THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 18, 1996 TAG: 9603160069
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
CLICK, CLICK, tap, tap, tap.
Richard Amey sits before a powerful computer, parting electronic curtains into subjects that touch him personally.
``There we go!'' Amey exults as the Internet leads him to a Johns Hopkins University Web site and then to a technical article on vaccine-site sarcomas in cats. It is a subject he cares about intensely because Sam, the 10-year-old, white fluff of fur napping on a bookshelf, suffers from the disease.
Click, click, tap, tap, tap.
Again, he zeros in on one of his passions, in-depth news from Bosnia. Again, it's personal. His wife, Patty, has been in Sarajevo for several months as a Canadian adviser helping to set up elections.
This may be a common scene in many homes connected to the Web, but Amey's computer station is tucked under teak bookshelves beside navigation equipment on his sailboat at a Norfolk marina.
He is much more than a cyber-cadet afloat. His interests run to novels and poetry and the painstaking care of woodwork and machinery on the 51-foot boat he calls home.
But he is wired to the 'Net more tightly than most people on land will ever be.
Amey, 48, an accountant, former banker and one-time photojournalist, is ``more or less retired,'' but he runs the computer file-servers of four Canadian companies from his boat. With the flick of the wrist and a password, he is massaging the companies' computers as if he were in Ottawa. Not a second's delay between keystroke and response.
He's a Canadian and British citizen, originally from Liverpool, and here on a tourist visa. He'll set sail for another country - Eleuthera in the Bahamas would be nice this spring - and clear customs. Then, like a basketball shot clock, the one-year limit on his visa will renew.
Amey settled on Norfolk because it's as close to Canada as he can get in the winter without encountering wintery conditions.
He's committed to life aboard because he likes the independence and the freedom to live the way he wants to.
``I live on this boat, fundamentally, because I reject all the usual trappings of society,'' he says.
``I'm totally fed up with being regulated,'' he says, dragging on one of many Marlboros that morning. ``Pretty soon they'll make you wear green hats on Tuesdays.''
In fact, he says, ``Were it not for all the pressure to quit smoking, I'd have given it up years ago.'' MEMO: [For a related story, see page E1 for this date.]
by CNB