Rites of Passage

From their anchorage at the southern end of Rindja Island in Indonesia, they watched Komodo Dragons, as long as broomsticks, parade up and down the beach. At dawn and dusk, it was monkeys. Deer and pigs also appeared…all within a couple of hundred feet from where Lawrence (Laurie) Pane sat with his wife, Carole Wells, and 9-year-old son, Ryan, on the deck of their 53-ft. sailboat. That was the fall of 1997, ‘Year Two’ of their six-and-a-half-year circumnavigation. And their adventures were just beginning. They had yet to discover hidden Roman mosaics in Turkey and walk under Angel Falls in Venezuela. The three-person crew’a middle-aged couple and a third grader’was not your average sailing team. In fact, Carole, an elementary school teacher, was prone to seasickness and new to traveling outside the United States. She and Laurie had met just two years earlier when he answered a personal ad she placed in the Los Angeles Times; he was a widowed father of a six-year-old child, and she was divorced with no children. Their relationship as a family was just beginning when they set sail from Marina del Rey in March 1996. The three-way partnership they developed on board and a good-humored but firm system of rules for living on and off the boat enabled them to travel safely and sanely around the world. ‘My advice to people who want to go cruising is: If you don’t have a kid, go rent one,’ says Laurie, a tall Australian with an accent as playful as his sense of humor. ‘Kids are the greatest ambassadors you can have; they get us to places we wouldn’t have dreamed of getting into or being taken to if we were by ourselves.’ Sailing around the globe was a dream that Laurie and his late wife, Patricia Mulryan, had shared and planned for since Ryan was a baby. An experienced boatman, Laurie had grown up fishing on the coral reefs off North Queensland and, later, racing catamarans in the Brisbane River and Moreton Bay. He and Patricia went on bareboat charters, principally in Tonga and the Whitsunday Islands. Ryan’s first sailing trip was a three-week charter in the Whitsundays when he was less than a year old. The couple, who lived in the Palisades Highlands, had even purchased the ‘Dolphin Spirit,’ a 1987 Mason 53 center cockpit cutter built and equipped for extended offshore cruising. When Patricia died after a two-year battle with cancer, Laurie focused intently on making their dream a reality for himself and for Ryan. Under Laurie’s guidance, Carole learned to sail, and she became an enthusiastic partner in the planning of their circumnavigation. They took classes in ‘medicine at sea’ as well as weather forecasting, sail repair, engine maintenance, refrigeration and navigation, among others. ‘A lot of planning goes into it,’ Laurie says, adding that weather- and season-related schedules had to be kept. ‘You have to be out of the South Pacific around November through March because that’s the cyclone season. The proper time to go up the Red Sea is January and February. You can only cross the Atlantic Ocean between November and February because you’ve got to miss the hurricane season.’ The ‘Dolphin Spirit’ became their mobile home, with three staterooms (two of which were Ryan’s territory) as well as a salon, galley and navigation station below deck. The boat was equipped with all the comforts of a house, including three televisions, three computers, a microwave, a blender, refrigeration, hot and cold running water, and even a washer and dryer. They also had a desalinator capable of turning 20 gallons of seawater into drinking water in an hour. ‘The cruising life is really quite special in a number of ways,’ Laurie says. ‘One is, you are very self-sufficient’you look out for yourself, you generate your own electricity, you make your own water, you’ve got to go out and shop locally, you do your own maintenance. If you get sick of a particular place, within reason, you can pick up anchor and move to another.’ In order to assure they would not get bored during long passages, they packed 183 videotapes to watch, 318 CDs to listen to and more than 200 books to read. Ryan became a master fisherman and a certified scuba diver while on board. Other than ‘first mate,’ Carole’s most important role on the boat was that of Ryan’s primary teacher in the maritime classroom they created. ‘I’m very structured, and Ryan had schooling every day,’ says Carole, who created her own curriculum after using the Calvert School system for the first year. ‘We totaled up his hours so that when he had a certain number, he earned his vacation days.’ Part of Ryan’s education was to learn some of the language, geography, history and culture of each country he visited. He learned to draw while sketching Roman ruins in Turkey, mastered playing ‘F’r Elise’ on the keyboard while crossing the Indian Ocean, became fluent in Spanish during a winter in Spain and studied Shakespeare’s ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ in Verona. ‘By the time we got to the Caribbean, Ryan was doing all the talking on the telephone and on the radio with people who were speaking Spanish,’ Carole says. ‘He did all the translating for us. He speaks much better Spanish than I’ve ever spoken.’ To separate the parent and teacher roles, they developed a charade in which Ryan would formally say ‘goodbye’ to his parents and greet his teacher (Carole) and principal (Laurie). After school he ‘went home’ and reported to his parents on the day’s activities. ‘It was sort of a matter of survival to get along,’ Ryan says about living and studying on the boat with his family. The experience ‘forced me into developing a lot more than I would have otherwise. I was just alone with adults and it made me mature.’ Ryan says the most challenging aspect of life at sea was ‘probably the lack of interaction with my peers,’ because he would meet other children his age about every three months and then have to say ‘goodbye.’ However, when he returned home at age 15, he found the classroom environment to be ‘sort of an impediment to learning.’ When Ryan, now entering his sophomore year at UC Santa Barbara, tried to learn Japanese in college, he felt the other students were a little distracting. S ailing at less than six knots most of the time, they covered 40,000 miles and visited 56 countries. It took them 19 days to cross the South Pacific (the first leg of their journey) and they only saw four boats during the entire passage. One of the ships was a fishing trawler changing direction to miss colliding with the ‘Dolphin Spirit’ when they were just two days from the Marquesas Islands, their first stop. From French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Tonga and Fiji, they sailed to Australia, where they spent about six months before heading up through Indonesia to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, then across to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Wanting to get away from modern life, they tried to stay out of the big cities, traveling instead to areas like the north part of Flores Island in Indonesia and Suakin, Sudan. ‘We have one major rule when getting off the boat,’ Laurie says, referring to etiquette in dealing with local people. ‘It is their country, their customs, their language. You either do it the way they do it or you go somewhere else. You do not complain about the way it’s done.’ This philosophy was especially relevant during the sometimes long and tedious process of going through immigration and customs in the various ports. ‘In the Sudan, for example, you have to have an agent,’ Laurie says. ‘An agent basically takes you through the process of entering the country and you pay him for that privilege.’ However, when they ventured from Suakin to Port Sudan, the nearest big city, for ‘the best milkshakes in Africa,’ they were arrested by the Secret Police, supposedly for ‘taking pictures of military things.’ They later found out it was because their driver had not paid the appropriate fee at one of the police checkpoints. Another close call came out at sea when they were approaching Israel and missed a check-in phone call to the Israeli navy. ‘We were being circled by an Israeli gunboat,’ he says. ‘As soon as we got into the port, two officials came on board and opened every single locker in the boat checking for bombs.’ For most of their journey, they traveled with a small but diverse group of other cruisers’Texans, Canadians and Swedes’whom they first linked up with in Bora Bora in July 1996. This company proved particularly helpful when traveling up the Malacca Straits in Malaysia, which have a reputation for pirates. They journeyed up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean, spending their first winter (November 1998) in Antalya, Turkey. Their second winter layover was in Barcelona. They crossed the Atlantic and sailed down to Trinidad, Venezuela and Colombia, through the Panama Canal and then back to San Diego, ‘proving the world was round because we kept pointing in the one direction and we ended up back where we started,’ Laurie says with a smile. They were in Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela in the Caribbean, on September 11, 2001. ‘We just happened to be in a harbor where we were able to get television reception,’ says Carole, whose mother called from the States to tell them what was happening. ‘We saw it all. We were wondering, at first, ‘Should we be going home?” ‘We kept going,’ Laurie adds. ‘The world didn’t change after 9/11. Americans’ view of the world changed, but the world didn’t change. The only places that we had to chain our dingy to the boat was in the Caribbean and in Mexico. In all of the Islamic countries’Indonesia, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Malaysia’we locked the boat but we never took special precautions, never felt unsafe, never even came close to feeling unsafe.’ Laurie says he would set off today and sail the same route all over again, with the exception of the Red Sea. The larger concern, to him, is that people don’t care about what they experienced. ‘There are three questions people ask when they hear that we’ve been cruising,’ Laurie says. ‘The first is: Did you have any bad weather? And we say, ‘No.’ ‘Did you strike any pirates?’ ‘No.’ And the third questions is: ‘What about them Dodgers?’ People are just not all that interested.’ ‘Except that they love the book,’ Carole adds, referring to ‘Chasing Sunsets: A Practicing Devout Coward’s Circumnavigation with His Wife and Son,’ written from all three of their perspectives. They published it in 2005, three years after they completed their circumnavigation. ‘I take a great deal of pride in the fact that we sailed all the way around the world and we never had sustained winds at sea over 35 knots,’ Laurie says, explaining the title of the book. His advice to people thinking about sailing around the world is ‘Live the dream.’