Hilton Head Island: a film about the 1960 Sydney Hobart Race and four haiku

I thank William for a link to a film about the 1960 Sydney Hobart Race that I find quite enjoyable and interesting.  How much the boats and equipment have changed.  And for that matter the clothes spectators wear.

I have twice spent a year living on a mooring in Sydney Harbor’s Elizabeth Bay and I have sailed past Tasmania both north and south.

In 1960 I had never even been on a sailboat.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xuPPMMQz5J0

Presently my morning Chinese or Japanese poetry is THE CLASSIC TRADITION OF HAIKU.

Here are four, some in multiple translations, by Matsuo Basho 1644-1694, who is considered the most significant writer in haiku history.

This is said to be his first masterpiece and the most influential Japanese poem on the English language.

I like this one because across four hundred years Basho describes what Carol and I often see in one of the live oak trees just beyond our deck.

And two more.

Hilton Head Island: from the past

I am presently rereading the journal from June and July, 2017, when I was back in Evanston after having sailed GANNET from Durban, South Africa to Marathon, Florida, with only two stops earlier that year.

Here are a two entries that I believe are worth posting again.

From Friday, June 9:

Evanston:  You give up your dreams

     

        I happen to be listening to Dave Albin singing, “Everett Ruess” which includes the line, “You give up your dreams as you get older, but I never gave up mine.” 

        ‘Dreams’ seems too vague and romantic.

        I never had ‘’dreams’.  I had purpose and plans.  

        If those dreams are of the sea, waves will rise and smack you cold in the face, as they have me a thousand times.

        Picture a solitary child, sitting in his bedroom, looking out over an overgrown field in the middle of a continent, longing for the thousand mile distant ocean.

        He reached that ocean, of which there is but one as the ancients knew, and he sailed and knew it as few others ever have.

        He grew older than he ever imaged he would.      

        “Almost dying is a hard way to make a living,” he wrote after almost dying every year for two decades; but even at a somewhat deaf and half blind seventy-five years he never gave up not his dreams, which he was too hard minded ever to have had, but his certainty that he was an original, fully aware that almost all original experiments are failures.
        He continued to live his life in uncertainly and risk, as all of us do,  not knowing if his life was a success or a failure, or even how to define those terms.

From Friday, June 23

        The NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, or NatGeo as it now calls itself in surrender to the apparently universal decline in attention span, ran an interesting article on genius in its May issue which supports many thoughts I have offered in this journal.  Among them that ‘genius’ like ‘superstar’ has no objective meaning and is societal judgement; there are only originals; if one is admired enough he or she becomes a genius; and that life is forty years long, roughly from twenty to sixty.  Charts in the article show productivity declines decade by decade and for most ‘geniuses’ ends by sixty.  Naturally Bach was an exception, and so was Giuseppe Verdi.  I try to be an exception to the forty year rule myself.  Luck plays a part.  Time and chance happens to us all.  And persistence and discipline even greater parts.  Few succeeded at their first attempts.  Simply, when you quit, you fail.  If you persist, you may succeed.

From Monday, July 17:

Evanston:  I liked it.  I was good at it.  I felt alive.

        Breaking Bad fans will recognize the words spoken near the end of the final episode by Walter White, under-achieving high school chemistry teacher, family man and cancer victim, turned killer and genius meth cook.  He is speaking about his life of crime.  But the words could be true of running marathons, playing the viola, painting, sailing, singing in a band, writing a poem, playing baseball and many other endeavors.

        I think that next time I am asked why I sail, I will say, “I like it.  I am good at it.  And I feel alive.”

———-

Today is Christmas Eve in the United States, Christmas Day in New Zealand and Australia and other countries on the other side of the Dateline.

I wish all of you a happy holiday season and a splendid 2026, although the numbers of these years are becoming startling.

Hilton Head Island: TravelGrit; an unmarked grave; unconscionable; and three poems

 Bernie Harberts, of whom I have written here before

https://self-portraitinthepresentseajournal.blogspot.com/2025/07/hilton-head-island-swan-song.html

may have been the only person on this planet, other than myself, who knew that last Friday was the 50th anniversary of my first rounding of Cape Horn without my telling him.

Bernie has started a new site, TravelGrit, in addition to his long running, RiverEarth.

https://travelgrit.com/

https://riverearth.com/home/

I have both on the list of sites I check each afternoon and look forward to his future entries.

At present there is some Webb Chiles at TavelGrit should you not already have had more than enough, including a podcast and link to a YouTube video of an interview Bernie did with me a few months ago.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3k863u3frc&t=240s

I wish Bernie success with his new site, however he defines success, and joy with his new boat, MYSTIC.

Carol was away last week visiting friends and in her absence I watched films that I did not think she would want to see.

One was J.S. BACH:  THE MUSIC, THE LIFE, THE LEGEND at Amazon Prime.  This was not a documentary, but a biopic.

I have read about Bach, but learned some things from the film I did not know or perhaps had forgotten, so after watching it I went to Wikipedia to see if the film was accurate.  It was, except that the actors who portray the great composer at various stages of his life are all considerably more handsome than he.  Nevertheless he was married twice and fathered twenty children, most of whom died before adulthood.  Seven with his first wife who died of a sudden illness when he was traveling elsewhere in Germany.  Thirteen by his second wife.  I pause to consider that.  Both women must have been almost continuously pregnant for years, one for more than a decade.

Bach died at age 65 in 1750 of complications of cataract surgery and I quote from Wikipedia:  He was originally buried at Old St John's Cemetery in Leipzig, where his grave went unmarked for nearly 150 years. 

Incredible.

Another was DOWNFALL:  THE CASE AGAINST BOEING on Netflix.  This is a documentary showing what happened, including two airplane crashes and the deaths of several hundred people, after a merger brought in new executives and a corporate culture that valued increasing the stock price above all else including safety.  

By Po Chü-i 772-846.

And two by Billy Collins 1941-present.

Hilton Head Island: A Fiftieth Anniversary

It was blowing Force 12 off Cape Horn fifty years ago today.  I know because I was there.

I had sailed from San Diego on my engineless Ericson 37 cutter, EGREGIOUS, almost two months earlier, on my third attempt to round Cape Horn alone.  The first two had ended because of rigging failure.

Three weeks out of San Diego the hull cracked and I began bailing water with a bucket.

In addition to no engine, EGREGIOUS had no electrical system and no plumbing.  In an ironic attempt to have a dry boat I had her built with no throughhull fittings below the waterline.  By the time we reached Auckland, New Zealand, after what became a five month almost 20,000 mile passage, I was bailing seven tons of water every twenty-four hours, never sleeping for more than an hour at a time before having to bail.

I continued on because I had little money left for repairs and after the first two failures I was going to become the first American to round Cape Horn alone or die trying.  Extreme.  But there is a quiet satisfaction in having proved to yourself that you are capable of making such a commitment.  

As we moved into the Forties the temperature dropped and, although it was early December, the beginning of the Southern summer, the sky became completely overcast and snow fell.

I was navigating by sextant, as one did then, and for several days got no sights.  Finally one afternoon I got a quick hazy view of the sun.  You don’t get a position from a single sight, only a line that you are somewhere on.   But that sight convinced me that I was far enough south to turn east, and just before dark a rocky shape formed in the gloom ahead that was one of the Diego Ramirez Islands, sixty miles southwest of Horn Island, and I knew that the next day I would be blown pass the Horn.

The wind increased during the night and by dawn was more than sixty knots from the southwest creating twenty to thirty foot breaking waves.  While the land around Cape Horn is islands, they are so close together they form an almost solid mass and the waves were ricocheting off them and breaking on both quarters.

I went to bare poles and for one of the few times in what are now six circumnavigations tied myself in the cockpit and hand steered all day.  Countless waves broke over the cockpit.  Without being tied securely, I would have been washed away dozens of times.

EGREGIOUS was rolled onto her beam ends regularly, and in those cross seas sometimes she went over to port, sometimes to starboard.  The strain on the tiller was immense, often forcing me to brace myself with my legs on the opposite side of the cockpit and use both arms to turn the bow downwind.  There was no time to look back and see on which quarter the next dangerous wave loomed, but after a while I could tell by feel and sound.  And though I caught only momentary glimpses of them as they swooped across my field of vision, even in the strongest wind albatrosses and petrels soared about as usual.  At such moments you know that no matter how well you adapt, they belong there and you don’t.  We do not conquer oceans or mountains.  We merely transit them.

EGREGIOUS had an Aries self-steering vane.  The servo-rudder was still in the water and as we surfed down waves a rooster tail rose from it as from a racing hydroplane.

Through a long, fatiguing day I steered.  To have left the tiller even momentarily would have been impossible.  Finally as the dim sky turned black, the wind decreased to perhaps thirty knots and I was able to get the Aries to steer us east still under bare poles, still making seven or eight knots.  

Stiff and cold and tired and hungry, I stumbled into the cabin.  My hands and feet were frostbitten and a glance in the mirror revealed dead skin hanging from my ears in bloody strips. 

Water was sloshing over the floorboards.  Before I could eat I had to bail.  I took the plastic bucket, bent, scooped, turned and tossed.

I was profoundly happy.  I was exactly where I wanted to be.

The water I was bailing into the Atlantic that night had come from the Pacific that morning.

============

One of the greatest days in my life and one of only two sailing days of which I still remember the date.  The other was November 2, 1974, the day I left for my first attempt at Cape Horn, the day that began the Being part of my life. 

The photos are then and now.  Quite incredibly they are of the same man.

Hilton Head Island: 14.1; the taste of women; a poem

I have said that the fastest speed I have seen GANNET make was about 13.7 knots.  I was wrong.  In rereading the log of the passage from Durban, South Africa, to St. Helena, I found that one night I was awakened by feeling that GANNET was going too fast.  She was.  Her SOG read 14.1 knots.  The tiller pilot couldn’t keep up.  I quickly went on deck and reduced sail.

Also in that passage log I read:

        The monastery of the sea was beautiful.

Waves as low as the sun.  Directly toward the sun was a narrow inverted pyramid of blinding white.  Elsewhere millions of constantly changing facets of light, shades of blue, some white crests, near the hull white bubbles and foam.  Pristine, untouched natural beauty.  I had heard no world news for weeks.  Those last two sentences are not unrelated.

I was standing in the companionway, sipping red wine and listening to my requiem playlist.  A line from Lucy Kaplansky’s ‘Scorpion’, “I’ll sting you with a taste of my skin.” 

        Women taste best fresh from the sea.  

I thank Larry for reminding me of this poem.