Bill Otey

Beyond Time: Lost at Sea, Near Death, Salvation, Magic, Dreams, and Ghosts in the Water World of Pacific Atolls Bill Otey

It is the story of an adventure as it unfolded in a moment of time, in a place far away, in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. It is a place that holds many secrets, a place unto itself, known to just a few. This story will take you there. The people are real. Some, who like a rare few, got to lead fictional lives once in a lifetime. It is the story of an incredible journey, back in time, to islands nearly beyond reach, aboard a 44-foot sail boat, and the perils of mariners who dare go there. It is the story of the Micronesian people themselves; how they arrived there millenniums ago from out of Asia, and how they persist today living by sheer intelligence, guts, and a small abundance afforded on precious small atolls and in the sea around them. It is the story of the Carolinian Navigators who knit this people into one, able to sail trackless hundreds of miles in carved canoes, without instruments, using only the powerful knowledge of stars, the sea, and the sky, passed to them unwritten from their ancestors, generation after generation, back to the beginning. It is the journal of a Peace Corps Volunteer who got to live among them, as a stranger in a strange land. Who learned the rhythms of life, attuned to nature, without clocks. Beyond Time.