Current Book Project Now Listed on Amazon:

Now that the book I'm currently working on has a page on Amazon complete with the preliminary cover image, I can give you a hint as to what it's about:

There will be a subtle change to the title and sub-title, as discussed with my publisher, but this is close.  Unlike Bug Out, this book will not be a guide or how-to, but should be entertaining reading to anyone interested in the subject of survival.  The scenarios presented here will cover a wide range of predicaments that others have lived through and that you might find yourself in as well, especially if you are the adventurous sort.

Here's a brief description from the publisher:

During a catastrophic event, what separates those who survive from those who are never seen again? In 13 suspenseful adventures, each a story of overcoming impossible odds, the author reveals the three vital ways to cheat death when all seems lost—avoid panic, know your survival skills, and maintain a relentless determination to make it out alive.

A unique combination of fictional scenarios, true accounts, and instructive sidebars, Would You Survive? educates as it entertains. Readers realize how important it is to suppress the natural panic response that produces bad decisions and often fatal outcomes.

Teaching by example, the characters use real-life survival tactics—including navigating, building shelters, finding water, and signaling for help. Scattered throughout the book, bonus profiles recount true survivor stories that illustrate how the determination to live in the bleakest and most devastating conditions has saved the lives of countless people.


The scenarios range from urban disasters to wilderness ordeals in many different environments.  And of course for the the readers of this blog and Bug Out, one of them will be a "bug-out" situation.  Needless to say, this is a big project and I'm working hard to get it done in time to meet the publication date.  I'll be posting more about it here as publication gets closer, as well as some posts about the types of predicaments that will be discussed in the book and how you could end up in one. 

Went to the Beach Yesterday....

Yesterday I drove to the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a first hand look at the oil that's washing ashore, and to take some photos for a magazine article I will be writing.  The oil is coming ashore almost everywhere on the mainland in my home state now, not to mention the once-pristine barrier islands on the other side of the Mississippi Sound.  The first thing you notice driving down Highway 90 is group after group of clean-up workers, concentrated in the areas where the most oil is on the sand:

Working with rakes, shovels and plastic bags, they are picking up globules of oil and tar balls in the sand.

It seems futile, as every wave washing up to the beach is carrying more tar balls and oil.  You can see how calm and gentle the Sound was at the time I took these shots.  Note all the black particles in suspension.  With the well still flowing unchecked, and who knows how much oil already in the Gulf, how long will this keep washing in?  Imagine how much would be coming ashore if the wind was really kicking up.

In places, the water is black with oil:

The so-called "booms" that are supposed to keep the oil off the beaches and out of the marshes are pitifully inadequate.  Look how much oil is washing over this one in an almost calm sea:

This is what this stuff looks like after it ends up on the sand.  You can try to step around the globs and tar balls, but there is more of it under what appears to be clean patches.  I ruined a pair of shoes and socks despite being careful not to step in any visible patches.

Where this stuff gets in the marsh, it kills the marsh grasses and every other living thing.  Here you can see it is just beginning.  This is in the Waveland area. 

I found this oil-coated eel right at the edge of the tide line.  Believe it or not, it was still alive, but just barely, slowly moving it's head back and forth as it suffocated to death.  It is so black with oil I have no idea what species it is.

Despite the oil, radio commercials in Jackson and other places around the state are telling people to "come on down, everything you love about the Gulf Coast is still here."  Some people are still letting their children play in the water:

I took these photos and left feeling sick.  I've been sea kayaking and sailing in these waters for over 25 years.  I've written countless articles about the islands and estuaries here, and a boater's guidebook to the area published in 2004, Exploring Coastal Mississippi: A Guide to the Marine Waters and Islands.  No words I can write here can convey how I feel about what has been lost.  Will it ever be the same?  I don't know.  It all depends on getting that well shut down, and soon. 

Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season

The blown-out  BP oil well continues to spew unchecked into the Gulf.  The first named tropical storm of the season has made landfall in Belize and crossed the Yucatan to restrengthen over the Gulf.  While it won't be coming into the area of the oil spill, its outer wind bands are expected to push more oil towards shore.  This will also hamper whatever efforts are being made to contain or clean-up the oil.  Here's an article posted today at the Biloxi Sun Herald:  Tropical Storm Alex Gaining Strength Over the Gulf.

NOAA forecasters have predicted this will be a particularly active season, and I've got a bad feeling about it anyway, not to mention the unthinkable damage to the Gulf that is being caused by the oil spill.  At any rate, whether or not we get a major hit in the Gulf this year or not, the memories of Katrina's destruction in 2005 are still fresh.  Here are a few of my photos from the aftermath:

Nothing but rubble left was left on most of Biloxi's Point Cadet - houses and businesses swept away, boats everywhere left high and dry:

The U.S. Highway 90 bridge that once connected Biloxi's Point Cadet to Ocean Springs was reduced to a broken pile of rubble.

Steel-hulled fishing vessels were scattered all over the woods from where they were trying to take refuge in Bayou Portage.  As it turned out, this area had the worst of the storm surge.

Below: my own cruising sailboat, Intensity.  She was swept into the woods despite all the heavy storm anchors and mooring lines I used to secure her.  When I found her a couple weeks after the storm, she was dismasted, battered, broken and even looted by someone who found her before I did.  I had spent over five years restoring her to immaculate condition, had lived aboard her for a time, and sailed her across the Gulf to the Keys and the East Coast of Florida.

I guess that's enough depressing imagery for one day.  If you live in an area where hurricanes are a threat, now is the time to prepare, not when one is already bearing down on you.  There's an excellent post on JWR's Survival Blog on hurricane preparation, written by a south Florida resident who's been dealing with them for a lifetime.  It also includes a detailed checklist of what you need to be prepared for one of these storms, whether you stay home or leave. Read the full article here:   Hurricane Readiness, by T. in South Florida
 

Oil Clean-Up Contractors Not Talking

My friend and canoeing partner, Ernest Herndon, who's a reporter for the Enterprise-Journal newspaper in southwest Mississippi sent me this story from the AP about a gathering of BP-contracted personnel from all over the country converging on the Mississippi Gulf coast.  Interesting that these folks are so tight-lipped and locked down with all that security. 

 3,700 ready to respond to BP oil spill
KAREN NELSON,The Sun Herald

 

 BILOXI, Miss. (AP) — They'll tell you where they're from, but otherwise they won't comment — the hundreds of men and women who've been brought in to the Mississippi Coast to work on the BP oil spill. Almost 3,700 are here now, although as time passes workers who had been brought in from all over the U.S. are being replaced by Mississippians. More than 40 percent are local now, a BP spokeswoman said.

The major deployment areas the company has set up along the coast from Pascagoula to Waveland are like hives, with workers moving in and out near rows and rows of equipment for vacuuming, hauling, bagging and moving about the roads, bayous and open water. BP's Marti Powers said the company has contracted with more than 160 companies — some as far away as Norway and some as close as Ocean Springs. Those companies, in turn, hire work forces set to hit the ground running. They're well-schooled on not talking, and each of the major deployment sites has a makeshift security-guard stand.

At BP's "north staging" area, one of two near the industrial area in Pascagoula on Tuesday, the Sun Herald was greeted by an armed security guard wearing a Taser and a local police department shirt who said, "Nobody comes by here who's not authorized. That's all I can tell you."

That's the norm at each site, Powers said. Why all the rock-hard security and secrecy? After all, it's an oil spill, not a matter of national security. But Powers said it's important. She said BP doesn't want anyone wandering onto the property, and it doesn't want its supervisors interrupted. And as for workers talking, "They don't have the big picture," she said.

It may not be handling national security but the operations are equipment-intensive. A DMR worker said, "It's like a war zone over there," talking about in Pascagoula , where two BP staging sites and the Marine Spill Response Corp. are located. Frank Wescovich with DMR said there was so much going on he couldn't find a place to park. He walked a mile to get to one site amid all the people, boats, overhead helicopters and trucks.
A NOAA spokesman called BP's network of staging areas in this state "significant operations."

One local contractor told reporters it was serving workers 70,000 meals a week. Employees Tuesday confirmed the company has had to ramp up operations and rent extra space to handle the load. Yet BP's Powers said many of the workers are on hold, waiting to be called up.

Those who coast residents see walking the beaches in groups of five to 15 are responding to calls of something washed up or are picking up debris of some type. Although some at the Joint Incident Command in Mobile say Mississippi preparedness is moving into a new phase, Powers said Tuesday, "There's a lot of waiting going on.
"We've had people in Mississippi for several weeks," she said. "We have a lot of people ready to work if something were to happen on our shores."

What's the Truth About the BP Oil Spill?

 
Here in south Mississippi and other areas along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, this on-going nightmare of gushing oil spewing unchecked into the waters of our very backyard is on nearly everyone's mind.  It's especially hard-hitting to me, as a person who has kayaked and camped along hundreds of miles of this coast from Louisiana to Key West and sailed thousands of coastal and offshore miles upon these waters.

For awhile, I tried to keep hoping that the problem would be quickly resolved and fears of a worst-case scenario would prove unfounded.  Now it's becoming more evident every day that this is a disaster of far greater magnitude than BP, the government and most of the media would have us believe.   So just how bad is it, and how bad can it possibly get?  What will the long-term effects be?

I've been asked by a couple of magazine editors that I write for to report on the impacts in my local area - along the Mississippi coast - and I wrote one early piece for SAIL magazine a couple of weeks ago when oil slicks were expected to wash ashore on Mississippi's pristine barrier islands.  At that time the oil remained offshore though, and was pushed west by strong winds to where it is now inundating the fragile marshlands of south Louisiana.  Here in the Mississippi area, it's too early to tell what's going to happen, but one thing's for sure, if the new efforts being made tonight and tomorrow fail to plug up the leaks, and some other successful solution doesn't come through soon after, life as we know it along the Gulf of Mexico could be changed forever.

A massive die-off of marine life is almost certain, what is uncertain is how far-reaching that die-off will be and how it will affect every other thing both natural and man-made along the shores of the Gulf.  Some of the scenarios presented by the scientists that study such things are grim indeed.  Survival Acres blog has been providing thoughts on these predictions and warnings and posting links to a variety of articles detailing them.  Some of these may seem far-fetched, but then again, we are in unknown territory here with such an unprecedented event.   Could something as unexpected as a massive oil well blowout like this precipitate a massive exodus from an entire region of the United States?  To ponder some of these possibilities, check out this post and some of the embedded links:  The Dead Zone

Gulf Oil Spill About to Wreak Havoc

Sunrise at Mississippi's Horn Island, across the Sound at Gulf Islands National Seashore.
(photo by Dick Dixon)

Ironically, I just recently wrote a feature article for SAIL magazine about the fantastic remote and unspoiled barrier islands and the Mississippi Sound that I consider one of the best sailing and cruising grounds on the Gulf.  The article is in the May issue of the magazine, which was just published days ago.  Here's a link to more about that piece that I posted on my other blog: Scott's Boat Pages.

And just a few minutes ago, I posted the tips Dave Sears sent on Unconventional Methods of Gathering Seafood.  Reading this really made me want to be out on the salt again right now, but I'm still a ways from completing the construction of my boat that will replace the one I lost in Hurricane Katrina. 

Unfortunately, all the sailing, fishing and escaping to beautiful uninhabited islands in this region appears to be coming to an end for an uncertain period of time.  The growing oil slick and the wind conditions that are spreading it our way leave little hope that this area and much larger areas of the Gulf will be spared from its impact.  I just corresponded with my friend, Dick Dixon, who took the photo above and who is an avid sailor and photographer based out of Pascagoula.  He informed me that his boat is indefinitely locked into the Pascagoula Inner Harbor, as it has been closed off with booms to try and prevent the oil from reaching the marshes of the estuary.   He also told me of another marina that is already price-gouging in advance of this impending disaster, asking tenants for a monthly fee equivalent to about 10 times that of other marinas in the area.  Time will tell how bad all this will be, but it's not looking good tonight.