Born in the dusty heart of Oklahoma in 1916, ten-year-old Melvin dreams of living in Alaska. Nearly fifty years later, he builds a 47-foot boat in his Arkansas backyard, launches it on the Arkansas River, and cruises it to Alaska by way of the Panama Canal. Prior to his journey, Melvin had never been south of the United States border and had never been on a boat in the open ocean.

"Learn by doing," he says.

South to Alaska takes the reader on two journeys.

On one, the reader follows a young boy's dream that begins in a one-room, Oklahoma schoolhouse in 1926, and ends decades later on an island in southeast Alaska.

On the other, the reader becomes a passenger aboard the Red Dog as it cruises along the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico where, in 1973, Melvin begins a solo journey along the Caribbean coasts of Mexico and Central America, through the Panama Canal, then into the Pacific Ocean to Alaska. Plagued by mechanical problems, international fraud, violent ocean storms, threats of foreign jail, illness and loneliness, Melvin fears a deadly end before reaching the place of his dreams and returning to the woman he loves.

A true story of courage, endurance and survival, South to Alaska chronicles the manifestation of Melvin's boyhood dream as he makes a 10,000-mile journey through a watery world he knows little about, to a world he cannot forget.