Taken by the Wind

Memoirs of a 1970s Pacific voyage reveals a time when sailors had to rely on their own pilotage skills for safe passage

Mike Jacker is a retired orthopaedic surgeon living in Illinois. Among many other activities he still sails his boat, now mainly on Lake Michigan, but he has a long memory. In 1976, shortly after graduating from college, he and two friends set off in a Cal 30 production yacht from New Orleans for a year's cruise in the South Pacific. The unusual thing about his account of this voyage is that it was not written until 2020, looking back on a different age with all the wisdom of a life fully lived. I sailed away into the blue myself at the same time, and I find his notes on the total lack of backup, no weather forecasting, no GPS and no communication with the outside world, ring absolutely true. Nobody sailing with all the benefits available in the modern world should forget that, just one lifetime ago, things were very different indeed.

We join Mike and his shipmates leaving Belize, bound on a tricky traverse to Panama...

On 15 September 1976, we cast off Rhiannon's dock lines and cleared the mud bar at the mouth of Haulover Creek. We were officially destined for the Panama Canal Zone, conservatively estimating arrival within two weeks. We had already learned from experience that potential calms, equipment failures, and headwinds precluded overly optimistic predictions for any passage.