Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  On the second day out from San Pedro I recorded: Made 103 miles in twenty-four hours, mostly under a reefed jib. Didn’t sleep till dawn, then slept till ten. Kittens eating now, dancing and clawing at everything that moves. Breakfasted off eggs and potatoes and a tuna sandwich. Spray hit my sandwich as I was putting it into my mouth, so I didn’t need to salt it. I’m worried about the alcohol stove, which last night flared up for no reason. I’m also worried by the amount of kerosene my Coleman lamp is using.

  At nightfall I had hung the Coleman aft so that its five hundred candlepower would bathe the cockpit and the sails with light and hopefully provide additional warning to shipping in my path. The lamp had to be pumped every two hours, a chore that soon wearied me.

  On the afternoon of my third day at sea the sky clouded over. With the gloom my spirits dropped. Throughout my voyage I was to discover that weather affected my mood. Given a clear sky my morale was good—unless I was sitting in the doldrums. But when the sky was overcast I was often gloomy too and even minor problems worried me.

  That third night I recorded: Just had dinner of canned turkey and yams, which stuck to the roof of my mouth. I’ll have to do something about my cooking! Took my first moon LOP [line of position] with a sextant.

  There followed several days of the kind of sailing that an elderly aunt would enjoy on a Sunday afternoon in San Pedro harbor—winds strong enough to fill the main and jib but not so strong as to put the gunwales under. From the start I had looked on this first leg to Hawaii as a shakedown cruise, a testing of Dove’s response to wind and water, and of my skills as captain, navigator, mate and cook. Much time was taken up with sextant reading and checking LOPs with the dead reckoning of my taffrail log.

  On the tenth day I hit the trades, which pushed Dove along 120 miles in twenty-four hours, and the clear night sky allowed me to take my first star fix. I was really excited about this and taped: It’s two o’clock in the morning and I know exactly where I am. That’s kind of fun.

  When I’d been out sixteen days I picked up a Hawaiian radio station and introduced the cats to Hawaiian music. I complained into the recorder: They don’t seem to appreciate the music as much as I do. The Honolulu station has just spoken about me. The announcer read a letter from my father, who’s asked all ships to look out for me. That’s me they’re talking about! They talked for five minutes, really weird! But I haven’t seen any ships anyway. The only way I know that there are other people somewhere is by a jet trail. I’m trying to picture a guy sailing along in a small boat in the mid-Pacific. And that guy’s me!

  All along my route I was to find out that the first or the second question a news reporter asked me was what I did all the time at sea. It sounds strange, but I was hardly ever without something to do—usually small things like cleaning up the boat, or mending something, or cooking. If there wasn’t anything to do I’d read or make work, like painting the inside of the cabin or cleaning up the stove.

  I would make quite a big deal out of writing a note and putting it into a bottle. The first time I did this was when I was on my way to Hawaii. The note read:

  “My name is Robin Lee Graham. I am sixteen years old and sailing a 24 foot sailboat to Honolulu. My position is 127° W; 22° N. If you find this note please write to me and tell me where you found it. Thanks a lot.” I added my uncle’s California address. I never did receive a reply to my bottled notes. Perhaps they are still bobbing about in the Pacific or yellowing in the sun on some distant shore.

  My library included Michener’s Hawaii (which I enjoyed very much), Hiscock’s Beyond the West Horizon, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, Heyerdahl’s story of his Kon-Tiki voyage, Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty. My schoolbooks remained under the used clothing in the cabin—although I was full of good intentions.

  So these early days passed, with me writing my log, taking fixes with a sextant, feeding the cats, washing my clothes, always tidying up the boat. Generally I stayed awake at night and slept from dawn till perhaps midmorning. There were a few moments of alarm.

  I told the tape recorder: Gosh, I was scared. I mean, all this water sloshing about. I really thought Dove was sinking. What else? I was just about to blow up the life raft when I discovered what was wrong. One of the plastic fittings had melted—I suppose by the engine exhaust when I was charging the batteries. It was fantastic how quickly the water had come through. Anyway, I pumped out the bilge and made another plug out of a little piece of wood. Wow, man! Anyway, it’s all okay now and we’re scooting along at about four knots.

  Another question often asked me, at least in my first year of sailing, was what my parents thought about the voyage. Mother never hid her opposition and I believe she actually spoke to lawyers to try to stop my voyage. But Father was always for it. Shortly after he had seen me leave San Pedro, he wrote a letter to my mother to try to stop her from worrying, and he later published the letter in various newspapers, perhaps to answer all the criticism of my parents for allowing a schoolboy to face “not only the dangers of the deep,” as one newspaper correspondent put it, “but the perils of the savages.” Father’s letter read:

  Dearest Norma,

  Our work is done and Lee has sailed. I watched the boat until it was out of sight in the morning mist. I returned to the slip to pick up some things. All the farewell wishers were gone. The slip was empty.

  As I drove home without him sitting beside me as we had done for so many days I had a great big empty feeling. We have been so close and so busy, and now there is nothing. I feel Lee has sailed out of my life. I have lost his boyhood companionship. When I see him again he will be a man, looking for a life of his own with other friends and other interests where you and I are not included.

  It happens to all parents, but it is so hard to take when it happens all of a sudden as it did to me, as he moved out of his slip and down the channel. I don’t think I would ever have let him go if I didn’t love him so much. It would have been easier on me to have kept him at home.

  In my heart I know it is the right thing to let him go. He was happier today than I have ever seen him, or than he probably ever will be. And happier at sixteen than most people ever will be after living a comfortable life—stretching it to a safe end.

  Lee knows the risk he is taking as he knows there are risks to those at home. Nobody can be entirely protected from the mishaps of life.

  If anything should happen to Lee—and it would be the end of me if it did—I would still feel that I did the right thing for him.

  Success or failure, he is fulfilling his destiny. We all have only one life, some are short and some are long. He loves life and wants a little more out of it than to follow convention out of fear of what others may think, or to be just another face in the crowd that follows the herd.

  Please don’t worry about Lee. The boat is as safe as can be. He knows this is the greatest thing that could happen to him and he appreciates what we have done for him to make it possible.

  With love, Lyle

  I am sure my father wrote that letter quite sincerely. I know he was really worried to see me go. But later, when he still wanted to control me from afar, I had to remind him that he had given me my freedom. I learned that our ideas of freedom were different because later there was to be much hurt to both of us.

  Dove continued toward Hawaii at a steady pace, and I continued to record on tape the small happenings of my progress: Cats pounced on a flying fish and look as contented as if they had eaten a jar of cream…. Today is Friday the thirteenth [of August]. Just took down the mainsail—not because of the date but because of a squall. Enjoyed seawater bath—poured buckets of brine over my head. Gosh, it’s good to feel clean…. The smell in the cabin has disappeared, so it must have been me that caused it and not the cats….

  August fifteenth and five o’clock A.M. Wow! Just saw my first ship…. That boat reported me. Listening to my radio and heard over Honolulu radio that I have been sighted. The radio
said that there had been “some anxiety about my safety.” That’s a lot of bull. Who could get into trouble in this kind of weather?

  Anyway, I was ahead of my ETA, because the ship had reported my position only 270 miles east northeast of Oahu.

  Newspapers in California and Hawaii were having a field day. What they did not know they continued to guess. One paper, I was to read later, reported me “industriously working at my schoolbooks.” The paper added: “Hawaiian hospitality is famous but Robin Lee won’t be attending all the parties he’s been invited to because he’s anxious to qualify for his high school diploma. He believes that the best way to learn is to get away to a quiet place—like the ocean.”

  So many newspapers wrote about me as if I were Little Lord Fauntleroy. Actually I had still not opened a schoolbook. I preferred fishing. My fishing equipment was in Honolulu, but I worked out my own method of changing my diet. One day I put a piece of canned tuna in a plastic bag and trailed it on a string. I gripped the other end of the string in my teeth so that my hands would be free to hold my bow and arrow. A big mahimahi came alongside, sniffed at the plastic bag and then snapped at it. I was lucky not to lose my front teeth and I didn’t get the fish. At that moment a plane circled low overhead. An hour later my radio reported that my mother was aboard. They had been searching for me for an hour.

  Easily the best moments of ocean sailing are those when land is first sighted. I saw Oahu at dawn on my twenty-second day at sea and whooped so loudly that the cats arched their backs. Outside Ala Wai harbor a Coast Guard power boat came alongside and offered a tow. With so many small boats around it seemed a good idea to accept.

  The press and television must have been short of news. They came out of the harbor in a small armada. One of the reporters shouted across the water, “What are you going to do when you get ashore?”

  “Find a men’s room and take a shower,” I said.

  Actually I felt terribly tired as I tied up Dove at a slip close to the spot from where Jim and Art and I had sailed out in the ill-fated HIC. I had been forced to remain awake for the previous three nights as I had run out of kerosene for my Coleman lamp. I had taken no more than cat naps by day—perhaps fourteen hours’ sleep in the previous sixty.

  It was marvelous seeing my mother again and my brother Michael, and I didn’t mind the pretty girls who necklaced me with leis. Hawaii is always fun. But I was anxious to be away again and to get out of range of people who gushed about my being the youngest solo sailor to make the California-Hawaii trip. A few days later my father flew over from California and helped me prepare Dove for the journey south.

  Now I was moving into the big league. Dove and I had to be ready for anything that the sea could throw at us.

  The only reason I spent as much as three weeks in Hawaii was that the inboard was causing trouble. It was a lousy engine to start with, worn and ill-used, and the spare parts did little to improve its efficiency. My father and I installed an additional outboard with an extension shaft. The outboard was light enough to be hauled up and lashed to the stern.

  I sailed out of Ala Wai at noon on September 14, my destination Fanning island, a tiny speck of coral (actually twelve square miles) 1,050 miles almost due south. With fair winds I hoped to make Fanning in ten days, but in case my navigation slipped I took on provisions for sixty. In my wallet I had seventy dollars—not very much for a global voyager.

  How much harder to say good-bye this time. What made it especially hard was that I knew how much my mother hated my going and how she really feared for me. It was difficult to meet her eyes, hidden behind a pair of dark glasses.

  A strange woman in a muumuu near the slip began ringing a bell. I was not sure whether this was intended as a salute or a tocsin. Anyway, this time there were no storm warnings hoisted on the harbor wall.

  Mother followed me out in a friend’s launch. There were last farewells, final shouts of “Good luck” and “Happy landings” and “See you when you arrive.” Then, following the old Hawaii custom, I threw my leis into the water. Hawaiians say that the traveler who does this will return to the islands again. The cats had been decorated with leis too. I forgot to throw their leis into the sea. The cats did not return to the islands.

  Then Dove was away under a main and a blue and white genoa.

  Two hours out of Hawaii I realized that I was not as brave as I had pretended. My throat was so tight it was hard to swallow. I told my tape recorder: Sure hated to leave. Wondering if I’ll ever see my parents again. I suppose saying good-bye always hurts. It can’t hurt more than this. I seem to be traveling at only one knot. But at least I’m pointing in the right direction. How long will it take me to sail around the world at this speed? Cats look miserable too. Oh, God, I’m so homesick!

  I was not a bit hungry, but I had to do something to stop my misery—to stop me from crying in fact. I made a spaghetti dinner and over my shoulder I watched the glow of Honolulu begin to fade. Fortunately, at the moment when I was just about to break down completely, a squall raced out of the northeast and Dove picked up to four knots. The last lights of Oahu disappeared quickly over the horizon.

  It took Dove four days to reach the trades and then the water turned a glorious turquoise blue—the kind of water that tempts you to jump over the side for a swim.

  Even wearing a harness—and there were very rare moments when I took it off at sea—to jump over the side would have been crazy, because if there had been a sudden puff of wind I probably would not have been able to haul myself back on board.

  Only four days out of Hawaii I saw the most beautiful sunset of the whole five years of my voyage. At least that is the one I best remember. I took a picture of it, but it doesn’t really show up well. There was no one to point it out to except the cats, and they weren’t interested, so I told the tape: The reds and the pinks are sort of coming toward me from the horizon and then the greens and the yellows are moving in and out like they’re being woven.

  I needed something like this to cheer me up because I was still so homesick. Loneliness slowed me down. When my morale was low I spent much longer calculating my position and making entries in my logbook.

  On days when the cats irritated me I complained into the tape recorder: Suzette and Joliette are so dumb. Why can’t they talk back to me? All they can do is chase their tails and go to sleep…. I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t even want to eat. Even that fruitcake you gave me tastes like warm water. You know what I mean?

  It was weird how when I was on the skids of self-pity something would turn up to distract me. The sunset was one example, and another was when I was in the doldrums under flopping sails, twelve days out from Hawaii: I saw my first school of porpoises.

  I recorded: The porpoises are now all around Dove. I can hear their squeaks. It’s amazing how loud they can talk. I guess I can hear them so well because my hull is so thin. I wonder if they’re trying to talk to me. Maybe one porpoise hit the keel, because I heard a thumping and she was squeaking real loud. It was nerve-racking but exciting. It has been so long since I heard any voice, and it’s almost as though someone was trying to answer me.

  To celebrate the visit of the porpoises I gave the cats a sardine supper.

  At times I was quite desperate to hear a human voice. Sometimes I would talk into the tape for a while and just play it back. I’d hear myself say: Everything okay here, but what’s happening at home? What? I can’t hear you. Why don’t you answer me? Are you sulking or something? Ah, well, if you won’t talk to me I’ll just have to go on talking to myself. Now this is my routine. I get up and put my sleeping bag away. Then I comb my hair as if a girl was coming to breakfast. Wish she was. Some seaweed just passing the boat. First I’ve seen. I’m overcooking my hard-boiled eggs. Perhaps six minutes should do them properly. Seventy-six-mile run in the past twenty-four hours. That’s a little better. Woke up last night and found I was going due north. How long did I go the wrong way? Squall probably turned me around. I have to wake up
regularly in the night to check my course and set the sails and pump up the lamp. Reading a book called High Wind in Jamaica. More porpoises came alongside. I paid no attention to them. They seemed to resent that. They began to squeak at me—real high squeaks. They seemed to be saying, “Look at me. We’ll race you to the next seaweed.” They’d win every time. Going to have tuna and yams for dinner.

  I was beginning to pick up the lore of the sea, learning to read the clouds, watching the drift of seaweed, marking the movement of the wind. Even my cooking improved. I discovered the best timing for a hard-boiled egg and how much water to add to hot cereal. I developed, too, a special understanding of sound. Even asleep I could sense a change in the wind or sea conditions.

  My mother once told me that she could hear a baby’s cry in a thunderstorm. The weird way I could hear the sounds of the sea, the wind and the boat, even when asleep, saved me much time and hundreds of miles, and more than once saved my life. Alerted by a change in wave patterns, I would immediately awaken, sometimes to find Dove pushed off course by a veering wind.

  Most of the time Joliette and Suzette were good company and I gave them a good report on the tape: It’s fun to watch them find their sea legs. They’ve learned how to bend their legs and lean over to keep their balance. They don’t like the hot weather, though. When it’s really hot I wrap them in damp towels. They seem to appreciate this. Then when the sun moves over and it gets cooler they creep out and start to play with each other. Both the cats love to watch the water when it runs along the gunwales. They sit absolutely still as if they are waiting to pounce on a mouse or something.

  When I’d figured out that I was about fifty miles from Fanning I became really uptight. I taped: I’m somewhere close to the island. I’m sure of that. But where is it? Pity there aren’t any milestones in the sea. My eyes are searching the horizon. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve missed this first landfall…. Every few minutes I stand on the cabin roof but there’s not a bump on the horizon. Oh, gosh, supposing I’m south of Fanning! It sounds crazy, but I’m beginning to look astern. That shows I don’t trust myself too much.