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Eighteen
months later, he quit his job.
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Bernie in the salon of "Sea Bird"
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He
says he took all his work pants and made shorts out of them.
But, he laughs that he was new to hemming and all the pockets
stuck out below. “So I went to the Salvation Army and
bought some decent shorts.”
Meanwhile,
he’d outfitted Sea Bird – he kept the name and the
hailing port, Doolie, NC. He added a few touches of home. A
gas tank was cut up, windows added and affixed to the companionway
hatch so he would look out from below without getting wet. And
a tractor seat that he found in a shed at the house on Lake
Norman was lashed to the pulpit. A reminder of the farm, it
also had a use. “What’s good about the tractor seat,”
Bernie says, ‘is that it’s in FRONT of all the spray,
so when you’re bashing to weather, it’s one of only
two dry places,” on deck. (The other being the more difficult
perch at the top of the mast.) “It’s perfectly dry,
I highly recommend it. … give or take a gale.”
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The tractor seat in the bow pulpit, and Bernie shows how
it's used...
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On
November 15th, 1998 Bernie took off from Oriental, and began
to circle the globe.
Preparing to take that first passage out to sea can be daunting
and it was for Bernie, when, a few days into his trip, he was
in Beaufort. “I was feeling… Lord, just as nervous
as could be.” He walked along the town docks, looking
out at the boats from all over that were there.
Bernie says one boat in particular was an inspiration…
and gave him yet another goal for his trip. “There was
a little steel boat down there and it was from Whangerei, New
Zealand. I thought, ‘My God, if he can get up here.. a
little Kiwi doing that…I should be able to go down there.’”
After that, New Zealand became a destination. He ended up spending
a year and a half on New Zealand’s north side, working
with herders, traveling by thumb, and absorbing some of the
accent.
Good Luck Being Unlucky
About ten days out of Beaufort on the way to St. Thomas, his
engine -- “this old hand-cranked Volvo… a great
big old bloody thing ” -- died after a line got caught
in the prop and shot the transmission. “I needed a $10,000
engine and didn’t have a job,” Bernie says. He notes
that welders and nurses are the kings of wage-earning ‘out
there’ among cruisers, and he was not a welder or a nurse.
“I was a horse trainer in the Caribbean”
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"Sea Bird" under sail - photo by Deni McIntyre
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But
he emphasizes, “I’ve had really good luck being
unlucky. It’s the greatest thing.”
A water taxi driver in St. Thomas, hearing his story “said
he knew some girl with a crazy horse on St. Thomas. So I spent
a little time with this horse, then started with some more people
there in stables. It snowballed.” Soon, he was giving
clinics, judging horseshows, arranging for cruise ships to buy
and train horses for passengers who came to the islands.
Buying and training horses became his on and off job over the
next few years. “It was a riot, “ Bernie laughs
noting that he would continue forward with his circumnavigation,
leave the boat in a place, such as Grenada, Colombia, Tahiti
and then “backtrack and fly over everything I’d
sailed, just to train horses.”
“It
is an odd way to finance a trip” he says, but in keeping
with that idea of being lucky at being unlucky: “The moral
of this is if I hadn’t run over that damn rope, I’d
have missed that whole thing, that whole experience, those people,
and not gotten any of those stories.”
When
the TownDock crew got to the harbor Thursday we found
4 members of the media already assembled. We're used to
seeing the Pamlico News at events - but this was the Winston-Salem
Journal plus two freelance photojournalists. They had
cameras with huge lenses - rather more impressive than
our Kodak. We were intimidated by those big lenses.
We were asked "Do people complete circumnavigations
here often?"
This was our chance to intimidate them with our salty
nautical knowledge.
"All
the time" we replied with confidence..."but
we've never seen a camera that big before."
Proving they shared our sense of humor, the "Oriental
press corps" posed for a
photo we won't often see at the harbor - click
here.
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the story continues on Page 3
