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Monday 13 March 2017

Idiot sailor tackles the Bahamas

Inspired by a personal tragedy and plain dumbness, this intrepid fool and neophyte sailor set off from Florida to the Bahamas - and found that things don't automatically go right. Read his account here:

They say that after a personal tragedy, you should wait a year before making any big or important decisions. The wisdom of this is both obvious and self evident. That being said, three days after my wife died, I decided to: quit my job, sell my car, sell my house, give away all my stuff, buy a sailboat and sail the carribbean for a year.

I would become a "Sailorman".

For the next month I pondered this decision deeply. By which I mean I didn't think about it at all. I was too busy being desperately unhappy, missing my wife, and trying to think of a reason to continue what looked to be a long bleak lonely life. Eventually I began to once more consider this vaguely formed idea to head for the "Islands in the Stream", and I immediately leapt into action. I grabbed a beer from the fridge, popped a DVD into the player, and plopped down on my recliner. I would watch a movie and then think about the future. The movie was a musical called “Mama Mia”, and as I sat there rocking out to ABBA cover songs I realized something; There was a dude in this movie that sailed his boat around the world to exotic places, and then wrote books about them!!!

It was fate, destiny, kismet, some other word that means something similar but that I don’t remember! I could do what he did. I mean, he was a man, I was a man. He was a writer; I wanted to be a writer. He had a sailboat; I could probably get a sailboat.

Only two things stood between me and the realization of my dream. I wasn’t sure I could write (or even spell), and I was completely sure I couldn’t sail a boat.

This book is not about sailing, although I do sail (poorly). It's a book about a clueless dweeb, who dreams of trying to accomplish something that he is not trained for, is constitutionally built to fail at, and is so abjectly terrified of, he cries himself to sleep thinking about it.   Him, not me, real men don’t cry. They whimper softly, then fart from the effort of holding in the sobs.

In The first seven sailing days on my boat I: got a concussion, ran aground breaking my $4000.00 rudder, caught a flesh eating disease, almost losing my foot and my life, had my identity stolen, sprang a leak and began sinking, was rammed by a multi-millionaire in a huge yacht, was almost run down by a humongous cruise ship in the gulf stream between Florida and the Bahamas, and got a blister.

After that, it got a little hairy.

I wrote this "Diary" as a series of E-Mails to family, and friends I met as I traveled. I am told that they would often take them to bars with other friends, or just have a party. Read them aloud, and laugh their asses off.

Because disaster can be really funny, when it happens to someone else. 


(90,700 words)Check out this new book here

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