Here I go again!

My ride - Wild Matilda

by Christine Kling

Yup, I’m packing my bags again. It’s time to go sailing.

Talespinner is tied up to my dock here here in Fort Lauderdale waiting patiently for our trip to the Bahamas in May, and I am supposed to be staying here hard at work on the research for my new book. But I’ve found myself wandering around having difficulty concentrating, missing my dear old puppy dog, and generally feeling at loose ends. It’s not going to be the same sailing without Chip, yet I’m not ready to run out and get another dog to replace him – as if he could be replaced.

So, along came the opportunity to go sailing with my friend Bruce on Wild Matilda, his Ron Holland 43. Bruce wants to get down to the Caribbean from the Bahamas on the route that is often referred to as the Thorny Path because it is a long, hard beat to weather. He was heading out to make the trip solo, and since I am no longer punching a time clock, I volunteered to crew. I’ve been zeroing in on the ideas for the new book, been browsing on Amazon buying books and videos for research.  I can do this reading between watches just as well as I can here. So next week I’m off to do a few more miles on OPB’s – Other People’s Boats.

I have lots of reasons for wanting to make the trip, not the least of which is wanting to help out a friend and see to it that he can make the trip safely with adequate crew. Also, I hope to follow more or less the same route next year in my own boat, and this will be a good chance to check out the lay of the land – or the sea and the islands, as the case may be. And, of course, sailing on OPB’s means I can relax a bit more than I can when it’s my boat, my decisions, my cruising kitty at stake. And one of the best reasons of all is that I sailed with Bruce several times while writing Circle of Bones and he is a terrific idea sounding board who helped me no end with coming up with ideas for the last book.

I know I’m not the fastest writer in the world and while it took me five years to write Circle of Bones, I sure don’t want to spend that long on this new book. But I also know that I will never be the kind of author who writes so much and so hard that I produce more than one book a year and do nothing much else besides write. I believe that being “out there” and living the adventurous sort of life I write about helps to make my books more authentic. One of my favorite writers during the years I was growing into a writer myself, was Hammond Innes, the British thriller writer. Innes bought his 42-foot sailboat, the Mary Deare, with the money he got from selling the film rights to his novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare to MGM. For many years he would spend six months cruising with his wife Dorothy (and researching and plotting), and then six months writing the books. Later, he traveled by ship to Antarctica for a book, and on a Norwegian whaling ship for another novel. The guy wrote over 30 novels and I’ve only read about half of them. But it has always been writers like Innes and Hemingway, writers who went out and traveled and lived the adventures they wrote about – they were the writers whom I most admired.

So next week I’m flying down to Staniel Cay in the Exumas with my backpack and computer bag and jumping aboard Wild Matilda. I’m offering four weeks of my time before I’ll need to fly back here and sail my own boat to the Abacos. We will be traveling through the Southern Bahamas, Turks and Caicos and the Dominican Republic en route to Puerto Rico and the Spanish Virgins. I hope to get as far as Culebra from where I’ll fly home. Internet access is likely to be sketchy out there, so while I hope to post blogs every week, I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to.  I might not find the bandwidth to post pictures, but I’ll have plenty when I get to Puerto Rico.

While I might not be able to upload it until the end of this trip, I hope to come home with some good video. With my cruising kitty purring these days due to Circle of Bones selling so well, my techie side decided to buy a GoPro Hero2 video camera, and I hope to get some awesome sailing and underwater footage.

Fair winds!

Christine

Author of CIRCLE OF BONES
Available for Kindle 
 
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