Joel Scott wrote the book on living life to the fullest.
Actually, the Chemainus author has written a book called Arrow’s Flight, based partly on some of his many life experiences, at least, but otherwise considered fiction. Scott, 78, has never shied away from taking chances, making the most of different opportunities and doing things initially outside his comfort or familiar zone.
After all, You Only Live Once despite novelist Ian Fleming’s labelling of Twice in his acclaimed book title.
Scott’s book is about a West Coast commercial fisherman named Jared Kane whose life has been plagued by bad luck and blackout drinking. Kane inherits Arrow, an old 46-foot wooden sailboat and sees a chance for redemption with his friend from prison, Danny MacLean, and plans an offshore voyage sailing from Vancouver down the Pacific Coast to California and into the South Pacific.
“Commercial fishermen luck into a sailboat, thinking it’ll change their life for the better,” Scott noted.
The author draws upon some of his own fishing and sailing knowledge in painting the descriptive pictures in the novel, although “there’s no real direct relationship,” he added.
Scott was born in Ashville, Manitoba and raised in Ste. Rose du Lac, Manitoba. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Winnipeg and spent five years in London, England in the early 1960s.
“In those days, it was really easy to get a job in London,” Scott pointed out.
While travelling and working in England, he met a halibut fisherman. Scott made contact again after leaving England and got a job for several years fishing on the West Coast.
He eventually returned to school and obtained a librarian’s degree in Vancouver before moving to Nanaimo to work for the Vancouver Island Regional Library for two decades.
Being around books all the time, “I always thought I’d like to write at some point,” Scott said.
But, after taking early retirement, first came a four-year circumnavigation of the globe with wife Hilary and son Ryan aboard a 41-foot ketch he had bought in Seattle a couple of years earlier.
“The boat was kind of sitting there and it was for sale,” he recalled. “So we bought it, this really, really nice offshore boat.”
It was put to the test, along with the family crew, during the circumnavigation from 1992 to 1996 and both the boat and people aboard survived quite nicely.
During the trip, Scott wrote Arrow’s Flight, a novel with a sailing background based on their experiences offshore.
“There’s not really that many books about sailing,” he pointed out. “I’ve read probably every sailing book there is.”
Scott put his book out there again following the trip, but got no response from publishers and shelved it. In 2015, he entered the novel in the Cedric Literary Awards for unpublished B.C. seniors and won the fiction prize. The following year, he won the short story competition in the same contest for his work, Jack.
“It encouraged me,” Scott said of the awards.
That prompted him to re-submit the novel to publishers and it was picked up by ECW press, a Toronto publishing house, in January of 2017. Scott then signed a book contract for a series.
Arrow’s Flight, the first book in The Offshore Novels, was published on March 8 of this year with the second book, Arrow’s Fall, slated for publication in the spring of 2019.
Scott has a third entry in the Offshore series ready and also a compilation of short stories.
“We’ll see how this goes and the next one goes and they’ll decide how they want to do it,” he said of future releases.
You can find a review and plot summary of Arrow’s Flight if you Google Arrow’s Flight Miramichi Reader.
Scott said it took him “probably about four months” to write Arrow’s Flight. “The editing process takes probably as long.”
Scott, who lived in a floathome in Maple Bay after his four-year trip and then moved to Crofton before coming to Chemainus 10 years ago, plans to continue writing now that he’s got the bug.