Three Years in a 12-Foot Boat
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Three Years in a 12-foot Boat For anyone who dreams of sailing away, here's an engrossing, gritty memoir of a 15,000-mile solo expedition in a tiny, hand-made boat. Bent on discovery, Bremerton native Stephen G. Ladd ranges along the pirate-ridden coast of Panama and Colombia, across the Andes, down a 600-mile river by night to avoid guerrillas, to the Antilles and the Caribbean. Robbed, capsized, arrested and befriended, he sails and rows through a tumult of uncharted adventures. The cast of characters: Dieter, mad ex-Nazi on a desert island; Hans, the smuggler who disappears at sea; castaways, prostitutes, and fortune-seekers. Stow away with a poetic storyteller on a stormy, soulful voyage through nineteen countries, on the razor's edge between freedom and fear, loneliness and love. Three Years in a 12-foot Boat may soon be out of print. We have published the book electronically in PDF format and it may be downloaded in four parts below. PREFACE From 1990 to 1993 I rowed and sailed a twelve-foot boat 6,500 miles, and traveled with her another 8,500 miles via cars and ships. I knew from the start that I would write this book, that I would rely on words rather than photos (the few you’ll see were taken by others), and that I would try to distill the poetry of the experience, the better to share it with you. All together, boat design, construction, voyage, writing, and publication have consumed twelve years. But this is the story of the voyage itself. It begins with a birth, and ends with a deeper sense of life’s limitless possibilities. It’s based on my journals, a cardboard box full of notebooks now moldering in Mom and Dad’s attic. A glutton for self-reliance, I created the graphics and designed the book myself. The maps (at the beginning of each part) and diagrams of Squeak (following pages) will augment your mental picture as you travel with me down the Mississippi, to the ports of Panama, along the Colombian coast, over the Andes, and down the dark rivers of South America. In my thirty-seventh through fortieth years I took chances and fended for myself. Yet all that lonely independence only underscored the importance of love and connection. My life was given to me by my parents, who assisted this undertaking in many ways, as did the others mentioned throughout this book. All my relatives and friends have helped, including David Ladd, Paula Wiech, Nancy Rekow, and others too numerous to mention. Thank you! Use the form at the back to order a copy of this book or to obtain the plans or molds to build a boat of the Squeak class. Hell, even Squeak herself, now restless in Mom and Dad’s back yard, might be available to the right fool. But don’t follow my course. Surrender to the adventure inside you, that only you can realize. Follow the path only you can find. 1 waterline HULL SHAPE main mast mizzen mast mainsail snotter mizzensail sprit boom sprit boom sheet sheet tiller boomkin rudder fork rudder blade leeboard rubstrake leeboard control line leeboard skeg lead weight SAIL PLAN 2 cockpit gunwale main bulkhead oar, stowed aft locker main hatch oarlock seat deck cockpit footwell aft hatch cover, closed open main hatch tiller, up gunwale cabin shelf rudder blade, up keel seat deck cockpit footwell compartment hatch coaming main bulkhead main hatch cover, open leeboard, up seat deck leeboard rubstrake longitudinal bulkhead keel leeboard, down ACCOMMODATIONS 3 Williston Wolf Point Culbertson Lethbridge Havre ri Milk River u R. ROCKY MOUNTAINSFt. Peck L. SWEETGRASSHILLS so is ne o M t s ow ell Y Seattle Platte Bremerton n a e c O c i f i c a P Rowing and Sailing PART I By Car or Truck NORTH AMERICAN RIVERS By Ship 4 0 100 200 300 miles N 0 500 km Lake Sakakawea Riv Bismarck er Mi ss P i e r r e is sip pi Omaha Ri River v e St. Joseph r Leavenworth Boonville i ver Kansas St. Louis R City Jefferson Washington i o City h O Cape Girardeau Cairo Arkansas New Madrid Osceola Memphis River Helena Red Greenville R Vicksburg iv Natchez er Mobile Lake Panama City Baton Rouge Pontchartrain New Orleans f M e x i c o f o u l G 5 Brian and Steve, 8/9/90 6 CHAPTER 1 DEPARTURE I gazed into my newborn nephew’s face. His eyes were shut tight against the unaccustomed light. His dark brown hair was damp and tousled. His skin was almost translucent; underneath were veins like microscopic rivers of red and blue. My sister-in-law, who had gripped my hand so hard through the delivery, lay limp and sweaty on the bed, smiling like a wounded Sphinx. My brother Mike, more comfortable now that the fear had faded, took a picture of me holding his son. Brian’s little fingers fidgeted weakly, but he didn’t cry. He was moving into the unknown. Time for me to do the same. The date was August 9, 1990. It had been half my life since I’d traveled limitlessly. The first time, in the year following my high school graduation, I had wandered alone through Europe, Asia, and Africa. Foreign cultures had swirled around me while I grappled desperately with my coming of age. Then I couldn’t have explained myself. But over the years I realized I had gone where all was unfamiliar so that I, the only constant, might emerge. I returned to my hometown of Bremerton, Washington, a pensive, rather hidden young man. I went on to college and became a city planner. Respon- sible jobs at courthouses and city halls in places like Coupeville and Sedro- Woolley helped me shed my shyness, but my introspection never really left. I had one worthy girlfriend after another, but never married. My continued wanderlust I assuaged by taking wilderness trips whenever possible. But the idea of a boat now plagued me. There, I knew, lay freedom. I dreamed a thousand daydreams, spent un- told evenings pondering the perfect vessel. I read every book in the Seattle Public Library on sailboats and naval architecture. For years I considered building a Francis-class double-ender, from plans by designer Chuck Paine. Then I discovered the shallow-draft genius of Commodore Munroe’s Presto, Philip Bolger’s work with leeboards and sprit booms, and the advantages of cold-molded plywood and ultralight displacement. No existing plans incorporated all these features, so during 1987 and 1988 7 I designed my own sailboat. It was thirty feet long, large enough to live aboard with Tammy, my girlfriend. But it would take years to build. Mean- while, my relationship with Tammy was increasingly difficult. Should I com- mit to such a large project when I wasn’t sure we’d stay together? “Why don’t you just shrink it down?” suggested my best friend, Jim Hogg. “Keep it the same, only a lot smaller.” (There was never much love lost between him and Tammy.) This threw me into a whirlwind of speculation. Could I make the boat light enough to drag up a beach by myself, yet big enough for an enclosed berth? I estimated the weight of a boat the same shape, unballasted, half as long. It exceeded the 250 pounds I set as an upper limit. I tried again, assum- ing a length of twelve feet. It worked! A cabin that would have been big enough for a game of ping-pong, in the original plan, became barely long enough to lie down in, and not quite tall enough to sit up straight. To enter the cabin at all I would first have to remove from it my camping gear, which would be the same as I used for cross-country skiing and backpacking. Two windsurfer masts, two sails, and two long, lithe oars would propel her. It demanded to be, so I built a half-mold and started laminating thin ve- neers of Douglas fir. I molded the starboard half of the hull on the terrace of Tammy’s and my apartment in downtown Seattle. The daily sight of a boat not intended to accommodate her naturally heightened Tammy’s misgiv- ings. My neighbors weren’t thrilled either. “You gonna do that all night?” yelled a voice from another terrace one evening when I hammered a little too late. I moved to my parents’ house, quit my job, and labored another six months in their carport. To hold the veneers in place while the glue cured, I punched, and later pried out, approximately ten thousand staples. It was tedious, but I loved what I was building. I could never be perfect, but she could. Her sharpness and curvature delighted me. Her rose-brown wood glowed under the clear epoxy coat. I decided to name her Squeak after a dear, departed cat. There was no physical resemblance, but the other names I considered all seemed too serious for something so small. Design choices were excruciating, like whether the main hatch should lift off or ride on hinges, but deciding what to do with her was easy. Squeak lent herself to river, coastal, and inter-island travel. I would exploit this potential in warm, foreign lands that could be reached without crossing an ocean. That meant Latin America, where I’d traveled for three months in 1973. To get there I wanted to drive as little as possible and take advantage of flowing water.