by Joe Cline
STEVE CALLAHAN PART TWO: VOYAGING AND SURVIVAL PHILOSOPHY Steve Callahan has spent his life around boats — sailing, voyaging, building, designing, and writing about it. He is best known for surviving 76 days alone in a life raft when his sailboat was lost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He wrote the best selling book, Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea, about that experience. The following continues from an interview started in the November 2020 issue of 48° North. 48° North: Even though you don’t live here in the Pacific Northwest, one of your many connections to the area is a special friendship with a giant in our regional scene, Port Townsend boat builder and innovator, Russell Brown. Please tell us your relationship with him. Steve: Russell is a little younger than I am. I read about him first in Multihulls magazine. I had built a 28-foot trimaran back in 1974, and my first wife and I lived on board for a while. Multihulls being desperate for stories at the time, they published a little article about us. There was another article around the same time about this young man, Russell Brown, who had built this 30-foot plywood box proa and sailed it off. Another friend had already gotten me very interested in proas. After Adrift, which is what most people know me for — being dumb enough to lose my boat in the middle of the Atlantic and bob for two-and-a-half months across half of it in a life raft — I hooked up with Roger Hatfield who was running Gold Coast Yachts in the Carribean. He gave me Russell’s information, and I looked him up. At that time, Russell was building his third proa. 48º NORTH
We got to know each other, and got to be friends, fortunately for me. He’s a great guy and incredibly talented. He’d sail near where I live in the summer and people would go, “Hey did you see that spaceship landed down on the beach.” Multihulls in general were thought to be pretty weird craft in those days. I did some sailing with him through the years, and one of the best voyages I ever made was when he called me up after he built his last Jzerro and said, “Well, I’m thinking about sailing across the Pacific. Do you want to go with me to Tahiti?” It really was one of the great adventures of my life. He downplays all this stuff, but it was a remarkable voyage by an incredible sailor.
Steve and Russell Brown share a beverage on Brown's proa, Jzerro, while en route to Tahiti.
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DECEMBER 2020
