| Living
In Southeast Asia Aboard Your Own Boat? |
| Travel
On The High Seas |
| By Harold Stephens |
| You have heard
so much about Southeast Asia, you wouldn’t mind living here. Imagine warm
balmy weather all year round, where the living is cheap, where the lifestyle
is exotic and exciting. But you can’t make up your mind. Maybe it’s Bangkok,
or better yet, one of those beautiful islands they talk about in Thailand.
Or is it Bali. It could be the Malay Peninsula, or in tropical Philippines.
Even busy Singapore. What if I say you can live in them all, by taking
your living accommodations with you. You can live in Southeast Asia aboard
your own boat. Think about it. In Thailand you can sail up the Chao Phraya
and moor a hundred different places, or you can go down to Pattaya and
anchor off shore one week and move to Koh Samui the next. |
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When the northeast
monsoons begin blowing, you can move around to Phuket. Maybe you say you
have to keep in contact; you have a business to run, work to perform. That
excuse is no longer valid. With communications the way they are these days,
you can live just about anyplace. So why not in the warm, tropical waters
around Thailand, aboard you own boat and no rent to pay.
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When people say
it’s only a dream, that it’s impossible, I tell them how I did it. I not
only did it, but I wrote a book about it - The
Last Voyage, The Story of Schooner Third Sea. I've always wanted
to own my own boat and live aboard. Why? It just seemed like a good idea. |
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| There were
no seafarers in my family, no grandfather or wayward uncle with a sea chest
hidden in the attic. But when I sat on the beach in Pattaya and saw all
those boats anchored off shore, and their owners rowing ashore, it seemed
like a grand idea. The only problem, I didn’t have the money. I am a writer,
and writers are notoriously poor, but that doesn’t stop us from dreaming.
Then one day
I was in Honolulu, talking to a yachting friend, and when I told him about
my dream, he said, “Why don’t you build your own boat?”
What an insane
idea. I knew nothing about boat building. And I told him. “You don’t
have to know anything,” he said. “Build in concrete." Build
in concrete! Was this his joke?
But he was
dead serious, and a few days later he introduced me to a yachtsman who
was to completely change my mind. |
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Offshore
Resources Gallery
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| The guy
had built his own boat, from a ferro-cement boat construction. He gave
me some books to read, and I month later I began in Singapore. Never
has there been a boat building construction any easier. Friends came to
help. I completed the hull, installed an engine and motored to Bangkok.
I moored in a small klong down near the mouth of the Chao Phraya, and hired
half a dozen carpenters to begin work. It took a year, but I wasn’t in
a hurry. Besides, I had to work to earn money to pay for my bills. A year
later I owned my own 71-foot sailing schooner and named it Third Sea.
I lived
aboard Third Sea for eighteen years, and sailed her nearly 200,000 miles,
several times across the South Pacific, to as far as Honolulu and Tahiti,
and up all the rivers of Asia. I did what I planned, a month in Pattaya,
the next couple months in Phuket—and all the islands in between. I even
found, when my checks were slow from publishers, I could earn extra money
by doing charter work and carrying passengers. I hauled everything
but guns and drugs, and got paid for it. Not only that, I had something
now to write about. I sold more stories.
I don’t have
my Schooner Third Sea anymore, and when people hear this they say. |
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| “So you
got tired of the sea, right.” Hardly. I was anchored in Honolulu and
flew to Los Angeles to visit with my family. The worst hurricane of the
century struck the Hawaiian Islands, with winds of more than 200 kms an
hour. My schooner and 130 boats were lost in the storm. There isn’t a day
that goes bye that I don’t think about her. But my story doesn’t end here.
I am building another boat, not as big as Third Sea, but one that my wife
and I can live aboard, and sail to where we want to go around Southeast
Asia. I get all kinds of objections to living on a boat. What about storms?
You avoid hurricane
and typhoon belts (move to a new location) and pay attention to
weather reports. I lost my schooner because I was not aboard to sail her
out of the hurricane belt when the warning came. What about navigation?
You don’t know declinations and you have never held a sexton. Today it’s
push-button navigation, where any time of the day or night you can tell
where you are within ten yards. What if you are a family person, with kids?
I can think of no better place to raise kids. |
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| I raised three
sons abroad, and they have all graduated from American universities with
honors. You have to be willing to do home study with them. What about pirates?
That is true, there are pirates and you read about them in the newspapers
every day. But read the fine print. Never in the history of yachting in
this part of the world has any pirate struck private vessels.
No, there simple
is no valid excuse these days. There is one problem that I discovered,
however, and that is you loose friends. People get jealous. You are
the envy of everyone.
The point
that I am trying to make is that it is possible to build your own boat,
especially here in Thailand. Go up the Chao Phraya and you discover
countless small shipyards. Ayutthaya is a shipbuilding centre and so in
Phuket and Koh Samui. The secret is do your home work, study books and
publications. And don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it. There
are books these days on everything, even if you want to build a rocket
and soar off to the moon. You don’t have to be a graduate engineer. You
just need the dream.
Editor’s note:
Harold Stephens is the author of The Last Voyage, the story of how he built
his own boat with little money and sailed the waters of the Pacific and
Southeast Asia. The book is available directly from the publisher at www.wolfenden.com
To see more about Harold Stephens Click
Here |
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