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Bio
Michael Latta is an ex-New York, Paris, San Francisco ad agency art director, writer, creative director and published magazine and newspaper writer. His past also includes ex-Navy brat, ex- Marine Corps, ex-race driver, ex-husband, ex-Peace Corps and life-long sailor.
During his previous Madison Avenue life, Michael managed to decompress between marriages or getting fired, by sailing off shore to tropical isles for as long as he had beer money. Each time it became harder to return to a life of fiscal responsibility.
Finally, he happily moved aboard to single-hand his traditional sailing cutter, Narwhal, to wherever and whenever he feels like going. Over the years he has cruised up and down both coasts, Bahamas, Caribbean, the South Pacific, including the Marquesas and Tahiti and recently a dozen years exploring the Sea of Cortez and south along the Mexican Riviera.
His present ‘home port’ is Monterey, California where he continues to write his Deep Salt novels and screenplays.
Novels/Books
#1 IN DEEP SALT
Parker, a lone salvage diver on a passage from Nassau into the Caribbean, rescues a small boy from the seas off Haiti. He sails to a nearby island reported to have a clinic to leave the child.
And move on.
What this ex-marine encounters instead are frightened islanders, a mercenary guard force for a horribly scarred doctor, a death-filled cargo plane sunk out on the reef, a sensuous barmaid with a Harvard MBA…and an uncharacteristic concern for both her and the kid’s welfare.
Parker’s reaction to any challenging relationship usually results in quietly sailing off into the night. But now he finds himself drawn into a dangerous, oddly tangled and grisly mystery. Parker smells trouble. Something is wrong. Should he leave them on the beach and split?
Or not?
#2 DEEP SALT DOWN
Parker and his ragtag Isla St. Catherine crew hear of a sunken WWII freighter loaded with copper ingots lost off a nearby island. It sounds like the opportunity for a quick and dirty replenishment of his faltering financial situation.
A lucky bonanza?
A fun diving lark?
He sails there only to find the old tramp steamer has a giant squid guarding an Auschwitz loot-filled wreck beneath the freighter’s hull, and a lurking ship load of neo Nazi killers determined to get it all back.
Parker and his out-gunned island friends are in deep trouble.
Again.
#3 SALT RIVER DUEL
Parker’s lover, Carly, on a shopping trip in Cap Haitian to the south, is kidnapped by a local drug lord. The notoriously corrupt island country is unable to do anything about it… other than hinting they might be able to help deliver the ransom demand…for a small fee, of course.
His only recourse is to single hand his salvage trawler at night up a long, twisting, crocodile-filled tidal river back to the head man’s stronghold in the mountainous interior. One way or another, the ex-Force Recon Marine plans to bring her safely back.
And kick some ass on the way out.
#4 DEEP SALT HAUNT
Parker is told of a mysterious pirate vessel rising from the depths off a little-known isle in the Caicos Island group. The story is causing panic in the local fishing fleet, not to mention, a smuggler friend’s boat sinking with a load of expensive rum.
And it’s still there. Rum and all.
What’s a salvage expert to do?
Parker pokes his trawler’s nose into the strange scene only to be drawn into a running battle that moves to the shores of Guantanamo Bay, ultimately ending with hundred-dollar bills flying like green clouds across a crowded Jamaican tourist beach.
#5 DEEP SALT ROGUE
Parker, after of a successful mission out of Gitmo, is asked by the CIA and Pentagon to worm his way into a Jamaican drug cartel to report back with facts enough to put them out of business.
“Go rogue?”
The CIA showered him with digital spy gadgets, enough cash to buy in as a regular customer and sent him off, saying, “If you don’t, we can still recall you back into uniform.”
“Okay. I get it.”
Parker immediately dumped all their secret stuff into the sea and went rogue…Parker style. Within a week mysterious explosions, fire and death began to rain down on certain Jamaican drug facilities and private homes. Ships were set afire. Colombia got involved. All of it unknown to a highly frustrated CIA. “Where is he? What’s he doing?”
It got worse from there.
LAZY PERSON’S GUIDE TO LOOKING FIT
Here is a simple, light-hearted guide to easily, without stress or buying anything, getting and keeping yourself in shape…forever.
As a wandering sailor in a small cutter, I didn’t have either the space or money for exercise machines. Or find a gym program in the wilds of the Sea of Cortez or South Pacific. So, I read up on something called isometrics. That a few seconds a day of intense energy on specific muscle groups was all they needed to stay in shape.
Over the years I experimented with ways to do just that in a small space. And it works. I’ve been doing it for ages. (and I’m old. Real old.) And I’m still healthy and wearing the same size Levi’s I did as a very young man.
Check it out. As the phrase goes…Whattaya got to lose?
Articles
MAYDAY!
In all my decades of sailing on or around many of the world’s oceans, I have never heard the word Mayday uttered over the VHF radio. And now, after two days and a night in the middle of the Sea of Cortez, still heaving countless buckets over the side, I am left with that one option. It’s a losing cause. I can’t keep up with the continuous rising water (The floor boards are floating. It’s almost up to my knees.) We’re going down eventually. And unless something miraculous happens real soon, I’m going with her.
I left Mazatlan in my 22’ Falmouth Cutter, Narwhal on a Wednesday morning, July 21, 2010 with a pleasant 6 to 8 knot southerly sending me motor-sailing north to my next destination, Puerto Escondido about 350 miles across the Sea of Cortez on the Baja coast. All went well until the Autohelm 2000 (steers the boat), under no stress at all, decided to quit about 8 hours later. (It had just been repaired for the third time by the factory after its previous breakdown.) As Narwhal has a good self-steering wind vane, and I had been waiting impatiently over a week for this weather window, I opted to keep going.
Shouldn’t have done that. It was a harbinger of things to come. The first hint of rampant complacency on my part.
Single handers don’t sleep a lot. I catnap for 15 minutes at a time with the aid of a stove kitchen timer like your mom uses stuck next to an ear. I am used to hopping up and down all night long checking the horizon. I do have a radar detector that works if other boats are running their radars. It has an alarm that goes off to warn me, but there is nothing like taking a periodic 360 scan outside for those that don’t, like the ubiquitous large steel shrimp boats. During one of these forays in the pre dawn hours of Thursday, I opened the engine compartment hatch and looked down to check the bilge sump hole in front of the purring 2-cylinder Yanmar.
Damn.
It was full and about to slop over into the area underneath the floorboards where I stow all my tools, oils and eight or ten bottles of vintage, hard to find, five buck chuck red wines. This was serious. I climbed up into the cockpit where my main bilge pump, a manual Whale Gusher 10 resides. It had been refitted at the yard with the factory rehab kit during my last haul out and had worked like a charm the few times I’d used it since. The only reason being to pump out the little water that accumulated from a dripping packing gland or stuffing box after running the engine in the berth periodically. The stuffing box had always stopped dripping after a short while. I figured that was normal as Narwhal hadn’t left her berth in months.
Bad assumption. Big mistake.
I started pumping and after 3 or 4 strokes the handle suddenly flopped loosely in my hand, all suction lost. It felt like shaking hands with an Iranian used camel salesman. Nothing happened.
Oh, no.
I leapt below, tore out the mattress pad on my bunk and squeezed back to the one foot aperture that manages to call itself adequate access to the stuffing box (This is the small ‘fail safe’ unit that keeps the water outside of where the propeller shaft enters the hull.). The box, re-packed by a yard one year ago, wasn’t dripping. It was gurgling (Picture watering a rose bush with a garden hose). I scrambled back and got out my ‘back-up’ portable electric pump and stuffed it down into the sump hole. It has a 4’ hose just long enough to pour water into a bucket placed on the floor boards. (Yeah, I know. The hose at least ‘should have been’ long enough to go outside a porthole.) I started filling and dumping salt water as fast as possible. With two buckets I could be dumping one while the other filled. In this fashion I was able to reduce the level and keep the water down in the sump.
I bailed the rest of the night.
I decided to wait for daylight to attempt the always difficult task of tightening the stuffing box. In the past this has generally taken the better part of an hour, assuming I didn’t take time off to swear a blue streak, bandage a torn knuckle and/or have a beer. Because I was going to be stuck down below during this essentially blind operation in the middle of a hopefully empty sea. If not empty, I wanted any other boats to be able to see and avoid me.
The job requires two wrenches and two hands. However, there being only room for one arm at a time, this takes some effort to balance the tools in the right place at the right time. Especially in a rolling sea. I have learned the hard way to tie a line between the two wrenches. Because when one of them invariably slips and falls into the black abyss underneath the drive shaft, it is a simple matter to pull on the line and retrieve it and try, try again.
So daylight finally arrived and I attacked the problem. Or, I should say, tried my ancient best to do this. And I couldn’t. I pushed, pulled, swore, yanked and grunted. It was stuck too solidly for one in his 75th year to manage loosening the required two large nuts with one hand. Getting old sucks. The old isn’t so bad. It’s the getting weak that is. My determination is still richly apparent. It’s just that my body can’t pick up the big checks anymore.
All I managed to do after an hour of struggle was make it worse.
Then the electric pump quit.
Now I tossed the floor boards aside and began bucket bailing directly from the bilges. An hour later I realized it was a losing battle. I couldn’t keep this up. Time and distance were at odds. I was never going to make it close enough to beach Narwhal if possible. I don’t carry, nor have ever wanted, an EPIRB or a canister life raft. The thought of putting satellites and long range planes into solving my self-made problems has never been an option. I have always thought of Narwhal as my life boat.
And if she goes, so do I. (I’m a guy who in his thirties cashed in all his life insurance and bought an Italian formula racing car. Longevity has never been much of an issue with me.)
Until now.
It came down to two choices. One: keep bailing until Narwhal was overwhelmed and sank, leaving me to splash around while waiting for something hideous and bigger than me to come by. Or Two: whine for help now and see if anybody with a pump shows up before option One becomes a reality.
And I thought a lot about what it would be like to get rescued and then, from the deck of a strange boat, watch my beloved Narwhal sink before my eyes. She is my home. My castle. She represents all I have in the world, except for a grandson I have yet to see. Everything I own, all my so-called assets are aboard her. As you probably can surmise, insurance companies consider single-handers to be devil spawn and in refusing to represent them, charge rates accordingly. (The entire marine insurance industry deserves to boil in their own soup.)
So the fact remained, when Narwhal goes down―other than a social security check―so do I. But now I was actually confronted with the real possibility of having my extremities gnawed on. Live bait? Me? Maybe there is a better option than going down as shark chum.
I chickened out and opted for option Two.
So out went my Mayday. It took several minutes before voices responded. All of them in Spanish, of course. I wasn’t sure what they were asking of me but I gave them each my particulars, including latitude and longitude position in English and Spanish.
And waited. Bailing.
Two hours later, riding high in ballast, a huge bulk/oil tanker, the Port Shanghai showed up from the south. After setting out protective fenders, I motored slowly over underneath this towering red wall of China that stretched the length of multiple football fields. I hoped to not smash the mast spreaders against her gigantic steel hull. Fortunately the seas were calm. They dropped down lines, a rope ladder and a crewman with the biggest pump I have ever seen. It soon sucked out the water that minutes ago had been up to my knees.
Good. A reprieve for a couple hours, but now what?
The water was still pouring in. I had previously placed my ‘ditch bag’ in the cockpit realizing that I had to catch a ride to shore with someone because the Port Shanghai didn’t have a small pump and certainly wasn’t about to pick Narwhal up and deposit us some where else. Nor did the Mexican Coast Guard launch that now showed up. I had about given up by then and resigned to losing everything that I own or give a hoot about. My thoughts by now were getting slow and murky. The last two days and night were catching up with me. I backed off from the side of the tanker, with no more than a touch of red bottom paint on my bowsprit, to wait for the inevitable.
However in the meantime a savior had arrived.
The beautiful Danish flagged Hans Christian cutter Aeolus motored over and told me he had a spare small electric pump! I went alongside and grabbed it with my boat hook. I was really punchy by then, not having slept since Tuesday night and it’s now Thursday evening. I was having brain fade problems trying to connect the pump wires to my batteries when the Mexican navy launch dropped off a bright young crewman. He quickly saw the problem and literally with his teeth, stripped the wires enough that I could connect the pump to a house battery.
And it worked!
The borrowed pump was slowly reducing the water level which by now had the floor boards floating again. Our mid Sea of Cortez gathering was about 40 miles to the east of the rocky, inhospitable shores of Isla Cerralvo. La Paz lay many miles beyond. I told my Danish saviors that I was heading for the port of La Paz. As Thursday night fell, Aeolus, on a passage back to Mazatlan, insisted on turning back to trail along behind me to make sure Narwhal stayed up. I wasn’t about to complain and off we went.
Five hours later their pump quit.
The highly competent skipper of Aeolus, Ib Svane, had suggested earlier that as a last resort I might be able to disconnect my engine water intake hose and place it down into the bilge sump in hopes of it temporarily removing some of the water. I did that now, and the powerful little engine managed to hold it off for the rest of the night and on into the following Friday afternoon. I constantly needed to adjust the wind vane (No auto helm, remember?), and keep switching the intake hose off and back on the engine every ten minutes. I worried how long the engine would last before packing it in, or blowing out the water pump impeller. If that happened there was nothing left to do but heave my bag onto Aeolus’ deck and say goodbye to Narwhal and all she means to me.
And, of course, twenty more sleepless hours later we made it. I circled off the Abaroa dockyards in La Paz at 3pm Friday afternoon and they immediately hauled me out. The fabulous couple on Aeolus, Ib and Yadranka Svane, had taken photos of the whole bizarre scene. If you are seeing pictures of the event, Yadranka took them. It’s an amazing sight to see a tiny 22’ cutter up against the hull of this behemoth. Being so fixated on my bucket brigade chores, I had no idea it was that big until I saw the photos.
The yard worked on the problems. It turned out to be a combination of a scored propeller shaft, torn cutlass bearing, broken hose clamps, dislodged hose connection to the stern tube and improperly packed stuffing box. All have been replaced new, including two pumps. The incredible people that responded to my Mayday have all gone their separate ways. I’ll never forget them.
And tomorrow? What else could I do with this reprieve, but keep on wandering. (Hey, it still beats commuting.)
Michael Latta – Narwhal – Falmouth Cutter 22’
SEAT TIME
This was the first column sailor, humorist and erstwhile philosopher Mike Latta, wrote for a Mazatlan newspaper under his byline: Mike Time.
I have a son. The proverbial light of my life. He is a superb race car driver/instructor/mechanic who, in spite of his heart’s career choice, was unfortunately born to be a six feet two inches, two hundred fifty plus pounds heavyweight. I say unfortunate because his large size is a decided disadvantage in this highly competitive field comprised mostly of mini-type lightweights. Sort of like horse jockeys. As a result, it is often difficult for him to get what all drivers lust after in the auto racing world. It is called…seat time.
Seat time is where a race driver really learns his or her chops and can ultimately make it…or not. We can practice our endeavors all we want, but actual racing seat time is where it gets very serious very quickly. Now you are playing with the big kids. People are watching. There will be criticism, constructive and otherwise. This is truly where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, for real. And whatever happens is up to you. These on-the-job opportunities are probably inherent in all fields of endeavor. Because seat time, in one form or another, is how we learn to get better. It is how others judge us. It is how we ultimately judge ourselves.
In the world of broadcast journalism this very same phenomenon is termed…mike time. Getting mike time. Mike Time? Are you sensing a self-serving segue here? A rationale for the above-mentioned title to my hopefully on-going attempt at entertainment of a sort? (Forget significance; that’s on another page.) Well, I hope you do. (Or maybe these opening comments will only count toward a down-payment on an eventual mea culpa?)
Mike Time is going to be (I hope…) an un-Gordian knot of loose observations and opinions about the people and places and events in and around our Mazatlán. Particularly the odd bits. However, the peripatetic life of this wandering sailor is a simple one by design. Because if I can’t easily sail my boat or take a dinghy or hop a bus to go check something out…it ain’t gonna happen. So, a good bit of these proposed mutterings are liable to be ripped from the shredded pages of my memory…such as it is these days.
Case in point: A while back I was strolling down the Mazatlán’s Malecon beach front somewhere in the center of the Golden Zone hotel area and came across a tourist lady about to be flung into the heavens strapped to a parachute. Now mind you, this is not a form of transportation that I think highly of. (No pun intended. Although it is a rather keen insight into one of my deeper fears…heights.) But perhaps this stalwart lady needed to experience some actual paragliding seat time. Good for her.
A curious beach crowd had gathered waiting for her impending lift off. The long, elastic tow rope was stretched across the sand and on out to a waiting power boat. No one, myself included, wanted to chance stepping across her umbilical cord to the sky.
We all waited because the upcoming event was obviously going to be a significant undertaking, as the lady in question was not exactly what one would call…petite.
In fact, I was more than a little concerned as I watched the three beach boys entrusted with the proper care and flight path of their nervously giggling customer. They were busy attempting to strap on a harness that to my un-trained eye had obviously been designed for a less…substantial person. I was more than curious to see just how this planned entry into the upper stratosphere was going to be accomplished. Because this lady was big. I mean she was really…big. (Think overweight NFL second string defensive guard on waivers.)
One boy stepped to her side and grasped a well-rounded elbow. The other two held the draping flame-colored parachute overhead and signaled to the tow boat to go for it. The rapt little crowd hushed. The brave woman handed her Margarita glass to a friend and began to waddle toward the water in tandem with the boys. The tow line stretched, tautened, and lifted dripping out of the sea.
The crowd let out a choir-like ‘Ooooh’ as she now rose straight up into the air like a Walt Disney hippo performing a Swan Lake solo. Up she went, much like the steady, increasing of speed seen at a space launch. Ten feet. Twenty. Necks craned upward. The crowd seemed stunned by the spectacle. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Suddenly, from the back of the speeding boat, the over-burdened tow line parted in relief. It snapped back like a giant rubber band toward the now plummeting lady. The crowd gasped. The boys stood transfixed watching their immense charge hurtle down toward the edge of the water. No one did anything except stare in awe as the fast-approaching woman loomed overhead like a flaming meteor.
Stupidly, I ran toward the spot where she was doomed to land. Well, not exactly ran…more like a hopeful hobble. (Hey, I’m old.) Maybe I could break her fall with my outstretched arms? Yeah, right. Maybe I could get squashed flat as a tortilla. Somehow, I managed to not get there in time. (How do you think I managed to get this old?)
Fortunately, the parachute stayed billowed out and slowed her precipitous drop enough that she landed on her well-padded backside in about a foot or two of water. The ensuing mini tsunami caused a panic as it drenched bystanders, condo salesmen, pick pockets and trinket hawkers for a hundred feet in all directions, but cooled off a rather upset tourist lady. The boys didn’t know whether to laugh or run. Fortunately, the only thing she hurt was her pride. I quickly decided my pathetic attempt to cushion her downfall would remain our secret and fled the scene.
The bizarre experience told me all I ever need to know about Mexico’s local safety regulations. Besides, anyone goofy enough to go flying around with the frigate birds in a harness attached to a tired rubber band by teenagers deserves whatever happens. I mean, after all, there’s seat time and there’s…seat time.
Screen Plays
KID ANGEL
A suddenly orphaned tyke ends up lost in an abandoned subway station of street-hustling disabled vets. While the city watches the amazing results, the boy’s aunt and a rookie detective search beneath Manhattan, as a Child Protective scam strives to lock him in a cage.
DIRT CIRCLES
An ex-champion dirt-track sprint car racer returns after 16 years to his hometown to prove both he and his dated car can still compete against the local points leader…and to see the girl he couldn’t forget. But only his still furious ex-lover knows he left behind a daughter.
GUARDIAN RUN
A disillusioned ex-Marine sniper searching for a lonely desert oasis to hole up, rescues a hitch-hiking computer genius kid determined to test his “system” in a Vegas casino…run by the mob.
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