Crew

By about May 1994 I was getting sick of eating fish and chips for lunch every day so I quit Captain Delicious and joined the crew of a sailboat headed for Kiribati, an island nation in the central Pacific Ocean. The yacht, "Crusader", was skippered by a Scottish retired merchant seaman named Sam, whose aim was to show Christian films and deliver Bibles to the natives. Sam needed three crew, so once again it fell to me to recruit two mates for the job. My seamen of choice were Michael "Thwaite means field" Haythornthwaite and Steve Rauch. On the first leg of the voyage from Auckland to Suva we were joined by two Bible college students, both great guys whose extra crewmanship proved invaluable on our maiden passage. Dubbed "the floating footpath" by some other yachties in Suva harbour, Crusader was a 50-foot, 27-ton yacht made of an inch thickness of cement smeared over steel frame and chicken mesh wire. Being concrete, Crusader didn't rot, didn't rust, and didn't move. Whereas race yachts take only four days to sail from Auckland to Suva, we took 12 days. But they were a pretty amazing 12 days. Here is a letter I wrote home as a bright-eyed 20 year-old (first, a small piece of background info: we sailed to Fiji in tandem with another yacht called Ipo Kai (referred to by Sam over the radio as "Eko Pie")): DEAREST Mum Dad Alastair Catherine and Evelyn, Wow! The trip so far has been amazing and I don't know where to start. Well, we saw you guys disappear from the wharf and Mike and I both looked at each other in total disbelief as we tried to comprehend the next 5-6 months. We had a great night's sailing to Tutukaka yacht club and arrived there at noon Sunday and left for Fiji (after Sam had finished clearing customs at Whangarei) on Monday evening. Steve and I are on the 4 - 8 watch (twice a day) and we had a real scare just leaving Cape Reinga on Tuesday morning. We had a storm and were forced to take down all sail and just let the wind and waves do their thing. That's when the sea sickness set in. All six of us were feeling lousy but only three of us 'hove to' for a few days while popping dozens of seasick pills. The weather eventually cleared up and it wasn't long before we were itching to jump in the 'briney'(Sam has taught us some real seaman terms). We eventually persuaded Sam to let us have a swim while we were in the doldrums for a few days. According to the chart, where we swam was 5.5km deep and we went over with masks and snorkels. It's amazing to look down - you don't see anything but a beautiful purple/blue/mauve colour but you can see a long way down - if you know what I mean - you feel real giddy. By this time we had conned Sam into unreefing the sails and putting an extra sail up. The boat is quite capable and we hit 10 knots a few times. One of the bizarre things of the Pacific is the flying fish. They leap out of the water and literally fly, only a few feet high, for ages - 10 or 20 seconds and it's sometimes hard to distinguish between these and some offshore gulls we had. On Thursday night we had to heave to (quite clever - you reverse the headsail, tighten the mainsail and give the wheel full windward lock, effectively stalling the boat in one position) for eight hours in the Kadavu passage while we waited for the wind to swing. It swung all right! That Friday we were heading upwind for Suva and the wind dropped off completely. Then five minutes later the wind hit us from an unexpected angle at about 40 knots with rain that felt like shrapnel. We were so scared (again) and the wind kept up for one day and we headed for Nandi to shelter. Sam rang Ipo Kai on the VHF and told them our plans - they heard us but we didn't hear them. We were told later by Ipo Kai that they heard us and were praying like mad that we wouldn't head there because there are tons of reefs there. Anyway, we got to Suva, navigating through other reefs, on Saturday. The waves are really amazing out on the ocean - about two to three metres high but about 10m spaced. They roll along at about 20 knots and look really freaky. Night sailing is freaky too because every piece of broken water lights up with luminescence and it looks all glowy.