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No one aboard would have predicted trouble ahead when on
March 3 Polaris departed Acapulco for the Marquesas, the longest
scheduled leg of the cruise. The weather was sunny and warm
as students settled down to shipboard tasks, anticipating
glorious landfalls at islands with such magical names as Tahiti,
Bora-Bora, Nuku Hiva, and Hawaii. Only five days out, however,
Polaris was hit by the first of 80 brief but annoying squalls
that would plague her throughout the passage. The frustrating
wind constantly shifted, then halted altogether, leaving the
boat becalmed. "This isn't what's supposed to happen,
according to pilot charts," a puzzled skipper re-marked
to Dr. Bruce Bongar, a psychiatrist from California who was
sailing aboard Polaris as a student.
Early one morning about halfway between Mexico and the Marquesas,
crewmember Marilyn Bruner was resting below, preparing for
her watch, when she heard a loud snap followed by a scream.
"We lost a shroud!" A quick glance confirmed the
worst: a section of Polaris's standing rigging had collapsed
on deck, carrying its tang with it. Fearing a dismasting,
Con-nolly ordered all sails dropped. He jury-rigged a temporary
shroud replacement with parts of the run-ning rigging. It
took nearly two days for the crew to rig a semi-permanent
repair on the shroud. Meanwhile, Polaris plodded along under
power. A day later, however, the accumulated sludge in the
diesel tank clogged the fuel lines; the engine sputtered and
died. Polaris was left bobbing violently in a cross sea with
10- to 12-foot swells. El Nino? Hardly.
The cause of the shroud failure was faulty hardware installed
in a previous yard haulout. The engine failure was one of
those Murphy's Law incidents that followed. Yet John
Connolly couldn't help but wonder: is there an El Nino
jinx as well as El-Nino weathers Another day passed while
the crew bled and rebled the fuel lines until the mutinous
engine would start and run smoothly. In the interim, the engineless
boat ran down-wind under bare poles and covered 95 miles in
24 hours. The exhausted crew peered through a driving rainstorm
and pea-soup fog as Polaris, navigating by radar, felt her
way into Nuku Hiva harbor. Fog in the Marquesas? "That's
not in the cruising guides, either," the skipper recalled
later, "but there it was, El Nino at work again."
Nuku Hiva was a scene of devastation, the legacy of a recent,
unseasonable storm. Few homes still had roofs. The water in
the harbor was an ugly brown color. "There's almost no
clean drinking water left because of heavy runoff silting
in the streams leading to the harbor," said Rose Courser,
the owner of a local hotel and a longtime friend of visiting
cruisers. "I've never seen any-thing like this here before."
Connolly expected to see more cruising boats in Nuku
Hiva; only one boat shared the anchorage with Polaris. "Last
year in this same week," said Courser, "there were
at least 35 visiting boats here." Remembering the many
cruisers in Mexico who had decided to delay their Acapulco-Marquesas
trip beyond the normal seasonal Coconut Run, Connolly
concluded that concern over El Nino might have been the reason.
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