I Have A Daydream

I have a daydream.  I’ve had the same one for over five years.  My mother is not fond of my daydream.  She’s pretty sure I’d be killed.  By sharks or drug-runners or big waves.  I’m more afraid of getting dragged by currents and ending up in Iceland.

Last night, I had a real dream.  In my night dream last night, I built a closet, no bigger than a telephone booth.  And I’ve planned to sail it, or rather, float it across an ocean.  Only that in my dream, it takes only a few minutes to cross, so it was probably a canal or small lake.  This water closet was only big enough for me, but for some reason there two other people hanging on the outside.  This dream was certainly inspired by my original daydream.  I’m not sure what inspired my daydream.  Perhaps it was Alfons Aberg, the little Swedish boy with a grand imagination.

My daydream is to build a lightweight and inexpensive boat and paddle and sail it around the Caribbean, starting in Florida and finishing in Trinidad or Venezuela, passing the Bahamas, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and all of the lesser Antilles en route.  I imagine a trip such as this would easily take half a year or more.  Preferably with some friends and a brother or two in the boat, too.

I wouldn’t say I’ve got the sea in my blood.  I wouldn’t even say that I’m a boat person.  I’ve been on a sailboat only once in my life and it was docked in a marina.  Out on the open water, I’ve never been in anything smaller than a ferry or a cruise ship.  I’m most familiar with canoes, paddling around the rivers of central Florida…but, I’d never try to cross the Gulf Stream in a tippy canoe.  I’m not a boat person, but I’d like to try to become one.

Buying has never been an option.  I do it homemade, with garbage and other cheap materials.  For my first attempt, I invited some friends to my home, and I told them to bring any float-worthy garbage.  We had a group of six sailors in addition to a hollow door, a wooden gate, a tile-encrusted wooden table, lots of plastic bottles, two 55-gallon barrels, and several oak branches that had fallen during a storm.  We divided ourselves into two teams and had three hours to build two lake-worthy rafts.  The result : the first boat was a submarine, gliding along two inches below lake level, wetting the pants of all crewmembers, including me.  The second boat fared far worse.  Taller than long, it flipped every time its crew attempted to climb back on.  Very funny.  Funny enough that we were encouraged to try again.


Six months later, we started again, with grand aspirations.  We were going to descend the Mississippi River iver iver er…or perhaps cross the Gulf of Mexico exico exico ico co o.  Like the echo ?  Anyway, the raft would be much bigger, more buoyant, more liveable.  Then we heard and read about all the sharks and the currents in the Gulf…  Back to the lake !  So we built it and lived on it for five days in the middle of the lake.  We never moved faster than one mile an hour, and that was with the wind.  We were thrashed about every afternoon by the daily thunderstorms, and we loved it !  But in the end, someone driving on the nearby bridge had called the police to report a sinking boat…and the police came, put their feet on our boat, threatened to deport our Aruban crewmember, and forced us off the lake.




Tries three and four were on the other side of the ocean, in Montpellier, France.  The last boat was too slow, too heavy.  It took four people to lift half of it.  So this time, we’d be going ultra-light : cardboard !  And so I convinced five teams (the first occasion) and eight teams (the second) to build flimsy cardboard boats, held together by paint and tape.  The first time, my boat sank after five minutes and my team swam across the lake carrying the submerged boat.  I swam back carrying a submerged paddle.  Did you know that a 25 kg cardboard raft weighs more than 3,000 kg when saturated with lake water ?  The second try, we fared a little better.  Our boat sank like before, but not before winning the race across the lake.  Progress !








It’s been six months now.  I’ve been boat-less for more than six months now.  I’m loving the mountains of Colombia, but my lake-legs miss the Huckleberry Finn life.  Every time I look at the world map, or at least the Caribbean part, I start daydreaming about crossing it, from Antille to Antille (is that the singular of Antilles ?).  But I know I have a lot of work to do before that, lots of materials to test, lots to learn about sailing and currents and man-eating sharks before embarcation.


Afficher Caribbean Trip sur une carte plus grande

So that’s why my next trip will be from the Ecuadorian coast to the Galapagos archipelago, in a raft made of tightly-bound reeds.  It’ll be a way to kill two birds with one stone.  The Galapagos islands are far too expensive for us to visit in the usual style, you know, with planes and cruises.  Keep checking for updates as my daydream approaches reality!




Just kidding, mom !  I’m not gonna cross hundreds of miles of the Pacific.


Yet.