SAHARA DUST - 1980s Windsurfing Antigua Memoir
Table of Contents - subscribe to read chapters as they drop
“A diseased girl, a drunk, a crazy woman, and a fool set sail.”
— Thea Ramsey, from her notebook (1982)
After my ten week 1973 hitchhiking odyssey, I spent a lost decade in California trying to become a filmmaker, chasing my father’s approval, and failing at both.
Check out my new memoir Boomerang: Before + After Thumb Out, now available here on my substack for paid subscribers. Also available on Kindle / Amazon Paperback and Hardcover / Audible.
Everything suddenly changed when I met a woman named Thea Ramsey in September of 1980. Three years later we escaped to the Caribbean, built a windsurfing school on a beach in Antigua, hired locals, taught tourists, lived in the trade winds. I became so consumed by the wind and the water and the building of it all that I didn’t see what was happening right in front of me.
I’m writing Sahara Dust live, one chapter at a time, right here on this page. The voice is mine at 74 — looking back at a life I built and lost on a Caribbean beach, telling it the way you’d tell it to a friend over drinks. Sometimes the memory takes over and you’re right there in the trade winds. Sometimes you pull back and see the whole thing for what it was. As each chapter is completed, it will appear below as a link. Subscribe now and you get to watch the book get written in real time.
Table of Contents
Chapters titles will appear below as they are published
PART ONE: EMOTIONAL RESCUE
1980-82 · Joy, fearlessness, and the door that opened everything
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PART TWO: JOLLY BEACH
1983–1985 · Building paradise on sand
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PART THREE: LORD NELSON
1985–1987 · The high wind kingdom
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PART FOUR: UNRELATED SURVIVOR
1987 · Castles made of sand fall in the sea
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The book begins with a man who has nowhere to go and ends with a man who has nowhere to go. The difference is everything that happened in between. That's why this trilogy is titled — The Spaces Between.