FROM THE DECK of Dove I watched the lights of Lina-A fade and vanish, and then I snatched three hours of sleep. I awakened before sunrise to a weird sight in the northeast sky, a comet with its fishtail streaming out from a hazy focus of light. That’s a good omen, I thought, and by the time the sun rose like a red basketball Dove was on her way under a ballooning main and genoa.
I put my thoughts on the tape recorder:
But there’s something missing. There’s a great big feeling of emptiness inside this boat. I’m twenty-one but it’s hard to fight back the tears. I keep telling myself that this is the last trip and that it’ll go much faster than the others.
Anyway, there was a fresh wind on my beam—very unusual in these windless islands—pushing the boat along at five knots. Kili and Fili came on deck together to sniff the weather and the two skinned goats hanging on the shrouds. Piglet and Pooh were still too small to make it up the companionway. On the second day out I cut the goats into parcels (a job I hated) and filled the freezer.
The good wind continued through the second day and I recorded: Guess someone’s looking after me because my spirits are quite buoyant.
After cleaning the goats’ blood off the deck I spent most of the day poring over charts—one for the seas south of Panama and the other for the northern Pacific, which I’d once known well.
On the third day the winds forsook me and the sails began to flop. I stood the calm for a couple of hours and then decided to use power. Dove had fuel for three hundred miles and I just wanted to get well away from the Galápagos. If I simply sat around in the doldrums I would go crazy. My plan was to sail close to the equator, due west, for four hundred miles and then due north nine hundred miles past the tiny islands of Clipperton and Clarion. I planned no falls before reaching Long Beach, 2,600 miles away.
It was no use trying to kid myself: this was certainly going to be the toughest leg of the voyage. It was the doldrums I dreaded. I’d heard of some yachts taking more than two months sailing from the Galápagos to California. Two months may not sound like a long time when you’re busy. But two months is getting close to forever when you’re sailing to the person you love and to the new life that you’re hoping for. The sun rises very slowly, and just as slowly the shadows shorten as the heat increases. Then you look at the taffrail-log spinner and it’s hanging almost straight down. The afternoon drags by. Then darkness. You sleep. Then you wake up with the sun again and you check your distance. You find you’ve traveled only thirty miles in twenty-four hours. That’s when you think you’ll go crazy.
Before disembarking from the Lina-A, Patti was scheduled to speak to me by radiotelephone. At the time we’d fixed I tried to get her on the air, but after a frustrating half hour of atmospherics I heard her say, “…just can’t hear you, honey. But I love you and I miss you…. Lina-A out.”
I did not hear her voice again for nearly a thousand hours, and I couldn’t bring myself even to tell the tape recorder how much I missed her. Instead I tried to talk myself into a more positive mood:
Whaddya know, I’ve gone three hundred miles in five days! That means I’m only two days behind schedule. Okay, I can survive a thirty-four-day sail. Then home! Oh, man! Just think of that! Then what? It has to be something different—something to do with the earth and animals perhaps. Or what about oceanography? I’ve got a head start here. The main thing I guess is to feed the family. I may have some sort of gift for fixing engines. It might be interesting to study diesels. I always wanted to build houses—not those ugly concrete things, but places where people can really live, houses which smell of timber. A lecture tour? My knees feel like water at the thought of standing up and talking about Fiji or the difference between a halyard and a headstay. It’ll work out somehow. It always does…. There are so many things I want to learn….
At sea I was a man, but when I thought of the business of making a living in a civilized society I knew I was still a child. I’d seen more races and places than 99.9 percent of my peer group. But I could not picture myself in a world of banks and department stores, of elevators and freeways. I’d never even learned to drive a car!
Of course I knew that life amounted to more than sea horizons, more than how to fix a Hassler wind vane or take an LOP. But I felt I had picked up something which might be useful, something which might even make a contribution to the new thinking, the hopes and goals of young people who are sick of the grab and greed of society.
I’d been long away from the campus but sometimes I felt the vibrations of my peer group. I understood some of the reasons for their revolt. Wasn’t my voyage prompted by the same longings for freedom, the same desire to get out of the rut and routine, to prove something to myself—to prove perhaps that a kid doesn’t have to be boxed in until he is a mental and spiritual dummy in a business suit?
Unlike a sailboat on a windless ocean, the mind can travel faster than the speed of light—can hover (in my case) like a hummingbird over the thought of “What’s for breakfast” and stream away to a comet in the predawn sky and ask, “What or who created that and why and where and when?”
Without another living soul in sight, without so much as a smudge on the horizon, I spent hours and hours simply daydreaming, just letting ideas and images float across my mind.
“What do you think about at sea?” is one of the questions people usually ask me. My guess is that I think the same sort of thoughts people think when they walk their dog or take a letter to the mailbox on the corner. The only difference is that at sea you’ve got more space and time in which to think. You haven’t got to return to the office and dig out the pink file on the Jones account or return to the kitchen and peel potatoes. I guess lone sailors should be better philosophers than the guy in apartment 406. Maybe we do get a little closer to the truths, though I certainly did not feel like the wise old man in the mountains.
But I know something about loneliness: Oh, man, I do! I know it can take you close to hell and sometimes, just sometimes, close to heaven.
When people have asked me about being alone and whether they could take it—in the doldrums especially—I’ve suggested that they should go off by themselves for a couple of days—just two days, say, in a tent out in the sticks. If they like it, if they can keep their own company for forty-eight hours, then they should try being quite alone for a week. That’s a real test. If they are able to take that then they might even be able to take forty days in a small boat with only cats for company.
I warn off anyone who hasn’t first tried being alone for a few days. Some people will return as raving lunatics.
One “sea thought” I might share here is that life has to have tension—the tension of making another port or finding a piece of gear to mend or how to face a squall. I mean, the guy who is really sick is the guy who has no goal, no ambition, nothing to go for. Having no goal would be like sailing in the doldrums forever.
There are pretty clued-up guys who have thought of these things. I just give this idea as it came to me sitting on the cabin roof in the doldrums under slack sails.
On March 28, after a week at sea, I taped: Here I am just glaring at these bloody charts and today I can’t even raise the energy to eat. I’ve made sixty miles from noon to noon. Oh, man!
In the doldrums the very small things became important once again. Playing back the tape recorder you might think I’d struck gold when I reported a big event for Pooh and Piglet. My voice was an octave higher as I shouted: Whaddya know! The kittens have actually crapped in their own sandbox!
On Easter Sunday I taped: Treated myself to a TV turkey dinner. I stuck a couple of candles into bottles and ate the turkey in the cockpit. The wind is so light—actually nonexistent—that the candle flames don’t even flicker. Imagine that, here I am in a sailboat and the candle flames on deck look as if they’re frozen!
For my birthday in the Galápagos Patti had given me a model kit of Drake’s Golden Hind—typical of Patti’s care for me. She could have given me a battery shaver or whatever, but she knew that the thing I would need most on the long haul home was something to keep me busy. Gluing the gossamer rigging and the tiny cannons kept me concentrating for many hours. As the model took shape the kittens were determined to destroy it. I would find them chewing off the masts and then I would have to spend more time mending and fixing them up again. That was okay.
I tried to make Patti’s saltwater bread and thought I had followed her directions carefully. The loaf felt as if it were made of lead, and I told the tape: If I eat this stuff I’ll have to be careful I don’t fall overboard.
Fresh water was never a problem. Every second or third day there’d be a tropical storm and the rainwater caught in the mainsail ran down the sail track, where I collected it in canvas buckets. There was often enough water to take a sponge bath and to wash out my clothes.
The freezer worked well. It was nice to sit in the tropical sun and to hear ice clinking in my glass. The cats had their own treats when flying fish landed on the deck.
I reported into the recorder: Fili has fantastic hearing. When there’s a plop on deck she’s out of the cabin in a flash of fur before the other three cats have stretched their legs.
The water in the doldrums continued to be glassy smooth, but mentally I dived:
April Fool’s day and I’m the fool. This is my ninth day out and I’m only 525 miles from the Galápagos.
I ran into a flat calm yesterday and it’s still calm this morning. I started the engine at three forty-five, and ran well in the morning. It’s so hot that I’m dripping all the time. I take saltwater showers as often as I can, but when it’s hot it’s hard to keep clean. I got a breeze in the midafternoon, and for a while I was scooting along at better than six knots. But before midnight it was flat calm again.
It was really awful. I had a sort of breakdown at the end of the day. I had trouble taking down the main. Then I found the boom vang so tightly tied I couldn’t undo it. I was working with a flashlight, and I got so mad I went below and threw the flashlight against the bulkhead and broke it. I grabbed a diving knife and went back to cut the jammed line, and I almost slashed the sail up too. Thank heaven I stopped short of doing that because I have no spare sails.
But on April 4 I was awakened by an unusual sound—waves beating against the hull. I leaped through the companionway and hoisted the main and genoa. Dove heeled over and I taped: This is the best day. It’s so beautiful. I’m right on course 307 degrees. Wind! Thank God for wind! It has to be the trades!
That night I saw the North Star for the first time since the Bahamas and next day I caught my first fish since leaving the Galápagos and I also saw my first ship. I recorded in the logbook: “Never thought I’d see a ship out here.”
The weather was variable. One day I’d make only thirty miles from noon to noon, but the next I might make as much as eighty.
I had thought that once I’d hit the trades my problems were over. Not so. When the trades died on me I was more depressed than ever. A deep depression is worse than physical pain. Pain is something you can fight, something you can come to grips with. But depression smothers you like a thick fog. You feel it’s impossible to fight your way out of it.
After a horrible, endless night I reported into the tape: Here I am 250 miles from the theoretical doldrum belt and yet there’s no wind at all. Last night was absolutely awful. Just horrible dreams. I wouldn’t wish a night like last night on my worst enemy. I guess it was a sort of mental breakdown. I just cried like a baby. I’ve got to beat this thing. It can’t go on forever.
It took three more days before I could even feel the wind again—three days in which I made exactly one hundred miles. The sails flapped and banged—about the ugliest noise a sailor can hear. Apart from nearly driving me crazy, the conditions were hard on the sail seams. But anything was better than just not moving at all, so I kept on trying to sail even when the taffrail-log spinner hung straight down.
Then the sails suddenly filled and I made 149 miles from noon to noon. “Fantastic!” I scrawled across the logbook. I celebrated by cooking a goat’s meat roast but some of the meat had turned green. I tried the meat on Fili but she threw up, so I tossed the meat overboard.
On April 12 I saw Clarion island, not much more than a rock, and watched the moon set right behind it. I was worried that a wind change might blow me ashore so I stayed up all night and listened to the radio calls of fishing boats which I guessed were about three hundred miles away. I went to sleep just as the comet appeared in the northeastern sky.
When I awoke at about ten o’clock Fili was missing. This didn’t worry me at first, because Fili liked to hide herself away, but after searching in the cabin I knew that Fili was gone. She had traveled half the world with me, this brave, blind cat. I felt sick.
The trades were more constant now and from the southwest. I could choose my course and decided to sail parallel to the coast. Long Beach was still about a thousand miles away. The thermometer suddenly dropped and I could no longer stay on deck and read without being half frozen. The nights were so cold I had to put on long pants and sweaters before getting into bed.
Pooh and Piglet missed their mother and cried but Kili adopted them. When the kittens tried to find out if Kili could give them milk he nudged them over to the food dish. But at night he allowed the kittens to sleep between his paws.
I was pretty sloppy about preparing food, but I ate more on this trip than I’d ever done before. Strangely I did not put on weight. In fact, although I’d grown a couple of inches (to five feet nine) since I’d sailed out of San Pedro in 1965, my weight was exactly the same as when I’d started.
Brewing coffee was quite a ritual. I would measure out the water carefully and let it perk for exactly five minutes. I gave the brew two minutes to cool before pouring my first cup. Then I heated the pot again and took my second cup. I used up quite a lot of fuel on coffee, but it was a luxury I felt I’d earned.
On April 16, my twenty-fourth day at sea, I made radio contact with the fishing boat Jinita about two hundred miles away off the Baja California coast. The Jinita promised to call up San Diego and get a message if possible to Allen Ratterree, with whom Patti would be staying. I gave them Al’s phone number. The thought that I might soon be able to talk to Patti cheered me up a lot. The batteries were a bit low so I went below to start up the engine to charge them. The engine wouldn’t start. No engine meant no juice for the radio. Then I saw that I’d forgotten to open up the exhaust pipe.
How dumb can I be? I asked the tape. Guess I’m just too excited. To cool me down I’ve just made some fudge out of chocolate, sugar and milk all boiled up together. I ought to take out a patent on a new recipe for glue. I tried to make some bread again. This time it has turned out much better but the loaf was as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.
In five years I had succeeded quite well as Dove’s captain, navigator and mate, but as Dove’s cook I gave myself the sack.
On April 17 I got up early because I wanted to make contact with the Jinita again. The fishing boat came through but with the disappointing news that it had failed to make contact with San Diego or Los Angeles. After exchanging weather information, the fishing boat promised to try to contact Los Angeles that night.
Ten minutes later another fishing boat. Olympia, came on the air. They’d monitored my call to the Jinita and promised to try to raise Al Ratterree. I gave them his phone number.
“Is it important?” asked the Olympia.
“Very important,” I said.
I kept the radio on, and at seven o’clock that night Olympia called back. “We’ve given your message and position to Mr. Ratterree.”
I spoke into the recorder: Wow, man! That’s great! Now at least Patti will know where I am. I feel close to her again.
Long Beach was only 675 miles away and Dove was averaging about one hundred miles a day. But because I was forced to tack, due to headwinds. I was closing the gap by only thirty miles a day. As Dove was in the shipping lanes again I had to be careful at night. The masthead light was on the blink—at least it wasn’t blinking often enough, because the batteries were low. All through the night I kept a light on deck hoping that the illuminated sails could be seen from a good distance.
I suppose it was because I was getting close to home that I had an unreasoning fear that Dove and I were not going to make it. I had read stories of sailors who had been lost on their last voyage. The idea played on my mind that something would happen in the next few hundred miles. It was a real sort of phobia.
My radio reported that three other navigators were making a more dangerous run home than I was. Apollo 13’s astronauts, James Lovell, Fred Haise and John Swigert were returning for their Pacific splashdown.
With me it was always a question of keeping up my morale, and on my twenty-fifth day at sea I taped: Been working on my model and puttering around with little things. I find a lot to do without doing very much. The weather is gorgeous now—calm and sunny. I got up nerve to take a bath. I really needed it. The water was icy cold, but I got clean. I washed my hair and felt about ten pounds lighter.
At dawn on April 18 I saw land. It was Cape San Lázaro in Baja California. The land was too close for safety so I headed out to sea, hoping for a more favorable wind. Under a reefed main and genoa Dove fairly skimmed along. It was just a pity Dove wasn’t getting any closer to Long Beach, but it was nice to be moving at a good clip.
The weather again changed and became suddenly cold enough to freeze things off a brass monkey. I complained into the tape:
The only time I get really warm is at night. All the three cats come and sleep with me. No wonder! The deck thermometer’s in the fifties and all of us are used to the tropics. It’s real hard to sleep when itchy little whiskers are tickling your face….
Kili’s getting as irritable as I am. There’s nothing for him to do—no bugs for him to chase and no green leaves to chew on. The kittens don’t seem to mind so much. They are still trying to eat my model ship. They love the threads and the little spools, everything….
Kili seems to be going crazy. He stares at the wall and then his hair goes up as if he’s terrified. If I make a quick motion it really wipes him out. I’m wearing a fishing knife in a leather sheath. Kili really hates the leather. Every now and then I feel a little tapping and I look down and there’s Kili batting at the sheath. Sometimes he sits down and cries as loud as he can. I don’t blame him. There are times when I feel like doing that myself.
For the next five days Dove beat into strong headwinds and I made very slow progress. I’d been exactly a month at sea, and Long Beach still looked much too far away. When I had figured I had gone long enough due west I turned toward the coast again.
I taped:
Weather is really terrible now. It’s blowing almost a full gale and the sea’s much rougher than it’s supposed to be. Between noon and noon I made only twenty-five miles toward Long Beach. How stupid can the weather be? Just headwinds. But I can’t do much about it. Quite forgot to get my noon latitude sights, but this afternoon took two LOPs which worked out okay. Discovered three chops in the bottom of the freezer. I cooked them in butter and it’s the best meal I’ve had since Patti’s stuffed lobster. The cats did well too. I caught a bonita and gave it to them. Can’t have the cats looking like alley waifs when we arrive. So we all had quite a party. Been mending a big tear in my Levi’s and reading Hailey’s Airport.
Next day, April 24, I picked up a more encouraging weather report from San Diego. They forecast that the winds would back from the northwest to the southwest all along the coast. I scrawled in my logbook: Blessed is the Lord. I hope the change comes quickly because I can’t take these ceaseless headwinds much longer.
Then a day later my jib halyard broke and I had to jury-rig another, but the wind did swing a bit around the compass and I was able to head northeast, straight for Long Beach. I taped: Slowly getting there, Patti, very slowly, but I’m coming. If the wind holds now, I’ve got it made.
The wind did hold, and I pushed Dove hard—too hard really for safety. On the night of April 28 I saw a glow in the sky to the north. I knew it couldn’t be the sunset. It was the glow from the sprawl of Los Angeles, one hundred miles away. Next morning I passed San Clemente island and picked up the vaguely familiar smell of smog from a city of about ten million people—a raw smell, like wet concrete. For the first time the idea of reaching home really got to me.
I put another reel on my tape recorder: I can’t believe it. I don’t know what I really feel except that my stomach is all knotted up. Man, I’m tired! It’s funny really. This is what I’ve dreamed about, but I don’t know what to say. Just home tomorrow!
I went below and took my first shave since leaving the Galápagos islands. I planned to arrive on the following morning, shortly after dawn, so there was no need to push Dove now.
It was an incredibly beautiful sunset and Dove looked as if she was sailing through a sea of hammered gold. An aircraft came sweeping low several times. It was Bob Madden taking pictures. My radio was tuned to a Los Angeles station and I heard my name on the newscasts.
I used the radiotelephone to call up the Los Angeles Coast Guard, but due to radio “skip” I could only get the Monterey station. I asked them to relay a message to Patti. The Coast Guard said they’d tell Patti that I’d be standing by waiting for her call at ten o’clock that night.
Patti came through on the radiotelephone right on time. It was terrific talking to her again, and yet it was so unreal. She said she had fixed up a temporary room in my parents’ home and that she was making the drapes.
I found it hard to think about hanging up drapes. I wondered if I was really dreaming it.
Patti was also finding trouble believing we were close together again. She kept on saying, “Oh, Robin, I can’t believe it.”
“I can’t either,” I said.
“It’s been so long,” said Patti.
“You’re not kidding.”
“But honestly, Robin, you’ve made absolutely fantastic speed. We’ve heard of some boats that have taken ninety days from Galápagos.”
“Well, I blew on the sails.”
She laughed. It was great to hear her laugh.
Patti said, “The newsmen and the TV people have been chasing us for two weeks. It’s really been awful. Try to be nice to them, honey. It won’t be long and then we can escape.”
“I’ll be nice.”
“Just keep your cool, please.”
“And how’s Junior?”
“Oh, he’s fine. Swimming around like crazy.”
We talked for quite a long time and arranged to meet at the harbor wall an hour after sunrise. National Geographic had chartered a big boat and she said she would be on it.
That last night at sea I sat on deck with a quilt wrapped around me to keep out the cold. Occasionally I spoke into the tape recorder: Okay, boy! I’m now off Pyramid Head…. Those must be the lights of Santa Catalina, good old romantic Catalina…. Two o’clock and the moon’s just risen. Looks like the moon the cow jumped over…. Wind is gentle now…. California, you sure stink! My provisions and supplies have just made it. Same for my endurance…. Thirty-eight days! Oh, boy!
Mostly I just thought to myself of the five-year voyage and what it had all added up to.
I’d learned so many things at sea—like kindness has got nothing to do with money and happiness has got nothing to do with rank or race. There were some pretty awful memories, like the time I was nearly run down by a ship at night and the big storm off Malagasy. I thought of the good things too, like the time in the Yasawas and the howl of jackals on the African veld, the thrill of making Mauritius on time under a jury rig and of mending a pelican’s beak in the Galápagos.
Little flashes of memory darted through my mind as I sat on deck. I thought how you feel beautiful things deep inside you so that they become part of you.
At sea I had learned how little a person needs, not how much. I wondered why men hold on to life as if the universe depended on them. It seemed to me that so many people hold back from doing the things they really want to do because of fear. The less sophisticated societies seemed to understand this better than the people in the civilized world. Being alone had made me realize that man is pretty insignificant in the universe, like a speck of dust.
I thought how the best times on my voyage were the interludes I had shared with Patti. There were a few periods when I was alone and had enjoyed it. But the loneliness really got to me in the end. Sitting on the deck that last night I admitted to myself that I would not have made the round-the-world voyage if I had not met Patti.
It was a long night and a good time to think. At about three o’clock I went below and took a saucepan bath, changed my clothes and gave the cats an early breakfast. The cats didn’t appreciate being waked up so early but they liked the last can of boned chicken.
On April 30, 1970, my thirty-eighth day at sea, I saw the sky lighten in the east. At seven o’clock I sailed past the breakwaters of the port of Los Angeles—1,739 days after I had left them to circle the world alone. I had traveled 30,600 nautical miles.
A powered cruiser came through the mist. Patti was crouched at the forward rail, her blond hair streaming behind her. She was laughing and looking so pretty.
The launch came alongside and Patti leaned over perilously and handed me a breakfast tray set on white linen—half a melon with a cherry in it, cottage cheese, rolls warm from the oven and a bottle of champagne.
Patti couldn’t come aboard until I’d cleared customs. Excitement, sleeplessness and champagne made me a bit light-headed. My eyes flooded—and not from the wind. A helicopter hovered overhead (it later crashed but no one was hurt) and then a whole fleet of yachts was heading toward me. It was the start of the annual Ensenada yacht race. As the yachts passed Dove the crews shouted and waved welcomes across the water.
At eight o’clock—actually three minutes after—Dove nosed into a berth at the Long Beach Marina. I threw a line. Dove was tied up. I’d circled the world.
I was glad the customs men kept people off the boat. I sat on the cabin roof while newsmen fired their questions. I wish now that I could have given them better answers, but everything added up to one huge sigh of relief.
Anyway, I didn’t really know the answers myself.
“What made you do it?”
There were many reasons. I didn’t like school—but that’s not unique. I wanted to look at the world, at people and places, without being a tourist. I wanted personal freedom. I wanted to know if I could do something alone—something really difficult. But somewhere deep in my mind I felt there was another reason and that it had something to do with fate and destiny. How could I phrase that? How could I tell these newsmen that I had sailed across the world because I had to do so—because that was what I was meant to do?
Then at last Patti and I were alone. She drove me to our temporary home and hideout. She stopped the car at a traffic light (it was weird seeing traffic lights again) and she said gently, “Robin, it’s really just the beginning, isn’t it? I mean we have a whole new adventure ahead, a whole new life.”
The traffic lights changed from red to green. I was just so tired I couldn’t answer her. She understood. She just went on talking quietly.
“It’s fantastic to think that we’re not going to be apart again…and soon there are going to be three of us…and all I know is that life is going to be great….”