Island Born

The memoir, ISLAND BORN, challenges what is possible in love and nature. The author and his partner (and soon-to-be-wife), from vastly different backgrounds in Los Angeles, resolve to follow an intuition and sail "the wrong way around the world” – eastward across the Arabian Sea. Pitted against treacherous conditions that included the volatile social and political situation of the world ashore, they discover what it takes, and what it means, to surpass all previous personal and cultural expectations so that they might truly live, and in the end, truly die.


Twenty-one years old, Gayle becomes pregnant in the middle of their sailing adventure, but her pregnancy does not make them retreat to Los Angeles where they began. They discover a tiny uninhabited island in a remote atoll, as barely discernible as a shake of pepper in the vast blue of their Indian Ocean chart. There they decide to give up their dream ship, and begin a real life journey neither of them could have ever imagined. With the help of an old chief on a nearby island, they build a thatched family home with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, no address, no bills, and no neighbors.


ISLAND BORN seeks to answer the question of whether it is still possible to voyage to an unspoiled place, not only on the globe, but within ourselves. In meeting this risk head on, Frank and Gayle’s voyage takes them to a reality of themselves that confirmed the bare whisper of that initial intuition. Together, they pull up anchor from the seabed of their culture and travel to a place where their determination, their romance, and their lives are challenged beyond the limits of each horizon, but they keep going.