"Eric Wiberg's Sea Stories are inspired by a circumnavigation under sail and years of boating. Eric has met characters and visited place I only dream about. Eric and I are a generation apart, but we share the same love of the sea. As children, we learned to swim and sail boats on the same Bahamian island."
Wm. Johnson, Jr.
Lubber's Quarters, Bahamas
This is a collection of stories gathered over decades, in many instances with difficulty and danger. They are meant to be emotive of survival, and challenge; one rule I had going into this project was; if a story does not make me cry, it's not worth including.
The stories are meant to be quirky, interesting, informative, and perhaps inspire feeling and empathy for the characters, who went through so much just to make it out of the harsh maelstrom of current, wind, waves, loneliness and pathos which the sea has always provided for those who dare to cross its global girth.
The boats covered range from an offshore lobster boat to life boat, World War II freighters, life rafts, speedy private yachts, plodding local schooners, a number of modern tankers, a classic yacht, and a Prohibition-era United States Coast Guard Cutter. The stories - embellished, perhaps, but not made up - take place in Trinidad, Mozambique, Singapore, the US east coast, Bermuda, Bahamas, Belgium, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Newport Rhode Island, the Caribbean, Canada, Nantucket, Indonesia, and the
British Isles.
Characters range from a Spanish cruise liner captain to a New Bedford ferry master to a cluster of Norwegians to a single or pair of survivors on life rafts in war. Others run the gamut to a retired gynecologist from Milwaukee, a jilted Filipino husband, kidnapped tanker captain, the fastest woman on water for decades who was known as Joe, US naval aviators, a Belgian playboy, and a Halifax shopkeeper. A crew of British naval officers who openly admit they were spying on Japanese islands from their yacht in the Pacific wrecked in the southern Bahamas, and the frustrated sheriff of Batam, Indonesia all feature.
The names of some persons have been withheld, and of vessels scrambled so as to provide some discretion, though these events happened on average decades ago.
