Bernard Moitessier's book "Tamata and Alliance"

I had a real "Wow!" moment while finishing Bernard Moitessier's book "Tamata and Alliance".

To make a long (but good) story short, he lost his boat, Joshua, in the storm while in port at Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Twenty-five other boats were lost that day. After digging in tons of sand and gravel, they excavated the boat on the beach and found out that despite the total loss of mast, rigging, and rudder, the 21-year-old steel hull was intact and watertight and was afloat the same day.

This is the first lesson I have learned, if I ever go to the big blue Pacific for some serious time, I will make sure to have a "tank" of a boat made of steel with a full-length keel that will allow me to the beach and paint the boat in the low tide on the sandy beach anywhere in the world.

Later in the book, his friends build him another boat, Tamata. After buying the steel sheets and welding the boat within weeks according to a design plan, he used telephone poles for the masts, which they smoothed with a simple electric plane!

Now, a cheap boat like that will not win any speed races or beauty contests, but think about it—no super-expensive aluminum masts, just a common-sense setup that has worked for him time and time again around the world throughout his lifetime at sea.

The picture is of a lovely wooden-mast ketch in the Kenosha Harbor.