Bermane Stiverne could have been on that list of names from the Japanese baseball video game. Somewhere between Bobson Dugnutt and Showne Furcote.

Knocked out cold with a closed fist isn’t “smacked.”

She learned a lesson she won’t soon remember, if she’s as drunk there as she looks... All she’s going to learn is how to live on a liquid diet while trying to remember what happened before she blacked out.

But he didn’t kill her.

What, “get back in your vehicle sir, and keep your paws where I can see them?” Jesus.

You must take very little contact to have piss smacked out of you. She missed him on the swing, and vaguely brushed him on the way back.

She whiffed and then barely touched him. He went youtube highlights video on her. I don’t think police can hit you just because you touch them, provided you’re restrained they don’t get to hit you back by some schoolyard fairness rule.

She was stupid, but she was also so loaded she could barely see.

“Mr. Kershaw? Patrick Ewing on line 1. He says it’s going to be okay. Sort of.”

To be fair, though, they’re probably the biggest seller of bicycles in America as well, and paper towels, basketballs, tampons, fishing rods, car batteries, minion-themed kids accessories, and everything else that is consumed.

So, them being the king of gun sales is pretty reasonable :)

Oh, hey, apparently they had an EPIRB with them and didn’t use it. Also, they were apparently in touch with the coast guard inside of a day from Tahiti, and said they were in no distress.

Nothing.

That’s what adds up about the original story.

“We only broke into his house and smeared feces on the walls to tell him that we love him just as much as we loved and respected the great Celtic, Bill Russell. Not because of racism. You know. At all.”

I’m a pretty big fan of Hanlon’s Razor, though... and Occam’s as well.

My guess is that the currents and the trades carry you in that direction, if you just act like a raft, and don’t really make decisions to pilot and sail the boat. It’s my only guess here. From my quick skimming through, the trades do blow from the east across the pacific, so they could have just been really slowly…

I’ve sailed for more than a few years. I wouldn’t dream of jumping feet first into a trip like this if I hadn’t spent a few years putzing around the Caribbean first, at least.

Blue water is an entirely different animal than my brown water swanning about on the Hudson.

You would probably have a halyard for a storm sail you could us, or a spare main halyard, or a spinnaker halyard, or a metric tonne of other things that could get even six or ten feet of sail up that mast. It can be done, we’re not talking about a Shackleton event here.

Jury rigging is especially easy to imagine in a setting where they would have had trade winds from the East to help them make way. Going to California from Hawaii is rotten for wind, from what I’m understanding, but the way they were going was nearly ideal for wind and weather.

You don’t learn by trial and error if you’re jump in at the shark-infested deep end.

Find people to learn from who don’t suck. There are plenty of them.

Start small, work your way up, and read about a basic set of packing items and precautions. For offshore passages, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t bring at least…

If it was strong enough to stay up for five months, I’d bet you could use the roller furling jib, barely rolled out, and a heavily reefed mainsail to make progress without overtaxing the remaining spreaders etc. It’s hard to tell what they were trying to do, though, and the boat is going to be left to drift until it…

I can’t figure that either.

The water is at a perfectly normal level. They weren’t sinking by that measure. If you were taking on water beyond what you could bail, then you’d expect to be up above the bootstripe/top of the bottom paint layer. That doesn’t look like it to me at all. I’m sure they were distressed and in…

You take what’s left of the rig and you lash stuff together, and you take what canvas you can, and make a sail out of it. Instead of waiting to die for five months, you have to think of how to work around it. It’s not easy, but this doesn’t look they did anything at all to put together a rig of any kind...