Blog

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...

Life has been a swirl, darling. Such a swirl that I’ve hardly even had one itsy bitsy spare moment to read my horoscope, which I’m rather fond of doing. Save me the rattle over that one, I know, I know, you think it’s hocus pocus.  Anyway, I hope this new...

Hi darling, I have another fiction story for you. Writing these is my little escape from all of the studying and work I am doing for the race. This one is about mermaids. Speaking of mermaids, there will be 4 real live Netflix-featured mermaids plus some of my films &...

A Work of Fiction – Dear Caroline, I love that you found the sky. I wish I could say the same for myself, instead I write to you from this grey-walled piss-smelling prison. And I can’t sleep, not one wink. I just sit here stoned like a black dog while...

I’m on an uninhabited island with a machete in my hand and I’m about to go full metal jacket on a sprouted coconut. The sun is a whisper of a thing and somewhere the sky is raining, yet still, somehow, the sea has got the sparkle of a disco ball...

Life in the Coral Triangle on somebody else’s boat is bliss. I don’t have to worry about sea nymphs rocking my rudder, it’s just all rainforests and reefs, blue fire skies, white sand beaches that vanish at high tide, and waves that peel across the water like a gold bone...

I pack my bags, lock Juniper up, and climb into a longboat headed for Gizo. Everything aches, even my eyeballs. The boat ride exists inside a swirl of rain. I arrive, dog wet, and walk to the Gizo hotel- it’s not far from the only hospital this side of the...

I was attacked by jealous Fairies. That’s what the locals think. At least that’s what they told me as they were pouring fresh coconut mixed with bush lime down my throat and searching for sand to rub on my face. Then again, they blame the Fairies for everything. You see...