below you'll see a whole bunch of pictures from a vacation to Roatan, Honduras, from 23 december 1999 to 2 january 2000. there's plenty of annotation for each image, and each thumbnail is a link to a larger image. the large images are meant to be viewable on an 800x600 display, so their maximum size is about 600 pixels high or 800 pixels wide, and none are larger than 100K.
these are mostly pictures of elysse, because she is far, far, far more photogenic and beautiful than i. we also did a couple of bettie page-style photo shoots (with elysse as bettie, of course)...
how do you tell a story like this? well, begin at the beginning, then go until the end, then stop.
| aaarr, she be a worthy sailin' vessel... this is the only long-range exterior shot of the boat that turned out from the four rolls we developed. (the others haven't been developed, yet.) this is the ship on which we lived for a week and a half, the one on which jesse still lives, the wanderer (originally named lady hawk, but renamed by a hollywood movie crew...). if i recall correctly, she measures 58 feet from bow to stern, and displaces about 50 tons, and under full sail can do about 15 knots. |
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| the wanderer is pretty nice on the inside, too. there's the captain's quarters in the stern (with its own head and shower), a full galley (kitchen, that is), the lower salon (like a living room), another head and bath, a midship cabin, and the bow cabin. in this shot, you're standing in the lower salon and looking forward to the head and midships; the green metal tube that runs from the ceiling to the floor (down the hallway) is actually the forward mast. in the distance, you can see the two bunks in the forward cabin. that was where i stayed... falling asleep to the clacking of the clamshells on the posts of the dock. to answer some inevitable questions: the shower is salt water, and the head flushes by suction into a holding tank. don't drink from the faucet (unless you want to go crazy), and don't put anything into the head unless you put it into your mouth, first. |
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| and this is what you'd see if you stood in the same place and turned around... the oriental rug on the floor of the lower salon, the essential life support device (the alvarez acoustic guitar, of course), and steps leading up to the galley, where elysse stands at the table wondering what the hell i'm taking pictures of. you can barely make out next to her the stairs leading up to the deck, and i think that's her dad's hand on the rail. through the door behind her is the captain's cabin, with the television and DVD player. (it's a rough life to live on a boat, you know!) |
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| when not out sailing, we kept the wanderer moored at brick bay, a "resort" hotel in the jungle which happens to have something akin to a marina. there were other boats in the bay --- these are a few of those other boats. it's also a good shot of the jungle and hills that make up the island... |
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| we docked the boat with the stern in, so that the bows pointed out into the bay. here's a shot from the bowsprit, looking out into the bay at the jungle on the other side. apparently i'd set the aperture incorrectly on the camera, because this came out really really dark... i also seemed to have a problem holding th camera level, which is evident throughout most of the pictures here --- oops. |
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| one of the permanent residents at brick bay is a monkey named pancha. pancha is pretty friendly... usually she resides in a little house out in back of the hotel, where she can climb in a tree, but for the first few days we were there pancha stayed out in the foyer, tethered to the posts that supported the common room. | 
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| pancha likes for people to pet her, despite the signs reading "don't pet the monkey." if you show any interest in petting her, she'll walk over to you, lay down, and point with a limp hand to the place she wants you to scratch. | 
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| but whatever you do, don't do too good of a job of petting pancha, or else she will like you. if she likes you, she'll latch on to you and won't let go. elysse got a little too close, and then wound up making the "oh no, i've got a monkey on me!" face. (the lighting turned the picture into a silhouette, unfortunately...) | 
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| here's a back view, so you can see pancha's prehensile tail in its death grip on elysse' midsection. her brother peyton was also very interested in the monkey, until this happened to him, too. | 
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| once pancha latches onto you, there's not a lot you can do. the only sure-fire way to get her to let go is to go to the pool and begin to get in. pancha is like a little kid who doesn't like to bathe, and she smells that way, too. so, if you take off your shoes and begin to step down the ladder into the pool, pancha just lets go and goes for the benches, which is where we see her in this picture, just after letting go of elysse. that's one of the guys from the hotel tying her to the post of the poolside gazebo. incidentally, pancha was so dirty and nasty that elysse' white blouse had great big brown stains on it wherever pancha's fur touched it. ick. | 
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| here's a close-up (cropped out of the above picture), for a better look at the ball of fur that is actually a monkey. | 
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| i tried to stay behind the camera, lest i break the lens. however, it is in fact elysse' camera, and for some strange reason she likes to take pictures of me. here's a shot of the muppet in his natural state, playing the guitar. it's one of those "i'm at home anywhere there's a guitar" kind of things, i suppose. we're sitting on the deck while docked at brick bay, by the way. | 
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| this is a beautiful shot of the honduran sky as backdrop to the most beautiful sight in the known universe, one miss elysse duncan. she is sitting, of course, on the bowsprit of the wanderer as it sits docked in brick bay. in fact, she's in exactly the same spot as she was on christmas night, 25 december 1999, when the breathtaking beauty of the stars and the astounding beauty of her soul became too much for me, and i asked her to marry me. (she said "okay".) | 
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| here's a crop out of that one, because i like that picture a lot. | 
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| a rare land-based shot of the skipper and his wife... er, that's elysse' dad jesse, and her step-mom margi. in this shot, they're actually laughing at elysse for having pancha attached to her. | 
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| the wanderer is, indeed, a sailing vessel. i awoke one morning to the unmistakable sensation of the boat rising and falling on open water. when i crawled out of the forward hatch i discovered we were under full sail just after dawn. it was my second time ever out sailing (two days after the first time), and it was amazing. unfortunately, after about fifteen minutes i noticed a fifteen inch long rip in the mainsail, and we had to pull in the whole sail lest the hole got larger. and then, only then, did elysse emerge from the bowels of the ship with her camera. here we see the skipper and margi on the stern, and a muppet sitting under the boom of the freshly drawn mainsail. | 
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| another silhouette of jesse and margi, enjoying the caribbean sun in the early morning... margi's driving, actually, steering from behind the gigantic steering wheel. | 
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| and here's one of me, enjoying the ride before i realizing that she was taking pictures of me. | 
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| yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's the "take the damned picture" face! also a very good shot of my pot belly beneath my t-shirt. *sigh* | 
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| elysse hung upside down off the bowsprit to get this shot of the hull breaking the water. it was cloudy that day, so the picture turned out unnaturally dark, and you can't tell that the anchor is hanging there, as well... | 
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i imagine that my parents would freak at the sight of this picture, envisioning such nasty horrors as me plummeting into the water or whatever, but this is actually a very fun way to ride on the boat --- grasping the rigging (those are steel cables i'm holding) and leaning out so that your field of view holds nothing but water. my only fear was that my glasses might fall off. as a point of trivia (i learned a lot on this trip, you see), that's the honduran flag on the rigging, flown as a courtesy since the wanderer is docking in honduras, but its port of registry is kemah, texas... the courtesy flag is to be flown from the starboard rigging, higher than the port of registry flag (the us flag on the stern). |
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| not every day was sunny, and we didn't always move under the power of the wind. the wanderer has a huge diesel engine (which lives under the galley) to move it around without wind. on this overcast day, we were just interested in getting back to brick bay before dark. this picture was another of elysse' bettie page poses. | 
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| another shot of the happy crew... | 
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| and another of mister and missus skipper... the sky was breathtaking that night... these pictures hardly do it justice. | 
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here begins the llewyn-worshiping section of the slide show... basically, i'm really fond of elysse and her looks, and i love having lots of pictures of her. we tried for a sort of bettie page style photo shoot at las palmas (another resort, which was still under construction when we visited), and some silly swimsuit shots by the poolside...
we all got dressed up on new year's eve, to spend the evening in West End, which was the town on the west end of the island. elysse outshone everybody, if not because she was the best-dressed and most beautiful, then because she had all sorts of glitter on her face and glow-in-the-dark stars and moons on her chest and arms. again, as marvelous a contraption as the modern camera may be, it couldn't capture the moment accurately (you can't see the glitter, and the "auto-focus" didn't focus properly). as an aside... the ladies got dressed for the evening en route to brick bay from las palmas, where we'd spent the whole day snorkeling over coral reefs. when we reached the dock at brick bay, the girls jumped off the boat to pull the lines... in their fancy dresses. quoth jesse, "it isn't every day that you see the dock crew in evening wear." |
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| here's elysse in a very bettie page pose, hiding under the mainsail boom. | 
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| and a close-up of the same. (these are heavily doctored, because i wasn't careful enough to ensure that the sun was completely out of the frame... i'm very much an amateur photographer.) | 
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| llewyn works her magick in the forward cabin... | 
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| so, having never attempted to be a swimsuit model before, how does one go about posing for a photographer? you start off being a little bored... | 
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| ...and then you stretch a little... | 
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| ...and then you stretch some more... | 
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| she's pretty skinny, but not skinny enough to hide behind that thing... | 
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| after a cold swim, we spy a sunbathing beauty... | 
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| ...with a little bit of bothering from her little brother, peyton... | 
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| ...and sleeping beauty awakens from her poolside nap... | 
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| i basically spent my time in the pool hunting peyton with the supersoaker. this picture illustrates how extremely caucasian i am. it's unhealthy-looking. luckily, these pictures are from the first day we spend in roatan --- by the time we left, i had a sunburn and some decent, non-pasty color. | 
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| after shooting pictures on the beach at las palmas for about ten minutes, we discovered while attempting to reload the camera that it hadn't been loaded in the first place. d'oh! so all those great shots we thought we were getting we instead lost to a bit of stupidity. oh well. here's the winding-the-film shot, the first one taken after reloading. (elysse was supposed to be on the left of this shot, but that part turned out completely white in the print. it makes a good landscape shot, though...) | 
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| hey, look over there! *click* (i actually wanted a shot of the butterflies and dragonflies in her hair...) | 
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| i had a hard time deciding whether this picture looked better as a close-up or a long shot... the vistas are beautiful backdrops, but the foreground is captivating in its own right... so the next few images appear in both wide and narrow views. | 
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| if her expression looks a little odd, it's because i snapped the shutter as she was saying the second word in the sentence, "i love you"... | 
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| las_palmas_13.jpg | 
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| las_palmas_13-crop.jpg | 
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| las_palmas_14-wide.jpg | 
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| las_palmas_14-crop.jpg | 
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| a coral beach can be pretty rough on the knees, so she decided to lounge with the local flora for a while... | 
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| ...but that tree was actually covered with ants... d'oh! | 
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| on your mark... get set... | 
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| suprise! | 
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| and again in black and white, to better cop the bettie page look... | 
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| llewyn peeks from behind the foliage... | 
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| who doesn't like to watch a bather shed her clothes? | 
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| (i find the pose vaguely reminiscent of the birth of venus...) | 
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| (again in a close-up.) | 
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| is that a siren on her way to work? | 
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| las_palmas_03.jpg | 
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| las_palmas_03-crop.jpg | 
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we shot six rolls of film in 12 days. one turned up blank, and you see about 70% of three more rolls. the last two haven't yet been developed. there was also an underwater camera and a disposable camera, so there should be even yet still more photos to add to this page at some point... but that's all for now.
of course, we didn't get photos of everything we did on our vacation, but if you can't take some memories in your head and your heart, then you didn't really enjoy your vacation, now, did you?
| and, last but not least, a parting shot... a beautifully bettie-like black-and-white of llewyn on the deck... you can find it in color here (45K), and in false color here (54K) (it was a dark print that didn't scan well) | 
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Sun Jan 9 02:38:05 EST 2000
