About Me

My photo
Sacramento, California, United States
so salty pieces of coral from surfing Hawaii in the 60's and 70's getting reef pounded living in my body fall through my skin from time to time!

sailing to Oahu

Jimi Hendrix was playing on Oahu. I had never sailed. Surfed Mexico, California, Hawaii! Aw, how hard could it be to sail 90-110 miles from Kauai to Oahu? Piece of cake, right? Remember it was the 60's! This is so bad. We thought we were looking at Kaiena Point,Ohau, knowing we weren't going to make the concert! But at least we were in site of Oahu-wrong! Coy, who had never sailed before, me,who had never sailed before, jeff and Abbott etc. We were looking at the sleeping giant on Kauai! We had done three-sixty's in the night! We sailed on the only tri-marran I've ever sailed on ( except later ) in my life, missed the concert! It was at the Waikiki Shell Ampitheater ( Moon eclipsed . We finally made Nawilwili Harbor! The Skipper tried to give us his boat saying, " It's trying to kill me"! We watched him go stark raving mad not even realising that had we got caught in the channel current we were on our way to Japan! Remember it was the 60's and we were going to see Hendrix. I left out some of the good stuff but I will make up for it later!

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Samurai, PNG---Cairns Aus......

Forget the Phillipines! We ran out of money! We headed to Australia to make money to haul "Guinevere" out of the water and go through her, heal Her from the many battles she had fought and won not only functioning as our house or exo-skeleton but as an extension of who and what we were about: who drove Her into strange harbors and filled our imaginations with truths that were the truth and not subject to whims created on "Wall Street" by think tank anal-ists! Ha! I saw You because You wern't there! The sail from Samurai was uneventful until we found the outside lead into Grafton Passage! That will be a story you need to remind me of for a future telling. For now this story is about after the green flag. When customs in Cairns took away a canned, sealed,unoperned tin of ham, manufactured in Aus, but bought in Papua, I knew we were in for some fun. It started raining so hard, if you put your hand to cover your eyes like a baseball cap you still couldn't see! We finally cleared customs without making any enemies but I had no visa so they gave me one for $ 35 for 24 hours. Dave, my skipper, paid and Royal Gage and I ran through rain that I had only experienced on Kauai, Hawaii before! Places where you measure rain in feet! We made it to the Cairns Yacht Club, laughing because this is the first, first world country we had been in for awhile and a rum and coke was not far away and the view inside "The Club" was a site to behold! We were so happy to see all these wonderful people having a great time we never realized we were being laughed at until later. At least we hadn't stepped upon the Cairns Yacht Club logo, on the floor! If we had done that we would have been forced to shout a round for the entire house! However, we did seat ourselves at the bar (never wondering why with a full house there would be three open chairs next to the service area) and were completely neglected. We finally with a few ( tongue in check) references found that we were siting in the gereiatrics section! Susan( the bartender) became my friend and many friendships spun off of Royal's and my unawareness of Yachtie behaviors. My future wife witnessed this event having no idea that we would fall in love and someday be married and have two children that are now adults! ( According to them) Guinevere got fixed! Royal and I got our rum and cokes! Customs got their's. We worked hard in Cairns and we all made it to New Zealand but that can be another story. It will be about " The Tasman" and " The Bay Of Islands"!

Blog Archive