|
|
|
|
from Flirting With Mermaids The Unpredictable Life of a Sailboat Delivery Skipper by John Kretschmer Mayor Feinstein sent her young assistant to present the keys to the city. It was a typical spring day in San Francisco, cold, windy and gray. The quickly organized ceremony on a wobbly dock at the Pier 39 marina looked a lot better on television later that night than it did in the drizzly reality of the morning. Thanks to video editing, however, my soon-to-be-adoring public was none the wiser. I was well on my way to becoming famous. While I already knew that fame is about as enduring as the unrefrigerated shelf life of sushi, I think that Andy Warhol was a cynic. My worldwide celebrity lasted for the better part of two weeks. It was early May 1984 and I had just sailed from New York by way of Cape Horn in a Contessa 32 sloop. The winsome Contessa is a damned fine boat, but an absurdly small one for so ambitious an undertaking. The 16,000-mile windward slog (the subject of my book Cape Horn to Starboard) retraced the outbound route of the legendary gold-rush clipper ships of the 1850s. Although we didn't establish any records worth mentioning without asterisks, we did survive Neptune's fury and a young skipper's many mistakes — plus my corporate sponsor, Stroh's Brewery, was delighted that we had sense enough to arrive on a slow news day. I didn't expect an armada of pleasure boats to greet us, or a watery throng to welcome us home as did the one that embraced my hero Sir Francis Chichester in Plymouth, England. But I was hoping that maybe a few spirited sailors, having heard of our voyage, would brave the elements to catch a glimpse of us gliding beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. But when that dramatic arch spanning the mouth of San Francisco Bay finally loomed and the end of our protracted voyage was within reach, there was not a single sail, not a single vessel in sight. In fact, it would have been a great time to be smuggling something sinister into San Francisco because we had the bay to ourselves. After we were well past the bridge, a rusty fishing trawler lumbered alongside and gave us a salute as we hoisted our faded red spinnaker. But they couldn't see us for long as a thick fog clamped down on the bay. Soon after, however, a helicopter from the local CBS station emerged out of the gloom. It whirled overhead, spoiling our wind as we drifted in and out of the fog. A launch with a few greenish newspaper reporters and the public relations agent hired by Stroh's popped out of the fog to lead us to a slip at the swanky Pier 39 marina. My crew Bill Oswald and I had been at sea for 72 days and we were not very steady on our feet as we climbed onto the floating dock. We had completely exhausted our stores, existing for more than a week on vegetables from the few rusty cans we had left on board. These were the worst, the ones I always ate last: lima beans, wax beans, and asparagus. While I was dreaming of many things, from the obvious to a cold beer and a greasy cheeseburger, I must admit that the keys to the city were not high on my list. But fame waits for no man, not even a bearded, bedraggled 25-year-old kid from the suburbs masquerading as an old salt. Unfortunately, the ceremony did not go well. The mayor's assistant was nervous and worried more about the rain ruining his hairdo than the job at hand. I was shaky, to say the least. After a brief speech proclaiming "GIGI Arrival Day" to the six people milling about the dock, the mayor's assistant presented me with a plaque and then hastily handed over the keys. I dropped them. They started to blow down the dock. I ran after them and nimbly stepped on them before they blew into the water. You see, what I didn't at first realize was that they were Styrofoam. Squeal, crunch. Oops. We managed to piece them back together and after reenacting the ceremony for the TV crew, quickly retreated to a nearby pub to reacquaint ourselves with our sponsor's product... ...Considering that my total offshore experience before the Cape Horn Clipper Ship Expedition, as we grandiloquently dubbed it, was a measly tradewind transatlantic crossing and some Caribbean sailing, the fact that we managed to bash our way around the Horn against the wind and currents at all is rather impressive. When you consider that our little 32-foot Contessa, GIGI, weighed about 10,000 pounds fully laden and had only 28 inches of freeboard, the voyage becomes more commendable, and more idiotic. Our 11-day doubling of the Horn, or sailing nonstop from the 50th parallel in the Atlantic to the same parallel in the Pacific, remains one of the fastest on record for any sailing vessel. And I navigated with my sextant: This was the age before the GPS and even SatNav for that matter. Besides, it doesn't matter how much I boast about the voyage today because at the time Dan Rather thought it was a great accomplishment, and what could be a more accurate barometer of importance than that?
|
| HOME PAGE | SEARCH | FREE CATALOG | E-MAIL US | HOW TO ORDER |