The different faces of fishing

The photo above is one I took in Vietnam. We were there a short time, in 2012 and didn't get much chance to hang out with the fishermen. I regret that.

I'm intrigued by the similarities and differences of rural peoples, and in particular, fishermen, which is curious, because I'm lousy at fishing. Fishing villages and the fishing folk are far more interesting to me than tourist destinations. 

Dagny (who catches far more fish than I) and I spent one of our years in Venezuela, a little more than that, actually, living among the scattered fishing villages along the north coast of the Golfo de Carriaco. We became friends with the fishing families and learned to respect their craft, their lives. 

The picture below is me (at the motor) and T-Bone Fisher out in my penero on the Golfo... on the way back from making a beer run to Cumana. I bought a 40HP Suzuki, much to the disdain of the fishermen who are big Yamaha fans. Although we left long ago, and T-Bone is (I think) dead now, the boat and motor are still there.

On the trip to Colombia that starts next week, I intend to visit a fishing village. I expect it will similar to the ones in Venezuela, but there will be differences. Those differences will be important to Book Two in the series I'm writing with J. Lee Porter, as some of the story will take place there. I'm looking forward to the adventure and brushing up on my fisherman Spanish.

I'm excited about that. 

An Unquenchable Lust for Sailing

It was fifteen years ago that we moved off our boat, HDML 1001, aka Float Street. She was a warship and a lovely, but decaying boat home. Before living on her, we lived on a junk, called Gambic, in Hong Kong. We loved boat life, but for a number of reasons that were true enough back then, when we left Float Street behind, we thought we were through with sailing. 

Float Street in Venezuela

Life changes. We (I, in particular) aren't good at routine. When we sink into routines, we feel ourselves ossify. We don't like feeling ossification as it diminishes us. I, in particular, don't thrive well in an existence of routine. I've never tolerated an office-hour life well. I've done it, and found it painful. That doesn't mean I'm good at avoiding routine, just that I suffer considerably from falling into them.

We moved back to Silver City from Cambodia about three years ago with the idea that we had finally settled on a place. We wouldn't move again. We'd travel, but not uproot ourselves. After all, we knew why we'd come back. We knew the place well. We knew both its limits and its benefits to us. And we were right. About the place. Not about settling.

But life changes. Goals change. Four days ago, over breakfast, Dagny looked at me with a somewhat puzzled expression and told me she'd ben thinking about living on a boat. We talked about the change of heart, her motivations and such, but mostly we talked about the possibilities (and difficulties) of living on a boat. During the next three days we tried to find good reasons to write that off as a bad, impractical idea. Well, boats are impractical, and we are pragmatic people. But our lives are not practical things to be managed and desire is a power of its own. As a result, the more we worked to convince ourselves what a bad idea it was, the more excited we became about doing it. We discovered that we had suppressed our love of living on a boat, but that the love for the life, the lust for the feeling of living at anchor (we were seldom in marinas) hadn't been quenched. We found ourselves physically craving it.

Over the next three days following Dagny's epiphany, we formed a strategy and an intention. In the process, the specifics of reaching our goal changed several times but the rather simple, and somewhat open-ended intention of moving from a fixed abode on shore to living full time on a boat sharpened into a workable, or at least an exciting, strategy. First, we are going to sell our house. This morning I'll call a broker or two and have them give us an estimate of what we can get for it as is. We don't intend to fix it up or do much to it. That's for the buyer to do. It's an old adobe, nearly 100 years old, and it has character. That will have to do. We will price it to sell.

We have our white Nissan van that Dagny christened Moby, and fixed up for camping. While we sell the house, she'll finish off Moby's cabinetry. When the house sells we will head off to visit family and friends, and then turn south, driving to Central America, where we will buy a boat, fix it up, move aboard and sell the van.

Simple, right?

Of course, intentions and reality often collide. The veneer of simplicity will crumble as it always does. We can't afford a fancy boat, but we have skills. We also have time, because hunting for the right boat will be part two of the adventure. Once we are on board, a new adventure begins.

This time our moving will be irreversible. For our last moves we had a property manager rent out our house, and it was there, welcoming, when we wanted to return from an adventure. Now we are cutting that tie and moving on to... something else.

So the inexorable change officially begins now. I intend to chronicle the adventures, posting as things happen, as we move from one phase to the next. Like many of the best things in life, the outcome is uncertain; like all good quests, only the intention can be controlled. It should prove interesting. 

Collecting and republishing the past

I got an email today from someone curious as to what I was up to. He wanted to know if I had a blog, and I sent him the link, but I realized that primarily what I have posted is observations, not updates of the ongoing effort to proved the world with new and improved art and music. So here is an update.

When we lived on an old wooden boat in the Caribbean, part of the way I earned my keep, when not doing boat work, was writing about living on a boat. I did a monthly column in the journal Caribbean Compass for at least five years, probably longer. It was caustic, and made fun of the readers, other people who wrote for people on boats, and even the very idea of life on board. It turned out to be very popular with readers, and advertisers didn't seem to hate it. At least the editor, Sally Erdle, never complained.

As I worked to edit and republish The Legend of Ron Anejo  and worked with my friends John Pocock and Tom Tsui to finish and publish Chancy,which is also about sailing, I thought of those short pieces and wondered it they still held up. Were they still funny? Would a collection be something worth republishing as a book.

But first, did they even still exist? My traveling lifestyle has been death on any old manuscripts that I might have had. Hell, the computers haven't survived, and I threw out the 5-inch floppy disks they were stored on years ago (any of you too young to know what those are can Google to find out).

I contacted Sally in Bequia and told her of my idea of publishing them as a book. She not only had the text files, but happily zipped them  and sent them to me. Dagny and I read through them, kicked out a few, and now are editing the 60,000 words that remain into a fun book. The good news is that very little turned out to be perishable. Since I seldom  address ideas more topical than what I had for breakfast, there is little to fade.

The intention is to publish the book both in ebook and in paperback formats; the ebook should be ready fairly soon, fairly being a time interval between one and three months. Being the chief editor, formatter, designer and distribution manager takes time. And this isn't the only project going on. But here is the dummy for the ebook cover.

So, if you happen to pass up the Kampot River and don't see us swimming, you now know what is going on in those strange wooden houses along river.

Publishing in print

Since I got to Cambodia I've been learning all about ebook publishing, but I always wanted to see one of my older books back in print. The original publisher went belly up, and I got the rights back, but producing paperback books has been expensive.

Learning the ropes more, I found things were changing and life was better on that front. So her is the re release of my humorous novel of the world best Caribbean boat bum.

It is available here Amazon. And it is also available in Kindle (same location) and in other ebook formats from Smashwords