Blown Away

By Herb Payson

WoodenBoat, March/April 1996:

Sailing Inland & Offshore (SA), February 1996:

Excerpted from SAIL, July 1995:

Excerpted from SAIL, January 1981:

“At age forty-four, Herb Payson, a witty and clever Los Angeles jazz pianist, gathered his family, threw all shoreside restraints aside, and put every bit of his money and energy into a rotund ketch named SEA FOAM. Together with his enthusiastic wife Nancy and a collection of teenagers, Payson sailed south along the west coast of Mexico and Central America to the Galapagos Islands, thence to the south and western Pacific islands, and finally, to New Zealand before returning to San Diego – 6 1/2 years and a thousand adventures later.

“A frequent contributor to SAIL, Payson has a special talent for telling us about the cruising life and poking fun at himself in a sparkling, cheerful style. (‘For ten seconds I knew that the hammerhead [shark] had returned to get me and that it was all over.’) He tells us about the beauty. (‘When we first saw Tahiti, we watched it grow out of the western ocean into a towering cone of gold, frontlit by the firelight of sunrise.’)

“He tells us about the bad things, the mistakes, the errors of judgment, and blunders that we all make but are reluctant to disclose. Payson does it in a cheeky, honest way to make old and new sailors chuckle and to teach them something at the same time. He chides us (properly) for endless partying with yachting people in foreign places and for ignoring the locals who might well broaden our outlook and ultimately really help us.

“In the early days the Payson family sailed near shore, in company with other yachts (comforting) and worried about the open sea. They spent a lot of time on the radio. Gradually, with experience and increasing confidence, the SEA FOAM crew sailed toward the distant western horizons of the Pacific and dealt with each problem as it arose. The uneasy feelings fell away as they became veterans.

“During Payson’s odyssey, financial disaster hovered at mast-top height. Homer was always broke. The captain eked out survival by painting and varnishing, chartering , making yacht deliveries (some of these stories in themselves), working as a carpenter, and writing articles. Nancy sewed faddish clothes for yachties, and the children helped too.

“SEA FOAM has now been sold, and Payson is living in Maine. He is writing a novel and has just sold the television movie rights to Blown Away. Personally, I hope that he and his gang go back to sea, because I like his witty and scandalous observations. Generally speaking, yachting writing is much too serious. A few belly laughs are delightful.”

Publisher's Weekly, April 1980:

“‘Getting away from it all’ was not an impossible dream for Herb and Nancy Payson, a California couple: they sold their belongings, purchased a ketch, SEAFOAM, and sailed for the Southern Seas. In their workaday lives Herb was a nightclub pianist and Nancy a cocktail waitress; he was an experienced sailor; she was eager to learn. So they set out with their children, one just 10 years old. And they enjoyed their journeys. When cash ran low everybody went to work: he and a son worked at carpentry in New Zealand: nancy and a daughter made blouses for a boutique in Papeete and the 10-year-old made tourist souvenirs from coconut shells. The story is a realistic portrait of an adventurous, enterprising family, with enough sailing lore to satisfy most bluewater buffs."

The Dolphin Book Club News, Midsummer 1980:

“The moment of rebellion against the credit-card world happened for Herb and Nancy Payson on a rainy Sunday. It was an impulse that, in other families, might have been lightly passed over and safely forgotten. But when Herb turned from some ‘creative writing’ to the finance company, and the old movie on TV, and blurted out, ‘Why don’t we give up all this nonsense, buy a boat and sail around the world?’, his wife Nancy’s instant response was ‘Yes, let’s!’ and they were lost.

“In Payson’s wryly retrospective words, ‘The genie was out of the lamp and had taken complete charge.’ Having no assets but their home and no great prospects – he was a 44-year-old jazz pianist, she a cocktail waitress half a dozen years younger – their choice was in a way made easier. There could be no half measures. To get any kind of boat at all they would have to unload everything and step into space. This witty and wholly impenitent book is their story of cutting loose from the grind of civilization. Along the way it is also imparts a good deal of hard-won cruising information.

“The Paysons played at boat shopping for a while, looking at 40-foot gold platers and assembling impressive lists of gear they couldn’t afford, and then by blind fortune the 36-foot wood ketch SEA FOAM fell into their laps. She had been designed and built by a master shipwright to take him across oceans, but she had only got as far as Hawaii before his dream collapsed. Subsequent owners had moved her back to Southern California, where the Paysons acquired her for only a little more than they could possibly afford and a good deal less than she was worth.

“In SEA FOAM, with their large brood of teenage children, Herb and Nancy have cruised the Pacific for six and a half years. They’ve experienced a certain amount of stark terror, but their delights have far outbalanced the drawbacks.

“In a way, the Paysons have maintained many of their shoreside Southern California behavior patterns, modified only by absolute necessity. They are no seagoing hermits but gregarious wanderers for whom one measure of a harbor’s attraction is the number and quality of the parties aboard the yachts present. At the same time, they are continually at the brink of financial dissolution, so they interrupt their voyaging to take temporary jobs or, in one case, sail hundreds of miles out of their path to drain a hundred gallons of diesel fuel from a wreck.

“The result is a kind of Swiss Family Robinson with overtones of the Marx Brothers. The situation aboard SEA FOAM may frequently be desperate but is seldom serious as Herb Payson carries his readers to Tahiti and the Fijis and New Zealand and dozens of other islands. All those seriously dreaming of setting off to sea should read Blown Away. But even those who find their ordered existences good and fulfilling can hardly escape a twinge of envy while reading this amusing, occasionally touching and wholly delightful adventure. 251 pages.”