In the fall, Curt and I made plans to go to Moosehead Lake in northern Maine with Excalibur Pacific for ten-month-old Christopher’s first boating expedition. Across northern Vermont and New Hampshire, the Datsun towed the boat until we reached Rockwood on the western shores of Moosehead Lake. The baby sat strapped in his car seat while we struggled for almost an hour to get the boat off the trailer and into the lake’s cold waters, until one of us realized that the two four-foot dagger boards were in place, which was preventing the boat from sliding off the trailer. It seemed strange that both of us would have made such a stupid mistake. I worried that I was losing my ocean rower’s savvy and becoming a domesticated landlubber.
Once I pulled up the dagger boards and set them on the deck, the boat slid off the trailer easily, and Curt went to park the car in a lot nearby. It was late in the day, and we were anxious to row to a spot on Moosehead where we could pull the boat up on shore for the night.
Dusk was falling quickly as we set our course across the lake’s choppy waters. The baby, whom I had put in the bow cabin so we could both row, screamed and cried out his frustration at being put in the cabin alone. I felt terrible listening to his mournful cries while I pulled on the oars. It was the first time since finishing the Pacific row in July 1985 that I was rowing in Excalibur Pacific. My heart was divided. Who was I: Kathleen, the tough-ass ocean rower, or Kathleen, the full-time mother to baby Christopher? My identity at that moment was in conflict. This boat I had built alongside Curt in a Rhode Island barn because we fervently believed in our ability to row across the Atlantic Ocean, and later the South Pacific, was now a different place. It was a place we shared with an innocent child of our own creation.
That night, we pulled the boat ashore in a remote cove on the eastern side of the lake. We had made the bumpy crossing with the baby intact, but I wasn’t the same. Though I knew and loved Excalibur Pacific better than any house or home in my childhood years of constant moving, she was not quite the boat I had known on the ocean. I was less certain of myself with the baby on board. The boat and our lives were changing.
Early Explorers Expedition and Turning Points
It was late January 1988, and we had just completed boat exhibition gigs in Kansas City and Minneapolis. We were now driving west to southern California for the start of the “Early Explorers Expedition,” our proposed epic journey to circumnavigate the North American continent. The idea of the Early Explorers Expedition, hatched over the long winter in Vermont, was to follow the routes of old explorers along the west and east coasts of America and Central America, through the Gulf of Mexico, eventually ending in a transiting of the Northwest Passage and south to California.
I drew up a simple design for an expedition logo and had stationery printed so I could send out letters to former ocean-rowing sponsors. We envisioned the expedition as an educational product we could sell to schools for an ongoing lecture series that would be given between legs of the journey. This time, though, we were out of luck. No one was interested in sponsoring the formerly successful ocean-rowing couple who claimed they could not only row around the entire North American continent but do it with a two-year-old child who would grow up along the way.
When we arrived in San Pedro, California, at the home of a couple we had met on the freighter to South America at the start of the South Pacific row, we had only a vague idea of how we were going to get the expedition financed and on the water. The couple very kindly allowed us to stay in their spare bedroom for a few weeks while the ocean rowboat was parked in the small parking lot of their ocean-front mobile-home community. Within a week, we were introduced to local legend John Olguin, who was director emeritus of the Cabrillo Maritime Museum and founder of the Cabrillo Whalewatch program. John took us under his wing and helped us to find sponsorship for a trimmed-down version of our expedition. He understood, somehow, what we were going through as a once-celebrity couple with a small child at odds with our altered identities. With John’s enthusiastic endorsement, his friends and acquaintances agreed to sponsor our rowing and sailing down the Baja Coast to Mexico and maybe the Panama Canal. We would still have the added excitement of a two-year-old aboard the rowboat. In fact, one article written about us at the time was entitled “Rowing Family Explores the World by Sea,” with a photo of Christopher perched on the roof of the bow cabin of the rowboat while it sat parked on a trailer.
Our southern California sojourn became a major turning point in our lives. After the South Pacific row, I had never given up my dream to travel around the world in a sailboat. Over the year we spent rowing across the South Pacific, and even at the beginning of the Atlantic row, we had met and been helped by many sailors. Meeting Corrine and François in Hierro Island before we set out across the open Atlantic had first sparked a desire in me to travel as freely as they did in their sailboat, instead of in our ocean-rowing boat with its obvious limitations. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to raise Christopher on such a boat and educate him about the world through a round-the-world sailing journey?
Back in Vermont, when we had first formulated the idea of the Early Explorers Expedition, the circumnavigation was to be done in a sailboat. I worked hard on Curt to get him to agree, though I knew he wasn’t really a sailor. He knew how to navigate a sailboat, but he wasn’t crazy about the amount of labor it took to run one. Besides, he liked to say, a sailboat was a black hole into which one just poured endless amounts of money for maintenance and upkeep. Nevertheless, I had managed to convince him we could find a cheap sailboat in San Pedro, California. I was excited, because I had finally gotten him to consider doing something I suggested for a change that wasn’t quite his style. Don’t worry, I told him, I’ll pull the sails up and do maintenance on the boat. You just navigate and drop the anchor. It will be great for Christopher, I promised.
For a couple of weeks, we scoured the boatyards for the right deal and eventually found a twenty-six-foot fiberglass sloop. The price of $6500 was within our budget, and we made a deal to buy the boat. It wasn’t the ideal sailboat, or one we could expect to sail across an ocean without extensive outfitting, but I thought it was an excellent start to a new chapter in our ocean-going lives.
The afternoon after making our offer, I was happy. It seemed we were about to return to the ocean and all those survival skills we had learned the hard way over the past few years would be put to use again on our new sailboat.
I should have known better, though perhaps I knew what was coming. The day we were to pay for the boat, Curt told me he didn’t want to buy it because it was old and wouldn’t work for what we needed to do. It would be a disaster to buy that boat, he said. I was very upset, but I couldn’t do anything about it. If he didn’t want to spend his portion of our boat show proceeds on a sailboat, it was out my reach. I couldn’t afford the boat on my own. Nor could I sail it without him. He called the owner, reached his answering machine, and left a message saying we had changed our minds.
John Olguin watched what was going on with us and wisely said nothing. It was he who then suggested that we re-outfit Excalibur Pacific to row and sail down the Baja California coast and, if we felt like it, continue on to the Mexican mainland. The expedition became the Baja California expedition, where we would row and sail down the coast of southern California to the Baja California peninsula and on to Cabo San Lucas at its very tip. Since some who had been told of our latest boating adventures had offered to sponsor us with products, we agreed to the re-outfitting of Excalibur Pacific. She would have a real sailing mast that would be cut down to size to suit the length of the boat, along with a specially made sail. A spray dodger to provide shelter on the forward deck was made and attached to the bow cabin. The dagger boards we had used so effectively on the oceans were replaced with heavier ones that could better balance the weight of the sail and mast, which sat on the bow cabin. A set of comfortable boat cushions rounded out the retrofit.
The day in early April that we left San Pedro, Christopher, who had been spend
ing a lot of time with John and Muriel Olguin and John’s wonderful friend, Lois LaRue, did not want to get on the boat. The local newspapers and a television crew were there, courtesy of John’s contacts. It was the moment of truth, and little Chris said publicly that he did not want to go with us on the boat. I couldn’t blame him: his new friends lived a much more predictable lifestyle than his parents, who were still negotiating their post-rowing identities.
Baja with Baby on Board
“Papa, Mama, I need help!” We looked at each other and then back at the pod of blue whales swimming off the bow of the boat.
“I’ll go see what he wants,” Curt said, and went to the open cabin door.
“Christopher, what’s the matter, little guy?” I half-listened to their conversation while I held the course. We were sailing Excalibur Pacific in a fifteen-knot wind toward the entrance of Magdalena Bay on the west coast of Baja California. With my right hand on the tiller and my left holding the rope to the sail, I was threading a tight course around a pod of hundred-foot behemoths that had appeared as we were changing course.
“Ah, Christopher, what’s this?” I heard Curt saying. Today it wasn’t the toothpaste two-year-old Christopher had gotten into; it was something more significant. He was trying to toilet train himself in the boat cabin while his parents were sailing through a pod of whales. Curt reached in and held him still on his potty while the boat bounced through the waves.
In a minute he was done and grinning as he stood in the doorway of the bow cabin with his safety harness attached to the gunwales. I was ready for them and steered over a wave that brought the boat neatly beside the pod.
“Look, Christopher,” I said, pointing. “Look at the whales!” He squinted and squealed with delight as one of the whales lifted its tail out of the water and splashed the boat. Curt slipped a pair of child-sized sunglasses over Chris’s eyes and tied his canvas hat over his blond hair, though he didn’t even notice, he was so mesmerized by the whales.
I switched places and sat beside him as Curt made a ninety-degree course change across the waves, the wind kicking up a fine spray. Christopher, sitting on my lap on the high side of the deck where the wind and waves were hitting hardest, turned his face toward the waves, fascinated by the machinations it took to keep Excalibur Pacific pointed in the right direction.
As the sun sank below the stark, jagged mountains of Magdalena Bay, a red glow spread throughout the sky and over the water. We sailed along the shore until we reached an anchorage across from a village of tin-roofed cement block houses. Christopher helped his father drop the anchor by holding on to a piece of the two-inch rope, while I gave the oars a couple of hard strokes to set the anchor in the soft mud of the bay.
Excalibur Pacific floated quietly as the three of us stretched out on the soft boat cushions, enjoying the stillness of the anchorage after days of hard sailing and rowing from San Diego. With our warm Mexican cervezas in hand, Curt and I were relieved to be finally off the coastal waters of the Baja, while Christopher drank his apple juice, oblivious to the work it had taken to row and sail so far from San Pedro, California.
Impacted Wisdom Teeth and Engine
Halfway along the Baja coast, after a stop at Punta Eugenia, the pain Curt had been feeling in his back molar developed into a full-fledged impacted wisdom tooth that left him almost immobile from the agony. Since I had not relearned coastal navigation because I was focused on taking care of Christopher, I wasn’t able to navigate the boat on my own. After a week of difficult travel along the Baja coast, where Curt tried unsuccessfully one day to flag down a ship for medication, we decided to head for the nearest port, which was Magdalena Bay.
The next day we went ashore to find medical help. Later, with the aid of some of the villagers, Excalibur Pacific was towed to a remote cove, where we would spend a week while Curt went to Ciudad Constitución to have his molar extracted. In the long week we waited for Curt to return, Christopher and I sat at anchor in the cove. Its extreme tides left the boat sitting on soft, stinky mud flats for hours at a time, while we were able to paddle to shore by the high tides and explore the flotsam-filled beaches. After a successful extraction, Curt took a local bus north to California, where he picked up the Datsun and boat trailer and drove south to La Paz, Baja, on the east coast. Our new plan was to row and sail around the tip of Baja California and end the expedition in La Paz.
The day Curt appeared on the edge of the mud flats of our little cove, Christopher and I were sitting on deck making camp bread. It had been a lonely and uncertain week at anchor, and we were happy to see him.
The day we left Magdalena Bay, our expedition changed its mode of travel entirely. Hanging off the starboard gunwale of our ocean-rowing boat was a brand new four-horsepower Suzuki outboard engine that Curt had bought in California. On deck beside it was a 2.5-gallon plastic container filled to its spout with gasoline. Sitting on the aft cabin in the arms of his father was Christopher, happily steering the boat toward the Pacific Ocean and Cabo San Lucas, from where we would continue north to La Paz on the east coast.
The Baja trip had evolved into something completely different from what had originally been planned. Though, on one level, sailing around the North American continent was an attempt to gain back our prestige as fearless explorers, it had also been my way to get us to change our mode of travel and go into the cruising life, a sailing lifestyle I thought had limitless potential while still appeasing Curt’s desire to continue doing expeditions. The problem was that we couldn’t agree as a couple, with equal voice, on what to do next. I was getting the feeling that my life’s journey, which involved making my own decisions, was stalling and fast becoming an unguided bushwhack into the unknown. Unlike the bushwhacking hikes I loved to take with my good friend Ruby, who knew the old abandoned town roads of northern Vermont so well despite the complete lack of road signs, Curt and I were headed into uncharted territory through a series of post-ocean-rowing misadventures, in which neither of us knew which path was the best and safest to take.
CHAPTER 41
Solar Boat Voyages on the Mississippi and Elsewhere
1989–1990
NONETHELESS, THE BAJA CALIFORNIA TRIP resulted in new ideas for future expeditions. We had always carried solar panels on Excalibur and Excalibur Pacific to recharge the batteries for the radio, the lights, and the autopilot self-steering device. Now we were thinking of new ways to expand our usage of solar energy on the boat. It seemed obvious, after the experience of motoring with the outboard gas engine down the Baja coast that a solar-powered electric engine would be much safer and equally reliable.
Curt jumped into the solar electric project enthusiastically, and eventually all our time and effort were dedicated to converting the ocean rowboat into a solar-powered electric boat. To test the electric engine, we carried out several long-distance coastal and river trips.
One summer, we drove to Cape Girardeau on the Mississippi River south of St. Louis to launch the Excalibur Pacific with her newly added amas (Polynesian-style outriggers) into the river’s fast-moving current. Curt planned to motor down the length of the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico while I drove the car and boat trailer with four-year-old Christopher along the Great River Road south toward Louisiana.
For six weeks or so, we ran parallel expeditions. Occasionally we met up, and once Christopher had a chance to travel with his father on the electric rowboat for a few days. I had never towed a trailer before, so it was a good challenge to drive, park, and back up the fifteen-foot trailer as we passed through small southern towns and campgrounds along the way.
One day I pulled into a state campground south of Vicksburg, Mississippi, that overlooked the river from cliffs high above the river’s edge. Carefully, I negotiated the hairpin turns with the old Datsun 810 and trailer, noting the steep drop-offs on either side of the road as we ascended to the entrance of the park. The atmosphere in the camping area was eerie, with the scent of ancient cedar trees draped with Spanish moss ha
nging over the roadway. There weren’t any campers or rangers in sight. I drove the campsite loop again and stopped by the outhouses. As I was getting Christopher out of the car for a bathroom stop, a man with a bucket and broom emerged from the men’s toilet. He was the only person I’d seen in the park so far, so I asked him about camping for the night.
“Well,” he drawled, “you might wanna think about that.” My eyes widened. “Just yesterday, a woman opened her trailer door and almost stepped on a rattler sunning itself right below her foot.” He went on to describe other incidents of rattler sightings, but before he finished, I had made my mind up to leave. Within five minutes of saying goodbye, I was driving out the entrance of the park without a look backward.
A few days later, Christopher and I were camping on the banks of the Mississippi near Natchez. I sat at our picnic table, writing in my journal and keeping an eye on Christopher, who was investigating a series of armadillo holes by our tent. Earlier in the day, we had seen one pointy-nosed armadillo scurrying through the campground in the direction of the outhouses.
A pleasant river breeze wafted through the open campground, and an elderly couple pushed their equally elderly hairless poodle in a stroller around the camp road. I looked up smiling at the sight and over at Christopher, who was patting another dog that had come out of nowhere.
“Hey, how y’all doing?” An older couple appeared by the dog, smiling at us. We chatted about the river and our road trip. As the red sun began to slip behind the cypress trees on the west bank of the river, the lady invited us to spend the night at their house. We could take a shower and come to church with them the next morning, she told me. I thanked them for the offer and tried to decline, but the lady wouldn’t hear of it; in fact, she insisted we come for the night. That night, Christopher and I slept in icy cold air-conditioned comfort, and the next day we fed our souls at the Natchez Baptist Church. Afterward, when we had been returned to our campsite, the two of us stood at the river’s edge watching for Curt, who was scheduled to pass by the campground that day. In the last rays of the setting sun, Christopher spotted a rowboat cum solar electric boat motoring our way and started shouting, “Papa, Papa!” We waved our arms until he spotted us and pulled in to shore.
Rowing for My Life Page 29