SAN DIEGO — Uncle Harry took me on a deep-sea fishing trip when I was 16-years-old years old. It was late in November, cold and overcast. I walked my chilled sea legs up the ramp onto the boat, along with 15 experienced anglers who staked out positions at the rail to cast their lines. The boat departed Sheepshead Bay for a day of fishing fun. The moment we left the comfort of the Bay’s smooth water the sea began to roil with great fury. The boat lurched up and down and side-to-side as waves hit the bait-ladened hull like a battering ram.
As the boat tossed, I tossed, heaving violently fifteen minutes after casting off within the sight of shore. I begged the Captain to turn around and drop me off at the dock, but my pleas went unanswered. The fish were biting and I would have to make do. I tried every conceivable position-standing at the bow, the stem, lying down, but nothing worked except my stomach, which quickly was on empty. In desperation I sat on the toilet, but the sickening smell of diesel fuel entered the bathroom and permeated my nostrils, adding to my distress. The agony lasted for eight hours, until the day I thought would never end finally did. I had not baited a hook nor cast a line. I just endured the worst day in my life.
I was so traumatized by the experience that six years later the Commanding Officer of the Coast Guard Officer Candidate School I attended wrote in my service jacket that I was not to go to sea. Seasickness was one of the motivating factors that propelled me toward flight school. When OCS was over, I was never stationed on a ship. However, after I was released from active duty in 1959, the law required I still serve an additional four years of monthly weekends, two weeks active duty, like every reserve officer. I had to go to sea every other year. Oy!
I chose a reserve cruise from Oakland, California to Juneau, Alaska through the inland passageway. I heard that portion of the trip would be in calm water. I was quite excited about the adventure and hoped I had outgrown my malady. I boarded the old World War ll cast-off Cutter in Oakland. It was three-hundred and-eleven-feet in length, with a round bottom, that made it roll excessively in stormy seas. I was assigned a stateroom with an old-salt warrant officer who was part of the regular ship’s company. I had the upper bunk, my head inches away from overhead pipes of different diameters that banged and hummed continually day and night. We sailed the next morning and soon were within the shadows of the Golden Gate Bridge, a span I had flown under and over many times. Just beyond the shadows of the bridge, there is a convergence of currents, creating an angry, boiling body of water known as “The Cotton Patch,” because of the white crown on the crest of every swirling wave. The round bottom of our ship became a rocking horse and I felt like I was back on that fishing boat.
Any sailor knows the expression,”heaving to,” associated with slowing a boat down. I will now discuss the concept of “heaving too,”which sent me retching to the rails, and recalling in excruciating memory my teen age experience as I let fly, again, and again.
Fifty miles out to sea, our crew spotted a commercial shrimp boat. The Captain ordered a “ship’s party” to board the vessel, check their license, and make sure it was current and proper, A “Long Boat” was prepared for lowering. We still used those anachronistic wooden whaleboats in 1962, the year of this adventure. The craft was manned by eight, able-bodied sailors who rowed in tandem, a coxswain at the helm. The navigator, who observed my retching, remarked, “Lieutenant Spector why don’t you go with the boarding party and take the helm. You’ll feel better on the water.” I don’t know if he was ignorant or had a mean streak in him, but boy was he wrong! Disastrously wrong! As we approached the shrimp boat, my head was bent over and I was barfing uncontrollably. I heard insane laughter on the deck and weakly raised my head for a moment, barely catching a glance at the grinning, weathered faces above me, before doubling over in disgraced agony. I must have been quite a sight for these salty codgers of the sea as we approached their vessel for our serious business.
Back on ship, I went below to my stateroom and bed. For three days of a rough stormy trip, I could only climb down out of my upper bunk bed to throw up in the sink, where it accumulated. My warrant officer roommate came and went, changing clothes and sleeping in the lower bunk. He never said a word to me and never went near the sink. After two days, the executive officer knocked and entered. “Mr. Spector, a coast guard officer has to stand watch,” he said.” I replied weakly, “ Sir I would gladly stand watch, but I can’t stand up.” He closed the door quietly behind him.
The third day we entered the Straits of Juan De Fuca, the long quiet body of water which ends after eight hours of steaming in Seattle During the passage through the straits, I recovered enough to clean up the sink, get dressed, and go to the ward room below to put some food in my scoured, vacant stomach. There I was ordered to report to the captain’s stateroom. I knocked, entered, and took a seat. I couldn’t help looking in his palm for three steel balls, but he was no Captain Queeg. He turned out to be a kindhearted, understanding commander.
“Mr. Spector, what are we going to do with you? A Coast Guard Officer has to stand watch.” I told the Captain about my history with seasickness. “My service jacket stated I was not to go to sea. Furthermore” I told him, “my legal commitment to the Coast Guard was over, and if he would buy me an airplane ticket to return home, I would resign my commission right then and there.” “Whoa, wait a minute,” he exclaimed. “I’m about to be transferred and don’t want to make waves with that kind of situation. “Look,” he said, “the rest of the trip is through the inland passageway. It’s calm all the way and absolutely spectacular. You don’t want to miss this trip. If you have a problem with your stomach while on watch, I’ll stand watch for you.” I badly wanted to continue this journey and hoped the worst was behind me. I agreed to his proposal, and retired to the officers’ wardroom.
After an overnight stay in misty Seattle, including a visit to its less than memorable World’s Fair, we departed back up through the Strait into Canadian waters. We passed Vancouver Island, sailing through an enchanting passage of dead-calm water (thank God)! The islands blocked the ocean waves from reaching the mainland with a storm-born energy typical of these latitudes and created an intoxicating scene.
The perpetual mist bathed the verdant green trees on the land on either side. The slow moving, midnight blue waters glided by the grey iron hull of our vessel. All around us was silence, except the screeching of eagles the soft rustle of the leaves gently stirred by the wind, and the incessant noise of the Cutter.
Late the next evening, we approached an extremely narrow channel, Seymour Narrows. In 1947, a gigantic rock outcrop that was a perennial danger to shipping once stood in the middle of this waterway. A great number of vessels of every size and type had smashed into the rock, and had either sunk or been severely damaged. The year-round frightful weather of rain, winds, and fog was a big factor in the disasters. The United States and Canada decided to solve the situation by dynamiting it out of existence. To accomplish this feat required the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. My memory is dim on the amount of explosives, but I believe it was relatively close to 20,000 tons of dynamite, the same amount of explosive force in the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. When the smoke cleared, there was no sign that the enormous pediment ever existed. Passage through the narrow channel, however, still required extreme caution by large ships.
The night was raven black and the air was brushed with soft white mist as we approached the narrowest part of the channel, which was about fifty yards wide. The navigator had stationed me amid ship on the starboard side to take bearings of the blinking, navigational light on shore. I used the Polaris instrument mounted on a pedestal to take the bearings. It was a serious situation, requiring intense concentration and focus. I called in numbers to the navigator every thirty-seconds on the JA Talker draped around my neck, chest and ears. The navigator received bearings consecutively from two other spotters at the bow and stern of the ship. As we got to the most critical and narrowest part of the channel, we fed him bearings every ten-seconds. He plotted these points on a chart of the waterway, making sure we were in deep water not getting too close to shore and in danger of running aground on the shallow banks. The able lieutenant J.G. called out course corrections to the captain on the bridge, who relayed it with a shout to the nearby boatswain’s mate handling the steering wheel. We safely glided passed the harrowing narrows and the remainder of the evening passed in uneventful cruising.
The next day we approached Queen Charlotte Sound. Again we were in open water, exposing the ship for two-and-a half hours to the wind-driven waves of the Pacific that felt like we were riding on top of a bucking bronco horse. I was officer of the deck on the bridge and started to turn green. The salt-encrusted boatswains mate on the wheel exclaimed as the waves kicked high, “This is more like it, the calm gets you down after a while.” I would have crowned him if I wasn’t so sick. The saintly captain came onto the bridge, took one look at me, and said, “Go below Mr. Spector, I’ll take your watch.”
Our journey took us through the Wrangell’s Narrows, a meandering body of water in a flat, treeless, wilderness delta. I was fortunate to be watch officer on the bridge as we passed this potentially dangerous, twisting and turning snake-like flow of icy blue water. One wrong turn and we would be aground, grinding our steel hull along the pebbly bottom, bending and chewing the twin screws to a twisted-flower-shape, that would bring scrap metal price at the salvage yard. Viewing the scenery that was devoid of any signs of man’s existence was not comforting. The Exec, a seasoned gray haired lieutenant commander, was in command of the helm. He ordered the speed cut to one-third power and barked out compass headings. The chief quartermaster, the most experienced boat driver on board, was manning the wheel. He twisted it like a baton for two solid hours in response to the calm, but firm, headings called out by the Exec. When it was over, and we had safely traversed the course, the chief handed control of the wheel over to a subordinate petty officer and dragged himself below for a well-earned rest.
The ship entered glacier country and drifted by blue-green mountains of ice, that occasionally shaved off pieces of itself that had dropped into the frigid water and floated off into the current like bars of soap. A message on our teletype invited all the ship’s company to a sourdough pancake breakfast in Juneau, our ultimate destination, and hosted by the niece of the late Judge Wickersham, the first federal judge of the territory of Alaska. I decided to go, not only to see the Judge’s home, but the prospect of sourdough pancakes seemed mighty tasty after six days of ship board-grub.
On the approach to Juneau, we sailed between bare, brown islands of dirt and rock. On the mainland side, we passed an old abandoned gold mine with weathered wooden buildings and a rusty ore shaft that lay on the side of the hill. We were told that there was still gold there, but it was too expensive to bring out of the mine and make a profit. Those were the days when the price of the precious metal was thirty-five dollars per ounce. (The mine reopened when the price skyrocketed years later.)
A short while later, we reached Juneau Harbor and docked at a small pier nestled in a treeless cove. Around the dock pranced several young, coatless girls, dressed in colorful, flower patterned, Hawaiian moo-moo dresses that reached down to the floor. The temperature was in the low fifties, but to the girls, it was midsummer. Their hormones were flowing, keeping them warm. Single men were scarce and the damsels were looking for romance. their hearts pinned to the front of their JC Penny catalogue coverings. the girls were a jarring contrast to the brown and gray landscape.
The ship’s company was granted liberty. Metropolitan Juneau, a town of ten thousand government-issue souls, could be traversed comfortably within an hour. The nostalgic Red Dog Saloon is my strongest memory, not because of my nonexistent drinking habits, but because of the bar’s history as a watering hole for miners, trappers, and fishermen during the Gold Rush days. There were hardly any customers in the saloon, which looked like it had been caught naked by daylight that poured through the windows. The streets were empty, except for occasional visitors like ourselves. Those were the days before the cruise ships arrived, disgorging their multitudes on shore, to crowd the streets, shops and saloons, as they sought some memory to carry back home, and justify the treasure spent to get there.
I returned to the ship in the evening. It was high tide and I climbed the steeply inclined ramp onto the deck, saluted the duty officer, and disappeared into the bowels of the ship. The next morning, fourteen of us went to Ruth Allman’s sourdough pancake feed. When we disembarked, it was low tide and I had to hold the handrail on the gangway to pull myself onto the dock. The tide change is the second greatest in the world. There is a thirty-five foot difference from high to low tide. Only the Bay of Fundy in Canada, at thirty-eight feet, is greater.
A friendly woman, slightly nervous, greeted us at the door. She had been serving these meals for five years. She invited us to sit down and enjoy the hot sourdough pancakes she had prepared, with a marvelous Dungeness crab-Louie sauce on the side. She suggested we try some of the rose-hip jelly that sat in large crocks on the table. It was delicious. As we ate, she told us, “Sourdough was the bread of the early settlers. It is dough with bacteria in it that acts as yeast when flour and water are added to the batch. The goldminers and trappers would wrap it around their bellies to keep the bacteria warm when they were out on the trail in sixty degree below zero temperature. Rose hip jelly is made from the bulb of the Alaska wild rose and is found everywhere. It was loaded with vitamin C, and during the long dark days and nights of winter, was an imperative source of essential vitamins that prevented scurvy.
The stories began to pile up. Ruth, a niece of the Judge, was raised by him and his wife. The house belonged to the Judge, and where all of his records and artifacts were stored. Ruth showed us one of the diaries, which contained the following entry; “I was the first white man who attempted to climb Mt. McKinley, the tallest mountain in North America. On the trail to the mountain I met two Indians. Around the campfire that ensued, I told them of my plans. One of the Indians commented; Judge, sheep fall off that mountain, maybe white man not do so good.” (He wasn’t successful on the climb, being stopped by an impenetrable wall of ice that was subsequently named after him.) He also wrote of days when the temperature was 50 degrees below zero, and just a little too cold to travel. The weather had to warm up to twenty degrees below zero for any extended trips.
When there was a case in Fairbanks, he had to walk and dogsled there and back, a round trip of one thousand miles. To adjudicate one notorious case, the Judge trekked to Anchorage in incredibly cold weather to convict and return to Juneau a crook known as the “Blue Parka Bandit.” The convict and the Judge slept in the same sleeping bag to keep warm on the five hundred mile trek.
The highlight of the visit for me took place later in the evening when at Ruth’s invitation I returned alone She showed me a book the Judge bought by mail from Russia in 1918. The book proudly proclaimed in English, “Printed in the Soviet Union,” but was written entirely in Russian. It was a giant of a book, three foot tall by two feet wide. It was a history of the Royal Czarist Court. Each member of the royal family, whose biography was in the book, was accompanied by an original hand painting of that personage. The illustrations were exquisitely detailed in vibrant color, showing their robes, crowns, scepters and other ornamentation. This treasured book was stolen from the Judge in 1922. Twenty years later, in an incredible coincidence, he was browsing in a bookstore in Los Angeles, found the book on a shelf, and reacquired the volume.
What I have recalled is but a smattering of the rich treasures Mrs. Allman shared with me about her uncle. The house was a museum of artifacts of early Alaska. The Judge compiled several hardbound volumes of research on Alaskan Indians, all written on onion skin paper. His personal correspondence was a treasure trove by itself. Ruth talked of a cellar full of documents and artifacts she had not yet sorted through. There were papers about the Judge’s years in the U.S. Congress as representative for the Territory, his fight to get statehood, court decisions on unique cases he ruled on, and the judicial precedence his decisions established.”
The amazing thing about this story is that the Judge first arrived in Alaska when he was fifty-four years old! He lived into his nineties. Ruth’s part in this history, and as well as her observations add to the story. This is as much a part of the story of America as any other in the rich history of the building of our nation.
The next morning, we departed Juneau harbor for the return trip home. The captain sounded the ship’s horn four times as we backed away from the dock. We had a fine liberty in this fair city. I was apprehensive about the return trip because we were taking the most direct route back to Oakland on the open sea in a single compass heading through the Gulf of Alaska. Fortunately, we had a following sea, and no storms. In a pleasant surprise, my stomach stayed as calm as the ocean water.
I was given the midwatch, which is the worst. 3:45a.m to 7:45 a.m. I was on the bridge, and the quartermaster on the wheel. There was nothing on the radar and nothing to look at straight ahead, Everything was pitch black. The bridge has a single chair, but by tradition only the captain is allowed to sit in it. After a couple of hours standing almost motionless, the cold steel deck beneath my feet felt red hot. I don’t think I exchanged any words with the helmsman during the five nights I had this duty. It was like he was mute. I now know what solitary confinement on Devil’s Island must have felt like. When I walked down the gangway in Oakland, I felt like I had been released from a penal colony.
I avoided any further sea ventures for many years, until 1982. My fiancée, Carole, (now my wife) and I went on an excursion to Mazatlan, Mexico. The airline package included a half-day trip around the harbor. I assumed the harbor would be similar to San Diego or any other harbor I’d been in-a calm refuge for, primarily, commercial ships to dock in and a multitude of interesting enterprises nestled on shore to gawk at.
We boarded the unimpressive double-decked vessel, that was coated with a mixture of old white paint blended with old and new rust. There was an air of festivity on board. A mariachi band was playing full blast and an adolescent girl was selling delicious shrimp cocktails in old-time ice cream soda glasses for a dollar. The other tourists quickly got caught up in the music and were having a great time. The boat left the dock and headed into the harbor. I could see other ships, docks, and buildings in the distance. The mariachis went topside and blasted their special brass sounds, mixed with rhythmic guitars, to stir the soul. Most of the revelers, myself included, followed them like they were “Pied Pipers,” Carole stayed below. We happily cruised, ate shrimp, and drank margaritas for fifteen minutes. People were singing their favorite tune and the obliging band played all our requests.
Then the boat changed course, made a 180-degree turn, headed toward the protective, rock-break water at the entrance to the harbor, and sailed through into the vast outer bay with no protection from the ocean waves beyond. The boat began to pitch and roll from the strong swells cascading in from the sea. After 18 years I felt trapped again and a mild panic boiled in my mind as I recalled my past sea-sick suffering. I began to feel nauseous and held on tightly to the bench I was sitting on, hoping I could make it through the ordeal. The band stopped playing and people put down their glasses and headed for the rails to dispose of used shrimp cocktail.
Carole arrived and gently said, “Ira, I think you ought to go below, you’ll feel better.” “No Carole,” I replied, “let me stay here and ride it out, I’m afraid to move.” Carole repeated her request with a little more firmness, “ I know you’ll feel better down below.” “Please honey, let me stay here,” I implored I was in great discomfort. Then she said, with great but calm firmness, “I think you should go below, there’s smoke coming out of the hold!”
Without another word, we both quickly climbed down the stairs and, sure enough, there was a substantial amount of smoke pouring out of the hold. A very concerned shrimp-selling young girl looked down into the hazy darkness from where the smoke was emanating. Carole and I took positions on a bench towards the rear of the vessel. I calculated, that if we had to jump overboard, we would not exit the stern, because we could get caught in the propeller. Instead we would jump off the side to avoid getting sucked into the blades.
Strangely there was no fire bell or horn blowing. The ship didn’t slow or turn around. Fire hoses did not appear, and no crew members running around. Thoughts and feelings of seasickness disappeared with the more immediate problem. We were the only passengers on the lower deck and the others up above were oblivious to the smoke problem. We kept our eyes sharply focused on the hold. Above us, people were emptying the contents of their stomachs, which showered past our deck to the water below. Eventually the smoke diminished and two crewmen emerged carrying a fire extinguisher, cursing in Spanish. They went to the fantail and started messing around with the extinguisher. Eventually, they disappeared and the vessel kept plowing ahead like nothing had happened.
Several questions went through my head. What had been on fire? How did they put it out? We never found out because of the language barrier but those thoughts were with me through the rest of the trip and saved my shrimp. Our unfortunate, fellow passengers kept barfing until we returned inside the breakwater and calm water once more.
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Ira Spector is a freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection, with slight revisions, was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.