Learning to Sail
Peter D Swanson
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Learning to Sail
COPYRIGHT 2000, Peter D. Swanson
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Nov 14: 46deg42‟ north, 113deg28‟ west: Montana
I‟m sitting on needles at the helm of a sailboat. A light breeze has my collar
tapping on my shoulder and it forms an occasional eddy that brings the smell of the
pines to my nose. Otherwise it leaves the boat and me unmoved. The boat is on a
trailer. The grass underneath is long and brown and seedy where the sun has found
an angle into but the mower and the recent wet snow have not. At my first view,
from a distance, the trailer disappeared into the growth and the boat floated on
wind-chopped rain-swelled water.
The trailer-boat sits on a few tennis-court‟s worth of land behind a ranch-house.
Over the years the clearing has been sprinkled with idle equipment; this boat, a
sleigh and other horse-related stuff, two old snowmobiles, a pile of ceramic
insulators from an old transformer, a stack of rusty ammo boxes, and some mosscovered cement idols and the molds to make them. The tall grass ringing each
individual assortment is like a frame around a little hotel painting. Any one might
catch an eye but the boat has the story that interests me and after I got out of my car
I walked right at it and climbed aboard to find the tiller and it is in my hand.
To my „starboard‟ is an old double-wide with additions; shack-extensions that
culminate in an attached barn, doorless, that has a 1981 Delorean inside. I guess
that the car hasn‟t been on the road lately, and this boat I sit in, well I guess that it
hasn‟t felt water moving past its flanks in years. „Portside‟, towards the hills that
block the lowering sun, big Ponderosas stand alongside an old woman. It was she
who put the ad for the boat in the “Trader” magazine. Along with the towering
trees and the land, she has all of her lifeless possessions and she talks fondly of
these. These are her companions. “It‟d take a lot of cash to part me and that car.
I‟ve driven it” “Guy once offered me $500.00 for that sleigh.” But the boat, “as
for that one,” she turns at me, or the boat, and croaks, “don‟t know nothing about
it.” She‟s never had it out sailing. Never meant to. She took it in a complicated
trade. Funny old bird. I wonder how little she‟d take to be rid of it. Unlike the
trees, she is hunched over by time, but she is still sharp-eyed, and she measures me
back.
I sense a small desperation within her and I‟m not surprised it is still for
sale after six months. Any use a big sailboat is to anyone in the middle of
Montana is lost on me. The lakes and reservoirs that are big enough to
float this thing are plagued with unreliable winds. No use to me. Asking
$1750.00 she‟s not giving it away. It is November. There is no money to
be made by buying it, tidying it up, bringing it to town, and then selling it
myself. The cost of the trailer-tires to even start… I‟m really not
interested in sailing it more than one time. It would be fun to bring it to
life but it would have to pay. I came to look, to get out of town for a while.
I was mostly curious to see a boat incongruously on a ranch. Anything to
get out of town. I shake my head, and blow air threw loosely closed lips.
No. Not even an offer.
The world gets a little bigger as I rule out the petty. The boat is no longer a
sought commodity to me, logistics are no longer concerns, and my freed mind
opens to the sensations around me. The woman can see this happening; or at least
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see enough to know that she has lost the sale, and straight away she loses interest in
me and, a little disgusted, leaves.
I stay on board. With a hand still on the tiller I smell the woods all around, see
the sky darkening above, I taste the dank of fall shade after a rain that is freezing
from the ground up, and I feel the neglect inward and below me. The boat is
unkept and smells of moldy canvas and old two-stroke mix gasoline and is
unspeaking. The trailer tires are flat and there are telephone poles in the way. Still,
underneath me, this sailboat, at twenty-four feet, seems big enough to go anywhere,
and could carry plenty of provisions. It is possible to picture it on the move, like a
loaded car moving to another life, or maybe even better than that.
At last I notice the wind‟s tapping on my shoulder. Feelings swirl as it stirs up
an old instinct. I sit cold in the face of it for near-to twenty minutes as my mind
sifts through some long-dormant urge like an archaeologist who has dropped his
ring amongst old bones, frozen in the realization that he must choose. With the
heat in my rig on full-blast, halfway back to town, my shivers subside. But a chill
remains, lodged somewhwere just below my conscious thought.
Nov 15: 46deg52‟ north, 113deg58‟ west: Missoula, MT
The next night I am standing on my heels outside of a bookstore; a big chain. It
could be anywhere, but it‟s not. It‟s not supposed to feel this way. It‟s supposed to
be my town but I feel like a stranger. I walked into the Border‟s earlier, belonging;
my marginal citizenship intact, but the words I have read and the pictures I have
scanned have put me out, so that now, smoking a cigarette under the electroplated
awning, watching fat, wet snowflakes fall at the end of an already short day, it‟s as
if I‟ve just exited the Interstate, as if I have never been here before.
The snow sticks only to the roofs and trunks of the cars parked in the lot. It melts
out from the seams and bleeds wet landing upon on the warm hoods. The air
hovers, visible ugly yellow-gray all across the blacktop under the magic-killing
mercury-vapor lights. At its edge are dark and disturbed fields overgrown with
knapweed, awaiting the next franchise. The foothills beyond are only dim
extensions, tilting and annoying where there should be free space. My feeling of
alienation grows the farther out my eyes focus. I lose even my sense of direction.
My home no longer exists, although where I live is just a few miles over my
shoulder- if I could get my bearings enough to turn away from it. I reenter the
Barne‟s&Noble‟s, now personally offended by the bland architecture and contrived
comforts inside. I have five books strewn about over a tabletop, one with a broken
spine. A book should hold its place.
While I read the inside covers and skim through their contents, I notice another
man pick one of the same titles as it is duplicated on the shelf and take it to peruse
at the next table. There is another man at the shelves looking at the now depleted
row. This man glances at my table. That makes three of us in this section reading
about sailing.
Is it just me, or are we all imagining we could be somewhere else, doing
something else? Somewhere other than Missoula, Montana in early November,
doing something other than trying to make the best of the coming season? We are
near in age I‟d guess, just entering mid-life, all of us have seen plenty of winters as
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young men, and here we are again facing another cold season…. this is the time of
year to think about this, and this is perhaps also a time in life to think about these
things, these little convergences of gloomy inevitables. Allied with the passing
time the cold will soon take the upper hand.
So here we are, all reading about sailing… no… reading about how to sail.
How to sail on oceans. How to sail the oceans alone. And in our pitifully
inadequate minds we are picturing what? Recreation? For a moment I wonder
what else we might have in common. Or will the man reading about solo sailing on
oceans go home to his family ashamed? Will he be unable to look his wife in the
eye as if he had been leafing through pornography? Will he be uneasy at work, as
if he had stayed up late working on his resume? Will tomorrow night find him
resigned to his fate in the ski-shop?
Then, I abruptly, contemptuously, set myself apart. When I read, I am
transported with a reality that these men cannot possibly feel. I have no one
waiting tonight; my wife and I live apart. I‟ve no “real” career, at least by that
grand designation, and I‟ve no children. There is no one in my life that requires a
deep truthful heartfelt explanation or a lie. Luck and an occasional side-step has
me free of those traps at the moment.
I am going sailing.
Now I know why I feel like a stranger. In my mind I am already gone.
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Nov 21: 48deg north, 122deg west: Seattle, WA
Drizzle. Seattle. I have come to buy an ocean-going sailboat. This boat I am
looking at is twenty-seven feet long, the new minimum length that I am
considering. For my purpose… given my budget.
I have been reading, and I have learned a new word in my research“pitchpoling.” This is where the boat goes end-over-end in a big sea as it tries to
run away from bad weather. The helmsman is at the stern, so after the bow has dug
in- when the rotation starts, I guess he would at first go up, and then he would
follow a catapultic path to land in the water where the bow had once been, and
perhaps he would get one breath before the boat lands upside down on top of him…
I have an unwanted ability to picture this in my mind that makes me queeze. The
longer the boat, the more resistant to pitchpoling it is, of course. The longer the
boat, the dearer it is as well.
Mark, the man selling the boat, and I, motor out, dressed like duck hunters.
When we raise the limp and heavy sails, moss falls from the mechanisms that
haven‟t moved in a long time. There is no wind, the drizzle just hangs in the air,
cars are still audible on the wet interstate, the ocean is nowhere near, and even the
Puget Sound is beyond hills, under bridges, and through locks. He is selling it, he
says, because hlost his sailing partner. But he is pale and thin, and lying. He is
dying- of cancer or something, and he must be tidying up his estate. Perhaps his
partner is as dead as he looks soon to be. I‟ve said I might sail to Hawaii or
something, and he thinks I‟m an idiot. He doesn‟t want to sell it to me. “Have you
ever read The Perfect Storm?” But he loved sailing and can‟t keep himself from
envying the fool who wants to sail and still has the time. I know he‟d sell it to me
if I wanted.
“I‟ll think about it,” I say as we part.
“Think hard,” he says.
As I head out of the parking lot, I scan my roadmap to see how far I would have
to drive out of my way to see the actual ocean. I think it would look different
through eyes that are contemplating a crossing. Oh- I‟ve stood on the beach
before, like most everyone has, staring out at the expanse of water. But I had no
questions to ask, no purpose in mind, and the ocean‟s response was predictably
vague.
On a big-boat pier, I talk to a coastguard officer. He tells me that they are
keeping “tabs” on some sailing vessels who are trying to head south, and who are
having a tough time of it. He belittles the sailors the same way a cop might belittle
some silly protesters he is assigned to protect. “They have no business out there,”
he says. The water-cop also says that there‟s a twenty-five foot swell; massive
crestless waves caused by a far off gale against the prevailing currents. “It would be
stupid,” he says, looking at me, “to try to sail on anything less than forty feet long.”
A little of the old paranoia creeps up in me, and I wonder how he knows.
It‟s bad outside the Sound for most of the year, too, he says, so trying to get
south along an inhospitable coast with few sheltered spots to duck into is a major
undertaking for a sailboat. I thank him, and get back into my Explorer. I drive
carefully. This vehicle, cashed out, is my boat.
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I have one more appointment. To look over a thirty-six year old boat that is
thirty-two feet long. The ad says it only has a „beam‟ of six feet. Given the
length, that‟s a very narrow boat. So far, my research has focused on boat design,
and how different shapes might cope with different conditions. A narrow boat
might lack floatation, and „heel‟, or lean over when the wind pushes at the sails. A
narrow boat might also lack space below decks, but with pitchpoling in mind, I am
after the longest boat I can afford, as long as it‟s not a submarine. It really is only
six feet wide and looks like a torpedo cut in half. It‟s got a tiny cabin. The guy
trying to sell it uses the word “submarine” twice when describing its sailing
characteristics. He also says it typically sails heeled over 30 degrees or more in the
lightest of breezes: “She‟s a bit tender.” He is fond of the boat, having day-sailed
the Sound with it packed full of full ice chests and friends, with a hot shower
waiting back at home. He seems ambivalent about selling out. He takes me on a
tour of the pretty boat, pointing out things he has been meaning to take care of,
almost starting on one or two of the projects before leaving me alone. “Take your
time. I don‟t ever lock it up anyways.” I really don‟t know what to look for
beyond what he‟s shown me and its dark out now with rain coming down, so I sit
hunched in small the cabin. I really like the gimbaled brass lamp.
I find a cheap hotel room. On the local TV news I see the ocean. A mudslide
has taken out a chunk of the coast road, a few cars along with it, and the waves are
really crashing. Two minutes later they show a helicopter rescue at sea, men
abandoning a pretty big fishing boat that has been pounded to a crazy angle,
obviously foundering, and then a grounded freighter with its diesel fuel leaking out
in an ugly slick. Sobering scenes to a man looking at small boats. The furious
surf sweeps into my imagination through the night, and screams from one of the
other rooms are fitted into the context of my sea-swept dreams.
Nov 23: 46deg52‟ north, 113deg58‟ west: Missoula, MT
Back in Montana I try to assimilate the new information. It‟s tough to sustain a
whim in the face of a task that looms large as an idea and far away as an
actualization. At night I read Richard Henderson‟s Singlehanded Sailing, the book
I found that first night. He follows a logical procession, starting with a chapter on
history and ending with one of conjecture, and fills the in-between with examples
of likely and immediate disasters. He interviews the solo sailors. Each survivor
offers up pitifully inadequate coping procedures and a good number of them turn
up dead or missing in later pages. Henderson is „matter of fact‟ in his discussion of
the challenges facing the lone sailor. My stomach tightens as I picture myself in
their place. Having taken so many steps to extract myself from the community
here, having deconstructed my life in a search for freedom of movement, I am the
same as the singlehanders in one key ingredient. I feel completely alone. I have
even found a home for my old dog.
Nov 29: 38deg north, 122deg west: San Francisco
I‟ve packed all my possessions into plastic bins and put them in storage, left my
small business in capable hands, and I‟ve driven through the night from Montana,
over ice-slick mountain roads and through the hot desert, and now I‟m in the foggy
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South Bay area with my third appointment looking at boats. It‟s as hard to move
around in San Francisco as it was in Seattle. I end up in inexplicable traffic jams at
all hours. I find a vehicle I can out-brake and tailgate it to discourage others from
dangerously cutting in.
In San Francisco most of the yachts in my price category are used as “liveaboards”. Extension cords, phone lines, water hoses, and TV cables grow out over
the long-ago tied painters. The marinas are like trailer courts and this one is no
exception. It is a low-rent „gated‟ community. It‟s not a long wait before
someone is entering the gate that accesses the jetty, and I slip in with a man and his
dog as they return from a walk. Beyond the ramp, on a walkway that comfortably
yields to my weight, I pass what appears to be an old sailing lifeboat, (long past
being a viable one), one like Shackleton might have spent some time in. It has
several layers of worn blue plastic tarps draped over warped old lumber, PVC, wet
cardboard boxes, and a broken toilet. Water is pumping through hoses out the
portholes. The scene fascinates me, and in the confused image a head pops out of
the front hatch and I am caught staring. It is a bright, plump, cheerful, and
incongruously clean-scrubbed face framed by what can only be described as refuse.
She beams. I say good morning, though it‟s four in the afternoon. She shakes out
her hair like an actress in a shampoo commercial, but the glamorous effect proves
fleeting when the strands catch in some of the peeling paint.
The boat I have come to look at is in a nearby slip. Paul, the owner, uses it as a
base in the city when his consulting business requires an overnight stay. Unlike
most people in this marina, he is an enthusiastic sailor and wants to cruise the
South Seas someday. He is upgrading to a thirty-seven footer. He shows up an
hour late to let me in.
After thoroughly checking it out from bow to stern, I decide, somewhat
reluctantly and somewhat influenced by an immediate need for a place to rest, that
it looks like the best I can do with three grand. A dollar bill, though harder to earn
in Montana, is worth no more in California, and I haven‟t accumulated many.
Mary in the lifeboat turns out to be a good neighbor. She cruises the dumpsters and
I buy a few things from her collection, and she takes my trash out for me after
sifting through it.
Dec 15: 37deg north, 122deg west: South Bay
I‟m the only one in the Bay. The wind is blowing hard. It‟s cold all over the
frothy chocolate-colored waters and the refrigerator and microwave have crashed to
the floor inside. The tiller is held way over to windward with a bungee cord, but
the boat still wants to turn upwind. Even with a taut jib up front, foresail or
whatever it‟s called, there is too much sail behind the boat‟s pivot point, too much
force in back. Apparently the design is prone to „gripe‟. I‟m trying to „reef‟ the
main; lower the mainsail a bit and tie it off to the boom to reduce sail area over the
stern, and I am unable to do it. The “balance” of a sailboat is a delicate matter that
requires placing the sails, which gather in the power of the wind, just so, and I think
that if I could reel in the Genoa, the boat might fall off from the wind, but on the
other hand I will surely rip the thin sailcloth if I pull any harder. I can‟t find a
happy place for any of them, so I drop all of the sails, half slapping down on the
deck, half dragging along the side wet. The sound of the water slamming at the
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sides is that of an old Winnebago taking a pothole at speed. It is more like a
floating RV than the graceful thoroughbred I had in my mind. After gathering in
the sails I start the outboard and inelegantly make my way to shore. Near the
marina entrance the old Johnson outboard quits. In an attempt to restart it, I pull
too hard on the pull-start and it jams. As I lift the cover to free it, I drift to the
breakwall, and the waves deflecting off of it are the only thing saving the boat.
My first trial run leaves me with an uneasy feeling about the boat and a gas/oil
smell in the cabin. I‟m wet and cold and bleeding from both hands. At least I never
let the boom smack into my head. When I give up the day to my berth in the bow, I
tense my body in frustration. I notice that by bracing my shoulders and pushing
with my feet I can separate the hull from the bulkhead. The next night I wake up to
the sound of someone getting sick a few feet away. My port-side next-door
neighbors party hard. At first light I move my boat over a few slips.
The first light of the next day after that I cross the Bay for a haul-out at a
boatyard, hoping to gain some speed by cleaning the barnacles and other
accumulated crud from the bottom of the boat. I have punched the numbers into
my GPS (global positioning system) that represent my destination, and a little
arrow on the screen points the way. The device keeps track of my location,
updating my movements with rising and falling numbers denoting degrees of
latitude, (North/South), and longitude, (East/West). I plot my position on a chart
that seems a poor representation of what I see when I stare ahead. The Oakland
shoreline is a confusion of ugly structures, the water is dirty brown, and the arrow
on the little Garmin GPS is pointing disconcertingly to a short cut to the boatyard…
overland. Finding the channel on my own using the noisy outboard for measly
progress eventually gets me into Oakland, California.
Lines are hurled from shore to clear the vast expanse I have left between the
boat and dock and I race to tie them off as I drift past it. There is a jerk that sends
me stepping haphazardly for balance, and the sound of creaking wood followed by
nails-on-a-chalkboard as the fiberglass hull meets wet pylons.
Ashore, as I back away down the dock and the grimacing yardmen, the boat is
attached to the marina‟s hoist and lifted out and I can see below the waterline.
There are five-inch long oysters, in clusters, all along the bottom of it. The keel is
an ugly, bulbous thing, hanging on as if an afterthought with sea-weed doubling its
length. The curve of the bilge looks like the midsection of a lazy bureaucrat. I
have no knowledge of nautical architecture, but even I can guess that scraping the
bottom will not change the inherent design flaws and structure-compromising
shortcuts used when it was built. Nobody else thinks much of my boat, either. I
reread the sections on hull design and construction in my books. I don‟t know what
to do except to try and make the best out of a poor decision and I make the hull
clean and fair and I strengthen a few soft-spots. When I am ready to go back into
the water ten days later, the yard manager, who knows I worked hard, right through
Christmas day, says, un-nautically, “You can‟t turn a sow‟s ear into a silk purse.”
I am getting the feeling that I have made a poor choice in my plastic tub, and
with my limited budget I should not have begun to attempt this story, or at least
realize that I have chosen this boat knowing it is based on an faulty premise. In any
case I can‟t imagine this boat at sea. Back to my books I look at the pictures and
see them in a way I hadn‟t before. OK start over: Where did I go wrong? For one
thing, I shouldn‟t have ruled the old wooden boats out. Wooden boats have the
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best stories. Early in my research I eliminated wood as an option, and only
considered the available fiberglass boats, but I did notice how inexpensive they are
in the Bay area. Here wooden boats are not coveted.
Wood. My hang-glider is made with aircraft aluminum, hardened steel, carefully
designed and machined fittings, and it has a crossbar of carbonfiber and Kevlar.
My bicycle frame is carbonfiber and carefully selected alloys. The modern
materials are lighter and stronger and last longer. I have heard that maintaining
wood requires knowledge and dedication. It reads different as I choke on plastic.
Also, the designs of most vehicles; cars and trucks and airplanes and bicycles and
trains, and even hang-gliders, tend to get better over time. I assumed that the same
could be said for boats, it was because of this that I dismissed the elegant shapes of
the old wooden boats. I think about a wooden boat I had looked at earlier. It was
draped with heavy tarpaulin so I couldn‟t see the cabin, but it had a pretty waterline and a „For Sale‟ sign. At the time I didn‟t even consider it, but the picture has
somehow stuck in my mind.
I also think I have foolishly misread my own relative primacy. I have been
working under the assumption that the sailor is the key player, and that if I was a
good enough sailor I could find my way on any boat. Now I guess that it is the
boat that will meet the sea and sky first. It is the boat. The boat. An inept sailor
on a good boat is better off than a good sailor on an inept boat.
Even on the lifeless feeling Bay, I feel like a useless appendage on a floating
piece of plastic trash. An inept sailor on an inept boat. A sea otter‟s face fills with
disapproval as we sail by. Maybe it‟s going to feel like this for me always,
whatever boat I am on, but something is wrong with this tub. I dock, discouraged.
That night I talk to my parents on the phone, and say, after my faked optimism
fades, I say this; half meaning it: “I think I‟ll just sail to Shanghai.” My father
says, “That sounds good to me.” I don‟t know exactly what he means. I do know,
however, that I won‟t sail anywhere in the plastic RV, this tub. What a waste of
time and money! I wander the docks at a nearby Marina and see the carefully
covered old wooden boat. I consider it. My next call is to the man with the
wooden boat and I ask to take it out for a sail.
Jan 12: 37deg north, 122deg west: Brisbane, CA
I don‟t see the boat with new eyes or a new appreciation; I see all the
refurbishing it needs. Mark, the owner, is a carpenter transplanted from New
Jersey. He‟s been here a while, and his accent is nicely edgeless. He had done a
lot of work on the boat, but all that was years ago. The exterior paint is now
cracked and peeling, even where the boat‟s name, “Sea-Spray,” is elegantly
scrawled. The seams show a quarter inch of brittle caulking between half of the
planks, the wood is spongy around the cabin, and the plywood deck is lifting, but
the overall structure seems sound enough.
It‟s a ketch, with the two masts, a main-mast and a smaller mizzen-mast behind
it, both raked back giving it a jaunty look, and a bowsprit juts proudly out the front.
It is very pleasing to my eye but the most striking feature is how little of it actually
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rises above the water. It only has two feet of freeboard, the height of the hull that
actually floats on top of the water, and this gives it a racy look. It‟s really small
inside, and wet from the recent rain too, but it doesn‟t smell rotten or mildewed,
and best of all it doesn‟t smell of old polyester resin. Mark talks about the wood
used to build it and the silicone bronze that fastens it together. He also talks about
how the designer, Somebody Herreshoff, considered it to be a working-man‟s boat,
and shows me a blueprint. The drawings show a sturdy construction and include
space for an auxiliary engine to assure that should the wind fail, one can still make
it to work Monday morning. Along with the design plans, the renowned naval
architect suggested what might be served from the galley, how people should dress
when aboard and how they should relieve themselves in a cedar bucket, among
other things. If he had the time perhaps he‟d have included some subjects that were
appropriate for discussion and some thoughts one might think. It has about five
feet of headroom inside, just enough for a working man, I guess. “This one has
less freeboard than the design calls for, and a little shorter cabin, because it was
made for Bay racing.”
The wooden boat, designed forty years before, points to windward much better
than one current design; my unnamed RV, and is faster on a reach, but it‟s wetter
on deck even in the short chop of the Bay. While handling it well, he starts to talk
about some good times out on it, perhaps when he loved it more than anything, but
then he keeps the thoughts for himself. But I can see him remembering back to
when the boat was not a burden or a chore, when it was more than just a bill to pay
every month.
I could sail out of San Francisco at the end of March. If I don‟t go soon, I may
never get away, and I don‟t even have a seaworthy boat yet. I‟m on the edge of
entrenchment here; I have a cell phone, an address, and I‟m reading the “help
wanted” ads. When I call Paul a week after our test sail, he is busy with a real
estate broker, or maybe a loan officer. He accepts the $3,200.00 I offer for the old
wooden boat.
I spend another $180.00 on two books: Jimmy Cornell‟s World Cruising Routes
and World Cruising Guidebook. I also buy a used book on celestial navigation, a
used inflatable; an old Zodiac made in France that will do double duty as a tender
and as my life raft, a used outboard for it, and a lot of new rope. I put all this stuff
in my car because there‟s no room in either boat.
I skim through the guides to learn about Pacific weather patterns and the various
entry formalities. The very next day I buy charts and national flags of some
countries I might visit. It takes an hour to plan a possible route half-way around the
world. It might have been thirty minutes but if a chart along my route is
unavailable, I have to either figure out where it is available in another chart series
or scale, or change my route entirely, and put all those charts and flags back on the
shelves. I don‟t want to feel lost, and I don‟t want this to take all day. The woman
behind the counter watches me with a cross consternation, thinking that I am not a
customer. It works out though, one place is the same as another in my ignorance,
and I find a complete set of charts. I know nothing about the countries and I don‟t
care where I go, I don‟t care what this woman is thinking, and I leave the chandlery
with entry flags and navigable routes linking islands and waterways across the
Pacific and a mind free of one more niggling detail.
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Not living aboard the old wooden boat yet, I commute daily from the unnamed
plastic RV boat, pulling up to the dock like maybe I really have a home
somewhere, like this is maybe just my hobby, and it changes everything. When I
chug through the marina to take the “Sea-Spray” boat out sailing, people smile. I
take the boat out in the Bay and race any sail I see and I catch plenty of them. The
guards are polite when I dock and often come over to accept a thrown line.
Back at the Oakland shipyard I am congratulated on my boat as it is lifted. The
underwater lines of it are beautiful. A full-length keel made out of four-by-four
White Oak, and Oak two-by-two steam bent frames are all planked with two-inch
Cedar. The wood forms a graceful, filling then tapering, set of arcs to gently pry the
water apart and then leave it as much as possible as it was.
I spend the next ten days and over $2500.00 with the boat on the hard. I scrape,
sand, and paint. In place of the old wood framed house glass I put in new portholes
made of brass and quarter-inch plate glass. I replace the soft wood around the
cabin and cover the whole cabin area with a fiberglass reinforced epoxy to assure
strength and water-tightness. I pull the prop-shaft and check all of the throughhulls. I spend a lot of time and even more money at nearby retailers. All of the
boat chandlers are near the boatyard. I‟m trying to stick with the essentials, but I‟m
not knowledgeable enough to identify them and not all is well-spent. The boat is so
pretty. Anything made of shiny brass catches my eye and I end up wasting a lot of
time and money incorporating the useless baubles. But I do get a few informal
„surveys‟ from people who know more than I about the key structures in old
wooden boats and the boat impresses everyone of them. The boat was designed to
be strong and built to last, and a few trinkets won‟t change that. When it‟s time to
go back in the water, I get a few more compliments from some newly-made
friends. This boat seems to bring people around, and even the crane driver says
“Nice work!” He warns me to keep an eye out, though, and get ready to man the
pumps, because wooden boats take water for a while until the seams swell shut,
finally saturated with seawater. …Huh?
When I motor out the channel and glide past Oakland‟s Jack London Square, the
tourists watch me pass. I try and look at myself through their eyes. The boat takes
no water at all.
I go out sailing when the other people are going to work. I work hard to acquire
skills. I drop and raise sails, throw the anchor, and spend one night out in the Bay.
I sail every day. I have a checklist of things to practice out on the water. When
they‟ve all been marked off, I start to pack Sea-Spray for the voyage. I spend my
nights on the old wooden boat now, too exhausted from the days for the commute.
My plan, if I could call bundles of thoughts a plan, is to sail to Hawaii. The boat
is worth more there. If I go no further, I can sell it there, and still come back to less
than financial ruin, with an adventure in my memories. This is what I tell myself.
12
I call the carpenter who sold me the boat. I have never told him of my plans. I
stopped telling people after my wife‟s grandmother begged me to call a friend of
hers who would talk me out of sailing. Most people don‟t take me seriously, or
write me off as an idiot. I take refuge in my books. But, this call has to be made.
He still knows this boat much better than I do.
Mark hesitates, choosing his words carefully after I‟ve told him I‟m off to
Hawaii, and says, “Uh, that‟s... ambitious.”
We talk about the things I‟ve done on the boat. He mentions some common
deck screws he used for the battery box. I had already moved the batteries. The
screws broke off as I lifted them. The next day, there is a note from him pinned to
the companionway hatch. “I didn‟t through-bolt the top pintle of the rudder.” I had
missed that. What else have I missed?
My father‟s brother is in town for a meeting and stops by with only a few
minutes to spare before his flight out. He takes a quick picture of the boat. I warn
him that I add on a few feet when I tell my mother the boat is over thirty feet long,
and that I only sent home pictures that make it look big. Right before he goes, he
says, “You know that Slocum (a famous sailor) hallucinated. He thought it must
have been the result of eating too much garlic.” Then he looks at me. I thought it
was the fruit, plums or something. I wasn‟t quick enough, though, to decide if he
was mistaken, or if I was, or if it was a test to see if I‟d read the book. I have very
little confidence in myself or my equipment.
13
My wife is down here now, living on the unnamed RV- she and her dog
Samantha, who is also my pal. I told Kari it was a cheap way to live in San
Francisco, and when she was done she could sell the boat for me. She has found a
job and we three walk in the parks and us two have one last dinner together and if
she only once asked me to stay…
On the day I am to leave, I jettison the things I don‟t need. A neighbor notices
the pile I am building on the dock. He is curious; it‟s good stuff. I tell him to go
through it and grab what he wants. He picks up a thirty-dollar dock fender.
“You‟re throwing this away?”
“No room in here.”
“But you could get a box.”
“Not coming back.”
He throws me my last line.
14
March 27: 38deg north, 122deg west: Sausilito, Ca
The Golden Gate Bridge is close, but gets closer slowly. It‟s an hour later and the
wind is up to twenty-five as the span finally stands overhead. I put one reef in the
main, the current pushing me around as I fumble unsteadily trying to tie the reef
points to the boom. My hands are stiff from the day before when I moved the boat
up from the South Bay to Sausilito, (six hours bucking a headwind) and my
stomach gurgles nervously as I put the old boat to sea. My first time ever at sea.
Past the bridge the swell increases and there are no more small boats. There is a
freighter sending out short bursts of his fog horn on its way in. I am the only boat
close, and according to my how-to book, the blast pattern is a signal for me to
clarify my intentions. I tack away from his path. The seas beat down his wake
long before it reaches me.
With clear sailing ahead I duck inside to look at the chart and wrestle once more
with my choices. If I keep the shore in sight I can still bail out of this foolishness
in Half Moon Bay, twenty miles to the South, but if it blows hard on-shore, I‟ll be
safer out, far away from the pounded shallows, with “sea room.” A lee shore gale
is the worst place to be. I have read this and I can imagine.
I tell myself this decision was made a long time ago. I can read a weather map.
If I can‟t handle a little depression from winter‟s last gasp then I might as well get
it over with. If I didn‟t fully comprehend the implications of the weather-satellite
view, well, I will soon enough. If I was ever going to bail out the time is well past.
If I put in now, all of my vegetables will rot, and I will have to take a taxi to the
Safeway.
The wind continues to build, and I struggle to take in a second reef and a smaller
headsail, stumbling hard on the sea kayak I‟ve brought along which takes up one
side of the deck. My hands are now a tender translucent white, and my grip is
gone, but my body has also run low on fear-producing chemicals. If I can get far
enough to the south and a little west, I can beat this weather front coming down
from the north, and once the land is out of sight I should be able to relax.
I angle west of south and leave three sails up thinking about the storm coming
down from the north. The more space between us the better. The boat seems fine,
and though the twenty footers are five times bigger than anything I‟ve sailed, the
little wooden hull rises with the seas, only allowing spray aboard, as promised.
As I tie off a reef in the mizzen, I look off of the stern and imagine a wave
tossing me into the water. The boat would be long out of sight and I would drown
in five minutes. The boarding waves knock at my ankles. I hook into a tether. I
tell myself in a mantra, “don‟t fall off, be careful, and don‟t fall off.”
15
We are running with the wind, and it‟s a lunging, precarious world passing over,
under, and through us. The wake disappears in the melee on the surface off the
stern, waves roll through from the north, and the wet gale bites as I face that way.
The boat picks up speed surfing on the front side of the waves, and as the hull
climbs the back of the crests, the wind pushes harder. We slow down in the
troughs, only to speed up once again as we ride with the cycle of the big swell.
According to the GPS, our velocity throughout is five-mph more than the boat‟s
theoretical top speed, ten more on the downhill side of the waves. It may be a little
boat, but it weighs over ten-thousand pounds, and the tiller bows to near-breaking
as I fight with it.
As the dusk shrinks the world I tire. My brain‟s scope contracts and I feel only
a dim sense of void. I go below and leave it to the electric auto-pilot to take me
through the night. It does.
At noon the next day, I plot my position. I have made it one-hundred and sixtyfive miles in twenty-four hours, sitting below deck through half of it, either groggy
or asleep. Nasal whirring sounds are now coming from the electric auto-pilot. I
take down the rest of the mainsail. I can only stomach crackers and am incapable
of any contemplation.
Under the reduced sail, we go one-hundred thirty-five miles in another twentyfour hours. I set my mind into a miserable resignation that this is my foreseeable
future. Then the storm‟s winds catch up with a distinct change in the note of the
rigging moan, and the waves are torn asunder by its force. The deck is invisible
through the spindrift, and I have to shield my mouth with my hand just to to
breathe. In the notched up violence I loose my faith. I hate the wind and waves,
and I go below to shut myself in.
The auto-pilot is overworked and soon blows up, locking the tiller. I am dull
and slow to act. The washboard (door) sticks on my way out of the cabin, and by
the time I reach the tiller, the boat rounds to the weather and a breaker plunges over
16
the cockpit, half filling it, slamming my legs against the sides with bruising malice.
I struggle in an unsuccessful race to take over from the bungeed auto-pilot arm.
We broach.
The boat gets sideways to wind and sea, the keel underneath drags, and the rest
of the boat trips over it, dipping the sails dangerously. The knock-down sends a
shiver through me and a shiver through the Sea-Spray. I am hanging on to the
mizzen-mast still trying to disconnect the locked auto-pilot, as the boat puts its bow
into the storm.
It‟s a winter white-out on a rough field, the sky is dark gray, and there‟s no
possible refuge.
I struggle for fifteen minutes to get back on course and spend five hours at the
helm, doing the best I can with the little physical and intellectual capacity I have
left. The wind is a constant moan and the noise fills my mind. I cannot see and
steer by the biting wind.
The effort to steady the helm and keep my own balance team up to sap my
strength. I lash the tiller down with heavy bungees and huddle in the cockpit, only
taking over when Sea-Spray threatens to broach again but with my increasing
inattention the waves board, and I cough to breathe. Before I am too weak, unable
to do anything, I brace myself for one more action, mumbling the steps I plan to
take- including each step. Just take it slow… get the small sail ready, lower and
stow the working jib, carefully unplug the electrics…
The jib catches on the way down and I can‟t reach the „hanks‟ so I knife through
a few as the sail wraps around the bowsprit and drags over the side. I put up a tiny,
homemade storm jib, running from bow back to the stern to steer a few times
during the maneuver. My safety harness line catches and trips me up along the
way. Breathlessly whined profanities are all I can muster. Unable to pull the
seized pin from its mount, I kick the failed auto-pilot loose and it is washed
overboard as a wave spills over the deck.
An electric pilots steers by adjusting its length with an electric motor
controlling a screw type plunger making the unit longer or shorter according to an
electronic compass heading. It has two ends; one that fits into the deck and one
that connects to the tiller- and a plug to the battery.
Two days at sea and the heavy brass socket mounted to the deck is ovalised and
the teak all around it is spongy and soft. The tiller is splitting where I have
mounted the pin. The waterproof electrical socket is blue-green and pitting. I set
up the spare.
I never open a chart or check my heading; I just feel around for a course that
stresses the boat the least. I am running from elements that have already overtaken
me, just hoping to lessen the blows. I cannot do any more. I go below.
April 01: 26deg north, 137deg west: North Pacific
The sky is still threatening, but the winds have abated some. For the first time
in four days, I take off my rubber suit. I pour rubbing alcohol all over my body and
use a whole roll of toilet paper to wipe myself clean. I‟m constipated, so I‟ve been
17
spared that task, but I have been peeing into the suit, just pulling away the gasket at
the bottom to let it run into the cockpit drains.
I crawl into my sleeping bag and sleep. It is the biggest bed in the biggest room
in the poshest hotel and I feel a little uneasiness thinking about what all this will
cost.
About an hour later, long enough to achieve complete unconsciousness, the
second auto-pilot fails. I am jarred awake as the boat goes sideways and takes some
hard pounding. I stare blurry-eyed at the pile of inside out polyester and rubber
that had been my second skin. I am looking for a familiar place to start, something I
can identify as a sleeve or collar. My skin is pale or raw red with swathes of dead
peelings where I have tried to nurse the muscles below. Where the rubber is taught
and pulling on what hairs are left I can feel pain intrude upon numbness as I
struggle to suit up.
Water slamming at the sides has my eyes clenching before I can determine how
much the walls flex; if the seas will cave them in. I am filled with self pity. I am
whimpering aloud and I hear myself, then I am filled with a small anger and I snap
my helmet on with a small dignity. This speck is swept away with the stinging
spindrift as I open the companionway hatch, the helmet taking blows that my neck
can‟t predict, and the pride is replaced by a complete fear. I cannot even come
close to balancing, and I cannot see more than a foot in any direction. I cope by
going about my business in a scaled down world, never focusing beyond my hands
and their tasks, never turning my mind to reality.
As I clip my tiniest sail to the forestay while standing on the bowsprit it turns
into a cat struggling to exit a gunny sack, and as I dive for the uphaul on the
mainmast I meet an angry elephant‟s trunk. The control line is attached to a wild
horse as I get the wraps I need to pull the sail taut. The boat steadies on a course
that ranges through forty-five degrees when I lash the tiller. It careens down the
steep waves digging a convex flank to trace a dangerous arc but because the wind is
so strong the little sail way up front drags the bow back around to a heading in an
ugly sideslip.
The next few days pass unremembered. I may have been on deck a few times. I
only recall waking to something absent, gone like a train that has passed.
April 06: 22deg north, 150deg west: North Pacific
I am going through the cabin with a new eye. Every now and then I pop my
head out of the companionway to spit and toss out some item that I can see will be
useless… twenty expired flares? Five ceramic plates? Drinking glasses? I mutter
cheerful obscenities, Oh, good idea, bringing that along...fer fucks sake,
whateryathinkin?
I have been conditioned not to litter, but I am not at all fond of the sea right
now, so I throw things overboard without thinking of the inhabitants below me. A
car jack? A rusted cylinder for a diesel heater?... when I’m going to the tropics? I
almost throw up when I open the electric cooler. I had unplugged it to spare the
batteries. I don‟t go through it; I just dump the contents overboard and pour bleach
18
in after rinsing it out. Then the bleach makes me gag and I throw the week-old
hundred-dollar cooler off. Before I go below I pat my boat and give the ocean the
finger.
That afternoon, the wind blows up again; forty-mph and I‟m drinking coffee.
No worries here. The air is warming up. I have eaten. I feel grateful for these
simple pleasures again. I am fond of my boat. I congratulate myself for getting it.
The coffee is kicking in. The reasons I had for abandoning other boat, the unnamed
RV, and getting the Sea-Spray are vague and transient, but I credit myself
nonetheless for choosing the craft that has seen me through a serious storm.
As the wind comes up again, I am at the tiller with long forgotten scenes from
my past floating about, and I am delighted that they are bubbling up. I remember
when my whole family was playing in some rare breakers in Lake Michigan near
our summer home, bodysurfing. I was scared and wouldn‟t go in the water. Hah!
Those years in prep school whenever I‟d walk self-consciously past construction
sights; the working men there, guessing at the many ways I‟d never be a man like
that.
I abandon my reveries to duck in to check the barometer, in case it‟s my life
flashing by, and, sure enough, it has fallen. It drops more as I rap on it. I‟m
running with a big old genoa from the bowsprit. We are going well; ten-mph by
GPS. I continue to ignore the world, my interaction with it mediated in every sense
in a conscious attempt to distance myself from it: I‟m listening to old Warren
Zevon on my Walkman, drinking green tea now, smoking, and trying to take a
picture of the GPS, which is flashing fifteen-mph. It‟s all fun, but after an hour my
arm is tired and the boat is all over the place fighting me. When I finally look to
the sky I am crushed to see the classic signs; mare‟s tail cirrus through the grey
breaking stratus that herald a fast moving front.
I can‟t lash the tiller down and “hand” the sail because we will probably broach
again. Taking down the sail on the end of the bowsprit takes time, and without an
auto-pilot our course will wander. And I‟m afraid to pull up, the waves are so
steep.
As the wind builds to fifty and more over the next hour, my hesitation grows,
my confidence fades, and I can no longer blot out the obvious. I can feel the big
sail push down on the bow. The spray from the force puts me in a tunnel that goes
halfway up the mizzen mast, and my breath echoes.
I try and ease the sail, but the old winch won‟t let go. I then try to shake the
sheet loose, but lose a wrap, and it is torn from my hand, with the barrel of the
winch detaching and flying forward, bearings bouncing all around the deck and
overboard.
Gross whip-snaps sound as the sail flogs to death. In a few minutes, it is in
shreds. When the uphaul goes, the ruined sail flies forward into the water. The boat
runs it down and I feel the sheets tangle in the rudder, and I see bits of sail, now
just ribbons an inch wide, stream out off of the stern. OK! Including the other sail,
autopilots, cooler, and winch, that’s well over a thousand dollars I’ve used up in a
week! I am lucky to have paid such a small price.
19
April 07: 21deg North, 153deg West: North Pacific
For nearly five months, I have floated on the San Francisco Bay and never swam
in its toxins. The air was so chilling there; I even went without a shower
sometimes to avoid the cold walk down the pier. For more than a week, the sea,
indifferently or not, has tried to kill me, and so I dread what I must do... and that is,
get into it.
The batteries need charging (the solar panels are useless under a week of
overcast skies) and before I can run the diesel, I have to clear the tangled sail that
fouls the bottom of the boat and propeller.
I‟m leaning way over, with a mask on, looking for the great white shark that
must be lurking down there. I‟m strapped in at three points so the boat won‟t ditch
me. I clear the mess in stages, panicky and gulping as I scramble aboard between
each maneuver. The deck is so close to the water and that makes it easy. I finally
realize that the water is fine. The air is warm now, Sea-Spray is going nowhere fast
in the light wind, and so I take a few dives, naked, off of the bowsprit. I swim the
nine meters under the keel and get back on at the stern.
The sky is full of benign cumulus clouds, and my skin, free of its own
excrement, is taking in as much air as my lungs and my boat is riding easy on the
moderate swell.
April 08: 20deg north, 155deg west: Near Hawaii
After seventeen days, I sight Hawaii. I haven‟t seen anything, not even another
boat or an airplane, for more than two weeks, so the Island seems closer to me than
the mark that represents me on the chart. Forty miles still lie between us, by GPS
plotting, but as the sun goes down, the light off the Island seems way too close and
I become confused and intimidated by its proximity. I lose track of the wind
20
direction, the compass direction, my speed, and my orientation to land. Finally,
after jibing by mistake, I throw out a sea anchor made out of an old parachute
drogue and decide to sleep some.
I wake up to a deep blue sky with the green shore less threatening and after four
hours it‟s only ten miles off. I put up the spinnaker for the run in. I take pictures of
myself. I think it would be nice to get one of the boat flying the colorful sail with
the shore and all, so with a rope I trail myself off the stern in the kayak to capture it
all in the camera frame. In the kayak I get sideways and almost lose my grip, I
almost lose my boat. Without a paddle I‟d have watched her sail right into the
breakers under autopilot. Stupid man!
The sweet smell of land comes in spite of the onshore breeze. The palms start to
stand as individuals, and a postcard fills my vision. I turn away from the beauty
and close on a commercial, industrial conglomeration that is Radio Bay. At noon, I
proceed in without incident and drop anchor; an impostor.
In the protected waters, the boat is silent and still. Sitting in the cockpit feels
like sitting on a bench in an empty gymnasium. I can feel each pulse of blood
through my veins and my breath is loud. I see a phone booth at the water's edge, so
I want to call somebody.
I paddle the kayak to shore where the concrete is warm and solid. A few sailor
types are around, but no one approaches me. I should check-in with my family, but
I am unable to bring the number to the top of my brain. I find no numbers at all in
my mind. With wind and water no longer dominating my every action, thoughts
that were submerged during my passage have rushed in to fill the space. I cannot
focus within the torrent.
Weaving and wobbling around the blacktop I search for balance in several
respects. After two weeks on a pitching teak deck, the ground seems to move yet is
unyielding. Ecstasy and anguish trade places in my bloodstream. And what to do
now? Concentrate. Uhhgn. Concrete.
The boat is seaworthy enough, in spite of its low freeboard it is no
cockleshell… I can go on with this boat.
Try to imagine yourself at the tiller, passing through the Torres Strait, on the
other side of the Pacific.
The faces in the pictures in Singlehanded Sailing look out at me from memory.
Faces of men and women who have completed their crossings. Some look like
stupid fools, some seem to be full of peace and strength.
Though it wouldn‟t be noteworthy enough to be in the book, I imagine my postPacific picture. Will that man be tormented by apprehension and loneliness from
leaving this world so far behind? Will that man have found a connection to the
universe not available to those bound by their ties to conventional society? Will
my mind open or close having been through that; having crossed the Pacific Ocean
alone in a small wooden boat?
This decision point looms as a defining moment in this one life. Have I ended up
here simply because I‟ve played out any other opportunities? Is it an inevitable
position that I have ground down to, or is this a reward for my willingness to throw
my life into the wind? Is it a gift for my actions?
21
A man has a past and a man has a future and the present can alter both… Is there
a place in time that I‟m running away from? Is there a place in time that I seek? I
feel sweat start to bead on my skin, salt pressure from within for once in a while.
What if I don‟t make it? Maybe I‟ll pile into a reef or sink. What is the point of
risking it? I am unable to project that way with any faith. I cannot pass through it
in my mind unscathed. I see the lee shore; I feel the bow digging in to the
inevitable pitchpole.
I‟m facing the same choices, making the same decisions I thought I‟d already
made in San Francisco, with the same ignorance of the critical information. I‟ve
done nothing. Right now I can‟t even walk.
I‟ve also done nothing irrevocable. I can go back home.
But if I go home now, I go home as the same person that left. I have something
new to bring up at cocktail parties. I have not rounded Cape Horn, after all. I don‟t
attend cocktail parties. I don‟t even drink. I‟m not doing this for anyone else.
I have moved with the ocean for a time, but I‟m standing on the hard tarmac of a
familiar crossroads, as if unmoved. This passage has given me a pleasurable sense
of accomplishment, but no joy that might come from finding a new life to take into
my heart.
If I do continue on to the South Pacific, it has to have purpose beyond learning
proficient boat handling. To be something more than a floating tourist. I want to
move through this world with the knowledge that I am a complete person, and so
am able to immerse myself in its wonders without losing what is fundamentally me.
I want to hear the Sirens without changing course. Face the storms and then make
land. It‟s going to take more than a couple of weeks to become a “sailor”, and it is
not going to be easy, and I will likely be changed by the experience.
The blunted cogs in my brain give way, and a new issue presents itself… I don‟t
have enough money to go on without burning financial bridges. I‟ll be running on
credit soon. I lose the option to recoup my investment beyond Hawaii. The boat is
monetarily worthless once away from here, and according to World Cruising
Routes, it is nearly impossible to get back from the west South Pacific under sail.
I‟ve been on shore less than fifteen minutes and I‟m assaulted by these realities,
but I don‟t have the luxury to consider this in another setting.
The soft heat waves belie the hardness of the ground, my balance tells me that it
is undulating, my eyes agree, but my feet and ankles miss their marks and the shock
goes to my spine. Holding fast to the booth with one hand, I punch some numbers
into the metal face with the other. I am taken aback when my father answers the
phone. New waves of thoughts and feelings wash over me. I don‟t remember what
we talked about beyond wind speed and wave height, but he seemed happy for me,
as if I‟d had some success.
I clear customs, have a cold fake beer, and bask in the physical sensations of
land. Superficially, it all tastes new enough.
I try to shut down the little man screaming realities from inside my head, but I
can‟t. I walk into town, find a cyber-café, and put the boat up for sale on “Yahoo”
feeling like a quitter, or at least a fatalist throwing off responsibility. If someone
22
makes an offer… The ground is too hard to walk on at all now; I find a cheap
bicycle and head back to Radio Bay, and the boat.
The other “cruisers” in the anchorage are mostly friendly and mostly relaxed,
chatting with me while making small repairs and awaiting the spare parts that are
apparently a part of any landfall. Two Canadian couples in from Mexico after a
season are glad to have access to a bounty of hardware unavailable in that poor
country.
A Brit, a professional delivering a boat to California who is unhappy with his
boat, a pretty forty-five foot yawl that limped in with a broken forestay. He is
disdainful of his charge. He is on “the short list” for captaining a seventy-five foot
Whitbread racer and thinks himself a little above his present assignment.
Two boats from the USA: One is a big cement yawl captained single-handed by
a reclusive and eccentric wild-haired man about my age. He looks old, remote;
unapproachable. This is the first solo sailor I‟ve seen. I don‟t really meet him; just
hover at the edge of a group where he stares at me unspeakingly for a moment. I
learn that he has been here a while and is resentful of the intruders that have come
with the beginning of the cruising season. One night he motors around Radio Bay
with all of his powerful spreader lights glaring, his engine loud, in some kind of a
territorial display. He anchors again, too close to another boat, and the two collide
in the night. One of his solar panels is damaged. The next morning, ranting and
shaking his fist at all of us, he leaves for the Cook Islands.
The other is a doctor of astronomy stationed atop the 14,000 foot volcano that
dominates the Big Island. He purchased a thirty-five foot sloop in San Francisco
and, with the help of four friends, sailed it over three days ahead of Sea-Spray and
I. Richard has a satellite link and can get weather faxes on board and he saw the
depression spinning down from the North. Though he says they missed the brunt
of the storm, they experienced conditions similar to the ones I had. Thirty-foot seas
and seventy-knot winds. While his crew was sick below he had set up instruments
to measure the wave height and wind speed. He was probably standing tall with
one hand on a tripod and peering into a transit with glee while I was miserably
hunched, passing my first solids.
He invites me to the christening of his boat. He has changed its name, in spite
of an old sailor‟s superstition, to a Hawaiian moniker, and a Hula priest is to bless
it.
Penny, the mother of my brother‟s first wife, lives in Hilo. I want to connect
with her, so I call her, and leave a message when her machine answers. Then I head
to the traditional Island ceremony that I have been invited to by Richard. Penny
has already heard that I am in Radio Bay and is there.
The ceremony having begun, we greet each other in whispers and sit lotus on a
spread rattan mat with the others. Everyone holds hands and, one at a time as a part
of the ceremony, we speak of our families as the priest mixes some brew, sifts it
through a sock, pours it into a bowl and passes a dipped cupful. I think about
germs, and how, in this position, the blood is being cut off to my legs. When my
turn comes, I talk about being alone at sea and how that revealed the people who
mean the most to me. As the words come out of my mouth, chosen for their
appropriateness and to meet the expectations of the group, I feel ironic sincerity and
23
warmth. The dancers are very good. The native food is tasty. The muddy liquid I
shared is mildly psychotropic.
Penny invites me to dinner at her place later that evening. Her friend George,
who I met at the ceremony, says that he admires what I am doing, and thinks I have
a good way of interacting with other people. The food she serves is excellent.
Penny and I argue about whether the Hula master was a man or a woman.
The next morning I‟m in an army surplus considering some glass lanterns. They
are spilled from the shelf as a tremor rolls through the Island. I run outside as the
streets fill with people. We look each other in the eye, one with the shared
experience, for a moment.
I try to get a deep feeling from my first earthquake. I visit the Tsunami museum
to contemplate the interaction between the earth and the water. Tidal waves are
caused by earthquakes. The ocean above is active, sloshing about, while the seabed below, terrally, doing what? It is disconcerting, having made an ocean
passage, thinking of the earth‟s core as sloshing. And is the earth‟s crust as brittle
as the lantern glass?
I like one painting in the museum. It shows a Polynesian man surfing a tidal
wave, on a one-by-eight board, with a fat wallet clenched in his teeth. Hawaiians
were the first surfers. He is a grown man, physically, brushed strong and straight,
but it is a child-like heroism portrayed. The caption below says it is a rare
occurrence, a Hawaiian hanging on to his money. I think that the risk he takes for
money is laughed at by a culture that doesn‟t value it highly. This is a culture that
values family above all. I could feel it during the ceremony. It would be a serious
matter if it were a child in his arms instead of cash.
My culture does value
money. We also know how to use it. To have “real” money is to have a potent
kind of power, and nothing else comes close. If you have enough, you are nowhere
near that tidal wave in the first place!
In San Francisco, I attended a cruising seminar at the local West Marine retailer.
It was given by a man who wrote a famous book on his romantic adventures sailing
the South Pacific. I never read it, but I‟m pretty sure that money wasn‟t one of the
main themes. In the seminar it was. And security. Epirbs, life-rafts, anchors; the
guy was clearly uncomfortable hawking these products, and looked to me like a sad
sellout… three-hundred dollar gel batteries, three-thousand dollar refrigerators, hot
showers… Is comfort security? Admittedly expensive, he says, but if you “go to
sea well equipped, you go to the sea with integrity.” Integrity? The people
attending appeared well off financially, and they listened intently.
After his speech, the questions the audience posed were all about how to avoid
the unknown. In other words, they wanted to know how to avoid the adventure.
They asked him how to keep in contact using satellite phones, weather faxes, sideband radios, and e-mail? How to keep your job while at sea? They wanted to know
everything that would happen to them, and be prepared. So did I, I guess, but
luckily I couldn‟t afford to. It is impossible anyway. Of course, if they learn
enough to recognize that, they might not go sailing. But here they live atop an
unstable fault-line and find comfort in their wealth, so why not at sea?
Comfort is not the same as security, which is not the same as integrity, yet they
mix the three up. When security and comfort are long gone... that is when you find
out whether or not you have integrity.
24
I considered myself reasonably prepared given my limited experience and
budget. I admitted to myself that I had the same goals, and that I attended the
seminar for the same reasons as the others. But when I heard their concerns I
realized that they had crossed a line that I choose not to cross. Even in a continuum
there can be an essential change in the nature of the undertaking. An essential loss
for all the perceived gain. Has a person been to Mt Everest if they fly by it in in a
jet in the comfort of First Class?
Another cruiser invites me aboard his nice cutter out of Spain. An elegant fourcourse meal is served in the roomy, teak-trimmed cabin. Single-aged malt flows
freely among the guests, though I have Perrier, as I am a “recovering” alcoholic.
Our host tells stories of his single-handing days in the Magellan Straight and on the
rivers of Africa. The richness of his experiences shines in his eyes.
He has taken on crew since those days. His present crew, a pretty young Basque
girl who speaks only a little English, and has been serving us all evening, well after
dinner she comes out as we are sampling vodka soaked prunes from Chile. She
carries a jar of peanut butter and a knife, and offers some from it to me; handle
first, with the glob about to fall off. Man wouldn‟t it be great to have her on board
my boat? I think of an old Neil Young song, “A Man Needs a Maid.” It has simple
words but complex orchestration.
One guest excuses himself to tend to some repairs, and another, a doctor, is
called away. Sea-Spray needed nothing but the one cable that raises the mizzen,
and the fuel tanks are still full. I have changed-out the wire and I dumped the
California water and replaced it with one-hundred gallons of the sweet local stuff.
Except for vegetables and other perishables, the boat is provisioned. I did it
mechanically, without thought; a hollow robot, unwilling to think of a future at sea.
So I stay for more stories and good advice. My host, a healthy, large-bellied
Spaniard, tells me how to salt cure fish, how to keep rats from swimming out and
climbing up my anchor chain, and how to keep worms from eating my wooden
boat. I like the way he carefully mediates every interaction between his boat and
the world, deciding what to let in, and what not. Civilization afloat. His eyes
continue to shine, though he gets quite drunk, as he revisits past shores, and in that
one night I allow him to inspire me to sail great distances and visit far-away shores!
Sometimes, when I have a tough decision to make, I‟ll write the pros and cons
down, and try and assign a value, say… a number from one to ten, to each. Then
I‟ll insert the unknown quantities- the desires I feel, the fear, and I‟ll count the
coins of life I have left…
In the morning, I wobble out to the airport on the old bicycle to pick up the new
auto-pilot that I had ordered. I send e-mails to my wife and family, and a few
friends as well. I delete the ad for the Sea-Spray. At the outdoor market I pick up
papayas, coconuts, tomatoes, lots of cabbage, onions, and some bread. No meat.
After one week in Hawaii, Sea-Spray and I motor out of Radio Bay behind a giant,
top heavy, “Carnival” cruise ship.
25
Apr 29: 4deg north, 153deg west: North Pacific
We travel one-thousand miles in one week, (fast for a little boat), with the
ebullient trade winds and over the raucous seas. I can personify them only with
two days distance. Anything time more immediate, and the sea is an acidic
chemical soup, and I am only a floating, inert compound. Inert only as long as I am
afloat.
The pages of Henderson‟s Single-Handed Sailing are seawater-swelled and
curled. I had the “four day” trouble as described in the book: I almost turned
around, I was so plagued with doubt, and I was queasy as well.
It doesn‟t take long, though, for it to be impractical to do anything but continue.
And after that, it doesn‟t take long to mentally resign. Then the magic begins. All
thoughts of shoulda, woulda, and coulda fall away, like powder snow falling
through the branches of a tree, resting on my neck and shoulders for moments with
pricks of cold before melting away. Unlike my previous passage, I am awake and
alert for the sensations. And warm enough to think fondly of snow. I have packed
away the rubber suit.
I think about where I might go. In California, I spent less than an hour planning
my entire route across the Pacific Ocean. I go through the hastily selected charts
that I bought that morning when they meant nothing to me. Now they are
treasures; my only link to my location. The tiny crosses gleaned from the Garmin
GPS data that trail to the south and west across the paper, from the last familiar
shape that is Hawaii, are proof that I exist and that I move. That and the wave at
the bow.
My imagination has never been captured by the “fabled” South Seas, so I have
never read about them. I know nothing much of the history. The traditional
European perspective I can guess at. The names of countries, captains, kings, and
queens, linked with dates and far-off strategies. First the Portuguese and Spanish,
then the English and the French… I know they came full of greed or ambition, or
both, and were armed with technology and the ability to dehumanize.
Even so, not many of the first made it through alive.
I had never read any books about sailing until about five months ago, and those
were mostly practical, didactic “how-to” types. I am used to the motion of the boat
now, and so I read a biography about Captain Cook. I am taken aback by his
consideration of every wave, of every person. I read some of the famous singlehander‟s accounts. I read The Saga of Simba, which is about a small wooden
boat. It is beautifully told story about how a boat can live despite a failure of men..
I think about my boat. I am beginning to understand that the boat interacts, not
really with me, but with the sea and the sky. I start to recognize that my role is as a
maintenance man. My job is to keep her sails oriented to the wind and to keep her
hull cutting a proper angle through the swell. She moves in a slow, graceful
charge, and for that, I can put up with her small cabin and lack of headroom.
Perhaps she doesn‟t move for me and is only driven by the imperative of the world,
or perhaps I play some small part.
I read Melville‟s “Enchanted Isles,” hoping to feel some pull on my heart from
the south. I need some inspiration, even someone else‟s. Wrong book. I am
morose for a day.
26
I once went through a phase where I refused to read. I got this idea from some
books I had read, written by Carlos Castenada; popular in the seventies. After
reading them, I decided I didn‟t want to be experiencing the world with another
person‟s thoughts bouncing around in my head. I even refused to take photographs,
for I felt that they prompted unbidden and distorted memories. I wanted to be a
spontaneous and free organism, a man of pure action.
In my next phase, or should I say his? I wanted to confront my mortality before
every decision to give them the power found in that finality. I wanted Castaneda‟s
fleeting black shadow of death on my shoulder to consult… but I found it a
difficult image to maintain.
Once, when I was sick with a failed love, and perhaps some flu, I pulled into a
poor West Virginia mining town, on my way back to the Rockies from DC,
completely exhausted. I paid two weeks rent in a run down hotel to recuperate.
The upper floor of the hotel was used as a hospice. The wealthy people lived atop
the hills on the other side of the river, the Kanawha. I didn‟t talk to anyone except
the clerks at the grocer‟s when I went to buy food and the desk clerk. I could smell
the dying above me. For a week I walked around town, only getting sicker and
more paranoid. Everybody in the hotel but me was black, except the Italian owner
who drove a five-year old Cadillac. I felt alone. I felt desparate. In an attempted
purge, I tried to write my thoughts down. Though I had never written a word of
expression before those weeks, I told the few people I talked to that I was a writer.
Those words didn‟t last a week, but I can remember my desperate actions to this
day. On the other side of the river from the hotel I found a cliff of white stone and
would climb it higher and higher until I was scared, and that made me feel better,
so when I walked back across the river and saw the big square-bowed barges as
they plowed beneath the bridge I had my cure.
I saw how the water pushed away from in front of the slab had nowhere to go
but underneath. It was almost dark and no one was watching, so I took off my
shoes and dove in front of one of the dark rectangles. Underneath, long out of
breath, my back lacerated from the rough steel, I could feel how much I wanted to
live. I felt stupid, and full of life, when I made shore.
I like to think that I outgrew the quick-fix of sheer terror a long time ago. Sure
on this boat it‟s easy to imagine death nearby. A few steps in any direction and I‟m
bobbing around for a few minutes, as I watch her sail away under auto-pilot. I
haven‟t used the tether in a week. Sea-Spray has no lifelines, so I wouldn‟t even
have to raise my feet to walk off. This proximity does invest a power in my actions
that I‟ve never known in a sustained way on shore—any decision I make could be
my last, but it isn‟t an obsession.
It doesn‟t feel as if death is the main theme at all, space is. I haven‟t seen
another vessel in a week and there is no land in sight. I have the place to myself.
Every now and then I end up on top of a watery, mountainous swell, and I can see
just how remarkably expansive the ocean is, and that this is so.
The ability to scale one‟s self in and out along space and time lines is unique to
the human animal. Our emotions, our desires, our schemes, are dependent on a
perspective we take from where we see ourselves on this scale. Whenever I am
mired in personal failure I try and picture the Earth as the first astronauts saw it, or
I go with my mind to that page in high-school textbooks; the one with all of the
27
ages mapped through one day‟s time, and the humans first appear at eleven-fiftynine-fifty-nine.
Yet, I am unable to get around the fact that my immediate space is exceptionally
confined; this is a very small boat. There is no place to sit comfortably on deck,
and waves board every now and then to soak me. I spend most of my time just
inside the tiny cabin, seated on the edge of my bunk. I am unable to get around the
fact that my time and my place are not under my own control. The winds take me
along at their own pleasure, toying with my time and space in an undulating swell
represtented by the oblivious seas.
The seas also bring flying-fish for breakfast, and if the toe-rail were taller I
would dine on them for lunch as well, but as it is when I hear a bigger (6 inches)
one flop I have to chase it down before it escapes, and most do. I enjoy the smaller
(2 inches) ones more as I can pop these right into my mouth without cooking or
cleaning. They are best after an hour on deck in the sun.
May 2: 1deg north, 157deg west: North Pacific
My latitude is approaching zero. I‟m hoping the GPS can cope with the changeover at the equator. The sea and sky have morphed into an ominously tranquil
dancing pair. The winds are light and shifting, sucked mostly south to the
convergence taking place at the equator. The ocean seems to bulge out here.
Everything is just piling up, in a seemingly threatening way.
I‟ve decided to make landfall on Puka Puka, or Danger Island, in the Cooks. I
left Hawaii with no clear destination, just possibilities, just light spots on blue
charts and scratched notes on wet sheets. We are getting nowhere fast now.
From above, Sea-Spray and her wake must look something like an earthworm
making a futile attempt to cross a parking lot that is quickly drying after a rain. We
are squirming around, slower and slower, as if we are dying. Perhaps we are
amusing some god, because the whole environment, if that is god, seems to be
toying with us. The trades have deserted us, now there are only calms chased by
sudden squalls that send us running in unchosen directions. I can‟t see these sudden
storm flashes that haunt nearby in the night. The sails suddenly fill, the boat heels,
and by the time I am on deck the wind veers or backs and the boom swings over…
I lose the top meter of my mainmast during one of these squalls…
I‟m inside watching through the port porthole, where the Southern Cross is
bouncing on a trampoline just outside. Every time he appears, he‟s making a
different funny face. I‟m not amused at all; I‟m trying to read. Now he‟s only
three stars, two... now he‟s gone. My tired, unfocusing brain fails to recognize the
significance of his quitting the game. I turn on the GPS. The compass shows we
are on course, or at least pointing in that direction, and while I‟m stupidly waiting
for the Garmin (the GPS) to get enough satellites for a fix, a 40mph gust front hits
all at once. I‟m still below. I only hear a WHOOSH, SLAM, and a CRACK, as the
top of the mast is carried away, along with the sail. Nonplussed, I look out at the
world. As I dig the torn sail and broken bits of mast out of the sea, the stars that I
can still see look very far away.
28
May 8: 11deg south, 166deg west: South Pacific
I‟ve sighted the island—Danger Island; it‟s ten miles off. The tops of the trees
are just visible from halfway up the broken mast, and only when we crest the
waves. I don‟t see how anyone could find it without a GPS, and for the most part,
no one did.
Ferdinand Magellan, the first European to round South America, first to cross
the Pacific, the first to circumnavigate the globe, may have sighted this Island in
fifteen-twenty-one. He found no anchorage and so named it the Isle of Misfortune.
He and his scurvy and hunger ridden men finally landed on Guam, after sailing for
nearly one hundred days. Nine-thousand miles without finding a place to stop.
The Europeans found this lonely atoll by chance, and surely the original
Polynesians also happened upon it. There are dangerous reefs and currents, and
uncharted wrecks everywhere. There is also a big swell, and so I stand off. If
someone sees us and radios, or sends out a launch...OK… I wonder how they feel
about visitors these days. I wonder if they have any epoxy I could use to fix the
mast? Any smokes? No one contacts me, or answers my call, so I hoist sail, plenty
of mast left, and head, instead, for my Garmin‟s alternate fix on American Samoa.
Still, it‟s nice to have sighted land. Even with the GPS it‟s an accomplishment,
more even with a sextant, and I am awed by the early navigators. The Puka-Pukans
filled the sky with sea-creatures and steered by these familiar shapes. After sailing
through fifty degrees of latitude, I still only have a dim idea of what the cosmos
revealed so clearly to them. I have confidence in the GPS, but I have talked to
plenty of unbelievers, so I have also been working on dead reckoning and a crude
star navigation. The southern sky is already familiar. The Southern Cross a
companion. Even if I miss all of the islands and reefs, I am confident that I can
find Australia. I also know, if it starts to snow, I am too far south. I mainly wanted
tobacco from the islanders anyway, and I think that is something they might expect
me to bring to them.
29
May 12: 14deg south, 170deg west: Closing America Samoa
I had set the alarm for 04:00, but am awakened earlier by thunder. I can feel that
lightning has flashed through the companionway, for as my eyes slide open, it gets
darker. It is raining hard outside. I grope for the bilge-pump and get forty strokes
before it sucks air. I sit, slumped, sweat running profusely down my bare chest and
filling the folds of my belly. The air is heavy and my lungs are unsatisfied. I open
the hatch all the way, it is just as stuffy outside. The rain doesn‟t stir up the air at
all. I can hear each drop as it lands. The water-saturated air is not as dense as dry
air, but that is how it empirically hits my senses. The temperature is transferred so
quickly to my bones, and it is such an effort to breathe, that my lungs feel like they
are filled with sludge. In reality, though, the raindrops meet no resistance and hit
hard with speed.
After a few minutes spent outside checking sails, engine rpms, fuel flow,
autopilot, etc., I am cooled off some. I squirt Ivory in my hair and all over and
wash myself down. I slide around on the soapy teak deck. The Garmin shows us
to be right where I expect. I wish I had slept through it all, because as I scan the
western sky, I see the light off Tutuila (an island in American Somoa) and know I
will stay awake.
I am motoring the little Yanmar diesel engine at low (2,000) rpms. It chugs
along reassuringly. I have a flat staysail up front and a tight to-amidships mizzen
sail bent over the broken main mast. We are making four and a half knots. There
is enough wind to steady the boat, pressing on the flat sheets, and adding some
speed as well.
There is a smaller island, Aunu‟u, off of the southeast coast that I will have to
go around. I had planned to run the gap, but with the poor visibility and big swell, I
divert Sea-Spray towards a way-point on the alternate-alternate route. I crunch on
the last onion, raw. I go below to make some strong brew and re-plot our course.
My charts are inadequate, too small scale, but I have copied a page of a cruising
guide that has a sketch of the approach and of the bay. There is a flash and a boom.
I am frightened, but I don‟t see electric fingers reaching for me. The next five
hours are easy once I compartmentalize that fear with the rational thought that all
men are capable of, though my stomach is a bit angry about the raw onion and
coffee. I‟m right on course; slicing way-points with precision. The clouds lift
every now and then, reacquainting swathes of sky. I can see Aunu‟u eclipse the
lights of Tutuila as I pass. I slip into a dream-state, so I set the alarm every half hour. I don‟t want to nod off with land so close.
The light winds back and veer with the pull of the small cells, and the tall island
spins them around. The light of dawn creeps grey and I see the rain beating down
the cats-paws. Eighteen days on eighteen days alone at sea, 2500 more miles on
2500 miles, crossing the equator, the fabled South Seas, the caffeine kicking in
from my second cup; this is cool.
The complex mix of chemicals that combine into human feelings can so easily
be manipulated. We are just at the beginning. One day soon we will be able to feel
triumphant when we fail. I always wonder if my feelings are earned, or if they are
concocted.
30
Ahead, “Breakers Point” throws massive amounts of spray into the air and I
sense the gap that is the entrance to Pago Pago Harbor. The swell is impressive,
out of the south, and I take over from the auto-pilot. I have some fun surfing right
through the gap.
Then, suddenly, I am inside, past the cotton flying off of the rocks. The
pressure of the confinement pushes into my eyes and ears, squeezing out my
confidence. I‟m confused by the buoyage system. Would it be the American or
the International system here in American Samoa? There are waves breaking to the
left of the first red buoy, and shipwrecks close to the right of it. Several more
wrecks lie straight ahead. After the expanse of the sea, I have again lost my ability
to gauge distance. The mountains are steep, green as could be, and they are as
close as could be.
And the water is full of debris. There are huge leaves, coconuts, gourds, plastic
bottles, swelling garbage bags, logs… and a huge crate that has more freeboard
than my boat, and rivals it in water displacement! I have to get the sails down in a
rush because of the down-drafts and some random gusts. I also have to dodge the
more threatening of the flotsam and I have to dig around for my quarantine flag.
Both temperature and humidity are near one-hundred, so my fresh shirt is drenched
and my shorts are creeping lower, keeping my steps small. The stench of the tuna
canneries ignites in my lungs like a back-draft. Sensory overload. It‟s a fertile and
rotting place, and I‟m just glad I have no open wounds. I turn a corner and the
swell subsides as I go deeper in the bay. I see ten or fifteen sailboats at anchor.
The check-in dock is right where it‟s sketched in on my copied page. A yacht is
tied off to it, and the captain is putting fenders on the outside of his boat in an
inviting way.
I am going to be welcomed! I pull up beside the yacht without bungling. It‟s a
couple, flying the Red, White, and Blue. The man is around my age... I see that he
has Marlboros in his pocket. I know I am going to smoke soon and talk about
ocean passages and strange lands. “Uh, can I bum a smoke?
May 15: 14deg 16‟south, 170deg41‟ west: Tutuila
I feel better with ten straight hours of sweaty sleep under my belt. Showers are
one U.S. dollar right near the dock. Looking into the metal mirror in the poorly lit,
poorly ventilated, but large, (relative to Sea-Spray‟s cabin) shower stall, I tend to a
new little cut that is already red and angry. I see the distorted image of a man who
has sailed here.
I‟ve been away from the boat for maybe twenty minutes, and as I return,
threading my sea-legged way carefully through upended concrete blocks and
embedded metal and glass, I see that a papa has lowered his boy on to the deck of
my Sea-Spray.
I approach cautiously, smiling widely, kind of chanting “No-no-ononono...” He
hauls the child back on to the quay. “Yes-yes-OKthankyou” The man is big and
strong. He doesn‟t act like someone who has been caught in an unsociable act. I
read no shame or, for that matter, defiance, in his face. He yields some as I move
between him and my Sea-Spray. He is still looking at the boat. I see only a dumb
31
greed in his face that over-rides any other expression. I had contemplated a shave.
I wonder what that would have cost me.
I have been working on the broken spar and things are strewn about, but my
tools are all locked away. It just looks like a big mess on deck. It just looks like a
big mess on shore. I see that the second half of my papaya has already attracted a
lot of insects, and I toe it overboard. There is no splash; an undulating layer of
garbage hides the water. It‟s a mess.
Pago Pago received fourteen inches of rain the day I arrived; a wet day, even
here. I watched as a few cars were washed off of the road, but I couldn‟t get too far
away from the boat. I had to stay onboard to fend off the floating debris pouring
out of the gullies. I do not let the logs come near. They are full of worms that will
eat my boat. I would anchor farther out, but I need access to the shore for my
repairs.
I check the dock-lines, which find a way to chafe no matter what I do. They
have to be loose enough to allow for the tide, but there is a swell that won‟t quit, so
Sea-Spray is all over the place. The break, as built, was put on the wrong side of
the harbor, with it and the entrance facing the swell, affording poor shelter.
In the tires hung over the starboard, I see a pair of toads locked together in a
mating position, dead. I had picked the tires up from a pile someone had dumped
next to the courthouse downtown. They are wearing through Sea-Spray‟s paint and
varnish, but without them she would crash into the rough concrete. The toads were
not inside the tires then.
There is something about this place that makes me uncomfortable. Too much
decay, too much growth, all crammed in to too little time and space for a man from
the North. Below deck, I push this thought out of my head and some water out of
Sea-Spray with a few pumps on the Gusher (the bilge pump), followed by a pint of
bleach into the bilge.
32
For the first time the boat seems to be taking-on water. I expected it sometime,
especially with the rough conditions. I don‟t even know if she had ever been out to
sea before, either. There is a tangible toll on the rest of my equipment, too. My
solar panel has failed (corroded wiring through supposedly waterproof seals), my
tools are rusting (even the stainless multi-tool my brother gave me), and the all
canned foods are fast losing their labels and showing rust.
I‟ve met one of the “locals,” Jack, a U.S. Expatriate. He has offered me a ride to
a provisioning store and has an Internet connection I can use. He gives me a shout.
He drives an old right-handed VW bug that has been converted into a pick-up. The
doors are rusted right through. There are two very beautiful Samoan women on the
rear, bouncing it up and down. Water pours out on the downside. Are they
preparing it for passengers? I‟m trying to think quickly. Can I back out politely
and take the bus? Shit, it smokes as well. There is no way out. The women climb
in, and so I start to follow, having failed to formulate an excuse.
The women laugh at me, and Jack calls, “Up here.” He explains that his wife
and daughter always ride in the back. I sit down in relative comfort.
“Those Marlboros?” I pass him a smoke and as we ride through the pitted
streets of Utelei he tells his story: Trouble with the Law, divorce, a boat, the South
Pacific, ten years on Tutuila. His “daughter” is from his wife‟s village in Western
Samoa, so no blood relation, I figure, and this is her first time away from her
island. It‟s sketchy, but apparently responsibility for her has been forced on him by
the head guy, or Matai, with whom Jack is somehow entangled. I don‟t pry.
He gives me his run down on Pago Pago: rain, heat, cyclones, officially
sanctioned greed, corruption, welfare, laziness, indentured servitude, collapsing
social and infrastructures, all subsidized by the U.S. With its sheltered waters, it
was an important base for the U.S. in World War II.
Jack names the extra large sinkholes after the governor. When we hit them the
women squeal from the back as the dirty water splashes them through the rustholes. There are two-hundred miles of roadway for 14,000 registered cars, which
translates into a lot of traffic for a Sunday morning. Christianity is a powerful
force here. Samoans are fairly hesitant, civil drivers, but not Jack. He is cutting
people off and splashing pedestrians. It‟s 10am and he pops open a beer. I‟m
guessing he is forty-five, but he looks a lot older. He‟s got a masters degree in
anthropology. We pass the LBJ Center for Tropical Disease. We pass the “yacht
club,” which is a bar with a bunch of decrepit Hobie-Cats out front. We pull into
the airport, his favorite place to eat… surrounded by tarmac, there are fewer
insects.
On our way in, the women follow a few feet behind. They have beverages
while we eat. When I engage them in conversation, though, they are not shy, and
Jack seems happy to include them. His wife, Lotu, and he, talk of a gale they
weathered together in his yacht. He says that the native women make good crew.
Lotu tells me that Totse and herself are from Western, Independent Samoa, and
how much prettier it is there.
It is plain that here, the unyielding steel and cement structures don‟t work in
harmony with the active landscape. Earlier I had taken temporary shelter in one of
33
the homes built by the West for the Natives, forty years before. Standing under the
corrugated tin paneled concrete, trying to find a spot away from the centipedes, the
rain deafening and the air dank, it was plain also to see why it had been abandoned.
Surrounding it was affronted jungle growing back angrily.
The picture she paints of Independent Samoa is one where people are nestled in
naturally.
Totse, her daughter?, talks about her village.
Jack chimes in with helpful clarifications, and his “daughter” freely disagrees
with him. “If a house needs help, everyone would be help. He, (pointing at Jack)
only knows the Matai.” She looks accusingly at him. I get the feeling that she is
here against her will. Her English is hesitant, but she seems very intelligent, and in
spite of the underlying tension, she is a joy to watch.
She is big boned, with big features that, to my eye,
only exaggerate her feminine beauty. “Independent
Samoa is not like Pago Pago, American Samoa,” she
says, looking directly at me. “I am not this way.” I
think she wants that one point to stand out. “I get it,”
say.
Western, or “Independent” Samoa is poorer in
money only. There is rich culture and tradition, and
harbors are clean. The people on the two island
groups share the same heritage…
but here in
Tutuila, they are a dysfunctional lot, with the highest
suicide rate in the world.
I
the
This division happened by chance. In the late
eighteen hundreds ships from three countries, British,
German, and American, stood staring each other
down on the verge of war to determine who owned the Islands. A hurricane swept
them all away, sunk them all, and later negotiations gave the “West” to Germany,
and the “East” Islands to America. The Germans surrendered to New Zealand after
World War Two, and they gave up governorship of the Western Group in 1962.
Western Samoa became “Independent” Samoa, free from the Colonialists, but poor.
The money is still sitting in American Samoa like a fat man on a small chair, on
Tutuila, and here money is power. The Samoans who have successfully tapped into
the prodigious cash flow lord over all the Islands. I don‟t know where savvy Jack
fits in.
He says that he has been given some beachfront property in Western Somoa,
and I wonder, at what cost? He doesn‟t seem to have much cash. Knowledge is
power as well. White skin.
What must have been like when that first White-Skinned European saw, in the
eye of the Chief, a glint, and he knew he could have anything he wanted from the
Islanders? Did he understand that there was a price to pay for himself?
I tell my short story to them all. We have a good time, and only leave when we
realize the provisioning store will be closing soon. I reach for the check, but Jack,
under some obligation, or, attempting to put me under one, insists.
34
After shopping, we stop at a church so that Totse can attend a funeral, or
something. The faded whitewashed wooden building is trapped between the dirty
road and the mean Pacific Ocean. It is kinder on the senses, though, than the
terminal building. While we wait, Jack and I smoke cigarettes outside the church
and he explains how Christianity has never quite fit into the traditional beliefs and
culture. Then his cell phone rings, and he moves off, arguing loudly into space, as
if with God.
I am feeling like I have made new friends. I think this is all fine, and I thank
God, or whomever, without a phone, for this situation I am in. How cool; I have a
boat parked here!
Lotu comes over and hands me some frozen concoction, and I think about the
infested water used to make it. She smiles, misreading my contemplation, looks me
over, and, sensing the time to be right, asks me why I sail alone. She asks if I get
lonely. She asks me if I like Totse…
Back aboard Sea-Spray, I have managed to clear the mess atop the broken mast,
and I have support lines running out from the remaining hardware in preparation
for a fix. The local Expat yachtees come by with friendly suggestions. They insist
that, say, five of us could easily lift the mast out and do the job properly. They all
know a lot more about it than me. They can show me how to “scarf” in a new
piece so that it will be stronger than before.
A few of them are drinking early beers, discussing how to go about it. They
have all been in Pago Pago a while. The islanders are mostly incapable of running
businesses the American way, so there are plenty of opportunities for white guys
from the States.
But their boats look neglected and unseaworthy to me. I feel that many of them
will never sail out of here. Wood rots, metal corrodes, fiberglass blisters, bodies
atrophy, minds... There is no way I‟ll let them pull my mast out. They are “stuck”,
I think, and I see how I could get stuck here as well, and that scares me more than
leaving. I will repair my mast as it stands, or I‟ll motor outta here if I have to. I
wonder about their credit ratings back in the States… I know they don‟t belong
here. I don‟t belong here. Getting stuck is failure.
To a “recovering” alcoholic, new friendships as these presented are fraught with
dangers. I am only one beer away from their world. I don‟t want to offend them,
so I pretend consideration, but I firmly keep them from boarding the Sea-Spray.
I‟ll motor outta here if I have to.
The children, on the other hand, who watch me work as they throw hook and
line in the holes where the water shows through, are a beautiful medley of races. In
them, Polynesian and Melanesian blood has mixed with Asian, Portuguese, and
some Caucasian. It‟s a wonder to me that intermingling cultures cannot produce
such a song. Friendship with them is seemingly innocuous, and I scratch their
names in a chart, so I can give them a proper hello.
Childless at forty, a man can‟t help but feel a void. I could so easily change
that here. The sensuality hangs in the air. I could take Totse with me, and show
her a new world. I could give her a lot, and she knows it. She is smart enough to
learn the technicalities. And there need not be any of that painful daily negotiation
35
with an empowered woman; an equal. And she could lead me into this primordial
soup.
That night I am lying on my bunk hoping to fall asleep, when Jack sternly, or
triumphantly, calls my name and asks if Totse is aboard. I tell him no, she‟s not.
He says she told him that she wanted to see the inside of my boat, and was to pick
something up from the store on her way. She‟s not back.
I jump up, dress, and help Jack and Lotu search for her. From the group that
hangs around (some, I‟m sure, are waiting for us to leave so they can rummage
around on our boats) a man moves forward. He has seen her. He points to a dirty
docked motorboat. It‟s an aluminum catamaran, around thirty-feet, the type used
by the local fishermen. Lotu knows the owner, George, a tough Portuguese, and
calls him out. She demands of him to say if Totse is aboard. As he answers, “No,”
she boards, shoving him aside, enters the cabin, and reappears with a totally naked
Totse by the hair. Jack has fallen behind locking his boat. I move to the end of the
dock to slow him, and then follow as he gets by me. As he boards at the bow, Lotu,
with Totse still by the hair, but now covered in a blanket, leaves the cabin on the
other side and off the stern they go, into the dark. I don‟t know if Jack has seen
them, but he knows what has happened. I stand beside him, trying to look serious
and bad-ass, but I don‟t feel that way. I have met George and he looks strong and
quick. He could knock me out, throw me in the water, no problem. Frail Jack,
quivering with anger, says that he didn‟t bring Totse over to get involved with a
“wharf-rat.” He tells George that he will pay to ferry her entire village over from
the neighboring island, and that they will rip him apart. He asks George over and
over if he understands, until George says a flat, uncaring “Yes.” I touch Jack‟s
shoulder and it slumps. We walk back to his boat. He thanks me for standing by
him. I walk back to my boat, with tears welling, I tell myself that I did stand by,
physically anyway.
Near the equator the sun drops like a rock at the end of the day. Dusk is shortlived, and I am caught clear across the bay in my kayak under a dark sky. I was
half-heartedly trying to board one of the ships that are wrecked and washed up all
along the shore, but the surf pounding against the jagged rust was too much for me.
Big purse-seine fishing trawlers, with helicopters on their brightly lit decks, are
motoring back and forth across my route home. Again I am a bug trying to cross a
road, but without Sea-Spray‟s council. During a break in their busy load transfers,
I scoot across the water and paddle beneath the loading docks to avoid the activity.
Under here the water is covered with dirty foam and the pylons are rotted and
cracked, exposing the corroding re-bar. This will collapse one day from the press
of business above and the Samoans will accept it with fatalistic resignation.
Passing town, the view shoreward is no postcard, but that is part of Pago Pago‟s
charm for me now. It is not a tourist destination. It runs on Tuna and U.S.
subsidies. Outside of town, the jungle is the theme. I have seen little of it, little of
the rest of the Island (which beyond Pago Pago must be beautiful) and don‟t think I
will. Most of my days are spent working on my boat.
I take my kayak out to be alone, and now I drift, not ready to make for land and
people. I stop paddling and replay a few hours from the night before:
I am sitting on Jack‟s boat, my bare feet pressed sole to sole with Totse‟s. It
feels very nice. We are alone. I don‟t know how we worked into that position, but
36
the tingle that starts where we touch has filled me. I only came over to demonstrate
to her that I don‟t consider her “damaged goods.” I don‟t feel that way, but my
mind thought of it; it‟s always the first consideration, right?
Jack‟s boat is behind a breakwall, the stern tied fast to it ten meters away, the
anchor running out from the bow. On a boat on our port lives a man from the
States whose facial bones are crushed inwards on one side. He is watching
pornography on a big screen TV, and he is trying to get his Samoan girlfriend,
whom Totse tells me is crazy, interested in something in his lap. On the starboard
side is an empty boat. That white sailor is in jail. The other yachtees set him up.
They were unhappy with his habit of luring young Samoan boys aboard with US
dollar bills.
In my ear a leaning Totse is telling me why she is here. She prefers women.
She‟s been sent over, torn from her village, because she was involved with another
woman. She is here because Jack is supposed to find her a man? She accepts this
and only wants one who will love her. She has a university education, she is
trained in computers, and she speaks three languages. I realize that she thinks I am
a perfectly suitable mate. After four days on this Island, though, I know that it is
because of the color of my skin, my country of origin, and a superficial politeness.
There is a pulley system attached to a small dinghy on Jack‟s boat. Lotu, Jack‟s
wife, reels herself over on it, boards, and suggests a threesome. A spell is broken, I
say I‟m too tired, and leave.
On the kayak I move slowly, passing the fishing boats. One is a beautiful
centerboard Cat-scow. The deckhouse is of rattan, and there is a hardwood mast
raked forward between the twin hulls. As I drift by, my mind flashes a picture of
her in a lee-shore gale. It peoples her with Chinese and makes them unable to
make headway to windward. I can almost hear the short, choppy sounds of an
Asian language shouted in fear as we are pushed toward the rocks. I am aboard,
but uninvolved. I don‟t know how I can concoct this scenario. Why such cruel
thought about such a beautiful object?
I glide in behind the breakwater and there is my Sea-Spray. She is nervously
chomping on her dock-lines. I feel her discomfort, as if she were whispering in my
ear, “Peeeter, lets go awaaay from heere.”
May 23: 14deg16‟ south, 170deg41‟ west: Pago Pago
The winds are up. It‟s blowing a gale right through the southern Cooks. I see
the isobars on a neighbor‟s weather fax, but in this hemisphere, at this latitude, and
at this time of year, the systems move into the prevailing winds, spinning in
unfamiliar directions. I stare confused. I‟m guessing it will be strong, but doable, if
I can get away soon.
Earlier, I had watched the water spin down in the toilet, and down the sink drain.
I had watched the mist swirl over the peaks, and felt the air funnel in from the sea.
37
I had looked into Totse‟s eyes. Then, I closed my eyes and tried to face northeast,
towards my home.
I hop a bus to clear customs, and their the officer is too lazy to follow protocol.
He just hands me my thirty-eight. I walk back through town with it in my pocket,
still loaded. Passing the busy bus station, full of colorfully hand-painted pick-up
trucks, I am accosted by a Samoan whom I stupidly talked to in the laundry-mat.
I took flack from my neighbors when he drove up to visit me a couple of days
ago. He was all wound up and I couldn‟t get him to leave. He wanted me to come
and meet his family. He thought if he could bring a white man home, his father,
who thought him a no-account, would respect him. In the end, I felt I had no
choice, and got into his truck.
I spent the evening translating a saying from my Alcoholics Anonymous days
that I never thought much of, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I
cannot change…” for his mother and father and brothers and sisters in their wet,
dark prefab. Though it is longer, I never got past that one line of the prayer; there
didn‟t seem to be any point.
In front of the bus station, he is clingingly grateful, and wants to shake my
hand. I refuse, afraid he won‟t let go, afraid he‟d see the gun, and I jog away while
waving. I arrive back at the dock breathing hard, where I try and say a farewell to
Totse, but she‟s not listening to my hyperventilations and she‟s not talking to me
either. I step down to Sea-Spray, raise the sail and I cut the engine right off the
dock in an attempt to dive back into the heart of it, this sailing. Sailing away, (as
opposed to motoring), is a goal in and of itself. There is grace to be had with an
elegant escape. But it is more slow than graceful, and time drags as a over a halfhour passes before I lose sight of the docks, and only then because I round a bend
in the bay.
Time enough for doubts to grow. About the past. About the future.
The winds are strong and more southerly than I‟d hoped for. As I leave the bay,
a squall crashes right down on me. Within minutes I am reefing the main and
mizzen, double reefing the main and dropping the mizzen, dumping the jib for a
small staysail, running aft a few times to regain the course, dealing with one sail or
the other in the water before I can make it back, and hearing things crashing around
below. I can‟t see shit and I‟m only a couple of miles out. I‟m cold, wet, and
scared, and I feel so very alone. What am I trying to do here? The frantic activities
are compounding my mental anguish. The wind and waves say go back, and I‟m
punishing myself beating against them. I‟ve abandoned my new friends, or at least,
I‟ve left people who wanted me around. Both auto-pilots fail to take over and I‟m
crying from frustration with the electronics, frustration with myself.
Sea-Spray below me, around me, is bucking the sea of steep, breaking sevenfooters, and taking copious amounts of green water aboard. I‟m not facing this
alone.
I rip the wiring out of the cockpit, and touch them to ground until I find a hot
one. I bite the plug off of the Autohelm, twist the copper to a union, and hear a
reassuring beep. After the helm is steadied, I go below to find water past the
floorboards. I had left the mast-hole gasket loose. My duffel, fresh from the
laundry, is half-submerged. I cram some ensolite from a sleeping-pad into the gap,
38
and pump. I sit and listen to the sound of water slamming wood, and I wait to be
needed above. Around midnight comes the now-familiar, and much-despised moan
through the rigging that means winds of forty-plus. I decide it‟s too much to point
into, so I head us northwest and run. At least now we have some sea room.
It doesn‟t get stronger, it doesn‟t last, and soon, I put us back on course for
Tonga. I read, doze, and dine on crackers and warm ginger ale through the night
and next day. The little boat slowly charges south and west.
Sea-Spray seems fine, and she is going well. The air seems drier with the
oppressive feel of the Samoan sky gone. It is mostly stars above now; scattered,
brilliant, focused, and three dimensional. My thoughts are scattered like the stars.
I am not going home soon, I am going west. I make that my goal for now. But my
thoughts are not as bright. Nothing brilliant or focused in there. I read all I have
about Tonga, which isn‟t much. I learn where to check in and what it‟s likely to
cost when I arrive. There is a brief history of the Island, but I skim over that.
I sight land in fifty-two hours. Three-hundred and forty nautical miles in fiftytwo hours. Zooming. I continue until I am in the lee of Vava‟u. There, it‟s nice to
have wind without the waves for a change, and we cut a fine straight line through
it, but have to stop and wait for the sun before we can enter the twisted channel. I
see a dry northern scene that could be Upper Michigan rising from Lake Superior
under a Hunter‟s Moon.
There‟s no way to anchor, so I raise the mizzen, and “back” the jib, and SeaSpray stops, feeling firm, like she gets my idea. I am able to sleep until dawn, only
half-waking each hour to make sure that the dark cliffs are still standing off to the
west. My dreams, not bound to any particular force and not driven by any
particular ambition, do wander. With my recent experiences as fodder, my mind
brings gentle souls on a watery conveyer, and as they pass by we exchange
wordless pleasantries, and they are gone.
Sea-Spray, thus hove-to, strays less than a rode over seven hours.
39
May 22: 18deg south, 175deg east: Vavau, Tonga
In the morning it‟s slow going. The wind has circled around and still meets us
mostly head-on as we turn into the Port of Refuge to see the lovely town of Neifu.
Broad, white, wooden buildings shoulder aside trees for space on the steep, low
hills. There are a few boats at anchor. I see uniforms on the first pier waving me
in.
The pier is made of rough concrete, with gaps, and overhangs the low tide water
in places where we could slip under. The officials get disproportionately large. I
circle to arrange the fenderboard and to rethink my perspective, getting blown a bit
on the downwind. We are slow, and it‟s an embarrassing five minutes going
around. Then, I miss the small safe spot and the toerail meets the unyielding
pylons with a crack. The officials are large.
And they are grabbing at our stays, but I see that this is a bad place for SeaSpray and use the “no, no” chant and pry the hands away. A white man comes over
to help, blocks them out and says, “Go! Hit reverse!”
Sea-Spray, with her propeller thrusting out at an angle to miss the rudder, like
many old boats where the auxiliary engine is mostly an afterthought, can only turn
one way in reverse, and I don‟t think that‟s the way. There is a boat in front, but
with the wind and the chop, I think I will more than likely lose the bowsprit if I try
and back out, so I gun it forward and hold the tiller to its stop. We are clear by
inches. I go out a bit, think about the first impression I‟ve made, say my apologies
to Sea-Spray, throw the anchor over, feed out the chain, feel it bite, launch the
kayak, and paddle back in wet. The three big uniforms are now waving me away.
They point to the channel I had come in, and I see a large ferry approaching. I see
that I have anchored in its path. I kayak back out, pull up the chain and anchor,
motor upwind to an empty mooring buoy, and tie Sea-Spray off to it. Back on the
kayak, I see the big black men gesturing for me to meet them at the next dock. I
paddle over to it as they come up on foot. They don‟t speak much English. The
three, big, friendly (Captain Cook called these the Friendly Isles, in spite of the
occasional cannibalism) Melanesians represent the departments of Customs, Health
and agriculture, and Immigration, for the Independent Kingdom of Tonga. They
want me to bring Sea-Spray over and put her between two sparkling forty-five foot
Beneteaus, but I like her where she is, far away from nosey officials and expensive
boats.
I say, “I dinna can park here.” They say, “Dinghy got?” “Nah-ah. This it.” I
think I can wear them down; confuse and delay respectfully. They point between
the big-buck plastic boats. I point out to the bay, shake my head no, and say, “OK,
big trouble to.” “Guns?” “Yes.” “Plant, fruit?” “Some, OK?” They talk amongst
themselves. I put my hands up. I paddle out, and return with my pistol and papers.
“Alcohol? Tobacco?” I say, “None. I sail without.” I start to see them as
individuals. One has cigarettes and I ask for one. This request breaks some barrier,
and they decide to clear me without a boarding. This dock is next to a yacht charter
operation, and they gesture shoreward, and take care of my paperwork as we drink
Cokes and smoke cigarettes at the outdoor bar.
Soon I am sitting alone there, my “practique” papers all signed and my passport
stamped, and the barmaid has turned my U.S.$20 into a few small coins. SeaSpray looks fine out front.
40
Nothing much on the boat demands my attention. I fix the toerail, and work on
the wiring and mounts for the auto-pilots. The good feeling of being ashore lasts
for a few days. Tonga is serene. I walk the cart paths and nod at people as I pass
by. The sun shines through the trees right down to the dry ground.
Though never officially colonized by the Europeans, the White missionaries
have left marks. The Catholic Church is on the hill above where Sea-Spray and I
are anchored, and the choir sings late into the night. After awhile it sounds like
circling wasps. I feel shy and awkward in the yacht charter base, which is full of
wealthy Europeans flown in to spend a busy week rebuilding family ties. They are
day sailing, with guides supplied by the boat rental company, a family crew… At
dinner the children turn red faced when they feel the attention of their parents. I‟m
guessing they don‟t get much at home. The wind is still blowing hard, so I keep
the mooring. I know I should search out some perfect anchorage, but I don‟t feel
like it. I kayak and climb the tallest hill, but I mostly just walk around the Island a
few hour each day. I exchange greetings with a few men, but the women step away
sharply, averting their eyes. I am OK with no meaningful human interaction. A
quick rest, a touch-and-go, and to be on my way, all sounds nice. To have a few
more miles and a few more passages behind will help build me a stable perspective
from which to view the next stops.
A forty-foot sloop takes the mooring next to Sea-Spray. Rick and Paula have
been in the Cook Islands, mostly on Raratonga, and left after six months because
their visas expired. They had left California bound for the South Seas, hit a storm
and landed in Mexico, where they stayed for a year. They left for Tahiti next, but
the weather was again bad, so they were forced to run past those islands, and ended
up on Raratonga. Paula cries, reliving the storms, and again tears flow when she
tells me how happy they were on on the Cook Islands. Some people can go around
the world without hitting any storms, some people are harried wherever they go.
Paula and Greg don‟t want to cruise anymore. They fear each passage. What
appealed to them when they decided to cruise in the first place were the
destinations, and they have found one at last. They want to ship a pre-fabricated kit
home, made out of teak, from Malaysia to the Island in the Cooks, and plant it
firmly in the ground. They want to sell their boat and live with the natives on
Raratonga, who have accepted them into their community. They invite me for
dinner and we eat a fish that they have caught along the way. Paula has mixed in
some indigenous vegetables that leave a starchy goo stuck to the roof of my mouth,
and my stomach quickly fills with the expanding paste. Mostly I feel welcome on
their boat. They have a modest boat, very clean and organized considering that it
has served as both a home and a passage-maker and an office (Rick is a freelance
programmer) for two years with two people, a cat, and houseplants aboard. Shag
carpeting and an easy chair, a freezer and a blender and a toaster and a paper-towel
41
roll and curtains. A sink and a shower and a toilet and a queen-sized bed and a
housecat? Where I would expect to see the navigation station or the engine
controls there is a dish cabinet. It is easy to see how a storm at sea might disrupt
this scene. I picture Paula telling Rick not to go outside: “You‟ll catch your
death!” The only things that seem out of place- the only things that don‟t belong in
a small suburban house are the artifacts collected from the land and the people who
are native to it. There are voodoo looking trinkets hanging everywhere. We talk
about Tonga, what little we have seen of it. I mention to Paula and Greg about
how uncomfortable I feel in the resorts. They say it‟s that way for them as well.
They feel like they have more in common with the native Islanders than with the
tourists and the infrastructure built for them. I don‟t think so. “But we‟re tourists,
right? I know I still am. I didn‟t come to this place with any special affinity for it,
or for these people…” I think as I face a dried dangling lizard, perhaps I am unlike
Paula and Greg in that respect. I probably feel weird because I‟m free-loading off
the resort‟s facilities, sitting in the comfortable chairs. I‟m sitting next to some guy
who has paid a lot of money for the same privilege. “The only thing I have in
common with the natives is income level.” The only thing I have in common with
the tourists is my upbringing. I have heard that poor cruisers have a reputation for
walking away from dinner with the silverware. You‟re bound to feel awkward with
a stolen fork in your pocket. But I haven‟t taken anything. If I am a tourist I have
paid in some other currency. Something about the passage must set the sailor
apart. Perhaps all those days focusing on a destination gives one a special claim to
a place, and that sets you apart from the jetted tourist. Possibly, no, in fact, these
bums flying in have no right to be here at all! I have earned something more
intimate. When they ride aboard the rented Beneteaus and eat at staged beachbarbeques they aren‟t interacting, they are buying. We have arrived in a scale
appropriate to the place, Paula, Greg, and I. Our needs and desires are
comprehensible to the environment, to the locals. When I walk by a tree it can
feel that I assess its properties, and when I meet a local girl she looks away
enticingly.
The next morning, they wake me up early so we can find the best food at the
local market. Paula talks to the Tongans about each vegetable she sees, nibbles at
each one and asks how to prepare it, struggling through the native words. I just say
“Coffee? Coffee?” to everyone I meet, and finally duck into an Australian run cafe.
42
June 02: 18deg south, 180deg east: Lau Group
I‟ve left Tonga, working from the same chart I first plotted our position on a
month earlier when we were near the Cook Islands. It‟s an inadequately largescaled chart; or too small, wrinkled and stained with coffee, dried salt, and blood.
Nonetheless Sea-Spray and I move easily together through the treacherous Oneita
Passage towards Vitu Levu. At night I am never sure, but by day the perfect
weather means that Sea-Spray is moseying with full canvas for the first time. Six
perfect knots, and I have full use of the decks, which are mostly dry.
Vitu Levu is an island in Fiji that has a breadth of a hundred miles, but is
represented on the chart by a US quarter-sized discoloration outlined in thin black
as we approach it. I have a pilot book describing the coastal waters, but it was
published in 1972.
I suspect that some of the shipwrecks it refers to have
disappeared, and some are too new to have been included. The only clouds in the
sky are splayed over the mountains and over Suva, the big town. We close the
coast until they cover us as well. I see breakers and creep Sea-Spray eastward,
parallel to the surf looking for a gap and markers. I raise Harbor Control on the
VHF and as they grant us permission to enter, I‟m tempted to ask them exactly
where that entrance might be. I see a buoy way beyond the surf and I am uneasy
thinking I‟ve missed it. The small wooden schooner in “The Saga of Simba”
ended her voyage here, but that was night-time, in a storm, and in the nineteenthirties. And she was rebuilt and refloated, but in the end, a weak man left her to
the Island. I hope to find that boat here. The entrance is easier to see once we are
abreast. Obvious, even. Safely inside, I am directed to “Prince‟s Wharf,” where I
tie off between two boats full of black men waiting. Warned about the red tape, I
am patient and polite, after trading some canned goods for tobacco with the Blacks,
and before any rats can board, it is done. We are here for as long as we want.
An uneventful anchoring, (maybe my seventh ever) and Sea-Spray is bobbing
on her rode in front of the Royal Suva Yacht Club, and I am drinking cold Cokes
and smoking stale fake Marlboros on the verandah. Nice! The club is old and
colonial and pleasant with people coming and going. It is possible to spend a
fulfilling day just observing the activity. A race from Australia to Suva has been
broken up by a storm leaving competitors scattered all throughout the Southwest
Pacific. There is a position board with the intended route, and the pins marking the
positions of the boats are nowhere near it, they are all over the place. Some are
even in the cork off to the side of the chart. The times to goal are spread over two
weeks. Every now and then, tired and satisfied crew from the race spill in and share
their adventures at the club bar. I meet one man who knows a hang-gliding buddy
of mine from Montana. His boat was hit by the storm, turned around to miss the
brunt of it, landed back in Australia up the coast, and then restarted after the bad
weather passed. He had no hope of winning; he just did it for fun! He can tell that
I‟m impressed, and so tells me again, in detail. After they have been at the bar for
an hour or so, a lot of them become loud, obnoxious, and repetitive. I head
downtown.
Suva, Vitu Levu, Fiji, is one U.S. dollar by taxi, if you negotiate with the cabby
before he hits the switch. It‟s a town full of tall, very thin Indian women who glide
along with dignity, not as tall, hustling, and clever Indian men, not so clever
Fijians, dingy looking white backpackers, and whiter professionals and tourists
from Australia, New Zealand, and England. The Brits are so white, so pale, as to
43
appear translucent; you can see the blue. Suva is not a place to look at beautiful
people, but it possesses an atmosphere that is kind to the soul of this sailor. It is not
as if my boat and I look like prizes. I am pale under my tan, my stool is a little soft
from eating Krishna, and my legs are tired, and Sea-Spray looks a bit rough with
tire rings, rust stains, worked seams (where her planks have shifted), and seaweed
all along her flanks, but we are both sound enough. I can walk and she can swim.
I am determined to have a South Sea Experience. I am ready to visit the outer
islands of Fiji. After three hours mired in the local bureaucracy, I have my cruising
permit stamped and signed. I have charts copied from copies from other cruisers,
and I have the required ceremonial kava bundles to present to the chiefs. If you
want to sail to the outer islands, you have to show this permit to the local chief and
present the “Sevu Sevu” kava bundle. If you are lucky, you are invited to the
ceremony, and get to share the kava. That is not the only hassle. Fijian charts are
unreliable. I have seen two boats fresh on the reef right out front, and heard so
many stories of yachts wrecked, that I have put up a note on the club board to see if
I can get another pair of eyes on deck. I put a few more up around town in the low
to mid-priced hostels and hotels, as well.
That night a storm rolls through the bay. I am unable to sleep as the anchor
lurches, drags, and catches with ugly sounding grabs at the chain. I start the
engine twice, thinking I will have to attempt a reset, or just spend the night
hovering alert as possible at idle. At one point I decide to leave- just head west,
and things will work themselves out, or through.
Boats at anchor bother me,
You‟re only safe if you‟re in the „lee‟.
If the wind should shift, you‟re up a creek,
Washed ashore with broken teak.
Boats at anchor bother me,
I can‟t get my bearings , I don‟t like what I see.
You‟re better off when you‟re out at sea.
Boats at anchore bother me.
44
The motion is bad, you‟re all over the place
And you wake in the morning with people to face
Without full sails, and no tiller to steady,
Nothing feels essential, nothing feals heady,
And every yachtee knows,
You have to be so polite,
Lest someone offended,
Cut your rode in the night.
June 06: 18deg18‟ south, 178deg32‟ east: Caterina
In the club‟s bar the soda pop is losing its new taste. I talk with two men,
Valentino and Francois, both single-handers at one time, both Swiss, but one
speaks only German and English, one only French and English, so we converse in
the lowest common denominator, English. They have both told me at one time or
another that I‟m not so bad, for an American. Valentino has been here three years
and his ferro-cement trimaran (??) is anchored next to Sea-Spray. He stays on
shore. But he knows most of the outer islands and routes, so I am listening
intently. “Vell you neuw I have verie small drafet, zo youw maey not take dis
route, but iz very…”
The Europeans seem to have a resentment towards Americans, which given
some thought is understandable, but I wonder if it only manifests itself to those of
us from the USA who sail the smaller boats. I can‟t picture these guys even talking
to the captain of a 60-footer, let alone trying to put him in his place.
We are interrupted by a woman‟s voice, “Excussey may, I lokk for capitan of
Sea Sepray?” “Hello, I am he. You saw my note?” “Yes, I have wish to move
west and by sail. I have experience to sail and certification, and having sail from
Gibroulter, Panaima and Polinezia....”
“Oh, oh, come over here, OK?” I take her away from the gaping Swissmen. “I
only want to sail locally, I want to see some islands and I need help to see the reef.”
“Yesyes, Lautoka. To go to Lautoka?” She looks at my eyes. “You cannot see?”
“No. I mean yes. I am sailing alone, and just while I‟m visiting the islands, I need
another person for lookout and… stuff.”
She oozes culture and sophistication. She is wearing make-up. Her name is
Caterina. I had pictured a young, backpacking couple who would camp ashore
after each days passage. I hadn‟t really thought it through, I guess.
I go into negative mode, but this upsets her. She thinks I don‟t want her for
some reason.
My note gives Sea-Spray‟s dimensions and emphasizes how small and spartan
she is. “But I have used to sail with ten... I am not so frail! I...” “Whoa, whoa,
whoa... You are a dream, I am smitten (she has a limited grasp of English, and I
45
throw out words and phrases I wouldn‟t use in a conversation with an American
woman), but I don‟t even have a toilet on board!” She doesn‟t get it.
I think that the only way to make her understand is to show her the boat, though
it will hurt my pride. She is wearing a dress and leather sandals. I have my
inflatable set up for the first time since I left San Francisco. It is an old, patched
and faded gray Zodiac, half the length of any of the others on the dinghy dock, and
it is shipping six inches of dirty water. She only hesitates slightly before getting in.
The outboard starts in gear. “Oh!” as we lurch off in a turn. I don‟t get out when
we reach Sea-Spray. The companionway hatch is open, so I just say, “Take a
look.” She doesn‟t even have to step up to board.
“Is kind, but for one, or for the day-sailing” she says. Not too painful. “Do you
know Hi-Roller? Is also boat with note.” We buzz around the anchored yachts
until we spot it. It‟s more what she had in mind. Forty-five feet of roomy plastic.
When we get back, I see that her bottom is wet. I ask if we can share a taxi to
Suva. We get a bite to eat. I help her compose a response to High-Roller.
She tells me of her experience sailing across the Atlantic, through the Panama
Canal to the Galapagos, and the Marqueses islands, all the time with a group of
yachts sailing together in a globe-circumnavigating rally. These “Millennium”
yachts are 15-25 meters, and most have paid crews. They are carrying a torch, lit
from a flame in Jerusalem as they departed, around the world. They have semiserious races from island to island, and extravagant, self-congratulatory parties at
every finish line.
Along the way, Caterina fell in love with the Marqueses islands, and stayed
there for a month, the Millennium fleet going on without her. Now she has jumped
ahead of them by plane; they will arrive in a resort near Lautoka soon. She has
timed it so that she will meet them there. She would just as soon find a yacht not
sailing with the group, also going the way she wants to go, but she wants to sail to
Australia, and that is where the Millennium is headed, after a few stops.
She is an opera singer from Bologna, Italy, on a year long sabbatical. This has
been her dream, to sail in the South Pacific. She has worked hard for the time off,
and has spent years honing her sailing skills in the Mediterranean Sea. After we
eat and I drop her at her hotel, I hold the cab out front while I pull down my note. I
have him drop me at a lumber yard. I will build steps for a rope ladder, instead, so
that I can climb the mast quickly, and look out for the reefs myself, solo. If I had
money enough to buy a bigger boat, I probably wouldn‟t even be here. I am a bit
chagrined that I wasn‟t more of a success in eighteen years of sobriety, but I think
if I can redefine the terms, somehow, I get what I deserve.
I see Caterina again the next day, and we go out to dinner. The day after, we
share a rental car and drive across the island to Lautoka. She flew into the airport
there and left her luggage in a resort there. I want to see the marina, where I plan
to have Sea-Spray hauled-out to repaint her bottom. After a few days together, I
know that she will, so I ask her to sail with me. Lucky man!
She is not sure how her luck is going, but sees something in Sea-Spray and me,
and like the salty sea seeking dry wood, she has no choice but to join us.
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June 11: 18deg51‟ south, 178deg22 east: Vitu Levu
The fisherman is waving his arms in a circular motion, and Caterina is telling
me that the arrow on the GPS is pointing behind us now. I‟m still focused on a
shipwreck that I am sure I passed on the way in, and I ignore them both. I assume
the fisherman is warning me of his nets, and I don‟t know what the Garmin‟s
problem is. When we graze the top of a coral head, it all comes clear. The
fisherman was warning an idiot about a reef, I had marked the route in on the GPS,
Caterina is right, and I‟m looking at the wrong wreck.
I carefully backtrack. We hit the same coral-head. This is the first time that
Caterina has seen me in action on a boat. She wants to anchor off, settle down for
the night, and leave in the morning with clearer heads. Once past the barrier reef
we will have open water through the night, everything will be fine… and I don‟t
want to lose my prize, the safety of the shore being just a dinghy ride away for her.
I worry that she might change her mind, and I talk her into bearing with me.
My bungling does fall behind, and we sail beyond the protection of the reef and
into the swell. The wind feels steady enough, so I set up four big sails and the
auto-pilot. The motion is perfect and Sea-Spray is in her element. We make love
on deck. We sail through the night and enter the Great Astrolobe reef at dawn.
The reef runs a circle around five or six islands, protecting the waters inside and
all around them. Happiness fills the little ship. We anchor off a different island
each day, climbing around on trails left by goats and sailors. We beachcomb,
kayak, and snorkel. Cat and I eat pasta with olive oil and fresh anchovies and
47
Italian dressed salads, smoke cigarettes, and watch the sun set, Caterina with her
wine, and I with my new hobby, kava.
Kava is what we present to the Chiefs in exchange for their civility. It is the
root of a plant that originates around here. The native people cultivate it, but it
grows out in the wild, too. They use it mostly for ceremony, (it‟s what I drank at
Richard‟s boat‟s Christening in Hawaii) but they find its effects pleasing, as well as
spiritual, and sometimes use it recreationally. It was ignored by the early traders,
who were after sandalwood and people to enslave, and later copra, palm oil, and
people to indenture, but the plant has its uses. It contains a mild mind alterer and
for me, it so eases the discomforts associated with living aboard Sea-Spray.
We meet some oceanographers who give us some waypoints to some secret
sights, then we take the dinghy over for a dive where the Garmin points to. We buy
sun hats from the women in the village, play soccer with the children, and ignore
the sales pitches of the men. We make a good team and our confidence grows. We
sail around Kandavu, her wondrous views slowly unfolding before us. We get wet
and cold, but are able to anchor in calm water before the sun sets. We embrace for
warmth, usually so available in this latitude. Caterina reads aloud from Conrad.
His book is crafted so carefully, so slowly, so considerately; like a boat designed
and built to meet the air and water just so. And it sounds so very nice to me with
her accent, but it‟s ten pages, or two days at our pace, at his, before he even gets the
old steamer away from the dock. Caterina comes fast to love Sea-Spray and talks
to her. She is an aesthete who rejuvinates my own wonder of the beauty in my
boat.
June 15: 17deg41‟ south, 178deg52‟ east: Ovalau, Fiji
Sea-Spray is just beyond the lights of the harbor, near this old capitol that the
British abandoned in the late eighteen-hundreds. She is the only boat at anchor.
Caterina and I are staying in the nearly empty Royal Hotel on the island of Ovalau,
and James has invited us into the private, empty club next door.
James is a mishmash of English, Scotch, Irish, and Fijian. He is a descendent of
Captain Bligh. Wrinkled black skin loosely drapes his face. He takes a key from
beneath a rock. Past the old lock and inside there is a picture of the Queen as a
young woman skewed on the wall. A Queen to be, she once stayed on this Island,
but she would not have been here in this room amongst the billiard tables.
According to James, in the mornings hungover noblemen would wake up stiff on
the slate and ask for a gun. Then they‟d lean unsteadily on the tables as they aimed
powder-driven shot at the birds in the aviary that was once built between the west
wall and the steep hillside with the two other sides and the roof enclosed with
fishing nets.
I‟m guessing that the Crown did not send its best and brightest to this holding.
The immorality of those men seems freeze-dried and preserved in the dust of this
place. Geckos are frozen there on the wall too, visible to Caterina and I only. We
have been thinking of taking one as crew. As James opens an old ice-box, an
arthritic frog makes a painful looking escape from beneath it; hop- plop, ugnhh
hop- plop. James has been drinking, and is drinking, and has regressed from a
clear, prideful boasting about his heritage and the famous people he has met, to a
48
slurred, lamenting grievance about his inability to make any money and the
disrespect of his wife. He rests his head sideways on the dirty table. Apparently,
this disrespect initially surfaced because of the problem he has been having with his
“weapon,” which we come to understand as his lately becoming impotent. I figure
it out first, and explain it to Caterina, who is not pleased. She is less and less
interested in anything having to do with the natives. We had our first argument
when we are in the Chief‟s house, earlier, on another island: I have just presented
the kava bundle, which he thinks is smaller than the standard offering. I am
explaining that it is very high quality kava, and cost twelve Fijian dollars more per
kilo than the crap most tourists would bring. I crack open a stem and he smells it,
letting himself be convinced, I think, when Caterina tells him that we have a small
boat, and that is why we have brought less. Then she adds that I had chewed up a
good portion of it. I am going to let this slide, but then, she stupidly offers him a
cigarette, with one protruding, you know, so she won‟t impolitely touch the filter,
and of course, he snatches the whole pack from her hands. That‟s how the chiefs
are. She tries to explain to him that it is her last pack, her concern and voice rising.
I can tell that she is starting to panic, so I stand up as if to leave, saying she can
smoke some of mine. Too late. She starts ranting about how ridiculous the chiefs
are with their childlike greed, but fortunately, soon slips in to Italian. When I touch
her to go, she follows, focusing her anger, then, on me. We have been together
about two weeks.
Sea-Spray is a very small boat for two people for two weeks. But we loved to
be together, and we were a well-suited pair, facing the same pause in mid-life; near
the end of youth, but still searching ahead. Both of us, more-or-less whole in our
own selves, are not looking for answers in the eyes of each other, but here we are,
watching each other even so.
June 24: 18deg18‟ south, 177deg51‟ east: Mbenga Pass
We change course to avoid getting caught in a lee-shore situation in the rising
wind and sea. Two reefs in the main, just in case, but Sea-Spray still shows her jib
and mizzen. We are heading north to M‟benga Pass and the protection behind the
reef there.
Anchorages lie ahead if we are quick. I have two charts of different scales and
when I try to plot waypoints, they do not agree. Visibility is poor and it‟s four
hours of peering forward before we see the breakers. Since we are unable to rely
precisely on the charts and GPS in these waters, we have to use our eyes, our ears.
Now and then, a rogue wave gathers up water along the natural break and moves
along the reef for a mile or more, gathering water up from behind, and towering
above us, like a child has drawn a curlicue, as it rolls past.
Both charts show two markers, but we see only one. We have to decide which
side to pass, as it has no sign or color to clue us in. I start the engine. Caterina is
on the bow, watching out for “bombies” (lone chunks of coral), and I am at the
helm with the binoculars. The useless GPS weighs down the useless charts, and I
have a false look of alertness on my face. We slowly make our way through, but
the sun is going down fast and we will not make the anchorage in time, so I head us
three towards more open waters.
49
We relax our vigil and have a quiet moment once we clear the unmarked reef yet
are still in calm waters. The sound of the breakers is muted, but ever increasing.
Sea-Spray is somber below me in anticipation; she and I know what‟s coming soon.
Caterina, used to sixty-foot boats, is intimidated by the proximity of the
elements as the sea builds, the sky darkens, and the wind gusts. But now that we
are out in it, I am happy. I am singing as I hoist a big sail (too big, really) on the
bowsprit and Sea-Spray is humming along below me. I savor her motion. I sleep
better out at sea than on anchor.
Below, I reach for the auto-pilot, like a man in a nursery rhyme for his nightcap.
I set it down, though, as I hear the helmsman, Caterina, belt out an opera to the sky.
She is wearing her drysuit and looks content at the tiller. In fact, she looks just fine
at the tiller, and I like the sound, so I lay back and drift to the sound of the water
parting and the words from her lips.
Tired from our night at sea, and our two-and-a-half weeks cruising the outer
islands, we are glad to get back to the main island. We have salt sores and are
dreaming of fresh water showers. We are out of vegetables and are imagining a
comfortable restaurant, where we will order a salad and icewater to start. The idea
of a simple, steady chair holds a lot of appeal. Sea-Spray needs cleaning and fresh
anti-fouling paint, so we are making landfall in a bay near the shipyard on Vuda
Point, where, using the VHF to call, we have scheduled a haul-out in the morning.
After some tricky entrances on our trip, this one will be easy, and so I enter the bay
at speed. I run Sea-Spray right up on a reef.
We were making four knots with no lookout when I grounded her. There are a
few other boats on anchor and people are appearing on deck.. Caterina‟s voice is
rising fast and Italian is starting to slip out. Her years spent earning various
certificates for sailing, she feels, are wasted on me. Sometimes she wants to
captain the boat, and clearly, to her, if she had been doing that, this wouldn‟t have
happened.
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Having effectively cut ties to the important people in my life, without severing
my capacity to love, or twisting it into hate, I am beginning to sense a freedom of
movement. I am somewhere past the loneliness. I had separated myself from my
personal history and, yet, brought the experience of forty-years intact. I could
disappear anytime and the thought of me would be mostly easy on the minds of
those who care about me. And I had avoided some common pitfalls the “loner”
encounters; I wasn‟t an introspective recluse, or an escapee, a drinking drunk, nor
did I leave anything undone. I was mostly whole. A kind of integrity.
And now I‟m wondering if I can make a living in Italy? Fix up Caterina‟s
dilapidated country home? This is the same trap I so deftly avoided in Pago Pago;
it‟s just wrapped in a different package.
When a Norwegian from a nearby yacht comes over, I ask him if he has a tide
table. Caterina, meanwhile, is second-guessing me with a “Wotta ya thing-keeng”
retort to my every move. I want a weather report. “Wotta…” Caterina wants me
to climb the mast and run a line to his yacht and try and drag Sea-Spray off tilted.
He agrees. No. I tell them its too late, we will have to wait for the next tide cycle,
but thanks. “Wotta yo…” I ask him how the food is at the local restaurant.
“Wotta ya…” This guy thinks he knows more than me because he‟s grounded
fifteen times?
A few hours later, Sea-Spray is over fifteen degrees in the draining bay.
Caterina arrives on the kayak with take-out chicken curry, cold drinks, and a
worried look. I tell her I didn‟t see any damage when I dived below . I am sure she
will rest easy on the plywood I have placed between her flanks and the coral, and
will float off near midnight‟s high tide. I have pulled off the rudder and cleared an
area for the propeller where it juts out the side. We eat dinner slowly, without
talking, and my calm begins to enter Caterina. However, when I nod off and drop
my plate down the front of my shirt, her concern returns. I send her ashore to get a
room at the resort, and I will join her once Sea-Spray is free.
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I wake from dreamless sleep when I feel that Sea-Spray no longer moves. She‟s
over forty degrees now. I check the batteries for leakage. I watch the sky and wait.
A “low” is coming in. I am taking a chance that I will free her before it arrives.
At sunset she mostly floats again, but is still solidly stuck. It is an hour before high
tide, 21:50. My faith has gone with the daylight. I am straining muscles when she
moves under my pull, and I fall hard over the side and on to sharp coral. The swell
is growing, the winds are veering, and I now have less than an hour to work with.
It will be a bad night if I can‟t free her, maybe the end. Panic starting to edge my
movements, I duct tape the spotlight to my head, wrap some more around a
ballooning elbow, and pour rubbing alcohol over my streeming cuts. Her bow
comes around with the winching and when I detention the stern, the kedge anchor
holds, and I pull her hand-over-hand into deep water.
Untriumphant, I buzz to shore in the Zodiak for a shower and a bed. The next
day, we arrive early for our scheduled haul-out at the marina, and are greeted by
friends, including Francois, who has also hit a reef. We all stand around and
ridicule the Fijian charts, some not updated since Captain Bligh surveyed these
waters in the eighteen-hundreds. We read aloud, choking on laughter from
passages in the guidebook that cautions you to sail only when the sky is clear and
the sun is above and behind you.
As Sea-Spray comes out of the water, people gather around to admire her lines,
and I see them think back on the boats they used to sail. Some Millennium yachts
are here, and Caterina is happily chatting away in Italian, Francois in French, and I,
I am gratefully left alone in the small crowd to appreciate Sea-Spray‟s smooth
curves. She is in slings above me, and as I continue to stare, I consider how that
part, the part that is her essence, is always out of sight when she comes alive.
Caterina and I dine at a neighboring resort, crisis behind, where the waiter gives
me a special, secret, budget menu after seeing my face with the first one proffered.
We talk about the future. Sea-Spray has to dry out for a few days before I can start
work. The week ahead is full of dry activities with Cat. We are to drive inland to
the mountains, camping when we want, staying in town when we want, picnics or
restaurants, bag or bed, the dry days and cool nights, I will teach her how to fly…
June 27: 17deg40‟ south, 177deg47‟ east: Vitu Levu
I‟m trying to convince Caterina to trust my instincts; I will find a place to fly. I
brought paragliders aboard Sea-Spray. They pack much smaller than a hang-glider
does. I brought them because I could, but also, as an additional way to justify my
trip. I thought I could say that I flew where no one else had, or further than anyone
from one unique place... the same justification I‟ve been using for the past twenty
years. Now, though, I get to show off for Caterina, as well!
Most of the Fijians and all of the Indians speak English well. Everyone we have
asked wants to help, but nobody we talk to knows how to get anywhere except back
and forth from their own village. Fijians are an inward looking people, Indians
seem to ignore the immediate surroundings and look towards their homeland, and
on the big island, neither peoples venture far from the maintained road or plowed
field.
52
We are driving a nice little truck down the road to “Sleeping Giant.” According
to the map, the road was supposed to have ended by now, but we are ten kilometers
past that, and it‟s still viable. I have engaged the transfer case, however.
It feels like August in Montana, trying to pioneer a flying sight there, for a bit.
I see one hill that has a grassy slope near the top that looks like a good launch.
We happen upon a few houses, a few huts, a village of sorts, and I stop. A
small boy appears and I ask, “Whose mountain?” “Joe‟s.” “Take me to Joe?” But,
Joe has found us, and is walking sternly towards the truck. He is big and puffing
up with self-importance, but he is friendly looking, too, and ready to listen. I
laboriously explain what I want to do.
Back home, when I have asked ranchers for permission to fly on their land, they
can sometimes be suspicious of outsiders and protective of their property. With
them, I always concede ownership in the first sentence, even if I have a map that
shows it to be public property. I tell Joe he has a fine looking mountain…
He is pleased, and jumps into the bed of the truck, slaps the roof right above my
head, and says, “OK, Peteah.” We ascend on a two-track that leads to the base of
the hill. We pass some men on their way to work the cane, big machete-like sickles
swinging in their hands.
Joe smacks the roof and they jump in as I slow. Two more times, this happens,
and there are ten men and boys in the back by the time the tracks turn to one. At
the base of the mountain, I turn the truck around for Caterina, put on my boots for
the first time in almost a year, and look around for my pack.
The men are arguing over who will carry it, and though I try to discourage them,
nine of us start walking up the fifteen-hundred foot slope. It is soon apparent that
none have been up far, though this is no Mt. Everest. Timothy, a barefoot twelveyear old, and I, lead the way on goat trails and occaisional bushwhacks. Half-way
up, we stop under a lemon tree and break open one that is the size of a basketball.
It is sweet, but definitely a lemon, I think.
I see that my pack still ascends, so Tim and I continue. Near the top, we wait on
a large rock that gives us a view. When the others catch up, we all smoke my
cigarettes and eat lemons. They are exuberant from their accomplishment and I am
sad that they live at the base of this hill, but have never climbed it. They scan their
world below, talking about how the roofs look and pointing out their own. I take
my pack and say I must go further to find the right spot. They have forgotten me,
or else they feel they have done enough to defeat the spiritual entropy, and I
continue on alone. When I make the top, the wind is blowing the wrong way and
the from-below perfect grass is eight feet tall once amidst it.
There is a knob that rises one-hundred feet more, where I think I can launch into
the wind, then sneak around one hundred-eighty degrees and fly back to the truck.
This seems easier than walking back down.
Someone once came up here; I take an overgrown and barely noticeable path.
Two-thirds of the way up, though, I can tell there is no way to make the top when I
see an old rope, useless with rot, growing out of a tree. Backing down is hard, hot,
and dusty work.
53
I don‟t get far when I hear my name, “Peteah!?” One of the men has followed;
maybe curious about something new, or maybe my determination?
Samuel is strong, quiet, and over six-feet tall. He is dark-skinned, but his
features are more European than Melanesian, and I consider his ancestry. Is it the
white blood that compels him to climb? Or does the urge come from his
Blackness, some long suppressed component of it that brought his people from
Asia or Africa?
I toss him the pack and together we look for another route. When we find one,
it also dead-ends, but there is a tree that is growing out from an overhanging cliff.
To get a better view, I climb up a few limbs. I can see a way. Sam hands me the
pack, I hook it over a branch, and jump four feet over a crevasse to make the
summit. After some coaxing, he climbs up to where I had been, and with his strong
arms perfectly, easily, throws the pack the four feet to reach my outstretched hands.
But then he has had enough, and I watch him climb back down to safety.
I explore the knob and notice that the wind has shifted. I see that I have only a
few feet of runway before I will have to launch off of the cliff. I set up carefully,
tamping down the grass where I plan to unfold the glider. I lay it, the confusion of
nylon and skinny kevlar lines, out, and upside down and behind me.
This is not like a parachute, it needs forward speed to fly. You have to inflate
its chambers by pulling it overhead, so that the air fills in its shape. Once you have
done this, you run with it until the air flows over and under its inflated wing-form,
creating lift, and you are off the ground and you fly. Theoretically. Twice I pull it
up to launch, but, not feeling it become a wing, twice I abort. The second attempt
leaves me on my ass at the edge of the cliff, my legs dangling into ninety feet of
space. I set up again and wait for a breath of air to reach me, then move with
complete commitment. I fly after three steps on the slope and two more down the
cliff face. I gag lemon as I lean back into my harness.
There is rising air out front and I gain altitude. Nice. I fly along the ridge for a
kilometer and look out at the ocean. The air is smooth, and though I chide myself
for risking too much for this, I settle back, the danger behind, and enjoy myself.
This is what it‟s all about: to strive for something undefined with no clear reward,
something that comes clear only in its midst…
After a while, I fly out to Sam and
Caterina and the twenty or so local people
that have gathered near the truck. They are
cheering, and I decide at the last minute to
land near them, in a small backyard,
nevermind the perfect open fields beyond.
I stay on my downwind leg too long, and
when I turn too sharply to compensate, I
end up in the wind shadow of a large tree,
and my wing stops flying. For a moment I
am thirty feet up, stalled, and fully aware
of the implications.
I hit hard and bounce. I bounce!!
54
I don‟t hear any bones break, so I slowly try all of my limbs and cautiously
stand up. Around me are twenty Fijians with looks of such pain and concern that I
laugh. Ouch! They have invested their entire day in me and my folly, and it is up
to me to salvage it now. I put on my best face and I say that I‟m fine, though I
quickly feel around in my nose and ears for blood that might mean internal injuries.
I stiffly pack my glider and walk it to the truck where an angry and scared Caterina
waits. She knows that I am badly hurt and I can tell that she‟s not impressed. She
can‟t help herself, she backhands me with a short stroke across my face, unable to
hide her feelings. I get out a Sevu-Sevu kava bundle and present it to Joe.
I thank Tim, and I give Sam, who followed me and made all this possible, and
who I think, in a just world, is the next chief, fifty Fijian dollars to distribute to the
climbers. To give it to someone other than Joe might be an insult, but I‟ll have no
part in suppressing whatever it is in Sam that is different from the others. (I find out
later that one should never hand anything directly to the chief.)
I drink two bowls of the brew they prepare from my offering, and go through
the routine. The kava helps my pain, and the mood improves (except for the fiery
Cat‟s who keeps her distance). Once I begin to feel dizzy I say “We must go.” I
elbow past Caterina and into the driver‟s seat—on this Island, men rule. I work the
clutch with my right foot and pull away. The boys run along side and everyone
else stands and waves. When I no longer see them behind, I find a spot to pull
over. I get out and throw-up, then crawl around to the passenger seat.
It‟s three days before I am able to walk, and only with the help of crutches.
Three days of shitting in a bag. Caterina takes me to the hospital, getting me in
front of the queue with her dramatic gestures, and the Philippino doctor looks me
over. My hip and side are black and blue, but when I show him that I can put
weight on it, if I don‟t move, he decides, with no X-ray, that I am a lucky man.
When he tells me it costs nothing, that all medical care in Fiji is free, I ask for some
pain-killers, some chloraquine for malaria, and some ointment for a mysterious rash
that is spreading.
55
I have ruined our planned two weeks on shore, and so Caterina heads back to
Suva, which is more pleasant than the marina and myself. I get to work on SeaSpray. It‟s slow going with the injury, and frustrating. I really only have one hand
available, and no mobility at all.
I have words with a secretary who forgot to put in my paint order, and as I am
leaving the office, I hear the captain of one of the luxurious Millennium boats say
to her, “…little boat...” I miss the rest. The rash is getting worse. I think it was
from preparing the hull with poisonous paint. My body must be allergic.
I take ten cold showers a day, resting wearily on the crutches as I shiver, and
wonder how I have unwittingly sabotaged my life. I go into Lautoka to buy
another kilo of Kava and I chew the dry root-stems all day long.
July 02: 9deg south, 116deg east: Lautoka, Fiji
A woman Caterina and I met in the bay where I grounded Sea-Spray runs a
public television station. Regina wants her husband to interview me on camera and
has invited us to dinner after the show.
They have cruised in Vanuatu and the Solomons, my next destinations, and she
promises that John will open his suitcase full of charts and point out some
anchorages for me. Caterina has taken the truck, so I rent a small car (on this side
of Vitu Levu, near the airport where naïve tourists pay too much, rental cars are
cheaper than taxis.) I decide to take care of some provisioning in Lautoka before I
show up for my interview.
In the market, I see an Indian man with one leg, and dressed in rags. I want to
give him one of my crutches, so I stop him with a pat on his shoulder. A strong
shoulder. Up close he is clean and sharp-eyed, and only says, “Well, it‟s up to
you.”
The television is broadcast from their home. It‟s in a nice spot; on top of a hill,
nestled in amongst some trees. John is busy overseeing some trainees at the
controls, so we are not immediately introduced. His wife Regina shows me around.
Half of the big house is a studio, full of equipment, with one room used as a set.
56
The other half is a comfortable home, with a roomy and open plan. A screened-in
porch wraps all around it.
They are doing this work, she says, running the station, because they care. They
are both European, but they met in Australia. Both had been married before, with
children, and together they cruised the Southwest Pacific in a seventy-five foot
wooden schooner for fifteen years. Often they had little or no money. They
finally settled here, she says, in their mid-fifties, to do this good work, in which
almost all of the programming is chosen by the locals. It is the only independent
media (money and otherwise) on Fiji. Though it has a small budget, it is a much
needed option. The commercial stations here blare out the very worst that world
culture can produce.
Fiji is often called the “Crossroads of the Pacific.” The Islanders are Melanesian
mixed with imported ancestry. Even with the long history of exposure to the
outside world, they do not do too well once outside of their villages.
They are supported by land laws that give them control, theoretically allowing
their traditions to continue. But, these collective traditions favor the group over the
individual so that there is no change except for a perverse, power-grabbing
interpretation by the Chiefs. The young people are so accustomed to the controlled,
contrived environment of their villages where they have little to say and even less
to do, that upon arriving in Lautoka, a city with jobs that take in the young, they
appear disjointed and dysfunctional.
Over half of the population is Indian. They were brought here to work the cane
by the British five generations ago and most are denied land ownership. They have
kept their heritage and religion alive. They are a distinct and separate presence.
The two groups are near in number and get along well, considering. Sometimes,
however, friction surfaces where the two overlap; people have died, and the tourists
have backed off. Many of the programs on public television attempt to address
these issues. There is a popular call-in show that is always on the edge of civility,
but the Fijians are congenial and the Indians are polite.
John, Regina says, has this one interview show where he does whatever he
wants. As the crew sets up the room for the interview, we meet for the first time.
He has already talked to Caterina before she left for Suva, so he knows what I‟m
about. I tell him about my flying experience, and he says he will want to ask about
that, as well.
He‟s not as friendly as his wife. He‟s a tall, detached, Brit (I think), but he says
he is from the U.S.
57
He turns to the camera, “OK, are we on? OK, welcome. As you know, in this
show I interview interesting people who are passing through Fiji, the „Crossroads
of the Pacific.‟ You all know I‟m a sailor, and my guest, Peter here, is something
of a sailor himself. Welcome to the show.” “Thanks John, glad to be here.” “OK,
now, am I to understand that you sailed here alone from California?” “That‟s
right.” “OK, (he looks into the camera), now, you all know that we‟ve talked about
the difficulties associated with navigating among the islands, and out at sea. We‟ve
talked about the Celestial Navigation techniques, and the sextant, and how much
education and practice is required to master them. (He turns back to me). But I
understand that you know nothing about it?” “Uh, well, I‟ve read some, and, uh...”
“But it‟s true that you have no sextant on board?” “Yes, uh, that‟s true.” “OK,
now, tell us how you, without any knowledge, can find your way to Fiji from
California.”
“Well, John, the United States military has a series of satellites orbiting the earth,
and they transmit to a receiver that uses the signals from three or more to
triangulate, uh, to pinpoint your location. It‟s called GPS, or Global Positioning
System. You have a screen that shows your latitude, longitude, and altitude. Then,
if you have a chart, you can plot your location on it within a few hundred meters.”
“And when we first met, you were having some trouble with it, weren‟t you?”
“Uh, well, yeah, when we met I was stuck on a reef.” “Is that why you need to
know your altitude?” He stifles a laugh.
He goes on about that for awhile, about how the GPS gives the illusion of
accuracy, and about this “new breed” of sailor as well. I don‟t know who his
audience is, but he‟s not subtle. I say that GPS has never failed me in my
experience on the boat, and that the grounding was due to the chart being off a
small amount and my inattention at the helm.
“Some of the charts of those waters haven‟t been updated since Captain Bligh,”
I point out. “Have you ever heard of a man at the spreaders?” he retorts. He faces
the camera and says, “We‟ll leave that up to our viewers to decide.”
Though my wits have been dulled by solitude and sea, I warm to the fencing, or
maybe my face is just red. “I have used GPS for five years as an aviator, and it has
58
never let me down.” “Let‟s talk about that. I understand you have been flying
here on Fiji. Tell us about the aircraft.”
I am a certified paragliding instructor and I have given a few presentations at
local schools back home. I think I do a pretty good job of condensing when I say,
“What I have with me is a portable, foot launchable wing, called a paraglider.
Paragliders evolved out of the modern, square parachutes that are used for
skydiving. But they are more efficient, and with enough skill and knowledge, you
can stay aloft by using the air deflected up an incline, or better yet, air that is rising
through thermic activity. You can gain thousands of meters, and fly for hours. It‟s
a relatively new...” John cuts me off with “and so tell us, Peter, about your flight
on Fiji. Did I notice you came in using a crutch?” “Yea, but…”
Caterina comes back from Suva in time to meet us for dinner. John is friendly,
in his victory, and gets his charts out. He regales us with stories of their years spent
cruising; all of the primitive people they met and the strange ceremonies they
witnessed. The food is tasty. We look through photo albums from the sixties and
seventies. The men had long hair and no one wore clothes, no white guys, that is.
We are having a good time. I am glad to have Caterina back. I know she checked
the board at the yacht club.
Caterina wants to sail to Australia, that I‟ve known since day one with her. At
that time, I wasn‟t sure where Sea-Spray and I would end up, but I wanted Cat to be
happy, and so when our love was young, I gave her a gift. It was a home-made
ticket to Sydney aboard Sea-Spray, via New Caledonia, where she could speak
French and drink nice wine before the long passage. The ticket only had one
condition; it had an expiration date. And it has expired.
I am sailing to Vanuatu and I want Caterina to come with me to those Islands. I
was hoping John and Regina would get her excited to head that way.
They say it is a fantastic place, if you take your time, and get to know the people
(they look sternly my way). They met tribes who have never seen a white person
before. The men wear only penis wraps made out of leaves, and huge sharks lurk
in the waters. I try and interject; “I‟ll bet there are some beautiful beaches though,”
hoping to salvage something for Cat. “Hardly any. If that‟s what cruising means to
you, you should take the tourist motor shuttle to where „Blue Lagoon‟ was filmed.”
We did.
When Sea-Spray goes back into the water, Caterina‟s things are on board. The
boat looks great, $1,000.00 Fijian well spent, I think. Her cabin is cleaned,
organized, and provisioned for two.
59
I only expect it to take us four or five days to get to Vanuatu, if we can get
through the Mamanukas without spotting any nice beaches. The wind is a perfect
twenty-mph out of the north-east, so we strike the Yanmar right off the break.
Even Caterina is excited for the passage, and doesn‟t stamp her feet as I commit to
the pass leading out of the reefs. She still considers Sea-Spray a day-sailing boat
and is very quiet and serious.
We have learned that the Millennium yachts are leaving soon from the nearby
islands, and listen to the radio for them on our way out. I jump in to contact a
Spanish captain we had dined with to ease Cat‟s mind, and he tells his crew to
listen for us should we need any help.
July 06: 17deg45‟ south, 177deg east: SW Pacific Ocean
The first of the Millennium boats overtake us at midnight in the forty-mph
winds. Three of the big yachts are within one-hundred meters of Sea-Spray. They
all have matching masthead lights and glowing “Millennium” flags. The
luminescence from their bow-waves reaches to the tops of their lifelines.
Sea-Spray is doing eight and nine knots with too much sail and a lot of pride,
but they overtake us anyway. Caterina is down and out in her bunk from too much
sea and sun. I stay up all night; not for the racers (they all have radar, and a rested
and alert watch), but for my Sea-Spray. We‟re nearly on a dead run, and a jibe
would likely cost her a mast. She deserves someone to trim her out tonight. The
big boats are scaled to these seas better than she, but her grace is large enough.
The next day, the wind mellows some, and the next night, I turn south and give
her a more comfortable aft-of-beam reach on the port side, no longer racing.
Caterina awakes on the third day feeling better, and she makes some pasta and
vegetables. We watch the sunset and are happy to be together. When it grows
dark, we can still see the masthead lights of the Millennium fleet. I pass on the
coffee and slip comfortably into my bunk.
At oh-two-hundred, Caterina fumbles for a light switch and instead shuts off the
autopilot. She turns it back on, but it has lost the heading. She continues with her
cooking as the boat slowly falls off the wind.
Normally when Sea-Spray is unhappy, she wakes me slowly, with a flutter or a
yaw, but when an auto-pilot goes, it‟s deep sleep to full adrenal panic. The hard
jibe first rips out a preventer, then a running backstay. I rip my healing ligament
and blow an eardrum shouting for Cat to pull up. I bang my plum-like elbow
diving past her for the tiller.
Then in my confused state, I am unable to get any bearings. The mizzen
preventer has held, so that sail and the jib are backed to the wind, and so driving
Sea-Spray back. The main sail is full, opposing them, propelling us forward. I
can‟t tell if we‟re making good in any direction. The waves aren‟t boarding, but
the deck is spray-blown, the rigging moans, sails slat, and Caterina is shouting and
trying to hand me my harness. Sea-Spray swings around from near jibe to irons a
few times before settling under my confused guidance. The damage to her is
minimal, but Caterina‟s footsteps never sounded as light to me after that. I can‟t
help glancing now and then at the ripped up teak decking.
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On the fourth morning, we enter the beautiful Villa harbor, only an hour behind
the last of the Millennium boats. The shore is green with an attractive front of
buildings on each facet of each hillside. The water is extremely clear but it distorts
the sea-bed as a prescription lens might, and I cannot tell how deep it is.
There is a large yellow ball floating in an area corresponding to the check-in area
on a sketch of the harbor that I have. Yellow is the international color for
quarantine; the color of the flag you fly to request “practique.” Apparently in some
countries checking in can be a painful process. Bringing a boat into a foreign
country requires clearance from Customs, Immigration, the Department of
Agriculture, the Department of Health, and the local Harbormaster. Part of the
appeal of joining up with an organized tour of the globe, like Millennium, is to
smooth out procedures like this. So far, it has been smooth enough for me alone.
I circle the big yellow ball. It is very near the reef. I pass near a yacht with a
man on deck and ask him if the big yellow buoy is THE big yellow buoy. The
quarantine buoy. He doesn‟t speak English, so I ask Caterina to translate, but she
refuses. She feels it is a stupid question.
A small boat with four uniformed officials intercepts us before we tie off to the
big yellow buoy, so I disengage the prop and Sea-Spray drifts as they board at the
stern. They all politely take off their black soled shoes as they board, but no one
ties their launch to us. In the confusion of the crowded deck, no one notices, and
loose, it meanders very close to the reef. I still haven‟t dropped anchor, but I am
reluctant to take Sea-Spray close to it, and the Zodiac is not set up, so I ready the
kayak. They all go below, five people crammed in a cabin that is small for one,
and in Caterina‟s struggle to pass me the kayak paddle, she displaces a kilo of kava
that I had stashed under a sailbag. As she and the men talk about it, in French, I
retrieve their launch.
Their runabout is heavy, and it tows awkwardly behind the kayak. It takes me a
while to reel it in, meanwhile, Sea-Spray is still drifting and Caterina is determining
the fate of my kava. As I board, I am sweating all this and I knock one of the
men‟s shoes in the water. I quickly shake it and try to dry it on my shirt, but it is
still wet, and my shirt is ruined by too much black polish. Fuck! I squat in the
companionway with the shoe and an apology. Although the owner, a short man
with horizontal wrinkles running across his entire face, is obviously upset, he is
gracious when I offer him a small, waterproof flashlight in compensation.
I know I can‟t argue about the kava now but I still want to know why they are
taking it, so I ask the agriculture representative as he is busy bagging all the
vegetables up. He looks at Cat and says something to her in French. She listens
and tells me, “They don‟ wan any addickts on shore.” The customs officer, who
speaks both languages, looks quizzically at her, then at me. Then to me, in a
superior, French-accented English he says, “Vanuatu is the source of the original
and of the very best kava, and it is important that this inferior Fijian root not pollute
the indigenous plants.” I am flooded with relief.
I fill out the forms they hand me, then they leave us, formal in heavy wool,
patent leather, and visored military caps, and over-loaded in the small runabout. Cat
and I are eager to get to shore, so after we anchor, instead of inflating the Zodiac,
we double up in the kayak.
61
Port Villa, Vanuatu is a gem of a town, with both English and French colonial
flavor. It was overseen by both countries, a condominium, until l980.
The United States used it as a base in the Pacific during World War II. The
native people started to get restless when American soldiers exposed them to the
wealth always denied them by the two European countries.
A legend, or a religion, (the Jon Frum cargo cult) had promised them that a god
would rid the land of the two tyrants, spilling the wealth for all to share during the
melee. America‟s arrival in the Pacific Theatre, its relatively fair treatment of the
Islanders and its own Black soldiers, and the general chaos of the war combined to
satisfy that prognostication.
A lot of the old wealth was left behind; airplane and boat wrecks, obsolete
runways, pillboxes… The U.S. tried to sell the useful, movable equipment rather
than crate it up and ship it home, but there were no takers. The Vanuatuans, the
French, and the English all thought it would be abandoned and they could have it at
no cost. We showed them. We dumped it all in the ocean, in a place now known
as “Million Dollar Point.” Fifteen-foot long, one thousand pound Groupers live
there now. Divers come from all over the world to visit the submerged junkyard
and the friendly, intelligent fish.
Cat and I walk around town. I am still using one crutch, and I lean on it each
time we run into Caterina‟s friends from the Millennium cruisers. They are
Italians, Germans, Spaniards, and French, and after saying hello to me, they talk for
fifteen minutes or more in their own languages. There is plenty of gossip; it‟s hard
to live in the confined space of a boat without some friction. It‟s also hard on the
crew. When we go to use the international telephone, there are Millennium
crewmen dejectedly looking for another way home, unwilling to get back on the
boats.
I need to track down some spare parts, so I leave Caterina and flag down a taxi.
“Can you take me to a chandlery? Uh, marina? ……..store for the boat? Fixy
boaty?” He replies, “Aluminum?” “Thank you, no.” I find another. “Fixy
boaty?” “Aluminum?” I am in no hurry, so I walk around town. I change some
money. The coins are ringed by the words “Blong Republik Vanuatu.” “Blong?”
I find a bookstore and discover that the language is a form of Pidgin English
called Bislama. Apparently the Islanders have made the shouted slang of
frustrated, foreign sailors their national language. The word “diarrhea” translated
into Bislama is “Sit! Sit! Water! Water!” “Blong” is used in nearly every
sentence and denotes possession. I think I can get by without the book, being a
frustrated sailor myself, so I find another taxi. “Fixy boaty blong me?”
“Aluminum?” “OK, Yea, yea…”
The aluminum boat manufacturer is right next to a small boatyard run by an
American couple. I meet the woman, but she is overburdened with the demands of
the Millennium yachts. I decide to come back another time. I get back in the cab.
“Kava want blong me?” Nothing. “Go backy”. That works.
After setting up the Zodiak so each of us can come and go as we please, I meet
Caterina in an expensive French restaurant. I have a small taste of her wine. After
dinner, she wants to visit with friends at a dockside bar, so I say I‟ll stop by later, or
we will just meet aboard Sea-Spray.
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I track down a kava bar that is up the hill a short way out of town, and using the
kayak paddle as a crutch, flag a taxi down. The driver wants to wait for me. “No
good, please!” I send him away. The bar is outside a cheap hotel used by foreign
backpackers, but it is winter and there are only dark Islanders around now. The
young man behind the plywood stand peers intently at me through his one eye as he
mixes the ground root in a bowl. It looks to me like he lost the other to a virus, so I
make a point to keep my hands away from my own eyes. He asks, “First kava?”
“No.”
Kava is not a treat to drink, tasting like dirty dishwater, but the effect is a mild
and pleasant intoxication. My mind wanders around getting nowhere as the sun
sets. The small groups of people around me talk quietly and watch as the Kava
takes me. I don‟t feel any threat, but I don‟t feel like trying to talk, so I coast down
the hill to the shore, enjoying comfort in my hip joint, perfecting the paddle-crutch
technique. I take the kayak out into the calm waters of the harbor and float for a
while. I sit on Sea-spray and smoke cigarettes. The wind is calm, and my smoke
rings stay together.
When Caterina boards, the talk amongst her cruiser friends has made her excited
about the islands. She has even picked out some anchorages.
July 12: 16deg22‟ south, 167deg42‟ east: Malakula
This was not one of them. We didn‟t want to stop here. Both weather and sun
conspire against us, seeming to anticipate our every move and thwart us. We have
a hard time making chosen anchorages, and instead have ended up twice in
unexpected places after quick decisions, like this sheltering bay in Malakula. We
are thankful for relatively calm water, but wonder at the foreboding feel hanging so
close. For this bay, the local cruising guide warns of very aggressive sharks and, in
the book‟s amusing and unsubtle accuracy, “Cockroaches as big as helicopters.”
Not recommended. Because of the sharks, it‟s the first time I don‟t dive in to see
how the anchor lays, because of the cockroaches, the dingy will not be used.
It is a big deep bay with small whitecaps in the center, but where we are only
catspaws move about and the air stills occasionally to fill instead with ominous
insect buzzing. The shore‟s hills are patched with plantation-style clear-cuts where
fast growing palms grow. The tracts look long abandoned though, and no people or
buildings show. There is nothing else around but an old copra steamship wreck
(which I boarded for a moment, until I saw it was full of webs and hives), and the
remains of a wharf where the natives perhaps still bring cattle once a year from far
inland to kill and load, (which accounts for the circling killer sharks). There is no
beach and I don‟t plan to set foot on shore, but I do take the kayak out to
investigate a fresh water-way marked on the chart.
On the river bats, as big as and the same shape as chickens, fly over in groups
of three and four as I make my way down a snaking stretch in the kayak. Cricket,
frog, and loon-like sounds fill the air, except when a coconut or a pig crashes
through the growth, then there is a second of silence. I think I can hear men
occasionally shout back and forth across the canyon ahead, as if encircling some
quarry. Wasps motor back and forth across the river, occasionally bumping into
me. They are bright yellow with legs dangling an inch below their distended
63
abdomens. The trunks of the giant banyan trees stand below the thick canopy, sent
from there strangely upside-down and close. I take a picture and the sound is
obscene. I spray on some more repellent and quietly dip my paddle in. The water is
slow, green-brown and clear. My interaction with this world is mediated through
my plastic kayak and my deet-covered skin. My lungs suck air through filtering
teeth, my eyes are suspicious and ready to close.
The undergrowth thins and the river gets shallow and wider a few miles up,
losing its perfect scale as I approach what must be an abandoned village or
encampment. I am quiet as can be as I slip through to the canyon beyond. I hug
the wall that puts me in shadow, until I stupidly stretch and tear a web with the
point of my bow. I then stupidly dig in a panicky backpaddle that spins me around
to where the spider might be (unlucky man!), and my stern pivots so that it touches
the bank. This displaces some stones, they splash, and my illusion of invisibility is
gone. So is the magic. I am no longer only a virtual intruder, so I trade silence for
speed, and paddle hard all the way out to the bay.
Once I was in the Mission Mountain Wilderness north of Missoula, Montana,
wrapped immobile in a mummy-bag as a twelve-foot tall grizzly bear perused my
backpack which was hung on a tree limb twenty yards away. He was gentle with it,
only tearing a few holes when his paws found zippers too dainty. He only ate a bar
of soap, (my food was higher up the tree).
I never unzipped, until he was long gone, then, with tears pouring out and my
voice cracking I banged a pot against a pan for fifteen minutes shouting and
moaning for them all to stay away.
The next time I went camping I carried a 44mag. I felt in charge of my destiny,
but even after a week in the woods I felt like an outsider with that gun.
To move through each place equipped appropriately is an art I haven‟t
perfected. I feel out of place everywhere I go well-prepared, and far too immersed
when I am not. I find no relief at the mouth. The sky is charcoal grey and the
water is black.
This dark bay was once Port Sandwich, and still carries that name on some of the
charts. To Captain Cook, it was an important and sheltering bay. He gave it that
Earl‟s name, Sandwich, the same name he gave all of Hawaii, too. It was deep
enough for his great boat. Port Sandwich has long been abandoned by white men,
though; the natives having been left alone to call it whatever they want.
We eat a quiet dinner as our world darkens beyond my imagination. Caterina is
unhappy. I am unsettled, unsleeping, and I weigh anchor in the middle of the night
without consulting, or even waking, Caterina. When I start the Yanmar I see her lift
her head, but she doesn‟t say anything. My mouth is tender as I chew the first root
of the new cycle. The land is invisible to my eyes but my other senses, some
unnamed, feel it, and I use three-quarter throttle, pretty sure we will not ground,
sure I can‟t spend another minute here.
Clear of it, the wind direction makes it a close haul to Ambrym Island as the
dawn shows a threat where we bear, but I am determined to follow my intent, if it is
indeed my own, and I force Sea-Spray to point at the weather I see.
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Don Juan said that “intent” is key to find the way to the “path of knowledge,”
and I search for some intent that I can gather in. The Christian leaning clichés of
Alcoholics Anonymous say one must give up one‟s will to a higher power. I could
never decide if the two were mutually exclusive or not, but beating into this wind
feels purposeful, and if the will is not mine, it is my boat‟s, for she points so high,
that four hours later, without tacking, we fetch the lee of the island, and the sails are
useless. We motor around to the northeast where I expect twenty-knots right in our
face, but it stays calm.
Our chart of the waters off Ambrym Island is a beautiful French map. It was
drawn in the late 1800‟s. There are no updates listed, and I am confused until I
relocate the longitudinal values, which as published, were ten miles off.
We can only see the foothills, but the chart shows a volcano directly behind
them in close curves. Most charts show land only as blank and featureless- all the
same to floating craft. This one reveals a surveyor with a knowledge that the sailor
will disembark here, and stumble on steep topographies in search of game or some
spice. There is more detail on the Island-side of the chart, and everywhere wet the
water is simply deep.
The seabed drops sharply offshore, and we motor, parallel to the shore, only
twenty meters out. The sand is black and receding, and white boulders startle me,
as they jump out from this background. We see a dugong, a sea-cow with a walrus
face. He is as big as Sea-Spray.
Then the wind builds ahead, just when I had decided it wouldn‟t, so we turn
around for a passed anchorage in front of a small village three miles behind. It
looked better when we didn‟t need it. There is a swell and waves are breaking in
the small cove. It‟s very deep. When Caterina releases the anchor on my signal, it
free-falls with all the chain and ten meters of rode without touching bottom. I reset
it, but are too close to shore, the holding is poor, and I know it will be all over for
Sea-Spray if the wind shifts and finds me inattentive or slow. The rocks are broken
small and worn smooth, but her sides would cave in with her own weight in an east
wind.
I am taking a terrible chance to stop here, but I think that my boat and I are
becoming entranced and absorbed by these islands that make up Vanuatu, and in
spite of my efforts to stay aloof, I help her set the hook. I am sure something has
brought me here with a purpose.
We go ashore and find a few huts of bamboo-supported corrugated tin. The
ground is dirty-black soil and in our path, there is a dead thing covered with flies.
The people seem listless. They look dirty and are dumb. They are sitting and
standing on a broken and coverless concrete slab in front of the largest structure, an
old bunker from WWII. They muster only a dull stare in our direction. They part
away from us enough so that we can look inside. I mumble a hello, but they still
don‟t respond. I‟m listening for a clue as to why I have been brought here, hearing
nothing. The bunker is a store without a refrigerator, so it has nothing we need.
We obviously haven‟t been brought here for a cold drink. We walk the shoreline,
then up, and inland on a cattle track, skirt another old bunker, and come back on the
south side of the cove. Here, the beach is smaller smoother pebbles and there are
naked children bathing.
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A Melanesian man introduces himself importantly, and in a mealy-mouthed
mix of French and English, asks us to dinner. He is an Adventist priest and these
are his people. I dismiss his invitation with a rude wave, and Caterina follows me
as I walk away.
Again I pull up the anchor in the middle of the night. Caterina never lifts her
head. It is blowing offshore and I am able to move us under sail, without using any
of the dwindling diesel, but, tacking eight times it takes six hours to go just twelve
miles. I drop anchor and leave the kayak for the still unmoving Cat. I wear
goggles and use a dry bag as a float as I swim to shore, all the while looking for
sharks in the clear water.
A young man with a mild, blemish-free face, empty also of any meaningful
expression, watches me walk out of the water. I say hello and he answers the same.
He knows some English, and tells me his name is John. I tell him that I want to
climb the volcano. “Longwe,” he says; long ways away. He says I will need a
guide. I‟ve read this in my guidebook and I ask him where to find “Michael.” “He
is in Villa.” I am still limping, and he again says “Longwe. Volcano longwe.” He
is going to the village in the other direction. I ask if I can tag along. “Me come
also? OK?” “Yes, fine.” I don‟t know why I think I am better understood when I
mangle the language. I don‟t know why I force myself into his life. I stop to put
on my shoes, a shirt, and a cap. I rub on some sunscreen and spray on some
repellent. He looks at my shoes. We pass some sculptures, ten-foot tall tam-tams
carved from breadfruit trees; long faces, Easter Island-like, hollowed out with neat
slits vertical in the midsection. Beside them, prone and rotting, are others. He tells
me they are used to communicate from village to village.
John worked in a troupe, its members gathered up from the different islands of
Vanuatu, that share Vanuatu‟s cultural heritage through song and dance as far away
as Australia. We walk on companionably, and he warms up to clueing me in. There
is a school up on a hill facing seaward and I climb up for a look. The yard is trim
grass with big trees and the buildings are handsome painted stone. Some pretty
girls in dresses walk shyly over and as I doff my cap and bow, they giggle.
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Intelligent John tells me a man from the U.S., the Peace Corps, runs this school. I
never meet him, but later I would drop off some markers and crayons I had brought
along. The girls I gave them to were happy; they were making signs for a parade.
We continue to the village where I buy warm drinks and share Marlboros with
the men sitting around out front. They ask me to drink kava with them at dusk. “I‟ll
be there.” Steadfast John is continuing on to his own village and I tell him I would
like to come along, if he doesn‟t mind. “Very longwey. Way upmountain.” “I am
fine. I can make it” I whine.
The guidebook mentions this village. It‟s up five-hundred meters and is home to
the most powerful Magician/Chief in all the Islands. He can‟t actually make the
volcano erupt, or keep it from erupting, but he can direct the lava and ash so they
miss the villages.
Magic! This is what drew me to Castaneda‟s Don Juan Matus, not the peyote
dreams of my drugged generation. Sober, I feel in a proper state of mind to
encounter some unknown, and the blood in my legs is happily flowing. But
halfway there, when I bring the subject up, John tells me that the chief has been
dead for six months. (This is not the first time I have been let down by
printing/publishing lag-time, and it won‟t be the last.) John‟s father is now the
Chief. He is a lawyer, too, and working in Villa on a case. A little pain intrudes as
we climb, and I reach for my root as we near the crest.
John‟s village is beautiful. It is on top of the big foothill, and there are views on
all sides. To the northeast, I can see my boat, and to the south is the cloud-shrouded
volcano. There are well kept traditional grass huts, and open faced, if not
welcoming, people in manufactured clothes. John seems to ask permission for me
to enter the village, and the people seem to acquiesce. The ground is even-colored,
short-cut grass. John shows me his house, the outside of a house, anyhow. Then,
we go around to the back and he shows me his garden. We spend a lot of time
there. It looks to be fighting back jungle on all sides, but is obviously visited and
weeded daily. He gives me a nice fat, potato-colored, carrot-shaped root. For sure
it is his garden.
I ask him where the kava grows, as I have never seen a living kava plant. “Very
longwey.” He shows me some picked kava, hanging to dry, though the Vanuatuans
don‟t dry it completely, as is done in Fiji. He says he will bring me some later, and
beckons me to the very top of the hill.
He looks for my reaction as we near the highest structure. It is an ugly, blue
cinderblock church with mud all around and topped with tin. “We will open it
tomorrow with a celebration.” Ahah!
I can only think of the magic that is gone. I‟m not sure how well he can read a
white man‟s face. There is grass and bamboo piled next door, the remnants of what
was here before, a “community center” where the Chiefs would meet before
Christianity had enveloped all. I wonder if this was where the magic was done.
There are a bunch of small tam-tams amongst the heap.
I ask about them and John says they had been inside. I start to pull them out, one
by one, clearing the mud from each. I ask him what will happen to them, and
whether or not I could have them.
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He is hesitant; we both know that they are not his to give. “You can trade for
others in the other village. These are rotten.” “Not too bad. I like these. I will give
you my shoes for them.” I gather some up, until I have ten or so.
I know that he wants the shoes. He takes the carvings and walks around the
village to the other side, so no one will know. I wait in a level courtyard on a log
bench, smoking, chewing kava, and untying my shoes. He meets me there. He
tells me to leave them on, for now. We walk down through the village and John
stops when we see a man. He is barefoot and dirty from working in the soil, but is a
fit and handsome old guy. They talk, and then John, shame in his face, introduces
him as his father. I say I am very pleased, and tell him his son has been very kind to
me. I don‟t ask him how his case in Villa is going.
Shoeless, I skirt all humans to arrive on shore near Sea-Spray, my salt-soaked
feet cut-up and blistered, the rest of me dirty and tired, but with my ten treasures in
hand.
There are three yachts anchored near her that were not here before. In fact, we
haven‟t seen any since Villa. I yell out to Caterina who paddles to shore to pick me
up. When she sees what I have, she is surprised, because I have never shown any
interest in the cultural relics of the Islands before, but she likes the carvings.
She also says that she is not pleased about having neighbors, but that she will
dine aboard with friends on one, and tomorrow we are both invited to another. I
clean up for the kava ceremony, remembering that women are not welcome. But,
Cat is not fond kava anyhow, and apparently I am not invited to dinner, so I set up
the Zodiac for her. I paddle to the village and upon reaching shore, am welcomed
by a small crowd of children. I find one to put in charge and give him the paddle,
after getting an “OK” from some adults further up. The kids go nuts on the plastic
yellow boat, but it is indestructible, and after the initial fracas it squirts out, well
handled.
John doesn‟t show, but the five other kava drinkers are friendly towards me.
This is not a formal ceremony, this is recreation. It‟s more like drinking beer
with the boys than drinking the blood of Christ in church. By day, these men are
building some tourist bungalows for the elusive chief, who is away in the south,
and this is how they relax after a day‟s work. They don‟t ask me about America
or about sailing, and I don‟t ask them about Magic. In an attempt to find a subject
to converse about I look at what they have crafted, but the new pole and hay
structures seem half-heartedly constructed, I think I would avoid them should a
typhoon pass near, and I can‟t think of anything to say. I just look out over the
water as the men mutter at each other. We become a little more animated after our
first bowl and talk about the plant. I deride the Fijian stuff and then remember the
bowl in Hawai. “Maybe not even real Kava up there, hahehe.” As the sun sinks
lower there is a small procession of children that shambles down the road inland
and then it uncertainly circles back towards us. The men become uncomfortable.
The schoolgirls have used the crayons I gave them the day before to make signs
pleading with their papas not to drink kava. “Papa yu no drink tumas kava,
tinkabout me.” I wonder if the guy from the Peace Corps put them up to it. They
shyly parade past us.
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I drink too much kava, (it‟s different than chewing) but realize it as I move to
stand, and sit awhile longer. I get back to Sea-Spray at midnight, and sleep through
Caterina‟s later arrival.
July 22: 16deg13‟ south, 168deg06‟ east: Ambrym Island
Caterina makes it an hour into the lava before giving into the heat. The walk of
fifteen-hundred feet, through five miles of jungle, has beaten her up. Now the sun
beats down, absorbed by the black, hard lava, and cruelly shimmers to about head
high. I am filled with the joy of walking again, aided by some over-the-counter
help, so I tell our guide, Isaiah, to pick up the pace. “Volcano still longwe. Sure?”
“Yes”. The exhausted Cat waits.
As the two of us ascend, the terrain changes from etched limestone and sparse
trees at the edge of the lava, to small islands of brush amidst black lava flows,
to…nothing.
I am seriously considering the flying possibilities, because I can feel the trades
slide around this face smoothly, the thermals rolling up sweetly, and I feel so
unsatisfied… then, as we reach the peak, the volcano vents, and Isaiah and I are hit
with a deadly-to-nylon rotor of smoky, hot, unbreathable air. It‟s apparently not a
good idea to fly here.
At the top, just standing is impossible for me. I have to force myself to crawl to
the edge as I am swept with vertigo for the first time in my life. I think it must be
from crashing my paraglider on Fiji. The cornice hanging over the activity is not
even as solid as wind-blown snow, however, so it may just be common sense. I
peer into the crater until the clouds lift for a moment, revealing the red hint of a
cauldron. I quickly back away then, vertigo swelling, and tell myself I‟m trying,
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that‟s all I can do. I wait for a break in the rumbling, and cough out a “Lets bolt.”
We start down and when a cloud of black magic surrounds us, we run.
We are both still nervously chuckling when we get to Caterina, forty-five
minutes later.
That night, Cat and I dine on board an older couple‟s boat. They are from
Germany and are with the Millennium fleet. The Millennium boats get a week to
cruise the Islands before they move to Australia in the next race. Unique among
Millennium, Deiter and his wife are sailing a forty-five footer with no help. The
boat does have an electric mainsail and three foresails on rollers, also electric. The
three of them gossip in the roomy cockpit while I study the deck. Deiter is a fit
sixty-year old with strong arms. He comes forward as I survey the automatic
whisker poles. He says, “I know vot your tinking. At votts da point it es no
lonkerr sailingk?”
“No, I‟m not, but I am thinking how different it must feel, sailing on this boat.”
Deiter shows me around the boat. He talks about it with some distaste, saying it‟s
the slowest boat in the Millennium fleet. He is modest. They don‟t push it too
hard, and even with all the high tech gear, it has had very few failures. Neither of
us can keep our eyes off of Sea-Spray, though, just off the plastic port side. She is
such a beautiful boat. He says, “She vil alveas take you ent ef you lest efcare forl
hear.”
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July 25: 15deg22‟ south, 167deg08‟east: Espiritu Santo
I tell Caterina that I will only take a look on this first pass, but as I stand, I see
the way in. Our timing and position are perfect, so I take us hard to our port. SeaSpray responds and we are committed. Cat curses me in Italian. The Yanmar is at
thirty-five hundred, the main and jib are full, and so, with the current, we are going
too well, but I want the maneuverability. I hold the tiller in place a moment, and
then, not too fast (to avoid stalling it), I swap sides and we slip in between the
rocks.
One breaker slaps her flank before we are in, and the jibe is harsh, but after that
the water is glass-smooth and the sails settle easily on the other side. We have
entered a lagoon on the Island of Espiritu Santo. I put the throttle on idle and let
Caterina take over. As we brush by each other, each bound to our own tasks, we
kiss quickly. I pull out the anchor chain, and when Cat finds us a spot, I throw it
out on her signal. She has nicely put us right across from the mouth of a river.
After she stops the motor, she opens the heavy engine room hatch and starts to
untie the Zodiac‟s outboard, which is stored next to the diesel. I lower the main,
pump up the Zodiac, and fill the outboard with premix, while she grabs towels and
soap. I lift and mount the engine to the tired inflatable. We jump in to the semiviable conveyance and buzz across the lagoon, settling ourselves to reduce the draft
of the little dinghy. The breeze flowing out from land leaves the exhaust behind and
brings tales of a slow, warm winter death from ahead.
Our goal is a spring, two or three kilometers upriver. The sun is still up, but
won‟t be for long. We enter the mouth. The river is spanned by bridges put up in
the forties, an old Dodge shoring up one bank, and a few cows tamping it down.
The water gets clearer as we progress, and the jungle deepens. The riverbed
changes from black muck seen through murky green, to light-colored sand seen
through glass. Where the water is deeper, it is tinged blue. Lily-like pads hide the
better parts, but I can hear the bell like Pavlov‟s dog.
We reach the source of the river. It‟s an impossibly blue hole, surrounded by
giant banyan trees. The blue is perfectly clear, giving an illusion of shallowness,
but when I dive, my ears pop full of water for the first time in my life and I still
can‟t touch the bottom. It‟s the first fresh water wash we‟ve had in almost two
weeks. It feels so staged. Ten feet below the surface I drink it in. I want to breathe
it in too, get it into my veins. To float with the fishes. I want to morph into some
being less driven. Wash my body inside-out..
As the sun sets my eyes are slow to adjust to the growing darkness and on the
way back I gash the dinghy on some U.S. steel, and we race the deflation across the
dark lagoon.
We spend a few days in the lagoon near the blue hole. There is a small resort
nearby, with just one other guest. At an outdoor phone on the empty grounds, we
order dinner. We breakfast on what is available early in the morning, and we eat
that right after the call, then have our day.
The chef brings fresh ingredients for the evening on his way to work. The
cuisine for the last meal of the day is French. So is the conversation. Many of the
Europeans I have met avoid English when they can. It‟s hard for them to master
the subtleties, so they dismiss it as an unsophisticated language. Cat talks with our
tablemates in French.
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Jack, or “Jacques,” isn‟t a guest after all, he owns the place. He‟s about thirtyyears old, made his money on the Continent trading stock, and now he is planning
the future of this lagoon. He is also trying to convince Caterina to stay on. In
French. I don‟t care. I go and talk to the kitchen help. John, the cook and
manager, has lived on Espiritu Santo his whole life. His job pays well and he says
he doesn‟t miss his village in the interior. The resort is modest, but John cares for it
well, with the help of two dark, young women.
One of them is a tall Namba from Malakula. Her nose is pierced and her veins
press out against the skin of her upper arms, but in places unfamiliar to my eyes. I
am used to the arms of gym-bred American women. The edges of her muscles are
sharply taught, in a subtle way not attainable on a Nautilus machine. I have
watched her fishing with a spear. She is quiet and quick, dignified and deadly.
Also, her front teeth have been ground to points. She looks well equipped to go up
against the local demon, “Saratau.” I want her to take me into the interior, teach
me, protect me, show me magic. I move closer. I really want to smell her breath.
After that, I slip out the back of the hotel room and kayak to Sea-Spray, leaving
Cat the Zodiac. There is a new moon, and winter-like cumulus clouds. Their
undefined edges and fast pace, reveal the planet‟s spin. I imagine being far out at
sea, alone with Sea-Spray. I want her to take me into it, protect me, show me
magic. Just her.
July 27: 15deg30‟south, 167deg08‟east: Bougainville
We all make our way to the south side of the Island where the big town,
Bougainville, Louganville, or Santo is. We pick up a mooring at a resort on an
adjacent isle. I trade the kayak for Sea-Spray‟s mooring fees and my share of the
bungalow at a resort. The proprietor is a greedy Australian, but he accepts my offer
for a week‟s mooring and half of the rent, so Cat is the only one putting up cash.
Caterina and I putter around the rest of the Big Island for seven days. We have
a nice time and Cat doesn‟t seem to notice that I don‟t meet her eye in the
passionate moments. I replace some rigging wire for Sea-Spray, service the
Yanmar, pack the Zodiac, and stow sails on Caterina‟s bunk. I pick up the
repaired auto-pilots from the airport, and customs has sent my gun as well, but not
the bullets; can‟t send them by plane. Caterina will try and bring them to Sidney
when she leaves. After painful negotiations, she is bound back to Efate, and from
there to Sidney, by jet. She jetted to Fiji from the Marquesas as well, but it hurts
me to be the reason for this new compromise she must make. It hurts me that my
feelings for her are gone.
I have told Caterina that it is because I have no liferaft that she cannot make this
passage with me and Sea-Spray. It is an easy rationalization because it is true- as
far as it goes.
I tell Cat I will see her in OZ. I weigh the anchor alone, and Sea-Spray and I
make sail, just the two of us, destination unknown.
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Part Two
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August 06: 13deg44‟ south, 159deg51‟ east: SW Pacific
Five mornings out from Espiritu Santo a deep haze has sucked all of the color
from my world. It has been a gradual process, blue-to-yellow-to-gray, and nothing
distinct like a march of clouds stands out to help me mark the change. I am no
longer able to see out of my glasses with the spindrift flying but the wind hasn‟t
blown the murk away and the darkness has fallen down by noon. The temperature
of this air and water mix matches my own, so the wind brings no noticeable
discomfort. I am used to breathing salt. I attribute the uneasy feeling to my
thoughts more than to the state of the sea and sky, there is unquestionably an
uneasiness in my place, and a slight frustration at the pace that imprisons me here.
The water below seems deeper and it‟s as if there is no land anywhere. The haze
that fills the sky has weighed it down so that empty space is close- just beyond
sight. Perhaps the temperature is dropping some, and the wind is up. Perhaps it is
so long since a long solo passage for me.
It is time to decide to point North towards the Solomons or fall off of the wind to
New Caledonia or Australia, or continue on to the Torres Straight. World Cruising
Routes doesn‟t paint a pretty picture of the conditions that greet passagemakers
who flirt with the equator, which is to our North, in this longitude, and World
Cruising Handbook and other sources suggest that depending on the political mood
in the Solomons the value of a human life can be stripped down to zero at anytime.
Cornell highly recommends New Caledonia, to the South, but I can‟t afford the
entry and anchor fees.
I have two of the original color charts remaining from San Francisco, one
showing my future in the West Pacific on a scale that allows me to cover Australia
with one hand, and another showing the Solomon Islands in some detail. This one I
scan unsuccessfully for towns that connect to my notes. I am afraid to open the
tube with the copied charts in it, as in Sea-Spray in heavy weather they soon
dissolve to uselessness.
I ponder the side-track Solomons and the obstacle
Australia with no interest. I even consider the winds that would help us to make a
big loop around the Pacific finally raising Alaska from the horizon. I have a good
rudder and an electronic tiller that only lacks a heading.
Sea-Spray has changed sails and now wears her smallest working sails. I have a
few new bruises and small cuts from the lurching when she slams into the now
steeper waves but I have covered the auto-pilot and have a spare as well, and I have
a well stocked galley. We have been making decent mileage, more each day from a
slow start, and have traveled 135mi since last noon, but progress is harder to
appreciate with no goal to measure it against. There are some steep waves but they
don‟t oppose us so I leave the Autohelm as is, safely covered, and put on a
windbreaker. It slaps and buzzes and throws me of balance when I try to stand. I
watch the masts shudder with an out of sequence wave. There are small sets of
these steep waves that move like oversized cat‟s-paws without the usual
accompanying gusts, or at least none that I‟ve noticed, but I have goosebumps now
where the wind slips under my noisy jacket. Hmmn.
At dusk the gusts do touch my boat and I, and it isn‟t long after that the masts
are bare from a quarter of the way up, and I am terrified by the blasts that seem to
blow down onto, more than across, the decks. A tropical depression has the
barometer lower than I‟ve ever seen. The seas are not much more than ten feet
high, but nine of the ten feet is straight up or overhanging giving us nothing to rise
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up upon. They go right through us. I oppose the sails and replace the electrics with
bungees as I taste the metallic taste of my bitten lip. I see teeth in the waves as
Sea-Spray turns flank-on to wait it out.
Attempting to recover my balance after a lurch, a face-full of sea hits me with
its force and I throw-up a mouthful of a recent meal of cabbage along with the
swallowed seawater. I am not sea-sick but dizzy with an acid- stomach in the
aftermath of adrenaline from the sail change, so the contents of my stomach have
been waiting at the door. While working aft the bow was grazed with a floating
blob of sea six feet around that flew over the deck without touching anything.
There is no pattern to discern, no regularity to make sense out of, sometimes I can
see clearly when the tops of the waves are not blown away, up to a hundred feet
away, and at other times I am blind to my own thoughts.
When all is pitch black with the night, I can feel the gusts hit my ears with a
push or a pull on my drums before I hear them. The cabin is one moment a
vacuum, the next a pressure chamber.
A few storm-building hours later we are hove-to under tiny stormsails, under
steadier, stronger, Force 11 winds now, under the steep plunging jaws of huge
breaking waves. When the ten-minute rogues hunt us down, we pitch up, forty-five
degrees before they start to sweep the bow and Sea-Spray loses her momentum,
and we make sternway sliding down from the crests and for a moment she seems to
lose her buoyancy.
The seas are toying with us. The realization that we are in deep trouble builds in
me like a retch with no orifice. I need to help Sea-Spray make a move. I need to do
something. This will not end well for us using this method of coping. Heaving-to
is an act of defiance, chosen when I still felt a modicum of confidence for my boat;
a stance she is in no position to take against this monster. We cannot run because
the waves are too steep, we are digging deep into them now. I felt the force on the
rudder when I attached the fifteen shock-cords. I could steer for twenty minutestops. Our only option is laying-to under bare poles, but I am too scared to go out
and take the sails down.
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I‟m below, cowering, indecisive, sitting beam-wise, bracing with every limb,
half-hoping the sails will just give way and shred, when we get clawed by a team of
wind and sea, and we end up sideways to the waves in one set, Sea-Spray digs in a
rail as the sails slat, tear, and do shred, in a few seconds, just as I pictured it, but
unpictured, we go upside down, fast and hard, one hundred-twenty degrees or
more, and I slam into the cabin top on the opposite side.
Six tons over and she pops back up like a punching clown, and I am on the other
hammock, and the cabin has been violently rearranged. Our first roll-over. I guess
that my life is soon to be over as well.
Through the howling roar I hear a new crashing. I crack open the hatch to see a
mess that was the mizzen-mast, its remains raking back and forth on the wind and
sea swept deck. I close it again and am swept by a nauseous anguish. When one is
alone with no witness, emotions take their toll and then leave like a star who
appears at an opening of an unreleased play, but if the play has opened badly, and
there is another act, there is no choice.
I crawl out with flashlight in my teeth and cable-cutters in my hand. There will
be no clipping in with the menacing tangle of spars and rigging. I close up the
companionway and with a winch handle and nail; lock myself out into the fury. The
shrieking moan fills my head and the salt takes my sight. I need all of my
appendages to hang on and so I don‟t think I can do a thing.
As I grope for the bit of mizzen to cut the wire that is holding the mess to the
main, the wire holding it up and out of my grasp except for when it swings down at
me like an oversized baseball bat, there, reaching up, for a moment, I do see. Aft
and down, the lower half of mizzen-mast, boom, and bits of sail are dragging half
on the lee and half over the nearly submerged cock-pit, caught up with stays on the
tiller, looking forward and up, past the suspended mizzen-top that threatens me, the
main-mast has gone at the spreaders, the broken top still attached and flailing at the
rest, its boom shows an open fracture, raw wood sticking out of the torn tissue that
was the sail, and it is all ripped from the mast in front. Every single spar of SeaSpray‟s is broken and swinging crazily.
The thought that every single spar has snapped... I gape for just a moment,
thinking maybe to give it up, and miss the chance to reach a handhold. I end up a
parody of a high-wire walker whom has lost his balance, flinging flashlight and
cutters as my arms reach for balance like a mime in an invisible box; a box that has
disappeared.
I fail to regain my balance and am thrown overboard into a tangle of rigging on
the lee side that saves me from an unswimmable sea. I suck salt, and feel no
resistance as I push sickeningly into the deep with one thrusting leg but I get a hand
on the toerail. Sea-Spray dips down so I can get the leg over, and then amidst the
melee she lifts me out. My limbs are intact, and I know this because I use all the
power I have in every one to grapple at the deck. I was not so serious about giving
up after all.
With brief contemplation washed away by a brief glimpse of our death, my
focus returns. Gulping a mix of air and sea I grope my waist pouch for more tools
and go back to the task of cutting away sails and spars, now with a grim
determination. I slash at the sail-cloth with a knife and then when this is gone in a
gust I lock Vise-Grips on the turnbuckles to methodically unbolt each at its base.
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With no cutters this is the only way to do it with one hand, the other is clenched
hard on a rail. If my muscles were strong enough to break my own bones they
would have shattered them all. When the last turnbuckle is free, the cables drag
and I hoist the wood that was the main over the stump of mizzen-mast that still
stands, and it all clears the rudder, clears me, rips a brass horn from two-inch teak
and disappears into the storm with the auto-pilot and more chunks of teak in tow. I
lash down the tail of the broken boom on a cabin cleat, and crawl on my belly
forward to secure the other end.
That done I am on the cabin, coughing, my arms spread to reach secure
handholds, my legs flying back and forth, waves mashing me against her, when I
sense a rhythm amidst the violent chaos. One simulated violent act of love before I
die. Sea-Spray lies “doggo,” hiding not quite beam-on between the huge waves.
She has conceded all but her buoyancy to the beast. But no portholes have been
broken in, and the hatches are still secure.
A faint hope rises as I realize that might be enough, and I just leave her to it. I
pluck the nail and crawl back to my own cowering struggle in the slightly less
brutal world below. All night long she fends off the slamming walls of water for
us; yielding well past ninety degrees of roll, but she regains her poise each time.
With the weight aloft gone, and no sails to dampen the motion, each cycle is only a
few seconds, and I keep my vigil all night long, feeling as if I am riding the
“Zipper” in a long abandoned amusement park. I await the unrecoverable
movement that will signal the end of us as my neck muscles tire and my helmet
takes blows.
In the morning, the sun rises to our still clenched teeth. By midday, it is calm
enough so that I can finally strap myself to the bunk and sleep. I strap down my
legs, then my torso, and then my chest, leaving only my head moving... no, no, no,
no...
Aug O8: 13deg south, 153deg east: S. Solomon Islands
It‟s dark again when I awaken—dark still. The storm is gone leaving a still ugly,
but less brutal sea. Sea-Spray needs only a few minutes of pumping. Was it a
dream? I open the hatch to see what‟s left outside, but there is a large bird resting
on the two-foot tall mizzen-mast, and I hesitate. It‟s all black in an all black
background, some kind of shorebird, unhappy to see me. I take a picture, just in
case it is an apparition, just in case this is magic, but I stay below. In the reality of
my own survival, my first magic-killing thought is that if it is a shorebird, it doesn‟t
have a chance. Sucked up and out to sea by the storm it won‟t live long out here. I
leave it be and continue the ride, now with the company of a condemned bird.
I spent a few hours believing I would die. It‟s different from a flash of
lightning, a near miss on the freeway, or a short struggle with a violent wind shear
in a hang-glider. It‟s more debilitating. If there was any magic, I missed it. I sit on
the bunk and inventory the losses inside.
Sea-Spray moves awkwardly; stunned and injured. I sit on the bunk all night.
At dawn, the bird is still on board. I dig out a backup GPS, unable to find my
primary, and plot our position from below.
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We are closer to the Solomon Islands, but Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea is
the closest place that has facilities and puts the wind on aft. We still have a rudder
and most of the main mast to work with. I go out for the first time in two days, step
around our passenger, who looks to be a raven, to throw some line up around the
spreader hardware to help support what remains of our remaining spar. I put up a
small staysail and go below for another day.
I finally get back to the job of helping Sea-Spray to sail in a direction of choice,
and with what is left to work with, I find it a challenge. These seas are unrelated to
the moderate wind. They are sent from another source, and though less than three
meters, still have a short, opposing chop that confounds Sea-Spray. I have to get
creative to help her sail. With only the one forestay to work with, I can‟t raise a
steadying main, and so she rolls and sidesteps randomly as if she is a dancer who
missed the beat. I try some odd positions with the sails; bending one on upside
down and flying another sideways, trying this and that to discourage her from
drifting.
I had lashed the tiller while hove-to, but left the auto-pilot mounted during the
storm, which was carried away, plus the mount, the cover, the wiring harness, a
breather horn and some chunks of wood. There‟s not much that that the storm
didn‟t take up on deck. I only throw the mangled main overboard after removing it
from the broken boom, otherwise the deck has been swept clean. The solar panel,
the cockpit GPS, the radar detector, and three other sails are missing. The Zodiak
seems OK, though. There is reasonable order below decks. I had screwed down
floorboards and strapped down anything heavy. Only the galley contents are
strewn about.
There are coffee grounds overhead and Caterina‟s peppercorns are everywhere.
They resist sponging and sweeping, and I spend hours tracking them down
individually. The task keeps reality at bay.
Sea-Spray had been boarded by cockroaches in Fiji (during the haul-out), and
they were having a tough time by the time we arrived in Vanuatu. They did not
survive the storm. A battery with an internal short goes overboard. (They were in
secured boxes, but within the boxes they could move a little bit, and apparently the
lead plates that collect and discharge the electrons had broken free with the violent
motion.) A seawater-violated fuel tank is drained overboard; I don‟t know what
else to do with the pollutants.
The bird flies away or drops dead and over- I didn‟t see. I had considered
trapping it, and though it would let me touch it, it never ate or looked at the
proffered water and its eyes pierced me with negativity, so I left it alone.
Carlos Castenada thought ravens to be possessed of a certain power, and though
I‟ve long forgotten if they were an “omen” or an “affirmation,” they have always
brought pause to me. Upon seeing one, especially when I have no clear ideas, I
often change directions. I didn‟t see the direction this one flew, but if it went
towards the Solomons, its only hope, it‟s got two-hundred and fifty miles to fly.
Sea-Spray and I continue on our Moresby heading
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Aug 19: 9deg53‟ south, 147deg16‟ east: Papua, N.G.
After disassembling and cleaning the fuel system, the Yanmar coughs to life.
Without it, I don‟t think we can thread our way through the reefs that parallel the
Papua New Guinea shoreline. The sails placed just so are what give her
maneuverability. I am again navigating by old pilot book and naked eye (even the
photocopied charts are uselessly large scale). Sea-Spray and I will want all of our
agility, what‟s left, as we may need to change direction fast.
The dull gratitude I have been feeling is replaced by a biting impatience as we
raise the PNG coastline. I am out of dry tobacco, eating wet cigarettes for my fix. I
don‟t feel lucky or blessed to have survived; there is a ton of work to do with the
first day of the rest of my life. I don‟t feel humbled either. After a beating like the
one we took, after feeling the depth, what surely must be the bottom of my despair;
a cavalier uncaring cockiness floats up in me.
Behind the reef, there are boats running around randomly, and the water is clear,
so I ignore the second set of leading lights and cut across the bay, ignoring the
pilot, (it‟s for cargo-ship captains) just taking my time and looking out over the
bow. If I hit something here so what. I head Sea-Spray right for my waypoint,
coming close to a few fishing boats without giving a hail. I drop the hook right
outside the yacht club and putter around the devastated deck. I set up the Zodiak
and work to get the outboard started. We are anchored near an ugly old glass-overplywood trimaran, where a black man stands on deck. He watches me in a solemn
silence. The way we look must tell him a story.
We have made it, but I feel unmoved by the experience. I am already dreading
the next one: checking in, the man still annoyingly watching as I struggle to attach
the outboard on to the Zodiak. I pass within hail of him on my way in, and meet his
eye. He still says nothing. My first word to another human in two weeks: “What‟s
your problem?” And when he doesn‟t respond, I add, “Fuck you.” He continues to
stare dumb.
Aug 20: 9deg31‟ south, 147deg06 east: Port Moresby
Most of the dogs I have met on the islands have been shy. Not this one. He‟s
ashore way down below me, snarling. I‟m ten meters up, carefully balancing on
the spreaders of someone‟s dream that has dragged anchor and been abandoned to
pound to death on this reef. I have just taken its rigging wire and hardware from
atop the mast, and so stand up here unsupported.
Sea-Spray is a few miles away, lounging in the security of the Royal Papua New
Guinea Yacht Club, sure that I will take care of her needs. She is a demanding
woman who knows that I owe her plenty. Her framework and planks are stout oak
and fir, but her standing rigging, designed with bay-racing in mind, was more like
the limbs of a runway model. Was.
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The “Club,” where she is tied to the working dock, is really a compound.
Razor wire tops a tall hurricane fence, and ten twenty-four hour guards keep watch.
It‟s a haven for Aussies and Japanese, who are here to rape the land and cheat the
natives out of their birthright.
In my need, I have found some friends. Ivan is a Czech who has been in
Moresby fifteen years (and is sadly stuck), and Cyriaque is a French single-hander
(the third solo sailor I‟ve met so far) who stopped here to replace a lost sail and
failed furling gear. We are fast. The other night the three of us motored Sea-Spray
over to a commercial loading dock where Ivan, despite being seriously intoxicated,
skillfully hot-wired a crane and gently pulled out her broken main-mast. If a guard
had seen us, I think he‟d have thought twice about a challenge.
This morning Ivan came by with some hardware for Sea-Spray. When I tried to
give him some coin, he said quietly, “No... I used to sail, remember?” Ivan is shy
when sober, and it is easy for me to imagine him cast as a target for banishment
from some prehistoric tribe, his family throwing rocks with the others as he sadly
walks away. His face is disfigured from a beating at the hands of some local
“rascals.” He is banned from the yacht-club‟s bar, so we sit just outside and order
drinks from there. He sailed from Canada, where he had ended up after sneaking
out of Prague as a younger man. He sailed without any navigational instruments,
keeping the coastline in sight, until he picked up a sextant in Mexico. He crossed
the Pacific without stopping, headed for Australia, where he has never been yet.
He still lives on the same small boat. It has ranged around the same mooring, never
putting canvas to the wind, for fifteen years now.
His neighbor on anchor, he tells me, the man on the trimaran who was silently
staring, is a missionary. When he saw me come in, he was staring; awed by the
mercy his god had shown me. To him, I was only more ad-hok proof of his deity‟s
existence.
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With Ivan‟s advice, Cyriaque and I have been scouring the docks, looking for
spare parts. We hear that it is dangerous for a white man to wander around alone in
PNG. Cyriaque finds a sail and trades his broken outboard for it. To get to his
anchorage without it, he paddles from the bow of his little rowboat. He enjoys the
twenty minute push into the wind and chop.
He was asked to leave the Aussie-owned restaurant in the Club for wearing flipflops. He wore shorts and a collared shirt; he looked fine. But the native Guineans
wear flip-flops exclusively, and this is how the bar is segregated. He left that time,
but was unchallenged in the same footwear from then on.
The Aussies here haven‟t been much help to us. They treat the land and native
people with contempt, and seem to consider passing sailors as an unavoidable
annoyance. Cyriaque doesn‟t care about following their rules. I, however, try
harder than him to fit in, with my button shirts and socked Docksiders, and I have
my boat within the confines of the club‟s breakwall. I need more help.
In a field overgrown with weeds at the edge of the club‟s property, I find some
abandoned spars, all cracked or bent from the boisterous local winds. They are
repairable, and I can use them to replace Sea-Spray‟s main and mizzen masts. I ask
around to find the owners. When I track them down, and we negotiate, they soon
find that I have nothing much to offer in the way of cash. I offer to work, but they
have plenty of natives to do the tough stuff, and I have no skills useful to them.
The Aussies aren‟t devoid of all basic manners. I am offered a beer wherever I
sit, but between my refusing to share a drink with them, and not being a fellow
conspirator in the plans they are making to extract money from the Island, they
soon lose interest. Most that live here on the yachts care nothing about cruising. It
is unsafe to cruise these waters. A plastic boat captained by Whites is fair game to
the native Guineans. Sometimes they drink beer and race on weekends in the
confines of the harbor, but for most, the boats are convenient and inexpensive
dwellings.
Filled with self pity I try a new strategy with my last shot at a mast. I shove
sobriety aside and approach the owner of it with two mugs in my hands.
He‟s OK. He‟s sympathetic, and we have a good time, and it is pleasantly
anticlimactic; my first taste of beer in eighteen years. He is an enthusiastic sailor
who commutes by boat two or three times a year to his family in Sydney. The
carbon spar is from his weekend play boat, and we go out to admire the trailerracer. It has a new mast on it that alone cost twice what Sea-Spray with all of her
equipment cost me. He throws out the figures with pride. “Hard to pass up the
money I make here in this shithole!” I ask him again what the broken one is worth
to him, and think about what it is worth to me and how far apart the two are likely
to be. The broken mast is under warranty, and he needs to keep it around to prove
that the failure was a manufacturing defect, but “It‟d be worth $1500USD to skip
the hassle.”
After that, Cyriaque, Ivan, and I mostly buy our beer on the black market and sit
in the streets talking to the Blacks, and I find a pair of flip-flops to fit in.
Now I am suffering the indignity of a poor man whose needs drive him to steal
under the cover of night. The dog is still barking at me as I detach and remove the
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only support (the hardware I need) for the mast. It will fall over in the next storm,
or it will fall out from under me now.
And surely the villagers claim this wreck, yes, here they come now. Oh shit!
They have heard the barking dog. I wear a submissive smile as I gently clamber
down, pass out cigarettes, and make it clear that I am not Australian. “America,
America please.” I play the clown with their local drug, spitting and coughing, and
pass out a few Kina (PNG currency). The next thing I know, they are helping me
load the Zodiak, for I am a bit unsteady. The big ugly dog is OK after all! I thank
them and warn them about the danger of the now unsupported mast. I buzz back the
foggy black miles to Sea-Spray with my mouth stained and burning, and my head
spinning from the bitternut concoction I shared, as well as from the kindness I
found in those people.
I work all day, every day on Sea-Spray. The Commodore of the yacht club, an
Ex-pat Brit, has lent me the key to the game-fishing hoist, and Cyriaque and I
wrestle the old mast up as it dangles at thirty degrees from kilter and a few feet
above the “step.” The paint isn‟t quite dry, so we are all three a mess when we
finish. To regain the lost height, I have used the remains of the mizzen as a
compression post, with a fine piece of local hardwood wedged in the difference. It
runs from the cabin sole to the keel. I then stepped the main on the reinforced
deck, and the recycled mast shrouds tighten down with a reassuring firmness. I
have no ideas for a mizzen mast and anyways the cockpit is roomier without one.
I find that another battery has partially shorted out internally, so I buy two more.
I discover a corroded ground wire, then I find that the starter has seized. The salt
water has seeped everywhere, and together with the violent movement, a lot of
moving parts have either failed or frozen. My brain has been exposed to the same
conditions.
A rusty can of salmon bursts unseen and I don‟t notice the creeping stench until
I open a little used cabinet and it all spills out. The smell is awful and powerful yet
somehow inviting. I think back for a moment…it‟s the smell of the canneries in
Pago Pago! The man who landed there is remembered as a separate entity. I would
give anything but my boat to have Totse with me. She would have survived the
storm with me. By now we‟d be intimate friends- by now she‟d help me decide
what I should do.
Cyriaque and I are invited out by two of the
barmaids, but a French boat has come in for refuge, and
he declines. He is making dinner for the new arrivals
aboard his aluminum cutter, “Bonnie and Clyde” (when
you buy a used boat, you must keep the original name).
I am surprised and disappointed. They are pretty
women with sharp minds. I have never thought of
Cyriaque as a person eager to please, but he is all nerves
about this dinner. Obviously, he wants to impress these
other French. I am supposed to be aboard as well and
shrug my shoulders at the women. The bright-eyed
black girls are more intrigued by Cyriaque, anyhow,
who is handsome and closer to them in age.
I also have a lot of admiration for Cyriaque; he seems
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to move through life so easily. The local people sense it and are drawn to him. I am
just a white guy who knows him.
He made some money working on off-shore oil rigs. He bought his boat in the
Caribbean, where apparently many Europeans end up. After crossing the Atlantic,
they often try to sell their boats to avoid the torturous return trip. They may stash
their boat there, intending to sail it back the next season, but when the time comes,
they are more than happy to sell out. The boats look run down after a year and the
prices are low.
Cyriaque guided Bonnie and Clyde through the Panama Canal. Then, on his
way to the Marqueses Islands, some thirty-five hundred miles, the rudder housing
cracked, and he started to take on water. The unstoppable leak required him to
pump for ten minutes out of every half-hour, day and night. The winds were light
and erratic, and it took forty-five days to reach landfall. One day he only logged
eight miles. He was almost out of drinking water, and living on rice.
He doesn‟t sound like he‟s complaining or self-pitying when he relates the story.
He doesn‟t sound proud, either.
I am pleased enough with how I‟ve faced adversity on my own trip. My body
has adapted to the confinement, and tolerated the salt-sores and other physical
indignities. My mind has accepted the decisions it‟s made.
But, at the moment, I don‟t feel like I have much resilience left. I suspect there
is something different, something inbred in the Frenchman, that I was not born
with, or maybe it‟s something I never learned. I try and meet some people without
him, but I am not as cheerful, not as sympathetic, not as something.
I do move around Moresby alone now and have no trouble. I buy locally made
cigarettes one at a time from the street-venders, and an occasional beer. They are a
realistic lot, these people who have left the interior for Moresby. Most don‟t say
that they miss their home. They seem more self-sufficient than the islanders I left
behind, who were hopelessly lost away from their villages. I had pictured the
pygmies and pig worshipers of the old National Geographics, but they are cynical
and sophisticated.
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They are not friendly, but the few I talk to are well spoken. They are resigned to
the limited opportunities here, and nobody asks me to buy or give them anything.
It is a painful question and answer type of communication, what is written across
my forehead? I again wonder what is different about Cyriaque.
I did exchange friendly words with the guard who patrolled near the working
dock, and asked him about his family before I asked him about what I should do to
get this or that. He gave me some good advice on where I might find free
hardwood. He said that he thinks Moresby is safe enough, for somebody like me.
I overheard him one day explain to a man who was looking through the fence of the
yacht club at Sea-Spray, that it was my boat and I sailed her, and that I was poor.
She does look a bit rough, and I suppose I do, too. Life is cheap here, but even so, I
do not look to be worth the trouble.
I‟ve been in Moresby for almost three weeks, working ten or more hours each
day, but, except for the batteries and chargers, I haven‟t had to spend much money
on the repairs. I provision, even perishables, and I know that the day for our
departure is approaching, but before the thought can really take hold, I push it
away.
John, the Commodore who lent me the hoist key, is helpful and updates the
weather for me daily. He has a weather theory: you take the pressure, in “melybas”
(millibars), of the high sitting on the south of the Australian continent, add ten, and
that is the wind velocity all along the coast and throughout the Torres Straight add
ten more. He forgets that he has told me this before and repeats it every morning.
Only three boats, including Sea-Spray, have passed through Moresby during my
three-week stopover. None of us planned the stop; we all came in out of necessity
after a battering. Jean Claude, the captain of another French boat, and Cyriaque
have never before concerned themselves with a weather forecast. Now we meet
upon every new arrival of the weather fax. We have all been cowed.
The fax is sent by a man we have never met, usually with two or three copies,
from a boat in a mooring we have never seen, by a cabin boy in his employ. I‟m
pretty sure that nobody around here wants to be liable for any specific advice. This
is a hard place. These people pay murderers to avoid inconveniences. But they
have a long inbred British sense of obligation to fellow Whites. We meet on Jean
Claude‟s 35ft cutter, Jen Cris.
Jean Claude doesn‟t speak any English, so we communicate with sweeping
circular motions that represent weather systems. He has two crewpersons, who
don‟t participate in our discussions. One of them, Michelle, a pretty but stressedlooking French woman with no English, was in line in front of me at the bank. She
tried to get some cash with her Visa and they confiscated it. I lent her a few Kina
but it wasn‟t a meaningful exchange.
Jean Claude doesn‟t say where he‟s been and I don‟t ask. We both are struggling
to look forward and he always offers a beer and Chex-Mix. Both of us are trying to
deal with the meager reef-covered space between two great masses of land, Papau
and Australia, and two great Oceans, the Pacific and the Indian, that is the Torres
Straight, an opening that squeezes water and air masses into another dimension.
Both trying to deal with personal matters as well. There are undercurrents on his
boat, something uncomfortable, maybe something illegal going on. We both think
a window opens the day after tomorrow. I have to continue west or I will miss the
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best monsoon for crossing the Indian Ocean. I don‟t probe the motivations of the
Frenchman, but he is likely pursued by the same seasonal imperative as I.
Cyriaque is probably looking forward to the passage. After the dinner he gave for
the crew of Jen Cris he never socialized with them again except for these meetings.
I thought we had fun, though the food was undercooked and Ivan came aboard
drunk with two very hard, mean, unattractive local women… of course I didn‟t
know what the Frenchmen were discussing.
Cyriaque, Jean Claude, and I all decide to try to leave the same day. The next
day. Not to be together like climbers attached by a rope, nobody wants to wait for
another and everyone thinks they will be fastest, it is just that it may be the only
time to get away in weeks. We politely exchange radio frequencies. We are all
headed for Bali, Indonesia. Cyriaque is tired of the Australians, and wants to go
right past them. Jean Claude and crew don‟t have visas for Australia, or other, or
worse. I just want to keep ahead of the next Monsoon, (season). I don‟t want to
get stuck. The only thing I have going for me is going.
In the morning a young, business-suited white man pulls up to tell me that my
mother is on the phone (?). There for me, as always. It must have taken her some
doing to track me down here. Mom… a part of her still lives through me. I should
have thought of that before I sent her an e-mail poetically… OK cryptically…
describing my encounter with the storm.
Don Juan told Castenada that regaining that part of your “luminous egg” lost to
your children was an essential step on the path of knowledge. You must steal it
back from your progeny, or somehow rebuild it. I think Mom hasn‟t quite achieved
this where it comes to me.
On the phone, my mother puts in a good word for Australia and my father wants
to know if I have any sails left. They both offer support and have kind things to say.
I walk back to Sea-Spray happy and again looking forward, until I get to the
thought of actually being back at sea. Then fear moves in and dominates all other
feelings. Duh.
In my three weeks in Moresby I had managed to keep it submerged all day
through hard work. Then, precisely when the sun dipped below the mountains, I
would change my clothes, stride big-stepped to the bar and order a beer. I don‟t
think that anyone but another alcoholic can appreciate the feeling of that second
beer when one is between great feats, how the hard edges of both past and future
experiences are softened and rosy and all-around easier to mull over. Now I see
that the buzzy contemplation has eaten away at my confidence. Nothing I have
been thinking of confronted anything close to reality, and I am distressed as I
finally face it.
We motor-sail out of the harbor into the usual Moresby thirty knots. After
drinking one beer I throw the remaining five overboard while chiding myself for
not giving the remaining Kina$ to the friendly guard. It just covered that six-pack.
We catch up to the French boats with our superior line, but once outside the reef,
they sail away as I head up to shakedown Sea-Spray‟s repairs. I tack back and
forth, treating her roughly then, even jibing twice on purpose. I climb the mast to
look for cracks in the brittle shellac I had sprayed on the meeting of hardware and
painted wood to help spot untoward movement. I duck back inside the reef and
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check over all my work and find nothing amiss. I think I have done OK. I head us
back out, westward, to the Torres Straight and the Indian Ocean.
I am filled with trepidation. The sea looks like a rough cut charcoal slate. I am
faithless in the face of its unfathomability. My heart feels as gray and hard as the
image before me, my teeth are clenched and grinding, and my jaw aches.
Without any electric auto-pilots, I get Sea-Spray to sail herself with the
homemade windvane, but not too fast, and not exactly where I want her to go. She
knows more than I do, though, because we make Bligh‟s entrance right on
schedule. The currents created by the full moon and spring tides make the timing
critical through the Strait. The weather turns perfect, and in spite of myself, I feel
joy; loving to sail as never before. We slice the GPS waypoints with precision, and
I man the tiller myself. Sea-Spray seems content as a cuttersloop, and together we
watch the many islands and reefs slide by. We get very close to a few of them, just
for fun, until an Australian “Coast Watch” plane buzzes us. When they make their
first pass I wave, when they make their second I take a picture, and by the third I
am on the radio asking, “What‟s up?” They ask for our registration and ask me to
give the islands more clearance. They harry us every day after as well, but
eventually, I get to know them, and they even secure a visa for me in case I want to
stop in Darwin or Christmas Island. They warn me that there are “hostilities,” ie.
civil war, breaking out in Timor, Indonesia.
On a southward heading, to skirt the impenetrable, uncharted barrier reef to the
west, I make a slight error in navigation. Sea-Spray and I get caught in a strong,
west setting current, so, just after sunset, to avoid a lee reef. we are forced to sail
close-hauled into twenty-five knot winds. Sea-Spray cuts through the chop without
yielding an inch, and I finally was able to put to use the skills I acquired in San
Francisco Bay. I am wet and tired, and the euphoria of the day changes into a
shivering peaceful exhaustion. I almost quit, content, and even start to heave-to, but
I can‟t bring myself to pass up the five knots of current kindly going our way. I
make some coffee instead and we head for the finish line. It is a mystery how we
can feel such confidence; we aren‟t only trying to make it through the Torres, we
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want to do it in a grand style. We sail through the early morning, through the
“Prince‟s Channel,” and with the current we make more than 12 knots averaged
over an hour, even passing the waves. This is what my mother and father might
imagine I am doing but it is a surprise to me.
Booby Island still lies ahead, and although it‟s not a large obstruction, clearing it
asleep without a compass-steered auto-pilot will be chancy. I am somehow sure
that if I am inattentive now, Booby has a place on its shores for us. So it is well
past the Island, after thirty-four hours at the helm, that I leave Sea-Spray to herself.
Dawn overtakes us.
September 03: 10deg42‟south, 141deg46‟ east: Carpentaria
I awake with us facing 1800 miles stretched out before Indonesia… The wind is
utterly gone.
We sailed under the spinnaker as long as it would fly. It required my constant
attention, though, and was getting wet in the lulls (either of the wind or my brain).
I turned away from the dead run in an attempt to increase the apparent wind, to stop
sail-slap and Sea-Spray-lurch. Once, I was on the bow, trying to get the spinnaker
flying, I noticed that the smoke from my cigarette was untroubled by the breeze,
like a line of people waiting patiently in front of an old-time movie house… I took
all of the sails down then. After six days of lulls, with half of our pitiful mileage
provided by the current, I start the Yanmar and turn Sea-Spray south towards the
Dundas Strait, beam-on into the two mile an hour tempest. The cruising book says
to avoid it, but I don‟t take Jimmy Cornell‟s words as gospel anymore. I don‟t and
never did take my plans to bypass Australia seriously. The storm has given me no
new inspiration, no new focus. That night I motor past Cyriaque who, being a
purist, only carries a few gallons of fuel on board. He is a few miles off to our
north, flashing his kerosene spotlight at a freighter that is dangerously close to
Bonnie.
Next day, having wisked through the Dundas on an aiding current, with the
sails back up, I have trouble understanding the harbormaster. He sounds like a Brit
trying to sound like a Texan. The Australians have left a bad taste in my mouth
after sailing the South West Pacific, and I am rude and impatient and don‟t even
listen. We pass the check-in dock twice. I think he‟s an idiot until it is obvious
that it is I.
When I finally see it, and see that it is also the fueling dock, and that my credit
card miraculously turns the machine on, I fill Sea-Spray‟s tanks as I wait for the
officials to come. They are expecting me and have all the paperwork for my visa.
The Coast Watch co-pilot kept her promise.
I try to give a decent first impression upon arrival, but it was hot, so I took my
shirt off while fueling up. I cannot find a happy expression for my face, and SeaSpray and I look a little disheveled. The officials spend a lot of time with a drugsniffing dog on the boat. This asshole, a kid, puts his arm on my shoulder and asks
me, real friendly like, where the pot is. A woman, Sue, seems to empathize, and
calls the dog and the young comer off. As he steps off my welling anger subsides,
but more officials descend upon Sea-Spray. I argue, but they take my kava, along
with all of my vegetables and a can of pork chili. I tell them to hold on to the kava;
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I want it back if it is being unnecessarily seized. I am combative. I picture the
officials as descendants of felons, which they mostly are.
It is blowing in the poorly protected anchorage in front of the yacht club as I
move Sea-Spray there, all checked in for a year, in spite of my manners, if I want.
When I first try to set the anchor, I don‟t notice the chain wrapping around the
anchor‟s shovel. It‟s a one-in-a-thousand occurrence and my impatience blinds me
to the possibility. We drag through all the other boats before I figure it out,
stupidly looking into the shallow but opaque water. We are far enough away from
the club‟s verandah that I think no one has noticed. I reset the hook and leave SeaSpray there, uncomfortable-looking. Once I reach the so-called shore, which is
actually a hundred yards of mud to the high water mark, I drag the dinghy to a safe
spot above the dirty ring.
They accept my Amex in the Yacht Club bar, treat me with respect, and call me
a cab when I ask where I can connect to the internet.
The cabbie is friendly and the cab is roomy. Darwin feels roomy. The
boulevards are wide and the sidewalks are as big as the streets, when there are
streets, in the Pacific Islands I am accustomed to. I get off at Mitchell Street, a hub
for travelers, and find a computer. I send a note to Caterina, who may be in town. I
send another with an “I‟m fine” to the immediate family, which now includes my
mother and father, my wife, my brother, and my sister, and some friends and some
friends of friends.
My wife, Kari, has sent me an electronic note telling me I‟m over my limit on
one credit card and that she can only make minimum payments on the others for
another four or five months with the money I have left. She also says she misses
our walks and she misses having someone to talk about the days. Kari had grown
distant, but never shared her feelings. She has always been a reserved person. I
knew something was wrong, of course, but it had crept up slowly; the feeling of
being alone when I was with her. I had my hang-gliding, my projects, my work,
and when I came home she was always polite, and we both loved the dogs. But it
came to a head when we were to drive cross-country together and I realized that she
didn‟t want to go. I think that she didn‟t want to be trapped in the car with me. We
split. Now I feel a pull of some kind of love from a computer screen. I wonder
from which direction? I need to find a globe. I send her a vaguely committal
response.
I like the feel of Darwin, and I eat Indian food on a neat sidewalk table while
waiting for some film to develop. I talk to an Australian man who is from the
southeast, seventy-years old, retired, and seeing the rest of his country. He is an old
hobby sailor who built some trimarans from scratch to sail in the waters behind the
Great Barrier Reef. He talks about his sons, who are both successful, and his wife,
whom he recently divorced. “She didn‟t want to do anything, and I did.” I tell him
about Sea-Spray, and our journey, and we decide to meet for a beer after I take care
of some errands in the banking sector.
I dial the 800-numbers on the back of all my credit cards. I‟ve had most of them
for ten years, but rarely used them. The reality of what I am doing becomes clearer
as I scratch the totals in the slanted stainless under the phone. I have ten-thousand
dollars of high interest debt. The “cash advance” limit has been reached on three,
though there is still room for purchases. The American Express cards are both
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expired. I walk around ashamed, the U.S.-like police cars making me
uncomfortable. But I do head for the American Express office to order new cards.
Back among the travelers on Mitchell Street, I see how clean and competent
everyone is. I am an exception. I‟ve categorized an entire continent full of people
into a convenient slot that allows me to de-humanize them as a few of them have
de-humanized others. This has allowed me to remain a non-participant in their
world. I am not them. I don‟t care about their rules. But I do. I pick up my
developed photographs and stare at one. It‟s a rogue wave.
The old man meets me in the pub. I have a beer with him, and confess my
financial sins. It‟s easy to get right to the heart with other travelers. He tells me to
get my shit together, find a job, and don‟t start sailing again until I am back on my
feet.
At dusk, after my self-regulated third pint, I receive an e-mail from Caterina,
who has a plane ticket to fly out the next day. As I walk the few miles to where she
is staying, my head is spinning with dwindling options and my heart is twisted into
a question mark. There are cars buzzing by and some flowers scattered on the
ground, and I gather a few for my entrance. A hundred meters beyond, I begin to
wonder what the flowers were doing there, and an uncomfortable feeling starts to
work its way up. What were a bunch of flowers doing on the roadside? I turn
around to put them back, when out of the dark, a drunk and dangerous looking
group of aboriginals accosts me. A few hours ago I would have been happy to see
the rag-tag group, bought some beer and talked politics, now I am paranoid and
they can tell. They saw me turn around and thought I was avoiding them. One
grabs at me. They are threatening violence. I push back with one hand and say
that I have no problem with them; I just want to put these flowers back. I repeat
myself a couple of times, sounding a little frantic. The anger and fright fills me
with adrenaline, and this gives them pause. I put the flowers back, and get through
them with only a few hits of spit to my body. They spit on me. In the quaint lobby
of the Hostel I smell it.
Caterina is happy to see me, and takes me in. She changes her ticket. We rent a
car and go to the museums and the K-mart. She keeps saying that I am strange.
She tells me about one boyfriend who died from an overdose of heroin in Thailand,
and another who lost everything through drink. I tell her I have been through a
storm, and the way I feel is natural reaction. In the morning we walk along the
shore and see Sea-Spray, far away and lonely. I don‟t go back aboard her for five
days. And I sleep on the floor of Cat‟s room.
And when I start to provision, I tell Caterina I should sail away alone
again, and I tell her about my wife‟s note. She leaves me then, saying
maybe she‟ll e-mail me, but that she doesn‟t want to tell me where she is
going, “I knever know wherea you area, so then now you donna know
wherea I be then.”
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September 13: 12deg21‟ south, 130deg44‟ east: Darwin
Sea-Spray is a faint star on the horizon. When I look right at her, she is gone. I
am tramping across the mud-flat that is Fannie Bay at low tide. The Zodiak is on a
pull-trolley, full of vegetables, charts, jerrycans filled with diesel, seawater and
sand. As the wheels roll, they gather up the sticky mud, their circumference grows,
then the mud slips off and the trolley abruptly falls, jiggling the contents and
causing me to fall to my knees, as if in spontaneous prayer.
I am sweating off a few farewell beers.
This is the first time I have been aboard since I left her that first day, one week
ago. She looks smaller, as if she has shrunk in her worry. I feel that she trusts me
even less than when I naively took her under the Golden Gate‟s span. But together
we will clear customs in the morning, at high tide. As I sleep, I dream of the catscow from Pago Pago. I see it then, this vision, as the inevitable and innocent
culmination of a deserved relapse into genetic alcoholism. My own lee-shore.
It‟s already hot when I meet my friend Sue from customs, seven hours later. She
returns my kava root, my almost down-and-out root (the law classifying it as a
narcotic will pass soon), and my pistol (I have also found bullets in Darwin.)
When I talked to her on the phone the day before, I asked her advice on how to
deal with the countries ahead of me. She has asked around for the latest
information, and thinks it‟s safe enough in Bali, Indonesia. If I stop there, I can
claim engine trouble or some other emergency, and they will let me stop for a few
days. It‟s a way to get around the time consuming and expensive Indonesian
cruising permit, which, now because of the trouble in Timor, is not even available.
It‟s a tactic commonly used by circumnavigating sailors.
I can decide whether to go north, or west from there.
It is kind of her to fill me in, she is a busy woman. She says an unjudgemental
“Good sailing, be careful,” and goes back to help with the influx of Timorese
refugees.
I have over sixty charts of the waters ahead and I can be flexible. According to
Jimmy Cornell‟s “World Cruising Routes,” depending on the timing and how I
feel, I can stay in the Southern Hemisphere and try for Capetown, or cross the line
on my way to Singapore or India. I‟m not too keen on trying the Cape of Good
Hope in a little wooden boat, though.
I take on fresh water, and after hosing down the Zodiak, I patch it up, pack it
down, and set up the gas inflation system and put it back into life-raft duty. Then
Sea-Spray and I motor out, weaving through the warships into an endless, windless,
and lawless Indian Ocean.
For three days and two nights the prop makes cream off the stern. As I drift in
and out of consciousness, I imagine that I hear old, unpolished rock-and-roll over
the throb of the diesel. Finally a breeze sets up the sails, and as we close in on the
Ashmore Reef, the sea comes to life with that breeze. The bed of coral below
brings dolphins, tuna, great gobs of jellyfish, flashes of some unidentifiables, and
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the ever present accompaniment of harassing birds. They are all moving in their
own way, creating a cacophonic quiz in my senses.
And there are sailboats… funny old sailboats, their hulls below the horizon. I
know they are Timorese because Caterina and I saw the design in one of Darwin‟s
museums. Their rigs are perfect, if upended a bit, equilateral jags of color. There
are two to the south and three to the north. They are working the reefs for fish, and
I am going down the channel in between them. I touch “plus ten” degrees on the
auto-pilot, keeping my options open, without it being obvious that I am avoiding
them. They, on the other hand, tack brazenly on a course to intercept.
I think that Sea-Spray, who is going well under her asymmetrical spinnaker and
main (winged out on opposite sides), can slip through before the gap closes. But
three of the boats birth sailing canoes, so I swap the spinnaker for a jib, and start
the Yanmar. I load my gun and get my tobacco out. They are fast with only one
man in each boat, and I turn my binoculars on the one from the south who will
reach me first. He is waving something frantic between strokes. As he gets closer, I
can see that it is a tuna. I am still a little nervous; there is a civil war less than fifty
miles away. I make sure he sees my pistol, and don‟t invite him aboard. In spite of
my paranoia, it is a friendly exchange; a handful of Marlboros for a tuna with the
first man, and a rusty can of Hormel chili for a tuna with the second, who lost the
race. Then I engage the prop and motor for a few hours, so I don‟t feel them so
close in the coming night.
There is some nice sailing for us after the reef, but it is spoiled by a mold that
has invaded my kava and it is a careful balancing act between nausea and
gratification. Looking back, I realize that I have been tricked by the seemingly
innocent plant, and over it goes. Twenty-four hours later Sea-Spray gets a
thorough cleaning as I search for some overlooked, some tobacco, some anything.
September 23: 9deg south, 116deg east: Indonesia
I‟m hoping we can arrive at the entrance to Benoa Port before sunset. On the
chart, it‟s a three-mile long, snaky path through the reef and I don‟t want to attempt
it in the dark, but on the other hand, no way do I want to spend the night out here.
We‟re behind because I have put us too close to the island of Lombok, and into a
strong counter-current. Sea-Spray‟s speed over the water is seven and eight knots,
but only three are made good towards our destination.
There are crazy overfalls, opposing waves that slap at each other and send the
splash ten feet straight up. Sea-Spray can change directions in the time of a
footstep when they meet under her. I kind of slide my feet along ready to pounce
with my weight. I have to steady her due north to get two-hundred ninety degrees
(WNW).
I take us into the shoaling, the shallows where the current can‟t climb, and we
race the free-falling sun. In the clear water I can see the water she parts disturb the
sand. At the entrance I cut short the leading lights and end up just in front of a
freighter, who is faster than us, and we have to move quickly to avoid being rearended, as he didn‟t seem to see us. We three-sixty, but there are no worries about
the jibe in the light winds and I had already handed the jib, we make the pass easily
in the cargo ship‟s wake with the Yanmar at full speed.
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It is still just light as we enter the port of Benoa on Bali. There are a hundred
kites in the air and prayers broadcast over loudspeakers as we pass a temple.
Ahead, Cyriaque has spotted me and runs along the jetty telling me where I can
anchor, “Don‟t worry about ze practique tonight,” he says.
I drop anchor in murky water and Cyriaque rows out in his launch with another
small dingy in tow. He knows what a chore it is for me to set up the Zodiak. I
often curse the French for their stupid inflatable boat. We talk about our passages.
The wind never blew for him. The current deposited “Bonnie and Clyde” only a
few days before Sea-Spray and I arrived. I had imagined he would be a bit
chagrined when he learned that I had spent a week ashore in Darwin, and in bed
with a woman along the way, as he was baking in the still heat, but I don‟t think the
thought ever entered his mind.
The paddle of my lender dingy is inadequate against the wind and it is a short
epic to get back to Sea-Spray after the night‟s revelries. I spend a fitful four hours
listening to a barge being loaded next door, and wake with a headache. I have a
chat with Dick, an American Expat who manages the yacht club. He advises me on
how to go about dealing with the authorities; how to check-in. Cyriaque isn‟t
mentioning to anyone “official” that he has arrived, but I think “how bad could it
be?” And, I don‟t trust my luck; I think I have used it up. So I walk to the building
that houses the Navy.
In the commander‟s office, I talk to a lieutenant, explaining my “plight, uh,
engine troubles and… ah, I‟m low on water… oh, and the war and all…" would it
be possible for him to grant me a few days in the Port? My querist has a bronzedbrown face and black eyes. His irises match his pupils and it‟s hard to tell where
he is looking, or if he can see anything at all. He gives me a blank, unlined sheet of
paper, and then reaches back for a notebook. He opens it towards me, to the pages
where there are some examples written by other cruisers for me to use, in this same
game.
I decide to emphasize the packing-gland leak (where the propeller shaft goes
through the hull) instead of the trouble in Timor. It does need some adjustment,
and I‟m thinking Timor might be a sensitive subject. He seems sympathetic,
nodding affirmatively, but then I feel I‟m losing him as he just leafs through all my
ship‟s papers without reading them. Then he puts my composition aside
distastefully, and for ten minutes only grunts as his head starts to pivot from side to
side, and it dawns on me what is missing—a bribe! Dick, who is probably laughing
about it in the bar, never mentioned it. The commander‟s eyes light up as I reach
for my wallet. After that, unable to face Immigration, Quarantine, Harbormaster,
and Customs…I taxi to town, after a painful negotiation with the cabbie, and pick
up a little Honda scooter, my passport unstamped.
I feel very alone in the traffic swarm. I am forced to go with its flow, missing
appealing pulloffs, people zooming at me on both sides, so that I don‟t even know
what side they theoretically drive on. At the first chance, I pull off and head to the
beach, where a local has set up an umbrella and a cooler. I have a cool beer and
sleep for a few hours.
I wake up sticky and disoriented, but more rested. I find a roadmap, but it is of
little help. I‟m still getting cut off by skillful fifteen-year old girls, who downshift
savagely with their platform soles as they pass on their scooters. I can pass the
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cars, though, and I can park anywhere. I take care of some provisioning and arrive
back at the marina with a full load, looking like a refugee; with the scooter piled up
top-heavily.
The next morning, I face the gauntlet of officials again. But I pay no more
bribes and each hurdle is easier than the last. Each person is a little more impressed
by all of the stamps I‟ve collected so far. At the final stop, I proudly present the
required seven copies and thirty-five stamps, each page signed a few times as well.
It is impressive in its way. And I am sure that the momentum will carry me
through. So sure, in fact, that I am able to lie about my hidden gun without my
usual betraying face.
When one official sees I have come from Darwin, we talk about the Australians.
The Indonesians are not pleased with them at the moment. I agree with him, saying
that the Australian borders are overprotected; that they won‟t let anyone near their
precious mud banks, but they reserve the right to treat Indonesia (and the whole
southwest Pacific) as their own backyard.
The night before, a piece aired on the local news about the Australian sex trade
in Indonesia. It apparently rivals any in the world, the OZ men coming to Timor on
three day junkets buying all the local teens “No wonder there is an uprising...” I
realize that I am feeding hate, and leave feeling badly. To the Indonesians, the
Australians are an unwanted presence and fair game. I am just a passerby.
And I remember back in Darwin, just before sunset, the locals would arrive at
the beach, as complete families, carefully setting up their folding chairs, and sit
without a word, watching the big ball drop, then gently go home. Very spiritual. I
sat in the sand behind them with Caterina and wondered about their retinas. There
was a kind of religious feel to it, and though it was lost on me, that doesn‟t mean it
is meritless.
Many single-handers find religion while out at sea. The undefined divide
between the heavens and earth and the solitude prompting the spiritual thoughts. I
have drawn a blank on the water, even the fear in witnessing the awesome power of
sea and sky seem to add nothing but distancing, but I do feel a fleeting contact with
my higher power while on land, on Bali, in Kuto, in the tourist center. It‟s full of
dust, smoke, noise, pushy street salesmen and affronted Australian tourists:
I‟m in an open-fronted second-hand music store, where bad rap plays loudly
and an unfriendly young Indonesian, dressed as a L.A. gangster, stands behind the
cash register. I‟m going through the disorganized titles in the cassettes, Streisand,
AC/DC, Public Enemy, Great Showtunes… when I see a Nick Kershaw tape I used
to own. It‟s not a great tape, but looking at the cover vividly transports me back
twenty years when I thought it was pretty good. I momentarily get to relive a night
behind the wheel of an old Fiat:
I am awake only because of a few cruelly delivered blows of cocaine, given by a
“friend” who didn‟t want me passed out on his couch. So, I‟m driving into Denver,
intoxicated and paranoid…
The scene gives me a great pause. I don‟t want „me‟ to crash. I buy the few
tapes I‟ve picked out, but not that one. I go out and cross the street to find a place
to let the memory pour out, the tears rolling out just behind the thought. I knew I
was near the end, near rock bottom. I was very unhappy. I had just gotten out of
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jail the night before (they let you out at midnight), and walked to my girlfriend‟s
house, who, not expecting me, had company. I kept walking.
I had a partner at the time, a friend, and we painted newly erected houses and
office buildings for various contractors. We made good money doing it, but never
saved enough to rent an apartment. We would spend our two-week‟s pay on a
week-end binge. Then, Monday we would work again, sobered by our lack of
foresight. After twelve hours of hard work, our guilt would be satisfied, and we
would drive out into the plains just beyond the creeping development, where we
would camp. We would have just enough cash left for a steak to grill and a sixpack of tall boys.
Once, on the second Sunday after a payday, we were particularly desperate, so
we painted a man‟s house when he wasn‟t home with some surplus off-white.
We had met him a few times, the first time was on a job; a building he had
leased. Then, a few days later, he had sold us some drugs, some “Peruvian
marching-powder” and briefly mentioned he wanted his house painted.
After we were done, we waited for him to get home. He took it well, and was
OK with the color. He didn‟t have any money, though, so he paid us in cocaine. We
were very pleased. We didn‟t have any money, either, not even a dime. We hadn‟t
eaten lately, and ran out of gas on Colfax Avenue, in a ghetto of Denver.
We were completely undeterred, having plenty of energy up our noses. When
the engine of the little Fiat quit, starved, we kept our lane, opened the doors,
continued our conversation over the roof of the little car, and walked it right on into
downtown, ignoring our own hunger, not even bothering to gas up the Fiat when
we had some cash. We kept going on that way for months, until the law finally
intervened.
Advised by my lawyer, I checked myself into the hospital. The therapy there
was structured around the “twelve steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I had
already taken care of step one before I arrived: admitting I had a problem. The
evidence was overwhelming. Back then, they used to give out “Antibuse,” a drug
that reacted violently with alcohol, and discouraged relapses, but the therapist
didn‟t think I needed it. I was clearly defeated.
The second and third steps of AA involve choosing your God. I chose Carlos
Castenada‟s version, who revealed himself in such interesting ways. It didn‟t
bother me that Don Juan Matus said that “God” and spiritualism were concoctions
of a so-called “rational” mankind, only existing as a concept because of literary
drabble, that a man on his path should strive for pragmatism. I would pray to my
Christian God as well. After doing that I would tie a red bandanna around my neck
before bed, to try to take control over my dreams, one of Don Juan‟s methods to tap
into a “separate reality.”
I was not lazy, and on the third night, I was rewarded. In my dream, I was able
to look down at my hands without waking. I was able to look around the dream for
a moment, too, and remembered what I saw for years. But now, I can only
remember the memory. Now, the magic is easily explained away. Now my eyes are
puffy, and I need some sunglasses.
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I need a pair that is polarized, so I can see through the water. Sea-Spray has no
depth sounder; she only has my eyes or that moment when her keel hits ground to
judge. I spend more than a man who is in debt should. I want to have a beer, so I
return the scooter a day early. My ass is sore, anyway. I find a computer cafe. I
have been, for some time now, sending e-mails to friends and family chronicling
my adventure. I don‟t include the moment where I meet God.
I see a couple from the yacht club and we share a ride back to the anchorage.
They are with the Millennium, and know Caterina, but haven‟t heard from her
lately.
The Millennium group split up in Australia. Half are going around the south of
Africa, the Cape of Good Hope and on across the Atlantic to Brazil in time for
“Carnival.” The waters are treacherous on this route, and I have ruled it out, no
stupid courage having lately emerged from inside me. The other half of the
Millennium boats are stalled because of the political instabilities. They had planned
to go up through Indonesia to Singapore, but are now considering staying off to the
east of Sumatra, then ducking into Phuket Island off of Thailand for New Years.
From there, they cross the northern Indian Ocean, and sail up the Red Sea to the
Mediterranean, carrying the torch back to Jerusalem.
Cyriaque is easing southwest to go around the rest of Indonesia for a few
hundred miles and then he‟ll head northwest, crossing the equator after a stop on
some island, Chagos, a French holding, along the way. This route has good winds,
except for the convergence zone around the equator, which is substantial there.
Timing is critical, because the cyclone season begins shortly in the west and if he
doesn‟t get ahead of it, he will have no choice but to hole up in Chagos, unable to
continue to Sri Lanka or India.
I plan to go north to Singapore, and then on to Malaysia. I plan to hole up
somewhere behind Sumatra from October through mid-December. There are
storms, sure, but plenty of shelter along the way. There are pirates, sure, but I think
Sea-Spray looks enough like the old sailboats of the Southeast Asians that we can
pass that way unscathed. After four days in Bali, Sea-Spray and I head out.
October 03: 1deg south, 106deg east: Java Sea
It‟s not often that we get to pass a boat going our way, so even though it‟s only a
tug pulling a barge; it‟s the biggest event in a while. I make some coffee; it‟s
3:00am. In the distorted darkness of early morning, I thought at first that the barge
was an island, but there is nothing close, according to the charts. I‟m suspicious,
though; sensory misinformation and wrongheaded calculations and the
accompanying mistakes are my constant companions alone at sea.
I am almost abreast of the tug, well ahead of the barge he tows, which is still
hugely out of proportion, when he turns sharply to the south-west, cutting me off
with the cable and ponderous cargo. What the hell? Sea-Spray is not set up for a
quick maneuver. I have locked the propshaft with Vise-Grips deep in the crawlspace at the stern so I have no way to get power, and I have a complicated wing
system on the bowsprit that makes any tack very slow. The wind is behind,
blowing us into the danger! I scramble to unclip the poled out sails in front, jibe
with the the tiller to the southeast, and run back up to the bow to fight the canvas,
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finally finding a sheet that hauls in one sail. Without a handy winch I duck behind
the mainmast and twirl the line around my body until I can get a wrap on a cleat.
Then I untangle myself and dive to the helm. The great heap of the barge slowly
bears down on us and in the near end with only a half working jib and reefed main
we clear it by only ten meters.
He then takes back his former course with the tug, and I can only conclude that
he tried to kill us. I don‟t know why. I get back on my north heading as well, sure
that I will stay ahead of him now. I set up the auto-pilot, unlock the prop, start the
Yanmar, and wonder at his motivation. Anger overcomes me and I fire off five
impotent rounds with the thirty-eight, aiming into the deckhouse of the tug from
100 yards.
We are nearing the southern end of the South China Sea. We are recrossing the
equator. So far, except for the attempted murder, it has been a gentle passage with
light winds and calm waters. I have been eating fresh vegetables and cooking
chicken all along the way (1000 miles). I haven‟t had to motor except to raise the
horizon from the malicious tug and occasionally charge the batteries. At times, I
have run up four sails, winging out a third foresail from the bowsprit, and that was
enough. I am enjoying the extra room around the mizzenless cockpit.
There have been a few equatorial storms, but they are a welcome respite from
the heat. When they come at us, I shorten sail, secure the deck, and get out the soap
to wait for the shower. The seas are protected on all sides, and shallow enough to
discourage rouge waves. I have set up my deck chair (with screws into Sea-Spray‟s
teak) and read books at a comfortable angle on the tall windward side.
Occasionally, I‟11 make some critical comment about the helmsmanship of the
electric auto-pilot, chat with Sea-Spray, or sing. I‟m completely sane, just bored
and lonely.
Time is dragging as I keep a watch out for cargo and warships, trawlers and
seiners, and the odd assortment of local boats. It is not as romantic an activity as
double reefing in a gale. My muscles are atrophied and my mind is numb. I cannot
relate to any of the words I read in my books. I smoke Papuan cigarettes that
Cyriaque has traded with me for some hardware. I get as greasy as an auto
mechanic one day, readying the Yanmar for the motoring I expect ahead.
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My ears still ring from the shots, aimed at another man, the next night as I close
in on Singapore Straight, and during a fit of humanity I toss the gun overboard.
Also, severe penalties await the failed gun smuggler in Singapore, according to the
Handbook. The traffic is increasing, so I stay awake, more or less, for 36 hours as
we sail in the busiest shipping lanes in the world, the sails proudly our only
motivation.
Past the ugly airport, which is built of mud out into the Straight I take a mooring
at the yacht club on the north side of the Island. I snag the buoy sailing in under a
foresail without ever starting the Yanmar. They are used to more monied sailors
and they come out to meet me in the motor shuttle, which costs me a couple of
bucks and obligates me for a return ride. It has been a slow season for them, as
word on the piracy in the area has spread and political chaos is bubbling throughout
the nearby Islands means that only fifteen boats will stop this year, when three
years before there were three hundred.
Once ashore, I make my way across the Island-country via an empty commuter
train, past the drab apartment city-complexes to the Sea-Men‟s sector downtown. I
need to check-in, so I take a Q-number and wait. The many cargomen ahead of me
slap half-foot stacks of passports down on the counter as their turn comes. I open
my briefcase towards the wall so no one sees that I have but one.
Companionless and unconnected, Singapore has all the charm of an ant farm. I
chase down some spare parts. My first credit card is refused when I try to buy an
auto-pilot, but the next one is accepted. I buy two copies of the same book printed
with different covers and find out later I have read it before. I walk around the
tourist-laden Boat Quay and Raffles Hotel until I am physically unable to go any
farther; painful shinsplints from the confinement of the passage have left me
immobile.
I choose a table at a bar with some young women. When I ask to join them I am
taken aback when they hesitate, I forget that I am older, and scruffy to boot, and I
work hard to earn my seat after they reluctantly acquiesce. An hour later the young
„backpackers‟ from the Netherlands want to meet Sea-Spray but I am bored with
them. I try a bar that looks to patronize locals, “The Divine Lotus Blossom”, or
something, and three unattractive Malaysian woman have ordered expensive drinks
as they start to fondle me before I realize the game. I protest that I hadn‟t meant to
buy them or what they drink and the bouncer lets me walk away. I take a room in a
cheap, for Singapore, hotel and, lonely and depressed, look in the phone book for
an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
I stop in hoping to just listen, but at those meetings everyone has to introduce
themselves. When it‟s my turn, I begin with how I‟m traveling alone and tired of
sailing, but I don‟t know what else to say, and I start to stumble over my words and
then I start bawling. Tears stream into my nose and I‟m sniffling too. The people
listening are mostly Chinese, and through the salty distortion I can see the
discomfort in their faces. There are a few older British Expat women who try for
some common ground, but they don‟t know what to say, either, and serve up the
well-known acronyms (“one day at a time,” “easy does it,” etc.) like hors-doeuvres
to an inappropriately dressed guest. They do invite me to join a group for coffee
later.
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I pass, and stop into a regular bar for a quiet beer. I‟m obviously screwed up,
but I wonder if it isn‟t just a normal reaction to my situation. I‟ve sailed through
the Paradise of the South Pacific unmoved. I have invested all my money and
more, all my time for a year and more, the end of my youth, in a folly that is taking
more out of me than I am getting in return.
The next morning, I get back on board Sea-Spray. It has been raining hard, and
she has taken on water because I had disconnected her automatic bilge pump. There
is a swell in the ugly channel, and the sky is a perfect match to my dark mood.
I feel guilty for my thoughts. I feel like quitting. After the storm, I promised
Sea-Spray that I‟d get her out of the wet tropics, get her to Europe, or somewhere
where her lines would be cherished and her wood well cared for. Why didn‟t I sail
to East Australia from Vanuatu? I knew I was out of money then, and there was
work, and Caterina wanted to go that way… There was even a Herreshoff, (SeaSpray‟s designer), convention. I thought this was a better idea? Sea-Spray ending
up rotting in the worm infested Indian, some loser pumping out her bilge?
I think, perhaps, that I‟ve read too many of the old single-hander accounts.
They were greeted by governors, chiefs, and kings, and would bask in the local
hospitality while the local colonial navy refurbished their boats. For me, after a
tough passage, it‟s endless bureaucracy, wallet-sapping fees, hawkers, cons, and
sleazy suppliers. Stupid man!
The bargeman had no way to gain from my death. We would have sunk before
he could have offloaded anything. That makes my death mean what? A few
minutes of entertainment for him during a boring crossing. How could he tell that
my life means so little?
I seem to be drawn to socially uncompensating, even diminishing, pursuits. I
learned a long time ago that no one was impressed with hang-glider pilots. When I
speak of it eyes quickly turn glassy. Prestige, outside of the small group, and
monetary rewards are nonexistent. Perhaps that is only fair, for what gift am I
sharing with others? Invisible lines across the sky? Yet I have spent fifteen years
pursuing flight above all other activities. I continue to fly because to me, at that
moment, I am an artist. To move with purpose over the Earth quietly using
thermals to gain altitude, often sharing the space with a like-minded eagle or hawk,
gliding for miles working clouds and mountains and at the end to pick out a place
to land…
I know flying cross-country under Dacron is art in perfect form. True, a good
cross-country pilot must be very pragmatic, but you are inundated with so much
information that your only choice is to go with your gut feelings. You have to
become an artist, and tap into all of the spiritual intuition you possess. You come
to trust these feelings through the time invested in listening, seeing, smelling,
feeling, and touching the forces of nature. Experience and faith combine in a way
one-sided religion can never offer. During this noble, fragile interaction your wing
becomes an extension of your soul. When all your senses perceive the environment
in harmony, and you are able to react just so, it is a very pure and spiritual
experience. Though it is a fleeting form of expression, when I scale out the
timeline in my mind I see it as solid as any other work of art.
It takes some years to earn such an experience.
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I think of my hang-gliding students. They have to read a lot before I first take
them out to fly. Most of them can answer the questions that I put to them on the
way up to the training hill. The questions are technical; about how a wing converts
the air flowing around it into a lifting force, about what happens at different angles
of attack (the angle that the wing meets the air), about the difference between
groundspeed and airspeed… Then I tell them to forget all about factual esoterica,
and I spend the rest of the day shouting “RUN, PULL IN! PUSH OUT! ARE
YOU OK? And if they are OK, and ready to move up the hill a bit, I try and tell
them what it‟s going to feel like to fly. It can‟t be learned from a book, and it can‟t
be learned in a year of flying.
Sailing should be the same. Maybe I‟m just a little beat up right now from
learning the basics, and if I go on I will feel that same earned essence with SeaSpray. Maybe I can meld with her as I have with my wing for brief moments. I‟m
almost half way around the world, I must have learned something by now.
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September12:1deg25‟north,104deg02‟east:Singapore Straight
We leave Singapore at high tide and drift along in the current, waiting for dawn
to organize the world. We sail around the bottom of the Island; south before west
before north, always determined. We tack, criss-crossing the shipping lanes, the
only sail amidst hundreds of boats. Winds are light and strong and switching and
we are slow, working hard for miles but the country is small enough I see progress.
Then a squall hits opposing us, and we close land and motor next to the causeways.
For all the charts show, this could be an uninhabited paradise, but it‟s not. We see
the dirty underbelly of the prosperous island; and it‟s busy with ships all day long,
like flies buzzing around a hog.
We continue out into the Malacca Strait, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore all
in colorless sight, the twelve-hour day closing, the lights starting to show in the
deck-houses of the other boats. There are plenty of other boats. They are bigger
and faster than us, but slower to turn. We can move well under sail only until it
gets near darkness because I can‟t see enough to tack across the shipping lanes. I
have no plan to anchor, no plan to sail, very little diesel. Alertness slips away with
the light. Again I have no plan.
When the city lights begin to turn on, the clouds turn off the stars, we are left
blind, and a storm blows a gale, a real Sumatra, right on our nose. I take down all
sails, even the steadying main, and run the Yanmar to maintain a position until it
passes.
This turns out to be a mistake. The wind and current drive us back, and the
choppy waves lift the propeller out of the water. It angrily cavitates in the foamy
divide between water and air. The cargo ships are too close.
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We catch in a fishing net and then hit a log, and together they foul us from
bowsprit to rudder. I leap to shut off the Yanmar, but it has already sucked in the
mess, and is strangled by the floating debris in its greed for water. Then Sea-Spray
is wallowing, dipping her bowsprit as I try to get the main up, but I‟m having
trouble, and she boxes the compass as the inertia of the debris spins her around
twice. I‟m blinded by a spotlight from a passing freighter (he‟s so close I can hear
the circuit complete as the powerful beam snaps on) but I‟m happy he can see us,
and with the deck lit up I can see that the main-sheet is caught on a spreader. I
wrestle it away, hoist the sail quickly, and we turn and run as best we can dragging
the mess. I feel more alert, but queasy. We duck (if you can spread a duck over an
hour) behind a small island; log, net, and all, and anchor to end the long day.
I awake two hours later to a ka-thunking chain. We are dragging anchor. Both
the wind and the current have turned 180 degrees with the passing of the storm, and
we will ground soon. I dive over the side to cut away the net and log. By the time
it is all clear from the propeller I am standing on the sandy bottom with my bare
feet and my forearms are spent. I clamber aboard and hoist sails and we motor out.
I am tired again at dawn, and start scanning the charts for a better spot to take
shelter.
Five hours and ten miles north, the sky is a benign orange and the
cumulonimbus clouds are far away. We stop at the mouth of a river flowing out
from the Malaysian Peninsula. It is mentioned briefly in a guidebook that I perused
and shorthanded in Australia. But my scratched notes say only that “keelboats
have been up here.” The chart shows 0.3 meters at low tide and I lose my whisker
pole probing the sand and mud bottom. I don‟t know which channel is deep
enough for us, since I have no decently scaled charts or well conceived notes, so I
throw the anchor over and nap through the day, waking once from a dream that has
Sea-Spray‟s keel touch lightly in the sand, and again from a position where my
hand is pinned and cut off from circulation. In the afternoon, more rested we wait
for the tide to lift us some more (it has been rising and she did touch), maybe to
attempt the river, or if it tops out before our confidence has maybe head back out,
or wait for someone to pass by.
As dusk nears, a fisherman comes over, acknowledging the blast from my little
gas foghorn and the waving of my arms. Following him in, motoring at six knots
behind the shallow drafted run-about, I am tense thinking about the shifting delta
underneath as we touch a few more times.
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The brown whorls where the river meets the sea, slowly turn green-gray as we
make our way a few miles up the Malaysian river, stopping right off of some
downtown as the sun sets. There are no masts, just these noisy thirty and forty-foot
power boats filled with logs and people. The sounds echo and bounce all around
us.
I imagine Sea-Spray curiously tasting the salt-less water, cautiously peering
upriver at the old boats chugging around unmuffled, and finally, settling her gaze
over her shoulder and upon me, wondering what my plans are. I throw both
anchors and all of the chain over and leave her wondering.
Sept 15: 1deg55‟north, 102deg43‟ east: Muar, Malaysia
The harbor police want me to tie off to the navy cutter, which sounds like a poor
idea to me. Rats and cockroaches and people, not to mention the overhang would
all be in contact with Sea-spray. Looks like a dirty town. They don‟t speak
English and I don‟t speak Malay or Hindi or Chinese or whatever, and I don‟t
bother to struggle it through. I just use the “yes, yes, no, no” chant and gesture a
lot. They obviously have no idea how to go about checking me in, and they don‟t
seem to care as I walk away, not wishing to waste any more of my day, to check-in
with immigration. There, they are just as clueless. I tap at the stamps in my
passport one at a time and then say “sailboat” tap, “sailing” tap-tap, “sail” tap-tap,
and then to the next blank page: “Malaysia” tap-tap, “stamp?” I get a stamp for my
passport out of them. I head inland to find an actual bed.
The little Chinaman I rent a room from has a face full of “follow the rules.” I
don‟t know why, and I don‟t care, but his consternation seems to have something to
do with me. I am wearing long pants, I don‟t aim the soles of my shoes at people, I
don‟t raise my voice, and I haven‟t been drinking, so screw him! There seems to
be a tension in Malaysia that I want to leave to the Malaysians. But the proprietor‟s
pained expression is the last I see before bed, and the hotel is less pleasant for it.
The next morning, after twelve hours of sleep and some mud-like coffee, I go to
visit Sea-Spray. I find all the old wooden rowboats moved around and the Zodiak
re-tied in the best spot; right next to the ladder.
I meet one Gho, a man who has been brought in to interpret. He has been
waiting for an hour. He speaks English with an American accent, looks like a
grown-up boy, and sports an earring. He is on the police force, but wants to be a
politician or a businessman. He tells me that the clueless ones were worried about
Sea-Spray anchored in the strong current. They were afraid she would be carried
away in the night. They are honored to have a foreign yacht in their midst. The
men were trying to help me.
That night, I‟m in the shower of my rented room, which has a window stuck
open to the hall, and I see the Chinaman timidly knocking on my door. “Yes?
Hello? What?” “I‟m so solly I speak, eh, the bicycle, someone take.” My folding
bicycle. Damn. But when I get downstairs I see it there, behind his desk. “I take it
in. OK? I watch all night for someone take.” Ahh… “I‟m sorry for your worry.
Thank you.”
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Muar, Malaysia is an ugly little city of run down two-story buildings that look to
be twenty or thirty-years old. They are poorly built, poorly maintained, with floor
tiles missing, crumbling plaster held together by tape hardened on paint where
posters of big-breasted women carrying beer have half fallen off. The sidewalks
require care, with broken blocks and holes with garbage thrown down them. There
are no ashtrays in the restaurants, everyone just uses the floor for their butts, and
they spit on it too. The sewers surface randomly. There are bluebottle flies
everywhere. The bathrooms are small, dark, unclean places with a hole in the floor
and a bucket of water with a slimy ladle with a centipede or two crawling around.
But, Muar and its kind people, are a breath of life for me.
I sit every lunch hour with Gho and an Indian man, Ramhere, drinking coffee,
talking, and looking out at Sea-Spray. She is floating happily less than fifty-yards
away. They can‟t relate to the issues in Time magazine. After a poor start in
politics (apparently my president has snubbed the Malaysians somehow), we talk
about sailing. We talk. I learn a little about conversation, how not to merely
question the people I meet.
The local news has been full of stories about the first Malaysian sailor to solocircumnavigate. This is what they want to talk about. “You know nothing about
it?” I picture this small crazyman braving the Horn in a little wooden boat. I
picture him engineless in the doldrums for weeks on end. “Nothing.” I have a little
to learn about Malaysia. He was government sponsored, in a $1,000,000 carbonfibre sixty-five footer, and was helocoptered a replacement when he lost his mast in
the roaring forties. I was right about the doldrums though. And these men
appreciate the art it takes to sail, and despite the high-tech equipment mostly
admire the fact that he rounded the globe without an engine. They have a deep
appreciation for the challenges faced on the water having been brought up on this
coast and beside this river. Both are the reason this town and these people are here.
When I leave after three days of companionable three hour lunches, my friends
are again at the cafe, and I use the last of my foghorn gas to say my bon voyage,
and we don‟t motor, we sail away. I have been welcomed into Muar, despite my
rude beginning, and I recognize this. I try and repay them with the spinnaker. It
fills mostly. I know that if I had more money, if I didn‟t need it, or if I‟d jetted in,
I‟d have missed the kindness, or mistaken it for greed, likely missed Muar
altogether, and for this I am grateful. The current steals the apparent wind, and the
big sail is a new mother still in her maternity dress, waddling after a toddler. It
feels like a fresh start.
I start the Yanmar at midnight with the wind light and out of the north. At 1:00
am, I am racing to unfoul the prop. There are plenty of floating things to run over
in the Malacca Strait. Even if I manned the helm, I would not see the halfsubmerged logs, our wiliest and most dangerous opponent. Twice, Sea-Spray has
fended them off with a clunk when I was below.
I usually pace two steps port, two steps starboard, a simple dance on the
foredeck, and watch the waters ahead. We can stay close to shore and risk nets and
unlit fishing boats, or duke it out with the big boys in the shipping lanes.
Depending on my mood, and the weather, I will try either. There are logs in both
places.
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The winds keep me busy at all the sheets. The shallows keep me checking my
lead-line. I am happy with these simple challenges. I strive for my best, even
though I know that a simple twist of fate is what dominates my existence.
I have a choice between stopping or sailing on north. I could find a place for
Sea-Spray anywhere along this coast. I could sell her in Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi,
or Phuket, and if I took my time, I could find her a decent home. OK so it‟s not the
promised European home… I could get a decent price, then go home myself. I
don‟t seriously consider those options.
I will wait out the cyclones in the north Indian and continue on with Sea-Spray.
I know that I want to sail across the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. Oh! To
sail a small boat across the Arabian Sea!
Sept 23: 2deg57‟ north, 101deg22‟ east: Klang
Twenty hours and one-hundred twenty miles later, we make our way up through
the effluence pouring out of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They welcome the little
boat and I, again happy to see a cruiser, and it turns out we are the first of the
season. We take a mooring at the Royal Selinger Yacht Club in Port Klang, or
Kelang, or Kejang, or Klong, depending on the map or sign you are looking at.
In Malaysia, the most reliable signs are those that warn against trespassing; they
depict a man getting shot in the back. Malaysian maps made before the economic
down turn five years earlier show grandiose plans for highways not yet completed.
The map of Kuala Lumpur has the lines of a monorail system, but where it should
be, there are only rusting-re-bar topped cement pylons standing like dead squid
spiked tail-first into the ground.
They do have a decent mass transit system, though, and the commuter train
quickly gets me downtown. I catch a taxi and I stand at the base of the Petronas
Towers, the tallest building(s) in the world, depending on what counts for height.
Kuala Lumpur impressively hides the friction between the Chinese, who control the
finances, the Indians, who were brought to work the rubber and palm many
generations ago by the English, and the indigenous Malays, who control the
government. They control the government with an Islamic twist and laws that
favor themselves. They need the advantages, for they are not as enterprising as the
others. The Indians seem to get the raw deal, running many of the businesses but
owning few. Still, the people here in this city do get along beside each other, in
indistinct communities that overlap and mix in the colorful markets. At times,
however, the friction of the different peoples ignites and splits the country. Other
times they come together in a defiant, distastefully nationalistic mob. The push and
pull of so many forces leads to land uses that are short-sighted, and mudslides and
tainted waters result. But the land renews itself furiously, if in a different form.
I stay at the “Coliseum,” which was recommended by my “Lonely Planet”
guidebook, and I see that most of the other guests have a copy. The hotel is a
wonderful old, colonial-era inn with a popular cafe serving slabs of beef on the
ground floor, and whores trolling in the alley behind. The rooms are wood-paneled
and have high ceilings. The bed is the biggest and best in my memory, and you pay
up front. The staff is Chinese, and the bar and cafe patrons have all kinds of blood
running through them. Most everybody speaks English, but I have trouble
understanding a grandmother from Glasgow with her thick Scottish accent.
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She‟s not a “Lonely Planet” carrier. She has been coming to Kuala Lumpur
every year for over a decade. Her face is pale and droops like a basset hound‟s. I
find out that she‟s younger than I am and that in Scotland, she works in an insane
asylum; an old, scary one in the Moors. She sits in coffee shops in the “Golden
Triangle” (a modern block crammed with sky-scrapers), reading trashy novels all
day long, and in the evenings, she can be found in movie theatres or Irish pubs.
She looks at me as if I am an open book and transfixes me. We share a taxi to
some spot my guidebook misses, leaving it untainted by travelers. The bartenders
know her in the poolhalls. She shows me to a few of her friends. They are
internationally-oriented Malaysians, Chinese, and Indians, with tattoos and
piercings, and laptop computers. Mostly well-adjusted heroin addicts. Four nights
later, when I come in alone, they all know my name. I bum a computer and and a
line, and my inbox e-mails reconnect me to Montana and Michigan, at least enough
to pull out of that place before I am stuck.
I return to Sea-Spray. The weather in the Strait has been too nasty to sail. I
spend a few days with her, and work on her through-hulls and patch the Zodiak,
which are both taking on water. I get a cold and an ear infection after diving her
bottom. She looks like the working boats now, as if she had never crossed the
Pacific, as if she were never a wealthy man‟s toy.
We are washed out with other debris, on a fast-ebbing spring tide. The land and
the water are less distinct on the charts and in my mind. I steady Sea-Spray for a
village one-hundred more miles up the coast of Malaysia. According to my
waterstained notes, I think I may be able to leave her there in safety and travel
inland for a few weeks. It is still stormy in the Strait, but now the winds are
veering to the northeast so that the seas, which had reached more than four meters,
twelve steep feet, and sank uncounted old wooden boats, taking uncounted lives
while I was in the city, are quieter.
When a squall rolls over us, I hold course and leave the sails up. Sea-Spray
heels over and takes off under me, and for me, reminding me that she is still a
thoroughbred when she has enough canvas stretched across her spars. I gather
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what strength I can from her. But a boat doesn‟t move through the world as much
as the world moves through a boat and as with all passages the inevitable first night
comes, and at 2:30 am, another, bigger, squall crashes down on us, lightning and
all.
We are approaching the tight pass between an island, Pangkor, and the
peninsular mainland of Malaysia, half-way around the world from my childhood
home, which is not on my mind. I‟m thinking that we‟re in a good spot to anchor,
and we have no reason to hurry, but I have formulated this plan, this way to regain
some lost grace, or at least style, for Sea-Spray and I, and at this point I feel it as an
imperative.
I‟ve timed the tides perfectly to come in with the sunrise, drop the hook in front
of the Royal-Whatever Yacht Club, check in with the authorities, have a relaxing
lunch on the verandah, catch the next tide and afternoon land breeze, sail motorless
up-river to this enchanting little village where the boat is safe from wind and sea,
eat dinner at a delightful little seafood restaurant...
I call it: Tide Timing and Wind Luck Soup. I need this.
I‟ve been up almost a full twenty-four hours and I have this vision… and I have
charts! I think Sea-Spray would rather us take the chance moving forward with
intent than worry about a stupid hook dropped in the night. We pause, heave-to
the storm cloud, the mainsail behind the opposing jib working fine, and I spend
twenty minutes punching thirty-five waypoints into the Garmin (one for every
quarter mile) as Sea-Spray is buffeted by wind and wave. Then, the Yanmar with a
full and fresh tank of diesel, idling in forward, just as a back-up, I loose the backed
jib sheet as we move tentatively forward into the decision.
The Island of Pangkor is tall, and blocks the seas, leaving only a chop once we
gather in its lee. The wind and currents are tripped up by it, though, and are sent
spinning into violent eddies, and I can feel the sandbank looming on our starboard
like a man in a bar who wants to pick a fight sitting a few stools over. There are
two big trawlers fishing through the black night off of the south end of the island,
and they use my our intended route in their work. I shift into neutral and sail over
the nets, unwilling to give up our line. Then I shut the Yanmar down. This must
be done under sail alone. Other boats, not much bigger than Sea-Spray, are rushing
the gap to catch the tide; some fishermen, and some others that have probably made
the crossing from Indonesia, sneaking in illicit cargo and people. I follow the
shallower drafted boats as they turn to our next waypoint.
Then, except for dots of light, some moving, some still, all of them paced by
their distance and track, I lose all sight in the sideways sheets of rain, windblown
spray, and steam. Sea-Spray leans and stands and falls off and heads up but I know
her so well I am only a step behind. I just watch the little arrow on the GPS which
to free my hands for the tiller, is velcroed to the inside of my raincoat‟s lapel. We
are completely dependent on my hastily entered coordinates, holding the imagined
course, only straying once when our bluff is called, and we have to yield to another
boat. The big boat first appears as a gathering of moving lights, rapidly spreading
out around the area in front of us and then showing a gray steel wall at ten yards.
Sea-Spray‟s sails flag a violent white as I start and gun the Yanmar in a panic to the
wind and they vane by the twenty knots out of the North. It is a Malaysian Navy
cutter on patrol and we get a spotlight in our back as we angle away from them. I
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hear a voice through a bullhorn, talking to us, but they don‟t change directions as
we go by unanswering. The air is steam and the big drops fall straight down as the
wind yields to the torrent. Back on our heading the sails hang limp, as if the wind
is stunned by our audacity. Our speed comes from the tide and the point of the bow
means nothing. I steady her west to miss the bank and again use the throttle. Then
the rain comes from the South, I shut down the Yanmar and let out the boom and
the sails fill. The lights on Pankor climb the hills and we slide by some power
boats.
We make the corner and turn east into the growing light, the sails pulled tight
again on the tack and the soaked and smearing copied charts showing us, as far as I
can tell, to be in a spot with banks on both sides; we have entered the Dinding
River. Only four gps waypoints to go. The shores rise out of fog showing low
growth, green a hundred yards past the water-line. The Navy yard, and then the
Yacht-club rolls into view as the sky brightens. The sky above turns deep blue, and
we have six knots of momentum as the wind suddenly quits. I drop the sails and
throw the anchor out in a tributary off of the yacht club. Just like that, we are in a
different world.
The anchor grabs near a sailboat boat, it‟s the only one in sight of the Yacht
club, and the people aboard are having a leisurely breakfast on deck, watching the
storm in the southwestern sky. I say, “Shwew… hello,” and I get a dismissive
German accented “ya-ah-un” in reply. I start to respond, but decide to save my
next words for someone more pleasant.
I set up the Zodiak without the outboard and paddle in for a pastry and a beer. I
find a bus that takes me in to Sitiawan, a drab, Muar look-alike. I check-in
smoothly, thanks to an Indian cabby working the station. He is named Supere‟.
He is taken in by the story of my night and my plan to continue up-river, not put off
by the salt white on my face and matted hair and he badgers the authorities in the
newly carpeted luxurious building that houses the bureaucrats: “Please, this man is
racing the tide, you must hurry.”
It is a perfect day with the sea breeze kicking in. All checked in again I weigh
anchor with the sails up, running around deck efficiently and clearing the German
boat with a practiced casualness and maybe a foot to spare. The towed Zodiak does
bump them slightly. We tack around some pylons that will make this route
impossible for a sailboat when the bridge is built, I navigate by eye, working the
sails as the autohelm steers. We sail a four miles up the tide-constipated Dinding
River without using the Yanmar. I am proud as we pick a spot amongst the ten or
so yachts anchored off of the village of Kamphong Baharu. It isn‟t exactly the
Congo in the 1930s, but taking Sea-Spray up this river under sail alone is
something of a personal passage.
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October 20: 18deg57‟ north, 98deg50‟ east: N. Thailand
I have four maps of the area around Chiang Dao Mountain. One is a store
bought tourist map, showing a cave attraction and a few roads, but it doesn‟t note
the spectacular heights. The other three are hand drawn by Thais, with the
impressively up-thrust mountain drawn with a small x. No two maps resemble
each other, and none represent what I see. After we sailed upriver, I saw that I
could move forward one small goal at a time. All I need to survive is something to
strive for, no matter that it is contrived, unjustified- no matter that it gets me
nowhere- each is whole in itself- and in each I see value. Little quests lined up in a
row. And I see simply convoluted terrain, five-thousand steep feet of it, standing
right in front of me. It‟s like a dream come true…
October 14: 4deg41‟ north, 100deg42‟east: Lumut
…I leave Sea-Spray behind, in the Dinding River off of the village, and take a
bus to Penang, Malaysia, an island one-hundred miles north up the Strait. On the
north side, in the City of, it is decaying colonial-era buildings horse-spaced on
usurped fragility currently used by Chinese businessmen, cross-dressing whores,
and heroin addicts. I stay in a wooden traveler‟s hotel recommended by the
“Lonely Planet” guidebook.
All of the white people, including me, walk around with these guidebooks,
while shopping for used books to pass the more uncomfortable movements, cheap
clothes to not take home, and we patronize the bars that serve Tiger beer and the
cafes that serve semi-sanitized food.
In this exotic cultural mishmash I interest no one. I am not relevant to the other
travelers or a mark for the locals. I guess that I look a little too old for the first and
a little too been around for the second. I watch “Dead Man ” in a dingy theatre, a
movie about an American Indian who takes an interest in a stupid White man who
is dying from bullet wounds. The fatally shot man is still up and about, and his
activities interest the Red man, because he can see the power of finality in each of
the stupid white man‟s thought and actions. I am an aimless, pointless contrast
with my comparatively, as far as I know, unlimited time.
From Penang I take a minibus headed north, across the Malay/Thai border and
up to Krabi. I am pleased to get “shotgun,” but when we catch up to our first car,
Len, the driver, a little pudge of unpleasantness, rams down the gas pedal. This
makes the little diesel clatter and smoke, but only that. He takes the passing lane
anyway, with one hand on the horn, and the other flicking the brights. I have time
enough to come up with a few strategies to wrest control from him, and feel the
first droplets of sweat roll down my face and under my shirt before we make it by.
I get out once we are over the Malay/Thai border, grab my pack from the heap in
the back, and forfeit the rest of my ticket with a friendly wave to my fellow
passengers and a rude finger at Len.
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I wander around the unintended drop-off site after leaving my enormous pink
backpack with an honest looking man in the travel agency. He is getting me
another ticket to Krabi on a full-sized bus.
I‟m happy to walk around with that pack, which sets me apart from the drab
backpackers with its color and outrageous dimensions; my wing, harness, reserve
parachute, and clothes and camping gear inside it, and I don‟t mind the faces that
gawk. But if I go inside a shop or a restaurant wearing it, I have to back out,
because I am unable to swivel or turn about without knocking things about.
And now, without it, I must look quite dapper, with my fresh button-down shirt
tucked into belted khakis, my briefcase in hand, and a recent shave and haircut,
because by the time I walk a block, I attract twenty lovely Thai women. They are
all beaming and scantily dressed, asking me if I want company. Closer, though,
and maybe a few of them are lovely Thai men.
I rent a room on the fourth floor of a mediocre hotel. I walk up to find more
Thai women in the halls. After a nap, on my way back down they ask me,
stationary in the doorjams, “Why you no take lady Mister?”
After my first real Thai food, I walk around. Seems Hat Yai has been missed by
the backpackers. Mostly Malay men binging on the cheap Thai beauties, and their
compromise sweats out in a foul odor when they pass. My American Express card
is working again; a cash machine having exchanged a few moments with it for tenthousand Baht, or about $250.00 U.S. dollars. I celebrate with a beer or two. They
go to my head. I feel the beginning of a rip in my personality, part of me knows I
am going on a tear. I move along vulnerable to the first pretty face. I see an
elephant and his person. They give me a ride in the rush hour traffic, where we
seem to have the right of way. I think a thousand $Baht is more than the going rate.
I am lucky because after that I have satisfied my need for intense excitement.
I don‟t get suckered out of any more money, even after a suspicious invitation to
sit and drink with an old man and his young bride on their wedding night…
throughout their wedding night. I stay very late at his Karaoke bar and end up
singing John Lennon‟s “Imagine” to an apparently appreciative audience. The
diversions are heart-given and my attempt is heartfelt as the view from my eyes
realigns.
The next day, slightly hung-over, but with a full and good memory, I take the
seven hour bus ride to Krabi. Caterina, who has been e-mailing me again, is there.
The café where I‟m waiting for her out of the rain has a ramp of slick wet boards
leading down to my table. I stand up to warn her, but too late, and she falls hard,
tearing her skirt and her skin, and filling her face with a puffy embarrassment.
Compared to the Asian girls in my imagination she is heavy, always probing my
words, and always demanding of my affirmations.
We do the beach thing, but that incident has set the tone, and we wander around
the obvious sights, uncomfortable bare friends, for just a few hours. I don‟t want to
drink in front of Cat, who will jump all over me, so I let her slip away as she looks
over her shoulder at me. Over a beer, alone in a rough fisherman‟s bar, the words
of the pretty whore echo in my head: “Why you take no lady Mister?” My dreams
spin elephants and death, and dawn is painful.
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Waking up each morning alone, to an unplanned and blank day is tougher than
waking to an impossible task. Feeling as if both confront me, I jump out of bed
before I start to think. I spend a few days climbing up to various Wats, or temples,
not because I‟m feeling religious, but to scope out a launch site for paragliding.
Each time, though, after climbing four-hundred meters up, I find no way to fly, and
I can tell that the sea didn‟t carve the haunting tree-topped limestone cliffs for me
and my wing. I also can tell that I have vertigo, so to cure myself once and for all, I
attach a luggage strap to the fence surrounding the Buddha and lean out over the
empty space.
Life is dizzying for a man alone. Opportunity abounds with no human
commitments pending. But as soon as a man takes life up on one of the many
choices he is a key fit for only one lock.
Have I let Kari back into my heart leaving no room for Caterina? No. I don‟t
feel committed to anyone but my lovely boat. I wonder if she‟s fine.
Sea-Spray is gentle on my mind because if she is gone I know that I can return
her to the world inanimate, as she was when I first saw her. And while we are
together there is room for another… or is there? Of this I am not sure. All I know
is that someone else will bring her to life when we are parted. I will be able to let
her go. But my conniving brain cannot rationalize away a living life the same way.
They are found alive and they stay that way, and it feels immaterial if they go alone
or with a companion. Though I left my old dog in loving hands, I cannot think of
him without tears welling, so I don‟t often think of him. My mind usually blots out
past relationships to strategically protect my heart.
I remember encountering an old girlfriend a year or so after our relationship
ended. I had a small panic attack. I was breathing hard and nearly gagging. We
had been together for four years, through emotional peaks and valleys. She had
moved to the city and I didn‟t follow her. We tried to stay close but both found the
phone calls too heart-aching, so we decided to see other people. I had never stopped
loving her, I just buried the feelings.
Now I was frantically trying to remember her name!
I move on to Bankok, but there I see razorblades for my pack in every friendly
face, so after less than an hour I head for the airport and jet to Chiang Mai, the
“Rose of the North.” It‟s a great town, and once acclimatized to the chainsaw-like
smog, dust, and noise, the ancient walls and temples glow out from every
viewpoint.
I make some friends at the bars, and leave some things with the man who has
rented me a motorcycle, a big enduro, and ride around north Thailand. The enduro
is a little tricky for me, with a sticky headset that makes the steering lock up lightly
as I gaze towards the sky.
I have another month to wait out the cyclone season before I can sail again…
In the summer, the huge Asian land mass heats up the air above it with the
absorbed energy of the sun. The molecules need to spread out for their hot angry
movement, and this spacing lowers the air‟s pressure, funneling it upward, and with
the earth‟s rotation and air cycling to and from the equator, (Coriolis effect)
clockwise.
In the winter, they huddle together, dense in the cold to form a
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massive “high.” This moves in a counter-clockwise, downward swirl. Meantime,
the ocean temperature of the Bay of Bengal, is relatively stable. These temperature
differentials, and so pressure differentials, are what determines the monsoon, or
season.
The result is that the trade winds of the Arabian Sea blow out of the southwest
during the summers, and from the northeast in the winters. Late summer is the
season most likely to produce a severe storm. A storm with a Force-11 or more on
the Beaufort scale like the one that took my faith away in the Coral Sea can march
across the Bay of Bengal without ever making the news. I can‟t imagine the
process needed to comprehend the seasons that the early sailors used, the
knowledge of generations, many lost, needed, but my guidebook covers all this. A
cyclone; a typhoon; a hurricane; a massive low; all one in the same, expected this
time of year, is out there now, devastating the southeast of India, killing tens-ofthousands of people. I track it each day, and note the body count as it rises like a
reluctant sports fan sickly unable to turn away from some game that has gotten out
of hand.
I can feel a low pressure system in my head. I need someone, or something. If I
don‟t pursue, with my time here, some goal, some life, it won‟t be long before I‟m
lost and spinning out of control. I won‟t make it through the month ashore if my
mind is unable to focus on any goal. Freedom is a fleeting and unstable state. It is
really just an intermediate step away from life. I need some challenge, some
participation.
Don Juan thought all life‟s pursuits to be “folly” in the end, but that didn‟t stop
him from leading a considered, disciplined life. I want to approach Thailand with a
self determined intent, not with just hither and yon desires. I have checked on the
computer and there are some flying possibilities, but all vague, with no directions,
so I stop at a little ultralight park, not far out of Chiang Mai, to see if they can help
me.
There are all sorts of drag inducing, noisy contraptions there. I meet “Brian,”
it‟s not his real name, it‟s his “Farang” name, or one that‟s easy for the tourists. He
can tell me where to try, but right now he is busy attempting to tow a banner behind
a powered paraglider.
A powered paraglider is a beautiful wing turned into a monstrous insult to the
sky. The man has a huge propeller strapped to his back! He‟s getting advertising
ready for the tourist season. The banner is somehow attached to his foot in a bag,
and he plans to deploy it once he is airborne. After two failed attempts that leave
long skid marks in the wet grass from his boots, he does become airborne (I
wouldn‟t call it flying) and circles back around. When he deployed the banner
though, he must have let up on his finger-throttle because he stops dead in the air
for a moment as out of his foot the rolled nylon drops. The wing above him pitches
forward with inertia, and the added drag of the banner stops his. I can sense that
the leading edge is near collapse. If that happens, he is dead. He recovers in time,
though, and swings forward like a trapeze artist under the now nearly stalled wing.
If that happens he is dead. He only just keeps the oscillations within living
parameters as he plummets. Then the ground is very close, and he has built up
some momentum towards it. He crescendos a huge, lifesaving flair, but now
maybe he forgets to let off the finger-throttle, for the huge prop strapped to his back
thrusts him face down into the reeds on the edge of a duck pond.
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He amazes all of us by standing up, cheerful and unhurt. A bit muddy, though.
I really want him to draw me a map before he tries the banner thing again, so I walk
up to him with my pad and pen before he can think to set up. I tell him that I am
afraid to ride my motorcycle in the dark, which is true.
He draws me three complicated maps, all the while sounding out unfamiliar
names.
I spend three days staring at those maps, as if I can somehow glean some useful
information from them by straining my eyes. I spend three days in the rotting,
tilted cabbage patches of three different hill tribes. They are a handsome people,
but pridefully disinterested in me and my big red bike and my enormous pink pack.
Communication with them proves to be impossible. I find my own way to the
summits, but have a tough time, being a poor dirtbike rider. My bike is willing
enough, but I am too timid, and go too slow, and tip over often in the wet, redbrown clay ruts. I smell of rotten cabbage for days, even after washing everything
twice.
I get one short flight, but spoil it by igniting a smoke bomb. I did this to help
me read the air currents in the valley, this having been my first flight since
crashing in Fiji. But it lands on the well manicured lawn of a Japanese-looking
garden and the caretaker is not pleased.
After that I ride for the taller, even more remote mountains, putting painful
miles on the bike. I find the two highest peaks in Thailand to be covered in trees,
but on a third, three days later, I turn a corner and here it is: Chiang Dao Mountain.
The top is obscured by the only clouds in the dryer, northeast monsoon turning
sky. I stop in a hotel, drop my things in a small room with a nice high ceiling and a
friendly hostess, and ride on unburdened, two maps in hand, scouting. Two more
hand-drawn maps later, I stop at a restaurant in front of a cave for the tourists.
There are no buses parked out front and the place is empty except for the
proprietors; two middle-aged women and one old man. They don‟t speak English,
so I point at the mountain and march in place. The two women start talking
excitedly to each other, walk out, hop on little motorcycles, and ride off, each in a
different direction. The man, seated at a table smiles knowingly, and says,
“Guide.”
The women reappear at the same time from different directions, and one has a
small, tidy-looking man behind her in the passenger seat. He has a thick head of
dark hair atop a Peruvian-looking face and round eyes. Lin doesn‟t speak English,
either, and when I point to the mountain, he sits down, carefully folds his hands,
and we wait. A few minutes later, a small pickup appears and two rough hillmen
climb out. They are Dan and Wan, my guides and my porters.
Our only means of communication are pointed fingers and numbers punched
into an old calculator. They don‟t have a map, so I show them my best one, which
includes some of my own modifications. We can‟t agree on where north is, let
alone get into the complexities of my needs, but I‟m guessing that they will take me
to the highest peak, Chiang Dao Mountain, for twenty-one hundred $Baht, plus sixhundred more for a truck to get us to the trail. I originally had stopped only for
directions, but it has gone so far, so fast, that I‟m taken in.
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We all meet early the next morning. Lin puts each pack on a scale. Twenty-five
kilograms is the maximum for each of the hillmen. I don‟t know what is in their
packs, but I have a tent and food stashed along with the glider in mine. I pull
things out of it and fill their mylar potato sacks until Lin sees the twenty-five. I sit
dumb in the cab of the six-hundred $Baht ride. We reach a police checkpoint and I
sign a page full of nice, but unintelligible (to me) Thai characters. The road turns
to rutted red/brown clay-mud and is deteriorating fast. Though the truck is 4WD it
cannot grip the slimy surface. We stop on top of the second or third rise. I don‟t
see a trail, but apparently there is one, it‟s just that the jungle just grows over it
every year, and no one has been up yet. Dan and Wan don‟t know my name, they
just say “Yo” until I turn around and then the hand gestures begin.
I don‟t care, I am thinking of my sea skinnied legs and diminished stamina. We
walk five hours through a wet jungle that rises and changes from denser to dense.
Dan and Wan talk about a plant and stop to take some of the long leaves. I wait,
not wanting to be the trailbreaker because whoever goes first knocks down the
heavy dew. In a few places where the undergrowth is not too thick, a hint of the
old trail can be seen. My legs work fine with my light load. We stop in a canopycovered clearing at 1:00pm and evidently, are at the “first camp.” We have walked
a two-hundred seventy degree spiral and are on the south side of Chiang Dao. We
offload our burdens. They turn down the Power Bars I offer, but accept the
Marlboros, carefully putting them in a folded piece of paper for later, and then they
smoke their own hand-rolled tobacco.
I can feel that the broad valley is past the wall of mountains and I can tell that
we are at a high altitude. We make camp as we lose the sun behind the mountains.
They erect a small cabin with bamboo sticks and plastic blue tarps left from the
previous season. They pull long grass out of the edge of the clearing to line the
floor, and then throw heavy wool blankets on top. I set up my small, hi-tech,
tunnel tent, built for Mt Everest, and it looks stupidly inadequate. My warm
weather down bag pulls out damp and stays limp and unfluffy.
We dine without utensils on sticky rice with a spicy sauce, pork, cucumbers, and
later, toast skewered cherry tomatoes over the fire. I have brought a pint of
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whiskey along, and as it passes Dan and Wan warm to me, but they don‟t try to
talk. I can see the peak next to Chiang Dao that I want to climb. It‟s not where I
am paying them to take me, but whether or not they understand exactly where I
want to go is anybody‟s guess. The path has been going my way, so I have said
nothing. But now, with the camp glowing under lamplight and a shared bottle
between us, I tell them my plans. I tell them I want to fly, and what I need to do it.
I scratch into the ground with a stick and point into the foggy night and repeat over
and over words that mean nothing to them.
I am up first in the cold morning and I restart the fire for coffee. After a
breakfast identical to dinner, except for the drinks, unintelligible arguing turns to
shrugs and I think they know my plan. Dan stays at camp while Wan follows me on
a bushwhack to the top with my pack on his back.
The wind is already upslope; the thermals are nicely tracking up the steep-sided
mountain. There is no launch, only large, loose, ankle breaking rock. Not
something you‟d want to run full speed down. So, we smooth a runway out of the
shale and Wan, after looking with disdain at my proffered REI band saw, takes a
sharp knife to everything within ten meters.
We have a spectacular view of the valley below, but Wan seemingly is not
interested and I am too busy considering the conditions. I determine that they are
very good for flying and there is no doubt I can stay aloft, gain altitude, and fly for
hours. I will take in the view then.
As I launch, one of my steering lines catches on a sharp edged rock and I pull it
right through, ending up in the air with a short internal debate going on. I really
shouldn‟t be flying without that line. I ought to repair it and relaunch. I turn back
into the hill and crash land into a tough little bush on a fifty degree slope. I get a
few scrapes and some new tears in my wing. Enough damage to have rendered it
unflyable. I pack up the now pointless nylon as Wan silently signals Dan to break
camp. We meet up and walk down the front side, which would have been the
better way up. Half the way down, I have to walk backwards to protect my
unconditioned knees, and Dan and Wan take my pack and distribute the load
between themselves. We make it down well before sunset. We dine on a cold
copy of dinner and breakfast outside Lin‟s house, and when he returns, Dan and
Wan tell him about our trek, using more expression than I thought them capable.
They are happy to be back a day early, and happy with the $Baht I give them. I am
happy enough with the effort. I tried my hardest. And I admit to myself that I am
relieved some that my wing is unflyable; my quest for airtime is over.
I wonder how Don Juan decided what to do. He called himself a “Navigator of
Infinity,” but how did he know where to go? “Choose a path with heart,” he told
Castenada. How, on one hand, can a man recognize the folly of his actions, and on
the other hand find “heart” in them? I don‟t know how to remain pragmatic and
feel a pull from my heart at the same time. At this point, my heart is pulled by
people, and that makes the lonely climb up Chiang Dao feel like a hollow exercise.
I head back to see my friends in town.
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November 10: 19deg north, 100deg east: Chiang Mai
I am standing at the ticket counter in the terminal at the Chiang Mai airport,
trying to extend my stay for one more week, when Sea-Spray breezes through my
brain for the first time in a while. The thought of her is gentle, but the fear wells up
when I think of sailing again.
Thom, a Chinese Thai, who is waiting with me for the outcome on the computer
screen, says, “Whhhot?” as she sees my face grow pale and distant. I‟ve known
Thom for nearly three weeks now; I met her in the restaurant she owns, on my
second day in Chiang Mai. She has grown fond of me, as I have of her. We have
learned to recognise humor, earnestness, and even passion in each other, but the
look on my face as I think of Sea-Spray, is new to her. I assure her that everything
is fine, and we continue to wait. In my mind I turn away from the future and think
of when I left her. I feel a fondness for her that has grown in our time together.
The memories are of feelings more than events and images, but I try and picture her
as I left her. I did what I could. I have left a few things behind, intending to return.
I have had a few things slip away slowly. I have let things go forever.
My dog. Summit was my dog‟s name. He was found in the hills of Montana
during a cold January, skinny and mottled, by a woman I knew then. She had no
place for him at the time, so I took him in. He was sketched-out by some previous
contact with a boot, maybe, and a hard winter week alone in the mountains, so I
took it slow. He hadn‟t been neutered, didn‟t have a name, and had no trust in me.
I earned his trust in a few days of considerate attentiveness, and then I tested it:
Along the city path is the Clark‟s Fork of the Bitterroot River, it was mostly frozen,
and I found a spot thick enough to cross. It held me with my clumsy two feet- I
knew it was no risk for Summit, but he stayed on the other bank howling. I waited
for an hour before he joined me.
He‟d hooked me then, and tested me back many times through the years. I
never cut his balls, and many times I bailed him out of the Pound at great relative
expense. He was Call of the Wild handsome, and half instinct. Once when I was
bleeding profusely from a hand I made blood snowballs for him and he howled and
circled me. He would get a far off look, and I‟d irresponsibly not expect to see him
for days. He had some loyalty about him. I took him across the Interstate, me in
my hang-glider and him below. He learned to pick me out of the sky when I was a
speck. He would playfully try and interfere with my landings.
As he aged faster than I, I saw the pain of his driven instinct when he stood to
any, and when he slept on the cold cement. He was well past his prime when I
asked the woman who found him to take him back. I left him with her after
fourteen years.
I left Sea-Spray anchored in the Dinding River off of a small village, a Muslim
enclave really, Kamphong Baharu. I put out a lot of anchor chain and watched for
untoward movement for a week, while I offloaded anything that might rot. I
cleaned, painted, double-checked the pump and the batteries, and set up the solar
panel to keep them all going. I put tarps up between her deck and the wet sky. . …
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I put all of the charts and courtesy flags of the places I had already been, and
some books I had already read, on a table just shoreward of the dock. Next to the
pile, I duct-taped a note saying, “Anything you can use, take. If you want to
reciprocate, I can use books I haven‟t read, and charts and flags of places I‟ve never
been.” I got an old guide, the “Gulf of Aden to Red Sea, including Suez,” some
novels, and a dinner invitation.
My pile of stuff also got me an informal introduction to the other cruisers and
yachtees, as I had hoped. I started to tell people that I might be gone a month,
asking them to look over at Sea-Spray every now and then? I felt good that I was
able to seek out friends, but my darker thoughts tell me that it was a calculated
move to leave Sea-Spray with people who knew her. I felt good about the group,
both the cruisers and the yachtees.
I think of “cruisers” as sailors on the move, stopping for a while and touring
ashore without any real interaction with the locals beyond getting their needs met:
Transnational. “Yachtees” are cruisers who are stuck somewhere for a while, often
due to over-interaction with the local people, or some local brew. They are in love
with someone or something or on a long-term drunk. Some fall for the place or
people, some are just hanging out and living cheaply and intoxicated. As I drink
Singa beer at a table outside of Mike‟s restaurant with a few yachtees, I try and
compare them to the expats in Pago Pago, but it‟s no good, I have changed too
much to measure the similarities.
I rented a grotty little bungalow from Zynol, a Muslim who has made the
pilgrimage to Mecca, so I call him Hadj. He wore a little cap and sported a little fuman-chu. He had a righteous countenance, but was a kind man underneath the
didactic platitudes. And he only charged me seven Ringits (one USD) per night for
the bungalow. I filled it with things that needed airing out. I also stashed the
outboard, the bicycle, and the freshly rinsed and patched Zodiak in the room just
before I left. I gave him one-hundred fifty $Ringits, said I‟d be back in two or
three weeks and would he look out at Sea-Spray every now and then? I told his
employee the same thing, and gave him, Ozman, the spare keys to her
companionway hatch.
I told her I‟d be back. Having done all this for Sea-Spray, the thought of her
was easily swept out of the window of the old Mercedes taxi as the Indian cabby,
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my friend Supere‟, raced to catch up to the bus to Penang, which I had just
missed…
Back in the airport in Chiang Mai, I feel some guilt leaving Sea-Spray there for
one more week, but the switched seat is approved, and my visa still has just that
time before expiring. Thom and I are happy to have a little more time together, but
me almost leaving changes our relationship. She must realize now that I am just
like the other Farang tourists. She must see that I don‟t intend to stay forever, I
only have one more week with her.
We walk out to her truck and I get in the driver‟s seat. Thom had opened her
face wide after the scrunching worry, and it is beaming again now while she pours
three ice-filled plastic cups two-thirds full of whiskey. Beside her is Lim, a
“ladyboy” about my size.
In Thailand it is inexpensive to have the operation that turns a man into a
woman, and plenty of Thais do it. Lim, though lovely in her way, is not as
convincing as most. She has big hands on the ends of big shouldered arms. Her
voice box was damaged when they reduced her Adam‟s Apple (the next thing done
after breast implants), so she doesn‟t often speak, but when she does, she sounds
like an angry tom-cat. I drive out through the airport parking lot, this week‟s
postponement feeling like a reprieve.
Tonight the Thais celebrate Loy Kathong, a many-faceted holiday. It can be a
very spiritual event and it can be a raucous party. A small boat is floated on the
river and light, paper balloons are floated into the sky. The boat is filled with
candles and the balloons rise with the heat produced by wax rings that glow
through the paper. Ancient Thai belief fills the air and water with ghosts and gods,
and these rituals are ways to honor them. In the same ritual, Brahmism meets
Buddhism, and these offerings can bring you closer to Dharma. It can also be
interpreted as a way to welcome the new season; the change in the monsoon from
the violent, wet, and hot southwest winds, to the stable, dry, and cooler northeast
winds. I like this version and launch a paper balloon with “good luck Sea-Spray”
above the painted dragon. Quite a few houses are burned down by failed flights,
but with Thom‟s help, Sea-Spray‟s offering goes well.
We drive through tourists, who have come as if to a Mardi Gras. I catch some
Americans, overmuscled and aging marine types, with the flash of my camera as
they run by wearing dresses. Lim won‟t let me take her picture, and I don‟t even
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ask Mel, who is the fourth person in the little cab. She is a real woman; what is
left. She is incredibly beautiful, but very thin.
When I first met her, after losing a heartbeat, I said. “Hi, my name is Peter. I
have no money, I‟m older than you think, and I‟m kinda married.” She laughed at
me and the small group of mostly Thais seated around the bar grew quiet. Laughter
from Mel is a rare occurrence. Thom came over to put a possessive arm around me
and said, “and he‟s mine for now.” But my eyes drifted to Mel‟s all night. There is
a wonderful sad deepness in those eyes that I wanted to get lost in. When they met
mine, I felt a magical tug. I learned that she used to speak English almost as well
as Thom, but she never talked to me, not even to say hello, not even after all of us
had spent so much time together. But, she would always meet my gaze. After I
learned that she was pretty far down the HIV/AIDS trail, I told myself the spell was
explained and rationally broken: a dead woman.
Once, on a flying trip to a little-used launch site in Montana‟s Bitteroot
Mountains, just south of Missoula, my driver found a camera. It had been there
through a few winters, but when I had the film developed, the pictures were clear.
It was the camera of a pilot, a friend, who had died two years before. He flew
straight into the ground at high speed three days after his fortieth birthday. The
camera contained pictures taken during a flight skirting the largest roadless area in
the lower 48 States. It was a very rare flight, and the longest “cross-country” from
that place. Much of the time he was at fourteen-thousand feet or higher, and one of
them is my favorite picture. He has pointed the camera up a beautiful Bitteroot box
canyon and you can feel that he considered flying that unsurvivable way. There
were also pictures of him remodeling his basement. Up close he had the same look
that Mel has, as if the camera somehow knew.
We stop by my guesthouse where I dump the enormous pack, pay for a few
nights lodging, and knock on my neighbor‟s door. I had promised I would tell her
if I stayed, and that she could come to Thom‟s village to see Loy Kathong done
away from the tourists. Her name is Amylin, or something. I met her the night
before and we had talked for ten minutes. She is from Capetown, twenty-five years
old, and built like a field hockey player—your basic “Lonely Planet” backpacker
type. Yachtees ridicule this ubiquitous guidebook, but they all have one. They just
twist the idea and use it to locate young women who will most likely be found in
places the book recommends. These women are often disillusioned with their travel
adventures so far, and will hop right on to the boat! I use it to find a safe base and
leave it in the room. I don‟t want to meet these girls, and in my present state, they
oughtn‟t to want to meet me.
I tell Amberlyn that it might get a little crazy; and that my Thai friends are well
into their second glasses of whiskey. She is completely undaunted, and climbs
right right past me and into the truck while introducing herself. Now, there are five
of us in the two seats, and I think we are pushing it a bit, even in Thailand; though,
I‟ve seen that many on a 70cc Honda Dream.
When I met Thom at her breakfast/lunch restaurant near the guesthouse, the first
thing I noticed was that she was pretty enough, but mostly that she had a matronly
swagger about her that made me think you wouldn‟t want her mad at you. She
speaks superb English, serves a good Thai dish, has traveled to India, and her
homeland, China. At her restaurant we play backgammon for $Baht. She prefers
the Thai games that she can always win, but after I had lost a good amount to these,
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I tracked down the backgammon board, and now my breakfasts are often free. She
also owns a bar that opens at midnight. Very enterprising. All the Chinese are;
they control the finances in Thailand, as well as in Malaysia, and of course
Singapore.
Thom‟s bar is right outside of a “go-go” bar. Most of her customers are on their
way in or out of it. They are mostly European, or “Farangs.” On their way in,
Thom says, “Hey mister wanna play a game?” (One night I talked her into
modifying it to a breathy, “Hhey G.I. Joe..., whanna plhay a ghame?” but later, we
all decided it was offensive, and it didn‟t increase business anyhow.) On their way
out, the patrons often have one of the dancers in tow, or maybe the other way
around. Thom knows all the dancers, and perhaps gives them a small piece of the
profits, because they invariably stop for a drink, Farang included. Farang buying.
Farang buying the whole bar a “round.” She keeps some Heinekens on ice for me.
Once I was in the go-go bar, letting myself being convinced by a girl who was
asking me about the divorce laws in “America” and a uniformed Thai came in to
get me out. He was sent by Thom.
I first thought her bar was a lean-to addition attached to nothing, just hanging
precariously between an alley and other lean-to‟s. But, after spending time in this
community and after being around her friends; a tuk-tuk driver, handsome and
loyal to her; some young cops who I taught to play poker, letting them win; a man
with a grill attached to a little motorcycle who serves sausage and other tasty treats
on a skewer; I began to see a completeness, an integrity, about the place. I was
always careful, though, not to lean on the bar.
When I would go off to the mountains for a few days, and then come back for a
few days, out and back, leave and return, the familiar faces were welcoming
friends. But, what a crazy bunch we made! The Thais have adapted, misfit, to
accommodate the strange cravings of the Farangs, mostly because of the money.
And it is an odd chemistry that starts bubbling in the Europeans, who come to
spend a month or so away from the rigors of their world. The money that was
poured into Thailand during the Vietnam War vanished as soon as the war was
over. But the Thai‟s were changed forever; they had seen what money could do
and would do nearly anything to get it, and now the tourists bring it. Still, the war,
whether having lived through it or watched it on TV, boils in everyone. How can
you count the cost? Here, five-hundred $Baht ($16.00 U.S. dollars) can buy a
human being. The purchaser is almost as likely as the purchased to die. Dead
people are walking around all over the place, that small price on their heads.
We stop at her bar, Amycline, Thom, Mel, Lim, and I, to refill the ice chest and
to pick up John, Bobby, and Tony. When they get in the bed of the little truck it
settles on its damper stops.
After forty-five minutes of yawwy driving, we start the night at Thom‟s house.
Her mother is a bit cold and children are crying and yelling in the background, so
we never really make it in the door. We eat on the street. I think it is just as well,
given that the house is built haphazardly onto the riverbank. It‟s made of plywood,
without the usual supporting two-by-fours. Thom is angry, though. She is the only
one in the household who works, and supports maybe ten or more people.
Bobby and Tony, two degenerate journalists from the UK, raise their voices and
mimic the Thai-spoken ruckus, louder and louder, until Thom turns to put them in
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their place. She can‟t keep her anger, though, and ends up laughing at them.
They both have skinny white arms and legs sticking out at odd angles, small sunken
chests, huge round guts churning with unreconsiled consumptions, bald heads, and
faces with “what are you looking at?” expressions. They are full of cutting wit that
flies off in all directions and gets sharper and meaner as the night progresses. They
would cruelly slander the late Princess Di, or the Thai king Bhumibol (a dangerous
practice as he is beloved by most and the longest reigning king alive), or any
unfortunate passerby. Always funny and always crudely insensitive.
While in Thailand they live life in three day cycles: Drinking, drinking with
women, and a day to recover.
Thom has promised Bobby and Tony that she would show them the “Pure Thai
Woman” tonight, so after dinner we all pile back into the little truck. I want to meet
her as well. We make it less than a kilometer before we run into the tail-end of the
Loy Kathong parade. I park, and we work through it on foot, but are distracted by
a bandstand where three women in hot pants front a four-piece band. We sit on a
blanket and Thom pours drinks. Everyone seems to be having a good time.
Amumblyne is talking animatedly to Thom; Bobby and Tony are searching for
fireworks, after their attempt to buy the women off the stage failed; Lim and Mel
are talking intently; and John, from Denmark, and I are talking politics.
We are interrupted by a fine looking woman, eighty or so, all bones lashed
taught with sinew, who wants to dance. She takes John‟s drink after we decline,
heads haphazardly across the grass to the stage, stops the band in the middle of a
song (Thai‟s respect their elders), points at us, and one of the women in hot pants
says something into the mike. Thom wouldn‟t say what, but a hundred pairs of
eyes zero in on John and I. Bobby and Tony save us. They have lit a fire and put
a lot of bottle rockets in. John and I slip away as they start to go off, and the others
quickly catch up and we all bump into each other trying to move as one.
It‟s only 9:00pm and already I‟m wondering what I‟m doing here. The parade
has doubled back and we work against the flow until we are at the next plywood
pavilion, where there is a beauty contest. The contestants have numbers hanging
from their necks. Tony soberly tells John and I that it‟s the same as in the
“massage parlors.” “Breaks my heart,” he says. But five minutes later, he is
shouting, “#4, #4, #4!” and Bobby is shouting, “#6, #6, #6!” They ruin the BBC
for me. Thom is starting to single out villagers and berating them. When a fight
breaks out between two Thai‟s, drawing blood with elbow blows, and I find
Amaissia to tell her it‟s time to go.
I give the truck keys to John and say goodbye to him. He left the next morning.
He only told of his love for Thom in a postcard sent from the airport. He said he‟d
come back if she wanted to see him. I figured him to be gay, with his matching
pajama-like pantsuits and effeminate pear-like shape. I hope I didn‟t cramp his
style. Anastasia and I find a Tuk-Tuk and are back at the guesthouse by midnight.
I want to be actively social, the key to surviving as a solo traveler, but my heart
and head are detached, and my intent is vague and directionless, that I am no more
successful at this than with my flying attempts. I want, and perhaps should, for my
own sanity, to return to Sea-Spray and set sail, but the cyclone continues to swirl in
the Bay of Bengal, and now the cholera is creeping inland from the coast of India,
killing…
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The next day before noon, I am in the shade of a roadside cafe 100km out of
town, my morning survival skills having kicked in painfully. My recalcitrant steed
is out in the heat. I rented it from the same man who set me up on the Enduro.
That bike had sticky headset bearings and I would travel the pavement in long,
shallow arcs followed by sharp corrections. This one splays my arms up and out,
leaving my back bent awkwardly, Captain America style. Worse, it bogs on takeoff and bucks as the second cylinder kicks in and out, sending my upper body
jerking back and forth. Once, I sent a string of spittle slapping across my face when
I was slow to tense my neck. Not cool.
It is impressive, though, towering above the little scooters wherever it is parked.
No matter how big the bike, however, it still gets no respect on the roads. I learned
quickly to brake hard and go right into the weeds if the cars came at me two
abreast. If I saw a fast car in the rearview mirror, I would ride on the shoulder,
steering with the weight of one knee pivoting in or out.
Thom will get no goodbye. She‟d probably take a swipe at me.
I won‟t say goodbye to another. In Thailand I have a girlfriend for the dusk.
Not Thom, who took all the rest, this was a girl. I called her Pam and she was
maybe sixteen. I did kiss her twice and bought her some tops, as a friend in sexist
circumstance. I wasn‟t interested in more, but I felt somehow obligated to play the
part. I met her in a bar. I had talked to the bartenderess, who it turned out owned
the bar with her husband, and they were happy to
have me wait and slowly nurse one or two beers
until Thom‟s bar opened at midnight.
Perhaps
they thought I returned to the guesthouse by
midnight, perhaps they knew better, but they liked
me. They told me honestly that they hated The
Eagles, which they played over and over for the
tourists. They argued with me about the merits of
Harley Davidson motorcycles until they learned that
I wasn‟t a fan. They liked me.
On my fourth night stopping by, there was a shy
newcomer. When I said hello, she answered like a
young ass braying quietly. She didn‟t know even
hello. They had brought her in from the fields for
me, no charge.
They let her decide, without consulting me, and
after a few darkening afternoons she asked, through
them, if I‟d take her up to the mountainside temple
on my motorcycle. I took her. I felt her hands holding around me from the back of
the bike. She had never been up the mountain. I felt the stares of the bussed
tourists as they breathlessly climbed the long, dragon-framed stairs up to, and down
from, the Wat. They expect me to feel shame?
I have no money, but I can still afford the moral high ground. Morally neutral
ground. I won‟t push back or forth on her life. Just God please don‟t let me ever
see her particular future. I don‟t like the odds. I have set her up perfectly to fall for
an expat. I will not return to the bar where she waits.
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I am riding around Northern Thailand, searching for the perfect Bhudda. Sure
it‟s a bit of a stretch, but I need something to do; flying is impossible and I‟m afraid
if I go back to the boat, I‟ll sail too early and end up in a cyclone. I know I can‟t
stay with Thom and her friends and not get stuck. I can‟t see Pam- not even one
more second. So I spend four days in four small towns away from Chaing Mai,
away from Sea-Spray, lurking in nondescript Wats. I find him. The perfect Budda.
His grin is half Papal, half Mad Magazine. As with everyone else, he looks right
at me. The death toll in India surpasses one-hundred thousand as the trades finally
start to turn the cyclones away...
…My 727 is delayed an hour while we wait for a storm that was harassing
Kuala Lumpur to pass. As we finally circle down, I see the subdued earth; rubber
trees, palm oil bushes, copra, swampy bulldozed and abandoned acres… and it‟s all
flooded. What a fool I was to leave my boat for a month! I make my way to the
village by bus. Five buses, actually. It‟s a circuitous route, with me impatient and
smoking too much. Finally, the last set of accordion doors opens to Kamphong
Baharu. I drop my pack and run to the river, and she is there.
Though not exactly where I left her.
The next few weeks, while I am cleaning her up and provisioning her, I get to
know my neighbors, and I hear about what might have happened. Each person has
a different account of Sea-Spray‟s time on the river.
Wilfred is a 56 year-old UK Expat. His own boat, a big cement schooner, has
no masts; they just fell over rotten one day. He‟s been here ten years. He drinks
an alcoholic brew made from fermented coconuts. He was brought up in Kenya
and tells stories, embellished some over the years I suppose, of wildcatting in
Africa, and diving everywhere from the Persian Gulf to Papua New Guinea. He
captivates me, until he heartbreakingly loses his train of thought, and his
distinguished captain‟s nose and mouth meet, match-made by a tick that sucks in
the flies unkindly hovering around his neatly trimmed goatee. He sputters and
coughs, and the people around the table turn away, but I stay attentive through the
discomfort and listen as he traces bloodlines through the ages. He is still all of a
man, highly intelligent, and given some task he deemed worthwhile, he would do it
well. But I fear that the scale of his interest is spinning ever smaller in a whirlpool
of self indulgence. He has spent two weeks working on a hopelessly age worn twostroke outboard motor for his spare dingy, pulling the cord angrily as he cursed his
past wives.
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He says a gale blowing with the current dragged Sea-Spray to the bank by the
bridge until she stuck in the mud. Meek and Roger bought their 40 foot steel ketch
in Singapore, 400 miles south, four years ago. Before they left, they took sailing
courses and went out on weekends for three years to prepare for a round-the-world
cruise. They have made it this far. Their pretty boat is no longer sea worthy from
sitting too long. Roger is an architect who works stints in Singapore. Meek is a
younger man; Chinese, a computer whiz who wears outrageous bug-eye
prescription sunglasses. They travel Asia together in love and they enjoy life with
this river as their base. They say Sea-Spray dragged close to the mooring, and
Ozman put her on it so he would not be worried about her.
Silvian is a Frenchman whom I met after I noticed there were some foreign
sheets on Sea-Spray‟s deck. When I inquired around to see who to return them to, I
met Silvian, who thanked ME. He made nothing of a night when he “popped over”
during a squall and tied Sea-Spray off to Ozman‟s moored boat, saving her, not
stopping as his dinghy sank, outboard and all, “eet was tieded welle, szo I knewd I
cood pull oit back op. Zi ootbohrd was shiit” He camped out under Sea-Spray‟s
tarps all night because he “was filling lazy then.” The next day, he and Ozman
helped retrieve “a view othars,” but because he hadn‟t eaten, he was “stupeed” and
forgot all about the sheets. Silvian lives at the mouth of the Rhone in the
Mediterranean and designs floating structures and stage sets. He says “no
problamee” to motoring up the river to Paris, so it‟s probably very hard.
Frenchman.
These yachtees will stay on this river and I will move on. Most of them have
placed mooring anchors; old engine blocks or chunks of old cement foundations
dug into the muddy riverbed, and their boats are secure in the worst storm. I
understand that they still have the option to sail away. Staying isn‟t nessesarily a
cop-out. Their lives are not nessesarily stagnated. They haven‟t stopped trying.
Still, by my working definition, most of them are stuck. They may have one
mad dash to Europe left in them, but probably not even that. More likely, their
boats will rot and they‟ll bail in the easiest way that presents itself. Maybe a parent
or sibling will pass on and they‟ll have an excuse to leave; to take care of the trust,
sell the house. Maybe they‟ll contract a disease that necessitates their return home.
Maybe even though I‟m leaving, I‟m going nowhere.
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Sea-Spray looked like a shipwreck underneath. She was supporting her own
ecosystem of barnacles, mussels, grass, mussel grass, and small aquarium fish, but
I evicted them all with scraper and scotchpad, and now her bottom is fair, and my
swollen hands are nearly back to normal. I have no illusions about this passage.
They are dropping depth-charges in Galle Harbor; the main anchorage in the
Maldives is an often untenable 35 meters deep over coral; and then there‟s Kenya,
Yemen, Eritrea, and Egypt… well, I‟m trying to keep an open mind. But for sure
it‟s not the same as heading for the South Seas and Paradise. For sure, I‟m not the
same man that headed there. And it is a good thing…
„Cause this man can see a starry night, all ours, and our wake is lit up with the
luminescence. Time is almost standing still. The stars scale us to all and nothing.
The miles are to be luxuriously measured in days, and the space will be remarkably
big and small. Each time zone now brings me closer to home, whatever that is… it
feels like something might still be there. And I‟m not alone. My boat. My boat is
alive in the sea and is my companion. And I have faced down my fear.
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January 03: 14deg21‟ north, 49deg07‟ east: Arabia
There‟s nobody around. Nothing grows. The dry, sideshore wind moves the
coarse sand in eddies around some overturned wooden runabouts. The sand sticks
to my wet skin for a moment, and as the wind dries me it falls off, taking some salt
crystals along, leaving me fresh. The air is dry. During the day the air moving in
over the Gulf of Aden is pulled towards the shore to replace the upward-bound
parcel over the hot desert and I can smell it, but the moist component is gone after
it has passed over one meter of desert.
I toss my shorts and two-dollar life vest onto a dusty pile of rubbish, empty the
contents of my dry-bag, duck behind one of the small boats, and don my shore
clothes. Long pants, belt, button shirt and formal black sandals. The garmets add
to my sense of unreality. I have had only the one pair of light pile shorts on for
three weeks, never a shirt or shoes.
Unwilling to face the delaminating Zodiak, I swam to shore. I have entered this
Arabian country swimming through the clear water nearly naked with a purple drybag as a float. After twenty-three days at sea, I am in an easy state of uninhibited
delirium, and all I see around me is a physical dream state. I have forgotten
conventions, and I don‟t see that I am on anyone‟s mind. There is nobody around.
There is an abandoned front, IMIGRATON stenciled in next to a padlocked
piece of plywood that is hanging on pitted gate hinges and next door, between the
blocky buildings that form an irregular wall, there is an opening, and an arch spans
a little used track connecting the city beyond to the small boat launch. The sign is
the only clue that says this is the correct landfall. But it is unmanned, so with no
entry formalities completed, I walk right into town. No foreboding creeps in, so I
continue deeper.
My laptop case, though I have no computer, makes a good stool in the often
chair less ports, and now holds two liters of water, extra sandals (with different
strap locations from where the first pair will draw blood on my salt-sorry feet), and
a carton of Marlboros. It‟s heavy, but I don‟t use the shoulder strap; I need a
swinging plumb line to locate gravity. Even so, I am unable to stay on the
walkway for more than a few paces; the length of a small boat. Imperfections in
the walkway‟s surface cause me to stumble and stiff-leg.
After two “blocks,” I see one man. His first word is a knowing “Welcome.” He
has seen me sail in? He has traveled himself? He has a short rifle slung over his
shoulder and a dagger strapped to the center of his chest. I stop abreast to pull out
cigarettes, but he becomes furtive at this and beckons me off the street. It‟s
Ramadan, he explains in clear English, smirking at my ignorance. He asks me no
questions. He is not curious about me. We don‟t talk, just think together in
different ways about broken rules, and smoke deeply and conspiratorially. It‟s
11:00am, and Al Mukalla, Yemen is still asleep. Ramadan requires abstinence
from sunrise to sunset, so schedules are shifted to cope with the strict religious
rules imposed by the North after their victory in the recent civil war. People here
still eat and drink and smoke, but only in the night. Or out of sight. This Arabian
smokes my Marlboros against the will of those in power. He is resentful of the
intrusive new government: “Dae com in and say how to do anyting.” My stomach
is resentful as well.
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I am very hungry, but resign myself to the religious circumstance and I wander
off, entranced by this city packed in from water‟s edge up to the mountains of
steep, dark cliffs. The white and pastel brick and plaster buildings are unceramic in
their softness, four to eight stories tall, often square from the top, and while a
perfect vision from sea up close they are slumping and crumbled, and garbage and
goats are everywhere. It is a jumbled town plan, but, my mind thinks, it is done
with a sense of purposeful humor. Haha. I climb promising stairways that dead-end
into blank walls. Doorjams are a meter off the floor, but there are no steps. The
doors themselves, of heavy wood fastened with impressive though poorly cast
carriage bolts, have big stamped pot-metal locks, but are paneled with
incongruously thin expanses of poorly fastened plyboard, yielding without a sound
to a slight push. Up above, there is one Frigate bird, looking sky-weary as they
always do, half-heartedly working the lift of the gentle land breeze that also brings
the smell of the sea. I scramble up a chute above town between the cliffs and look
out at the harbor. The vista slowly rotates in my hungry and spent state. There are
a few old cargo ships at anchor and more than a few others are dead and resting on
the reef. The half-dozen Yemeni Huris and Sambug are at anchor and look like
sculptures in a fountain. They are pumping copious amounts of water out of
portholes and deck-draped hoses in a constant struggle for buoyancy. There‟s also
one small sailboat, and she does look fine. The Arabian designs are still being
made from wood. Forty-five feet and built for trading in a region where trade
began. Sea-Spray looks like she belongs with them in spite of carrying the only
mast and I know she couldn‟t carry much. But in every harbor she finds that she
can share some line with the local boats, all the time uncritically schooling them in
grace and modesty. Digging my heels into the slanted desert, I lay back against the
incline while Sea-Spray gently tugs at her chain on an ebb tide.
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December 12: 5deg23‟ north, 100deg15 east: Bay of Bengal
I was back from Thailand, and we were headed into the North-Easterlies, up the
Mallaka Strait, feeling as though we‟d been doing that for a year or so, with the
shipping lanes and the logs and all of the shallow banks.
We were proceeding toward Langkawi this time, the northernmost point in
Malaysia still one hundred miles off, but fat, zeppelin-like storms hovered over that
coast, and I lost my taste for the wet and bumpy windward beat. I found us a
kinder starboard tack just off the wind that gave Sea-Spray mostly dry decks, and if
the monsoon gods would veer a bit, or back, (I get the two mixed up), we would
escape the confinement of banks on both sides, clear Sumatra... they helped some,
and we did!
We ended up ambling twelve-hundred miles across the Bay of Bengal instead of
a planned stop along the coast of Thailand, which seemed unnecessary given the
fine looking weather towards the east, even stupid, given the constant rainstorms
north and west overland and the stories of yachts being preyed upon by thieves in
longtail boats and my empty purse. Thom will not wait long for my call.
Changing sails often, I kept on putting mostly more canvas to the wind as my
faith gradually returned. With the sea clear of land I only used the old compass and
the only plotting was how to attain speed and grace and West and we made good
time in spite of sporadic trade winds; only nine fine days sailing found us off Galle
and the south end of Sri-Lanka.
Upon our arrival there, I was hesitant; Cyriaque was jailed for a week when he
stopped here, and in his pointed e-mail, “thought the locals generally unpleasant.”
And the book cautions that check-in is expensive and time consuming. Also, I
liked the sailing- I wanted to keep sailing.
We sat in an easy roll, Sea-Spray and I. I had dropped her sails and was staring
uncommitedly at the entrance and my chart and the Garmin. I was listening to the
BBC World Service, and to the hour‟s opening story as it was transpiring.
It had just happened twenty miles to our north. The president of Sri-Lanka had
been injured, maybe killed, maybe her face blown off by a “Tamil Tiger” suicide
bomber, a young woman, who martyred herself, a woman who took another twenty
or more lives. Nothing to do with us. I put up one sail and Sea-Spray steadied
West at two-and-a-half tentative knots.
I was thinking we still would have time to turn around for a few hours, maybe
give time for things to settle down, when we were run over by a local fishing boat
who took out my wind vane with his careless boat handling, my windvane which I
had finally perfected and actually steered Sea-Spray as well as the electrics, at least
when the wind was close to beam-on.
I didn‟t even care, I was happily angry, and started to jump on his boat to beat
up all of the skinny men, which was still thumping Sea-Spray‟s flank, but then, I
realized it was a poor idea, I am one skinny man and they are five, and it would be
stupid, leaving my boat alone. Instead, I calmed down and traded one pack of
smokes for a nice tuna, four pineapples, five coconuts, and some gourds I never
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understood. I considered myself reprovisioned, and as they and their world quickly
disappeared from my thoughts, I hoisted four sails.
The Maldives, or India...
The next day, having halfheartedly decided to try and catch Cyriaque in
Cochin, strong winds funneled over Adam‟s Bridge between the Continent, (India)
and the Teardrop, (Sri Lanka), sent determined white horses to run over us.
I was too soft to push north to India, (it‟s only blowing twenty and only a few
points to our nose), and with my intentions scattered and as fleeting as the crests,
the next day we also ended up past the Maldives because they seemed a little too
far south…
So we ducked into the nine-degree channel and into the Arabian Sea. The
Northeast Trades were northwesterly and we had to push a little from our perfect
point-of-sailing for the higher latitudes, but Sea-Spray charged tirelessly on
underneath me, happy to work into it.
I had Joseph Conrad on deck by day, tossing his sea-soaked pages overboard
one at a time as I read them. The seas were spilling breakers that made a nice
sound and when I was drenched by the occasional errant wave it was refreshing and
I never shivered feeling a malice directed at me. I never used the Walkman, and for
navigation I only used the old compass for another week. Encouraged by the easy
rhythm of the sea, I slept throughout the twelve hour nights. I forgot about both
Christmas and New Years. I was happy in the present and untroubled by the past
and sure of the future. I could feel that the weather would stay fine and nothing
would break, and was prepared to be wrong.
My peripheral vision was attuned to the seas, and my feet knew exactly how
much weight to take on. I knew where the rogues would land and I was able to step
away without thinking if I cared to. I took my time preparing meals with the
carefully stored vegetables. We were two and a half weeks from the last market
and I still had a perfect tomato. I even caught a few tuna. I felt a steady and
rhythmic joy in this passage.
I felt no anticipation for a landfall, and no regrets for what was behind us. I
was just sailing her and no one expected us and our wake was untraceable. SeaSpray and I existed as one being in the present; I was part boat, and she was part
me. My neural network reached into the sky with her spars and her oak frames
reached within my subconscious so that I felt her there.
My thoughts and my actions scaled down. I didn‟t think of my wife or my
mother or my father or my brother. I was acutely aware of only the immediate,
which for the first and only sustained time in my life didn‟t include myself. I could
sense the infinite without a longing.
January 02: 13deg north, 64deg east: Arabian Sea
I wasn‟t oblivious. We made all the points we could to clear Socatra (an island
between Arabia and Africa) and her fierce, piratical inhabitants, who troll the
waters in search of prey in 30 foot fiberglass speedboats, equipped with radar, twin
200hp engines, and machine guns mounted on raised foredecks. Many of these
boats once carried the American flag. Spoils of limited and temporary
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engagement. They are feared by both the Somalians to the South, who ran off the
USA, and the Yemenis to the North, who are politically their own countrymen.
With land in sight on both sides again, I felt a want to put in then, and so I did a
plot and I had us push for points on the Garmin‟s screen North, away from the
scary Island. We made so many points, in fact, that when the trades finally kicked
in, we ended up rolling and wallowing along the coast of Yemen into Al Mukalla.
The wind was directly behind us and we were slow in the inefficient angle, but
thirty-five hundred miles was also past. Thirty-five hundred wondrous miles.
We must have moved in a cloud made of magic. Time stood for me, and every
moment was a lifetime of struggle confirmed. In those moments I learned how to
sail. A fleeting lesson, but it is my boat and mine nonetheless, and if it took a
lifetime, it will last one.
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Humans appear, groggy, in the doors and windows. Some of the men are smooth,
olive-brown Arabs; some are pale, doughy, and scholarly-looking (Jewish-looking
to my stereotyping eyes); some are pock-marked nightmares with missing limbs;
and some are black Africans- one Black, in particular, has a very small head and
pygmy face, an extremely long neck, snakegrass limbs, and a posture that leaves
me feeling slouchy. All carry weapons unthreateningly. There are children.
The women, on the other hand, are unidentifiable. They are covered head to toe
to fingertip in black. A centimeter slit in their veils reveals shiny, wet, dark,
expressive eyes, in what seems an obscene exhibition. I am horrified when
accosted by a woman who grabs at me, at my intimates, to beg for money; I worry
that I could be killed for breaking some taboo when our eyes met.
I spent just four days in Yemen. I always felt like an outsider because when
someone would try to make friendly contact, I would feel others zoom in like cold
spies, and I‟d back off. I never learned to appreciate the loudspeakers blaring out
the words of the Koran. To my uncomprehending Americanized ears, it sounded
like hateful political rhetoric, not reverent prayer.
But the fishermen who would shuttle me and my jerrycan and boxes and bags to
Sea-Spray would never accept any payment for it, even though they were extremely
poor- they had an easy dignity and a deep warmth. They did accept an offer of tea
on deck, and we drank it, chewed some local narcotic leaf, and spit strong snuff
over the side. We never spoke, so we weren‟t struggling for any common ground,
just content in the comfort provided by the “ghat” and each other‟s company. SeaSpray and I found a deep peace in the cover of that beautiful harbor.
The shopkeepers who returned the overpayments I made when fumbling with
the local currency, Ryals… The harbormaster who gave me some fine old charts of
the Mediterranean and told me the likely smuggling routes of the scary Socatrans;
they land on the deserted Yemeni beaches at night during the long Fast, and the
children who lived parentless in the beached freighter… The day we all saw the
new moon from the top of the mountain, like an earthquake, and everyone finally
ate by the light of day… I ordered an omelet and got a whole chicken (it was very
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good)… The tangerines that peeled themselves and tasted so sweet, as if they were
honeyed… The tomatoes I ate like apples because they needed no seasoning…
Each small event carried such gravity. There is a deep simplicity in Al Mukalla
that I hope I‟ll never forget.
When Al Mukalla was astern I was pleased that I still had my sea-legs. I felt as
if the passage from Malasia had stayed unbroken and the usual nervousness of a
new beginning wasn‟t there. I touched up Sea-Spray‟s topsides with some white
and her natural wood with some varnish as her sails pulled us West through smooth
water. She was taking water through her hull but none of her stress points showed
movement. Every twenty-thousand miles or so of hard sailing a wooden boat likes
to have some fresh caulking pounded in here and there. I hoped to do this for her
somewhere in the Mediterranean.
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January 07: 12deg43‟ north, 43deg11‟ east: Red Sea
Passing through Bab-El-Mandib, the Gates of Sorrow,
under the gentle power of the little diesel and a barely
perceptible current in a glass calm is perhaps the rarest
occurrence, statistically, that Sea-Spray and I have yet
faced.
Sharp breakers, over-falls, and gusty gales are to be
expected here where winds and seas are funneled and bent
through the topography of an ancient upheaval.
The
imperative that pushes and pulls at the two elements
through the less than twenty miles separating Arabia from
Africa is palatable even in this calm. The shore, when
visible, is moving past at a suspicious pace and I can track
our movement by the changing angle from which we view
the seemingly stationary stars.
This narrow Strait links the Gulf of Aden- the Arabian
Sea, to the Red Sea. The conditions through here have
knocked down and capsized some famous sailboats. The
bones of dhows and men litter the shores from war and
mostly deadly windwaves.
Sea-Spray is levitating on a peaceful cushion of
brilliant phosphorescence, always perfectly perpendicular
to some invisible tangent.
There is enough of the
plankton-born luminosity to read by, and enough light to
see the individual skin cells on the tops of my hands, even
though it‟s midnight.
Twenty feet below us, outlined in fire, the ubiquitous
hammer-heads are easily distinguishable from the
plentiful porpoises. Other sea life moves in a shower of
sparks, and even the “Rapalla” trolling 20 meters behind is
clearly visible. I can see the fish strike but we are too fast
to catch them. With no reflection, I can‟t tell where the
water starts. I start to drag a hand for the sharks but
leave the question unasked, the plane undefined.
It‟s surrealistic space, and I should be able to push
down on the rudder and watch her bow rise. I think that
if I did so, maybe we would fly. I leave the possibility
untested. Undeniable magic is beyond my tinkering skills.
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I will take in what gifts are given to me, and I seek no
explanation.
In his desert walks with Don Juan, Castenada spotted a
coyote struggling to untangle from some stray wire. It
looked as if all of its paws were caught at once, and it
tried, with great heaves of its body, to free itself. Then
Castenada thought he was mistaken; it must be a snake
pinned by the canine, and, afraid to let the serpent slither
out, the coyote was trying to crush it with the momentum
of each down-thrust. Then Carlos saw that it was only the
wind tearing at a bush. Don Juan was disgusted with
him.
The moon slivers a saucer to the west and somewhat
below us; there is no visible horizon. We are suspended in
the dome of an infinite, circumephereal planetarium.
There is no political delineation. There is no threat from
the shore.
The sharks would kill me, but it‟s nothng
personal. I gently push down. Sea-Spray rises out of the
water as I let the rational slip away.
Up where the air is less thick I can see the lights of
Mecca below, as I understand it, Baron von Munchousen is
there, and beanstalks stand among the stars. Sharks swim
along-side the head of Albert Einstein or Carol Channing;
I don‟t hold the view long enough to be sure. Below I can
see the Strait, I can see Sea-Spray, I can see a figure
hunched at her helm with a craned neck…
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Two nights and days later, having slipped passed the shipping lanes and the
disputed Hannish Islands, where it is said that alliances shift to justify any prey,
approaching Africa from the East, I am below making tea and pan frying a freshly
caught tuna, in series, when I hear a very loud and hearty “Hello” through the
hatchway.
It is so nice, so gentle, that I poke my head up without a worry to an open
dhow, heading south and east, pumps pumping, as it transports thirty Africans.
Forty listing feet of rotten wood. “You go Eritrea?” “Yes.” “Where from?”
“America.” “Very good.” “Some good.” “OK Hello.” “OK Hello.” As they pass,
the pungent smell of humanity and plenty of flies inundate us. I hold my smile and
my breath as we continue through the Massawa Channel.
A couple of attentive hours contemplating charts and low islets and then we are
threading our way through a wreck-ridden harbor fringed by bombed out buildings.
The dome of a grand temple sits half round except for some rocket-holes atop a
pock-marked rectangle without glass. I tie up to the docks between two freighters,
one of them shell-holed and settled on the cove‟s bed, and the heat hits me as the
air stills. Afoot again I wind my way unescorted between old abandoned machines
and empty structures to check-in.
A pair of two story white-painted clapboard longhouses face each other with
people moving about. The roofs are overhung and afford shelter from the sun to the
wooden walkways that access all of the rooms from the outside. The trim is
infinite shades of dull green, the only green anywhere, the wood stairs have deep
tread paths and the furniture is an odd mix of weathered wood and stainless steel .
I suppose that crews tend to enter in groups and there are rows of chairs like a
school-room. I wait fifteen minutes for customs, immigration, health, and
agriculture like a student held after class. He is welcoming, and suggests a thirtyday visa, so I might go inland if I choose to. I sift through my thin wallet and
cough up the extra $30 USD.
We anchor in a nearby bay, again the only sailboat, and I ready the Zodiak. The
ride to shore ends rather unpleasantly as the floor of the tired Zodiak drops through
and I have to grapple, without dignity, for the jetty, with two heavy dry-bags slung
over one shoulder.
I get soaked in front of a crowd of people… enough people
to spread the word, so that everyone I meet during my week in Massawa starts off
with, “You... One sink?”
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January 09: 15deg37‟ north, 39deg28‟ east: Eritrea
In the hot afternoon, I pick up a shore pass, and “Mike the Laundryman,” who
has been recommended as “honest and helpful” by my scratched notes, the source
forgotten, meets me at the gate into town, as a young man is poking through my
bag with the business-end of a machine gun.
Mike hands me his card, which is bent and frayed and dirty. He looks gray and
sick under a wool sweater with three cotton t-shirts worn over it, though it is
95degF, and asks me if I have any Chloroquine (for malaria) aboard. Yes, I do, and
I think after looking at him I think that I might want to grab some bug spray and
some of the faster acting anti-malarial Doxycyclene, so I turn back to the Zodiak.
After swallowing two pills and re-arming my skin with Deet, I ride the dinghy with
one foot precariously placed on each air chamber, and return, standing defended in
body and mind and all-around more serious to face Africa.
The living town of Massawa, Etritrea, surprises me with well-swept streets and
handsome, old, well-patched buildings. When the Turks, and later the Italians,
controlled this Red Sea port, they brought their architecture, and made the Eritreans
build from the imported plans. Now the country is free of the colonialists and more
recently, free of Ethiopia, though skirmishes along those borders claim thousands
of lives and sap already strained resources.
A pride shows through the pain, however, and it is apparent that they are not
resentful, and that they understand the value of these structures that they built with
their own hands.
The Carlos Castenada that was to meet Don Juan Matus was a cocky grad
student on his way to meet some old Indian who had come in on a bus. He felt
superior, as most rational, materially wealthy Western men might, when they
encounter a poor third-world man. But he was self-conscious and sensitive to how
people reacted to him. When Don Juan didn‟t concede his superiority, and even
saw right through to his own fragile ego, he was taken aback.
My ego has been deconstructed enough so I feel I can see people as they are. I
have nothing much material to put me above the Africans. And I have found a
depth in a spiritual relationship with a small wooden boat that puts me on par with
any real hocus-pocus I may encounter.
Mike is where he said to meet, but at a table slightly apart from the others, at
which other men sit and drink tea or coffee. As I sit, he orders a beer from a pretty
woman wearing a dress that belongs in another time and place: Maybe a Black
church in the Southern United States in the fifties. The dress is faded pink, with
brilliantly clean white frills. I say no thanks to the beer and ask for coffee. I pull
out my wallet, and Mike is transfixed by it. He snaps his fingers, not something I
expect an African to do, and sends an answering boy off to change one of my few
remaining twenty dollar bills.
The men at the other tables are well dressed in comparison to Mike. They seem
disapproving… of Mike? or myself? or the twenty? I hear a loud hiss. The sound
is familiar, yet seems a lifetime away. I defiantly follow it inside and see an old
espresso machine churning out hot sludge. The room is full of Art-Deco, stainlesssteel furniture.
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Back outside Mike swallows five of the pills and all of his beer in one long
draw, and orders another. “Ahem… So you wanna girl youz come to me, I find a
nice wannat lives at home.” He drinks half of his second. “Stay away from
anyadem named Addiz Ababa , thaze all got de Aidz.”
My coffee comes down with a soft hand and I hear sharp Eritrean words for my
tablemate, who is now holding old coins across the table to me, ignoring the
fantastic woman, palms up. “I got more of deze, some betta.” The boy returns
with my changed money, and tries to give it to me, but Mike intervenes. I let it
pass. “So… Mike, where‟s the nearest fuel? I‟m going to need…” “don worry we
gonna take care of ya when my brudda comes.” The waitress comes with his third
beer. “No more, OK? Look I think I‟ll just wander around.” I stand. To the
waitress I say, “I can pay?” Mike stands unsteadily and takes my forearm in his
hand, across the table. “Can I have my change, please?” He gives me most of it,
and the waitress takes some bills from the rest. Her nails are perfect. “Look here
siddown.” “Let go, Mike.” “One more beer siddown!” The waitress looks at me
incredulously, “Mok? He teld you he Mok?” She thinks I‟m stupid- I have seen
this look before. Mike or whoever has a vise-grip on my arm and when I pry it off,
his other latches on. My demands for him to let go are getting louder as the tension
builds, when a man from a nearby table comes over. “Andre is no good.”
“Andre?” The helping man has just one arm, and together, our three hands are
full, grappling with Andre. I wrench my hands away and back up from the
unwanted scrum and walk off saying, “Thank you, no thank you.” I meet the real
Mike on the next block. He is honest and helpful. He gets me a room in the Savoy,
and invites me to his house for dinner.
His home is in an older, Turkish-designed part of town. It has a small front
room for sitting with guests. Adjacent is a lightless cavernous space with a
looming stone spiral staircase leading to the sky two-storys up. It serves as a
kitchen and laundry room. The roof is gone; taken out by an Ethiopian-sent
Russian shell while he and his family huddled below. It strikes me as a biblical
scene- the rounded way the floor meets the wall and the washbasin in the center of
the room and of course the stairway that ends in the sky.
His wife is quiet but her eyes never turn away. She sits on a stool wearing a
white dress under the arch leading to the space, and makes coffee. She takes green
beans and roasts them over an hibachi, then grinds them between mortar and pestle,
then pours hot water over the powder, and finally, out it drips into a small cup. It is
delicious. Mike has a TV and an ice-box. Pictures of Jesuses on crosses are
plentiful, but Mike never mentions religion except to say that everybody gets along.
I dip thin fry-bread into spicy goat soup.
I am a guest in their house for six of my seven nights in Eritrea. I help his three
daughters with their English in an attempted exchange. We work straight from
their school-books, I introduce no new thoughts, mostly because they are nearly
uncomprehending of my words and also I get the feeling that Mike wouldn‟t
appreciate it, but it is a playful exchange despite the limitations. His oldest
daughter, so beautiful, I think understands more than she lets on, but won‟t join the
English lessons. She has the face of a wooden mask on my father‟s wall but her
eyes give life to an intelligence below in the place on his mask where they are
carved out from.
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Every night neighboring men stop by to gather together and to watch the news on
Mike‟s TV. Eritrea is at war with both neighbors now; Ethiopia to the south and
Sudan to the north. When the leaders of either country appear like smoke on the
screen, the men talk hopefully about the expressions they see in the faces. I know
nothing of the history, and just trying to empathize makes me dizzy. After the
young girls go to bed, I watch his oldest clear the table. I go outside to smoke and
she stands dreamily in my mind. I wander back to the Savoy. Every night the
coffee has me staring at the ceiling alone.
After I was so easily taken in by Andre the bandit, Mike is a mother hen treating
me like a particularly stupid chick. With the exception of Andre, the people of
Massawa are unthreatening and possess high moral standards. Even Andre civilly
shares a coffee with me after Mike‟s patronage is established. I start to miss the
danger.
I give Mike the slip one day so I can get out on my own. I have my tourist Visa
in hand as I ride the bus up into the mountains to the capitol, Asmara. It is a wellkept city with Italian colonial architecture. The air is sweet and cool, the streets are
neat and unencumbered, and the people are clean and polite.
Eritreans fought hard, without any help from the international community, for
independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990‟s. They continue to improve their
lives despite poor odds. They are, wherever I go, clean, healthy, and educated.
They are rightfully proud. Plenty of the men are missing limbs, but they all look
well taken care of.
I came to Africa with a head full of stereotypes, and the belief that Black
Africans, because of their tribal culture, are incapable of self-government by
European standards. Eritrea shatters them all. There is less corruption and less
crime here than in my own country, and there is tolerance for divergent religious
beliefs.
Three distinct generations make up the population. The old men, who come up
to me gesturing and speaking in a Brooklyn/Italian accent,
find me
uncomprehending, and therefore dismiss me. They have adapted to, and in many
ways adopted, the culture of the occupiers. They have the skills to keep the old
Fiats and Lancias running, and they nurture the ancient espresso machines that
churn out the fine, gooey slime.
The men from twenty-five to fifty-five years old are serious, and not altogether
friendly. They have paid a high price, many with lives or limbs, and worked hard
to build a genuinely secular government that supports schools and innovative
agriculture (they have learned how to grow corn in the desert) There is a respect
for women born of days fighting side-by-side. The books I use to teach Mike‟s
beautiful daughters are Africa‟s best hope.
But the men of that age look at me as if to say, “Tell me what you want, white
man, what you want… to take from us. Tell me what you bring. No. Let me tell
you what you bring. You come with money so easily got and the plague of
influence that rides along with it.” They fully understand what happens along the
sharp divide between rich and poor. They are intelligent and skeptical.
The two subgroups among the young are those with parents, brought up with
love, history, structure and education, and those who lost parents in the wars,
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brought up alone and schooled in the dusty, unyielding streets. Both, however, are
caught up in the “culture of the material.” It attacks from outside, entering their
minds as a virus living on hope and a future. They do not see how far their country
has come, they see only how far there is to go, and how slowly they approach it.
They don‟t remember the fight, only their elders telling them how it was.
Mike and the others of his generation have a tough task ahead. The pride they
feel is earned, and there is no other way to acquire it. It cannot be taught to the
children. The contorted and charred wreckage in my street-kid friend Meron‟s
mind is far from the intended result of Mike‟s righteous nationalism, and his own
daughters will not find men like Mike. It is the same for my generation.
I was at my father‟s 70th. There were 50 couples attending, and they all had
know Mom and Dad for 60 years. They had all been married, once, for 40 or 50
years. They all had worked it out so they had homes and enough money to afford
the best medical care to the end. Most all have grandchildren and most have passed
on a financial legasy. Some of the people I grew up with have the same continuity,
and some have taken the culture and values of their parents, but only some. Most
have relocated, many are childless, and a few, like me, have built nothing.
I have little to give these people, but they love music, and so I gather all my
tapes and go through them looking for some near appropriate selections. I give all
my classical music away to the adults, who can sing along side the opera, and then
Mike stops me with a hand. He says he wants to see what I have for the young
people. He listens to each tape and returns most a few days, later saying that they
are no good for his people.
Eritreans have their own sound and the lyrics are all about their struggles. They
are often directed at the people of Ethiopia or Sudan, asking them to get their
governments to stop the wars. OK. So I didn‟t bring him the Eritrean National
Anthem, but I didn‟t bring him “Gangsta Rap,” either, and I am a bit resentful of
his censorship.
But that night, the streets are filled with the badly reproduced sounds of Tracy
Chapman, and I know that Mike has made copies for any street kid who wants one.
Melancholy moves in me as I eat fresh-rolled pasta and drink locally brewed
Italian beer alone at the Massawa Cafe. I am entitled, I have to sail in the morning,
and I order a third. I have not touched alcohol around Mike and his family. I told
him I had work to do tonight, but I know he will know where I am. I let my heart
fill with the memory and magic of my encounters with people and places as I
indulgently retrace the path that Sea-Spray has brought me along.
They are so innocent and fragile, the Islands and the Peninsulas and the People
who live near the Oceans, and they are all so wise in the knowledge of their
temporary existence. Life comes from the Sea and Death washes the shores. The
White small-boat sailors who know harrowing seas are only cynical on the crest,
the men who work the water and seem so dull are only shallow on the surface, and
the women are only abused in their shallows, and have depth beyond ken.
A few beers later I see what I have done. I have lived a wondrous past. The
memory of the people and the places are with me to the core. I come to the bitter
conclusion that I have taken it to heart, and stupidly left it behind in the always
uncomfortable present. And now my future is certain. I will run into the ground.
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There is no money left in hand and every bank-wire or credit transaction means
another month of work back home, where I see only hardship and tedium. I have
come a half circle to finally understand my peers on Pago Pago. I can no longer
fool myself into thinking that I am different from them. I can no longer fool myself
into thinking that I‟m a free man. My past does nothing for my future, ever, except
now I am an older and poorer man. Whatever I have built will crumble to vague
nostalgia inside before it can be redeemed. In so many ways the stuck ones have
proved smarter than I. I‟ve no choice now but to move on.
This is not from a lack of commitment or perseverance, not from an inherent
flightiness; it comes from a different understanding of circumstance. I notice
things that others miss only because the obvious flies right past me. My mind first
thinks what can be gained, like any animal, but my heart, embarrassed,
immediately rules it out to obsess on the unattainable. I have tried a few different
strategies to attain my ethereal goal, this is just another one that hit back in a way I
didn‟t anticipate. I stand, almost fall. I have fallen. I have fallen in love with
Mike’s oldest daughter. No. I have fallen in love with a concept. I have fallen in
love with a mask. I am drunk.
In the pained morning, Sea-Spray and I await customs. Mike and his family are
there to see us off, and with tears he says, “Don‟t forget.” And there is the best,
looking at me with a quizzical sorrow. She looks surprised that I haven‟t made the
connection, surprised that I am leaving. From my boat I get a bug-eye view of
her- she is tall and thin from behind my tear-distorted lens. Sea-Spray and I head
out to the north, somehow knowing the best is south and east and in the past and in
her eyes.
January 20: 19deg10‟ north, 38deg42‟ east: Red Sea
We are pounding north into a cold northwest gale. The keel shows its deepest
reaches in the troughs and the bow is buried in the crests sending a cruel judder
through Sea-Spray. Two sails have blown out in three days, and our portside
spreader has broken and the stay has chewed into the white paint on the mast which
whips sickeningly on the downside jarring.
Sailor’s aside: I left San Francisco with maybe 15 sails, most of them dug out
of dumpsters. Not counting the storm in the Coral Sea, I only lost one through
gross mishandling, and it wasn‟t one of her best. She still has her like-new main,
a mizzen (OK, so there‟s no mast for that anymore), a working jib, two genoas, and
a faded but undamaged spinnaker (which I often handed under trying
circumstances). None of my structural repairs failed, it was always something
different and new (in this case the cast fitting that attaches wire to the mastbolt
broke). I had changed every shroud along the way. Most of them failed under
load, and I had to throw a line up quickly when they did, as the mast contorted
wildly. True, it was my job to inspect everything and to replace anything
suspicious. Aside from the cast fitting, I found and made preventative repairs to a
few potential failures, and it was the integrity of those repairs (and luck that I was
on deck to head up and douse sails) that saved us from a few other dismastings.
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I‟ve got three sails up and pulled taught, so we‟re over 30 - 40 degrees into
winds of 35 - 45mph. We‟re making 5 - 6 knots- only one of which is made good.
I have us motor-sailing on every starboard tack.
We‟ve been doing this for 4 days now. I‟ve pushed too hard, right into the bitter
and conceited higher latitudes, right into a bully winter. The chainplates are
shifting under load- one of them squirts water on my bunk periodically, and the
seams around them all are weeping. The weather spitting down from the cold north
is killing Sea-Spray. With no delays since Australia, I‟ve put us ahead of the seachange. I‟m protected from the wind and sea from a dodger I put on in Lumut, so
I‟ve lost touch with what my boat is facing. I‟ve been thinking more and more of
myself now, and trying hard to reach a conclusion—any conclusion.
We go back and forth between Arabia and Africa on each tack, pointless hours
only to arrive at the same landmark. Through the shipping lanes, across the cold
expanse of steep seas, in behind the unmarked reefs…
When the prop and shaft are bent by some flotsam, I don‟t even hear it. I only
notice, hours later, the water start to slosh higher below decks. After a frantic
search, I find a loose plank where the bearing hanger mounts. The shaft moves it
elliptically when it is engaged. The plank lets in a gallon for each revolution. No
more motorsailing. The electric bilge is now running full-time, and even without
the Yanmar running, I still have to pump every half-hour, or we will sink.
Sliding leeward towards a rock and reef infested island group off of the East
African shore that was last surveyed in the 1800‟s; uncharted for our practical
circumstances, I consider beaching and abandoning Sea-Spray. What would I
face? What did the Cat-scow in my dream do? Sudan is the nearest land mass
next to these islands, and aside from the fact that they hate Americans, there is a
civil war raging. Before Sea-Spray and I could even get close, she would be ripped
apart and pounded by the reefs surrounding the islands.
I should run back to Eritrea, but I cannot bring myself to retrace our path.
Midnight. Gale force winds. We are on our last tack- one way or another,
because I‟ve failed to secure the mast on the port side and in this gale there is no
sail small enough for the unsupported mast. We are making no northing, so I am
westward and in the process of resigning myself to the uninhabited beach in Sudan.
The Zodiak hooked up to a gas cylinder had been my life raft, but the cylinder was
rusted, and the Zodiak itself was coming apart, so I tossed the cylinder in Massawa
and stashed the Zodiak in the anchor locker. I have filled two drybags with the
barest essentials, set three alarms, and I sleep in my lifejacket.
Sea-Spray has the watch, when we suddenly find calm waters 30 miles out. The
chart shows nothing within four miles, and I jump on deck, night blind, really
scared. I can‟t tack. I can‟t run the motor. I just stay at the helm ready to jibe,
though it will cost the mast for sure. I stand on the bowsprit and peer into the
black. With land so near, I cannot keep the selfish thought away; if I can make it
through to the beach, or close enough to swim, I will run her aground and take my
chances. But we hit nothing, and the eight-foot whitecaps hit us as suddenly as
they left. I feel guilty for thinking of abandoning Sea-Spray, but I can‟t retract the
thought. My stomach is sour with fright and shame as I turn off three alarms
below.
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The wind backs (or veers- I get the two mixed up) and we cling to a line that
holds some hope, and after a few hurtful more hours in the pounding brutes, now in
the predawn light, we make a southern approach channel marked on the shipping
chart. I shorten sail to a few hanks, tack to the weak side, the mast pulls the epoxy
and paint from my repair as it cantilevers against I-don‟t-know-what, but it holds
and we finally get the correct angle to follow the deep between three or four
grounded hulks and five or ten floating freighters.
After being ignored by the Pilot for a few repeated requests, I claim an
emergency for any seaman to hear, loudly mumbling something about international
maritime law in a righteous whining tone: “This is the yacht Sea-Spray and taking
water and with a broken stay and claiming an emergency under international
maritime law and demanding entry to the port and under international law and
coming in and under international maritime law.” and I get a few responses from
the cargo ships, and finally the clearance from the Pilot that I need to enter Port
Sudan though I was entering either way.
We have to tack a few times in the fuzzy water of the harbor, where the wind
still blows, and we almost lose the mast before I am able to drop the anchor
between a long wooden schooner and a big steel stinkboat. They are both a
hundred feet long, and both flying the Italian flag.
I pump until I cannot pump any more which still leaves six inches of water above
the floorboards. I drink a gallon of fresh water and jettison twenty from the tank. I
can see the saltwater coming in through the propshaft but there must be others
because she fills so fast. She has to be pulled out of the water. Even in the still
waters of Port Sudan she is sinking. I am asleep mulling over my options when I
am hailed.
I am invited aboard the wooden schooner; a launch is sent when I am dressed. I
sit on the big boat‟s deck with my back to Sea-Spray. Looking over my shoulder
the fat captain nods and says, “She is a pretty boat.”
He knows I‟m in trouble, only boats in trouble put in here, but I don‟t think he‟s
speculating what he can get out of it. We discuss my predicament. There is no
good place to haul-out, but there is a crane that could handle her. The only trouble
is, the Sudanese charge 100 percent duty on anything landed—anything—and I
haven‟t a penny on board. There is no way to wire money, I‟d not make it back to
the water both alive and with coin. There is a dive boat, though, who might help,
and I could pull Sea-Spray‟s propshaft out from underneath her and get that going
again, refasten the loose plank, reattach the spreader wire, drill out the chainplates,
look for the other leak… It could be done.
After dinner, I sell the Zodiak‟s outboard and the solar panel to my hosts. They
ferry me and my new $200USD back to Sea-Spray with and once aboard, I try and
think as I pump, but I‟m very tired. I hire an agent to get me a shore-pass, then
walk downtown to make contact with my family: “I‟m fine- trip in peril thoughmore tomorrow.” Three men stand around the computer as I read my e-mail.
Back aboard, I sleep until the water is a foot above the floorboards. It doesn‟t
take long. Though my eyes are almost stuck shut, a tear slips out. My heart knows
before my brain. I cannot deal with this situation. And like that, it ends.
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I put the word out: the first U.S. thousand dollars cash buys Sea-Spray. SeaSpray is a worth a lot more around here. There is a flurry of activity amongst the
money changers.
Five hours later I‟m aboard the steel dive boat and Marcos is telling me his
business. The dive operation is really a floating brothel that caters to wealthy
Arabs who come to Sudan to avoid scrutiny while they do things forbidden by their
culture. He shows me a storage room filled with Italian wine and cheese, pork, and
marijuana.
But, we are also talking about teak, oak, fir, and silicon bronze, about how the
dry air will give long life to these compounds now that Sea-Spray is out of the
tropics, and about how he will care for her. The new-style US hundred dollar bills
look counterfeit to me as he peels ten of them off. Then the conversation turns to
the dicey matter of how to get me out of Sudan, boatless.
I am no longer a ship‟s captain, and so no longer allowed ashore. No way to
send a follow-up e-mail to Mom. I can stay on the dive boat until some way out
presents itself. I carefully consider my options.
I fall asleep with the money on my lap…
Marcos wakes me when a big catamaran motors in. It is out of Zimbabwe,
heading north, and they need crew. They are as exhausted as I am. I borrow their
dinghy and fill three sail bags with my belongings from Sea-Spray. I pack and
leave what has been my home for more than a year, in five minutes. As I untie
from her for the last time, Marcos is already towing her possessively over to his
own ship. Just like that it is done. I climb aboard the catamaran, look one last time
at Sea-Spray, and take up my new position as crewman.
Thirty-two hours after entering the Port, I am beating into the still blowing winter
gale. I am a cabin boy now, on a lumbering half-million dollar appliance. It is a
boat overburdened with plastic expanses of windage, which make for really poor
windward performance, not even close to Sea-Spray‟s (I have my poorest daily
mileage so far), and it judders with strange noises all out of context with the sea.
With a few days rest and some patching-up, I could have been on my own boat.
The owners of this confounding contraption are a family leaving Zimbabwe
forever. The man, his wife, and their toddler twins are headed for the UK, where
he was promised a job. He is white and close to seven-feet tall. He has a dark look
in his face, which I assume comes from escaping some kind of hell. He killed three
people, all Black of course, in their flight from the only home they have known.
I‟ve no doubt that he would throw me overboard in a confrontation. His wife is
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kinder, but has a blank stupid stare, and the children seem to be developmentally
disabled. They are all sea-sick. We leave a trail of soiled plastic diapers and puke
in our wake. I make myself useful and the hot showers, iced tea, fresh bread, and
queen-size bed are some compensation, but they mostly serve to keep my mind
alert when I want to be oblivious. I am happy to leave the boat when I disembark
two weeks later in Egypt. In Hurgada, Egypt, I have a room.
It‟s filled with ridiculous luggage.
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I think about Sea-Spray; about the way it felt to be alone
with her, moving, in the middle of the ocean. I think
about her as I haunt the Shisha parlors in Hurgada,
burning my lungs tasting a mixture of the tobac and
hashish that the government provides in an attempt to
pacify an unhappy population of near-children. I think
about her as I sift through the sailbags crammed with now
pointless gear and I reduce the pile down to two big bags
and my glider pack.
My wife finds me a way to Europe, and we decide to meet
there. As I walk down the streets of Paris with her, knowing
we are both hopelessly ambivalent about each other, I
think about maybe moving again with Sea-Spray. Instead
I move on. Another hotel room is full of discarded gear
when I leave to catch our flight to the States. I can carry
my baggage by myself for short stints.
I present my version of the events upon my arrival
amongst family and friends, who are welcoming,
interested. I wallow unhealthily in my experiences as I
write, but am still able to climb out of myself enough to see
that I am not alone, not so different from them. I gather
strength from this sense of belonging, and wonder what I
could do to maintain and nurture it. I can still feel the
discomfort and fear those few feet above the ocean, but
once written down, I can leave the pain behind- as I left
my sailing harness in Hurghada; the autopilot in Paris, as
I left my boat in Sudan.
I think about the hours I spent working on her as I
scrape and paint my family‟s summer home in northern
Michigan, making a start on paying my debt to my
parents, who paid-off some of my creditors. I grow fond of
the “cottage”, a simple, static structure that lets in a hint
of the woods and the bay through its walls. I know that is
what Sea-Spray tried to do. But to move me she let the
whole world in, filtering out only those things in it that
would surely kill me. I throw away the tools, uselessly
rusted, that I had worked on her with, that I had taken
away from her.
My old dog is fine. I visited with him for a few hours on
the river where he now lives. I was half thinking the
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woman would want to take me in, and half thinking I
might stay with her, but she had found a lifelong man.
Summit didn‟t try and follow me out.
I think about Sea-Spray as I get back into the air with
my hang-glider over the Lost River Range, 17,000 feet
above sea-level atop a mountainous swell of thermic air,
landing 50 miles from where I had stepped away from the
ground. But my feelings for my glider never go so deep as
the ones I had for her , and when I land the world has not
changed. When I made a landfall with Sea-Spray it had
moved. I retire the torn paraglider that I carried all
around, and with it, hopefully, the last of my vertigo.
Caterina e-mails me. She says that it took her months,
but she is happy and resocialized, singing again and out
late with friends. She has let the pain slip away from her
memories without forgetting the hard times, or our
temporary love.
I think about her as I tell a pretty young redhead that I
can teach her to fly. And what might I want, in exchange,
from this woman? What exactly do I offer her? Sea-Spray
would teach me when we were together, and I allowed her
to come alive.
Time eases the burden of a person‟s memories, and I
again have a spring in my step that I hope won‟t keep me
from settling down. But I still think about Sea-Spray even
as I search for a place in the world where I can get stuck;
somebody I can get stuck with.
A place where I can
contribute to, and take from, my share of this world.
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I also think about going back to Sudan, maybe sail‟n
„er outta there one day...
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Learning to Sail is the story of a man and a boat
sailing across oceans. The boat is old and small and
made out of wood, and the man is not a sailor. He
has reached the end of his youth, is not sure that he
has spent it wisely, and he is even less sure of the
future. But he will find little time for contemplation
once the adventure begins.
The man and boat will not be the first, they will
not be the fastest, and they won‟t go the furthest.
But joining them in their journey will give you an
eye on the world as it looks today from the deck of
a willing boat sailed by a cynical, yet sincere forty
year old man from the USA. You‟ll meet people
who challenge his every notion and face seas that
challenge his very existence.
pswanair@yahoo.com
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