Catalan Castaway Review

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.