When I connected with my future wife Elizabeth. We were sailors. She owned and lived aboard a beautiful twenty-eight foot deep ocean sailing boat, and was a dock master at the Charleston City Marina. I stopped there to see a doctor about the stiches I put in my head to close a cut received from an accidental jibe. Sara was about to cross to Europe. I had no crew but it was late August and there were already hurricanes making their way across the Atlantic.
We had a truncated but intense flirtation. When I finally left, she decided she wanted to sail with me to Africa via the Red Sea. However, she had to put her boat in storage. I thought. “Oh well, she seemed like a keeper.”
Low and behold she showed up in Palma de Mallorca a few months later. She and I had a magical Christmas in Palma, the perfect place for a love affair. It was during this period when we sailed in and out of Palma that we were offered a job to go to Greece to look for a box of WWII lost gold nearby Corfu (Go to podcast Lost Buried Gold in the Greek Islands in this website).
My new partner, Elizabeth, was first and foremost a sailor. She was keen to sail down the Red Sea to Africa, but she was not willing to be a smuggler. However, I had an alternative plan to produce a new type of television series, a reality series that was real and unscripted. Keep a video camera shooting while doing my usual sailing to unusual places, even dangerous places film the smuggler’s lifestyle. The sailors who lived my lifestyle were part of a rarefied non-fraternal group. We would be filming an alternative life about which few people even had a clue.
When I sailed out of Florida months before the filmmaker, who helped develop the model for the reality series, couldn’t leave. We needed a broadcast-quality videocam, a tripod, and more importantly a cameraman. More importantly, we needed a broadcast company willing to help us produce this project.
We took the ferry to Athens and spent three days putting together a twenty page proposal for a Red Sea Series, including treatments of some potential episodes, based on my previous experiences in that area. next we visited ERT, the Greek national television company. They were fascinated by our project but also skeptical. In a meeting with the head producers, we were told, “This is a very attractive project. But ERT cannot give the shooting resources to a couple of total strangers with no previous track record. If you are who you say you are, take a camera and do your voyage. If you come back with good footage we will give you an editor and an editing suite here. This type of project is something entirely new and exciting in our industry”
Sara was moored with all the fishing boats, right in the old port of Corfu. We returned undaunted and encouraged. The waterfront community adopted Sara and pointed introduced us to some local filmmakers. We ended up buying a broadcast video camera from a tv station that was going under. We also found one of their camera operators willing to go on a voyage with us. Nicos was an art student just out of his national army service. He was perfect. Nicos loved the Matrix and he spoke English. All the Red Sea clips were shot on that voyage.
Four months later we took the “Red Sea Voyage” trailer to Rome where we had a few contacts. It was there we dug up a well known filmmaker George Bottos who listened to our ideas and told us he wasn’t interested. An hour after we walked out of his place, he called. “I watched your tape and you two look good on screen. Maybe we can do something.”
We did a voyage with George and his camerawoman with much better equipment. George shot enough footage for some episodes. He also got the attention of the big cable network in Italy to offer us an editor and studio to make an episode for their travel channel. the clips from Europe came from that project.
There is a lot more to our television story but I think I’ll save it for a podcast.