An Irishwoman’s Diary: Salty sea tales from Kevin Crothers

Confidence, stubbornness and hubris could be pretty useful attributes if your name was Thor Heyerdahl. Modesty and patience would not necessarily have helped the Norwegian almost 70 years ago in his bid to prove that Polynesia was settled from ancient Peru.

Pål Sverre Hagen's brilliant depiction of him in the Oscar-nominated film Kon Tiki exudes just the right mix of sulphurous ambition, guts and guile. "The oceans were not barriers but roads . . . not impediments, but pathways", Heyderdahl told the crew of his balsa-wood raft, which he built with lots of optimism but no keel and no ability to steer.

Enneagram enthusiasts might class him as character “number eight” – charming, terrifying, but the man to be with in a tight spot .

Watching the Norwegian drama just days after reading about yet another migrants’ ship abandoned in the Mediterranean by smugglers, one couldn’t help but be struck by the double standard: how resilience is rewarded if one is a successful adventurer or explorer, but penalised if one is an economic migrant who manages to survive desert and sea crossings and rotten double-crossers in search of a better life.

Like Heyerdahl, Dublin-born adventurer Kevin Crothers couldn’t swim when he first went to sea.

He was already the proud owner of his second boat when he learned how to keep himself afloat at the age of 22. Like Heyerdahl, he also relished risk and recalls how gripped he was as a flu-struck boy when his sister brought him home an account of St Brendan the Navigator's Atlantic voyage. A seven-foot clinker "pram" dinghy was Crothers's first boat, bought for £5 in 1951. After scraping and sanding it, he painted it white and "fitted it with a rudder, a leeboard, a mast and a dipping lugsail made by my mother from old bed sheet," he writes in his self-published autobiography, Salt in my Blood.

Baby’s pram

The trailer for it was fashioned from a baby’s pram. Securing pram handle to carrier, he would tow it by bike to the river Liffey and launch it at Islandbridge.

It was during one of those below-weir trips that he had his first taste of life beyond the Liffey mouth. A man in a converted ship’s lifeboat asked if he and his friend would like to go angling off Dalkey Island. Crothers remembers being so excited that he could “hardly breathe”.

Though it was a short trip down Dublin Bay, he felt as if he had “crossed the whole ocean”. Motoring back up the Liffey towards the sunset, he knew then that salt was in his blood.

His first “real boat” cost him almost £20 when he was earning one pound a week as a carpenter’s apprentice. He worked on refurbishing it, and its maiden voyage was to Kilrush, Co Clare, via the Grand Canal and the Shannon river.

Car engine

With a mixture of ingenuity and resourcefulness, he equipped it with an engine from a scrapped Austin Ruby car.

Renowned boatbuilder Jim Kearney gave him a useful tip when the gearbox wouldn’t switch to reverse: “use a bucket on a rope to slow you down”. Kearney was one of many influences and Hal Sisk, yachting historian and restorer of classic craft, was another.

Crothers first met him in the old mariners’ church in Dún Laoghaire, where both had volunteered to help the Maritime Institute of Ireland set up as a maritime museum.

Through Des Branigan and others he became interested in diving. He worked on the Spanish armada ships off Streedagh, Co Sligo, among many wrecks, and was instrumental in setting up structures for State protection of underwater cultural heritage.

There's much more to the man who became a vice-president and life member of the Maritime Institute and was awarded its gold medal.Unlike Heyerdahl, who lost his marriage to his obsession, Crothers always made family and friends a priority and is still with his long-time partner in life,Gretta. "I couldn't have done half of what I did without her," he says,and she is duly credited in Salt In My Blood , published by Original Writing and available in the Maritime Museum.

However, he still hasn’t quite forgiven his parents, who kept him up very late chatting the night before what was to have been his first start in a job at sea.

Years later, he asked his ma why she had let him sleep in. “I was worried about your morals, son,” she said. “Like most mothers,” Crothers concludes, “she was probably right.”