01NOW AVAILABLE
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Pink Diamonds and Blue Fire
Shadows of the Serengeti
A luxury safari turns into an international chase through Tanzania and Amsterdam—where a camera captures what powerful people meant to keep buried.
View on Amazon ↗Writer · Sailor · Photographer · Explorer
Stories for people
who are still going.
I’m Richard McGarry. I write about second acts, open water, complicated people, and the roads that change us when the original plan falls apart.
FICTION✦ADVENTURE✦SECOND ACTS✦OPEN WATER✦PHOTOGRAPHY✦CURIOSITY
Selected stories
Books & works
in progress.
Adventure with something human at stake. These projects move from the Serengeti to the Camino, from Lake Erie to a marina hidden in the Georgia mist.
02NOW AVAILABLE
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Eight Days to Santiago
The Worth of a Man
After work, marriage, and identity fall away, Dakota rides an e-bike across the Camino and meets eight ways of seeing what remains.
View on Amazon ↗03NOW AVAILABLE
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Divorces, Drunks & Dysfunctional
D Dock
At a marina missing from every cruising guide, broken boats and bruised people drift together—and somehow become a community.
View on Amazon ↗04NOW AVAILABLE
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Twelve Sundays on Lake Erie
Point Abino
Two teenagers race a Lightning sailboat through one unforgettable summer of class divides, first love, and impossible choices.
View on Amazon ↗05NOW AVAILABLE
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Building Wealth & Freedom
The Modern Privateer
A practical handbook for building freedom, wealth, and entrepreneurial confidence by adapting the strategy, independence, and daring of history’s privateers.
View on Amazon ↗06NOW AVAILABLE
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One Wild Winter in Quebec’s Laurentians
Black Diamonds and Champagne Snow
A young ski instructor enters a glittering mid-1970s world of champagne snow, après-ski parties, romance, ambition, and dangerous money north of Montreal.
View on Amazon ↗07IN DEVELOPMENT
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A Second Act in the Maine Woods
The Writers Cottage in Northern Maine
Dakota Bellegarde buys an unfinished off-grid saltbox cottage near a northern Maine lake, hoping to create a seasonal home for writing. With his Maine coon cat, Tiger, beside him, he faces the work of finishing the cottage, building a writer’s shed and greenhouse, and discovering what the quiet woods ask of him.
08IN DEVELOPMENT
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Memoirs from a Foot Soldier
The Computer Revolution: 1976 to 2002
Beginning with a computer technician certificate in Montreal, Dakota Bellegarde follows a twenty-six-year career through minicomputers, networking, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, digital video, and the early web—an eyewitness memoir of the people who built the revolution one system at a time.
About Richard
I’ve learned that a life can have more than one first chapter.
I began in the computer world, building a career around systems, people, and problems that needed solving. When that chapter ended, the route ahead became less predictable—and much more interesting.
I lived aboard a sailboat, traveled, photographed wild places, rode unfamiliar roads, and began turning experience into fiction. My stories are about reinvention without easy answers: people who lose the map and keep moving anyway.
“The road doesn’t care how you get there. It only asks whether you keep going.”
35 ft.Home under sail
4+Novels taking shape
∞Curiosity remaining
Beyond the page
Things that keep
me curious.
The best material usually appears when I’m doing something else.
Life under sail
Years aboard Dancing Lion, a 1980 O’Day 35, taught me that every harbor has a story—and every repair has a sequel.
Travel with a lens
I’m drawn to wildlife, unfamiliar roads, and the revealing moment just outside the frame. Photography often becomes the first draft.
The long way there
Whether by e-bike, freighter, sailboat, or safari vehicle, I believe the detour is usually where the real story begins.
CURRENTLY
Writing toward the next horizon.
Developing new fiction, refining book covers for publication, and collecting scenes from a life lived near the water.
WritingSailingPhotographing
Get in touch
Have a story, a question,
or a good dockside recommendation?
I’d be glad to hear from readers, fellow travelers, sailors, photographers, and curious people of every kind.
rbm0010@gmail.com ↗