The Book
It is finally time for those crazy stories of wild adventures and daring escapades to be described in detail and immortalized in print. For the hundreds who have been entertained by Captain Harold’s stories with gentle beginnings that progressed into ravings and barely believable exaggerations, you will be amazed at how writing them down can add to the flavour. A book of dreams and unusual experience, tragedy and triumph, wild characters and adventure, all laced with philosophical undertones and comparisons to “ordinary” life. There is great potential for a very dynamic book indeed.
When I dared to put Cassiopeia on the market to save her, it was also justified to finance the time to focus and write “the book”. I considered loosing her so I could have the funding to take a year off and invest in “the book”, and my dreams. But due to the screams of others, and my own hesitancy to let go of the very thing that has generated the stories, I launched this project instead and it has successfully provided me with the time and inspiration to now have spent many hours getting stories of adventures and ideology onto paper.
I am very excited about the direction it is taking and believe it will be a very good book. It is a look at the inside of the square from the outside, wrapped up in exciting stories with danger and romance and the pursuit of dreams including colourful depictions of island life and ex-pats and moments at sea and the many unusual situations that twenty years of cruising the tropics has provided. The hard part is deciding which tales to leave out as there are so many!
The many readers who have vicariously shared in my convoluted journey of the past twenty years through emails have often asked for a collection of these stories. I too have longed to produce a work worthy of the actual experiences. At one point in the late nineties I was anchored in Tobago where I decided to have a hand at writing. My depictions of life at sea and sailors type poetry intrigued a few editors and thus I was published regularly for about six months in each of the Caribbean sailing rags. My story about teaching my cats to swim won a yarn spinning contest at the Australian Woodford folk festival as an oral presentation and also won me the only writing competition I’ve ever entered, netting me a free book of sailing stories no less! These achievements, along with the feedback I have been recently receiving, make me confident of the great potential for success.
So here is a chance for those who have read my work before, or heard my stories before, or anyone keen on adventure, to become partners in the production of an unusual presentation about an unusual life and also save the vessel which made it all possible.
And of course, if all goes right, you can actually make a profit on your investment!
ARRRRGH Me Hearties, a bit of treasure for all is part of any good dream!!!
