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Reaching Home
Bernie arrived in the Caribbean, at St. Johns, on April 23 and
made it to Beaufort, NC a month later. On May 29th he returned
to where he’d put the boat in the water.. at Oriental.
A light rain was falling. And so were some tears. After hugging
his family Bernie, standing on the dock, wept over the pulpit
of his boat. It was a cry of joy that came from having done
something he had felt, “driven to do for 20 years and
by God, here I was, after all the aloneness of being out. To
be around people again, I think brought it out.”
Ten years ago, he says, he’d have pushed those tears back
and hidden them. Now he calls it “a lovely, cathartic
thing to let out.”
Next Up - Selling the Boat
Just about 24 hours after he arrived in Oriental, Bernie had
moved his boat to the Oriental Harbor Marina. And he strung
two “For Sale: Just Circumnavigated” signs on Sea
Bird’s pulpit.
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“That’s
a hard thing to digest.”
In his circumnavigation he says, he met some ‘absolutely
lovely women’ who for various reasons didn’t want
to travel or couldn’t travel. Sea Bird, he says, “was
the one woman who would travel with me. It’s been a great
4-1/2 years, we’ve had lots of adventures. We’ve
run over shipwrecks, hit logs, run across ghost ships in the
horse latitudes.”
All
of which makes it difficult now for him to, as he puts it, ”turn
around and say, ‘well honey … you gotta go.’
But he is.
“I
need to take a break now.” Bernie says he plans to spend
time with his family at their tree farm – and work on
a house in Caldwell County. He doesn’t want to split time
between his inland home and a boat on the coast. Not yet anyway.
And being on land is important at the moment.
Bernie says he wants to “catch up a bit with the mainstream,
come back to the base.”
Avoiding Eccentric Old Man in
Old Boat Syndrome
That idea of a base is important. As much as he liked being
in solitude, Bernie suggests that for travelers who go “winging
off alone” there is a risk of going off in to “deep
space. And I don’t want that to happen.”
Or, as he puts it more bluntly, “I don’t want to
be an eccentric old man on an old boat, who can’t connect
any more.” ( Asked about that he noted that he had seen
one two days earlier. ) "I don’t want to become an
eccentric old man… or even a 40 year old one!”
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Chatting with boaters at the Town Dock
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“One
of the big things I‘ve learned out on my alone so long
is, I really like people. People are fascinating,” he
says emphatically. Being isolated on ocean passages for so long,
he thinks may have made him “ thrown myself in twice as
hard” when he would get to land and talk to people.
Traveling Many Miles For A Camel
On the day he returned to Oriental Bernie talked about visiting
with a group of Aborigine men in Australia and trying to explain
the distance he had traveled to get there. Lacking a piece of
paper, a pack of cigarettes was brought out (though not as an
illustration of the crop of Bernie’s home state) and opened
up to draw upon. With only one of the men in the group having
seen a compass, describing his boat travel was a challenge.
Bernie’s been doing a lot of describing. The Winston Salem
Journal has published dozens of his dispatches sent along the
way. Now, he wants to do a lot more of that. To write not only
about the places and people he met and photographed on this
trip but about travels in the future. He has taken to keeping
a small note pad in his pocket.
ISO: Editor. Must Travel
Bernie is not planning another circumnavigation.. But he’d
like to sail again to faraway places, some of the ones he missed
this trip.
And in another departure, he says next time he goes out he doesn’t
necessarily want to go by himself. Somewhere along the way on
this trip, when discussing writing and photography with some
other travelers, he says he hit a turning point. “I’d
really love nothing more than to be able to travel and have
a partner who’d be able to write and collaborate on projects
like that.“ He laughs that his reasons may be self-serving.
“It’s tough to edit yourself. It’s a pain
in the ass!”
So, was that a Personal Ad ISO an Editor?
Bernie laughs. Yeah, he says, and he’d like that person
to be a photographer too.
“I’ve lightened up”
It’s a good bet Sea Bird weighs less coming back than
it did when Bernie left Oriental 4-1/2 years ago.
“I’ve lightened up.” He says. The fridge and
radio are gone. The oven, over the side. The autopilot, he says,
never made it out of Iredell County. The big wind generator
did, but didn’t come back. Nor did the acetylene torch.
Nor the radar. His grandmother’s Singer sewing machine
“hit the water in the Bay of Islands,” New Zealand.
For that one, Bernie says, “I’m definitely gonna
burn.”
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In the salon
of "Sea Bird" - note the giraffe next to the
heater.
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And
in their place, he’s not added much. He says he’s
not a collector and didn’t stuff his boat with relics
or a lot of things from places he visited. Down below on Sea
Bird there isn’t much evidence that he and the boat have
been around the world, other than the mola pinned to the varnished
wood near a port light and the three-and-a-half foot tall wooden
giraffe he got for three dollars off of a ‘scrap heap
in South Africa’ which stands next to the heater.
The collection of music he began with is down to “one
Gore Vidal tape and John Boy and Billy’s “RockNRollRadio”.
Meanwhile, 'The Bee Gee’s Greatest Hits' wind indicators,
he notes, “blew off the shrouds Good Hope way.”
“Sometimes silence is better.”
There is of course, the bigger collection of books than he set
out with. Which is appropriate. What Bernie Harberts has brought
back from the 4-1/2 year trip are stories, and a desire to wrestle
them to paper.
So,
why did Bernie Harberts start and end his circumnavigation
in Oriental? He said he had been through Oriental years
earlier with a plywood boat he built and he and his father
had started another trip here. “And I just liked the
name, Oriental. You sail around the world, you want to go
to Oriental. You don’t want to go to.. “ Bernie
chose his words “ I don’t’ want to put
down Beaufort. But Oriental? They have a dragon in the pond!
Have you seen that thing?” Local reporters on board
Sea Bird cast a glance and Bernie asked, “Is it still
there?”
Told that the dragon was last seen in the Duck Pond a few
years ago, Bernie asked, “You do sill have the Croaker
Festival???”
When one reporter suggested he might work toward bringing
back the dragon, Bernie asked if he could judge the Croaker
Queen contest instead. |
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see Photos on Page 6
