By the Grace of the Sea : A Woman's Solo Odyssey Around the World 3122306301, 0071355278, 2002006319

Citation preview

A Woman s Solo Odyssey Around the World

$24.95 U.S.A / $39.95 CAN

IN A PERSONAL ACCOUNT as vibnu r and adventurous as its author, By the Grace of the Sea chronicles one woman • voyage alone over vast oceans. In M;r 1989, Pat Henry left Acapulco aboaiv her little sailboat Southern Cross for a jour ney that would take her through eight years, forty countries, and thirty thou¬ sand miles. Love for the sea and foreign land:and a thirst for meaning in life were only part of the story. This was an odyssey motivated both by a great yearning for adventure and a profound sense of failure. Henry’s journey began with the collapse of her textile import company, a result of flawed personal and professional judgment that left her broke, betrayed, haunted by self-doubt, and spiritually spent. Forced to live frugally aboard her 21-year-old sailboat, she ventured down the California coast to Mexico for a brief trip that moved impetuously onward— around the world. Her voyage becomes the vehicle through which Henry faces her fears and her dreams, her future and her past. Along the way, she finds new beauty, talents, friendships, and even romance, and is given a priceless gift—the distance from which to repair and deepen famLv relationships and to reach peace with the choices and abandonments of a turn :! tuous life. Battling storms, near-collisions, equipment failure, fatigue, solitude, an a host of other challenges, Henry pe:severes to become one of the first women ever to sail around the world alone— (continued on hac : Sap

N 3 8 3033

DATE DUE

S, 10-03 3.t=3.C‘

4

-

—

— s

-‘iJKrV o -fr*

GAYLORD

PRINTED IN U.S.A

fiy t/ie C(fuice ofthe Om

A Woman’s Solo Odyssey

3 1223 06301 9633

Around the World

77ht TTTemu/

International Marine / McGraw-Hill Camden, Maine • New York • Chicago • San Francisco • Lisbon • London • Madrid Mexico City • Milan • New Delhi • San Juan • Seoul • Singapore • Sydney • Toronto

The

McGraw-Hill Companies

Visit us at: www.internationalmarine.com 1098765432.1 DOC Copyright © 2003 Pat Henry All rights reserved. The name “International Marine” and the International Marine logo are trademarks of The McGraw-Hill Companies. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Henry, Pat, 1941— By the grace of the sea : a woman’s solo odyssey around the world / Pat Henry. p. ISBN 1.

cm.

0-07-135527-8

Henry, Pat,

(hardcover : alk. paper)

1941-Journeys. 2.

3. Voyages around the world.

4.

Southern Cross (Sailboat).

Sailing, Single-handed. I. Title.

G440.H495 H46 2002 910.4'!—dc2i

2002006319

£/o (y/i/em fMk/Aim (Sfy/tet Her courage, FAITH, AND COMPASSION GAVE ME MINE

Preface -

If the moon if you dance

IX XIII

Sarah Zale

i

Prologue

12

Part One

Acapulco to New Zealand

Part Two

To Singapore

Part Three

To the Mediterranean

182

Part Four

To the Caribbean

266

Part Five

Sailing Home

324

94

Sail and Boat Plans

355

Acknowledgments

359

About the Author

361

X —

ce of the Sea is more than a sailing story of my eight-year

on board Southern Cross. To understand the drive and behind it I had to examine those moments from child¬ hood, marriage, motherhood, career, and life that propelled me to the edge of a chasm and pushed me out of Acapulco on May 4, 1989. It took an inner journey as well to reach the other side. Revealing the threads, treasures, refuse, and rubble of my life meant includ¬ ing those who shared it. Some will wish I had not told all that I did and oth¬ ers may wish I had said more, but I chose from among life s fragments those that defined the woman who left Acapulco and those en route that left an indelible impression and tilted the course of my life. The people and boats found in Grace are real, but some identities and descriptions have been changed. Most of those mentioned contributed to my life and this journey in significant ways. Writing about them is one way to express my debt of gratitude. Even those who might seem to have been a neg¬ ative influence gave me a lesson in life and an opportunity to better know myself. I thank them, too. There are letters throughout the following pages. None are literal copies, but some reflect closely the nature and content of real letters. Others I wish I had written. They carry the thoughts and emotions of the moment that I

failed to put down and send. Those for whom they were intended may only now know my feelings. Within the following story are entries from the logs of SC. They reflect the conditions on board that shaped a day of struggle against harsh forces or one of tranquillity. They are written in the common language of a ship s log. The date follows international conventions (like the U.S. military) of day, month, and year in ascending order. Time is based on the twenty-four-hour clock used around the world without A.M. or P.M. Sometimes it is local time and at oth¬ ers it is Zulu time, which we also know as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the time at the prime meridian, 0 degrees of longitude, which runs from pole to pole through Greenwich, England. My location is shown in degrees of lati¬ tude and longitude with the hemisphere indicated. SC s course is expressed in magnetic degrees, not in true, as I steered to the compass reading, which varies across the surface of Earth with the pull of the magnetic poles. Distances are given in nautical miles and speeds in nautical miles per hour, the universal measurement of sea and air travel. A nautical mile—the distance along the curve of the earth—is slightly longer than a statute or land mile, which is the chord of the curve. This difference makes a knot slightly faster than a mile per hour. Sea, wind, and current directions are by the marks of a compass rose, the card inside a compass showing NNE (north-northeast), S, NW, SSW, and so on. Wind and sea read as the direction they are coming from and cur¬ rent in the direction it is flowing toward. These are the hard-edged details that ruled my days and nights at sea. At the end of my voyage my mother pressed me to write the story of my travels. It seemed a simple thing to her, a journalism graduate. I resisted, con¬ sidered a coauthor, and finally agreed to the task. Armed with materials gath¬ ered over eight years and a contract with International Marine/McGraw-Hill, I began. Three months later, after ninety pages were finished, my editor wrote back that he liked the first three paragraphs. Writing this story seemed far beyond my capabilities, but it was too late to back out. Jumping on Southern Cross and sailing away was not a solution this time. As in the trip itself, I would

go ahead word-by-word and page-by-page until it was finished. I stumbled, groping for threads not of the outer journey but of the inner process that had changed me. I sought inspiration and direction from the bookshelf in my studio in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, smarting with Christopher Voglers The Writer’s Journey. Not only did the story begin to take form, but also an understanding of my life. Vogler approached story analysis and telling through the universally recognized form of myth. Using the symbolic paral-

lels he found with human life unlocked a path to understanding and provided focus and structure to my writing. I began again, consuming books I had collected: Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness; Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces; Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype; Caroline M. Myss’s Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing; Arnold Mindell’s The Shaman’s Body: A New Shamanism for Transforming Health, Relationships, and Community; Michael J. Harner’s The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing; Gregg Levoy’s Callings: Finding and Follow¬ ing an Authentic Life; John Broomfield’s Other Ways of Knowing: Recharting Our Future with Ageless Widsom; Linda Schierse Leonard’s The Wounded Woman: Healing the FatherDaughter Relationship; Ted Andrews’s Animal-Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small; and Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization. Each book set

me on another path back through my life, then forward to question where I was going and why. I dug deeper into the layers revealed en route. Words sprang from insights and the following story emerged. It took both the physical journey of sailing and the spiritual journey of writing about it to bring peace. Above all else this is a story of affirmation, of the power of grace, of lis¬ tening to dreams that wait to be followed. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico June, 2ooz

XI

Jot TPat fd/truy, tv/io Mii/ed /Ac woz/d a/one

.F

THE

MOON,

IF

Draw a line across paper, pale blue, slip inside

YOU

DANCE