Let's get this out of the way at the onset
On the Wind and a Prayer documents the yearlong "seabatical" Deb and I took beginning in the autumn of 2005. Living aboard our 34 Morgan sloop Laura Lynn, we overlooked a limited cruising background to set off for the Bahamas. What we discovered on the way, about life along the Eastern Seaboard, among the islands, and between two people sharing a floating shoebox for a home, provides the surf and turf of our story.
We shelved New York careers, Deb's thriving and mine foundering, to head off on a nautical adventure, our collective lack of experience be damned. While we'd been to the Caribbean on a few bareboat charters, where we rented the boats and sailed them ourselves, the bulk of our previous experience had consisted of day sailing on Manhasset Bay and the adjoining waters of the Long Island Sound, during predictably pleasant weather.
If the trip was to tax our experience and comfort levels on the water, our decision to go was made easier by a growing dissatisfaction with our professional lives. We were further goaded on by the words of another author:
"Twenty Years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
The guy who wrote those words went by the name of Mark Twain. It turns out that wasn't his real name at all, but a cleverly commandeered nautical term. These boaters types, they're a shifty lot.
The book is comprised of three sections. The first is a lead-in to the trip, beginning with recollections of some of my early life experiences around significant bodies of water. It includes the discovery of my mate-to-be, and culminates in our preparation for the trip. The second section is the recounting of the trip itself, which includes among its chapters the twenty logs we'd emailed to an ever-burgeoning fan base as we traveled along. A final section is a set of appendices giving additional information for readers interested in furthering research on the planning of this sort of trip.
About the Crew
Somebody help us. We're sinking and don't know it.
I've been a freelance cinematographer in the New York City area for over twenty-five years, having worked on television shows, commercials, documentaries, industrials, and the occasional low-budget feature. I do not do weddings, but I did once document a family's big-game safari. There was lots of blood strewn about, so in that way a safari can be said to resemble the job of working on a diesel engine in a rocking boat.
I've been fooling about in water since the womb. Only in recent years have I refined my aquatic habits to include the skills required to commute from one unfamiliar port to another.
My dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in my chosen profession provided a certain impetus for breaking away. During my darker moments, I'd found the television industry to be a mind-numbing, humanity-debasing, spirit-sapping cesspool of cult-pap. Were I to say something positive about it, I'd observe that it has provided for me a quarter century's worth of storytelling experience, since I've been visualizing others people's scripts all that while. Aside from this benefit to me, TV has also given the world Baywatch, an estimable artistic achievement that, if memory serves, promotes safe bathing practices for those drawn to the ocean's natural attractions.
Deb has been an energetic and successful women's apparel salesperson since the day she left home at sixteen. As a business executive, she has succumbed with Swiss-like regularity to a seven-year professional itch, which near the end of her last cycle coincided with my increasing desire to shoot everyone on set with something more potent than a 35mm round of film. Boaters are quick to tell you it's all in the timing.
Deb and I have day-sailed for our fourteen years together, and we've enjoyed bareboat vacations in the British Virgin Islands and the Leewards. Yet I still find it difficult to label myself a sailor. I can sail, yes, but there has always been the gnawing sense that I haven't paid enough attention to what I've been doing. I'm of the opinion that we humans are not so much what we eat, as what we metabolize. As a result I feel experienced enough to have the right to pontificate to an audience of armchair adventurers while exhibiting enough antic hubris to make the exercise entertaining.
My dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in my chosen profession provided a certain impetus for breaking away. During my darker moments, I'd found the television industry to be a mind-numbing, humanity-debasing, spirit-sapping cesspool of cult-pap. Were I to say something positive about it, I'd observe that it has provided for me a quarter century's worth of storytelling experience, since I've been visualizing others people's scripts all that while. Aside from this benefit to me, TV has also given the world Baywatch, an estimable artistic achievement that, if memory serves, promotes safe bathing practices for those drawn to the ocean's natural attractions.
Deb has been an energetic and successful women's apparel salesperson since the day she left home at sixteen. As a business executive, she has succumbed with Swiss-like regularity to a seven-year professional itch, which near the end of her last cycle coincided with my increasing desire to shoot everyone on set with something more potent than a 35mm round of film. Boaters are quick to tell you it's all in the timing.
Deb and I have day-sailed for our fourteen years together, and we've enjoyed bareboat vacations in the British Virgin Islands and the Leewards. Yet I still find it difficult to label myself a sailor. I can sail, yes, but there has always been the gnawing sense that I haven't paid enough attention to what I've been doing. I'm of the opinion that we humans are not so much what we eat, as what we metabolize. As a result I feel experienced enough to have the right to pontificate to an audience of armchair adventurers while exhibiting enough antic hubris to make the exercise entertaining.
Each voyager we met out there had compelling stories, personal experiences that resonated with our own. “You ought to write a book, you know,” is the common refrain. So I did. With the boat journey came our chance to record our own reality-based narrative.
What we did was in and of itself not unusual. It's going on all the time. There are scores of crews out there far more accomplished and adventurous than us, and newbies join the parade each year, some as a one shot deal, some in it for life. I only hope that what I accomplished afterward with the book is memorable and entertaining.
I like to think that what I bring to the nautical genre is my own inimitable brand of, I don't know, je ne sai quoi? I think I already mentioned the hubris thing.
Fair Winds,
The Author
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