Category: James’ Blog

So the whole thing about not loving the Brazil idea anymore got more traction the more we thought about it. The Brazil to South Africa and into the Indian Ocean would be the fastest way to get to India, but not the easiest. (All things being relative, of course.) The Northwest Passage isn’t famously easy either, but it’s a road less traveled which makes it attractive. Meanwhile. As we went through our groceries, the cliff hike became more and more arduous. And so did beaching the dinghy in that round rock. On our last trip ashore, I (Dena) had the weirdest experience. A young woman approached the back of the truck, where I was already sitting, and hauled her toddler up by the arm and…handed it to me! I was taken aback but relieved the pressure on the kid’s shoulder, remembering a story about having my arm pulled out of the socket by my mom at about that age… We took a hard look at our finances and all that we could expect to make from publishing and Patreon…and it’s not enough to keep us going indefinitely, or even until James’ social security kicks in (if that even still exists then). We know we can work in the US and never have been able to figure out the work-abroad thing so here we are. We’re sailing for Martinique! Now there are a lot of things that direction so it won’t hurt us too badly if we don’t hit that exact spot, but the weather is good for it. The idea is to work our way west to Haiti or Jamaica, around the west end of Cuba, and up to Key West while it’s still to cold to go farther north. If we find only shit jobs paying crap, we’ll do[…]

When we find a place in the world that looks and feels like paradise, we tend to want to explore that place in depth. After the intense shakedown sail to Brava and the associated healing and projects list, we took a little time to look around and discovered we were anchored in a totally beautiful environment. The water is clear and warm, but not too warm for swimming and making water, the people are awesome, hardworking and respectful, and the cove we are anchored in is calm and quiet. Brazil is looking less and less attractive from a cruiser’s perspective, being expensive and a long ways away with a bit of a beat south of the equator. After the debacle where we got and then lost a contract for writing a Brazil cruising guide, we’re no longer sure we want to continue on the Portuguese trade-wind route, east around the world. We had developed an entire five-year circumnavigation course and plan. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we had an itinerary or anything but we had a working plan that was cool and exciting…then it was blown to shit. We were both numb for weeks afterwards. Gradually we came out of the shock, anger, resentment and healing phases of the process and regained our excitement about what it is we are doing with our lives. And that brings us back to the island of Brava, uniquely situated in the middle of the Atlantic flow of the Earth’s one big ocean. I (James) mean, from our current perspective here in Cabo Verde, we could very easily take the fair winds back to the Caribbean for the winter then take the Gulf Stream back to the Downeast run, setting us up to do the Northwest Passage. The boat is ship-shape and[…]

Dena and I (James) met about 28 years ago at a performance of a play written by a friend and former band mate of mine. After that show, we made a date for about a week later. The date was set for October 25, 1996, and the occasion was the Black Dog Forge’s annual Halloween party, a Seattle hipster mainstay event for well over a decade. Dena came to the party dressed as a flapper with long black feathers in her hair and I wore a suit. Even though she had classes from 8am to 7pm the next day, Dena and I stayed up most of the night talking and we have been very much into each other ever since. About 28 years later, we sailed into a crystal clear cove indenting the island of Brava in the country of Cabo Verde in the middle of the Atlantic flow of the Earth’s one big ocean. Still so into each other! The longevity is a side effect of being people who made promises they could keep, promises we continue to want to keep. We continue to work at this and our intertwined adventure continues. Our adventures since that first year in Seattle have taken us most of the way around this big blue world. From the Pacific Northwest to San Fransisco Bay under sail. From the Bay Area to Hawaii. From Hawaii to India, India to the United States Eastern Seaboard. From Florida to Bermuda. Bermuda to the Azores. The Azores to Madeira, on to the Canary Islands and down the African coast to the Cabo Verde chain, where we are anchored today. 28 incredible years of this! After we sailed into the tiny cove on the southwestern corner of the island of Brava for some much needed rest and repairs,[…]

We got the dinghy loaded aboard, everything stowed, and made big batches of tuna salad and egg salad for easy sandwiches underway. We went to bed feeling fine but when we got up, I (Dena) didn’t feel so well. I thought it might pass, but I felt worse and worse. Finally, terrible stomach cramps turned into puking. Meanwhile, we ran out of prepaid data on the sim card we’d been using. As foreigners, we have no way to top it up without going into a store but the dinghy was already stowed and getting it in the water is no one-person job. It looked like we weren’t going to be leaving right away and we weren’t going to be able to check the weather once we could. I do a phone screen-record of the full forecast before we get out of internet range because, even though it’s swiftly out of date, it’s better than nothing. I just hoped I’d get well fast. I didn’t. I couldn’t rinse my mouth without setting off another round of retching yellow bile from somewhere deep in my torso. Finally well after dark, the stomach cramps started easing and I tried to go to sleep. James came up to kiss me better and was startled by my temperature. I had a fever that raged through the night and broke with the dawn, but I was weak and dehydrated. So we sat in Mindelo, incommunicado, until I was strong enough to take my turn raising the anchor. Not, of course, because James wouldn’t take an extra turn but because I wasn’t strong enough for the sailing if I wasn’t strong enough for anchor duty. We finally got underway on Sunday, October 20th, at 9:22am. James took us out under sail alone. The electric motor was on[…]