He is currently working on his first book, St. Croix, a memoir. Design updated He was sitting on an exposed cliff overlooking the Pacific.
It was dark, and the beach was deserted for fifty miles in both directions. This was the Lost Coast, a vast swath of rugged, uninhabited, magnificently forested Northern California, the kind of place that made you understand why people have always been drawn to the Golden State.
Dave chose the spot for landfall precisely because it was so empty. He and his team needed secrecy. The sailboat was laden with contraband: 4, pounds of Thai stick pot, the latest in marijuana commerce, a product as potent as it was valuable, which Dave and his crew—a team of smugglers called the Coronado Company—would unload and sell for millions of dollars.
The Company, as its members called it, was already a successful and sophisticated operation, importing Mexican pot by the ton, hugging the coast in fishing boats from as far south as Sinaloa. But this was a new type of gig, crossing the Pacific in a double-masted ketch.
There were more variables, more opportunities for error. Then, under sail, she was becalmed in the Doldrums. And then she disappeared. He set up a radio watch, feet above the ocean, for a better line of sight. The beauty of single sideband radio was that you could communicate halfway around the world, coordinating, as the Company liked to do, with your fleet at designated hours on Zulu time.
