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Show Page A10 Thursday, April 15, 1982 The Newspaper If you go to Tonga, stay away from Isaac 1 h s A SKI OUTFITTERS THE GOODBYE WINTER SALE 50 off all remaining stock in store RossignoJ, K-2, SpauJding, Nordica, Hansen, plus all of our clothing April 16, 17, 18 from 9 -6 1240 PARK AVENUE PARK CITY, UTAH 649-9123 i A STANDARD FOR LUXURIOUS LIVING Quality craftsmanship, tasteful, luxurious appointments appoint-ments and location, location, location make DOUBLEJACK condominiums one of the finest investments invest-ments in Park City today, lust 300 yards from the lifts at 1313 Woodside Ave., there is nothing as luxurious as DOUBLEJACK in Park City a town that boasts of luxury housing and a quality lifestyle. DOUBLEJACK will afford its owners not only unique year-round living, but lucrative lucra-tive nightly rentals as well. DOUBLEJACK DEVELOPED IV SIS ENTERPRISES WE5TPORT. CT (203) 2274294 BUY THE BEST Imagine yourself as one of the few who will own this outstanding investment in the West's finest recreation recrea-tion community. 3 major ski resorts vie for your attention atten-tion in winter and a huge selection of summer activities activi-ties are at your doorstep. Choose from 2 theater companies, com-panies, a major art center, concerts by nationally acclaimed performers, the world famous Park City Arts Festival, great restaurants, fantastic shopping, dancing, rodeo or just relaxing by your fireplace and enjoying the peace of mind that comes from sound investment. LOOK AT THESE AMENITIES IN EACH UNIT! 2,000 square feet, 3 or 4 bedrooms Private sauna with adjacent walk-thru shower Pell a glass solarium with 7' hot tub and magnificent magnifi-cent views Gourmet center island kitchen with microwave, barbeque and custom cabinetry 3 tiled bathrooms with decorator fixtures Hardwood floors and luxurious carpeting Woodburning fireplaces in living room and master bedroom Washer and dryer, elevator, underground parking park-ing and storage Professional management available tram MA toera D WWW teaax JL jul; Si ljJ JUL. JJL 5 rn c I rji L n J n b-vi r I hi iMizz: rdHr-L it 1 n Jrrr REAL ESTATE ,'erry Perrine Res. 649-8429 1662 Bonanza Drive P. 0. Box 2848 Park City, Utah 84060 (801)649-9134 -y MlEJjj 1 1 by David Hampshire Hurricane Isaac didn't make much of a splash in the American papers when it ripped through the South Pacific Island Kingdom of Tonga. It hit the headlines in Salt Lake City for a couple of days, chiefly because of the large Mormon population living in Tonga. But for most people it was just another of those natural disasters which make the news every so often. It was soon forgotten. forgot-ten. But Pete Park and Bonnie Bedford aren't likely to forget Hurricane Isaac, ever. They were on a 44-foot sailboat, doing a leisurely tour of the Vava'u island group in Tonga, when Isaac paid them a visit. Pete and Bonnie, both Park City residents, have this thing about sailboats. They spent two weeks last winter on a boat in the Caribbean, and were planning plan-ning to do the same this winter, win-ter, but then decided to try a change of scene. They got one. Along with Pete's brother, Jim, his wife Wendy, and their parents, Gene and Dotty Park of San Pedro, California, Califor-nia, they chartered a boat known as a Caribbean Sailing Yacht 44 (CSY). Gene, a retired naval officer, and his sons are veteran sailors, so handling the boat under normal conditions would have posed no problems. And, for the first seven days of their Tongan visit, things were normal. They spent the first week doing just what they had imagined, sailing between the islands, snorkeling in 78-degree 78-degree water, drinking Foster's Lager Beer, just relaxing. They also met the crews of some other cruising boats, including one American couple who had come to Tonga because they had heard it was a good place to weather out the hurricane season. Hurricane season? Come to find out, February in the South Pacific is a bit like August in the Caribbean. It can get a little hairy at times. But Tonga hadn't been hit since 1961, so nobody was too concerned. con-cerned. Then, on the morning of March 2, their seventh day out, came an ominous weather report from the Vava'u weather station. "All of a sudden they were predicting a cyclone," Pete remembers. "They were saying it was 280 miles northeast of Vava'u, heading (in our direction) at five miles per hour." However, the forecast predicted winds of 30 to 40 miles per hour, hardly a cause for panic. And the other American couple didn't seem too concerned. "They were saying there had been three or four other cyclone (hurricane) warnings warn-ings that season," Bonnie recalls. "They were taking it pretty lightly." Gene Park, now a California Califor-nia yacht broker, thought the couple looked familiar. As it turned out, he had sold them their first sailboat in California some years before. mmmmimmm i;f f ir if 1 f -m m MIMlil W'f'' Iff j " Si-iiilp g::l . kw fed .,Jb Bonnie, Foster's in hand, peers cheerfully from the cockpit of the beached craft. The sailors contacted the charter company on the radio, and were advised to head for the harbor before the storm hit. But they took their time, spending most of the day getting there. Bonnie caught a tuna on the way. Nobody was overly anxious. "I was figuring it was going to be bad," Pete said. "But I didn't figure there would be 120 mile-an-hour winds." They were moored in the harbor by about 4 p.m., and started installing the rain gear, which included a plastic windshield called a dodger to protect the cockpit cock-pit area. By 6 p.m. it was starting to get windy. "They said the eye was supposed to pass over at 1 o'clock in the morning," Bonnie said. "We had a second anchor out just in case we started to have problems." By 10 p.m. the waves had reached four to six feet high. "I don't think we ever thought about going to shore," Pete said. "We didn't," Bonnie added. ad-ded. "It didn't even cross our minds." They were not alone in the harbor. About 16 other boats were anchored nearby. Or rather, they were supposed to be anchored. As the wind picked up, it started to drag the boats, anchors and all, toward the shore. The usual chatter on VHF Channel 16 started to be replaced by expressions ex-pressions of alarm. Redhawk, another private American sailboat equipped with radar, was giving a running narrative on which boat had slipped anchor, who was coming down on whom, and which boats were headed for the coral. "It was like a stratego game," Bonnie said. Along with the wind came the rain, whipping almost horizontally across the deck. About 11:30 p.m. their boat snapped its mooring line, and Pete, Jim and Gene went on deck to throw out an auxiliary anchor. "We just had a vision of these guys flying over the side of the boat," said Bonnie. Bon-nie. "We were pretty quick about getting the life jackets out." "The wind was whipping us from side to side," Pete recalled. "And the other boats were converging on us." "It was like a demolition derby with $150,000 sailboats," Bonnie added. Jim and Gene started the engine to keep the boat heading into the wind, and to ease the strain on the anchors. an-chors. Jim took the wheel for about two hours, battling to keep the boat from going aground. About midnight the eye of the storm passed over the harbor. There was a brief lull, allowing the sailors to catch their breath. "Then, all of a sudden, we were going in the opposite direction," direc-tion," Pete said. It was a losing battle. The line connected to the auxiliary anchor eventually snapped. The mooring line from another boat wrapped around the propellor, stalling the engine. With the wind still howling at two o'clock in the morning, the sailors could do little except try to wait it out. Pete, with a flair for the dramatic, chose this mtt? ... a .ss,.... Jf .v& Surveying the damage the following day. moment to ask Bonnie to marry him. "She didn't say anything," he remembers, "So I said, 'What do you think?' And the wind was howling and everything... "And she said, 'Sure.'" The waves eventually deposited the boat on a coral ledge, wedged tightly against another boat. "The boat was just pounding, pound-ing, because of the wave and wind action, against the other boat," Pete said. "Was the boat going to break up? That's what I was afraid of ... We could feel the whole hull twisting." In spite of Pete's concerns, they stayed on board the boat, until about 3 a.m., before going out to survey the damage. "Finally the tide went out, and the motion of the boat had stopped." He climbed out the forward for-ward hatch. "It was still pouring rain, and blowing like a bat out of hell." They soon discovered they had company. In addition to the boat wedged beside them on the shore there were half a dozen others stretched in a row along the reef. A woman on one of the other boats had been injured, in-jured, caught between two of the lurching vessels during the height of the storm. Early the next morning, Pete and Jim helped transport trans-port her to a native medical clinic. Even after experiencing the storm, they were astonished by the destruction destruc-tion on the island of Vava'u. "It was thrashed," in Pete's words. "There were electrical wires, everything all over the place ... Maybe 65 to 70 percent of the houses didn't have any roofs on them. The roads were barely passable." Frame houses had been lifted off their foundations, breadfruit trees ripped up by their roots. The damage to their boat was confined mainly to the rigging and a section of the hull near the bow. The mainsail main-sail had been ripped from the boom, the genoa shredded, shred-ded, one of the shrouds snapped. As Pete pointed out, they had one distinct advantage over many of the other sailors whose boats were on the beach. They could leave the boat where it was, hop on a plane, and fly back to civilization: getting the boat off the reef was a project left for the charter company. They stayed in Tonga for two days after the storm, then spent one night at the Rainmaker Hotel in Pago Pago, American Samoa (made famous in the writings of Somerset Maugham), before flying back to Los Angeles. Hurricane Isaac had cut short their vacation by about 10 days, but they'll have a great story to tell their kids. Of yes, the wedding: it's been scheduled for August |