Wind, northeast steady at 20, gusting to 30. The seas are only a few feet as we are sailing on a broad reach across Penobscot Bay, returning to our homeport of Rockport, Maine. We are sailing on Fair-Thee-Well, my 42-foot wood sloop. She is my second sailboat and the first to carry me offshore to the Caribbean in 1980 and to the Bahamas in 1984. She was a faithful companion through many adventures. She was designed by Geared Hendle and built in Camden in 1947 by Maclomb Brewer. She was a demanding lady, requiring a lot of attention (not to mention money), but she taught me more lessons than I learned in college. Photo by Kate Carter, 1979.
My West Indian hang-out. When not out sailing on the waters of the Caribbean, I'm hold up at Pineapple House in English Harbour on Antigua. Libby Nicholason runs a charming cottage colony on the hillside over looking the Super Yacht docks.
Thanks for dropping in.
I’ve been a magazine man most of my professional career—writing, editing, photographing, designing, and laying out publications.
So, if this website feel a little like a magzine, you'll know why.
I've gathered my magazine articles, essays, books, photographs, and videos and put them in one place. Poke around. There’s a lot to see and read—after all, I’ve been at this for some time.
I've been telling stories since I was old enough to talk. I've worked in radio, television, newspapers, and magazines; authored a few books; published hundreds of magazine articles; made thousands of photographs; and created a few videos. I created a $10 million enterprise and launched a summer school that then became a college. owned and sailed four different sailboats and skippered a few for other owners.
Most of my creative work has involved writing about my adventures: climbing up mountains and skiing down them, sailing boats on voyages to and through the Caribbean. I'm drawn to doing things that scare the bejesus out of me. Why? I want to feel what it's like to be on The Edge, to live just on the other side of "my comfort zone.”
My adventures have taught me something and given me something to write about and share.
This became my career.
Back in 1973, I launched a summer school to help my fellow storytellers (and myself). It wasn’t that I had anything to teach; it was because I had a lot to learn. The best way to do that, I figured, was to spend time with the best people doing what I wanted to do. I got to invite the very best photographers, editors, filmmakers, and journalists to spend a week in Maine leading a master class.
The Maine Photographic Workshops grew into I've much more than I’d dreamt of. Within three years, my summer school became a year-round conservatory. Twenty years later it became a college and graduate school. What started with $4,000 in my pocket grew into a $10 million enterprise. It was a fantastic 35 years, full of challenges, friendships, and discoveries.
Then, in my late 50s, I met Julie, and we started a family.
In 2007, then in my late 60s, I turned the schools I created over to a non-profit and took my wife, Julie, and our two young kids, daughter Renaissance and son Havana, and we sailed to the Caribbean to spend a year living on your boat, Searcher. It was while there, in the tropics, that I went back to my first career: writing and photography—telling stories.
These days, I write two monthly columns for a Caribbean Currents newsletter and feature articles for Cruising World and Caribbean Compass magazines and a few others. My first memoir, Seabee71 in Chu Lai, about my time as a US Navy photojournalist in Vietnam (1967), was published in 2019. I'm working on three others.
WHAT'S NEW!
FREEESTYLE SKIING EXHIBIT
Fifty years ago I was a winter sports photojournalist. I wrote magazine stories about skiing and skiers, photographed them and the mountains they skied down. From 1970 to 1976, I followed the growth of new kind of skiing--freestyle.
In mid January (2025) I instilled an exhibit of my photogrphs and my writing from those years in the base lodge of Waterville Valley (NH), where freestyle skiing competition was first held. The World Cup of Freestyle will be held there at the end of January.
My story on hurricne survival in the September edition of Cruising World magazine won Second Place in Boating Writers International annual competition. It's the second time Ive received a second place. Here's the link to that story.