Woodside, CA
Plans are coming together apace for Project STARBOARD (Steve’s Trailer And Roz’s Boat Off Across Remote Deserts).
But who, you may ask, is Steve?
Steve Roberts is a person I haven’t met yet, who for reasons known best to himself has allowed me to talk him into giving up two months of his time and incurring significant depreciation on his new truck (NEWT – New Expensive White Truck) to retrieve my boat Sedna from Miami and drive her 3000 miles to the West Coast.
Apart from ownership of NEWT, Steve has certain other attributes that ideally qualify him for the task of co-driver. He is an adventure cyclist of epic proportions (meaning his cycle ride was of epic proportions, although at 6 foot 4 Steve’s proportions are also bordering on the extraordinary). He is a grand master geek, so we have much to discuss about potential enhancements to Sedna’s technological infrastructure. And he is a wordplay whizz, which may (or may not!) help those long flat miles across the American Midwest just fly by.
I first contacted him less that 5 weeks ago, after Jim Appleton (the owner of the sculling boat in the Columbia Gorge) mentioned him. Now many emails and several phone calls later, we are about to embark on a major adventure.
We already know we have a lot to discuss. What we don’t know is how two independent, free-spirited souls will cope with spending 2 months living in each other’s pockets.
We will meet for the first time next Friday, in Washington State. We drive from there diagonally from the far northwest of the States to the far southeast, where (I hope) Sedna will by then be awaiting collection. She is still in Antigua, but is due to ship shortly.
If Steve and I get on well and STARBOARD leads to future collaboration (or in fact, even if it doesn’t) I will always wonder at how statistically improbable our meeting was. If Jim hadn’t thought to mention ‘that cycling guy, think his website is called Microship or something’, if I hadn’t made a mental note to look it up, if Steve hadn’t just happened to have bought a new truck… it makes me mindful of the butterfly effect, that our every tiny action can have untold consequences.