BCA Pioneer Interviews: Graham Darby, Part 1

I joined the BCA Currents team in 2024, with the idea of doing a series of interviews with our Pioneer Members. After many delays (due to personal and technical issues) I am pleased to report that the following interview, with Graham Darby, will be the first of several.

The recent passing of long-time BCA member Stephen Carlman has lent more urgency and importance to recording these stories before they are lost. I have two more interviews in the works, and others will follow as fast as time and availability permits.

Bringing this to fruition would not have been possible without transcription by Donna Sassaman, and the support and assistance of Barb Peck, Jennifer Handley, and Kate Swangard.

I hope that you enjoy reading these interviews as much as I have enjoyed conducting them.

Interview with Graham Darby

Graham Darby is one of the early members of the BCA, having joined the club when it was founded in 1978. He was already an experienced Bluewater cruiser when he joined, and was happy to share experiences and advice with other sailors. I was excited for the opportunity to speak with Graham about his time on the open water, much of which took place in the 1970s – long before the widespread availability of the modern sailing electronics that we now take for granted.

This interview will be published in two parts. It has been lightly edited for clarity and accuracy.

Bluewater Sailing, 1970s Style

Barrie (B): What boat did you start out in?

Graham (G): I had a boat here [in Victoria]. My first offshore was when I crewed on a ferro cement schooner between here and California, called Patricia Ann. That got me hooked, really hooked (chuckles).

B: What year was that?

G: 1970. Back here, there was a boat for sale that had been in the Vic-Maui race, a beautiful-looking boat. It was kind of flimsy, and we sailed it for a couple of years. It sold really quickly.

B: Do you remember what make it was?

G: It was a Hughes 38. I think it’s still around – Kookaburra. Whoever bought it from me chartered it out. I don’t think it left here again. Oh, it sailed lovely, but it was too light and I wasn’t going to take it all apart and reinforce it. And at the time, they were selling Nicholson 35s around here and I thought, “That’s the boat I need,” and a lot of people thought that. So I ended up going back to England and buying a one- or two-year-old Nicholson 35. It was pretty well equipped. It had things like an autopilot of the time, a Perkins diesel, and quite a few sails. Anyway, we fitted it out, put on a brand-new wind vane, a Hydrovane. It was on the east coast of England. The guy who started that company, Derek Daniels, put it on. It’s like an original Hydrovane!

Anyway, I left there in 1975. This is 1975 and there are virtually no electronics at all. We had a VHF radio – an old one – that only had a few channels. We had to buy a different crystal for each channel, right? And our log was a spinner that we hung off the back.

B: That could be in a museum now!

G: Well, I still have [the log] in the basement. And a chronometer, stopwatch, and sextant. I learned all that in Vancouver from the Jib Set [Sailing Club]. That’s how I learned navigation. So, navigation was pretty crude – all this fiddling around looking at charts and bits of paper. It would take half an hour to figure out a position, and then you would mark it on a chart and sort of draw a 50-mile circle around it, and say, “I know that I’m somewhere in there!” And that’s how I navigated all the way. We left England and didn’t stop anywhere until Madeira. Then the Marianas, across the Atlantic, did a few of the Channel Islands, through the Panama Canal, and all the way from Panama to the Marquesas in one trip. We spent weeks at sea.

B: That’s like a four- or five-week journey, isn’t it?

G (chuckling): How long did it take? I know we had a dirty bottom. It took…49 days, 49 days!

B: And knowing where you were within 50 miles!

G: It was quite pleasant. And at that time in French Polynesia, they hadn’t had a hurricane for 40 years and boats were pretty rare. If there were 200 cruising boats there that year, I would be surprised. We stayed all year. We stayed through what is now called hurricane season.

B: This was what year?

G: It was ’76, ‘77. And then we sailed up to Hawaii and back here.

B: So basically you went from England, across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, to the Marquesas, spent a year…

G: Actually, through all of French Polynesia to Maupiti, so past Bora Bora. It was like two or three months in Bora Bora. There were a lot of friendly people. I love Polynesia.

B: Then direct to Hawaii and then Vancouver Island?

G: Yes. (Sigh) Then you have to readjust to living in your community and trying to find work and make money. We ended up going up the coast to Kitimat. I lived ten years in Kitimat, working for Alcan, making lots of money and refitting the boat. The boat was worn out after the first voyage.

B: New rigging? New sails?

G: It needed lots of stuff. Oh, and I changed the cockpit. On the way back from Hawaii – I think Pukahara was with me on the way back from Hawaii – we took a wave that filled the cockpit. A hundred gallons or so, a huge amount. So, I modified the cockpit and put in a through-hull deck.

B: And reduced the volume a bit?

G: Yeah, and put in big scuppers going out the back, things like that; lots of things changed.

B: This is the Nicholson 35?

G: Yeah. I actually still own the boat. Everything is worn out. Literally everything needs renewing. I’m just waiting for the right young person to give it to! (Laughing)

B (chuckling): You know, I work at Trotac half time, half the year. We sail May to September. But whenever we see a young person coming in saying they’ve been given a boat, we just smile because we know that their entire paycheque is coming into Trotac for some time to come!

G: It’s still a bargain. You know, you could live on it downtown for a fraction of the rent for an apartment.

A Return to Cruising Life

G: Anyway, then we went off again. (I had a new wife by then.)

B: Who went with you this time?

G: This is Linda, Linda Darby. We actually got married, in Kitimat.

B: I just want to pause here for a second… You’re away again?

G: Down the coast to San Francisco. It was really late in the year. October? Yeah, October.

B: What year was that?

G: 1991. And now, I had this GPS, a second-hand, used GPS, a thousand dollars. It could pick up three satellites in about 15 minutes; it could give you the position and the course you were sailing…and that was about it!

B: And then you have to transpose that onto a paper chart.

G: I quit using the sextant. There was just no point. Celestial navigation took hours. I kept the stuff around, just in case the GPS didn’t work.

B: Did you ever have experience with SatNav? Or did you skip that and go from sextant to GPS?

G: Oh, I never could afford that. When I first crossed the Atlantic, there was no SatNav. I think it happened while we were sailing. But it was like $40,000.

B: More expensive than the boat!

G: Yeah. So, anyway, we went from here to California in a glorious October gale. You know, we really roared down there. I remember, we arrived in San Francisco on a Sunday afternoon or Sunday mid-day, or something like that. We were all wrapped up in our cruiser suits. We sailed under the Golden Gate, and everyone was out for a Sunday sail wearing shorts and tee-shirts!

So we went to Mexico when the hurricane season was over and then we sailed to the Marquesas, out to Hawaii, back down to American Samoa, and then down to Tonga and over to Fiji.

Going back, the first time we were in the Marquesas [in the late 70s], this Polynesian voyaging canoe arrived in Tahiti. It was started as an experiment to prove that Polynesians could sail it [across oceans], after Thor Heyerdahl. [The prevailing western thought was that the Polynesians were] too inexperienced to sail upwind so they must have drifted. There were a couple of university professors in Hawaii collecting stories from the Polynesians, all over Polynesia, and they said, “Well, clearly, that’s not true,” [so they set out to prove that Polynesians could and did sail around the Pacific].

They went into all the archives and found the best drawings they could of what a Hawaiian canoe looked like, and they built the replica; it was cold molded. And then they looked around [for someone] to sail it and they found a guy in Micronesia who had learned from his father offshore navigation, completely without instruments! His name was Mau Pialilug. He came to Hawaii and they sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, this guy navigating, and they proved it, [that navigating in the traditional way allowed the ancient Polynesians to sail across the ocean]. While they arrived in Tahiti, the entire island turned out – there were literally tens of thousands of people there – and it completely revitalised [Polynesian marine culture].

We were in the Marquesas and the locals knew about the experiment and one said, “I’m building a canoe, a dugout canoe!” So, what happened, that’s old history now. What the Polynesian Voyagers Society has become since then, rather than proving the fact about navigation, they had completely revitalised Polynesian culture. So, anyway, back to when we were in Tahiti [in the 90s], they were on their third or fourth trip they’d done down there, and they’d had a big tragedy – they’d lost a man – so they only sailed with an escort vessel. We met this chap on the escort vessel – a big steel cutter – they call him Russian Bill; actually, I think he is Ukrainian. Interesting fellow. Anyway, in the meantime, my wife had got a ham radio licence, and we now had a ham radio. So, all the time that we were sailing to get to Fiji, we were chatting with this guy on the radio. We were in Fiji and he said, “You know, we’re going on another trip next year. Do you want to crew for us?” “Yes!”

I got out the books how to sail from Fiji to Hawaii and all the books said you can’t do it. So, we went anyway. About forty days.

B: Fiji to Hawaii? Wow! That was all uphill…upwind?

G: It was close to November, too. November, December ’94. We were pretty close to the equator, more or less on the edge of the trade winds. So, they were light; it was nice. We sailed upwind most of the time and it was just lovely.

B: Twelve to 20 knots?

G: Yeah. When you’re on the wind, the boat is nice and steady.

B: Basically, you were on one tack for a month…

G (chuckling): We didn’t quite make it to Hawaii; I sort of wandered too far north. So, we went into Fanning Island, where I’d been two or three times. Absolutely lovely people there, they were so welcoming. And then the weather did a shift, as it does when you’re close to the equator, and I said, “We’re leaving.” “But it’s three days to Christmas! You can’t leave!” But the wind was right – it was time to go.

So we got to Hawaii and Linda and I crewed on the Kamahali. We crewed for four months.

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Join us in Part 2 to learn about Graham and Linda’s time on the Kamahali, and his connection with the early days of the BCA.

More information about the Polynesian Voyaging Society can be found here.