Where to begin? I guess introductions are in order.

Lee, the boat owner, purchased The Great Escape III Prowler 450 over the Internet. Enough said? Probably. All the really worthwhile lessons in life are learned the hard way, arent they? My only complaint with that basic fact of life is that sometimes the people who are learning those lessons drag their friends along with them. Since I won't ever have a spare 300k floating around to buy a yacht over the internet, I'm not quite sure why I needed to learn this lesson as well. But I certainly know better now!

Lee is a former US Marine and like all Marines there are certain sayings that have been drummed into him. One of Lee's favorites is "Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance" ... the six P's as he calls it. Lee is a financial planner and a very smart guy. He's made a lot of great buys and savy purchases over the Internet, but most of us probably aren't quite so bold as to buy a yacht that way. Lee felt he could take charge from Seattle and by hiring the right guys to inspect and prepare the boat, and he could get everything taken care of from several thousand miles away. Never trust anyone trying to sell or repair a boat, that was apparently the lesson that needed learning there.

As one chaotic event swirled into another on this trip and it became clear that Murphy and his infernal "Law" would dance a jig on our steaming skulls, I dredged up an appropriate line from the movie "The Wedding Singer" that was uttered by Adam Sandler's character ...

"Information I could have used previously."

Unfortunately as this story unfolds you will see how that line became a catch phrase for the entire trip, along with other phrases like "it's Africa hot", "voyage of the damned, part X" (insert steadily increasing integer here), "the sun is six inches from my head", as well as a very long list of indelicate phrases uttered by Lee about the performance and character of our (not so) esteemed Captain Rob, who we quickly nicknamed "Pogo". Rob earned this nickname because he could never stop hopping around, something like the way I would imagine that a Ferret on methamphetamine bounces around. I'm still shaking my head over how this guy hasn't managed to get himself killed by now. It seems likely that I'm going to become addicted to the obituary pages, just waiting for Captain Rob's name to show up there one day. Its only a matter of time, I figure.

Captain Rob, aka Pogo ... I don't even know where to begin. I guess we lost confidence in him about the time he bumped into a coral reef as we were trying to find the marina in Aruba. His resume certainly looked good when Lee hired him to pilot and navigate the boat back to Seattle. After all, we were a bunch of ocean going rookies who didnt know jack squat about cruising the Caribbean, so we needed an experienced hand to guide us. Hiring a skipper not only seemed like the right thing to do, but the only sane option. Pogo is a fairly likable guy, but you have to be able to patiently overlook some of the manic caffeine/sugar induced states he seems to work himself into. I don't know that I've ever seen anything quite like that.

I've always considered caffeine a drug, now I have the evidence I need to make that statement in the future with the kind of conviction that is unshakable and grounded in real world experience. Pogo should be the Caffo-holics poster boy.

In fairness to Pogo, he wasnt completely out to lunch. He and Lee just didn't get along and that was clear from early on. Calling Lee intense might be an understatement, and you better have thick skin, cause not only does Lee not suffer fools gladly, he doesnt suffer them at all. Pogo did make some good calls along the way, but he also screwed up often enough that eventually all our confidence in him was shot. Many of those details follow. We didn't laugh much about those things at the time, but most of us can now.