The Joys of Sailing in Your Ketch

John Balzar’s adroitly written “Transpac Tale: Alone Together on Swift Wood” (Aug. 2) invites many an old Eastern Pacific sea dog to compare and contrast.

Thirty-one years ago, I skippered my all-teak 36-foot gaff-headed ketch from Marina del Rey to Hawaii in an off-race year. No sleek racing sliver, portly Sea Dragon, with my two teenage children, my brother and two other teenagers as crew, rolled and pirouetted her jolly way to Honolulu in 16 1/2 days--excellent time for such a hefty little vessel.

There was no refrigeration, but we ate well. There were no satellite electronics, nor regular radio contact with other vessels. Navigation was the old-fashioned way: chronometer for longitude and sextant sights of sun and stars. What we traded for the knife-edge excitement of keenly balancing helm and barely controllable billows of swaying canvas was the pleasure of escaping the workaday competitiveness of urban life in favor of a leisurely voyage in which the spirituality of interfacing intimately with immense cosmic forces was not missed. It was an exercise in self-reliance for all of us. As we slid by Diamond Head and the twinkling lights of Honolulu after midnight, the scent of plumeria blossoms wafting down from Manoa was so overwhelming to our sea-cleansed nostrils that one of the crew had to go below to manage the overstimulation.

HARRY R. BRICKMAN

Los Angeles

* Balzar’s story, which related his adventures on board the sloop Ragtime during the Transpac race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, brought back memories of an encounter with Ragtime which will always be a cherished family memory. In 1981, after 13 years of mostly self-taught, solitary and painstaking labor, my father launched his 38-foot wooden-hulled ketch, the Lady Dee, named after my mother, Dorothea. But a serious injury incurred during construction, and age, prevented him from fulfilling his dream of sailing around the world. He contented himself with sailing only in local waters.

In 1982, while entering Long Beach Harbor and approaching the Queen Mary while on a day sail, my father elected to reverse course and head back out to sea. Coming into the lee of the Queen Mary, the winds died abruptly, yet we shifted sails and executed the 180-degree turn without losing the wind in our sails, or our headway. Sailing not far away was a black-hulled racing sloop. It reversed direction, came up alongside us, signaled “well done,” then turned back to its original course. It was the Ragtime.

My father’s gone now, as is the Lady Dee, from the family, but the memory of that encounter endures. Well done, Ragtime, for being the legend you are.

HOWARD H. GETHING

Glendale

* What a wonderfully informative article Balzar wrote. It made one feel part of the experience, and what an experience!

J. TRACEY

Costa Mesa