Tahiti Travels
Christmas morning found us baking pies on the sailboat Sanctuary for a party that evening. A week earlier, with the last of the sailboats heading south for the hurricane season and Excalibur Pacific resting safely in the island doctor’s garden, we hitched a ride aboard Andiamo III to Rangiroa atoll in the Tuamotus. From there we bought tickets on Manava Pitti, a small copra and supply ship to Tahiti. For three days, we shared the crowded stern deck with families from all over French Polynesia and chatted with Manava’s crew about weather conditions in this part of the South Pacific. Every day someone would invite us to their corner of the deck and share their stewed chicken in coconut sauce or whatever they were eating. In the evenings, we spread out our sleeping mats on deck and fell asleep listening to the nightly patter of soft rainfall and murmur of voices speaking Tuamotuan or Tahitian.
Tahiti, like Ua Pou, is a mountainous, verdant island. The morning Manava Pitti motored into the tropical harbor of Papeete, which is protected from the sea by a man-made breakwater, we saw hundreds of sailboats lining the quay at Boulevard Pomare with commercial vessels anchored around the harbor. Manava Pitti motored over to a far wharf and there, like all our new Polynesian friends, we departed the ship by jumping off the bow gunwale. As luck would have it, we ran into a couple we had met in Rangiroa atoll at a Sanito Iglesia conference the week before. Jane and Allen Breckenridge were picking up packages that had been shipped to them from Rangiroa via Manava Pitti. They kindly offered to give us a ride to the boat basin, where we planned to stay with sailboat friends from Ua Pou. As we were deposited at a black-pearl store across from the yachts, the sky opened up and a heavy deluge of rain poured down. Everyone was in good spirits as we met up with our sailing friends again.
On Christmas Day, before the party on Sanctuary, we planned to share a noontime meal with Jane and Allen, who were missionaries from the Reorganized Church of the Latter Day Saints (RLDS). After lunch, we planned to go with them to a leper colony on the east coast of Tahiti. Every year, the Sanitos choir, as the Tahitians called the RLDS, led by Allen, their pastor, sang Christmas carols for the leper colony.
With Allen at the wheel of the car, we arrived at a white building covered with brilliantly colored red and orange bougainvillea. A group of lepers waited for us on the open porch. Jane told us that in the past, the lepers would sit apart from visitors behind glass windows, but now, in 1984, they could sit out with people because research had shown that only open sores were contagious and repeated contact was necessary to contract the disease. Leprosy had once been a serious problem in Polynesia, but sulfa drugs helped to control it, though some of the residents had disfigured hands and faces. It was sad to think that these people had to be incarcerated and cut off from their lives in the outside world.
The Sanitos’ Tahitian songs were beautifully melodic, and it was apparent that the lepers enjoyed the music very much. At the end of the performance, a spokesman for the group stood and thanked the Sanitos choir in Tahitian for remembering them as they did every year. A reception line formed, and we and the choir members shook hands with the lepers.
Most of our stay in Tahiti was spent hiking and camping. From time to time we would visit Jane and Allen and spend a few nights with them. They had told us that whenever we wanted a shower and a bed to sleep in, to come by and stay. As the month went on, we stockpiled our new expedition supplies in their back bedroom. Because they had worked with the Tahitians for over twenty years and spoke fluent Tahitian, there was so much they could teach us and share about Tahiti.
One January evening, Curt and I gave a talk about our Pacific row to a congregation in the village of Tirona using the color slides we had had developed in Papeete. We both spoke in English while Allen translated into Tahitian. At the end, there was a funny exchange about the two villages of Hakatau and Hakahau in Ua Pou. It seemed the Tahitians had the impression that the two must be one and the same, because they regarded the Marquesas Islands as remote and primitive as compared to Tahiti and not capable of sustaining development. And because the Tahitians were Polynesians and we were “poppa,” or white people, who would know better what the truth was? I wasn’t sure who won the argument, but we were given lots of shell leis in appreciation for our talk.
By late February, we became restless with Tahiti and our wayfaring lifestyle. We missed Excalibur Pacific and knew it was time to return to Ua Pou and ready the boat for a March departure. Once back on Ua Pou, in between enjoying the Hakahau cai cais (feasts) where we sampled the Marquesan poe (fermented breadfruit) that was not as sweet as the Tahitian poe and the delicious coconut-flavored poisson cru, and laughed with the villagers as we watched and Curt filmed the stilt races, we began working. The puncture from Curt’s spear gun in the fiberglass hull was repaired, and new food stores were repackaged and stowed below deck along with a bag of new used paperbacks from our yachting friends in Tahiti. A new Weems & Plath metal sextant sent by Curt’s father and a new donated spare Davis plastic sextant went into the navigation hatch in the bow. Our friendship with Fred, the island doctor, and his wife, Magali, strengthened as we came to their yard regularly to work on the boat. We shared daily meals with them, and I would babysit their ten-month-old son while Magali, also a doctor, would prepare for her sex education classes at the College de Ua Pou.
When the weather improved, I filmed Excalibur Pacific being launched in the harbor at Hakahau with Fred, the gendarmes, and village men helping out Curt, who captained the operation. On the eve of our departure to Hakatau, our original port of entry, where we would continue the row to Samoa, our French friends threw a special cai cai in our honor with écrevisse, the small Marquesan crayfish, poisson cru, and Tahitian poe. Jean-François, the teacher who shared the anchorage with us in his sailboat War Vor Atao, strummed his guitar and sang about traveling. In his last song, he mused about meeting people and making new friends and the special friendship born out of travel. He concluded by saying there was sadness in those friendships, because when a traveler says goodbye, there is always the possibility that one will never meet again.
Departing Ua Pou for American Samoa
On March 23, 1985, at 11:30, with only one sailboat to say goodbye, we left Hakatau, Ua Pou. Soon, we were out of the shadow of the island and rowing at a good speed with a following sea.
The seas were easy, though the boat’s motion was hard to get used to again, as usual when we set out. Sometimes the boat swayed gently side to side as we rowed and drifted easily at night, its motion soothing. At other times the motion was extreme as the boat rocked hard from port to starboard.
Excalibur Pacific was well supplied, but there was little fresh food except for a bag of citrons, a few pamplemousses (extra-large, sweet grapefruit), and a couple of coconuts. The reason for this was that a strange and awkward episode had put a damper on our fresh food collection. We didn’t fully understand what went wrong. A month before, while anchored at the main village of Hakahau, we had ordered several packages of dried bananas from the bank manager, who in turn called her sister in Hakatau, our original port of entry, to relay our order. Everyone was pleased that we wanted to take their bananas on the boat. Unfortunately, the Hakatau villagers dried a kind of banana that was not the sweet one we’d ordered and on top of that, they wanted to charge more money than agreed. When we refused to pay the higher amount, their attitudes changed and hardly anyone in the village would speak to us. Before that, when we arrived back at the village, we made the mistake of not first going to greet Charles. At a religious festival happening at the same time we sat with the town drunk, a schoolteacher, and the sailboat family. These unfortunate missteps made our departure less than congenial.
Curt’s log: March 22, 1985
The gendarme came this morning with his speedboat and towed us at high speed southwest to Hakatau in one and a half hours.
In the village, we met Jerome, the village drunk, and a new schoolteacher. We drank wine and ate poe with them, while outside of the f
are, a local open-walled house, there was a religious procession with a child at the head holding a cross. Jerome gestured to us to be quiet as half the village filed past our party, chanting prayers with the priest. The teacher became emotional as he drank more wine and talked about the bomb testing at Mururoa atoll that was taking place on a regular basis in the southern part of the French Polynesian archipelago. I think, in the end, this nuclear bomb testing will cause France to lose this Pacific empire.
March 23. We’ve left Ua Pou, having purchased only sugar, noodles, beans, rice, matches, and condensed milk from the second store. The first store had nothing but cocoa with the price specially upped for us. We didn’t buy there. We bought some fruit too.
I picked up the anchor and sat down to row with Kathleen away from Hakatau at 11:30 a.m. with only the sailboat accompanying us. Charles and Mary Josephine didn’t come down to the waterfront. Our last sight of them the day before was odd: they stood at the door of their house, eyes looking glazed, with all their children beside them, staring silently at us. I think there is a certain amount of cousins marrying cousins that contributes to the startling resemblances between most villagers. Only their oldest daughter, Virginia, whom we had met at the high school in the main village of Hakahau and who was visiting for the weekend, came to say goodbye. She seemed to be the only adult in the village not glaring at us and walking crookedly.
As Curt and I rowed away from Ua Pou, the last sight of land was the brownish, dry west coast of Ua Pou, which had looked so green to us when we rowed between Motu Oa and Ua Pou five months earlier.
Despite the pleasant months we’d spent hiking on Ua Pou and socializing with the yachties in port, the wonderful visits to Tahiti and a few of the atolls in the Tuamotus, we were both happy to be out at sea again. None of the parting was hard. For the French who were our friends, their time in Ua Pou was transient as well, as they would be leaving someday too. Curt and I talked about our long discussions at anchor with the French sailor Jean-François and his anti-American sentiments. We never responded in kind to the things he constantly threw out at us, but if we had spent more time together, it would have come out eventually.
Over the months in French Polynesia, we had thought of home, which was so far away. Vermont didn’t seem real anymore, though the previous year we had left from there for the Pacific row. But fleeting glimpses came back in flashes: the hilly Echo Lake Road drenched in a late spring shower, the silence of snowflakes falling in winter, and the intense green of the Vermont summer in the Northeast Kingdom.
Before losing sight of land, we caught a forty-pound bluefin tuna with our friend Gigi’s fishing rig: a large plastic squid and 200-lb.-test fishing line. Gigi, a schoolteacher on the island, had given us one of his best plastic squids and me an elegant necklace he had threaded together from the yellow green spikes of a sea urchin. With the meat that Curt cut up into small chunks, I made a tasty poisson cru snack marinated with soy sauce and lime. I hung the rest on the safety line to dry while listening to Gabilou, the Tahitian singer whose tapes I bought in Papeete. Though the batteries to my tape cassette recorder were fading and the music became softer with time, Gabilou provided fine background music to life at sea again.
A few nights after we had left Ua Pou, Curt rolled out his new handmade hammock and rocked for a while on deck. It was exceptionally quiet that night, and a multitude of stars were visible, especially those far enough away from the quarter moon. Though we were returning to our routine at sea with decided improvements from the last voyage, it took time to relax and adjust to life back on the rowboat. The best way to sleep at night on rolling Excalibur Pacific, I decided, was to exhaust myself by rowing a lot. Curt agreed with me and thought that doing his navigation helped him to rest easier once he knew where we were heading.
CHAPTER 33
Forty Days and Forty Nights
March 1985
TWO WEEKS AFTER LEAVING UA Pou, there was a first for us: shark baiting. It started with the fishing line that had been out all day without a single bite. Curt was rowing and I was in the cabin reading, waiting for my time at the oars, when I heard, “Kathleen, we’ve got a bite!” The new fishing line and squid lure that Gigi had given us had scored another strike.
I crawled out on deck to see an eruption of blood and agitated water on the port side of the boat. A bluefin tuna was being eaten alive by a brown shark. Curt gave the line an extra hard jerk and the tuna flew out of the water, landing hard at my feet. I gasped. “Look at that! It looks like an apple eaten around its core!”
Indeed, the shark that now raced up to the gunwales and then disappeared had ravaged the sixty-pound fish. A minute later the boat started rocking violently. The shark was banging the boat’s rudder.
“Jesus Christ. The asshole. Let’s play tag with it. Like John Fairfax.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That sounds like a bad idea.” Our boat was only twenty-five feet long and the shark was about five feet. The deck we would be “playing” from was only nine feet of crowded space. An image of John Fairfax’s bitten arm flashed to mind. He and his girlfriend Sylvia Cooke had been rowing across the Pacific Ocean in the early 1970s when one day John started to fool around with the sharks. A miscalculated grab at the shark with a grappling hook left him with a forearm that looked a lot like our tuna.
I crouched by the bow cabin door while Curt leaned against the stern cabin, looking off the port gunwale. The shark had reappeared beside the boat, and it seemed he wasn’t going away.
Curt looked over at me, and I barely nodded my head. It was tempting to see what would happen if we dangled a little bit of the tuna over the side. We were bored after just a few long days at sea. The hours could be monotonous: Sunrise. Curt rows. Breakfast. Kathleen rows. Lunch. Curt works out navigation sights and updates the course. Kathleen does boat maintenance and reads on deck. Late afternoon we both row. Dinner. Ham radio contacts. Sunset. Do the evening star sights. Write in our logs. Sleep. The next day, do it all over again. There was a distinct quality of sameness about our existence on the rowboat. Tuna tag was the perfect antidote, but it was very risky.
We started with the innards, which were splayed out on the deck. The tuna was a sorry sight, though no longer alive. The shark gobbled up the offering.
“Let’s see the knife,” and Curt cut the tuna’s head off and threaded a one-inch braided rope through its gills and mouth. He wiped his bloody hands on his shorts and got ready to swing the head over the gunwale.
“Hold it,” I yelled, and dove into the bow cabin for the camera. Curt paused and braced himself, right foot on the edge of the gunwale and left foot wedged under the lip of the water pump. I leaned against the bow cabin with the Nikon around my neck, ready to take photographs and grab Curt if the shark tugged a little too hard.
In one fluid motion, he lifted his right arm with the tuna head dangling off the end and flung it like an old mangled softball with a sharp snap of his wrist. Before the tuna even landed in the water, the shark was reaching for it. Bam! It was a strike. Curt grabbed the rope with both hands to stop it from disappearing overboard. I clicked away, caught up with the excitement.
“This is crazy. It’s like playing tag with an out-of-control dog,” he managed, his arm muscles straining with the violence of the shark’s reaction. The port gunwale dipped precariously as Curt pushed against it with his foot, pulling hard on the rope while the shark kept up the pressure. “You wanna try it?”
I was tempted. When would I ever have such a chance again? “Yeah, this is dangerous. But I want to …”
The shark was waiting, and Curt was looking at me. I said no. But then I said, “How are we going to get rid of it? That shark’s going to follow us from now on.” I imagined it just below the surface when I washed dishes, or even worse, whenever I hung my bottom over the side to pee. Though our last encounter with an aggressive shark was seven months earlier off the South American coast, the fear from its nightly bumping of the hull was still there. I d
idn’t want to go through that again.
“We have to shoot it,” I said. “It’s not going to go away otherwise.” We looked at the dark shape swimming just below the surface. The rope was trailing limply in the water; the tuna head was completely gone. Frayed ends of the rope floated beside the boat and there was blood in the water.
The headless tuna was crosswise on the deck, its blood dripping slowly into the ocean through the drain hole in the stern rowing station. There was no way to clean up the deck without dipping a bucket into the sea, but neither of us was particularly anxious to dip anything into the ocean now.
I crawled into the bow cabin, put the camera away, and reached for the plastic bag with the handgun wrapped in one of Curt’s old faded bandannas. I pulled it out and unwrapped it carefully. I had practiced with it only once on land. On the ocean as on land, Curt was the shooter.
Standing against the stern cabin, he braced himself while I stood by the bow cabin watching; the shark was still there. He fired a couple of shots, and then fired again, until the shark faltered, pointed downward, and sank slowly out of sight.
Thunder and Lightning
Curt’s log: April 1985
Lately, we’ve been recording unbelievable mileages of 85 and 60 miles per day respectively. Fast moving squall lines hit the boat and send us flying. The other night it was stormy with the wind dying but with heavy rain. Excalibur Pacific wallowed around in lumpy, confused seas. The sea anchor I put out did nothing to smooth our drift. It only hung limply below the boat at the end of its rope.
Rowing for My Life Page 23