DavidFagan.org is a website devoted to promoting the lighter side of life … and saving the planet. We also offer assistance to travelers seeking private vacation homes or other holiday assistance, as well as to those who may wish to relocate here permanently. Feel free to contact us directly with any questions, and we’ll make every effort to help.

The Kamini Comet (KC) is published by David and Jennifer, who share a love of life in this village, playing with words and essentially having fun. It is an apolitical subwebsite, which is neutral, unbiased (without affiliation to any party, organization or legislative forum), unprejudiced, and nondenominational. The people, events, and things mentioned on this site are completely fictional and bear no resemblance to anyone or anything. You use this website at your own risk; we will accept no responsibility for any injury, mental or physical, to yourself or others, directly or indirectly caused by reading these pages.

David

David is CEO, president, managing director, author, publisher, and chief bottlewasher of DavidFagan.org. On his first visit to Hydra back in 1983, David decided that owning a bar in this exotic location was an ideal way not to spend the rest of his life in the fast-lane of corporate advertising and journalism. It was an idea spawned by the Honorable Bill Cunliffe of Bill’s Bar, renowned wateringhole for anyone who knew this part of the world at the time. He and a couple of old-timers, Anthony Kingsmill and Leonard Bernstein, planted the seed: Come!

Returning in the summer of 1985, David acquired the Bahia Bar and Restaurant in the heart of Hydra, assuming that this was a justifiable way to achieve semiretirement early in life. Naivety, misjudgment, and somewhat shrewder local business circumstances conspired to teach him that life wasn’t that simple. One does not open a local pub in an exclusive destination and live happily ever after. Small print and subsequent loss of said operation encouraged him to investigate other avenues of survival.

A decade’s worth of practical new skills emerged, from crewing on yachts to gardening. He helped arrange famous birthday parties, such as Joan Collins’s 55th, and rescue dying donkeys (a tale published in his collection of stories about life on the island, Rhubarbs from a Rock).

In 1995, David launched the island’s first community website, the Hydranet. He also prematurely and simultaneously opened the island’s first public Internet office. At the time, the incidental and computer-literate tourist was seriously impressed to find such hi-tech coms on the Rock. Even Koffi Annan was impressed when shown our operation by Mayor Kosta Anastopoulous when the UN secretary general was visiting back then.

David and his partner, Michael Giese, ran the business on steam and analogue phone lines (Hydra only went digital a couple of days before the millennium). Downloading simple text messages could take minutes, and sending an images, hours.

Even with his enthusiasm for this new medium, David couldn’t have predicted the massive proliferation of Internet technology. Back in the late 1990s, an unprofessional little website  with only a couple of dozens pages of info, Hydranet leapt to the top page of all search engines, simply because it existed. (We were even bigger than Corfu or Crete in the first months).

Today, a staggering 6.25 million pages come up in major search engines if you just type “Hydra Greece” into the search box. Such fierce competition in virtual Hydra space was reminiscent of the rat race, so David moved away from the central business district of downtown Hydra to the subsuburb of Kamini over a year ago, where he continues his writing, adding to his collection of Rhubarbs and maintaining the Fair Society, an astronomy site he conceived in 1998 to promote asteroid awareness and raise funding for research.

This village is, oddly, reminiscent in many ways of Hydra 25 years ago. It’s cast and characters are too rich for a scribbler like him not to play with by creating an unassuming, noncommercial platform for sharing ideas about this little community. The KC has not been created for industrial purposes; it is simply a place for off-the-beaten-track muses and mutters about life outside the fast lane of any city, including Hydra.

Jennifer

Jennifer first arrived on the Rock at the age of 10, after her father, Michael, bought a house above Hydra’s port. While she lived in Virginia year-round with her mother, Jeanne, and stepfather, Steve, she visited Hydra with her father every summer for a month, in her younger years tripping along the port chasing kitties, then later tripping home from Cavos to make her curfew (father had threatened to call the “police” if she was even a minute late).

Jennifer and David first met in 1991, then again in 1994, at which time Michael threatened to hobble David if he ever again flirted with his daughter. Jennifer didn’t return to the island for another 12 years. In the interim, she lived in Prague and Costa Rica, received a graduate degree in English literature, and became a freelance editor.

After her father passed away in November 2005, Jennifer and her stepmother, Lisa, and her two brothers, Mack and Will, made plans to return to Hydra in June to scatter Michael’s ashes. As she had invited a dear friend with back problems to join her here, Jennifer, then living in Rhode Island, did a Google search in mid-April for “David Fagan Hydra” solely with the intent of contacting him to find out about chiropractors on the island. So began a string of e-mails that resulted in her staying with David in Kamini for the entire summer of 2006.

After a winter of travels together in the United States and South Africa, Jennifer and David decided that she, her two dogs, and her two cats should join David in Kamini permanently. She arrived on the Rock six weeks later, following a frenzy of packing, shipping, selling, and general arranging. They soon settled into their sweet spitaki overlooking Kamini harbor, where one cat quickly went mad, and the dogs learned to stop attacking donkeys.

Due to the blessings of broadband Internet technology, their work with writing and editing continues, although for Jennifer without the familiar sounds of sirens and thudding rap music in the background.