ELENA: I can’t believe how bad our voyage to Grenada was and what the place turned out to be. What is your impression of our dash to Grenada and back and about Grenada itself, in a few words?
MEG: desperate, un-thought-out, delusional. As for Grenada itself, an absolutely repellent, crooked, shit hole. Not to mention dangerous, filthy, degrading.
ELENA: All those nasty things, like Meta, Google, Facebook and their elk are impossible to miss. They are all the rage. What do you think of Facebook and people’s obsession with it? Does it give people anything good at all or it uses/abuses them instead, you think?
MEG: My opinion of social media like Facebook, or specifically Facebook, is that it is invasive, dehumanising, and manipulative. It preys on basic human needs in order to exploit people for commercial and political manipulation. Essentially, I see Facebook (and others) as tools of social engineering. In other words propaganda, manipulation and spying (invasion of privacy) on a colossal scale.
In a word I would say that Facebook is dehumanising.
ELENA: Why do you think those who choose not to do anything with social meadia are smeared and called untisocial?
MEG: Because social media has programmed everybody who’s on it into claiming that anybody who isn’t on it is an enemy, is antisocial or whatever other derogatory term you can think of. It’s exactly the same as religion. If you don’t believe in the same God as I do, you are an enemy!
ELENA: The deadline (the spring) and the debt bottom are fast approaching, how do you feel about the ensuing crossing, our near future? Your fears? Expectations? Would you do things differently if you had the power/money to do so?
MEG: Of course I would do things differently if I had the money. I wouldn’t even have this boat! Of course, my biggest fear is the lack of money. We’re gonna put everything we can into doing whatever we can on this boat just to get it to Montenegro, which is a place we might be able to legally be at for a while, and when we get there we’re gonna have no way to pay for being there. Our only hope is to bring in some money between here and there. We could sell the boat when we got there, but that’s gonna take time and in the meantime how do we live without any money once we’re there? I still have a pittance coming in, for a very temporary period of time, but pretty much…
The entire pence is going to go into servicing the debt we are now accumulating to make this crossing of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean even slightly possible.
There’s absolutely no way we can make this boat safe, or seaworthy according to Coast Guard standards. We can make it float, and we can probably make it go in sort of the right direction, we just can’t bring it up to minimum safety standards. Which is why we are practising a form of triage until we run out of debt room. For instance, we have to forgo safety equipment like a liferaft, fire extinguishers, flares, even lifejackets in order to get things which are vital to making the boat move in some semblance of direction. In other words we need to spend money on things like rigging and the engine and of course the hull, itself. In other words…
We are putting all we’ve got into getting as far along toward making the boat keep the ocean out, keep us in, and keep it going.
ELENA: Boating is a torture for you. Your recent quote: “I had a life, and then I bought a boat.” If you could speak to your younger self, 19 years ago, in Marmaris, would you tell that Meg to not buy a boat and sail to BC with me?
MEG: Certainly, with the 2020 vision of hindsight, I would most certainly have dissuaded my younger self from even considering boating.
ELENA: Out that entire boating/bouncing experiance over so many years is there something that is valuable to you that you wouldn’t want to give up?
MEG: I guess that would have to be that I’m not stuck in traffic, stuck with neighbours on either side of me that hate me or make living where I am unbearable. I’m not stuck serving fries at McDonald’s, and I get to see nature in its real form. I also get to witness it’s current extinction level event, right up close and personal. The wholesale slaughter and execution of mother nature. That’s kind of interesting, sort of like being able to watch that one big astroid, albeit this is a little bit slower but not by much!
I should add that out of the entire boating-and-bouncing experience over so many years there is something I considered to be very valuable that I wouldn’t want to give up. That would be, being with you!