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Islands,
Oceans and
Dreams
Michael
Salvaneschi, Author
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Reviews
Everyone’s talking about the new cruising book
Islands, Oceans and Dreams...
The Log
If you have ever tinkered with the idea
of sailing around the world…even in
your dreams…you are a prime candidate
to read Islands, Oceans and Dreams.
48 North
From palm trees and hidden lagoons to hurricanes
and pirates, Islands, Oceans and Dreams transports
the reader into a remarkable adventure of one man’s
seven-year solo voyage around the world.
Latitudes & Attitudes
Islands, Oceans and Dreams touches the dreamer
in all of us.
Living Aboard Magazine
Many books have been written about round-the-world
voyages, but this one is special
About the author
Michael has more than thirty years experience sailing California’s
offshore Islands. His two voyages to Mexico, his two-year stint as a
commercial swordfisherman and his seven-year solo voyage around the
world has taught him much about seamanship.
As a guest speaker at yachts clubs, sailing societies and service
groups such as Rotary, Michael tells his stories, and answer questions.
He offers private consultation to owners aboard their boats. At times,
Michael learns as much from experienced owners as they do from him.
Sharing knowledge betters seamanship and promotes safer sailing. To
contact Michael for guest speaking or consultation go to"
michael at cruisingdreamspress.com
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Hardcover
Edition
380pp
$29.95
Signed First Edition
Price includes shipping by priority mail,
all handling fees and any taxes
or:
Send check or money order to:
Cruising Dreams Press
3600 South Harbor #500
Oxnard, CA 93035
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A true
story of
a man who, at the age of thirty-three,
began dreaming of voyaging with his wife to the South Pacific. He
wasn't an adventurer or daring by nature, but he bought a boat and
began learning the ways of the sea. Twenty years later, racked with the
pain of divorce, and still aching to live out his dream, he set off
alone for Tahiti. When he reached French Polynesia, he continued
cruising for seven years and wound up sailing alone around the world.
Islands, Oceans and Dreams takes the reader on that voyage. From
turquoise lagoons to pirates and plenty of adventure in between, this
is a must read for any sailor or arm chair traveler who loves stories
of the sea.
Few cruising books on the market convey what it is really like to go
cruising, not so with Islands, Oceans and Dreams. The author allows us
to experience his inner most personal thoughts. It's as if we are
sailing along with him. We see what he sees. We feel the joy, the fear,
and the wonder of it all. I reccommend this book to any couple
considering a blue water passage or to anyone who loves a great sea
story. "Islands" has already become one of our best sellers. Captain
Ann Kilner, Seabreeze Bookstore, San Diego
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TABLE
OF
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 The Dream Voyage 1
Chapter 2 On to the South Seas 6
Chapter 3 Landfall 14
Chapter 4 The Marquesas 18
Chapter 5 The Islanders 28
Chapter 6 Daniels' Bay to Rangiroa 37
Chapter 7 On to Tahiti 44
Chapter 8 Suvoroff Atoll 51
Chapter 9 Samoa 56
Chapter 10 Pago Pago to Tonga 61
Chapter 11 Mariner's Cave 70
Chapter 12 Kanton Atoll 78
Chapter 13 Conflicts in Paradise 85
Chapter 14 Hurricane 92
Chapter 15 Fiji 96
Chapter 16 Ride to Savu Savu 112
Chapter 17 On to Australia 122
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Chapter 18 New
South Wales 136
Chapter 19 Pete the Rogue 147
Chapter 20 New Zealand 151
Chapter 21 North to Cape York 155
Chapter 22 The Queensland Coast 171
Chapter 23 Over the top of Australia 188
Chapter 24 A Force Nine Gale 205
Chapter 25 Touring Sri Lanka 217
Chapter 26 Planning for the Red Sea 225
Chapter 27 Uleguma Atoll 235
Chapter 28 On to Oman 250
Chapter 29 Pirates 267
Chapter 30 The Red Sea 284
Chapter 31 The Suez Canal 297
Chapter 32 Israel 317
Chapter 33 Cyprus 327
Chapter 34 From Rome to Trinidad 340
Chapter 35 Panama Canal to San Diego 359
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PREVIEW CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The Dream Voyage
Near midnight on April 17th,
1995, sea conditions turned eerie. Waves peaked up and down in small
pyramids. The air seemed filled with foreboding. The wind remained at
15 knots, but inky clouds from the east, like black hands, scudded low
across a moonless sky. Stars vanished in their grasp. Ten almost
sleepless days had passed since I departed La Paz, Mexico and set sail
for the South Seas. A fair breeze had scooted Mika, my 38-foot
cruising cutter, over a placid sea, but now, on this black night, waves
banged into each other like the wing tips of agitated ravens. At 53,
alone on my first solo voyage, 1100 miles off shore, I had nowhere else
to go and no other choice but to accept the changing weather
conditions. Aching for half an hour of sleep, I climbed into my bunk. I
had just drifted into dreams when a resounding boom on deck, like a gun
shot, snapped me awake. I bolted upright.
I flipped on the spreader lights and rushed topside. The wind whistled
at 30. Flecks of spray glistened in the spreader lights and blew back
into my face like silver needles. Crouched in the cockpit, shielding
squinting eyes with my hand, I scanned the deck for the cause of the
unnerving bang. The backstay and lowers were intact. Lines lashing the
dinghy to the deck were tight. Everything looked normal. Then I saw it.
My heart sank. The forestay had detached from the masthead. My largest
headsail, held aloft now by only the halyard, swayed from side to side
in death rolls that threatened to rip out the mast. The chill of fear
tingled down my spine. I felt the surge of adrenaline. I
had to claw the sail down and I had do it fast.
Heading Mika downwind, using the vane to steer, I rushed to the mast.
Grabbing the halyard, fearing what might happen when I released the
enormous pressure on the sail, I eased it out. The sail went
wild. Thrashing back and forth as if seized in the jaws of some
giant Mastiff dog, it immediately smashed out the spreader lights. For
a moment, thrust into a blackness as thick as tar, I couldn’t
see. Broken glass fell on my head. A shard cut my foot.
Worse, the runaway sail, now pounding furiously against the spreaders,
refused to fall. When my eyes adjusted to the blackness, I
strained to see what fouled it aloft. Mika heeled at 45 degrees,
bucking and pitching as she thrashed through the waves at 8 knots;
threatening to pitch me into the sea. Clinging on with one arm
wrapped around the mast, my feet spread wide, I struggled to free the
snagged halyard. I whipped it back and forth but the sail refused to
fall. Then suddenly, Mika took a roll. The genoa fell. Half
of it tumbled over the side, but I didn’t care. I had saved the mast —
at least for the moment. Heavy with water and under pressure from the
flow of it rushing past the hull, I wrestled with the sail for 45
minutes in order to drag it back on deck and lash it to the lifelines.
I had just caught my breath when the clouds above me burst open and
engulfed me in a deluge.
Feeling my way in the dark, wincing in the stinging rain, I put a
triple
reef in the main, backed the staysail, tied the helm down and
hove-to. I used a spare halyard to jury-rig the downed forestay.
Two hours later, exhausted and with nothing left to be done, I looked
up at my mast. I prayed it wouldn’t topple into the sea. Worried and
fearful of what might happen if it did fall, I went below, dried off
and crawled into my bunk. With my fate in the hands of a higher
power — I fell asleep.
At dawn my weakened mast still stood, but as I sat in the cockpit
looking at it, the weight of my predicament felt overwhelming. Bobbing
around in the middle of nowhere, riding over the waves like a cork, I
checked my chart. Honduras, the closest land, lay 1100 miles to the
east. The Marquesas Islands, my first landfall in French Polynesia,
were 2400 miles due south. If the mast crashed, I imagined
jury-rigging sails and reaching Central America, but the thought of not
making it to the South Seas, after a lifetime of dreaming to go, left
me beyond disheartened. Sipping coffee, waiting for the ham radio
net to begin, I had no idea what to do.
While I waited to speak to my friends on the radio, I thought
about my life and how, at the age of 53, I had ended up alone in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean. I realized the turning point in my
life occurred on a hot summer night in 1973. At 32 and single, I
had stopped for a quick beer at a new tavern that had opened near my
apartment in North Hollywood. I hadn’t been there before,
but the place looked presentable and so I went in. I took a seat
and ordered. When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I noticed that the
establishment looked dumpy and that I was the only patron. I
intended leaving as soon as I finished my beer but a moment after my
first sip, an armed robber entered through a back door. He pointed his
gun at me and snarled, “ Get on the floor...if you move I’ll blow your
head off.” I turned white and did what he said. While I lay prone
and motionless and with the bartender’s hands in the air, the robber
cleaned out the cash register. But when he reached the exit, for some
reason I’ll never understand, he turned toward me, crouched down
and took careful aim. I hardly breathed when suddenly the report of the
357 magnum, sounding like a cannon in the enclosed room, deafened my
ears. The hollow point bullet, like the impact of a speeding car,
slammed into and shattered my hip. Lying there in excruciating
pain, I prayed he wouldn’t fire again. I didn’t know he had fled for I
feared looking in his direction. I had never felt so helpless or
so violated. I lay motionless. As minutes passed, I sensed the
robber had gone. Realizing I wouldn’t be shot again, I tried to calm
myself. I didn’t want to go into shock. Within ten minutes the
police arrived. An ambulance followed and transported me to a hospital.
A week late, in a ten hour operation, surgeons pinned the hip with
bolts and screws and removed the larger pieces of shrapnel.
During the three months I spent at Los Angeles County General, the
House of Ushers with blood stained hallways, I had time to ponder my
life and my close call to its sudden end. Until then I had spent
that precious life pursuing money and the things money can buy.
After ten years of hard work, following society’s blueprint for success
and happiness, I had filled my garage with more toys than my neighbors
but my heart felt barren. The traumatic event of being shot brought
that reality to my conscious mind. Somewhere along the way to the top
of the mountain, I had forgotten what it felt like to be happy.
It dawned on me that pursuing monetary success as my only goal in life
had left me feeling subhuman. Lying there in the hospital, I promised
myself to find something else to live for besides making money; what
that would be — I didn’t know.
What I did know is that the police captured the armed robber. The
liberal District Attorney, however, had more concern for his high
conviction record than justice. Through plea bargaining, the DA
dismissed the charges of attempted murder, armed robbery, assault with
a deadly weapon and convicted on simple battery. After that I became
disillusioned with our justice system and our society in general.
The court sentenced the armed robber, a dangerous psychopath who had
left me crippled and in chronic pain for life, to five weekends in jail.
Bitter with the sentence and my bad luck, I drew strength and light
from a wonderful woman during this dark time in my life. A few years
after meeting a tall, slender blond with empathetic blue eyes, I
realized I had found my soul mate. Karen and I were married when I left
the hospital. Together we searched for a more meaningful way to live
our lives. When we least expected to find a path towards
that goal, it came to us on a sunny, clear day in June, 1974.
We had driven up the coast to Santa Barbara. On a spur of the moment
impulse, Karen and I rented a 24-foot sailboat and headed out of the
quaint harbor. The sea sparkled. The Channel Islands, 25 miles distant,
green and beckoning, looked touchable. As I took the helm, with the
wind in my face and the wide sea stretched out before me, all the fine
memories of sailing in my youth flowed like a healing balm into my
bruised soul. The toils of land life, for those few hours on the sea,
disappeared. Karen not only shared my joy but she too felt the
wonder of it all.
A few months later we bought a 28 foot ketch. Three years later, in
love with boats and the sea, we made the significant move that changed
the direction of our lives. In 1977, we purchased a Hans Christian
38. Using the first two initials of our names, we christened her
Mika, berthed her at Channel Islands Harbor in Southern California, and
became live a boards with our two children from previous marriages. The
experience at first proved challenging with four people sharing the
space of a small kitchen, but soon we adapted. No longer able to
stomp off to other rooms when miffed, the close living forced us to sit
down together as a family and talk out our problems. The tranquility of
marina life also worked its magic. Living on the water, our days became
like jewels. The mystical colors of dawn and sunset; the lights
at night reflecting on the harbor’s water; the great blue herons and
wild ducks; the bark of seals and the forlorn call of fog
horns all knitted our family closer to nature and closer to each other.
And as we gained sailing experience cruising California’s offshore
islands, our long sought for ‘new purpose in life’ took further shape.
Karen and I began dreaming of taking a two year break from the toils of
city life and sailing together one day to French Polynesia. Once Karen
and I embraced this goal, we often thought of nothing else. Together we
dreamed of tropical isles, balmy air, sunsets and hammocks under the
stars. We read books on cruising. We went to lectures and took
seamanship courses. However, breaking away from society’s shackles
became an almost insurmountable obstacle. Years passed. Our
children married. Our parents passed on. Yet the longing to depart
never waned. At long last, the perfect timing arrived. Nothing
prevented us from voyaging together to the South Seas. But it was
not to be.
Now, as I sat in the cockpit 1100 miles from nowhere, recalling
memories of my past, I thought back to a February morning a few months
earlier when I stood below aboard Mika in La Paz, Mexico. Alone
for the first time in my life, I looked in the mirror as I shaved.
Tired eyes filled with sadness gazed back. Mika, loaded with a year’s
supply of food and charts of the South Seas, stirred and creaked with
the outgoing tide. She seemed to sense I stood on the threshold of
achieving my life’s dream. But instead of feeling joy, despondency
overwhelmed me. Brokenhearted from an unexpected and unwanted divorce,
I felt my life and my dreams had ended. I ached to see Tahiti before I
died, but I had never dreamed of sailing to the South Seas alone. Solo
voyages were the exclusive domain of those brave adventurers we see on
the Discovery Channel. I had never thought of myself as a risk taker.
We had purchased our boat based on her seaworthiness. I had
rigged the heavy, full keel, 32,000-pound cutter to be handled by Karen
and I. Together we had safely sailed Mika thousands of miles without
radar or roller furling and because of the added expense she still
lacked those items. Mika did have thousands of dollars of
cruising gear aboard, but I knew none of them gave me the courage to
head out across 3000 miles of open ocean alone. In the twenty
years I had owned Mika, I had never sailed her solo — not even in a
harbor.
Struggling to suppress my fear of the unknown, I continued preparations
to depart from La Paz. But all the while my common sense filled me with
doubts. I wrestled over whether I had the guts to go. To reach my
first landfall at the Marquesas Islands required twenty-five days or
more at sea. Just thinking about it flooded my mind with anxiety. I
worried about everything. I fretted about getting enough sleep, falling
ill, or injuring myself. I worried about keeping watch and being run
down by ships. I brooded over dealing with storms. Until then, I had
never experienced a prolonged gale at sea. All these questions,
fears and doubts swirled through my head, and as the count down to my
departure date ticked on, I hardly slept.
Avoiding the hurricane season in Mexico mandated I cast off for the
South Pacific in mid-April, and when mid-April arrived, so did my
moment of truth. Facing a deep-seated fear of cruising thousands of
miles away from land, having never had to come to grips with it before,
I had to decide — did I really have the courage to cast off.
On the day of my scheduled departure, I expected to find that courage,
but it never materialized. By then the weeks of self-doubt had left me
weary. I looked in the mirror at my haggard face — as if expecting
encouragement. None came but at that moment, feeling fatalistic, a
change swept over me. I told myself — just do it (If I died at sea so
be it). Suddenly setting off across an ocean became less terrifying
than spending the remainder of my life obsessing about it. And so on
April 12th 1995, with that false bravado, I set sail from La Paz. I
headed out into unknown adventures and began the voyage of my dreams.
A gentle wind encouraged me as I headed south. That first night,
slipping through a channel off the Baja coast that leads to the open
ocean, the sky blazed with stars. The reflective sea, twinkling and
placid, glistened like a mirror. Tranquility surrounded me, but instead
of calming me as Mika ghosted along, conflicting thoughts still
collided in my mind: Half of me felt exhilarated to be finally off, but
the other half, the voice of self-preservation, never stopped
questioning the insanity of my actions. My thin veneer of bravado had
already peeled away. I asked myself one last time — should I go?
At that moment, as if Mother Nature answered my thoughts, a brilliant
meteor streaked parallel to the horizon and headed due south in the
direction of the Marquesas Islands. The enormous fireball lit the sky
for ten seconds with such intensity that I took it to be an omen of
encouragement. By the time it faded, I still didn’t feel courageous but
I had, at long last, the resolve to continue on — come what
may. ++++
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