Samoa to Tonga to New Zealand and Tahiti   •   December 1979 – March 1981

“Around the World on a Shoestring” began in June 1979 when I left Astoria, Oregon with a one-way ticket to Hawai’i and $200 in my pocket. My adventures in Hawai’i and how I got south of the equator are described at length in the piece “Apprenticeship” posted previously on this blog. “South Pacific” takes up the story as I arrive in a Western Samoan village as the invited guest of a young fisherman returning home for a visit, and follows me to New Zealand on one sailboat and to Tahiti on another. The piece ends as I leave New Zealand on a third yacht headed for Australia as a Tasman Sea cyclone threatens.

This is a pretty straightforward account of what it’s like to travel to faraway places with little or no money, relying on one’s own resourcefulness and ingenuity to survive and find a way from one place to another — at least what it was like in the 80s, it would be different in 2018 I’m sure. There are not a lot of philosophical asides, few jokes, not much navel-gazing or scrutiny of my own shortcomings, but plenty of judgement of others and opinionated  rants. Popeye was my mentor in those days: “I yam what I yam.” To others who might want to try traveling “on a shoestring,” I would advise you to do it when you are young enough to put up with a lot of discomfort but old enough to have some significant survival skills.

Joseph Stevenson  •  Astoria, Oregon  •  March 2018

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Joe’s mother was as surprised to see Joe as she was to see me, but she greeted me warmly and so began my nine-month love affair with the land and people of Samoa. The extended family of Joe Wulf consisted of nearly 20 souls under one roof: Joe’s father and mother, his youngest sister Star, his elder sister Marcella, her husband Faaumu, and 10 of their 12 children. Faaumu was 36 years old and Marcella one year younger, the whole family Catholic. The Samoans are solidly Christian these days, and of various denominations. It is about the only aspect of “Western” culture that they have embraced wholeheartedly.

Probably because most of the children were still too young to do much work, another teenage boy and girl lived with the Wulf-Faaumu clan, borrowed from another family. In Samoa children are frequently passed around. This in no way implies a lack of love and care, often it is the child’s own wish. A child is not expected to stay where he is not wanted, needed or happy. The Samoans love children to a fault, and are much more gentle, tolerant and affectionate with them than in the average American family. Faaumu and Marcella’s second child was living with relatives in American Samoa and going to school there, and child number 11 had been given to another family when still an infant. One of the first things I noticed about the Wulf family was the degree to which Star, a Downes Syndrome woman in her 30s, was integrated into the life of the family. She was an important working member of the family, cleaning, sweeping and tending to the smallest children with boundless patience and affection. She spoke very little, but she learned to say my name and did so every time we met around the house. Star gave, and received, a lot of love.

Never have I experienced such hospitality as I was shown in Poutasi, especially considering the slender and severely taxed resources of the Wulf clan. The Samoans have strong traditions of hospitality and a guest is waited on hand and foot. To house a guest does honor to a family in the eyes of the village, and one is not encouraged to reciprocate in any way. All my attempts to help out in the ways I am accustomed: washing dishes or clothes, or helping around the house and garden, met with severe disapproval, and eventually I just relaxed and let it happen. I was thin as a rake at this point from lean days in Hawai’i, and I couldn’t have come to a better place to put on some weight.

The Samoans love to eat. All of their coins are adorned with pictures of food items. They generally eat only twice a day, but when they do they really put it away. My gargantuan appetite was the most Samoan thing about me, and they enjoyed stuffing me to capacity with every sort of food available. The staple foods are taro, breadfruit, and boiled green bananas supplemented with various vegetable greens, fruit, coconut cream, eggs, fish and a wide assortment of shellfish and other sea life from the reef. Occasionally a pig is roasted in the earth oven or “umu”, or perhaps a chicken, or a goat.

They had me try everything. I learned to love fish heads and raw urchins with their spines still’s waving about. The only thing I never cared for was fermented sea cucumber guts, but most of it was delicious. At the table you never have to ask for more, your plate fills up automatically and is generally as full when you finish as it was when you started eating. Later, back in American Samoa I received a letter from Poutasi which included the lines: “You are the number one eater we have ever seen!” — a remarkable statement coming from a Samoan.

Sunday after church is a weekly feast — always an umu on Sunday. No one works on the Sabbath, you can actually be fined by the village if you do, so everyone just eats and goes to church, sometimes two or three times, with in-between naps. The nap is another Samoan institution. I have always envied people who can flake out at a moments notice and cop a bit of rest and the Samoans are expert. They tend to do the hardest work in the dawn hours, eat a huge brunch late in the morning, nap and take it easy in the midday heat, finish up work in the late afternoon, gorge again at supper time and then early to bed.

My fiddle made me an instant celebrity in the village, violins simply don’t exist in Samoa and no one has ever seen one before except in pictures. I was often called upon to play for curious people and neighbors who dropped in to see the “palagi” (the Samoan word for Caucasians). It being December, Christmas carols were quite popular and I found that most of them came quite easily on the fiddle. Most Samoans can play guitar or ukulele, and I got to sit in on some of the fia fia music parties. I soon discovered that the Samoans have their own version of “Jambalaya”, all about food of course, and we played that one a lot. “Home on the Range” is another song well-known in the Pacific Islands for some reason. Probably the most popular contemporary song is “Rivers of Babylon”. By and large Samoan music is vocal, and they love group singing in rich harmonies. The children’s choirs have a brilliant, vibrant sound that goes right to your marrow and brought tears to my eyes the first time I heard it. Faaumu was the leader of his church choir and I was exposed to a lot of fine hymn singing both in church and at home.

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I thrived on the village life, learning to eat with my fingers and sleep on a mat on the floor, certainly cooler than a bed. My first visit lasted five days, and I returned to Poutasi two weeks later for Christmas and New Year’s. I arrived Christmas morning with a box of toys for the kids and a bottle of 151 Bacardi for Faaumu. Faaumu took me and the bottle to a neighbors house where we settled down to some serious drinking. The Samoans mix their booze with lots of water in a big tea kettle. The drinkers — there were about a dozen on this occasion — sit in a circle and drink until it’s all gone. I didn’t last very long. I have vague memories of playing a bowling game where you roll a breadfruit at some tin cans, and later sitting in the top of a tree laughing fit to bust at the efforts of Faaumu and his friends to get me down. When I got back to the house Joe’s mother handed me a bar of soap and a towel and pointed to the river. Faaumu didn’t get home till the next afternoon.

One night as we sat chatting in the moonlight they asked me to invite my mother to visit them in Poutasi. By this time they had found out that my mother lived alone, unthinkable in Samoa, and I suspect they were trying to cover for me, such a negligent son to go off and leave his mother. The more I thought about this invitation the more I thought that perhaps my adventurous mother might accept the invitation and have a great time to boot. So upon my return to American Samoa, where I now had a job painting a house for two dollars an hour, I sent off a 17-page letter of invitation and description of the scene in Poutasi.

Sure enough, in late March my mother flew into Pago Pago, spent a few days with the Kneubuhls, old family friends from Southern California days, and then we set out by ferry for Western Samoa. I had spent a great deal of time and energy worrying about this adventure: what if there was an accident or some kind of medical emergency? As it turned out I was the one who caught a cold and spent a lot of time in bed with the sniffles, while my 67-year old mother spent most of her time skin diving out on the reef. I literally couldn’t keep up with her. Faaumu took took us out to a little island half a mile offshore owned by his family. One of their few sources of hard cash was taking day parties of picnickers out to Nusafe’e. Nusafe’e is the tropical isle you’ve always dreamed about being stranded on, preferably with an intimate friend. About the size of a football field, on one side the shore is rocky and on the other white sand, with beautiful reefs all around it. Coconut palms cover the island, and are so tall relative it’s diminutive size that from shore it looks something like a green cake with little white feet. A few of Faaumu’s relatives are buried there but it is otherwise uninhabited, and I ruminated about returning in my old age with a few pigs and chickens to plant nine bean rows. My mother has some great photos of Nusafe’e and Poutasi that I’m sure she’d be glad to show to anyone who can find the leak in her water line. [This offer has expired.]

Life in American Samoa is not quite as traditional but despite 60 years as an American territory, except for television, soda pop and printed T-shirts, even in the American sector the Samoans remain largely unaffected by American culture and customs. Samoan is still the language of choice, and fa’a Samoa still dictates all the important social, political and family structures. Two dollars an hour doesn’t sound like much, but in Western Samoa wages are more like two dollars a day, and on my small salary I could live and save enough for the occasional trip to Poutasi. Eventually I got a place to myself, a tin-roofed shed in the corner of the Kneubuhl family compound/estate/plantation, surrounded by a lush assortment of fruit and flowers. I called it “my little brass shack.” I could actually reach out my window and pick papayas off the tree. I ate lunch daily from the family’s ample leftovers at the house I was painting, bathed from a rain barrel, cooked dinner on a little Primus stove Mrs. Kneubuhl lent me, and in the evenings watched the enormous fruit bats flitting about in the moonlight.

Since Samoan houses have no walls, driving along the road at night you often see them glowing with the ghostly light of television. Wireless communication is the modern wonder in much of the world, and the traveler is continually surprised by unexpected often paradoxical juxtapositions, cross-cultural tableaux. A year later I hiked 5 km into the hills of Bali where most of the small children had never seen a Caucasian person, to find my hosts listening to a BBC broadcast of Stefan Grossman playing Blind Willie Johnson records.

Back in 1980 television came to American Samoa in the form of videotapes flown in from California and broadcast a week later. Every night you saw the NBC nightly news from a week ago. The only live show was a short news program without any visuals, and so it was that the day Mount St Helens erupted, announced on the live news, the last item on the week-old video: “Scientists observing Mount St Helens today predicted that a major eruption would take place within a week.” It was a bit eerie. I was really put out to be missing all the action. Turn around for one minute and a volcano goes off in your backyard! Everybody sent me photos, it must have been the most photographed volcano of all time, and my house-sitter Winley Zanetto back in Astoria sent me some ashes off my own roof. I ate them and felt more a part of things.

But far and away the most popular television show in Samoa is the wrestling from Hawai’i. I don’t know how many of you watch pro wrestling – my grandfather did – but the Samoans are crazy about it. It doesn’t hurt that there are lots of Samoan wrestlers these days, generally festooned with the traditional tattoos solid from the midsection to the knees: big, and tough and mean. In Hawai’i of course they are generally cast as the bad guys, so to keep up the interest they usually win the match. Well there is nothing the Samoans like better than watching one of their own demolishing one or more handsome, clean-cut palagis. One night I saw a 300 pound tattooed Samoan with a wild head of hair take on two palagis and pin them both simultaneously. When it’s time for the wrestling broadcast in Samoa the streets are empty. Towards the end of my stay in Tutuila, the largest island in the American group, the power generating facilities were breaking down so regularly that all the offices on the island were forced to turn off their air conditioning, a real trauma for the white-collar crowd. All television broadcasting was discontinued except for Sunday night wrestling. Never mind air conditioning, if they ever canceled the wrestling there would have been an uprising.

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Around this time I had hatched a plan to build musical instruments as I traveled on, using whatever materials were locally available and giving the finished instruments to my hosts as a way of repaying their hospitality. With this in mind I was assembling a small tool kit and working on three stringed instruments as well as experimenting with making flutes out of bamboo. The first instrument I had started in Hawai’i, it was to be a fiddle with the body made of two intersecting coconut shells. At the time I was looking for ways to increase my earnings as a busker, and I figured a playable instrument of this kind would attract a lot of attention. I finally finished this instrument in Samoa, also two ukuleles: one made from a Philippine mahogany cigar box, and the other from a big Poutasi coconut shell with a sharkskin top. The sound of the coconut fiddle was disappointing, I think it needed a different top, but I didn’t have the heart to tear it apart so I just shipped it home to Astoria where it still hangs on the wall. The cigar box uke, which looked very sharp and played beautifully I gave to the Kneubuhls, and the little sharkskin uke traveled on with me.

People always used to ask, “What’s that thing called?” and I never had an answer until one day a little girl in New Zealand said to me, “Anything at our house that doesn’t have a name we just call Leroy.” And so little three-stringed Leroy became my traveling companion for the next year and a half. Small, sturdy and remarkably loud for his size, Leroy served me well, and only when I started traveling overland in Indonesia and found that I absolutely had to reduce my traveling weight was I persuaded to put Leroy in a box and send him on the slow boat to Astoria. I also used my new tools to repair a guitar that I spotted in a store with one whole side kicked in. They gave it to me for $15 – it had been brand-new – and when I got it back together I left it in Poutasi with Faaumu’s family where it got a lot of action. Eventually when it came time to travel on, it became obvious that I couldn’t pack all those tools around, so I had to content myself with a Swiss army knife, a few warding files, and a bit of sandpaper sufficient to turn out the occasional flute.

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Early in 1980 I took a five week sabbatical from house painting to take a job bonito fishing, same as my friend Joe Wulf, though not on the same boat. Two young Samoans and I set out every day at dawn in a 25 foot outboard powered catamaran and trolled around Tutuila island for about 6 to 10 hours depending how the fishing went. What you do is watch for birds circling and diving and head for that spot; rarely do you pick up a fish unless there are birds around. We went full throttle all the time, stopping only to pull in a fish using big wooden reels. Generally the fish were about 3 to 5 pounders, though we’d occasionally get a 20-pound yellowfin tuna or the odd shark. Sometimes the birds and the fish were moving just a little bit faster than the boat could go and we’d chase them for miles without landing a fish. Sometimes there was just nothing, and we’d shut down and nap for a few hours, or swim, or play the ukulele I’d bought for $10 in Pago Pago. I bought the uke about the same time I started living with the fisherman in Faga’alu village. I let it be known that I didn’t mind anyone using it as long as it stayed in the village, and that little uke was busy from dawn till late at night every day of the week. If I wanted to play I could generally stick my head out the window, hear it playing somewhere in the distance and retrieve it.

Ukes being so small are not only quite easy to pack around but less fragile than a guitar, and mine never came to any harm. I absorbed a lot of Samoan music in the month I spent in Faga’alu, and became quite fond of the Samoan popular music broadcast by the local radio station “WVUV — The Power of Polynesia”. After persistent inquiry I found out that these were not commercial recordings. The songs the radio broadcast were were recorded at the station and I doubt that the groups were paid. Radio-cassettes being cheap and popular, Samoans made their own tapes from the radio and played them all the time at home and in the colorful little “chicken-catcher” buses that scurry about the island, each of which boasts a leather-lunged sound system. Some of the songs came from afar like “Jambalaya” and “Crying Time” but with new Samoan lyrics, most were original compositions. I loved the beautiful harmony singing and the tasteful acoustic guitar work. Since my departure from Samoa some of these groups have recorded in the studio and commercial tapes and records are now available, but I treasure the memory of that lovely music played and disseminated for free, a truly “popular” music with no commercial angle. [WVUV is still on the air today but the music has acquired an unappetizing gloss. The guitars have been replaced for the most part by synthesizers and there’s a GarageBand feel to all of it. The local news is still interesting to listen to. Yes I’ve been streaming WVUV as I edit this piece.]

One of my fellow fishermen Filipo was a hot guitar and ukulele player, though he didn’t seem to own an instrument, at least not with him in American Samoa. Like Joe and most of the other fishermen he was from Western Samoa, over in the other territory trying to make some money for his family back home. American Samoa serves this function for Islanders from a large area of the Pacific. The US government sends something like $60 million a year down there (the population of American Samoa was only 30,000 at the time), and some of it gets siphoned off to the benefit of people from Western Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Niue and the Tokelaus. The medical care at Pago Pago hospital is something between free and extremely cheap, and again many of the needy come from afar. (Me for example, more on this later.) Filipo used to play “Roll Out the Barrel” on my uke, his hand a blur, using a matchstick for a pick. Sometimes he would stop quite suddenly in the middle of a song having improvised some witty verse, and leap up with a great whoop while everybody rolled with laughter. Good times. I managed to record some tape of Filipo and other Faga’alu folk playing and singing, sometimes with my rudimentary accompaniment.

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A few words on the subject of communication, the language barrier. English is taught in all the schools of both Samoas, and in fact until recently the Samoan language was not officially used or taught at all in the schools of American Samoa. The fact that you find very few Samoans who can actually speak the English language I consider a measure of how tenaciously they have stuck to their own language and culture. Everybody knows a little English, but all ordinary discourse is carried out carried on in Samoan. It was possible for me to communicate fairly well using some basic English, a lot of body language and pantomime, and a small assortment of Samoan nouns and adjectives, although – and I’m not proud of this – in nine months I never learned to make a proper sentence.

When I went fishing with the boys I learned the words for line, hook, birds, motor and the names of the various fish and so forth. They didn’t know much more English than I did Samoan but we got along fine. Not to say that it wouldn’t have been quite a different experience to have been able to chat with them in their own language, but it’s remarkable how much you can communicate without a lot of words. In fact occasionally the language barrier was sort of fun. They used to do a lot of singing on the boat, and my name (Iosefa) used to pop up regularly in their songs, so I used to retaliate by improvising songs in English prominently featuring their names. Occasionally things got pretty wild and we used the hardwood sticks we used to quiet the fish and beat rhythms using every part of the boat for a drum.

One day on the way home I dozed, half-listening to one of the guys singing a melancholy air when I suddenly realized that he was harmonizing with the steady drone of the outboard motor. I began to experiment with this idea, experiments which evolved into a song contrasting my experiences in Hawai’i and Samoa, and dedicated to songster Michael Hurley.

“I went to old Hawai’i, the people there are rich,
Or else they’re on the welfare, but you can’t tell which is which.

They hit me in the back with a bottle of beer, I was walkin’ in
the ditch,
They got no use for a fiddlin’ man and a travelin’ sonofabitch.

(Chorus)

And it’s fa’a Samoa, I couldn’t ask for more,
Eatin’ with my fingers and sleepin’ on the floor.

Now if you got no money Hawai’i is the pits,
Unless you’re a sweet little honey with a great big pair of tits.

So it’s goodbye Hawai’i, aloha, lotsa luck,
I’m off to Pago Pago with a fiddle and 100 bucks.

I spend all day on a fishin’ boat a couple of miles from land,
Chasing down the aku (bonito) and pullin’ em in by hand.

Now when you’re on a fishin’ boat, boy you got no band,
You sing with the outboard motor, jump and clap your hands.

I think about Michael Hurley, back in the States somewhere,
He was “Goin’ to Polynesia”, and I wonder if he ever got there.

When you come to Samoa the booze is duty-free,
A fifth of ol Jack Daniels, just $7.63.

Now this is the end of this ol song, it’s been one helluva day,
We’re coming in with 58 fish to Faga’alu Bay.”

I recorded this one day on the boat with the original outboard motor accompaniment and sent the cassette to Mr. Hurley along with some other Samoana in care of his sister in Vermont.

So back to the subject of language and communication. I think that most places in the world you will find at least a few people who speak a bit of English, and if you speak slowly and distinctly, sticking to literal sorts of constructions and as much as possible avoiding the colloquialisms that English is rife with, that you will get along okay. In other words don’t let the language barrier scare you off from traveling. Pantomime is also extremely useful. In fact if someone were contemplating an extended trip such as mine, I couldn’t think of a better preparation than studying mime or at least playing a lot of charades. Someone highly skilled in pantomime could not only make money in the street, but communicate and entertain anywhere in the world. It would be a fabulous way to travel requiring practically no extra gear. Of course music is also a universal language and has been a vital key to my trip, both as a source of income and a way to relate to people.

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Bonito fishing was a paying job but I averaged less than $50 for a six-day week and eventually the pressure of poverty dictated a return to the less exciting but more lucrative house painting that was slowly driving me to drink. 151 proof Bacardi rum was $3.74 a quart downtown at the duty-free store and my letters and journals from that time tend to bear the stamp of the demon. I was rescued from this downhill slide by a boatbuilding job in Pago Pago village. The biggest sporting event of the year in Samoa is a boat race featuring 90 foot ‘whale boats’ with 46 oarsmen, a captain on the tiller, and a drummer in the bow beating out very complex rhythms on a big biscuit tin. The race usually takes place on April 17th, the anniversary of the date the chiefs of Tutuila put their island under the territorial umbrella of the USA in the year 1900. At the time, the Americans were interested in Pago Pago as a Naval base, but after World War II the base was closed, and since then American Samoa has functioned primarily as a distribution point for Yankee dollars to Polynesia, and a way for Islanders to get into the US. There are now as many Samoans in California as there are in Samoa.

Anyway, in 1980 the US Air Force sent a skydiving team to assist in the celebration of “Flag Day” (or “Dependence Day” as I dubbed it), and apparently the night before there was a wild party somewhere on the island attended by the entire Air Force crew. Afterwards at least one man was too hungover to make the skydiving exhibition the next morning, and lucky for him. After discharging two groups of divers, the plane made an unscheduled third pass down the bay and ran smack into a large steel cable that spans the harbor. The tail was sheared off and the plane crashed into Tutuila’s only hotel, demolishing the west wing and killing all seven men still on board. Fortunately most of the hotel guests were downtown watching the show and only one unlucky tourist perished.

The race was postponed till the 4th of July and the island went into mourning. It was quite a long time before the story of the wild party trickled down the grapevine; it may not be true, but I never did hear a different explanation of what happened.

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The village of Pago decided to make use of the extra time to build themselves a new boat (called a ”fautasi”) and hired a young American yacht builder who had temporarily settled there while his wife had their first baby. This was to be the first fautasi built with modern plywood and epoxy technology, and Larry Potter the builder, who I’d met in Faga’alu Bay where he lived on his trimaran, hired me at the hefty sum of five dollars an hour to act as sort of a working shop foreman while he spent much of his time zipping around on a motorcycle chasing down materials. I had four young men from the village working under me, and they turned out to be a most difficult lot. I tried to live in the boathouse while the work went on. There were a few villagers who brought me food or took me home for the occasional dinner, and were cordial and appreciative of my efforts, but my “helpers” were no help at all, snotty assholes who succeeded in making my life in the boathouse so miserable that I had to look for another place to live.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the folks who took me in adopted me totally, and I became like a member of their family. Pepe Lam Yuen was half Chinese and half Samoan, a biker, weightlifter and former badass turned Mormon. He had finally married a really lovely girl, and their first baby had just turned one when I came on the scene. They lived in the back of a dingy old gymnasium about 20 yards from the boathouse, where every afternoon incredible co-ed volleyball games took place. Upstairs in the back was a weightlifting room managed by Pepe, who also worked as a carpenter by day and bouncer by night at the Tepatasi Club across the street. At 5 o’clock the weightlifters went home and the room full of barbells and assorted exercise equipment became our living room. Pepe and the other bodybuilders and boxers who worked out at the gym were a welcome change from the badmouth, skinny-ass punks I had to work with all day. Pepe and his friends had no need to prove how tough they were, they were tough. One was the South Pacific middleweight champion. As a lot they were the sweetest, gentlest folks I’ve met to date on this road.

Pepe’s wife, Papauta, was one of those rarities, a stunningly beautiful woman without a bit of nonsense about her — gentle, considerate, unselfconscious, friendly and unspoiled. In the process of inviting me to live with them, Pepe in his halting English said, “I want…to share… my wife with you…” and my heart turned flip-flops. He didn’t mean what you’re thinking, but they truly opened their hearts to me, and it is such experiences that make this kind of journeying worthwhile for me. Baby White (born on “Whit Sunday” or Pentecost in the Anglican church) took to me right away, and we spent many delightful hours together. White took to almost anybody. One day I walked into the gym and found White in the arms of a woman I hadn’t seen before. I asked her, “Do you know where Papauta is?” “Who’s Papauta?” she replied. A bundle of mail I received later in Northern Sumatra when I was writing this account included a Christmas card from the Lam Yuens with a photograph of the family with Pepe’s new motorcycle and White in a pretty red dress well on the way to displacing her mother as the prettiest girl in Samoa. Papauta wears a T-shirt that says “Sonic Booms Kill Blue Coots.”

We had only five weeks to build this fautasi and I put in many long hours in the boathouse. Evenings with the Lam Yuens were a real pleasure after the rigors of the day. At this point, having learned of the cheap hospital services in Pago and having saved a few bucks from the boat job, I arranged to have an operation to correct a small umbilical hernia incurred from lifting an engine block in Hawai’i.

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When the boat was finished I entered the hospital and went under total anesthesia for the first time in over 20 years. It’s kinda scary to think about, you can’t be absolutely sure you’ll ever come back. They stuck a needle in my arm and my brain went down in a black whirlpool. The next thing I knew I was being shifted to a cart for transport back to the ward, and there was a great pain in my belly. The next few days went by in a Demerol haze. Pepe and Papauta came bearing fruit and fried chicken, the Polynesian middleweight champion brought me flowers. He had the softest handshake imaginable.

The day after the operation the new fautasi won the race hands down, but by then I was fed up to here with the Pago boys and would rather have heard that they’d all drowned or something. I had come to regard Pago Pago Bay as the ass hole of Samoa, where most of the highrollers and would be highrollers hung out trying their best to be like the angry punks you find in Hawai’i, where indeed many Samoans have migrated. There they give the pissed off Hawaiians someone to fight besides tourists, and the Samoans give good battle. On occasion it’s gotten so bad that they’ve had to close the schools…but I digress.

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After five days in the hospital I moved onto a yacht recently returned from a circumnavigation. “Naomi” was a 47 foot steel yawl, a veritable tank of a boat that had carried a family of four safely around the world. It felt like the right place for me. The plan was to rest up while my belly mended, and look for a job crewing on a yacht to New Zealand, Australia or some such place. I had already been in Samoa nearly 8 months, and it was high time to hit the road again. By the way my total bill for the operation came to only $93.

The Ring family, originally Norwegian now naturalized Americans, were taking a welcome holiday on dry land after six years on the boat, and were glad to have someone looking after Naomi. I love living on boats — the gentle motion of the liquid world, the ebb and flow of the tide. On Sundays I went to church with the Lam Yuens and feasted back at the gym afterwards. After a nap we’d watch the wrestling on TV and wrestle with White. Trying to wean them from their soda pop habit, every week I brought big bottles of fruit juice: apple, orange, apricot, pear, pineapple, prune, grape, cranberry, whatever I could find. Pepe would dress me up for church in his flashy clothes as I didn’t really own a respectable set myself. I rattled around in Pepe’s clothes but nobody seemed to notice. One Sunday I took the dinghy from Naomi and drove Pepe, Papauta and White all around Pago Pago Bay. White loved it and kept trying to jump into the water.

After a month the Rings decided to move back to the boat so I shifted to another, smaller yacht, which I shared with Don Carr, an American engineer who had deserted the US five years before when his marriage fell apart, vowing never to return. He was also looking to get to New Zealand, and eventually a job came our way. “Desiderata” was a 50 foot ferro-cement ketch from New Zealand which had set out about five months previous intending to cruise to Canada with the owner, his wife and assorted crew. We were told that the wife had gotten so seasick that she’d flown back to New Zealand swearing she’d never again set foot on Desiderata, and the owner was shopping around for a crew to take the boat home.

We eventually found out the hard way that basic maintenance on the boat had been neglected for many years, and under the shiny new paint lay many problems. Of course Don and I didn’t know these details at the time. At first the owner was going to make the trip with us, then the plan changed and he flew a hired skipper up from New Zealand to make the delivery. Of the seven people who rode Desiderata into Pago Pago Bay not one departed on her. We should have taken the hint. But it was a free trip, and I was glad to get my foot in the door of blue water yachting at last.

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One more thing: Though Samoans are by and large more polite and considerate than most people, there is one situation in which this falls away utterly – the line. If you are faced with waiting in a Samoan line, you might as well come back some other time. If you leave what we consider a normal space between you and the person in front of you, someone will immediately slide into it. If you press in closer, and remember it’s hot down there, the moment the line moves again if you’re not paying attention the same thing will happen again. Many more people will be cutting in at the head of the line or wherever they can find a friend. If you should by chance actually reach the front of the line, more than likely the window will suddenly close and you will be invited to repair to another line. In short, there is nothing you can do. Give up.

After several such experiences especially at the Pago Pago customs dock when returning from Western Samoa, I decided to make the ultimate effort. An hour before we got to Pago I was waiting with all my gear down on the usual disembarkation deck. As we neared the dock I was still the only one down there. Finally somebody clued me that I would have to go back to the upper deck, that today the immigration procedures would be carried out there. As I entered the upper deck area there was soon the usual crush of people eager to be off the boat. I fought hard for my place, I gave no quarter. I was maneuvered out of first position, but I was still close to the front, and I stuck like glue to the back of the person in front of me. Behind me a wiry five-footer had his pointy little chin dug firmly into my right shoulder blade but I hung tough. The two people in front of me seemed to have a great number of other people’s papers as well as their own and I could begin to see the handwriting on the wall, but I didn’t relax or give an inch.

By this time it had taken on the dimensions of a research project, and to slacken would have prejudiced the results. As I finally made it to the desk of the immigration officer (there were three of them working now, and perhaps half the passengers had already left the boat), he folded up his papers, took his rubber stamps and split. Knowing I was doomed but unwilling to concede, I wormed my way into the adjacent line and continued to push. I was the very last passenger to disembark from that boat, and never again did I try to get the best of a Samoan line.

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Before we leave Samoa I have to say that what I’ve written seems awfully brief and sketchy. It’s difficult to communicate just what it was I found there that affected me so strongly. Samoa represented to me an ancient and sensible way of life with enough inner strength to resist the push and hurry of the modern world. In Hawai’i I had seen the sad result of a disintegrated culture that exists only as a sort of museum piece resurrected in the hotel lounge every night at eight. The Samoans welcomed me into their world, gave me succor, and renewed my faith that perhaps the whole world isn’t doomed to Californication. A full description of fa’a Samoa would take a large book, and a complete account of my nine months there would fill another. I offer these sketches hoping you catch the flavor. There is so much more I could say about the music and dance, village dramas, the snorkeling, the food, sexual habits, marijuana, bonito fishing, and the amazing Easter I spent in Western Samoa.

I didn’t leave home in search of exotic scenery, there is precious little description here of the land and seascapes I have seen along the way. I was out to meet the folks who populate the rest of the world — good, bad and in-between — and it’s these encounters that I have focused on. Countless strangers befriended me. I have tried in my life to find ways to pass these gifts along, repay these debts to the good and kind people that comprise most of the human race. And as for the bad apples, well you learn to watch your step and later maybe rave a bit in your journal. “It takes all kinds of people to make a world,” my father used to say.

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The delivery skipper Ian McDonald had brought along his girlfriend Nicolette, and on August 25, 1980, the four of us headed south into a stiff 25-knot wind. Our boat was made of ferro-cement fully 1½ inches thick – by contrast the sailboat my friend Hank Niemi built in Astoria was only ¾ of an inch. Hence Desiderata was extremely top-heavy and rolled like a bastard. Everyone but me was instantly sick. The first sign that all was not well with the boat came as we cleared the harbor when black oil began to come bubbling up into the cockpit, making it extremely slippery and difficult to keep one’s footing at the helm. Then someone discovered a fire in the aft cabin. It seemed the exhaust pipe from the engine came up under the stern bunk and unless you removed the mattress you soon had smoldering plywood and foam rubber on your hands. In the time it took to clear the harbor and put the boat under sail we had a fire. The owner had neglected to tell us about this unique feature of his boat.

As I was the only one not throwing up at the time, I went down into that cloud of stinking black smoke with a bucket of water and extinguished the smoldering embers. Next the jib sheet block suddenly disintegrated and the now-slack jib line started cracking like rifle fire. It took Ian and Don half an hour to find a way around this. Shortly after dark Ian called us together and we took a vote whether to go on or turn back for repairs. The vote was unanimous — keep going. “Good old bricks this bunch,” I thought to myself. Then all the power went out and we had to use a flashlight to see the compass. The owner’s last words to us were, “Don’t you boys worry about a thing, this boat will amaze you.”

The next morning Ian found a Honda generator in a stern locker and managed to get the engine going long enough to get the batteries up. Times like these are transporting. Survival is the name of the game, and if everybody does their part pretty soon, no matter how sick and tired you might be you find yourself laughing at these trials sent to test your fortitude, and later the people who lived and laughed through it with you will always have a special place in your heart. I can still hear Don as he looked up from retching over the side and remarked dryly, “I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun.”

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I was not feeling all that great, but at least I wasn’t vomiting, and the second day out I asked Ian if I might take some shots with the sextant. He obviously didn’t feel like getting out on deck and he told me to go ahead. Mogens Ring the circumnavigator had suggested that I study celestial navigation to make myself more useful on a boat, and with his help I had been practicing for a couple of months. I would work from his log book, plotting old sights from his trip and comparing my results with his on the charts, but as yet I had never actually taken a sight with the sextant on the open sea. Before Ian had arrived on the scene I had wondered what sort of a person he would be. Would he let me use the sextant at all? Often you find captains and navigators quite jealous and secretive about their art, but I hoped at the very least he’d give me his times and altitudes and let me compare my plotted results with his. Little did I dream that I would get to do all the sextant work and get to plot the whole trip myself, but that’s just what happened.

Ian was about my own age, came from an upper-class New Zealand family and bore the marks of a good education. He’d spent a number of years sailing around the Pacific and exuded the kind of quiet confidence in the face of adversity that was just what we needed. He did his own plotting by dead reckoning (or “DR”), using my shots to confirm our position, but he had enough confidence in his own abilities and in mine to let me jump into offshore navigation with both feet. For this I’ll always be grateful.

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By the third day the list of things wrong with the boat had gotten so long that we were officially headed for the Tonga Islands for repairs. The weather had moderated somewhat and everybody had his appetite back, but water was leaking into the boat from both the hull and the decks, and the bilge pumps were packing up one by one. There was a short in the electrical system causing the batteries to go flat overnight and something was radically wrong with the steering. The night before we got to Tonga we finally had no port helm whatsoever (translation for landlubbers: we couldn’t turn left), and there was nothing to do but pull down the sails and tear the whole steering apart. Luckily the weather cooperated and we completed the job overnight in nearly dead calm waters. About midmorning I had us figured to be pretty close, but we hadn’t seen anything yet. I turned on the depth sounder (surprisingly it worked) and got bottom at 140 feet. Ian climbed the mast and reported coconut trees dead ahead. My first landfall.

Tonga is a group of atolls so low that the first thing you see over the horizon is the tops of the coconut trees. We motored into Nuku’alofa Harbor, home of the capital city and residence of the renowned 400 pound King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, and dropped the hook about a quarter-mile offshore in the calm waters inside the reef. We had drinks on deck as the sun set in an orange haze of umu smoke and the sounds of singing drifted out from the shore. It was a picture postcard ending to a hellfire trip.

After one day of rest for everybody, Ian sent off a 14-page letter to the owner detailing the misadventures of our five day passage and the repairs needed for the safe completion of the trip, and we set to work. Having an engineer around was quite handy, and Don set out to unscramble the rats-nest wiring in the engine room. For a while it seemed like we were going backwards, finding things wrong that we didn’t know about already, and Ian finally hired a professional boat surveyor to assess the condition of the boat, partly to protect himself should the owner get obstreperous or try to blame him for the difficulties we experienced. (This is exactly what did happen later.) The surveyor found a quantity of diesel fuel in the engine sump, indicating a problem with the injectors and a potentially deadly situation. Diesel in the oil drastically reduces its lubricating effectiveness causing overheating. If the overheating should go unnoticed the engine could conceivably explode sinking the boat instantly like a stone. This boat was made of stone after all. Nicolette had to fly home as she was a schoolteacher and had not expected to be away so long. Ian, Don and I toiled on, keeping detailed accounts of the work we did.

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Ian’s letter to the owner took some time to reach him and when it did he was grievously offended. He and his wife jumped on a plane and breezed in on us without warning one day saying, “What have you done to our boat??” In the two weeks we had already worked trying to get Desiderata seaworthy again we had developed considerable animosity towards this fellow who had stupidly let his boat go to the dogs, and even more stupidly thought he could sail it across the Pacific regardless, and then jumped ship leaving us to get his rotten hulk home for him without telling us anything about all the problems on the boat. Well he and Ian had a lot of hot words, threatening suits and countersuits, and three days later Ian flew home, leaving Don and I to ponder our future.

My first impulse was to get off the boat. I had a pretty clear idea by now of how many problems lurked in its bowels, and the owner was blustering to the effect that nothing was seriously wrong and that we could sail back to New Zealand without the engine if necessary. Well on some boats you could if you knew what you were doing, but Desiderata was not designed to make do without power and I was convinced that the owner did not know what he was doing. It seemed the height of foolishness to set off in a crippled boat under such a captain. I would have sailed in practically anything with Ian, but this bloke?

Once Ian left things did settle down a bit and the repairs went ahead. I kept working and developed a wait-and-see attitude. Don, who’d had much more sailing experience than me, was a calming and stabilizing influence but we both felt pretty much the same: we’d get off the boat unless it was brought up to a standard we considered reasonably safe. I depended a lot on Don to evaluate the work done.

Of course I always had my eye out for another boat. I asked one German yacht if they needed extra crew but they didn’t. Then a ragged-looking catamaran turned up with a large crew of young Kiwis (New Zealanders) and Australians. They turned out to be into folk music and country dancing, known as “bush dancing” down under, and before long we had a contra dance going on the cats big wide deck. They were delighted to have a fiddler around and invited me to accompany them to some of the outer islands in the Tonga group for more festivities but I had too much work to do on the boat.

By the time they returned to Nuku’alofa I was seriously looking for another way to New Zealand and I asked if I could go with them. That’s when I found out what this boat was all about. “Dirty Dick” the captain, who had formerly run a folk club in Auckland, had built this boat himself about five years before and set out to circle the globe financing his trip by taking along paying crew. This had worked out well for him, he was nearly home and with money in the bank to boot. His boat had nearly as many problems as ours, but I knew that at least Dirty Dick could sail. But it turned out that his jolly crew was paying as much as $20 a day for this “adventure holiday”, and I just couldn’t afford that kind of money. I did make some friends on that boat who I visited later in New Zealand and Australia including Dick’s charming and devoted girlfriend Ginny who seem to do most of the work on the boat and whom he deserted soon after arriving back in New Zealand.

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The best part about being in Tonga was the music. The Tongans are the best musicians I encountered in the Pacific, and the only ones I ever saw play the fiddle or banjo. As luck would have it, during our one-month stay there was the weeklong Heilala Festival of music and dance, and every night I wormed my way into the huge crowds of Tongans who turned out on the malae (the central city park) every night to watch and listen and carry on. I borrowed a tape machine from Don and recorded a lot of it from the middle of the crowd. There were school choirs, male and female adult choirs, string bands, and pop singers ranging from “Some Enchanted Evening” baritones to extravagantly-sequined 12-year-old Michael Jackson clones. One fellow called Rocky came out with just his guitar and sang one song in English called “How I Want You, How I Need You, Baby Blue”, one I’d never heard before and remarkable only because he had the audience howling with laughter for no reason I could discern. John Kneubuhl used to tell me that the Tongans have a very subtle sense of humor. Two little girls performed the singing square dance call to “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” just like caller Susie Holden back in Astoria.

The Tongan string bands are fantastic, usually all-male, though there was one with two girls singing. Typically three or four guitars and maybe a ukulele or two, all playing comfortable rhythm except for one lead guitar, tuned very strangely and usually played with considerable virtuosity. But the best part is the singing, creamy smooth falsetto harmonies, really ethereal stuff. I have some pretty good tapes of this music, one recorded at a party of Tongans at the Kneubuhl home in American Samoa and a couple of tapes I bought from the radio station in Nuku’alofa. Any musician thinking about a trip to the South Pacific should definitely plan to spend some time in Tonga.

But the climax came the last evening which was devoted to “floor shows”, groups who performed at the various hotels around Nuku’alofa. Some of these were enormous, perhaps 50 or 60 musicians and dancers. I will try to describe one. They brought out a piece of stage scenery that looked like the front of a big television set or maybe a wall with a big window, but all covered with green leaves. (A lot of the dancers wear costumes made of variously colored leaves sewed together, a painstaking creation you wear for one night and then throw away.) The band was stationed behind the big green TV though they spilled out around both sides. There might have been half a dozen guitars, a couple of big bluegrass banjos played hard with a flat pick and incredibly loud, one or two big tea-chest basses, assorted drums, and anyone who wasn’t dancing was back with the band singing with raucous abandon.

There were women’s group dances both standing and sitting featuring smooth flowing movement of the hands, arms, and torso, right down to the toes. The men did a lot of war dances, popular with the tourists no doubt, and some of their club-swinging dances reminded me of Morris dancers cracking their sticks together though their garb was certainly different. They were all really charged up that night. Several spears were accidentally discharged into the crowd, and at least one overenthusiastic dancer went right off the stage on his final fearsome lunge at the audience. In the later parts of each ‘show’ the specialty dancers came out, perhaps a fire or sword dancer, or some particularly lissom female. This particular group finished up with a sequence of girls dancing solo in the company of a clownish old man who kept the audience in stitches with his antics. The rest of the company was hanging around and out of the big green TV and everything was going full tilt. The funny man dancing with the girls kept grabbing at his lava lava to keep it from falling off, and at the climax when he finally lost it completely he turned out to be wearing a pair of pink satin shorts with big white ruffles, and the crowd went berserk.

After six hours of this my legs cried for mercy and I had to bail. When I got back to the boat I turned on the radio and found that they were still going strong back at the malae. It was three in the morning when the last floor show finished. Getting back to the boat after a late night like this was never easy. Since the dinghy would be back at the boat, I had to strip at the end of the wharf, swim out to the boat through the spooky dark waters twinkling with glimmers of phosphorescence, then row back in to pick up my clothes and Don’s tape machine.

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A few days later Don and Ian told me that they’d heard a fine string band in the hotel bar the night before featuring not one but two fiddles. That night I went to investigate and found five old men sitting casually around a table in the bar and playing an amazing variety of tunes, mostly old American standards like “Sioux City Sue,” “12th St. Rag,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “It’s a Long Long Way to Tipperary.” They also played a couple of interesting instrumental medleys, including classical themes with lots of counterpoint between the fiddles. I was so taken with their music that after a couple of tunes I left and walked back a mile and a half to the boat (now inside the harbor and much easier to get to) to fetch Don’s tape recorder. I was accompanied most of the way by a persistent female impersonator who kept insisting that he was a woman and trying to drag me into the bushes. By the time I got back to the hotel, the “Oldtimers Band” was about ready to go home, but they told me to come back the next night. When I did I brought Leroy with me and was immediately invited to join in.

For the next two weeks I played with the Oldtimers nearly every night. Four nights a week they played standards at the tourist hotel and two nights only Tongan songs at a little motel. This latter was a more relaxed atmosphere and a slightly different lineup featuring a lead singer who played that peculiarly-tuned lead guitar oh-so-softly with the fingers. But the real leader in both cases was obviously the old man with the battered viola. Peni Filimoehala was in his mid-60s and had owned that instrument for some 47 years. It looked like it had been demolished and rebuilt more than once, and was strung with old guitar and banjo strings, but how sweetly he played! They sang in lovely three and four part harmonies, high quavering falsettos with the kind of mellow blend that comes only with many years of singing together.

At the International Dateline Hotel I was able to follow the chords of the somewhat familiar tunes, but at the Friendly Islands Motel I was so blown away by the Tongan music, the like of which I’d never heard before, that I just listened, rapt. At first I used to buy beers for the band; towards the end when my pocket money was running low they used to share their beers with me. Sometimes they would come by the boat to collect me when it was time to play. The last couple of nights I had gotten familiar enough with some of the Tongan tunes to join in with my fiddle, or Peni would play mine and I his. For a while it looked like he wanted to trade instruments, he really liked my cheap Chinese fiddle. I would have given that sweet old man anything of mine he wanted but eventually he decided to stick with his old tried-and-still-true viola with its fingerboard full of hills and valleys.

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In the end Don and I decided to stick it out, and so in the last days of September the four of us set sail, Don and I hoping that at least one of our five patched up bilge pumps would survive the voyage. As we sailed south towards the “Land of the Long White Cloud” as the native Maoris call it, it soon became obvious that the main reason Desiderata’s owners had aborted their trip was that the incessant rolling of the boat kept the misses in a state of perpetual nausea. She was the “official” navigator having completed some kind of navigation class, but unlike Ian she was very jealous of her gear and wouldn’t let me use the good sextant. She was too sick to use it herself, so we plowed along on her dead reckoning which she plotted lying flat on the chart room floor.

I finally secured permission to use an old plastic sextant that I had found on the boat and fiddled with while we were tied up in Tonga. I had already established that it was inaccurate by 10 to 15 miles matter how you adjusted it, but I reasoned that if I shot three stars at roughly 120° apart, that three errors would cancel each other out and a position in the center of the resultant triangle would be reasonably accurate, more accurate in any case then the guesses of our seasick navigator. My calculations had us heading directly for the only real danger to navigation between Tonga and New Zealand, a mid-ocean reef named Minerva, according to the pilot book littered with the wrecks of many a ship. I brought this to the attention of the Captain but he didn’t seem to care. “Reef, reef, what’s another reef?” he blustered, “I’ve seen thousands of them, sailed by so close you could reach out and pick off the barnacles!” Besides, the navigator’s best guess didn’t agree with mine, but my positions continued to put us closer and closer to Minerva Reef until I could no longer get any sleep for worrying. What’s that song about the implacable will coming up against the immovable object?

Again I brought up the subject with the Captain. By this time I had us so close that to alter course wouldn’t have necessarily helped since my sextant was so inaccurate that one couldn’t say for sure at this point exactly in which direction the reef lay from our present position, but I was sure it was close. Finally the Captain prevailed upon his wife to get out on deck with the good sextant, and with him physically holding her up she took a single shot of the sun. She insisted that it had been a good shot and upon plotting the result announced that we were at least 40 miles north of Minerva Reef. Relieved but not really convinced, I was able to doze for the first time in two days.

I was awakened an hour later by some commotion on deck. The helmsman had just sighted Minerva Reef dead ahead. What a strange sight to see in mid ocean — miles of breaking surf with occasional rocks sticking up, and the odd remains of a shipwreck here and there.

After this I made a point of keeping my own DR, and though I was still not permitted to use the good sextant, the Captain began to take an interest in my calculations. His wife continued her own navigation, and at times our positions were 50 miles or more apart, but oddly enough the night before we made landfall in New Zealand we both worked out a position for Desiderata and the two were only a mile apart. We shook hands on that, and sure enough the next morning Piercy Island at the mouth of the Bay of Islands came popping out of the fog right on the bow and we were home safe. The passage took nine days and was, except for the Minerva business, relatively uneventful. The boat continued to leak and the bilge pumps continued to break down, but one of them hung on gamely until the end.

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Don and I stayed two nights with Desiderata’s owners and then went off to look up Ian and Nicolette who lived in a beach town about 20 miles outside of Auckland, New Zealand’s one really sizable city. At this point I was very nearly broke, and everybody told me that for work to go to Australia, so I began haunting the docks of Auckland Harbor, putting up signs at the yacht club, and prying mussels off the rocks near Ian’s house. One day Ian got offered a navigating job for a brand-new yacht to be delivered from Auckland to Papeete, Tahiti. He was tied up at the time waiting on a long-sought job on a big cargo ship, but several days later when we happened to be together in town we stopped by the customs dock to see the boat. “Vehia” was a real beauty, a 50-foot catamaran designed more for speed than comfort and destined for charter work in Papeete. The owner, a young French-Tahitian named Henri Lucas, and three of his surfing buddies had flown in a couple of weeks before to take the boat home, but it developed that the buddy who had claimed to know about navigation had all the right books but no experience whatsoever, so Henri was looking for someone to take over in that department.

Ian had been recommended to them, and when Ian introduced me as a navigator they offered me the job on the spot. I speak no French and they spoke very little English, so I was spared any detailed accounting of my previous experience (which amounted, at this point, to a total of 14 days at sea). They offered to pay all my expenses, put me up in Tahiti as long as I wanted to stay, and fly me back to New Zealand whenever I wanted to go. It was 2000 miles in the wrong direction, but what an opportunity, not only to have sole responsibility for navigating a long ocean passage, but to see the fabled paradise of Tahiti. How could I say no? Besides, they were quite a jolly bunch of guys, it looked to be a fun trip. Henri had a beautiful new Tamaya sextant and a preprogrammed navigational calculator that was the latest and greatest gadget back in 1981. [Both of these items have been obsolete for decades now; nobody uses a sextant in 2018, we all have a GPS in our shirt pocket or purse.] I had heard about this marvel and was dying to try one out. We made one trial run on the harbor, zipping along at 15 knots in a 25 -knot breeze with more than a dozen curious Auckland yachties on board. They and I were suitably impressed; I had never moved that fast on a sailboat before. The next morning, 10 days after my arrival in New Zealand, we departed for Tahiti, roughly 2200 nautical miles east-northeast.

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The weather was so rough for the first three days that we had to restrain the boat or she would leap off the tops of the waves and go crashing down into the following trough with an impact that felt like it would tear the boat apart. It was a very strong boat though, and the only weak points turned out to be the main cabin windows which for some reason had been fastened on with little screws barely ¼ inch long instead of the bolts specified in the plans. The screws began unscrewing, and little trickles of water began to seep into the cabin, the bunks and the food. We kept tightening the screws, added a few extras, and kept a tight rein on the boat for as long as we were beating into the weather. It was not a serious problem.

One issue I did have was that my Tahitian crew was freezing cold. Back in Auckland they had complained about the 60° temperature, a good 20° cooler than they were used to. Below the equator and sailing east the usual strategy is to keep at least 30° south latitude in order to catch the westerlies. Auckland is about 35° south so my directions were to steer due east and avoid the relatively windless but warmer horse latitudes to the north. However every time I went to sleep, when I woke up I found the boat headed north for reasons I was slow to figure out.

I instantly fell in love with the Tamaya sextant and probably took about three times as many shots as were actually necessary just for practice and because it was such a joy to handle such a quality instrument, like driving a Rolls-Royce. The calculator was also quite interesting to use. About the size of an eight track cassette [now there’s a dated reference], it contained much of the information usually gleaned from the yearly Nautical Almanac, right up through the year 2000. For some shots you needed neither the almanac nor the sight reduction tables, with the calculator you just punched in the time and altitude and it did the rest. For a backup system we had the reduction tables (in French), and I had a small pocket calculator with trigonometric functions on which, by punching in the equations already programmed into the Tamaya calculator, I could arrive at the same results. I found that with all the figures in front of me, what took two minutes on my calculator took 30 seconds with the Tamaya. Learning to use the $20 pocket calculator was to come in handy later.

I really took to celestial navigation. In high school I had clawed my way through a lot of higher math: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, analytical geometry, and differential calculus. At the University of Chicago I even took a crack at integral calculus, but by that time I was clearly sick of math and school, and I actually failed integral twice before giving up math forever. In any case I’ve never had the least use for all this math until at the age of 37 I got into celestial navigation. Actually with the books in front of you all you really need to do is add and subtract, but in terms of strict step-by-step procedure and the importance of accuracy, the kind of discipline that math demands is also required for reliable navigation. Geometry was my favorite branch of math, and celestial navigation is really a problem in spherical geometry. [Trigger warning: If an account of this lost art is not interesting to you, you should have already started skipping ahead in this narrative.]

The basic idea is this: with the sextant you measure the angle between the horizon and any heavenly body (except Bo Derek), and you note the exact time at which your observation took place. You then choose an “assumed position” somewhere in the general neighborhood of where you think you are, and by using the Naval Almanac and the sight reduction tables you calculate what the altitude of that particular body would have been at exactly the time you took your shot, if you had been at this assumed position. There will, of course, be a small difference between the two altitudes. The difference, in minutes of arc (60 minutes to one degree) Is the number of miles you are from the assumed position. Actually from one shot you get not a point but a line. You are, or were, somewhere on this line. You must now take another shot, establish another line, compensating for the boat’s progress in the interim, and where the two lines cross is your position at the time you took the last shot. Got that? Good.

If you’re using the sun, you have to wait 4-5 hours for it to move around to a new azimuth (point on the compass) in order to get a usable second shot, but with the stars you can take a number of shots at different azimuths at virtually the same time and get very quick and accurate results if you’re careful. Most navigators don’t bother much with the stars and planets as you have to shoot them in the 20 minutes or so at dawn or dusk when both the brightest stars and the horizon are clearly visible. You have to work fast, you have to know or be able to figure out what you’re shooting at, and the weather must cooperate. The moon can be used, but it wobbles around a lot in its orbit and requires a lot of additional corrections, increasing the chances for error, hence it has a bad reputation as a navigational aid. The sun is the popular choice. You have to look through heavy optical filters of course, but it is big and easy to find and the horizon generally bright and clear. It’s not so accurate as the stars for various reasons, and I always liked to average about five shots when using the sun. I liked the stars, and always shot them, visibility permitting.

Because the heavenly body is always drifting up or down in its orbit, the boat is moving in at least six directions at once, and you have to make sure you’re not mistaking the top of a swell for the actual horizon, it takes some practice before you start to get reliable results. With a boat rolling in heavy seas you may have to adopt bizarre positions on deck, bracing against whatever’s available while you operate the sextant. Once on the cabin top of Desiderata I was leaning back against the mast for support and I reached out with my foot for the ratlines and missed. The boat went out from under me and I dropped like a stone 4 feet onto the deck. Luckily I landed square on my feet without banging the sextant against anything and escaped with only a bruised elbow, but the physical problem of finding a stable stance from which to work is often half the battle . You can see why the modern navigator prefers pushing buttons on the GPS to falling overboard clutching his precious sextant.

Some shots are going to be better than others and you have to develop a sense of which are which. Shooting stars or even the sun on a cloudy day you might have to use that not so good shot if you don’t get another, but you keep in mind when evaluating your results that it wasn’t a reliable shot. Navigation is not an exact science. In the end it is always your best guess taking into consideration your DR, your celestial sights, possible ocean currents(essentially invisible), leeway (which way the wind is pushing you) and more. Your timepiece must be accurate and you check it regularly against the shortwave radio time signals. If it gains or loses it should do so consistently and you should know how much in case for some reason you lose the time signals. My little digital Timex gained a second a week, pretty remarkable I thought. A 4-second error in your time will put you one mile out of position. Most navigators used to get someone to hold the watch and take notes for them, then all they have to do is take the shot and call out the altitude. When I broke in on Desiderata nobody felt like getting out on deck with me and so I got in the habit of doing it all myself with the watch on my wrist, a little notebook in my pocket, and the pen in my teeth. That way at least any errors would be my own responsibility.

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My favorite time at sea would have to be the clear night. Generally everyone else is asleep and as helmsman you have two or more hours of utter solitude with the stars and the sea. The ocean is beautiful anytime, a vast empty beauty like the desert. Daytime happenings like whales and porpoises, rainbows and thunderheads, albatross escorts and sunbaths can be wonderful of course, but at night the blue dome disappears and the waters become dark shadows, and you see where you really are, adrift in the universe. With the naked eye you can just make out the smudge that is Andromeda galaxy, 100,000,000 light years away. If the boat has an autopilot you can just lose yourself in the stars, but you should be careful not to fall overboard. Henri’s sextant had such excellent optics that when the moon was full I could shoot stars all night. I sat on the cabin top steering with my foot and shooting stars by moonlight just for the hell of it.

I loved that sextant and Henri knew it. I knew that he knew it, and I also knew that he would likely swap it to me in lieu of the $740 return ticket to New Zealand if I asked, as he would not need it once back in home waters. It was a nice daydream but that sextant lived in a box the size of a typewriter and there’s no way I could have carted it around. Today I can’t believe I carted around the almanac, the sight reduction tables and even Bowditch’s “American Practical Navigator” — about 10 lb worth of books — as long as I did. Those days are over now, but back then there was a real romance to navigation. In Tonga I met a German sailor who was trying to sell a boat he had built and sailed 1½ times around the world by himself. His notice read, ”Complete with all gear and provisions. All you need is a sextant and a toothbrush.” A guy can always build another boat but you might never find another sextant that felt just right.

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Henri had provisioned with some excellent food, but not enough of it, and by the time we’d been out for about 10 days there wasn’t much left to eat but rice, salami and powdered split pea soup. We kept a fishing line trolling behind the boat but hadn’t had a hit except for one giant swordfish that instantly broke the line, and so we altered course for Rarotonga in the Cook Islands to put in for supplies. A couple of days out of Rarotonga my 38th birthday came up and the boys did me right. Jean Baptiste managed to insert a fork into a hand drill and used it to beat the batter for a birthday cake. They produced a bottle of French champagne, and when that was gone we finished off the beer and started on the rum. The weather cooperated by going flat calm and so we pulled down the sails and spent the afternoon floating drunk in mid ocean.

The next day the wind was back and a mahi mahi hit our trolling line. This fish is legendary for its beauty and delicious flavor. You always know when you have one on the line because they jump and jump and jump. We’d had quite enough of rice and salami by now, and so the landing of the mahi mahi was anxiously attended by all. Since the catamaran has a flat deck without gunwales, once he came aboard there was a mad scramble to grab him before he managed to slither off the boat. Eventually someone got a grip on him and was hanging on for dear life to the tail of this lively 4-foot delicacy. Kiki called for a screwdriver and Jean Baptiste went to fetch one. When he returned, Baptiste tried to beat the fish over the head with the blade end of the screwdriver, a sight that made the rest of us roll with laughter. Kiki, a fisherman by trade, got the screwdriver away from JB, stabbed the fish in just the right spot, and the fight was over. Tahitians really know what to do with a fish. We had that fish raw and cooked about six different ways, and four days later we were still dining on it and giving away chunks to other yachts at Rarotonga thanks to our small refrigerator onboard. Last we ate the head, considered the greatest delicacy in the islands, and for good reason. Yes I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true.

When we went to fill the water tanks we discovered we that we actually had plenty of water; someone had apparently turned off a valve somewhere, likely looking for an excuse to get off the boat for a night after two weeks at sea. We bought more food, fresh fruit, beer etc., then we all went to a nightclub where, after a lively Cook Islands floor show for the tourists, a four-piece electric band took over and played such typical bar music as “Louie Louie,” “Proud Mary” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” The Cook Islanders were quite a different lot than the Samoans. Most of them wore hot, uncomfortable and expensive trousers instead of the cheap and sensible sarong (or “lava lava” as the Samoans call it). Many of them spoke good English; I think that the Cooks are still connected with the British Commonwealth. At the nightclub I overheard one young man confide to his friends, ”What I try to do is go for the money without lowering myself you know…” Baptiste got so drunk it took some time to locate him later asleep in the bushes outside.

Baptiste was the clown of the trip, and it astonished me later to find out that he was several times surfing champion of Tahiti. Eventually I got to watch him in action, and up on a wave he was as smooth as silk, but to meet him on the street you’d think he was a stumblebum rather than an accomplished athlete. I wanted to spend another day and take a hike across the island, but the boys were in a hurry to get home, and hungover or not we pushed off the next morning. I did manage a quick trip to the post office where I was able to get myself a Cook Islands one-dollar coin, famously featuring the Queen on one side and Tangaroa the “god of the sea and fertility” on the other with his enormous dick hanging down between his legs.

It was a fast three-day run to Tahiti; one day we made 263 miles. As we neared Tahiti’s sister island of Moorea a small motor launch full of friends and family came out to meet us, and we were suddenly busy catching cans of cold Heineken, beautiful leis of fresh flowers and little packages of Tahitian delicacies. We eventually veered into a lagoon at Moorea where most of the welcoming party came aboard for the final 20-mile run to Papeete. We made this last stretch with the most favorable winds of the trip, and Vehia surfed along like a bird on the wing, bearing a happy crowd bedecked with flowers and awash in beer.

We tied up to the seawall in Papeete which is right on the main street of town, a jolting contrast to 2½ weeks weeks on the open sea. Reporters took pictures and conducted interviews with Henri, more family and friends and curious passersby, more beer and scotch, and so it went on into the night. Baptiste took me home to a tropical bungalow straight out of somebody’s dream vacation, with its own dock, sailboat and jet ski, a gigantic bathroom with two sinks, an enormous shower with several spouts and a regular jungle of houseplants. I woke up the next morning with a bad sore throat and spent the day in bed leafing through all the articles about us in the morning papers, sensational and inaccurate in the extreme.

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Except for delicious ripe pineapples for $.25 apiece, the cost of living in Tahiti is the highest I’ve seen anywhere, but the island is also remarkably well-preserved compared to others in the Pacific, and Papeete is one of the prettiest towns ever. Not the least of its attractions are the gorgeous women, stunning blends of Polynesian, European and Asian genetics. The French are much less puritanical about intermarriage and although there are many Christian churches here you don’t find the blue laws and the Mother Hubbard clothes for women that have become the norm in many other parts of the South Pacific. The fabled French chic is everywhere in evidence. To walk around Papeete during lunch hour when all the shop girls are on the street was one delight that I could afford. Once I got over my strep, such strolls were my main recreation.

[I can’t find a photo to illustrate exactly what I’ve just described, so I’ll just post this:]

While I was recuperating at Baptiste’s, one Sunday morning on the radio I heard a Tahitian song with sort of a Guantanamera rhythm to it. The singers kept repeating something that sounded to me like “P. F. Sloan”, a name that hadn’t crossed my mind in quite some time. Remember the protest song “Eve of Destruction?” He wrote it, put out one album, and as far as I know was heard from no more. Anyway, out of this reverie was born a new song which revives the memory of P. F. Sloan. The tune is loosely based on the old calypso song “Shame and Scandal in the Family.”

“There was a call for me down at the Island Club,
My woman she mad, she say ‘Look here Bub,
I’m tired of you, yeah I’m sick to de bone,
I’m goin’ off to Hollywood with PF Sloan.’

[Chorus]

PF Sloan, PF Sloan, why don’t you leave my woman alone?
PF Sloan, PF Sloan, why don’t you find a woman of your own?

She said, ‘I’m takin’ the car and my old guitar,
PF Sloan’s gonna make me a star.
You can give all my clothes to the Goodwill,
I’ll get plenty more in Beverly Hills.’

Well I begged and I pleaded, I started to cry. She said,
‘It’s too late now daddy, goodbye!
You’re always out drinkin’, you leave me at home,
Things will be different with PF Sloan!’

About 3 in the mornin’ when they closed the door,
They found me sleepin’ on the barroom floor.
They picked me up, they heard me moan,
‘Oh my baby’s gone to Hollywood with PF Sloan.’

But when I got home, what did I find?
There sat my baby with a bottle of wine.
She said, ‘Aw Honey, I’m right here at home,
You know I’d never leave you for PF Sloan.’

Well I kissed my baby, and I took her by the hand,
When all of a sudden, the telephone rang.
I said, ‘Hello?’ He said, ‘Thanks for the loan!’
It was the voice of PF Sloan!”

One night Baptiste took me to the movies to see “Tess“, the new Polanski film. It was all in French, and consequently I suppose I missed some of the detail, but I had quite a vivid reaction as follows. It seemed to me that there were two films. One was the Thomas Hardy story, beautifully shot on location, well-cast and well-produced. The other was Natassja Kinski who I could happily gaze upon for many hours without the need for any story, sets or costume, but the two films just didn’t go together. There was no way on earth I could believe she was an English peasant no matter how they dressed her or how much mud they smeared on her face. An Eastern European peasant possibly, but an English peasant, never! The fact that everyone else was so well cast only made poor Natassja stick out all the more.

I had already seen stills in Playboy magazine from her first movie, a skin flick with Marcello Mastroianni, and I‘d heard that she was living with Polanski at the time “Tess” was made. I could just imagine the preliminary dialogue. ”Roman darling, I want to do a film where I don’t have to take off my clothes, something with… class.” “Yes dear, I understand…a little lower please, more to the left, not so hard, ahhh that’s it. I think I have just the thing in mind, anyway it’s time I got away from these pervy flicks and horror shows.” I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the evening, but as a “work of art” I thought it was a monumental flop. Two years later she was posing naked with pythons for Richard Avedon. [FYI: I see that you can currently buy the 24 X 36” poster, signed by Avedon, for $900 on eBay.] Now back to the South Pacific:

The social life at Baptiste’s consisted of endless conversations over beer, and speaking no French after a while I got bored and moved to Henri’s where there was a nice guitar and two sweet children to keep me company. A promised trip to Moorea on Vehia never materialized but I finally managed to hitchhike a ride over there on a yacht from Lahaina, Hawai’i where I had spent many bittersweet months the year before. Captain Jimmy knew my zany friend Marina and that was introduction enough. That night some Tahitians came out to the boat with guitars and the amazingly loud little ukes carved out of hardwood with goatskin heads. The party went on until dawn by which time the cheap French rum had poisoned me right to the core.

The Tahitians are great partying people and their music is more wild and exuberant than what I heard in the western parts of Polynesia. One of the party was an American fisherman named Leo who had brought his little 22-foot power boat all the way from Hawai’i to do some exploratory fishing in Tahitian waters. By using special night fishing techniques he had already landed several broadbill swordfish to the astonishment of the locals who didn’t know that the broadbill existed in that area. Leo was one of those people who have been everywhere and done everything. Originally from Texas, he was delighted to hear some fiddle music. “Now here’s a song I’ll bet you don’t know,” he said, and was suitably impressed when I joined right in with him on the choruses of the old Ed Sanders song from the first Fugs album:

“Clara June, Clara June,
I done gived up heifer for youuuu…”

Two days later I was on the plane back to New Zealand, having failed to find a yacht or even a cargo ship to take me for cheaper. I arrived back in Auckland the last days of November and resumed my search for an Australia-bound yacht in need of crew or navigator, but by this time it was already hurricane season in the Tasman Sea and most sailors who knew what they were doing were waiting it out.

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One day Nicolette asked me if I’d like to come to school and sing for her 10-year-olds. I always have a great time in the schools and so just before Summer vacation in early December (this is the southern hemisphere remember), I came in one day with my fiddle and Ian‘s guitar. I sat with the class out on the soccer field and sang ‘When I first Came to This Land,” “Polly Wolly Doodle,“ “The Eggplant That Ate Chicago“ and a few others. During lunch hour I sat under a tree and played fiddle tunes. Afterwards we moved back into the classroom and I decided to have a go at P. F. Sloan, not exactly a children’s song but I had a hunch it might be fun. I wrote “P. F. Sloan“ in big letters on the blackboard and ask the kids to sing that much. Well they got right into it, laughed at the verses, belted out the chorus with me, and when it was over and I started to noodle up another song, one little girl spoke up shyly. “Please… could you sing… P. F. Sloan again?“ and they all started shouting “P. F. Sloan! P. F. Sloan!!“

I said OK, but I wanted them to sing a song for me first, so they did a group-and-leader song called “Goin’ On a Bear Hunt” complete with hilarious sound effects such as slogging through the mud. The second rendition of P.F. Sloan eclipsed the first, the kids even spontaneously chimed in with sound effects like the ringing telephone at just the right moment. At the end a great cheer went up and I didn’t get away from school without singing it one more time. Nicolette told me the next day the whole school was humming P. F. Sloan. If there were any complaints from parents about the type of songs their children were bringing home from school, Nikki didn’t have to deal with them as she was throwing up her job anyway and looking to do some world traveling for a year or two.

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Wandering the docks of Auckland harbor one day I ran into Jack Russell, a salty character I’d met previously in Hawai’i. He loved New Zealand and was determined to settle there even though they’d deported him once already. I had last seen him on his way to Australia, from whence he had planned to worm his way back into New Zealand somehow. Eventually he accomplished this, and during the ride into town from the airport had proposed marriage to a girl he’d just met for the very first time. Eventually she had been persuaded, and he was now officially an “alien resident“ although he was having difficulties with his new wife who didn’t even know where he was living. He was actually living with an American girl, also married conveniently to a Kiwi; it was pretty complicated. Jack took me along to meet some musician friends of his, and I instantly had a place to stay in Auckland proper though I still spent a lot of my time with Ian and Nikki at the beach. I had already started busking on Queen Street in the heart of town and found that I could make $5-10 an hour playing solo fiddle, but my new friend and roommate Seiffe was an excellent guitarist, singer and dulcimer player, and we began to team up in the street.

The trouble with Seiffe was that he is the worst skirt-chaser I have ever known, and it was difficult-to-impossible to get him to play two songs in a row without stopping to chat up some lady, or even take off after her down the street. This probably sounds like an exaggeration but it’s not. Playing with Seiffe was fun but not very lucrative, and I made more money on my own. Another fellow from Seiffe‘s house, an Englishman name Chris, was a better partner in the street. He was more accustomed to playing folk clubs and restaurants, but when he found out how much I was making he sat up and took notice. He had an interesting repertoire including some good original material, and was a seasoned performer. With Chris I used to play fiddle with his guitar and sing harmony; sometimes I’d pick up Leroy and a kazoo and we’d do jug band tunes. We used to draw quite a crowd. After the money was split up I didn’t make any more than I did alone but it was much more fun, but Chris was drawing $50 a week from the government for doing nothing, and unless there was some pressing financial need, he was loath to hike downtown with me.

Chris had an Achilles heel however and that was alcohol. One night I saw him perform at a folk club, and though he played well he seemed awfully nervous. I was about to suggest that he have a stiff drink with me across the street between sets when I saw him filling his coffee cup with whiskey. As the night wore on he got more and more uncomfortable on stage and his guitar playing began to fall apart. He would falter, stop, start again, falter some more; it was painful to watch. Another time in a drinking session at home when we both got into hot water by drinking somebody else’s bottle of brandy when we ran out of our own booze, he literally came unglued right in front of me. I can only guess that for Chris alcohol triggered some kind of toxic reaction in his system, and after that I simply refused to play with him, in public anyway, unless he left the drink for later.

There were quite a few other buskers on Queen Street: old derelict harmonica players, clarinet duets, Neil Young clones, one day even a classical quintet of flute, French horn, clarinet, oboe and bassoon. There was one middle-aged Maori chap who made a bloody nuisance of himself by using a small ratty amplifier on his harmonica, turned it up to top distorted volume and accompanied himself with a tambourine he played with his foot. The only tune I can remember him playing was “White Christmas,” I think maybe there was one other, but anytime he started up in the little shoppers alley I used to frequent, it was no use to try and compete even though he might be 50 yards away. Fortunately he was rather short-winded, and if I was patient he generally didn’t last long, or at least took such long breaks between his renditions of “White Christmas” that I could sneak in a few tunes of my own. With him around I came off pretty well by comparison and may have benefited from the backlash.

Seiffe and I still worked together occasionally. He was great company, one of the funniest people I’ve ever known, and a fine musician. We would sometimes go down into the concrete stairwell leading to the underground parking lot in the center of Auckland and play there. There weren’t many people around but the acoustics were amazing, and often the people who did linger to listen were generous with money, drink and smoke. We worked out some odd numbers down there including the old Doors song “Light my Fire.” With Christmas hard upon us, we worked out some Christmas carols as kazoo duets. The kazoo is actually quite an ancient instrument, and there are many medieval instruments that have that same sort of reedy, farting sound. The only trouble was that it was really difficult to keep from laughing, and it’s not possible to laugh and play kazoo at the same time. Seiffe was also a sometime poet and songwriter, and his song about the rigors of singing in a folk club is hilarious. A typical if unusually short example of his brand of humor is the line he used on every single waitress: “I’ll have a crocodile sandwich, and make it snappy!“

On Christmas Eve, 1980, I played Queen St. by myself, determined to make enough money to kick back for a while. I’d heard about a folk festival coming up between Christmas and New Year’s out on a sheep farm in the green hills south of Auckland and I wanted to go. I’d been told that it would be “semi private,“ for musicians and folk club members only rather than a commercial operation. I like folk music — there I said it — and it sounded like just the thing I was looking for. Instead of my usual pitch, far enough from the traffic to be heard and with a few benches nearby where people could sit and listen while they munched lunch, I got right out on the busy sidewalk and played “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls” for six solid hours. Well if you’re going to jingle, you need to jingle all the way. Nobody likes a half-assed jingler. I knew I couldn’t be heard for more than 10 or 15 feet, nor was it possible for anyone to stop long enough to discover that I was playing the same two songs over and over. These are the only two carols I could think of that are easily recognizable in the time it takes to walk 10 or 15 feet. My take for the day came to more than $90 plus a Christmas card from somebody named Cass. It was hard work, I didn’t touch the fiddle for days afterwards and I never got so mercenary in the street again.

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Seiffe and I rode to the folk festival in the back of a van with a couple of girls, singing and whooping it up all the way with the help of some flagons of New Zealand wine, one of the few shopping bargains besides milk and butter in that sleepy little country. If you bring your own flagon (2¼ liters) to the store, you can fill it up from a spigot with port or sherry for as little as $3, and we were well-stocked. It was 20 miles of bad road from the highway to the sheep farm, and the green rolling hills were a welcome change from the streets of Auckland where busking and yacht-hunting had held me fast. By the time we arrived there were already tents springing up here and there and little groups of people playing music. Right away I saw Jack Russell slapping away on a tea-chest bass, and strolled over to say hello. They were playing “Peggy Sue.”

To make a long story short, what everybody at this “folk festival“ wanted to play was American pop music, and I just wasn’t in the mood. There were some good musicians around but nobody seemed the least bit interested in playing folk music. There were about 47 guitars, 4 mandolins, a couple of banjos and dulcimers, and one fiddle – mine.

The one bright spot was a teenaged harmonica player named Brendan. Brendan could play anything from great blues to fast Irish jigs and could learn a new tune in no time flat. With Brendan‘s help and encouragement I put up a few signs announcing a “country dance workshop” for the morrow, and arm-twisted a small group into joining us to rehearse a few minimal dance tunes.

At the appointed time, one prospective dancer showed up. I was about to give up in disgust when Jack appointed himself deputy arm-twister and went around trying to drum up more dancers. After a full hour of wheedling we finally managed a Virginia Reel. I don’t like to wheedle. If people want to dance, great, I can help, but I’m just not into dragging them kicking and screaming onto the dance floor. It ruins my mood. After the reel the Kiwis were all in, and that was that. I consoled myself with New Zealand fortified wine and Sarah Trusdale.

On the way to the folk festival I had gotten rather friendly with this young lady who wore so much make-up that it was sort of intriguing. I couldn’t wait to see if she would keep it up out there in the sheep pastures, but sure enough the next morning when she emerged from her tent there it was: rouge, paint, powder, blue eyeshadow, mascara, eyeliner, the works. People told me she was a fine piano player but as there was no piano on the sheep farm I never found out for sure. That night we lay together on the hillside kissing and cuddling as reggae versions of “It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” drifted up from the campfires below, but when I tried to put my hand inside her shirt, she jumped up and ran away. When I caught up with her she explained, “I don’t want to get into anything heavy.“

Flagon in hand, I spent the next couple of hours wandering campfire to campfire. It was Neil Young here, Buddy Holly there, Bob Dylan and Judy Collins and the Beatles. I did hear one folk song somewhere, I forget which one. Dejected, rejected, disgusted, and catastrophically drunk, around 3 AM I packed my gear and split, stopping only to add quotation marks to the word “Folk” on the sign at the gate.

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A lot of my contacts with the ‘folk scene’ in New Zealand ended up in frustration of some sort; it just wasn’t what I expected or what I was used to I guess. There are quite a few folk clubs where typically anyone can get up and play 3 songs, and you pay about $3 at the door whether or not you play. There may or may not be a featured performer who makes about $25 more or less depending on the gate. On the North Island of New Zealand anyway, the performers are nearly always solo guitarist–singers who apparently sit alone for hours behind closed doors polishing up their act. Informal jams seem to be just about nonexistent, and even good musicians seldom know how to follow one another into unfamiliar territory. You can follow them if you like, but chances are they’ll slap on a capo and insist that they can only sing this song in C-sharp or A-flat — tough deal for a street fiddler. It’s goddamn frustrating. I took to hiding Seiffe’s capo. One bright spot for me in there clubs was the unaccompanied singing, something we could do with more of back in Oregon. Without an instrument in your hands you can get pretty theatrical, and I heard some wonderful songs from time to time at the Auckland clubs, with and without audience participation.

One night Seiffe asked me to play with him at a folk club Christmas party. We arrived at a small, dark building on the fringes of a lake-side forested park, and entered a crowded room illuminated with candles. It was the usual 3-song format and largely tedious. I mean how many times must you sit through uninspired versions of “In the Pines” or “Wabash Cannonball” or “Cocaine Blues” sung by a man in a suit and tie? OK it’s all for fun and fellowship and all that, but why the emphasis on the individual performance? Why can’t I get up and join in on fiddle? Why should I sit there and applaud politely when I’d rather be outside throwing stones in the lake? [I really am cranky when it comes to folk music — first I can’t get enough and then it’s too much.]

Seiffe and I sat in the back drinking beer. As long as you bring it yourself you can drink anything you like in these clubs, thank goodness. Seiffe is the kind of performer who demands attention and quiet, and I remember him early that very night going out to the kitchen in back to shush some loud talkers, but if he had a mind to (or a few beers) he could be as rude and disruptive as the next guy, if more witty, and so after the first couple of bottles and perhaps the third version of “Gypsy Rover,” he and I began to titter and chitchat.

A lady mounted the stage with a fiddle not a guitar, and I sat up encouraged. Then I saw the music books and the music stand and groaned. Seiffe poked me in the ribs and we both began to giggle. The available candlelight wasn’t sufficient for this violinist cum fiddler to read her music, and so the lights had to be turned on, triggering more mirth from our corner of the room. Finally with the books all spread open and well-lit, she announced that she was going to play a Texas fiddle tune “The Dusty Miller,” and off she went.

She made lovely pear-shaped tones and her classical technique was smooth and articulate, but after the first couple of bars she began to drift out of tune. I held my breath hoping she would get back on the right track, but it only got worse. All the notes were there, but not on the right pitch. Next to me Seiffe was doubled over with his hand clamped over his mouth and I did the same hoping that it would all be over soon, but she went on and on. There was nothing to do but get out of there before I disgraced myself by bursting out in uncontrollable laughter, so with one hand over my mouth and the other firmly clamping my nose, I headed as unobtrusively as possible under the circumstances for a little door in the back of the room. Behind the door was another room used to store the chairs, but even with the door closed the sound of the out-of-control fiddler was inescapable.

I had just caught my breath when the door opened and Seiffe staggered in, likewise looking like the victim of a gas attack. There is little hope for two people in the same room both with the giggles, and as outside the fiddler rampaged on heedless of our agony, Seiffe and I tried our best to contain the explosions of mirth. At last, long last, the music stopped, and we stood there gasping for breath like fish out of water, deliberately avoiding each other‘s eyes and precipitating fresh gales of laughter. Surely she would desist but no, she tore right into another tune. This time it was even worse, and she actually had to stop twice in the middle trying to get her bearings. By the time she finally finished, to polite applause as always, Seiffe and I were wrecked, weak in the knees with aching stomach muscles, and as we sagged against the wall like a couple of midnight drunks, we heard our names announced as the next performers.

This piece of bad news only brought on the giggles again, but giggles or not we emerged from the room, all eyes on us, and got out our instruments. As we busied ourselves with strings and straps and picks, now and then a chuckle would seep out, and both of us would crack up all over again. Seiffe is generally very self-possessed on stage, he really thrives on it, but tonight he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face long enough to get on with the music. Finally someone in the audience remarked, “I don’t know what those two were smoking back there, but it must’ve been pretty good,“ and everybody laughed. The plan was for Seiffe to sing one, sing one together, and one for me. After about five minutes on stage trying to regain enough composure to proceed, Seiffe finally managed his folk club song, which I’d never heard before and was all too appropriate under the circumstances. It’s a clever adaptation of a Paul Simon song, one I didn’t hear till several years later. If you’re a Simon fan you’ll probably recognize it from the lyrics.

“Playing in a folk club you’re bound to win a prize,
They’ve been singing out of tune all night long, (sings out of
tune)
And I’m nearly asleep,
I only came cuz it was cheap,
Here I am at Poles Apart (big Auckland folk club)
And here’s my song, won’t take long.

(Chorus)

Die, die, die you buggers die,
Fiddle all day, play all night,
Die, die, die you buggers die,
Fiddle all day, she’ll be right, mate.

My mother played the dulcimer, my father played around,
I was born with my fingers in my ears,
And when I reached my prime,
Left my home at the age of 29,
Came down to Poles Apart
To see what’s here, drink some beer.

Keen lad in a folk club, he’s singing to a crowd,
Trying hard but ending up with tangled strings and
f-f-f-f-f-fingers, (at this point not only the poetic
meter but the guitar playing gets all tangled)
And he clean forgot the…clean forgot……clean forgot the chorus,
But the audience plowed right on,
Obviously they’ve clapped themselves,
They’re singers, real dead ringers, and the chorus was:

Now we’ve hit the big time and were headed for the top,
And the guitars seem to stay in tune sometimes (bad chord here)
And were workin’ on a version
Of Dylan’s latest song
Called “Growin’ Pains a’Comin”,
Nearly rhymes, almost…”

Then we did The Band’s “Take a Load Off Fanny” with guitar and dulcimer, and I could think of nothing more appropriate to close with than the a verses to the Temperance Reel that I learned from Clyde Curley in the late 70s, performed a cappella with an empty whiskey bottle for a prop.

Possibly because I was so involved with my own music at the time I didn’t make much contact with the music and dance of the native New Zealanders, the Maoris. The white New Zealanders, unlike the Australians, have practically no folk music of their own – – they will argue this point but it’s pretty much true – – but they do take a good deal of pride (unlike the Australians) in the original indigenous culture that existed before their grandfathers took over. All Kiwi school children learn to sing Maori songs and even study a bit of the language. The Maoris came from Tahiti about 1100 years ago on 4 big canoes, and they keep such careful genealogies that any Maori can tell you which canoe he descends from.

Their performances traditionally have the women in long beaded skirts, beadwork blouses, and with distinctively tattooed chins. They usually sing in large groups with swaying movements and percussion accompaniment. The Maori women also do special routines with “poi balls” which consist of a cord with a ball attached to each end, and they twirl these balls quite skillfully in different patterns in time to the music. For tourist shows the men do a lot of war dances.

Stripped to the waist and bearing spears and clubs, they are famous for their spine chilling war whoops and grotesque facial expressions with unnerving tattoos, bulging eyes and tongues protruding like Gene Simmons of the rock group Kiss. They say some Maori regiments during World War II caused real havoc in the German lines in North Africa, descending on the Germans in a wild yelling horde. The poor Germans, who had never seen anything like it in their worst dreams, dropped their guns and ran for their lives.

✱

At some point in early January 1981, Ian had to go somewhere for a week or so, and with Nikki gone in the daytime working on something or other, I took advantage of the empty house to borrow a typewriter and do some writing. I had filled seven journals so far since leaving home, and I couldn’t go on packing them around, but before I shipped them home I wanted to edit out an account of what I’d been up to for the past 18 months to send home to my family and friends. I opened the first book and began. 27,000 words later I hadn’t even made it to the end of the first journal book, and I was running out of time and money. As the writing evolved I realized that my original intention was going out the window but I was having such a good time of it that it didn’t matter. Sometimes I would read back what I’d written at the end of the day and howl with laughter, but it was a rough draft yet, and I had to put it aside the day the phone rang and the voice at the other end asked if I was the navigator who was looking for a passage to Australia? It was a terrible connection, Ian’s phone was the kind you had to crank. I had difficulty not only with the line but with the Australian accent. Eventually I got a telephone number and arranged to make connections in Auckland.

The next afternoon I met Michael Tubbs for the first time. He drove up to Seiffe’s in an old white Ford and we had a little chat on the front porch. He had built his 37-foot Brown-designed Searunner trimaran in his own backyard in roughly 6 years of intermittent labor. Soon after launch she had broken loose from her mooring in a storm and gone careening around Auckland Harbor smashing into a number of other yachts and actually sinking one of them. “Seahawk” had suffered remarkably little damage herself, but there were several holes in her sides and some of the safety railing stanchions had been pushed right through the deck. The incident had not endeared Mr. Tubbs to the Auckland yachting fraternity, and this had contributed to his decision to move to Australia in the middle of hurricane season.

Michael was born in Burma of mixed English-Burmese parentage and had spent a lot of his youth in India. Then his folks had moved to New Zealand where he eventually met and married Christine, an Australian 10 years his junior, off on a “walkabout” with some girlfriends. It’s become a tradition for young Australians to make at least one long adventure trip, to New Zealand if not Asia, Europe or America before settling down to marry and work and drink beer. Both Michael’s parents were now past and gone, and the Tubbs’ had decided to move to Oz where Christine still had folks and it’s considerably easier to find work. New Zealand is a fine place to mosey along, but the ambitious usually end up migrating elsewhere.

Tubbs was looking not only for a navigator but someone to help fix the boat. He offered me room and board while the work went on and guessed that it would be a month or so before we were ready to sail. I took a look at the boat and had a chat with Christine. We seem to get along okay. and so the deal was made and I moved in with the Tubbs’. My room was tiny but it was mine, the first such space I had enjoyed since my “little brass shack” in Samoa, and there was a tiny desk big enough to hold a typewriter. In the evenings I managed to finish a second draft of my lengthy open letter home.

The Tubbs house looked like a marine warehouse with yachting gear stacked up everywhere. They were obviously committed to leaving. They’d already shipped off their only child, a 10-year-old boy, to Christine’s parents. There were big packing crates filled with stuff they were going to ship, and they were selling off the washing machine and other household appliances. It gradually became apparent that the one thing they’d neglected to do regarding this proposed voyage was learn how to sail. In all the 10 years they’d been dreaming about a boat, assembling materials, and putting it all together, they’d hardly ever done any sailing.

Tubbs told me something to the effect that he didn’t want to accept invitations to go sailing with other people because then they’d all want to go sailing with him when his boat was finished. This was typical Michael Tubbs thinking. At the same time he complained continually that none of his friends ever came around to help him, but he was obviously deathly afraid of getting in anyone’s debt regarding future boat rides. Perhaps he was thinking about how embarrassing it would be for his friends to find out that he didn’t know how to sail. He even changed the interior design to two single and two double births instead of the four doubles described in the plans, to reduce the number of guests should he be forced to take anybody out for the weekend.

Two days after I moved in with the Tubbs’ I got another call, from a guy who wanted to sail to Australia tomorrow. I had one hour to think it over. I could see that the smart thing to do would be to leave the Tubbs’ to their own devices, get myself over to Australia and stuck into some kind of paying work, but on the other hand the Seahawk job offered a number of interesting opportunities.

First of all I like to fix boats. You always learn a lot, and you get to know the boat. Secondly it began to look as if this was not only a navigation job, but as I was the most experienced person currently involved I would probably end up calling all the shots. On Vehia, Henri generally took the courses I recommended, but he chose and set the sails and otherwise took responsibility for running the boat. It began to look as if this kind of global responsibility would be mine by default on Seahawk, a really valuable opportunity not easily come by. Besides I had already listened to many a sad story from Tubbs about the difficulties they had experienced, and I couldn’t feel good about deserting them now. I didn’t know yet that complaining had become a way of life with Michael; he will spend the rest of his life blaming other people for life’s every little irritation. On the negative side was the real danger of crossing the Tasman, one of the worlds roughest stretches of ocean, smack in the middle of hurricane season with a green crew. Would they be sick, terrified or otherwise incapacitated? And what about the boat, brand-new and untried? They had sailed her exactly twice, and had suffered some misfortunes in the process that they seemed reluctant to discuss. Would she hold up in a blow?

I decided to stick with the Tubbs’. I wrote a will of sorts and sent it to Zanetto my house-sitter with strict instructions not to mention it to my mother unless I didn’t make it. Then I set out to get on top of the situation. I had sailed on a trimaran only once before, in Hawai’i, and I started reading some books on the subject of which they had quite a few. I studied the boat’s plans and checked as best I could to see that the construction had been done to specifications. It was something of a relief to find out in the process that Mr. Tubbs had done little of the actual building himself. He would buy timber and plywood and fiberglass, cut things to size according to the plans, and then hire somebody else to do the actual assembly, Tubbs acting as the laborer. I compiled endless lists of necessary gear including all recommended safety equipment, and occasionally had to do a little arm-twisting to get Tubbs to lay out the necessary cash by threatening to pull out, the only kind of leverage I had under the circumstances. I inspected everything from the tip of the mast on down. I may be a bit adventurous, but I try not to be stupid. If we were caught in a Tasman cyclone I wanted to have a fighting chance.

I told Michael we’d need at least one more crew, preferably two. If the weather got nasty I knew I wouldn’t be sick but what about them? I’d heard too many tales already about unfortunate crew left to struggle alone through a storm, perhaps for days, with the owner and guests in their bunks too sick to care if they lived or died. Tubbs asked if I knew of anybody and I immediately thought of Nicolette who had thrown up her teaching job and was looking for a crewing job herself.

So Nikki joined our crew, and it’s too bad she didn’t last because she was the only one I ever saw who could always cut through Michael’s whining bullshit and get him to laugh at himself. It would have been a much more jolly trip with Nikki along, but three days later she got another offer, a job on Neil Young’s hundred foot schooner “W. N. Ragland,” departing shortly for the Solomon Islands, Japan, Alaska, and the States. It paid $600 a month on top of the experience of living and sailing aboard a real classic sailing ship, sturdily built, beautifully rigged, painstakingly restored, with everything on deck solid teak, and a superb heavy timber interior with lots of decorative carving. Nobody blamed Nikki for jumping ship but a replacement was hard to find. For some strange reason nobody seemed very keen to go out on the Tasman Sea during hurricane season in a brand-new trimaran.

I might mention here that amongst the yachting fraternity a great controversy perpetually goes on between the monohull crowd and the multihull believers. A lot of the monohull people won’t set foot on a multi, and the multihull fans love to tease the monohulls by zipping past them in their generally speedier craft. I take no sides in this matter. Both designs have been around for thousands of years, and in most circumstances and in the right hands one is about as safe and seaworthy as the other, but of course not everyone agrees.

✱

By this time we had Seahawk out of the water and a genial fellow named Gordon was fixing the holes in the hull and deck. Gordon occasionally demonstrated a talent for deflating the Tubbs balloon in a friendly way, and one incident I’ll always remember with a smile. Michael, for lack of anything else to complain about at the moment, was carrying on about the people who day after day took nasty spills on the slippery concrete at the waters edge where they came to launch their trailer-sailers. Gordon remarked that maybe the harbor ought to put up a sign or something warning people to watch their step. “No that wouldn’t do a bit of good,” Tubbs railed on, “they’re just plain stupid and 100 signs wouldn’t make any difference.” Gordon thought this over for a moment and then drawled, “Well, you could be right. You’re not often right, but this time you could be.” We all laughed at that, even Michael.

Meanwhile I had discovered some discrepancies between the dimensions specified by the designer for the rigging, what was written on the rigger’s bill, and what was actually on the boat. The diameters of all three were different, and I was determined to get it ironed out before we went to sea. I complained and finally a man came from the company that had done the work, and we (he and I, Tubbs stayed out of it) got into quite an ugly scene. He insisted that there were no discrepancies, that I was a loud-mouthed Yank who didn’t know what he was talking about, and that if I didn’t believe him I could call ‘so-and-so’ who would set me straight. In the process he told a couple of bald-faced lies which made me quite angry, after all it was my life that was going to be depending on that rigging not his. I did call ‘so-and-so’ who was not easy to get hold of, and he agreed that the boat should have the rigging specified by the designer. Eventually the riggers came back and replaced four of the mast stays with considerably heavier wire, and after this I redoubled my efforts to make sure that nobody else had cut corners on the not-terribly-bright Tubbs who apparently never checked these things himself.

It was a full-time job and then some. All day at the boat: painting, installing handrails on the cabin tops, mounting life rings and buoys, designing and installing lights for the compasses, new anti-electrolysis sinks on the prop shaft, the list was endless. I made emergency storm covers for all the windows, and special patches that could be installed quickly to seal off the center hull should wave action punch holes in the under-wings going out to the two side hulls. I replaced the latches on the out-hull hatches as the ones Michael had installed came open with just a tug. At night back at the Tubbs’ residence they peppered me with questions as long as I could stay awake, and I finally had to insist on a bit of time to myself to finish my writing and collect my thoughts.

During these weeks I saw practically nothing of my friends except for one or two who came down to see the boat. Ian flew off to Hong Kong and his cargo ship job without ever setting eyes on Seahawk. One night I was determined to get away and Seiffe talked me into accompanying him to a restaurant gig that entailed a ferry ride across the harbor. I was quite tired of the Tubbs’ menu by now which consisted of mincemeat curry four or five nights a week, lots of white bread, Kool-Aid, and canned mackerel, and Seiffe assured me we would eat like kings. However on the ferry boat he started chatting up a lady and by the time we’d had a few beers on the other side and he had her phone number tucked away in his pocket, dinner was over, and it further developed that Seiffe didn’t actually have a gig at all.

It turned out to be a folk club-type situation where people just got up and played, and by this time I was too hungry and put out to feel like playing for a cup of coffee. As we left the place Seiffe indicated a fellow standing near the door as somebody who he wanted nothing to do with, and in fact he made a point of sliding by when the fellow wasn’t looking so as to be spared any pleasantries. When I asked why, he told me that this man had a perfectly nice girlfriend to whom he was continually unfaithful. I had to laugh. This was a perfect description of Seiffe himself, who had been for two years sleeping with an 18-year-old beauty whose charms he couldn’t praise highly enough, and yet not a week went by without his bringing home some new piece of action from the folk club. One of the strangest laws of human behavior is that the faults we criticize most strongly in others are usually the faults we have ourselves; we know them so well we are quick to see them in others.

✱

At last Seahawk went back in the water. I had found out that the frugal Tubbs had neglected to sacrifice a bottle of champagne over her bows during the initial launching, and I thought perhaps this had something to do with her subsequent rampage through Auckland Harbor as well as the mysterious misfortunes of her maiden voyage. So without saying anything to anybody, as Seahawk slid into the bay I poured a can of New Zealand’s best beer over the bow. Not champagne perhaps, but better than nothing. I wasn’t keen to go out on a boat that was still thirsty, perhaps for somebody’s blood. With little else to do but find crew, I decided to take off for a week and hitchhike down to the South Island, about which I’d heard a lot of good things.

Back in Hawai’i, Jack Russell had showed me a book of photographs of the Hyde Park-type free speech area in the city square of Christchurch which featured daily confrontations between the Wizard, a charismatic freethinker, and the legions of the Lord led by Renee Stayton, the violin-playing Bible Lady. The Wizard appeared in a variety of costumes including a sackcloth outfit that made him look just like the Woolworth paintings of Jesus.

He kept handy a white princess phone with which to speak with God up in heaven as well as a red phone for calling the Devil. It sounded like a lively scene in an otherwise somewhat boring country and I had hoped to make it to Christchurch somehow. Several of the folks I’d gotten to know on Dirty Dick’s catamaran in Tonga lived in and around Christchurch and I already had invitations to stay.

✱           ✱           ✱

I packed a light bag and was “off to see the Wizard”. The two-day hitch was not so difficult. In New Zealand sometimes you wait a long time for a ride but when it comes, more likely than not you’ll be invited home, treated to lunch or some such gracious gesture. In Wellington at the tip of the North Island I was taken in for the night by a Maori by the name of Max Crapp. My first host in Christchurch was Tony Hamilton, a Dirty Dick alumnus who was putting the finishing touches on his dream house in the country a few miles out of the city, a gingerbread affair of ferro-cement over 2X4s and tarpaper, with bedrooms sticking out in all 4 directions made of enormous sections of sewer pipe with big round windows at the ends. Tony had three children, the oldest of whom was just in the process of leaving the nest for the first time. Consequently things were aflutter with all the usual “get out of here/don’t go” emotions. Bridget the youngest and I played tiddlywinks and stayed out of the way.

In the morning I hitched into Christchurch proper, arriving a bit early for the noonday action. It was a spacious flagstone square with a small cathedral to one side in front of which most of the speakers held forth. At 12 o’clock sharp a fellow emerged from the church carrying a Bible and a small step ladder, and setting up in front of a set of wide steps that provided convenient seating, began to tell me and one or two others how the Lord had changed his life. After a few minutes a picturesque character wearing striped trousers, an ornate vest, some exotic jewelry and a big wide brimmed black hat strolled over and sat down with us. After a few minutes of listening quietly he suddenly reacted to something the evangelist had said by loudly remarking, “Oh bullshit!” The street preacher ignored this comment and went on with his testimony. The fellow in the black hat, whose name was Bernie, was soon joined by a few other dissenters, and they were not a bit shy or polite in their comments concerning the heartfelt witness of this earnest soul who had been saved by the Lord Jesus Christ from alcohol, marijuana, fornication and a long list of other evils sure to result in eternal damnation.

I must confess that at first I was a little shocked at the intensity and foul language of Bernie and his friends, but it soon became apparent that this was business as usual in Cathedral Square where the only rule is: no physical violence. Bernie roared, “You’re not saved, Don, you’re just another wanker with a Bible. You just like attention, standing up there telling us how holy you are now. You’re just a show-off who wouldn’t know Jesus if he were standing on your foot!” Not everyone was so articulate or witty as Bernie and there was a lot of “fuck you” and “shove that Bible up your ass” and the like, but now and then they would engage Don, and those that followed him, in regular theological debate, and it was obvious that a lot of them knew the Bible pretty well. I couldn’t help but laugh, even at the crudest comments. How many times have we had to listen to such preaching — funerals are a good example of a captive audience often subjected to severe Bible-thrashing — and when was it ever permitted to question, harass and harangue in turn? Sometimes people would jump up and start speaking themselves to make a point. Sometimes the evangelist would stop and listen, sometimes he just plowed right on. Someone told me that the Wizard was out of town that day but would be back tomorrow.

✱

Then another character appeared wearing a Sherlock Holmes cap and all the gear an English gentlemen might wear on a fox hunt, really dressed to the nines, even a cravat. By this time Don had been replaced by another Bible-thumper as Sherlock Holmes set up his own stepladder nearby and began a long and very funny oration on the subject of vegetarians. “We’ve all heard these pious vegetarians who say, ‘How can you eat animals? How can you be so heartless as to kill the gentle cow or sheep to satisfy your craving for meat? Must we shed the blood of God’s creatures in order to live?’ and so forth. But what do they do? They seize on the innocent vegetables, fruits and flowers sitting peacefully in the earth or hanging from a tree, bothering nobody. They take out their knives and cut them up into little pieces and devour them. The vegetables never have a chance! At least the animal has a chance to escape, possibly even mount a counterattack, but the poor defenseless vegetable has no chance whatsoever. Friends, I tell you the reason these people eat only vegetables is that they are cowards! Rather than taking their chances with an animal that has legs to run, teeth and claws to bite and scratch, they take on the unfortunate vegetable who cannot escape their hungry jaws. These vegetarians would like us to think that they are some how less cruel or more humane than the meat eater, but the truth is that they are bullies every one!”

This is a highly condensed version of what took Sherlock about half an hour to expound in a very witty and articulate fashion. The poor evangelist nearby was no match for Sherlock and went forlornly droning on to an empty set of steps. As the crowd expanded to perhaps 100 people, Sherlock shifted to another favorite topic in Cathedral Square: the devilish Yanks (that’s us folks) as the source of most of the world’s problems including pollution, war, fast food, advertising, women’s liberation, disco and bad taste in general. “We won the war in spite of the Yanks, and in the process we found it out exactly what’s wrong with them: they’re overbearing, oversexed, and over here!” (Big roar from the crowd.) There were several American tourists in the crowd who were apparently taking all this quite seriously and one of them, who seem to typify everything that Sherlock bemoaned, began to get angry and disruptive. Finally he jumped to his feet, faced the crowd and shouted, “I’ve had enough of this shit! Every day this week I’ve come down to the Square here, and all I hear is lies and slander about my country. If it went wasn’t for the USA all of you would probably be speaking Japanese! Well I’ve had about as much as I can take, I’m not going to listen to another word of this rubbish!”

So saying he produced a small tape recorder and switched it on. It began to play “God Save the Queen.” Sherlock, like all of the Wizard’s band being a staunch royalist, snapped to attention and removed his hat. The obstreperous Yank then produced an aluminum pie plate and a can of shaving cream, and as he filled the plate with a heap of lather he went on: “From now on we Yanks are not going to stand for any more of this abuse, were going to fight back!”, and with that he quite deliberately pushed the plate full of shaving cream right into Sherlock’s face where it remained during the final strains of the British anthem. The Yank went on: “I call on all loyal Americans here in Christchurch to join with me to put a stop to this scurrilous propaganda campaign. We will seize a piece of ground here in Christchurch from which to operate and defend it if necessary from any attacks by the Wizard and his cronies.”

Meanwhile Sherlock had peeled the pie plate off his face and made two holes in the sea of white lather so that he could see out. From his waistcoat pocket he produced a small mirror and a safety razor, and as the Yank went on about his plan to organize opposition to the Wizards anti-American propaganda, Sherlock calmly shaved. When he was finished he tidied himself up with a towel somebody handed him, retrieved the pie plate, and shoved it in the still-ranting Yank’s face, dusted off his hands with a flourish and strolled away to loud cheers from the crowd.

I’m a little thick sometimes, and I didn’t immediately realize that Sherlock and the Yank had planned this whole scene beforehand. I thought perhaps Sherlock always carried a mirror and razor just in case. I did follow them to a nearby coffeehouse where we all sat around a table and discussed the execution and dramatic impact of the performance, much as a group of actors might talk about opening night. I was told that the Wizard would surely return the following day and that there would be further confrontations with the rebellious Yanks. I volunteered to play music for the Yank contingent. That night at Tony’s I constructed a large Uncle Sam hat out of heavy cardboard, gave it a fine red white and blue paint job, and decorated it with bits of Americana like Bob Dylan, McDonald’s, Raquel Welch, baseball, Nixon and apple pie.

✱

The next day, sure enough, at 1 PM sharp the Wizard arrived in a long purple robe, carrying a large plastic carrot which turned out to be some sort of a flute on which he played a short tune to open the proceedings. Earlier I had already searched out Renee the Bible Lady, heard her life story in a personal interview, and joined her on fiddle, struggling through a number of hymns I’d never heard before. Playing with the Bible Lady I got my fair share of abuse, and when the Wizard showed up I excused myself and went to join the legions of the damned. The Wizard began in his most stentorian bellow: “I understand that in my brief and necessary absence there has transpired a Yankee uprising here in Christchurch, and that loyal defenders of the monarchy have been physically attacked by unscrupulous Yanks right here in Cathedral Square!” He went on to reiterate the many evils that could be traced to Yankee influence and declared that the world map should be turned upside down, putting New Zealand at the top of the world and the Yanks and the Russians on the bottom “where they belong.”

I should mention here that the Wizard is British by birth, and an extremely intelligent and erudite fellow with degrees in psychology and sociology. He was reportedly a lecturer at Sydney University in Australia during the Vietnam era [which in 1981 remember was less than a decade previous] and became the leader of a movement to defuse campus violence by instituting mock battles with paper swords and water balloons. He’d declared himself “Wizard of Sydney University” and actually had some sort of official recognition. From there he went to Melbourne, where he was declared a “Living Work of Art” by the National Art Gallery. He was currently “on loan” to Christchurch, where he heads up the “Imperial British Conservative Party”, a small but devoted group who dress up in quasi-military garb featuring the Union Jack colors. Group photos generally include his stately white-haired mother, the only female in the Wizard’s entourage who doesn’t wear a veil. He is a staunch foe of Women’s Lib and declares that all women should be as “slave girls,” waiting on their men hand and foot, and when not busy around the house should be found lounging in seductive poses.

He is a great believer that human beings need strong myths to sustain them and is therefore a stout monarchist and an enemy of all democratic and all egalitarian political systems. One of the articles in his “Wizard’s Almanac,” a fascinating publication full of wonderful nonsense, is entitled “Mythleading the Masses.” His tongue is so firmly implanted in his cheek that it’s quite impossible to say what, if anything, he really believes in, but he is a consummate orator who maintains an open challenge to debate with anyone in public who would dispute his title of “Wizard of the Antipodean Realms.” He seems to survive by selling posters, postcards, pamphlets and maps of the upside down world during or after his regular Monday through Friday appearances in Cathedral Square.

“Where is this dastardly Yank?!” he demanded, and the dastardly Yank came forward, followed by me in my new hat playing “The Battle of New Orleans” on kazoo and ukulele, a song that I’d already heard Sherlock declare in public that he detested. Paper swords were produced and the Yank began to duel it out with one of the Wizard’s lieutenants while I encouraged him with a medley of patriotic melodies and Sherlock attempted to steal my hat. But the duel was clearly a draw, and during a pause in the action I was asked to play “God Save the Queen” again.

By this time the Bible Lady had spotted me and she joined me on the fiddle for the British anthem, and as the Wizard came to attention, as Sherlock had the day before, the Yank drenched him with a large bucket of water poured right over his head. After this treacherous act there was no alternative but to declare all-out war. The Yankee faction had already laid claim to an island in the Avon River which flows through the middle of Christchurch, and the Wizard vowed to flush them out on the morrow by means of a water bomb assault, real saturation bombing. I wandered off for a final chat with the Bible Lady whose parting shot at the Wizard was, “Now everybody can see that you’re all wet.” She told me that once when she’d been riding on a float in the Christchurch Easter parade dressed up as an angel with wings and all, when the Wizard’s boys had attacked with water balloons and soaked her right to the skin. “He’s a very wicked man,” she told me confidentially. She sold me a book of her poetry for $3, some of the worst verse ever to hit the printed page.

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I had to leave Christchurch the next morning in order to catch up with Seahawk so I had to pass up the big water fight, and as I left the Square for the last time I was thinking hard about the significance of all this horseplay. I’m convinced that this sort of free-speech and nonviolent games are an excellent institution on a number of levels. Language becomes so loaded at times, we’re ready to fight somebody we don’t even know over a careless word, even at the international level. I’m sure a lot of us have been in situations where if we had said the wrong thing we’d be dead now. We forget that it’s only language. On the other hand the freedom to use it freely is, I still believe, extremely important. I am currently living in a country (Indonesia) where you cannot print “President Suharto doesn’t know shit from Shinola,” in your newspaper or magazine. With an election this year there are big billboards going up showing Suharto out in the rice paddy with a hoe. No one believes that General Suharto has ever seen the business end of a hoe, but you won’t see any graffiti on these ridiculous billboards and people get very nervous if you poke fun at them. Democracy is a somewhat ponderous and inefficient system of government, but it seems to me to be the one that best ensures that the welfare of the people as a whole will be the most important consideration, and without the freedom to express all points of view democracy becomes impossible. No nation on earth is currently what I’d call a shining example of this kind of freedom, but people like the Wizard make it hot for those who would suppress the opinions of others.

I liked the Bible Lady, and it pained me to hear Bernie and his boys shouting “Shut up and go home you old bag! You wouldn’t be out here making a racket every day if your old man hadn’t thrown you out of the house years ago for bitching and nagging him to death,” and yet the Wizard and the evangelists really fed off each other. If I was to become a Bible-thumper some day I’d want to test my faith in the fire of Bernie’s skepticism. Bernie was not a man without morals, but he had no mercy on hypocrites and holier-than-thou types repeating scripture like parrots, and could rip them to shreds. Bernie was good for these people. Just as we wouldn’t know what good was without having evil to compare, so the two factions in Cathedral Square played their parts in a daily drama that was generally entertaining, thought-provoking, nonviolent and therapeutic. My two days in the Square were worth every bit of the 4 days it took to get there and back.

Tony had finally managed to locate Ginny, Dirty Dick’s ex-girlfriend, and she invited me to spend my last night in Christchurch at her parents house. Unfortunately she was still carrying a torch for Dick. She was the only person I ever met who liked him. Dick had taken up with a 19-year-old hippie from Kansas, had bought himself a Land Rover and a few kayaks and was running a land-based adventure holiday business out of Christchurch. Poor Ginny was still running errands and doing paperwork for him, and taking kayak lessons in the vain hope that Dick would come back to her someday. She took me to an international folk dance class which turned out to be run by a nice lady from Oregon. The very first dance they did was a New England contra that I used to call, and though the music was all recorded I had a pretty good time. During the intermission the caller and I chatted about Oregon and dance. She asked if I’d like to call a dance and I said sure. She invited me to look through her collection of tapes, but I had brought my fiddle and said I’d like to try to play and call myself. In 1978 back in Amherst, Massachusetts I’d spent a couple of wonderful hours contra dancing in the front room of an ice cream parlor, a spontaneous middle-of-the-night adventure made possible by a guy named Campbell Kaynor who could both call and play fiddle and keep it together all by himself. It had since been my lingering ambition to attempt to do the same myself someday. I put everybody in a big circle and stood in the center — taught, played and called a circle waltz to the tune of Ash Grove. It worked! The next morning I set off for Auckland having made it to roughly 43° south latitude. Only the tip of South America, Antarctica, and a few islands lie further south.

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By the time I got back to Auckland, Michael had found a couple of crew willing to take their chances on Seahawk. This was too bad in a way because I’d just found out that Jack Russell and his girlfriend Pam were parting company and she, a sailor with at least as much experience as me, was looking for a boat. Neither of Tubbs candidates had ever sailed on the open ocean before though they both owned sailing dinghies that they raced on Auckland Harbor. When I showed up they were all ready to go on a shakedown cruise out to a small volcanic island off the East Coast, about a three day trip. I really liked Pam and consequently was a bit slow to warm up to Rod and Mike, but they turned out to be pretty good blokes and we got along well. Tubbs was another story. The main things I wanted to do on the shakedown trip were: find out who was going to be seasick, try out all the sails and running gear, push the boat a bit if possible to see how she might react in a blow, and run a few “man overboard” drills. That last means to throw something that floats over the side and then practice bringing the boat under sail back to that spot — a very tricky business and something none of us had ever tried including me.

Michael turned out to be the only seasick one, and every time the wind came up he got hysterical and began shouting, “Pull down the sails we’re going to capsize! I want to live to see my boy in Australia!” Seriously. I tried to reassure him that we were not in danger of capsize but there is no arguing with fear, so down came the sails. We limped along making 2 or 3 knots and I wondered when Michael would call the man overboard drill. He never did. We rounded White Island at dusk the second day. The crater is blown out on the south side right down to sea level making it possible to look right in at the clouds of steam and smoke bubbling out of the waters. Quite a sight, also quite a stench. By the time we got back to Auckland Harbor, Tubbs and I weren’t getting along at all, and I just retired from the scene and let him putter along as he pleased.

The next day, parked in front of the bank, Tubbs suddenly exploded and all this shit came out. I was reckless and rebellious and putting his boat in jeopardy and why did I question everything and I was trying to ruin him financially by insisting that he buy a sea anchor and so on and on and on. I got a little ruffled at all this abuse. I had been listening to Michael abuse everybody and everything in sight for over a month now, especially the bit about “Nobody ever helps me, everybody’s against me.” I had been working for him for three meals a day and a bed and was about to guide him across the Tasman, a service that alone would have cost him at least $1000 plus return air fare from a professional if he could find one to take the job in hurricane season. I was losing patience with Tubbs and all his wingeing. I told him there was no evidence whatsoever for the contention that I had put his boat in danger except for his own fear, largely the result of inexperience, and that the real danger lay out there in the Tasman should we be unlucky enough to encounter real weather, not just a 20 knot breeze, but 50 or 80 or 100 knots.

At this point I had read enough about Searunner trimarans and talked to other owners with experience that I believed that with the proper equipment we could survive such weather if it didn’t last too long, but I was no longer counting on any help from Tubbs who I assumed would be too sick to assist or interfere. I pointed out that he had not demonstrated any leadership qualities on our shakedown trip, and despite several reminders from me had never called the man-overboard drill that we’d already agreed must be practiced before we set out. As things heated up I even accused him of possibly concealing defects in the construction from the rest of us; I just couldn’t figure out why he was so over-the-top nervous about his boat. We had a lot of hot words for each other, and when we got back to being gentlemen again Michael declared that he would call a meeting of all the crew for that afternoon and we would talk it out together. He was sure that Rod and Mike would back him up and put me in my place. I had spent the previous night as Mike’s houseguest, discussing the trip over many a beer, and I had a feeling that Tubbs was in for a big surprise.

Later that day we all sat down under a tree: Michael, Christine, Rod, Mike and I. Tubbs opened the discussion: “During our trip to White Island there seem to be a few disagreements…” That’s all he got out before Mike interrupted him. Mike and then Rod held the floor for the next 10 minutes or so, and the gist of what they said was that Michael obviously didn’t know how to sail and therefore it would be wise for him to listen to the advice of the only person on board who had ocean sailing experience; that they’d never felt the boat to be in any danger; that they had confidence in my ability and judgment; and that furthermore if for any reason I was not going on the trip, they would pull out as well. Well Tubbs didn’t have a thing to say after that, but down inside I guess he never forgave me. I tried to persuade him to take Pam along too, but he said no, five was enough. [In case you haven’t figured this out for yourself by now, my luck in this department was horrible right down the line.]

The night before our final departure Jack Russell turned up on the boat when the others had gone, his new girlfriend in tow. We smoked a joint and he showed me a couple of knots I’d been keen to learn. One of them I still carry around with me — there it is right in front of me, but I can’t reproduce it to save my life. He brought a special package from Pam containing three other packages, one for each Sunday of the trip, a sweet gesture that only another sailor would think of.

After they left I made a final call to the weather bureau and received the unsettling news that there was a small cyclone brewing up slightly north and east of Australia, winds of 60 knots, the storm moving slowly eastwards at about 6 knots/hour. Their advice was to stay in New Zealand waters until it was clear what was going to happen with this weather system. Since we had several hundred miles to go to clear the North Cape we decided to depart the next morning as scheduled — my visa expired that day in any case — and island-hop for a few days while we assessed the weather situation.

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We cleared customs at Admiralty Steps in Auckland the morning of February 28, 1981, and sailed 30 miles across the harbor to Kauau Island where I put the crew through some good tacking drill, beating (sailing into the wind) up a narrow bay before dropping anchor. We spent two nights at Kauau, went for a hike and saw a wallaby. Cyclone Frieda was still puttering along eastwards at 6 knots with 60 knot winds, no change. From Kauau we sailed out of Auckland Harbor proper to Great Barrier Island off the East Coast. On the way Tubbs and I got into another of our stupid little tiffs. I wanted to go to Great Barrier for two main reasons: we had a chart for it, and from there it would be downwind sailing all the way to the Bay of Islands up north. Michael for some reason wanted to go to Whangarei, a section of the coast for which we had no chart. I had done precious little coastal sailing, I like to be out away from reefs and rocks and the like, especially when there’s no chart, but Tubbs seem to think he knew this area like the back of his hand. At this point we were still operating under the “let’s all discuss these decisions together” plan, and when the rest of the crew took my side Tubbs got very cranky and petulant.

It was a beat out to Great Barrier and on the way the winds changed for the worse and then died. As it became clear that we would not make it before dark, Tubbs began to exult in this evidence that my plan had been faulty and we should have gone to Whangarei instead. He actually seemed keen to hamper our already-slow progress, and when I wanted to use the motor he put his back up. Finally he agreed to start the motor, but when I set the throttle up to normal cruising RPMs he began to carry on, claiming that I was trying to blow up the engine. This was a lot of hokum of course, but by the time I dug out the operation manual several days later the situation had deteriorated to such a degree that there was no point in bringing up the subject again. We exchanged some hot words, and then felt our way slowly into an anchorage and dropped the hook without further incident.

The next day we made the downhill run to Russell in the Bay of Islands with fair winds, sailing wing and wing with the main and the two jibs feeding the wind from one sail into the next. As we made the turn around Piercy Island where I’d arrived in New Zealand nearly 5 months before, I had Seahawk surfing down the swells at up to 16 knots. It really was a nice boat; I’ll give credit to Tubbs where credit is due. Building a boat is a big job, and for the most part it had been a job well done.

After four days of sailing up the coast the news from the weather bureau was the same: Cyclone Frieda still reporting 60 knot winds, still moving very slowly east, roughly 1000 miles north and slightly west of us. We decided to make a run for it. Frieda didn’t seem to be going anywhere, and in any case barely deserved the title of cyclone; anything less than 60 knots would be called a gale. If it should turn in our direction, at the rate it was currently moving it would take a long time to reach us, allowing time for evasive action. Seeing this reasoning on paper in black and white it doesn’t seem as convincing now as it seemed then, after nearly a week on the same boat with Michael Tubbs. I think we were all anxious to get on with it.

We had supper on shore together, Rod and Mike made last phone calls, and we had enough beers to get reasonably jolly. The next morning another squabble broke out. I can’t even remember what it was about…a screwdriver or something. This time at least it didn’t involve me. Tubbs was doing his sulking act and Mike called him on it. “I thought we were supposed to talk things out on this boat,” he insisted. “You’re just acting like a big kid. If you don’t get your way you just go off and sulk. That’s what you are Michael, just a big kid!” This led to another meeting, but nothing was really resolved, and Tubbs sulked for the rest of the morning while we did a last load of laundry and made one more call to the weather man.

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I had been thinking about all this interpersonal friction, sure to magnify itself out at sea, and about how much of it could be my fault. I had tried repeatedly, virtually every day, to bury the hatchet with Tubbs, going out of my way to try and cheer him up, teach him about sailing, pat him on the back, swallow his bile and come back smiling. It was something of a challenge. What I’m just not capable of is to smile and agree when I don’t agree. When I don’t agree I like to defend my opinion. I don’t insist that I’m always right, but until such time as I change my mind, I feel like I have a right to my opinion. I never insisted that Michael do what I said, and would have only if I felt the boat to be in actual danger. I decided to make one final public gesture in an attempt to start out the trip on the right foot. When there was nothing left to do but pull up the anchor, with everybody on deck I said, “Michael, up to now we’ve had our little disagreements, but we’re about to embark on a long and possibly dangerous voyage together and I’d like to suggest that we forget our past differences and start this trip as friends. You’ve got a fine boat here and I’ve got a lot of respect for anyone who can build a boat fit to cross the ocean. We’re all in it together now and we’ve got a long way to go, what do you say?” and I stuck out my hand. As everyone looked on dumbfounded, Tubbs left my hand hanging out there, darting black looks at me from under knotted eyebrows. “No,” he muttered, “wait till we get to Brisbane.” I couldn’t believe it “Don’t you have anything to say?” I asked. “Nope.”

I turned my back on the man and went to pull up the anchor. For a few seconds I thought, “I should get off this boat now; I can’t go to sea under such a Captain.” And then the anger washed over me, and as I yanked up the anchor rode I said to myself, “Well, fuck him! If he wants to be that way, let him be that way. I’m not afraid of him. If he gets in the way we can bloody well tie him up. (This possibility had already been discussed between Rod, Mike, and me.) But I’m all through changing his diapers. If he wants to be Captain, let him be Captain, and if he wants to putter along at 3 knots I’m in no hurry, but if there’s a cyclone sweeping down on us and we’ve got to run for it he’d better stay out of the way and keep his damned mouth shut. I’m gonna get to Australia and I’m gonna enjoy this trip in spite of this prick, and if he thinks I’m going to take any more of my time to teach him how to sail, plot a course, or use a sextant, he’ll soon find out different. He can sulk and stew in his own bile all the way across the Tasman for all I care. I’m all finished being a nursemaid for this big spoiled sulking brat of an overgrown baby…” Thunk!! Oh yeah, the anchor…and we were under way.

We motored out of the bay and I gave a course to clear North Cape. There was a fine breeze blowing but Tubbs made no move to hoist sail, so with the sun going down I crawled into my bunk and resumed my mutinous meditations. Half an hour later Christine gave me a shake. “Michael wants to know if we should put up the sails.” It was like putting a match to a cherry bomb. I literally exploded out of my bunk and up into the cockpit.

“YOU WANT TO KNOW IF WE SHOULD PUT UP THE SAILS? WHO THE HELL IS RUNNING THIS BOAT ANYWAY? YOU WANT TO MOTOR ALL THE WAY TO AUSTRALIA, BE MY GUEST! I’M JUST THE NAVIGATOR AROUND HERE, AND YOU’RE THE CAPTAIN, RIGHT? YOU WANT ME TO RUN THE BOAT, YOU WANT ME TO BE CAPTAIN? (shocked silence) OF COURSE YOU SHOULD PUT UP THE SAILS, THIS IS A SAILBOAT, REMEMBER? YOU DON’T WANT TO BE FRIENDS, THIS IS JUST A JOB, RIGHT? YOU DO YOUR JOB AND I’LL DO MY JOB, AND MAYBE WE’LL GET ALONG BETTER THAT WAY!”

I had a good rant and the sails went up, but it was obvious that Tubbs still didn’t know the difference between a jib and a gybe and was not anxious to take responsibility for running the boat. I had run out of reasons for maintaining the pretense that he could or would even try to take command. I decided that my best chance of enjoying this trip was to pretend that Michael Tubbs wasn’t on board. On this cheerful note we began our 1200-mile passage to Australia.

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Afterword — March 2018

This account was originally written in Medan, Northern Sumatra in a dusty typewriter shop kind enough to let me come in daily for a solid week and use one of their machines. That was in February 1982. Now it’s March 2018, 36 years later, and my effort to digitalize this faded old 28-page, 8½” X 14”, 28,000-word onionskin manuscript has leaned heavily on modern dictation software. In a few places I have tried to bring the piece up to date,  substituting past tense for present tense in reference to things that were but no longer are, inserting an explanatory note here and there in brackets, adding the few photos I have or was able to find, but otherwise it is much as I laboriously typed it out in 1982.

Oh yeah….I guess I left you all hanging. If you want to know what happened next, see “Cyclone Frieda and the Incredible Sulk” elsewhere on this blog.

Update

About 8 years ago I tracked down Seiffe LaTrobe and we corresponded back and forth a few times. He was still in New Zealand, still playing music and still chasing the ladies, but today I found a comment on a YouTube video of one of his songs that seems to indicate that he is now deceased. The performers in the clip mention that his lyric was full of gossip about Auckland musicians — that sounds totally Seiffe. Last week Chris my other Auckland busking pal and I exchanged emails. He is still alive and well, back in England and still playing great guitar. Click here to hear him.

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