“Do they have to crawl around on their hands and knees?” we heard one citizen demand, eying the two feet of cabin that is raised above deck level.
“They came all the way from Hiroshima,” a man explained to his companion. Obviously he had read the newspaper.
The girl beside him let out a little cry as she spotted our bobtailed Mi-ke sleeping in the furled mainsail. “Oh, look at the poor little pussycat!” she crooned. “It must have lost its tail in the atom bomb!”
In Wellington we said good-bye at last to a quiet, but not particularly attractive, deck passenger—the gempylus, or snake mackerel, that we had caught and preserved on our passage from Hilo to Papeete. We had had some correspondence with Dr. Falla, of the Wellington Museum, and now we turned our specimen over to him with accompanying newspaper fanfare. “Snake Mackerel Arrives!” proclaimed headlines on the front page and we were reminded again of how little it takes to titillate the reading interest of so remote a country as New Zealand. Accompanying the article was a picture of our unprepossessing-looking creature, curled into a tight U-shape, just as it had solidified in the can. It was obvious that it would need considerable expert attention to restore color and natural form before it would be ready for display.
Meanwhile, we were making preparations for our crossing of the Tasman, mostly a matter of laying in provisions, as we had given the ship a thorough overhaul in Auckland. Another boathiker was signed on for this passage: Peter Callander, a sensitive and intelligent young Britisher who was looking for deep-sea cruising experience and promised to be an enjoyable companion for Ted and a help to Barbara.
We sailed on March 5, with the promise of a southerly to push us through the strait, a promise that was not kept. Cook Strait had fought us coming in and it fought us going out. Unable to make progress against a fresh northerly and heavy seas, we crossed the strait and I checked the charts for a likely anchorage along the coast of South Island. There was a choice of two, but one was suspiciously empty of soundings, so I elected to backtrack ten miles downwind to a better-marked anchorage, Weary Bay. Once again my fellow crew members made it obvious from their attitudes that they felt I was being overcautious, and when I insisted on setting an anchor watch there was even more audible dissent.
I think we were all a little jittery about the passage, particularly as we had only recently been told, in graphic detail, about two yachts that had been lost, with all their crews, in the course of a race across the strait only the year before. We lay uneasily at anchor and even though I had set an anchor watch, my rest was disturbed. I was more than annoyed, therefore, when I found Mickey sound asleep in his bunk during the period of his watch. He apologized profusely, and promised it would never happen again.
Once again the ever-recurring dilemma presented itself. The only sensible thing to do with a delinquent or mutinous crew member would be to fire him, for the safety of the ship. But how could I fire Mickey when I hadn’t hired him in the first place? To sever our relationship now would mean putting back to Wellington and waiting for an indefinite period until passage could be arranged for him to Japan. On the other hand, to make it clear that I intended to terminate the association as soon as we reached Sydney would certainly do nothing to make for smooth crew relationships on the potentially difficult crossing of the Tasman. Again I compromised with my better judgment, accepted Mickey’s apology, and hoped that all would work out for the best. This solution was not an easy one for me, personally, as I am not a patient man by nature nor do I take kindly to mutiny. However, I was learning patience, a lesson I sorely needed.
The south wind finally arrived in the early morning and we began to work our way through the strait. By nightfall we had recovered our lost ground and made good progress, but we found the going very tricky at the northern end, where the currents were strong and unpredictable. It was another day before we had made a safe offing, and I had a deeper appreciation of the passages in Cook’s Journal in which he describes his own difficulties in this area, which came near to wrecking his ship.
Once again, after a wistful looking backward to friends left behind and things undone, we settled into the timeless routines of life afloat, with Peter to continue the galley boy arrangement that meant so much to our cook. It was good to have leisure to relax, to get acquainted with one another again, and to sort out our impressions of the country we had just left before plunging into the whirl of the one that lay ahead.