The Resurrection!

Western Alaska had a tough winter this year while the headlines boasted of sunken boats and epic rescues at sea. A friend of mine, Bill, called me in March from Durango Colorado, where he was spending his winter vacation. In a radical storm storm his boat had frozen in the ice pack and been swallowed by the rising sea and needed some TLC. He built the Namorada him self years ago on Kodiak Island and has fished it all over Alaska for twenty plus years with his wife and son. I have been privileged to work with him for five years and through many adventures and prosperous seasons I have grown attached to the boat my self. News of her sinking, was hard to bear. It was going to be "a miracle", but Bill wanted to resurrect and refit the boat so that we could fish in four short weeks. With pictures all over the Internet the word was out and the consensus was overwhelmingly doubt full. It was going to be an a life time experience dealing with the cold and desolate conditions up there and it sounded like another adventure.


Some parts of Alaska solidify in ice during the winter, and we happened to be in one of those parts. The F/V Namorada was stored on the beach at the end of the summer in a tributary of Bristol Bay. Through the winter the rivers become five feet thick highways for those who live there year round. The Namorada was preserved in the ice pack poised for Shackleton's photographer, when an extreme hide tide and a twelve foot storm surge came for a visit.
Amazingly four weeks time has brought us from the above, (a complete bath then the boat becoming a solid block of ice inside and out) to where we are now... completely ready to fish.
Chipping the ice out of the boats living quarters, cleaning every nut and bolt, defrosting and breaking apart our fishing net, repairing radios, reviving the engines, chipping the boat out of the ice with a crowbar and a two inch wood chisel. Jacking the boat up out of its ice bed, then towing the boat off the beach into the water and having a bottle of champagne flown in for the occasion (great job Amanda)!
When you have a guy who smiles in the face of everything, knows his boat backwards, has a spare part for everything and can tell you what size wrench you are going to need for every job, values good conversations hot cups of tea anything is possible. We are in the wild wild west out here, beyond the realm of OSHA and hardware stores where WD40 and a good pair of vice grips is all you need.

Nostalgia

I changed my return ticket to France the other day and my heart sunk. When I left Noche I thought I would be back in three months. My spirits were beaming from the French culture and vivacity of the sailing lifestyle. So many magic moments one after another, no stress, just one day after another of everything you want it to be.
September 15Th is the date I will take hold of Noche's lines again and head for that next horizon. I am dreaming of when that daily routine resumes of putting the kettle on, drawing a few scoops from my elndless supply of stale bitter Caribbean coffee, walking down the dock to the bakery for a small baguette, some cheese and a bottle of two euro wine, stopping to chat with friends encountered months ago in some random far away place, pulling my sails back out, fitting them back in their places, and peeling through charts looking for that next adventure.


Today I was checking the weather, feeling remorseful and debating about taking a few weeks to go check on the boat. Its winter, I thought, but what does that mean over there? Jon's boat is snowed in there in bristly Brighton. That would be brutal.

The wind in the Bay of Biscay seems fine, and the swell not bad either.

Here is twenty four hours later, fifty knot winds and 10 meter waves.




Ah, life is good, maybe I feel like I am missing it, but the best is still to come.









Who do I know in the Bahamas instead?

Derek Got Pranked!!!!!

This is what happens when you leave your car and your keys at one of your old college roommates house.



Derek is famous for decades of pranking people in good humor. Its very hard to catch him in a vulnerable position, but Rob Evans happened to catch him off guard. 2,500 post-it notes, a car full of packing peanuts, shredded paper, glitter, and some hidden treasures yet to be found make for a nice payback!

Snowboarding in Crested Butte

Jon from the Double Bruyn and Laura my cousin from the days of Barely Twisted and I met up for a reunion in Colorado. We romped around the slopes under cloudless skies, met really hospitable people, drank beers in the sunshine, talked endlessly about sailing and our next adventures, and soaked our bones in the hottub.

Crested Butte is a charming town and warm community. We were greeted with genuine interest, treated like royalty with discounted food and lift tickets, free accommodations, and a ski jump right in front of our porch. We couldnt ask for more. If you buy a case of beer, you receive two for one lift tickets. How could we complain? Free buses roam the streets and there is always a way to score free hot chocolate. Thanks to Kristen and Thomas for all your hospitality! They even said we could come back anytime... hehe

Back to boats and back to Alaska

The boating adventure has morphed into a boating venture and the labor of love into labor for money. She's twice as long and twice as wide as Noche. This boat was sold at close to half its value because of the uncertainty of the economy and the fickle nature of fishing. Some are scared and some are simply ready to move into their place. The taste of Alaska is now a lifestyle and days on land few and far between. I am living in Seattle and its awesome! I am metting inspiring people and the weather has been relatively dry and nice to us.

I am a "waterfront character" to these poeple, who sleeps in a sleeping bag, on a dirty smelly boat, with oil on my clothes, with earth in my nails and grime stained calluses. And to me my friends are "nine to fivers", living up the finer aspects of city life, working for a greater cause, tasting adventure through a flat screen, raging two days a week and two weeks a year and trickling the extra into the promise of a 401k. Its all an adventure and you sleep in the bed you create. Admittedly I only have one pair of jeans that I like to wear, a favorite hat, no car in my name, but a powerful confidence/ delusion of my self as one of the wealthiest men alive. I have a hundred dollar gift certificate to Nordstroms that I cant spend because there is nothing that I need. I wake each day, and its the day that I own. I show the wear and tear of a large boat project, but its my project. Its up to me each day to do what needs to be done, to make that list and cross it off. I like that. Free to run, free to work, free to read, free to talk with the person next to me. My tools aren't made by Black Berry but I can build, fix and interact fist person with this universe and still strike five conversations a minute with a group of strangers on the streets or in a room.
Today overwhelmingly I sense this great dichotomy with whats being said and whats actually going on. I think that we should learn to read the weather for our selves, and nourish our instincts and what it really means to be a human. Its crazy to get all our information from a Television or even a newspaper. Its crazy to experience an emotion with a a inanimate object like a television. Our ability to read life and sense whats going on atrophies to nothing when we swallow, believe, and act with out our own reason. A decade with out television (except for movies and the Lost Series) and I feel like I have a pretty strong grasp of what is going on around me.
I can feel rain when its on its way and when its not. As far as the economy goes I was in line at REI (an outdoor clothing store) listening to a couple in front of me talk about stories of "lay offs" and this massive "recession" that we were in. All I could think of was that, in fact we were standing in the longest line at REI that I had ever been in. So many people were getting new ski outfits that Sunday that I had to wait longer than I had ever waited. Last night after a sold out concert the bars were so packed with free spending consumers that my friends and I had to walk several blocks in the cold to find a place that was empty enough to hear each other talk. I am writting this now in a cafe with out an empty table, there is heat, 46 visible light bulbs burning, food going stale in their show cases and coffee being poured out every hour because its not fresh enough for our palets. Times are tough, thats what I hear, but sometimes I cant get over what I see.
For every person that is out of work and forced to sell their stuff there is someone buying stuff cheap. There will be more opportunity now to acquire promising assets, than buying houses or assets when they were at their peak. The channels of information have us scared, when we should be getting ready for the biggest opportunity for economic gain this generation will experience. The boom is when allot of people see a steady gain, the bust is when a select few will see tremendous gain. American companies are on sale. Wealth will be shifted again even more now into the hands of those who already have it. The economic middle class will pour like sand in an hour glass into the lower region and the money will swell in the pockets of the extremely wealthy.

Companies will shrink, because they over expanded. Houses will loose value, because we built too many, and frankly we built boxes around shiny marble counter tops surrounded by other unimaginative boxes that were engineered in shapes that squeezed more into less with no regard for livability. Our dallor will loose its value because we are printing too many. Our credibility in the world as a power, as a leader as an inspiring idea has lost its luster because we wrote checks our soft power account couldn't cash.

So that's my soap box as you know, don't miss out on the land of opportunity. A friend, fisherman, businessman from Alaska and I are venturing into the uncertain waters of this recession with a Canadian boat. The Canadian salmon fisheries are in turmoil and boats are being sold off. Alaskan fisheries are in good shape, but traditionally really expensive to capitalize for. So a cheap boat from one area, brought to to the promise land is the plan.

Of course there are always reasons why there aren't other people doing the same thing... this boat was too long on both ends.. so we cut the bow off and part of the stern. So nothing is easy and you have to take risk. We are taking engines out, and putting engines in. Cutting nets apart, and sewing nets together. Cutting catches off, and putting hatches on.



Here is my number one: Jamil, a Peruvian, who drove from LA a month ago with his mind set on becoming a fisherman, and he did.


And we are looking for more:

A gold mine in Mexico

Old Mexico

We crossed the border in a convoy of delapidated trucks and freshly painted mining equipment, heading for the sonoran moutain desert. funny as it works this time I was waved through, while everyone else had to dig for their wallets. A hundred bucks here a thousand bucks there a few days later and we evenually got all our gear through. I was pit crew for our mecanically feable fleet. It seemed as though from Colorado to base camp we experienced it all, from broken windows flat tires, trailers jumping off their tow hitches while cruising down the highway, fuel problems, new pumps, compressor problems, two new compressors, running out of gas, locking the keys in the car, paying road side tire repair guys to watch our trailers, getting totally separated with no means of communication and camping along the side of the road in dangerous parts of Mexico.
The adventure of gold minining in mexico has long begun.


Once we arrived with our pile of gear we rounded the troops for a meeting with the owner of the ranch where we would hopped to set up this mine. The ranch owner happens to live in a hacienda style compound with gaurds and surveilance cameras on the alleys that border his estate. Why all this? he's got alot to loose. Most mafia familes do. when we arrived We were expected and were ushered within the thick compound walls single file into a large air conditioned meeting room with marble floors, leather chairs and a surveilance monitor with my car awaiting out in the alley front and center.

Our host was unlike the weathered sunglassed faces that possed around his property. He was middle aged, well groomed, and greeted us each with a bottle
of water and a soft skinned hand shake. He smiled with perfect teeth
a perfect mustache and stood short but tall in a perfectly pressed shirt. we were tired, dusty and sweaty palmed. An hour before we had had breakfast
with a local that had filled us with horror stories about this man and his connections and other possible businesses. Our meeting started casually and
revolved around the interpretor. When it was discovered that we would need a document, Castro would pause, make a call and moments later a courier would be
at the door panting with a freshly typed up document.


We discussed legistics, partnership details and the use of Castro's planes. Yeah of course this story wouldn't fit the bill if it didn't involve a
private air strip and planes awaiting. We concluded the meeting and on our way out admired his car collection and reconveined in the alley. In mexico there are many
parties struggling for power and pilaging or taxing the people. The government patrols with the military. Federali cops patrol with little oversite.
Local cops patrol with even less oversite. then
there are mafia types and militia gangs. Who's on top, who knows? Our association with Castro keeps everyone away. Who is he? Thats not our business, our
business is to find gold, and keep our promises. I am kind of intrigued by him, but I figure it wouldn't pay to dig for anything around here other than gold.

What am I doing down here?
Sitting on a gold mine by my self with a bunch of rusty equipment. I play around on it till my imagination runs dry or I get embarassed
because I think someone is watching me pretend to drive tracktors that are not turneed on. I can hit a pop can with my sling shot from ten yards and I know
where a den of jack rabbits are come thanksgiving. I learned "G, D, C and E'm" on my Mandoline. I tarred the roof of my trailer this morning and just
climed the highest hill in the area. Its beautifull down here. The moonhas been bright at night and the sunsets on the desert landscape are always
spectacular.


I found a local cheese maker and a tortillaria, so I pretend I am in france. Instead of being close to everything, I am fifty miles from the nearest gas station
and twenty two kilometers from the nearest street light. I made pinto beans yesterday, and it took all day. I am reading Down the River by Edward Abby.
Talk about coincidence, Abby left the day he cast his ballot for the 1980 elections then went on yet another river trip. The story is in journal form and its
the same calendar day as the day I started this trip the day after I cast my ballot. You guys know more about him than I do, but he talks alot about mining
and industrialization, mexican labor and ruening the earth with our urban foot print. Its easy to come to the same conclusions as he does when I look out
across the beautifull desert from the top of a hill. I see the magnificence of the desert vegitation, sense the struggle for life, admire the hillsides,
and then contrast it with the view of a fifty year old pit mine that looks like a wound that has never healed. I look at the power lines and dirt roads
that bisect the landscape. I view the trash we leave and listen to the heavy trucks rattle back and fourth. I imagine all the open pits that we created,
so that we could make those trucks, and the fuel they consume so we can make more pits, and I close my eyes and imagine them all gone. You can't have to
much of a concience and carry on being human. Even the most fervant environmental lawyer drives a Toyota Tacoma. Its all hypocracy. Where do we begin?

It would help though if we all realized that gems and gold only hold the value we place on them. Gold makes things shiny, and has a few electrical applications.
what else does it do? What do dimonds do on our fingers mounted in gold. Its simplifies the human race down to that of a hungry fish that strikes at a shiney luer.
We like shiney things, and are enamored and estemed by glitery objects. They cost lives and create huge holes in the earth, reck landscapes and waste time, the only true gold we will ever have.


The tremendous cost of a miner to aquire and a consumer to buy a piece of gold. What do I do if I find a nugget of gold, should I smile? should that make me happy? I'm not sure what I am supposed to do. What a miner can find in one life time amounts to a small pile of Gold. How much promise does a pile of gold yeild, and how big a pile would you trade your life for?Its an easy annology. What are you trading your life for right now? A garage full of stuff from Walmart, a car that people esteme? Its all worth thinking about, what are we exchanging our youth, vitality and life for? Is it the promise of something in the future, like freedom in retirement? All in all I still think the promise of retirement is a crazier idea than looking for gold in mexico.

Hundred things to do in life....work on a political campaingne

Check.

If you were bugged to vote and received piles of handbills on your doorstep in the last month it could have been me. Funny how it works, I hate to be harassed my self, I resent being invaded with phone calls and junk mail and yet I jumped at the opportunity to work with a political organization for this election. Why was it so easy to be a pest and pass out alot of stuff that goes straight to the bin? Well,i figure that its unacceptable that half of Americans don't bother to vote, and under this current administration we have dumpsters full of metal and usable lumber.

The efforts by the politicians may be annoying to us, but our lifestlye and foreign policy has become life threatening to the world and our greatest threat to national security. I was ashamed to fly my American flag while sailing around the world. I am not ashamed of our ideals. I am not ashamed of where I come from. But those stars and stripes have a different meaning today. I am ashamed that we have insulted world leaders and not done our part to move forward on world wide issues where the rest of the community has.






I had a blast. As you can see I got to see a life long hero up close and almost shake his hand. John Elway was the Denver Broncos quarterback while I was a kid and in love with football. Seeing him in person was really cool. He is a big human, bigger than I thought. I had to wait through a few speakers, but I got to hear him, and it was for me a life time opportunity.


One of my favorite memories was running into an old college alum, while wearing a pink cowboy hat and a pair of retro roller skates. Yes I was a paid goon, and I probably contributed to how annoying this last campaign became.

Funny, I learned nothing about politics, but not because I didn't ask questions, all was not lost I had day after day of opportunity to observe America. I learned that if you ask someone how the electoral college works, they typically recite a few of the same text book answers then realize there is a gap in their own understanding and they reach for a friend, the friend provides justification for the electoral system yet the gaps remains. Its one of those issues that most people have a question about, but no one follows it to the end. Nodding and assuring understand is less painful and gets most people by. Who is the electoral person in your area? Where are they, and do they have to vote with the people? That depends on the state. Its great, it makes no sense, but that confusion incites nothing.


If you were a Martian you would scratch your noggin at this. In America we turn lights on during the day even though we have the sun. We have this idea that our personal freedom and Independence is tied to driving in a car alone even though it means we spend hours of our own day in the trafficked jammed lanes, side by side with other solo drivers who feel they are exercising their freedom and rights while the four passaenger cars jammed with two humans fly by at top speeds in the empty carpool lane. Who's free? This is the most impressive behavior: we travel the earths surface and bore its depths with tremendous equipment sourcing out various metals.
We capture those metals, refine them, use them for some human purpose for a short while and then we discard them and they are mixed back up with other materials and we try to then put them back into the earth. If you could watch us, there would be a few obvious ways to make our existence alot easier. Let me tell you that if a mining operation found this much resource in an area the size of a dumpster every employee in the operation could retire rich.

We need a leader. This new guy brought more people to the streets on a Sunday than any football game, and the world was dancing all at the same moment for the first time in history. Hes going to bring us together. I'm not talking about the suburbs and rural America, if you think Obama is a terrorist, or your still nervous around black people, well frankly we cant afford to wait for you at this point. I'm talking about making america and its ideas popular again. Its not about us its about war, genocide, tremendous waste and we do not have the right to waste the worlds resources.
Ignore the news and take a look around, while I was a away I heard horror stories of depression but my observations are that we are not in desperate times over here. The carpool lanes are empty, and people leave their lights on all day and there are dumpsters full of resources.

Wow, hitting the news stand makes you wonder. The year has passed; cruising through the Bahamas was great, the Caribbean was worthy, crossing the Atlantic was once in a lifetime, the Azores was an undiscovered paradise, Spain lax and dreamy, England rainy and unwelcoming but worth visiting because there are so many Kiwis. Then France was heaven with Angels and all the rest. It has been such an inspiring year! The world seems so accessible now, people seem so welcoming and life seems harmonious.
But what’s this, the world is in turmoil. I’m not sure what is really going on. One phenomina seems blantant: TV and the periodicals have a lot to do with it. The media perpetuates these catastrophic events by spreading the fear. Shut it off.

The first newspaper I see shows this:

















The Magazine underneath it shows this:















Both are illustrating what’s going on in the world. Yeah the rich are having a ball still and we are in turmoil. But I am poor and I didn’t feel the world shake. The Financial times said the world shook. Well, not enough to rock my boat, nor the rest of the boats and these guys seem to be carrying on as planned.

It's time to go sailing. Its really time, maybe the promises of retirement that we live for, won't exist in ten-fourty years. What if you lived your life based on a promise, and it turned out to be a lie? You might be reay to kill, eh?. Well its nothing new, if you planned on retiring with your "investments" in realestate or the stockmarket, its not time to retire its time to go back to work.
If you would rather not get caught up in all the doom and gloom, and jobs seem hard to come by,or the pay is not worth your time even, then do what you can to get a sailboat. Get a small one, put this lie to rest and start the dream. It would be hard to convince me that this was'nt the greatest year to have gone by. As the news pumps this demoralizing saga and the dark clouds of depression loom ahead, the world of sailing is beeming. The wind will always blow and exploring this earth will always be fantastic. I've got pictures of more smiles and magic moments this year than any other. I missed all of what happened on TV but I am soo excited about what lies ahead.