The Helmsman of Anthesis Book Tour

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Book Details

Historical Fiction

Date Published: March 12th

Publisher: Acorn Publishing

William Sukara, a gregarious dreamer, emerges from the 1950s an estranged son. In divorce debt and with limited visitation rights as a father, he searches for order in failure. Pursuing self-discipline as an answer, he enlists in the Navy, volunteers for underwater demolition team training, and survives the elite course.

With five other team members, he raises his hand for a clandestine mission, knowing only that it’s a “hundred day operation in a warm climate.” They are led by a mysterious civilian who alludes that their authorization comes from the Oval Office, and they are to operate with extreme malice. They revolt, escaping under bizarre circumstances.

The Helmsman of Anthesis is a raw, close to the nerve, psychological thriller about a mission gone wantonly mad.

Excerpt 1 – 577 words

To the east, molten first light flared into the chrome of sunup. It was going to be another
fiery rebirthing along the desiccated coast. A dying offshore zephyr filled and failed an ethereal
spinnaker. The bow-to-stern sail made the thirty-six-foot hull appear as though it were breathing.
As the solar fire rose to flaunt its power, it colored the eight hundred square feet of nylon into a
giant orange peel.
Standing in the sail’s shadow, the helmsman avoided its full rising wrath. Astern a
squiggly scratch on a tin sea revealed a few knots of course progress. Luffing cloth coaxed the
weathered hull along. Framed in a cerulean empire above and below, she pulsated over an idle
Sea of Cortez.
As he held a creeping course toward a far sickle of sun-burnt hills, he romanced the
curtain rising over the Sierra De La Giganta, a five-thousand-foot face now blushing with
exposure. The Mountains of the Giantess were as naked as the helmsman. His faded safety
harness exposed his immodesty to a revealing day.
Shaking his fuzzy head, tired of being tired of sailing up the Latin coast, he remembered
he hadn’t spoken at length in English or Spanish for weeks. He was long overdue for a cup of
percolated jump juice, as well as some face-to-face conviviality. He often considered his
solitude; when his façade of being witnessed was long absent, how do you conduct yourself? To
where would his errant mind wander?
He had anchored near solo sailors before, being audience to their cooking-over-a-candle
stoicism and fervent loquaciousness. He monitored his own petty actions and eccentricities,
cognizant of anyone going to sea by himself, and continuing alone, should be suspect. He also

knew that another person’s habits and warts could turn a small boat into a prison. He had heard
of a captain ordering a crew member off his boat for not burping Tupperware.
With little wind for self-steering to be put into slave-duty, he put the tiller amidships and
went below. Pumping up a Primus, he got a flame going under a dented kettle. He reached for a
rusty can that was innocuously labeled, KAHVE. He had offered a Panamanian trawler captain a
Playboy magazine for it, receiving an enthusiastic, “Pornografia? Si.”
The tin’s writing was utterly illegible, its country of origin lost. A blurred logo was either
a stylized gargoyle or skull and crossbones. Its hostile brew produced a heart-pounding, hand-
trembling, eye-dilating affair.
“This stuff can jump-start a toe-tagged cadaver,” he had advised guests.
With a cup of serious caffeine, he climbed topside and back to rippling, indecisive
sailcloth.
His sight returned to an inflamed mountain range a mile off in the slow promenade.
Piercing deeper and deeper into the phantom haunts, the torching dawn wilted shade out of
serpentine gorges. Held in stony silence, venues twisted down tiered citadels of rillstone, spilling
out onto a flood plain of razor-armed flora. His thoughts again started to drift off course, heading
toward past shoals.
An uneasy comparison surfaced. The helmsman’s thirty-four years of people’s dressage
weren’t a pebble of concern to this implacable barrier. The massif could never feel the difference
between sublime and tragic; rain and tears were synonymous. The billions of tons didn’t have to
patch together unshakable meaning to veil an endless blank. Mountains offer transitions; humans
possess heirs and an icy regularity of hope. Even when the defiant peaks erode down to the sea,
they are imperceptibly uplifted in sedimentary reincarnation.

Virtual Book Tour – March 11 – April 10

March 11 – RABT Book Tours – Kick Off

March 12 – Tea Time and Books – Spotlight

March 13 – Always Reading – Excerpt

March 16 – Liliyana Shadowlyn – Spotlight

March 17 – Book Junkiez – Excerpt*

March 18 – Crossroad Reviews – Spotlight

March 19 – My Reading Addiction – Excerpt

March 20 – My Bookmarked Reads – Spotlight

March 23 – Sarandipity’s – Excerpt

March 24 – Sapphyria’s Books – Spotlight

March 25 – On a Reading Bender – Review

March 26 – Book Corner News and Reviews – Spotlight

March 27 – Momma and Her Stories – Excerpt

March 31 – Novel News Network – Review

April 1 – Books 1987 – Spotlight

April 2 – Texas Book Nook – Review

April 3 – A Life Through Books – Spotlight

April 6 – The Faerie Review – Spotlight

April 7 – The Avid Reader – Excerpt

April 8 – Nana’s Book Reviews – Spotlight

April 9 – The Indie Express – Review

April 10 – RABT Reviews – Wrap Up

About the Author

At age twenty, Lee Hodiak joined the Navy and spent most of his enlistment attached to Underwater Demolition Team 12. After serving, he joined the San Diego Police Department but realized he needed to follow his passion for wilderness travel and adventure instead. He went on to backpack the Baja California Peninsula, built a thirty-six-foot sloop, and lived in Australia for twenty years.
Now a resident of Central California, Lee enjoys birdwatching and living by the ocean. Sixty years in the making, The Helmsman of Anthesis is his debut novel.