Lusty landlubbers set sail

Published on February 10, 2008

 The Chronicles of the Schooner Lusty I
By Mike Williams
Published by Chiang Mai Sabai Publishing
Available at Asia Books, Bt695
Reviewed by James Eckardt

The Nation
This is a great joyous romp of a book. "The Chronicles of the Schooner Lusty I" is the tale of six hardy men in their early 20s - fit, intelligent, good with their hands - who bought a wooden 50-foot gaff schooner designed by John Arden and built in 1927. They fixed it up and learned how to sail in Puget Sound. Then in 1970, they sailed out of Seattle and around the world. The 30,000-mile trip would take six years.

It all began with a cup of coffee between author Mike Williams and his friend Terry Anderson in the University of Washington Commons shortly before their graduation. They had just returned from a spring break in Guaymas, Mexico: "warm nights, cold beer and a couple of wild senoritas". They decided, like so many college students, to sail around the world. The difference is, they did it.

One of the modifications they made on the schooner was to lay a teak grid over the bowsprit and surround it with a stainless-steel pulpit railing: "the best seat in the house".

The shakedown cruise down to Long Beach, California, was a horror of huge seas and howling wind. The crew was properly scared, especially when Terry nearly fell overboard and was only saved by the bowsprit pulpit. Harboured safely in Long Beach, they partied hard, split up to find work and rejoined the boat later for the next leg. This would be a pattern over the next six years, crew leaving, crew coming back, but the beautiful old schooner continually beating westward.

The next leg was a three-week, 3,000-mile reach to the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. A new addition to the crew was Jill Watson. Remarkably the crew functioned as a pure democracy, with no captain.

"There is a radical transition from everyday routine on land to life aboard a cruising boat that everyone who sails has to recognize," Williams writes. "Besides coping with the discomfort and crowded conditions, there are sleeping and eating routines that everyone must conform to. Then there's the watch schedule; for 8 hours out of 24 two of us would be on deck either steering, trimming sails, doing chores or just keeping the helmsman company... Comfort, privacy and personal space were going to be a little hard to come by for the next few weeks.

"But let's not forget what was really happening here ... We were sailing for the South Pacific on a beautiful schooner. We were young, we were free and we were as happy as any six people on the planet."

There were the ritual "sundowners" at dusk too, lubricated with plenty of beer, wine and marijuana. Lusty I was a floating commune of kindred souls. The crew was also lucky to be arriving in the Asia Pacific region before advent of jumbo-jet mass tourism. They were disappointed by over-development in Tahiti but every other island was an untouched tropical paradise with mountains to climb, coral reefs to scuba dive, and waterfront thatched-roofed bars to sing and dance and drink all night.

Their first landfall was Nuka Hiva:

"Like an apparition the mountains of Nuka Hiva gradually began to take form out of the haze and clouds on the horizon and everyone got more and more excited. Within an hour we could see the island clearly ... steep jungle-clad mountains, jagged rocky peaks, bare-stone cliff faces and a wild, primitive look about the place that had us all thinking about the Lost Island or the Land that Time Forgot."

They pulled sharply into Taiohae Bay and marched ashore to a world of wonders.

"Once we were all ashore, we dragged the dinghy up the white sand beach above the high-water mark. Our senses were on overload. Everything we saw around us seemed extraordinarily bright and vivid."

Accompanied by a happy pack of kids they were led into a village and a store with a back veranda for fresh food and cold beer.

"Do you remember the best beer you ever tasted? I do ... that large cold Hinano there at Maurice's store in Taiohae Bay."

They were joined by a couple other cruisers in the bay, and this would became a pattern too: crew jumping on and off boats as they continued onward. Lusty I soon gained an ocean-wide reputation as a party boat.

The author was the first to jump ship. Down to his last hundred dollars, he talked his way into a job as a surveyor for a new airport on Rorotonga, one of the Cook Islands. Here he fell in love with a 19-year-old Maori beauty named Rouru ("Ro") Tikimoe  and they settled down to domestic bliss on the beach.

The crew of Lusty I sailed down to New Zealand where they found various jobs and girlfriends. Mike and Ro met up with them again in Fiji and set course for Australia.

As for the rest of the story, read it yourself. This is life lived to its fullest.

Mike Williams has lived in Chiang Mai for the last 15 years with his Thai wife and son. He wrote this book partly to tell his son of his youthful adventures but the pleasure is there for the whole world. There are 80 gorgeous colour photos to boot. 

James Eckardt's eighth book, "Singapore Girl", is on sale at Kinokuniya, Bookazine and Asia Books.