Author: Dennis Rae Maggard

A day out from Apia, Samoa, Pamela was floating in a calm, glassy sea with her engine driving her at a leisurely 4 knots.  Next stop, Niuatopotapu, a remote island in the Kingdom of Tonga called “the Sacred Coconut” in Tongan and referred to by cruisers as “New Potatoes”, lay about 180 miles to the south west.  With wind predicted in the mid-teens from the east-southeast, I was looking forward to an easy sail, beam reaching, two nights and one day of easy sailing.   After two weeks in the heat of Apia harbor, dirty with the grit of construction around the bustling commercial port, I was ready for a fresh sea breeze and blue water.

The first night had been quite calm.  We had motored quietly out of Apia harbor at sunset, then hoisted all the sails to catch a faint seven knots of breeze that eased Pamela ever so slowly along the northern shore of the island along a black coastline  punctuated by a string of lights, the last lights we would see for many weeks.  A northwest squall had suddenly pounced as we were traversing between Samoa’s two main islands, ‘Upolu and Savai’i, but the squall had lasted only a few minutes, with full main and jib pushing Pamela over hard and me holding the wheel with knuckles that shone white in the moonless night.

Now in the daylight, I felt the wind slowing to six knots, five knots, four knots, steadily decreasing and causing the main sail to flap like a half dead fish.  If only we could get seven knots of wind!  With that magic number we could fill our sails and glide through these smooth seas making good progress to Tonga.  I would trade four knots of wind for a gale, I thought, then hastily rapped my knuckles against the teak combing.

We lowered the forlorn sails and ran the engine throughout the morning.  I knew a rugged marine diesel engine could take it, running for days on end.  Looking out at the endless ocean, however, and imagining the miles ahead, the horizon that never changes, the soft lines of waves resembling the time-worn blue ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains, the water flowing by with the leisure of country folks strolling home from church, and the little stream of wake behind gurgling like a spring emerging from a rock in a hollow of those mountains, watching this slow-moving scene for hour upon hour, and knowing that it will proceed like this for mile upon mile, you begin to doubt the longevity of the diesel engine, you place your trust in the sails and you long for the coming of the wind.

I listened to the tunka-tunka-tunka of the engine for hours, then ducked below for a few hours rest while Pam took over.  I came back up into the cockpit in the early afternoon and stared again at the wind instruments, willing the wind to push the needle from four to seven.  No use.  I sat back down against the combing and continued reading.  What was I reading now?  I was losing track — four different e-books about London in the Middle Ages, the recent wars in Afghanistan, Tom Neale’s account of living alone on the island of Suwarrow, and a Louis L’Amour western about men with fists of steel; a couple of paper books including the complete short stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and the history of the Beaufort Scale; and audiobooks about the Mayflower, the history of Greece, and an interesting account of how LSD swept like wild fire through the 60’s.  So many subjects, some would say an eclectic collection, but none I wanted to read this afternoon.  I just wanted some wind.

The wind generator mounted above my head began to turn, slowly at first, and then steadily.  Eight knots!  I hoisted all sails and watched them begin to fill, happily shutting down the engine.  Ah, the sound of the wind and waves once again, no more tunka-tunka-tunka.  Six-foot waves began to form from the south-east, pushing against Pamela as she attempted to leap over them like a puppy chasing a butterfly.

The sky was beginning to fade into a mass of leaden gray, a few blotches grayer than the others, and the wind continued to rise, soon into the high-teens.  It seemed as soon as the sails were hoisted it was time to reef them again, first one reef then two, giving me a late-afternoon aerobic workout.  The waves were steeper now and coming from two different directions.  Suddenly there was a blast of spray, warm and salty, across the dodger and over the combing, drenching my head and washing away the Apia grime, baptizing me in the name of Poseidon, brother of Zeus, with trident in hand.

I put on my foul weather gear, a little late perhaps, then pulled down the hood over my soggy head and snuggled under the dodger in a vain attempt to stay dry or less wet.  The waves were now hitting us hard as if Poseidon was exchanging his trident for a hammer.  Every minute or so another steep one crashed with sudden intensity against the beam, sending Pamela far over on her starboard side, forming whitewater down her port railing, and spraying the cockpit with a furious blast.  The wind generator shrieked in pain as the twenty-five-knot gusts spun its blades in a tortured frenzy, then stopped altogether as the winds reached Force 7, switching on a mode called “hysteresis braking” to protect the turbine.  I wished I could apply hysteresis braking to Poseidon’s wind generator.  “You wanted wind!” he shrieked, then jabbed Pamela once more with his trident to send her tumbling down into a trough.

The sullen remains of daylight began to peter out, giving way to a sodden blackness, and I clipped on the safety harness and settled my mind to endure a long night of bumper cars on the high seas.  The rain came off and on, indistinguishable from the flying salt spray, and the entire universe was a swamp of wet darkness.  My foul weather clothing could not keep out this universe and became as sodden as all the rest.

I dozed off and on, sometimes listening to the crash of waves, sometimes the story of LSD or the Mayflower, shivering as I lie on the soaked cushions pushed hard against the low side of the cockpit.  With Pamela’s low freeboard, the whitewater rushed just a few inches past my head.  A pale moon struggled to emerge through the black clouds and managed to illuminate the whitecaps from time to time.  The sea was a roaring, swirling washing machine, and the long night wore on.

Daybreak came timidly across the blank horizon, no sun, just a gradual lightening of the  solid gray.  I rose to awaken my creaking bones and stiffened ligaments, surveying the scene.  The seas were still pounding, the wind still in the twenties.  The self-steering windvane was holding up its end, keeping Pamela on a straight course.  The main sail kept its aerodynamic curve without signs of strain.  The jib showed a bit of dacron cloth beginning to come loose, but otherwise held tight in the onslaught of wind and waves.  The dinghy folded in its bag was still securely lashed to the cabin top.  The four diesel jugs were holding tight even though whitewater foamed past their bottom ends.  The staysail in its cover looked soaked and dejected, but held firm with its hanks around the staysail stay.  The spinnaker in its “box bag” was … wait, where was the spinnaker? I saw the tattered remains of the bag dangling helplessly over the side and knew at once the fate of the spinnaker.  That beautiful white, red, and green sail with its wind sock and collar, costing several thousand dollars, was floating miles downwind on its way to Fiji like a giant ameba extending fingers of protoplasm, a writhing undersea umbrella for small sea creatures to hide under.

I tried getting angry, then sad, then laconically pensive, but after a night of shivering in the wet cockpit I didn’t have the energy for a proper kaniption fit.  Oh well, what’s the use of having a spinnaker if you’re too lazy to fly it?

The wind howled stiffly from the south-southeast all day.  Pamela bashed into the pounding waves with her chin held high, but with the wind in the south quadrant we were moving progressively fifteen degrees off our course to Niuatopotapu.  We tacked back to our rhumb line but the starboard tack carried us to the northeast, well away from our target, and at no better than three knots.  Starboard tack proved to be rather wet, with leaks around the port chainplates, enough to cause a salty puddle on the saloon floor.

A few days later we fetched up in Niuatopotapu harbor, cold, wet, and miserable.  The wind was still howling.  Our broken transmission cable made the anchoring procedure a nerve-racking trial, but our friends on Southern Cross put their dinghy in position and shouted, “Drop it here!”

What a relief it was to be floating in flat water inside the reef of Niuatopotapu!  We spent the following day drying out our clothing and the insides of the boat, catching up on sleep.  I’d spent 60 hours straight in the cockpit the last few days of the passage, and I slept like fallen coconut tree.

The kids on shore were cute, asking if we’f brought them candy in English they were learning in the village school.

“Where’s my lolly?” asked a boy about eight years old.

“My lolly!” repeated his younger sister, about six.

“Lolly,” came the high-pitched song of her sister, about four.

Meanwhile I counted the pigs in the village.  Including the four that were rooting through the coral several yards out on the exposed low-tide reef, I counted nineteen.  The sows hurried across the road as we approached, with their tiny spotted piglets galloping in zig-zags behind them.

 

 

 

 

 

After meandering through the village and exploring the coconut groves I was returning to the dinghy landing when I met a young man who had just come ashore.  From a distance I saw him land, tie up his boat, then hop up onto the landing.  He was putting on his knapsack as I approached, and something about his movements seemed asymmetrical.

“I’m Dustin,” he introduced himself.  He had just arrived from Hawaii by way of Pago Pago and appeared to be going solo.

“Singlehanding?” I asked.

“Literally,” he replied.

It was then I noticed he didn’t have a left arm.  Nor a left leg, for that matter.  The leg was a steel-rod prosthetic with a weather-beaten tennis shoe attached.  The missing arm was a stump attached to a shoulder, pointing up and down in gesticulatory agreement when he waved his right hand.  He was in his late-thirties, solo-sailing his 35-foot sailboat Rutus.

“What does ‘Rutus’ mean,” I asked him later when we were having dinner on board Pamela, sitting down to enjoy a hearty Oaxacan chicken mole with a warm loaf of whole wheat bread that Pam pulled from the oven.

“A rutus is a wooden sword that the ancient gladiators used to train with,” Dustin explained.

I tried to imagine how I could sail Pamela with only one arm.  Each time I reached for a line or a winch handle I thought what it would be like without two hands.  There is a nautical expression, “one hand for the ship and one for yourself”; meaning, when operating the boat you always need to be holding on tight.  But in Dustin’s case the hand for the ship took priority.

But Dustin was completely content with his situation.  He was putting in more effort than any other sailor, and perhaps putting his life on the line.  But, he said, if it weren’t for his unfortunate motorcycle accident, hit by a drunk in a truck, he probably wouldn’t be out here sailing.  Dustin struck me as the most well-adjusted young sailor I’d met.

A few days later he and I were free-diving with Jack from Iguana.  I’d never been spearfishing before, so Jack was showing me the basic moves.  Jack, about twenty-eight, was quite a fisherman and kept Iguana’s freezer full of ahi, mahi mahi, and wahoo.  He’d been at Niuatopotapu for two weeks when we’d arrived, and he’d been out spearfishing every day.  Several times he’d spotted humpback whales swimming lazily off the reef.

“Let your body go completely slack,” he said.  “Minimal movement, feel your heart rate go down.  Take a few deep breaths then point straight down and kick.”

I went down about fifteen feet then came back up a moment later slurping air.  I still had the unpleasant memory of diving twenty-five feet in Suwarrow to release my tangled anchor chain, not properly clearing the pressure from my ears.

“That’s going to be pretty hard with those fins of yours.  They’re short and they’re also flexing 90-degrees.”

I stared at my sadly flexing swim fins.  Compared to Jack’s and Dustin’s long fins mine seemed like stumps.  One was about to break in half.

“There’s a couple giant clams down there,” said Jack.  “See them?  Dustin’s looking for a giant clam, so I’m going to go down and lay the speargun beside them.”  Then down he went like a slow-motion torpedo moving gracefully with his long fins.  He laid his speargun down in a sandy patch beside a coral shelf about twenty-five feet down, then resurfaced slowly a minute later.  He motioned for Dustin to swim over to the spot.  How could Dustin possibly swim down that far with only one leg and one arm?  With my stubby fins I had kicked my hardest and only made it halfway.

“It might take a few dives to pry it off the coral,” Jack remarked.  Then with a long screwdriver in his hand Dustin descended.  From the surface I could see his body jerking at the giant clam down below.  He was down there a minute or so before he began to resurface.  With a grin he presented the huge clamshell, about a foot wide, in his good hand.  A moment later he was down again, this time prying away at the second clam.

Jack showed me how to load his spare speargun, then swam off to hunt.  I floated along the reef gazing at hundreds of tropical aquarium fish, none of which I could properly identify, with the exception of the turquoise-colored parrotfish with its goofy grin.  I pointed the speargun at a brown-colored fish but decided not to shoot.  I didn’t want to eat a brown fish with all these multicolored rainbows swimming about.

Finally, after several minutes of drifting I took aim at a parrotfish in a shallow area of the reef.  Thwack went the speargun, sending the spear deep into a chunk of coral where the parrotfish had been a moment before.  I swam down to pull out the spear but it was wedged tight.  Several times I dove down and tugged on it.  Multitudes of tropical fish swam by to watch, now that the spear was safely lodged in the rock.  Finally the spear came out with a thunk.  This spearfishing was turning out to be harder than it looked.

I tried to recall how Jack had showed me how to reload the spear, examining the strong rubber bands, impossibly short.  I couldn’t pull them even halfway back to the trigger point, and even if I could there didn’t seem to be any way to latch them in place.  Surely there must be something missing; maybe a special piece had fallen off when the spear was wedged into the coral.  What would Jack say if I screwed up his speargun?  I had to find that missing piece.  I swam back to the edge of the reef to find the spot where I’d fired the speargun.  Through canyons of coral and ravines of ridges I paddled hard against the surge, my stubby fins pumping hard.  It all looked the same.  If there in fact was a missing piece to the speargun I’d never find it.  I swam back to the dinghy and waited.

After a long while Jack returned.  I showed him the speargun.  “It’s perfectly fine,” he said.  A moment later he had it loaded.  Damn, I need to figure this out.

“Did you get any fish?” I asked him.

“A couple.  Inside the boat.”

I looked in the dinghy and found several large parrotfish and an enormous fish with a head the size of a tire.  Jack was particularly proud of it, called an uloua in Hawaiian, a large trevally.  He was not satisfied that I’d come up empty-handed on my first spearfishing odyssey and he insisted that I go down again and shoot something.

I found an unsuspecting parrotfish and fired, again burying the spear tip into a coral bank, but this time about fifteen feet down.  I pulled on the spear a moment, then floated up a few feet and pulled on the tether, then floated up a few feet more until I was upside down and nowhere near the surface of the water.  I floated there a moment gazing up at the rich oxygen above the surface and wishing I could get some but reluctant to let go of the speargun’s tether.  I finally had to let go of the gun, popping up the surface with a mighty gasp.  Jack dove down without a word and quietly retrieved the abandoned speargun.

I was feeling rather ridiculous at this point.

Meanwhile, Dustin appeared with his third giant clam.

Jack urged me to try once more.  I was freezing cold by this time, furious with my retarded swim fins, and wanted to go home.  I fired again at a parrotfish and this time got lucky.  I pulled the little guy up to the surface and felt like the Great White Hunter.  Next to the trevally with the tire-sized head my parrot fish was nearly invisible.

“Your first kill,” Jack intoned.  “Not bad.”  He paused and then pointed.  “Look down here.  See that grouper?”

I looked into the depths where Jack was pointing.  I saw a few angelfish and triggerfish but no grouper.  Besides, I didn’t quite know what a grouper looked like.

Jack continued to point.  I looked again and saw nothing.  He pointed again.  It was beginning to feel like a bad comedy.  I decided to dive down once more and have a closer look.

About fifteen feet down I came upon a beautifully fat purple fish covered with plump black dots.  It was love at first site.

I fired at the grouper and then pulled on the tether to see if there was anything like a grouper attached to it.  Miraculously the spear did not go into a coral bed.  It went right through the head of my cartilaginous prey.

“Great shot!” exclaimed Jack.  “Way to go!  Let’s call it a day.”  With chattering teeth I agreed and clambered aboard the dinghy.  The dark-purple grouper was the second largest fish in the dinghy, next to the big trevally.  Ah, sweet redemption for an ex-trout farmer.

That evening we enjoyed a fantastic feast aboard Pamela.  Dustin marinated his clams in a Hawaiian poke sauce and served them with great panache.  Jack provided a grouper and a couple parrotfish which Pam sautéed alongside my grouper in a coconut-cream sauce.  Pam topped it all off with a loaf of fresh-baked bread made from olives and herbes de Provence.

As I lightly strummed my guitar and sipped white wine I reflected on the spearfishing that Dustin, Jack, and I had done and the bounty of fresh fish we had provided for our table, feeling perfect contentment.  The winds died down to a whisper, the sky turned pink, and the developed world seemed like a million miles away.

How curious.  In The Cruise of The Snark, Jack London writes almost nothing about the most famous island of all — Tahiti.  All of the other significant landfalls of his 1907 sailing journey receive their fair share of discourse, but Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, he dismisses with a hand wave, and decides instead to turn his attention to a lengthy description of “the Nature Man,” a vagabond who lives in the jungle above Papeete.

Jack London meets the Nature Man some years before his epic sail, in San Francisco.  The reader can’t tell whether he’s a charlatan or a sage.  Living like a hermit in a shack in a grove high atop one of San Francisco’s famous hills (this is before the infamous 1906 earthquake), the Nature Man resembles a kind of John the Baptist.  He wears rough homespun clothing, eats only vegetables, sports a shaggy beard and an uncombed mane, speaks in parables, and turns handsprings when he comes out to meet the famous writer.  You can easily picture the Nature Man in modern-day Berkeley, lurking behind a tree in the People’s Park.  But in the early 1900’s he is quite an anomaly.

Imagine Jack London’s surprise when he meets the Nature Man again in Tahiti.  The Nature Man is there to meet the Snark as she sails into Papeete harbor, then invites Jack London on a bush-whacking trek up the densely forested mountain to a space he has partially cleared and planted with hundreds of mangoes, bananas, and breadfruit trees.  He tells his fascinating story:  some years earlier he lay lingering on his deathbed while all sorts of doctors investigated, probed, and prescribed.  Convinced it was simply fresh air that he needed, he escaped the hospital and began living alone in the outdoors, abandoning red meat.  He ends up in Tahiti, hacking a rough subsistence farm out of the mountainside, and seems very happy.

I think of the Nature Man as Pamela sails to Tahiti.  What is happiness?  What does it take to be truly happy?  On a mission to find peace, time, and space, one pursues the dream of learning to sail, acquiring a boat, and sailing across an endless ocean to cultivate a quiet mind.

Reaching Papeete on a black, squally night, I dropped Pamela’s jib, flattened the double-reefed mainsail, and set her up to heave-to quietly in the oncoming waves, barely moving as the rain squalls passed overhead, laying just offshore to wait for the dawn.  The jagged outline of Tahiti began to form as the sky lightened to a dull gray, with dramatic Moorea about a dozen miles to the north west.  I was alert and watching for traffic as the ferry boats and fishermen began their morning run.  Meanwhile, the sky dissolved into a gray-black blob and the fiercest squall of the journey so far hit Pamela hard.  The wind meter soared above 30 knots and the rain flattened into a horizontal sheet of cold bullets.  Pamela endured the squall easily with her bow 50-degrees to the big rollers that formed in the onslaught of the gale.  Her mainsail held firmly in the onrush of wind and her rigging sang a rollicking shanty.  She sat so well in the waves that Pam read a book below, obliquely aware that there was a spot of weather outside.  I stood comfortably enough in the cockpit, dry in my foul weather gear, enjoying the storm and grateful that I was not trying to enter the harbor at that moment.

In the anchorage we found several boats we’d met previously in the Marquesas.  We found a good landing dock next to a cafe with cold beer and good wifi, and an enormous   shopping mart a short distance down a busy highway.  Trekking down the highway put me in a dull mood, with cars and trucks spewing exhaust, scooters without mufflers breaking the sound barrier, and plastic Coca Cola bottles strewn alongside.  I tried to mentally prepare myself for the mega-store.  I hadn’t seen one in the past 4000 miles, and I knew it would contain any kind of grocery item I could think of.  But I wasn’t quite prepared for the onslaught of consumerism.  Vast columns of soft drinks!  Rows of sweet breakfast cereal!  Islanders well over 300 pounds waiting at the checkout station dragging shopping carts heaping over with every sort of sweet carbohydrate in plastic packaging.  I picked out some wine and bacon then waited for Pam at the checkout, settling into a seriously dismal funk.  The highway, the superstore, the plastic, all introduced in the past twenty years, totally foreign, unnatural to these islands, and now an integral component of city life in a lost paradise.  I had to move on to Moorea, to Huahine, to Tahaa, to escape.  I felt an overpowering urge to return to the primitive existence I’d found in the Marquesas.

At the marina by the anchorage we met young Fynn, son of Bruce from the catamaran Skabenga, who we’d met in Hiva Oa, Fatu Hiva, and Nuka Hiva in the Marquesas.  Fynn is a happy-go-lucky nineteen-year-old with dreadlocks, tattoos, and a handsome face with a perennially sweet expression that reminds me somewhat of our son Lindsay.  His face lost its happy features when we asked him where he was headed next.  Apparently he was going no further with Bruce and was looking for a ride to New Zealand.  But he needed to get his passport renewed first and needed a work permit, and he was frustrated with the bureaucracy in Papeete.  Meanwhile, he had no place to sleep.  “I have my hammock,” he smiled wanly.  “I found a place under some trees.”  When we left Papeete the following day he was sitting by the wharf looking pensively into the water.

On we sailed to Moorea with her silhouetted extinct volcanos.  I hiked high into her mountains to escape from the city scene of Papeete, climbing over the ruins of maraes and temples overgrown by ancient banyan trees in steep canyons where mosquitos thrived in the forested gloom.  We swam with black-tipped sharks and tame stingrays in Moorea’s famous lagoon, then sailed overnight to Huahine, where we rented bicycles and pedaled off across the island to visit a pearl farm, then rented a car to retrace the route we’d already covered on the bicycles.  Then off to Raiatea and Tahaa, two volcanic islands that share one huge lagoon, and where we’d been before, in 2009, on a chartered sailboat getting our first taste of the cruising life.  Raiatea is a cruiser’s haven, with charter boats and various yacht services available.  As we sailed past its main town, I recall thinking, “You really should get those navigation and anchor lights installed at the top of the mast.  It’s a long way to New Zealand ….”  My anchor light had gone from dim to dead, and the navigation light had been knocked off the boat by a wayward spinnaker sheet back in Mexico.  I was seriously procrastinating on getting these fixed, yet I knew I would probably have no more opportunities to fix them until New Zealand.

We sailed into Apu Bay on the southwest corner of Tahaa.  The Taravana Yacht Club, the little bar and restaurant where we’d stayed during Christmas 2009, was all closed up.  It felt wonderful coming back to Apu Bay.  This time, the lagoon felt familiar and we no longer feared sailing through a pass in a coral reef.  But what would we do here without a base like the tiny Taravana Yacht Club?  What had happened to it, and to Richard, the American we’d met here in 2009?  We enquired about Richard at the adjacent pearl farm, and the proprietress there told us that he was still living in Apu Bay, a little distance down the one-lane road around the bay.  So we set off to find him on a bright warm morning.   On the way we found a little shack with a sign advertising fresh crêpes at any hour of the day, which we certainly couldn’t pass up.  A tall man came walking down the street with a pretty young girl.  “Is your name Richard?” I asked self-consciously.  “Yes, why?” he answered, and I explained that we’d met him four years earlier.  He was on his way to the pearl farm to visit a friend, and the young girl was his daughter from France.  He invited us to his house to watch the Worlds Cup soccer match, and there we met Randy, a flat-picking guitar and banjo player, who I jammed with several times while we stayed in Tahaa.  Randy had just sailed his trimaran down from Hawaii and planned to leave it on a mooring in front of Richard’s place for a few years or so.  They had met in Rangiroa as young men over thirty years ago, each pursuing the dream of sailing a boat to the South Pacific.

Finally I decided to tackle the anchor and navigation lights.  I had a new masthead light and plenty of wire, but I’d have to run the wire down from the top of the mast and through the boat to the DC electrical panel, and that seemed like a major job.  Richard knew a marine electrician in Raiatea who could help, so we contacted him and made plans to take the boat over to Raiatea’s town wharf in a few days.  Meanwhile, we sailed to the north end of Tahaa to a quiet anchorage with a stunning view of Bora Bora, a fabulous coral garden for snorkeling, and an upscale hotel on the motu where we could get a foo-foo island drink.

A few days later we sailed out of the Tahaa lagoon to Bora Bora, feeling the satisfaction of having finally installed the new anchor and navigation lights.  However, the navigation light had a flaw in its LED circuitry and only the port-side and rear lights worked.  Oh well, two out of three, but I’d have to order a replacement and pick it up somewhere down the line, probably New Zealand, and of course go back up to the top of the mast to re-install it.  The marine electrician had recommended an external voltage regulator that he believed would help to charge the batteries much faster and more efficiently, so I felt satisfaction in having had this new electrical device installed.  Hooray!  I had gotten off my lazy butt and had some significant boat work done.

But I still felt some apprehension.  What was it?  Was it the weather systems west of Bora Bora that had me somewhat anxious?  We would be crossing the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ) and the trade winds we had enjoyed for the past four thousand miles would soon be interrupted by the high and low pressure systems coming across from New Zealand, bringing rain squalls at times, calms at other times, and reinforced trade winds on top of the highs.  And not likely any place to buy spare parts until New Zealand, a couple thousand miles away.  Besides, we didn’t even know where we were going — maybe south to Aitutaki, but its entrance was notoriously shallow; maybe to Rarotonga, but its harbor was small and crowded; maybe north to Suwarrow (formerly called Suvarov), but reportedly the national park ranger there would spray the boat for bugs and Pam can’t stand the thought of pesticides.

Bora Bora is the last opportunity to turn right and sail up to Hawaii, back to the States.  Or to call it quits and sell the boat outright.  That’s what Starshine was doing.  “We realized our dream,” said Dave of Starshine.  “We sailed to Polynesia.  Now we’re putting Starshine up for sale in Raiatea.”  He had had a lot of trouble on the passage from Mexico — loosing his engine about three days out, then sailing back upwind to Banderas Bay, then continuing the journey back to the Marquesas, but alone, without Gail his wife.  Now he was having trouble with both of his alternators.  Had he and Gail simply had it, fed up with the boat repairs, the frayed nerves from the anxiety of wondering what critical component would fail next?

A similar fate for Moshulu.  Jerry had practically built her himself, but now he was at the end of his odyssey, having sailed here from Mexico, and was planning to leave her in Raiatea, for sale.

After a week playing in Bora Bora, it was time to sail on to the Cook Islands.  Our 90-day visas for French Polynesia had expired, and the weather looked good for heading down to Aitutaki, 700 miles away.

The seas were rough outside of the Bora Bora lagoon, although the winds were too light to sail.  We bobbed around for a while listening to the limp sails banging against the rigging, then started up the engine and chug-chugged our way toward Maupiti.  The washing machine seas suppressed any appetite, and the day turned into a miserable episode.  Then, going below, I glanced at my instruments and gasped in horror — the voltage of the batteries was over sixteen volts!

For a twelve-volt battery system, thirteen and a half volts is normal during a charging cycle.  You can take the batteries up to a little over fourteen volts for a brief period, causing unwanted deposits to boil away off the cells.  But sixteen volts is unheard of.  My batteries were basically frying.  The new voltage regulator was telling the alternator to give the batteries all you’ve got.

Immediately I switched off the engine to stop the overcharging.  Pamela bobbed like a cork in the waves while I wondered what to do.  With the satellite phone I managed to reach the man who had installed the new voltage regulator in Raiatea a week earlier.  He suggested that I take the fuse out of the circuit between the regulator and the alternator, effectively switching off the regulator, then motor back to Raiatea, about 60 miles away, to replace the regulator.

The thought of backtracking 60 miles upwind was appalling, but I had little choice.  A day and a half later we were sailing past Maupiti for the second time, but this time we were headed for Suwarrow instead of Aitutaki.  Amazingly, the replacement regulator was no better and the voltage problem persisted.  It didn’t make any sense to go back to Raiatea a third time.  I learned to watch the battery voltage very closely when running the engine and to disconnect the regulator as soon as the voltage reached fourteen.

Meanwhile, across the southern route through the Cook Islands, a few hundred miles south of us, the winds were raging.  We were glad to be headed to Suwarrow in the northern Cooks rather than Aitutaki, Rarotonga, Beveridge Reef, and Niue.  Our wind and seas were heavy, though not as strong as the weather system to the south.  The wind angle was good but we couldn’t sail straight to our target.  Instead, we swung the boat in long gybes across our rhumb line, sailing several hundred miles out of the way and turning the five-day trip into a seven-day meditation session.

About midway through the trip I turned on the engine for a bit to recharge the batteries, keeping a close eye on the voltage problem.  When I shut down the engine, I heard the propeller shaft spinning down in the engine room and asked Pam to put the transmission in reverse briefly to stop the spinning.  When she tried pushing down on the lever to move back into neutral, she complained that she couldn’t get it into neutral.  Pam often complained that the gear shift lever was hard to engage.

“It takes finesse, not strength,” was my typical irritated reply.

“Well I can’t do it,” she resigned.

I signed heavily.  “Here, let me do it.”  I tried to gingerly prod the lever downward from reverse into neutral.  It was stuck, as usual, but I knew it would disengage the stuck gears with … one … good … push — and then — SNAP!  The lever became lifeless in my hand as the end of the transmission cable sheared its threads.

I cursed vainly, defiling Neptune, the Holy Trinity, and all the apostles in a solid round of sailorly oaths.  How would we get to Suwarrow with a busted transmission?

After some thought it occurred to me that I could manually shift the transmission by jumping down into the engine room and pulling up and down on the small lever attached directly to the transmission.  So I could put the engine into neutral to charge the batteries, and crank it down into forward gear when we needed to motor through the pass into Suwarrow.  I wouldn’t be able to handle the boat easily in tight quarters but I should be able to get into an anchorage and drop the anchor.

A day or so later the jib started showing a tear.  I hoped it would last until Suwarrow.  A day later the radar reflector came crashing down.  The line that suspended it from the port-side spreader had chafed through.  Late that night, while half-dozing in the cockpit I heard a strange metallic sound by the steering wheel, grabbed my flashlight, and discovered that the Monitor self-steering drum had fallen off the wheel.  Pamela bounded over the seas like a horse without a bridle.  Of all the systems on board, the self-steering was the Number One Most Important.  Two hose clamps that held the drum to the steering wheel had shorn off, their stainless steel bands finally giving way to the constant tension of turning the wheel left and right.  I found a couple of spare clamps in my tool locker and managed to secure the drum back to the wheel, resume self-steering, and went back to dozing.  Getting to Suwarrow was starting to feel like running through a gauntlet.  Back in Bora Bora, was I having a premonition of this unpleasant passage?

Maybe I should have put the boat up for sale in Raiatea?  Nonsense!  Maybe I should sell her in New Zealand?  Maybe I should quit whining and take it on the chin like a proper sailor.  After all the years of planning, saving, and preparing — and here I was, finally sailing my own boat through the South Seas, wondering how fast I could get rid of her.  That wouldn’t do.  What would Slocum and Moitessier think?

A few days later we were safely anchored in Suwarrow’s crystal-clear lagoon.  I took the binnacle apart to have a look at the transmission cable.  The stainless steel bolted end had broken off, so I would need a new cable.  Four screws holding down the compass would have to be removed before I could reach the end of the cable, and these screws refused to budge.  After copious blasts of WD-40 and another round of sailorly swearing and blaspheming of all the world’s major religions, I managed to strip the heads of all four screws.  With my electric drill and Dremel tool I reduced one of the screw heads to a mound of powdery metal filings, then decided to suspend further destruction until I was in Apia, Samoa.  Destroying the compass in mid-ocean on a deserted island seemed like a bad idea.

I pulled down the jib and had a turn with my needle and thread.  The jib did not have a tear as I had feared, only a bit of dacron coming off one of the edges of the clew.  A few hours with my needle and rigger’s palm produced a handy repair, albeit somewhat like the scar on Frankenstein’s forehead.  I snapped a needle in half at one point and stuck it right through my finger.  It felt satisfying to be paying my dues.

Midway through the jib repair the wind began to rise.  Bursts from the south caused wind waves to emerge from the far side of the lagoon.  By the time the waves reached Pamela they were four or five feet high.  I looked up from my sewing and watched her bow rising and falling, submerging on each frenetic plunge.  The lagoon, typically calm and peaceful, was boiling like a witch’s caldron.  I was glad I had buoyed my anchor chain — tying a float to the chain fifty feet from the bow to keep the chain closest to the boat from dragging across the bottom and fouling itself on the numerous coral heads.  If the chain were to snag on a coral head below the boat, the shortened scope could cause the chain to break or the deck cleat to wrench loose.  As the wind grew stronger and the waves steeper, I stared back at the reef a few hundred yards downwind and imagined the horror of breaking free and fetching up on that razor-sharp edge.  More boats are lost on submerged reefs than to storms out at sea.  A moving boat can hit coral with such force that its fiberglass hull will crack open like a porcelain dish.  With the wind pinning the boat hard to the coral, it is often impossible to get the boat off the reef, and only a short while before she fills with water and founders.  Little did I know that this gruesome scene would play out in about a week’s time.

In a place like Suwarrow, such a boat would be completely and hopelessly lost.

In a place like Suwarow, a man could also be completely lost.  But not hopelessly.

In the late 1930’s Tom Neale, a New Zealander living in Moorea, discovered the writings of Robert Dean Frisbie, who had lived a while on Suwarrow.  Indeed, during the great hurricane of 1942, Frisbie had tied his four young children to a tamanu tree to prevent them from blowing away, as the wild ocean swells raked Anchorage Island and completely carried away sixteen of the twenty-two islands of the Suwarrow lagoon.  Neale began to dream of living on Suwarrow, and after meeting Frisbie in 1943 he made up his mind to somehow get to the isolated atoll.  Situated well away from the trade routes where a ship rarely passed, the atoll lay over 500 miles north of Rarotonga and 200 miles south of Manihiki, its closest neighbor in the Cook Island group.

“Tom Neale,” said Frisbie, “Suvarov is the most beautiful place on earth, and no man has really lived until he has lived there.”  If this were true, then very few men had ever really lived, for only a handful of men had ever spent any amount of time in this beautiful, empty Eden.  Two years later, Neale visited Suwarrow for the first time as crew aboard a schooner bound for Manihiki.  He fell in love with the forlorn group of islets surrounding fifteen miles of lagoon, and seven years later, when the next vessel from Rarotonga passed near the atoll, he jumped at the chance to visit again.  With a thoughtful collection of tools and kitchen supplies, a fifty-pound sack of flour, a seventy-pound bag of sugar, and forty pounds of coffee, Tom Neale found himself back on Suwarrow.  He woud live alone on the island until — who knows when?

As you stand on the beach of your isolated island, completely alone, watching your ship sail out of the lagoon and away, what thoughts go through your head?  Tom Neale describes his feelings in his book An Island To Oneself:

Over the years I had imagined this moment dozens of times, often wondering what sort of emotions I would experience at the actual moment of severing my last contact with the outside world.  I had imagined I might be a little despondent and had thought, too, there might be a sudden surge of almost frightening loneliness.  But now the schooner was leaving I felt nothing but impatience that the ship took so long to get under way.

How does he keep from becoming incredibly lonely on this half-mile long island?  Basically, he works himself each day to exhaustion.  Fishing for his food, hauling topsoil to create a garden, repairing an old coral-stone jetty, just to watch it disintegrate in the next storm, then repair it again, over and over, he keeps himself occupied with hundreds of chores and projects.  He may be alone in his Garden of Eden, but he is certainly not idle.  He even cuts his hair and shaves regularly.

Looking into my mirror on Pamela I see a spurious fur-ball staring back at me.  I shave once every six weeks.  I brush my hair only when it rains.  It stands up like Einstein experimenting with static electricity.  I might consider cutting my hair sometime but I don’t want to clean up the mess when it falls into the bilge.  If I were to live alone on Suwarrow I would become so lazy I’d turn into a tree.

It takes about ten minutes to explore the island.  As Pam and I walked from the small beach on the lagoon to the old hut where Tom Neale lived, we smell the nutty fragrance of the Tamanu tree, probably the same one where Frisbie tied his children in the hurricane of ’42.  A few steps later we are on the other side of the island gazing at the crushing waves of the Pacific Ocean.

Suwarrow’s lagoon is aquamarine, incredibly clear, and full of fish.  A short distance from Pamela we found a huge bommie (underwater coral head) to explore, over 100 feet across.  Its coral was vibrant and phosphorescent, with purples, greens, and blues that an artist would struggle to recreate.  Teeming with all kinds of tropical fish and squirming eels, it fascinated us as we circled it in our snorkel gear.

That same bommie would claim the life of a sailboat in a few days.

Suwarrow’s coral bommies make for difficult anchoring.  You can easily drop your anchor into soft sand, but in a few days your boat will drag its chain through an endless array of coral heads around the avenues of sand.  In the week that we were there, Pamela swung through all the points of the compass as the winds shifted from east to north to northwest, wrapping her anchor chain around a complex circuit of bommies.  From the surface twenty-five feet over the anchor I surveyed the chain in the clear depths below.  Near the anchor, the chain was wrapped three-quarters of the way around a big bommie, and around another one a boat-length from the bow.  With Pamela’s broken transmission cable I didn’t think I’d be able to forward and reverse my way around the bommies.  Rather, I had to dive on the anchor and attempt to lift the chain up and around each coral head using my bare hands.  I’d never dived down as far as twenty-five feet, but it seemed like a necessary thing to do.

When it was finally time to leave Suwarrow, I put on my mask and fins to survey the underwater scene.  About fifteen feet down I tried to clear the air pressure from my ears, then kicked hard to get down to the chain on the bottom.  At twenty feet my ears were exploding and my lungs were soon to follow, but I was determined to get the chain off that coral.  I grabbed the chain and heaved it upwards, unwrapping it from the first bommie, then slowly floated myself back to the surface.  A few deep breaths later I was kicking back down to the bottom.  The bommie near the anchor had overhanging sides and held the chain in place while I attempted to lift and shake it loose.  It took two or three dives to unhook the chain from the overhangs.  After clearing the chain, I came back on board with pride and satisfaction, although with somewhat of a hearing loss, then waved goodbye to Suwarrow.

Three days later we were halfway to Apia, Samoa when we heard the news on the morning radio net:  the sailboat Amiable, who we often heard on the radio net, had come into Suwarrow the day we left.  When a storm whipped into the lagoon a few days later, Amiable’s anchor chain malfunctioned.  As her crew attempted to navigate through the anchorage to the pass, she was blown hard onto the huge bommie that we had snorkled around a few days earlier.

The bommie tore a hole in Amiable’s hull, she filled with water and was destroyed.

The pass leading through the coral was alive with churning water.  From a mile out at sea it looked calm enough, but now that we were beginning our baptism into its hidden currents we saw a different story.  Just ahead of Pamela, the four-foot swell was rapidly turning into eight-foot rollers.  Our timing had been wrong.  Instead of a slack tide with light current we were going in on an ebb tide.  The outflowing waters from Rangiroa’s massive lagoon were meeting the easterly ocean swells in an angry conflict of wills.

Could Pamela make it through the opposing current?  Or would those eddies push her hard onto the fringing reef?  Would she slide sideways down one of those steep waves and get pooped, her cockpit flooded with two hundred gallons of seawater?

What had gone wrong with our tide plan?  I wasn’t confident in our iPad app that showed the tides of Ahe and Manihi, for those atolls were nearly a hundred miles from Rangiroa.  The app didn’t show the tides for Rangiroa, which seemed very odd given that Rangiroa is the most developed of the atolls of the northern Tuamotus.  I was forced to extrapolate by adjusting the times further west.  As an insurance policy, I had emailed the SailMail operator on Manihi and asked him for a tide timetable for Rangiroa.  His reply indicated a time several hours from my extrapolated time, leaving me further perplexed.

So here we were, at the right place at the wrong time.  I braced the wheel and spread my feet wide apart and into the corners where the cockpit benches meet the deck.

Pam stood behind me.  As Pamela began to surf high over the first of the eight-footers I said as calmly as I could muster, “Whatever happens in the next minute, please don’t scream.”

From the top of the cresting wave the trough below looked impossibly deep, at least ten feet straight down.  Pamela paused on the crest of the wave then let the roller pass beneath her keel, seeming to slide backward for a moment.  I glanced quickly behind to see the next steep roller begin to lift her fine canoe stern.  She bucked like a slow-motion hobby horse as again we were carried airborne over Rangiroa, and then settled back down as the second great roller passed under her and into the lagoon.  I opened up her throttle to full speed and the knotmeter recorded our progress as 0.9 knots.  My mouth was dry and my palms were dripping with sweat.  We were certainly taking our time getting into the lagoon, but at least we were not being carried sideways by the swirling eddies.

Three minutes later the breaking seas were behind us.   The pass was still churning away, but the confused eddies looked benign compared to what we had just bashed through.  I glanced behind and imagined trying to motor headlong into those breakers, deciding to never attempt such a thing.

A few minutes later we were safely anchored in the placid turquoise water of Rangiroa’s lagoon.  It was definitely time for a cold Hinano in a Butch’s Fish Camp cozy.  My dry throat began to moisten, my palms were drying out, and my voice returned from a Vienna Boys’ Choir alto back to its normal tenor.

After pumping up the inflatable dinghy and lowering down the outboard from its perch under the stern davits, we headed straight for the Kia Ora Hotel with its inviting dock, open-air lobby full of local information about diving the pass and renting bicycles, and not least, its upscale bar overlooking the flat water stretching for fifteen miles across the lagoon, with lovely Pamela in the foreground.  And wifi!  In a broad conspiracy to hide the ugly truths about long-distance sailing, I uploaded a photo to Facebook showing a happy couple enjoying chilly island drinks in a palm-fringed lagoon.  Who wants to hear the truth about a six-night passage from the Marquesas, when rain squalls force you to don your foul weather gear, while late-night bodily functions force you to frantically come out of jacket and bibs.  Alas, and not coming out quickly enough, and spending an hour cleaning up the resulting mess in the cubby-hole-of-a-bathroom while the ship tosses you about in the fetid darkness.

Meanwhile, the gardenia-scented men’s room of the Kia Ora Hotel bar conspired to lure me back to a life on land.  You could sell Pamela and with the proceeds travel the whole  world luxuriating in men’s rooms such as this!  With foo-foo islands drinks as well!

But would I?  No, without a sailboat I wouldn’t even be aware of Rangiroa in the Tuamotus in French Polynesia in the middle of the Pacific.  This atoll of tiny islands surrounding a lagoon of calm water in the midst of the rolling ocean, one of hundreds of motus that make up the Tuamotu archipeligo, a thousand miles long, in between the volcanic Marquesas and Tahiti.  These islands made entirely from coral and coconuts, once called “the Dangerous Isles” because of their razor-sharp fringing coral reefs that ships couldn’t see until it was too late.

We rented a pair of rusty single-speed bicycles with fat, sagging tires and enjoyed the fresh breeze against our sunburned skin as we raced along Rangiroa’s only road, standing high up on the pedals to get further airborne.  I spied a brown coconut and stopped to give it a shake to see if there was coconut water inside, then tossed it into the basket under my bicycle’s handle bars.

A lugubrious Frenchman seated in the shade of a broken-down cafe agreed to serve us a drink but declined to serve us lunch when Pam announced in broken French that we wanted only one serving of fish, not two.  It wasn’t worth it to heat up the grill for only one serving the man replied.  How far this expat had come from his homeland to spend his final days not serving lunch in Rangiroa.  A while later we cycled past the Gendarmerie but found it closed for the afternoon.  A black island dog, perhaps the most long-suffering of all beasts, panted in the shade of a coconut tree.

The wind that had been at our backs on the swift ride up the island was now in our face.  It conspired to dry off the sweat produced by the noon-day sun, but our laboring against the wind on under-inflated, fat old tires, generated more sweat than the trade wind could dry.  On we pedaled over the coarse coral road made blinding white by the sun, and it seemed that nothing could break the peace of this sleepy afternoon, until —

An explosion overhead caused me to jump off my seat.  A truck barreling down the island road behind me?  A maniacal island dog waking from a dream to find invaders in his coconut grove?  It was a large, twin-engined aircraft making a landing on the melancholy strip called Rangiroa airport.  I looked up to see faces pressed against the glass windows, airborne over Rangiroa, watching a shirtless man with odd spectacles pedaling an old bicycle with a coconut in the basket.  Some of these faces belonged to islanders returning from a visit to Papeete to see a relative.  Others belonged to tourists heading to the Kia Ora Hotel, having saved up their precious vacation time for a few days in the Tuamotus.  A few belonged to young French-speaking honeymooners, weary after a long flight from Paris but eagerly anticipating a plunge into the warm lagoon.

Soon we joined them in adventure, “drift snorkeling through the pass.”  We arranged for a local outfitter to come out to Pamela and take us on a trip back into the swift currents of the pass.  The concept is simple; you jump off a boat where the Pacific enters the pass, then drift along the canyon-like coral walls of the pass as the inflowing current carries you into the lagoon.  You glide through the water like Superman, discovering the bigger fish in the depths below, including a number of large sharks.  As you soar into the lagoon the depths become shallow, and soon you’re drifting over a coral shelf called “The Aquarium”.  The fish see you coming.  Your host tosses a few bits of canned mackerel into the lagoon and immediately you’re in a maelstrom of pink bodies and yellow fins thrashing wildly about to see who can get more than his fair share of mackerel.  You wonder what happened to the blunt-snouted sharks you drifted past back in the pass — what, they don’t like mackerel, or pink fish, or tourists with swim fins?

We met a group of women from Southern California, a few years older than us, spending a short chick-trip vacation in Rangiroa.  They were very curious about our journey on a sailboat all the way from California, asking the usual questions:  What do you do at night?  Do you have a stove on board?  Aren’t you afraid of storms and pirates?  It turned out that Pam knew someone they also knew in Southern California, and soon Pam and the girls became fast friends.  They invited us back to their over-the-water bungalow at the Kia Ora Hotel, and we shared a bottle of wine while Pam enjoyed their fine, hot shower.  The room had a small landing with an outdoor shower, which I found enjoyable, taking care not to become too civilized too quickly.  After all, we still had 3,000 miles before reaching New Zealand.

We were soon airborne over Rangiroa once again, this time on a speeding motorboat flying high over the waves of the inner lagoon on our way to Les Isles Recifes, a collection of little motus on the far side of the lagoon.  As beautiful as The Aquarium had been the day before, the coral-studded shallows of these motus were even more so as the afternoon sun dappled around the myriad forms of underwater life.  In many places the water was so shallow I had to breath in great lungfuls of air to float my body over the coral bommies, sucking in my gut so far that my stomach rubbed against my backbone.

On the fine coral-sand beach we split a few coconuts for an invigorating snack, then explored a curiously high wall of jagged coral mixed with basalt that formed a protective fence to keep out the Pacific westerlies that beat hard against these islands in winter.  We followed the wall of coral past several pools of bathtub-warm, clear tropical water to another motu where our host had a hot lunch waiting for us.  Warm coconut-filled bread!  Grilled mahi mahi and chicken, fresh from an outdoor oven heated by burning coconut hulls!  Poisson cru with fresh, raw tuna and coconut cream!  We ate more than is befitting a man who spends the day lazing about in the sun, pretending that our efforts floating past the bommies qualified as exercise, then lay back to watch the timeless tropical afternoon.  The women enjoyed a weaving lesson, learning to make baskets from interleaved palm fronds, while the men pretended to be interested by photographing the enterprise.  When the baskets were finished we fed a troupe of black-tipped sharks by the shore, then waded back out to the speedboat, once again airborne of Rangiroa as we launched off the little waves made by the fetch of the afternoon breeze.  One more trip to The Aquarium to feed the fish there, and then out again into the pass, this time to see the dolphins that come to jump in the rollicking waves at sunset, leaping in high somersaults, airborne of Rangiroa.

How can time slow down, yet speed up at the same time?  It was soon time to say goodbye to our new friends at the Kia Ora Hotel.  The clock was ticking on our 90-day visa in French Polynesia, and there was still much to see in Tahiti, Bora Bora, and the rest of the Society Islands about 250 miles to the southwest.  We pulled up our anchor from the soft, sandy bottom and followed the island up to another pass, this one more gentle than the pass we’d entered a few days earlier.  We timed it just right — no adverse current, no tide rips, no drama of breaking waves — no “airborne over Rangiroa”.

Except for the dolphins.  They are always there to greet you when you sail into a new Polynesian island, and there again to saw farewell to you as you sail away.  As we left Rangiroa behind, a large pod raced to meet us, leaping with wild joy through a series of acrobatic dives.  The red sun blended into the far horizon and a crescent of moon rose in the east to light up the seas for our journey to Tahiti.

“Who wants to read all that stuff you’re posting?” asks Pam.

“Why, the literary ones.  The ones with lots of time on their hands.  The ones who appreciate a bit of Hemingway mixed with Steinbeck and totally foresaking Faulkner,” I explain.

“Forget it.  Post some photos.  Our friends want to see some photos.  Post some more photos.  Some more photos.”

And here they are:

Pam was on a plane back to the US for a couple of weeks, from Nuku Hiva to Pape’ete to Seattle to attend Lindsay’s college graduation, and then on to Palo Alto to scratch Little Bear’s tummy.  Much as I wanted to see Lindsay and Julian again and to attend the graduation, there was no way to leave Pamela anchored unattended in the Marquesas.  I wondered what I would do for two weeks alone on the boat.

My plans were to provision in Taiohae Bay in Nuku Hiva, then make an upwind beat for Taipivai for a few days, followed by a sail around the cape to Anaho Bay.  In Anaho I would find the farm that provides fresh organic vegetables to Taiohae, then hike over the mountain to get a good meal of curried goat at Chez Yvonne, picking up mangoes along the way.  Most of all, I would spend my time writing.  What better way to write than to cloister oneself on a boat anchored in a windswept backwater of French Polynesia?

My provisioning run to the three magasins in Taiohae Bay resulted in a baguette, four sections of camembert cheese, three litres of red wine, and a chicken with seven legs.  Before leaving the wharf I picked up my tank of propane, washed out a bucket of clothes, and visited the wharf’s notoriously hideous public shower.  Nobody goes into that bathroom, ever, period.  One stall is constantly flowing with water, while the other stall is completely blocked up with generations of ecoli, with the dank mosquito-infested shower in between.  You stand in the darkness groping for the L-shaped valve to open the water, then shiver as a torrent of cold water dumps down upon your head in a steady stream, no soothing spray, just a impenetrable gush of solid water like a cold lead pipe.

Outside the public bath the fisherman had returned with their catch, and several large tuna waited stiffly to have their heads hacked off and thrown to the thrashing sharks.  The tide was high and surging three feet as I lowered my propane and laundry into the dinghy tied along the wharf with fifteen others.  The day was cool and rainy, a nice respite from the sun-burning heat.  A gust of cold wind announced a new squall coming down from the mountains, which was followed a minute later by a driving rain.  The rain whipped against my skin as I motored the dinghy away from the wharf.  On the breakwater three men were offloading a cargo of goat carcasses from a fishing piroque.  They heaved up a dozen or so dead goats like limp burlap bags with hairy legs.

Back at Pamela I loaded my three empty diesel jugs into the dinghy then motored over to Mintaka to make a fuel run to the jetty where the Tahiti Nui cargo ship was loading a helicopter onto her foredeck and preparing to cast off.  Four times we motored from Mintaka and Pamela to the fuel dock carrying a total of 280 litres of diesel.  Each time we departed in the dinghy a new rain squall hit us, and each time at the concrete jetty the swell pushed the dinghy four feet up and down against its sides.  Four times we trudged through the mud from the fuel station back to the jetty carrying the heavy jugs of diesel.  At last the job was finished.  I lashed down my diesel jugs and prepared Pamela to set sail in the morning, saying goodbye to Robyn and Mark on Mintaka and bidding them fair winds until we met again in New Zealand in November.

New Zealand, 4000 miles away.  Is it possible that I will actually make it that far?

At daybreak I made final preparations for setting sail, stowing the provisions, lashing down everything on deck, and doing my morning Yoga exercises.  Fifty-five years old, so fifty-five push-ups and fifty-five sit-ups, followed by a hot mug of sticky sweet coffee.  I hoisted up the anchor and turned Pamela in a circle around Mintaka, saying our goodbyes, and then raised the mainsail with a single reef and unfurled the jib.  I thought of putting two reefs in the mainsail in case there were heavy winds outside Taiohae Bay, but decided against it.  After all, yesterday’s rain squalls were long forgotten and the morning wind was light.

Just outside the bay the seas got big.  A swell was running and a heavy chop from yesterday’s wind was producing seas of six to eight feet.  The south-easterly trade winds were getting a lift from a high pressure system south off the Tuamotus.  The building seas had come a few thousand miles before crashing into Nuku Hiva’s easterly cape.  They rushed toward Pamela in a rapid succession of deep troughs and steep slopes.  Suddenly the wind went from 10 to 25 knots.  The single-reefed mainsail heeled Pamela over 30 degrees and washed the side decks clean.  The kayak paddles were lashed together and weighted down by the secured kayak, but were not lashed to the ship.  As Pamela careened down each wave a wall of sea water sprayed me thoroughly from head to foot.  It was a rollicky white-knuckled adventure!

Taipivai is a small bay in the larger Controlleur’s Bay about five miles upwind and to the east of Taiohae.  I had planned on a short motor over to Taipivai and had put up the sails just for the sport of it.  Now I was hanging on for dear life.  My life jacket and tether were up forward in the V-berth under a crate of eggs.  I held on tight and put all thoughts of the grossly tilted slippery decks out of my mind.

I went below decks for a quick survey of the wreckage below.  My chart books were thrown to the floor and the ditch bag was about to spill its contents.  A puddle of seawater was forming in the galley, probably from the anchor hawse pipe which I had not completely sealed before leaving Taiohae.  With the foredeck completely awash, seawater was streaming into the anchor chain locker and dripping its way back to the lowest part of the ship, the galley.

I tacked Pamela out to sea for about five miles hoping the seas would lay down a bit.  Then tacking toward Controlleur’s Bay I found myself retracing my track back to Taiohae.  Alas, Pamela’s port-side jib sheet was too far forward and her jib was sagging.  She pointed no higher than 60 degrees and scudded along at a whopping two and half knots while the waves conspired to push her back in the direction we’d come.

I tacked back out to sea and adjusted the port-side jib sheet car.  Then I noticed that the spinnaker bag that had been secured to the foredeck for the past five thousand miles was hanging over the side and filling with seawater!  Forgetting about life preservers, tethers, and slippery decks, I shouted, “I’ve got to get that spinnaker out of the water!”  I dashed forward amid the turmoil and grabbed the spinnaker bag.  It was hanging off the starboard rail by its straps and was completely filled with seawater, heavy and producing lots of drag like a sea anchor.  I passed another line through one of its grommets and quickly tied it to a stanchion, then raced back to the cockpit to turn Pamela back on starboard tack to get the spinnaker bag out of the water.  With her starboard rail high out of the water I was able to wrestle the soaked spinnaker bag back up on deck and tie it to the deck cleats.

Pamela was now approaching the last point before Controlleur’s Bay.  How I longed to be back in flat water within the confines of that bay.  As she approached the point it was a crapshoot whether she could round the point without another tack.  But another tack ran the risk of tossing the spinnaker bag back over the rail.  I considered my options.  Approaching within a half-mile from the point I furled up the jib and started the engine, turning the ship another 10 degrees to weather to round the point with some sea room to spare.

Inside Controlleur’s Bay the winds calmed and the seas magically turned back to a manageable two-foot swell.  The inward bay of Taipivai called invitingly.  As I prepared to anchor I revised my list of “must-do’s” before leaving an anchorage:

• be sure to tie everything down tight, such as the kayak paddles
• stick lots of play-doh around the anchor hawse pipe to prevent water from coming down below
• hoist the mainsail with the #2 reef until I get past the gusty promontory that keeps an anchorage protected from the prevailing winds.

Once anchored it was time to relax a while and forget about the savage ocean churning around the cape.  I turned on the stereo and turned up the country music.  Pamela’s mood grew festive with the sounds of banjo and fiddle of “Good Ole Rockytop” and I popped open a beer to add to the celebration.  I placed the Hinano in a beer cozy from Butch’s Fish Camp in Okeechobee, Florida to enhance the authenticity.

I cleaned up the sea water down below, put away the various items that had been pitched across the cabin, and prepared the boat for a relaxing period at anchor in Taipivai Bay.

When I’m alone on the boat, the first thing I do is to plumb through the depths of the refrigerator to see what moldy delights Pam has left for me.  Before leaving Taiohae I removed four plastic bags of putrified compost.  One such bag that had not completely liquified contained the remains of a cucumber that we had bought at the vegetable market at 0400 the previous Saturday.  Everyone had warned us, “If you want lettuce you have to get to the market by 4:00 a.m., otherwise all the good organic produce will be gone.”  Get up three hours before dawn and clamber into the dinghy to get to a vegetable market?

“This is a cruiser myth,” one cruiser had told us.  “You don’t have to get there by 4:00 a.m.  They will still have good stuff available at 5:30 a.m.”

“I am longing for fresh organic lettuce,” Pam replied.  “I need it.  I haven’t had any since Mexico.  We need to get there early.  I will make it so.”

And so it was that at 0350 on Saturday morning we were the very first customers at the market.  We had to wait a bit for the lady to bring out all her vegetables.  And there it was — the organic lettuce, tomatoes, cilantro, dill weed, and cucumbers.

And now here were its remains floating in a quart of scummy water at the bottom of the refrigerator.  The genuine organic quality of this produce seem to hasten its return to the  soggy earth.

When I’m alone on the boat there are rules that are strictly adhered to by captain, crew, mate, and cook.  Rule #1:  there are no crumbs allowed on the cabin sole.  If I find a crumb or bit of lint or hairball, I stare at it unblinking until the weight of my gaze jerks my legs into action, jumping for the broom and dust pan.  Rule #2:  no alcohol before 0800.  The few precious ice-cold beers in the refrigerator are solemnly sipped with slow and ritualistic Shamanic rigor, while the bottle of red wine is permitted to sit in the galley sink throughout the long day, evening, and night.  No beer or wine is allowed during a passage of course, for all good ships are dry ships underway.  But when the anchor snubber is locked in place, the coldest adult beverage on the ship becomes an article of matronly succor providing solace to a sea-ravaged crew.  Rule #3:  absolutely nothing in the galley sink.  No dirty dishes attracting fruit flies and encouraging maggots — the foulest things ever to encounter on a ship at sea, even worse than rats — no piles of utensils and bowls preventing one from accessing the fresh water spigot, no coffee grounds splattered about and getting under your fingernails; nothing at all in the sink, with the noted exception of the bottle of red wine.

When I’m alone on the boat, preparing food for myself becomes an exercise in Newtonian scientific analysis.  Each day I survey the contents of the refrigerator, the fruits and vegetables ripening and hanging in nets, the alfalfa and clover sprouting, and the hand-made yogurt curdling.  I take out that which is furthest down its natural path toward composting and set it aside on the cutting board beside the galley sink.  Today it might be two tomatoes sautéed with a sprouting red onion crowning a crusty end of baguette with a fried egg on top, and tomorrow it could be three bananas and a mango stir-fried with wrinkled green beans.

I cooked up the seven-legged chicken and covered it with onions, garlic, and salt.  The chicken should last me three days before I have to open up the cans of corned beef.  My salvation, a large can of ravioli stared at me from across the cabin saloon.  After the chicken and the corned beef, the ravioli would be my final meal before taking on more provisions at Hatiheu, an hour and half hike over the mountain from Anaho Bay.

There was just one other sailboat in the anchorage of Taipivai, and after a day it departed, leaving me alone in this wild place.  At night I could see a few lights from houses on the hillside, but by day the Taipivai valley looked green, deserted, and melancholy under the rain clouds formed by Nuku Hiva’s sharp ridge of steep volcanic mountains.

A young Herman Melville ventured to Nuku Hiva ‘round Cape Horn from Nantucket in 1842.  Long before the writing of Moby Dick, Melville spent several months on Nuku Hiva and sketched out the plot of his first novel called Typee after the fierce native Marquesans in the Taipi valley.  In the story, a young man deserts a whaling ship in Taiohae Bay, then climbs up the mountainside to avoid pursuit.  With his companion Toby he manages to make his way along the knife-edge ridge tops.  Looking down from the top into Nuku Hiva’s many valleys, he says to Toby, “This is the way we want to go.  This is the valley of the friendly natives.  That over there is the Typee valley, which we must avoid at all costs.  They are cannibals there in Typee.”  Then down from the ridge they venture into the verdant valley, only to find the Typees waiting below.  They are captured but are free to wander about the village of the Typees unmolested.  Happily, they are not eaten.

The young Melville dreams of a beautiful and exotic Marquesan princess, who in the story is the lovely Fayaway.  The young man falls in love with her of course.  And ever since, young men have come to Polynesia looking for a Fayaway to excite their passions.

After two days sitting on the boat in the anchorage I was anxious to go ashore and see the valley that Melville wrote about nearly 175 years ago.   I was getting tired of picking up lint and crumbs off the cabin floor.  Who keeps putting them there?  I couldn’t blame Pam, for she was thousands of miles away in Seattle visiting friends with the boys, preparing for Lindsay’s college graduation.  I should be there, I kept thinking.  But how would the boat be safe in these anchorages with such gusty winds?  What if the anchor dragged in a cloudburst, who would keep Pamela from hitting the rocky shoreline?  In the well-protected anchorage of Anaho last week Mintaka dragged her anchor 70 feet.

But the day turned into a series of rainstorms.  I could just make out Melville’s valley through the driving slats of rain, looking more somber and eerie than ever.  The rolly anchorage was now a choppy sea, with stout waves passing Pamela like columns of white horses.  With a machete in my knapsack and a bottle of mosquito repellent I launched the kayak into the chop.  Away I bobbed in the waves toward the beach of Taipi.

How long have I imagined this wild valley?  Like Jack London before me I had read Melville and dreamed about Nuku Hiva’s earthy cannibals.  London had come here in 1906 aboard his boat, the Snark.  Like me, he was at the beginning of a two-year odyssey across the South Pacific.

When I was a little boy, I read a book, Herman Melville’s Typee;

and many long hours I dreamed over its pages.  Nor was it all dreaming.  I resolved then and there, mightily, come what would, that when I had gained strength and years, I, too, would voyage to Typee.  For the wonder of the world was penetrating to my tiny consciousness — the wonder that has lead me to many lands, and that leads and never palls.  The years passed, but Typee was not forgotten.

(Jack London, The Cruise of The Snark)

A rain squall hit me as my kayak careened toward the shore with the gusts of the reinforced trade winds.

Typee was not forgotten, and here I was now, gazing at its misty outlines till the squall swooped down and the Snark dashed on into the driving smother.

With only the knapsack on my back — shirt tucked away inside the pack and shoes mindlessly forgotten back aboard Pamela — I struck upon the small dirt road that lead into the valley and its village of a handful of houses, a church, and a post office.  Melville had described Typee as a wondrous garden — Had a glimpse of the gardens of paradise been revealed to me I could scarcely have been more ravaged with the sight — whereas London found a wilderness of abandoned paepaes, the black lava-rock foundations of ancient Marquesan homes.

He saw a garden.  We saw a wilderness.  Where were the hundred groves of the breadfruit tree he saw?  We saw jungle, nothing but jungle, with the exception of two grass huts and several clumps of cocoanuts breaking the primordial green mantle.

Instead of the beautifully elusive Fayaway, London saw two leper women.  In only two generations, from Melville’s to London’s time, the strong-limbed warriors of Taipi had dwindled to a small pack of coughing islanders dying from tuberculoses.

Not so with my visit three generations later.  The people of the village were thriving.  Children played outside the doorways of their simple homes.  A group of young men play barefoot soccer in a field outside the church.  One young man in a ski cap — stylish, perhaps, but not so practical in the tropics — was jogging barefoot along the road.

“Combien de kilometres — how far is it — to Hatiehu?” I asked a shop keeper.  She arched her eyebrows in amazement.  “À pied?” she asked.  Surely not on foot.  Hatiehu was on the other side of the island, with a sharp spine of volcanic mountain separating it from the Taipi valley.  People drive there, but no one walks there.  I set out to do so without my shoes.

How liberating it is to walk in a rain shower wearing only your swim trunks.  You don’t have to worry about getting wet.  In some places the road was concrete, but mostly it was red dirt with occasional gravel.  The mud oozed between my toes while the gravel toughened my heels.

Along the way I passed groves of coconut and trees full of pamplemousse, banana, guava, mangoes, and lemons.   Groups of horses, some staked, some roaming free, grazed along the road.  Red roosters and hens roamed everywhere.  Twice I chanced upon groups of wild pigs.  Standing motionless I waited for them to recognize me with their squinty pig eyes that see motion but only vague forms at a distance.  When they noticed me they froze in their tracks and lifted their ears, then turned and ran.  In one group a huge old boar with a shaggy razor back and long tusks stood his ground while his brood took cover.  Galloping behind the sows were a line of baby piggies, the last one small and fuzzy-brown and running comically with fore- and hind-legs stretching to catch up.

The word taipi originally signified a man-eater.  The warriors of the Taipi valley were dreaded throughout the Marquesas.  They were a race of fighters who could not be beaten.  In battle it was more likely that you would be killed outright or captured and eaten.  The survivors of the Essex, from which Melville’s Moby Dick is based, knew that they could sail their whaleboat downwind to the Marquesas.  But in those days the islands were supposedly infested with cannibalism and rambant homosexuality.  The Essex crew wanted desperately to avoid the Marquesas, and instead of taking the natural trade wind route they struggled against the trades for a thousand miles, leaving half the crew on a barren rocky island, where they all perished, and the other half finally making it to Valparaiso several months later.

Rather than a horde of bloodthirsty cannibals, I was met repeatedly by friendly people in pickup trucks who wanted to know where I was going, and did I want a lift?  Three times from the back of these pickup trucks I spied the sultry Fayaway who returned my smile in her knowing way.  One young man introduced himself as Will Smith, the black movie star, and wanted to trade his pony for a ride on my sailboat.

Halfway up the mountain valley I caught my breath at the site of three magnificent water falls.  They plunged vertically down the rough volcanic cliffs in a splendid array of cascades.  I wondered how Melville or anyone could scale those cliff walls, for there was not even a path big enough for a goat.

Four miles up the valley my soft feet began to complain.  They reminded me that it was four miles back to Pamela, and eight miles trudging up and down the mountainside barefoot was something I would likely pay for tomorrow.  But up ahead was the mountain pass, and I simply had to climb to the summit to see what was on the other side.  I was not disappointed — the valley of Hatiehu, a favorite spot of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, lay beneath me in verdant green splendor.  The sun shown soothingly on the little town below, and in the distance I could make out the white caps on the blue Pacific.  In contrast lay the valley of Taipi behind me, brooding under thick clouds that formed at the mountain pass, rubbing out the sun, turning rain into the three great cascades.

I will soon sail singlehanded across that water yonder, I whispered, and round once again that cape that forms Hatiehu and the placid bay of Anaho.  I will soon be in that village below, golden in the sun, looking up at where I now stand, at the black knife-edged ridge that separates the dark Taipi valley from Anaho, the best of all anchorages in the Marquesas.  And there I will wait for Pam to return, while I write my story of Typee.

 

In Tahuata we will find a palm-fringed white sand beach with turquoise water so clear that you can see the bottom under your boat.  In Tahuata we will find trees laden with pamplemousse.  In Tahuata we will stop worrying about wifi and email, but sit and watch the sun light and shadows unfold on the surrounding hills and valleys, sighing as the sun dips below the clear horizon and cheering as the full moon peeks over the ridge top.  In Tahuata ….

It was time to see the rest of the Marquesas.  Leaving the ghost of Gauguin and the muddy anchorage of Atuona behind, we set sail for Tahuata.  What a glorious afternoon of sailing!  With a fresh wind and light following sea we brisked through the Bordellaise Channel between Hiva Oa and Tahuata on a single tack, leaving the dark mountains of Atuona behind in their solemn brooding and approaching the sun bedazzled white beaches along the northwest shore of Tahuata.

There is an unexpected excitement when leaving an anchorage.  As you prepare the boat for sailing again you are thinking about raising halyards and running jib sheets, about securing things inside the boat so that the coffee pot does not go airborne in a knockdown, and about removing snubbers and raising the anchor.  There is a slight apprehension as you imagine the ship heaving in breaking seas and rising winds.  If you’ve been in the anchorage for anything more than a week you wonder if you still remember how to sail.  But once you have that anchor raised and you’re cruising out to sea there is an exhilaration!  Freedom once more!  Goodbye to [mud, mosquitoes, cars — whatever it is you are escaping from] and hello to [fresh wind, sea rhythms, stars — what you are dreaming of].

We anchored in Hanamoenoa for a couple of days before moving along to Vaitahu.  While Hanamoenoa is an undeveloped beach and Vaitahu is the primary village on Tahuata, there were a dozen boats anchored in Hanamoenoa but only three or four in Vaitahu.  The two bays exemplify the contrasting aspirations of the modern sailor:  one bay with a wild palm-fringed shore and sandy beach offering a primitive isolation and seclusion, and the other bay presenting a convenient wharf for going ashore to find fresh baguettes and pamplemousse.

In Vaitahu we had a mission — to get tattooed.

Our friends from Ariel 4, who we had met in Mexico and who had come there from Sweden via the famous Northwest Passage, had been tattooed when they had visited Tahuata a few years previously.  Eric’s manly arm band around his left bicep showed the unusual motifs of the Marquesas, casting him as a savage when he removed his shirt and displacing his otherwise serious demeanor as a modern physician.  When I saw that I decided that I too would go to Tahuata to get tattooed.

In Vaitahu, many have come before me with a mission.  The Mendaña the Spaniard anchored here in 1595, “discovering” Fenua Enata (the true name for the Marquesas, the Land of Men) and naming the islands after his patron, Marquesas de Mendoza.  He named Vaitahu “the Bay of the Mother of God,”, then went ashore to celebrate mass.  Soon a fight broke out and Mendaña killed a couple hundred islanders before leaving to continue his search for terra australis incognita, the fictitious southern continent.  Captain Cook himself anchored here in 1774 during his second great Pacific expedition aboard the Resolution.  Pastor William Crook came in 1797 on a London Missionary Society ship to evangelize the people of Tahuata who were rather hostile about the idea.  The French Admiral Dupetit-Thouars arrived here in 1842 with the treaty in which France took possession of the Marquesas.

Stepping ashore on the concrete wharf and following a dirt road along the black rock beach we passed a few houses hidden in groves of banana and hibiscus.  Several huge mango and breadfruit trees drooped with ripe fruit.  Shaded under a noni tree at the edge of the beach a pink hairy pig grunted as we passed, while chickens ran squawking across the road in their ridiculous fashion with necks outstretched as if inviting one to prepare early for Sunday dinner.

We came to a small church on the edge of the village with a rusting tin roof and a simple unadorned steeple.  Some of its side boards had holes big enough to put your fist into.  Inside, its pews were rough-hewn and small.  On a grassy lawn in front of the church a collection of fishing piroques rested, each painted in bright primary colors.  As the afternoon sun splashed on the church and the piroques, I declared that I loved Vaitahu and would be happy to get tattooed in this magical place.

We discovered fresh baguettes at a tiny magasin in the village, with intermittent wifi just outside.  We were looking for a tattoo artist named Felix.  A young lady at the cash register knew him of course, for there are no more that 600 people on the entire island.  She indicated that he would be back in the morning.

“Environ le neuf heure?” I asked.

“Oui.  Dans le matin.”  That sounded pretty simple.  Come back to the village tomorrow morning and simply look around for Felix.  Since he’s the tattoo artist, he’s probably the one not wearing tattoos.

We explored the village in the ten minutes it took to do so and found a splendid modern church newly built on the village green, supposedly built from river stones that formed the ballast of ships visiting Tahuata in the past.  There were no locals at the new church, whereas the small wooden church at the edge of the village always had a small gathering of locals on the stoop.  The new church was built to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Catholic missionaries.  The Marquesans don’t seem particularly bitter about the missionaries who changed their culture and insisted that they wear clothing.  They seem to have forgiven the missionaries from chiselling off the carved penises on hundreds of tikis guarding the holy maraes up every valley.

Across from the village green and bordering the waterfront were a group of young men playing pitanque (like bocci ball but with heavier steel balls and a small white ball that served as the target, called a cochonet, or “little pig”), while the young women from the village played volleyball.  I declared that I loved Vaitahu even more and would be happier than ever to get tattooed here.

The next morning we tied up again at the wharf, this time with a small stern anchor to prevent the ocean swell from banging the dinghy against the wharf with each rise and fall.  We purchased our fresh baguettes for the day, then made our way over to the village green past a schoolhouse with a room full of singing children.  Outside on the lawn a small band of Marquesan toddlers played a game of leapfrog to the rhythmic meter of a stern schoolmarm, who seemed to believe that these fun-loving youngsters would stoop to wanton frolicking if not kept in check by her exhortations.  Past the new church we met two women sitting in the shade with a basket of flowers they had collected.  We exchanged Marquesan greetings of ka oha nui and me tai and they asked us if we were looking for pamplemousse.  We said yes, and tattoos as well.  One of the women called to a man in a small house up the hill and he came down in a truck to take us looking about for pamplemousse on the way to where Felix lived.

Up a steep road we climbed out of the little village.  Overlooking the bay we spied Pamela and Mintaka resting at anchor and pointing to windward in the blue waves far below.  We had no clear idea of where we were going, or for that matter who this man was, but we grinned at each other as the adventure unfolded.

We came to a shack high on the hill with several fruit trees in the yard.  The man, whose name was Kooki, showed us how to get the best pamplemousse.  I climbed high into one of his trees as he gestured to show me which of the grapefruit to get.   An enormous hog clambered up from a mud pit as we walked through Kooki’s garden.  Next he asked us to take some bananas from two huge clumps hanging under the eave of the shack.  He presented a morsel of delicious banane sechèe (dried banana) for us to sample, describing in French and Marquesan how to dry the banana in the tropical sun until it turned a sweet leathery brown.  He told us to leave the bananas and pamplemousse in the back of his pickup, walk down a ways to Felix’ house, and then Kooki would meet us later in the village.

Not quite sure we heard the directions correctly we walked back down the hill as the adventure unfolded.  Felix was in his truck and about to head back down the hill when we approached him saying, “Felix?  Tattoo?”

“Maintenant?” he asked.

“Oui, aujourdhui,” I answered.  He smiled warmly and I knew at once that he was the one to give me my Marquesan tattoo.

Into his truck we climbed and rolled back down the steep hill to the village and to a tiny unadorned white shack that was Felix’ tattoo studio.  He explained that there were two tattoo artists here, himself and his good friend.  Felix had few tattoos on his body, mostly on his legs, whereas the other tattooist was completely covered, courtesy of Felix.  In his simple studio we saw a poster showing the other man, his face, head, even his ears, all tattooed in an intricate display.

We also saw an unsigned plaque from the William Spaulding Manufacturing Company, Inc., certifying that this tattoo studio used only the finest and safest modern techniques.

“Il faut avoir confiance — have confidence in me,” Felix told me.  He motioned to a plastic chair and told me to sit.

I leafed through a collection of books on a bench.  They showed many varieties of Marquesas tattoos.  I found one that looked like Eric’s arm band.  “Comme ça,” I pointed.

“D’accord.  It will be like that.  Only different.”

I closed my eyes as Felix began drawing an outline.  I yielded to his pen.  He was a great artist and he would give me a great tattoo.  If not, I might have to wear a sweater permanently, like Mr. Rogers of children’s television fame, who wears his sweater to hide tattoos that indicate the number of enemies he has personally killed with his bare hands as a Navy Seal.  Or worse, graft some skin off my butt to cover the mistake, or perhaps lop off my arm to add to the piratical effect.

After some time Felix showed me his drawing and asked me what I thought.  I thought it would be hard to erase with an abrasive ink eraser.  “I love it.  What exactly is it?”

“Here is the whale,” he motioned.  I had seen several whales in Mexico at the start of our journey.  “And here — the manta ray.  And here another manta.”  In Hanamoenoa I had swum with a huge manta under Pamela’s keel.  “This is the Marquesan cross.”  Very cool.  Just what I was looking for, a primitive archetype from the early days.  “And here — this is the turtle.  Here the male and here the female.”

“How do I know which is the male and which is the female?”  A reasonable question, which is not at all obvious with turtles.

“Ici, regard,” he pointed.  Sure enough, the male turtle had a point that the missionaries did not know about, while the female had “c” shaped opening to receive the point.

Now came the hard part.  While I waited, Felix assembled his tattooing equipment.  A raw battery provided power to a tattoo gun that he switched on and off with a foot pedal.  He told me to lie down on a table, then adjusted his lamp, switched on the gun and went to work.

It felt like a swarm of killer bees who were pissed off because they couldn ‘t find any flowers.

Felix jabbed and poked with the needle gun and stopped briefly to blot up the excess ink and blood.  I tried to imagine a serene mountain scene but could only think of sitting in a dentist’s chair and measuring the torrent of sweat dripping from my palms.

The ordeal lasted an hour and a half as he made his way around my left bicep.  I tried not to think about the poster above me with the young man with tattoos in his ears.  I found consolation in the fact that Felix had done the tattooing on this guy, and in the promise of the William Spaulding Manufacturing Company, Inc.

Finally he was done.  The tattoo looked much better than the ink drawing.  Now that the buzzing of the needle had stopped, I felt manly and strangely … Marquesan.  I was ready to do the hakka dance, stick out my tongue, and find some missionaries to eat.

Now it was Pam’s turn.  She wanted a dolphin, not just any dolphin, but a special dolphin.  It was her totem.  It guided her through the difficult times.  She showed Felix a picture of one, but it should be turned this way, not that, and here should be some Marquesan architypes, and the face should be different.  Felix had his work cut out for him.

Felix drew the perfect dolphin behind Pam’s right shoulder and I took pictures so she could see it.  Watching the tattooing on Pam was worse than getting mine done, but I dutifully photographed the event for future generation.  She grimaced painfully for the hour and a half that it took to produce the perfect dolphin.

And what a dolphin!  Such intricate detail, including a small bug-eyed tiki in the tail section with his skinny arms folded across his pot belly.

Immediately after finishing with Pam, Felix retreated to the back room of his studio and fired up a joint.  Exhausting work!

The next day I set out to explore more of Vaitahu and the surrounding valleys and cliffs.  As I walked past Kooki’s place he shouted a greeting.  Further on up the steep mountain road a friendly young man walked with me for a spell, conversing in French and telling me that he was off to cut bananas after he fetched his machete.  I followed the road high above the ocean cliffs for several miles to the overlook of Hanamoenoa’s coconut-filled valley.  On the way back down I passed Felix, waving, carrying a load of kids from school.

I felt that I had achieved something special in Vaitahu.  Not just an armload of pamplemousse and a tattoo, but a relationship with some of the special people there.

I am proud of my Marquesan tattoo.  Which is a good thing, because it won’t come off.

 

It is the storm before the calm once more.  As we make preparations for the 3000-mile run from Mexico to French Polynesia we bear more resemblance to ants running amok than sun-tanned cruisers relaxing in paradise.

Pam flies back to California to visit old friends, check up on Little Bear, and pick up a few thousand dollars of boat parts.  The friends treat her like a hero returning home from the Trojan wars.  Little Bear licks her hand and wonders where the rest of his pack, me, Lindsay, Julian, have gone to.  The boat parts fill several duffle bags and weigh over a hundred pounds but provide me with the satisfaction of knowing that these aspects of the boat will never fail — because if you have a spare starter motor it is your bilge pump that fails, not your starter, and if you have a spare bilge pump it is your alternator that fails, and not because these are related in any way, but because Murphy’s Law states that the parts that will fail are the ones for which you carry no spares.

Abandoned onboard Pamela at the scorching marina in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle I am left for eleven days to my various vices.  I decide to get a ham radio license by memorizing the answers to 750 exam questions such as “What is the peak-inverse-voltage across the rectifiers in a full-wave bridge power supply?”  I don’t actually need a ham license to talk to other sailors in the South Pacific on my single-sideband radio, but being a ham will give Pam more assurance that I know what I’m doing when I pick up the radio.  Besides, if we run into a whale and I need to send a MAYDAY I can chat with other hams while the ship is going down.

MAYDAY, MAYDAY, this is KK6KMH sending a CQ for all ships.  We’re sinking.  And by the way, did you know that a mixer is the circuit used to process signals from the RF amplifier and local oscillator and send the result to the IF filter in a superheterodyne receiver?

I study like a madman for a solid week, day and night, refusing all offers to drink tequila and eat tacos with my friends on the dock.  I read the study guides for the Technician Class and General Class Licenses, the two levels required to become a full-fledged ham.  I run through the 750 questions five times.  I begin having dreams about capacitors and the ionosphere, my brain turns to soft oatmeal, and I stumble into the testing center at Nuevo Vallarta with red-blotched eyes and bad breath.  I score 100% and the Technician and 97% on the General.  Overkill.

Elated with my achievement and seeking balance I return to the boat and turn my attention to my next challenge.  Is it possible to drink all the Pacifico beer from the marina tienda before Pam gets back in town?

In between sips I change the oil in the diesel and replace the fuel filters.  I poke around in the aft quarter below decks to top up the transmission fluid and stare at the steering cables and autopilot.  I service the watermaker, changing its filters and “pickling” it to prevent nasty organic crap from piling up on the membrane while the boat is sitting in the marina for the next couple of weeks.  I pour all the diesel from the jugs up on deck into the fuel tank and refill the jugs with fresh diesel.  José on the dock agrees to take my old gasoline for free, and I fill the gas tank for the outboard with fresh gas and add a fuel stabilizer, some to the gas tank and some down my pant leg.  I attach a new swivel to my big forward anchor and attach new control lines to the Monitor self-steering windvane I’ve affectionately named Monte.  My calculations show that I can purchase two tall-boys of Pacifico each day and return the bottles for a grand total of $4.80 which would allow me to work on the boat and drink beer in perpetual motion in perpetuity.

I need a break from the boat preparation work so I get some cold beer and move into the air-conditioned cruiser’s lounge in the yacht club and start working on my income taxes.  After a couple of marathon sessions I manage to file my federal and state income taxes and drain several thousand dollars from my retirement fund to help pay for US military might and budgetary deficits.  A small portion of the money will go to roads, an even smaller portion to public libraries, with a couple bucks left to pay for public schools.  The tax form gives me a chance to donate a dollar to the president’s re-election fund, which works out to about half of what goes to the schools, so I politely decline.

Now it is time to attack the brightwork.  The varnish on Pamela’s teak has been peeling like an onion since we entered the tropics, and I’m going to put an end to this abomination.  Robyn on Mintaka tells me to leave all the teak alone and just let it go natural.  Carlann on Pacific Breeze tells me I’m working too hard and all the people in the marina are feeling lousy. But I won’t listen, and instead bring out the heat gun to begin stripping a decade of varnish from the rubbing strakes and cap rails.  The Mexican sun burns down on my head in harmony with my heat gun.

Everyone comes by to have a look.  You can’t apply even a stroke of varnish in a marina without attracting the attention of every advice giver within a nautical mile.  Many are helpful and some may offer you a handy tool.  And then there are small minority who insist on your following their advice to the point of belligerence.

Ian on Salish Sea is one of the helpful ones.  He offers me his scraping tools and a file to keep them sharp.  He shows me how to sharpen them with the file.  After a day of using them he comes by with an orbital sander.  The day after that he returns with a six-pack of Pacificos and we drink them slowly in the cockpit while I show him how to play blues riffs on guitar.

Pam calls to give me an ultimatum — there had better not be any varnish smells on the boat when she returns next week.  I am working from first light to dusk on the varnish, now on day four for this job, but it is not enough.  I need to get into seriously high gear.  I pick up a couple more tall-boys and apply varnish like never before.  Carlann continues to tease me about my slavish work ethic, but soon she is whistling and complimenting the new shine on Pamela’s brightwork.  I vow to have seven coats of fresh varnish on Pamela’s teak before Pam returns.  I am now up to six coats.  She returns in two days.  There is no stopping for a break.  Two more tall-boys of Pacifico, wet-sanding every surface before applying the next coat, I am a man possessed, an obsessive-compulsive bundle of firing synapses.  Like my insane studying for the ham license, this varnishing project reveals yet another example of trout-farm work ethic gone awry.  Perhaps more Pacificos can bring balance.

At last the job is finished.  Pamela’s clean decks are gleaming in the tropical sun.  I tell my friends on the dock that this fresh varnish will help us sail faster in the South Pacific trade winds, less friction and all that.  They stare back at me, too diplomatic to state what they are thinking, which is this:  You’re about to head off across the South Pacific.  Don’t you have more important things to do to get the boat ready rather than varnish the brightwork?

Soon Pam is back on board.  Her trip to California has been fabulous and she has eaten at all the best restaurants in the Bay Area.  The boat is spotless and the Pacifico bottles are all gone.  She dumps the boat parts onto Pamela’s uncluttered saloon floor and looks around.  “Looks good,” she says.  “Smells bad.  Have you been breathing all these toxins?”

The last week crawls by.  I am anxious to sail across the South Pacific, but there its still lots to do, stowing all the gear, more trips to the market for provisions, starting the process for clearing out of the country, cleaning Pamela’s bottom, informal seminars at the yacht club about fixing your rigging, avoiding onboard fires, and how to successfully jump into your life raft when the boat is sinking.  Larry, our crew for the Pacific Puddle Jump, arrives with his guitar.  He has lined up several gigs in town and we go see him play with various groups in La Cruz.  He lets me sit in on a few numbers and I belt out a handful of Van Morrison songs and find harmonies to blend with Larry’s voice and his virtuoso guitar playing.

I’m up the mast doing one last rigging inspection when the officials arrive to clear us out of the country.  Four men come onboard, including a customs official, two immigration officials, and a representative from the Port Captain’s office.  We leave the marina for a couple days in the anchorage getting our sea legs back.  Having gone to the top of the mast, I now take the opportunity to dive down to the ship’s keel.  I am satisfied to find the mast head and keel are right where they should be.

We have a bit of a misadventure the last day in La Cruz.  It is a Thursday, the day when fresh produce arrives at the tienda in town, and Pam has ordered lots of produce along with Robyn on Mintaka.  We need to pick up all this produce, including eight dozen very fragile eggs, but we are anchored out after officially clearing out of the country, not in the marina.  This is a bit of a logistical problem given that our dinghy and kayak are all stowed for the long journey ahead.  Mintaka has two dinghies, a rubber one stowed below and a hard dinghy on deck, so Mark from Mintaka and I form a plan:  Mark is to row the hard dinghy, a stout little ship, along with Pam and Robyn, over to the marina dock, then proceed into town to the tienda to get the multiple cases of fruits, vegetables, and eggs, and then I am to take Pamela to the fuel dock to pick up Pam, Mark, Robyn, and the load of produce.

The dinghy arrives at Pamela according to plan to pick up Pam, and Mark is heaving heavily on her oars through a boisterous chop raised by a stiff afternoon breeze.  The little boat is quite full with three passengers and bags for carrying the produce, and off they go through the rough water.  I give them sufficient time to pick up the produce, then raise Pamela’s anchor and drive her into the harbor and up to the fuel dock, which closes at 7:00 p.m., and now it is 6:45.  The gate to the fuel dock will close promptly at 7:00 so the operation has to go very smoothly or we will be cut off from getting all the produce on board.

But landing at the fuel dock to pick up passengers is not actually allowed, so I make as if to take on fuel.  My tanks, of course, are already chock full, but I’m able to take on three litres.  A nearby power boat is taking on 1000 litres.  The fuel dock girl smiles at me.  She is a doll, quite pretty in her short-shorts and make-up, not at all what you might expect at a Mexican fuel dock.  How the pangeros must stare!  She is not phased by my three litres, but her boss in the kiosk at the end of the pier is suspicious and calls over a fuel dock official.  He arrives with his assistant right behind Mark and Pam carrying bags of produce while Robyn settles the bill with the van driver who they hired to drive them the two blocks to the pier.  Caught red-handed we are subjected to his questioning, primarily “How many people are you?”, a question that seems odd to me until I realize that he is going to charge us a fee for each person.  The fee is 350 pesos, about $30 US.

Robyn, who is good in Spanish and loathe to spend 350 pesos unfairly, makes our case to the official.  The debate goes on for some time before the expressions on the faces of the two officials shows Robyn is winning her argument.  But the officials must save face, and soon we all arrive at a happy compromise.  There will be no fee for Pamela, but we must pay 40 pesos (a couple bucks) for tying the dinghy to the fuel dock pier.  I am delighted to leave Mexico for only 40 pesos, avoiding the customs, immigrations, and Port Captain officials who would not be happy to find us at the fuel dock after clearing out, because clearing out officially means leaving the country right then and there and not hanging out at anchor and fiddling about with produce and fuel.

 

With Pamela’s fuel tanks filled beyond the top and her cockpit strewn with several weeks of apples, tomatoes, potatoes, eggs, and more, I wave goodbye to the fuel dock girl who waves cheerfully back at me, while Mark pulls at his dinghy’s oars and offers to race me back to the anchorage.  The chop and breeze are gone and the evening is now tranquil, making it easy to divide up the produce and ferry Mintaka’s portion over to her.  We sit one last evening in La Cruz anchorage, watching the sun set and feasting on roast chicken and red wine with Mark and Robyn, who we hope to remain relatively close to all the way to the Marquesas.

And now the time has come that I have been looking forward to for more than thirty years.  It is time to raise Pamela’s anchor, trim her sails, and point her bow to the southwest.  At last we are bound for French Polynesia!  We check email one last time, count how many dollars are left in the bank account, and make one last website post to announce to the world that we are off and away.

Mintaka is resting at anchor a short distance away.  I raise Pamela’s anchor and while I am busy securing the anchor to the deck with extra lashes I notice that Mintaka has slipped her cables and is away.  She is ahead of us!  We raise our sails and begin to fly in the morning breeze but Mintaka maintains her lead.  I attempt to catch her as we glide past Las Tres Marietas islands but she is too fast with her jib, staysail, main, and mizzen.

And then — rotten luck — we hook a skipjack on the hand line and slow Pamela down a notch to reel in and then release the skipjack, for the crew is in no mood for a greasy-tasting jack just yet.  Ten minutes later — worse luck — we hook a big jack cravalle on the rod and reel and slow Pamela even more.  I have been warned that the jack cravalle is a disgusting fish to eat, so we attempt to release him.  But he is hooked too well.  While the skipjack was only lightly hooked and swam away with much vigor when I released him, the big jack cravalle is badly hooked and is laying upon his side like a heavy sea anchor.  It takes twenty minutes to reel him in, and by then he is all done in.  I  work quickly to free him from the hook but he is caught by his gills.  He is bleeding and his gills are nearly ripped out before I have him off the hook.  I feel truly bad about releasing him half-dead.  I am reminded of a botched goat-killing when I was fourteen on the trout farm, when my .22 rifle bullet went astray.  It is a grim memory and haunts me throughout the morning,

As the red sun sets off of Pamela’s bow the full yellow moon rises synchronously off her stern.  It is a good omen for our long trip.  The moon illuminates the horizon all around and its silver trail on the wave tops eventually moves around to the west as the night wears on, giving me a path to steer by.  At midnight a pod of porpoises joins our bow wave.  I hear their gasps of air and watch them play for a while in our bow wake.  Happy dolphins.  A good omen indeed.

On day two the wind freshens and the waves become steep.  The decks are awash and salt spray is everywhere.  On watch in the cockpit, we wear our foul-weather gear, jacket and pants, and wait with clenched teeth between cold splashes of salt water.  Pamela is rolling deeply in the troughs while the contents of her lockers go banging through the night.  I wait in grim anticipation for two dozen cans of turkey meat to crack through Pamela’s hull and six-packs of San Pellegrino mineral water to shatter in the cockpit lazarette.  But the cargo holds.  As bad as it sounds, the ship is solid and does not hole nor capsize in the confused seas.  Meanwhile, Pamela runs at seven knots directly to her first waypoint, latitude 6 degrees north and longitude 130 degrees west, 1700 miles away at the beginning of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (i.e., the doldrums near the equator).

On day three we are becalmed.  The boiling seas have marched off to the southwest and we are left with a warm, calm, sunny day.  We open the hatches and enjoy the fresh air coming through the cabin.  We sit on deck in our swim trunks while our foul-weather clothing dries.  I am mesmerized by the clear blue water under our stern, calm as a swimming pool, stabbed by yellow shafts of sunlight penetrating down hundreds of feet below the smooth surface.  To celebrate the fine weather Pam makes fried chicken and garlic mashed potatoes for dinner.  I am awakened at 0200 by Larry scraping the pot for another spoonful of mashed potatoes, and Pam is awakened two hours later by me doing the same.

Pamela’s systems are all working well, the solar panels, the wind generator, the SSB radio, and the watermaker.  But the watermaker takes lots of amperage from the battery so we have to run the engine every day to make a few gallons of fresh water.  Running the engine means burning up precious diesel since the solar panels and wind generator do not produce enough electricity to keep up with the watermaker and the refrigerator.  I try to keep all these variables in my head but its a complex formula.  I’m nervous about having enough diesel, especially since our cruising guide says that occasionally there are shortages of fuel in the Marquesas.

Pam wants me to fill more water jugs for emergency purposes.  We have 100 gallons in our tanks, five gallons in an emergency jug on deck, and five or six gallons in jugs down below.  Plus a couple quarts in our ditch bag and a can or two in our life raft survival kit. I remember reading various accounts of shipwreck victims in life rafts who have to drink their own urine to survive.  Why do all life raft stories begin like that?  I don’t want to drink my own urine, nor anyone else’s urine for that matter.  So I dutifully fill more empty jugs.

On day four on midnight watch I am startled by a loud gasp from the water a couple of yards from where I sit in the cockpit.  The sound of breathing is eerily human in the dark night.  A large pod of porpoises, a dozen or more, are arcing through the waves.  I see their dark fins come to the surface, while their tails make bursts of phosphorescence.  They glide with grace.  I imagine that I am speaking telepathically to them.  I imagine that they have come from far away just to say hello to me in the dead of night.

On day five it is Pam’s birthday.  Alas, I have no gift other than my presence, our floating home, and a love letter I write to her at midnight.  We set the hand line at dawn, and by midmorning there is a fish on the line.  Another jack?  Hopefully not!  It turns out to be a beautiful fifteen-pound yellow-fin tuna.  We land it easily on Pamela’s coaming and watch the sensational rainbow-colored skin while the poor fish completes its death throes.  Pam sends the fish positive vibes of gratitude.  The cockpit is soon covered in soaking blood, fish parts, and red filets.  By lunchtime the cockpit is clean and we are eating chilled sashimi with wasabi and pickled ginger.  We will feast on this tuna for several days, enjoying seared ahi and fried eggs for breakfast, sushi for two or three lunches, and teriyaki tuna for three dinners.  It is a wonderful birthday present.

On day six we get the spinnaker flying.  The wind is perfect, about ten knots, the sea is mostly flat, and Pamela glides over the waves at six knots, the definition of glorious sailing.

Then the lazy sheet wraps itself around the bow light and pitches it through the air.  A moment later I am staring at it in Pamela’s wake, still floating.  We snatch down the spinnaker, sheet in the main, and turn into the wind across our back trail to try and find the bow light.  A man-overboard setting on the chart plotter shows about where the bow light made its plunge, with an icon on the screen in the shape of a person flailing in the water with his arms in the air.  But with three pairs of eyes we are unable to find the bow light, which probably sank or floated off to join a million other bits of flotsam in the Great Pacific Gyre.  I am seriously bummed.  It’s not the first time my bow light has gone flying — I smashed it into a pier at Catalina, then ripped it off with a spinnaker sheet off the Baja California coast — and I’m running out of wire to attach it back to the boat.

But who needs a bow light 700 miles out to sea?  There is no one here to see it.  That evening, without the bow and stern lights burning bright, I find a boiling trail of phosphorescence off Pamela’s stern.  I try to imagine how Pamela must appear to porpoises swimming far below her in the crystal-clear blue water with the shimmering strands of bioluminescence streaming along her bows, weather strake, and rudder.  Like a comet!  I lay for hours on Pamela’s port rail staring at the glowing streaks as waves are pushed by her bows, then turn over onto my back to watch the stars high above her mast.  The moon tonight is waning, rising three hours after the setting sun, and with long cumulonimbus clouds covering half the sky the night appears black.  When the moon finally rises above the clouds it shines with an intensity that causes the stars to fade.  Once again its silver trail illuminates the wave tops and beckons me to follow.  In my watch from 0400 to 0600 I steer Pamela directly into the well-lit moonbeam highway.

Day seven is a blustery day.  The sky is overcast, the wind is strong from the north-east, and the seas are rough.  We bounce along and are thrown about the cabin as we putter about on various chores and contemplate how to reduce our energy consumption.  We are running the engine for an hour each day to keep up with the refrigerator and navigation equipment.  Soon we will shut down the refrigerator for a few hours each day as we use up our frozen meat, and hopefully we will not need to run the engine so much.  Our cruising guides tell us that the diesel supply is unpredictable in the Marquesas since it has to be carried in by the monthly supply ship Ara Nui and the locals get first rights to it.  We may need to make our fuel last all the way to Tahiti, some 1500 miles beyond the Marquesas.  So we need to run the engine sparingly, keeping our batteries topped up with the solar panels and wind generator and casting our fate to the vagaries of wind and cloud cover.

On day eight the decks are awash in flying fish.  They range in size between a plump ten inches and a scant single inch.  I find over a dozen on the weather side as I take my morning stroll around the deck.  The crew refuses an offer of fried eggs and flying fish for breakfast.  I am reading Sailing Alone Around The World on my night watch, and I relate how Captain Joshua Slocum finds flying fish on Spray’s decks each morning and prepares them for his breakfast.  In 1896 Captain Slocum is the first man ever to sail around the world alone in a small boat.  Soon we will be following his path through the islands of the South Pacific.  His boat, the Spray, is exactly the length of Pamela, 36 feet 9 inches from stem to stern.  Reading this book 30 years ago I was captivated by Slocum’s adventures and decided I would one day follow in his wake.

But I can’t quite bring myself to fry up these bloated flying fish, stiff from rigor mortis and baking in the scuppers.  Pam tempts me with cold fresh yogurt and sweet pears instead.

On day nine I awaken in a foul mood.  The day is grey and the clouds are low.  The ocean has been a washing machine since midnight and the seas can not decide whether they are northerly or easterly.  A big swell from the north hits Pamela hard on the side while Pam, Larry, and I are finishing breakfast in the cockpit.  Cold salt water spills down our shirts and onto the cockpit seats to soak our pants.

After the big wave Pam finds a “ring-ding” on the cockpit floor.  The job of this particular ring-ding is to hold a cotter pin in place, and the job of the cotter pin, in turn, is to hold some vital part of the rig from falling down.  I pick up the prodigal ring-ding and examine it closely.  It is a big one.  It is there — rather, was there — to hold something particularly important.  Now it is no longer holding.  I need to find out where, and right away.

I begin a systematic sector search of the mast and boom, then the various blocks holding halyards, sheets, vangs, and traveller.  Everything that needs a ring-ding seems to have one securely in place.  And none of the existing ring-dings are anywhere close to the size of this mystery ring-ding.  From where did it come?

Back on the dock in San Francisco I would occasionally find a nut or washer on deck.  After an extensive search and no findings I would decide that it came from another sail boat in the marina.  Sure — a curious gull found it on Johnny M’s boat, scooped it up as a kind of scavenger hunt prize, then dropped it onto Pamela’s foredeck as a mischievous prank.  I would not rule out the possibility of Johnny M himself putting a loose washer in Pamela’s scupper.  That might explain his perpetual Cheshire Cat grin.

But out here on the high seas I am unable to blame the lone ring-ding on another boat.  We did see a fishing boat at daybreak, and it is certainly possible that the roving ring-ding could have been carried by a porpoise pod from the fishing boat to Pamela.  And I wouldn’t rule out entirely the extraordinarily tiny possibility that Johnny M himself is behind this ring-ding business.  But even here on the wide ocean where the fertile mind tends to invent apparitions and hallucinations, I can not convince myself that a sea-faring ring-ding flew over from a passing ship or a puckish Johnny M.

And then I remember Monte the windvane.  Of course!  Monte steers the boat night and day with precision and trustworthiness you would never find in human form.  A missing ring-ding from a shieve, spindle, or pulley in Monte’s complex array of mechanical parts would be the undoing of us all, for steering the boat is something we do only for a few minutes as sport rather than necessity around the clock.  I am horrified to find a ring-ding on the windvane exactly the size of the wayward ring-ding.  But my frantic inspection shows that all of Monte’s parts, ring-dings included, are in place and functioning with reliability.

My search is exhausted and there is not a scrap of evidence.  I place the ring-ding on the chart table and try to forget it.  But as I move around the cabin the evil ring-ding stares at me like sinister eyes in a portrait of a brooding great-grand-uncle hanging in a dank basement.  At last I hide the ring-ding under the log book.

It whispers to me in the midnight witching hour:  “Find my pin.  Find my shackle.  The mast is tottering ….”

I need help.  I decide to call in the big guns.  I put it out there for the universe.  There is lot of universe out here indeed.  I get my angels working on it.  I meditate on the ring-ding and ask the spirits to point me to where it came from.

And then, like a spotlight on the sails in the midnight dog-watch the answer is clear and the mystery is solved.  The lower lifeline I found hanging loose a few days ago and repaired with a spare nut and bolt!  Suddenly I am transformed into Inspector Columbo unwinding the mystery:  the lifeline ring-ding somehow unravelled in the rocking and vibration of the boat, its pin was washed over the side while the ring-ding lay in the scupper; the rogue wave washed the ring-ding out of the scupper, over the coaming, and onto the cockpit sole where Pam discovered it.

So the mast is not tottering after all, nor is Monte on the brink of failure.  And with this blazing, and admittedly obvious, revelation I sink into my bunk and begin to snore.

On day ten I ponder.  Foremost on my mind is the filthy state of my body and habitat.  A boat at sea is a somewhat grubby environment, with salt-encrusted cockpit, a plethora of dead flying fish and squid on the side decks, and a galley that reveals just how far that can of tomato sauce was tossed when a breaking wave slapped hard against the starboard beam while Pam was preparing spaghetti sauce.  I ponder the flaking of my salt-saturated scalp and the hole on my crown that is developing from a case of chronic bed-head.  I ponder my navel, now full of tiny bits of blue tarp trapped within it.  (That ancient blue tarp that we discovered in a forgotten lazarette which disintegrated within minutes of putting it to use.)  I am captivated by the myriad oils that my body produces in all of its parts both public and private.  I am appalled at the distinct possibility of an outbreak of swamp-ass, or worse, Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone ball rot.

A fresh water shower in the cockpit, with copious hot water heated by the diesel engine, washes away all of these horrible ailments in minutes and leave me feeling fresh with an awakened vitality.  And then the cycle repeats and the pondering continues.

Mostly I ponder on the enormous effort that we as a culture exert each day to keep ourselves from devolving into this state of disgrace I find myself in on the down-cycle.  Essentially, all of our effort to do well in school, go to a good college, get a well-paying job, and show up to work every day for 40 years is for a single purpose:  to prevent our falling into this natural state of filthiness.  We need to shower daily.  So we need a home with a mortgage and plenty of hot water, and we need to purchase various soaps, powders, shampoos, and deodorants, and we need a car to get us to the local mega-supermarket.  We need to keep the home and the car clean as well, for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy, conspires to cover them gradually in the grime that we hope will never reach our bodies.  Finally, we need to spend hours scrubbing it all — mornings and evenings in the bathroom scrubbing, shaving, and flossing ourselves, Saturdays spent wiping down and disinfecting the bathroom, and Sundays spent washing the car.  There is just barely enough time before and after work each day to do it all.  When do we have time to write a poem, learn French, or play guitar?  We trade self-cleanliness for self-actualization.

Not so on a boat at sea.  I wear the same pants every day, and when I’m smelling like a flying fish I point the cockpit shower nozzle at each of the directions of my body-compass and blast away, first with my pants on and then with them off.  After a few blasts my pants and I are clean, Godly, and vital.

It is only a matter of a minute or two before a wave crests over the spray skirt and covers me with salt, or a flying squid lands in my lap and squirts his ink on my clean pants.  Alas, the sea and its creatures are conspiring and colluding to make me an integral part of their world.  Why fight it?  If I can learn to accept this all as an essential part of the journey, I might find peace in the simple harmony of the wind and sea.

On day eleven we find ourselves on the same tack for the past 48 hours.  We haven’t touched a sail for over two days.  Pamela is careening along over bumpy seas with 18-22 knots of fresh north east wind.  Long, low cumulonimbus clouds threaten to rain, which we long for.  And then finally the shower comes — a glorious torrent of fresh water carrying away the salt from our bodies, sails, and decks!  I peel off my soggy gym shorts and scamper nude across the foredeck, feeling the warm rain against my salty skin.  I am amused by the contrast between deep tan and Puritan pale, and celebrate the moment by singing gospel songs at the top of my voice as the squall blows sideways sheets of rain into my face.

We are almost at the halfway point, nearly 1400 miles from Mexico and 350 miles from the doldrums, or Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).  I have been studying the weather charts for the past six weeks to see how the trade winds converge around the equator in these seas.  My strategy is to aim the boat at six degrees north latitude and 130 degrees west longitude to reach the point where the north east trades meet the south east trades, with almost no dead air between them.  But now the weather charts tell me that this area will become a large zone of disturbed air flow in 72 hours.  Winds are forecast at four knots, a far cry from the 20 knots that are currently rocking and rolling us ever south.  If this forecast comes true we may sit for days in light air and rolling seas with our sails slatting and tempers souring.  We may be forced to fire up the engine to motor 150 miles or so through this awful zone.  For now, we point our bow to our imaginary waypoint at the ITCZ and cross our fingers.

On day twelve we are soaking in streams of rain.  The squalls hit us hour by hour and wash away all the salt and grime.

I stumble into the cockpit at 0600 and realize I am on a careening train with its wheels just barely holding onto the tracks.  It rocks wildly from side to side down a steep mountainside.  The sparks fly in a dazzling array where its wheels find friction on the slippery rails, becoming bioluminescence as the tracks gradually turn into the sea and the train is Pamela.  I am groggy from a deep sleep and a weird dream.  For the first time in thirteen days I don’t know where I am when I awaken in the dark cabin.  There is no moon and few stars.  Pamela speeds into the black night as I write these words.

The sun does not rise.  The sky becomes a kaleidoscope of grays, light gray in the east and dark gray where the storm clouds hover.  My spirits brighten considerably when Pam pulls a hot brioche from the oven and we attack it with great globs of butter.  She has been kneading the dough and patiently letting it rise on the swinging gimballed stove, all day long rising and swaying as tall waves toss us about.  The fresh baked bread is delicious, soft and fluffy, not at all like the hard-tack I practiced making all summer in preparation for this voyage.  Tomorrow we’ll have toasted brioche and fried plantains for breakfast — yum!

The wind begins to fizzle so we set the whisker pole to hold out the jib to keep it from slatting.  In the hour before dawn the wind is on the rise again and I go forward to take down the pole.  I haven’t done this alone before, and certainly not in the dark.  But all goes well and I have the pole safely stowed as the wind freshens.  I am safely back in the cockpit now and the wind is starting to blow hard.  I look between the shrouds and see the Southern Cross low on the horizon.  Its four stars twinkle, then one by one they slowly disappear, snuffed out by a low lying cloud.

On day thirteen we are soaking in rivers of rain.  My foul weather gear is soaked through.  I go up on deck dry and naked, then layer by layer put on my water-logged gym shorts, dripping shirt, soaked rain pants and jacket.

As I study the weather charts I feel like a seamstress threading my way through highs and lows.  Yesterday’s chart looked dismal, forecasting that in 72 hours Pamela would drift in the middle of a 200-mile-wide high pressure zone with little or no wind.  Today I see a different pattern developing, projecting that we will enjoy fifteen knot winds as we enter the convergence zone

Pam creates the most wonderful scones conceived by the imagination of poets, crusty and hot and filled with currants.  They are overwhelmingly delightful as we munch on them in the rainy cockpit.

Deep in the doldrums and ahead of us by 100 miles, Mintaka motors for twelve hours looking for wind.  We have no shortage of wind so far, with frequent squalls through the day and night.

On day fourteen we are soaking in oceans of rain.  I capture some of it on video as Pamela, with sun on her decks, approaches a sky so purple-black that it quails the heart.  I pass the time doing sit-ups, push-ups, and down-dog Yoga postures on the foredeck, oblivious to the spray and rain.  The day is brightened considerably as Pam pulls a hot Tuscan loaf out of the oven, her third bread of the voyage.  It is soft and moist and reminiscent of Perugia and San Geminiono.  Simply marvelous!

Still 100 miles ahead of us, Mintaka is motoring with a adverse current that limits her progress to two knots.  Our wind turns from east to southwest, directly from the direction from Hiva Oa, and forces us westward for a time.  Ah, the doldrums.

Day fifteen is a good day for washing and drying.  The rain squalls have ceased for a time and there are beautiful cumulous clouds on the horizon hinting at a spell of fair weather.  I remove all the sheets, towels, foul weather gear, and damp rags from the saloon and hang them around the boat.  Monte complains when the bed sheets hanging from the clothesline spoil the airflow to the windvane and Pamela begins to sail in circles.  Then come the chart books that have been lying in a damp place on the floor, and next come my various spiral-bound notebooks that have taken in the damp from the humid equator.  Soon Pamela is festooned in waving flags of laundry.  She sails on proudly in seven knots of breeze, keeping her sails full and drawing and making three knots through the gentle equatorial waters.

We may need to turn on the engine soon.  Mintaka, now well over 120 miles southeast of us, has motored over 24 hours through the ITCZ so far, but Pamela is still finding enough breeze to keep her moving along.

On day sixteen I am visited by a dolphin pod during my midnight watch.  Pamela is sailing finely and churning up long tendrils of phosphorescence, which the dolphins see and hear from a great distance.  They streak through the black water like torpedoes making their own trails of phosphorescence.  They play for a few minutes and then disappear into the starlit night.

On day seventeen we are becalmed.  We talk of crossing the equator soon.  A sliver of moon appears as the sun sets.  On days eighteen and nineteen we are becalmed for a while, then set upon by gusty little gales as dark clouds pass overhead and dump rain down on our salty decks.  On day twenty the winds have finally blown themselves out and can no longer drive the sails.  The sky is cloudy with frequent rain that brings no wind.  The sails are slatting.  Unable to hold any wind they fill briefly and then collapse.  They crack loudly as they swing back and forth and test the strength of the standing rigging and our nerves.  We take this punishment for a while, then drop the sails and motor for twelve hours, then repeat the process, slatting then motoring.  We talk of one day crossing the equator.  Ah, the doldrums.

Pam once again brings hope to the crew by baking fresh bread — this time a light loaf with spiced pumpkin seeds and Mexican habiñero peppers!

On day twenty-one we have been at sea for three weeks.  But today there is a new exuberance —  we are preparing to cross the equator at last!  This is not an easy thing to plan for.  You have to do it just right or there could be consequences.  Typically there is someone on the boat who has crossed previously — a “shellback”.  Those on board who have not crossed previously are “pollywogs.”  The shellback dresses up like King Neptune and performs an initiation ceremony to turn the fresh pollywogs into seasoned shellbacks.  But in our case, everyone on board is a pollywog, so we have to improvise without a Neptune.  Pam dresses up in her Greek Goddess outfit, a gorgeous white gown exposing a sexy calf and ankle.  Larry is stripped to his waist and sports a red velvet fez with a gold and silk tassel, complemented by a Saint Patrick’s Day necklace and a kitchen whisk.  I go simple.  Naked (again?  really?) with a green fig leaf made of watercolor paper and a half a watermelon on my head.

While we’re discussing how we will all pose together on the bow for a photo we are beset by a hoard of wild dolphins.  Like kids running out of doors and alleys to chase the ice cream man, we see dolphins coming from near and far.  One dolphin leaps high into the air and performs a back flip, then flips again a moment later.  There are thirty dolphins now swimming in uniform along our port and starboard bow. They arc upward from the waves, draw a breath, and curve gracefully back below the surface of the water in synchronous twos, threes, and fours.

We photograph our chart plotter at precisely the moment that Pamela crosses the equator at 00 degrees, 00.0 minutes.  As the sun sets we snap our photo on the bow and I marvel that my paper fig leaf has not yet blown away.   We make a toast to Neptune and pour a tot into the sea.

On day twenty-two we are motoring at dawn.  We have been motoring all night.  With all the noise, vibrations, and diesel fumes I’m ready to climb the mast and leap off.  It’s pissing rain and I’m soaked as I stand at the wheel and hope for a squall to give us some wind.  I feel a bit of wind on my cheek and roll out the jib.  It holds!  Encouraged, I release the mainsail ties and the bound halyard and prepare to raise the main.  The wind picks up appreciably in the minutes it takes me to do this, and I’m thinking maybe I should have hoisted the sails when the wind was a bit lighter.  Then, as I’m raising the mainsail, there is a blast from the east and Pamela is thrown down onto her beam ends.  The jib I have unfurled is about to shred itself and the boom is swinging like a disoriented pole vaulter.  The mainsheet, reefing lines, and halyard are a tangled rats nest.  I struggle to get in the reefs and trim the sails.  Larry and Pam tumble up on deck and shout, “Do you need help?”  “Oh no, I’m doing fine.”  They are not convinced.  We work together to get the boat back under control.  I check the wind instruments and see that we have a new ship record, 31 knots of wind.

I make a note to myself to (1) always set up the lines before unleashing the sails and (2) always inform the crew before hoisting, dousing, and tacking the sails.

Larry is shivering in his underwear and lashed with cold sideways rain from the squall.  He looks sideways at me and wonders if I’m sane.

“Happy birthday, Larry!”

Pam makes a peach-upside-down cake for Larry’s birthday.  We have only 550 miles to go before Hiva Oa, and it seems likely we will get there without murdering anyone on board.

My coffee is hot and sweet and dribbles down my shirt.  It is day twenty-three and it is going to be a beautiful day at sea.  The sun is an orange-red ball peeking above the horizon.  It brings out a lustrous midnight-blue in the rolling waves and inflames the clouds in the east.  With the newly formed light I can now see how big the rollers are.  In the dark they seemed like monstrous wrecking balls, while in the early morning light they appear friendly.

The wind is up, the sails are full, and Pamela is full of sounds that indicate that she is sailing fast.  The steering wheel creaks with each turn to the left.  Monte the windvane whistles like a bird with each swing to the right.  Halyards on the weather side clank against the mast.  The American flag snaps against the backstay and makes the SSB antenna wire tremble.  Every minute of so the sea delivers a wave that runs counter to the regular swell and hits Pamela’s port side with a crash, and a bit of spray flies over the skirt and into the cockpit.  If you are trying to sleep in the port side bunk with your head against the hull it sounds like a mini cannon ball when the wave hits.  You hear the hard slap, then wait a moment for Pamela to go down low on her starboard side.  Canned goods in the lockers go bang and the metal water bottle that someone left in the galley sink goes clank.

Up in the cockpit the rocking is gentle and soothing.  Not so down below.  When you need to go forward, say, to the head (the ship’s toilet), you have to make quick dextrous grabs at the various hand holds while the boat lurches in the dark.  Standing at the sink you wedge yourself in with thighs and buttocks and lean hard against the low side of the boat to keep from slamming your back against the teak door.  A few nights ago in pitch blackness I reached down to open the valve to flush the toilet and my hand felt wetness.  It was not the valve, it was the inside of the toilet bowl.  No, I hadn’t flushed it yet.  Yes, it was full.  I calmly pulled my soiled hand out of the toilet and washed it in the sink, quite bemused by my attitude.  No big deal.  I simply accepted this minor misfortune and carried on.  On land I would have had a kannipshit fit.

When the sea is rough the erratic jostling makes you stagger like a drunk around the saloon.  You have to constantly watch out for “boat bites”.  Early in the voyage my head went hard against the edge of the saloon table.  The bump lasted over a week.  That same table caught me in the groin a day later.  Now I pay close attention to the table.  I might not know where my gloves and hat are, but I always know where this table is.

While Pamela looks tidy and ship-shape in a marina, out here she is a disheveled mess.  Coffee and hot chocolate stains adorn the cockpit.  The decks are covered with smelly dried flying fish.  Under the spinnaker bag near the bow I find one half-rotten.  A nice piece of steak lies behind the galley stove.  (I retrieve it, wash it off, then cook and devour it — tasty!)  Plantains in the bottom of the refrigerator are black and oozing.  The forepeak looks like a garage sale with gear and clothing strewn about, wet cushions festering, and potatoes sprouting.  Sleeping in the starboard bunk under a net of hanging vegetables I feel the drip-drop of a putrefying onion.  Meanwhile, back up on deck the water in my glass becomes brackish with salt spray.

But all of this we accept without complaint.  It is actually a nice change not worrying about it.  In Hiva Oa we will find a spring and wash everything out.

In Hiva Oa we will have fresh pamplemousse (sweet grapefruit).  In Hiva Oa we will have baguettes and pain au chocolat.  In Hiva Oa ….

It is day twenty-four and I am huddled in the cockpit with my wet raincoat thinking about altruism.  I finish a Kurt Vonnegut novel about an altruistic heir to a fortune who gives money to the less fortunate and listens patiently as they describe their painful lives, like a kind of modern-day check-writing Jesus.  He is accused of being a lunatic.  I read SuperFreakonomics, which describes psychology experiments in the 1960’s indicating that people tend to be altruistic without seeking any reward, yet recent experiments more carefully controlled indicate quite the opposite.  I am reading an account of the first solo ‘round-the-world sailing race in 1968 by Bernard Moitessier.  The winner of that race, Robin Knox-Johnston,  performed an extremely kind act of altruism by giving away his winnings to the widow of Donald Crowhurst.

Since that time there have been several such races, the Whitbread, the Vendée Globe.  Today these sailors compete in super high-tech machines made of carbon fiber.  But in 1968 many of of the competitors built their own boats. Some, like Moitessier’s Joshua and Knox-Johnston’s Suhaili, are exceptionally strong and heavy with traditionally long keels, able to withstand the savage pounding of waves along the 40th parallel south which circle the globe non-stop without interruption from any continent.  Other’s, like Crowhurst’s, are trimarans made of plywood.  In 1968, no one has ever crossed an ocean in a trimaran.

But Crowhurst’s plywood trimaran, Teignmouth Electron, is super high-tech.  The other competitors have already left Plymouth, England, and the leaders are well out into the Atlantic and past the equator, yet Crowhurst is still tinkering with his boat’s myriad electrical systems.  He confidently assures his sponsors that he will make up the time easily due to his boat’s superior technology.  The competitors can leave Plymouth whenever they want up to a certain date, for the fastest time wins the race, not the first at the finish line.  Crowhurst’s boat is not quite up to snuff, and he casts off at the latest possible moment.  Moitessier is rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the southern end of Africa and Knox-Johnston is plugging away not far behind.  In the English Channel Teignmouth Electron is already beginning to fail.

Crowhurst does not have much sailing experience, but as a technical entrepreneur he is competent and confident.  He has sacrificed much to get this far, having sold his business and mortgaged his home.  He is in debt after spending a fortune on Teignmouth Electron, and he has got to win this race.  His wife and two children wait anxiously at home in England for his upbeat ship-to-shore radio updates, while alone on the Atlantic in his creaking leaking boat he gnaws his fingernails.  He knows his boat is not going to survive the Southern Ocean.

Crowhurst is caught in a vise.  To continue is suicide, to go back is financial ruin and shame.  He hatches a brilliant plan:  he will proceed to the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil and simply wait for reports of the lead boats rounding Cape Horn.  He will turn back to England ahead of them and simply arrive first.  To convince the race committee he will give false reports of positions off Good Hope, the Indian Ocean, Cape Leeuwin, the South Pacific, and Cape Horn.

The plan actually works for a time.  The race committee is amazed at his progress.  Teignmouth Electron is truly an amazing boat and Crowhurst is a master sailor as well as a technical whiz.  But Francis Chichester is skeptical.  His ‘round-the-world voyage on Gypsy Moth two years prior was the inspiration for this race.  Chichester actually knows the route and what the sailors will encounter.   Crowhurst can’t possibly be that far along he tells the committee.

While he lingers in the South Atlantic, essentially going in circles off the coast of Brazil for several months, Crowhurst keeps two logs.  One contains the false position reports, the other his true thoughts.  He knows his deceitful plan will not work.  He will be found out.  Not only will he lose the race, he will lose all honor and respect.  His wife and children will lose their home.  His journal is filled with the wanderings of his agitated mind as he bobs on the ocean for months, with nowhere to go and going nowhere.

Teignmouth Electron sails dutifully on, creaking and leaking.  Perhaps she is not strong enough for a circumnavigation around the five capes of the Southern Ocean.  But she is still afloat several months later when a ship finds her wandering in mid-ocean without her skipper.  The log books are still intact.  Soon the world finds out about the false reports and the deceit.  The true journal comes to a tortured end.  Its last entry is surreal, resolute, and trails off in an unfinished sentence.

On day twenty-five I contemplate kindness.  It is one of the words I recite each morning when I rise.  But out here I rise at 0400, 0600, 0800, depending on my watch, and with my eyes full of sleep I forget about being kind.  I say something mean to Pam although I don’t intend to be mean.  She is hurt by my words and she does not know how we will make it all the way across the Pacific like this.

Bernard Moitessier’s book leaves me with mixed feelings.  I want to be like him, self-sufficient on the ocean, competent.  He handles all of Joshua’s sails by himself through gales and calms without the modern conveniences of rolling furlers and self-tailing winches.  He shoots a noonsite with his sextant to determine where he is.  He climbs his mast every week to lubricate his wire halyards, and says nothing of the wild gyrating motion fifty feet above his deck.

I climb the companionway steps at 0400 to sit in the cockpit groggy with sleep.  Compared with the muted sounds from my bunk, up here the wind seems to be screaming and the waves pounding.  I don’t quite know where I am for a minute or two.  Can I stand?  I attempt to stand and I’m thrown against the dodger.  Can I make it back to the steering seat?  I attempt to climb around the wheel and I’m thrown against the binnacle.  Could I grope my way securely to the bow?  Forget it.  Could Moitessier do it?  Of course, again and again, whistling a French tune.

Moitessier is more than a top-notch singlehanded sailor.  He writes beautifully, describing living pearls of phosphorescence along the leach of his jib.  During a prolonged calm in the Indian Ocean he trains a wild sea bird to eat from the palm of his hand.  He practices yoga and sends messages to freighters using a sling shot.  His film canisters containing messages to his family and the race committee land with precision on the bridge of the passing ship.

Moitessier loves his time at sea.  He maintains a blissful harmony with the elements as Joshua, which he built with his own hands, cruises effortlessly through the turbulence.  He watches out for icebergs as he rounds Cape Horn, where he begins to imagine that he may possibly not sail back to Plymouth.  Perhaps he will continue going straight, right past Good Hope again, through the Indian Ocean again, past New Zealand again, and then steer left for Tahiti.  One and half times around the world non-stop solo.

Moitessier will certainly win the race.  He will be more than a hero back in France.  The French are passionate, even rabid, about open ocean sailing, and Moitessier will be honored for time immemorial.  Is that what I really want, he asks.  To return to society, living within the constraints of landsmen in accelerated time and limited space.  Or to be absolutely free?  The prize money means nothing to him, nor the status.  Indeed, it would limit him to a significant degree.

What about his wife and family, Pam asks.  Ah, that.  I suppose they will have to wait several more months and meet him in Tahiti.  Eventually Françiose his wife has to tell his daughter that daddy will not be coming home soon.  His daughter cries for three days.

On day twenty-six the moon is high and bright when I awake at 0400.  Moitessier believes that sailors love the moon more than the sun, and I feel this as well tonight.  I am thinking of what I wrote yesterday, about not being able to walk to the bow.  Of course I could walk to the bow, even sleepy in a rolling seaway.  I go forward to prove it.

At the bow is Moitessier himself.  I am not surprised to see him there, wet with spray.

“Bonjour, Denis.  Quelle belle nuit,” he greets me in his native tongue.

“Yes, Mr. Moitessier, it is a beautiful night.”

“DÎtes-moi Bernard.”  The lines at the edges of his eyes show his welcoming smile.

“Très bien Bernard.  We’re nearly in Polynesia.  What an accomplishment!”

“Oh yes.  You can be proud of yourself.”  He looks wistfully out at the dark ocean.  “I have always loved it here.”

“Was it hard when you left Françoise for your solo voyage?”

“Yes, it was.  On both of us.  I was driven, it was my destiny.  She understood this.  We were stronger afterwards.  I have no regrets.”

“Pam doesn’t like it when I read your story.  She says I am trying to be you.”

He cracks his wry smile.  “It is important for you to be you, tu connais bien.  You need to be kind to Pam.”

“You’re right.  I want to sail across this ocean with Pam.  I could do it by myself, but that’s not what I really want.  We’ve been all over the world together.  She is my ultimate travel partner.”

“I like that.”  He stares thoughtfully at the stars on the horizon.  I follow his gaze a while, then turn to comment and find him gone.  There is a draft of warm air and suddenly a waft of sweetness is borne on the wind.  It is the unmistakable smell of land!  Like the fragrance of warm candy, or a boulangere sprinkling driplets of creme brulee on a fresh-baked loaf of coconut bread.  The smell is lusty with a tinge of vanilla.

On day twenty-seven I am giddy with anticipation as the sawtooth ridge of Hiva Oa is gradually formed by the rising sun.  We are sailing fast only four miles off Cape Matafenua and wild plumes of spray are ricocheting off the nearby rocks.

Mintaka is anchored securely in the little Atuona harbor and Mark and Robyn come on the VHF radio to give us helpful instructions for navigating the tight space and setting a bow and stern anchor.  After twenty-six days on the wide ocean this anchorage looks amazingly small, with eighteen boats packed into a space that would comfortably hold half that number.

The mountains of Hiva Oa are unbelievably steep.  The valleys are fringed with coconut palms, while the ridge tops show patches of light green that resemble the high pastures of Switzerland.  The highest mountain rises 3500 feet and is purple and black under a brooding canopy of cloud, its ridges nearly vertical.  Where is the sun today?  The sky is  quilted with various shades of gray.  Occasionally a valley is illuminated by a fleeting shaft of sunlight before disappearing back into gray obscurity.

We launch the dinghy and row ashore, finding Hiva Oa a land full of surprises.  The water in the anchorage is murky and brown from runoff.  On a rocky black sand beach no one is sunbathing or swimming.  Outside the seawall is apparently a favorite place for hammerhead sharks to hang out.  There is a small shack on shore with signs indicating various services, like laundry, but it is noon and the shack is closed.  A group of sunburned cruisers stare at us from the porch of the shack.  Sitting with laptop computers perched on their knees they wait for a fleeting spark of wifi signal to carry an email back to their friends and family announcing their safe arrival.

I stagger drunkenly trying to find my land legs.  I haven’t slept much in the last twenty-four hours and my brain functions in three-quarter time.  We lurch along the country road into the town of Atuona, about a mile and a half.  I am pleased to find ripe mangoes in season, and I share one with a horse who lets me scratch his ears.  The roadside is fringed with sweet frangipani and bougainvillea.  I pick two luscious red hibiscus blossoms for Pam and Robyn to put in their hair.

Atuona seems bleak under the somber gray sky.  There is no one around on a Thursday afternoon.  It is humid and the trees and flowers are prospering while the village sleeps.

We trek up a steep hill to visit the grave of Paul Gauguin, the French impressionist painter who deserted his wife and five children to go and find himself.  Like his colleague Vincent Van Gogh, he shared a burdensome melancholy.  He died here at the age of fifty-five, exactly my age.  Back in the village we wait for the Gauguin museum, then wander through the rooms in oppressive heat to see copies of his work.  The original paintings I have seen before, in Paris, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, showing the unsmiling painter in various self portraits that highlight his great drooping eyelids and long jawbone.  His expression of Gallic fatalism betrays a hint of confidence in what he is doing.  He knows he is a great painter although in Paris they do not understand him.  He will go to Pont Aven in Bretagne to form his own school, and then to Tahiti in search of paradise lost, and finally to Atuona to escape from the French colonials who have spoiled paradise.

Gauguin’s letters on display show his insecurity.  He compares himself to Degas who has no heart and to Monet who earns 100,000 francs a year from a wealthy patron.  But the letters also show a poetic tenderness, like Moitessier.  To his wife Mette he describes the softness of a Tahitian night, with a stark silence interrupted only by the sound of a dried falling leaf stirred by a passing spirit.

It is the eyes of the Marquesan women in Gauguin’s paintings that capture me.  I see these eyes again and again during our brief time in Hiva Oa.  They stare into the abstract distance with a soft melancholy for a moment and then return to the present to greet a friend or neighbor with an easy smile.

The people of Atuona are not searching for the same things as me.  They do not seem to mind that the wifi service is expensive and slow and they do not pay $20 dollars to watch it non-functioning for twenty-four hours.  They do not seem to mind that there is very little wine in the small magasin in town.  They seem happy enough to chat for hours other under the shady mango trees by the post office.  On Saturday night there is a local rock band playing at the only restaurant, with a sit-down menu of boiled pork and couscous for $25 a plate, and they seem content standing in the parking lot outside and listening to the music while they visit with each other in the warm night air.

But I am still searching.  After five days in the murky anchorage we are officially cleared into French Polynesia, our laundry is done, and Pamela’s water tanks are full, as well as our diesel jugs.  We have fresh bananas, mangoes, and pamplemousse in our cockpit and crispy baguettes hanging in the saloon.  We haul up our two anchors dripping with black mud and catch a cool breeze as we sail out of Atuona harbor bound for Tahuata.

In Tahuata we will find a palm-fringed white sand beach with turquoise water so clear that you can see the bottom under your boat.  In Tahuata we will find trees laden with pamplemousse.  In Tahuata we will stop worrying about wifi and email, but sit and watch the sun light and shadows unfold on the surrounding hills and valleys, sighing as the sun dips below the clear horizon and cheering as the full moon peeks over the ridge top.  In Tahuata ….

Today we weigh anchor for Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, a beautiful island group in French Polynesia about 3000 miles away!  It should take us about 30 wonderful days of sailing day and night to get there.

Check out the Pacific Puddle Jump article in Latitude 38

 

Video update #3:  Follow s/v Pamela to La Paz, Mazatlán, Puerto Vallarta, and Oaxaca as we enjoy the Mexico winter before leaving for French Polynesia in Spring 2014.

“Ahoy!  Pamela!  Welcome to Tenacatita”  The familiar voice on VHF channel 22 boomed out as we sailed into Bahia Tenacatita.  It was Craig on Adios.  Craig and Jane had spent a few days with us in Bahia Chamela several miles to the north and had left a day or so earlier, bound for Tenacatita and Zihuatenejo.

The setting sun low on the clear horizon painted the columns of Punta Hermanos, the Brothers, in hues of red, orange, and brown as we sailed past.  The southwesterly swell crashed against the columns but began to subside as we entered the large bay.

There are two beautiful anchorages in Tenacatita, each with a wide fringe of gold sand with rows of coconut palms beyond.  The first anchorage, called The Aquarium because of its turquoise reef abounding with fish, looked curiously empty.  We followed Adios around the outlying rocks of Punta Chubasco that made a tricky entrance into the second, larger anchorage filled with thirty one boats.

Then came a hail from Cat 2 Fold, a funky twin-masted catamaran.  “Do you know about the underwater rock?   If you divide the distance to the shore into thirds you can go in between the third third, which I often do.  Otherwise, go to starboard of the exposed rock.”

Adios coasted past the exposed rock, then made a sharp left-turn.  Cat 2 Fold drifted with the waning afternoon westerly, sails just barely drawing, as the young man at the tiller decided to move with what wind there was rather than turn on his engine.  He donned his guitar and sang into the early evening as he waited with infinite patience for his catamaran to creep slowly, slowly, at one-and-a-half knots toward the little village of La Manzanilla on the southern edge of the bay.

“Adios, Adios; Pamela,” Pam hailed on VHF when we’d dropped our anchor a short while later.  “Hi guys!  Come on over for dinner.  We’ve got some red wine.”

“I’ve been reading about the land dispute,” said Craig when we settled into the cockpit with a lovely chicken and rice dish that Pam concocted.

“Land dispute?” I asked.  I didn’t have much information about the area.  Our cruising guide, about four years old, described the bay as a happy place where lots of locals come every Sunday to enjoy the sandy crescent of beach that bordered The Aquarium.

“Yes,” explained Craig.  “At the other anchorage near the point where you enter the bay, where we were at yesterday.  There’s a land development corporation that is claiming ownership of the area along the beach.  They say that squatters there have no right to the land, although some of the so-called squatters have been living there for 40 years.  They want to turn the beach into a big development.  They sent a notice that the people there must leave in 24 hours.  There were several hundred living there and operating restaurants and hotels, including a number of gringoes who have purchased property there.  Then the corporation came in with bulldozers and knocked down dozens of palapas along the beach.  There were violent demonstrations, and armed guards came in and shot up the crowd with rubber bullets, including children.”

It sounded like trouble in paradise.  Squatters?  Land dispute?  The cruising guide did not mention anything about rubber bullets.

“We anchored over there yesterday,” said Jane.  “It’s a lovely place.  We saw a whale with a calf as we entered the anchorage.  We landed the dinghy on the beach, and at six p.m. a couple of armed guards told us we had to leave the beach and go back to our boat.”

Armed guards?  This sounded like a place to avoid.  What a shame it would be to have to miss The Aquarium.

“What about the Jungle Tour?” asked Pam.  “How about if we go together tomorrow?”  The Jungle Tour is a narrow creek that runs through a mangrove swamp and connects the big anchorage with the smaller anchorage at The Aquarium.  You can take your dinghy up the creek for an adventure lasting several miles.

We made plans to meet Craig and Jane at 8:00 a.m. the following morning.

At 7:30 a.m. I shook Pam under her blanket in the V-berth.  “Wake up!  We need to get ready for the Jungle Tour.”  How early 7:30 a.m. seemed!  A year earlier I would awaken at 5:30 a.m. to do a few morning stretches and then walk Little Bear to the park, then make coffee and awaken Julian, then hustle him out the door to drive in darkness to catch his 7:05 a.m. train to San Francisco to his high school, then watch the sun come up as I drove the frozen convertible down Highway 280 to spend a half-hour in the gym before starting my work day by sifting through 150 emails searching for signs of relevance in the universe.

We set ourselves down gingerly into the dinghy as Jane brandished a large machete.  “I’m Jungle Jane!” she announced.  “Ready for the Jungle Tour.”

Jersey, her twelve-year-old puppy sat stoichly in the dinghy as the gentle morning swell pushed the boat up and down in a rhythmic pattern as we approached the creek that entered into the bay.  We followed behind Jeff and Janey on Adagio.  They had been up the Jungle Tour once before, so we trusted their “local knowledge” about the shoals at the mouth of the creek.  We entered the creek and navigated through a shallow section just deep enough to prevent the dinghy’s propeller from striking the bottom.  At the shallowest section I jumped over the side and pulled the dinghy through the cool dark morning waters, thinking about the point where the Napa River flows into the Amazon, where years before I had caught piranha.

The winding creek unfolded in a series of greens as the morning sun rose on the estuary.  Egrets took flight as we rove our dinghies through the myriad mangrove tunnels.  A giant iguana with a spiny yellow backbone perched on an ancient tree trunk ignored us as we powered our way up the flowing rivulet.

As the creek narrowed we gave thanks to the parties who had gone before us to slice back the tendrils of mangrove knees and arms that hung down from the canopy tops.  At regular intervals we encountered the sharpened edges of vines that had been hacked close to the water’s edge.

“Watch out for the sticks!” Craig warned, but too late, as Jersey met with a branch that grabbed her collar and hoisted her above the dinghy and over the side.  Jane grabbed her just in time, while a mosquito buzzed in my ear.

And just when we thought the jungle’s branches would prevent us from going any further, the creek widened and became a pond.  A broken down jetty greeted us at the far end.

“The crew from Scavenga came here recently,” said Craig.  “There’s a fence that was put up when the land dispute came to a head, blocking access to the beach.  They jumped the fence and made their way to the beach, when a security force with guns caught them.  The guards detained them, then demanded money, but the Scavenga crew told them they didn’t have any in their swim trunks.  So the guards demanded their wrist watches.”

Guards with guns demanding money?  I didn’t like the sound of this.

We landed the dinghies in the brackish water beside the splintering jetty.  Our cruising guide described this as a delightful place to tie the dinghy for a visit to the nearby beach.  That was before the land dispute.

“This is where they filmed the movie McHale’s Navy,” said Jeff.  I remembered the wacky late-60’s TV series and tried to imagine it as a feature film.  A team of Hollywood screenplay writers would have to be hard up to look to such a silly show for a movie plot.

We explored the mosquito-infested jetty to find a number of liquor bottles alongside an outdoor brick oven.  A hammock stretched between the oven and a pole supporting a deteriorating palapa roof.  Beyond the hammock were signs that read “Important!  Always wear your life jacket”, and a chain-link fence with two strands of barbed wire on top.

“This way!” announced Jeff.  “We can get around the fence over here.”

“Someone went to a lot of trouble to put up that fence,” I remarked.  “I don’t think we should tease these gun-toting fence builders.”

But around the fence we went, as a mosquito bit into my ankle.

Beyond the fence was the beach separated by a road that ran parallel to it.  As we made our way to the road a group of three men in military fatigues emerged from a concrete building.

“Hola!” shouted Jeff.  The men seemed perplexed.  By their wary movements it was clear they were not comfortable with us being there.  As they came forward the biggest one began shouting at us.  He looked mean, tall and stocky, and very capable in his jack boots.

“What happened?  What happened?” he shouted.  It didn’t make a lot of sense.  He was not carrying a gun but he did have a heavy night stick.  Busting the head of a peasant squatter, or a stupid gringo, might be good fun.

“We’re going to the beach,” we said.

“The sign!  What happened?”  The big man grabbed at his crotch and continued to yell at us.  He was not a real policeman, but was hired by someone to keep people out of the area past the beach, where we happened to be standing.  There were a few abandoned buildings along the road.  Someone didn’t want people squatting in these dilapidated buildings while the land dispute was being settled in the Mexican courts.

“We came up the creek on the Jungle Tour and we’re just going over to the beach.”

“What country you from?” asked crotch-grabber.  “What happened?  The sign!”  He motioned toward a sign that declared this area to be private property.  You would have to be facing the sign from the beach, not from the Jungle Tour, to notice the claim of private property.

It seemed pretty ridiculous.  I said “adios” and began walking back to the creek but crotch-grabber shouted “No!” and motioned for us to remain where we were, meanwhile yelling “What happened?” as if it made some semblance of sense.  Jane explained that we were from the U.S. and Canada, while crotch-grabber began an interrogation.

An older man, disheveled and unshaven, emerged from the concrete building and screwed his fists into his eyes.  He was apparently just waking up.  Crotch-grabber explained the situation to him in rapid Spanish.  A dialogue ensued to determine our fate.

The older man rubbing his eyes seemed to interject some reason into the conversation.  By his gestures and the occasionally understood Spanish word I sensed that if we would just turn around and head back to where we came from, they would call it a day and not shoot us.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Craig and began walking briskly back to the fence.

“Jeff!  Jane!  Come on,” he called, and as we walked in a group back toward the jetty it appeared that the three men in fatigues would not follow.  We made our way back around the chain link fence as dogs began to bark a short distance away.

“That was weird,” I said as we climbed back into our dinghies.  The abandoned jetty, the security fence, the guards — it all seemed irrational and I didn’t want to tempt any gun-toting security forces who might decide to detain us with meaningless questioning.

“I thought it was kind of fun,” said Jeff.  “Did you see the older guy?  I think he was packing a pistol.”

We drifted back down the creek and soon came upon an elder couple in a skiff.  They lived in the nearby village of Rebalsito and knew all about the land dispute.

They had been out fishing and the elder man in his mid-seventies lifted a 20-pound parvo, a big pink-red fish similar to a red snapper, from the stern of the skiff.  What a fish! we exclaimed.  Are they good to eat?  Wonderful, the man told us.

How early had he launched his skiff from the Jungle Tour creek to wind his way past the sand bar and out to the rocks at the edge of the bay?  “Very early,” he assured us.  I tried to imagine the mangrove-thick creek in the blackness of pre-dawn.

We told them about the security guards.  We were wise to turn back, they said.  The guards do not have a right to prevent access to the beach, but they can intimidate you into thinking that they do.  They are paid by the land development company to keep people off the disputed land.  The man and woman were covered in muddy pants and shirts with wide-brimmed hats that hung down over their ears.  They were familiar with the intense morning sun.

They had come here about 30 years before and made Rebalsito their home during the winter.  When the land dispute boiled over in 2010 they began a relief effort to help the many families who lived on the beach and operated the palapa restaurants for the teeming crowds of locals who converged on the beach every weekend.  They established a fund called The Tenacatita Fund and raised $30,000 to help the displaced families.

“They are very resilient,” said the woman.  “When they were kicked off the beach some of them went to La Manzanilla.  They found what work they could.”  With the funds they raised they were able to provide food for many of these families for a month while they struggled to find new homes and jobs.

The Rodenas Corporation has been trying to get people off the Tenacatita beach for two decades and has been battling with the local ejido, or land cooperative. Ejidos were set up by the Mexican government to implement the land reforms fought for in the Mexican revolution of 1910, and the ejido that includes Tenacatita beach was established in 1940.

On the morning of August 4, 2010, Rodenas sent in the state police in riot gear based on a judicial order.  No one has actually seen the order.  The police demanded that the residents leave immediately, forcibly removing them.  Nearly 800 Mexican citizens were routed from their homes by 200 police and forced to leave at gunpoint.  Several shots were fired into the air to scare the residents, and many unarmed residents were injured, their possessions seized, their stores looted, the contents of their restaurant kitchens emptied into the street.  The road to the beach was blocked by a gate and controlled by a Rodenas security force.

Three years later, in June 2013 the gate and guard post were torn down, again by a court order and by state police.  But while the beach is now open, no one is allowed to camp or stay overnight and no one is allowed to operate a restaurant.  Meanwhile, the land dispute continues to meander through the Mexican court system like the Jungle Tour through the mangrove swamp.

The day after our Jungle Tour adventure we paddled our kayak to the beach to play bocci ball.  The highlight of each day in Tenacatita is the 2:00 p.m. bocci ball game on the beach, played by the cruisers who often spend several weeks, sometimes months, anchored in the bay.  I went for a run up the beach to enjoy the warm sand and cool sea breeze.  At the end of the beach where all the boats are anchored there is only a single palapa restaurant tucked into the coconut palms next to the Jungle Tour creek.  The beach is beautifully undeveloped for about a half a mile.  Then you come to a bright orange mega-hotel built into a natural rock formation.

As I approached the rock I heard something like a police whistle.  I continued running past the hotel, wondering how I could get to the empty beach beyond the rock.  The whistle continued.  I began to get irritated.  Was someone trying to signal me to stop and not proceed past the hotel?

A man in a white uniform with a serious face appeared on the beach beside the rock formation.  He was gesturing emphatically for me to turn around and go the other way.  I stopped running and stood and looked at him.  He continued to wave his arms and point to the other end of the beach.

I couldn’t believe it.  The Rodenas security guards kicked me off the beach by The Aquarium, and now this hotel security guy was kicking me off the other beach.  What was up with Tenacatita?  Could I stay there only if I agreed to stay in one place, keep quiet, and play bocci ball?

I realized that the hotel guard was just an ordinary man doing his unpleasant job, and I decided to comply, even though beaches in Mexico are not private property.  I didn’t want to yell at him like a stupid gringo tourist about my right to walk on the beach.

“OK,” I said as I approached him with a friendly smile.  “Me llamo Dennis,” I told him as I offered him my hand.  He shook it with a quizzical expression.  “Que bonita dia, si?”

“Si,” he answered, it was a beautiful day.  He looked uncertain.

“Adios!” I said, then turned and ran back to the safety of the bocci ball game.

We stayed in the big anchorage a few more days scraping barnacles off the bottom of the boat and slowly passing the time in between the bocci ball games.  But I wanted to go back and see The Aquarium and snorkel in the clear water around the rocky reefs.  So we pulled up the anchor and sailed a couple of miles over to The Aquarium beach.  I scoured the beach with my binoculars as we approached, watching for signs of the security guards and noticing the abandoned buildings with missing windows and doors.

I picked a spot to anchor near the beach, then suddenly saw a pair of whale spouts in between me and the anchoring spot.  A small black fin appeared and then disappeared, followed by a much larger fin and a long dark shape.  It was the mother and calf!

The whales swam silently past the anchorage, reversed course to make another pass, then turned again.  They didn’t seem to be any kind of hurry. Meanwhile, I sailed Pamela in circles to wait for the whales to move away from my path to the beach.

We set the anchor and then paddled the kayak to the shore.  A small boy played in the water while his smiling parents rested in a shady spot next to an abandoned building.  A few families laughed and called to one another further down the beach.  It was good to see people enjoying the beach, but nothing like the photos from our cruising guide that showed scores of families playing on the sunny beach.  The abandoned buildings produced a feeling of apocalypse.  There was no sign of the security guards.

I imagined the beach full of of colorful palapas and kids splashing in the water and old people sitting fully dressed in the soft surf, the beach alive with activity and sounds.  I imagined getting some rollo de mar, a local favorite, a fresh fish filet around an octopus wrapped with a slice of bacon and covered in an almond cream sauce.  It might be years before the local palapas are allowed to return to the beach, if they can get some of their land back, and if Rodenas’ luxury hotel on 100 acres does not crowd them out.

We enjoyed the reef, especially seeing several striped eels and hundreds of colorful fish, but we did not stay long.  We hoisted the sails and let the west wind carry us back to the anchorage with the other boats and the security of afternoon bocci ball.

We attended the “Mayor’s Raft-Up” off Good Dog Beach.  The “mayor” is the cruiser who’s been in Tenacatita the longest, and this honor goes to Robert and Virginia from Harmony who have been coming to Tenacatita each winter for a dozen years.  On Friday night the cruisers tie up their dinghies in a circle and Robert asks them a special question.  On this particular occasion there was Scott and Connie from Traveler, so Robert announced that the raft-up would include a talent show.  Connie, a professional singer, played the ukelele while the crew from Traveler sang a tune that Connie had composed, followed by “Mama Don’t Allow No Ukelele Playin’ ‘Round Here”.  We made plans for a jam session on Pamela the following night, then followed Robert and Virginia back to Harmony to purchase some colorful tie-dyed T-shirts they’d made and to get a signed copy of Virginia’s book, Harmony On The High Seas: When Your Mate Becomes Your Matey.

You meet some very interesting people out cruising.  It seems everyone has written a book.  Virginia’s book tells how she and Robert joined The Caravan in 1970, with 250 traveling hippies on 60 buses and vans on a four-month odyssey to rediscover America.  In Tennessee they helped start up The Farm, one of the largest communes of that era.  They put six kids through college at the University of California, then began their cruising career with several tours of Mexico, and eventually Central America and Ecuador.

We visited the nearby town of La Manzanilla with its interesting cocodrillo, a crocodile sanctuary.  You don’t have to ask where to find it, you just walk to the edge of town where the road ends, and there you see a large prehistoric crocodile sleeping with his toothy snout in the sun and his wide tail in the muddy estuary.  You can see why these creatures have endured for millions of years — they can lie absolutely motionless for days, paying no attention to the flies landing on their eyelids or the tourists snapping photos.  After La Manzanilla we sailed back to the quiet Tenacatita anchorage and practiced being crocodiles for a few more days.

We left the wide bay after a week and splashed through a churning seaway with 30-knot winds to Bahia Navidad, a dozen miles to the south.  We toured the towns of Melaque and Barra de Navidad and splurged by tying up at Marina de Puerto Navidad with its spectacular luxury hotel complex surrounded by blue swimming pools and green mountains.  In the pool we met several cruisers who had spent two or three weeks there, enjoying the pool and the restaurants of Barra, who would go no further than Mexico, and couldn’t see why we wanted to sailed away to Polynesia.

A few days later we were back in Tenacatita attending the Mayor’s Raft-Up off Good Dog Beach.  I brought my guitar and sang a song I’d just composed about being a lazy boy on a lazy day.

Lazy days and nights and all of the minutes in between

I don’t believe in the concept of time, I don’t know what it means

I was the only man there singing cheerfully about being a no-good lazy bum.  As the other cruisers introduced themselves, each of the men professed to have no talent but were good at fixing things, while their wives  bragged about how the men had kept their boats in good shape, fixing engines and rebuilding galleys.  I was the only man there who hadn’t rebuilt his transmission in the past 30 days.  I hung my head and tried to wipe the silly crocodile grin off my shameful face.

I needed to give something back.  It wasn’t enough to float day after day, scraping off a barnacle now and then, chucking a bocci ball, acting like a crocodile.  I needed to contribute something.  I picked up the VHF and announced “Attention the fleet!  Attention the fleet!  At 5:00 p.m. Pamela will offer a free guitar lesson.  Bring your instrument.”  A sense of euphoric accomplishment rushed through my veins and buzzed in my ears.

That evening, two dinghies motored up to Pamela with guitars!  I’m not sure what should happen in a guitar lesson since I’ve never really had one, so I winged it.  “Here’s how you hold a pick,” I demonstrated.  “You hold it like this, and you make a major chord like this.”  My students were riveted.  “And you can compose a song like this:  just go from the tonic to the fifth, the minor sixth, and add a cadence on the fourth, see?”  The eager expressions sagged in a barely perceptible hint of uncertainty.

I soldiered on.  “And you can offer a tint of dissonance with a minor third flat five chord that resolves into a minor seven … see?  Boy, I wish someone had showed me all this when I was getting started on guitar!”

Glazed eyes blinked.  I waited for my students to fret the neo-classical jazz chords but there was an unspoken reluctance.  “How about some more wine?” I offered, and the lesson was saved.

Soon it was time to head back up north to Banderas Bay and leave Tenacatita behind.  The barnacles that I was unable to scrape off in Bahia Tenacatita would have to ride on Pamela’s bottom all the way back up to La Cruz.  The more tenacious barnacles would get a free ride across the South Pacific to Hiva Oa in an epic westward migration.  The bocci ball would have to go on without us, and the court battles to defend David against the Rodenas Goliath.

The sun was rising over Bahia Tenacatita as we raised Pamela’s anchor and sailed silently out of the anchorage, past the outlying rocks of Punta Chubasco, past the turquoise reefs surrounding The Anchorage and the desecrated buildings of Tenacatita Beach that had been forcibly abandoned but not bulldozed.

Suddenly there was a splash of white water just off Tenacatita Beach.  I focused my attention on the spot and waited.  A dorsal fin appeared, and then a breaching whale.  It was the mother and calf.  While the mother streamed along in modest propriety, her calf launched high above the surface of the bay and allowed the morning sun to paint a swath of red across its white belly, landing with a pink splash on the tranquil bay.

Over and over the juvenile calf leaped for joy as Pamela bid her adios.