The Book

Editorial Reviews

The Five-Year Voyage: Exploring Latin American Coasts and Rivers is a fascinating cruising tale of sailing, paddling, powering with a two hp. outboard, and sometimes getting out and pushing a 21-foot, ultralight boat, Thurston, for a total of 18,000 miles (mileage taken from their GPS.) Setting out from Florida, Stephen Ladd and his wife, Ginny, chose an audacious route along the east coast of Central and South America and up and down some of the largest rivers in the world, including the Amazon River. Surviving storms, high winds, wicked waves, and a swamp the size of Washington state, author Ladd relates the couple's five-year adventures with honesty, directness, and sometimes humor. They meet many new friends and helpers, but they also have to deal with a plentitude of large and small jungle critters, scheming local officials, thugs, and even get robbed at knifepoint. Five-Year Voyage is an extraordinary cruising narrative and unique armchair adventure not only for small craft fans but for anyone who appreciates an honest cruising yarn chock-a-block with gripping true boating tales.

--- Marlin Bree, author, Bold Sea Stories and six other boating adventure books

The Five Year Voyage is a highly readable account of one couple's adventure sailing their 21 foot dinghy down the Latin American coast.

In his late thirties Stephen Ladd spent three years living and exploring alone in a 12’ homebuilt dinghy, Squeak. When the wanderlust returned in his mid-50s he had a partner, Ginny, as eager for adventure as he was.

Their boat needed to be larger, but not very much. Thurston was an adapted Sea Pearl trailer sailer, a 21-foot two-masted dinghy, 5 feet wide and drawing only 9 inches. They added a cabin top, drinking water ballast, stowage and a sliding-seat rowing system. Two years later, when they had traveled from Florida via Cuba, Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua to Panama, they added a Honda 2hp outboard. This would enable them to continue eastward, against the prevailing wind, exploring the coasts of Colombia and Venezuela before obtaining portage to a tributary of the Orinoco, thence to the Rio Negro through Brazil and onwards through Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina into the Atlantic once more. Perhaps just this roll call of countries offers some hint of the extant and variety of their adventure. On the way they married and had a baby.

Navigation, especially through the vast and complex river systems, was usually via Ginny’s painstakingly constructed maps, downloading GPS co-ordinates from Google Earth.

The range and variety of their encounters with wildlife, indigenous peoples, gold-dredgers, fishermen, scoundrels and officials is awe-inspiring. An extraordinary beginning to little George’s life.

The final section of the voyage, from Belem in the Amazon delta home to Los Angeles was undertaken by Stephen alone. Even their intrepidity quailed at a long sea voyage with a toddler in such a very small boat. This proved wise as Thurston only made it as far as the Dominican Republic. Ridiculous to write ‘only’ in such a context!

This is an intensely impressive small boat voyage. It’s also grippingly readable.

Stephen Ladd’s first book, Three Years in a Twelve Foot Boat, describing his solo adventures from the Missouri to the Pacific, South America and the Caribbean is being republished to accompany The Five Year Voyage, which will be published on 5 April 2022.

---Yachting Monthly

Excerpts from the book

On the crossing from Florida to Cuba

"The knowledge that we were heading out to sea seemed surreal, nerve-wracking yet exhilarating, especially to inexperienced Ginny. In the wee hours of our departure date the houseboat next to us caught fire. It burned like a torch all night. By dawn it was all gone except some charred, half-sunken remains. On that somber note we hauled in our anchors and left Marathon. At 6:00 p.m. we entered the Straits of Florida. A northwest wind was blowing at ten to fifteen knots. The sun set. No moon or stars. The blackness made our speed seem much greater and our motion more violent. We couldn’t see the waves to brace against them, and we had the Gulf Stream to worry about. Our goal lay to the southeast but the current flows northeast. Our GPS track showed that the current was flowing about as fast as we were sailing, so by sailing southeast we actually went east. We steered south to compensate, which drastically reduced our speed-made-good. We should have cut straight across and made up the difference later. It’s like swimming across a river: you have to go straight across and not worry about being swept downstream. Time went by incredibly slowly. We traded off taking little naps curled up in the cockpit and yearned for daylight."

In Puerto Ayacucho, Venezuela, seeking approval to proceed into the Amazon

"The Navy, National Guard, and National Institute of Aquatic Spaces all searched Thurston. The grand finale was an especially meticulous tear-down by Military Intelligence. It took seven men three hours to remove and examine everything. They even checked our camera and computer storage devices for incriminating material! They found quite interesting our copy of the Small Craft Advisor magazine in which our article about Cuba appeared, because Cuba was their ally. During the process the ranking officer sidled up to me and whispered into my ear, “I want to go to America!” Like this was the Cold War and he wanted to defect to the West!"

On the Rio Negro, tributary of the Amazon

"The remoteness overwhelmed us. Since Puerto Ayacucho the towns had been far apart with no connecting roads. There were native villages tucked away up various streams but most of Amazonia is simply uninhabited. The hummingbirds delighted us while our failure to see leopards frustrated us. In wilderness travel is there always someplace even more remote that you can’t reach? With the right gear could one hike into a land where sloths can be cuddled, and spotted agoutis minutely observed? When if not now would we penetrate nature’s innermost secret? We talked about leaving Thurston’s sailing rig in Manaus and building a roomier canvas enclosure. We daydreamed of following the Rio Japura into Colombia, or climbing the Madeira into Bolivia. We even fantasized about getting a bigger boat, having a kid, and becoming fluvial beekeepers. But what about our families, friends, professions, possessions? Would we lose our old senses of belonging? Would the wanderlust wane?"

The Watercolor and the Book Cover

The cover of The Five-Year Voyage has a story behind it. First we commissioned Mykola Gorielov, a Ukrainian, to create the above watercolor. We wanted him to portray us pushing and poling up a small tropical river without a motor. We found ourselves in such situations before we acquired a motor, and again after in streams too shallow to immerse the propeller.

We gave him a photograph of Thurston to work with, but had no corresponding photo of ourselves in those positions. We no longer had Thurston, this being long after I’d abandoned her in the Dominican Republic. So we posed around a different boat and had George photograph us from the indicated angle and distance. We sent Mykola this photo plus representative pictures of riverine jungle to create the setting. He put it all together nicely.

Unfortunately, a good landscape painting doesn’t necessarily make a good book cover. The watercolor didn’t focus the eye’s attention properly, and expert word placement was still needed. So we hired Donika Mishineva, a Bulgarian who specializes in covers. Her work employs the crucial portion of Mykola’s watercolor but surrounds it with different foliage. We like it, but Mykola’s original hangs on our wall at home.