Books by Eric Douglas

Thriller fiction and Non-fiction

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  • Mike Scott Thrillers
    • Held Hostage: Search for the Juncal
    • Water Crisis: Day Zero
    • Turks and Chaos: Hostile Waters
    • The 3rd Key: Sharks in the Water
    • Oil and Water: Crash in Curacao
    • Return to Cayman: Paradise Held Hostage
    • Heart of the Maya: Murder for the Gods
    • Wreck of the Huron: Cuban Secrets
    • Guardians’ Keep: Mystery below the Adriatic
    • Flooding Hollywood: Fanatics at the Dam
    • Cayman Cowboys: Reefs Under Pressure
  • Withrow Key
    • Lyin’ Fish
    • Tales from Withrow Key
  • Agent AJ West
  • About the Author
    • Publicity and Interviews
  • Nonfiction
    • For Cheap Lobster
    • Heart Survivor: Recovery After Heart Surgery
    • Oral History
      • Batter Up!
      • Memories of the Valley
      • WV Voices of War / Common Valor
      • Capturing Memories: How to Record Oral Histories
    • Dive-abled: The Leo Morales Story
    • Keep on, Keepin’ On: A Breast Cancer Story
    • WV Voices of War / Common Valor
    • Russia: The New Age
    • Scuba Diving Safety
  • Free Short Fiction
  • Other Fiction
    • Sea Turtle Rescue and Other Stories
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You are here: Home / Archives for Photography

The secret is in how we see ourselves

July 15, 2015 By Eric Douglas

how we see ourselvesIn 1998, I left West Virginia headed for California. I remember thinking the place would be full of health food restaurants and gyms, along with high-end stores. I remember wondering if they would serve iced tea in the restaurants.

I know, I know, I sound really naïve. Believe it or not, I had been out of the state and had even traveled internationally. But those were my perceptions of what “California” was. That’s what we see on television and in the movies. We only hear about beautiful people doing beautiful things. For the record, there are plenty of fast food places, including an ironically named Fat Burger, and lots of not-so-beautiful people.

A few years later, I made my first trip to South Africa. Most of what I’d seen in the news were the shanty towns and the slums with dirt streets. Intellectually I knew there were cities, but it was still a surprise to see everyday people going about their everyday lives in suburbs and cities—both black and white. And both races were working side by side. Apartheid had ended 10 years before.

What I learned from these experiences (and dozens of others) is we what see shapes our perceptions. If all we see is one side of the story, we don’t even know what we don’t know. Recently, I learned about a really interesting website called Looking at Appalachia. It’s a crowd-sourced photo project (that has recently expanded to include audio, video and writing) by Roger May that takes on the perceptions of Appalachia and what is called “poverty porn.’ Poverty porn are those cheap, salacious images that are trotted out every so often to represent the “real’ West Virginia and Appalachia. May grew up in Chattaroy, WV and now lives in Raleigh, NC. This project is breaking down misperceptions and has been exhibited all over, even while it continues to expand.

Just last week, I heard about a similar project called West Virginia Point of View. It’s a collection of photos taken from Instagram. Chris Hodge, who developed it, explains on the site that photos are pulled regularly from the photo service, but then a human curates the photos and decides what to display. This is done to avoid privacy issues. The photos represent real people doing real things; going to baseball games, concerts and whatever else they get into. There aren’t “gritty black and white photos.” Unless, of course, someone uses an Instagram filter.

Poverty and despair are everywhere in the world (including California). But those things don’t represent a complete picture of any place. The trick is to not allow outsiders to dictate that public perception.

Filed Under: Documentary, Photography

Dive in! The Cayman Islands are all about the ocean

June 22, 2015 By Eric Douglas

This is an excerpt from a newspaper travel story in the Charleston (WV) Sunday Gazette-Mail, published 6/21/15. The link is at the bottom to read the complete story.

By Eric Douglas
For the Sunday Gazette-Mail
The author’s wife, Beverly, poses with the 9-foot-tall bronze statue of the mermaid Amphitrite, located at one of the many dive sites around the Cayman Islands.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Rising from the sea floor thousands of feet below, Grand Cayman, along with the sister islands of Little Cayman and Cayman Brac, makes an improbable Caribbean paradise.

The islands are small, without much soil or freshwater, and at the most only rise about 60 feet above the sea level. What they do have is incredible warm blue water with a gentle breeze and year-round warm air temperatures.

And scuba diving. The Cayman Islands have lots of scuba diving.

I’ve been there four times over the last 10 years. The first three times were while conducting safety training for local dive instructors and to do research for my latest novel, “Return to Cayman,” which is based on the island.

On my last trip, my “reason” for visiting was to hold a release party and book signing, with all proceeds from book sales benefiting a volunteer effort to restore a coral reef damaged when a cruise ship dropped anchor on a reef.

My real reason for traveling to Grand Cayman, of course, was the legendary diving.

For the avid diver, one of the best places to stay on the island is Sunset House. Sunset House and My Bar are featured prominently in “Return to Cayman” as well. The resort bills itself as “a hotel for divers, by divers” and it does not disappoint. The entire resort is oriented toward making it convenient to scuba dive, either off one of their boats or in unlimited shore diving for guests.

It’s easy to get there from Charleston. I generally leave out of Yeager Airport on the 7 a.m. flight to Atlanta and get to Grand Cayman in time for lunch at My Bar. It’s a small island, so the commute from the airport literally just takes a few minutes after you clear customs.

Situated about 200 miles south of Cuba, the Cayman Islands are located in the Western Caribbean just south of the Tropic of Cancer. Air and water temperatures hover around 80 degrees with very little variation. The rainy season runs from May through October, roughly corresponding with hurricane season.

The last major storm to hit the island was Ivan in 2004. It tore the island up, tearing roofs off of houses, but since then the island has only suffered on glancing blow from a storm.

– See more at: http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20150621/GZ05/150629971#sthash.thbuPppB.dpuf.

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving, Photography, Travel

Cayman Cowboys plot coming true in Bimini, Cayman

September 15, 2014 By Eric Douglas

Cruise ship docks threaten coral reefs

What happens when you ignore your own environmental surveys in the interest of installing a cruise ship dock to bring in more tourists? Unfortunately Bimini in the Bahamas is in the process of finding out.

The Bahamian government has allowed Resorts World Bimini to dredge the coral reefs and install a new dock so a fast shuttle from Florida can bring in day-trip passengers. The boat can hold up to 1500 passengers at a time, nearly doubling the population of the tiny island. In the process, the dredging and the boat propellers are covering the coral reefs with silt, killing them. The very attraction that drew people to Bimini in the first place is being killed.

While this situation is sad, Bimini isn’t the only place faced with this dilemma. Cruise ships bring huge numbers of passengers to island, injecting cash into the island economy. Grand Cayman, already a destination for as many as five cruise ships a day, is moving forward with an environmental impact study to install a new, larger cruise ship dock.

cayman cowboys cover webThe plot from my first novel, Cayman Cowboys (2005, 2013) touched on exactly this issue. A greedy developer co-opted several key officials from the Cayman government to build a cruise ship dock at the expense of the environment. The book is set at the very real Sunset House (follow Sunset House on Facebook), long-considered the pre-eminent dive resort on an island world famous for its coral reefs and scuba diving and a number of scenes take place at My Bar…world famous for after-dive activities. When I wrote the book, I really thought the people of Grand Cayman would never allow something like that to happen there. Now, unfortunately, I’m not so sure.

The environmental impact study in Bimini said installing the dock was a bad idea. The Bahamian government ignored its own study and allowed the dredging and construction to go forward. I have my fingers crossed that the government of Grand Cayman won’t make the same mistake there. My friends Neal Watson (Bahamas) and Keith Sahm (Grand Cayman) are doing what they can to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Find out more:

Tough Lessons: Cayman Islands looking at Bimini for what not to do

Bimini cruise dock putting reefs in peril

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Filed Under: Books, Diving, Photography, Travel

Hummingbirds in Flight

September 11, 2014 By Eric Douglas

For the last couple summers, I’ve photographed the hummingbirds at my backyard feeder. They are a constant source of amusement and amazement to me.

This year, I decided to set my GoPro camera up by the feeder and see what I could get. In some ways, I like the still photos better. And there are things I could have done with the GoPro to make the video better, especially where I slow it down, but they are still pretty amazing birds.

Enjoy!

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Filed Under: Photography

Honoring a hero in Nags Head’s Wreck of the Huron

February 28, 2014 By Eric Douglas

Wreck_of_the_Huron_Cover_for_Kindle.jpgWhen I wrote the adventure novel Wreck of the Huron, I used the Admiral’s Inquest into the sinking of the ship for much of the background in the story. I wanted the events of that night where more than 100 sailors died off the North Carolina coast to be as accurate as possible.

As it happened, though, one story that I missed in the tragedy was probably the most important of all. In my defense, it wasn’t included in the Admiral’s Inquest because the central character in the story was still in the hospital recovering from his own injuries and wasn’t interviewed.

That night, November 24, 1877, Antonio Williams was on board the Huron when it ran aground near Nags Head on the Outer Banks. Williams was a naturalized US citizen, born in Malta. His heroism that night earned Williams the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valiant efforts to save his fellow sailors. He is the oldest person to ever receive the award. At the time, the medal was given in war time and in peace time. Since World War I, the Medal of Honor has been limited to war time valor.
Steve Lovell, an Englishman, made me aware of Williams’ honor and service after he read my book Wreck of the Huron. As it turns out, Williams eventually retired from the Navy and moved to England to live with his British-born wife. When he died, he was given honors in the England, but more than 100 years later, his headstone is missing and there is nothing on his grave that indicates who was buried there or how he served the United States.

 

Lovell has made it a personal project to obtain a headstone for Williams’ grave and to give the man, the hero, the honor he deserves. He has been to endless meetings with various cemetery officials and met with the stone mason to make the arrangements. He has done this for no reason other than it is something that should be done..

Filed Under: Adventure, Books, Diving, Photography, Travel

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Real Thugs: A Cult of Murder — Small groups of travelers have disappeared all over the mid-Atlantic without a trace. When bodies turn up with what appear to be ritual markings, FBI Agent AJ West is on the hunt for what might be a serial killer. Or something even more sinister. It’s a race against […]

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