by Joe Cline
STEVE CALLAHAN PART ONE OF AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR OF ADRIFT 48° North: Steve Callahan may well be familiar to many 48° North readers. He’s the award winning author of the book, Adrift: 76 Days Lost at Sea. He is renowned as an expert about survival at sea, but also has 50-plus years of experience around boats — designing, building, and voyaging. Steve: What was Rat’s quote in The Wind in the Willows? “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” By that measure, I guess I’ve had a very worthwhile life. I’ve been very fortunate, most of all, because this meandering, serendipitous path of my life has led me to meet a great number of incredible sailors, designers, builders, and adventurers. So I feel very lucky about that. Please tell us about your background as a naval architect. My father was an architect, so I grew up drawing. You develop sort of a three-dimensional eyeball looking at two-dimensional plans — you can envision it. I remember writing a letter to the late, great Gary Mull. Here I was, this kid of maybe 13 asking, “How do I get into designing boats?” He was so kind to send me a response. Gary said, at the time, that there was Westlawn [Institute of Marine Technology], the University of Michigan, or MIT; the latter of which was mostly specializing in large ships. I didn’t really pursue that. I got out of school and stumbled into helping people build boats as part of the ‘back to the land’ movement. Jim Brown, father of legendary Port Townsend builder and designer Russell Brown, coined the term 48º NORTH
“Seasteading,” which suited that era too because a lot of people were building their own boats. I had enough skill, not great skill, to help out in that regard. I really stumbled into boat building. When I moved to Maine, I had done a little catamaran design. A local designer, Bob Ballstrom — who had been partners with Ted Brewer — was running Yacht Design Institute (YDI), which was a competitor to Westlawn. He hired me, and I worked with Bob and YDI off and on for about ten years. I worked with designers as we developed the school, writing texts, helping edit and publish, correcting papers, all while doing my own designs on the side and finishing Bob’s. I don’t consider myself anything. I’m not a designer. I’m not a writer. I’m not a boat builder. I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to play around with all this stuff, and each one has crossfertilized the other. I think you can’t be a great boat designer or boat builder if you don’t have a fair bit of sailing experience. My primary interest has been doing more voyages and offshore sailing. To me, it’s been a lifelong college experience of learning about boats, and I’ll never know it all. What’s going on with design now, I just think it’s incredible. I wrote an article about foils in about 1983, which were starting to be applied in speed trial boats. Foils then merged with the multihull movement and were being applied to offshore shorthanded racers. Things like the America’s Cup have blown it out of the water, literally. Rodger Martin, another fantastic designer (and, fortunately, a friend) once said to me for an article, “If you want a new idea,
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