Capt. Marc, veteran of multiple ocean crossings, and instructional pro, invites you to join him for lessons and/or excursions under sail. By special arrangement only.
“There’s No Place Like Nowhere” - John Lennon
“It’s fear of the unknown. The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that—-it’s all illusion.Unknown is what it is. Accept that it’s unknown and it’s plain sailing. Everything is unknown—-then you’re ahead of the game.
That’s what it is. Right?”
John Lennon
Some interesting backstory
John Lennon - Sailor/Human Being
John Lennon had always had a secret desire to sail the Atlantic. After his return from Cape Town, where at Yoko’s behest, he underwent a course in psychic alignment for making a journey, he chose one that would eventually put him under considerable risk. The African oracle had told him that he could sail the Atlantic safely, but the only in a southeast direction. This meant that his destination could only be Bermuda.
Yoko was always extremely concerned for John’s safety, always thinking that something dreadful would happen if he was set free. Despite the fovorable omens, she worried as John prepared himself to sail the Atlantic ocean in a 40ft boat with an unknown crew, past stormy Cape Hatteras, across the dangerous Gulf Steam, and into the Bermuda Triangle.
On the morning of the 4 June 1980, a burly, bearded man known as Captain Hank, prepared the “Megan Jaye”, a 43-foot Hinckley centreboard sloop out of Newport, Rhode Island. for the offshore passage to Bermuda. About that same time, John left for Newport, Rhode Island aboad a Cessna with Tyler Coneys and his cousins, Ellen and Kevin, who were to be additional members of the crew. It hadn’t been since he traveled to Hamburg in a mini-van with Alan William, that he had ventured such an exciting leap into the unknown. Soon he would be alone among strangers in a wild sea, taking a risk that he had spent his whole life avoiding. He was about to fulfill his most cherished childhood fantasy—his great dream of going off to sea just as his father and grandfather had done before him.
What happened next was, poetically speaking, inevitable. The little sailing vessel ran into stormy seas and eventually a tempest. One after another the crew got seasick. Eventually captain Hank himself became incapacitated by mal-de-mer and ordered John to take the wheel and hold the little ship steady. John stood on the deck in his yellow foulies, lashed to the rails of the wheelhouse like Ahab strapped to the whale. He was petrified by the force driving the ship into the waves. Spray stunned his face and streamed over his glasses.
As his watch wore on, John felt his courage rising. “It was just like going on stage” he recollected, “At first you panic and then you’re ready to throw up your guts, but once you get out there, you start doing your stuff. You forget your fears and you get high on your performance.“
As the sea rose before him, he shouted back in defiance, singing shanties, sailor’s songs and old ballads he had heard in Liverpool.
The experience was life changing for John Lennon and after arriving safely in Bermuda on the 11 June 1980, he inscribed an entry in the ship’s logbook .
“Dear Megan”, he wrote, “There is no place like nowhere”, and added a doodle of himself and the “Megan Jaye” at sunset.
After years of lacking the confidence to write and record, this voyage under sail not only restored John’s confidence in himself but also inspired him to create his final recording “Double Fantasy”.
Here’s to “plain sailing”
Marc, I am the current owner of the Megan Jaye, now Jubilee. I, too,
was sailing to Bermuda in June 1980 on my own boat arriving shortly
after John. Of course, I did not know of this coincidence until much
later (1998) when a reporter writing about John’s transformation and
rebirth as a result of this trip contacted me and came to Annapolis,
MD to photograph the boat.
Sailing has this impact. Having sailed almost 40,000 miles on the
open ocean I can attest to the transformative effects that occur
from the challenge of the sea, the weather, the darkness, the
isolation, the danger. John experienced this challenge as all
sailors do of being confronted by man’s insignificance in the cosmos,
a little speck on the vast open ocean and then surviving and
regaining land; it is a powerful experience and it influenced John’s
creative power to write and capture these cosmic experiences in
several of his last songs.
It is a wonderful story that is not widely known. Thanks for sharing it.
Stephen, thanks for the comment and picture of Jubilee (nee Megan Jaye) as she now lies. Looking good!
THAT’S A HELLUVA EXPERIENCE I’D SAY. I’M VERY PROUD FOR THE EXPERIENCE THE TWO OF YOU WERE VERY KIND TO SHARE. MORE THAN ALL OF THE FOREGOING, I’M PARTICULARLY PROUD TO HAVE ALL KNOW THAT DR. FULLER IHAS BEEN MY BEST FRIEND, CONFIDANTE AND “SPIIRITUAL BROTHER” FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS!!