“I saw your want ad for crew and I’m interested.”
He invited me to have a cold cerveza up at the Muy Hambre cabana. Over the cerveza I told Fred the only boat I had ever sailed was my dad’s Hobie Cat in San Diego Bay, so I didn’t know a thing about sailing, let alone sailing across the ocean to a foreign port. Fred told me his boat was a custom-built Dreadnought 32. We discussed what my responsibilities would be on board, namely cooking and taking watches. I said that if what he really wanted was a “partner” I wasn’t interested. He told me he was recovering from a Tabasco-laden divorce and the last thing in the world he wanted or needed right then was a partner. All I would need to do was cook and stand watch.
With all the cards on the table, we agreed to go on a shakedown cruise—a trip to see how I took to sailing. We sailed to La Paz, 170 miles away.
It was a fabulous, two-day trip. Fred was the gentleman he promised to be and I took to sailing like a fish to water. I signed on the Tangaroa. My mom was more apprehensive about my sailing off into the wild blue yonder than my dad, but she knew she couldn’t stop me, just like she hadn’t been able to stop me from coming to Mexico nine months earlier.
When I returned to Todos Santos, the Jimenezes said it would be okay for me to leave my bus parked there. Years later I learned it had become a livestock feeder. They’d dump food into the sunroof and open the side doors so it could spill out, conveniently feeding the pigs.
Fred and I left Cabo in March 1979. The passage down to the Marquesas was a wonderful learning experience for me. I spent a lot of time at the wheel learning the feel of maneuvering a vessel through the dense sea. The only bummer was that Fred and I were like oil and water. He, in his mid-fifties, liked classical music. I, nineteen, liked rock ’n’ roll. He liked gourmet cuisine, I liked vegetarian meals. He was disciplined. I was carefree. He was an impressive man—posture perfect, body perfect, tan perfect. But all that was way too perfect for me.
One day, the horizon gave birth to volcanic peaks. I was breathless, seeing land after being surrounded for thirty-two days by nothing but blue seas and blue sky. Dense peaks split what had been a monotonous horizon line. It was a mystical sight that brought tears to my eyes. I wondered if this was how Christopher Columbus felt when he first saw land. Fred and I were barely speaking to each other by this time. I could hardly wait to get off Tangaroa, although I knew my desire to sail and explore had just begun.
Fred had told me we’d need to post an $850 bond upon checking into customs at Nuku Hiva, one of the Marquesan Islands of French Polynesia. But, being a novice traveler, I never dreamed my money, which was in pesos, was something the Marquesans wouldn’t recognize as a trading currency. Fred posted the bond for me, but it meant I had to keep crewing and cooking for him. I mailed all my pesos to my mom in San Diego, who said via telephone that she’d convert them to American dollars and mail the exchange back to me in care of General Delivery, Papeete, Tahiti.
During that time, I met Darla and Joey, who were also crewing on a yacht. We became fast friends. A small group of us crewmates, all about the same age, ended up fraternizing, and to keep us from committing mutiny, our captains decided to buddy-boat together through the Marquesan Island group.
Fred and I were the first boat in our group to leave the Marquesas and head for the Tuamotu Archipelago. It would be a three-day trip, and we deliberately timed it to arrive on a full moon, which would give us the most available light at night to navigate the atolls in case we arrived later than planned. Atolls are low-lying, ring-shaped coral reefs enclosing a lagoon. Because atolls are not easily seen and are surrounded by underwater coral reefs, they are dangerous to the mariner. Going aground on one can ravage the underside of a hull and sink a boat in minutes. The highest points on an atoll are the forty-foot palm trees swaying in the tradewinds. Due to the curvature of the earth and the fact that you are in a boat rolling with the sea, forty feet is not as obvious as a four-story building. Palm trees are the first indication to a mariner that solid ground is near.
It had been suggested that Fred and I look for certain ships and boats that had gone aground on these atolls, and to use the old hulks as points of navigation. Sailing past the wrecks on the reefs made me realize how important it is that everyone on board a boat be aware of the dangers and know how to navigate through hazardous areas. This was something I thought Fred knew.
Our first port of call was to be Manihi. Fred calculated it would be early morning before we spotted the atoll, giving us plenty of time and good light to find the lagoon entrance. When late morning came and we still hadn’t seen anything, I started to get worried. It wasn’t until one o’clock in the afternoon—when we saw the tips of palm trees blowing in the distance—that I could finally sigh in relief. Before long we were close enough to try to locate the entrance shown on the chart. We looked for a lull in the streams of white water, but all we saw was one long breaker. Fred explained that often waves break on either side of a lagoon’s channel, making it hard to distinguish the cut in the coral polyps.
Fred and I took turns looking through the binoculars, voraciously scanning the breakers along the shoreline. Finally I climbed up the mast steps to the spreaders—the crossbars on the mast—and wrapped my legs and one arm around the mast, surveying the tropical isle through the binoculars. The land appeared continuous, with no cut. We sailed completely around the atoll and still did not find an entrance. My nerves were taut and Fred refused to admit we were lost. The sun was quickly setting.
Through heated words we both conceded that we must have been set—that is, pushed—to the west, and that we had circumnavigated the atoll Ahe instead of Manihi. So we agreed to sail on through the night to Rangiroa.
Both of us were on edge that night. We stayed awake, watching and listening for any waves that might be breaking across a reef. It was that night, in my fear, that I realized I never wanted to be in such a position again. I needed to learn to navigate.
At first light we saw our destination. It was like the palms were waving a special hello to me. Around midmorning, we located the pass. This time it was easy to see where the white water petered out and then churned up again. The shift in color along the shoreline made the channel obvious. We could see a yacht flying an American flag tied to the village loading dock. We maneuvered into the dock, with help from the couple off the other boat. I jumped onto the dock and exhaustedly said to the woman: “Man, am I glad to be here in Rangiroa.”
“Rangiroa? You’re not in Rangiroa. You’re in Apataki!”
I was shocked. I leaped back on Tangaroa and went below to look at the chart. We had been set over a hundred miles southeast. What we had thought was the atoll of Ahe had actually been the atoll Takapoto, one of the atolls with no entrance.
I had now lost all confidence in Fred. I endured the five-day passage to Tahiti seething with anger toward him. My bags were packed two days before we arrived. I was eager to jump ship and leave the Tangaroa far behind me.
In Tahiti, I saw my friend Joey at an outside café; he told me he had signed on the schooner Sofia as a cook. I asked about Sofia. She wasn’t a luxury liner by any means, he said, having been built in 1921, but she was awesome: a 123-foot, three-masted topsail schooner that was cooperatively owned. He added that the accommodations were rugged: The head, for example, was a toilet seat mounted on a metal bowl located on the aft deck, rigged to dump overboard. The galley had four kerosene burners and one large diesel stove, and the sink pumped only saltwater. Fresh water was allowed for drinking and cooking only, not to be wasted on such frivolous things as rinsing saltwater off the dishes.
The membership fee to join the sailing cooperative was three thousand dollars. The cooks had to pay only fifteen hundred dollars. Joey set the hook when he told me the crew of Sofia was looking for someone to fill the other part-time cook’s position. The next day I went to the schooner, applied, and got the position, becoming a permanent crewmember.
Though primitive, Sofia did have character. She carried a crew of ten to sixteen people. Her ribs creaked of history and adventure. She was heading for New Zealand via all the South Pacific island groups. Those days on Sofia were some of the best imaginable. The freedom of being on crystal