Graham Robin Lee - Dove

I would like to thank Derek Gill for all the hours he spent in helping me write Dove . Without his help this book would never have been written.

I would also like to thank my father, Lyle Graham, for having enough faith in me to make this trip possible and my mother, Norma Graham, for having the courage to stand by his decision.

My sincere thanks go to the many people who prayed for me along this trip, for I now know that it was their faith in God that saw me through safely.

And last but not least my loving thanks to my wife, Patricia, for all of her encouragement.

D OVE nosed into her slip at the Long Beach marina, her sails furled like a bird resting its wings after a storm. I wasnt thinking about the voyage at all. My mind was on Patti. I was yearning to hold her again. She was standing there among the reporters and television cameras, and laughingher long wheat-colored hair blowing across her face in that familiar way, her body swollen with my child.

As Dove was being tied up, so many newsmen came charging down the floating slip that it threatened to sink and to throw them into the April-chill water. I sat on the cabin roof waiting for the customs officer, and a dozen microphones were thrust into my face. Then the questions came at me like stones.

What does it feel like to be the youngest sailor to have circled the world single-handed?

I havent given it much thought, I saidand that was true.

Would you do it again?

God no! Ive done it once. Why do it again?

How did Patti become pregnant? This from a woman reporter fluttering artificial eyelashes.

I urged her to read a book on birds and bees. She was closer than she knew to a love story that I wasnt yet ready to tell.

What did you think about when you were alone and a thousand miles from land?

Perhaps the things you think about when youre alone, I parried, but mostly about the next port.

How far have you traveled since leaving California five years ago?

About thirty thousand and six hundred miles, I said.

What are you going to do now?

Take a hot bath.

Did you do it for a stunt?

A stunt! Hell no!

Patti was making signs to me, trying to tell me to keep my cool. She knew how short my fuse was when people asked damn-fool questions. But how could I tell these people, all thinking of their copy deadlines, why I had made this voyage?

Couldnt they leave me alone? Couldnt they guess that all I wanted was to be with Patti, to get away from this damned boat, to be among trees again, and in front of a blazing hearth and in a bed that didnt lurch with every wave and wind?

Actually I had seen Patti half an hour earlier. She and her father and my parents had come out in a launch at dawn to meet Dove at the breakwater. Patti had leaned perilously over the launchs rail to give me a breakfast of fresh melon, hot rolls and a bottle of champagne. I had drunk the whole bottle before reaching the marina and my mood was reasonably mellow. The reporters were safe. I even grinned at them. The television cameras zoomed in.

Many have sailed long and dangerous voyages for the sake of personal glory. Others have sailed for personal adventure. I fall into neither group. I have tried to answer honestly when people have asked me what made me do itwhat compelled me at the age of sixteen to take a twenty-four-foot sailboat out of San Pedro harbor (it flanks Long Beach) and to tell my family and friends, Im going around the world.

Shakespeare, who seems to have had an answer to most questions, had Hamlet say, Theres a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. That was an answer that fitted pretty closely.

Id never heard of Shakespeare and understood nothing about destiny when I went to school at the age of five in California. The classroom was close to a forest of yacht masts, and while other kids crayoned pictures of automobiles, airplanes, flowers or their Uncle Harry wearing big glasses, I drew only pictures of boatsboats with scores of portholes, top-heavy boats, small boats, wind-filled mainsails, mizzens, genoas, jibs and spinnakers. Then, when I was ten and a lot more resentful of homework, I pressured my father into giving me an eight-foot dinghybeat up but beautiful. We were living then at Morro Bay, one of the more attractive of Californias coastal towns. On launching day my father said he would teach me how to sail. He was full of wisdom because the previous night he had been reading a manual titled How to Handle a Small Craft . We got out two hundred yards from the shore and he lectured me on the danger of jibing (page 16 in the manual). Hardly had he lowered his finger than the boat jibed and both of us were thrown into the water.

But how I loved that little boat. Every day when school was over my brother Michael would dash off to the back yard and tinker with his beach buggy, but I would run all the way to the little wooden jetty beyond the reeds near our house. Sailing already meant much more to me than mucking about in boats, as the neighbors used to call it. It was the chance to escape from blackboards and the smell of disinfectant in the school toilet, from addition and subtraction sums that were never the same as the teachers answers, from spelling words like seize and fulfill and from little league baseball. It was the chance to be alone and to be as free for a while as the sea gulls that swung around Morro Rock.

One night when I should have been asleep I could hear my parents talking about me, their voices drifting down the passage from the living room. Im worried that hes such a loner, said my mother. He needs more company. More friends. Perhaps we should ask Stephen or David to join us for the vacation.

A loner? Was I really different? I had friends. But I liked being alone, and a boat gave me the chance of getting away from people.

Was I different just because history didnt turn me on and boats did? Perhaps sailing is in the genes. Ten years before I was born, my father and his brother had started to build a twenty-eight-foot boat, intending to sail it around the world. They had the hull finished and were beginning to study the charts of Polynesia when the headlines blazed Pearl Harbor. When I was thirteen my father still had ideas of fulfilling his boyhood dream; or at least part of it. He had made out well with his house construction and real estate business. One day he took me to the Long Beach marina and as we walked past a thirty-six-foot ketch with a For Sale sign pinned to its stern I crawled under the green canvas. When my father called me I invited him to climb aboard. I dont know whether it was at this moment that my father decided to buy the Golden Hind , but a few days later he told the family that he had sold his business and that we were all going sailing in the South Seas.

My father is a quiet man, wiry, not by appearance the adventurous type, and his decision seemed on the surface out of character. Anyway, at the age of thirteen I was not going to analyze his motives or his personality (although I guess my mother did). For me the prospect of missing school for a year and sailing over that horizon was not one to be questioned.

We spent three months equipping the Golden Hind , provisioning her with six hundred cans of food, and then, without fanfare but with much head shaking from our kin, we sailed south to Nuku Hiva, the port of entry to the Marquesas islands. Fortunately bad memories fade fast and the happiest stay in the forefront of our minds. I can barely recall, for instance, our eighteen days in the doldrums or my being doubled up with a flaring appendix about 120 miles from the nearest surgeon in Papeete. The appendectomy wound failed to heal, and I spent three weeks in a primitive hospital where huge cockroaches crawled up the wall.