Two days later, on June 10, at 150° 20′ West Longitude, we crossed the equator at about 2100 and were, for the first time in our lives, in the Southern Hemisphere.
Had our Equator Crossing Celebration. Menu included roast chicken, cranberry sauce, brown rice, spinach, olives, pumpernickel, chicken broth, hot tea, peaches, fresh-baked “Equator” cakes. Also, there were individual place cards, paper hats, and candy favors, courtesy of Jessica. A gala time indeed, which began with a splash when hot broth spilled in Nick’s lap. But no harm done, since we had plenty of broth.
As far as the operation of the boat was concerned, we were proceeding smoothly. We had finally settled our two immediate problems, the log—we now used the Small Log with a correction factor—and the topmast, which we had repaired and restepped. Now, for the first time, we carried our full canvas: main, mizzen, foresail, genoa jib, mizzen staysail, topsail, and top jib. I wished there were some way we could take a picture, as we had never seen ourselves fully decked out.
On this trip we trailed a fishing line but only occasionally did we catch an addition to the menu. Near the equator, however, the man on midnight watch pulled in a long, thin, toothed fish, which looked like nothing we had ever seen before. It definitely did not look edible. In the morning I hunted in vain through my book on Deep Sea Fishes. Suddenly Barbara had an inspiration.
“I’m sure I’ve seen a picture of that fish somewhere!” she insisted. She ran her eye along the titles of the books in our shelves and pulled out Kon-Tiki.
“There it is!” she announced. She pointed triumphantly to a photograph of the gempylus, or snake mackerel, which had found its way aboard the raft at about the same latitude. Our visitor was its twin brother—snakelike body, vicious needle-sharp teeth in an undershot jaw, saucer eyes, and all. Kon-tiki’s gempylus, we read, had been the first specimen ever found alive, so we recognized our catch as something a bit out of the ordinary. Sacrificing all the spare alcohol on board (methylated spirits, rubbing alcohol from the medicine chest, and just a splash or two of gin), we popped our trophy into a spare five-gallon can and covered him with spirits. I didn’t know exactly what we were going to do with him, but he seemed too unusual to discard.
About this time we made a discovery which was to have far-reaching consequences. Crawling around on the deck we found a number of glossy, hard-shelled, beetle-like insects. The first one or two I captured and placed in a glass jar, thinking them isolated specimens of an insect found hundreds of miles from the nearest land. As more turned up, however, I reconsidered. Had they actually boarded us on the high seas or were they stowaways? And, if the latter, where had they hidden, and what damage might they be expected to do? Eventually we were to find out, with distressing consequences.
On June 18 in anticipation of our arrival in Tahiti—and in honor of Father’s Day—Barbara and Jessica presented me with a French flag they had made. Like our international signal flags, it was concocted from flag material I had bought in a job lot from my old standby back in Kure, Japan: the BCOF salvage depot. This lot—one of my “sight unseen” bargains—consisted of a couple of bushels of assorted ensigns, in conditions ranging from brand-new to moth-eaten. Among them were flags for Russia and Red China, each about the size of a badminton court, and all of them made in Sydney, Australia—a circumstance which we found mildly curious.
We were now about 12° South and had to be careful to give Matahiva, to the east, a wide berth. We passed it in the night, and set a course to clear Tetiaroa, north of Tahiti. Now that we were approaching our landfall, the problem of communications again became crucial. Although Mickey and Moto were improving rapidly in their ability to understand English, occasional incidents served to remind me that much of our speech was restricted to highly selective bands, like a radiotelephone.
For example, if I wanted the figures from the log, it was necessary to tune in to the proper wave length: “What is the log?” If I forgot and, poking my head up through the hatch, inquired breezily “What are we making?” I would be greeted by a polite but blank stare. The same applied to any of the other dozens of circumlocutions which I might use with Ted: “How’re we doing?” or “Has our speed picked up (or dropped)?” or even “What’s the log say?”