Episode 10 of The Sailing Podcast is an interview with Pam Bitterman, author of “Sailing to the Far Horizon; The restless journey and tragic sinking of a Tall Ship.
When I got the opportunity to interview Pam Bitterman I jumped at the chance and not just because she has been a teacher of maritime history and seamanship but because she sailed on a tall ship for many years. About 3 decades after being a sailor, and as she raised her family she decided to write about her experiences and that is what we are talking about today – about a tall ship named Sofia, which sank off New Zealand’s North Island in February 1982.
You will find the YouTube video for the book at the bottom of this page and more information about Pamela in the Show Notes below
Next Episode is “Top Tips for crossing Coastal Bars” with Alan Hall
Transcript of the Interview with Pam Bitterman
Introduction This is The Sailing Podcast with David and Carina Anderson, episode number 10. We would love you to come and join us on our journey. Hello everybody and welcome to the 10th episode of The Sailing Podcast. Thank you for joining Carina and I on our journey. If you haven’t gathered it yet, I’m a bit of a sailing book enthusiast and I like stories about sailing around the world and circumnavigation by sail. I love stories about the age of exploration and also about old tall ships. So when I got the opportunity to interview Pam Bitterman, I jumped at the chance, not just because she’s been a teacher of maritime history and seamanship, but because she sailed on a tall ship for many years, about three decades after being the sailor. And as she raised her family, she decided to write about her experiences. And that’s what we’re talking about today. It’s about a tall ship named Sophia, which sank off New Zealand’s North Island in February 1982. I’d like to get straight into the interview so you can hear about this story straight from the author’s mouth, but I’ll quickly mention the show notes for this podcast. They’ll be at thesailingpodcast.com forward slash tall ships. Carina was still away this week at a nursing conference in Finland, and while she was away, I talked to Pam on Skype.
David: Hi, Pam. Thank you for taking the time to have a chat to me on the Sailing Podcast. It sounds like you’ve got an interesting story. You actually went to the trouble of writing a book as well, which I’m excited about because I love reading people’s books about their sailing stories. What’s your book called?
Pam: My book is called Sailing to the Far Horizon. It’s the restless journey and tragic sinking of a tall ship, and it is my own story. I boarded this tall ship in Boston in August of 1978 and left the harbor, not having any idea what I was getting into, and sailed on her for four years, circumnavigating until we lost her in a storm off the North Cape of New Zealand, which is where the story ends. But it takes you through the world before globalization, a wonderful window into a world that we were able to see that may not exist anymore, to cultures and people.
David: How did you come to be putting your hand up to go off sailing for what was an indefinite period at that stage? It was kind of propitious. I had been a professional. I had been working as a therapist with emotionally disturbed and socially maladjusted kids in New England for several years. I got a little frustrated with that, not really seeing the kids’ opportunities develop the way I would have hoped they could in our society. I followed the sun to the West Coast and traveled up to Northern California, the land of the proverbial alternative lifestyle at the time. This was in the 1970s. I was working as a resident naturalist for a nature and wildlife preserve where I had written a grant proposal for money to set up an outdoor education program, which was in line with my profession for children that weren’t functioning well in the traditional setting. My grant was approved, so I was going to be able to run that program on the property, help the property with some funds as well. Then our governor at the time, Governor Reagan, who later became a president here, he slashed all of those government funded programs. Mine was one of them. All of a sudden, there I was, 28 years old, being left basically without a job, without a home. I was living on the property where I was setting up this program, and really with no real prospects. I had no debts and no dependents. I read a little blurb in the back of a magazine called Co-Evolution Quarterly. I had a picture of this beautiful, old, three-masted, 123-foot gas topsoil tall ship, Sophia, 60-year-old cooperative, returning to America to enlist crew for her second circumnavigation. Very little money got my foot in the door. No experience necessary was written in big, bold letters. That was important because I had no experience. I thought, well, this is my chance. I’m going to go see the world. I traveled cross-country and left my dog with my folks and said goodbye to a lot of people and gave away everything I owned and jumped on board.
David: You must have had a fairly adventurous spirit and being into outdoor education as well. My wife, Carina, studied outdoor education when she left school. So sort of the same sort of interests. You must just be like an outdoorsy sort of person anyway. P: Very much so. I think it was an auspicious time for me to see this. As I said, it was the 70s where, for those of us that were lucky enough to be children of the 60s and lived through the 70s, we know that we kind of got the brass ring for feeling that everything was possible and that we had this tremendous freedom and the world was a very welcoming place and adventures were very attractive. I definitely was part of that whole movement. So I was up for anything and everything back then and this seemed like the perfect opportunity for me.
David: And where was your family living?
Pam: In the Midwest, in Michigan actually.
David: What did they think about you sort of disappearing off the radar?
Pam: I had kind of gone off the grid with my choices at a young age and they had worked out for me. So my family was actually very supportive. They said, well, she seems to know herself. She seems to be doing things that might be questionable except that she isn’t making them all work. So we’re behind her. And they were actually very supportive. They were probably far less concerned than they should have been.
David: It sounds like you had your profession behind you already. So I guess they would have been happy that you sort of had at least some form of employment to fall back onto?
Pam: I’ll tell you, interestingly enough, my parents, and I have to say, particularly my father, lived vicariously through my adventures. They really were rooting for me all along. I think they recognized maybe even before I did that I didn’t fit really well into traditional structure. And they were happy that I found my way into areas that allowed me to express myself. I think that they recognized that that’s how I was going to be happy. So I think that they were very supportive actually. This book is basically a result of a running journal that I kept, letters actually, and a journal that I kept the entire time that I was sailing that I would send home to my family that they kept for 25 years somehow believing that I would someday write this story. Had they not kept all of this, there would have been no way that I could have done this book because it’s full of all the details. It’s full of all the feelings of the moment. And they took this trip through me, through these letters, and then they saved them for me. And the book is a result of that literally a quarter century later. Isn’t that so funny? It’s such a different time because I don’t write to my parents because it’s so easy to ring them or send them a quick email. I don’t think if they put all my emails together it had ever come together as a story.
David: But you were lucky because that was the sort of mode of communication with sending those letters, which were probably fairly personal as well. Like when you’re writing letters to people, it probably had a lot of emotion in it as well, which you’ve been able to probably draw on again.
Pam: Oh, very much so. And I’m sure as anybody who’s listening who has any sailing experience or possibly any cruising experience will be able to attest to, it’s not always wonderful. There’s a lot of hard things to get through out there. And if you’re going to be honest and introspective, you talk about these things. You talk about whether or not you’re willing to keep toughing it out and getting through the hard bits to get to what you hope is the end result. And some people do. I’d say most people don’t. I think probably most people cave. Most of the people that I came in contact with certainly didn’t stick it out. But that is what a lot of my writing of this book was about. It was not just about the disaster that claimed the ship in the end, which is I think a really good hook for a story, but I wanted to tell the life of this ship and I wanted to tell the life of people that choose to go that route. And I also wanted to tell people what the world was like then, talk about the cultures and talk about the wonderful experiences and adventures and people that I was able to meet because I was so fortunate enough to be on this ship. So I told the story of her life as well as the story of her death. So it’s a wonderful adventure. You sit in your armchair and you go on this trip, you read this book and you will feel like you were there.
David: Am I right in saying that your story is perhaps the only record of that?
Pam: It is the only record. And that’s really the impetus for my having written it. I waited all these years. There were hundreds of us. Hundreds of people came and went on board the ship in my term of residency on her. Thousands over the years that she was sailing from 1920. But hundreds of thousands of people are the legacy of tall ships. And I felt like, even though there were only 17 on board at the time she went down and none of these people had chosen to tell the story in 25 years, I knew nobody would, I also felt like the ship deserved to have her story told for all of the legions of sailors that had come before her. I think that it was an honour.
David: So does your book have a bit of the history of the Sophia? P: Yes, it does. It tells all of her history that was available to me. Where she was built and when and what happened to her and how she was renewed and refit and why and how she became a cooperative and quite a bit actually of technical, nautical and shipwright information. But I tried not to weigh it down in that because I wanted it to be an everyman’s book. So there is a great deal of information that anybody that’s done any shipwright work or any significant sailing or particularly any traditional sailing will be able to identify with. But people that know absolutely nothing about it will be able to enjoy this story as well.
David: So how was it for you?
You hadn’t been sailing before and you arrived at the ship in Boston, is that right?
Pam: Yes, on Lincoln Wharf. She was being taken apart. They put her out to pasture basically on the end of this old decrepit wharf, Lincoln Wharf in the Italian north end of Boston. Her yards were down on the dock being reshaped and all her sails were unbent. She was this massive vessel but she was all wood and all traditional, all tar and caulking and oakum and varnish and paint and bleeding fastenings. I think she would have looked daunting to someone who was more knowledgeable than I was. I didn’t even know enough to know that she looked a little bit dodgy. But I jumped on board and first learned just how to work on her and then learned how to get along with all of these strange conglomeration of people that had gathered to work on her in the hopes of sailing as well. Then we finally put the sea on what would be my maiden voyage in late October, waiting out the hurricane season into the North Atlantic and ultimately into what would become Hurricane Kendra. My maiden voyage was out into a hurricane. Ten days of running from it. We were not expected to survive and that was my maiden voyage.
David: I guess again that would have been probably easier to handle without any experience than if you probably knew what was coming at you.
Pam: That’s quite accurate and from my writing you can tell that an awareness is coming over me out there in the midst of it all. But we survived that and a lot of the folks when we finally limped into port, the last radio communication that we had out there with the Coast Guard was that they were attempting to get the names of the crew and their next of kin. They did not expect us to be able to get out of this. We did. We limped into Bermuda ten days later and immediately lost a good deal of our crew who said, this is not what I signed up for. But I felt differently. I had kind of married my soul tour out there. She had taken care of me and I had taken care of her and I felt like this was a hand that I may have expected to have been dealt sometime in the future but it came early and we had both survived it. I thought, well, it can only get better, right?
David: What was the percentage of crew who knew what they were doing versus newbies like yourself?
Pam: There was always a core crew of knowledgeable sailors of at least five. This ship could have been run with five people who knew what they were doing and we did. I was on board her as one of those when we numbered only five at different places in the world and five of us knowing what we were doing could manage the ship in spite of the fact that there were 156 lines of running rigging and over 5,000 square feet of sail, 16 sails. Everything was run, no winches, block and tackle, manual, windlass, all of it. But when you knew what you were doing, you could sail her. So at least five of a core crew and then as many newbies as we could fit. Sometimes we’d have only those five people, as I said, and sometimes we’d have 30 depending on where we were in the world, if there were people that wanted to be in that area. South Pacific, we never had any trouble enlisting. We never had crew. We were a working ship so it was very important that we made that distinction because we were never licensed for passengers. So everybody that came on board was working crew. They paid their $10 a day or they threw in a couple thousand to become an owner. As I said, it was a cooperative. You could actually become an owner, which meant that you could come and go for the rest of your life and always have a bunk wherever she was in the world. But we always had hitchhiking hippies, sailors, itinerants. She was multinational, pretty multi-generational, although we averaged our crew at about 30 years of age. It wasn’t a bunch of young people, but we did have our share of young people. And as I said, again, multinational, so it was wonderful. We had this crew of men and women ranging in age from maybe 17 to I think we had a 60-year-old on for a while, all coming from different parts of the world and different backgrounds. And it made it very colorful, very interesting, and sometimes it was what was her demise. Socially, a lot of people, even if they could have handled the difficult living and failing circumstances, really couldn’t handle the social situation. It was like a floating sociology experiment. I write a lot about that as well.
David: I don’t know if this is a weird question to ask, but was there like a hierarchy, like when I read old books about tall ships, there’s quite a distinction between the captains and the mates and then the crew. Was there that sort of a hierarchy? What happens in our sort of times? So you know what I mean? P: Yeah, that’s a very good question. And that was one of the pivotal points about this experience that made her successful but also probably led to her demise as well. Unfortunately, a circumnavigating tall ship and no viable chain of command seemed to be like mutually exclusive concepts. But we were a sailing cooperative, and a cooperative doesn’t have a hierarchy by definition. So this was always something we were struggling with. We had to have a captain, but these young people that found this vessel and renewed her in the 1960s, these were the quintessential hippies, and they thought we could just do a captain for a day, which of course disintegrated into anarchy on the high seas in short order. So there was always a captain, and it typically was the most experienced and most willing and hopefully most approved of sailor on the ship, but it was never perfect. And then beneath him there was always kind of a hazy hierarchy. We had a sailmaker, we had an engineer, we had a boson, we had a first mate. I worked my way up from grunt swabby, knowing nothing when I got on board, to the ship’s boson where I was in charge of maintaining this massive rigging. And when the ship went down, I was actually her acting first mate, second in command. So experience and time on board her, and the approval of the other people in the crew at the time is what gave you a position of authority. Yeah, because that chain of command, as I understand it, on a big ship, I mean especially if things get nasty, it really needs to be a no questions asked scenario where when the captain says jump, you just say how high. Absolutely. And it’s interesting, it’s a little bit like our government over here I would say. I don’t feel qualified to speak on anybody else’s government, but I have opinions about ours. And I think that everybody has their two cents to put in until the crux of the matter suddenly presents itself. And then people are really looking for someone else to take charge, not only so that they can feel safe, but that they can blame someone for whatever happens after the fact. That’s really pretty much the way it was. We had a chain of command, and it was a little bit hazy during most of our sailing. As I said, a cooperative, there were people that never worked, and there were people that did a lot more of their share of the work. That was always the case. But when the going got tough, everyone was grateful to have someone in command who was willing and able to be in command, and they were very willing to take command from that person. So it’s kind of the way it is in our government. Everybody complains until we’re in a mess, and then they want to make sure that whoever is in charge is going to be taking responsibility and going to be held responsible for what they do. So where did the journey take you? We’ve gone from Boston to the… All through the Caribbean. Yeah, I was there. We were mostly in the Windward Islands, the Lesser Antilles. We didn’t go to the heavily-touristed places ever. We really liked to be in the quieter, more pristine, more natural, untouristed areas of the world, aside from the fact that we were this big, massive, lumbering ship that didn’t always fit well into a crowded harbor. Certainly, the way we lived wasn’t always welcomed in a crowded harbor. We were not a fancy-flash yacht. We did not have a lot of amenities on our vessel. So even though we were always the most popular ship in any harbor where we anchored, we were just this giant floating party and very welcoming, there were areas that really didn’t want us around fancy yacht clubs, for instance, or places with a lot of yacht or hoity-toity traffic. And that was fine with us. So we stayed in the areas that were more in tune with an old, wooden, traditional tall ship personality, I guess, and a bunch of young people that didn’t have a lot of money to spend in port.
David: Can I just go back a step? A lot of historical sailing ships have some sort of purpose that they’re sailing around. I know that we see the Endeavour sailing around here, and it’s the young Endeavour, and it’s got groups of kids. They’re trying to teach them something. Was there an overriding purpose to the journey?
Pam: The overriding purpose was to keep this old ship sailing and to give people who came on board of her the opportunity to experience her and to experience their world via her. We would deal in trade goods. We were very much of a cost-plus operation always. We never had a lot of cash. So we took care of her ourselves, and we kept going by virtue of the payment of the wandering itinerants that would come on board at any given time. So we certainly didn’t want to discourage people from coming.
And we dealt in trade goods just to keep her going as well. We’d buy things in one port and sell them somewhere else, coffee in Costa Rica that we’d sell in Papiti for a profit, soapstone in Africa that we could sell anywhere in the world, tapas from the San Blas that brought in a pretty penny in America, all kinds of things like that. But basically the purpose of her was what you would expect of a sailing cooperative that was born in the 1960s. It was just to keep the old girl going, keep the sails keepers sharp. Yes, yes, I think it was right. It was very clean and clear. Anybody that came on board either came on board as a sailor and learned how to cooperate, or they came on board willing to cooperate and learned how to sail. But basically the ship came first always. She determined whether we would put to sea, whether we would stay put in work, where we would go. People didn’t get a vote based on what their particular whim was. It was the ship and her safety and her needs that dictated everything.
David: Who was making those decisions?
Pam: Well, we would make them as you would make them in a cooperative. But we had some, there were some things that were not to be trifled with. For instance, if the majority of the crew said we are going to sea today because we’re frankly running out of vacation time, and the knowledgeable people on board knew that the ship was not safe to put to sea, that she needed work or that the crew needed more training, then she simply didn’t go. Then there was an absolute mandate. But other than that, it was basically being, everything was more or less voted upon. But we made sure that there were intelligent, people were making intelligent decisions. We did not have a bunch of crazy people on board that were in the majority at any given time who would say and do things that would put all of us at risk because they were putting themselves at risk as well.
David: So you’re saying you didn’t have a majority of crazy people, but you had a percentage of crazy people.
Pam: Always had, yeah, one or two here or there that kept everything lively, always, yes. But ultimately, she garnered a great deal of respect from sailors all over the world by the way that we sailed her and by the way that we took care of her. She was the priority. And sailors who cut their teeth on ships like Sophia all over the world really honored us by being proud of the way we were taking care of her. And that meant everything.
David: So of the places that you traveled with Sophia, have you been back to visit many of them and seen changes? I mean, it’s not history. I don’t know. I don’t know what to call it. Something the kids are going to study in school, 1978. But there would have been a lot of change in the meantime.
Pam: Absolutely. There’s no question. The geophysics and the geopolitics that I write about in the book, they’re just part of the story because they are what’s happening while we’re sailing. In all of these different parts of the world, I literally filled three passports with stamps from all the different places that we were, have changed so much. As I said, this was pre-globalization. I’ve been back to many of the places that we sailed and the changes are, some of them are good. I would say most of them are inevitable but make me sad. Progress. So many of these cultures that were really undiscovered. We actually went to places that had not seen white people. We sailed into harbors that had never seen a ship. We sailed into the back islands and bays of the Marquesa Islands at the time when only Thor Heyerdahl had been there. We really were able to do that on this ship. Today, there are cruise ships that go to these places and McDonald’s. I can’t feel good about that but I think I suppose it’s inevitable. Costa Rica was one of my favorite places back then and it’s still one of my favorite. We’ve been back recently and although it’s obviously changed, the good things about it remain. Places like New Zealand, for instance, which was the unofficial home of the ship, we’ve been back to because New Zealand really considered the Sofia Her ship and they mourned her when they lost her and we have been back there. We actually had a life. I’m jumping to the end of the story a little bit but the ship went down off Cape Reinga, off the North Cape of New Zealand. So it really hit New Zealand very hard. The sinking actually happened there, the disaster. But after I wrote this book, we had a launch of the book in New Zealand because so much of the book is about the New Zealand people and the history of our ship that took place in New Zealand over the years. We had a life raft survivors reunion in New Zealand 25 years later.
David: Was the ship actually registered in New Zealand?
Pam: The ship was registered in St. Thomas in the British Virgin Islands and it had never been there. It just happened to have been one of those convenient places to register her. But in all of the years that she was sailing and circumnavigating, she would do her major refit in New Zealand and spend about a year there and the people learned to expect her and wait for her and literally loved her. She was almost like a national ship to the people there. On the dock where we would tie up for anywhere up to a year was down in Nelson. On the northern tip of the South Island, the town of Nelson, we knew everyone, everyone knew us and on the dock, on the big cement dock, it was the Sophia painted her name and the years that she had been there. It was really home.
David: You won’t find a group of people more passionate about sailing, I don’t think, than as a group in New Zealand.
Pam: Absolutely. It felt very natural. That’s why I did the book launch there. It was really to pay homage to those wonderful people and what they meant to me and what they had meant to the ship and vice versa all those years.
David: The time that you were sailing, you can’t recapture those experiences now, can you? You’re finding places that are so remote. I guess there are some places still fairly remote, but you couldn’t just jump in a boat now and have those same experiences. Like you say, there’s cruise ships everywhere, there’s so many people cruising the ocean, which is great, but you were just so lucky you experienced something that people can’t book a holiday and really get that same experience anymore.
Pam: That’s what I felt at the time. I somehow had an inkling that that was happening and I think I was old enough and maybe wise enough somehow to appreciate that, but after the disaster, after we lost her and then we were miraculously rescued and we had this multinational crew of survivors, most of us survived the sinking. When we all managed to make our way back to our home nations, I was fairly inundated here in the United States by people who wanted to tell the story, film producers and writers and everybody wanted to tell the story, but they wanted to tell the story of her death, of the disaster. And I said, I may tell the story someday, but it will not be just her death, it will be her life because it’s such a wonderful story and the tale of the places that we visited and the people of that time, they are gone now and that part needed to be told. That needed to be memorialized in print. That was as important to me as any other facet of the story. And so that is what I wrote 25 years later, is her entire story. And that ties into, it’s just great that you had that written record to go back to as well. Not just the written record, to pick photographs and artifacts and really, I would be writing in my journal and sometimes it would be on the backs of produce boxes or on the backs of old navigation charts and just ripped in a wad from my notebook and sent off from some foreign harbor somewhere that might have been months in the making and that I would send it home wet and soggy with whatever else I had been given or gathered along the way and that would show up in my parent’s mailbox, months of traveling. But that’s the most honest. That’s when you write what you’re feeling or what’s happening at the time that it’s happening, when it’s raw and unfiltered and uncensored like that, you can never get it that real again. So thankfully they saved it because I was literally able to recreate in my mind and in my heart that time while I went through those journal entries to create the book. I was right back there, all the good and the bad of it.
David: And you must have only been able to put a limited number of photos into the book. Have you kept photos, put them up somewhere else or?
Pam: We have hundreds between my husband and myself. The fellow that would ultimately become my husband took the ship about two years in for me. I had already been circumnavigating for a couple of years when he came on board. He proposed to me in the life raft two years later when we were out there feeling fairly certain that we were going to die fairly shortly. And he thought maybe we’d have the captain marry us at sea before we all died. It was very romantic.
David: He didn’t change his mind afterwards and say…
Pam: He did not. It was like a deathbed confession and life raft proposals, I think. We were miraculously saved. But between he and I, we have hundreds of beautiful, wonderful photographs. The book only has I think 15 black and whites in it. But you can see more photographs from this book. If you go on my website, you can click onto the book trailer link and there are photos to music. And when I do book events, when I tour and do book events, I show photos to music videos. It’s a very kind of a sensual appreciation of this ship. It brings her to life and it puts you there. I was sad that they couldn’t put the photographs in the book. And I should mention this book was translated into Swedish by an old sailing mate of mine who became an author and a world traveler in his own right. He translated this book into Swedish and had his publisher in Sweden publish it. And he was able to put many color photographs in. So if you want to get the book just for the photograph and you can’t read Swedish, it’s still worth it. But that book is also, you also can find out how to get that book on my website. And that’s full of color photographs. I’m not sure they’re the photographs I’d have chosen, but the ones that he put in there are pretty indicative of a certain slice of life on board this ship, one of the more renegade aspects of it.
David: Pam, while we’re just talking about your website. What’s the address that people would go to if they wanted to have a look?
Pam: The website is www.pamelasismanbitterman.com. It’s my name, my married name and my maiden name. But if you just Google Pam Bitterman, several pages of things will come up, including my website. So if that was too hard to write down, Google Pam Bitterman. And I have several, on my website, several things about this book. This book is now, actually my publisher is re-releasing it. It is sold out in hardcover, although I have several copies and you can still find them on Amazon. But they’re re-releasing it in the fall. That will be re-released with more hardcover copies and in paperback and digitally. Okay, great. Yeah, that’s terrific. I’m very pleased about that. And then my other books are available on there as well, other adventures that I’ve had and written about. But definitely link to the YouTube videos of the photos to music and you get a good feel for.
David: Whereabouts? Is that on the website?
Pam: If you go on my website and you click on Published Works, the first book that will come up, you click on Sailing to the Far Horizon. And on that page, if you scroll down, it tells you the link to the website for the book trailer. All the information is there and reviews of the book and all the information that you might need.
David: That’s great. I’ll put some links on my website as well after we put this up.
Pam: Terrific.
David: And that might help people find it too if they’re sort of perhaps listening and hard to write something down. I’ll put some links there so they can just find it easily.
Pam: Well, we always had a good representation of Aussies on board the ship at any given time. The Aussies are tough. They’re tough and they’re knowledgeable sailors and they were not deterred by the rough living and the hard work and the lack of amenities on the Sophia. They were always our best crew.
David: That’s a nice compliment.
Pam: Yeah, so there are going to be people in your homeland that are going to remember this ship and maybe would have been on board of her.
David: Okay And so the sailing trip, I guess we should talk about what’s happened at the end. Is it too early to jump to there?
Pam: No, no, I could spend a lot of time on that part alone. What happened is what tends to happen in a situation that you and I were discussing earlier where you’ve got a hazy hierarchy and a cooperative and not everybody agreeing or getting along and personal conflicts getting in the way. We had been in New Zealand for several months doing a major refit. We were actually putting a false keel on the ship. She had a really serious hog. I think sailors will know what that means where her bow and her stern were literally 18 inches lower than she was a midship, her keel. She was just bending like an old osteoporotic spine and that’s what happens with an old wooden ship. You get all this weight forward and aft and the middle of her just kind of bends. So we knew we had to, in order to strengthen her at this point, we couldn’t sail with her any longer like that. We had to do something. And we talked to lots of shipwrights and marine architects in New Zealand and came up with this plan for making a false keel for her, kind of like those old block sets we used to play with as children where you have that little crescent-shaped piece and then you have that half-moon-shaped piece that flips right into it. We literally did that to her on the hard in Nelson. And then we attached the whole thing with six foot through bolts and keel bolts and a big metal truss and it was all this wood planking. But instead, if we weren’t going to rebuild her from the waterline down, we were still going to have old wood and new wood, old fastenings and new fastenings, old caulking and new caulking. That was inevitable. But that’s what we did. And that was the best that anybody who knew anything could come up with. Once we finished this refit, we had been approached by a film company who wanted to use our ship to make a movie. And they wanted us to come to Auckland where they were going to put a new engine in so that we could be where we needed to be on time. We had a beautiful old Uni-Munktel 2 diesel chugger that wasn’t all that reliable. We basically sailed. We hardly ever used the engine, but they said we’re going to give you a whole new engine so you can get to these locations we need you to be for shoots. And we’re going to go to Fiji and we’re going to hire all the guys on board to be in the extras. And of course, no women because this was going to be a traditional pirate movie. So our next stop was going to be Auckland to do this. There were people on board that didn’t want to do the film. They wanted to sail straight away for Australia and they wanted to have a different captain. So we had a kind of a coup, a bit of a mutiny, and the mutiny ultimately was foiled. The captain remained in command and the people that had tried to force the mutiny, who were most of the experienced sailors on board who had crossed the South Pacific with me, some of whom had been on board with me for almost four years, left. They left then. They said we’re not going to go on and sail with this man. We’re not going to sail with this ship any longer. So we had a pretty green crew. I was given the position of acting first mate. I was the second most knowledgeable person on board at that time and second most sea time on the ship. And about five knowledgeable sailors and a lot of green crew. And we were sailing north about, which is a notoriously rough passage up around the east coast of the North Island to come over the top and into the Bay of Islands into Auckland. We had very rough weather coming across the top, across Cape Reinga there where there’s a wicked strong current in the middle of a dark night. We were laboring. We were pumping constantly. There were some new sailors that were frankly fairly terrified. But we only had a couple hours to go to come into Auckland in the morning. And we had certainly been through worse. And those of us on board who had been there, done that, were managing the ship fine. But we think while we were on deck at about one in the morning, I called all hands on deck to reduce sail per the captain’s orders. We think while we were all on deck furling sail, we only can presume this. We will never know for certain. But we think the garboard strake or the plank that runs the length of the ship from the stem to the stern right at the water line sprang. And water was coming in in massive volumes below decks. Because within minutes, the next time we were all on deck, the next time anyone looked below and it was me, the billboards were floating. And the engine was underwater. And we were trying to release life rafts. And the ship, literally, a big wave came over her bow. She went over on her beam end and everybody was back aft, except my husband and I. We were up forward furling sails and trying to release a life raft. And people just floated off. She went down right underneath us in a matter of minutes.
David: That’s what’s going to be my question. It sounds like, I mean, what sort of, from noticing something was wrong to stepping into the lifeboat wasn’t a very long time.
Pam: By the time that we noticed something was wrong, it was over. It was too late. I think had I not called all hands on deck and had we not been on deck furling sail, probably we would have lost the majority of the crew if not everyone because everyone but the watch was down below. The water came in so quickly. But we didn’t even, we weren’t aware of it because we were on deck. And it was very, it was dark and stormy and it was very difficult to reduce sail. So everybody was working very hard. But the ship was riding very low and lower and lower. And that’s when I went to check on the life raft and the engine to see if we could start the auxiliary bilge pump. And I stepped down into waist deep water when I hit the cabin sole. So by the time I made the deck again, it became apparent. But we didn’t have time to release the raft. A big wave came over her bow, leaned her over on her port beam. Everybody that was back aft just literally floated off the ship, which was a lucky thing because they were clear of all of that rigging and sail. I was forward, my husband was forward, and a young girl, who we actually lost when the ship went down, was up forward. It’s a miracle my husband and I weren’t dragged down with the ship as well. The life raft released at a certain depth and self-inflated and rose to the surface damaged. And 16 of the 17 crew members were able to find the raft and scramble into them in the storm. I was the last one to get into the raft. I heard the girl in the water who did not make it crying for help. I couldn’t find her. And the rest of us made it into these rafts, but they were disabled. The lifeboat stores were gone. We did not have the opportunity to set off our EPIRB or any of our abandoned ship protocol that I had put the crew through hours and hours of drills. We fought the storm all night in these disabled rafts. When the sun came up the next morning, there was no sign that the ship had ever been there, nothing, no flotsam, no jetsam. We were not able to find the young girl, 17-year-old New Zealand girl. That’s a real tragedy. It was a terrible tragedy.
David: I can imagine that all of New Zealand would have been devastated.
Pam: All of New Zealand was devastated. Her family didn’t even know she had gotten on board. She jumped on board in New Plymouth. a couple of the fellas met her in a coffee shop and talked her into coming for the ride just around the North Cape to Auckland, and then she’d probably have gone home again and told her family about this great little adventure she’d taken. It was terrible. It changed everything. We lost the ship, and that was horrible. We all survived, and that was miraculous. But the fact that we lost this young woman changes it all. It changed it forever for me. I was in a position of responsibility, and I have never been able to be okay with it, I guess.
David: No, I was just thinking that’s a sort of trauma that’s sort of life-changing, isn’t it? I mean, it must go through your mind just so many times. I was trying to think of what the thing is that the people who are in a war zone, what’s the thing that they have?
Pam: Post-traumatic stress. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David: I mean, it must have been that sort of level of thing.
Pam: Right. I think probably, I know I’ve been more affected by the loss of this young woman than the captain was. He felt more, he didn’t know her and he didn’t feel a particular personal connection. I don’t think he felt responsible either because it’s the nature of what happened at sea. They did an investigation, and the whole Coast Guard investigation is in my book as well, and he was not found negligent. But in my heart of hearts, I will never be okay with having been in a position of responsibility where a young life was lost. I think probably I feel it more than anybody else. He and I were in charge. I know I feel it more than he does. I certainly feel it more than any of the other people on board who were just happy that they survived. So it’s just something you learn to live with, but it’s never okay. It’s never okay.
David: And you said that your husband proposed to you because he didn’t think you were going to get picked up from the life rafts?
Pam: Right. We were in these life rafts being blown out to nowhere. We had been in the rafts for almost a week. We had virtually no food or water. We were being blown past the Three Kings Islands. It would be 40 days until the nearest landfall. We’d all be well dead by then. We were well out of shipping lanes and just being jettisoned in this current. We figured we’d maybe be able to stay alive for about 10 days. Under the present circumstances, all kinds of things were failing physically and emotionally. But basically, we had really kept up well. We kept our spirits up. But one of our rafts was seriously disabled, and we had sharks monitoring us pretty closely. And we knew that those of us that were in the disabled raft, we couldn’t continue to patch it, get in the water and flip it and patch it. So half of us or more than half of us were going to be in the water the next day. And that would have been the end. And then the rest would follow shortly thereafter. There wasn’t a rational, intelligent good reason to hope at that point. Everything we had tried had failed. And there was very little else that we could do or hope for. So our rescue was a miracle. There’s no other way to explain it. And here we are today to tell the story.
David: Yeah, that’s amazing. I guess once you passed the top of New Zealand, you would have just blown to Australia, I guess, unless you hit one of the reefs on the way.
Pam: Right. And again, we had no sustenance. Everybody had gone in the water basically in what they had come up on deck in various stages of undress when I called the all hands. So people were everybody had these terrible sores from skin rubbing on the salt encrusted rubber rafts. And some people were fading faster than others. And luckily, though, we never had to see how bad things could get or perhaps how bad we might get. Everyone maintained a very heroic, I guess, profile. And so we can all remember each other that way and maybe even remember ourselves that way. We were right at the cusp of things really turning a very dark corner.
David: And you had a reunion, did you say? When was that? That was just a couple of years ago. We actually came back when I wrote this book. As I said, so much of it deals with New Zealand and the ship and the people that I felt it was appropriate, as did my publisher, to have a launch of the book in New Zealand. So the people in New Zealand, I had kept in touch with all of these years, so many of them. I talk about them in the book, but some of them were very important to me and vice versa. And they kept writing and I’d tell them about our children and I’d send pictures and they’d say, when are you coming back? They all thought we would come back and live there. They all thought we would come back and be New Zealanders and raise our children there. And they were waiting for us. Many of them did not live to see the day that we did come back. Many of them were older. But when we finally did come back, we came back to launch the book there and that was about seven years ago. And it just so happened that our old captain had gone on and built himself another tall ship. And he continued to sail around the world on it and he continued to make New Zealand his annual refit and kind of home base. And he just happened to be there on his ship at the time and he gathered together as many of the survivors, of the life raft survivors and the important people who remembered the ship from our day to meet us there when we came. My husband and I came over with our children, our grown children. And we saw these people again from the life raft for the very first time in over 25 years, all of us together there. On board the captain’s ship at the exact same dock in Nelson where our ship had been prior to her final voyage.
David: Was that fairly emotional?
Pam: Very emotional, very emotional, very sentimental, actually very difficult. I learned a lot of things at that reunion that I hadn’t realized. My husband and I had not only sailed on the ship together and had all of those wonderful memories and this wonderful sense of each other as who we had been back then, but we shared the memory of her sinking and the memory of the life raft and the memory of the rescue. And so we didn’t talk about it a lot, but we knew that the other one knew. And there had always been this unspoken comfort in that. When we got together again with all of these other people that had been on the ship with us during this horrible nightmare of her sinking and then this further nightmare of this life raft survival, they had spent all of the years since then not having anyone to talk to about it. They had just been alone with this, with their confusion and their fears and their questions and their just such unfinished business that they talked to us as though it had just happened yesterday for most of them. It was astounding really. We were the only people in the world with whom they could share this most important moment in their lives.
David: Yes, so just being bottled up for them versus you guys being able to sort of go over it.
Pam: Yes, and I hadn’t realized that. It actually made me feel quite guilty that we hadn’t tried to do this sooner or kept in touch so that these people would have had, I don’t know, maybe just an event, someone to talk to, someone to help them try and make sense of it all and come to terms with what had happened. They were all alone with it.
David: Well, I’m sure it would have helped everybody as well in the end.
Pam: Yes, and I think it did and it was a wonder. They saw our children and actually our children looked like we had looked the last time they saw us, our son and our daughter. They thought that they were them, that they were us actually, but we had all gotten older.
David: Yes, it sounds like a really interesting story just to taste the old experiences that you’ve had and like you say, I guess it’s sad that it finished in a tragedy, but yes, I’m really excited. I’m looking forward to having a read through.
Pam: Oh, well, I’m so happy to send you the book and I’ll autograph it for you. I would encourage anyone who thinks that they might be interested to go on my website and read about it and then scroll down and link to the book trailer itself. You will get a good sense of what this story is and I reiterate, it is a story for everyone. It’s a story about taking a leap of faith, about looking for the best in each one of us, about a world, as I said, before globalization. It’s certainly a story for sailors and for circumnavigators or traditional Marlin Spike seamen, but more than anything, it’s a story about the human spirit and it’s a story about the human condition. It just happens to be on board this beautiful, proud, old sailing vessel that was able to come into ports and cultures and share all over the world her story with the story of all of these wonderful, welcoming, generous people. Their story gets told as well and thank goodness for that because I honestly don’t think that you’re going to find that anymore.
David: Yeah, and I’m looking forward, I’m trying to think how to say this without sounding sexist, but it’ll be nice to read a sailing story as well that’s written by a female because the majority of the books I have are written by men, so it’ll be really interesting from that aspect as well.
Pam: Absolutely, and the nice thing about this that I found while I was doing my book tour and I would have people come up to me buying the book to have me sign it, there were so many women from my generation who came up to me and said, this has meant so much to me. They were able to see it metaphorically. Many of them had never stepped foot on a ship nor would they ever or had they ever even wandered that far from their own home, but what it represented for them was this, it was new to women of our time to be able to take these leaps of faith, to believe in ourselves and to break the mold and they remember having those feelings and they were able to identify with that in this book and they said, this is a book I want my daughters to read because this was how I felt back then.
David: That’s what popped into my mind is I’m sure that Carina will enjoy reading the book as well, being from a female perspective she’ll relate to it a lot as well.
Pam: That would be my hope. I honestly wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it was true, but I honestly believe that this book is for everyone. It is a bigger story than what you might think by the title. Actually the title was not my choice, that was the publisher’s choice. I had a more metaphorical title in mind, but the title is very specific to failing the book is a much bigger story than that.
David: That’s terrific, so that’s great. I’ll put up links to your website and people can go there having a look around. If they wanted to write to you, is there somewhere on the website or is there an email address?
Pam: My email is not on the website, but I’m happy to give it to you and people can write me there. They can also write, the website has the WordPress, so whoever writes me on the website I always answer. My email address is MabelDog4, M-A-B-E-L-D-O-G, the number four, at AOL.com. I will always answer anyone that writes me there. I would also, if anybody has any trouble finding a hard copy right now until the new copies are re-released, I would be very happy to send anyone an autographed copy. I don’t think I have Australia in my immediate travel plans, otherwise I would say I would sign the book for them when I got there, but I really am happy to do that if anybody would like.
David: That’s great, and then people can also then leave comments on the website as well, like you say.
Pam: Yes, and I love hearing people’s reactions to the book. I really do, I love hearing, and actually what has happened since the book has come out is that people from all over the world who remember the ship, they either saw her, or they were on board her, or they were in a harbor somewhere where she came in, or they were on another ship that saw her in port, and they’ve gotten in touch with me all these years later. And we’ve renewed an association, and they have thanked me for recalling in such vivid detail that era that is gone now.
David: Excellent, that’s terrific. Well, thanks so much for letting us know about it, Pam, and like I say, I’m really looking forward to reading through the story, it will be terrific.
Pam: Well, thank you, I know that you had to put the time together for us to meet up here halfway around the world, so I really, really appreciate it, this has been great. Conclusion/Outro Well, thank you everybody for listening, it really inspires me to see people downloading the podcast. Thanks again Pamela for that very interesting interview regarding the Sophia, it’s a story I hadn’t heard of, and I’m really looking forward to reading the book, and since recording it I’ve seen that Sailing to the Far Horizon is going to be released in paperback and digital format this year, so that will make it really easy for people to find or download onto their devices. I’ve put a link to Pamela’s site on the show notes, and I’ve also put up the YouTube book trailer, which has got those photos that you can have a look at, and there’s a link to Amazon where you’ll probably be able to find a copy of the book. That’s all at thesailingpodcast.com forward slash tallships. I mentioned joining the newsletter on last week’s interview with Peter, and that I hope to have some books to give away to listeners, I’m going to go ahead with this and I’ll pass the details on through the newsletter, so make sure that you go to the website and sign up there. Thanks to everybody who’s visiting us on Facebook, that’s facebook.com forward slash thesailingpodcast, and you can find us on iTunes by going to thesailingpodcast.com forward slash iTunes, that will redirect you to our listing, and of course you can always contact me by email, david at thesailingpodcast.com, you can link up with me on Google Plus using that address as well. Thank you for listening, I hope you have a great day, and thank you for joining us on our journey. You’ve been listening to David and Carina Anderson of The Sailing Podcast.