The Story Behind My Flying Inflatable Boat Video

If you’ve just arrived here after watching my YouTube video of an old fellow attempting to fly an inflatable flying boat—and you’re wondering whether you’ve just witnessed extraordinary courage or extraordinary stupidity—welcome.

Judging by some of the comments on YouTube, quite a few viewers concluded I’d completely lost my mind. Watching a tiny aircraft leap into the air before apparently staggering on the edge of a stall will certainly leave that impression.

Fair enough.

But a seventy-five-second video rarely tells the whole story.

That flight wasn’t the reckless whim of someone who had never sat in a cockpit before. It was the latest chapter in a lifetime of flying, travelling, improvising, making mistakes, surviving them, and occasionally learning something useful along the way.

I first learned to fly in the late 1960s, earned my private pilot’s licence, and spent years flying light aircraft before wandering the world became my real occupation. Like many of the adventures that followed, flying was never simply about getting from one place to another. It was another way of exploring the unknown.

Over the years I found myself in situations that, looking back, probably should have cured me of ever wanting to leave the ground again.

There was the night I flew a Cessna into Toronto International after not touching an aircraft for almost five years, with a faulty gyro, no instrument rating, and an air traffic controller patiently guiding me through solid cloud while Air Canada and Lufthansa queued up behind me. I remember responding to a question about an ILS approach without the faintest idea what “ILS” even meant. Somehow we all survived, and I suspect the controller enjoyed the story almost as much as I do today.

Years later, living in Thailand, I taught myself to fly a powered paraglider simply because there was nobody available to teach me. Only after several months did the instruction manual I’d ordered finally arrive in the post—revealing all the mistakes I’d been making without realising it. Fortunately, the only casualty was a wooden propeller after I found myself wrapped around a tree and deposited rather unceremoniously onto a very prickly aloe plant. Sunglasses and khaki shorts, it turns out, are not ideal flying attire.

Not long afterwards I acquired an abandoned ultralight on floats, repaired it as best I could, and promptly discovered that a shortened throttle cable has an unfortunate tendency to turn “reduce power slightly” into “engine stopped.” The resulting stall ended with me and the aircraft hitting the Andaman Sea at rather different angles and a group of horrified sailors arriving, fully expecting to recover a body, only to find me standing on a pontoon trying to right the wreck as though I’d merely capsized a canoe.

Ironically, it was that accident that eventually led me to buy the Italian-built Polaris Flying Inflatable Boat featured in the video. I wanted to find out whether its single V-shaped hull would solve the bouncing take-off problems I’d experienced with pontoons on choppy water. Unfortunately, life intervened. Nearly twenty years passed before I finally got hold of one, by which time I was back in Canada.

So no, I don’t recommend climbing into an unfamiliar aircraft without proper instruction. If you’re new to flying, please don’t mistake my stories for advice. They’re simply accounts of what happened to one incurably curious individual who has sometimes relied a little too heavily on optimism and good fortune.

As I grow older, I’ve realised these adventures were never really about aircraft, crashes, or close calls. They were mileposts along a much longer journey—a search for understanding, purpose, and the strange chain of events that has carried me across more than eighty countries and into situations I could never have imagined.

This story is one of many.

Over the coming months I’ll be adding more to this blog as I work towards a memoir tentatively titled Dangerous Encounters. Despite the title, it isn’t simply a catalogue of accidents and improbable escapes. It’s the story of a lifetime of wandering, the remarkable people I met along the way, and the lessons that often arrived disguised as disasters.

If you’d like to come along for the ride, you’re very welcome.