| By Chuck Leinweber - Harper,
Texas - USA |
It’s been several years
since Brian Anderson and I “met”. I
feel like we are pretty good friends even though
we may have never actually stood within a thousand
miles of each other. Such is the world of the internet.
In fact, it was my foray into the world of online
publishing that brought us together. Brian edited
a number of excerpts for Duckworks that reflected
his ideas of real adventure in boats (see links
at the bottom of this article). Brian has been there
and done that and knows what adventure is all about
but these stories are not what you might expect.
Eventually, Brian found a publisher
who shared his vision. He and Garth Battista at
Breakaway Books put together a collection of 40
stories by authors ranging from Robert Louis Stevenson
to Robb White. Anyone who reads Duckworks should
have this book on their summer reading list.
Probably the best way to explain
Brian’s vision is to let him tell it in his
own words. Here is the introduction to the book,
“Small
Boats on Green Waters”. Please
accept this in lieu or a "real" book review
and tell me if this does not embody the Duckworks
philosophy.
– Chuck -
It has often struck me how, when one
speaks of nautical literature, it often seems to be
first and foremost stories of wooden ships and iron
men, perfect storms, exotic ports, and long passages.
In the magazines, one reads of “go anywhere
boats” and “real blue water cruisers,”
of selling up and setting off into the blue.
As a boat nut steeped, like many of
us, in those kinds of stories, it always seemed the
natural thing to think of the ocean passage as the
Holy Grail, and a trip in a canoe or rowboat or daysailer
as a stopgap. I dreamed of someday spending days alone
between sea and sky with maybe an albatross or a school
of dolphins for company and then stepping from a sturdy
little sailboat onto the quay at Marseilles, Istanbul,
Tahiti, Shanghai, or a hundred other ports whose names
hung in the air, as pungent as the spices, salt cod,
ambergris, whale oil, and incense that drove men over
the seas in the first place.
So you can imagine my thoughts when
I found myself the owner of the 28-foot “real
blue water cruiser.” Over three years, with
friends and alone, I stepped from the deck of my sturdy
little cutter, Lookfar, onto a dock or dropped
the hook in some legendary places: Louisiana’s
bayou country, Norfolk, Horta, Lisbon, Cartagena,
Barcelona, Marseilles, Pilos, Rhodes. It was the adventure
of a lifetime. I don’t think I could have turned
my back on it, and given the chance to do it again,
I probably would.
But there were times, weeks, when I
found myself thinking more and more of my time on
the river in my hometown. Bobbing around in the Gulf
of Mexico, waiting for a tropical storm to arrive;
twisted up like a pretzel in the engine “room”
trying to get a wrench on a stubborn bolt when everything
I touched immediately became slick with sweat; days
on end of sea and sky and nothing alive between them
except me; when the wind started to blow cold out
of the north and seas built and there was still nothing
but sea and sky and after a week or so of it I started
to forget that there was a time when I was not tired
and cold and wet and afraid. Wrestling with the engine,
I dreamed of a paddle. When I had been days without
seeing another living thing, I longed for a river,
its banks teeming with life and something new to see
around every corner. In bad weather, I thought of
paddling a few yards to the bank and snugging down
in my tent, a book like this one in my hands (or let’s
be real here: a certain couch, warm and dry that almost
never bounced around like a rubber duck in a washing
machine filled with cold salt water).
 Some
people are just never happy, I guess. You can take
the boy out of Ohio, but can’t take Ohio out
of the boy. In the arms of an exotic beauty, my thoughts
always turned to the girl next door. Go figure.
So when a friend asked me to do a book-excerpt
column for his online small boats magazine, Duckworksmagazine.com,
I decided to concentrate on stories of small boats
on green waters, for want of a better way to put it.
Good stories of messing about in small boats one does
not need a wad of cash the size of Texas to own, or
in places that could be a couple of miles down the
road. Although I must say I wasn’t able to resist
the story of Blackbeard’s demise and a naval
battle or two when I ran across them. Few of us are
likely to take a 600 ton frigate into action these
days. But at least they took place on our collective
doorsteps, even if they do stay a little into the
realm of “wooden ships and iron men.”
There’s plenty of adventure out there, if one
is looking for it. As it turned out, there was a lot
of material, and so I thought it would be a good idea
to gather together the best passages I could find
and do a book.
Small Boats is certainly not exhaustive,
and there were probably as many good writers I left
out as put in. Mostly, I figured that if one could
walk into one of the big stores and find an author’s
books on the shelves in the boat or adventure sections,
there was little point. But maybe down the road there
will be a second book. I hope that the excerpts that
are from familiar works will give pleasure again,
and the ones from new authors doubly so. One of the
best things about reading through the books for Small
Boats was the number of new writers I discovered
in them. People who write books on a subject tend
to read quite a bit, and so one good book will often
recommend two or three others. One could follow the
threads in these books for years.
Brian Anderson.
Small
Boats on Green Waters is available from Duckworks
Excerpts by Brian Anderson
that appeared in Duckworks:
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