1. First Steps to a Voyage
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The radiant goddess Circe sent a sail filling wind
behind us, a good companion for a voyage. We made
all shipshape aboard and sat tight: wind and helmsman
kept her on her course. All day long we ran before the
wind, with never a quiver on the sail; then the sun set,
and all the ways grew dark.
-
Homer, The Odyssey
A sailor’s worst fear arrived before dawn…
Under a gray twilight I knelt on a shore of coarse pebbles and scattered black boulders and faced a crazed sea. Surf crashed on rocks, filling the air with sheets of wind-driven spray that streamed down my face and soaked me through. Numb with fear and cold, I watched my sailboat, my home, now half submerged, breaking up on the sharp talons of the reef. The waves hammered at the boat, grinding away years of work. The mast carried away with a shudder. I felt sick with fatigue and helplessness.
It seemed
my solitary voyage around the world would come to an abrupt end on this
uninhabited coast. Curling up behind a rock I closed my eyes and gave way to an
overwhelming physical and mental exhaustion. The ceaseless thundering of waves
breaking their backs on the reef filled my semi-consciousness. When I opened my
eyes again somehow I was back aboard my boat, wedged face down into the thin
vinyl-covered cushion of the leeward bunk. I turned over to focus on the scene
around me while the sound of surf shook the cobwebs from my mind. I wondered,
was the shipwreck real and this now a dream or the other way around?
“Idiot!” I cried as I bolted up the companionway steps…
*
* *
The series
of events leading me to that far island encounter likely began with childhood
days watching sailboats gliding across the flat waters of Michigan's Lake St.
Clair. I used to imagine they were all bound for distant adventures. Our little
lake, deep within the mid-west watershed was, after all, connected by hundreds of miles of rivers,
greater and lesser lakes, canals and locks, to the rolling waters of Niagara
Falls and the
sea. Ocean-going ships daily plowed up and down our lake’s deep-water channel
-
proof of our connection to the
larger world. Yet these Great Lakes were still only lakes: fine for cruising or
beginning a voyage, but all too familiar to satisfy my growing lust to explore. Looking back, it seems there was never a time I hadn’t dreamt of a
sailing voyage. A family trip to the Bahamas Out Islands in my early teens
confirmed my desire to be on a sailboat running down the trades to the fabled islands of the South
Pacific. These yearnings I held in check as I spent my teenage years
finishing high school and vocational courses, then moving into my own apartment
and scratching about to “earn a living.” I was nearly sidetracked into
marriage until my girlfriend finally concluded I was not ready to have children
and a mortgage.
Though
there was some boating involved in a few of our early family vacations, we never
had a sailboat of our own. The first boat I almost launched was a 12-foot
rowboat, more rot than wood, that a neighbor gave me for the cost of hauling it
away. It took six of us kids to carry it to my backyard. We worked for a month
on the boat on our summer school vacation, rigging a crude rudder and patchwork
sail, dreaming of the day we could launch her. My parents thought it
unsalvageable and tried everything to discourage me from drowning myself in it.
Still we patched her up. The day before our proposed launch I went out and found
someone had knocked new holes in the bottom. It was beyond saving. My buddies
and I were crushed. At the time we blamed the older bully down the street. My
father, all too soon appeared with a can of gas and said, “Burn it.” The
case of the sabotaged boat remains open.
At the still impressionable age of eighteen I chanced to read the recently published book To Challenge A Distant Sea, about the life of French sailor Jean Gau. Beginning in the 1950’s, he twice sailed alone around the world in his 29-foot Tahiti Ketch, named Atom. Gau lived great adventures – encounters with hurricanes and cannibals, shipwrecks, a love affair with a beautiful Tahitian vahine. Each return to sea was for him a coming home.
At this time I didn’t know the course I would ultimately take nor did I dare to imagine I would travel across the oceans entirely alone. I was no Jean Gau and had no reason to believe I ever would be. Yet from that time on, dreams of tropic seas and exotic landfalls never ceased. Through the pages, I saw myself rediscovering the world from the deck of my own sailboat. Why I was so permanently affected by this book I couldn’t say. It certainly awoke the nagging notion that the promise of a full life was not to be found in my hometown or even on one continent. What better siren song to capture an innocent youth than romantic visions of himself aboard a stout boat anchored snugly in a palm-fringed lagoon, then putting out to sea and running before the warm trade winds to a new landfall where perhaps some vahine awaited.
Like all aspiring sailor’s, I had also read the book Dove, about Robin Lee Graham who sailed alone around the world between the age of sixteen and twenty-one. His story too inspired me to undertake a voyage, but inwardly an entirely different type journey. His had been all about his father and publishers pushing him to continue a voyage he grew to hate, about perpetual loneliness and lovesick self-pity. Too much anguish and loathing made Dove, in many ways the antithesis to the path I would follow.
My faraway dreams took on a glimmer of life on one of those frigid Detroit winter evenings when my equally bored, broke and quietly desperate teenaged friends gathered around the kitchen table for yet another Saturday night poker ritual. We’d all had a few beers when I began to daydream aloud about islands in the South Pacific. I told them condensed and not strictly factual accounts of what I had read, that in those warm tropic seas far to the south were countless volcanic islands and coral atolls peopled by gentle brown-skinned natives who never worked a day in their lives because the ripe fruit practically dropped into their hands. And all of this lay within easy reach of even a small sailboat.
Carried away by my enthusiasm, I told them of the unequaled beauty of the Tahitian women, “pure goddesses” I claimed, adding how they were not too pure to literally throw themselves at visiting sailors. To make up for lack of first-hand experience and make my vision more compelling, I recited descriptions of island girls from romantic stories of the South Pacific by Herman Melville, James Michener, Paul Gauguin and others. Even I seemed to have forgotten it was 90 percent fiction. Fact or fiction, we believed only what we wanted to believe.
Staring at me over emptied bottles of Detroit brewed Stroh’s beer, my friends appeared spellbound, or possibly just in their normal stupor – it was hard to know the difference. “Tell us more about these native girls,” someone said when I paused to empty another bottle. After a few more of these Saturday night sermons, they claimed to be as convinced as I that we must go to sea and go quickly. Dying of boredom was the only apparent alternative. Their passions proved shorter-lived than my naivety. Life interfered, as it commonly does.
There were real obstacles to overcome before my imaginary crew and I set sail. We had no boat, we had no money, and we knew nothing about sailing or the sea. We didn’t even know any sailors. And these, I admit, were not our weakest points. As a first step we laid out a plan where we agreed to work at our various jobs for about two years with the goal of saving at least ten thousand dollars each. We would then pool our money and buy the largest old wooden sailing boat we could afford. Sixty-foot long not counting the bowsprit sounded about right. To learn about boat building and save money we would refit it ourselves, teach ourselves to sail, and then set out to voyage around the world together. Knowing my friends better than I, my parents warned me it was a doomed venture, but it seemed doable to me at the time.
For my part, I continued at vocational school learning metalworking and then labored for three years at factory jobs, moving on several times whenever a new position offered better pay. I only felt successful if each week I put away at least one dollar for every dollar earned. For months I assembled and welded metal cabinets on a production line until my mind went numb. The next job paid better as I made heavy braze repairs on cracked punch press frames. This job required I hold a propane torch the size of a flame-thrower while standing on a scaffold atop a half-ton of flaming charcoal – stoking the fires of hell. At night I’d go back to my apartment and lose myself in nautical books borrowed from the library. I read what little they had, from Elementary Dinghy Sailing to Two Years Before the Mast. My first real step to getting under sail was when a friend and I bought an old 12-foot sailing dinghy. Together we sailed most Sundays and holidays on Lake St. Clair, paddling in the calms and turning upside down in any wind strong enough to snatch your hat off your head. Because of our little boat’s tall rig and sails that couldn’t be reefed, we spent the best part of the best windy days clinging to the bottom of the upturned hull.
Eventually, through books alone, I became familiar with the rudiments of boat design, navigation, and ocean weather patterns - at least the bookish version, which is far from the real thing. After nights dreaming of narrowly escaped shipwrecks and exotic landfalls, I awoke to the rude buzz of an alarm clock. On autopilot mode, I plunged into another winter day of toil in a depressing smoke-filled factory. In my beat-up 1961 Volkswagen beetle I slid along ice covered streets on bald tires in the pre-dawn rush hour traffic. It was not lost on me that most of us filling the roads at that hour were on our way to build even more motorized metal boxes for crowded American roads or working in the various auto-related industries. In the factory's smoky welding pit, the days dragged on as I moved like a misshapen gear in a machine determined to ultimately mash my rough edges into a kind of tortured conformity…if I stayed long enough. And then I saw it on the faces of the men around me: with each passing year their own hopes and plans faded into the barely remembered dreams of youth. I was here working with them, but no longer of them. I had confided in a co-worker that I would soon quit this job, buy a boat and head for distant lands. “Sure you will,” he told me and passed my secret to the rest of the shop. One day after my combined assets reached the fifteen thousand dollar goal I had set, I broke free of the machine, walking out of that particular hellhole for the last time. It couldn’t have felt better if the whole shop walked alongside me cheering instead of just following me with quiet stares, the kind that seem to say, “You’ll find nothing better out there, fella.”
It should have been no surprise that, one by one, my friends lost their enthusiasm for our joint venture. Their lives had moved on in other directions. One of them had dropped out in the drug-cult of California. The others had made safer, more practical plans for their futures. One longtime friend, whom I hadn’t seen in a year, I now found was engaged to be married and already signed a mortgage on a new house in the suburbs. He turned his head away when I stood before him as a resurrected ghost of a dream he had long ago quietly buried.
I was now twenty-one years old, had never owned a real boat, and had never even stepped foot on a sailboat larger than a dinghy. Though little problems and discouragements came at me from all quarters, I decided to buy the best second-hand boat I could afford. If necessary, I’d travel alone, as long and as far as my poor talents could take me. My parents thought it a bit reckless to spend my limited savings buying a boat, but they didn’t mind at all my plan to sail around the world because I simply didn’t tell them until I was halfway across the Pacific. You can talk about doing a thing until everyone finally talks you out of it or you can actually do the thing.
Through the coldest months of that winter, I searched through lifeless boatyards and poked my head under countless snow-laden tarps. Finally, a boat caught my eye as it lay despondently under a blanket of snow, gripped in the ice of a frozen canal.
I had no patience to wait for the ice to break up so the boat could be lifted out of the water and properly inspected. After a cursory inspection, the marine surveyor reported that this 28-foot Pearson Triton, built of fiberglass in 1963, was solidly constructed, although somewhat neglected and minimally equipped. Though I had some initial doubts due to its small size, I was reassured by its long keel, and admired the low sleek profile and handsome lines of the hull. “You can sail this boat anywhere in the Great Lakes,” the broker assured me.
“And beyond, I hope,” I added. She had a good reputation and looked seaworthy in design. Equally important to me, she was beautiful in my eyes and I could imagine us bound together for far places. It was as if the boat spoke to me, “I’ve been waiting for you. Your life is waiting too.” A boat, like a woman, has to excite and incite you to dream. If it doesn’t, just walk away.
Even the ridiculous name, DOCTOR’S ORDERS, blatantly taped onto both sides of the white hull in four-inch high black letters could not dissuade me. A name change was the first job I’d see to, regardless of popular nautical superstition against it. You don’t sail into Tahiti and moor alongside world cruising yachts in a boat with a name like that. After some offers and counteroffers, we agreed on a price of $12,000. This was a fantastic fortune to me since it represented four fifths of my savings and three years of hard work. The owner later told me he was reluctant to sell, but his wife had ordered it. A fair deal; he temporarily saved his marriage and I had my boat.
That first winter I tried living aboard my nameless new boat as she lay trapped in the frozen canal, but a constant rain of condensation under the non-insulated fiberglass deck caused by using the boat’s alcohol stove for heat, shortly forced me back into my apartment. The heady daydreams continued: with nose pressed against the frosty apartment window watching snow blow into drifts around my car I envisioned it as a ship fighting her way around Cape Horn in a mid-winter storm.
The spring thaw brought relief and I recall taking my girlfriend Maria with me on our first sail. By the way, never take your girl with you on your first sail unless you want to terrify her with your stupidity so that she never asks to go again. Since no one had told me that, I helped her fit a raincoat over her jacket and sweater, trying to ward off the effects of below freezing temperatures. A light snow fell from that typical Michigan-gray sky as we chopped away at the ice in the slip with an ice-fishing spud, then used the inboard gasoline engine to motor out of the canal. Once clear of the breakwater, I silenced the rumbling beast, raised the full mainsail and largest jib. Trimming the full sails to take us close to the wind caused a slight heel and the boat began to glide along effortlessly. Clusters of snowflakes swirled in the air currents around the sails. Now and then, I made a sharp turn to avoid the scattered ice floes. It felt good to be the only boat on the water. We were probably the first boat sailing that year and briefly attracted the attention of a coast guard helicopter that buzzed lowly past us. Everything felt fine, yet Maria rightly did not trust my sailing skills and looked at me apprehensively as I tacked upwind. Within a few minutes the wind picked up, causing the boat to heel over sharply in the gusts until waves were spilling over the leeward side of the cockpit and splashing around our feet. This we hadn’t expected. Maria demanded to know what the hell was going on as I tied a life jacket around her and told her to go below and close the hatch. I let the boat round up into the wind and pulled down the flogging sails as quickly as I could and motored back into the marina.
Safely back at the dock, I wondered why the boat had seemed so unstable. When the wind got up she felt almost as tipsy as my old sailing dinghy. This was my home, a four-ton little ship to carry me across the oceans and here it was about to roll over and sink in Lake St. Clair! Either this boat had been robbed of the three thousand pounds of lead in her keel or I had not paid attention to the sailing books I’d read. Later at the bar next to the marina, a couple of relative old hands at sailing assured me it’s the nature of sailboats to “put the rail under” while carrying full sail in a fresh breeze. We were in no danger of rolling the boat over in anything short of hurricane conditions - something unlikely on our 20-mile-wide lake. Once the boat is heeled to about 45 degrees, the wind is spilled from the sails and the lead ballast in the keel forces the boat upright. All we needed to do that morning was reef the mainsail and set a smaller jib to maintain balance. Those books I had read discussed reefing sails, I just didn't realize reefing was required in such moderate winds. Also, the technical words on the pages of ten books were not half as impressing as one minute under sail. What I needed to be told was: “When your ass gets wet, it’s time to reef, boys.” Maria remained unconvinced I would make a competent sailor and before long I faced the same choice as the previous owner – her or the boat.
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The next summer I convinced one footloose friend - not having found employment elsewhere - to escape the coming Michigan winter by joining me on a voyage to Florida and the Bahamas. My second crewmate was an older fellow, found through a pay by the word Detroit News advertisement I placed containing these key words and nothing else: “Sailing south. Share expenses. No experience necessary.” None of us had more than limited day-sailing experience, but I figured the best remedy for this was to set aside the sailing books and make our way to the open sea. This crew of one old man and one young guy, both without much sailing experience, as the best I could come up with, made it clear that merely having a boat was not the magnet for women I had fantasized it would be. Maria had forced the issue, telling me, “You’re going to have to sell that boat so we can buy a house.” She had visions of marriage and a $12,000 down payment on a house in the suburbs with a 30-year mortgage. I couldn’t understand, and still don’t, how people could chain themselves to a house, a job, a bank loan, and a discontented spouse when they are still young enough and uncorrupted enough to appreciate the wonders in this wide-open world. Prisons come in many different guises and the largest are filled to capacity by the self-committed.
By September we reached the Atlantic by sailing through Lake Erie and Ontario and the New York Barge Canal system to New York City. We reached Florida through a series of short offshore passages and longer detours inland through the Chesapeake Bay and ICW (Intracoastal Waterway). Like East Coast disciples of Huck Finn, we followed the connected bays, rivers and canals of the waterway on its meandering course through the Carolinas where fishermen tossed a basket of live crabs into our cockpit footwell for a free dinner; past the industrial back doors of big cities and the river-facing fishing port towns; past plantation homes set in green forests, primeval cypress swamps and the Georgia salt marsh where slaves once dammed the creeks to harvest rice and cotton along the river’s muddy banks. Too much of our time was occupied with schemes to refloat after running aground by straying from the marked channel. Impatient bridge tenders and road traffic were apparently more annoyed than impressed, as we’d try to pass through the opened bridges under sail during frequent stalling fits from the cranky auxiliary gasoline engine.
While on a thirty-six hour excursion offshore, I nervously plotted our course and speed each hour as I made wildly inaccurate first attempts at celestial navigation. My first position fix by sextant observation of the sun placed us firmly ashore in mid-Kentucky. I didn't share that with my crew since even they may have noticed the error. A happy ship requires the crew must never lose confidence in their skipper. Keep’em in the dark if you must. Why advertise your incompetence; it will come out soon enough on its own. Despite our near total ignorance at the beginning of the voyage, it culminated with an idyllic winter of gunkholing across the shallow banks and among the myriad sandy islands of the Bahamas. When the sack of potatoes and three cases of macaroni and cheese we had bought together in Miami ran out, we anchored for awhile off an uninhabited island where we fished and collected conch shells with an intensity tweaked by hunger. Twice a week we walked across the island to where a cruise ship set up a barbeque on the beach and we mingled with sun burnt vacationers, returning to our boat with bellies and pockets stuffed with hamburgers. Missing family and girlfriends and a more rounded diet finally caused us to sail back to Florida where my slimmer, sea-weary friends made their way home.
Back in Ft. Lauderdale I worked a few months part time apprenticing in repairing and fitting out sailboats around the marinas, but there was a shortage of well-paid work for inexperienced hands. Here I spent most of my remaining funds on a new $1,500 Aries windvane self-steering gear built in England. I had experimented with balancing the sails and various sheet-to-tiller arrangements with mixed success. No matter what I tried, the boat would not remain balanced for long periods with the wind from behind and I dreaded the idea of crossing an ocean with one hand tied to the tiller. Now, with the windvane there was no longer any need for the mind-numbing drudgery of hand steering and it seemed possible to sail alone into the South Pacific, even going around the world alone, which I quietly set as my goal.
First I needed to replenish my cruising funds and
better equip the boat. With a job waiting for me in Detroit, I decided to make
my first long offshore passage alone by sailing 1,000 miles nonstop from Ft.
Lauderdale to New York City. That ten day autumn passage held some anxious
moments as I trained myself to sleep in brief naps and keep a vigilant eye out
for shipping and weather changes. On this trip I became moderately proficient in
celestial navigation, which greatly increased my confidence. Before that passage
I had renamed the boat Atom, in the sense of the ancient Greek definition:
small, powerful, unbreakable. It was also in tribute to the late Jean
Gau, owner of the original Atom, whose
writings of adventure first inspired me to challenge my own distant sea.
Back in Detroit, I returned to the daily tedium of heavy repair welding in another smoky shop. For fifty-plus hours a week my lungs were poisoned by toxic fumes and asbestos dust that hung in the air like a permanent smog - a far cry from the pure cool winds of the Bahama’s Out Islands in winter. My co-workers looked like co-zombies, the older hands with hacking coughs, more dead than alive, it seemed. And I thought of something I had read about men that are sick of living but too frightened to just lay down and die. They go numbly on about their routines, the forgotten lust for life turned to ashes. It's possible I have judged them unfairly – expecting others to feel as I do when, of course, they may not. Between the In and Out punches on a time card I lived somewhere between yesterday’s memories and tomorrow’s expectations.
In the hours after work and on Sundays, I made modifications and repairs to Atom to make her more comfortable and seaworthy. There was little time for sailing. For nearly a year Atom rested on a trailer in my parents’ backyard as I disassembled and refit her from the rudder on up to the mast rigging, or at least as much as my limited experience and resources allowed. Using marine plywood, epoxy resin, and fiberglass cloth, I added bulkheads and reinforced several areas of an already strongly-built hull and deck. Any experienced shipwright would rightfully have pointed out my flawed and inadequate work. My boat was then and still remains a work in progress, transforming as I do along with her.
Meanwhile, my parents asked if they would ever have the use of their backyard again. A small crises came when, without asking, I chopped down one of their beloved trees that crowded my work area and its overhanging branches dripped a red staining sap on my freshly painted light-blue decks. During this time I still kept my plans for a solo world voyage to myself. I told friends and family merely that I was planning a trip to the Caribbean and maybe later towards the Pacific. It would be better to quietly get started with the voyage than to worry them or invite more questions than I could answer. After two years back in Michigan I quit my job again and cleared the decks for adventure.
My earlier trip through the Bahamas taught me that beating down the "Thorny Path" against the trade winds and currents in a small boat wasn't the way to go. Boat and crew took a terrific punishment and progress was slow and uncertain. There was no way I could make it around the world unless I followed a carefully planned route, running for the most part, with the trades at my back. As a final test before the solo voyage, I planned to sail through the lakes back to New York and from there sail offshore to Trinidad with a stop in Bermuda and then island hop back to Florida. After talking my hometown buddy, Mathew, out of enlisting in the army, the two of us set off from Detroit in the autumn, hell-bent for warmer climes like the honking Canadian Geese passing overhead. A northerly gale caught us a few days out of New York harbor, kicking up a high breaking sea as we crossed the Gulf Stream Current. The motion was lively as an endless roller coaster, but the boat tracked well downwind with the windvane holding course and not once turning sideways in a broach as boats will do when hard pressed and badly helmed. We rode Atom like a horse, gaining more confidence in her as she charged up and down the hills without stumbling. Sitting inside with hatches secured we could block out the breaking waves landing on deck and mute the moaning of the wind in the rigging, safe as in the mother’s womb.
Unfortunately, my crewmate saw it differently. Where I was absolutely liberated to be galloping over hills on my steed, Mathew complained he felt he was riding a tire as it rolled and bounced down one rocky hill and up another in endless dizzying procession. He was also terrified we would be sunk by the high waves that broke harmlessly onto the afterdeck and filled the cockpit with their foaming crests. Worst of all, he seemed to be terminally seasick. During those seven days he rarely left his bunk other than when I dragged him up on deck, clipped him into his harness and wedged him into a corner of the cockpit where he sat crouched down or bent over on his knees with chin over the rail as if in supplication to Allah. Otherwise, he sat in his bunk still wearing that green army surplus rain gear with a bucket held between his knees and cursing involuntarily. After a few days without eating he heaved up nothing but bits of yellow slime and still he couldn’t stop convulsing. It was remarkable that someone could be that sick and still be alive. Having never felt seasick, I have a bad habit of treating those who are with heartless contempt. I gave helpful advice like: “Pull yourself together, man,” which never works. Usually I coax and cajole seasick crew into taking a spell at the tiller. This sometimes works because it’s hard to concentrate on seasickness when you’re trying to follow a compass course and not jibe the sails, while getting face-slapped from sea spray. Strangely, within minutes of arriving in Bermuda, Mathew made a miraculous recovery. Within an hour of mooring alongside the quay in St. George’s Harbour, Mathew was sitting up at the table with raised knife and fork as I dished up a sticky pot of macaroni and canned tuna spiced with two heaping spoons of black pepper.
That night at the pub, he described the trip to the other sailors there as “The Hell Voyage” adding with exaggerated drama: “The storm was incredible! The first couple days I was afraid I would die. After that, I wished I was dead.”
In a few days he was on a plane back to Detroit, a place that looked a whole lot better to him than another trip offshore. But time heals a sailor’s bad memories and I took some satisfaction in hearing that Mathew purchased his own sailboat for use on the lakes a few years later.
By now I had enough basic sailing skills to have continued the trip alone. Still, I wasn’t yet entirely comfortable with the idea of going it alone and attempted to find replacement crew to share the watch keeping and the travel expenses. While moored along the quay in St. Georges I hung a sign from the mast rigging that read: “Sailing to the West Indies. Crew needed. Share expenses.”
A week later as I was about ready to depart alone I awoke to a knocking on the cabin top. I stuck my head out the hatch to see a thin young man with stubby black hair staring down at me. He pointed to my sign and said, “I’m your man. Jon Clark from Manchester.” Jon was in Bermuda on vacation visiting his brother who worked here as a gardener. His sailing experience was limited to some short passages along the English coast. He did have two important qualifications: he had the money to share expenses and was the only serious response I got. I practically yanked him aboard before he could reconsider. Jon proved to be a great sea companion on the 15-day nonstop passage to Trinidad. Though he was seasick much of the time and doubtless in some misery, you would hardly have known it. He did his watches without complaint, ate my peppery meals and then quietly went on deck and spewed them over the side, answering my query with, “Feeling much better now, thank you.” For two months we sailed the Windward Isles of the Caribbean and climbed the volcanic peaks of nearly every island between Trinidad and Martinique.
Our timing was not so lucky when we landed in Grenada in October 1983 and found ourselves ducking bullets as the Americans attacked to retake the island from the Cuban-backed regime. On the first day of the battle, a Grenadian policeman came out to our boat in a small launch and demanded we surrender our weapons. He seemed disappointed to hear we had none. It was unclear whether he was pro-Cuban, pro-American or as confused as most of the locals. Probably, like most people, he was wisely not going to commit himself until there was an obvious victor. Before leaving, he advised us to keep our heads down and not move until the shooting stopped. That is just what we did for three long days.
We weren’t much bothered by anyone after that encounter with the police aside from the US Navy helicopters circling overhead several times each day. At night we watched small arms tracer fire decorate the hillsides like berserk fireflies. In our minds there was always the chance we might be boarded by Cuban soldiers wanting to hijack the boat and sail home. When the fighting was over, we sailed north through the islands of the Grenadines and on to Martinique where Jon caught a flight back to England. I sailed on alone back to Ft. Lauderdale with stops along the way at Guadeloupe, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and one stop in the Bahamas. That first voyage introduced me to a life cruising under sail that suited me perfectly and strengthened my resolve for the ultimate adventure - to sail alone around the world.
Over several years of sharing my boat with all manner of crewmates, it became apparent that having crew aboard was generally more work than not having them at all. A crew must be fed, consulted, depended upon, humored, and catered to in countless ways. Compared to sailing alone, the experience when shared was somehow diluted, less vivid, less memorable. Although I was an only child who had long ago learned how to fill solitary hours, I had never been accused of being anti-social. Still, sailors who choose to go alone on the sea go there to stand apart from society, if even briefly. Only absolute solitude can sharpen the senses and develop a deep appreciation of simple pleasures otherwise lost to the distractions of a companion. In any case, the time of a sailor alone at sea is brief compared to the time he shares with friends in port and ashore. And when he does come ashore he surely can appreciate his friends all the more after experiencing their absence.
While enjoying the mild winter climate of Florida, I made final preparations to Atom for the voyage ahead. One thing that concerned me most was the lightly stayed mast, which I watched vibrate and bend a bit more than I thought was safe while beating in heavy seas. The existing rigging was twenty-years old and marginally sized as well. I couldn’t afford new rigging at this point so I left the original wires in place on the fractional rig and add extra rigging to the masthead that I scrounged from cast-offs in the boatyard dumpsters. This rig would never win a race to windward because of the extra weight and windage aloft. But my voyage would be primarily downwind with long stretches far from repair facilities. I was willing to do whatever it took to prevent the mast coming down and leaving me adrift in mid-ocean. With a hull as solid as the Triton, I didn’t let the lack of a life raft worry me, especially since I couldn’t afford one anyway. My 6-˝ -foot plastic dinghy had built-it flotation that could be used in an emergency, but only in fairly calm conditions. Underneath the dinghy stowed on deck, I kept a bag of survival gear with some water, peanut butter, fishing gear and flares.
Although a short-wave transceiver was way beyond my budget, I did have a short-range VHF radio for contacting nearby boats or shore stations and a cheap short-wave AM receiver that I could hear news and get time signals for the accurate time required for celestial navigation. It was just as well that I had no long-range two-way radio since it would have given me a false feeling of security. In US coastal waters people have gotten used to the idea of instant rescue. In the far Pacific or Indian Ocean you are on your own and you’d better face that fact right at the start. Besides, I wasn’t going to sea this time to chat with other people. There was time enough for that in port where the contrast from the soul-cleansing isolation of being alone at sea gave me reason to appreciate human contact all the more. Confronting myself and my fears alone would lead me towards that state of self-sufficiency I was looking for.
Since I was making such a drastic change in my lifestyle, I chose this opportunity to purge the toxins from my body. I had already quit smoking, drinking alcohol, even coffee, as well as all other kinds of subtly mind-numbing drugs. Gone too would be the excessive fats, sugars and meats and most of the additive-laden foods of my past life. In place of that, I committed myself to at least two years of a vegetarian diet of mostly unprocessed foods consisting mainly of whole grains and vegetables. This was not a way for me to try and live to see one hundred years - I wouldn’t be sailing across the oceans alone in a small boat if that was my goal. But I sensed that something in my lifestyle was keeping me from being as fit as I knew I could be, and would need to be, to live the life I imagined. I would bake my bread and grow sprouting seeds onboard to supplement the fresh vegetables available at the native markets along the way. The major items on my initial provisioning list were: 20 pounds each of whole wheat flour, corn meal, brown rice, dry beans, dried fruit, non-fat powdered milk and oats. I also bought alfalfa and mung beans for sprouting, potatoes, onions, cabbages, limes, and an assortment of other foods that keep well without refrigeration. For snacks I made a garbage bag full of toasted granola in the oven at a friend’s house. I would not buy many canned goods and none of those expensive meat products. As a protein supplement, I took several pounds of brewer’s yeast to mix with milk and some dried soybean product called TVP (texturized vegetable protein), which is a good high protein meat substitute.
In my quest for the simple life, I did not entirely forsake modern technology. My most useful electronic gadget was the digital depth sounder followed closely by the radar detector alarm I used for collision avoidance. One item that I might have been better off without, but was too unsure of myself to believe it then, was that cranky old inboard engine that by frequent tuning I was able to coax into assisting me entering ports on windlass days and to get me through the Panama Canal. Later I concluded a small outboard motor kept in a locker until needed would have served me better. When the engine with its generator was not being used, a small home-made wind generator, later replaced with a solar panel, kept the single 12-volt battery charged. For offshore navigation, aside from a faulty boat speed indicator, I had only the traditional methods of celestial navigation and a compass and a sense of guessing speed, drift and leeway that improved with every passage.
My biggest concern now that the boat was ready was that I had only $500 in savings remaining. I didn’t expect this would get me around the world. I did hope it would see me across the Pacific. From there I could work my way around, taking temporary jobs wherever I found them. Thankfully, I was wise enough, or reckless enough, to refuse delaying the voyage another year or two by returning to work. After all, if lack of money stopped me this year, then other insecurities could just as easily keep stopping me until my instinct to explore faded into that cursed life of regrets I was so eager to escape. So I worked out a budget that allowed me to spend less than $100 a month. This might seem impossible today, but it was not then. It did require a large dose of rashness and ingenuity and just a little in the way of what others might call hardship. An example of this was that a new set of charts for all the oceans and harbors along my proposed track would cost me several hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Even photocopying borrowed charts was beyond my micro-budget. I solved the problem by buying a roll of tracing paper for $5 and traced copies from charts borrowed from fellow sailors in ports I visited along the way. Later I found that sometimes other sailors would donate charts to me that they no longer needed. Not that I would recommend this for prudent navigation - just a solution for a desperate man unwilling to be delayed by excuses.
My plan was to sail direct for Panama, transit the canal, and cross the South Pacific to Australia or perhaps New Guinea where I would wait out the Southern Hemisphere’s cyclone season. The following year I would cross the Indian Ocean to South Africa and round the Cape of Good Hope during the summer months. From there it was more or less an easy downwind run across the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea, to return to Florida where I’d begun two years earlier. I expected to make only some 10 to 15 stops along the way, partly as a way to reduce expenses, but mostly I looked forward to the long uninterrupted passages. I had already picked out most of these likely stops from research I’d gathered by reading every account I could find of travelers before me. The time limit of two years suited the seasonal weather patterns and gave me a goal with a foreseeable end to strive for.
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