VOLUME TWO

Strangers in their own land. Looking for a home. Struggles of the two sons emerging into adulthood and contending with life ashore. Building their own boats in their teens and leaving home in them. The design business running into losses, Jo Anna goes back to teaching. The coming of Charles Chiodi and Multihulls Magazine. First World Multihull Symposium, Multihull milestones of the seventies. Meeting Dick Newick and Phil Weld. Development of Constant Camber construction method. Tradewinds races, World Bank meeting in D.C. Off on another career!

Yep, we’re still in the chicken house, Jo Anna and me. We get to see the “boys” now and then, they are in their early 50s, we are ticking off our early 80s, and we are all quite well, knock on… No, bang on wood.

When we get together we still sometimes talk about “the trip.” And we agree that in some ways it was nuts for us to take off like that, to jump from the frying pan of California’s counterculture right into the smoldering fires of Third World reality. It seems that we have never quite recovered from that warmth because we learned to take some comfort from its authenticity, and we still occasionally shiver from the chill of jumping back into a “developed” world where so much seems phony, unnecessary and put-up.

We came home, really, to get the boys back in school, and that had very limited success, but once settled in the chicken house, with our own land base – and a boat still able to go anywhere – our drowned river home became like a ripe bowl to a bowl weevil. This demonstrates the “Able To Go” hypothesis, wherein most cruising sailboats sit idle year after year yet still able to go; latent freedom, possible escape, expressed paranoia, last ditch stand.

To me, the owner of a seagoing sailboat that never goes to sea is like a kid with a security blanket. And such an owner who has taken his boat to sea but now keeps it just able to go is like an adult who still keeps his blanket in a trunk. For the last fifteen years or so while we kept SCRIMSHAW on her mooring out in front of the chicken house, that was me. After our trip to Cuba in 1996 (Chapter 21), she did a bit of “Chesa-peeking” every summer, and that was nice, but it was not enough to explain yacht ownership. That can be explained only by the able to go syndrome.
This syndrome prevailed with us until recently (2013) when my declining eyesight made it clear that it was I who was not able to really go anywhere in a boat again.

Yesterday was the summer solstice here, and SCRIMSHAW’s 41st birthday. We still had twilight at 9 PM when I paddled a kayak past her vacant mooring and cried. The man who has her now is getting something out of her that I completely understand. He is, at least, able to go.

Oh, dear SCRIMSHAW, if you are reading this, please know that I have always loved you and I always will.

That World Bank consultancy to Kenya and Burundi remains one of the most visual of my recollections, perhaps because I went nuts with my camera on that trip, and have many nice shots to include in the on-line illustrations for this chapter (please visit www.outrig.org and click on Outrig Videos.). Eastern Sub-Sahara Africa is already an extremely visual area, in land, water and people, but some of my strongest phantom visions of the place occur at night, thus no pictures. That beach seining scene on Lake Victoria with Fuji, and the purse seining expedition on Lake Tanganyika both happened at night and so can be described only in words.

Sad to say, Kenya’s politics and economics have degraded somewhat since I was there, and Burundi continues to bear the effects of the Tutsi – Hutu vendetta. One reason this area has become so crowded is that much of it has been so very habitable. Equatorial, it has enough elevation to give water and fertility, but the expanding Sahara is apparently influencing the surrounding climate, driving many of its agrarian inhabitants into the mountains and the cities. I’m just glad I had the chance to see it in the early 80s, and can only wish I had come along much earlier, say with Livingston and Stanley.

After this project concluded and I was back at The Bank in DC, I was ethically obliged – at great emotional cost – to recommend that Jose Shreder’s contract not be renewed. I knew he wanted to stay on in Africa, even to buy land in Burundi to pursue his horticultural hobby in what was left of Eden. But I had to agree with his wife Lucy that his trauma during the Uprising made working with Africans extremely stressful for him. She also had told me that their savings were sufficient to buy a small place, with room to garden, in the South of France. She was confident that Jose would be content there when they retired. She was convinced that to invest in land in Burundi was too risky because of the unstable government and the tribal conflict. “This country is too crowded,” she said. “There is bound to be inter-tribal war.” As it happened, Jose and Lucy did indeed retire to France, and Burundi has avoided most – but not all – of the machete massacres, at least so far.

I doubt that there is much of anything left of our boatbuilding project near Bujumbura. The last I heard they had built some thirty catamaran units with some of them sold across the Lake in Zaire, but the money had not made it back into the Project. Wages were unpaid and materials had run out. I can only hope that our unforgettable trainees came away with a slight leg up for finding places in the private sector.

The accident that cost Narindwa his finger seems now to have been somehow ordained. The power brown-out was routine, but for its end to coincide exactly with the position of Narindwa’s hand near the saw, that instant when the saw’s -starting torque created just the right leap for it to grab and chew his finger off… Well, that seems unreasonably coincidental. Except, I failed to foresee the possibility of the power coming back at any moment, so of course it was my fault, and we all know how strong, yet worthless, guilt can be.

Life in Africa and, indeed, life on earth, now reveals to me a blinding vision of the earthly balance beam at work, weighing out amounts of splendor and travail. Nevertheless, sometimes it is hard to accept that Justice holds the scale. If not her, then who else but Entropy?

The next time, and I suppose it will remain the last that I sailed into Castle Cove was in August of 1997. The Windrider 16 had been introduced just the year before, and Jo Anna and I hitched up ours and headed off to Newfoundland, a great place to beat Virginia’s summer heat. We launched the little boat at several places on the way, one being from a camp ground on the eastern shore of St. Margaret’s Bay in Nova Scotia. Quite on purpose, we were right opposite Castle Cove.

I launched the little boat there and sailed across this gorgeous Bay one bright, mild morning and, with great anticipation, pulled up to the castle unannounced. Max was there, and we had a great reunion, but both Guy and Gigi had died. He had their ashes buried at the base of the granite bluff right behind the throne room, with brightly colored wooden plaques to mark their graves. We visited for far too long, and when I left he hugged me so darned hard it made me squeal.

Because of its inimitable people, this chapter remains one of my favorite sailing episodes. To balance the splendor, there is only the shameful fact that I have long since lost track of Guy Asbury’s knife.

I have not been back to the Philippines since the early eighties, and from what I hear of conditions there I’m not sure I would jump at the chance to go. While the people have endeared themselves to me forever, the population of Manila and surrounds has increased to the extent that some people are “de-centralizing” by spending everything they can muster on a ferry ticket to Cebu, where they arrive destitute and homeless, only to make the poor place more like Manila.

Michael Allen ran a busy boat shop there for years, building various vessels out of Constant Camber, some yachts, some workboats, but his business has pretty much dried up now. The country has exhausted its own timber supply for its once-thriving furniture factories, and the cost of importing wood from Indonesia has helped to cause a massive movement of the industry to China.

The reign of Ferdinand and Imelda is over (the U.S. finally stopped propping them
up), but the vacuum they left was quickly filled by political strife and still more corruption. The Philippines’ combined heritage of both Asian and Catholic dictums – together with grinding poverty – makes it impossible for any government to address the population problem and its many direct consequences.

Ironically, it may have been this very same problem, some two or three millennia ago, that led to the development of the ancient multihulls. Without fossil fuel, even the Philippines’ 8,000 islands could not support anything like the human numbers there today (all of them now dependent on imported oil).

One construction of ancient history supports that even in the Stone Age, Island Asia’s environment was outstripped by human activity, and the Filipino fisherfolk, once interbred with migrating hordes from China, were literally pushed out into the Pacific Islands to become the Polynesians and others. Logically, they escaped in multihulls. Please forgive me if you can, but I see certain parallels to this in the development of modern multihulls. What parallels? Well, that’s a subject for a future, even futuristic, book.

The original suffix assigned to the nation of Tuvalu’s internet addresses was “—.tv.” This suffix was considered sufficiently valuable by a foreign commercial entity to warrant a sale price of those two letters was enough money for every citizen in the country to receive a substantial windfall. Many of them bought automobiles, now used for driving up and down the two mile-long sandy track on Funafuti atoll, the only road in the nation.

The Tuvalu group was the lowest and therefore least habitable – of the ancient Polynesian colonies, inhabited for only the last 700 years or so. Indeed it is likely that Tuvalu’s habitation is explained mainly by population pressures on the higher islands, for these pressures were mounting during the zenith of Polynesian culture about 1200 AD.

When Steven and I worked in Tuvalu in the 1980s, the population of Funafuti, the main atoll in the archipelago of eight atolls, was about two thousand souls, and it was growing fast as a result of immigration from the other atolls in the group. More recently I have heard that this number had swelled to as much as eight thousand, even though a great many were leaving for New Zealand. This migration is being forced by what is commonly regarded as a rise in sea level, which indeed is happening slowly, but the principle cause is actually a geological subsiding of the land. The entire tectonic plate is sinking (the same phenomenon now affects the central East Coast of the (U.S., as explained in Chapter 12). In Tuvalu, this subsidence is combined with a mysterious increased incidence of “rogue” waves. Many of the Pacific atolls are influenced by these phenomena, and very fortunately New Zealand has opened its doors to islanders whose lives are thus affected. If indeed sea level rises and/or the land settles by only a few more inches, most of the atolls will have to be evacuated.

Steve and I can only hope that our trainees at Funafuti will enjoy a slight leg up when seeking places for themselves in a setting totally alien to the dwellers of their almost grass shack, almost grass skirt, utopian homeland. The people of Tuvalu hold a primal place within our memories of working there together. It is likely that all such settings will have to be evacuated sometime within the next century, so yet again we are so very glad we had the chance to be there when we were.

Since sailing together with son Russell in this chapter (my favorite in Volume Two), Russ has sailed his 38’ proa, from Seattle to Auckland. Called JZERRO, this boat is distinguished from his first proa, the 30’er of that name but spelled with only one “R”). Russell is still very reluctant to consult for anyone about proas because he doesn’t like the implied responsibility of leading the uninitiated down a primrose path. He does feel, however, that there is a lot more to be done with the type.

So do I. Because of what I learned from Russ, and from working in proas with Polynesians (Chapter 17), I have formed the following firm opinion:

The ancient single-outrigger, Pacific-type, shunting proa configuration will resemble in principle the ultimate wind-powered watercraft yet to be developed by humankind. That goes for both small, recreational vessels and large, commercial and military craft. I suggest such proas are destined to appear as an icon of the future “green recovery.”

Now, why would an old, convicted boat nut say such an outlandish thing in a public forum? Well, if anyone ever really asks me that question, I promise to attempt a reasoned answer.

I know very little of the end result of our project with the Indians of The Mosquito Coast, probably because I dread finding out. Since I was there – and our trainees were here – Honduras has endured a spate of civil war, a governmental coup, a tide of centralization, a decline in tourism, and a drug-related crime wave. Now there are truckloads of Honduran children arriving on our border unaccompanied by adults, this latter resulting from the cities growing faster than the food supply.

I hope, however, that the farmers and fisherfolk of La Mosquitia, with whom we worked in this chapter, have at least something, including enough boats, with which to sustain themselves without fleeing to the cities.

Shortly after the conclusion of our training project in Maine, several of the WoodenBoat stab traveled to Puerto Lempira, way out there on the great Laguna de Caratasca. Their connection with our Indian trainees had been so strong in Maine that they made the trip to La Mosquitia on their own hook, unable to resist the desire to know something of the local life and times of our new fast friends. I think the staffers were a bit shocked by what they found (“Jesus Christ! What an awful f—ing place that is,” said one.). But they expressed great admiration for Mike Bonfigli and anyone else that had the pluck to work there out of altruism. They did say, however, that three groups of our students were establishing boatbuilding operations in the region, and that the loads of tools taken from the junk shops and donors in Maine – if not the training itself – had given them a leg up and a level of respect otherwise unattainable there.

We were truly devastated to learn that MOPAWI, the local development agency in La Mosquitia, had removed and sold the diesel engine from the big tuk tuk VENITA (which We built in Maine as part of the training) thereby rendering the boat next to useless. Whether this was done for graft or to acquire funding for more crucial applications I don’t wish to know, but I’m glad the great Joel White always the knight of magnanimity, didn’t live to hear of his donation engine being separated from the boat.

Regardless of the Maniacs’ impressions of the Caratasca jungle, our trainees from The Mosquito Coast definitely gave us WoodenBoat folks a powerful sense of the Indians’ humanity. More certain still is that the stories of their gambit to Los Estados will live on as a jungle legend. And no, multihulls – and maybe even plank-on-frame dugouts – are not for everyone. Let’s face it: the noble log (if you can find one near the water), when hollowed out and pointed on both ends, remains the very fundament of watercraft design. Finding the log is one thing for them, finding the fundament for us is another.

Windriders have been in production almost constantly for the past 18 years, but the brand has thrice come very close to foundering in fiscal overfalls.

The current owner of the Windrider molds and other assets (as of this writing on 6/26/14) is a Mr. Dean Sanberg, doing business as Windrider International LLC at Minneapolis, Minnesota (www.windrider.com). Dean is well experienced in marketing and advertising, which is just what these products have so sadly lacked for years since being sold off by a consolidating Confluence Watersports Inc. He and his son Robert, a recent college grad trained in the social sciences, are attempting to resurrect Windrider’s long-since disenchanted dealer base. They have made progress despite the fact that they had not been sailors.

What on earth would lure a seasoned salesman into taking on a product he knows little about? All I know is Mr. Sanberg saw a Windrider 17 sitting on the beach in Belize, where he has a wintertime retreat, and by summer he had bought the company! It seems these juicy little boats just move some people that way, even when they’re only sitting on the beach. Of course they’re not the only craft to have that power, but it’s enough to make me think, egotistically perhaps, that the reason Windriders have survived such stormy corporate seas for so long is at least in part because of their design. Even so, the Sanbergs continue to build and sell “my boats” without sharing, even the usual 2% with the designer, so I have absolutely no business connection with the Company any more. Still, a lot of people have a lot of fun in Windriders, as I do in mine. Its rubber ducky nature makes it the only boat in which I can still zoom around our drowned river without much danger of killing myself or someone else. When I get cabin fever from not being able to drive a car, for me and Abby there is always the boat!

I returned again to Cuba in 2012, and can report that life there has improved somewhat since our visit there in SCRIMSHAW in 1996 (as described in this chapter). This time we flew, some friends and I, even though SCRIMSHAW was in Florida, able to go. We were told that the “Trading with the enemy” law was now being enforced, so it would be risky for American Yachts, not to go there, per se, but to come back. All the information we could gather, from the State Department and the internet, suggested there was a chance the boat could be confiscated upon our return. So we gathered in Cancun, and with the help of a travel agency there called Havana Tours, The paperwork, which was started previously by phone, was completed in an hour and we hopped over to Havana on Mexicana Airlines.

I wanted to explore the possibility of transferring Constant Camber know-how to Cuba, and while in Florida, I learned of one Commodore Escrich, the director of the Club Nautico at Marina Hemmingway, Havana. I looked him up first thing, told him of my interest, and he asked me to come back next day.

When I returned, it became clear that he had investigated me somehow, and asked if I had ever worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). I explained that the Honduras project (Chapter 19) had been sponsored by that Agency, but that I had never worked for them directly, nor since. He advised me not to mention my involvement with USAID, no matter how remote, for the rest of my stay in Cuba, but said there was little possibility of building boats there because they would be used for escaping to Florida. Then he proceeded to literally open up the country for us. He planned a tour, helped us rent a car, met us along the way, arranged for our accommodations in private homes and referred us to other nautical contacts.

Life in Cuba is improved because the government now permits many more private individuals to go into business for themselves, and this has relieved the widespread desperation for those with nothing to do. Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and the current dictator of the country, has promised to step down in 2017, and his possible replacement is apparently much more forward thinking and a “people’s politician.” He has risen rapidly through the ranks and has been consulting for the Castro brothers for a while – which may explain the easing of restrictions on private enterprise. Nevertheless, Cuba’s regime remains one of the most repressive in the world, and “normalized relations” with the United States are likely to come very gradually if ever they do become “normal.”

The division, as I see it, is ideological. The Cubans, and apparently many others in the world, do not want an “American style” democracy. I get the feeling they view our system as sectarian, and that our “capitalist faith” provides inadequate separation between “church” and state. Whereas, their own, imposed, “socialist faith” does indeed place some constraint on rabid capitalism.

Who knows where either system is going, but it appears to me that the whole Third World is going someplace else, not where we are or have been. Why not? Because the Earth cannot sustain such excessiveness. So again I see Cuba as Harbinger Island, just one example, one piece of evidence – one among many – of where the world just might be headed. To me, that’s why it is such a great place to visit, to explore, to actually witness the past and possibly the future.

From our experience in 2012, going there is not a problem, and neither is getting back – unless you go in an American yacht. The Cubans were glad to see us coming, and US Customs and Immigration had no objection to our coming back. Even though our passports showed two consecutive entries into Mexico, both entering at Cancun with no mention of another country in between (Cuba does not stamp your passport, they just issue a tourist card), none of us were challenged even though we re-entered the US at different points. We followed the advice of not carrying anything in our luggage to flaunt the fact that we had been to Cuba (no rum, no cigars, etc.), but in the end there were no inspections and no questions asked.

On the southern coast at Cienfuegos, we spoke with one charter boat operator who has received many parties of divers and fishermen from the States, and none of them had experienced any difficulty coming or going back. Now, if we had gone to Cuba and made trouble, for Cuba, Mexico or the US, it could have been different. That guy who tried to bring in satellite communications equipment, in order to offer unrestricted internet access in Cuba, is still in a Cuban jail after five years of a fifteen year sentence. And incidentally, Cuba takes your picture both entering and leaving,

We spoke with several Americans who live (rather inexpensively) in Cuba. They are required to leave for another country every six months (which one would like to do anyway to bring back the many consumer goods not otherwise available), but it appears Cuba could become a retreat for pensionados.

Strictly speaking, it is still indeed illegal in the US for Americans – and only Americans – to spend money in Cuba. Unless, that is, we are part of the so called People to People Exchange program, a clever means of restricting travel and separating the tourist from a few more dollars. But the legal issue of that crazy “Trading with the Enemy” law has apparently now become moot. That’s the old law under which the Miami Cuban lobby is still attempting (after 55 years) to starve out the Castro regime by creating the embargo, or as the Cubans calls it, the bloqueo or blockade. Apparently, the funds to prosecute individuals who offend this law have been withdrawn. Actually, there are at least several American companies doing business in Cuba, and they seem to get away with it. For example, we were told that most of the chicken consumed in Cuba comes from Texas – or some such.

Soooo, anyone who wants to visit Cuba before the gate swings open any wider, I would say, go now! Because, if things really loosen up, it just may ruin the place in a way. Already the personnel in tourist jobs are starting to develop, justifiably, a bit of an attitude, and the prices for anything outside the pervasive subsistence economy, aren’t getting any cheaper. Do research the current situation on the Web, but don’t be dismayed by the official, State department warnings. Contact Havana Tours in Cancun for their current appraisal of the situation for Americans visiting Cuba.

Have a great trip, and if you meet a tall, old, mulata woman named Josepha (she may have a striking pigtail), tell her I said, Saludos, mi amor primera!

When re-reading the above Afterword, I am surprised to notice the negativity in my remarks. It must reveal a “downer” side to my current mindset. Maybe this has come normally from age, but I would prefer to retain my utopian attitude toward life, realistic or not.

At what price realism? Doesn’t it deprive us of living in our fantasies, of making dreams come true, of making our art? I think it was Nietzsche who said, “We have art to save us from dying of the truth.” Hey, that’s good, so long as it does indeed save us, but art is also what you make it, and we could make a truly wonderful world if we just used our memories – together with our wisdom — in order to determine something of our future.

If we have a close look around, at what is going on in the world today, there is plenty of splendor and plenty of travail, but – unless one believes that technology has answers for all problems – the earthly balance beam seems to be tipping, realistically, toward travail. It also seems that all this modern stuff, even modern boats, has just increased the pace of life. Is that why things are happening so fast? Believe me, when one starts ticking off his 80s, a fast pace seems mainly to make it tick faster and faster. In fact, it seems that life is like a roll of toilet paper; the more you use it up the faster it runs out. So when it gets down toward the end of the roll, instead of zipping it off in a frenzy of rpm, maturity suggests we draw things out with more deliberation. And yet the issues at hand plead for immediate action. Or at least deliberate action, eh?

Another notion that may well come to those of seniors of every age is of having lived at the “right” time. For Depression era babies like me, hard times were normal, and when the 1950s came a long, things got rather cushy and stayed that way right up until we had the mortgage paid and the Eagle shat “soc sec” every month. It surely aint that easy now, for our kids and grandkids.

Of course we’ve had the wars, busts, booms, diseases, hair and technoquakes, but we’ve come through them, mostly. We’ve also seen some peace, prosperity, stability, cures, straights and gadgetry. In some respects at least, we have witnessed a vast extension of the human potential, and found it laden with unexpected troves of both splendor and travail. It’s just that the scale seems to be tipping ominously toward spilling it all. Or is it that there is so much of everything that the balance beam itself is threatening to snap?

At any rate, it seems like I and my contemporaries chose a nifty time to live, right at the very zenith of the human bell curve. It also seems that we are starting down the other side of the bell. And that’s a real shame because it doesn’t have to be a bell. How about a ramp? Or even a plateau. We could draw it any way we want.

Our brains have the capacity to gather information in memory (now hugely augmented by magnetic storage) and utilize that information to project the future (now hugely augmented by electronic computation). No, not to predict the future; we haven’t come that far, but to at least suggest possible scenarios. Yet we seem incapable of acting on such anticipation, of responding even to obvious changes in our surroundings. Isn’t that how species go extinct? By failing to respond to changes in their environment? The human being is supposed to be “the wise, wise ape” (homo sapiens sapiens), but it appears that his wisdom is learned mainly from enduring some kind of cataclysm.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that all the signs are telling us that perpetual growth, economic and demographic, is unsustainable. Isn’t that what the signs are saying? And let’s assume that we take some rather drastic measures to devise a different system, and yes, some of that is happening now, but always in the quest for more growth! More people, more cars, more gadgets, more energy, more money and – one assumes – more eventual cataclysm. Isn’t that the real issue now at hand? To use our wisdom to avoid some kind of cataclysm?

If we answer “yes” to that, then what would human life be like if we were to jump on the problem hard enough to really save – not the day – the tomorrow? What would have to change in “life as we know it” for us to avoid impending cataclysm? What would life, as we would know it then, be like?

Well, it just may take a cataclysm to find out, but I happen to believe that kind of living could be groovy; at least well balanced between splendor and travail. And if I ever get around to making another book, I think it might be the story of a new age schooner bum living in a time when humanity gets slapped hard in the face and comes back to build a world that really runs on stuff like wind power and hard-won wisdom. That could be a fun story to write and, if sufficiently real, to read.

Until then (if then ever happens), fair winds to all you multihullers – aw hell, anyhullsrs – old and new. Fair Winds!

Jim Brown
Hick Neck, Virginia
7/7/2014