Publisher's Synopsis
The young American captain of a Venezuelan owned mega yacht runs from his homeport in Venezuela to an isolated bay to avoid a revolution. Prior to the yacht's departure the Venezuelan Mate is coerced into being a spy for the government. There are two women in the crew: the American chef, whose life is her work, a little brandy and unattached sex; and the Venezuelan stewardess, an accommodating single mom supporting her child and her mother with the best job she's ever had. The engineer is an American hoodlum who is minimally qualified for the job. The very professional steward is from a Colombian peasant background; and there is a Cuban American who was an applicant to the U. S. Marshals Service but was recruited by another organization to spy on important Venezuelans as the deckhand on the yacht. The story is about how they and the people of the very small nearby fishing village deal with multiple disasters and total isolation from the rest of the country. AUTHORS BIO The weight of the responsibility of having a pregnant wife ended my college experience at the end of the first year. Education in the diversity of humankind, and how to survive it and prosper led me in and out of too many cultural milieus to list in this effort. I became addicted to the freedom and adventure that the sea and seaports provided. Commercial fishermen, yachtsmen and their crews, and mariners from most varieties of vessels have been my life teachers. The Atlantic and Pacific ports of the US, the Caribbean Islands, the South and Central American ports around the Caribbean and ports of the Mediterranean were my windows into human activities until I retired to the Virgin Islands to use my experiences as grist for my writing. I have read that good police detectives think like crooks; I would have made a great detective. That talent has brought me very close to trouble several times when it became obvious to me there was illegal activity afoot and afloat, and those involved in it saw I understood what was going on. Surprisingly, they frequently tried to recruit me because I was obviously aware but minding my own business and keeping my mouth shut. Those encounters and my very active imagination have been the source of some of the material in most of my books---and that's my story and I'm sticking to it.