Back when I was a kid there was a musical and cultural revolution going on. It was psychodelic, “underground”, records passed from hand to hand with rare and amateurish covers and only played late at night on some of the more adventurous radio stations, outlawed in polite society. The names were new, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, The Doors. The Velvet Underground even incorporated it into their name and their “hit”, which was NEVER played on top 40 was Heroin. A song about the rush of the high. I was mesmerised by the honesty and shear audacity of it all.

Kris's book is something like that. Too honest for polite society. The sense of underground has to have appeal to you or it won't work but if it does.. there are few that would satisfy like this. So all you pirates out there, here is a taste of the accounts of the travels of the ship and crew of Kehaar. The books are hand crafted and will never see the best seller lists.. well.. never say never. I hope you enjoy these excerpts as much as I enjoyed the book. All the typo’s and grammatical errors are genuine, I tried not to add my own!

I usually tell people I built my boat. This is not exactly true. About 20% of the work has been done a by a chap on the west coast of Tasmania. Ho bought a set of plans from John Pugh, stole a lot of plate steel from the gold mine he was working at and started building. He bent the 1/8th plates into the shape of the hull and tacked them together. That's as far as he got. His dream was to finish his boat and go cruising. His Missus wouldn't have it. So he had that heap of rusting steel in his yard for a while, then sold it to his mate on the north coast. I heard it was something about paying his debts in kind or similar story. The new owner was a nuts and bolts man close to retiring age. He did no work on the boat, only dreamed of cruising. His missus wouldn't have it either. He had it siting in his machinery yard for a while, then put it on the market. Nobody wanted the thing. It was only a few rusting plates tacked together. I was driving past it for a year before I seriously considered buying it. I was going to finish it and go cruising. Naturally, my missus wouldn't have it. So I got myself a divorce and bought the hull.

The only mode of propulsion was to be provided by sail. No engine. I am not a purist. A purist is someone to poor to buy en engine. With me it is not a question of costs. I feel that smelly noisy infernal combustion engines belong into barges and trucks, not into sailing boats. From my personal experience I know that the only time you really need them, they won’t start, anyway. People sailed all over the place without them. They still do, millions of fishermen and traders in poor areas of the world. No engine means no noise, no stink, no grease, plenty of room aft, no through-hull fitting to leak, saved weight of motor, gearbox, shaft, tanks, fuel, oil, spare parts. Instead you get a true independence in decisions. So what happens when the wind died and you are drifting with the tides? Another bloke starts his engine. I start cursing. You learn to sail your boat, keep her bottom clean. You learn to catch every puff of a breeze, use the wind shifts to your advantage. You learn not to make reckless decisions, not to sail into traps hoping your cast iron genoa will save you if you get caught.

There is no ideal rig; otherwise everybody would be using it. I wanted to do fast comfortable single-handed passages. Frenchmen have shown us that you can single-hand anything, and fast. They’d single-hand the “Cutty Sark”, if she weren’t too slow for them.

I like more comfort, and the simplest, cheapest rig. Junk is fast downhill. We once sailed 1000 miles in 7 days and 2 hours. For a 33' steel cruiser I do not ask more.

I was watching the mountains in silent wonder, a childhood dream coming true. We had crossed our first ocean, without using a compass, GPS or even an electric torch, 41 days of tranquil solitude, undisturbed by idle chatter on a two-way radio. A simple profound experience that justified itself. Precisely the way I want it.
Every generation of boat bums grows up with their own heroes. I grew up on tales of Chichester, Knox-Johnson, Tabarly and above all Moitessier and Lewis. Those guys expanded the field of small boat navigation to the regions undreamed of until then. After their exploits there was virtually nothing left that has not been done.

The following generation concentrated on speed, a bunch of young French dragons who were using the latest technology, sailing improbably fast multihulls, slicing days off the fastest times, always pushing for more speed. 80 days around the world. Fine. What next?
There comes time when our heroes disappear at sea, lose their boats or die of old age. One morning you wake up and looking over a quiet anchorage you realise it’s up to us to carry on. We are the generation who is DOING IT. Right now.

I believe it’s time to put a bit of magic back into sailing, for sailing is not about hardware. It is about interaction between a man and the sea. More gadgets you put between yourself and the ocean, colder and more diluted your experience becomes. And there is nothing in this world but firsthand raw experience. Reality, if there is such a thing, is experience at first hand, and on the quality of that experience depends what you get out of life.

Zanzibar is an island 60 miles long. The main town, also called Zanzibar, has about 100 000 people. What makes it so attractive is hard to define. It is not one particular thing that arrests you. Many small details combine to creep up on you. Zanzibar has always been the distribution centre for East Africa, trading hub, dealers’ place. The Stone Town is well preserved. Many buildings were restored or are being restored. Famous carved doors, old and new, convoluted narrow lanes struggling to accommodate modern traffic, bazaars, spice shops, coffee-vendors, dhow sailors, tourists. Everywhere distant and recent past is mingling with the present, jumble of most diverse influences. I can’t think of a more depressing combination than Islam and Communism together, a drab unimaginative negation of life. Yet African zest survived it, absorbed it and sprang back. A number of whites fell under the spell of Africa and stayed, but ask them why and they can’t put their finger on it. How can you explain that intelligent and capable people are barely scratching living in countries where they are not welcome, where they lack basic comforts and securities, where general poverty and illness reflects in their own conditions? There is no way to explain it in a rational way without experiencing it yourself.

You wake up one morning on the anchorage in Zanzibar at dawn, hearing drums over the waters. Ngoma. Africans returning from fishing the reef, beating their drums and chanting. And you know - this is it, the life itself, before communism, before Islam, before Aristotelian logic, a primal chant of humans alive. And you want to be a part of it, this “to hell with tomorrow” attitude making our philistine prudence appear sterile and lifeless. Watching them joyfully crowding into already overfilled taxi, loudly arguing the price of a single mango or shovelling greedily rice gruel from a cracked plate into their mouth, you know that nothing is alien to them. They live now, in total abandon, poor, dirty, futureless, free of neurosis and agonising indecisiveness. Imperceptibly you are drawn into it, however out of place you may feel at the start. If you are not tough and cynical enough, you can quite easily lose your fragile identity, without gaining another one. In such a place having your own boat outweighs any inconveniences it may bring. Wherever you are, you have a refuge to go to. Not just any hotel or some other impersonal shelter. You carry your own home with you. After a day’s bustle you return into the sanctuary of your own hearth, your own home. It makes it easier to preserve your identity in powerful or overwhelming circumstances. I found this nowhere more important than in Africa. There are few things more pathetic than a white man who lost his tribe.

Waking up on a passage one morning I found “Kehaar” racing an 80' three masted sambu under a full sail, a half a mile from us. I sat there in my hatch, spellbound. I felt I had finally arrived; I went through time backwards where I had always wanted to be. I missed the time of square-riggers and down-easters and often, when travelling, I felt I was born too late. All I had left was chasing romantic images of the past. Travelling two decades ago in Asia I got close several times but never the less late I was. Questionable progress and tourist development managed to alter the places. And not only Bali, Goa, Phuket. In Eastern Indonesia I got very close, sailing on huge two-masted “pinisis” of Buggis people from Surabaya and Macassar to the Islands of spice and New Guinea. Yet even then, I felt there was not much time left for them. Indonesia, lying in the equatorial doldrums, is famous for its calms and everyone was talking about engines. I was right. In the eighties they indeed converted to unreliable truck engines, cutting down their masts. I was late again.
Now, here, in Madagascar, watching fascinated how the sailing master of a 120-ton butre tried to get the best out of the morning breeze, I felt that was IT. For once I was not late. It’s hard to describe the excitement of the moment. These guys were direct blood descendants of Arab traders from Oman, blokes who were sailing in the same way since King Solomon’s days, ignorant, raw, brave and wise, the last fleet of working sailing ships anywhere. And nobody is talking about installing motors into rickety leaking hulls. They’d shake and fall apart. And with $12 a month average wage there is no money for engines and fuel in Madagascar. Selfish and cruel as it may be, this absence of progress is one of the great attractions of Madagascar right now.