Hilton Head Island: seeing himself in the flames

 

This was 1981.  That boy is now about fifty years old and I am certain that he has often held his own sons and perhaps grandsons on his shoulders as they have looked into the cremation flames and first sensed their own mortality.

Hilton Head Island: from THE OCEAN WAITS

8:22 PM.  The sun is touching Pickney Island.  I have pushed my chair to the side so that it is not blinding me.  From my new angle Skull Creek is rippled and silver.  If I sit forward and look west it is golden.

Rereading my books has been a voyage into the past.  Not one of nostalgia.  There were countless moments of joy.   There were countless moments of despair, particularly in the last half of THE OCEAN WAITS.  I do not know whether there were more of one or the other.  I do know I would not relive my life if I could.  Once was enough.  This reviewing my past is to bring myself up to the present and understand what I have been and am so that I can decide how I ought to live the remainder of my life.

I expect that some of you have read THE OCEAN WAITS.  

Here is part of what I found of value in rereading it myself and those passages which Amazon tells me others underlined.

The book begins with an apologia.  An apologia is not an apology, but an explanation of why one holds a given position.  THE OCEAN WAITS begins with an apologia.

Here are the passages Kindle tells me readers underlined.

On the passage from Darwin to Bali I wrote this which I have always remembered.

I left CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE in Singapore until the trade winds reversed as they only do in that ocean and Suzanne and I flew back to California to spend time with my grandmother.  Along the way we stopped in Hong Kong and from there visited Macao, which was then still governed by Portugal.  In the Old Protestant Cemetery I copied the inscriptions on two tombstones of seamen who had died there.

While being transported under arrest for suspicion of being a spy from Rabigh Gaol to a new cell in Jiddah.

This comes from CHIDICOK TICHBORNE 2 which I added to the Kindle edition of the book.

I was caught with full sail up  in the Gibraltar Strait by a wind called the Levanter because it comes from the east   

And almost final thoughts:

The final thought:  I just looked at the hard copy of the book I have.  After losing everything years later at the sinking of RESURGAM, I had to buy my own books second hand.  My copy of THE OCEAN WAITS was once a library book.  I just noticed that inside the back cover is stamped:  DISCARD.

Hilton Head Island' under full twig

I recently read THE THIRD REALM by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard which came to me as does much of what I read through BookBud.  It has excellent reviews.

The reader is presented with parts named after individuals.  We have a married woman painter with three children who is mentally ill and given to psychotic episodes; a high school teacher who thinks his wife is having sex with another man; a world famous architect who in his early sixties fears that his creatively is gone; a nineteen year old girl who is attracted to a handsome and charismatic man in his mid-twenties who the first time they have sex shallowly slices his and her chest with a knife, although she flees from him, she finds she has become pregnant and decides to have the baby and to continue the relationship; an eminent neurologist who is called to examine a man who was brain dead but somehow came back to life; a police detective who is investigating three ritual murders; a woman member of the clergy who doesn't believe in God; and a few more.  

There is a bright star that suddenly appears in the sky and as suddenly disappears.  During the five or six nights it is visible no on dies in the entire country of Norway.

There is a lot of talk about the Devil.

And on one page there is:  "The first Realm is that of God.  The second Realm is that of Christ.  The third Realm is the age of the Holy Spirit.  We've entered the Third Realm."

I read all five hundred pages of THE THIRD REALM.  I found it to be well written and interesting and I kept hoping that eventually it would make sense.  It never did, so with relief I turned to a book that does make sense, THE OCEAN WAITS.

Editors have never much edited me.  I like to believe that is because I give them words that don't need editing.  But occasionally they have changed titles for the better.  They did with THE OCEAN WAITS.  I had simply titled the book, THE OPEN BOAT:  ACROSS THE INDIAN OCEAN, though in fact it covers the voyage from when with the kind assistance of Honnor Marine I put CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE back together in what is now Vanuatu after our two week drift following her pitch-poling in 1980 in the Pacific to my being jailed as a spy in Saudi Arabia in 1982.  In the Kindle edition I added CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE 2 covering my resumption of the voyage in 1983 in the Red Sea to its end at Santa Cruz de la Palma in the Canary Islands later that year.

I was sailing RESURGAM from Portugal to the Caribbean to The Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific in 1984 when the book was published and did not know the publisher had changed the title until I finally got a copy of the book in Tahiti.  As you may know the title comes from one of my poems and I think the publisher's title far better than mine.

I enjoyed the first part of the book about the sailing in 1980 and 81 from Vanuatu to Australia to Bail to Singapore.  I have remembered that CT had several noon to noon runs of between 140 and 150 nautical miles, but never quite reached 150.  From the book I learned that her best day's run was 148 miles and her best week's run was 861, both set on the wonderful trade wind passage from Port Vila, Vanuatu, to Cairns, Australia, and quite respectable for an 18' open yawl.

I did not enjoy the last part of the book which describes the events of 1982, one of the most despairing years of my life.  I did make that year what is perhaps still the longest non-stop open boat passage of all time--4,058 miles in 47 days from Singapore to Aden.  Then after only four days rest, when I learned my grandmother was dying, I sailed another 700 miles in 14 days of gale and calm to Port Sudan.  

The southern entrance of the Red Sea is the Bab el Mandeb, the Strait of Sorrows, and for me it truly was.  My grandmother, who was the only family for whom I cared or who cared for me, died before I could see her;  Suzanne and I separated and were divorced; and I was jailed in Saudi Arabia on suspicion of being a spy.

I will include more from and about THE OCEAN WAITS in future entries.

The photo above was taken after I returned to Port Vila with Suzanne, two months after I reached land after drifting for fourteen days in a 9' inflatable.  I paid another yacht to go the forty miles north to Emae Island on which CT and I both reached land and tow the hull back to Port Vila, where one morning Suzanne and I walked along the dusty road leading out of the town and found three suitable  fallen tree limbs which I rowed out to the anchored hull.  I set up one in the position of the main mast, a second in the mizzen bracket, and tied the third between them as a ridge pole for the tarp we used as a cockpit tent, under which we lived for almost two months until the spare masts and sails and floorboards and rudder and oars reached us.  We were, I wrote, under full twig.

Hilton Head Island: Je suis de toi; more from THE OPEN BOAT; fighting in the shade

I chanced upon a song, 'Je suis de toi', that I did not know, sung by Lara Fabian, a singer I did not know.  The song is lovely, more complicated than I first realized, and as I have since learned Lara Fabian is very famous in the French speaking world.

I took two years of French in college and could read it well then.  I am not good with accents and could never speak it well.  So for those of you who are monolingual like me, the title translates as 'I am from you' and is said to be about accepting your childhood for better or worse and taking responsibility for your own identity and life.  I agree, but then I come from no one except physically.

Here are links to two videos of the song.  I saw the official video first and did not understand parts of it, particularly after having the words at the end translated by Google, until I rewatched it several times and noted about one minute in a brief shot of the street cellist with the little girl and her mother and realized that he is her father.  I also only noticed after reading the translated ending the pack he placed on her back.  I did notice that they used sign language.

Here are the words that end the official video.

Here is a link to the official video:

watch

And here is a link to a version with English translation.

watch

I hope you are moved by the song as much as I do.

I found three more passages people underlined in THE OPEN BOAT:  ACROSS THE PACIFIC.  I often read a book partly on my iPhone and partly on my iPad Pro.  These came from my phone.

I recently read a good novel, GATES OF FIRE, about the battle of Thermopylae.  I like the  epigraph.

Hilton Head Island: THE OPEN BOAT: ACROSS THE PACIFIC

 

In my ongoing effort to read all the works of two great authors, I have just started DOCTOR PASCAL, the twentieth and final novel in Emile Zola's Rougon/Marquart cycle, and I recently finished Webb Chiles's THE OPEN BOAT:  ACROSS THE PACIFIC.  I have the pleasure of knowing that I still have four more of his books ahead of me and even possibly the passage log of his sixth circumnavigation as well.

The voyage in CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE was the most audacious I ever undertook.  As I have written, after my first circumnavigation I had sailed almost 40,000 miles in less than two years, including my first two failed attempts at Cape Horn, and that was enough.  For a while.  But after a year I began to consider another voyage, one that would be qualitatively different, and decided to attempt to circumnavigate in an 18' Drascombe Lugger, which I named CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE after an Elizabethan poet.  The top photo was taken from a bridge in San Diego.  The second in the lagoon at Papeete, Tahiti.

I took delivery of CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE in June of 1978, sailed her some around San Diego, slept on board a few nights, determined that I could use sheet to tiller steering on her, and five months later set out for the Marquesas Islands, 3,000 miles distant.

In rereading THE OPEN BOAT for the first time in many years I find that I still sometimes misused 'treacherous' and 'adventure'.  Ah, well.  I learned.  And the book is in some ways a time capsule, particularly about money and prices.  Costs that I found outrageous then are almost unbelievably low today.  That is to be expected after almost fifty years.  I write that then the average cruising couple spent about $5,000 a year, half on boat maintenance.

I also say that an Englishman I came across in Tahiti, Tom Blackwell, was at the time one of only four men to have made two solo circumnavigations.  I do not know that is fact, but it is what I was told in 1979. 

I remember vividly the more dramatic experiences of that voyage:  heaving to one Friday night only six miles from the pass into Papeete, Tahiti harbor, waiting to enter the next morning, but being blown for four days around the island by a 55 knot gale; and of course CT pitchpoling a year later between Fiji and what is now Vanuatu and being adrift for two weeks in a 9' inflatable.  But I had forgotten much else.  Fifty years will do that too.  So there are some advantages to have written about your life.

Almost fifty years--forty-six now to be exact--will effect many changes.  Here is what I looked like in a photo taken at Papeete by another sailor whose name I do not remember in January 1979.

 And here is a photo taken by my friend, Steve Earley, on our screened porch in February 2024.

And here is the beginning of the book, a passage about two ways of facing death, and those words that Amazon indicates multiple readers underlined.

Hilton Head Island: by the window

There are many fine places to sit in our condo, but I spend more time in a chair by our bedroom window than at any other.  I am there now just before sunset.  As I have mentioned before this is the first place I have ever lived where I can observe at sunset through the year how far the sun moves north and south.  It is near its farthest north now with the solstice in a few weeks.  Here that puts it at the right hand edge of the window.  Six months from now it will be near the left.

Forgive me for repeating that I love the beauty here.  The to me previously unknown and unexpected beauty of the marsh.  The birds, the trees, the Spanish moss, the spartina, the acrobatic squirrels, the changing light on Skull Creek.

We are supposed to be having air pollution from far distances.  Smoke from fires in Canada.  Dust from the Sahara.  Rain seems to have washed them from the sky.

I have a small glass of Laphroaig at hand.  A friend asked me why Laphroaig.  I do not have an answer.  Perhaps because it is to me the taste and smell of the sea.  For whatever reason it is my favorite liquid and I take a sip.

I read yesterday an article about Yoshua Bengio, who is described as “the godfather of AI”.  In the article is expressed the “The ability for systems to assist in building ‘extremely dangerous bioweapons”…as soon as next year.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/godfather-of-ai-calls-out-latest-models-for-lying-to-users/

In ‘Last Born’ I suggested perhaps the most humane way of ridding the planet of the cancer our species has become.  I doubt that AI will be so kind.

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/lastborn.html

I recently read Barbara Tuchman’s A DISTANT MIRROR about the Fourteenth Century which with the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, and the schism and corruption in the Church—at that time there was just one in Europe—she found a mirror of the disaster of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

As I have observed here before there are generations born on the wrong side of history.  My grandmother’s was one.  Born in the 1890s the young men were of age to be slaughtered in what we now call World War 1–far more in European countries than those born in the United States; then they endured the Great Depression; and if the young men born around the turn of the century lived long enough to have sons of their own, those sons were of age to be slaughtered in what we call World War 2, which as you may know I am certain in time both wars will be seen by historians to be one war, separated by a twenty-one year cease fire by countries bleed dry until a new generation could become old enough to be destroyed.

I sense that those now young are on the wrong side of history.

I’m old.  I found my way between the cracks.  I’ve had a life.  

I hope I am wrong and that the young do too.

Hilton Head Island: why; two endings; two poems

With occasional exceptions I avoid answering:  Why do you sail?  I have found that people either understand instinctively or they never will.  And beyond that it appears to me that as a species we have evolved by being better at answering 'how' than 'why'.  Yet in rereading STORM PASSAGE I came across the following which is as good an answer to why I have sailed and lived as I have as any.

Also from STORM PASSAGE the ending of Part 1 written just after I returned to San Diego in March 1975 after my first two attempts at Cape Horn failed because of rigging damage.

And the end of Part 2 when I had successfully become the first American to round Cape Horn alone and had completed a two stop circumnavigation in world record time.

I do not delude myself that I have conquered the sea; it is enough to have faced it.  And I am more proud that I continued to struggle against defeat than of my ultimate victory.  To struggle was in my control: victory in that of chance.

(You know that now I would not have claimed 'victory'.)

"Resurgam", I said, and now I must learn the Latin for 'I have risen.'  "Time and chance and Cape Horn:  I am still coming at you," I said, and I kept coming until Cape Horn was mine; and for one brief moment in my life, time and chance subdued.  "Victory or death," I said, and though death often seemed the more likely, finally it is victory.  "Wind and waves of torment cease," and for a while they have.  "Sail to the limit," and I sailed beyond.  "An ordeal of grandeur," I said, and it was.  It truly was,

In Auckland, Suzanne I attended an exhibit of Chinese art.  One of the objects was a figure holding aloft thirty-two concentric spheres, only the outer half dozen of which were visible, all carved from a single piece of ivory.  The satisfaction of the artist upon completing carving all thirty-two spheres and knowing that each--even the innermost which would never be seen--was perfect, is the same as that of a man who completes a solo circumnavigation, who fulfills any dream, even though no one else ever knows.

I smile to myself as EGREGIOUS sails slowly across the dusky harbor, and beyond the sea-etched face of the man, a small boy grins because he has made his dream come true.

        Egregious man, boat, voyage, life.

        The fool smiles and sails on.

In looking for something else I found screenshots of these two poems.  I  don't recall posting them before, but may have.  If so they are worth reading again.  

I do not know who wrote the second.