Hello..my name is Rod, I’m 55 and have unexpectedly found myself on the journey to the top of the mountain once again. My life has been one of my own choosing and what many would consider Peter Pan like. Most people work with the goal of having the financial foundation and freedom to pursue their passions in life. I was fortunate enough find my passion & true place in life at an early age. not only did I find it but I was exceptionally good at it and I turned that passion into a career. At the age of 14 living in Southern California I started working as a deckhand on a sport fishing boat. Not an opportunity available to most 14 year olds if For no other reason than the physical demands. For me it was a combination of being 6’4 235 lbs and at the right place at the right time. Not only did I feel more at home on the deck of a boat than any place else but everything about fishing offshore just came naturally almost intuitively for me. A few years later I was awarded a scholarship to UCLA not for sports but for art I had a choice to make and I chose to become a licensed captain. So the adventure began!… I have spent the last 30 years traveling the world fishing. A few years commercially fishing for swordfish (as seen in the movie a perfect storm ) but mostly on the sport fishing side and mainly catering to the most affluent. The boats I ran where not the typical tourist charter only working seasonal tourist traffic then starving in the off season. It was always summer somewhere and there was always another new billfish or tuna hot spot to be discovered and that’s where you would find me. It was a life money can’t buy and most can only dream of. At 50 I was 6’6 245 lbs and more fit than most gym rats 20 yrs younger, owned several boats and a solid charter business. my plan was set, start working 6 months out of the year and enjoying the family I had recently started. Life was perfect until it wasn’t! long story short i suffered a spinal cord injury, bone shards migrating from an injury 15 years earlier. I now have limited use of my legs although I’m not in a wheelchair yet i jokingly say I don’t walk I fall in a general direction. As doctors where trying to figure out what was going on COVID hit and my wife lost her job, I was put on disability and we began liquidating and scaling down to weather the storm and figure out the next move was going to be. I inquired about programs available for people on disability to learn new skills that would allow them to earn a living again, there are NONE. So what can I do, I’ve got all this knowledge and experience but it’s not real transferable to a lot of things and im financially tapped out. Time to get creative, don’t laugh at me guys but something that i always noticed on the boats, around the docks and dockside restaurants was the fishing related t-shirts people where wearing, most of them are hideous! They are either cartoonish and just plain ugly or a walking billboard for a brand. So that art scholarship I passed up. time to put that artistic ability to work. I put the 30+ years of inspiration to work creating a few designs and quickly learned that trying to have my concepts turned into print files by graphic artists was like trying to get a blind man to describe the color blue. I Bought some design software and taught myself how to use it with some online courses. my goal is to create designs of artistic value that capture the imagery of life on the water and are genuinely inspired by the fish, the boats and the places that fuel the passion. Not just another gaudy fishing t-shirt. Since start up capital was almost non existent I went the route of print on demand. It’s been a hell of an experience I’m 20 days from launch 50 designs ready to print,up at 5:30 each morning and not calling it a day till 10 or 11 but I’m doing whatever possible to make this happen what I know I’m applying to the effort what I dont I’m trying to learn and seeking advice from those that do. What I know for certain is that anything is possible if the desire and determination is great enough most important giving up is not an option!
thank you for accepting me into this community of people not willing to accept life as it is handed out and willing to take the risks and do the work to make it what they want it to be!
thank you for accepting me into this community of people not willing to accept life as it is handed out and willing to take the risks and do the work to make it what they want it to be!
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