On Anchors and Swallows

It's time for me to write a short post on the topic of anchors and swallows, as so many sailors before me have done.  There is a saying about this day being the second happiest day for a sailor.  That's a cute little saying, but is nowhere near to the reality of the day.  I have had many happier days onboard Luckness.  However, this day is indeed welcome.  One chapter closes as another opens.

Years ago, I was looking for images that could accompany this exact blog post.  At the time, this is around the best I could find:

However, since that day the world has changed and Artificial Intelligence is now everywhere and is proving quite helpful.  Here's an AI generated image on this topic, using Grok 2:

That's closer to what I was thinking.  I then tried to convince Grok to create an image where the swallow was actually swallowing the anchor, as the saying goes.  This proved quite difficult.  The problem may be that swallows do not have long necks, so combining those two images appeared to be easier in my imagination than in reality.  Something like the following is about the best I could do, in more of a cartoon style:

However, that image shows the future tense of the action, not the past tense, so it's wrong in that regard.

Grok-3 came out a little while ago, so I tried generating a few more images.  Something like the following is not bad, as it alludes to where the anchor swallowing occurred:

This has been a fun journey!

My best wishes go out to Mark and his wife.