What is my passion in Life?

One of the planes I used to do delivery runs from Island to island in the Bering Sea flown by my friend Dwight Blackburn who would ask me to accompany him on these runs mostly delivering liquors to Native Aleuts.

You are never too old to reminisce about what has been nor are you too young to become passionate about your cause in life.

Unfortunately several of my Journals related to Alaska has gone missing during my global transition from the US to Japan and then to Malaysia. The Iceland was a wooden boat some 65 feet in length and was one of the twelve boats built by the Norwegian Paul Martinez.

To be passionate about how we feel towards the fate of our Nation one does not need to stand on a soap box in the town square and scream at the crowd about it; we just have to look within and untangle the tangles that has been inherent within us from the day we were born. At birth sometimes even our umbilical chord can be all tangled up and the midwife has to free these tangles or we would die of lack of supplies to our brain. Then the chord has to be cut to free us from our mother's womb and in place we are placed at our mother's breast to continue on getting our nourishment and safe comfort; our attachment to her is still closely maintained till we come of age; til then the food we ate the cloth we wore the friends we were allowed to hang out with the religion we belong to etc. all are handed down to us from her and the rest of the family members.
Our sense of freedom comes only after we have broken away from this circle of influences; when we leave for boarding school or college or to work away from our city or village. Even then most of us carry with us our baggage, our back pack containing our past connection to the family and society we had just left but to few this freedom becomes an opportunity to explore the unknown. To seek for what it is that we are truly passionate about in life and how with this inborn passion how we can serve our extended family; the Nation. It is only with absolute freedom from the bonds of our past conditioning can we find the truth about our true passion and hence serve without fear or favor. This journey towards self discovery and understanding of who we are can never be overstated for those whose desire in life is to be of service to the whole.

Flying the Reeves Aleutian Air can be an experience in itself especially when the gales hit these areas of the Pacific Northwest. The plane would fly from Anchorage to Dutch Harbor and then stop at Sand Point on the return trip.

Sometime in 1982-83 after graduating form the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay I left for Alaska tagging along with an artist friend who I had just met when we had a two man show at the Belin Hospital in Green Bay. After  much persuasion and convincing I managed to talk my friend Robert Sergei to take me with him for the summer fishing season in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska in the Pacific North West. I had no idea what i was getting into much less of what was in store for me but after three days of making our way to Anchorage, Alaska, i discovered that I was short of 87Dollars to pay for my plane ticket from Anchorage to Sand Point, the harbor where Rob was to fish from; I had to borrow it from Rob.
On looking back at my actions I am still amazed at how dumb if not reckless i was to have taken such a venture with no back up plan or worse with not enough resources to even make a return trip: I had burned all my bridges behind me without realizing it. Little did i know that at sand Point where we finally landed there was one hotel, one policemen, one post office one restaurant; it was a one horse town with only eight trees standing, the res was Tundra vegetation. It was cold as the wind carried the cold Pacific current even though it was summer. My saving grace came when upon landing the Captain and the rest of the crew for the Iceland met us and the first thing that came out his mouth was the fact that one of the crew members could not make it; I raised my eyes to the grey skies and said, thank you Lord!. I became the fifth member of the Fishing Vessel -The Iceland; I had never fished before and the closest i came to fishing was when i was invited to fish with a fishing rod under the Ibai Bridge in Kuala Terengganu on the east Coast of the Malay Peninsular.I was far from home; I was pursuing my passion not fishing but to travel the world and do things not commonly done and then some. For a brief period of time I was in the Bering Sea doing the "Deadliest Catch" of Halibut ( I had no idea what a Halibut looked like before this) something i could never dream of even if I had tried and all I wanted to see and experience was the out of this world pictures that Rob had taken for his Art exhibition. These days whenever I watched Astro's Discovery Channel's "The Deadliest catch"? I say to myself, I did that, perhaps the first Malaysian to have done it.( The record is still 1982-83)
I spent two years of my life living on Sand Point, but that would mean having to tell a whole episode of how i got there. Suffice to say that with passion and lack of fear for the unknown it is not impossible to achieve beyond one's dream thus making life that much more worth living and living to tell about it makes it more passionate as i kept an on going record in my sketchbooks of most of my travels. One of the reasons why i kept writing this blog is to be able to share my past experiences with a wider audiences around the world which the Internet has allowed me to do. It is also my way of continuing keeping an ongoing journal or 'Self Discovery', having did this and done that is not enough without a good story  or fish tale to shoot the breeze with and sketches and pictures to look at.