The Canadian literary nonfiction writer Charlotte Gray once wrote that it doesn’t take long to see how much drama there is in real life — more than a novelist would dare invent.
Drama on the high seas of open blue water — induced by gale-force winds, bizarre behavior of unknown crew, towering waves and heavy squalls, broken water mains and oil-burning engines, but also vast open horizons and star-bedecked heavens — is the nature of the nautical nonfiction island writer Rich Bard presents in his latest book, “Red Flags in Blue Water: Misadventures of a Freelance Sea Captain.” Bard will read and discuss his book at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 25 at Vashon Bookshop.
After a 29-year career spent fishing offshore for salmon and albacore tuna along the West Coast and Alaska, Bard sold his boat in 2000, during a perfect storm of life — the combination of small children at home and the plunging price of salmon. But his “long love affair with the ocean” remained undiminished, which eventually led him to build the website smoothpassage.com and parlay his captain’s license into work as a delivery skipper.
It is out of his adventures delivering boats on passages from Hawaii to Seattle, the Panama Canal through the Galapagos to Bora Bora and up and down the West Coast, among other journeys, that Bard crafted “Red Flags in Blue Water.”
Writing is nothing new for the salty author. After his boat sold, but before venturing out on deliveries, Bard worked as the West Coast bureau chief for National Fisherman, covering stories from California to British Columbia. He’s written poetry for 18 years, with many of his poems recited at FisherPoets Gathering in Astoria and published in his second book, “Along the Fifty Fathom Line.”
It was on a long passage from Jacksonville, Florida, to Victoria, B.C., that Bard penned his first novel, “West of Spencer.”
Life on the water and fishing hooked Bard at an early age. In a recent interview, Bard — with his eyes twinkling from a face weathered well by a life spent outdoors — recalled the turning point.
“I was 23. My friends had bought a fishing boat, and we went on an inaugural trip to the San Juan Islands, before they were built up,” Bard said. “It was a wonderful archipelago of natural shores, and I loved every moment of it. My share of the catch was 80 cents, but I loved it and couldn’t wait to get my own boat.”
It is clear from talking with Bard and reading his book that the incontrovertible constancy of change, the combination of unexpected challenges and satisfactory solutions are part of the allure of “living on the sea’s quixotic surface” as Bard writes in the book’s foreword. Later, in a subsequent chapter, he elaborates: “To react smoothly and seamlessly as conditions change — isn’t this the way of life we celebrate and reward the most? A feeling like this, that what we are doing is just the right thing to do at the time, is common at sea.”
His philosophical musing makes a slight course correction when he adds, “But let’s not be too dogmatic. Life at sea isn’t necessarily one of pure animal instinct. You can lose yourself intellectually, if you like, in the labyrinthine architecture of cloud formations; you can go beyond a simple wonder at the gleam of a newly landed dorado. … But the more vital and immediate demands compete for your attention: the starboard jib sheet needs to be re-looped.”
Bard organizes his book by retelling select stories in which “chaos looms — when the weather snarls, when mechanical systems fail, crew relations spiral into weirdness,” then filling the last chapter with the first delivery he made, from Hawaii to Seattle. It was also his first ocean passage.
Describing the magic of catching the perfect wind, he writes, “To scoot along downwind without pounding, the sails full of pure atmospheric power, was magnificent. Below decks, the hull skimming through the water filled the air with a silken hiss.” But just as quickly, Bard paints the adrenaline rush that attends wind gusting to a 30-knot gale force.
“It’s a wild ride. There’s just enough moonlight coming through the clouds that you can barely make out the waves rearing up the stern, more easily if they’re breaking white. But there’s no definition, no real sign of how they’re going to affect us.”
Bard does a laudable job capturing the “absolutely beautiful ocean (that) may, in short order, become ominous and wild” and his own optimism and preparation for each journey as he contemplates how to find “the balance between hope and hubris.” The reader is pulled into the narrative, riding the waves with captain and crew, while the author explores at what point he might have let optimism obscure reality.
“This book is an examination of that puzzle,” Bard concludes. “It is written for those who love the sea and the stories it inspires, in the spirit of hope that we never grow too old to learn from experience.”
