Kodoku: Sailing Alone Across the Pacific

By Kenichi Horie

Kodoku is the true story of a young Japanese sailor whose fascination with the art of sailing led him on a solo trans-Pacific journey.

First described in a best-selling Japanese book, then an internationally acclaimed motion picture, Kodoku is the full record of the background, conception, preparation, and execution of this daring, yet carefully planned adventure.

It includes not only the full text of his original log, but also his supplementary comments, adding detail and highlight to the day-to-day experiences recorded in the log.

Also included are charts, plans, and a diagram comparing some of the more noteworthy craft that sailed the open seas in the past. The 61 photographs, including 43 taken by Horie himself during the trip, add a vivid touch to this fascinating story of courage, tenacity, adventure, and humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
• Release date: Mar 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781462913343

Book preview

1

The Fascination of the Pacific

Just because . . .

What made you want to cross the Pacific? Why did you do it? What did you expect to get out of it?

1 must have been asked these same questions hundreds of times since my trans-Pacific cruise. Maybe even thousands of times. Writers, newspaper reporters, and all kinds of other people came to see me, always with these same questions. I guess they expected me to say something that would sound nice or startling or convincing or exceptional. Each time I was asked these questions, I had a rough time trying to think of something that would satisfy them, but I always ended up with Well, I crossed it just because I wanted to. Honestly, I didn't have any purpose or motive other than that when I decided to sail across the Pacific. But none of these people were able to understand this.

But, they always continued, "you must have had a reason, you know, something special that made you set out to sea in a tiny sailboat." Some of these people even thought up their own explanations and then tried to prove to me that they were right.

Why? Why couldn't they accept what I told them? It was just that simple. I soon got tired of answering all their questions, and finally I couldn't stand them any longer. Some of the fellows at my club started ribbing me when they saw that these questions were bothering me, but others felt sorry for me and were just as disgusted with the writers as I was. Being yachtsmen too, they understood. One of them said to me: "Forget it! They really can't understand what you mean. They won't believe that there is no damn reason for it, not a damn reason," and he was right. Nearly everyone of us yachtsmen at one time or another has dreamed, and seriously dreamed, of the day when he might take the chance and sail across the Pacific. But if you ask him why, he won't know, any more than I did.

Even in San Francisco, I got the same whys. They were always the most frequent questions, and San Francisco is famous for its large sailing population. One day, when I met with a group of newspapermen, the inevitable question came again. I said, through my interpreter: "Just because I wanted to cross it."

Do you mean, asked one of the reporters with a kind of sly grin, that now you are going to walk across this continent?

I wondered what he was driving at. I didn't quite understand what he meant until after the press conference was over, when I began to get the picture of how all of this confusion started. When my interpreter had put my answer into English, he had adapted what I said to the classic remark of the British mountain-climber Sir George Mallory by saying Because the Pacific was there. Nothing that I said had any such subtle refinement in it at all. Besides, I certainly had no desire or interest in restating the words or meaning of anyone else, especially Sir George, the celebrated climber of the Himalayas.

This part of the story has bothered me a little and I want to set the record straight. People I know said to me Wasn't he a wonderful interpreter? You don't have to worry at all; it's so beautifully done. And it was, but I didn't say anything as profound as because the Pacific was there.

There are over 500 members in the NORC (Nippon Ocean Racing Club), and I am still a very junior member. If you picked out any one of these people and asked him: Do you want to sail across the Pacific? he would answer: Sure I do. But I also bet that if you asked him why, he would reply For no particular reason.

Some of these fellows, I know, have spent more than twenty years preparing for a time when they might set out to sea on a trans-Pacific cruise. I guess it was just a matter of my being able to do it one step ahead of the others.

Since the Pacific is the only real open sea for us Japanese, anyone who loves to sail and wants to plan a real cruise—and I don't mean a yachting trip along the coast—will turn his eyes to the Pacific. He doesn't think: I'm going to sail it 'because it is there.' He has to sail on the Pacific, and because there is no other open sea available to him, he has to cross it, if he can. It is not our purpose to conquer the Pacific; yachting is the end in itself.

1. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed with the realization that I was at last here in America, in San Francisco, California, U.S.A.

2. The yawl drew up alongside us. . . . The skipper waved and yelled: Where do you come from? Osaka, Japan! I called back. There was no need to hide my identity now. PHOTO, MR. HARRY JACOBS.

Has any Japanese yachtsman ever before reached the American coast alone? I'm told the answer is no. Others have done it, but it was always a foreigner who did it. No Japanese has ever sailed anything like a Snipe alone across the Pacific, the largest of all the seven oceans. Maybe I had a craving for the fame of being the first Japanese yachtsman to cross the Pacific single-handed, but I don't know.

My swimming record: 50 yards

Kenichi wanted to go to sea ever since he was a baby, someone has written about me. This, I can tell you, is an exaggeration.

I was born on September 8, 1938, the first son of an auto-parts dealer at East Tanaka-cho in the district of Osaka known as Minato-ku, or Port District, close to the harbor. In 1944, during the war, my family moved to another section within metropolitan Osaka, a landlocked section called Minomo. The next year, after I entered elementary school, we moved again—this time to the city of Okayama, where my mother's parents were then living. The Asahikawa River flows through the middle of the city, and I used to go swimming there with my schoolmates, who were all good swimmers. They all liked swimming and would swim hard and fast until they were exhausted. But I guess I didn't care so much about exerting myself, because I remember that I spent most of my time on shore. Maybe it was because my distance record was about 50 yards. I'm not any better at swimming even now.

We stayed in Okayama for three years and then moved back to Osaka. In 1951 I entered Yasaka Junior High, and during our summer vacations, I went to a camp at the seashore. Of course, part of the daily routine at the camp was swimming. You know how they do things at summer camps: someone blows a whistle and into the water you go—for twenty minutes; then another whistle and out you come. I didn't think it was any fun. In the afternoons, the sea was rough and real swimming was impossible, even if you liked to swim. So, I really didn't become attached to the sea until after junior high. But I did like to work out in the gym, especially on the high-bar. I joined the school athletic club when I was in the eighth grade and was quite good at balancing on the high-bar and at hand grips.

After graduating from junior high in 1954, I entered the freshman class at the First Senior High School, which is attached to Kansai University in Osaka. As a freshman, I was not at all motivated by youthful ambition as some are. In fact, the only impression I still have of that first year is that the new school charged a good deal for tuition. It wasn't long afterwards that I heard about the sailing club at the school.

Not a bad idea for a school activity. It would be a brand-new experience for me, and it sounded like fun, so I registered with the club to practice the art of yachting.

But right from the beginning it was a bit frightening to see how the club was run. It was operated by the college students who worked on very tight training schedules, and the discipline was rigid. Some of the college men were six or seven years older than the high school freshmen, but the rules were the same for all.

Roughest of all was the training camp during the summer when we were aboard sailboats for a good ten hours a day, every day. For rookies like me it was even tougher, because we had an hour of preparation before setting sail and an hour of work after mooring and an hour of rest in between, because the work was so grueling and exacting. Altogether we spent thirteen hours a day on sailing. And after that there was a lot of studying and homework.

During this rugged training period, all of us, skippers and crew alike, lived together in a small wooden shack. When the day's work was over and I returned to the shack, dripping with sweat and soaked with the salt-water spray, my body and head ached from fatigue. If I looked like I was getting soft and sloppy, the coaches—college juniors and seniors— doused me with buckets of cold water from the head down. Maybe this was invigorating, but I was so tired. When the summer training camp ended and I returned home, all I wanted to do was sleep, sleep, and sleep. I got up when I needed something to eat and then I went back to sleep. During those first days at home, I sometimes slept as much as twenty hours a day. This worried my mother, who thought that evidently I was sick, but eventually she realized that there was nothing wrong with me except exhaustion.

What was the purpose of all this rigorous, back-breaking training? Certainly there must be better ways—more scientific ways—of training. I kept thinking these thoughts in those early days because I never really got to enjoy sailing under such rough discipline. But, apparently it paid off. Because a month later I learned—to my surprise and delight—that out of the thirty high school freshmen who originally registered with the club, I was the only novice who survived the initial ordeal. The others had either quit or were asked to leave.

I guess I had been ashamed to quit, no matter how little sailing meant to me then. Maybe I was unable to bring myself to say to the coaches: Let me quit too. I was determined to stick it out until the day I would finish high school—at least.

With a mere puff of wind

Day after day we sailed in Nishinomiya Harbor, starting in a dinghy and working up to a two-man Snipe. Still, my skipper would not let me have the satisfaction of steering it all alone.

There were times when I wondered if I wasn't wasting my school years, spending almost every free moment on yachting. But then I would marvel at what a magnificent creature a sailboat is, cutting her way through the waters on a mere puff of wind!

I was now a sophomore and this was also the second year of my sailing career, but they still would not make a helmsman out of me, nor was I allowed to practice even the fundamentals of sailing a boat.

The way we ran our small Snipe, the skipper trimmed the mainsail and the mate trimmed the jib. It took less strength to sheet the mainsail than the jib because the main sheet was doubled around a couple of blocks. But the jib sheet, which I handled, was connected directly to the jib, and it had to be trimmed hard all the time. Hanging on to the end of the sheet with all my strength often made my palms blister. Then the skin would tear and peel off. When the threads of the sheet ran through my hands, which were oozing blood and numb, I could not release the sheet from my grip.

It was toward the end of my second year at high school that the day finally came when I was allowed to take the tiller of the boat. As the seniors were getting ready to leave school, I became a skipper. This followed naturally because I was the only sophomore still in the club. It soon became evident that those first two years as skipper's mate had not been wasted. I now realized that they had provided me with an invaluable store of practical knowledge and experience. Because I had sailed with several different skippers, I was now able to judge what good helmsmanship was, and I knew many basic steering techniques.

While sailing our little Snipe, we often saw the university sailboats—larger, of course, than ours—and I began to feel that I was falling farther and farther behind by still sailing in the same old Snipe.

A burning passion for the sea beyond gripped me. Maybe it was then that the Pacific began to beckon to me, inviting me to dream of a boundless open sea to sail. How I wished I could do it before it was too late!

When will I be able to sail the open sea? Maybe the Kansai area (western Japan) isn't really the place for sailing. There weren't many yachtsmen in the Kansai area, with its few harbors around Nishinomiya or in Osaka Bay. The farthest we could sail in a Snipe was Ashiya or Fukae. At that time these places seemed a long way out to me.

For two successive years, 1954 and 1955, the sailing club at the Kansai University First Senior High School won the first prize in the Kansai high school competition. At that time I was a mere crew member. In 1956—the first year I was club skipper—we entered the races again, but came out second. That same year we also participated in the all-Japan races at Nishinomiya. In this race we ended up, as I recall, in sixth or seventh place. Luck wasn't with us.

As time passed, I was beginning to do well enough to sail the two-man Snipe alone. This was something I had intended to accomplish some day. Now I could do it!

When I was a high school junior, the American sailboat Gloria-Marris anchored at Kobe prior to her cruise to the United States. Her skipper was doing some local recruiting. Two fellows I knew, Okui, the former chief skipper at Kansai University, and his friend Yasui, were applying. I wanted to apply too. But, according to the conditions laid down by the skipper, the recruits would have to make their way back to Japan on their own after reaching the U.S. coast. This, sad to say, was beyond the financial means of a high-school boy like me. As it turned out, however, my two friends didn't make it either. All of the new recruits on the Gloria-Marris were selected from Konan University. Among them was Yamamura, who later was an alternate in the Japanese Finn-class sailing team in the Rome Olympics of 1960.

I wished I could join up with a foreign crew. In those days of sailing our school's Snipes, I read a great deal about oceanic cruises. Of all the books I read I think the greatest were Tales of Great Trans-Oceanic Passages, Voyage of the Hérétique, and A History of Piracy in the Western Seas. I also read through the navigational records of the Nippon-maru and the Umitaka-maru (four-masted sailing barks of the Japanese Merchant Marine Training School). I was quite disappointed to learn that there were really very few books available on cruising techniques. Worst of all was the long wait we had to endure before we could get the books we wanted from England. The books on navigation I wanted most all came from England. Anytime we could get hold of such books, we used to rent them out to each other. I started to build up a collection on the Pacific Ocean; it was a source of constant excitement to me. I scouted around everywhere, building the collection, adding maps, charts, pictures, and articles from newspapers and magazines.

Of all the books about the sea that I read, two inspired me the most: Voyage of the Hérétique, which was written by the young French physician Alain Bombard, and Sailing Alone Around the World by the great American sailor Captain Joshua Slocum. Both of these books were about solo ocean cruises. In 1895 Captain Slocum put out to sea in a sailboat. It was his intention to sail around the world on this cruise; actually it took him four years before he reached the American coast. He was a real pioneer in solo trans-oceanic sailing, a man of amazing, almost supernatural, accomplishment. Alain Bombard wrote about the two months he spent drifting across the Atlantic Ocean in a rubber raft. He was determined to find out for himself whether a man could live alone on sea water and the fish he caught. He proved, in the end, that it could be done. So, the American yachtsman demonstrated the wonderful capacity of a small sailboat on the vast high seas, while the French doctor proved that man can survive on the sea.

Day after day, I kept dreaming about that broad expanse, the Pacific Ocean; I was sailing on it, but only on a little piece of it!

2

The Southern Cross:

The First Step

It had to be a cruiser

My last days at high school were approaching. Just before graduation, I gave up all thought of going to college for what seemed to me a very good personal reason. I just wasn't interested. I certainly was not a diligent student, even in high school. I hadn't wanted to go to high school, either, but reluctantly at the insistence of my parents had gone. At that time I was still so young that I had to follow whatever course they chose for me.

Now a high school graduate, I felt I would make up my own mind about my future life. College didn't fit into my scheme of things, and I wanted to be honest with myself, if with anyone. My mother and father, like other parents, had set their expectations of me a bit too high and wanted me to go to college. The high school I had attended, they figured, should help me get into Kansai University through its institutional ties. This was probably true, if only I had wanted to go to college, but I didn't want to go. There would be the whole series of highly competitive college entrance examinations to take, and I knew that I hadn't been doing too well in high school. Still, even though I was never a brilliant student, they argued, I was nevertheless in the upper half of my class and could make the grade. To me all of this seemed like riding an escalator that took you to a higher level with no effort on your part. It was all too pat.

A young man should not be content to live a life in which his future and security are all assured by this escalator process, I thought. Yet, I cared even less for facing the more rigid exams to get into another college. I just gave up the idea of going to college and stuck to it.

In this connection, I want to set the record straight about one of the questions that have disturbed me recently. People ask: Is it true that you didn't go to college because all you wanted to do was sail? Even the implication is untrue. I simply do not and cannot sacrifice any one cause for the sake of another. There was no connection—ever—between my love for sailing and not going to college. If I had gone to college, I would have been able to sail just as I did during my high school days. I knew I wanted to go to sea, and I didn't need a college education for that.

Looking back at it now, I think that if I had gone to Kansai University, I probably would have ended up with sailboat racing, and that would have been it. Developing racing techniques was never one of my goals. I knew that mastering those techniques would not lead to what must inevitably someday come—a trans-Pacific cruise. This dream was always in my mind and