AUGUST 26: Swam with dinghy out to a sand spit which attaches Waia to Waialailai at low tide. Shell tracks abundant and we found many augers and olives. Dived about an hour and then swam back to boat. We always swim with the dinghy for safety’s sake. It’s not that we are chicken, just sensible—I hope. Spotted the yacht Apogee sailing for Yalobi. We knew it from Suva. It’s from the east coast of America. Believe Al and Stella are aboard. They are collecting shells for the Smithsonian. Robin found enough eating shells for supper.
AUGUST 27: Girls came down to the beach and gave us some bananas. We mentioned we liked papayas. They promised to bring some next morning. We gave them a few ball point pens and kava roots. At 2:30 girls turned up again with ripe and semiripe papayas in a coconut frond basket. Lovely. Sailed over to the Apogee. Al and Stella gave us a wonderful supper.
AUGUST 28: I’m suffering from boils and so is Robin. Wonder what causes them? Big swell has come in and Dove is bobbing about. Robin decided to make spaghetti (ugh!). While rinsing the pot over the side he dropped half the spaghetti into the ocean and then spilled the other half over his pants. It I hadn’t felt so sick I would have died laughing. Robin wasn’t so amused. Boat moving so much in the swell we decided to sleep ashore. We gathered up blankets and medical box (it contains penicillin, pain killers, gauze and tape) and a can of applesauce. We were settling down to sleep on the shore when a boy came across and invited us to sleep in his bure. Rather horrified by rats running around.
AUGUST 30: Awoke early and found breakfast laid out for us by the family—neat blue homemade cloth mats and matching napkins, tea and banana fritter biscuits. The son of the family loaded us with garden-fresh vegetables to take back to Dove. Had a delicious fresh-water shower too. Powered Dove over to Nalawauki. Thought diving would be good but we had failed to notice the fresh-water stream that runs in here. Fresh water kills the coral and shell life.
AUGUST 31: Arose at 6:30 to a beautiful clear morning. We sailed on a little and Robin wanted to dive but I wasn’t too keen as the wind was chilly. The water felt wonderful though after the first shock. Terribly exciting diving on these coral reefs. Large caves are always popping up over unexpected ridges and sometimes big game fish come swimming lazily out. When the big fish see us they dart madly into holes. Any day now I expect to run into a shark. I suppose that would be the end of Robin Graham and Patricia Ratterree—but what a lovely place to die! Wind came up in the afternoon and we had a lovely sail to Naviti. When we passed a group of small islands we decided to anchor and dive…. Not too much luck but the spider conchs were good eating. I had a sudden feeling we’d catch a fish and then sure enough, just as we pulled out of Nanuyu Balava—bang! a big strike! With our combined efforts we brought in a beautiful barracuda, snapping and snarling at our feet. We’d both been dying for fresh meat and here it was. Pulled into small bay at 3:00, and immediately Robin wanted to go diving. I’d been in the water twice already and hated the idea of going in again. But rather than disappoint him I went over the side anyway. Returned to boat and made some chow. Cut fish into large steaks and made rice and gravy. Ate past the bursting point. Figured we’d have to do something about the remaining barracuda so we handed it over to two Fijians in a canoe. They gave us papaya. Read aloud to each other for a while from Tales of the Pacific. Then we went to sleep.
SEPTEMBER 1: Lazy morning. Woke when the sun was well up. Nibbled on the leftover fish and some awful rice pudding. Swam and dove a bit in a beautiful green patch. Found our first murex and one baby lobster—only a spoonful but great. Sailed for Tavewa. Magnificent lagoon. This is where the movie The Blue Lagoon was filmed. Poor anchorage on hard coral. Robin had to place anchors by hand in sandy patches. Made pea soup for lunch and fried the last of our bacon. Two natives paddled up in canoe and told us something of the history of the island. There are only twenty inhabitants. It seems that a Scotsman came here in the early part of the last century and married a Fijian girl. Most of the people are his descendants. They are rather inbred and odd.
SEPTEMBER 2: Fixed Spanish rice for breakfast. Natives came by in canoe and offered to fill our water bottles. I asked if there was a water hole where I could wash my clothes. Old man snatched my washing away and said his daughter would do it. The man sat down and told us story after story about the islands. He had it all memorized of how Captain Bligh had passed here when Bligh and a portion of the crew were set adrift after the Bounty mutiny. Apparently Bligh was chased away by cannibals. Robin wrote across his logbook, “This is Bligh Water.” The island is divided into four sections and the main families feud like crazy. The old man’s sister joined us. She is a riot—a sort of Mammy Yokum type with short braids. They took us to the store. You feel for the poverty of these people. There was so little in the store. Shelves were thinly scattered with cans of mackerel, one onion (which I bought for eight cents), matches, lollipops, gum, sugar, rice and one bag of tea (which I bought). They are so proud of their store, but it made me feel sad. One of the women took us to her bure and opened an old trunk. By the sound of the rusty hinges it had not been opened for years. It contained old family photographs. She pointed with pride to pictures of her two sons who had migrated to New Zealand. We felt suddenly wrapped up with the cares of people again.
One of the old men, named de Bruce, told us more tales of pirates and tribal wars. One story was about a chief and his twenty wives who were driven into a corner of the island where the cliffs are high. As they were about to be overrun by the invader he ordered his wives to throw themselves from the clifftop into the sea. There is still a feeling of death about the place.
SEPTEMBER 3: Old Charlie brought my washing back to the boat and our full water bottles. My washing is sparkling clean and fresh. Robin gave the old man his spare Coleman lamp. Wind came up strongly and we had some rather tricky sailing in poor visibility in an area completely honeycombed with reefs. Anchored at Nalova Bay, which has a shell market. The natives come in from the other islands and bring beautiful shells for the tourists who come here once a week on an island cruiser. The ship came in while we were there and we bought butter and ice cream off the ship—what luxury! We were invited to attend a dance, but I had one of those premonitions again, a sense of danger. I urged Robin not to go. We went anyway, and things did go wrong. First the dinghy came untied and drifted toward the reef. We went after it in Dove but we hit a reef. As Robin backed Dove off I retrieved the dinghy. When again looking for good anchorage, there was a jolt and crunching noise. Dove had hit again. If she had been a wooden boat I think she would have holed. But fiberglass is tough, and with help from local natives we got Dove afloat again. We were lucky!
SEPTEMBER 4: Lazy, lazy day. Robin sailed back to Nalova Bay while I just slept on the deck and soaked up the sun.
SEPTEMBER 5: Radio warned of strong winds on their way. We moved Dove to better anchorage shown to us by Fijians. The bay is so beautiful here, so blue, so calm, but we know the danger because along the shore there are coconut tree stumps—evidence of the ferocity of a recent hurricane. We waited for the predicted forty-knot wind, but it never came. Dove was as steady as a four-poster bed.
SEPTEMBER 6: We beached Dove at high tide and inspected her for damage. None, thank God. A Fijian boy on a rock nearby caught a fish and gave it to us. It was the only fish he caught—a gesture typical of island hospitality….
There are gaps in Patti’s diary, which was written to remind her of days that meant much to her. She knew as I knew that we had got too close to heaven too early, that our time in the islands must come to an end; that we would soon have to return to the real world again.
One day I noticed that she had stopped typing. She had put the typewriter back in the locker where she had found it. I asked her why, and she smiled and said, “I don’t want to write the last chapter.”
“Now who’s being morbid?” I said.
She did not reply.
Patti did not record that we had sailed to the northernmost island in the archipelag
o, and the one from which the Yasawas take their name. It is a limestone island, quite different from the others, which are all volcanic. The cliffs of Yasawa island are full of caves, many with their own legends. We found a grotto which, they say, was once the refuge of young lovers. We dived under a submerged arch and swam for several yards under water before surfacing. At first it was very dark, and then as our eyes got used to the gloom we saw that it was bathed in a soft blue light coming from the water through which we had just swum. The air was supersaturated, chilled and quite weird.
Patti said, “I’m sure there are bodies floating here.”
I was just as sure there were not, but the thought sent us scuttling back into the sunshine.
In one of the bays we had a quite alarming experience with a shark. I was setting the plow anchor by hand and Patti was on Dove. A shadow moved across the coral reef and when I looked up I was facing a long gray shark. It made a false pass at me. Sharks often do that before they strike. I guess it was figuring out whether I was worth a meal. Anyway, I didn’t give him time to work out the answers. I broke the surface and jumped into the dinghy as I heard Patti shouting a warning.
“Wow, man, that was too close,” I yelled to Patti.
“I’ll say it was,” said Patti. “It was awful. I could see him from up here. I just prayed you’d see him in time.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said as I climbed back aboard Dove.
We did. Actually this was the time when I turned Dove about. We meandered back through these marvelous islands to Lautoka. Neither of us spoke about the future, but both thought about it a lot.
A letter was waiting for me at Lautoka. It was from my father. He said he was flying out to join me in the New Hebrides. Some months earlier he had arranged for me to write my story for the National Geographic magazine. He wanted to take pictures of me for the story. I was to sail at once.
While I was readying Dove for the next leg of my journey, Patti found some Tongan friends to stay with, and she made plans to join a yacht sailing for New Zealand.
I intended to sail on to the New Hebrides at dawn on October 22. On the evening of the twenty-first a wave of depression hit me. It may have been due partly to the fact that I had spent the morning in a dentist’s chair.
Dove was ready to sail at first light. I was sick at the thought of leaving. I could not believe that I could ever be as happy as I had been in the Yasawas.
Patti came over to say good-bye and then in the evening I rowed her ashore. She was wearing the blue island dress she had worn when I had first seen her at Suva. It was as if the past weeks had never happened, that our time in the islands had been a dream.
Now we stood on the shore, an awkwardness between us. Both of us put up a fence against the pain of parting. We spoke about the weather and silly things like “Don’t forget to send me your address.” Then she did a simple thing. She took the gold chain from her neck and put it around mine.
She kissed me and said, “It’s only a loan. You can return it to me when we meet again.”
Neither of us dared to think we would ever meet again. She stood there on the beach, quite alone, and in the fading light she watched me row back to Dove.
5
Battlefields and Love Letters
I WAS hardly out of Lautoka harbor, the sun not an hour above the horizon, when a strong southeast wind came out of nowhere. It whipped the sea into twenty-foot swells with whitecaps. Dove began to take a lot of water and was really shuddering. I was feeling seasick for the first time since leaving California.
Now I had a new shipmate. Two days before I left Lautoka Patti had come down to Dove with a little spitting kitten. It scratched my arm as soon as I had taken it from her. “We’ll call it Avanga,” she said. “That’s the Tongan word for bewitched.” I was to find out how well she had named him. Avanga was now bouncing around the cabin, and when I opened the companionway he looked at me with murder in his eyes.
It was easy to believe that the wind and the sea were trying to beat me back to the Fijis. I was pushing the boat too hard and began to hope that the mast would break so that I could have an excuse to turn the boat about and return to Lautoka or the reef. Just when I felt I couldn’t take the weather any longer the wind dropped and shifted to the northeast. I put up twin genoas, and Dove logged 120 miles in the first twenty-four hours.
But the easier weather turned my thoughts inward and then to Patti. A desperate feeling of loneliness overcame me. I made some cinnamon toast, enough for two people, and pretended Patti was there to share it with me. I was going crazy with the pain of missing her, so I began to write her a letter. That helped. Patti had given me a small picture of herself, and I put it in front of me as I wrote:
…It is real hard to put into words how much you mean to me, how much you are now part of my life. I was hoping when I left Lautoka for a real strong wind that would blow me up on the reef so that the trip would be finished…. I want to talk my father into changing the route of my voyage so that I can take in Darwin in Australia. Would there be a chance of your getting to Darwin so that we could be together again? Perhaps I could find a job there, in a uranium or gold mine or something, and we could live together—live in truth and happiness as we did in the Yasawas…. I’ve got up twin genoas now and Dove is going like fun, but the wind is taking me further from you. When I think of this I could die from the pain of being torn from you like this…. I manage to keep myself from crying out loud, but inwardly I cry—especially when I look at some of the things you left on the boat…. Only you will understand what it means not to have you here with me, not to have someone to laugh with, to talk to, to whisper to….
The next day I continued the letter:
Last night I went to bed at six o’clock, but I didn’t sleep well. I’m reading a book about two young lovers, and the picture of you comes to my mind as I read, and I think how beautiful you are…. It’s night again, the best time, because you somehow feel closer to me at night. As I write I feel I’m almost talking to you—almost…. I know it’s hard to ask, but would it be possible for you to get to Honiara in Guadalcanal? I’ve simply got to see you again. I keep on taking out your picture and searching your face. I wish I didn’t cry so much. I’m just a damn baby, but I miss you more than words can tell….
My father was not in Vila when I arrived but turned up two days later with news of home and friends. It was more than a year since I’d seen him and I realized how much I’d changed. I don’t know that I’d changed so much physically, but I had in other ways. He spoke enthusiastically about Mike, Jim and Art, David and Steve, Judy and the other friends and relatives in California and Hawaii. They seemed somehow locked away in a closet in the back of my mind. I tried to remember their faces, their voices and the parties we’d gone to together. But it was like rediscovering a book I’d enjoyed as a child. The memories were nice but so distant—separated from the present by eight thousand miles of sea and a year of new experiences.
Between “now” and “then” the gulf was deep, and on the other side were bicycles, ice cream cones from the corner drugstore, ball games in the yard, a round of birthdays—all the interests of my boyhood years.
I was glad to hear my father’s news, interested to learn that my brother Michael was now an officer and serving in Vietnam. It was especially good to hear about my mother.
With home news now reported, my father started to talk about his plans for my journey. He was enthusiastic about the National Geographic contract. His traveling bag was loaded with new film, his back with cameras. What was needed, he said, were more photographs of me talking to island natives, pictures of Dove sailing round headlands and up jungle creeks.
The subject on top of my mind never came up at all. I would have liked to speak to my father about Patti, but I was afraid he wouldn’t understand. He was anxious for me to complete my global voyage and was worried about the slowness of my progress. I may have wronged my father. Perhaps if I’d talked to him honestly
he would have thought back to his own youth and understood my loneliness. I’m sure we could have been close to each other had things been different at our first meeting in thirteen months. I should have understood his deep personal involvement in my voyage. I should have told him that if I failed then I alone would have to take the blame. I should have told him to trust me and to free me from his control.
But we kept our secrets. At least I kept mine. My father produced maps and charts from his suitcase. Each one was marked with lines and dates. With the Suez Canal now closed, we agreed to plot a different route, around the Cape of Good Hope. As we talked across coffee mugs in Dove’s cabin and looked at the maps spread across the bunk I fingered the gold chain encircling my neck.
Hurricane season had come around again. I was not in a hurry to sail too far from land. My father studied prevailing weather charts and then announced that “risks are minimal.” He boarded a freighter bound for Honiara in the Solomons. I sailed out ahead of him on November 8, expecting to rejoin him in ten days.
Navigation through the islands of Malekula and Ambrim was not too difficult, but staying awake was. I reported into my tape recorder: I’m really nervous and scared because the winds are blowing in all directions. The winds seem to funnel down through the islands and the currents are strong and always changing. I’ve been without sleep now for thirty-six hours. I’m just so tired. I don’t remember ever feeling so tired. I take a long time to write up the logbook. All the islands here seem to have two or three names. I’ve not had much to eat—too tensed, I guess. The volcano on Ambrim has a weird glow. I was going to stop off at Pentecost island to see the famous tree divers. They say that the men leap eighty feet from a treetop and stop their suicidal fall a few feet from the ground with vine ropes tied around their ankles. But the shore looked too dangerous for a landing.
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