Understanding #Dolphins

UNDERSTANDING DOLPHINS

The life experience one gains from years of being around and engaging the magnificent Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin lasts a lifetime. The main character in my book, Five Miles Deep, is Marina Victoria, the queen of a people that arrived on earth before the dawn of man. Marina uses the intelligence of the Bottlenosed Dolphins in her quest to rescue her people.

In studies made by the U.S. Navy, dolphins were trained to find and recognize underwater mines and explosive devices so naval divers could disarm enemy explosives and save lives of sailors and their ships from certain destruction. Dolphins have, with or without training, saved many lives of sailors, and swimmers from deadly shark attacks.

In the past, my partners in the attractions that we owned in Cape Coral, Florida and in Townsend, Tennessee had dolphin and sea lion shows, in conjunction with our water ski shows and the Waltzing Waters shows. I was invited along to help capture and train dolphins that we used in the shows. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 mandated the method and means of treating the animals we captured, and they were safe and unharmed at all times. That was not always the case with the humans involved with the capture, however.

One such case was a fully uniformed Florida Marine Patrol officer who was assigned to accompany us on a dolphin catch in the waters of Pine Island Sound of the Coast of Useppa Island in Lee County, Florida. The officer stayed out of the way when we brought a young male dolphin along side the boat, secured him on the lifting sling to bring him on board. We had the animal out of the water when the officer decided he wanted to help. He wrapped his arms around the dolphin about a foot ahead of his tail flukes.

Jack Scarpuzzi, our dolphin trainer hollered at the officer, “Don’t grab him there...” when the dolphin flipped the two-hundred pound officer about 10 yards into the water and the weight of his gear and guns began pulling him down. We had to drop the dolphin and set him free in order to rescue the drowning officer.

Later in the day, we captured two more dolphins and brought them back for training in the shows. Dolphins love being fed fresh fish and reward us with the way they play. We don’t really train them to jump, flip or retrieve items. They do that naturally. We just teach them to read clocks so they know when it is show time. They perform for the attention and affection we share. Mealtime is for eating, not as a reward for performing. Thanks to the trainers at Sea World, marine mammal behavior and biology has provided us with a wealth of knowledge about the Atlantic Bottlenose dolphins. Dolphins

are an awesome animal to share the planet with. Their intelligence has been measured at the level of a middle-schooler.

#ExpressYourself: My Favorite Book #author #IamReading #paranormal

Welcome back to my blog. I have decided to join the weekly Express Yourself Blog Hop. Each Tuesday I will be answering a question that is posted on the Express Yourself Banner for that given month. This week I was asked to chose one of my favorite books. Turn to page 89 and write the 8th and 9th sentences found on that page. 

I have two books published and two more ready for release. The book I chose to write about that I feel emotionally close to is Dying Dreams, the fictional account of Evan Shea and how, as a successful father, former athlete and businessman who must now deal with the fact he has only two months to live.

Death from a malignant brain tumor is not instant and is not pain free. Often, the treatment plan exceeds the pain levels of the disease itself. My granddaughter endured this inhuman experience from the age of thirteen until her death at age fifteen. She was able to survive all of the invasive medical procedures with dignity and strength, knowing she was terminal. She believed the experimental procedures might help some other young cancer victim beat the disease. She allowed the painful experiments and treatment options to erode her young body right up to the end when she asked her mother for her permission to pass away.

That is why I dedicated the book to my daughter, Lisa and her young daughter, Shawna. They provided the story line for Dying Dreams and the work of fiction it became. A year after Shawna died, Lisa and I went to lunch. She was depressed and had no appetite. Trying to cheer her up, I made a funny comment about being pregnant. She said that her husband, then almost 45 years old, wasn’t able to father children anymore.

A year after Shawna died, Little Hope was born.

DYING DREAMS

Page 89

Lines 8 and 9

Just then the fish jumped.

“It’s the edible kind. Not Flipper!”

Previews and Memories: An #Author's Inspiration #IAmWriting #Fantasy

PREVIEWS AND MEMORIES

I never realized what a long ride it was from Recife, Brazil to Atlanta, Georgia until this week. It is a three-hour flight from Recife to Sao Paulo, about 1600 miles. The ride to Orlando was over eight hours covering the 2600-mile length of Brazil, and flying over Georgetown, Guyana and Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela. This is the principal location of my next book, A Diamond In The Rough.

This is the story of Gil Devos, a man who spent forty years buying rough diamonds from the miners who labored to extract the hardest, most precious stones out of an unyielding earth. Actually, diamonds do not become dangerous until they find themselves in the hands of men who will risk everything to own them, steal them or even kill for them.

Gil lived the story I tell in the book. Mountain Springs House will release A Diamond In The Rough on June 27, which just happens to be my 77^th birthday. Well, it just so happens, Gil Devos will be meeting me in Odessa, Florida where we will once again visit our mutual friend, Jack Wylie and do a little water skiing and a lot of storytelling. Who knows, Gil just may come up with another story about chasing diamonds again. He has never lost “the love for the rough,” as he calls it.

As I continued sitting on the increasingly hardening seats of TAM Brazilian Flight 8110, it carried me 40,000 feet over the Atlantic where, an hour later we passed over Ponce, Puerto Rico and I was barely able to see the old Air Force Base at Roosevelt Roads on the east coast of the island. This is the location of the action that takes place in my first book, “Five Miles Deep,” the story of Marina Victoria, Queen of an ancient civilization living five miles deep in the Puerto Rican Trench. This is the second deepest location on the planet.

I was able to see the darkened water where the 35,535-foot depth of the trench exists.

My imagination kicked in as I visualized the team of scientists and Navy Seals descending in the NASA built submersible, into the trench depths in an attempt to rescue the citizens who have lived under a protective dome in a pristine, ideal world since before the ice age. Yes, Five Miles Deep is a science fiction story. But, it is so close to reality that the reader can imagine the events really happening.

And, as the Airbus A 330 continued tracking north, I was already missing my daily walks on miles of sandy beaches in Brazil as they disappeared further behind me. I even had a few memories of the events that occur in the sequel to Five Miles Deep, “The Return of Marina Victoria,” in the Tiger Shark Terror. This is book two in the series that takes place in Recife, Brazil, in the State of Pernambuco in a place called Suape. Mountain Springs House in the fourth quarter of this year will release this book. 

Reality kicked in several hours later when the Air Tran Boeing 200 touched down in Atlanta and I put on my jacket for the first time in six months and stepped outside in the cold 70-degree weather of north Georgia.

Creative Writing: It's Team Work

As a published author, I thought I was a literary island unto myself. I found out this week that, not only am I a member of a publishing house with all the support from the publisher, the editor and formatter, I am a member of a team of authors with a desire to work together to help each other succeed as well. How great is that?

The Diamond Trade: Great Rewards Attract Dangerous Risk

GREAT REWARDS 

ATTRACT DANGEROUS RISK

Gil Devos with his wife, Nina. His daughter, my friends and I hosted Gill at Lake Keystone in Odessa, Fl recently to work on the book and play in the lake.

The life and times of Gil Devos is chronicled in my next book, A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH. The book will be released in June from Mountain Springs House publishing. The story is about a man from Brussels, Belgium who walks into an Antwerp diamond district merchant’s office and lands a job because he did not know a thing about diamonds.  

Gil had trained to be a mercenary and worked out for months with Claude Goetz, the karate instructor who taught Jean Claude VanDamme. In fact, after quitting a job as an advertising agent prior to that, Gil became a beer distributor in the jungle of Central Africa. Gil probably would have been fighting some tribal lord’s personal war in another remote country had he not accepted the beer distribution job.

This is not the story of a rich kid that goes to college and becomes a success just to please his father. Gil didn’t know his parents very well. A loving grandmother raised him. He struggled to find good jobs. His good looks and “street smart” ways led him to eventually become one of the premier diamond buyers in the business. The merchants of Antwerp taught him well. He learned the craft and the dangerous business of buying rough diamonds from the people who actually flushed the stones out of the mud, rocks and rivers of South America and Central Africa. He made millions for himself and billions for his sponsoring employers in Antwerp.

The unsavory and dangerous part of the diamond business also cost many lives, as great risk always does. It ruins careers and governments as well. Diamonds have also cost Gil well over two million dollars to learn who to trust, and who not to trust.

The book is in the hands of Lee Porche, my very capable and demanding editor. After the manuscript was finished, my friend, retired bush buyer Gil Devos took off on another risky adventure to Sierra Leone, Africa. At 78 years old, he is not much of a trained mercenary anymore. But the lure of an eighteen million dollar potential diamond buy has once again dragged him out of retirement. It could be big. It could be a waste of time. It could be deadly. I can’t wait t see how this adventure unfolds.

Have Your Ever Seen Water Dance?

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN WATER DANCE?

Once upon a time, in Berlin, Germany there was a man named Otto who, in 1939, put a musical water fountain together on a stage, and with a series of pumps, levers, electrical switches and bright lights, created the first “Waltzing Waters.”

Today, in Cape Coral, Florida, Otto’s grandson is doing the same thing. Michael Przystawik grew up in the musical fountain entertainment business. His father, Gunther, and Otto before him created the first and most sophisticated musical, lighted fountains that danced, swirled and swayed to Broadway Show Tunes. Michael has made technical improvements that have brought the fountains into the modern world of jazz, rock and contemporary music. His fountains, some of them over 150 feet wide and sending colorful plumes of water nearly 100 feet in the air to perfectly timed music are now located in many cities and parks around the world.

I recently wrote a book called Dying Dreams. It is a fictional story of a man who dies and enters the “spirit world.” When his children honor his memory by building a park and having Michael install the latest edition of a Waltzing Waters musical fountain, the spirit of their deceased father crosses the mist of the waters as a “portal” to communicate with his mortal family.

For the past forty years I have been associated with Michael’s father, and now Michael, where I have had the opportunity to see his shows hundreds of times. I have heard the comments that have come from the audiences who witness the shows. Many people have been mesmerized and transfixed on the beauty and tranquility they experience while watching something as simple as water “dancing,” and reflect on how they wish their departed loved ones would have liked to see that, and even imagine their faces appearing in the fading mist.

And now, as the future of one of America’s minor entertainment treasures contemplates the future, a possible opportunity exists for the “Water that Dances.” Last week, on April 12, the Waltzing Waters showcased the Hall of Fame induction for the USA Water Ski Foundation held at The Fantasy of Flight in Polk City, Florida. Thanks to the generosity of Kermit Weeks, owner of Fantasy of Flight who hosted the occasion alluding to the possibility that the Waltzing Waters may figure into the plan for something huge, something on a grand scale that he is planning for the property he owns at exit 44 along the Interstate 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando.

Good things take time and great things take even more time. But, let us hope that some of Kermit’s plans materialize in my lifetime so that I don’t have to be watching the progress through the mist of Waltzing Waters. I love it when a plan comes together.

Welcome to my new blog!

Have you ever wanted to know what it is like to experience flying and airplane, landing on water?  Have you ever tried water skiing and wondered what it would be like to ski without any skis at all? Have you lived an interesting and fulfilling life and wanted to try your hand about writing a book based on your experiences?

Well then, I have some wonderful stories to share and some even more wonderful people I want you to meet through my regular blogs that my publisher, Mountain Springs House Publishing has made it possible for me to do. I’ll be a regular on this site on Tuesdays and Thursdays from now on.

Allow me to share some verbal “snapshots” of what you can expect from me in the blogs to come:

I was a scholarship athlete at Miami University, the famous university in Ohio. I thought lettering in a few sports was enough to keep me in school. I learned the hard way that they expected you to be able to read too. That is something I learned to eventually accomplish by the time I was nineteen, thanks to a demanding wrestling coach.

And then, there were the years in the water ski shows at Cypress Gardens where I performed daily, rubbed elbows with a lot of TV personalities, participated in several national television shows live, a couple of films and even an Esther Williams Special.

Real life beyond sports was an eye-opener for me. I taught school, later became and insurance adjuster with a nationally recognized company and moved back to Florida, where I once again, found myself in the tourist attraction business.

And now, at almost 77 years of age, I am still living the dream and telling the stories. Earning a Masters Degree in Fine Arts – Creative Writing that made it possible to tell the stories well. There are dark clouds and bright lights in all the stories just as in the real world. And just wait!  I’ll be talking about who the characters in my book are, and who the real people they represent really are. Some of them you may already know.