Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  Lashing the tiller, I helped Art bale with plastic buckets. We knew well enough that another big comber would put the boat dangerously low in the water. Although HIC had been built as a lifeboat, the flotation tanks had long since been removed, and our funds had not allowed us to buy a raft.

  There was nothing exciting about the situation now. The sense of adventure that we had carried across the harbor mouth had quite gone. Wind-whipped gray clouds scudded a few feet above our heads and our homemade rigging cracked like pistol shots as it lashed the mast. Darkness fell quickly and with our loss of vision our sense of hearing increased. The sea began to sound like a fleet of locomotives and the cold pierced our flesh like a thousand needles. I kept thinking of the plywood keel. If it broke away we would have no hope, for HIC would roll right over with the first broadside.

  It was neither courage nor, I think, stupidity that prevented me from thinking about drowning. It was simply that all my energy and thoughts were concentrated on keeping HIC afloat. Art, seasick though he was, volunteered to take the tiller, but at the moment of handing it over to him a huge comber thumped our stern with a jar that threw the three of us to the floor. We jumped up spluttering and baled with all our strength.

  The wind, I guessed, was now fifty knots. It was Art’s idea to rig the mainsail across the boat as a spray guard. He tied one end to the mast while I lashed its edges to the gunwales. So we huddled in the darkness beneath our awning until another big comber hit and crushed the canvas to the bottom. We baled until our bodies ached with pain.

  Perhaps it was the bitter cold and weariness that dulled my mind, for strangely fear never overwhelmed me. From the tiller I could see the moonlike faces of my friends as we waited for the final wave that would send us to the bottom. Sometime between midnight and dawn we heard a plane, one of several out searching for us. But by the time we had found and fired a flare, the aircraft was far away.

  An hour after dawn the wind dropped sufficiently for us to hoist the spare mainsail, and our spirits rose. It was enough just to know that we had somehow survived the night. Art remembered his small transistor radio and switched it on. For a while we listened to some music and then the announcer came through with news. The first story was about us. The announcer said:

  “The Coast Guard is conducting an extensive air and sea search for three teen-age boys feared to be lost at sea. The Coast Guard spokesman reports that because of the extreme weather conditions last night the chances of their survival in a sixteen-foot boat are very slim.”

  The report went on to give details of our families and school, and promised to report any further developments.

  We listened in stunned silence, unable at first to realize that we were on the news. Then perhaps to our credit we were worried about the anxiety our families would be feeling. I wondered if my mother in California had picked up the news. It hurt me to think what she was going through. We did not then know that our adventure was the main story in the Hawaiian newspapers. It had even swept the Churchill headlines from the top of page one.

  Our situation was now much better. We had food and water for several days. Then Art pointed over the side with an exclamation. Our keel had finally broken away and was drifting past the stern.

  Had the keel snapped off the previous night in the height of the storm, we certainly would not have been still afloat this warm morning. But by now we knew we had made it.

  By midmorning HIC drifted on the lee shore of Lanai. With a reefed jib we managed to steer around narrow coral heads, and before the sun had dropped the bow crunched into a sandy beach. We threw out our only anchor and staggered up the sand.

  Hearing a picnic party along the shore, we stumbled over rocks and thorns to reach the circle of their firelight. The party guessed who we were at once because hourly radio bulletins had been giving ever gloomier reports about the missing teen-agers. One member of the picnic party volunteered to drive us to Lanai City, about eight miles inland. He properly urged us to report to the police.

  At the police station the reception was mixed; the officer on duty was obviously pleased to see us and pushed mugs of hot coffee into our hands while telling us we were crazy. He called up the Coast Guard and reported our safety. We spent that night in jail. No drunk had ever slept better in my bunk.

  Next morning a plane chartered by Jim and Art’s parents flew us back to Honolulu, and it was at the airport that I first experienced a full bombardment of news reporters’ questions and learned what it feels like to look down the barrels of television cameras.

  My father was there too. He had his own opinion of our adventure. But he did remind me of the seafarers’ superstition never to start a voyage on a Friday.

  For several weeks the story of HIC was followed by a flood of correspondence in Hawaiian newspapers—letters signed by “Angry Taxpayer” and retired colonels who huffed and puffed about our irresponsibility. But there was one letter in the Star-Bulletin which I stuck into my scrapbook. It reads in part:

  I am not unmindful of the staggering amount of time, effort and cost to us taxpayers which was involved in this escapade by three teenagers who sailed to Lanai in an old lifeboat. It was a pretty big goof up on their part, and I doubt very much if they are front page heroes to their friends. I am sure they now feel pretty stupid about the whole affair. But what really gets me is this trying to equate the attitude of “We wanted to see if we could do it” with your correspondents’ propositions about “this dry rot affecting the youth of our nation.”

  Think what the elimination of the attitude of these boys would have meant to the world. Would Columbus have discovered America? Would the Wright brothers have flown at Kitty Hawk? Would Mount Everest have been climbed? Indeed would our Hawaiian ancestors have discovered these lovely islands?

  A little red-blooded urge to excel, to do the impossible, to see what is over the next hill and to take little heed of the consequences—these are as American as apple-pie. It is obvious that the angry critics of these boys never walked a neighbor’s fence or swam a forbidden hole or pushed over an outhouse on Hallowe’en…. Irresponsible? Yes. Thoughtless? Yes. But dry rot in the nation’s youth? Baloney.

  The letter was signed: Gene Weston.

  Another correspondent, who lashed us for our “foolish escapade,” expressed his gratitude that “there are a few youngsters in the country who aren’t out raping, mugging and murdering…and whose initiative, though misguided, will help them to avoid becoming teen-age vegetables.” The writer concluded, “They’re a trio of crazy kids who are lucky to be alive, and they’ve learned this too. But don’t be too quick to criticize that quality we need most in this day and age: raw guts.”

  Perhaps it was this more tolerant view of our adventure, which had cost $25,000 in rescue operations, that helped us when we were ordered to appear before a hearing of the local Coast Guard. We were found guilty under a federal law which prohibits the reckless or negligent operation of a vessel endangering the life, limb or property of any person, and we were assessed a one-hundred-dollar penalty each. But we were excused from payment.

  The penalty was remitted by Captain Herbert J. Kelly, acting chief of the Merchant Marine Safety Division of the 14th Coast Guard, because, he stressed, the parents would have to pay for their sons’ violations. Had we been convicted in a federal court we could have been sentenced to one year in a reformatory or a two-thousand-dollar fine or both. Captain Kelly gave us the ghost of a grin as he dismissed us from the courtroom.

  So instead of a life on the islands—and it had been our eventual plan to sail HIC to the South Seas—we returned to McKinley High School, I to complete my sophomore year.

  My father knew well enough that although my first attempt to escape from established society had failed, I intended to try again. I could not yet articulate what motivated me, but my father wrote my mother from Hawaii: “Lee is more interested in living than longevity.”

  I knew what I disliked, what I wanted to leave behind. But I knew t
oo that there was something “out there” that I desperately wanted. It was a chance to be my own man, a conviction that I was born free, that I had a birthright that would not be denied.

  Recognizing that I would do “some other damn silly thing in a tub like HIC,” my father argued that it would be better to find me a boat that was reasonably safe for ocean sailing. Mother never accepted this reasoning, but father flew back to California and bought a twenty-four-foot fiberglass Lapworth sloop in a San Pedro boatyard. She was called Dove and carried a thirty-foot aluminum mast, a fifteen-foot boom and she drew four feet. Although five years old, Dove was in good shape, with hatches and portholes strong enough to withstand a heavy pounding.

  On the first day of the summer school vacation I flew from Hawaii to join my father in California. I was now sixteen years old, and for the first time seriously considered sailing around the world. This idea was just a passing notion, but it began to nag at the back of my mind. Instead of turning my school atlas to the Polynesian islands, I flicked the pages to the maps of Australia and the Indian Ocean. The Suez Canal had not at that time been closed by the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt and I began to picture myself racing Arab dhows up the Red Sea. If I could get that far, I argued, it would be natural to sail the Mediterranean, “take in Europe” and return to Long Beach by way of the North Atlantic and the Panama Canal.

  On my small atlas it all looked so straightforward, and I thought that two years would probably be time enough for the journey. I didn’t worry about the cost, because with a schoolboy’s optimism I expected that problem to work out somehow.

  Surprisingly, my father barely reacted when I put the idea to him. We were now working ten hours a day preparing Dove for the ocean. I did not realize at the time that secretly my father had been hoping I would come up with just such a scheme, and that right from the beginning he would live my voyage and my life vicariously.

  My father and I spent most of July companionably together fitting out Dove, installing a thirty-gallon fresh-water tank, constructing a stern pulpit rail, putting up heavy rigging. Then we fitted a chronometer, barometer, gimbal tray for a kerosene stove, furling gear and roller reefing for the mainsail. This furling equipment would allow me to raise and lower sails from the cockpit in seconds if I was hit by a sudden squall. Other special fittings and extras included a lifeline attached to the boom and harness, a small blow-up raft containing a compass, water and hard rations, a chart table and lockers, a David White navy sextant, a marine radio receiver and volumes one through four of the Hydrographic Office’s Longitude and Latitude Tables. We put two compasses aboard, mounting one on Dove’s self-baling cockpit and the other, a “telltale,” above the port bunk.

  The most important and complex extra equipment was a wind vane of our original design. Its operation was quite simple—the vane of about one square yard of canvas moving through a gear system, a small trim rudder which would keep Dove on course while I slept. In effect it was an automatic pilot, and although the vane would not work too well when the wind was on the beam, my charts showed that I would be traveling downwind or windward most of the time on an east-to-west global voyage.

  From friends and local churches I collected about five hundred articles of used clothing. The idea was to trade these—and one hundred ballpoint pens—for food and other necessities when I reached the islands.

  We invested heavily in canned food and I found room (reluctantly) for schoolbooks and a small steel bow and quiver of arrows (not to fight cannibals but to attempt to shoot fish).

  Dove had originally cost $5,500, but by the time we had fitted her out with the additional equipment and provisioned her, the total investment was about $8,000—a sum, I assured my father, that was to be regarded as a loan.

  In the evenings, although bone weary, I studied prevailing currents and winds and seasonal weather patterns which would determine my course.

  It never occurred to me to publicize my voyage and I asked my father to keep our plans secret. But somehow word got out, perhaps through a marine shop or a friend, that a sixteen-year-old schoolboy was planning to sail the world single-handed. One morning while working on Dove I heard an unfamiliar voice on the slip. It was a reporter from a local newspaper, the San Pedro Pilot. I looked up and found him standing there, pencil poised and notebook in hand, a photographer at his shoulder. With my mind occupied with adjusting the wind vane, I thought his questions innocent enough, but the reporter, Mr. Lyle Le Faver, was the front scout of an army of newsmen who were to besiege me from that moment on.

  I have nothing against newsmen. Many of them are really nice, but it seemed silly to me that even before I sailed past Catalina island, twenty miles out of Long Beach, I should be worth more than a paragraph on an inside page. Yet the report that a schoolboy was contemplating a globe-circling voyage seemed to fascinate the press, and radio and the television studios.

  When I was ready to sail on the morning of July 27, I had been given almost as much publicity as a presidential candidate or a notorious gangster. I was honestly and deeply embarrassed when on sailing day the reporters and television men who turned up at the San Pedro marina outnumbered my friends and relatives almost ten to one.

  Among the farewell gifts were a couple of kittens brought in a basket by my uncle, Dick Fisher, with whom my father and I had been staying. I named them immediately Joliette and Suzette for the two Tahitian girls who had been offered to my parents as a trade for me three years earlier. The kittens, born in a closet, became famous overnight, their pictures appearing on front pages from Mexico to London.

  The morning of July 27, 1965, was a marvelous one, with the sun burning off the mist in the outer harbor. Excitement killed my appetite, but I sat down with Jud Croft and ate a bowl of breakfast cereal. Jill Gibson, a girl friend who had come up from Newport, delighted the cameramen by giving me a kiss.

  Then my father came aboard. He looked ill at ease, uptight, and when he put out his hand I noticed it was trembling. He said something about seeing me in Hawaii. Then, at exactly ten o’clock, I started up Dove’s inboard engine.

  That was the beginning of it all.

  I wonder now if I had been able to see the future whether I would have sailed at all. Supposing at that moment I had been able to sense the loneliness that drove me to within a breath of madness, supposing I had seen my demastings or that huge storm in the Indian Ocean—would I have left the slipway at San Pedro? Yet if I had been able to see the terrors and troubles of my global voyage I would have seen, too, the days of tremendous joy, days no man deserves this side of heaven. I would have seen Patti out there in the islands, Patti laughing, the sun on her shoulders, Patti in my arms through velvet nights. Yes, I am sure I would have sailed—sailed through hurricanes, the deepest hurts and hell itself had I known the full pattern of my life.

  As it was, on that sparkling morning at San Pedro marina, setting out on the 2,225-mile first leg of my voyage around the world, my heart thumped with an excitement I had never known before—for the spirit of freedom seemed to be touching me with her wings.

  2

  Loneliness and Landfalls

  THE VOYAGE to Hawaii was almost too easy. The Pacific can be like that—days of sailing through nothing bigger than four-foot swells and winds of fifteen knots. Dove behaved well and so did the kittens once they had gained their sea legs.

  It was a relief to discover that the steering vane worked well and that I could move about the deck and the cabin confident that I was sailing within a few degrees of my course.

  As the sun went down I began to feel sick, a new and surprising experience because I was a good sailor. I thought the symptoms were just reaction to the tension of getting away and to the first chill of loneliness.

  Loneliness was to ride with me for a thousand days, and throughout the longest nights. At times it was like something I could touch. Loneliness slunk aboard as the lights of Catalina island began to fade, and I told myself that time and distance would destroy it.
How wrong I was. There was no way of striking down this enemy, and my only defense was the business that a boat demands when under way, the activity called for by a sudden squall or the concentration of taking a fix on sun or stars.

  At nine o’clock I forced myself to eat a can of stew and then tuned the radio to my favorite Los Angeles rock music station. It was interesting to hear the news announcer report that I was on my way—“the first schoolboy ever to attempt to sail the world alone.” The announcer audaciously guessed a lot too, and guessed wrong when he added, “The most important piece of Robin’s luggage is a shelf of schoolbooks.”

  “Like hell,” I told the cats.

  At dusk the sea was lit by phosphorescence, tiny flashlights in the folding water which moved away from the rudder. The phosphorescence reminded me of looking down at Los Angeles from an airliner at night. You see things differently when you are alone. The sea seemed to be putting on a special show for an audience of one. Even the stars seemed now to be for my own entertainment.

  But into my tape recorder I spoke of simpler things: Joliette has diarrhea. The kittens are not enthusiastic about the spray, which takes them by surprise as it comes over the bow. I have just dried them off with a hand towel and they’ve taken over my sleeping bag. Catalina almost out of sight. Wind a steady fifteen knots.

  If any one piece of additional equipment aboard Dove was more important than the rest it was my portable battery-operated tape recorder. With it I not only filled out the bare details entered in my logbook, but I recorded, sometimes too intimately, my fears and hopes, my passing thoughts and deepest feelings. Throughout the voyage at every port of call I mailed the tapes to my home. They make up about two hundred hours or more of listening—mostly unimportant, idle chatter, the names of men and places, sightings of fish, boats and aircraft. But when there was danger and excitement, the magnetic ribbon caught these too. Above the sound of my voice can be heard, at times, the roar and thunder of a storm or the squeaks of dolphins nuzzling Dove’s hull.