Sailing Memories

Condesa is revealed above at her new home at the Club de Yates Quinteros, about twenty miles north of Valparaiso. Condesa’s next door neighbor, seen just beyond Condesa in the photo, is an Islander 36. Ahh, the Islander 36…

I was an innocent lad of eighteen when I was shanghaied into sailing on an Islander 36, and look at the ruin my life has become because of it. My cousins Rocky and Joe bought her the year before, christened her Starwake, and set off to sail her to New Zealand and back. They stopped in Newport Beach on their way south, and my brief tour aboard was a watershed event. I had always been a powerboat passenger, and never understood why anyone would want one of these slow, complicated sailboats. When I saw the provisions stowed behind netting, the diving and fishing gear, the surfboards tied up in the v-berth, and the windsurfers in chocks on deck I asked, “Where did you say you were going?”

“The South Pacific, man.”

Nine months later I was about to graduate from high school and got a fateful phone call from my dad: “Your cousins Rocky and Joe called me from American Samoa. Their third crewmember jumped ship and they thought you’d make a good substitute. If you want to do it, I’ll buy you a plane ticket as a graduation present. Your mom is going to kill me.”

Two days after graduation I landed in American Samoa. Rocky and Joe both had beards down to their bellies and scabs on their faces from a brawl with a couple of Samoan guys a few days before. The boat was pretty bare bones to begin with, but by this point in the voyage Starwake had lost her engine and toilet. We were definitely Crusty Cruisers. This was before GPS so we navigated by sextant. The first week I was so green with seasickness that I swore I’d fly home from the first landfall. There was no airstrip at Penrhyn Island, but I felt better by then and ended up having the adventure of my young life.

One night on watch that summer I watched a ball of fire crash into the Pacific. A small miracle was that Rocky found a 35th page newspaper article several months later, which gave the exact latitude and longitude of a Russian satellite that crashed just a hundred miles behind us. I was probably the only eyewitness.

The original photograph is unavailable. Explore the recovered photo archive.