My love of the ocean comes from my Uncle Jerry. He had an open fisherman with a tuna tower on it. A fast gas guzzling boat with twin Volvos named the “Busch-1. Every weekend in the late 70’s and 80’s, he terrorized the South Florida Gulf Stream slaying Dolphin Fish (Mahi-Mahi). Uncle Jerry started my military training off during my early high school years, by coxing me to do back flips off the top of the Busch-1 tuna tower. It’s an elevated platform about 15 feet high in the center of the boat.

One time he started the boat up and accelerated off towards the horizon just after I jumped, leaving me adrift for about ten minutes. I was twenty miles off shore and with hundreds if not thousands of feet of water below me. I was astonishingly calm. It was absolute luck he found me many minutes later. As I would later learn, searching for and finding a small object in a vast ocean is a much more luck than skill. Thankfully, the ocean was very calm and he found me. One of my young cousins was on the boat with him and yelled to me as they pulled up, “We almost couldn’t find you.”

I wasn’t ready to start swimming to shore yet, but I was contemplating what I was going to do. My Uncle almost threw up when we made eye contact. He was really scared. What I liked about my mindset at that early age was my thoughts towards problem solving. I gave myself a matter of fact – this is bad and I tried to figure it out. Something the Air Force honed in me and I continue to use in my capitalist life.

What did your youth tell you about what you should be doing? Now later in life, are you doing it? Have you surrounded yourself with people that are doing what they should be doing?

If not… you might want to start.

Authored By: Joseph Barnard, Retired Pararescueman Officer

Click Here to View Joseph’s Bio.

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