The Maiden Voyage

Harrowing sailing adventures are to men what childbirth is to some women: if you remembered how awful it was you would never do it again! 

In the summer of 1983, Betty and I had bought out all our partners in the 44-foot cutter, the Sea Nymph. We wanted to do some serious cruising and to do that we decided to totally refurbish the boat and rename it Expectation. Expectation had been the name of our Morgan Out Island 41 we had purchased as part of a charter boat fleet in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. The first Expectation had introduced us to the cruising life we loved, and we decided to keep the name.

The refurbishing took place in San Diego. We hired Billy Cast (Captain Billy) to do the job because he also owned a Peterson 44 and knew the intricacies of the boat. Terrible mistake! Billy was a nice guy, but he hadn’t the faintest idea how to keep a schedule and was rather disingenuous about reporting his progress.

One of the items of new equipment I was most proud of was a Satnav, satellite navigation system. Previously I had relied on a compass, the depth finder and dead reckoning for navigation. The Satnav, a forerunner of GPS, determines the boat’s position from satellites at least every four hours and sometimes more frequently. Every four hours is not a problem on open water when you're only traveling six or seven miles an hour.

The original plan was to complete the refitting by October 1, then take the month of October to do a shakedown cruise and final adjustments. In anticipation of this, I had invited my son, Jeff, and good friends, Paul Koontz and Dave Smart, to join us on the maiden voyage. Paul and Dave were under the impression that I was an experienced Bluewater sailor because I had told them about the sailing Betty and I had done in the Caribbean. What I hadn't told them, and, in fact, didn't even think about, was that almost all our sailing had been in warm Caribbean waters with very predictable moderate winds. 

To allow a little leeway, I had scheduled the guests’ arrival for November 10, and they were right on time. Regrettably, not only had we not done our shakedown cruise, but the final work was not completed. Everybody pitched in to do what they could and on November 20, I decided it was now or never as everyone had commitments back in Kansas City. We could do the final small tasks underway.

I had been told that the traditional winds were from the north and usually fairly light this time of year but the wind in the protected harbor told us that we should expect fairly strong winds out of the south so we prepared by putting up the smaller staysail instead of the regular jib and put a double reef in the mainsail.

Late in the afternoon of November 20, we left the harbor and discovered that it was indeed rough out there. Our greatly reduced sail area meant that we were not heeled over too far, however, almost every wave was breaking over the bow and it was going to be a rough ride.

We soon found that the ports had not been properly sealed and the main salon was getting a nice saltwater bath. And the crew was feeling queasy!

Fortunately, the chart table where the Satnav was installed was staying dry.

When I checked the engine room, I found the automatic bilge pump was not working. The sawdust from the construction had not been cleaned out of the bilge and was being sucked into the strainer causing the pump to fail. The only solution was to go down into the hot engine compartment to clear the intake every 10 to 15 minutes. Not a comfortable job.

Later that evening, I looked up and could see that the side stay on the starboard side was loose and flapping in the wind. If we had come about onto a starboard tack, we would've lost the mast. The wind was blowing 45 knots, waves were breaking over the forward deck and I had to go out there and secure the side stay or we could lose the mast. As I made my way along the deck, it was like riding a roller coaster. I was soaked and cold but managed to reach the stay and somehow anchor it. It turned out that Billy had forgotten to install the cotter keys, an essential for keeping the stays tight.

I don't know what we would've done if we had lost our mast out there.

We had attached a windsurfer to the lifelines on the port side and, sometime during the night, a giant wave swept the windsurfer overboard and there was no hope of a recovery in those conditions.

            The autopilot that was doing most of the steering was working but draining the batteries and to compensate I was hand steering as much as possible. Eventually our batteries got so low that we decided to run without lights and to check the compass heading by flashlight! 

It was a night from hell, and everybody was seasick except Jeff and me. I decided to head for the Mexican island of Guadalupe with the thought that we could anchor there, regroup and make repairs. It was dawn as we were approaching the island and I was extremely concerned about a reef that the chart showed to be just off the harbor. Fortunately, the wind had let up considerably and switched to the north, so we were before the wind as we approached the island. At the last moment we were caught by a wind shift, the mainsail accidentally jibed, and the force of the jibe ripped the sail in two. Then we had a moment of panic when the engine would not start, and we were approaching the reef. Fortunately, the engine caught just in time, we avoided the reef, and with a great feeling of exhilaration, dropped anchor in the small bay.

The calmer weather had revived the crew and we were able to breakfast on last night's ‘s sandwiches. Then everyone pitched in to make repairs. Paul Koontz, the renowned breast surgeon, was the only one who knew how to sew so he was assigned to repair the sail. The rest of us got busy caulking portholes and cleaning the engine room. About that time to men paddled out to us in a dugout canoe with their rifles in 6 inches of water at the bottom. They purported to be the local customs officials. They wanted to see our papers but, since the papers were all in English, we suspected they could not make heads or tails of them. They were friendly enough, examined our documents, accepted a cold beer and were on their way.

Two hours later most of the repairs had been finished except Paul’s, who, at his doctor rate, had sewn $10,000 worth of stitches in the sail but was less than 1/5 finished. We decided to put the sail in its bag and see if we could get some sewing assistance ashore.

We all piled into the dinghy with the wounded sail and headed for the beach and the village we could see above the shore. There was one large problem on the beach: a group of elephant seals the size of small houses were between us and the village. Each was easily 2,000 pounds of unknown danger. There was nothing to do but hold our breath and walk right through them. I later learned that the following year another yacht made the same stop and one of the elephant seals felt threatened by their dinghy, attacked, and destroyed it. 

The friendly villagers were patiently waiting for our arrival. I explained our problem with my pidgin Spanish and sign language. It was obvious when we showed them the ripped sail. One of the women looked at it, indicated she could fix it by the next day and proceeded to rip out thousands of dollars of Paul's handiwork right in front of him.

When we returned the next day, our sewing lady presented us with a fully repaired sail. That repair lasted as long as we had that boat. She wanted $100 but seemed delighted when I offered her $70.

By then the winds had returned to normal, everything was working, and my wonderful crew and I headed south before the wind. We decided to stop at Magdalena Bay for drinking water and hopefully some of the cheap lobsters we had heard about. We backed up to the pier, filled our water tanks and made a deal on enough lobster for a feast. The sail from there to Cabo San Lucas was before the wind and we were even able to fly the spinnaker for the first time on Expectation.

We hated to see Paul Koontz leave us at Cabo, but he had to get back to surgery. We would miss his dry sense of humor. Seems like sometimes you did not get the joke until five minutes later.

Ashore at Cabo we saw a cockfight. A cockfight is 20 minutes of betting followed by 20 seconds of feathers flying. One bird is down but the only way you could really tell what had happened would be to film the fight and view it later in slow motion.

That night we met two young women from Aspen and Jeff invited them to sail the final leg to Puerto Vallarta with us. A shipboard romance was kindled between Tonya Younbblat, one of the women, and Jeff. In fact, Jeff was at the helm while we were flying the spinnaker that night, got off course with romance, and wrapped the spinnaker around the forestay. A mess but not fatal. 

It was just before dawn when we were approaching the Bay of Banderas and I knew there were dangerous islands at the head of the bay. Since Billy had been there before I told him to take the helm as we entered the bay. I laid down in the aft cabin to get some rest, but I could hear what was going on at the helm. Someone was calling out the depths from the fathometer and I heard 30 feet, 25, 20, 15 and, knowing we drew almost 7 feet, I was wide awake and headed topside as 10 was called. Just then the helm was swung to the right, away from shore. Billy explained that it was his “barking dog” theory of navigation. You want to cut the corner of the bay as close as possible, so you head in until you hear the dog’s bark. Then you know it is time to go to deeper water!

Betty was at the dock when we landed and not at all happy about our female passengers. Despite everything, it was a story book ending. Jeff and Tonya were married and gave us Keegan and Sasha, two great kids.