The Hazards of the Sailing Away Fantasy, JP White – Author Guest Post

There are few fantasies more compelling in American life than sailing away and leaving the rat race behind. Yet less than half the couples who embark on the “booze, cruise and snooze” life in the islands find the adventure bliss they are seeking.  The other half routinely find trouble and lots of it including theft, infidelity, drugs, divorce, loss of boat and sometimes murder.  The sailing life — which is the setting for my debut novel Every Boat Turns South — provides more than enough fodder for the mystery/crime genre because unsavory characters linger on every dock, beach and fishing pier.  And it turns how sailing away is hard work.  You need to navigation, engine repair, be reasonably fit and nimble, and have enormous reserves of good cheer and resilience because things will go wrong, the weather will turn foul, and will run aground somewhere.  What else?

We don’t have to look very far to see that pirates are alive and well in our world.  Wherever there is water, there are men and women on boats with guns who know those waters better than anyone else.  The Bahamas, where my story travels to, have always been used for drug smuggling because of their proximity to the States.  In the 1980s, there were hundreds of millions of dollars worth of  cocaine coming into Florida through the islands.  Now, there is both human and drug smuggling. If nothing else, the law of the universe tells us opposites always attract.  Where there is great beauty and peacefulness there is also the worm of its undoing.

In my novel, a boat delivery from West Palm Beach to St. Thomas in the B.V.I. gets sidetracked by the Trade Winds shifting. The Trades blow from the northeast from November to April then switch around to the southeast starting in April.   Matt Younger, my protagonist, is a skipper on a forty-foot trimaran that pulls into South Caicos on April Fool’s Day. Problem is, Matt is heading south and he gets caught there.  While he’s waiting for a front to push back against the Trades, he gets mixed up with a drug pilot and makes a reckless decision to steal a cocaine drop out from under the pilot’s nose.  When the weather turns foul, sailors make bad decisions all the time.  In fact, they’ve been doing this for thousands of years. Every Boat Turns South is a sailing adventure retold to a dying
father.  Bad decisions are the standing rigging of this tale, but then one good decision arrives, but it’s not one that anyone expects.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR… J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in over a hundred publications including The Nation, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American
Poetry Review, and Poetry (Chicago).  He is a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida, Colorado State University and Vermont College in Fine Arts. He is the author of five books of poems and a novel, Every Boat Turns South.

Author website: www.jpwhite.net

Every Boat Turns South is the story of Matt Younger, a 30-year-old boat delivery captain, who returns to Florida from the Dominican Republic to make a confession to his dying father.

With two companions, a cook named Jesse, and Phillip, a French mechanic, Matt tells his father how he set off from West Palm Beach on board Stardust, a 40′ trimaran that will be tested as much as the crew.  Matt Younger reveals how, instead of sailing Stardust in one outside shot to St. Thomas, he drifts through the Bahamas, arriving in the Turks & Caicos, just as the Trade Winds switch against him.  There, in Cockburn Harbor, Matt’s brush with a drug pilot will take him off course to the Dominican Republic where the dreams that enchant these three sailors are paid for in lust, betrayal, and violence.

When Matt meets Rosario, a sensuous Dominican woman, he believes she can help him outdistance his guilt over his role in the premature death of his brother who was the father’s favorite son, yet Rosario has her own dream of escape which she must negotiate just as Matt presses her to leave with him for St. Thomas.

Every Boat Turns South is, in part, a meditation on dying, on love and forgiveness as well as an adventure odyssey of the wayward flesh and the returning spirit, and on how one re-invents and denies the past in order to redeem the present.