Several months ago, I got wind of a powerboat adventure that I’d not only never heard of, but didn’t even realize was physically possible. It seems that back in 1968, a daring young couple had, over the course of 124 days, piloted Triumph II, a 20-foot, open-hulled Glastron 8,600 miles clear across the country—save for the Great Divide—from Juneau, Alaska to Key West, Florida.
That couple, Bill and Kathy Dimond, even authored a book about the adventure. Across the U.S.A.—by Boat was released in 1970. It met with modest success, but today has fallen into obscurity. Fortunately, Kathy’s nephew Charles Hardy was an active member of Facebook’s Antique Outboard Motor Club. Upon inquiry, Hardy let me know that not only was the now 82-year-old Kathy happily living in Naples, Florida, she was also happy to have me down to her beachfront condo for lunch and a chat. I dropped everything and flew to Naples for a fascinating—and inspiring—conversation with a delightful lady who knows just what life is all about.

Power & Motoryacht: Can you tell us a bit about growing up and how you came to meet your husband, Bill?
Kathy Robbins: When I was growing up, we would vacation in Minnesota. And my dad (in St. Louis) always had an outboard motorboat, and the resort [in Minnesota] would have jon boats.
Dad worked for the phone company—ended up being general maintenance supervisor for Southwestern Bell. He loved fishing, so we would go out fishing in one of the jon boats. I learned how to water ski, and I learned how to operate the engine. So, I had that boating experience. And then when I met Bill, he, a buddy and I recommissioned a boat that had been decommissioned after World War II, a 34-foot Defoe (patrol boat). We got it ready for the water, launched it, and had a really nice summer on this boat—on the Mississippi north of St. Louis. That boat lost the housing for its gear case in the middle of the river. So, we were biting our nails, but we did get it home, and we decided not to fix it. Bill and I married in 1964 and he bought a 26-foot cabin cruiser—with a cabin, and I think a head. And we had that for a couple years.
And then Bill decided that we should sell the boat. He had the mind to get another boat, but we were boatless when this trip opportunity came from Evinrude. A newscaster in St Louis, Sterling Harkins, was promoting it: a boating couple with solid experience to take a trip from Juneau, Alaska to New York City. So, I called immediately to the factory. And of course, Saturday afternoon, you called the Evinrude factory, they were closed. The guard said, “Lady, you got to call back on Monday.” So, I did. They brought us to Milwaukee. We interviewed with the brass there. They interviewed four couples in all.

PMY: A lot of couples wanted to do this, I read. A lot of couples that claimed they had the experience they didn’t have.
Kathy Robbins: Yes. The number of 1,800 couples comes to mind. One of the finalists of the four couples admitted, when they got to Milwaukee, they weren’t even married. That was a nonstarter. Another couple said they could do it, but would need two months off in the middle to attend to business—I don’t know whether he was an attorney or accountant or something. That was a nonstarter. And then the third couple, according to what I hear: The gal got off the airplane when they went to meet them, with one of those “up” (bouffant) hairdos. And they looked at her and said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” And my hair was pretty much like it is now, you know, set it and forget it, so we kind of got it almost by default—but we had solid experience.
Bill was working as a sliding door salesman—Modern Fold Doors. I don’t know where they were based. I think Indiana, something like that.
PMY: You were a computer programmer?
Kathy Robbins: I was a computer consultant for IBM. Systems Engineers. I was working 16 hours a day. And Bill wasn’t happy about that, so I had resigned from IBM and went to work for a couple of their clients—helping the clients install new equipment. So, I was between contracts when this opportunity came up. I was about to sign one, and I didn’t, because this opportunity came.

PMY: What were aspects of your personalities that maybe made the Evinrude people choose you—and that made you want to do this together?
Kathy Robbins: Who would not like an all-expense paid trip from Juneau to New York City that’s on your own boat? I mean, that’s really an adventure. We were both that adventuresome that we would do that. I was 25, Bill was 29. That’s definitely the adventurous age. Our parents were not quite sold. They said, “What are you doing?” But they had no control.
PMY: The Glastron was 20 feet with two Evinrudes; can you describe it further?
Kathy Robbins: A deep-V hull. It was fairly stable. And the little cuddy just was for the anchor and some lines and stuff like that. No accommodations. We had back-to-back seats that laid down to be bunks. And then the outfitters built custom boxes that were after the aft seat … you would sleep head towards the stern. And that was it for facilities. We had a little butane stove, you know, camping stove. And for a head, we used a Rubbermaid bucket. Engines were twin 55s—so that model was new the previous year, and they were promoting the engine, obviously. Back in Milwaukee, they were hand-torquing two engines for us to use. But unfortunately, they (the hand-tuned engines) were late. So, when they outfitted the boat and got it all balanced and everything, they used two stock engines.

PMY: So, somebody got the motors in Alaska, right?
Kathy Robbins: They didn’t get them in Alaska. They got them in Michigan. They wrote the factory and said, after like, 10 or 15 years, they said, these are the best engines I’ve ever had. I don’t think they ever told them they had been handmade.
Along the way, and still in the Alaska Inside Passage, we lost a lower unit. Now they (Evinrude) had wanted us to take a spare lower unit, but we didn’t, because where do you put a lower unit in a 20-foot boat? So, they flew one up to us. We were accompanied by people we had met in Juneau or Ketchikan, that had a large cabin cruiser. And we were headed south through the Inside Passage sort of together. And they said, “Oh, well, good luck with that.” You know, getting a lower unit replaced. And the next morning, there was the seaplane.

PMY: This was a big risk for Evinrude. Not that you guys didn’t know what you were doing. It’s obviously a big PR Bonanza, if the boat makes it. But, gosh, I mean the Inside Passage—it’s not entirely inside…
Kathy Robbins: Two open areas, open water. Big ones.
PMY: When you first set off…
Kathy Robbins: We flew in from Seattle to Juneau, and we get off the airplane, and if you’ve been to the airport in Juneau, it is, of course, sea level. So, Bill says, “What elevation are we?” And I’m saying, well, we’re pretty much sea level. The water, the cliffs, they go right down to the water. You go up to a cliff, and your depthfinder is reading like 50 feet. You can’t even anchor. We spent like, 2 or 3 days in Juneau with press. I was wearing white slacks and a red shirt, and then they told me at the end of day one that we had to wear the same clothes all three days. Those white slacks were toast when I finished.

PMY: Must have been a mind-blowing experience as Midwesterners to see that landscape and know you’re going hundreds of miles through it.
Kathy Robbins: Our first night out, we spent somewhere close to Juneau. We weren’t underway for very long. Then I woke up the next morning. We wanted to get an early start, because that was going to be a long journey. So, I shot up out of my bunk, and I said, “Bill, we got to get up, the sun is up.” Well, we were in the land of the midnight sun. So, it was like, 2 in the morning. And we thought, well, oh heck, we’re up already. Might as well keep going. That was the last time we made that mistake.
PMY: And any recollections of people and the weather?
Kathy Robbins: The weather was pretty good, and I think they timed it—June is a nice time to go, right? We met fishermen, local fishermen. We met fellow boaters. Typically larger boats than we were on.

PMY: Were some people just shaking their heads, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’
Kathy Robbins: No, a lot of boating goes on up there. But we did meet a lot of people and saw a lot of sites. Mendenhall Glacier—we did not go into that bay. I think the picture in the book of the ice field; there were some very big icebergs, and there was one grounded. You stay away from them. They’ll flip. And you don’t want to be there when they flip.
PMY: You had something like 1,000 linear feet of charts for this trip? How pre-planned was the run?
Kathy Robbins: They (Evinrude) had to have distributors and dealers along the way to welcome us and provide stuff we needed; fuel and supplies, oil changes on the engines—stuff like that. So they had planned that out. Also, the Coast Guard was aware of it. And believe it or not, we did see a few cruise ships in the Inside Passage. That was comforting, because it is a fallback position if you run into trouble.
PMY: Didn’t the Coast Guard say something like that was one of the best-equipped small boats they’d ever seen?
Kathy Robbins: Well, it was. A problem we occasionally had with Evinrude; they’re sitting in Milwaukee, and we’d say, “Well, we’re going to be delayed because of weather,” which meant they had to reschedule a lot of stuff. And of course, they’re in Milwaukee. It’s beautiful, sunshiny, you know? And we say we’re not looking at the same weather, and we have to make the call on the ground.

PMY: What is it that they say when it comes to making a boat passage? You can either have a schedule, or you can arrive alive.
Kathy Robbins: I choose arriving alive.
PMY: Bill wrote of one crossing where your boat was completely disappearing in the swells when you were crossing in tandem with the folks who were cruising in the bigger boat.
Kathy Robbins: That was crossing the Dixon entrance, and they got separated from us. They were a little faster than we were. But we were just going along. We didn’t realize, the waves were maybe 25 or 30 feet. Our boat was 20 feet. So, we were riding up and down and up and down—just happy as clams. They were not. They lost every piece of equipment that wasn’t nailed down onto the floor of the cabin; their TV broke. They were worried about us. When we finally showed up, they said, “Oh my God, thank goodness you’re here and you’re fine.”
What? What was wrong? We pretty much felt safe the whole time.
Now, on the Inside Passage was an area where there was a terrible eddy that happened. It would have had more of an effect on a smaller boat or sailboat that didn’t have enough power. We just powered right through. You could tell the stern was slipping and sliding. You could tell that you were in the eddy, but we just skipped right across.

PMY: Huge tides there. Were there ever any points when, with tides in particular, or fog or when you were really disappearing into waves, the boat did feel small, or it felt like ‘This was the boat for the job?’
Kathy Robbins: This was the boat for the job. But now on the (upper) Missouri. We thought this boat was too big. Because it really was … it gets so shallow, you know, like Mark Twain says, you don’t know whether to plow it or drink it. It’s hard to follow a channel on the upper Missouri. We were ending up in the middle of a field, surrounded by a fence, like a farm fence. So, you wonder, why are you there? But, I mean, it was not a matter of safety. We never felt at risk. But you’d do better with a jon boat.
PMY: Speaking of rivers, how about the Columbia? It can be really treacherous.
Kathy Robbins: The Columbia, yeah, we didn’t run into any debris, natural or otherwise. We also picked up the Columbia at the bottom of Puget Sound, so we didn’t go over the Columbia Bar. That can be very treacherous. We had intended to go up the Snake, but when we got to The Dalles—a narrow part of the Columbia—it was very windy. You could barely stand up. You had to lean into the wind. And we got word that the Snake River was closed to navigation. We had wind against the waves on that section of the Columbia and were beating ourselves silly. So, we hauled out there and then proceeded to go across the continental divide at that point.
PMY: Didn’t you have a reporter say: “Why didn’t you take the boat the whole entire way? Why did you have to haul out?” Because at some point, you’ve got the Continental Divide—where the rivers actually start, so there’s not enough water for a boat of any size.
Kathy Robbins: Yep.
PMY: How did the boating change, going upriver, versus downriver, after the Continental Divide?
Kathy Robbins: Well, much less water. We put in at Fort Benton just below Great Falls. Another reporter, said, “Why did you put in below Great Falls?” I said, “Well, I didn’t really want to go over Great Falls.”

PMY: Did you ever get to a point where you hung the boat up on the bottom and you were like, Oh my gosh, we’re gonna have to call somebody to pull us off?
Kathy Robbins: No. But we did have to get out and push. Typically, Bill would get out and push, and I would be on the boat, you know, under control, until he was able to get back in. On the northern part of the Missouri, there are six reservoirs—six dams. We hauled around each of the dams. The six reservoirs are pretty good for boating. When they get down towards the dam, you’ve got lots of water, but up in the upper reaches, just after the upstream dam, there’s hardly any water. So that was where we were running out of water quite regularly.
PMY: When you had to haul out at the dams, some of the trailers were a little sketchy?
Kathy Robbins: Some were mongo trailers with steel cables to haul you out. But one was, like, for a jon boat—polyethylene line, which, you know, stretches and snaps. That was a nailbiter.
PMY: You were in Montana three days without seeing other people. I know you had lots of fresh-caught fish, spaghetti and crackers. Were you able to eat at restaurants when they presented themselves?
Kathy Robbins: We only spent 24 nights on the boat, so most of our meals were at restaurants, or dealer/distributor’s houses. Besides spaghetti, we made sandwiches, and maybe other canned meals like chili, heated on our little butane stove. Meals were generally not memorable. In New York City, we did go to dinner at Tavern on the Green, with our sometime travel buddies, Ralph and Ceil Jerome, whom we met in the North Channel. Their teenage son joined us on leave from his prep boarding school. He was maybe 12 or 13. He ate his bone-in chicken with a knife and fork and after dinner asked me to dance with him—the foxtrot. Quite the little gentleman. Another memorable dinner was October 3rd, when we were near Jensen Beach, Florida, where the Evinrudes had a house. One evening, we were all invited to Perry Como’s house for a surprise birthday dinner for (big band singer) Vaughn Monroe.
PMY: Did you ever run out of gas?
Kathy Robbins: Well, yes, on the St. Lawrence River. The Corps of Engineers brought us some gasoline. We were in touch with the Coast Guard and the Corps of Engineers basically the whole trip.
PMY: What were your impressions of passing through the midwestern landscape?
Kathy Robbins: Along the upper Mississippi, starting at Alton, Illinois, that’s beautiful. Like nonstop Palisades. The river cuts through all these rocks and you could see in one picture, at one point, there’s a coal seam in the rock.
PMY: So, you eventually reached St. Louis, and then headed north towards Chicago on the Illinois.
Kathy Robbins: The Illinois is totally a different river. We were familiar with the Mississippi, of course, and the Missouri is totally different, too. The banks are much lower and more benign, I’ll call them, on the Illinois. Then of course, you get up towards Chicago, and you are into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which I guess now has an electric dam on it.
PMY: You ended up in Milwaukee, at Evinrude headquarters. Is this when Bill got a job offer?
Kathy Robbins: Yes, he had quit his previous job. The offer wasn’t specific about what job, but they just said there would be a job.
PMY: Any recollections of Ralph Evinrude?
Kathy Robbins: He was a very nice man, a very nice man. And married to Francis Langford. Now (on the 1950 and 60’s comedy show The Bickersons) she is Mrs. Bickerson, the bickering Bickerson. That’s how we mostly knew her. You probably never heard of her. The two of them were delightful.
PMY: What a life change. And then you had this rest of this voyage to make, right? You were supposed to end the journey in New York. How was the decision made to go to Key West?
Kathy Robbins: There was some scuttlebutt regarding the length of the trip. Evinrude was billing it as the longest outboard trip, you know, ever. Somebody contacted them and said, “Well, no, my trip was longer.” So, Evinrude said, “Well, okay, we’ll go to Key West.” Bill, on the other hand, might have suggested we keep going.
PMY: What were highlights of the portion from New York?
Kathy Robbins: It was very busy. And the days were much shorter. Not the physical day, but the distances we traveled. In Alaska, of course, we would run for 12, 14 hours, and then stop. Along the Intracoastal, 20 miles and you were stopping.
PMY: They wanted you to talk to media and make various public appearances along the way, too, right?
Kathy Robbins: They did. Now, when we were on the St. Lawrence Seaway, we were instructed to go through one of their locks. We got caught crossways in the current, so we had suffered some damage to the boat. So fairly close to Baltimore, we stopped for a couple of days and an Evinrude dealer repaired the boat because the mishap had splintered the fiberglass. The poor guy had to do fiberglass work inside, and it was like 100 degrees.
PMY: And then you eventually found yourselves down towards the Keys.
Kathy Robbins: Right. Well, we went down. We went outside. You know, once you leave the Intracoastal, you go out. We went outside, and then we cut through at one of the major passes to continue the trip, but we did come in at the wharf there at Key West. All the brass were standing up there—dress whites—but I mean, they weren’t in formation or anything. We weren’t important like that.
PMY: Oh, you were important. Wasn’t this coming in just ahead of an impending hurricane?
Kathy Robbins: Oh, yeah. They had to haul the boat out right away.
PMY: In the book, I read that, early on, the canvas top leaked like a sieve, and you had to do some more modifications.
Kathy Robbins: Well, you know, you can’t give me any canvas that doesn’t leak.
PMY: And Bill had described that you had little fans to defrost the inside of the windows but, he said, your skill with a rag was much more effective.
Kathy Robbins: Yep.
PMY: What did you do in the wake of the trip?
Kathy Robbins: Four months after, we embarked on a rubber-chicken circuit. You go and you give a presentation. Bill did a wonderful job, and we had a curated set of 100 slides.
PMY: And then Bill went into sales for Evinrude. That was all by the seat of your pants, but you guys surely sold a lot of motors, because a trip like that really speaks volumes about the motors.
Kathy Robbins: And I hope that it encouraged other young couples to do this, because it’s doable. You know, you can do this without having a ton of money. That was their whole point.
PMY: This trip was a real, I guess, sort of turning point in your life.
Kathy Robbins: A life changer. We ended up moving to Milwaukee, and subsequently, I spent 35 years in Milwaukee meeting people I never would have met, you know, along the way. Including (her later husband) Mr. Robbins.
PMY: Just so people know, you and Bill did eventually split when, in 1981? And then you met Mr. Robbins, who you continued to be married to for…
Kathy Robbins: He died, in ’92 … His idea of boating was a small boat, very small. He had bought a little car-top sailboat; it didn’t sail well. It didn’t paddle well. We had an engine on the back. We took it out on the Mississippi one time and almost didn’t make it back to shore. It was like a bathtub. We also started camping, tent-camping. And I camped after he died—for 3 years, by myself. Really mastered setting up and everything, breaking it down. And finally, I thought, this is a lot of work. I had bought myself a canoe—a paddle canoe, 16 feet and fiberglass—and I was up in Door County, which is a finger of Wisconsin, going into Lake Michigan. I was paddling throughout all the big boats anchored there, and I said to myself, Well, I’d really like one of those. Well, why don’t I get one? So, I went right home and bought a 26-foot Bayliner Command Bridge.
And that was my boat.

This wasn’t the end of Kathy Robbins’ boating life. In fact, it was a new beginning. To hear the rest of the story and see many more photos from her journey, tune in to our podcast with Kathy here ▶