Two souvenirs remain of that wild initiation night: the broken link of our brand-new half-inch anchor chain and a sheet from our recording barograph, which charts the pattern of Typhoon June. The line of barometric pressure descended sharply until, at the passage of the eye of the typhoon, the ship was bucking so wildly that the ink was spilled out of the pen, and the record stopped.
We also gained some valuable information and experience from this episode. First, we began to appreciate the difficulties in communication that were to plague us in time to come. Regardless of how well the men improved their English, and I my Japanese, in a crisis they lapsed into “man’s talk”—rapid, peremptory vernacular—which conveyed nothing but a sense of extreme urgency. The normal, formal Japanese language, which we knew a bit, was gone with the wind.
Beyond this I learned the absolute necessity for anticipation if this voyage was to be a success. At all times we must expect the worst, and try to be ready for it. Had the second anchor been ready for instant use, precious minutes would have been saved. On the credit side, I profited, because never again were we caught without ready anchors.
Typhoon No. 4, Marie, caused no great damage in our area, but roared past us and northward to Hokkaido, where she overturned a seagoing ferry with the loss of over a thousand lives. Locally, however, she did play havoc with the tides, and drowned out the machinery in the local shipyard, so we had to postpone our haul-out, for bottom painting, more than two weeks—another unavoidable delay.
However, by September, in spite of typhoons, troubles, and tape (red), we were far enough along to be thinking about a date for our departure. We still lacked such extras as electricity, running water, gimbaled stove, radiotelephone, and a host of minor items, but we ignored these and concentrated on the absolute necessities. Provisioning, of course, led the list, and Barbara took the brunt of this terrible task. Now that she had a better knowledge of the crew’s daily food consumption, she doubled her original estimates of rice, fruits, and canned foods, and then doubled the amount again as a safety factor. The total was prodigious. Day after day, carrying yardlong lists, she set out in a taxi-jeep, to return in the evening with a mountain of supplies to be hauled aboard and stowed.
Ted, meanwhile, when I informed him that he had been promoted to chief navigator on the defection of Takemura, redoubled his studies. With a textbook and the help of a navigation officer friend, Ted gained a competent grasp of at least the theoretical aspects of his assignment. However, when we worked out our practice sextant shots, we often found the Phoenix not in Hiroshima harbor but somewhere up the slope of Fujiyama.
Jessica, too, had been given an official role, that of ship’s historian. She took her assignment seriously and, from the day we moved aboard, she kept a daily record of our activities—as she saw them (a very important qualification). I might add that this diary was continued without a break for the next six years, and by the time we had completed our voyage around the world she had filled seven large ledgers with about 200,000 words. Unprompted and uncensored, Jessica’s Journal provides a detailed, refreshing, and sometimes chastening picture of our rather unconventional family life.
Time had now become an important element in our plans, for it was late in the season. After many conferences with family and crew, after a careful (and prayerful!) study of the North Pacific Pilot Charts, and after consultation with the Japanese Coast Guard, we finally decided that November was the very latest date we could leave Japan and still have a good chance of a successful crossing to Honolulu, over 4,000 miles to the east. This would put us at the tag end of the typhoon season and, we hoped, ahead of the worst of the winter storms which roar down out of the far north Pacific.
We decided upon Honolulu as our first landfall, because it was an American port, where we could have the Phoenix registered as an American ship and could obtain certain supplies and equipment lacking in Japan.
The numerous unavoidable delays had made it impossible to fit in the shakedown cruise in the open ocean, which we had planned, but by leaving Hiroshima early in October we could have a short cruise up the Inland Sea and give ourselves and the boat at least a smooth-water test. We could then complete our fitting-out at a northern port, make any adjustments that seemed necessary, and still depart by the appointed date. It was not an ideal plan, perhaps, but it was the best we could do. For a number of cogent reasons, mainly financial, it was impossible to lay over until next June, the optimum month for crossing the North Pacific under sail.