Page 57: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (June 2005)

Most mariners can appreciate a good ending to a bad voyage. Many of us have been in heavy weather and felt our ship just wasn't big enough. I can recall being in stormy seas aboard a U.S. Navy ocean- going fleet tug and thinking my ship was just too tiny for those big waves.

Compared to the craft that William

Longyard tells us about in his book, "A

Speck of on the Sea," my 195-ft. tug is a giant. This compendium is itself an epic voyage into the world of epic voyages: journeys of daring, desperation, danger and drama. These are heroic stories about great ocean adventures accomplished in the most unusual and smallest craft imagi- nable. Some incredible tales result from necessity or calamity, such as a shipwreck or a plane crash. Longyard sheds light on legends, offering evidence that kayaking

Inuits were the original long-distance solo- voyagers who sailed as far as Europe. We get the whole story of cast-off Captain

William Bligh, set adrift near the Friendly

Islands by the unfriendly crewmembers of

HMS Bounty in 1789. He didn't set out to perform an amazing feat in a small boat.

But despite the unanticipated conse- quences, Bligh and his shipmates traveled 4,000 westward to Kupang, Timor with just one casualty, a sailor killed very early in the voyage in an altercation with the

Tongans. Naval aviators Harold Dixon,

Anthony Pastula and Gene Aldrich ditched their Douglass Devastator in the drink in the South Pacific early in World

War II. They survived their crash and crawled into a small inflatable rubber raft to discover their boat contained no water or food or even a signaling device. Their survival gear consisted of a .45 pistol, a whistle and rubber repair kit for the boat.

They had no success shooting birds or catching fish with their makeshift hook (fabricated from a spring mechanism from an ammo clip); but they did have some modest success spear- ing fish and birds, with a spear fashioned from a small knife. Any landfall would be welcome after being adrift for 34 days, but they were just as concerned about making landfall on a Japanese-held island as they were about food and water. They finally came ashore at the isolated Pukapuka, in the isolated

Danger Islands, part of the isolated Cook

Islands. Let's just say they were isolated, but safe! And they had traveled a distance of more than a thousand miles from where they went down! Some of these voyages were planned with a larger purpose, and some with really no purpose at all. The most unusual voyages were intentional journeys by unusual mariners seeking fame, fortune, fun, or something not even they could fathom.

Some adventurers are driven by an idea.

American boat builder O. K. Ingersoll set out to build a better lifeboat, and sailed his

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YEARBOOK

Set Sail on an Epic Voyage

A Speck on the Sea

Epic Voyages of the Most

Improbable Vessels

By William H. Longyard

Reviewed by Edward Lundquist

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