frail beyond his years, hard of hearing, and somewhat of an old grumpy neurotic. He has no muscle tone to speak of and his weathered skin sags all over the place. I suppose this is what happens to chain smokers when they get old. I'm not certain whether he ever eats much of anything but he routinely offers to mix up a Bloody-Mary for me every morning whenever he sees me striding either to or from my car. It's an offer that he knows that I will politely yet resolutely decline but nevertheless an opportunity for him to hit me up for yet another favor so it seems.

We often meet up at a local tavern for happy-hour in the evenings along with another wanna-be boater. Together we talk boating and what not. Somehow I've got to keep reminding myself that I am not his caretaker, nor am I his chauffeur to be driving his scrawny ass around places. Sorry... don't mean to be an A-hole about it but I see a pattern developing along here somewhere.

I spent a couple of hours today figuring out how to program Captain Jacobo's GPS... GPS, as in Handheld Global Positioning, not that any cell-phone savvy, pimply-faced adolescent couldn't figure out. Somehow while at the tavern yesterday evening I got snookered into agreeing to programming the thing and getting it to work. Well I had made a promise to "look into it", so the handheld was waiting for me first thing the next morning. I didn't mind... I even learned a few damned things along the way.

After a simple google search I found and proceeded to download the GARMIN GPS76 operators manual and read through it. I also found a website with GPS coordinates submitted by other boaters which I then proceeded to load into the handheld.

Later at the bar that evening, I show Jacobo how to operate the GPS as well as how to load way-points and what-not. He was pleased I suppose, but didn't deliver on his promise to buy me a few beers for my efforts.

Boater Wanna-Be soon thereafter shows up and inquires of Jacobo whether he had brought his GPS handheld along because he was lost. Jacobo looks over at me and proceeds to derisively dismiss the question with a "he was just messing around with the thing"... He might as well have stated "He's just f*rting around with the thing." This all after I had spent the previous thirty minutes or so methodically explaining how to operate the thing and having him perform the various operations himself. I later find myself doing a slow-delayed burn.

Next on my agenda for tomorrow is to haul his dinghy out of the water and who knows what else...

Memo to self: Park car elsewhere... disengage to some extent... haul ass on out of here.