Outward Leg - Hardcover

Jones, Tristan

3.73

66 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688043089 ISBN 13: 9780688043087

Publisher: Hearst Marine Books, 1986

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After seven years ashore and having had his left leg amputated, Tristan Jones decided to return to the sea, hoping to inspire other handicapped people. In October 1983, Jones and his only crew member, Wally Rediske, set out from San Diego in a 36-foot trimaran, intending to circumnavigate the world from west to east by sail. This is story of Tristan's preparation for this major seagoing event and the chronicle of half of it. (continued in Improbable Voyage"). Tristan sailed down the west coast of Central America through the Panama Canal to Colombia, where he had to fight for survival among hostile natives, drug dealers and uncoooperative port officers. He went on to Venezuela, Aruba and the Dominican Republic during its 1984 revolution. Finally he reached New York and crossed the Atlantic to return to St Katherine's Dock in London where he began his seagoing life, thirty years before."

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About the Author:

Tristan Jones is one of the best-known authors of sailing stories. A Welshman, he left school at age 14 to work on sailing barges and spent the rest of his life at sea. The author of 16 books, Jones lived in Phuket, Thailand, until he died at the age of 71 in June 1995. All his books have been reissued by Sheridan House.

I had only one lecturing appointment, in mid-1983, in San Diego. Normally I would not have crossed the continent for one engagement - the expenses are only just covered. But this time something told me that I ought to go. I had warm memories of my previous visit in 1977. I recalled its good, dry, warm climate and its friendly people, among other things. Besides, it was another port, a place to look for a trimaran. By that time I'd already been to some ports in the eastern states, but had seen no multihull that impressed me as being what I thought she should be. The agent in San Diego arranged for a telephoned radio interview the week before I went there, and in it I mentioned my intention to make a voyage, as an example, for Operation Star, and that I was on the lookout for a suitable trimaran. I had about a thousand dollars at the time, but when destiny decrees, then money is of least importance - the will's the thing.

I had been in correspondence with Eric Le Rouge, one of France's leading multihull designers, for some months. Eric had told me that he could probably find sponsors for me to build a trimaran for the Star voyage - but it would take a year or two. Now a year or two at twenty or thirty or forty years of age is a fairly short time, but when you are approaching sixty years of age, it is a very long time indeed - it is perhaps a quarter of your remaining lifetime. Nevertheless, if no other solution to my problem of finding a suitable craft turned up - and I had a strange feeling, as I flew across America yet again, that synchronistic destiny was at work, bringing unknown strands together into the weft and warp of a certain design. . . .

She was at anchor off a golf clubhouse. She was low, and fast-looking, and of the right sort of line; there was an indefinable air of longing about her and when my eyes fell upon her, all the other yachts around her dissolved into a blur. As I drew near her in a borrowed dinghy, she seemed to me to be imbued with the spirit of a song, a carefree, never- ending rhythm that was part of the rhythm of the sea, perhaps of the universe itself. She was, as I stepped, stumbled and clawed my one-legged way up her stern, an engine, pure and unadorned. A sailing engine and a hard nut if I ever saw one. My whole being was overcome by the feeling: This one's for me. On board, it was no longer "I" but "we."

I sensed her lines, their round practicality, and I knew that she was "just right." Even though she was bare of all gadgets like winches or guardrails, I could see them all in place, as she could be - as she would be.

She was not a makeshift craft, as most of the multihulls I had looked at had seemed to be. A makeshift craft will not do for any kind of serious voyaging. Skippers and crews are influenced above all by the temperament of the vessel they sail, and they adjust themselves to her living spirit. That a yacht can be but a machinelike convenience for sailing to distant lands is an illusion. She must be more. She must live, and she must be made to live. She must have the character, the turn of temperament, the high spirit, to dwell in salt water - with the flow of the wave, with something of the wind captured in her very bones. Perhaps all things touching the elements so completely must have this conforming character, this flame, in order to exist. The sea can make or break the spirit of any venture by making or breaking the spirit of the craft and, in turn, that of the crew.

The craft herself must also be an adventurer in the real sense - a living spirit. And the spirit is vital, not vague, in a good voyaging craft, emanating directly from the integral spirit of her designer; a symbol revealing his science and, more important, his art; and even before these, his ideas, loyalties, faiths. There was nothing mystical here for me, as I looked her over in San Diego, merely a hint that she was approved by my heart as well as my head, and that she had been designed by someone who went beyond the feel of ships, someone who was striving to find Truth in his creation; someone who was not only a scientist, and surely someone who was not a layman, for never have such sweet lines in a vessel been designed by a layman, and never yet has a happy amateur-designed vessel sailed the seas. The name on her side was Osprey, but to me she was already Outward Leg, and a symbol of far greater things than design only. . . . And someone wanted to meet me and discuss fitting her out for the Star voyage.

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