SAILORMAN
A month’s passage through a lifetime
After their sailboat is ripped apart by a hurricane, two middle-aged lovers, who built their own house on an out island in the Bahamas, set off to find a replacement in South Florida. Their first choice, a second hand sailboat advertised on the Internet, proves to be a big disappointment but eventually they find their Angel. Although the boat is only 22 foot long Mark and Missy are determined to sail her the 500 miles from the West Coast of Florida down the Gulf of Mexico, through the Everglades to the Florida Keys and then to their home on the island of Eleuthera, Bahamas.
Missy is new to sailing and has to deal with an alien environment, a new husband and a life so clearly and radically different from all she’d known before. Early on, Missy panics on a simple sail along the coast of Eleuthera, in only moderate weather and seas. How will she handle a much more perilous journey? During the January crossing of the Gulf Stream, Angel's mainsail is shredded as they encounter a sudden squall and they have to drift all night in the busy shipping lane.
There are many hours where Mark tries, in his solitude, to reconcile the difficulties of his recent past, and does so brilliantly, through the connection of his "two lives" in England and the Bahamas, to the art of sailing. Mark’s reminiscences about his past voyages with his family are wonderfully informative, bittersweet and very telling.
This true story reveals that the passage tested their relationship, and deepened their respect for each other. This is a compelling human drama, and a fascinating story.
Mark Adams was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, England in 1948. After five years working in Nuclear Medicine, he retrained as a teacher and spent 20 years teaching music and physics in English high schools. He moved to the Bahamas in 1998 where he married his second wife Missy. They built their own house, which is off the grid and uses alternative energy sources. Mark continues to teach piano, classical guitar and violin. He has owned seven different sailboats and sailed the North Sea, the Atlantic seaboard of northeast America, the waters of south Florida and the Bahamas. He is now the Commodore of the Governor’s Harbour Sailing Club.
Missy Kennedy Adams was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. A mother of three and grandmother of four, she spent the seventies as a homemaker, the eighties in the magazine publishing industry and the nineties in the hotel trade. Before moving to the Bahamas in 2001, she had returned to her first love of interior design, and dropped commercial projects to focus on residential work. She was an instructor of interior design with the Vancouver School Board. An avid golfer, she always stows a 7 iron, 3 wood and a large bag of balls aboard when sailing.
4 Illustrations by Missy, 4 maps by Mark and over 67,000 words.
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