What some of the reviews say:

"Fast, foolish and lots of laughs!... a most enjoyable

evening of genuine wit and humour":

John Holmes - St-John's EVENING TELEGRAM

"A genuine and talented nut-case... quick-witted and

relevant": Tom Reagan - Halifax DAILY NEWS

" Elliott's 90 minutes on stage was delightfully quirky

and unrelentingly hilarious":

Steve Mazey - The Ottawa CITIZEN

"An exceedingly astute student of his environment,

with a quick wit and matching delivery, Mr. Elliott

gives a new meaning to the word stage presence":

Doug Gallant - The Charlottetown GUARDIAN

"Master of mirth, Elliott, skewers human foibles...His

monologues show a master of the spoken word: he

prods, stretches and cajoles the English word":

Roxanne Davies - The Montreal CHRONICLE

"There are excellent reasons why he deserves ranking

with the top wags. He has scores of good jokes, an

endearing way with stories, a sharp ear and nimble

fingers for musical comedy, and enviable reflexes"

Randal McIlroy - WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

"Elliott's act was nothing short of brilliant, and I

wanted to see more":
Kevin Zimmerman - New York City  GOOD TIMES

"His show runs the gamut from the sublime to the

ridiculous, but all of it literally

sucks laughter out of your face":

Lance Callahan - The Newfoundland HERALD

" A solid stand-up with a squeaky-clean set":

BOSTON GLOBE

Journey Without A Footprint.

The idea was to cross Canada leaving no carbon footprint, but it was turning out to be trickier than I thought. My boat, the Sea Pig, in which I planned to start the journey with a quick sail across Malpeque Bay, was not in great shape. All winter she had been sitting in a field in Prince Edward Island, and the blue tarp which covered her had stretched under the weight of the snow and started to leak. Now she was full of water, and where her belly rested on the trailer some fibreglass had cracked. Also the wheel bearings of the trailer, not the best to start with, were under a lot of strain. The summer before we’d brought an old frame and set of wheels to a welder who’d rebuilt it, but the axel and wheels themselves were still fairly worrisome, and the extra weight couldn’t have been helping.
On the other hand, in the field where she sat the wild strawberries were numerous and delicious. You have to take the bad with the good. I picked and ate them as the boat drained, then I stripped off what was left of the tarp and bundled it into the boat, hitched the trailer to the rented truck, and we started to haul it to our place in Charlottetown. Somewhere around Vernon River people behind started honking at me, and I thought, that’s nice, fellow members of the International Boat Appreciation Brotherhood encouraging us in our adventure. Then a car full of students passed, making terrified pointing gestures out the window and when we all pulled over they told us that the tarpolin had blown off onto the highway behind me. I didn’t want to turn around and go back right then because it would have meant backing the trailer around on a busy highway, so I continued to our house in Charlottetown and backed the trailer back into our driveway, then returned to see where the tarp had fallen. We never found it and I was angry at myself for being so stupid. I started to add up the damage. So far I’d driven out twice by car to check the boat, rented a truck and drove out once more, and halfway again by car to pick up the tarp, a total of about 300 kilometres. It was starting to look like I was going to have to plant some trees.
The way it works is that CO2 is absorbed by green plants, who use the carbon to create fibre and then give back the oxygen, so you can offset the amount of carbon you create by tree-planting. At one tree per 3000 kilometres we were already 1/10th of a tree into “carbon debt” and over the summer, I might as well tell you now, between cars and rented truck, coming down and returning to PEI, we logged about five thousand kilometres, meaning I would have to plant a little less than two trees to get even.
For now though my boat was in our driveway, ready to be fixed. Over the next week I sanded down and fibreglassed over the crack in the belly and made a new rudder blade to replace the one I had destroyed last year when we hit a rock in Cardogan Bay. There are four rocks in PEI and I’ve hit them all.
We rented a truck again to tow the Sea Pig out to Malpeque, but before we did, and while the truck was rented I also cleaned out the garage and brought a load of junk to the dump, or “recycling station” as they call it now. They weigh the truck going in and once again coming out and then charge you by the pound for what you left there. I’m not sure exactly when they started charging us for doing their work, but I suppose we can expect more of this sort of thing for a while. Don’t get me started.
The first leg of our journey was supposed to be from Malpeque to Alberton and we’d actually done part of this before, and with no carbon footprint either, simply by sailing with no motor, but in and out of harbours can be tricky, so for this summer I had bought a second-hand electric outboard motor. The idea was that once I had bought a solar panel to keep its battery charged, I would have a permanent clean source of energy.
I have to say that I don’t really understand how. When light hits matter it apparently creates an electrical charge. I started to ask myself how this could be, and when you find yourself asking questions about electomagnetism it’s best to conduct the simple educational experiment of opening the hood of your car and attaching your jumper cables from the battery to your tongue. You will find that you will then stop asking yourself any more questions about electromagnetism.
Anyhow, I hadn’t bought the solar panel yet, and this was just the sea-trial to see if the motor would push the boat. She was in the inner harbour and I wanted to bring it out to the dunes around Darnley Basin where we could rig her and set her up for sailing. It got me out of the inner harbour, but then it ran out of juice, luckily when I was out of danger of interfering with other boats in the channel. It hadn’t run anywhere near the hour and a half I had previously test-run it in a barrel. But I had done that at it’s lowest setting, and it seems that although at that setting in dead calm against no current whatsoever it moved the boat quite handily (and silently) once it found itself in any contrary wind or tide it had to use more power, which drained it much more quickly.
But it wasn’t completely useless. I took it home to recharge it, and when we came back for our first sail we brought two cars, one to where we would sail to, and one to where we would leave from so this experiment was costing more and more trees. I had visions of acres of stumps, and baby seals washing up in oil slicks.
Once sailing, though, we were carbon free. The wind filled our sails, the tide carried us out the channel. The sun beat down and warmed the dark parts of the boat which absorbed it, but reflected off the lighter colours, leaving them cool. You could feel the difference on your bare feet. This warmth, rising and adding itself to other rising warm air, was replaced by other air rushing in, which were the winds that moved us. The tides shifted the ocean we were on with another type of energy, gravitational. A dazzle of light created a mild electric charge from any matter it fell upon, a charge which could fill our batteries once I’d bought a PV Cell. The day was hopping with all types of energy. I can see why Einstein enjoyed sailing.
He was the one who (amongst other things) found the mathematical proof for the photovoltaic effect and received the Nobel Prize for the paper he wrote on the subject when he was 26 years old, the smartass. As I say, I don’t understand it. Something about photons in light which can be either a particle or a wave, transferring electrons to atoms which when they are full, move to other less charged atoms.
At any rate, by virtue of wind and tide, we sailed down the bay to Grover Island, which claims to be the largest nesting site for herons in eastern Canada but which I can’t see will ever be much of a tourist destination. To make their nests the herons excrete on the trees, killing them, and creating a fairly rich pong, to say nothing of what they are doing to their carbon debt.
We sailed beyond the island on a “beam reach” which sailors call the “soldiers tack”, because even dough-headed soldiers were deemed capable of executing it, then felt the wind on our port and aft, the mizzen was taut abaft, and I was thinking, look how much nautical language I know! There were thunderheads moving in from the west though, and the wind veered and came right out of where we wanted to go into Marchwater, on the shores of which we had parked one of our cars. The channel got narrower and narrower the nearer we tacked between the buoys. We finally started the electric motor to move us in the last little bit, but it made very little headway against the wind, then ran clean out of electrons altogether, and stopped. We tacked some more, rowed some more, swore, and finally it was shallow enough to hop out and pull the boat to the car. A clumsy end for an otherwise fine day of sailing. Driving home there was a spectacular double rainbow over Breadalbane, and then a torrential downpour which made our trip back like driving through a carwash with vast cracks of lightning, a trillion watts each. We could have used some of those watts back in Marchwater.
Next day I returned with my brother in one car this time, and a bike to get back to it. The wind was against us again, but we sailed effortlessly out of Marchwater, across the inside bar at Grover Island at high tide, like flying low over ocean floor, and up the coast back to Malpeque.
Malpeque Harbour, set in classic dune country, looks benign but actually is quite treacherous. Darnley Basin empties out into where the mouth of Malpeque Bay empties in turn into the Gulf of St Lawrence, between dunes, and the channels of these contrary currents and tidal races create shifting channels and bars.The tide was rushing out of the harbour in one thick muscular current, impossible to sail up, so we sailed across and ran the Sea Pig aground on the far dune. The smart thing to do would have been to wait until the tide turned. But instead we pulled the boat on that far shore around into Darnley Basin. Now our way back to the outer harbour was blocked by a wide shallow bar so we sailed into the basin, came about clumsily, and back towards the mouth of the harbour aiming for the beach on the other side, trying to cut around that wide bank of sand. The current caught us, I started up the electric motor, and here it was we confirmed how useless that motor was against any real current. The tide race snatched us and we flew down and out the harbour and bumped ashore on the beach on the right side of the channel then almost snatched us away again but just then I hopped out to pull the boat ashore and found out how strong the current really was.
I couldn’t hold the boat, so I let go, and then my feet slipped from under me. I looked down and saw beneath my feet sand pouring off the lip of the bar like a waterfall straight into the depths, and I felt myself being sucked down. It was a sensation I had never felt before and I started to panic. Intellectually I knew that the way to survive this was to just float, don’t fight it, but it’s hard to stay rational when panicking. That’s the definition of panic. There’s no reason for it, it fulfills no evolutionary purpose, but of course that assumes that evolution is designed to protect individuals. From nature’s point of view, it is immaterial if I get swept to sea and “of my bones are corals made”. Who says coral is any less important than me?
I do, that’s who, so I splashed around and came ashore. I had been wearing my life jacket and it had held me up but I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t. I always wear my life jacket now, (though I do get some strange looks in crowded elevators).
My brother in the boat dropped anchor, tossed me a rope, I pulled the Sea Pig ashore and we walked it around the right side of the channel. The last little way, the skipper of a passing lobster boat asked if we wanted a tow and we said Yes Please. I took down the rigging while my brother pedalled back to pick up the car on the bike which was too small for him. He looked like a Shriner. I told him he should wear a fez. He returned, we drove back, returned the next day and in dead calm with the tide at slack water, moved effortlessly to the slipway, with the electric motor on its lightest setting. Then we dragged the boat onto the trailer.
I find sailing completely engaging, trying to get to where you want by using contrary forces to move you. You have to be constantly aware of your surroundings. But if you want to get to some specific place at a specific time a gas engine is of course much more efficient, as long as you don’t factor in the hundreds of thousands of years of energy it took to lay down oil deposits. As everybody agrees, we will eventually run out of gas, so we will sooner or later have to use other forms of energy to get us around, and I guess that’s what this project is about.
The problems we encountered on his trip all stemmed from not being patient enough. Not taking time to tie down the tarpolin tightly enough, for instance. That was irresponsible, although ignorance is no excuse. Lucky nobody got killed, and this is why we have laws. Another example might be when, coming out of Kensington on the way back home, I saw flashing lights behind, I pulled over and the cop came up to the window and said my trailer was looking a bit wobbly, and that it probably wasn’t registered, now was it?
I said I was only taking it to a barn not far away where I would be putting it away for the winter, at a cost of a hundred dollars, but worth it to get the damn thing off the road and didn’t I just know that it was a danger, and thanks for the concern. He said the wheel bearings looked shot and I might lose a wheel on the highway, and added that if I didn’t get it onto a flatbed to take it the rest of the way, he’d impound both trailer and boat.
And I thought: Until next summer?
And on the way to put the boat away for the winter, the boat on a trailer on a flatbed truck, all of which was adding immensely to my carbon debt, I devised a way to download the cost of recycling garbage back to the Government. I would buy old beat-up trailers, put trash in them, and drive around until police pull me over to impound them.