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Hi Mom,


Well it’s the last missive from abroad I think, and a long one filled with the last weeks adventure and a few reflective moments on the last leg home. In two days we will be able to send a date of arrival, and the day after maybe a time.

After the train of friends, family and film guys the last couple months, constant dodging of reefs and the shallow water heebeegeebees, the open gulf beacons with the allure of an easy down wind, and deep water sail. Fifteen easy knots of wind from astern, no Atlántico swell, cool breezes, the poor old girl deserves every easy mile.. Her threadbare multi-patched mainsail has just about enough sail-tape to hold her together, and seam-strength left for one more week. The dingy went flat while on deck, as if on queue knowing we would never need it again, perhaps one of the twenty or so old patches popped it’s seal. It was taking on water like a sieve this last month, in perfect deteriorating harmony with the fizzing of air in it’s last efforts to keep friends, fam and cameramen afloat,. ‘Pump, pump, pump…bail, bail, bail' have been part of my daily routines. Just before going to the marina in Key West the alternator failed, we are living on ice to save energy in lieu of refrigeration. Solar and wind power keep enough battery power to run lights at night and start the engine when we arrive Galveston. My laptop has lost 3 letters of its keyboard, useful ones like the W and the S, so we have been zubztituting zem vith the Z and V and are all writing phonetically German as you shall soon read. I am using Wayne’s laptop now and will transfer this email with a thumb-drive.

My excellent navigator program also crashed, and we loaded a 8 year old program with ancient rasterized charts and are navigating with it now. Since my last bottom-paint in Malaysia three years ago, Gypsy Soul has long lost her anti-fouling ability, and for near 6 months required a biweekly scraping, which of course has been neglected in the priority of adventure the last 2 months, so she has a fluffy green beard around her waterline, like an upside-down oceanic grassland, complete with clinging crabs grazing like cattle among bushy barnacles hitched thought-out the Bahamas. ‘Your almost home’ I keep telling her, then petting her teak coamings with the love of a parent. I almost feel guilty for having kept her away from Texas for so long, she’s like an old war-horse, who's worn herself to bare bones following a westward dangling carrot on the longest barn-struck trot ever, and I am not kidding when I write affections for the Old Girl that have never been stronger in loving appreciations than these last few days. I am having confusions of allegiances in approaching Texas, thinking it home, when I also feel as if I had never left it. I'm glad she doesn't know it took 50,000 miles to get around a 26,000 circumferential planet…and more than 8 years when I promised her no more than 4. The sun that has greeted us for a thousand off-shore mornings has just popped up with early orange rays, a gentle warmth on the left side of my face, and I just realized that my closest and most reliable companions these last eight years have been either inanimate or celestial instead of human. That is not a slight on loved ones and friends, just the twisted reality of solo travels.

Wayne, Kai and Paul are aboard the Ole Soul . The same sailor-boys who made certain I took off 8 years ago, and now are making dam sure I make it home. It’s almost like they wouldn't let me bail on chasing the dream back then, and now want to make sure I finish it…or on second thought maybe its that they had made certain to get rid of me back then, and will now finally let me come home, but not without chaperone…but probably its that they just want to get their shit-eatin-grins platered on the Statesman, which Janet has now alluded to a possible Sunday front page article.

We provisioned for 6 days, Wayne and Kai took care of it, tore the list in half and wielded their credit cards like plundering pirates.... “CHARGEITTOMYVISA!!!” then filling the boat to feed a dozen for a month. But Kai forgot to get meat other than sandwich stuff and first afternoon we caught a mackerel with Kai at the pole, then an hour later a big 25 pound kingfish manhandled by Paul, and I began to joke that Kai’s selective shopping left room for fish a plenty in the freezer section. This mooring we caught a small mahi, then a pole wrenching 45 pound tuna, and kudos flowed at him as we ate about 5 pounds of sashimi and teriyaki fried tuna for breakfast…washed down with beers. First day of the crossing and we are eating like men.

Back to last week:

Wayne, Kim and I left Nassau and sailed south toward Key West, and after a day we dropped anchor on the Great Bahamas Bank because there was no wind. We were out of sight of land but in flat calms with ten crystal clear feet of water between the keel and a white sandy bottom. There were a couple pieces of coral and an old tractor tire on the ocean floor, the latter off which was a perfect lobster commune and we bagged ten in quick succession. The next day we motored to an island 40 miles off the cost of Cuba, not certain if it was Bahamian or Cuban and there was an old abandoned copra plantation (coconut), beaten by hurricanes into submission so we filmed it for the reality show as a true-to-life ‘deserted island' with boat wrecks on the beach, even an old lifeboat from a big ship, smashed into twisted fiberglass and metal. We followed the beach to where sea turtles had made nests for their eggs just the night before, and I did a little schpeal on how they make false holes then lay them elsewhere to throw off predators, with Wayne as camera man. We explored the ruins of the copra plantation and found that some Cuban Boat People had stopped on their way to America, and with spray paint had written their names on the walls on September 19th of 2002. They had written in Spanish “down with Castro” and sketched their boat which they named “Futoro”, then Wayne filmed me climbing a palm the Tahitian way to get coconuts, and we bagged a few more lobster, which last night we feasted upon alongside a plate of sushi rolls that would have fed a Japanese family of ten, again eating like men. I had a bag of fish jerkey made for the trip, maybe 4 pounds which Wayne and I had cured, the boys munched that down in a day, which of course gives everyone motivation to fish and make more. We are fishing fiends right now and Gulfo de Mexico, as always, provides a plenty.

I Love you all. A GREATER SET OF FRIENDS NO MAN HAS EVER HAD!!!!!

Love you mom, love to all, possible philosophical pondering's before landfall.

ben