…little bit tired of social media. It feels hollow, like junk food for the adult brain. This website/blog/photo gallery, etc is my alternative: a place to slow things down, pay attention, and see what happens when I actually pick up my Nikon.

I recently became obsessed with the idea of becoming somewhat of a historian in the subject matter of piracy, specifically the Golden Age of Piracy. Not too long ago I was watching a Netflix documentary about pirates and got stuck on wanting to know more about the “experts” and “historians” they invite to be on the show. Like what does it take to be on a documentary? I was further motivated, after sailing around the British Virgin Islands in a sailboat we crewed with friends, to dive further into this pirate thing. The working theory is that I’ll come out the other side as the world’s most knowledgeable pirate historian. Like… one day you’ll see a new documentary has come out about pirates and you’ll just know I will be featured as an “expert”.

And if you didn’t already know, I live in the San Juan Islands in Washington State with my boyfriend Ty, but I’m from, and still tethered to, the Florida Panhandle. For work, I fly air attack over wildland fires. I am, however, at my absolute best flying my little 1946 Cessna 140, Belmont. Low, slow, good views. Easy peasy… the perfect little airplane. 🥹

There’s also a small sailboat (a 25′ Dufour 1800) involved, which I purchased initially as a live aboard during my days as a San Juan Airlines pilot. At the time, I had every intention of learning to sail, but very little time. I now somehow have seemingly less time but I’ve been making some progress in it.

This whole website is me leaning into curiosity and figuring things out as I go – along with a stupid amount of code written by ChatGPT, which is either incredibly helpful or absolutely the opposite of helpful. Building a website from scratch has been so so so so hard and infuriating, but I think I’m through the worst of it if not, I may literally hurl my laptop into the ocean. I have a “journal” which will be somewhat of a “blog” but I so hate that word. Obviously there is a gallery for photos and also a page to track my progress towards becoming a pirate historian. I am no where near that point yet but it will be similar to my journal page 🙂

I’ll clean this up eventually. Probably.

For now, I’m just trying to move from construction to action and see what survives the process.

No promises. Just momentum, and maybe a bit of rum. (which I really do love).