Arrrrrgggggg!
Pirates are on the Ohio, matey.
Boaters arriving for Riverfest should be on the lookout for a craft flying the Jolly Roger. The vessel - named Betty Walker's Conestoga Wagon - passed Cincinnati on Friday before dropping anchor at Rising Sun, Ind.
The ship with the Skull and Crossbones flag boasts a crew of five, two of which lay eggs. That's because they're chickens.
"The hens have been running around a lot lately. That might be because we have a cat with us," said 24-year-old Colin Anderson of Richmond, Va., one of the two humans - Faith Audens, a 20-year-old construction worker from Media, Pa., is the other - on board.
"We're just friends," he added as she steered their way past Cincinnati. "We're boatmates, not soulmates."
Their dreamboat - 12 blue plastic 55-gallon drums lashed to slabs of Styrofoam - departed from Pittsburgh on July 15. They're in no hurry to reach their destination, either New Orleans or Mobile, Ala. To conserve fuel, avoid wear and tear on their motor and save money (interested parties can buy them gas via their blog: wewillnotdrown.blogspot.com) they just drift with the current.
"We decided to do this when I was in Europe in October," said Anderson, a bartender turned boat builder.
He had just entered an Internet café in Austria when he struck up a conversation with an Austrian woman. She was trying to learn English by reading Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
He saw that as a sign.
"Who would try to learn English by reading Huck Finn?" he wondered. "That book has way too much dialect in it."
The woman gave her copy of Huck to Anderson. Then, he went online. The first e-mail he read came from Audens.
"Do you want to build a boat?" she asked.
"When do I need to get back in the States?" he replied.
He explained why he was so quick to quit Europe and float down the Ohio on a raft named after his grandmother.
"This is living a dream," he declared.
"Practically everyone we meet tells us that," he added.
He hears this a lot: "I've always wanted to float down river on a raft."
He also hears people say: "But I can't. I have obligations."
Audens and Anderson have none of the above.
"We're not married," he noted. "We have no mortgage payments. We don't own a house. We have no kids. Nothing is tying us down."
So, off they go.
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