Sailors on Safair (Book) - 3/16/2020 7:44:52 AM
Once again, if I have already stated before, true life adventure is often much more exciting and realistic than fictional adventure. And your family certainly has an overflowing amount of adventure in all those years that you have sailed to exotic places and experienced exotic people, natural disasters and happenstance on the seas.
Great reading for those now quarantined until the virus moves on or they recover from it. I am still writing so much that I've even gotten behind in my magazine reading. So I will pass on your four books until it is reading all I will do.
Ron
Tuamotus encounter (Short Story) - 12/14/2019 12:49:09 PM
What an amazing life! I am adventurous, but I can't imagine what it would be like to set off like you did, with young children in tow, to sail the seas, making your living while doing so, so courageously. Makes my travels seem trivial. I'm so glad that you have chronicled so much through photography, video photography and books.
Makes me wish I'd taken up that offer to buy half of a Danish Folkboat back in 1968, even though my hands and arms were rather useless for sailing.
Ron
Short stories online (Short Story) - 12/8/2019 9:49:47 AM
I read two of your short stories from your great-looking website, but have to pass on because there are several more I want to read this morning. From what I read, I was looking for a bit more adventure. But you did give me an opportunity to share with you what intrigued me.
In 1968, I was assigned to work with Terry Holmes, a Berkeley engineer on systems quality at GTE LenKurt. He was old enough to be my father, but we hit it off right away. Terry was born in Hawaii and known around the Bay Area as Capt. Nemo for his race sailing prowess. One day, knowing that I was a single guy in my first job, saving my money, he asked me to go 50/50 on a $4000 wooden 1949 32 foot folkboat (may be an incorrect spelling). I declined, primarily because my hands and arms were paralyzed and sailing, like many other sports, were out of the question.
Terry managed to buy the boat anyway, and a couple of weeks before I was about to leave the company to go back to landlocked Wisconsin, invited me on an evening sail with his wife and two teenage kids. We left from Alameda Island on a beautiful evening with Terry pointing out all the landmarks and sailing the boat alone while his wife handed out a picnic dinner and his kids, bored, occupied themselves below deck.
Terry gave me the helm on the way back from around the Bay, and I steered us around Alcatraz and "not too close!" to Treasure Island. A dense fog came up and wet the inner timbers. Suddenly, I found my back bouncing over the hull spines. I was flat on my back on the bottom of the boat and no longer at the tiller! My feet had slipped off the spine I was bracing on. No harm done. Terry brought us back to his slip with the sails down and moving at a good clip in what seemed like a calm, turned us 90° into the slip and then ran from the rear tiller all the way to the bow, jumping off and easing the boat to a smooth stop without ever touching anything. Consummate sailing with no help from his kids or me--show off!
I was in Atlanta in 1980 and had my 13-year-old nephew with me for the summer. We drove to Florida to see my cousin, Terry, staying with his wife on a 1949 mahogany Chris-Craft that he was restoring, moored behind a home in Boca Raton. We went fishing one day. There was a nice chop, and I got seasick trying to hold my footing. We drifted over a weed bed and caught a barracuda, red snapper and bonito. When Terry went to start the engine, the battery was shorted out by a bad light connection caused by the people refinishing the deck. The radio failed while calling mayday and we were drifting dangerously toward the shore when a Coast Guard auxiliary boat showed up and towed us to Boca Raton where we got the battery charged and were able to go home and cook the fish.
In 1989 my girlfriend and I were treated to a free cruise in an ugly old very well used cruise ship to the Bahamas as a promotion from the city of Palm Beach. Terry, an all-around sportsman and adventurer who died in a car wreck driving alone to his hunting lodge in North Dakota had 57, was working in Naples at the time and drove across Florida to join us one evening while waiting for our cruise the next day.
After Terry sold the Chris-Craft, he and his wife worked for a while running a tourist fishing boat from a wharf in Boca Raton. Reminiscing, he took us back there for dinner and reconnected with some of his friends at the restaurant and wharf. He recommended that I order the dolphin. I balked, telling him that it was an animal that I didn't want to eat. He laughed, and told me it was a fish. The dolphin was delicious, probably because, as a cannibal, it only ate its own kind.
Ron
