I became a sailor more out of spite than anything else. You see, “back in the day,” being a sailor was about the last thing in the world I ever thought I’d be. By the time I’d turned 30 I had been thru my stint serving my country as a fly-boy in the Air Force. I had been married at 18, had my first child before I was 19 and my second before I was 21.
I’d been divorced, lived as a hippie in Venice Beach (California) and had already started a couple of small businesses including a carpet store, a head shop (c’mon, you remember those, right?), a gym, a martial arts equipment retail store and a travel agency. But my main purpose in life was devoted to the worship of the twowheeled beast known as a Harley-Davidson.
One night I met this nut while riding my true love down Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. He was wearing a fur coat and driving a convertible Maserati. We stopped at a light and he was looking over my bike, while I was looking over his car. The light changed and we both wicked it on full throttle. I hate to admit this, but he kicked my ass! I had him for the first half-block, and then it was all about horsepower.
He turned into the parking lot at Cyrano’s (an eatery where I could never afford to eat), and as he pulled in he flagged me over. Okay now, I gotta tell ya. I was tossed.
Here’s this dude wearing a fur coat asking me to pull over, so I’m thinking, this being Hollywood and such… well, you know. But at the same time, a Maserati convertible is not something you see every day, and I’d never even seen one as a convertible. My mind was made up when I saw his license plate. It was from Montana and just had the word “Evel.”
Long story short, that night Evel and I had a little too much fun.
By 5:00 in the morning I was 10 Biker to Sailor being locked up in the West Hollywood Police Station with a dude named Filthy McNasty. Filthy (yes, that is his legal name!), owned the nightclub we’d been partying at. It seems the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had a rule about serving booze after 2:00 a.m. in a bar. At two the doors had been closed, but the booze kept flowing.
The following evening I was being interviewed by a guy from Rolling Stone who was doing an article on Evel and the coming jump at the L.A. Coliseum. He was asking about the previous evening’s adventure which included, but was not limited to, Evel Knievel, me, Wolfman Jack (the Disc Jockey), and a group of strippers from the Classic Cat burlesque house which was right next door to Filthy McNasty’s. Oh, and Filthy’s was across the street and a half block down from the Whiskey-a-Go-Go.
It was the old Melody Room, which was infamous in the ‘50s and ‘60s and later became the Viper Room where River Phoenix died. So, what, you are asking yourself, does this have to do with sailing, right? It’s just to show you that, as I have said, any idiot can sail. Read on.
Okay, so by the end of the week I was hanging out with Knievel helping him get ready for his jump at the L.A. Coliseum. It was fun, to say the least, hanging out with this guy. I became his bodyguard and party partner after he asked his pilot to help stop him at the top of the ramp he’d set up for the jump, and the pilot refused saying you’d have to be crazy to stand in front of Knievel coming up the ramp at 60 mph.
At the top of the ramp were two 4×8 sheets of plywood where he had to stop and turn the bike around. Knievel looked at him and said, “You’re fired. Get out of here.”
Then he turned to me. “Would you catch me?”
“Hell yeah!” I thought. “What a gas!”
For the next few weeks we hung out, partying every night. I got to meet a lot of real celebrities and it ended up changing my life. After the jump I worked with him setting up the Snake River Canyon jump, and once that over I moved on.
With the connections I’d made with Evel I soon started Biker News, a tabloid all about the outlaw motorcycle life in Southern California. So now we are going to get into my actual introduction to sailing. One day my editor, Degenerate Jim, and I hopped on our bikes to go to lunch. We’d planned on going to Momma Rosa’s for burritos and beer, but it was packed so we rode down to King Harbor in Redondo Beach, about a mile away, and to Captain Ahab’s. They had hotter waitresses anyway!
After lunch, as we were leaving the restaurant, I heard a banging on one of the docks. I looked over and there was a guy putting a “For Sale” sign on a boat.
Now, here I must digress. You see, me and my 
partner in the head shop I owned, “Hermosa High,” had used some perks from my travel agency for a little flight to Tahiti a month or two before this. We’d stayed at the Club Med in Moorea. Back in the good old days, Club Med was for singles only. Well, while we were there, it turned out that there were two women to every man, and most of them were from Australia.
This, at the time, was quite an advantage for American males. In fact, it was better than walking thru a women’s prison with a pocket full of pardons, if you get my drift. So, at the end of our stay, the folks at Club Med offered us a chance to stay on to help the ladies have a good time, as jogging instructors (???!).
It would have been a dream come true, but alas, I had responsibilities and deadlines.
My partner Patrick, however had no such claims on his time, so he stayed in Tahiti and I flew home.
About a month later I got a call from Patrick. He’d met a couple guys on a yacht anchored off the beach at Club Med and they’d offered him a chance to sail from Tahiti to Hawaii.
Okay, so I was so green with envy I probably glowed. And then I found myself standing in Harbor Marina watching a boat go up for sale.
“Hey, dude!” I hollered across the water. “What’s the deal on the boat?”
He stood staring at us for about a minute. We must have made an odd picture there at this beautiful marina. Degenerate Jim looked like a cross between the dude in ZZ Top and Charles Manson. He was wearing a cut-off Levi jacket with patches from various motorcycle events, dark glasses that he never removed, a beard that reached down to his belly button and big, black motorcycle boots.
I, on the other hand, was what I considered at the time to be dressed appropriately. Standing about 6’4” and weighing in at about 285, I had been pumping iron at the gym I owned, “Grunt & Sweat Gym,” so was just wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and my Levis cutoff with a big patch on the back saying “Biker News” and a rocker at the bottom saying “So Cal.”
I was still wearing my “rings” I had when I was Knievel’s bodyguard. That is a very large silver ring on every finger, mostly skulls and large daemon heads. Of course, both of us were sporting tattoos as I was, at the time, just starting Tattoo Magazine.
He opened the gate hesitantly and we walked down to the boat. Now, you have to try and imagine what people on the dock were thinking. Kinda like having a center seat on an airplane and then seeing a couple of Sumo wrestlers walking your row to sit down.
So, we are going to make this long story short. I bought the boat, a Cal 28 with a 9hp outboard on the back. I asked the seller to give me five sailing lessons if I bought it, but he said he could only give me three because he was leaving for Hawaii that Friday on the 50-foot ketch at the end of the dock.
I have to admit I was more than a little nervous. After pulling off my boots, I boarded the boat and when I stepped on it the whole boat started to sink on the side I was boarding, or at least that’s what it felt like. I jumped back onto the dock and looked at the seller with an “are you sure about this” look in my eye.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Once you’re amidships the boat will right itself.” I understood the words, “Don’t worry,” but the rest of what he said could have been in Greek. But not wanting him to think I was afraid (you know, manly men on manly ships, right?) I stepped on again and quickly stepped down into the cockpit. He was right. All was well once I was standing there.
Meanwhile, he was dashing all over the boat doing God only knows what. I watched and wondered if I would ever understand what he was 17 Bob Bitchin doing, and wondered even more, what the hell had I gotten myself into! He lifted the center area of the back bench where the outboard was located, and pulled on the starter cord. It fired right up.
“Kewl!” I thought. I can do that!
Then he jumped off the boat and started untying the dock lines. “You are coming with me, right?” I asked timidly.
“Oh yeah, just gotta cast off the dock lines.”
Ahh. More lingo to learn. Cast off obviously meant to leave somewhere, and dock lines, even I could understand that. Maybe this wasn’t going to be too bad after all.
As we motored up the channel he started pulling on one of the many ropes that were laying around and the big sail in the middle of the boat started to rise.
“This is the halyard,” he explained. “It raises the sail. This is the mainsail.
” Yeah, right, I thought. Now I am supposed to remember the names of all these ropes. Like that’s going to happen!
Okay, so far not too bad. This I could do, and I understood all of the magic behind it. At the end of the channel he pulled on the stick that controlled the steering and the boat swung the other way. This seemed kind of odd, but I kept watching as he started to pull on another rope and a floppy sail started to rise from the pointy end of the boat. It flogged and made kinds of noise, and just when I figured something was really wrong and was about to swim back to shore, the boat started to fall over.
No, really! The whole boat started to roll over as the sail caught the wind. I grasped this big chrome thing with my arm and hung on for dear life! That, I later learned, was called a winch. The boat was leaning over at a 25degree tilt at least!
“Hey,” he said in a deceptively calm voice, “would you mind easing the sheet a little bit?”
I just stared at him as if he was crazy.
Why would I want to go and grab a sheet? Who could sleep in this death-trap?
“The sheet is the line over there on the cleat,” he said, pointing to what I assumed was a cleat. “Just un-cleat it and let it slip a little.”
I sat there hanging onto my new best friend, the chrome thingy, and stared at him. Then I sat and watched how this seemingly normal individual wrapped a little line around the wood steery thingy (the tiller) and walked across the deck of the boat while it was heeled over so far I was sure we were going to flip over. As he let the line slip a little from the cleat, the boat came back to an almost normal slant, and once again, all was well with the world.
For the next two days at about 2:00 p.m. I would ride down to the marina and get a “lesson.” I refused to try and learn what a halyard or sheet was, but became acquainted with the winches (my former best friend), cleats and tiller.
By the end of day three I was hauling up the mainsail, trimming the headsail and starting to get the hang of pulling the tiller one way to go the other.
And then he was gone.
The next day I grabbed Degenerate Jim away from the typewriter and told him we were going sailing.
We jumped on our bikes and headed down to the marina. I don’t mind telling you I was more than a little worried, but excited as well.
We boarded Rogue, which was the name I’d given her, and I got the sails ready to raise. We released the dock lines and just as I started to push her out into the channel I realized I’d forgotten to start the outboard.
Oops.
As we drifted towards the boats behind us I popped up the center seat, pulled the choke and gave it a pull. Thank God, it started. I don’t even think Jim noticed how panicky I was.
As we motored into the wind I pulled the mainsail up and made the turn at the end of the channel. As I pulled the headsail up I noticed Jim start to grab my friend the winch, and when the wind caught it, well, his normal calm demeanor fell apart and he was hanging onto it for dear life.
Inwardly I smiled. Three days earlier that had been me!
For the next few months, every day at the office I would pull Jim away from his desk and say, “Let’s go sailing.” We were both starting to really enjoy it. Every day we would head out of the marina and then sail about three miles north to where the oil tankers would moor to unload at the refinery.
There, they had these huge mooring buoys. They had to be 35-40 feet long and about 10 feet in diameter. On top there was a cleat for the oil tankers to tie to. I would use the buoys to practice pulling along side. I didn’t want to do it in the marina because if (when) I screwed up, I didn’t want people laughing at me.
After a couple weeks we got pretty good at it. I was oblivious to what we must have looked like to the other boaters back then. I mean, there were times, like on a weekend, when two or three of my club brothers would ride down with their ol’ ladies and six or eight of us would jump on Rogue and go out for a day sail.
As we’d head out of the marina, all the men would be wearing Levis with black T-shirts, in most cases with something rude printed on them, motorcycle boots (yes, we wore them on the boat!) and sunglasses.
The ladies, on the other hand, would usually be wearing panties and bras as we left the dock, and then would lose those as we’d turn the channel… Which was right in front of the King Harbor Yacht Club.
I wondered years later, when I was sponsored for membership, why I was blackballed? This was my intro to sailing. Who knew how it would change my life!
