Blog

I’m back in Fiji. All of my bathing suits are a different shade of purple and I’m swimming against a current. I wonder where I’d end up if I succumbed and let the current have it’s wild way with me. The prairie’s edge? The galactic side of the salt? A...

TURKEY – feels like a century ago. After five solo flights, three tandem flights, and a quiz on lenticular clouds in the troposphere, I get a license to fly under supervision. I take one last tandem flight before heading to the airport. The air is white with fog, but I...

“Please let me fly from the beginner spot,” I say on the radio to Ferdi. “You can either fly off that 1200 meter mountain or get out of my class,” Ferdi says back to me on the radio. He’s my cowboy paragliding teacher. He’s got dark curly clown hair, and...

Montana is a day and a half swirl of horses galloping in the mountain mist towards me. Just before I leave, a young cowboy with Fly-Agra in his hands tells me, “If you wanna catch a trout, you’d best go fly fishin’ on a full moon night.” From Montana I...

It’s been a while. Life got wild and is getting wilder, since last we spoke. I’ve been bouncing across the earth like a red rubber ball, from Fiji to Ireland to Montana. And if you were observing me, you would feel as if you were observing a tennis match. Anyway...

It’s my day off of work. I’m laying on top of my pink flamingo. His name is Joffrey. I didn’t name him. The cats on Wildside did. Anyway, Joffrey’s glitter is blinging bright in the sun. The water beneath me is the shade of a swimming pool and it’s got...

I keep asking myself if everyone was jumping off a bridge would I do it? You know what? I think I might, because I’d just want to know what they’re all running from or jumping into. And also I wouldn’t really want to be the only person left on dry...

MYSTIC MOUNTAIN MAMA I don’t know what that falling galaxy on the horizon was. It stayed with me all night and disappeared at dawn. Perhaps it was never there, perhaps it is always there deep inside my lunar channel. I arrive to Matuku at sunup. The island is a green...

OGEA Everyday is an adventure when you float in a desolate place. Ogea feels like a slow Saturday on a summer’s day. Sleepy, spacious, stunning. My mind is totally lost in the azure, wandering and wondering. It’s like I’ve come out of the blue and into the great wide open...

We are leaving Fulaga for it’s sister island, Ogea. It’s six nautical miles to the southeast, beyond that you fall off the waters edge and into Tonga. We haven’t seen my friends in two days. The ferry from Suva came with dozens of distant relatives and everybody is fishing frantically...

The CHIEF Fulaga is full of mystical enchantment. The people, the holy blue of the lagoon, the waves smashing onto the outer reef, the secrets, the low tide beaches, the myriad of uninhabitable palm tree-topped islands, the purity of the air, the siren songs, the blue-feathered birds, the hibiscus blooms...

DAY 1 I wake up like a live wire. I’ve been waiting all week for the wind to turn north of east and today it is turning. I’m going to ride it back out to Fulaga in the south eastern most part of the Lau group- where the women are...

It was two weeks ago that I ripped my mainsail and so much has happened in my life since that I must cut it into small slices and feed it to you in vignettes, piece by piece, layer by layer. TWIN PISTON I hop a twin piston from Savusavu to...

With the mainsail busted and the air sucked dry of wind, the rest of our journey across the Bligh is a limp on an iron leg. We putter up to the uninhabited island of Yadua long after sunset. We don’t have any tracks for the pass, or cell service, and...

Oh honey, have I got a story for you, it starts like this.. It’s 4 P.M. and I’m on an aluminum dinghy in the Blue Lagoon. I’m thinking about how Fiji is a real easy place to never leave, all the islands, all the wind, all the magic. I spent...

I’m in a green and purple hammock that’s strung up in the cockpit between the stern pulpit and the boom gallows. The sea is rocking me like a swing, back and forth, high and low, and it’s way more alive and effortless than anything that hangs from a tree. I’m...

The Navandra anchorage is so rock and roll that it’ll make you throw up your Fruit Loops. Everybody’s leaving. The pirates and their Jolly Rogers are long gone on the horizon and I’m getting towed back to civilization by Zephyr. That catamaran is always doing something real nice for me...

It’s been a wild week on the water and I’ve been feeling like such a billygoat. It began with oil exploding out of my engine and ended with the bolts that connect my drive shaft to my transmission shaking loose and me running aground. I’ve been towed three times in...

It’s 7 AM. I’m in the water with my salt sister, Abi, and she’s singing songs about the stars. The sun is mighty bright and the boobies are flying ocean low. Black-tip sharks are roaming the reef, and the wind is blowing the crystals into long prisms that rain around...

It’s sugarcane cutting season in Fiji and the air is crisp and cool and perfect, like it always is in that space between seasons. I sleep beneath a wool blanket and wake up to a spastic symphony of birds singing  against a hot pink sky, and the splashing swarm of a...

You know what I love about the sailing community? You can be at a party and say, “Hey, let’s all go to Vanuatu!”  And someone responds, “Yes and after that, Papua New Guinea, and then Indonesia.” And we mean it. And we’ll do it. Soon. I feel like a boomerang...