CALM IN THE STORM
Not for the first time, the Royal Cruising Club’s wonderful annual journal Roving Commissions has turned up a jewel of seamanship. Delving into the 2021 edition I found an account by Francis Hawkings entitled ‘Three lucky escapes to Japan’. The article comes in two sections. The first describes a passage from California to Hawaii, two-handed on his Tradewind 35 Plainsong with his son-in-law.
As is so often the case these days, the trades largely fail to oblige and the passage is not without incident. Hawkings goes on to make the run from Hawaii to Japan single-handed. He finds himself confronted by challenges aplenty but deals with them in a relaxed and seamanlike manner, describing the events with unusual clarity yet never losing the human touch. He manages a potentially catastrophic cap shroud failure with what seems almost a shrug of the shoulders, then makes an assessment of how to cope with a truly ugly weather situation. The single-handed passage is recounted here in its entirety, including a final twist courtesy of Japanese bureaucracy.
I left Hawaii on 27 March and for the first two and a half weeks enjoyed the beautiful trade wind sailing that I'd
