I’m a man with many facets. I sail, I cook, I write, and I make videos. That probably is not in order of interest for me, but rather in order of how much I have earned from each trade.
I started writing as a kid. I was first awarded a book award for a children’s book I wrote in first grade and that always kind of stuck with me. I always liked writing and books, but never really got to be much of a reader. I excelled in the liberal arts in high school and college but decided that I wanted to go to a military academy to please my Dad.
Because of my intention to go to a service academy, in my junior year of high school, I was selected to go to Boys State. It was then that I decided political office and politicians sucked. I then went onto the United States Coast Guard Academy where I learned that the military is a shit show and so is the federal government.
So, with nothing else to do and no inclination to write another college essay, I decided to go to UCONN. I majored in journalism and political science and in my senior year of college, I interned for the Republican Governor of Connecticut, John Roland.
He went to jail and I went to work for Subway restaurants as a PR man.
It was boring work, but I got to eat all day at the employee cafeteria, which was like a big Subway Restaurant and that was pretty cool. But the work was not very satisfying ( I discovered Jared Fogle haha), and so I got a job writing for a weekly newspaper.
The paper was the now-defunct Wilton Villager and I spent many an evening covering P&Z and Fire Board meetings. Turns out, I didn’t have the attention span for print journalism and quickly bored with that when I learned of an opening teaching at a sailing school in Westport, CT.
From there my eyes were opened and I decided that I would sail until I got too old to do it. A busted knee in the BVIS convinced me to go back to radio and worked in commercial radio for several years while during the days, I taught sailing.
In 2003, I decided to go back to school and got accepted into Boston University’s school of communications. I loved editing and video and discovered there that I really didn’t like writing long-form pieces.
When I graduated I was offered a job running a camera out of a helicopter over Boston that paid $600 a month and another job teaching kids to sail in Fall River that paid $30K a year. I decided sailing made more sense because it was safer, had better hours, and paid better. I also couldn’t handle the stress of a newsroom and would later learn that I was severely ADHD and that why the twitchy TV execs made my skin crawl.
When I got back to Connecticut, I was offered several jobs at several places teaching sailing and took a job at Pequot Yacht Club teaching high school and adult sailing. That was when I met my students and friends at Fairfield Prep Sailing. I loved those guys but life at Pequot was less than stellar.
And so, in 2007, I created my first opus in the form of a non-profit in Bridgeport, CT called Connecticut Community Boating. I taught thousands of kids and adults from all walks of life to sail. Unfortunately, the economy, Hurricane Sandy, and politics all combined to shut that down. So, in 2015, I moved from Connecticut to Eastern Carolina and found the love of my life, Jennifer, in the quaint seaside town of Beaufort.
I knew that one day I would have to grow up and get a real job and when Hurricane Florence trashed my boat and killed my business, I knew that it was time. I started my new career by launching a TV station called The Charted Life TV. It was more stress than I could handle and gave me shingles before I lost it to yet another economic setback.
That’s when we decided to move into a trailer and hit the road. Our first stop was in Bull Frog Utah where I spent the summer driving a towboat and developing an idea for a novel,
We named the trailer “Tessa” and are now located somewhere in the deserts of southern Utah.
Our goal as a family is to buy a chunk of land, build a farm and raise chickens alongside our family of fur babies.
We also hope to buy a bus like this beauty we looked at in South Carolina that we can live in and see the North American Continent. This one needed more work than we could handle, but we are committed to finding the “right” bus and making it our own.
The other goal that I am working on right now, is to create a docuseries called “The Great Loop”, where five teams of sailors will follow along the track of Kenneth Ransom who made that voyage over 100 years ago as the first Great Looper.
For a long time, the idea of writing and movie making would have been impossible for me to even dream, because of my ADHD. Now that I am receiving proper instruction on how to live with ADHD however, I just published my first novel, “Whither We Tend”, and am now working on the second in the series called, “Governments of Men”
