Blog

I’ve been having regrettable dreams in Kavieng. Nightmares rather. In one somebody had a ghost inside of them and they exhaled it into my mouth and I inhaled it into mine and I became possessed and everything that happened beyond that was criminal. Then there was the one where I...

It’s 5 in the morning and the birds are all singing for the rise of the sun or a lover. I like the stillness of the hour before dawn. I can see the shadows of clouds and palm trees and boats and watch the shapes of them illuminate as pastels...

There is a 12-month-old hornbill named Rocky sitting on my arm and trying to eat my necklace. I fed him bananas and now we are friends sometimes. A hornbill is called a Kokomo in the local language. There are five kokomos hanging out here at this surf shack spot in...

At first I thought everyone in Papau New Guinea was such a honey and just wanted to give me fruits, but then I got robbed.. “I want $1k Kina,” the man says. He is hot and tall and muscular. Well dressed, well-spoken, wearing the type of hat a poker player...

I bobbed and bobbed and bobbed and felt very much like a flightless birds with worthless wings. I slept, and cooked, and showered, and stared, and fidgeted, and waited. Around sunset the wind began to fill in and I hoisted the main and unfurled the genoa and harmony was restored...

The wind is a total mystery in Papau New Guinea. I’ve never known it to be so illusive. Half the time I feel like I’m out here chasing something that doesn’t want to be found. As if we are in a game of hide and seek. Wind, we are friends...

I have been sailing along Bougainville all day and I don’t have much to show for it; a burnt nose, 27 nautical miles, and a black and white butterfly that’s hanging in my cockpit. The wind was south, then east, now northwest. There was some wind, then no wind, then...

The water is really trippy right now. Looking glass still with floating reflections made of clouds and islands. There is the green and the blue, and seabirds sitting on logs, and flotsam and jetsam, and the aching in the sailors heart that comes with zero knots of wind. When we...

Morning came with sun and birds, but I lost the wind. I’ve been motoring for hours. Two of those hours were spent inside a reef system with a knot and a half of current pushing against me. Wooding Reef, Else Reef, Taylor Reef, Oldham Reef, me going backwards between it...

There was a blue and magenta sunrise at sea this morning and last night I could see every ghost in the Milky Way. The breeze blowing across my body and the sound of the sea fizzing beneath me is invigorating. I’m on my way to Papau New Guinea. Currently in...

I am in Gizo now. I was all set to clear out and sail north of Papau New Guinea on a south wind then I got knocked down by some type of flu. I slept 32 hours straight and when I woke up the forecast had changed, but it’s ok...

The peanut butter bribe worked. My neighbor and I got Juniper off the reef in exchange for an entire jar. She wasn’t wedged in or anything, she was just floating right over the reef and there were love taps that felt more like getting punched in the face every time...

Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve got crabs. In my dinghy. On my anchor chain. Around my hull. Hiding inside my thru-hulls. Falling out of my hair. Climbing on my toes. The dang crustaceans are living on everything. Right now I’m floating in my dinghy, with all my dinghy crabs, on...

This morning I woke up from some crazy cheese pizza dreams. First I dreamt that I was in the witness protection program and they had to change my eye color and I was livid about loosing my baby blues. Then I dreamt that my friend was hosting these expensive retreats...

There is a squid the size of a baby dinosaur hanging out by my anchor chain and looking at me with it’s alien eye. I think it wants to take me back to its planet and eat me. It’s 7 in the cock-a-doodle-do and I’ve been up and up shaking...

Waves are thundering on all sides of me as I stare at the moondrops on the water. Moon. The moon. The pretty, pretty man-faced moon has grown fat and blue since last we spoke. It’s not that I don’t love you, I do, but my head was too heavy with...

I am stern tied to a palm tree that’s growing on Sogumau Ite island. On the charts the island just looks like a bunch of black and white X’s and O’s but in real life it’s all blue and green. This place is covered in lizards and birds- ockatoos, terns...

I’ve been sailing all over, from island to island. I’ve been close-hauled, and beam reaching, and on the very brink of dead down wind. I’ve had too much wind and too little wind. And I’ve sailed into passes that I never want to see again. I sailed back to the...

A man named Keventon, who is good at catching coconut crabs and other sea creatures, tells me that Kokomongara means “Water Shell.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it sounds nice. I am leaving Vovohe Cove for another anchorage on the Water Shell. There are the dripping...

Levan swims Juniper back out to a mooring. It rains all day and there is not even one blackbird in the sky. I’m going a bit mad being inside the boat, I need a change of scenery, I need to spread out my roots and move my flower in the...

My bag arrives to Honiara four days after I do with everything still in it. Ten minutes after it lands I am on a flight headed to Gizo. It is raining and I sit in the way back of the little plane next to a cop. Not just a cop...