Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from Chapter 1
I built Cormorant, my 18-foot open boat, in 22 months – from August 2005 to June 2007 – on weekends and nights in the single-car garage of the studio apartment I rented in San Clemente, California. Working from a set of plans drawn by Iain Oughtred on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, I laminated stem and stern pieces; set up molds for the hull on a building frame; cut, bent, and secured planks; and saw a vessel steadily emerge from my efforts.
Pointed at both ends, with sleek, even curves, Cormorant carries more than a hint of her Viking longboat lineage. Under sail she glides through the water, with a large, trapezoidal lugsail for the main and a smaller, triangular mizzen sail, both in tanbark, which glows red in afternoon light.
I also had a set of narrow-bladed oars meant for sea work, and two spare oars as well. There would be no motor.
Modeled on traditional Shetland Islands fishing craft called sixareens – rugged, open boats that plied the North Atlantic from the Viking age until the advent of internal combustion – Cormorant differed from them only in her modern materials: Marine-grade plywood for the hull, secured with epoxy to timbers of Douglas fir for the keel.
A two-week supply of food, water, and gear in dry bags fit neatly in the boat, and I secured my surfboard in a padded bag over the top of my stowed equipment. My plan was to sail the sparsely populated Pacific coast of central Baja, landing in coves to camp and ride waves. This was a test run, a short getaway from work to gauge the feasibility of longer trips in the future. For now, I budgeted 10 days to sail along 100 miles of coast.
A culmination of various impulses – for time alone, for wilderness surfing, and for something I thought of as “full nature immersion” – the expedition before me also represented a living experiment. I had the notion that traveling in an ancient mode, removed from the ceaseless roar and electronic thrum of contemporary life, I could connect to the most basic aspect of my nature. Not so much my nature as an individual, but my nature as a member of our species shaped by longstanding, elemental human practices and by the elements themselves.
I wanted to know more about what I had come to think of as “blood memory” – a physical intimation I had of my ancestors’ knowledge. I felt it once, clearing brush under a low forest canopy in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It had come to me unmistakably, in the hard physical labor, that my body had been formed by the very work that I was engaged with: cutting limbs with a handsaw and hauling them down the steep hillside. Even the slant of the light through the trees… all of it was already in me and was merely activated by repeating what my ancestors had done.
Cormorant was my way of trying to know the world as it was before – a wilder place, where magic showed itself in weather and animal encounters.
