About me

 

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Name: Matthew William Caplins

Date of birth: 2/18/82

From: St Mary's, Maryland

Favorite color: Plaid

Favorite drink: Ting

:

(Playing to a packed and captivated audience on schooner Adventuress with my sock hat)

 

My story:

        I was born in Annapolis, Maryland and lived in Calvert county.  I was soon joined by a younger sister, Laura, and a few years later by a brother, Ben.  When I was two our family moved into the house my father was building for himself (and is still not done with).  The age of two is also when I learned the word "Why?"  This quickly became my word of choice.

        When I was four I met the girl that broke my heart.  I had plans to marry her and I was going to borrow my dad's tools and build a house behind ours in the gully.  However, my romantic dreams were shot down even before pre-kindergarten with the lousy excuse that "our family is moving away to California."  With my heart crushed I lost myself in a world of Legos. (Especially the pirate ones!)

        When I reached the age of ten I finally started to try and venture outside the comfortable world of Legos.  However, I soon discovered that the real world is scary and not much fun.  So I this time retreated into the sanctuary of the woods.  Here I could explore, learn, eat wild plants, hide from boring stuff like chores, my dad's projects and the worst, English homework.

         This was also about the time my dad discovered that I could be useful as a source of manual labor.  It may have had something to do with the fact he would find me making rope out of  tree bark, chopping logs in half with rocks and other wastes of time (In his mind).  When asked why I spent six hours chopping a log with a rock I would just shrug and say "Just to see if I could."  This led my dad to statements like "Why don't you see if you can dig out these tree stumps tomorrow?"   I However never found his ideas to be as much fun.

        My high school time was interesting.  I believe it or not was fairly well known.  However,  this was likely because raccoon hats and moccasins were not in style during this era and many classmates found shelling acorns on the bus for bread weird.  So although I may not have been extremely popular but I at least left an impression. 

        Throughout my high school career my father came up with a great many "wonderful and brilliant" ideas.  An example of one was a sun room with a walk-in basement.  His basic philosophy at the time was to use the smallest tool to do the biggest job possible.  So in keeping with this high ideal he had me dig the hole by hand.  To be a little more descriptive it was actually a 16 X 17  foot hole and was nine feet deep.  Oh yea and all the dirt was moved up the hill to the end of the driveway with a wheelbarrow.  By his plan of digging a few hours a day after school it only took six months to finish. 

        When I wasn't digging, some of my other activities in high school included spending time in the woods, Boy Scouts, blacksmithing, and working with Capt. Will Gates on the square-rigger the Maryland Dove.  It was this last activity that really screwed up my aspirations of staying in the pack of social lemmings and corrupted me into a vagrant gypsy life.

        I was all set to  go to college after high school until I was asked by the Capt. Dan Parrot from Pride of Baltimore if I wanted to sail after high school.  I at the time replied like a good little boy with "No, I am going to college to become a mechanical engineer so I can afford a blissful life and have a cookie cutter family."  Well, a few months later I was off to sea on the barque Picton Castle. 

        It was quite an adventure leaving home with just a sea bag and a little money and knowing I had to meet the 180 foot square-rigger in Lunenburg NS.  My time on Picton Castle turned out to be a first rate adventure as well as a breeding ground for great sea stories.   It got me hooked!  For the next few years I hopped from boat to boat and sailed up and down the East Coast and somehow got a pretty good reputation.  (This turned out to also be good planning on my part as I have found "sea stories" grow like any investment over time.  Thus I am anticipating a very good return on investment in my older age.) 

        After a few years of sailing I decided that a few college classes wouldn't hurt me.  So I took a few classes at College of Southern Maryland and St Mary's College of Maryland. Oh yea and Co-bought and sold a house in Northern Virginia.

        I then ended up writing a an essay for a scholarship for University of Maryland.  (actually a girl with heart melting green eyes made me)   But, I figured there was little danger in getting it as UMD is huge.  The essay was suppose to be about "your most intellectual experience." 

         I decided to write about building a saw mill in my backyard.  I was hoping no one else had already taken this topic.  Apparently no one else did.  I believe they asked me for an interview out of sheer curiosity.  The only problem was at the time I was in Puget Sound sailing on the Schooner Adventuress.  So I said "Well, sorry, I can't come because I'm sailing on a hippie boat in Washington state."  In the end they settled for a phone interview instead. 

         The interview consisted of three of them asking relatively normal enough questions like "What do you see yourself doing after school in mechanical engineering?" and myself giving back what I felt to be the most reasonable answers.  I knew what they wanted to hear "I plan on doing very well in the corporate research world so I can donate large irregularly shaped glass buildings to the university and you can name them after me."  However Instead, most of my answers were more like "So that even if I become an English teacher I can troubleshoot my car when it will not start in the morning," (Yes, I actually said that.)  I also remember telling them I didn't need college to do well in life.

        The last question, however, was the best .  It was "How does the Dungeness crab (the local crab of Washington State) compare to the Maryland blue crab?"  For this question, I didn't miss a beat.  I went right into Old Bay seasoning and the crab picking culture, followed by an oyster tirade for a few minutes straight.  I could hear them all cracking up uncontrollably on the other end.  When they tried to speak I just kept on going.  I think I even threw in gramma's crab soup with the whole crab claws in it. 

        Well a few weeks later they called back to tell me they were going to let me go to school for free.  After running out of excuses not to go I am now going to school in College Park.

        Now in school I have reserved myself to the normal life of a major research university student and own half a old house with lots of "character" that doesn't seem to fix it's self very well.

That's it in a nutshell......