Hesitant Pirate

I always have fancied myself as a latter day pirate.  One of my favorite songs is Jimmy Buffett’s  A Pirate Looks At Forty.

Yes I am a pirate, two hundred years too late
The cannons don't thunder, there's nothin' to plunder
I'm an over-forty victim of fate
Arriving too late, arriving too late

After my eight plus years in the Navy, I like going to sea and I like being at sea. Sailing into port after a long voyage is bItter sweet. You’re back to where you live, but you’re not back home. Home, to me, is at sea. Some swab somewhere said that  the sea is a cruel mistress. But I don’t feel that way at all. She is a mistress of that you can make book on, but I don’t find her cruel. Like any woman that I’ve ever been around, she is demanding and unforgiving, but cruel, I don’t think so.

Anyway to help propagate my swashbuckling image, I drink rum. Mostly wine or beer but when there witnesses, it has to be rum.  I used to drink that cheap ass rotgut $10 a half gallon stuff but now my palate has grown up and I like a better quality quaff. I buy, or should I say stock up on Bacardi when it is on sale being the parsimonious old bastard that I am. My son David brings me Nicaraguan or Cuban rum  back from his Central American surfing safaris. That and eight year old rums are great for sipping. My friend Scott favors me with a bottle of Pyrate Rum every now and then and then I am really in my element.

The one thing that has been the missing link is my cigars. I buy them online by the bundle or box. Now don’t get the idea that I am a rum soaked cigar smelling old pervert. Maybe I am sort of but not totally. I smoke maybe two cigars a month and a bottle of the good rum lasts me for about nine months. I have made the greatest discovery of the twenty first century, ranking up there with a cure for cancer and where the other sock goes after coming out of a dryer.

Hesitant Pirate cigars. Big deal you may think, who cares you may say. I do. I can sit up on my fly bridge with a glass of rum and a Pirate cigar and survey my whole world during this Covad 19 horse crap. I don’t care if it rains or freezes as long as I have my plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of my boat.