Membership leads one boater around the world
In the 1970s while living in Bellevue, Washington, I served as an adult advisor for a Sea Scout ship. As part of Scout training, I took the United States Power Squadrons basic boating class and joined Bellevue Sail & Power Squadron on Jan. 21, 1975. I began taking classes, and by early 1978 I had completed Celestial Navigation, now Junior Navigation.
I had two concerns: One was that if I didn’t use the JN training, I might forget it, and secondly, I was interested in trying an offshore passage.
I signed on as navigator on a 50-foot ketch sailing from Seattle to Honolulu. While underway, I used both dead reckoning and celestial navigation with morning, noon and evening sights and plotted the positions, along with dead reckoning data adjusted for the forecasted currents. This great adventure convinced me that an oceangoing sailboat was in my future.
I bought a new Irwin 37-foot cutter I named Evie. I owned Evie for 30 years and sailed it all over the world. In 1984, I sailed Evie down the coast from Seattle to San Diego, where I had taken a job. I joined San Diego Sail & Power Squadron, continued taking classes and served in various squadron positions.
In 1995, the company I worked for left San Diego for Tucson, Arizona. Fortunately, I was in a position to retire and started to plan my own ocean passage to Honolulu. That year San Diego hosted the America’s Cup Race, so while Evie was refitted and provisioned for an ocean passage, I signed on with the America’s Cup team to operate a patrol boat to keep people off the racecourse.
Now was the time to set sail. Although my wife, Carole, and I didn’t know it at the time, this was the start of a 17-year adventure.
Gateway to the world
After a successful passage to Honolulu, we did needed maintenance and completed additional projects, including solar panels and engine-driven refrigeration.
We had decided by then to continue to the South Pacific via Palmyra and the Line Islands in Kiribati to spend 90 beautiful days in French Polynesia. With cyclone season nearing, we continued west across the Pacific through the Cook Islands and Samoa and then sailed north to wait out our first cyclone season in the Marshall Islands.
In the cruising season, we again sailed south, visiting islands big and small and eventually reaching Australia, where we based ourselves for five years. During those years we visited most of Australia and sailed east to islands in the southwest Pacific during the cruising season.
After our five-year visa expired, we sailed “over the top”—meaning north up the east coast and then west across northern Australia to Darwin.
After a few weeks exploring northern Australia, we sailed northwest through Indonesia to Singapore, our next stop for a year. For the next five years we sailed between Malaysia and Thailand while land traveling through southeast Asia, China and Japan.
In January 2005, after dodging a bullet during the tsunami in Phuket, Thailand, we crossed the Indian
Ocean. Our first stop was Kochi on the west coast of India, as the damage along the southern coast of
Sri Lanka and India was devastating. We stopped in Oman, Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia and Egypt on our way north through the Red Sea and Suez Canal to the Greek island of Crete. After that we went on to Israel, where we enjoyed another year exploring historical sites in both Israel and Jordan.
It was time to move along again, so we sailed to the southern coast of Cyprus for a few months before continuing to our base in southern Turkey. Interestingly, we could drive by car to Turkish-controlled
Northern Cyprus through the Green Line buffer zone from southern Cyprus but were not allowed to take our boat into Northern Cyprus.
We spent the next five years sailing around Turkey and Greece. This beautiful part of the Mediterranean
proved to be a good location for the boat while we traveled through Europe on land.
Heading homeward
In 2011, a European couple living in Turkey offered us a good price for Evie. After some consideration, we decided to sell and return to San Diego to live on our 42-foot motor yacht Carole Ann, which we had purchased a few years earlier. We also returned to our squadron activities and classes.
In 2017, we purchased our “Plan B” house in Henderson, Nevada, so we continue to run between the boat and the house. We are associate members of Las Vegas Sail & Power Squadron/13 as well as members of San Diego Sail & Power Squadron/13.
In due time, I have completed the Navigation class in Las Vegas and taken the Boat Operator Certification classes and on-the-water training in San Diego.
