Sunday, March 21, 2010

By Reviewed by Richard Boettger

"Tales of a Sea Gypsy"

by Ray Jason

Paradise Cay Publications, $14.95

My favorite tale in "Tales of a Sea Gypsy" by Ray Jason features "one of the most beloved cats on the Seven Seas" named Running Lights, due to his having two white spots on his black face much like a ship's mast and range lights. Just a kitten when his owners left Sausalito to sail around the world, Running Lights enjoyed his sailing life, for example by catching flying fish that landed on board.

But one moonlit night in the Indian Ocean, what landed onboard was a raft of squid. Running Lights ran to them but lost traction on their slippery bodies and flew overboard. After 20 minutes of fruitless searching with their spotlight, his despairing owners tried one last plan: drifting. "You know how well R. L. swims. We'll let him find us."

Sure enough, within five minutes they spotted their beloved kitty's running lights headed toward them "like a miniature freighter with whiskers at the bow and terror in his eyes. And what a glorious sight that was!"

R. L. completed the circumnavigation happily enough, it seemed. But two hours after they returned to Sausalito, "he went silently to the bow and surveyed the docks and woods he remembered so well from his kitten days. And then, with one last glance, he jumped lightly to the dock, ran down the pier, and disappeared into the woods. There he began a new life -- one in which he would never have to swim again."

Ray Jason must himself be one of the most beloved sailors on the Seven Seas for the affection he shows for his fellow sea gypsies in this book of 22 tales, a collection from years of writing for sailing magazines. Ray winters his 30-foot sloop Aventura in Key West, replenishing his "cruising kitty" by, in the past, juggling at Mallory Square, and now driving for Five Sixes cabs.

I expect Keys cabbies to be interesting characters but Ray is over the top. He ended up as a taxi-driving sea gypsy by starting out as a Rhodes scholarship finalist with a Columbia Law School fellowship. But a low Vietnam War draft number sidetracked him to the Navy.

That experience knocked him off the conventional career path into a world of traveling, first as a juggler. Specializing in bowling balls, he advanced from being arrested in San Francisco, when street performing was at first a suspicious activity, ultimately to having the mayor proclaim a day in his honor in 1981.

It then dawned on him he could buy a boat and wander the world, paying for it mostly by juggling and selling his stories. Which he has done now for a quarter century and this book is the result.

As any blue-water sailor knows, it's not always dolphins cavorting in the moonlight and it's not just the ship's cat taking a desperate midnight swim. Ray's most harrowing cruise was his qualifying course for the single-handed Transpac to Hawaii. Out of San Francisco's ever-exciting bay, in succession he got boarded by the Coast Guard, ran right over the body of a "floater" he thought was a fellow Transpac qualifier who'd been swept off his boat the day before (it turned out instead to be a Golden Gate Bridge jumper), dodged an entire Navy convoy, almost crashed into a buoy tender, got surrounded by a mysterious bloody red tide and finally made it back through dense fog to successfully qualify.

Other stories include a brave sailor getting run over twice by the same freighter, once by mistake and again when it came back to "help." Brave, because he promptly used the freighter's settlement cash to buy another boat!

People survive lightning and power lines -- one strike is memorialized by a blob of flash-melted Fosters beer cans framed on the bulkhead.

Ray himself almost gets strangled by his own dinghy lines trying to muscle his inflatable through rough surf. Luckily, his plea of "Sky Bosun . . . cut me some slack!" completely flipped the dinghy to free him.

Ray enjoys hearing others' sea tales as much as he likes telling them. Drop by to meet him over food and drink at Richard and Cynthia's home at 1402 Olivia St. from 7 to 9 p.m. this evening. Bring your sextant. Or some bowling balls.