Captain Robert Beebe, 1909-1988, wrote the first edition of Voyaging Under Power in 1975. He was trained as an aeronautical engineer at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. He graduated in 1931 and became a naval aviator in 1933. He was navigation officer on the USS Saratoga during WW II and was executive officer aboard the USS Sitkoh Bay during the Korean war. He finished up his naval career at the Naval Postgraduate School, retiring in 1961. With a continuing interest in boat design, he decided to build an ocean-crossing powerboat. His boat, Passagemaker, built in 1963, was a prototype for many other designs to come. The list of his designs numbers up to 147 so he was quite busy. The first edition of VUP describes the development of his concepts and their implementation. Many of his plans and correspondence are housed at Mystic Seaport in the Captain Robert P. Beebe Collection.
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Denis Umstot has owned powerboats for over 50 years. When he retired from his academic career as a professor of management in 1997, he and his wife Mary bought Teka III, a 52' passagemaker designed by Robert Beebe and built by Knight & Carver in 1981. This boat
was capable of long ocean passages up to 5,000 nautical miles. They gradually built their confidence in ocean
voyaging by cruising down the Pacific Coast, through the Panama Canal, through
the Western Caribbean, and then up the East Coast to Maine. By this time they decided to cross the
Atlantic to the Mediterranean, spending five years cruising the Mediterranean and Black Seas before re-crossing the
Atlantic to the Windward and Leeward Island to Trinidad. From there they traced a route back to the
Panama Canal and up the Pacific Coast to their home port of Seattle. Since their return we have made two more trips to Alaska. All in all, they have cruised well over 60,000
nautical miles in Teka III. Mary has written a book about their adventures: Voyaging to the Mediterranean Under Power.
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