Reid Stowe - Early Voyages

Early Voyages

Reid Stowe initially pursued studies in the arts, enrolling in the University of Arizona, where he took up painting and sculpture. During his late teens, Stowe visited Hawaii in the summer to surf. During one of these Hawaiian excursions, when Stowe was nineteen, he fell in with Craige Fostvedt, who had invested some of his college funds to purchase a small sailing vessel. Invited to accompany him on an extended sail through the South Pacific to New Zealand, Stowe was obliged to obtain a passport, for which he needed a copy of his birth certificate. Years later, Stowe recalled to interviewer Harold Channer that his parents could very well have refused to send him the certificate and instead could have insisted on his return to school. That they chose otherwise, Stowe regards as a life-affirming experience, the tacit parental support giving him confidence to proceed. The South Pacific trip was Stowe's first experience with open ocean sailing, for which he acquired a passion.

Following his South Pacific voyage, Stowe returned to his grandfather's residence in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, where he spent eight months constructing a 27 ft (8.23 m) catamaran named Tantra, specifically for open ocean sailing. During its construction, he was visited by a Dutchman—whom he had first met on his South Pacific voyage—who persuaded Stowe to take the catamaran across the North Atlantic to Holland. The two embarked on their journey to the Netherlands in June, 1973. After their arrival, Reid Stowe continued on a solo voyage which took him to Africa, a second Atlantic crossing, a trip to Brazil and the Amazon, returning to the United States in 1976. In his 2003 interview with Harold Channer, Stowe claimed that the catamaran Tantra was "the smallest boat to cross the Atlantic Ocean twice," though on closer reading it appears that a smaller boat has made the round trip crossing as early as the nineteenth century. In 1880-'81, George P. Thomas and Frederick Norman navigated their 16 ft 7 in (5.05 m) dory Little Western from Gloucester, Massachusetts to Cowes England in June 1880, stayed in England for nearly one year, and returned to America the following June.