The strangest thing happened to me (James) after setting the hook off Praia on Ilha da Santiago… a pain in my chest, no really, on the left side, a pain like I have never felt before. We traveled over a thousand miles offshore and I felt stronger than I ever have, meaning I didn’t feel anything at all physically. I mean sure, I felt hammered by the Earth. I felt exhaustion from lack of sleep or whatnot but I didn’t feel anything like…well, you know, old and decrepit. But all of a sudden, and I mean immediately after I got settled down below, I felt a sharp pain a little left of center in my back that went straight through to a little left of my sternum. Holy fucking shit! It was hard but I had to tell Dena. Now, this is a person who knows me better than anyone else in the world, who just witnessed me sail over a thousand miles without as much as a cut, so she knew to ask as many questions as possible and to go into it with the grain of salt it deserved. “Let’s sleep on it.” I slept in a restless state with real nightmares and all that shit but, physically, I was having chest pains. I did not want to experience this but I actually was. And there was no time to figure it out or wait it out. The only reason we sailed to Praia was because we had some very important business to attend to. Praia is not only the capitol of the Republic of Cabo Verde, there’s a US Embassy and my passport (at that point) was about a month from expiration. “They” say a person can not enter the country with a passport that is within[…]
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