Daniel Hays

Ever wonder what it would be like to drop everything and live on an isolated wilderness island in appalling weather? How would you collect enough fresh water and stay warm? What would you do if you encountered an enormous dead whale washed up in the front garden? What would it be like to find yourself bathed in acid while using the ferocity of a midnight gale to charge your power supply?

Boldly honest and pee your pants funny, this book is written in a cocky, sharply humorous style that kept show more me reading long after I should have been in bed.

Dan's adventures (and misadventures) made me cringe, reflect and laugh out loud. His musings on step-parenthood and on his relationship with his wife are starkly frank. His story made me contemplate life, relationships, and running water (and all those other things we take for granted). Anyone who lives with dogs will relate to Dan's detailed descriptions of some of the drawbacks of living in close quarters with them – yes, we love them, but it can get disgusting.

I am not sure I could do what he did; and I know I would not be able to live with him with the stoicism shown by Wendy. However, beyond all the humor, the book raises the big questions about how we choose to live our lives. show less

On Whale Island - Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave by Daniel Hays is a true life story of the author’s one year stay on a remote island off the coast of Nova Scotia. After becoming bored with the hullabaloo of every day life in the suburbs and running out of money from royalty checks from his first novel, an adventure story co-written with his father, Hays decides to move with his family to an desolate island he already owned for a year. The book is taken from the diaries of the show more family members over the course of the 365 days of isolation. The book is truly one mans flee from the McWorld in an attempt to live deliberately, if only for a short time.

My own obsession with real adventurers stories is enough for this book to remain a permanent fixture on my shelf, but there is another reason why it is being reviewed here.

This book is not a dog book, it is not an Airedale book, to the best of my knowledge no profit goes to any charity, but one of the supporting characters in the book is an Airedale named Abby.

Abby is one of two dogs the author took to Whale Island during his yearlong adventure. Although the Airedale does not play any primary role, she is referred to several times throughout the book and adds greatly to the humor of the story, as any good Airedale would. In my last reading of the book I took notes on each reference to Abby and there are many considering she is not so admired by the author as one might hope. She is introduced as “an overbred neurotic Airedale.”

In one special part of the book the author writes:

I call Abby the “dog” because an Airedale is about as smart as a bag of hammers. Those who disagree with me are a special group of people - Airedale owners - and they will use words like “independent,” “stubborn,” and even “slightly dyslexic” to explain why their dog responds to only about a third of their suggestions.

The author does appreciate this dog, ending the novel with “Abby continues to exult in a continuous brainless yet blissful moment, and I sometimes envy her.”

On Whale Island always comes to mind when I see pictures of Airedales on the beach. I had some free reading time while waiting for some books arriving from the publisher for review, so I picked this up to re-read with the thought of writing a review here. It is an easy read, almost too easy, finished during a layover in the lounge at Charles de Gaulle.

It is a wonderful book in its own right, but any Airedale owner should be amused by the various Airedale antics that really steal the show.

Five paws for this humorous adventure with an Airedale.

My full review: http://www.doggeddogdom.com/news/?p=1406 show less

My Old Man and the Sea by David and Daniel Hays is about a father and son (respectively) and the growth of their love and respect for each other, and perhaps not inconsistently, the flowering of their independence. That in itself is not so unusual, but most fathers and sons don't build 25 ft sailing yachts to sail around Cape Horn.
The tip of South America has probably the worst weather for any kind of sea vessel of any place on earth. It can take months to beat and tack back and forth show more against the howling winds that sweep unhindered by any land mass around the bottom of the globe. They were not so foolish as to sail from east to west, so they took a short cut through the Canal on to Easter Island then back around from the west via the Horn. Their voyage covered 17,000 miles and lasted 317 days.

They had an interesting system of reefing the sails for various kinds of weather. It was color-coded with a mnemonic system that related to fear levels. "Red for the first reef stands for 'mere general fear.' [fifteen knot wind] If it blows over twenty, one turns green with nauseating terror, and secures the green line, which is the second reef. Next if it's blowing over thirty knots and shock has set in (the blood has left your extremities), you pull the blue line for the third reef. If the wind picks up more than that, you're scared to death. White is appropriate. That makes the sail tiny."

The voyage continues as father and son explore their past and prior relationship. David remembers Dan's constant pranks at boarding school that necessitated a plea to the headmaster for reinstatement. Dan fears his father's age and other inadequacies - cooking is a jointly recognized incompetence of his, only half-jokingly referred to as "time spent in the galley area, after which, the food scraped out of the utensils and off the walls is served."

David speculates why small boat voyages became a British specialty after the war: " ... the cold and damp and bad food on a tiny boat were indistinguishable from home; they didn't realize that they weren't in their living rooms." show less

A trio of husband, wife and preteen sell it all and move to an isolated island for a year - escaping the world and society at large - this diary-of-sorts really pulls you along. Daniel Hays shows himself, warts and all, and the struggles that landed them on the island and their time there, good and bad. Only very rarely does the writing get repetitive and self-aborbing - worth the read.