My Great Adventure!
For years, as the sun was setting on Fort Peck Lake, I would sip come cool ones with my friends, aboard my sailboat, PTERANODON, and the conversation would inevitably turn to: "Wouldn't it be nice to go to the ocean and sail off to the islands of the South Seas." The thought kept gnawing at me until 1993 when I sold Realty One and had no more excuses. Then I thought, "What the heck! - Why not?"
So in February of 1994 I started off on my great adventure. My cousin, Terry Kubesh and I dug PTERANODON out of the snow bank and towed it down to California for the start of my "around the world cruise". Dennis Fulton from Glendive sailed with me across the Pacific to Brisbane, Australia. We made stops at Nuka Hiva, Takaroa, Tahiti, Moorea, Raiatea, Bora Bora, American Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and New Caledonia. We began the first of April and arrived the first of October and had many adventures along the way. Dennis toured Australia whilst I returned to Montana to take care of business and pay taxes.
In 1995, my sister, Elaine and her husband, Wil, helped me sail up the East Coast of Australia from Brisbane to McKay stopping at such place as Mooloolaba, Gladstone, Sandy Strait, Great Frazer Island, and many of the islands behind the Great Barrier Reef. Then Ned Kitchel, Rob Radford and I sailed on up behind the Great Barrier Reef. Ned, from my US ARMY days in Germany, sailed as far as Cairns and Rob, the Australian rancher who owns a seventy-seven thousand acre cattle station in central Queensland, sailed as far as Cooktown. Two Canadian brothers, Justin and Trevor Ables, from Vancouver, B.C. went "over the top" with me to Darwin. Then, I capped off the season with a week of mustering bullocks on Rob's cattle station not far from where "Waltzing Matilda" was written by "Banjo" Patterson during the famous Shearer's strike of 1895. This was a bloody labor dispute that gave rise to two of Australia's three major political parties. I greatly enjoyed the hospitality of the Radfords including Rob's wife, Eileen and son's, James and Willie.
In 1996, Bob Devier from Glendive accompanied me back to Darwin via Sydney, Adelaide, Coober Pedy, Alice Springs, and Tennent Creek before touring the western part of Australia on his own.
From Darwin, Rod Radford sailed the Indian Ocean with me as far as Seychelles. On the way, between Cocos Keeling and Chagos we sailed through part of Cyclone Lindsay. It was a small hurricane, but the waves averaged about twenty-four feet high for the better part of two days.
From there, Ronny Jean, a young Seychellois man sailed up, around the Horn of Africa, to the Gulf of Aden, to Djibouti, the Red Sea, Gulf of Suez and the Suez Canal to Ashkelon, Israel.
In 1997, Mike Ruddy and I flew to Israel, stopping in Amsterdam a few days on the way for the tulip festival. In Israel, we rented a car and toured all over the "Holy Land" including such places as Masada, Caesarea, Acre, Nazareth, Sea of Galilee, Bethlehem, Hebron, Qumran, Jericho, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.
Mike returned home and Bill and Mary Beth Keil came over from Powell, Wyoming for the sail to Greece. We stopped at Cyprus, Rhodes, Kos, Leros, Patmos, Mikonos, Delos, Syros, Poros, and Aegina. It was glorious cruising the Aegean and the Greek Isles. We toured Athens and the Acropolis where the Parthenon still ranks as one of the most impressive buildings on the planet. Even in it's ruined state, it is a great site.
Bill and Mary went back to America and Fred and Linda Unmack come over for the sail around the Peloponnesian Peninsula and over to Italy and Spain. We visited Agamemnon's home at Mycenae and toured Olympia where the original games were held regularly for over seven hundred years. From the Island of Cephalonia we sailed across the Adriatic to Italy. In Italy we sailed through the Strait of Messina with it's great whirlpools and visited Vulcano Island where we tied our boat to the active smoldering volcano! After two more stops in Sicily we sailed to Sardinia and the Balearic Islands of Minorca and Mallorica. We ended the season in Almerimar, Spain.
In 1998, Bob Devier and I returned to Spain and we toured Madrid, Granada, Cadiz, Cordoba and many other cities and towns in the southern state of Andalusia. An English writer, Mark Eveleigh, and I sailed to Gibraltar.
Mark Thurston, an Australian tourist, helped me continue the sail on down to Tenerife in the Canaries. There we rented a car and toured the island and even took the cable car to the top of the twelve thousand foot, Mount Teide. I had the PTERANODON stored on hardstand at Radazul and returned to Montana.
Then in 1999, Francis Rys, a native of Czech Republic, sailed the Atlantic with me from the Canary Islands to Mobile, Alabama. Along the way, we made stops in Antigua, Saint Maartin, both the British and American Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Mexico. In Mexico, we rented a car and toured the, Quintana Roo and Yucatan, Mayan sites of Chichen Itza, Tulum, and Coba. We had a nice motor-sail across the mirror-like Gulf of Mexico to Mobile Bay and Mobile, the last fifty miles through the hundreds of oil drilling and production platforms.
Francis found some work at the marina in Mobile and I headed up the Mobile River to the Ten-Tom Waterway intending to go all the way to Minneapolis if I could. It was slow going, motoring up the waterway. With all the towboats and barge traffic, and snags, drawbridges, locks and dams, I could only make forty miles a day at most.
At Midway Marina at Fulton, Mississippi, my friend, Mike Ruddy joined me. He helped man the boat to Big Spring Lake, Divide Cut, Pickwick Lake and the Tennessee River as far as Paris Landing, Tennessee. We had a nice cruise and one of the highlights has to be our tour of the Civil War Battlefield of Shiloh.
I sailed Kentucky Lake by myself to Kentucky Dam where Bob Devier came aboard. We started on down the Tennessee River, entering the Ohio at Paducah, Kentucky. Then, we motored down the Ohio to Cairo and started up the Mississippi. The water was very dirty and fast moving and so after spending all day to go just thirteen miles, we decided to turn back. We went back to Kentucky Lake and the adjacent Lake Barkley where I had PTERANODON set on hardstand at Eddyville, Kentucky.
A bus ride got me home to Glendive in time to help with the Montana wheat harvest. In October, my cousin Terry Kubesh and I fetched the boat back to Montana and the point of the beginning, of my "Great Adventure" - my front yard.
It was one heck of an adventure but I made it all the way around the world to the tune of about twenty-five thousand miles of sailing, averaging about five and a half miles an hour. It was not a circumnavigation because my returning wake did not cross my outbound track but I did sail from Redwood City, California to thirteen miles north of Cairo, Illinois via Australia and the Indian Ocean. It was my good fortune to have help and company for all but about four hundred miles.
It is great to be home!
Ken Kubesh
PS: People ask, "Where is the best place in the world of all the places you visited?" My reply, "My hometown - Glendive, Montana, in the United States of America!"