C James

But but but... I never use cliffhangers! And I can prove it... search this forum for "I never use cliffhangers" and you'll find it used literally hundreds of times. Welcome, Winemaker! Thanks!! Yep, those seas are horrendous at times, and your Navy has done some truly breathtaking rescues in the area. The Australian Search and Rescue zone stretches halfway across the Indian Ocean, and Australia gets stuck doing SAR for a lot of reckless yachters who venture too far south for safety in those waters. (often one or two a year, especially during the round-the-world races). CJ

Five hundred years before Columbus, Europeans discovered the New World. Their nearby colony thrived for hundreds of years, only to mysteriously vanish.

Trevor hauled down the sails, cut the autopilot, and fired up the engines as they neared the outer channel for the Cocoa Beach Marina at Jetty Park. Motoring in, he remained at the wheel. Even though Julie was the official captain, Trevor made a point of taking the wheel when first meeting his charters; he’d found that doing so right from the start precluded any raised eyebrows when he did so later. There was also the fact that Atlantis was not an easy boat to con in tight quarters and Trevor wa

An hour after nightfall, dirty and sweaty, Trevor climbed back up on deck, nearly bumping into Lisa. “Pew, you stink,” she said, wrinkling her nose. Trevor rolled his eyes as he flipped on the 12-volt deck lighting. “Nice to see you too, Lisa. After working for five hours, including an hour down in the bilges, I do tend to stink.” “What’s wrong with the bilges?” Lisa asked, knowing full well that getting Trevor talking about Atlantis was a sure way to put him in a better mood. Tre

Splash Trevor completed the kickturn, breaching the surface and resuming his freestyle crawl. ‘That’s thirty, twenty to go,’ Trevor thought. As had become his custom, when he reached thirty laps, he’d begin counting down. Splash ‘Nineteen.’ Trevor thought, pulling hard, eager to get the swimming workout over with. Three times a week Trevor worked out in the pool, even when it wasn’t swimming season. His swim team coach demanded it, and Trevor liked to stay in shape, finding

After losing his mother at sea, teenage sailor Trevor Carlson pours himself into running the Atlantis while navigating grief, family pressure, and a guarded love life. As his world expands from school and friendship into romance and dangerous adult secrets, a high-stakes chain of criminal conspiracies and deadly threats forces him into a long voyage toward truth, survival, and hard-won freedom.

May 15th, 1997 The dawn came as with a thunder, a fitting omen for the day. Fifteen miles northeast of Cocoa Beach, Florida, the catamaran Ares, a fifty-five foot charter boat, bobbed in the light northerly chop. The passengers didn’t mind. Not one bit. Their attention was elsewhere; on a structure just onshore to their northwest, which was a collection of pipes and gantries, topped by a lightning rod and holding a large orange tank astride two smaller white columns. At first glance,

The blue flicker of lightning on the horizon lit the night, the air thick and humid, unrelieved by the offshore thunderstorm. Trevor, in his accustomed place at the end of the breakwater, sat watching. It was his favorite place, one where he could be alone with both his thoughts and the moody sea, each of which so often mirrored the other. A muted rumble of distant thunder rolled across the calm, windless waters of the Indian River Lagoon, a fitting accompaniment for Trevor's dark mood. He

It is often taught that Columbus was the first European to discover the new world in 1492, but that is unequivocally wrong. The first Europeans known to have set foot in North America were the Norse. In the waning days of the eighth century, they launched the first of their overseas raids. In the year 793, Norse Longships descended upon the monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, off the east coast of England. With that raid began the long reign of the ‘Terror of the North’, which was what

The Winter 2010 Anthology, Haunted, is up! I'd like to express my sincere thanks to Graeme, our Anthology Coordinator, for his work in organizing and preparing the anthology. I'd like to also thank Steph, for uploading the files and doing her magic with the index. Thanks also to the authors and their editors and betas. Thanks everyone! CJ

A belated happy birthday!

Happy Birthday, Jan!!! :king: :2thumbs:

**************** Yipes... that's a real disaster. Sounds to me like they had a navigation error, or an engine failure, and ended up on a lee shore. But there is no suspense there... The Southern Ocean is notorious for storms, so this was to be expected. That area (the Southern Ocean in the regions southwest of Australia) is literally the fiercest body of water on earth. Rogue waves, monster storms, massive breaking seas... its not a nice place. So, it's no more suspenseful than it getting cold near Antarctica. Exactly!!!! It's just a perhaps-ever-so-slightly-tense situation. Good point on the cat's structural Achilles heel; that's why Trevor was worried earlier about the pounding she was taking under her bridge wing. Wow... those are great vids. The one of the cruise ship wallowing was in the Med... apparently, she had a temporary engine failure (due to a wave smashing into her bridge) and ended up sideways to the sea, which would make her ride very badly indeed. I remember a cruise liner going down of South Africa due to an engine failure. They are lucky is was an older design; the newer cruise ships are even more top heavy. I would not like to be in one that lost power in a storm. What they did to get out of it in that vid was turn into the seas as soon as they got the engine going. Generally, a boat is a lot safer either running before a storm or turning into it. Atlantis has been running before the storms, but now she's in a bad one, and we just saw her wooden sail reduced to kindling. And it was her wooden sail that kept her running downwind. We also know that the netting sail (that Trevor is currently using for bedding)is frail, and could never take a storm. I did, I did! See? Not a cliffhanger. But, there aren't any cliffhangers in my stories. :ph34r: Now, Wildone, I can easily prove you wrong here, about nut allergies... how could anyone in this forum have them? After all, they'd be allergic to me... unless you want to argue that I'm not nuts. :wacko: And how could sweet, innocent me be evil? The timelines match up, in that the scenes are in chronological order. So, Joel's question feel between where we last saw Trevor and where we saw him again in this chapter. Uhoh... is that a threat of goat-roasting? Well, Trevor is safe from running aground; the nearest land is over 575 miles away, and it's Australia. There aren't any islands closer than that, in any direction. You're right, the winds can and do alter; highs and lows rotate in opposite directions, and the winds also change as a low or high passes. There are also prevailing winds to consider... a I'll dig up some wind charts from those days.

I totally agree, and confess!!! So, therefor, I surely do not deserve to get what I'm after, right? So the only way to thwart me is to not give me the King of Cliffhangers award... right?

One of those four people... is me! I'm shocked that only three voted with me... is the conspiracy against me so entrenched? But but but... it can't be a cliffhanger!

He's inside the wave, not on top of it, so it can't be a cliffhanger.

Dawn began, as it so often does, in the east on that troubled day. “Gentleman, we have a problem,” declaimed General Houston. “You can say that again, Houston, we definitely have a problem,” said the janitor, in whom Houston most often engaged regarding affairs of state. Waving and wafting thick sheaves of paper through the air, the General rambled on, “Now, as if the problems here on Earth were not enough, the Sun is acting up.” “Whose son?” inquired the janitor as he ferve

Pro is to Con as Progress is to Congress.

Trevor is getting closer to Australia, you're right. He's about 575 miles southwest of Cape Leewin (the southwest cape of Australia) He's made most of his Southern Ocean voyage. His plan worked; entering the roaring forties did hurl Atlantis east at comparatively high speed, and his wooden wall sail worked, until now... It wasn't all storms and waves.. he even got to have a campfire cookout on that log. And it's a white Christmas... White water is white, isn't it? Thank you!! How does the story display on a cell phone? Can you see the pics as well as the text? Not so! Atlantis isn't on the edge or on the top, she's under that 30 feet of whitewater, so no cliffy! BTW, I even edited the first post in this thread to make it more christmasy... see the Christmas goat? Benji! How could you? The wave itself might not be as big as you think... Rogue waves bound up, and are thus steeper in shape than they can hold, and so they can have large breaking areas relative to their height. Also, even if it was a hundred foot swell, a hundred foot swell that isn't breaking is totally harmless to a small ship. It's only the breaking bit that's a problem, and in this case it's only thirty feet (three stories). Plus, Atlantis is now under it, playing submarine, so no cliffy. Look at it this way... Trevor wanted extra speed, right? Well, he's got it now... Atlantis is moving faster than she ever has before, and could maintain that speed for several seconds. Also, Trevor was heading for Australia, the Land Down Under, and the last we see of Atlantis is her bows are dropping, diving deep, heading which way? Down... Down under... So it's all good, right? Okay, seriously speaking, Trevor does face a few challenges, and you touch on one of them; what happens after the wave, assuming Atlantis survives? When we last saw her, she's beginning to do something called pitchpolling: flipping end over end. If she flips, he cannot right her. He'd be trapped in her overturned hull, with the interior spaces partially awash. He'd die of hypothermia within an hour. So, pitchpolling (described in the glossary on the Atlantis page) is one issue. Will she? We'll find out. The other issue you raise is how far the storm will carry her. Not far at all, because we just saw her wood sail reduced to kindling. That also means she won't be running before the storm, but instead will be taking heavy seas, most likely abeam (from the side). That's a recipie for disaster. There are quite a few other little issues... ones that would be minor under normal circumstances. Here's an example; what if Trevor's bedding (the netting sail and foam) just gets wet? Even that would put him in extreme danger of hypothermia and death.

“Lighting arced across the sky, and a peal of thunder rent the air.” No, Joel decided, that was far too clichéd a way to begin the story. It was supposed to be a horror story, a plot that had been rolling around in his head for quite some time, but try as he might, Joel couldn’t get past the first few sentences. Joel stretched, closed his laptop, and then stepped away from his desk. After pacing awhile in front of his window he donned a dark greatcoat, then stepped outside into t

Fall 2006 Anthology

It's Christmas season, so a chapter with a nice Nordic name, "Maelstrom" is up. :music: :music:

Hey now! That's just not possible... I never use cliffhangers! :blink:

I've seen the new system: if you can use Efic, you can use this, and it is far better. It's very easy to use (easier than efic) and has some awesome features. I'll mention just one; you can set a chapter to post whenever you want. So, if upload it (similar to Efic, only easier) and set it to post in three days, at noon (or whenever). Or right away.

Sometimes, I don’t know why I bother. Three weeks. That’s how long it’d been since my most recent move, just the latest of too many, and this one landed me in Fort Pierce, Florida: humidity capital of the world. It would be easy to blame my dad. Easy, but not really right, exactly. It’s his job as a consultant that caused the last three moves, so it wasn’t his choice. Then, there’s the mess the moves make of my life: losing all my friends and having to keep starting over. The only prob