New Adventure

Saturday 9/26/09

Today I embark on a new adventure. I joined the 42 foot sailboat Fiona as it sails from Dutch Harbor, Ak across the North Pacific ocean to San Francisco. This will be my first major sailing escapade, and it leaves me feeling excited, nervous, and slightly lightheaded in my disbelief of having this opportunity present itself. It has been a long time dream of mine to go sailing-I just have never been able to turn it into a reality. Shelley was the one who created this opportunity for  me. Her friend Jim Keely is an avid sailor in New York and emailed to her the blog of Captain Eric Forsythe, in which he stated he had one berth open for the leg to San Fran on his journey back from the Arctic circle through the NW Passage. Shelley immediately got a hold of me, and urged me to go. I was slightly hesitant at first as this all happened so quickly and I had already made other plans for the month of October(I had just bought a walltent and stove for a month long hermitage of meditation/surfing on a beach in Kodiak). She urged me to go on this adventure-that an opportunity like this one is rare, and that it was a window to fulfilling one of my dreams. She told me that it was her lifelong friend and inspiration Norman Vaughn who was always the voice of energetic prompting and motivation for her to seek out new adventures. His motto was "dream big, dare to fail". She is passing it on now, and in many ways has been a Norman to me over the last few years. So with much trepidation and giddy excitement, I emailed Cpt Forsythe, told him a little bit about myself, and requested to join him. He said if I could make it to Dutch in a couple of days that I was on. The last few days have been a blur as i have scrambled madly about trying to wrap up all my loose ends on such a short notice. Yesterday alone I dealt with last year's taxes, finished cutting up moose(a project that took several days), organized my things on the Shadowfax, moved things in and out of storage, cut down some dead trees and hauled them out of the woods to be split for shelley(something i feel guilty about because i promised repeatedly that i would be the one to fill her porch up and didn't have enough time to do so), wrote a few thankyou cards and sent a package(the line in the post office alone seemed to take up an eternity as it always seems to do-especially when one is in a rush), delivered moose to all the friends i have in Homer, and packed up my things for this new adventure.  By the time i finished everything it was 11 PM and I was exhausted. My stomach rumbled in complaint and I realized the only thing I had to eat all day was two small slices of wheat toast and honey that morning with a cup of coffee. There wasn't any food left on the Shadowfax besides a few moldy blocks of cheese, so i took mike's truck into town. I noticed the lights were on at Andy's and Sally's Mermaid Cafe and there were a few cars parked in the lot, so i stopped in to see if they had any left over pieces of quiche or something in the fridge. It turns out they had shut everything down for the evening and were just finishing cleaning the kitchen, but they insisted that I stay and eat with the chef and the waitress. It was a fine meal of salmon, asparagus, and spinach, complimented with a cold IPA. Salmon has never tasted so good! Stress does bad things to the body- for one i just forget to listen to mine, but as soon as a drop of that cold beer touched my parched throat it seemed to forgive me. Andy and Sally have always been so friendly to me, and in kind hearted generosity refused to accept my money. With a full belly and grateful sentiments i left the cafe, but i was still wired and i stopped at the down east saloon to hear a band called "three-legged-mule" play. I had met the accordian player a few days ago and he had encouraged me to come hear them. He was an interesting fellow and told me all about his days on the oil clean up crew in Prince William Sound directly after the Exxon Valdez spill. Together we cursed that evil empire of greed and corruption, and bemoaned how this corporation, this monopolization of great wealth and power could manipulate any system, sadly even our own courts. The music was okay, it was more folk then anything. My mind was elsewhere though, which was evident in my pool game-I hadn't played so badly in months! I took off and spent my last night on the Shadowfax for the year 2009. My dreams were filled with small boats bobbing about in huge rolling seas. I tossed and turned the whole night long, and it was soon time to head for the airport. The winds were blowing, but I made it okay despite a bumpy ride.