Today is the day I completed my New Year’s Resolution for 2012! For those of you who don’t personally creep my Facebook page 24/7, the resolution was to do 20,000 push-ups.

AND… yes I am checking it off with a left-handed check!

 Though if you have read the very few pieces like this I have ever posted, you will be starting to ponder when I am going to reveal that this, as usual, is not about me … it is about YOU!

AND … you may ponder no more!

The things I do are not because I am, in the least bit, skeptical I cannot do them. They are to show you that if SOMEONE can do them than ANYONE can!

What I am really trying to tell you is, this year instead of making that pointless resolution that you are knowingly going to give up on before you even start, be creative and invest in yourself for once because the only thing to blame for not completing it is YOU.

AND… that’s enough about you… let’s talk AHAB!

The one ongoing resolution since we started Ahab’s Adventures is that we have to grow bigger than the year before. This coming year will be no different. We have been talking to people that are ridiculo.us, people that care about us, people faraway, people that are skeptical, people that think outside the box, and people that are just people.

The one thing they all have in common is that they have all invested time into listening to our ideas and this year, more than ever, it will show…

Cheers!

“If you don’t ask, the answer is always no”

Someone asked us this week … ‘How do you convince people/places/etc to let you do these things with Ahab’

The answer to that is very simple, WE ASK !!

Literally everything we have done with Captain Ahab up to this point is because we ask to do so. Believe it or not the phone isn’t ringing nonstop with offers or our inbox isn’t full of unanswered sponsorships. Asking is a big part of everything we do.

And to tell you the truth, the only weakness we have had in asking is when the recipient of what we ask is usually an older silver-back male … or a woman that thinks she is. (and they are scary!)

In our case, asking really seems to be in our favor which in the end comes back to you because you are joining us on these adventures!

Try to think of a goal this weekend that is out of reach and think about what you need to do(ask) to make it more reachable … OR just sit on your couch and be a bum, but don’t you dare ask us to join you for that!

Cheers!

Have you ever had a good day? Well we are having an amazing few months! (**Now that I think about it, we have actually had an unbelievable 10 years and counting!)

Between our first speaking gig … our soon to come fun with MEGA BLOKS … the Mini Ahabs spreading all over the globe … the biggest summer adventure plans to date … or chats with fellow creative minds, these months really have been something!

After looking for the many spelling errors I make when writing I realized this may be coming off as bragging, but it is very much the opposite. If anything else this is more of a THANK YOU

I am truly thankful to everyone who is a part of this. On purpose or not, I have created a hobby people enjoy following and I know it is a very unique experience that is still growing.

So expect great things to come after the holidays, because ready or not they are coming!

Cheers!

Ahoy All!

Today’s Captains (B)Log pertains to the book, 50 Shades of Grey (don’t play dumb I know you have heard of it!). Actually what we are going to share with you is what the book is hiding! It was hard to accept what I am about to divulge to you at first, but I have seen the light…er… and darker sides of this truth. There are 49 OTHER SHADES OF GREY they left out!!! I am aware of this information because of a few brave souls risked their lives to get the knowledge out to the public. The heroic men and women that are behind Ridiculo.us .

Ridiculo.us, a startup that bills itself as  “an online community dedicated to the encouragement, development, and execution of ridiculous ideas” was kind enough to answer a few questions about its first Kickstarter project.

The project, a book called “99 Shades of Grey”, is exactly what it sounds like: a coffee table book full of 99 different shades of grey, each slightly darker than the one before.

Initially aiming to raise $600 for a small printing, the project has been a runaway success, raising over $5700 in the first 7 days. With 7 days left in the campaign, it’s anyone’s guess how high the total will get.

Kickstarter, the world’s largest crowd-funding platform for creative projects, allows its users to contribute funding to projects in exchange for rewards ranging from the obvious to the obscure. One popular reward for the “99 Shades” project allowed 99 backers to pay $15 each to name one of the shades of grey in the book.

Finally a chance to relate Ahab into this story! As with all projects I look at on Kickstarter, I try to find a way to throw Ahab into the mix. This reward was a perfect way for us to do so and ‘Captain Ahab’s Beard’ became the 14th shade of grey.

“Honestly, we thought we’d have a hard time selling all 99 names.” said Kyle Scheele, the Ridiculo.us Director of Ridiculousness. “But then Kickstarter featured us on their front page, their tumblr, their blog, their facebook, their twitter…We ended up selling all 99 names in the first 24 hours.”  

I personally can’t wait to see what is going to come next from this group. If you would like to support this book HERE is the Kickstarter link.  I also suggest you checkout their webpage, facebook, and twitter.

Cheers!

This is my talk from last night give or take a few grammar issues … audio with slides coming soon!

Ahoy! My name is Geeg Wiles and I am here to talk about him. This is Captain Ahab. He is a 3 foot tall, 40 pound, bright yellow wooden fisherman /aspiring wannabe pirate captain … and this is the story of how he went from common lawn gnome to a motivational traveler.

My friends and I love having conversations with strangers. (20sec) I am not talking about when we were 5, everyone knows the rules about creepy vans and strangers. I mean sometime during our high school career we realized that every friend we ever made was a stranger to us at some point in our lives.

That being said, one hot summer day after completing our first year of college, my friends and I were at a fourth of July cookout (40sec) and met a man that told us a story. A story about a group of guys in the Air Force that on the night before they left port, commandeered a lawn ornament. While they were out on their lengthy tour they took pictures, wrote letters, and plaster it with cargo stickers from their travels. (60sec)When their tour was over they returned the lawn ornament to its home with a huge scrapbook of its world travels. They watched from the bushes to see the smiles from ear to ear as the parents of the lawn ornament realized what had taken place.

So naturally, being college aged kids with a knack for trouble, we were instantly motivated by this story and sought out to commandeer (80secs) a lawn ornament of our ownto take back to college and return it with a scrapbook. We searched and searched for weeks with no luck and just when we were on the brink of giving up on finding the perfect lawn ornament we went flying by the once nameless lawn gnome we have now come to call Captain Ahab.  

The Fall came (100sec) and we were back at the Univ. of New England with our new lawn gnome doorstop that had a camera tied around his neck. Anytime people asked what the story was we had them take a picture and we hung it on our wall. As the years past he became more of a social mascot for the school. He was at every event and social gathering (120sec) you could think of and before we knew it, it was the end of our college career, but there was a problem. None of us graduated. I still can’t figure out why…

To celebrate prolonging our time with Captain Ahab we went on a cruise to the Caribbean, because that is what you do when you want to celebrate such a momentous stepping stone in your life, like not graduating from college. (140sec) At this point our love of talking to strangers was becoming fine tuned. We started to realize a byproduct of carrying Captain Ahab around was that he amplifies the characteristics of the people around him. He was the perfect ice breaker for people; they would let down their guard just (160sec) enough to let curiosity get the better of them. This was a key momentin the evolution of Ahab. Instead of us talking to strangers, strangers were now talking to us. Another stepping stone happened on this trip. It was a conversation with a man that went something like this:

Him: So what do you do with these pictures?

Me: Hang them on the wall in my house. (180sec)

Him: So how do I see them?

Me: Umm… you are welcome to visit???

Him: You guys should have a website

Me: You are the smartest man I have ever met!

We built AhabAdventures.com as soon as we got home. From this single adventure we gained two key pieces to any successful idea. (200sec)We had something people were interested in and we had a way to share it. The problem now was that we lost our first piece, our goal. Our goal of Ahab graduating college had failed leaving us with two options; bring him back  with one partially finish adventure or give him a new purpose.

(220sec)As you can see we chose the latter of the two and started traveling. He was my excuse to get out and see our country and made it much easier to get friends to come along. Instead of hearing the classic excuses like not having the time, money, or their girlfriend wouldn’t let them. They wanted to take Ahab somewhere. (240sec) That’s what I told myself anyways, do you honestly think if I said, “hey guys do you want to drive 25 hours just to take a picture of me next to this?” they would have said yes, but somehow getting Ahab to have that experience made them forget their excuses.

Ahab transformed from a (260sec) small joke between friends into making friends in every corner for the country. He was a logo you could wear when checking accomplishments off your to do list. Miniatures were created so people could take them on adventures of their own, and we even started collaborating with businesses to come up with unique ways to give back to our fans. (280sec)

The bottom line is that Captain Ahab is an example of why you need to Commandeer Life ^TM. If a 3 foot tall, 40 pound, bright yellow wooden fisherman /aspiring wannabe pirate captain can do all these things you have no excuse not to. We use him to seize every opportunity we can and make sure each (300sec) experience is worth sharing. USE our experiences to motivate yourself, to research places you may want to go, or if you truly are unable, we invite you to live vicariously through Ahab and his travels.

It doesn’t matter if you are eight or eighty, Find Your Excuse to do the things you want to do. You don’t need to change your whole (320sec) life around to complete goals you have had for a long time. You also don’t need someone like me, or him, to tell you this either, or maybe you do.

Looking back one would not have believed Ahab’s Adventures was laying the foundations for something bigger. From the cross country trips to jumping (340sec) out of planes, from national parks to nights out on the town, from tales around the campfire to talks like this one. Everyone connected to Ahab as a fan, friend, or business fuels Ahab’s Adventures to grow. They become a part of this unique ongoing story.

(360sec) And honestly that is my favorite part. We never know when we’ll meet the next person that helps Ahab’s Adventures evolve, but I look forward to every stranger that becomes MY friend and a fan of Captain Ahab because it was a story from a stranger that started this journey so why not let our story be the start of yours. (380sec)

Cheers

(TAKE A PICTURE!)

Can you believe this was our 3rd year of Dew Tour! We knew when we went to our first year of Dew Tour it would be fun, but we never knew it would become an annual adventure.

Dew Tour is always a lot of fun with sponsor tents like Toyota, AT&T, GoPro, NTR, Mountain Dew, and many more running around. What makes it the most of for us though, and you know we aren’t blowing smoke up your bums when we say this, is when we run into people from previous years or other adventures we have been on. So a shout out to Paul for putting down a lot of ground work over the weekend before we arrived.

Personally we think Ahab just likes to go because every year his pictures with the yeti seemed to get frisky, but who are we to judge. There isn’t really a whole lot to talk about when it comes to this event everything you think happens does happen at a place like this. When you have over 30,000 crazy people in one place over a single weekend you can only image the limitless fun to be had!

And as usual … here are some pictures to humor you with :)

DEW TOUR 2012 ALBUM

Cheers!

Our latest adventure was down to Union, NJ to visit the world renown Smarties Candy Company! I bet you didn’t know that they are owned and operated by three generations of the Dee Family. A family, which after meeting most of them, I could go on and on about with only the nicest things to say, but you are here for the giveaway so that is a story for another time.

In honor of this imaginary union between wooden statue and candy, Smarties has generously supplied our giveaway prizes along with a few surprises thrown in from Ahab himself!

As with any giveaway there are a few things you can do to significantly increase your chances of winning or what some have come to call ‘rules’.

#1. Follow Smarties on their FACEBOOK , TWITTER , and/or VIDDY.

     #1a. If you don’t have Viddy it is a great time to get the app!

#2. Comment/Tweet(using #ahabsmarties)/Viddy at Smarties creatively mentioning/linking Ahab’s Adventures and/or vice versa. (make sure to send us a link if using Viddy!)

#3. Enter daily using any of the means above to improve your chances.

There will be at least one winner randomly chosen from each of the social media platforms so use them all! The giveaway ends Dec. 7th so have fun this week interacting with our new friends at Smarties and an early thanks to all that enter!

P.S. Prize Packs are limited to residents of the Continental US, but Ahab will come up with other fun prizes if any of you long distance fans want to join in!

Guess what?! We were at all 4 days of the New York Comic Con this weekend! Guess what else?! We saw the Angry Bob preform while we were there!!!

First off if you haven’t hear of Angry Bob you can see his bio HERE.

They had him near the kids area of Comic Con which confused me because his standup is definitely adult humor. This did aid some of his jokes to make them even funnier though! Since he was on the kids stage though the crowd was a little rough on him, hence me writing a whole blog post about it.

Hands down his act could have opened for Kevin Smith later that night. His jokes across the board had depth and humor. There was even one point where he almost had two straight guys get married the joke was so convincing!

Most of you that visit the site and/or this blog know I am not one to be a brown nose or kiss ass. You also know for me to write a blog post about it I must have enjoyed it more than most things or something must have really bothered me since I rarely sit down and write in here.

In this case it was a little of both. I thoroughly did enjoy his stand up, which he saw. The fact that Comic Con put him on the kids stage not only didn’t help his cause but I feel gave people the wrong light of him, which bothered me a lot.

Anyways, I just wanted to say that Angry Bob is a great act and anytime you have a chance to check him out I recommend it!

Here are a few links to all things related to him:

Angry Bob’s Website

Angry Bob’s Facebook

Angry Bob’s Twitter

Cheers Angry Bob from myself and the Ahab’s Adventures Crew!

We just clicked on the Captains (B)log book on our homepage and realized we must hate writing in here since we haven’t since Feb… so we are changing that starting yesterday!

The month of October is going to be a big one in the World o’ Ahab and this is why:

Oct 1st- We are helping out (aka ‘taste testing’) at the Pittsfield Berktoberfest !!

Oct 8th (Part I)- Geeg will prove to be one step closer to crazy!

Oct 8th (Part II)- IFC’s Broke-Ass Stuart Book Reading/Signing Party! For details you can join his FB group HERE !!

Oct 9th- MASS MoCA has all new exhibits which means Trista wants to take Ahab on another date!

Oct 13th-16th- Ahab scored his biggest event yet receiving PRESS PASSES to the NY Comic Con !!! We have always been pirates, but being a geek was a close runner up !

Late Oct- Finally we will finish off the month with something Halloween related!

If you think this is a heavy month for adventure you might not be able to handle November … but lets just get through October first before we spoil that!

Cheers