Trade Winds Calling: A South Pacific Sailing Adventure and Love Stories.

By Dan Feltham

The principal character in the book, Ed Rogers, replicates many of the author's adventurous romantic dreams. Ed’s goal as a happy bachelor, was to experience as much of this marvelous world as time, money and fate would allow. Rogers, had the good fortune to travel, sail and love many wonderful people and exotic places around the globe. It is hoped that the sailing episodes in the book will acquaint and educate the non-sailing reader (and at the same time not insult the experienced sailor) with various aspects of the day-to-day life aboard a well-founded cruising yacht. It is also hoped the stories will explain an adventurer’s attraction to the South Seas, distant lands and peoples that have so richly blessed so many sailors and the history of the South Pacific.
I have been told that there are two love stories here. I prefer to think there are many. I enjoyed the writing of this story, The freedom of being able to write anything I wanted and to create people, places and things rather than sticking to all reality is intoxicating. Much like the shores of the world’s major oceans, the boundaries of writing fiction are far apart. Lastly, I would like the reader to keep in mind that most of this story takes place in the time period between 1977 and 1982. Please look back over the past thirty plus years or so and recognize that many changes have taken place since then, in both sailboat technology and Pacific Island tourism. Thank you for opening these pages. Welcome aboard!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781483595016

Book preview

dream.

Chapter 1 - A Boat Race to Hawaii

A storm or extra heavy winds at sea can certainly teach humility and God’s help is often privately requested at such times by those aboard a small sailing boat. I know I mumbled more than a few words asking for safe passage. An angry ocean can also teach just how much fear a person can handle. Fear deserves reassuring company but is never mentioned between mates and none of us racing the 46 foot yacht Undine would readily confess to having serious concerns about our well being through that wild ride in July of 1977, half way to Honolulu. The early morning light showed good promise for a calmer day and the huge dark menacing waves remaining from the previous night’s gale were finally becoming almost manageable. My name is Ed Rogers and I love sailboats and sailing (much more about that later), but I’ll have to admit that I had never been through any sailing experience like the high winds of the previous night, before or since.

We hadn’t seen another boat for several days and the racing fleet was spread out over hundreds of white-capped square miles. It amazes me sometimes how such a small boat remains intact and afloat in such a storm. The freeboard measurement between the deck and sea level for our boat’s hull was only about three feet and by comparison some of the breaking stern waves were probably fifteen to twenty feet. We called them crocodiles and alligators and just knew they were there snapping at our stern and trying to swallow us whole in their white frothed gaping jaws. Undine would roar down the face of each steep wave, her heaviest spinnaker stretched to its limit, into what seemed like a bottomless, black, salt water pit; then she would slow to a relative crawl down in the trough where the horizon would disappear, and again start up the back of the next huge white topped Pacific swell before beginning the adrenaline producing slide down the face of the next big wave. There were times when I was sure we would continue plunging downward, straight into Davey Jones Locker. It was risky keeping the spinnaker up all night in such conditions, but we were racing and sometimes what seemed like the edge of disaster! The nautical miles were flying by and we had come through the strongest winds of the race in excellent shape.

My shipmates and I were racing Norm Dawley’s Kettenburg PC sloop Undine to Hawaii from Los Angeles in the 29th biennial 2,225 nautical mile 1977 Transpacific Yacht Race. There were six of us on board, all good friends, all proven sailors with years of ocean racing experience. It was a good team. I, for one, had begun my sailing while in high school in 1949 at Newport Beach, California, had owned boats and done several long distance races to Mexico and the 1975 race to Hawaii. The other five men had all grown up actively sailing in Southern California.

For the past 12 hours we had been hanging on for dear life as Undine surfed along in regular bursts over 12 plus knots (that may not seem very fast but heavy displacement boats like Undine cannot really surf; it’s more like plowing). We knew it was 12 plus because for long periods at a time the knot meter was pegged at 12 and that was as high as the bulkhead-mounted dial was calibrated. The thing about pushing a sailboat beyond its rated hull speed was the fact that the head high, churning, white water bow wake would remain amidships for minutes at a time and the roar of noise on deck was so deafening that we had to yell to each other to be heard.

By dawn the wind was finally down from gusts of around 40 knots to an enjoyable 15 to 18 knots and the sun was just breaking through some low-lying clouds on the eastern horizon behind us. We shook out one reef in the mainsail and were back in control of what seemed to be a very insignificant combination of wood, steel, lead and cloth called a sailboat. We were just one tiny speck on the vast Pacific Ocean, one out of 65 other little specks, all trying to sail to Hawaii as fast as possible. Norm and our barefoot longhaired hippie Peter had done a great job of steering during the worst of the blow. Any loss of concentration or error in steering judgment in those conditions could have been disastrous and those two were the very best. Rick and I had crawled out of our warm but soggy bunks and come on watch at 4 a.m., but without having had much sleep due to several all-hands on-deck sail adjustments. The constant scream of the wind and ocean wash was not a friend of sleep, and worry competed with adrenalin rushes.

Just after 6 a.m. sleepy owner/skipper Dawley stuck his head out of the companionway and calmly said, Hey guys, my dawn celestial shots came out pretty good. I have a reasonably good morning fix and guess what; we did great for the last 24 hours - would you believe 220 miles, 6 a.m. to 6 a.m.?

Norm was an expert with celestial navigation and could somehow stand on the wet tossing after deck, one arm wrapped around the thin wire backstay while manipulating his trusted sextant. He was usually confident with the results of his plotted positions and properly so.

Rick exclaimed, Wow skipper, that’s our best run since we started isn’t it? We should be right up there with the leaders in our class.

Yeah, I think you’re right, said Norm, "This old bucket has really been trackin’. That’s the best Undine has ever done and I figure we’re definitely in the top four or five in our class. The morning roll call and position report for each yacht should give us the answer as soon as I get it all plotted."

I’m guessing the gale has blown itself out, I still had to half-shout. That was pretty wild last night. I thought some of those huge growlers were going to break on our stern for sure. You could see our white water wake, even in the dark, for at least a hundred yards behind us.

I asked Norm how many yachts had broken their masts during the night.

It sounded like five, from what I could hear on the radio, so there are some major problems out there. Sure glad we’re not one of ‘em.

I kept thinking that our mast was held up by just a 3/8ths inch diameter, length of stainless steel wire and we were the only yacht in this year’s race with a wooden mast and boom. Norm had put Undine through a lot of tough weather over the past 15 years and really knew what he was doing and what Undine could do in rough conditions. I can say, without a doubt, he is one of the two best skippers I have ever sailed with, and I’ve sailed with some good ones. We had done the previous Transpac with Undine and four of the same crew that were on this race, but had not been through the kind of winds we had just experienced. Faith in the skipper and boat is almost everything and we had the best of both!

We told Norm to join the three others below and get some much needed shut-eye; Rick and I had a couple more hours to go on the 4 to 8 a.m. watch. Norm agreed and climbed into his upper bunk, although he was still suspicious after breaking through the leeboard and being tossed out to the cabin floor a few nights before. We settled into some relatively smooth sailing and some very interesting conversation. Undine was still doing a steady 8 to 9 knots under reefed mainsail, a 2.2 ounce spinnaker and we had set a steadying ‘tall boy’ staysail under the chute for better balance. Undine tracked extremely well, thanks to her excellent design and her new spade rudder. We could finally begin to relax, steer carefully in the large remnant swells, trim sails when needed and sip our morning coffee.

Rick had also done a lot of sailing over the years, had recently sold his Cal 36 sloop in Hawaii and purchased the 42 foot Herreshoff designed wooden yawl Pikaki, named for the Hawaiian variety of sweet smelling jasmine. He and I had worked together in the same IBM office in Honolulu and he had rented a room for a while in my Kahala home after his divorce. Rick was about five years older than I, but usually outran me in a fast jog around Diamond Head. We hadn’t spent any recent time together, since I had been working for IBM in Saudi Arabia for the past year. I had flown from Saudi and joined the crew in Santa Barbara only a few days previous to the July 2 start off San Pedro’s Point Fermin. We had been too busy preparing for the race and experiencing the initial cold and rough early going the first few days sailing away from the Southern California coastline. I had no early sea legs and had been somewhat seasick, finally recovering after two days of sweaty queasiness and occasional retching over the lee rail. Several days later the much heavier winds hit. This was the first time Rick and I had been on watch together. I asked him what he planned to do with Pikaki after the race. Rick answered with quite a surprising plan that he had laid out for the years ahead and the conversation that salty morning changed the course of my life and the lives of a few other people in the story that follows.

As you may know, Ed, I left the corporate world last November and have been working on the new boat and taking a few seamanship courses - celestial navigation, diesel engine maintenance and ham radio operation. I have been thinking seriously about cruising to the South Pacific for the next few years - white sand beaches, beautiful sunsets, sailing in the warm trade winds, coral atolls and silent anchorages in quiet bays, brown skinned maidens and all the fables and freedoms of the south seas. I figure that this will be the best time in my life to drop out and go cruising, fulfill my dream - that sort of thing - before I get too old to do it.

Sounds good to me, I said as I steered Undine down the face of a medium sized swell. Dick adjusted the spinnaker sheet, cranked a rotation on the jib sheet winch, and talked on.

"I single-handed Undine to Santa Barbara from Honolulu last month for Norm as sort of a test case to make sure I could handle long water passages. My celestial worked out okay, still a bit rusty though, and I enjoyed the 17-day crossing living with myself with no problems. So, I’m ready for the grand adventure and plan to head south with Pikaki as soon as possible. The first stop will be the Marquesas and then I’ll spend Christmas in Tahiti. I want to take my son and daughter with me and invite compatible guests to join us from time to time."

Well, this was big news to me. I thought this was perhaps a typical escape thing for a middle-aged man to do after a divorce. Since I had always wanted to do the same thing, I was full of questions. Who else were the crew, where did he plan to lay over, what had he done to get Pikaki ready, did he have a self steering vane, did he have good charts, did he plan to keep going around the world, and so on? Our four hour watch was soon up, time for a quick breakfast and some hours in the sack. I told Rick I would like to hear more and would sure like to join him somewhere along the way if schedules permitted. Why not? I had no strings attached. I began to think about a new adventure and perhaps, just maybe, after Saudi, and at my age of 45, I could still try to fulfill my own personal dreams.

The winds were strong for the entire race and Undine stayed with the leaders in the Class B fleet. The third day out Norm had disassembled a faulty generator and rewired and re-soldered it on the cabin floor so we could re-charge the batteries and stay in the race. A yacht cannot race effectively at night without instrument lights. It was a case of fix it or drop out and return to California! Norm actually did the final soldering job using a glowing steel bolt that he had heated over the butane stove. About the 7th day out, Peter discovered a crack in the starboard main shroud’s lower turnbuckle during his routine around-the-deck morning inspection.

Norm was prepared and calmly said, Okay, guys, we’ll jibe on over to port tack so that there is no pressure on the lee starboard shroud. We’ll cut the shroud as close to the deck as possible and replace the cracked turnbuckle with a Norseman fitting. (For the reader, a Norseman is a two part swage-less fitting system that can be quickly attached to damaged standing wire rigging. Individual wire strands are spread over a metal core and then screwed to a threaded cover. The fitting assembly forms a very reliable point of attachment).

Ed, you steer and for heavens sake don’t jibe her accidentally or we’ll loose the entire rig overboard!

So Norm and Peter went forward with a hacksaw, a crescent wrench, and the Norseman parts. While we were under full main and spinnaker doing about 7 to 8 knots almost straight down wind, they cut the wire shroud, splayed the wire strands into the new fitting and completed the repair in about ten minutes. An unintended jibe is always a possibility if not alert. Boy, was I nervous on the tiller.

Norm came aft and said, Okay, let’s jibe back and see if she holds. She did, and we sailed on without losing a knot. It was an amazing display of seamanship! We ripped and repaired a couple of sails and one stormy night the starboard jib track threatened to pull up from the deck, but nothing more serious occurred. These events were minor compared to the complications of being dismasted or suffering a series of knockdown.

Our race was full of only these relatively minor emergencies onboard Undine. We didn’t break anything major, we had no knockdowns ourselves although we did a few rock and rolls managing to drag the end of the main boom through the salt water several times. We never dipped the end of the spinnaker pole (which can be disastrous), and we ate well and enjoyed a few golden sunsets. We six also had a great time enjoying each other’s camaraderie and arrived in Honolulu with the same crew we started out with (one of the basic objectives of every sailboat race). Compatible personalities at sea are sooo important! I kept a copy of the day-to-day log; a review of all of our written comments and those cartoon drawings over time has brought back many a laugh and great memories.

It was blowing strong in the Molokai Channel – maybe in the mid twenties - and we pulled off two nearly perfect two-pole spinnaker jibes as we roared past Molokai’s Ilio Point on the downwind approach to the Diamond Head finish line. In the early dawn’s half-light we could see the dark silhouettes of two yachts not too far ahead and we thought we were gaining. It was close. Our third place finish in Class B just 12 minutes behind Scaramouche and 10 minutes behind Tuia was both satisfying and disappointing - where had we lost just twelve minutes? Twelve minutes over an official distance of 2,225 nautical miles! Our little wooden boat corrected 14th out of the 66 entries averaging just over 193 nautical miles per 24-hour period (just over 8 knots for the entire race).

Undine’s Diamond Head Finish

Five boats were dismasted within hours of each other during a savage 40 to 50 knot squall and limped in to Honolulu a few days later, each under creative jury rigs. A few other yachts experienced multiple knockdowns, serious damage and blown out sails. Bill Lee’s Merlin set a new passage record of 8 days, 11 hours, 1.75 minutes. It was the fastest overall Transpac on record to that date. Our 6 a.m. arrival off Waikiki was spectacular and we were escorted past the Hawaii Yacht Club’s welcoming A L O H A reception that called out each crew member’s name over the club’s loud public address system. The early morning sponsor’s reception party - orchid leis, music and breakfast mai-tais at the Ala Wai docks - were arrival events to always remember. And Undine looked real good tied up next to some of the more famous biggies that were almost twice our size!

I remained in Honolulu for a few more days, ate and drank too much, met a few old girl friends on Waikiki beaches, attended the always fun trophy presentation dinner at the Ilikai Hotel as well as a couple of good parties at the Waikiki and Kaneohe Yacht clubs. We six bid each other fond Aloha’s and vowed to race together again someday. It had been a great race, but unfortunately it was soon time for me to return to the stark desert contrast of my computer management job in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern province.

One of the principal reasons I had taken the Saudi Arabia position was because I thought I could save enough money while on a tax-exempt overseas assignment to buy my own yacht after my return. I had one final discussion with Rick about his South Pacific cruise and we promised to stay in touch during the coming year or two. Rick said I would be welcome to join him on Pikaki sometime in late 1979, somewhere in the South Pacific – rather indefinite but definitely something I wanted and planned to do.

Chapter 2 – Saudi Assignment

After the 1977 Transpacific yacht race on Undine, I returned to Saudi Arabia to a pile of responsibilities and personnel problems – too many customer demands, inadequate family housing, twenty-eight nationalities speaking at least five languages in our office and so on. Saudi was experiencing an economic expansion and well into their second five-year economic plan, undergoing massive infrastructure developments, including computing. I was familiar with the Arab world, had been to Saudi in 1962 as a geologist and had volunteered for this IBM Corporation ‘overseas’ assignment.

When there was time I was enjoying management responsibilities, the technical challenges at one of IBM’s world-class clients and a fair amount of extra international travel. My principal data processing client was the huge progressive ARAMCO organization (Arabian American Oil Company). IBM computers were becoming critical to Saudi oil production and it was said that if certain segments of our equipment experienced an outage of more than two hours, then the flow of oil to the rest of the world (even then they had the capacity to pump 12 million barrels a day) would stop (perhaps an exaggeration). We also marketed to the beautiful University of Petroleum & Minerals (UPM) and contractors such as Fluor, Northrup, and Bechtel Corporations. The rest of Saudi Arabian business and commerce was also in an information-processing renaissance. The mid-70s in Saudi were socially restrictive but the computer business was booming. Our technical staff was challenged on a daily basis and I, for one, sometimes needed to take a break.

When time permitted and my work responsibilities became too overwhelming there was one oasis of peace and tranquility in Saudi’s Eastern Province where I felt most comfortable - the Royal Saudi Yacht Club nestled on a large and beautiful beachside cove called Half Moon Bay. It was a place where I could disappear from computers, sales quotas and personnel challenges. The bay was, as its name suggests, a half round indentation on the Arabian Gulf (it was definitely not called the Persian Gulf if you lived in Saudi Arabia). The club was about a half hour’s drive from Dhahran down a two-lane road through hardpan desert and huge migrating sand dunes – no trees in sight. The sand dunes eventually came right down to the gulf and water’s edge, blown by hot prevailing winds from the west. These same dunes served as a physical framework for the yacht club facilities and its members. Since the winds normally blew offshore the sailing racecourse enjoyed flat calm waters, even in a hard blow. Water skiing, swimming and sailboat racing were the weekend (Friday and Saturday) water sports and club membership consisted mostly of ARAMCO employees plus a few lucky American or European contractors like myself.

Sometime in early 1977, I purchased a new Hobie 16 catamaran, manufactured and shipped from France, in partnership with new girlfriend Nancy, a good looking blond ARAMCO systems programmer. Nancy sponsored me to the yacht club through my IBM vendor/client relationship with ARAMCO. Both the sailing and Nancy progressed into a winning combination and when not racing at the yacht club we were enjoying each other’s company at her apartment within the walls of ARAMCO’s private residential quarters. Occasionally she would spend the night at my house within the Juffali housing compound in the town of al Khobar. Nancy and the sailing helped take care of a bachelor’s loneliness and my extra energies in a foreign land.

The weekends at Half Moon Bay were something to look forward to  whenever work schedules permitted - picnics, American and European women in bikinis (the yacht club property was private and part of ARAMCO. Strangely, no local Arabs were allowed; they would not have tolerated the half dressed women). There was boat racing in a fleet of up to ten or twelve Hobie 16s, volleyball on the beach, swimming to cool off in the 90 degree water, and just socializing with some very nice people all with similar interests – my kind of place. One day we hauled the Hobie half way to the top of a nearby and very steep sand dune. I climbed aboard with great expectations, sheeted the main and jib in hard and tried to sail down the face of the dune into the bay, but the soft sand made the going too slow and we finally pushed the boat down the dune and back into the sea - where it belonged. I guess we would have invented ‘sand dune sailing’.

Smooth Sailing with the author on the Gulf

On another windy day we were actually able to tow a water skier behind the Hobie by handing off the tow line with skier from motor boat to sailboat while each were doing about 18 knots through flat smooth water – this also may have been a first! Who knows?

A few Friday evenings, Nancy and I remained at the club after the races, enjoyed a steak fry and a few drinks of the illegal ‘sadikiti’ (bootleg high grade home distilled alcohol – beautiful stuff that you could mix with almost anything – the most popular mix was Nesbitt’s orange drink). Too wise and too happy to drive back to town through Saudi territory, we spent several warm weekend nights on the Hobie’s comfortable webbed trampoline under bright middle-eastern stars and forgot sailing. Making love on a catamaran trampoline is one of the better ways to sail a Hobie 16.

I had owned and raced seven different catamarans (Pacific Cats, Hobies, Hawaiian 18s and Tornados) in Hawaii during the late ’60s and early ’70s so I had an advantage over most of the relatively new inexperienced sailors in the local fleet. The race conditions were almost always perfect - smooth