Kretschmer Johm - Cape Horn to Starboard

Books dont always end at the end of the story. Cape Horn to Starboard concludes abruptly. I was young and saw my life as a series of independent acts, not as a complete play. Cape Horn was behind me and I was ready for a new adventure, for the next curtain to rise. However, many of the best stories occurred after the Cape Horn voyage. Some of these events are related in my memoir Flirting with Mermaids . One of the most dramatic chapters in the story unfolded just a couple of years ago.

The last leg of trip, as you know, was difficult, but one of the few things we did right was to arrive in San Francisco on a slow news day. For reasons known only to the sages who ran the local CBS affiliate, our voyage was deemed newsworthy. Maybe it was because we were greeted upon arrival by then mayor Dianne Feinstein and presented the keys to the city. It was a wonderfully corny ceremony that went all wrong. Before we could present a plaque from Detroit mayor Coleman Young (Tys and our sponsors Strohs hometown) to Feinstein it began to rain and the good mayor hastily retreated into her limo. Out trotted her assistant, with his trench coat pulled overhead, to present the keys to San Francisco as quickly as possible.

He read a brief statement, shook my hand, and handed me the keys. I dropped them. Id been at sea for seventy-two days and I was shaky on land. The keys started to blow down the dock so I scrambled after them and stepped on them before they blew into the water. I didnt realize that they were made of Styrofoam and I crushed them. Alas. We pieced them back together and reenacted the ceremony. But there was no stopping fame, at least not for a couple of weeks, and soon I was on my way to New York to appear on the CBS Morning News after a personal call from Dan Rather. Other talk shows soon followed; Strohs was milking the moment. I appeared on one show with Dr. Joyce Brothers and exercise guru Richard Simmons. Brothers assured the audience of middle-aged women that the reason I sailed around the Horn was because I was sexually repressed. Simmons couldnt believe that I washed my hair in salt water for seventy-two days! Fortunately my fame faded and I went back to doing the only thing in the world I knew how to do, sail across oceans.

Gigi, the real hero of the story, continued to ply the wilderness that is the ocean for a few more years. Ty, with his life in pieces and resentful of the notoriety that I had received, launched another Cape Horn voyage the following year. This time he sailed alone. He left Newport, Rhode Island, and worked his way south. He tarried in the Falkland Islands. Then he rounded Cape Horn again, and continued into the Pacific. He just kept going. He was trying to sail as far away from his former life as possible. He eventually fetched up in New Zealand after an epic 5,000-mile crossing of the Pacific.

Ty was exhausted but he had, at last, sailed beyond his demons and came home to put his life in order. We patched up our differences; wed been through too much together to remain at odds. Ty had become, in his own aggravating way, the father I was craving and the mentor I needed. We butted heads but we loved each other. He hired a delivery skipper to bring Gigi back to San Francisco but the crew gave up in Hawaii. Ty then had the boat shipped to Fort Lauderdale.

When she turned up in the port Ty realized that he had no desire to sail Gigi again and donated her to a seamanship training school in central Florida. He hoped that the school would refit the boat and use her for offshore training voyages. They didnt; instead they managed to sink Gigi while conducting, of all things, a marine survey class. Fortunately she went down at the dock in a shallow pocket of the Intracoastal Waterway and was quickly raised. As soon as Tys tax write-off was considered safe, the school sold the boat. Gigi was shipped to Texas, where she languished on the muddy shallows of Galveston Bay for years. Her storied sailing rsum carried no weight. She was just another white fiberglass boat in sea of nondescript white fiberglass boats. Her gallant Cape Horn voyages soon became a distant memory.

A friend of Jeremy Rogers, Gigi s legendary builder, spied the boat stranded in a Galveston marina. She was in a sorry state. He wrote a pleading letter to Jeremy and his wife Fiona, urging them to buy the boat and make it right again. The Rogerses were at first reluctant to take on the project of restoring Gigi . Theyd been on a wild ride of their own during the many years that had passed since Ty and I sailed away from Lymington Yacht Haven on Gigi s maiden voyage. Their firm, Contessa Yachts, had plunged from being one of the premier sailboat builders in the United Kingdom into bankruptcy in a few short years. The 1980s was a brutal decade for the sailing industry and as Fiona put it, we lost an empire. But Jeremy and Fiona clawed their way back, eventually buying back their own molds for the Contessa 32 in 1995. They began producing a handful of new boats and developed a booming business of restoring old 32s, and other Contessa models. It is safe to say that the Contessa 32 is the best-loved fiberglass boat in England. Its legendary and almost a thousand hulls were launched during its production run. All UK sailors know of its proud performance during the tragic 1979 Fastnet Race. There is something irresistible about the Contessa 32; its rakish and winsome, and oh-so-capable. One of the reasons Cape Horn to Starboard has been republished after so many years is that the book has always remained popular in England and tattered copies were snapped up on Amazon.com. UK sailors crave stories about the Contessa 32, even the coming-of-age story of a bungling Yankee sailor and his band of ragtag sailing friends.

Jeremy and Fiona could not resist Gigi, and finally agreed to buy her and ship her back to their yard in Lymington. Jeremy was shocked at her poor condition, worse than hed imagined, and it took him a year to find the will to start the project. The soon-to-be-revived Earls Court London Boat Show gave him inspiration, as the organizers wanted to exhibit Gigi when she was fully restored. As Jeremy tore into the boat, he realized that Gigi provided him with opportunity to rethink and redesign many of the standard features on the Contessa 32. From new pipe berths in the bow to a revamped head and reworked galley, Gigi came back to life. When he finally finished the project and placed Gigi on display at Earls Court, she was the most impressive Contessa 32 of all and fittingly so.

Walking through the cavernous hall with my wife Tadji in December of 2007, I was a bit nervous about seeing Gigi again; like meeting a friend from long ago, theyre never like we remember them. Then I spotted Gigi across from Gypsy Moth, Sir Francis Chichesters famous boat that had also been restored. A flood of memories raced through my mind. Gigi was propped on a cradle and I had a perfect view from afar. Her chiseled hull shape was as magnificent as ever. Designer David Sadler and builder Jeremy Rogers were perfect collaborators; anyone with an eye for sailboats cant help but admire the lines of the Contessa 32.

We greeted Jeremy and Fiona in the cockpit. Jeremy was beaming and that was inspiring to see, for hes a humble man. Well she did come out pretty well, he admitted quietly. Pretty well, she looked spectacular. I joked that I needed the same makeover and wondered if he could restore me next. People pouring on to the boat had to be convinced that she was actually a twenty-six-year-old boat with two Cape Horn roundings under her swept-back keel.

Tadji could not believe how small she was below, and I confess, I was a bit surprised myself. But she felt right. Sitting in the companionway, my perch for thousands of miles, I could feel myself bracing for waves as we beat south toward the Horn. Taking the tiller in my hand I remembered the colossal seas that greeted us in the Southern Ocean. Gigi was back, in all her glory, and ready to sail the oceans of the world once again. Thats the rest of the story.