Flew by the Seat of My Pants

I looked around for someone to help me sail the “Sarah Ann” because there was no way I could sail a gaff-rig by myself and unfortunately my son Jeff couldn’t get the necessary time off from work to go and I knew Shirley and Cindy wouldn’t be much help. I went to a marine hardware store, asked around, and eventually found a 23-year old kid who wanted to go named Dave Davis, who we immediately began calling Dave Dave. Shirley and my then-fourteen year old daughter Cindy rounded out the crew. We set sail right after the school year ended. We left from Alamitos Bay filled with high hopes, excitement, and yes, a few nerves. Skipper’s Log 6/18/78 Barometer pressure 30.00 Left slip at Alamitos Bay about 10:15 for Hilo, Hawaii. Family and friends came to see us off. Shirley, my wife, daughter Cindy and crew member Dave Davis aboard. Winds about 20 kts. Motored past the east end of Catalina, wind increased to about 30 kts, 8 to 10 foot swells, wind chop. Cindy & Shirley seasick. I didn’t feel to hot either. Dave OK. Dave and I put on foul weather gear. Boat awash, forward hatch leaking. I’d put a little barbecue grill onboard and our plan was that we were gonna make hamburgers our first night to celebrate the beginning of our voyage. We had everything ready, when suddenly this strong wind comes up and really starts pounding us. Shirley and Cindy started to get seasick, they went down below where they proceeded to get as sick as dogs. What a start to the trip-- we had a rough passage just to get to Catalina, twenty-six miles off shore. Somehow we finally got out past Catalina, between it and San Clemente Island and I took a shot with the sextant so I could start charting our course. We never did have our hamburger feast because everyone was so sick, we had to throw the meat overboard the next day because it had spoiled. Before we left, everybody kept saying to me, “Hey Art, you’re going to Hawaii in June? It’s a piece of cake!” Well it wasn’t a piece of cake! I couldn’t use the stars to navigate because it was overcast the entire voyage. I tried to take sunshots during the day to plot our course, but sometimes all I could see was the highlight of the sun through the clouds. I knew how to shoot the stars, but I never had a chance to do it because I never could get three stars lined up to get a triangulation with my sextant. That summer these hurricanes called chabascos were coming out of Mexico heading straight for Hawaii, of course. Let me tell you, those things caused some storms! One night I was on watch and there were seven line squalls in a row. They call it a line squall because you can see the storm brewing on the horizon and then all of a sudden the wind will come up around fifty or sixty knots, and it would start raining like hell... Believe me, you don’t know rain until you’ve been rained on at sea. It’s like sitting under a pipe with a raging stream of water running on your head. On the mizzen-mast, right where the rain would hit it and run off, you could put a pail under the run-off, a couple of seconds later it would be full. During one storm, rain leaked into the front of our forward hatch because it wasn’t sealed properly by Gary my joiner guy. All of our sleeping bags and belongings up front got soaked—Rain at sea is something else. There’s no such things as individual raindrops, at least that I could distinguish, it was just solid sheets of water. At the time I had a full beard, and it would get wet and dry out, get wet and dry out--- I would go down below and shake it and all the salt that had dried it in would fall out, it was like a big salt shaker. I got so soaked with salt water on the trip that the fingernails on both of my hands lifted up halfway down, and got so raw I had trouble buttoning a button or zippering a zipper. It rained like that a lot of the way to Hawaii.