When my friend
Kyle and I began talking about the idea of sailing from Gibraltar to Istanbul
in a sailing dinghy, one of my first impulses was to find others who had
already done it. It was during that search I encountered Ben Crawshaw, an ex-patriate
Brit living in Catalonia who built a plywood skiff to sail and row around the western Mediterranean. I first encountered his six-part mini YouTube documentary
covering his trip to the Balearic Islands and back, and this led me to his
blog, which ended suddenly and without explanation four years ago. And then,
googling his name to find out what the hell happened to him, I found out he’d
published a book, Catalan Castaway.
I was surprised when the book
arrived. It was smaller than I’d anticipated, and the long horizontal layout
seemed strange for a narrative documenting building and sailing a small boat.
The rationale for this was apparent upon reading Ben’s Forward – this book is
his blog in print, complete with photographs. He’d been approached by Lodestar
Books, which speaks a little to Ben’s one-time presence on the net within the
small-boat community.
I admit I was initially disappointed
with this blog-cum-book. I’d been expecting a narrative, not an epistolary
account, and I felt a bit as though I’d been tricked. The bad impression didn't last long.
Catalan
Castaway opens with an introduction / disclaimer by the boat’s designer,
Gavin Atkin, who lauds Ben as a person (this is pretty common from everyone who
knows Ben, actually) and warns the reader against following his example. Atkin
notes that his design was “being tested in a way [he] hadn’t anticipated and
couldn’t approve of” and is surprised that “somehow Ben has survived his
adventures” despite sailing in a “small, narrow flat-bottomed boat that isn’t
designed for rough weather and strong winds.” Although Atkin hasn’t yet built
his design, he assures readers that when he does, he will “sail it cautiously
on the kinds of sheltered waters for which it was intended.” Despite so many
repeated warnings within the body of a very short forward, there’s also a
definite sense that Atkin not only likes Ben immensely, but has also enjoyed
living vicariously through him in his adventures.
The blog dressed in book’s clothing
opens with Ben launching his boat, the Onawind
Blue, through the surf of the beach in front of his house in Catalonia. The
difficulties of launching through this surf are a returning theme in this book.
Over the next chapters Ben goes through a series of trials and sail
configurations as he learns what works best for Onawind Blue and fights with his budget to outfit her. It doesn’t
take him long before he starts properly cruising, sailing along the coast and
camping ashore in the sand, and later with an improvised tent over his dinghy.
There’s enough food and wine to make the reader hungry and a little jealous,
but also enough hangovers to make the reader glad it’s Ben and not them.
Pages of rudder adjustments and
broken tholepins culminate in Ben’s big trip to the Balearic Islands, where he
gets to put some of his sailing and all of his rowing skills to the test
as he’s repeatedly becalmed for hours. The main theme of this part of the book,
and one that he deals with more specifically in his six-part YouTube videos, is
fear. “Fear is a Giant Octopus,” Ben writes, and describes his pre-trip
jitters:
Physically I was fine. Long hours of rowing, running,
swimming and weightlifting with my local rowing team had left me in better
shape than ever. I knew I had the stamina and the physical reserves and that I
could handle the lack of sleep. But what was unsettling was my high state of
nervousness. Though my stomach felt hollow it was full of dread.
I was struck by
the overwhelming fear expressed in Ben’s videos, and also with his honesty and openness
about it. In the philosophy of courage, there’s a repeated mantra that bravery
isn’t a lack of fear, but rather the will to overcome it. From this
perspective, courage cannot exist without fear, and a person without fear is
only reckless, not brave. To be afraid of something worth acting upon and be
defeated by fear is actual cowardice.
By this estimation, I would esteem
Ben Crawshaw as a brave individual, and his fear may only be a sense of timidity inspired by a lack of faith in something – maybe himself at the time of his crossing.
I can’t say a lack of self-confidence, because Ben also appears to be an
incredibly confident, affable and open person. Atkin describes Ben as “not just
a great sailor, adventurer and writer,” but also “charming an interesting” who “has
the great gift of being sociable.” Ben’s own thoughts on the subject are
interesting, but go largely without resolution, except that by committing to
sail he overcomes the fear that holds him back.
As it turns out, facing his fear of disappearing
at sea on his solitary trip was a dry run for what comes next: Ben gets cancer.
There’s not much in the book after this, but I’m going to spoil the end and say
that Ben defeats his second Giant Octopus too.
The book / blog is well-written and
the colourful Catalan coastline make for terrific photos. Ben is a reader, and
it shows-through in his writing. He mentions Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and
Maturin series, the Donald Crowhurst tragedy, and other books and authors that
are well-known to thallassophiles everywhere. There’s enough nautical terminology
here to properly illustrate the narrative, but I don’t think a land-lubber reader
would get lost or feel the writing is polluted with jargon. While most of the
writing is designed to recount specific events and speculate on possible future
endeavours, there are also the occasional truly beautiful prose passage that
speaks something of the artist in Ben.
Where the book may suffer is its
format. There are virtues to the blog presentation; the future is unknown
chapter to chapter, leaving the narrator as un-omniscient as the reader;
because of this, each chapter appears honest and unadjusted for how things
actually turned out; the reader may have more of a vicarious experience and
feel closer to the writer because of this. On the other hand, speculation about
things that never happen begins to feel wearing, and small problems that are
important to each chapter eventually become boring. It didn’t take me long
before I expected there to be a problem
beaching the Onawind Blue through the surf, or for a tholepin to break every trip. I was
intrigued by the archaic tholepins before I read Catalan Castaway – there was a set hanging on the wall inside the
barn when I was growing up, and my father explained them to me- but I can now say
with certainty that I’ll never, ever use them.
I learned a lot from Ben’s adventures with Onawind Blue that I’ll apply to Eurydice and hopefully eventually transfer
to the Mediterranean trip. Most of all, I was inspired by Ben’s willingness to
experiment with his boat. He tried different sail plans, rudders, rigging, and
a variety of woods for his tholepins. He was constantly trimming, so to speak,
until he reached a fine point of sailing.
And by the way – Ben appears to be
doing fine, despite dropping off the face of the earth. By the end of his blog
he seems to become a commercial fisherman, and he's penning lyrics these
days for his partner Monica’s band. I can only hope that someday Ben's blog The Invisible Workshop flashes back to life with new updates. I enjoyed reading both it and the book version - which is admittedly not quite the same thing - immensely.
