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THE OCEAN WAITS and CHIDICOCK TICHBORNE II Webb Chiles Copyright © 1984, 2011 by Webb Chiles All rights reserved. Contents THE OCEAN WAITS 1. The Resurrection of CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE 2. A Gift of the Coral Sea 3. Cruising the Ghost Coast 4. Sea Snakes and Shallow Seas 5. The Proper Storm 6. The Battle of Bali 7. Dire Straits 8. In the Middle 9. Another Start 10. Pirates of Malacca? 11. The Longest Passage: A Specimen Day 12. The Longest Passage: Landfall 13. “She is Dying” 14. The Red Sea Backwards 15. Going Home 16. A Shipwreck of the Spirit 17. The Shipwreck That Wasn’t 18. Arabian Prisons: Rabigh Gaol 19. Arabian Prisons: Jiddah ***** CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE II Charts Emae Island to Rabigh Emae Island to Port Vila Port Vila to Cairns Cairns to Cape York Cape York to Darwin Darwin to Bali Bali to Singapore Singapore Malacca Strait Singapore to Rabigh Red Sea to Canary Islands In the unlikely event anyone ever compares this with the published text of THE OCEAN WAITS, he or she will find that I have made some significant changes. The Apologia has been shortened; almost all of Chapter 16, A Shipwreck of the Spirit, has been deleted; and Chapter 20, Poems of a Lone Voyage, has been dropped. An Apologia is not an apology, but an explanation. A few of its paragraphs seemed unnecessary. I’m tempted to remove a few more. Chapter 16 was too filled with personal pain that seemed important a quarter century ago, but doesn’t now. And when I went over my poetry last year, I found much of it unsatisfactory. If you are really interested, that which I still like can be found under the poetry heading at www.inthepresentsea.com THE OCEAN WAITS ends in 1982 with me in California and Chidiock Tichborne in Saudi Arabia. Against the advice of the U.S. Department of State, I tried to return to her, but was not able to obtain a visa from Saudi Arabia. In 1983 Honnor Marine, the builder of Drascombe Luggers, gave me a replacement and shipped her to Egypt. I put her in the water at Suez, sailed down the Red Sea, crossed my 1982 track, sailed back to Suez, and subsequently to Malta, Portugal, and the Canary Islands, where the voyage came to an end. That year’s sailing is recounted in CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE II. THE OCEAN WAITS "You are mad," shouted Angus, who had learned to cherish his own limitations as a sure proof of sanity. —Patrick White, Voss With my dying strength I will bite the lips of the jaws of death. —Yuichiro Miura, The Man Who Skied Down Everest Live passionately, even if it kills you, because something is going to kill you anyway. —Webb Chiles Apologia To me a voyage is essentially an act of will and a testing of the human spirit. If a sailor doesn't learn anything more important from the sea than how to reef a sail, the voyage wasn't worth making. One of the pleasures in setting out on a voyage is not knowing where the sea will lead. On a voyage a sailor is at risk. On a voyage a sailor knows he is truly alive. A voyage is not an escape from life; it is a reach for life. The sea may take the sailor anywhere and bring him anything: joy, pain, love, marriage, divorce, exotic islands, shipwrecks, safe harbors, despair, death, human kindness, human stupidity, even a prison cell in the desert. A voyage is a struggle against wind and wave, and time and chance, and sometimes of the spirit against itself. There are many reasons why you make such a voyage, among them simply that you like to sail. But mainly you go because you must. There are strengths and talents that by their very existence demand use and testing. In his sonnet "On His Blindness," Milton wrote, "And that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless." As I set sail on my first attempt at Cape Horn, I wrote, "I was born for this." The spirit of adventure probably exists in all men, but it is overwhelming in some. That this is so has survival value for the species. It is the spirit of adventure, the desire to explore new lands, to sail new seas, to find new facts, to discover new ways, that has taken man from the cave. The spirit of adventure is a means by which the species provides for change and adaptation. Someone must go ahead to point the way for the rest of the tribe to follow. Other sources of values are also needed. The adventurer, the explorer, the scientist, the artist, are not enough. They are disrupters, although necessary disrupters. The species also needs those who stay behind and provide stability. In any age, great parents are probably as rare as great artists, and certainly as useful. The adventurer, and the pure scientist, and the artist, have no responsibility that their work be of specific value to the rest of mankind. By definition the explorer cannot know what he will bring back from the unknown. We are all experiments, and most of us who are the most radical experiments will prove to be unsuccessful. The only duty of the man who is compelled to go beyond is to struggle and bring back what he can, whether he goes to the depths of his spirit, or to a test tube, or across a new continent or sea. Time alone can determine if the exploration had practical value. But in addition to possible practical value there is surely value in living a life of example, in saying: Here is my goal, and nothing, no suffering, no obstacle short of death, will keep me from struggling toward it; of proving with my life that man can do more. Voyages are objective. Thinking you can do things—sail, write, love—is not enough. You must do them. In an open boat I have done what no sailor has ever done before. I have explored an uncharted coast of the human spirit. I am proud of that, and I do not apologize for my pride. I wish all our lives could be voyages of such adventure. But without the capsizes. San Diego, California December 28, 1982 1 The Resurrection of CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE A day made for sailing. A steady ten knot trade wind. Sunshine. Blue sea, shading from turquoise in the shallows to dark blue on the horizon. Tan sails fluttering as they are raised, then filling as the sheets are drawn home. Tan triangles arching up and out beyond my mind. But not on September 8, 1980. The only sails arching up from Chidiock that day were in my mind. The sails themselves had been left on the dock in Noumea, 300 miles south, where they and the masts and the floorboards and the rudder and the other pieces needed to make Chidiock Tichborne more than a hulk at anchor had been sitting for almost a month, since their arrival from England. Three times the Captain Kermadec the ship that was to bring them up to Port Vila, had been delayed. That morning at last the Captain Kermadec had arrived and I had trotted down to the shipping office, clutching the bill of lading in my hot little hand, only to be met with a shrug, a bored "You know, the tropics," and a halfhearted gesture of appeasement: "Perhaps on the Rodin at the end of the month." Suzanne knew to make my sunset drink a bit stronger than usual that night, and as I sat sipping it aboard Chidiock and staring morosely out the pass, I tried to tell myself that I was lucky to have a boat left to repair. If they thought they could wear me down this easily, they were wrong. I would outlast them, and sooner or later they would give in and bring the parts up from Noumea. Sooner or later. Sometime. Surely. I told myself. Chidiock and I had come apart at mid-afternoon on Saturday, May 24, when I cut the lines securing the inflatable dinghy to her. It was our fourteenth day adrift after the little yawl was swamped half way between Fiji and what were then the New Hebrides. Once apart, we fell, each with our own momentum, through time and space, coming together only briefly the following morning after we had each made our separate way over the reef at Emae Island and been found by the natives. There Chidiock stopped, but I spun off again a thousand miles through a veil of fever and starvation, by airplane to a hospital in Port Vila, then to a hotel room, by other airplanes to Noumea and Auckland, a reunion with Suzanne, and a room at her parents' home, and finally by automobile a hundred miles east to a quiet house at Cook's Beach, where I came to rest and began to mend. In those first days ashore, I spent most of my time asleep and was fed up with the sea when awake, but still I trusted that someday I would want to go sailing again, however unlikely that seemed at the moment, and took some positive actions toward that end. On the suggestion of Fred Timakata, the main chief of Emae Island, I gave the villagers who had found Chidiock floating upside down in the lagoon 20,000 New Hebridean francs, about $300 U.S., as a "gift" for finding the boat and for watching over it in my absence.