Month: March 2026

When I was 22 years old, a very good friend of mine cried when I told her I could see no reason to live past the age of 31. Yeah, I was a dick. I did not die at 31 and I gotta say, I’m glad I didn’t. Of course, I very well could’ve. By the time I reached the ripe old age of 31, I’d been a rock star for 4 years. I owned a 24/7, 8 track/32 channel analog recording studio, a pirate radio station and had a healthy (?) appreciation of illegal substances. My life was on fire and I had no intention of putting that shit out. It was 1995, I’d been around the world on mainstream music’s dime, I was the center of the independent media scene in the Pacific Northwest with a 75 watt mobile micro-radio station, I rode a bike through the rain drenched hills of Seattle, I was sexy as a motherfucker so I said, “burn, baby burn!” Then something profound happened…Love and Life. I believe if life is viewed through greed, you will make money and perhaps that will make you happy for a while. If life is viewed through ambition, you will succeed, and that can be thrilling. But if life is viewed through love and adventure, you will fall in love with life and never want it to end. I somehow sloughed off the chains of greed and false ambition and ended up viewing life through the wide angle of love and the adventure that brings…through travel and cultural observation…through the love of life as viewed through a partnership. And I never want it to end! And here I am, 40 years after my own personal doom-foretold, on another boat (S/V SN-E Cetacea), thirty-thousand nautical miles and almost 30[…]

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Patillas kept us interested for far longer than we expected, with green jagged hills and thin beaches, plenty of birds and a little bit of water wildlife. We were into letting the propulsion battery charge and not rushing out to the next port, but mostly? We liked it there. We were a couple-few days in when we realized we were running out of some basics. The town beach was about a half mile east-southeast, but the only convenience store was much closer to the north. It would save us both rowing and walking if we could just… James spied something that looked a lot like a concrete staircase up the hill on the north side and, sure enough, we were able to beach the boat and get up to the two-lane highway that serves the area. Yeah, this is fucking awesome. The walk was not long but it was nerve-wracking as highways without edges tend to be. We picked up some groceries and I (Dena) tried to charm the guy running the place with my Spanish. The shopping was more successful than the charming. A tree ripening a thousand mangoes had let some go in the wind and we picked the least damaged up to bring back to the boat with us. Unfortunately, the convenience store was a real one-stop-shop and had more space dedicated to plumbing parts than pills and James can’t do without his old-man-prazole. We dedicated ourselves a few days later to stretching our legs again, this time heading into Patillas proper for some drug store and supermarket action. It was three and a half miles into the green hills TOTALLY AWESOME SHOPPING COMPLEX and I am so glad that we remembered to bring water. Once we got past the winding coast road to the straightaway that[…]

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