Boone and Emily looked at each other, a silent agreement passing between them.
“So… if you’re interested…?”
Boone reached for Emily’s hand as he smiled at Anika. “What island?”
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Wayne Stinnett’s Rising Spirit is available on Amazon HERE.
I wanted to do something a little different in this afterword. Yes, I’ve got oodles of thank yous to dole out and they’ll be along shortly. But first… this is a work of fiction. Now, one of the things I enjoy in my writing is the research, and I strive for accuracy when depicting a place. That being said, I certainly took a few liberties in this book and I thought it might be fun to let you all in on some of them. So, if you’d rather not “peek behind the curtain”, then skip ahead!
First: Caribbean Reef Sharks. No, they have never bitten a diver in Saba. I did hear they had begun displaying a little aggression around some lionfish culls, but my scene with Chad was entirely fiction, a scene that popped into my head when I was diving a Saba site that had four or more of the beautiful creatures. I tried to mitigate some of the sensationalism of that scene by having Lucky pull up the International Shark Attack file to find out how rare attacks actually are. So… when you see a “reefy,” sit back and enjoy the graceful creature. It isn’t going to bother you.
The airport: Why did I place a WinAir Twin Otter on the cover headed toward the airport from the southeast when ninety-nine percent of flights will come from the northwest? Because it looked cool. Also… I wanted you to better see the Hell’s Gate side of the island as well as the famous airstrip, and Saba Tourism was kind enough to provide me with a marvelous photo to use on the cover. Also… I got the rights to a fantastic shot of the exact type of plane that would be used, courtesy of an excellent photographer and airport enthusiast, Rolf Jonsen. Full disclosure: that plane is diving down to land at St. Barts, not Saba. Finally, pilots do sometimes land from that direction, if the winds require it. And since Boone and Captain Every were coming over from Statia… “doing the triangle,” which they don’t do much anymore, I figured that was another reason they might come in from that angle.
Volcanoes: Just to be clear… Saba is not going to blow anytime soon, probably not during our lifetimes, or our children’s lifetimes. But where’s the fun in that, if the Servant thinks this? Saba is very quiet, geologically. Although, I did stick my hand under the warm sand at the Hot Springs dive… and felt the intense heat in a deeper part of The Sulphur Mine… so it’s easy to let the imagination run wild.
Dive sites: The nautilus shell that Chad shows off. Fact: It is a lawn ornament and it exists. Got some great photos of it and baffled my divemaster until Sea Saba told me what it was. Fiction: It’s actually at the Ladder Labyrinth dive site, not Hot Springs. Another liberty I took: the Customs House dive is not typically done as a night dive but, for obvious reasons, I needed that to be the location. The next nearest site, Porites Point, wouldn’t have a view of the customs house up on the cliff.
Over to the island of Sint Eustatius, or “Statia”: I’ve been there twice—much of the content in the chapters set there is a reliving of some old memories. I am sad to report that Win, the German owner of the Kings Well, has passed away. I decided to keep him in the book. It was from him that I got my very own Statian Blue Bead. And the Smoke Alley was closed by the time of Irma, but I liked the location and chose to bend reality to the whims of my fiction. Statia is such an undiscovered gem and Boone and Emily will probably find themselves back there someday.
And here’s a little fact-versus-fiction throwback: in Deep Shadow, I mention a KMar police boat operating between Saba and Statia. Well, on my trip to Saba to research this book I spoke to a KMar officer (KMar is a branch of police of the Dutch armed forces) and he said they didn’t really have their own boat for that, but used the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard instead. So that’s why the cutter Puma had to be brought in.
Hurricane Irma: This hurricane dealt significant damage to numerous islands in the Leewards, no doubt about it, and it was record-breaking in its strength. But, of the 134 deaths attributed to Irma, ninety-two of them were actually in the United States. No one died on Saba or Statia. All things considered, Saba weathered the storm with minimal damage and was back up and running in an incredibly short period of time. Electricity was restored in twenty-four hours, communications shortly thereafter, and the entire island went out and cleaned everything up. An interesting bit of irony… later that month another Category 5 storm, Maria, swept into the Leewards. Her winds largely missed Saba but it gave them twenty-three inches of rain. Remember what Croc said about how it would all be green again if they got good rain? He actually said words to that effect, in a video taken just after Irma. And sure enough, when I visited the following year, ten months after Irma, the foliage was lush and green. The rain of a second hurricane helped repair the damage from the winds of the first.
In the interests of the book, I certainly hyped the storm… although, to hear some of the stories from the Sabans who lived through it, I may not have done it enough justice. I was just looking at my notes as I write this afterword and one resident up on The Level said their winds were estimated at 225 mph! (this individual inspired the idea for the whistles, which they distributed throughout the household when the winds became terrifying). And the seismometer on Guadeloupe picking up Irma… sounds really awe-inspiring, right? Actually, it’s quite common for that to happen when a hurricane approaches.
And now for some hefty thank yous! I and my scuba buddies visited Saba in June 2018 and I was able to pack in a surprising number of interviews and tours to help with the research of this book. First and foremost, Sea Saba is without a doubt one of the best ops I’ve had the pleasure to dive with. Great boats, great dive instructors, and a well-appointed shop. Lynn and Mel at Sea Saba were fantastic (and both beta read this book, making sure I didn’t make a hash of describing their island paradise). They seemed to know nearly everything I asked, and if they didn’t know, they’d call someone who did. Thanks to Steve Knight, a dive instructor at Sea Saba, who gave me great insights into free diving and shallow water blackouts.
Ryan Espersen, an archaeologist at the Saba Heritage Center, took time out of two busy days to sit down with me over Long Haul pizza, regaling me with a dazzlingly diverse number of historical facts, before taking me and my mates all the way down into the old sulphur mine—I can’t thank you enough! Tricia, up at Scout’s Place, for some great information about Hell’s Gate (and the Passionfruit Martini was excellent), Garvis Hassell and James “Steady Peddy” Johnson, two multi-generational Saban taxi drivers who gave me a phenomenal amount of useful tidbits about the people and culture on the island. Thanks to Andries and Eva of El Momo cottages for the jaw-dropping tale of your experience during Irma. The idea of holding the bathroom door shut against the wind haunted me. A big thank you to all the Saba Lace ladies who spent some time educating me about their art of “Spanish Lace” as well as recounting various experiences of the hurricane.A big thank you to Will Johnson. Will invited me up to his beautiful cotta
ge on The Level and I chatted with him on his porch for a long while about all sorts of things. The cow kicking the seismometer? That was his anecdote. The unofficial historian for Saba, Will was a senator and governor ad interim on Saba for nearly forty years and has accumulated a mind-boggling amount of records and historical photographs, many of which can be seen on his website: www.thesabaislander.com. He’s also an author! Alas, I was never able to catch a moment with the legendary James “Crocodile” Johnson—hardly surprising, as he really is out in the wild, keeping the astonishing trail system in good order. Guess I’ll just have to go back.
Over on the island of Statia, thanks to the new owners of the Golden Rock Dive Center, Sarah and David, who were kind enough to answer some questions about the current state of the island. I have a special affection for the shop, as it is where I first learned to dive, taking lessons from the previous owner, Glenn Faires. In the interests of symmetry, when it was time to get an advanced certification, I did it there too. I was sad to hear that their building by Ro Ro pier was destroyed (sending them to a nearby temporary location) but I’m very pleased to learn that the original location will soon return! Thanks also to Win and Laura at the Kings Well. My visit with them is a bittersweet memory.
Thank you to all of my beta readers: Lynn Costenaro, Melanie Marks, Chris Sorensen, John Brady, Dan Sharkey, Peter Johnson, Dana Vihlen, Drew Mutch, Mike Ramsey, and James Cleveland. You all kept me accurate and helped me to flesh out a few plot points (and strip down some others). Thank you to Terence Zahner from the Saba Diving booth at the Beneath the Sea Expo for the information on birding in Saba… sorry about what I did to the birdwatcher. And a special thank you to Angela Church, for allowing a certain Yorkipoo to make her fiction debut.
A huge thank you to Saba Tourism and Cees Timmers of TVC Advertising for the gorgeous photo of Saba, Rolf Jonsen for the dynamic photo of the plane, Shayne Rutherford of Wicked Good Book Covers for yet another beautiful cover, Marsha Zinberg of The Write Touch for her on-point editing, Colleen Sheehan of Ampersand Book Interiors for her excellent formatting, Kristie Dale Sanders for her chapter header of the Saba silhouette, and Gretchen Tannert Douglas and Sondra Wolfer for their keen-eyed proofreading skills and suggestions.
Thank you to ACX and Audible studios. It was my decades of narrating audiobooks that led me to try my hand at writing, and though there are numerous other studios I can thank for many of those books, it was the symbiosis of narrator and author through ACX that led to conversations with specific authors and finally set me on that path. And… on that note…
A huge thank you to Wayne Stinnett and Michael Reisig, two phenomenal action adventure writers who have given me sage advice, encouragement, and support. When I say “I wouldn’t be here without them,” there isn’t an ounce of hyperbole in the assertion.
Thank you to all the readers who read my first book. Many of you reached out to me and shared your own experiences under the sea and in the islands. Rest assured, I was taking notes.
And finally, I said it in the dedication to the last book, and I’ll say it again here: thank you to Mom and Dad, for taking me to the Caribbean many times when I was young. You gave me a mask, snorkel, and “flippers”—yes, we called them flippers back then, so sue me—and I spent day after day with my eyes under the surface, discovering the wonders of our oceans. Beats Disney World.
Born in East Tennessee, Nick Sullivan has spent most of his adult life as an actor in New York City, working in theater, television, film, and audiobooks. After recording hundreds of books
over the last twenty years, he decided to write his own. Nick is an avid scuba diver and his travels to numerous Caribbean islands have inspired this series.
For a completely different kind of book, you can find Nick Sullivan’s first novel at:
www.zombiebigfoot.com
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