A Man with a Plan
Richard Bost, 66, a meteorologist and retired New York City high school principal, plans ahead, and so far he’s planned well. He left Providence, Rhode Island, on his 1989, 42-foot Kadey-Krogen Dauntless on July 20, 2014, and he’s been at sea ever since, crossing the Atlantic to the Azores, then cruising up to Ireland, the North Sea, the Baltic, and finally down the coast of Europe to Spain and the Canary Islands. He then crossed the Atlantic again, making landfall in Martinique before transiting the Panama Canal. Dauntless is now at Fish Hook Marina in Golfito, Costa Rica. Bost’s next goal is to head up to Alaska and then over to Japan and South Korea. “From the beginning,” he says, “there is a plan and a goal and a destination.”
Growing up in New York’s West Village, Bost loved the waterfront, “an exciting place of warehouses, trucks and working boats of all kinds.” His first career was as a meteorologist, and then he became a science teacher and eventually a principal. He started thinking about serious cruising as he approached retirement. “I thought if I lived on a boat, I could move from one town to another, not tied down, not stuck anywhere.”
Bost did his homework, and decided he wanted a Kadey-Krogen for their offshore capabilities. Originally, he wanted a 48, but decided it would be too expensive to buy and operate. So far, he’s logged about 20,000 nm on his 42, which has a single 135-hp Ford Lehman diesel. Dauntless’ average cruising speed is 5.2 knots. Bost varies between cruising by himself or with family and friends. His expenses for himself and the boat combined are less than $100 a day.
Right now, he’s in a hassle with the Costa Rican authorities over the boat’s documentation, but once that’s solved he’ll head north up the Pacific coast. The problem is that he’ll be heading into the current and the wind, with long stretches of coastline without harbors for refuge. Going uphill all the way to Alaska, he says, will “take twice the time and burn twice the fuel.”
Still, Bost is happy with his planning and cruising so far, writing on his blog that his future “lies not in New York or even in Europe, but back to the water, where at night, when the winds die down, there is no noise, only the silence of the universe. I feel like I am at home, finally.” For more, see:
