Genesis

 

Genesis no not the pop group with Phil Collins but the start of things type.  The sort of let there be light type of the biblical sense.   Every project needs a beginning, a point of departure and every beginning needs inspiration.  I remember as a kid floating stuff like rubber tires, bloody great logs hazards to shipping Styrofoam, flotsam, and jetsam and such.   Riding on them like Captain Ahab on Moby Dick’s great white back.  Indicators confirmed suspicions of the primordial beginnings of sailing.    

I started off poor from a broken family in a small mining village in Scotland so there was no transatlantic circumnavigation in daddy’s yacht.  No gin and tonic at the Yacht club.  I grew up in an orphanage and clearly remember getting into some serious trouble when George Stewart and I found some truck inner tubes and decided to run this uncharted river in the hinterland of Ayrshire.  It was two days before the police found us.   We were adrift like Huckleberry Fin, absolutely free, well at least until we were caught.  I have looked deeply into my miscreant youth to find the moment of the spark the ember that would develop into a full blown obsession but it is veiled and hard to see like a penny dropped into a wishing well that tumbles ever deeper into darkness there are flashes, reflections, but nothing tangible just a vague sense of the void. 

Navigation started quite early on there were the embryonic sorties on to Dartmoor when I was twelve.  I had signed up for the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme and we had to slog from hill to hill.  Try finding a twelve year old today that could or would want to do that.  Dartmoor famous for Arthur Conan Doles “Hounds of the Baskervilles”, failed prison escapes, and dead Royal Marines.  Our first night on the moors and the rain was torrential It was then I decided to start the fire with the map.    A very nice example of improvisation as we huddled hypothermic.  Which doesn’t seem like your most catastrophic navigational failure until you realize that you might need it to traverse the rest of the moors the very next morning.  Regardless of how sophisticated my sense of direction is today on that morning on that hill I discovered the ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome.