JON

Mystic Trip Shakedown Cruise: San Francisco to San Diego, 1998

600 miles

It was somewhere past Pt. Arguello, out of Morro Bay, twenty miles into a Pacific Ocean green with thirteen foot swells foaming every five or six seconds, the wind picking up, our spinnaker sail foolishly out, starting to wrap and shred, when I realized it. No way am I going to throw up.

I knew then we had this trip licked. As long as they keep making Dramamine we'll be alright.

There are dream makers you meet even in the midst of a dream. Sylvia and I were riding our bikes in Marina del Rey, where we'd docked on our five day stay in Los Angeles. Along the bike path winding for miles along Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo Beach. We stopped in a dive shop. We needed another spear for our spear gun.

He didn't seem like a dream maker. He only seemed like a nice enough guy. Twenty something.Quiet with a smile. Who could have started to guess he'd turn out to be a Yoda, delivering crypticisms I'm still trying to figure out.

Tony Cooper didn't have the spear shaft in his collection of marine equipment. He had a question. Were we planning on surfing on this trip down the coast of Mexico to Panama and then who knows?

Sylvia grew up in New Mexico. I started in Minnesota. We both still have the rough white skin scars that pavement shredded from our knees after wiping out on skateboards. That's as close as you get to surfing in the upper midwest or the high desert near the Mexican border. Riding a board on wheels. Neither one of us mastered that concept.

Surfing. You don't bring that up around the table when you're a kid in a room full of Scandinavians. Pass the Jell-O. Could I have some more hotdish? Are you going to eat that lutefisk? That's dinner conversation to a Minnesotan.

Tony Cooper, the dream maker, changed all that. He showed up at the Aviana the day after we met him with his beatific smile, steady eyes and the gift of a long board under his arm.

I'm now a surfer living the endless summer.

The dream maker, the surfboard and me

San Francisco Bay

We sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, rolling with the tide and good wind October 6th, 1998. The sum total of our sailing experience: four years. One year in S.F. Three in Chicago on Lake Michigan, which means a sum total of six months when you consider Chicago is not exactly a kind place to sailors or anybody else ten months out of the year. Still, we figured we knew what we were doing.

Sailing is like dancing, painting, playing an instrument. Anybody can learn it. Read some books. Sailing magazines. Take lessons maybe. Get a boat. Sail.

To sail well, to take on the great ocean, you need intuition. You feel the wind, not figure it out. Spirit over mind. There's a certain zen to sailing your craft to its and your best advantage. Sylvia and I have both met dozens of sailors whose grasp of boating terminology and nautical fashion leaves us standing quietly, listening, nodding, eyes glazed over, wondering, "how do they keep their shoes so white?" Then we see them sliding their boats into a slip and slamming the dock at four knots. Not that we have the intuition that I mentioned above. It's just that they don't.

So, if they can sail, we can.

San Simeon Cove (Hearst Castle above)

San simeon Cove sits as a beautiful calm water pond about 200 miles down the coast from San Francisco. Surrounded by eucalyptus trees, below the hills where William Randolph Hearst built a castle and tried to live his own dream, we decided to load the bikes into our rubber dinghy and go ashore.

The perfumed, pungent smell of eucalyptus is uniquely Californian. Maybe that's what made us dopey enough to try a Normandy Beach-style landing, fully clothed, the air temperature 63 degrees, the water even colder.

I'm not here to blame anybody. My wife is smart. She's beautiful. She can handle herself in most circumstances. Besides she wouldn't accept the blame. Somehow, though, we landed, pitchpoling through the surf, tangled in bikes, a boat, tumbling as salt water filled our sinus cavities.

Intuitively, I thought bikes would float. We found them only after kicking and flailing around in four feet of skin shriveling, lip-turning-blue water. Two tangled frames and wheels sat rolling in the surge on the bottom of the bay, full of sand and salt water. Intuitively, too, I thought they'd rust. From the moment we got them on the beach they did.

If you should ever decide to sail a boat on the ocean for an extended period and actually tell anyone of your plan, people will , undoubtedly, tell you about boating accidents and shipwrecks. I don't know where they hear about them. Some great sea disaster data base maybe. They'll spell out, to your face, the doom that is to be your marriage, stuck on a boat, nowhere to go. Pirates? We're warned several times a day by people whose only aquatic experience is water skiing. It's always cheerful talk. Not that they're not right. We've only gone 600 miles.

Santa Cruz Island

About those miles, there is terror and tranquility. Beauty and boredom. Santa Cruz Island, twenty-five miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, sits with rocky coves, long sandy beaches, birds, deserted, for the most part.

Of course, there are the sunsets.

near San Diego

My brother, Jay, joined us in L.A. for the sail to San Diego. We stopped off on Santa Catalina Island, an obvious nightmare of tourist boats and people in the summer months. November, it was empty. Seventy-five degrees and sunny. We snorkeled in the kelp along the coast, stayed two nights, then set sail for San Diego

Jay helps with navigation

SYLVIA

There are times when I wake up in the middle of the night, so afraid of what I've just dreamt: That the bilge pump isn't dumping the water out of the boat as it should. That the spinnaker wildly tosses me over the life-lines as I try to shut it down. That we've actually caught a fish and I have to kill it.. Even worse, that we have to to back to work.

The last nightmare makes me cry. It makes Jon cry, too. His suits are now of a different fabric.

Jon's gone native  

Most days, our sails have been relatively full..The wind, kind. But there have been some doldrums. When I was a kid, I used to read so many books, some days, I wouldn't even come out of my room. Now, I embrace books again. Some days, I hardly look up.

Boredom, I think, sparks jon's creativity. oh, pirates...

I still feel so queasy some days, I just wish I could throw up. Just get that last peanut butter & jelly sandwich out of me before it does any more damage.

I'm not so sure I like the nights the way I once did.. It's so black out. The sky, a dark background uninterrupted by the brownish haze of artificial city lights. The sea, well, I can hear it passing beneath the Aviana, but I can't see it. What's down there? What's that staticky-popping noise I hear under our floorboards?

Where Jon feels the wonder of it, I am quaking in my timberland deck shoes.

But that's under sail...when you don't know which unkown danger we've been told about by perfect strangers will hit us and sink us.

Still, I love the nights at anchor. The stars are so piercingly bright...and there are so MANY of them. We're surrounded by the billions and billions of points of light. I can see the Milky Way!! Despite the worry dreams that I'm sure will haunt me until we reach paradise, the gentle rocking of a bed on board, lulls me into a solid sleep.

We've tried to be as ready as we can be for this journey. We've researched..plotted..bought. Sometimes it's overwhelming.

Jon tallies the costs.

Ka-Ching, Ka-Ching! More to come in San Diego. A radar...single-side-band radio, watermaker, windlass.....

Design and Color by Louis Jaime. Illustrations by Louis Hinkhouse.