O n the list of "Things I Never Wanted To Do," I can now check off "Cross the Atlantic In A Sub-Tropical Storm."

 

Slogging through seven days in 10 to 15 foot seas is as little fun as it sounds. I don't get seasick, but imagine a dull headache, a lighter version of the dizzy kind you got as a kid when you rolled down a hill too fast.

 

The payoff, though, was spending three days in Horta, a small port city on the island of Faial in the Azores – the Portuguese archipelago of volcanic mountaintops sitting two-thirds of the way across Atlantic.

 

Faial is an island of some 12,000 people. At one point, more than twice that number populated it. But 50 years ago, in 1957, a volcano erupted, and made life on the island difficult.

 

Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts responded by welcoming Azoreans to Massachusetts. Kennedy work magic with the federal bureaucracy and managed to invite 12,000 or so folks to the Bay state.

 

A sea-faring people, the Azoreans moved to coastal cities like New Bedford, but they also moved inland to Springfield.

 

So it should have come as no surprise to me, but when I sat down at the seaside restaurant Quebra Mar for a dinner of the local delicacy Guelly Fish with a special sauce, the owner Ernaldo turned out to have visited his cousin in Hartford during Christmas a few years ago.

 

He remembered how beautiful and cold and white and snowy it was, very different from the temperate island climate of Faial.

 

In Horta, if you look west and can see Pico, the next island, it is going to rain. If you can't see Pico, it is already raining, said one local, a transplant from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He moved there 16 years ago, and hasn't looked back once.

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Words can't always describe the enormity of something entirely visual. So, here is a photo essay of the work of hundreds of sailors who visit the port of Horta on the island of Faial in the Portuguese Azores.

Looking south down the marina dock. This is just one wall, and there are multiple other veins of paintings like this.

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S top one, the Bahamas, provided more adventure than I signed up for. While on shore leave on a small island called Guana Cay, the First Mate Tim - enjoying his first night off in three weeks - was walking back to the tender and he fell down and broke his right ankle.

 

Of course, the Guana Cay is so small that it has no medical facilities to speak of, and not at 10:30 at night. We didn’t know how bad the break was, only Timmy – a 28 year old former college hockey player from Rochester, NY - telling us that he was no girly man, but boy it hurt.

 

In the dark moonless night, some local paramedic volunteers strapped him onto a stretcher, carried him to the nearby dive boat/nautical ambulance and ferried him the 30 minute ride across a choppy bay to the Government Clinic on Marsh Harbour.

 

The Captain and I followed soon after in the tender from the yacht Maverick II. When I walked into the Government Clinic, four black Bahamian men were sitting in folding chairs watching white Republican presidential candidates debate on Fox News.

 

We found Tim laying on an exam bed, heavily sedated. Medical equipment that was 20 years old and had seen it better days surrounded him. The physician on duty at midnight wrapped Tim’s leg in a splint, but had no x-ray machine to diagnose the problem other than it was a fractured leg.

 

The Clinic had no overnight beds, and it shut down at 1 a.m., the good Doctor suggested that we get Tim a hotel room, and put him onto a commercial flight in the morning to Nassau.

 

Doctors’ Hospital, a private hospital, would have the best care, The MD said. At the government hospital in Nassau, he said Tim might wait all day.

 

I kept asking the doctor if he could give Tim more drugs to ease the pain, but he ignored it. He gave us a pair of crutches at 1 a.m, and sent us away. So we took Tim to a hotel, and left him with another deckhand.

 

The Captain and I returned to the boat at around 3:45, navigating foreign waters in pitch blackness.

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Law school is really expensive, especially at a private university. Like $23,000 a year for part time night school pricey.

 

I graduated from Syracuse University in 1994 with more than $10,000 in debt, and it took me until 2002 to finish paying it back. When I wrote my student loan checks, I often wondered if I was paying for classes that I skipped, was stoned for, was hungover for, or fell asleep in, and if I was there, had I done the homework?

 

From that student debt encumberance, I learned that financial freedom is intellectual freedom. Since I don’t see myself raking in the big bucks at a firm like Dewey, Cheatam and How after I pass the bar, I am taking that lesson to heart.

 

Once I finish school, I want to be able to apply my newly acquired legal skills to battles that I want to fight, not ones that the senior partners assign me to.

 

Combine that entrepreneurial spirit with my bad case of wanderlust - one that has plagued me for years – and I need to do something to finance my education and travel. The solution is simple: I am taking a semester off to work as a crew member to deliver a boat to Thailand.

 

The yacht – owned by an obscenely wealthy white man from Britain – will start the journey to Southeast Asia from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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Hartford native Elizabeth Torres is a solid human being. She is a survivor, and she is only a college student, attending Central Connecticut State University. She is a journalist and an activist.

 

I’ve known Elizabeth since 2002. And last spring, I was eating lunch with my mom and my niece at a restaurant in Watertown when Elizabeth called my cell phone.

 

She could barely contain her outrage with the “satire” rape story in the CCSU weekly newspaper the Recorder. She wanted the editor fired, and she was passionate about justice here.

 

We discussed how the staff at Echoes from the Streets, where Elizabeth and I worked together, might have handled the problem of printing stories like that one. She calmed down, and looked for a more reasonable, than emotional approach.

 

Editor Mark Rowan stayed on. But I am sure Elizabeth’s Boricua blood is boiling right now over the cartoon that Rowan and the Recorder just published that suggests sexually abusing a kidnapped pre-pubescent Latina.

 

Since I am in Bermuda right now, I can’t phone up Elizabeth and ask her what she thinks of the cartoon. If I know Elizabeth, though, she is at the front lines of the controversy. And I hope she has less mercy on the editor now than I counseled her to have back in the spring.

 

Clearly, as far as student journalism goes, the CCSU Recorder is stirring the pot, but in the wrong way. I read at CTLocalPolitics.com that the problem is not just bad editorial judgment, but a recruiting issue.

 

The Recorder can’t find good students to work for it, the argument goes, so it relies on “less talented” students to fill space, and thus the stupid stuff gets into print.

 

Yes, staffs are thin at college papers, what with students having to work six jobs to pay for their education. But the recruiting issue at the Recorder is a symptom of the larger problem with scholastic journalism: lack of support and vision for the school news missions at all levels of education in state.

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This week, historians and pundits will draw all sorts of conclusions about our world because of the sixth anniversary of something really big and terrifying.

 

I say we need to look back farther, say, 284 years, and let's see what dusty lessons September, 1721 holds.

 

This column comes from deep in the fourth floor stacks of the Berkeley Library on the lovely campus of Trinity College in Dublin, where large leather bound books contain royal British records and correspondence. Instead of studying for law school finals one afternoon this past summer, I examined the English Crown's perspective of the American colonies.

 

In the spring of 1721, fish merchants in Massachusetts were keeping the prize catches for themselves, on the authority of a local law called "For the Better Regulating of the Culling of Fish." The Massachusetts Assembly passed this in May, 1718.

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Editor's Update: It appears as if Matt Ritter was the highest vote getter among seven Democrat city council wanna-bees in Tuesday's Primary. Out of the six nominated by a paltry number of voters, Thom Page was the one left out.

 

Two wanna-be city councilors running in the Sept. 11 Democratic primary have contacted me recently, and asked me to write about them.

 

Assuming that City Council will have relevance in the future, I think it is worth noting that no incumbents contacted me, a sign which makes me think they take their positions for granted, or that the people who reached out to me are ambitious and think I matter more than I do.

 

Whatever the case, I want to respect Thom Page and Matt Ritter for trying to get their message out. I think it is a rare thing for a candidate to communicate directly with the press.

 

So a few days before the big primary, I want to delve and give them the space to communicate with the voters.

 

When Democrats go into the booth on Sept. 11, I think this is information to consider.

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Eddie Perez stands poised to break the $400,000 budgetary threshold for his re-election campaign.

 

The half-million dollar mark isn't far from that, and that boggles the mind. The obvious solution is publicly financed campaigns, but since that is four years away in Hartford at the very minimum, what exactly does that $400,000 mean to the city of Hartford?

 

First, between the primary and the general election, Perez won't likely garner more than 8,000 total votes, which means he is spending $50 per vote. That is about $20 more per vote than Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman spent in their 2006 battle royale.

 

According to the latest campaign finance reports, the money has been rolling into this campaign.

 

Between Art Feltman's $80,000, I. Charles Mathews' $40,000 or so, and Minnie Gonzalez's $9,000, we have $130,000 or so additional dollars. Add maybe $10,000 more for the rest of the mayoral crew, and we are at$540,000 total for maybe 15,000 votes between primary and general, or $36 per vote (still more than the Lamont-Lieberman fiasco).

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