Orient

In her day, she was a bona fide queen of the North American ocean racing circuit. Sixty-four feet of sleek, traditional racing sloop, she bore no resemblance to her counterparts in this modern age but that beautiful blue hull once raced to victory after victory on both the east and west coasts. A later claim to fame is that she was used in the movie “Lucky Lady”, with Gene Hackman and Liza Minelli. Her name was Orient. She was designed by the illustrious Sparkman & Stephens, built of teak in Hong Kong in 1937, as exquisite a sailboat as one would ever hope to see.

A little research tells me she underwent a 2-year restoration around 2000 after being purchased as little more than a derelict by a Santa Barbara resident, Kathy Roche, who remembered seeing the gorgeous yacht under sail as a child. That's quite a story all in itself I suspect, but I haven’t been able to find out anything more recent or find a photo of her under sail. I hope she is still out there, sailing with all her former grace and beauty.

I met her around 1969 when she came to the St. Francis Yacht Club in San Francisco to participate in a race. By now, her ocean racing days of glory were past and she was a purely pleasure yacht out of Newport Beach, California, racing occasionally for fun. My own sailing experience at that time was somewhat limited, but I’d had my share of heavy-weather, gunnels-awash sailing on San Francisco Bay and that’s not bad training ground for sailors. Still, I’d never sailed on anything like Orient or sailed offshore.

Through a lucky series of events and acquaintances I ended up being part of the delivery crew on her return trip from San Francisco to Newport. There were five of us: the paid skipper, three husky young men and me. As usual, I was fearless and eager for this new adventure and wangled a day off work to make a long weekend.

We left the St. Francis on a clear morning and weren’t even outside the marina breakwater before someone put me at the helm and the men began setting sails. I stayed at the helm for some time, sailing her through the Golden Gate and out into the open ocean headed south. To say I was awestruck would be something of an understatement. My Sunday afternoons spent sailing on a clunky, solid, heavy boat owned by an east bay winery family had trained me well enough, fostered my burgeoning love for sailing, but where their boat was clunky and heavy, Orient was light and agile and I loved having the control of that big wheel. I probably stayed there for hours – the men were happy to leave me there and this was a long time before auto steering devices became the norm.

I don’t remember much more about that first day, other than that seasickness began to overtake my body, much to my chagrin. I’d never been seasick on the Bay, even in the roughest of weather, but as I was to learn on this trip and again on later trips, the motion of ocean swells is totally different from even the roughest choppy waves of San Francisco Bay. The skipper dosed me with meds but wasn’t convinced they would help because I couldn’t keep them down long enough. Eventually, they must have worked because the rest of the voyage was fine, from that standpoint.

As large and beautiful and fast as she was, Orient was anything but a luxury craft. She’d been designed for no-nonsense racing speed. The main cabin had bunks stacked on both sides and that’s where the crew slept. The captain had his own quarters and there must have been an owner’s stateroom, but I didn’t stray aft enough to remember any details. The galley, unlike any other sailboat I’ve ever been in, was forward, in the bow of the boat. It was tiny and cramped and a slave to every bobbing motion of the sea. In rough weather, a tether kept the cook from being tossed around too much and left hands free, but certainly didn’t offer much sense of comfort or stability. I mention this because the second morning dawned with a storm and one of my strongest memories of the voyage is of trying to cook while being thrown around the space, bouncing off the cabinets for what seemed like hours. Eventually, the skipper took pity and did most of the cooking for that day. As I recall, he even served up a turkey dinner.

I spent as much of that day as possible on deck,took advantage of a momentary lull in the wind and rain to take this one photo. Even with the storm raging around me I wasn’t about to miss a moment of this adventure. The men were taking turns at the helm and working to keep the boat as stable as possible. I tried the helm once, but after about 10 minutes of fighting the wind and waves to keep the boat on course, my arms literally said ‘no more’. I simply could not do it, didn’t have the strength, but I can promise you that it’s an effort I will never forget.

We’d dropped the foresail, reefed the mainsail and were running on diesel power. I watched the men struggle with the huge boom, tying it off to one side for safety as well as stability. Waves crashed over the boat. Everything was wet and slippery and cold, visibility almost non-existent. The boat crashed bow-down into one huge wave and rose high on the next, over and over. At one point late in the afternoon an aircraft carrier emerged from the foggy murk, just off our port side, and glided past silently like a grey ghost. Beautiful to watch, but way too close for comfort. Watching her pass I felt as if I could simply reach out my arm and touch her – it was that close. Needless to say, we were dwarfed. We didn’t know she was coming until we saw her. I’m pretty sure Orient didn’t have radar, but no doubt the skipper of the carrier had picked up our radar reflector and knew we were there.

As cold and wet and rough and wild as that day was – and believe me when I tell you it was far rougher than my description might imply – I felt no fear, had no regrets about being where I was and found my love of sailing diminished not in the least. Nor did the joy of the adventure itself wane. I was in my element and if I could have, I would have spent a lot more time on the open ocean back then. I simply didn’t have the opportunity. By the following day, a Sunday, the storm had passed us by and we were sailing smoothly with the wind in warm sunshine, lolling in the cockpit and eating strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Newport Harbor is long and somewhat narrow, lined with marinas and yacht clubs and private docks and filled wall-to-wall with sailboats and other pleasure craft on any warm sunny summer Sunday. The easy thing for us to do would have been to drop the sails and motor through all that traffic to Orient’s dock, but that wouldn’t do. Orient was home and a proper entrance needed to be made. As we rounded the breakwater into the wind the men trimmed the sails and all sixty-four feet of sleek sky-blue hull tacked upwind through the teeming mass of smaller craft. Short tacks, back and forth across the harbor, moving with all her famous speed, charging ahead like the queen she was. Oddly enough, nobody in any of the other boats seemed to resent having to move out of her way. Instead, they waved and smiled, simply watched a sight sure to warm the heart of any sailor, and welcomed her home.