Setting sail
Memoir offers an intimate look at one couple’s life on the seas
“We Ran Away to Sea: A Memoir and Letters” is an engaging recounting of improbably true adventures crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and cruising the Caribbean. In a sailboat.
Improbably in that the authors — memoir writer George Kent Kedl, and letter writer Pamela Thompson Kedl — had no experience on the high seas when they set out to make a home on the water.
The couple were raised in landlocked Wyoming and were living in landlocked South Dakota where Kent Kedl unhappily taught philosophy at South Dakota State University and Pam Thompson Kedl taught a first-year composition class.
Kent Kedl dreamed of life on the open water — for him, his wife and their two sons, Jake and Andy. Kent Kedl wanted that momentous change now, not delayed until after his retirement.
“I naively thought a sailboat would be an ideal vehicle for our new life,” the 82-year-old Kent Kedl states in the prologue.
They got their feet wet, you might say, when a friend took them out on nearby prairie lakes in a dinghy-sized sailboat. Kent Kedl learned some basic principles of boating. Then he read a ton of books on sailing.
To handle a sailboat without getting too seasick, they chartered a small sloop on Lake Superior; halfday with an instructor and one day on their own.
“A little knowledge is, indeed, a dangerous thing,” he writes.
The Kedls made the move. They bought Jacana 2, a 38-foot, two-masted sailboat they found on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel.
In the fall of 1984 they sailed to the Canary Islands on their maiden voyage. The departure almost wasn’t. Kent Kedl was forced to make temporary repairs en route and permanent repairs in the Canaries.
On Nov. 14 they set out to cross the Atlantic crossing. The Kedls relied on celestial navigation. The only ship the Jacana 2 encountered on the Atlantic was a Korean freighter a few miles away.
At 3 a.m. on Dec. 7 with Pam Thompson Kedl standing watch, she shouted out, “Land ho!” She had espied what she hoped were the lights of the Caribbean island of Antigua in the Leeward Islands. It was.
The Kedls took the Jacana 2 through much of the Caribbean, visiting islands small (e.g. Dominica, Martinique) and large, (e.g. Puerto Rico, Jamaica) and the coastal mainland (e.g. Belize) before returning to the states in the spring of 1985.
That concluded the Kedls’ first sea voyage. They sold the sailboat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and took a disappointingly long break from the open water — about nine years. Kent Kedl returned to Brookings, South Dakota, to teach, save money and help Pam Thompson Kedl raise their sons.
Kent Kedl placed his dream on hold until younger son Andy finished in high school and entered college, and older son Jake was in the Peace Corps.
Kent Kedl was on a continuous lookout for a replacement boat. In 1991, they bought Coot, a 31-foot, Dutch-built steel sloop in Newburyport, Massachusetts. It was trucked to Superior, Wisconsin. Two years later, they took the Coot through some of the Great Lakes on a shakedown cruise that concluded in Midland, Ontario. A year later they again left South Dakota, got back to the Coot in Midland.
Extended mechanical and mechanic troubles had to be solved before the Kedls headed for the Erie Canal and onto the Intracoastal Waterway and south along the eastern United States and back to the Caribbean and coastal Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala and Belize.
The Coot was the Kedl’s home off and on for about the next seven years. (Boat repairs is a sub-theme of the book. Good thing that Kent Kedl was a skilled repairman. Pam Thompson Kedl helped.)
“If I had had the opportunity, I would have liked to have had more experience (starting out),” Kent Kedl said in a phone interview from his Albuquerque home. “I think people should be better prepared than we were. … I was foolish enough to think that once we had the boat we could live on nothing.”
The Kedls shared many warm, and a few lukewarm, remembrances of fellow boaters and locals they had met along the way. Plus memorable adventures like their encounters with Warao Indians, a hunting-gathering people who live along the Macareo tributary in the vast delta of the Orinoco River.
They sold the Coot in 2000. Kent Kedl kept his dream alive but Pam Thompson Kedl tired of the sea. Home to her was dry-land Wyoming. The couple moved there, then impulsively bought a home in Las Cruces to be close to Mexico, a country they had visited and dearly loved. During the move to southern New Mexico, Pam Thompson Kedl became seriously ill with an autoimmune disease. She died in 2009.
In the epilogue, Kent Kedl relates that his life was empty without Pam. To fill the hours, he hiked, visited junk stores, restored old typewriters, built furniture.
In 2011, Kent Kedl married Linnea Hendrickson. He credits Hendrickson as the book’s motivator, its prime editor and ghostwriter.
He said he wanted his memoirs and Pam’s letters just for family. Hendrickson convinced him that the general public would want to read their recollections in the form of a book. She’s right.
The front of the book has four useful maps. At the back are nine pages of a glossary of nautical terms, for readers and next generations of Kent and Pam Kedls.