Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I loved this guitar and would spend hours lying on my bed just staring at it.
My mom then organized a couple of weeks of music lessons from a twenty-year-old girl
who I fell hopelessly in love with. I spent most of the lesson staring up her little skirt as
she sat carelessly in a chair just opposite me. She taught me on a tomato-red Fender Stra-
tocaster, and my attention wandered between these two beauties.
I learned to play mom's all time favorite song, Danny Boy, and I would play it for her on
the swing outside on special occasions. She would sit with her eyes closed going back to a
time and place I was too young to know or understand.
When my mother passed away, I was fortunate enough to have spent time with her at her
bedside, and the evening before she died, I instinctively knew she wouldn't be with us in
the morning. I played to her her favorite song, as she stared into space. She died the follow-
ing day, and when they lowered her into the ground next to my dear father on our estate, I
sadly played Danny Boy to her for the last time; there was not a dry eye amongst our relat-
ives and friends who were gathered about the humble grave.
The radio beacon was out of service in Aitutaki, and there was a lot of cloud cover. I could
not navigate too accurately but rather just ran on a deduced reckoning from my previous
fix. I saw lights that night and, as I was fairly close, I decided to hove to and get some
sleep. I catnapped most of the time and took constant peeks out the fore hatch. I am al-
ways so nervous when I am close to land, and there are lights in the night. I left a paraffin
lamp swinging under the boom in the cockpit. I was a little closer to my final destination
of Hawaii.
The following day, bright and early, when I went above decks to turn on the propane for tea,
before me lay the lovely island of Aitutaki in the dazzling, morning sun. She had an em-
erald green crown of foliage with puffy, white clouds about her. The beaches were golden
in the sunlight and the water was pale blue around her immediate girth, turning ever bluer
towards the deep. Yachts and boats were moving about on their way to wherever they were
going.
From the chart, I could tell there was a narrow pass on the southwest side to get through
the coral reef. I waited for a few boats to go through and saw how the outgoing tide slowed
them down. I began to worry if my little diesel engine would manage to get us through.
I entered the pass with my heart in my mouth and started up between the steep-sided coral
reefs on either side. It was very narrow in some areas, and this was where I got into diffi-
culties, as all the outgoing water bottled up here and Déjà vu was halted dead in her tracks
from the force of the tidal stream. I had the engine at full revs for at least twenty minutes
while a pall of black smoke poured out the exhaust. Déjà vu wasn't going anywhere; she
Search WWH ::




Custom Search