PenDragon - the official magazine of Lyford Cay International School PenDragon Vol 1, Spring 2015 | Page 25

“WHAT DREAMS
WILL YOU LIVE OUT?”
sailing yacht from the Galapagos Islands to New Zealand;
the voyage across the Pacific took five months. By age 25,
I earned a license to skipper 100-ton vessels. After three
years in Singapore operating big tanker ships, I moved
back to Newport and started my own company transporting
yachts globally, but mostly from New England to the
Caribbean and back. Between 1987 and 2007, I sailed to
or from Bermuda over 30 times, mostly as captain.
To be sure, there were lots of adventures and stories. I made
numerous voyages between ports in Canada and Maine,
and as far south as Florida. I was knocked overboard in a
snowstorm at dusk in my underwear and was rescued after
16 minutes in the water. Off Trinidad, a large yacht caught
fire, burned and sank under us. We were enveloped in
lightning storms, deprived of food (two weeks on a bowl of
pasta and a slice of bread daily), and I once tried to deliver
the wrong yacht. When I was running tankers, four men
died and two ships were lost.
Swallowing the Anchor
After all this, I realized that the life of an itinerant yacht
captain was not the most secure future for me, and I hung
up my sea boots at the age of 36, so me 20 years after
I started and with no regrets. I obtained two graduate
degrees, married, secured full-time work in the New York
area, and my wife and I had a child. I also devoted time
to writing and publishing books – five so far. I still stay in
touch – via online tools that we could only dream about
in the 1970s – with my schoolmates from Lyford Cay
International School. I was even invited back to campus to
speak about a book I wrote about The Bahamas during the
World War II era.
Throughout all of life’s voyages, I fondly remember when
I first got the bug for global adventure, an impressionable
little boy in a school uniform dangling his legs over the edge
of a canal, looking out to sea and dreaming of crossing
oceans.
My voyage isn’t over, but it’s been a great ride so far, and
I hope it will be for generations of Lyford Cay International
School students going forward. My life motto was originated
by sailor-historian Samuel Eliot Morison: “Dream dreams,
then write them. Aye, but live them first.”
What dreams will you live out?
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