From where Ray and I sat in the cockpit of the 50-foot (15 m) sailboat, we looked across a couple hundred yards (meters) of rough offshore ocean at the fishing boat we’d met up with. We’d been going up and down the California coast since our almost-successful offload of ten thousand pounds more than three weeks…
At the end of the most recent episode in this sorry tale, the boat’s captain Ray and I were sitting on a 50-foot sailboat, watching the first light of dawn strengthen. Overnight, we had just finished successfully offloading ten thousand pounds (4,500 kg) of foil-wrapped compressed one-kilo bricks of Thailand’s finest herb. Block by block,…
It was late afternoon. After three and a half months at sea from Manila to California, we were due to offload twelve thousand pounds of Thailand herbal matter on the coast a ways north of San Francisco that very night. We were running a little behind time because the wind had died off a bit…
For those not familiar with my tale of aquatic lunacy, so far it has gone from Hong Kong to Manila, the South China Sea, Thailand, the Pacific Ocean, and mid-Pacific with a side trip through a dolphin party. And finally, we’re approaching the US. A non-stop cargo sailboat trip from Manila to Thailand, then back past the Philippines and across the entire Pacific…
This voyage so far has encompassed Hong Kong, Manila, the South China Sea, Thailand, the Pacific Ocean, and mid-Pacific with lots of miles still ahead of us. We’re in a fifty foot (15m) gaff-rigged staysail schooner, a tub of a sailboat. Up north of Hawaii, we got caught up in the tail end of a disintegrating…
When last heard from, your obedient servant was on a sailboat somewhere in the mid-North Pacific Ocean, a boat with a busted engine that was loaded top to bottom with twelve thousand pounds of illegality. We’d already been a month and a half crossing and recrossing the South China Sea without touching land when we…
The sea drives truth into a man like salt. Hilaire Belloc. I wrote last time the latest of a string of posts about how I ended up in a sailboat without a motor just leaving the passage between Taiwan and the Philippines, headed across the entire Pacific Ocean for California with the boat totally stuffed with twelve…
With Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Sea of Waterspouts behind us, when we left off the previous section of the story it was dawn offshore of the island of Ko Samui, Thailand. We were on a tubby fifty-foot (fifteen metre) wooden sailboat. Opposite us, there was an eighty-foot (twenty-four metre) ugly Thai fishing boat, with a bunch of…
The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea. — paraphrased from Karen Blixen. So there we were, having left both Hong Kong and the Philippines behind us, sailing the South China Sea again. From Ray, the Captain, I’d learned one of the more valuable rules of thumb in my life. In…
So we’d finally gotten through all of the lists, we’d left Hong Kong behind, and we were headed across the South China Sea to Manila. Sea trials are always an unknown, particularly with a new crew. But we’d prepared well, as I discussed in my previous post, and the boat, while mulish and hard to…
Back in 1976, when I was about 30, a wealthy friend of mine made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I was to fly to Hong Kong, where I’d be the First Mate on a sailboat he’d bought and wanted to be delivered back to the US. I’ve done a variety of boat deliveries, they’re…
This is the sixth post telling of the misunderstandings and coincidences at the end of which I ended up living in Hawaii with a group of folks involved in LSD-assisted psychotherapy. Here are parts one, two, three, four and five of this convoluted tale. So … what did Dr. Charles Hawkins, PhD., and folks in the psychotherapy house get right, and…
