![]() revoked his passport because he was behind on child support payments for the children he has with his first wife, he says. The family was living together in Guangdong province, a manufacturing hub, when Martin’s criminal history caught up with him. He traveled to meet her, and in 2007 they married and had a son, he said. Martin, raised on the Kenai Peninsula, first got to know the woman while chatting with her on an early Chinese messaging computer program, he said. Martin decided to sail to China to reunite with a wife and son he says are waiting for him in an industrial city in Guangdong province. “He just believes if it’s his time to go, he’ll go,” Schaffer said. Martin has a long history of putting himself in danger, from long wilderness journeys to homeless camps, said his friend Brian Schaffer, a former Anchorage pastor who met Martin during his protest days. He was also tried twice for manslaughter in the death of his girlfriend in a rollover crash on the Seward Highway, in which Martin was driving and had been drinking.ĭepending on whom you ask, he is either a flawed but sincerely religious man who has thrown his fate into the hands of God, or an extremely lucky person who is suffering from delusions that cause him to take serious risks. John Martin camps out in front of City Hall in downtown Anchorage on July 1, 2011, protesting Mayor Dan Sullivan's policy of clearing homeless camps. He also stoked a public feud with then-Mayor Dan Sullivan, who said he wouldn’t meet with Martin to discuss homelessness policy because Martin is a sex offender. In 2011, he made headlines for his monthslong sidewalk protest at City Hall over the city’s policy of clearing personal belongings from homeless camps. Afterward, he and his wife divorced, and Martin says he lost contact with his three children. He was 23 at the time and spent eight years in prison. In 1995, Martin was charged with having sex with a 15-year-old foster child he and his then-wife had taken in. It was another strange chapter for Martin, who has for many years been a fringe public figure in Anchorage. “There was definitely a hell of a lot of luck involved for him,” said Paul Webb, a civilian employee of the Coast Guard in Alaska who coordinates Bering Sea rescues. Coast Guard is still wondering how Martin made the trip of several hundred nautical miles in a boat more suited for a Midwestern lake than one of the most treacherous patches of ocean in the world. “I think sometimes a desperate act can open a door.”īut he was blown off course and, dehydrated, landed on the remote Chukotka Peninsula locality of Lavrentiya in search of water in August. “I had hoped I may be able to appeal to them to let me stay,” Martin said on a scratchy cellphone connection from the Siberian hospital where he has been detained. There, he planned to beach himself and ask to be let into China to be reunited with a wife and child he has not seen for more than a decade. He had a rough plan to sail until he hit Asia and then hug the coastline until he was near a sliver of Chinese territory between Russia and North Korea. ![]() ![]() Martin left Alaska in July, planning to sail down the Yukon River and across the Bering Sea in a tiny boat equipped with little more than a bucket of salmon bellies, a jug of grape juice and water, pilot bread and a compass, he said in a recent phone interview. Now Russian authorities are trying to deport him - but he has to find the money to get home. ![]() The 45-year-old has been detained there for the past four months. To the surprise of many, Martin, a homeless activist who once camped out for months on the sidewalk outside Anchorage City Hall, made it as far as Russia, washing up on the Siberian coast in August. John Martin III set out last summer to sail from Alaska to China alone in an 8-foot dinghy, a plan that sounded crazy to everyone but him. John Martin sailed this 8-foot boat across the Bering Sea and hoped to reach China. Updated: NovemPublished: November 29, 2018
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