Phillip
Zweig(inducted 2007)
Voyage of the Sloop Blanquita
My voyage of a lifetime---about 3 ½ months and 3500 miles from Honolulu through the Hawaiian islands, Marquesas, Tuamotus to Tahiti---began in the summer of ’69. A war was raging in Southeast Asia, Neil Armstrong had just set foot on the moon, and the last of the yachts in the Transpac race from Los Angeles to Honolulu had rounded Diamond Head and tied up at the Ala Wai Yacht Basin. I had graduated from Hamilton a year earlier, dropped out of a Peace Corp training program on the Big Island, and completed a semester of graduate work in psychology at University of Hawaii. I was fully expecting to be drafted into the U. S. Army at any moment and was pulling out all the stops to avoid participating in our misguided adventure in Vietnam.
My sailing experience at that point had been limited to some Red Cross sailing lessons during the summer while in college and a few weekend races on Cal 20’s in Oahu. A college roommate’s mother belonged to the Waikiki Yacht Club and got me a guest membership. For many Transpac racers, the downwind sprint to Honolulu was just the first leg of an extended voyage. So it was with Capt. Robert Amos, the 50 year-old skipper of the Blanquita (“little white one,” named after Blanca, his El Salvadoran wife). An engineer and low-end Oakland real estate operator, Bob bought the hull and deck of the 42’ Cascade sloop and finished the rest himself. It was a solidly built fiberglass ocean cruiser with a bulb fin keel, a 13 hp Lister Diesel, and British-made Hasler self-steering gear. Though it lacked amenities like refrigeration, Blanquita carried a huge sail inventory and spares of everything. After a few Mai Tais one evening at the WYC bar, Amos said, “How would ya like to sail around the world?”
“Great,” I replied excitedly. “When do we leave?” [I had discovered, not incidentally, that potential draftees who had exploited every other legal loophole had three months to return to the U. S. if they were drafted after leaving the country.]
A week or so later, in late August, I cleared out of the apartment I shared with two other graduate students and was assigned a bunk in the main cabin of the Blanquita. Besides Bob, Blanca, and myself, the other crew members were Jill Carlson, a single, 23 year-old ex-flight attendant (they were called stewardesses then); Sparky Petre, 25, a strapping former football player at Oregon State, and Michael Dobrin, 30, a PR writer at Kaiser in Oakland who had grown weary, as he put it, of being wedged between in and out boxes at the giant company. For the most part, this disparate crew barely knew each other, and, as it turned out, the skipper and his wife barely knew each other either. Bob made it clear to Blanca that he was determined to realize his dream of sailing around the world--- with her, or without her.
Michael would later chronicle our voyage in all its delicious, colorful detail in “Misadventures in Paradise,” a two-part series that ran in the long-defunct American Boating magazine back in 1971-2.
After a frenzied week or so making final repairs, stowing provisions, and securing visas for French Polynesia, we cast off the dock lines for a gut-churning passage through the notorious Molokai Channel to the island of Molokai. The next weeks were idyllic, as we dropped anchor at Maui and the Big Island of Hawaii, rowing ashore for sightseeing, hiking and dinner. Our final port of call in Hawaii was Hilo, where we tied up to a tanker mooring late at night after a exhausting passage and woke up the next morning to find that one of our neighbors in Hilo Harbor was Lee Quinn, who had carved out an enviable niche for himself taking on all-girl crews for fun and profit. When we first spotted him, he was reading contentedly before the mast, while his bikinied, multicultural crew scoured the deck and performed other shipboard duties. Sadly, a couple of years later, Quinn, along with his all-girl crew, was reported lost at sea in a Pacific hurricane. Years later, at around 2:00 am one Saturday, I happened to catch a dreadful Grade C movie based loosely on his exploits. It was called, appropriately, “I Sailed to Tahiti with an All-Girl Crew.”
The plan was to cruise the Marquesas, Tuamotus, and on to Pitcairn, then head northwest for the Society Islands and wind up in Tahiti before the onset of hurricane season. First stop: Taoihae Bay, Nuku Hiva, the Marquesas, roughly 2100 miles to the SSE. Getting there required more than a week of “easting”---rough, close-hauled sailing into 20-25 knot northeasterly trades so that we could later fall off and head south on a reach for the fabled island of Nuku Hiva.
We cast off on October 3, 1969. After several days of pounding into sometimes towering Pacific swells, it started to become clear that our honeymoon was over. Bob was a first-rate sailor, navigator and technician, but he was the prisoner of an exceedingly rigid, controlling personality. He ordered his wife to stand a watch despite the fact that she was legally blind, or close to it. Jill, who never really adapted to life at sea, left us hungry and seething by letting kerosene from the gimbaled stove leak into the rice Creole. One morning, Sparky accidentally threw the silverware over the side with the dishwater. Bob levied a $25 fine, which the rest of us felt was going a bit overboard, so to speak. He also accused me of exceeding my daily ration of Tang. Ideological and generational rifts emerged between Bob and the crew on the war, race relations, and virtually every other burning issue of the day.
For nearly two months, we were virtually cut off from any news in the U. S. or elsewhere in the world. We had a short wave radio, but the reception was scratchy. Somehow, though, on October 16, one broadcast came through loud and clear, as I recall: the Mets had defeated the Orioles 4-1 in the World Series.
After 16 days at sea, I awoke one morning to the loud chugging of the Lister Diesel. Bob was at the helm, and a few hundred yards off to starboard was one of the most magnificent, awe-inspiring sights I had ever seen: the sheer volcanic cliffs and lush valleys of Nuku Hiva, the northernmost of the six inhabited islands.
Cruising sailors who’ve just dropped anchor after a long blue water crossing have a well-defined hierarchy of needs. At the top of the list is a cold beer, followed by a hot shower, and a fresh-cooked sit down meal served on a surface that doesn’t bob and weave. For our celebratory dinner, we found our way to the only restaurant on the island. That evening, chicken was the only entree on the menu. But it was delicious, even if we had to remove the buckshot ourselves, and certainly a welcome respite from rice Creole a la kerosino. Soon we moved on to Bar Maurice, a dingy, candlelit cement cube with a dirt floor that served as the watering hole for a motley assortment of raucous local drunks, the occasional cruising sailor, and romantics and escapees of every description. It was run by one of the great characters of these islands, Capt. Robert Maurice MacKittrick, the grizzled son of a Scots-Tahitian trader, who dispensed island lore, booze and beer with a toothless grin in English, French, Marquesan and Tahitian.
As we meandered over the next several weeks from island to island in this legendary tropical paradise, following, literally, in the footsteps of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin, and later, Thor Heyerdahl, we recognized that this crew was not likely to remain intact for a circumnavigation.
A major source of friction: Bob was preoccupied with the technical aspects of sailing, and had little interest in spending time ashore partying with the locals and learning about their history and culture. Mike, Sparky and I couldn’t get enough of that. By the time we reached Hiva Oa, Jill had decided that she’d had enough. She accepted the invitation from the local French meteorologist and his family to stay with them until the next copra schooner arrived that would take her to Tahiti and back home. Then we were five.
The schism erupted into a near-mutiny in Fatu Hiva. After a night of dancing to the erotic beat of tamure music and guzzling Hinano beer, we accepted a ride in a runabout to the Blanquita. We were looking forward to presenting Blanca with a gift of 15 loaves of French bread made especially for us by the local baker. Alas, the French bread took the brunt of a six-foot wave as we charged through the heavy surf. Bob and Blanca were furious. As the altercation escalated, Mike, Sparky and I seriously considered jumping ship and turning our backs on western civilization. One of the villagers had offered to rent us a cottage for $20 a month. But after much soul-searching, we concluded that we would probably disrupt the pace of life on the island and agreed to press on to Pitcairn, which figured heavily in another, more celebrated mutiny nearly two centuries earlier.
After several more days at sea, we made landfall at the sun-parched, hardscrabble island of Amanu in the Tuamotus. These are low-lying coral atolls that are barely visible until you are right upon them, even in broad daylight. Trying to navigate through them at night is hazardous at best. Motoring through a passage in the coral reef, we anchored in the clear blue waters of Amanu lagoon. Two young Amanu natives joined us for the next leg to Hao, a French military installation that was involved with the nuclear tests the French were conducting at the time on Mururoa atoll to the southeast. We got a premonition of things to come when a military helicopter swooped down low over us. Suddenly one of the crew turned around and shouted, “The dingy’s gone!” Ignor---as in “Ignor-Amos”---which we were towing on a long painter, was nowhere to be found. Blanca was on watch with her head buried in the compass. One of our island guests quickly shimmied up the mast barefoot and scanned the horizon. No Ignor. Gone. Perdu. The riddle of the missing “Ignor” was never solved, but Blanca was a prime suspect. Was she clueless, or did she cast off the painter in the hopes of forcing Bob to cut short the trip and head directly for Tahiti, where a hot shower and fresh-baked French bread awaited her?
In the end, the French “force de frappe” made that decision for us. Although we had radioed ahead and received permission from the authorities to enter Hao lagoon, we were startled when we were greeted by a French gunboat manned by a contingent of inhospitable military officers. Dispensing with nautical etiquette, they boarded Blanquita without requesting permission, demanded the film from our cameras, shoved the boys from Amanu into their boat and ordered us to proceed directly to Tahiti. No, they said, they wouldn’t help us fix our broken generator. And no, we wouldn’t be allowed to wait until the current through the narrow slit in Hao lagoon, then rampaging at well over four knots, shifted in our favor. You must leave NOW! What’s more, they intimated, on arrival in Tahiti we would likely be charged with trespassing and incarcerated in a military prison.
The passage through Hao lagoon was, in a word, terrifying. The boat rocked like a seesaw through the steep chop, and waves literally crashed on the foredeck. To avoid being swept overboard, we wrapped our arms around shrouds, mast, lifelines--- anything that was bolted down--- as if our lives depended on it. (They did). If the engine had cut out Blanquita surely would have been impaled on the coral heads on either side of the channel. But we made it, and the rest of the trip to Tahiti was a mostly uneventful downhill slide.
Fortunately, the French being the French, the civilian bureaucrats in Papeete appeared to know nothing about the prison sentence we had been given by their military counterparts back in Hao atoll. But not long after we secured our bowline at the quai Bir Hakeim, the crew situation quickly began to unravel. In one of those bizarre small world coincidences, Michael no sooner stepped ashore than he met a friend from Oakland who had built his own trimaran after graduating from high school, sailed it to Tahiti, and met and married the daughter of a Tahitian chief. He immediately invited Mike to stay with his family at their home outside of Papeete. Meanwhile, Bob ordered Sparky off the boat after he brought a woman on board whom Bob deemed to be of questionable character. By this time, Bob had decided to ride out hurricane season---January to May in that part of the world---in Tahiti. Having concluded that crew were unreliable, he planned to rig the boat for solo sailing. I remained in Papeete for about two weeks, then signed on as a “workaway” on the M/S Thorsgaard, a Norwegian cargo ship that plied the route from the West Coast to Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, Noumea and occasional stops in New Guinea. But that’s another story.
Blanca later flew home to Oakland and filed for a divorce. Tragically, she died of cancer several years later. Bob sailed on to the Fiji Islands, where he got involved in a hotel construction project and met an attractive, 18 year-old woman of Indian descent. Her father agreed to let Bob marry the girl if Bob would cut him in on the hotel deal. The couple had three children. Fast forward to June 1985. Bob was found dead in the back of his van in the parking lot of the Royal Suva Yacht Club, murdered by his young wife and several conspirators. The murder and trial made front-page headlines in the Fiji Times.
Michael picked up when he left off with his writing career, edited American Boating magazine, and eventually started his own PR firm. Borrowing the title of the 1960’s Rolling Stones song, he quips that he is now the Under Assistant West Coast promotion man for Toyota. By inviting me to write a piece for American Boating on my post-Blanquita escapades, he helped launch my career as a financial journalist and author. We remain lifelong friends. Re-reading his “Misadventures in Paradise” series jogged my memory of a number of the incidents I’ve described here. He also gets the photo credits.
Ironically, where once I helped plot a course from one South Seas safe harbor to another, today my work involves safe harbors of the figurative kind. As a media consultant and non-registered lobbyist, I shuttle between New York and Washington trying to persuade Congress to repeal the Medicare anti-kickback “safe harbor” exemption to the Social Security Act, which, incredibly, permits big healthcare suppliers to pay bribes and kickbacks to giant hospital purchasing cartels to guarantee their exclusive access to 5,000 U. S. hospitals. It is a long ways from Washington to paradise.
---Phillip L. Zweig