Steve Roberts

Amazon 44' steel pilothouse cutter Nomadness
Gig Harbor 10' Navigator dinghy Nomadling
Microship - amphibian pedal/solar/sail trimaran Wordplay
Hobie i12s inflatable kayak Nessie

home port: Camano Island, WA
contact: wordy@microship.com

SKR headshot

I have a long history of technomadic adventure; in 1983 I took off from Ohio aboard the Winnebiko and covered 10,000 miles around the US, leading to the book, Computing Across America. In 1986, I took on a traveling partner, conjured the imaginatively-named Winnebiko II, and covered another 6,000 miles. Intent on taking the concept to its logical extreme, I then spent 3.5 years building the 580-pound BEHEMOTH, which trundled ponderously out of Silicon Valley in 1991 (here are photos from Wisconsin and Joshua Tree). This machine is now retired and on display in the Computer History Museum.

The Microship project began in 1993 with a kayak, and was supposed to be quick... but it turns out that the average completion time of a homebuilt boat is 137 years. In the past decade, I've been through four completely different substrates, three labs, a succession of relationships, over 130 corporate sponsors, and uncountable variations in on-board system designs. Wordplay is the resultant of all this, and is an amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimaran built around a canoe... an album of photos may be seen here.

The Microships underwent their first real test in the fall of 2001, in a 132-mile loop through Puget Sound (the map of that adventure is here, and various local kayak trips are documented in a collection of maplets). There are a number of detailed articles in the resources section of this site, and I post updates and photos on a blog and live page.

My home is on Camano Island, Washington, where I have a solar house in the forest as well as a 3,000 square-foot development facility (at 3X the size of the house, it's an indicator of my priorities). In addition to these projects, I'm working on a backpack-scale technomadic system called Shacktopus as well as a new boat of world-voyaging scale named Nomadness.

Photos of the fleet are below...

Nomadness anchored in Port Hadlock

Nomadling in outer space

Dinghy Nomadling in the vastness of outer space

Wordplay in the Microship lab

Bubba on Strawberry Island, with tracker and power system operating

Wordplay rig in Puget Sound

View off bow of Wordplay on a placid day in Dye's Inlet