Editor’s Note: Part 1 [1] of this article describes Malcolm Wilkinson’s introduction to sailing, his early days as a keen racer, and the acquisition of his offshore boat, a 44-foot Spencer 1330, Meridian Passage III. Malcolm’s closing comment was that they went offshore in 1977 and sailed around the South Pacific, covering 16,000 nautical miles in 13 months.
Continuation of Interview
Barrie (B): I think navigation aids and communication aids were probably quite far from what we expect today.
Malcolm (M): Yes. We were members of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club at that time and a couple of fellows had actually gone offshore the year before we did. They were ahead of us. And one fellow came to me and said, “You can’t go offshore if you don’t have a ham radio.” And I didn’t have the time to go and study at a radio. He says, “You’ve got to do it.” And there’s a fellow in the Yacht Club who had a ham radio license. I’m not sure you should be publishing this!
B: I think the statute of limitations is probably expired!
M: Anyway, the fellow’s name was Paul Wagner – a Wagner engineer. Well, Paul Wagner’s a Royal Van member, and he helped me set up. He said, “Here’s the radio you want to buy.” So I went to the Russ Beckham Company, which was bringing radios in from Japan. I bought a FT-301, which is a pretty powerful radio, and Wagner came and helped me set it up. And then he told me, “Here’s what you do when you’re offshore. This is how you turn it on.” And it was all manual; there was no automatic stuff at the time. In order to tune the radio, I’d have Darcy standing with it switched off and I would climb in the back of our quarter berth – the very back – as near to the back of the stairs as I could get and tweak the knobs.
B: None of these automatic tuning devices.
M: Absolutely not.
B: So you had a ham radio and you probably had a VHF.
M: Yes.
B: And navigation was it a sextant?
M: Yeah, yeah. A couple of years before we’d actually built the boat, Darcy and I both took courses in celestial navigation. I learned how to do celestial map. And then in the Vic-Maui race, the navigator in the race, I talked to him and said, “Do you mind if I run a parallel set of books?” And so he’d do his official stuff and then I’d go farting around after that.
The guy’s name was Dr. Cyril Williams, and he was really good. We had a RDF (radio direction finder ) on the boat. He would say, “Don’t touch that radio!” (Laughter)
B: So, on your own boat, did you have a radio direction finder as well? And was it harbours that would have a radio beacon?
M: No, it was airports all through the South Pacific. So, it was all the airports I would beam in on. The only problem is that the airports only work in the daytime. So your RDF only works at the daytime.
B: I think the old saying was the only important sighting was the one before you got to land. But how close were you able to get with the sextant in terms of where you were?
M: Well, I studied economics at university, so I’m very into mathematics. I developed a few techniques that I would do better than most people could. And we also had better watches. It used to be a case when a guy would go off on this 300 foot boat, a commercial boat, he would have a chronometer down below. But then to use it, he would use an hourglass. Okay, so he’d be on deck, take a sight and say “Now!” and the fellow who was with him would take the hourglass and turn it upside down. Okay, and then he would have to go from where he was down to the chronometer, and they’d figure out when the time of the actual sight, they couldn’t go back and forth, right? Because you had to go back up, turn the hourglass around.
And so when people would say, “You’ll be lucky if you’re within that hand,” well, that was because you didn’t have accurate times, okay? What I did is I bought one of the world’s first English Timex digital watches and I used that for my navigation, plus I had the radio I could check. … I would take six or seven sights and say “Now!” and Darcy would just write the times down. Then afterwards I would take the times and … plot them, and I’d plot the sextant readings, and I’d look at them and I’d simply put the crosses on a graph sheet, and if one of them looked odd, I’d throw it out. Okay, so that wasn’t scientific but it really worked well. Then I would plot the rest of them, take the average, and make sure the average went on the line and then we would use the average, so we were getting the benefit of having probably six or seven readings that we kept and that increased the accuracy probably a hundredfold. It made a huge difference.
B: So instead of 70 miles, you’re probably getting down to seven miles or something.
M: No, I was actually probably getting down to one mile.
B: Oh, awesome!
M: Yeah, I mean people don’t believe it, but I don’t care. I got the one mile. Just a quick aside: a Navy navigator who taught us way back when with CFSA [Canadian Forces Sailing Association] – we were members of the Canadian forces – he said that once the Timex watches came in with a crystal thing, for years afterwards, they still had to maintain these two chronometers on the Navy boats, but everybody was using their Timex to keep it.
B: So you were an early adopter of that?
M: The watch was really inaccurate. I mean, I kept track of how much it gained or lost per week, and it was atrocious, but I kept track of it, and … I would plot it. We also had a ham radio receiver on the boat so we could get time signals. I would take an accuracy check every day and we got quite good at sextant work because it was mathematical changes I made to the practice circuit.
B: Excellent. So you did the circumnavigation of the Pacific, and that was it?
M: No, we sailed from here to California, from California to Hawaii, from Hawaii to the Tuamotus. Am I going right? Yeah, to the Tuamotus. And then after that, we went down to the Society Islands, and then Tonga, Fiji, Samoa. All there. We spent 13 months.
B: And that was on your 44 foot Spencer 1330.
M: And Darcy and I, we had a race boat before we left Vancouver, and then amazingly, a large number of my crew members said, “Hey, I just happen to be available that week. Can I come?” So we had two or three of our race boat members come and sail with us at times, and that was great. And Darcy and I did the rest of it, just the two of us.
B: What were a couple of highlights that you’d like to share?
M: Probably arriving in Hawaii and knowing where the hell you are; that was pretty interesting. We were very aggressive as racers and we were pretty good at what we did. So we managed to make the boat go really well. We left Hawaii with five of the boats to sail to the Marquesas, which is uphill all the way up. We sailed uphill with 25-knot trade winds. Of the six of us who left, we were the only boat that made it. The rest just gave up. We went to Papeete.
B: The rest just gave up?
M: Yeah.
B: Any interesting interactions with the people in the countries you met?
M: It was the most phenomenal trip. I mean, we were going down into places where there were no other boats, because if you didn’t know how to use celestial navigation, you couldn’t go cruising, right? We arrived in the Marquesas after 10 days, 12 days of uphill beating. There was one boat in the Marquesas.
B: Whoa! One boat there! A far cry from today.
M: Yeah, and we anchored and this guy rode over to us and it turns out his name was Brent Swain, who designed boats in Vancouver. Brent was economical, let me put it like that. Brent had actually built his own steel boat, he’d equipped it, provisioned it, and sailed it to the South Pacific with some stupid amount of money, like $8,000.
B: Well, back then, that was worth a lot more than today, but…
M: Brent’s boom on his boat was two 2-by-4s nailed together, and his dinghy was a box. It was. And we made the ‘mistake’ of inviting Brent over to have dinner with us, and every time we saw him, he came and had dinner with us, so we’d given Brent a thousand dollars! Brent was a very good fellow, very, very friendly and generous.
B: Is there anything else you want to share about the trip before we get on to BCA?
M: The day that the group of sailors in Vancouver got together and decided to form the Bluewater Cruising Association, Darcy and I were anchored in Papeete and we went off that night to a club called La Petata, the Petati club, and went dancing and drinking. It was a great night and we had a marvelous evening while people were having their time in Vancouver setting up Bluewater. And Patrick and Heather Hill, who were original Bluewater members with us, they were there, and there were about three other boats, maybe three boats in total, from the Vancouver BC area.
And back then you would get maybe three or four boats a year going off, and it was really interesting.
B: So when did you join?
M: Well, we were in Papeete at the time and Bluewater had just been set up. As we sailed, we met people who were Bluewater as we kept going. And then we came home in 1978 and Bluewater was then running and at the time it was a party club. There were 30 people who would have a party, would rent a hall, rent a band, and have the party catered, and we’d have a marvelous time. I got invited to that so we went and I joined thereafter, and I’ve been a member since.
BCA Past Commodores, from L: Blake Williams, Malcolm Wilkinson, Guylain Roy-Machabée, Glenora Doherty and Jennifer Handley
B: Yeah, this is the early days. When did it start to change to be more of a support club than a party club?
M: Probably 20 years, at least. Actually, Bluewater has become a less fun club. Hmm… I was involved in the executive as Commodore for a number of years. We used to really enjoy going to places. I would go to Royal Vancouver and say, “Hey, we want to have a party here. How much?” And then we’d say, “How many people?” And we’d sell tickets, hire a band, get a whole bunch of people, and go and have a superb time. That doesn’t happen anymore.
B: The rendezvous are still a big social event.
M: Yes, but nothing other than that. They’re stagnant. Nothing happens other than we go and we play the same silly games that we played 30 years ago.
B: Yeah, I guess there is a bit of a formula to it.
M: It is, yeah. I mean, we developed it over a few years, and it works really well. I’ve been trying to tell the people who are in charge now that, you know, Bluewater’s goal is not to put money in the bank, and so we shouldn’t be spending all our time earning money! … We don’t have to have lots of money, you know. Bluewater survived very well at the beginning with no money at all. Day to day, night to night, scraping up, you know.
B: Yeah, I’ve heard that comment as well from others. I think, yeah, that’s my read on it and I’ve only been a member since 2006. It’s moved to be a training and support society rather than a social society.
M: Yeah, I would like to see it go back to being a bit more fun.
B: A bit more fun, yeah. Okay, well, that’s a good observation. Is there anything else you’d like to add to the story?
M: I got involved because people were going offshore who were not prepared and getting into trouble. I said you know that’s crazy because once you’re out there, you’re on your own and nobody’s gonna come and pick you up and dust you off and say, “Try again, buddy.”
I was quite involved in the executive. Some guy in Calgary delivered his boat to Vancouver and said, “I’m gonna leave in six weeks to go around the world”. And I said, “Well, how long have you been sailing? He said, “I haven’t figured it out yet.”
B: We took five, six years.
M: I said, “Oh, have you run your engine? He replied, “No, no, we’re going to run it.”
I called a meeting of the executive and said, “Listen, we should be telling this guy you’re not bloody safe to go offshore.” The executive just farted around and didn’t do anything. This guy went and after a few days his engine wouldn’t start. So, what do you do when your engine doesn’t start? You just keep sailing, right? Well, he just keeps saying, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.” He got towed 3,000 … miles by the U.S. Coast Guard at a huge expense and a huge danger to all kinds of people! And he was quite proud of the fact that he called Mayday. So I tried to get a group that would say, “Look, they have to have minimum standards” but that didn’t fly. The prevailing idea was: “I’m a romantic sailor and I’m going to go offshore.”
B: Well, that’s a good lesson for us all, really.
M: Nobody, absolutely nobody took the lesson.
B: Yeah, it’s sad. Well, if there’s nothing else you want to add, we can sign off.
M: Sure. Oh, so you didn’t go offshore?
B: We’ve been offshore. We spent about 7 years, over about 12 years, offshore.
M: Well, there you are. When did you go?
B: We went from 2007 to 2019. [See Passat II Blog here [2]].
Thank you, Malcolm. I really appreciate your sharing your story.