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Show Adventurers Sail In Pacific Ocean For Sea Thrills Boat Owners Seek Escape From Troubles and Routine Work HONOLULU. White sails again sweep the windy roads of the Pacific as seagoing adventurers match tiny boats and seamanship against vast stretches of ocean. In fragile homemade craft or in luxurious yachts, sea travelers are making Ala Moana basin off Waikikl beach a bustling ocean crossroads. All cherish a like goal escape from a troubled world. Some meet schedules. They plan to span the globe and return home at a certain time. Others drift aimlessly, answering answer-ing the call of the South Seas, still a dreamy refuge from 20th Century strife. Almost any time the Pacific sailing sail-ing log reads as a chronicle of adventure: ad-venture: There is Harry Pidgeon, who sailed his 34-foot yawl Islander here from his home port near Los Angeles. An-geles. Pidgeon, 78, and dean of round-world small boat skippers has circled the globe twice in his little lit-tle craft. He returned to Honolulu on his third attempt at a world cruise. The old seaman and his two-woman crew turned the prow of their yawl westward. Seaman Disappears Nothing was heard of them for months. Then word filtered back that a gale had ripped the Islander apart off Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. The battered but uninjured unin-jured little crew steamed back to California on a Norweigan freighter. Another oldtimer bucking the Pacific, Pa-cific, 68-year-old Eugene S. Sheffield Shef-field of Napa, Calif., sailed a 40-foot, homemade yawl single handed from San Francisco. He fought rough seas for 52 days on a 5,000 mile course. A prune rancher with a yen for salt air, he had worked eight years to build his boat, the Peggy, in his backyard. Marvin J. Bigelow of San Francisco Fran-cisco recently turned seaman after more than 20 years behind an accountant's ac-countant's desk. "Nothing is duller than wholesale hardware," he said and cast off from the West coast in a midget sized yawl, the 26-foot Spring-Bok. With one crewman, Thomas Harrison, a merchant seaman from Capetown, south Africa, Bigelow made the voyage voy-age from Los Angeles to Honolulu in 27 days. Last heard from here, he and Harrison were riding the high seas for South Africa. The 108-foot schooner Seaward stopped over on her way from San Pedro, Calif., to the Society Islands. Capt. Charles Williams and his 22 passengers and crewmen said they hoped to lease a tropical isle somewhere around Tahiti. They longed to "get away from it all for a couple of years or maybe longer." |