Old Fools Journal: What You Can Do When You Don't Know Any better.

Back in the 1970's when I was living on the good ship "Serenity" in the Lahaina, Maui road stead we had all sorts of unusual things happen. This amphibian came in one afternoon and decided to stay the night. Very colorful. It was looking good when I went to bed and the sea was calm so I expected it to still be there in the morning. When I arose to put water in the ocean just after daylight it was gone. I knew it didn't fly out at night so I jumped in my dinghy and went over where it had been and sure enough it was still there firmly attached to the mooring, upside down on the bottom. Must have had a leak I thought. My second thought was that it was going to be really hard to start.

The water is only about 30 feet deep there and very clear. It was recovered that day and it was flying the last I saw of it dangling under a really big helicopter. It was recovered by a bunch of local divers and tourist boat people.

It was not a good day for the pilotThis is the Yacht "Lia" formerly a 400 ton Japanese fishing trawler. Apparently it went on a reef somewhere and was rescued by a friend of mine. I don't really remember the story. We'll just call him Al. Al is one of the most interesting people I have known and I considered him a really good friend. I last saw Al in 1984. Al had plans for this little ship but it needed a little work first which involved moving it to Honolulu. He didn't have any confidence in his ability to skipper the vessel so he ask me if I would. Of course I would. I was after all a steely eyed, square jawed airline pilot and could do anything. Or so he thought (I guess) but I was not so sure. I had never found a boat I couldn't handle or an airplane I couldn't fly but I was getting to the age where I was wondering if maybe there wasn't a lot of good luck involved in that. Self doubt was beating up on my ego.

The night of the departure came and Al's lovely wife came in the dinghy to pick me up and off we went. The crew was made up of a handful of harbor rats from Lahaina harbor, a oilman in engineering, the owner and his wife, myself as Captain and my faithful girl sidekick Genie as helmsman. Why on earth I thought that would work I'll never know.

It did work. The engineer had messed with that inline 8 cylinder diesel until he knew it forward and backward and that was a good thing. There is no transmission on this vessel, only a clutch, so to get into reverse one has to shut the engine down and restart it in the opposite direction. There is also no electric starter but a air starter instead so there is a limited number of starts before you have to let the air pressure built up again. There is no steering unless the propeller is pushing or pulling water past the rudder. That means you can't just coast and steer. The prop has to be turning. Without power the ship keeps going in the direction it was going only it turns sideways. Very disconcerting.

None of that was any concern at the beginning of the passage as we had the entire anchorage to get our act together. Honolulu harbor would be a "whole nother thang". I had found out that there would probably not be line handlers on the dock in Honolulu and we would have to put off our own. Oh my.

Well the engineer and I put our heads together and rehearsed getting into reverse and back into forward until we were sure we understood each other. He thought we might have 5 restarts. This was going to be tricky and I couldn't touch anything. My only connection to the ship was the soles of my flip flops and a sound powered telephone between the engineer and myself. The helmsman (my faithful girl sidekick a person of Norwegian descent) had the wheel and some Texan had the throttle. They were both magnificent.

A commercial ship entering Honolulu harbor must have a harbor pilot on board and I believe a tug had to be standing by. The "Lia" is a yacht. I'll bet that loop hole has been closed by now but who knows.

The overnight trip was pretty much uneventful and I even got about 4 hours sleep being awaken only once because the lookouts thought we were going to go aground. We were in the middle of the Molokai channel with Molokai on our starboard side so I had to get up and explain that what they were seeing was not a city but the inter island tug towing two barges probably delivering toilet paper to Maui, or maybe more beer.

The engine topped out at about 600 rpm, I seem to remember, and we were running along at 270 rpm making good about 5 knots according to my calculations.

I have lost the log book that my notes were in so this is as I remember it.

We arrive in the morning between seven and nine, I believe, and the adrenaline started. It wasn't like I would have any monetary loss if I screwed up but the embarrassment would kill me. It seemed like forever getting through the entrance to the harbor but once inside it was show time and no time to hesitate or be nervous. It went off as we rehearsed it. Our first shutdown-reverse-shutdown-startup-forward was to slow the vessel to minimum. We came in at a very shallow angle to the dock and the second shutdown-reverse-shutdown-startup-forward was with the bow withing inches of the dock. Apparently the line handlers got off OK as suddenly there were people running around and passing lines. The third shutdown-reverse-shutdown-startup-forward was to get the ship moving aft and then swing the stern in toward the dock. It all came off perfect and we looked like professionals. A bunch of drunks and harbor rats. Imagine

I had an adrenaline headache for days which I treated with gin.

I have handled a lot of different boat competently and a lot of different airplanes as well but landing on the moon would not have given me a bigger rush than this. I still get a rush just remembering it and it was the crew that caused it to be so.