On one day only, October 18, I exercised my prerogative of declaring a holiday. By coincidence, it also happened to be my birthday. We took this occasion to visit Kotohira, where Kompira-san, the god of the sea and patron of Japanese seamen, holds sway. We toiled up the thousand steps to the shrine and paused at the summit to admire the magnificent view, while Nick, Mickey and Moto went inside to pay their respects to the priests and to inform them of our plans.
When they emerged they were smiling broadly. Kompira-san, they had been assured, viewed their venture with favor and predicted a successful outcome if—and this, to us, seemed to be the joker—we promised to revisit the shrine at the conclusion of our trip. It seemed to me that a sort of Delphic aura surrounded this promise, but the boys seemed satisfied, and we were only too happy to agree.
After this single day of relaxation we began our final preparations in earnest. One by one jobs and purchases were checked off, from a list which originally contained several thousand items. On the day before our departure Barbara’s most recent provisioning efforts were delivered to the dock: a box of apples packed in bran; 100 pounds of potatoes; 70 pounds of onions; 40 of sweet potatoes, 5 of carrots, 6 of green beans; and some two dozen heads of cabbage. All that day, Barbara and Jessica sorted out vegetables, setting aside the doubtful ones for early eating, while the rest were packed in wooden crates and lashed to the cabintop.
Also on that day they coated and packed some thirty dozen eggs with oleo. That night we had scrambled eggs for supper.
That evening Nick and Mickey stayed in the forecastle writing stacks of last-minute notes, while Barbara, Jessica, and Moto went out to dinner with new-found Japanese friends. Only Ted—and already I was coming to depend upon him more and more—seemed to share a realization of the enormity of the step we were undertaking. Of his own accord he turned down the dinner invitation and remained to help make a final inventory.
Together we made one more check of the entire list of Things to Do and Get. The water supply had been topped up—300 gallons in five unconnected tanks. Canned food for twelve weeks at normal consumption had been divided into separate duffle sacks, a week’s rations to a sack, and stowed beneath the floor of the ladies’ cabin. The fresh produce was aboard and stowed securely. For ship lights, stove, and engine we had 120 gallons of kerosene.
There were ample replacements for all expendable and vulnerable items, from flashlight batteries to sail needles, and safety equipment was complete from flares to heliograph.
In the navigation department we had six compasses aboard (master, steering, inside telltale, lifeboat, and two spares); four watches and a chronometer (rated); three barometers and a barograph; a sextant; anemometer; inclinometer (never used); thermometers of various kinds; a complete set of signal flags; several pairs of binoculars; and, of course, the necessary navigation books, sailing directions and charts, and the 1954 nautical almanac which Takemura had left with us at his departure.
We had a spare battery radio, with batteries, wrapped in a moistureproof package, and an emergency fresh-water still. We had adequate sail repair equipment and materials, tools of every description, and a quantity of spare lumber, in case fairly extended additions or repairs proved necessary at sea.
Our medicine chest, a gift from the doctors at the Casualty Commission in Hiroshima, was unusually complete, from antibiotics to scalpels. Barbara had taken a survey course in emergency medicine under our good friend Dr. George Hazlehurst. She had passed the final examination with honors by successfully injecting a grapefruit and suturing a sausage. As Ted wryly observed, if anything went wrong with grapefruits or sausages, we were all prepared.