Nuku Hiva North Point Fishing Adventure:

This is a fish story from 1976, when I was sailing my 37-foot cutter "Spice" in the Marquesas Islands (down near Tahiti). I had made a plan with some friends on another cruising boat to meet them in a small bay on the North side of the island of Nuku Hiva.

They'd left Taiohae bay earlier in the day, and I'd stayed to finish some maintenance jobs on my boat. I got done later than I'd expected to, hauled anchor and set sail for the north side. I had put out four trolling lines as soon as I'd cleared Taiohae harbor, but hadn't had a single strike in about an hour and a half of sailing.

As I made my way around the western end of the island and turned north, I watched my lines and wham! One of them went off, the bungie cord stretching all the way out to its full length of six feet. This meant that there was a big fish on, and I sheeted out and put the boat on her windvane self-steering so I could?go pull the fish in.

I pulled in a nice 50-pound yellowfin tuna, what was called locally "kahi", and put it in a net bag. I then put out the trolling lines again, and got headed in the right direction.

Just as we were passing around the north-western tip of the island, the wind, which was blowing straight towards the towering 500-foot black stone cliffs that came right down into the sea, switched and came FROM the cliff for a minute or two. It swirled around the boat, throwing us aback, with the sails pressed against the rigging and mast.

The wind wasn't very strong, and we were VERY close to the cliff, so (just a little scared!) I jumped down below and started my little hand-cranked 6-hp diesel engine to get us straightened back out and going in the right direction.

In my little time below, though, we'd gotten a gust of wind that had swirled the boat around in a different direction, and as soon as I started the engine, the prop sucked in a couple of the trolling lines and the engine stopped dead with the lines wound around the prop shaft. Now I was really scared!

I looked at the wind, saw that it was gusty and shifting from moment to moment. I saw the cliff, only about 200 feet away now, and realized that I was at a critical juncture. So I sheeted the sails all the way out (loose), dropped the boarding ladder off the stern, and dove over the side with a razor sharp butcher's knife in my hand.

The whole time up til now I had kept my lifeline harness and lifeline on, to keep me with the boat, but now, a safety webbing harness and lifeline on me could be the one thing that caught on a rudder gudgeon or the prop itself and drowned me. So I dove in with no lifeline on at all.

I went straight under the boat, and sawed about half the lines off the prop with my first breath. I had to come up to take another, then went down again. There was a confused sea off the point, and although the boat wasn't moving through the water much, or at all, she was bouncing up and down three or four feet by the stern and trying to bash my head in with the rudder and prop shaft. When I went under and grabbed the prop shaft as a solid point to anchor myself to, and work from while cutting the fishing lines off the shaft, I was jerked violently up and down underwater about every four to five seconds, which was the period of the waves. Exciting to say the least!

I went down a second time, got a death grip on the prop shaft, and just barely sawed the rest of the lines off the shaft before running out of air. Swam to the boarding ladder, faced a quandary: How do I climb this thing with one hand holding onto a knife? Jammed the knife in between my teeth like a buccaneer, latched onto the ladder like it was my savior (it was!), and made it up the three rungs in about three tenths of a second!

The engine had never sounded sweeter when it cranked over and sucked me and my boat away from the towering stone cliffs. I sailed into the bay without seeing a sign of my friends; kind of feeling my way because by now it was pitch black, and there were no boats, no lights on shore, and no moon out. When I got the boat anchored and collapsed into my bunk, I totally forgot about the beautiful ahi I caught, and had to salt-dry it the next day instead of eat it fresh. But I still had a boat!