Author: James

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[…]

After the hurricane…

So, we’re settling in on the Island of St. Thomas here in the Caribbean Sea on what is commonly known as the US Virgin Islands. Dena has set her mind to doing a job for the company she works for and I (James) have dedicated myself to getting the boat ready for a run at the Northwest Passage as soon as we can make that happen financially, psychologically and physically. The yacht management company that Dena works for has given us a mooring (as a perk?) very close to her office so the commute is as simple a row as we’ve ever had. As a matter of fact we’ve never had a row in from a mooring field or anchorage that has been as easy on us as this one, no matter the weather. Now granted, we’ve had better looking neighborhoods than the one we’re in today but it’s so calm back up in Vessup Bay that it will give me the opportunity to get all the work done that needs doing on S/VSN-E Cetacea. The first order of business is aesthetics. Our working systems like the sailing rig, the electric propulsion system, the pumps, cooking and lighting systems are all in good working order so getting the boat looking good gives me a chance to get a much closer look at every inch of the vessel while at the same time making her look and feel ship-shape and ready to go. The scum-line around the entire boat between the bottom and the rub-strake was a serious eyesore after our voyage from the Canary Islands to Africa’s Cabo Verde Islands. The reason it got so bad was because of all the travel we did in the shipping lanes. When sailing amongst the big ocean going freighters and tankers on the[…]

…at the dawn of the Great American brOligarchy, taking our pick from the flora et fauna, and we still decide who lives and who dies. We are pit against each other in our arena of capitol that is bringing us down with a system so vast that even the minions can erase you. …But where there is life and love and beauty there is hope. We continue on because there is imperative to life and love and beauty. We live on not because we can’t die but because we must see the life and the love and the beauty prevail. We’ve been through a lot together Dena, me (James) and all of you but that doesn’t mean we can rest, and I mean, not for a second. We have jobs to do. We have projects to complete. We must fix what we have broken and whatever it takes we must continue on with our lives and loves and our beauty. So here we shit at the top of the food chain in the third decade of the twenty-first century… still taking our pick of the flora et fauna… we still decide who lives and who dies but we’re not pit against each other, or at least we don’t have to be, and we can bring it all down with a system so vast that even their minions won’t escape us. Peace first!

We rolled up on Martinique like we owned the place, dropped the hook and then what? We sat in silence for about an hour and stared at shit while our minds and bodies caught up with each other. When a meat-bag body gets tossed about for 23 days at sea and suddenly stops, there a thing that happens. It’s as if the imaginary parts of your body, the parts that dwell in the mind, keep going at the same rate as the sea while your physical self is anchored with the boat. It’s a reality shift and it takes a while for the two parts to catch up with each other. My (James’) mind was still traveling through the Milky Way galaxy at the relentless pace of the multiverse while my bruised and battered meat-sack recoiled from the sudden relative stop. It was beautiful and terrifying… It was calm and chaotic… It was and still is an altered state of being that words will ultimately fail at describing. 23 days at sea from Africa to the Caribbean on a single downwind run is a life-changing experience and, when it’s over and done, what the fuck do you do next? Grocery shopping, of course! We weighed anchor after coffee to do an exploration trip of the inner harbor on the southern most part of the island of Martinique, a highly protected bay known as Le Marin. If you look at a satellite view of Le Marin, it’s mind boggling how many boats are packed in that tiny little bay on any given day but we figured it was worth it to at least check it out. The first place we anchored, Sainte-Anne, was protected by the island but wide open to the north and the east. There were well over a[…]