THE NIGHT WAS MOONLESS. Suva’s harbor entrance is almost five miles long, narrow, flanked by coral reefs sharp enough to rip the bottom off a freighter. Navigation by daylight calls for watchfulness. By night, and especially for the single-handed sailor, it demands full concentration.
The problem was to line up the pilot lights, which I knew had been well sighted. But still there was an eerie feeling because we could hear the noise of the surf on the reef. Patti sat beside me in the cockpit hugging her knees. She was silent and scared. I was pretty nervous too as Dove pitched and rolled in the swell. I put my arm around Patti and she rested her head on my shoulder. We kissed for the first time, very gently.
Then Patti went into the cabin to sleep. She was a bit seasick and rather miserable. The boat was self-steering well, but I stayed up on deck to keep a lookout.
We joked about it later, but we had taken a chance. When dawn came we struck calmer water on the lee of the little island of Savala. After the sun was well up Patti came on deck. She was still pale but managed to smile. She began to brush her hair and then to braid it.
She began to talk, just quietly. She spoke about her life, her childhood. She had been born, she told me, not twenty miles across the sprawl of Los Angeles from where I had been born. Her parents had been divorced when she was quite young. She had remained very fond of her parents, but the effect on her life of an unsettled though affluent home was to make her self-reliant. She had tried a short spell at college but found campus life too shallow and irrelevant. So she had sold her sports car, bought a backpack and hitchhiked with a girl friend through Mexico. There for the first time she met people with values as simple as their needs. She was convinced that the exciting frontiers were beyond Los Angeles, beyond America.
Sometimes she stopped talking and I could see her mind was far away. Then she would look up at me and smile and go on again. Rather shyly she talked about discovering in Mexico a strange sort of intuition that may have saved her life.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said, “but I have sometimes had a feeling of being able to see a little way ahead—as if time were a sort of path, and I could pick out my footprints before I made them.”
I did not grin, and she continued more confidently. “I’m not a witch or anything, but I’ve sometimes seemed to know what to do, sort of where the thorns are. It was as if somebody was helping me.
“In Mexico my friend and I were waiting for a ride on a dusty, isolated road. It was as hot as hell and we hadn’t seen a car for an hour or more. Then a truck came rattling down the road and my friend thumbed it. The truck stopped. The Mexican driver invited us to get aboard. My friend had already thrown her pack in the back when I grabbed her, and said, ‘No, this isn’t our car. Let’s wait.’
“My friend was absolutely furious. We were madly hungry and thirsty. We stood there arguing on the road until the Mexican shrugged his shoulders and drove off. My friend sulked as we tramped on. Another car picked us up soon afterward. We’d gone on about four miles when we came across a group of people standing on the road. They were looking over a cliff. The Mexican’s truck had gone over the side.”
Patti paused and then added, “There have been other times like that. I must tell you about them sometime. It’s rather odd and scary.”
Her story had fascinated me so completely that I had not realized Dove was heading toward some rocks. I moved the tiller over and reset the wind vane. I asked, “Was it intuition that made you decide to come with me last night?”
Now she smiled, her teeth white as the surf. “That—and other reasons.”
But I was to remember Patti’s intuition in the months to come.
She continued to tell the story of her life, of how she had returned to Los Angeles with a wanderlust and had worked for a spell as a dentist’s assistant to save enough money to travel again. With another friend she hitchhiked to Panama, staying at cheap hotels, finding little back-street cafés, always turning, as she put it, cents into dollars. In Panama she learned of an old but comfortable yacht going to Tahiti and was invited to join the crew, comprising a tough Swedish skipper, a German-Canadian cook, two Jamaicans and an older woman. The voyage took four months, with a six-week stopover at the Galápagos islands. It was not a happy voyage. The skipper was another Captain Bligh, she said, a bully who kept his own stock of food and treated everyone like dirt.
In Tahiti, Patti found, as I had as a boy of thirteen, that the Polynesians are people who have discovered their own source of happiness.
But Patti’s goal was Australia. She had met a number of people who were enthusiastic about Australia offering a new way of life. From Tahiti she island-hopped across the Pacific to the Fijis, finding work where she could to supplement her savings. Her funds were low when she reached Suva and she was grateful to find a job as hostess on an inter-island tourist boat. Her duties were to point out the sights, to know something of the history of the islands and to hand out seasickness pills when water came over the prow. Returning to Lautoka after her first tour, the lecherous veteran skipper of the craft claimed that it was time for her to share his bunk. Without waiting for her wages, she jumped ship.
A few hours later, walking down a street alone, Patti heard a familiar voice shouting her name from a bus window.
“It was unbelievable! Dick Johnston! I’d known him in California,” she said. “Does that bring me up to date?”
“And what does your intuition say about the days ahead?” I asked.
She laughed. “Bliss,” she said.
And she was right.
We were children as we sailed the islands of the Yasawa group, kids reveling in sun and surf, knowing a glorious sense of freedom and timelessness. When the sun had risen high enough to warm our bodies and light the caverns and ledges in the coral reefs, we dived for shells and poured our treasure into Dove’s cockpit. We found violet conchs, zigzag and spotted cowries, grinning tuns (Malea ringens), quaint delphinia snails, pagoda periwinkles, murex, tiny moon snails, fashioned with a jeweler’s skill, delicate striped bonnets, tritons, augers and olives.
The cowries we loved best—some as large as a fist, skins silken smooth, dappled in warm browns. We swam together, Patti graceful as a dolphin.
Shell hunting among coral reefs is not all child’s play. It has its dangers. Some shellfish are as dangerous as a rattlesnake. Under a rock shelf I found and fortunately recognized a cloth-of-gold (Conus textile). I pried it loose and, holding it with the tips of my fingers, swam to Dove and placed it on top of my drying Levi’s. We watched its wicked-looking little proboscis come out of the mouth of the shell as the mollusk felt for its enemy. Then there was a faint swishing noise as the proboscis shot out its tiny harpoon into the cloth of my pants.
If the poison from the harpoon had pierced my finger I would probably have survived, but only because I was in good health. A few days earlier I had heard about a tourist who had picked up one of these rare shells. The harpoon had stabbed the palm of his hand and he had died in great pain three hours later.
While we were in the Yasawas I had a truly close shave. I turned over a rock on the reef at low tide and thought I had discovered a rare shell. But it was a stonefish, with a vicious sting in its dorsal spine. The sharpest pain I had ever known started at my finger and went up my arm.
The wound began to bleed a lot. There are plenty of stories of people dying from a stone fish sting, and I was really frightened. We were quite alone on the rocks. Patti tore the rubber band off her ponytail and made a tourniquet around my finger, which was already beginning to swell. The pain made me sick. Patti urged me to suck the wound and to spit out the blood and then she ran down the beach for help. She came upon a group of native women and with sign language and drawings on the sand she explained what had happened to me. One woman who could speak a little English told Patti that my finger should be boiled in gasoline.
I was not very happy when Patti returned with this prescription. We agreed that it would be better to take the odds on my surviving the poison than face the prospect of being blown up by boiling gasoline siphoned from the stove.
My finger throbbed for three days and it carried the scar for three months.
Apart from meeting up with stonefish and deadly mollusks, survival in the Yasawas gave us few problems. When we were hungry we dived for clams or fished for mahimahi. Sometimes a squid would jump aboard Dove. Squids are delicious. When there were no mosquitoes about we went ashore and built a fire to boil or barbecue our seafood. We drank from coconuts or we made drinks from papaya juice or fresh limes.
When Dove was anchored in a lagoon we did not usually have to wait long before being hailed from shore. Often there would be young girls standing there with baskets of fruit—papayas, bananas, breadfruit and limes. Sometimes we would barter for a chicken.
One scruffy-looking chicken so closely resembled a childhood pet I had called Henrietta that I could not bring myself to kill it. For several days Henrietta II was kept in a banana crate on the top of the cabin, and Patti fed it rice. When I decided that it was time for a chicken supper it was now Patti who pleaded clemency for Henrietta. But one evening, after a day of poor fishing, I concluded that Henrietta’s hour had come. Patti was in the cabin, and on the excuse of sanding the deck I closed the hatches. To make sure Patti would not hear Henrietta’s last squawks I began to sing. At least I made noises which were meant to be a song.
Patti’s chicken fricassee Henrietta II was superb.
One learns from the sea how little one needs, not how much. These were our islands now, islands cut off from the world of concrete and steel, from freeways and television.
On the island of Naviti we climbed the shore and made our way through a grove of palms to a sort of meadow that overlooked the sea. Here we stood for a while soaking up the beauty of the morning.
Patti said impulsively, “Let’s build a house.”
We pulled down palm fronds and cut some poles. In a short time our house was built. It even had a front door that closed on leafed hinges. Whispering and secretive as children, we went inside and knelt together on the grass floor. The sun shone through the interweave of fronds as if they were tiny windows. The only sound came from the surf below the cliff.
A moment later and we were children no longer. It was a game no more. We had laughed and joked as we had gone about the building, just as kids laugh when they build a house in a back-yard tree. But now our playhouse was suddenly important, not like a tree house at all. If only, I thought, this place, this time could be forever—that here we could sleep and eat and love and sleep again.
In the cool light I reached out for Patti, felt the silk of her hair, the warmth of her body.
In the same moment there was a sudden pounding on the door. Someone was beating our palm frond house with a stick, so violently that it threatened to crash about our heads. There followed a rough demand:
“Hey, you two in there, what are you doing?”
It was one of the islanders and apparently we had trespassed on his land. After freezing in alarm we roared with laughter and scrambled into the sunlight, stammering explanations and apologies.
I am no diarist and would rather face a squall than write a letter. To mark Dove’s progress I always used the tape recorder. But with the best of intentions I had bought a typewriter in Pago Pago. Patti discovered the machine and began to put down brief impressions of these Yasawa days. Often while I was shell-diving I would hear her tapping away in Dove’s cabin. Her sea-stained manuscript survived the voyage. It captures some of the color and the happiness of our time in the Yasawas. Here are some quotes from her diary:
AUGUST 25: Arrived at Waialailai after nice sail from Vomo. It’s an island midway between the mainland and Yasawa group. Anchored around 2:30 and immediately got ready for diving. Swam with dinghy to sandy area and found quite a few nice shells. Went ashore and met the only family on the island. They seemed pleased to see visitors and presented us with papayas. Since it was still very warm at 4:00 we swam back to the boat over magnificent coral reefs, beautiful colored fish and giant underwater caves. Our best find was a beautiful triton, spiral-shaped and faultless. Robin has been looking for that shell for seven months. He spotted it encrusted in a coral growth about six feet down, decided to investigate and behold, it was the jewel! We’ll have to polish it a little and peel off the coral. We also found large trochus and smaller edible shellfish. I boiled them all, including the triton, which did not taste as good as it looked. The spider conchs are the best eating—rather like crab. The island is covered with long yellow grass and reminds me of California—just a bit.
AUGUST 26: Swam with dinghy out to a sand spit which attaches Waia to Waialailai at low tide. Shell tracks abundant and we found many augers and olives. Dived about an hour and then swam back to boat. We always swim with the dinghy for safety’s sake. It’s not that we are chicken, just sensible—I hope. Spotted the yacht Apogee sailing for Yalobi. We knew it from Suva. It’s from the east coast of America. Believe Al and Stella are aboard. They are collecting shells for the Smithsonian. Robin found enough eating shells for supper.
AUGUST 27: Girls came down to the beach and gave us some bananas. We mentioned we liked papayas. They promised to bring some next morning. We gave them a few ball point pens and kava roots. At 2:30 girls turned up again with ripe and semiripe papayas in a coconut frond basket. Lovely. Sailed over to the Apogee. Al and Stella gave us a wonderful supper.
AUGUST 28: I’m suffering from boils and so is Robin. Wonder what causes them? Big swell has come in and Dove is bobbing about. Robin decided to make spaghetti (ugh!). While rinsing the pot over the side he dropped half the spaghetti into the ocean and then spilled the other half over his pants. It I hadn’t felt so sick I would have died laughing. Robin wasn’t so amused. Boat moving so much in the swell we decided to sleep ashore. We gathered up blankets and medical box (it contains penicillin, pain killers, gauze and tape) and a can of applesauce. We were settling down to sleep on the shore when a boy came across and invited us to sleep in his bure. Rather horrified by rats running around.
AUGUST 30: Awoke early and found breakfast laid out for us by the family—neat blue homemade cloth mats and matching napkins, tea and banana fritter biscuits. The son of the family loaded us with garden-fresh vegetables to take back to Dove. Had a delicious fresh-water shower too. Powered Dove over to Nalawauki. Thought diving would be good but we had failed to notice the fresh-water stream that runs in here. Fresh water kills the coral and shell life.
AUGUST 31: Arose at 6:30 to a beautiful clear morning. We sailed on a little and Robin wanted to dive but I wasn’t too keen as the wind was chilly. The water felt wonderful though after the first shock. Terribly exciting diving on these coral reefs. Large caves are always popping up over unexpected ridges and sometimes big game fish come swimming lazily out. When the big fish see us they dart madly into holes. Any day now I expect to run into a shark. I suppose that would be the end of Robin Graham and Patricia Ratterree—but what a lovely place to die! Wind came up in the afternoon and we had a lovely sail to Naviti. When we passed a group of small islands we decided to anchor and dive…. Not too much luck but the spider conchs were good eating. I had a sudden feeling we’d catch a fish and then sure enough, just as we pulled out of Nanuyu Balava—bang! a big strike! With our combined efforts we brought in a beautiful barracuda, snapping and snarling at our feet. We’d both been dying for fresh meat and here it was. Pulled into small bay at 3:00, and immediately Robin wanted to go diving. I’d been in the water twice already and hated the idea of going in again. But rather than disappoint him I went over the side anyway. Returned to boat and made some chow. Cut fish into large steaks and made rice and gravy. Ate past the bursting point. Figured we’d have to do something about the remaining barracuda so we handed it over to two Fijians in a canoe. They gave us papaya. Read aloud to each other for a while from Tales of the Pacific. Then we went to sleep.
SEPTEMBER 1: Lazy morning. Woke when the sun was well up. Nibbled on the leftover fish and some awful rice pudding. Swam and dove a bit in a beautiful green patch. Found our first murex and one baby lobster—only a spoonful but great. Sailed for Tavewa. Magnificent lagoon. This is where the movie The Blue Lagoon was filmed. Poor anchorage on hard coral. Robin had to place anchors by hand in sandy patches. Made pea soup for lunch and fried the last of our bacon. Two natives paddled up in canoe and told us something of the history of the island. There are only twenty inhabitants. It seems that a Scotsman came here in the early part of the last century and married a Fijian girl. Most of the people are his descendants. They are rather inbred and odd.
SEPTEMBER 2: Fixed Spanish rice for breakfast. Natives came by in canoe and offered to fill our water bottles. I asked if there was a water hole where I could wash my clothes. Old man snatched my washing away and said his daughter would do it. The man sat down and told us story after story about the islands. He had it all memorized of how Captain Bligh had passed here when Bligh and a portion of the crew were set adrift after the Bounty mutiny. Apparently Bligh was chased away by cannibals. Robin wrote across his logbook, “This is Bligh Water.” The island is divided into four sections and the main families feud like crazy. The old man’s sister joined us. She is a riot—a sort of Mammy Yokum type with short braids. They took us to the store. You feel for the poverty of these people. There was so little in the store. Shelves were thinly scattered with cans of mackerel, one onion (which I bought for eight cents), matches, lollipops, gum, sugar, rice and one bag of tea (which I bought). They are so proud of their store, but it made me feel sad. One of the women took us to her bure and opened an old trunk. By the sound of the rusty hinges it had not been opened for years. It contained old family photographs. She pointed with pride to pictures of her two sons who had migrated to New Zealand. We felt suddenly wrapped up with the cares of people again.
One of the old men, named de Bruce, told us more tales of pirates and tribal wars. One story was about a chief and his twenty wives who were driven into a corner of the island where the cliffs are high. As they were about to be overrun by the invader he ordered his wives to throw themselves from the clifftop into the sea. There is still a feeling of death about the place.
SEPTEMBER 3: Old Charlie brought my washing back to the boat and our full water bottles. My washing is sparkling clean and fresh. Robin gave the old man his spare Coleman lamp. Wind came up strongly and we had some rather tricky sailing in poor visibility in an area completely honeycombed with reefs. Anchored at Nalova Bay, which has a shell market. The natives come in from the other islands and bring beautiful shells for the tourists who come here once a week on an island cruiser. The ship came in while we were there and we bought butter and ice cream off the ship—what luxury! We were invited to attend a dance, but I had one of those premonitions again, a sense of danger. I urged Robin not to go. We went anyway, and things did go wrong. First the dinghy came untied and drifted toward the reef. We went after it in Dove but we hit a reef. As Robin backed Dove off I retrieved the dinghy. When again looking for good anchorage, there was a jolt and crunching noise. Dove had hit again. If she had been a wooden boat I think she would have holed. But fiberglass is tough, and with help from local natives we got Dove afloat again. We were lucky!
SEPTEMBER 4: Lazy, lazy day. Robin sailed back to Nalova Bay while I just slept on the deck and soaked up the sun.
SEPTEMBER 5: Radio warned of strong winds on their way. We moved Dove to better anchorage shown to us by Fijians. The bay is so beautiful here, so blue, so calm, but we know the danger because along the shore there are coconut tree stumps—evidence of the ferocity of a recent hurricane. We waited for the predicted forty-knot wind, but it never came. Dove was as steady as a four-poster bed.
SEPTEMBER 6: We beached Dove at high tide and inspected her for damage. None, thank God. A Fijian boy on a rock nearby caught a fish and gave it to us. It was the only fish he caught—a gesture typical of island hospitality….
There are gaps in Patti’s diary, which was written to remind her of days that meant much to her. She knew as I knew that we had got too close to heaven too early, that our time in the islands must come to an end; that we would soon have to return to the real world again.
One day I noticed that she had stopped typing. She had put the typewriter back in the locker where she had found it. I asked her why, and she smiled and said, “I don’t want to write the last chapter.”
“Now who’s being morbid?” I said.
She did not reply.
Patti did not record that we had sailed to the northernmost island in the archipelago, and the one from which the Yasawas take their name. It is a limestone island, quite different from the others, which are all volcanic. The cliffs of Yasawa island are full of caves, many with their own legends. We found a grotto which, they say, was once the refuge of young lovers. We dived under a submerged arch and swam for several yards under water before surfacing. At first it was very dark, and then as our eyes got used to the gloom we saw that it was bathed in a soft blue light coming from the water through which we had just swum. The air was supersaturated, chilled and quite weird.
Patti said, “I’m sure there are bodies floating here.”
I was just as sure there were not, but the thought sent us scuttling back into the sunshine.
In one of the bays we had a quite alarming experience with a shark. I was setting the plow anchor by hand and Patti was on Dove. A shadow moved across the coral reef and when I looked up I was facing a long gray shark. It made a false pass at me. Sharks often do that before they strike. I guess it was figuring out whether I was worth a meal. Anyway, I didn’t give him time to work out the answers. I broke the surface and jumped into the dinghy as I heard Patti shouting a warning.
“Wow, man, that was too close,” I yelled to Patti.
“I’ll say it was,” said Patti. “It was awful. I could see him from up here. I just prayed you’d see him in time.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I said as I climbed back aboard Dove.
We did. Actually this was the time when I turned Dove about. We meandered back through these marvelous islands to Lautoka. Neither of us spoke about the future, but both thought about it a lot.
A letter was waiting for me at Lautoka. It was from my father. He said he was flying out to join me in the New Hebrides. Some months earlier he had arranged for me to write my story for the National Geographic magazine. He wanted to take pictures of me for the story. I was to sail at once.
While I was readying Dove for the next leg of my journey, Patti found some Tongan friends to stay with, and she made plans to join a yacht sailing for New Zealand.
I intended to sail on to the New Hebrides at dawn on October 22. On the evening of the twenty-first a wave of depression hit me. It may have been due partly to the fact that I had spent the morning in a dentist’s chair.
Dove was ready to sail at first light. I was sick at the thought of leaving. I could not believe that I could ever be as happy as I had been in the Yasawas.
Patti came over to say good-bye and then in the evening I rowed her ashore. She was wearing the blue island dress she had worn when I had first seen her at Suva. It was as if the past weeks had never happened, that our time in the islands had been a dream.
Now we stood on the shore, an awkwardness between us. Both of us put up a fence against the pain of parting. We spoke about the weather and silly things like “Don’t forget to send me your address.” Then she did a simple thing. She took the gold chain from her neck and put it around mine.
She kissed me and said, “It’s only a loan. You can return it to me when we meet again.”
Neither of us dared to think we would ever meet again. She stood there on the beach, quite alone, and in the fading light she watched me row back to Dove.