In the 1960’s and just out of my teens, I set out to see if the rest of the world was as boring as my home town of Manchester, England. It wasn’t, or at least most of it wasn’t. After many years of travelling with my thumb, I made my way to Singapore. From there, I caught the French steamship, MV Cambodge, that ran routes from Marseilles trading by the Red Sea, stopping at Jabuti, Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Manila, Hong Kong, and Kobe, Japan. Bound for a quick trip to Saigon to see what that was like before going to work in Australia, I jumped aboard. I never made it to Saigon, though. The captain refused to stop because of recent violence. I didn’t mind continuing on, though. In those days the journey was everything, and traveling didn’t mean getting to the destination as quickly as possible. The ship carried me to the end of the line at Kobe, Japan. At that time, there were so few foreigners in Japan that I soon had more work than I wanted, mostly as a movie extra and TV commercial actor. I've used Japan as my base ever since. I've built my boats here, left from here to circumnavigate the world, and returned to do it all over again. You would think this would offer enough freedom from the general grind but I'm a guy who was born out of my time ,who believes the last free men were the hunter gatherers of the stone age before everyone was obliged to bow down to THE MAN. More and more its becoming difficult to find individual expression. Adventure and freedom swamped in an over crowded world of rules and regulations, where perhaps the only way left for us to say this is' ME' and I dont want to be like you is to buck the system and break the laws!