Dale Dutcher: Tales of the broad Pacific

Dale Dutcher still gets to meet people from different places on the globe, but these days they visit him and his wife Cheryl at their home and B&B on Altoona Road.

When he was 55, he sailed the South Pacific. He intended to sail all seven oceans but it wasn't meant to be.

Dutcher grew up in Nebraska, surrounded by a sea of grass and corn and wheat and hay. He and his father built a little fishing boat, but that was the sum of his experience on water.

He joined the Air Force and was teaching aviation technology classes at Portland Community College before he retired at 55.

It was a wild hair to sail, but it was a thought that had been germinating in his mind since he was a child.

He bought plans for a 42 foot sailboat and built a large structure in the backyard of a building he owned in Portland. Then he began building a wooden mold and frames of scrap lumber and sheets of plywood. Next came a heavy plastic sheet to keep fiberglass from sticking to the wood.

"I just started building the fiberglass up on top of that," Dutcher said. "When you get it built up to the thickness you want, you break it loose from the mold."

The shape was complicated and according to Dutcher, removing the mold required a lot of kicking and prying.

The project required Dutcher to be a creative problem solver too. He built his own lathe to carve out the 55 foot mast.

When that was done, he and his friends took the boat to St. Johns to put it in the river.

Now imagine this: He and his friends stopped traffic on the St. John's bridge and lowered the mast onto the boat.

"People got out of their cars and helped us," Dutcher remembered. "If we had dropped the mast, it would have gone through the boat," he added with a shudder.

There was still one more mast to go.

In the meantime, he was taking classes, learning to read the stars for navigation, learning to use a ham radio for communication.

He was a self taught sailor, or as he says, "self scared," but all he had to do was pack up some groceries and fill the water tanks.

Starting at the mouth of the Columbia, he took a couple trips in his handmade, homemade vessel to Barkley Sound.

"It's a pretty protected water back there," Dutcher said, "and lots of crabs and fish and deep bays. It's just a beautiful place for a vacation. Not a lot of roads, but when you are in the water you can go right up to shore. There is not any swell in most of it. It always kind of amazed me back in those days that I didn't see more boats. Saw deer and bear on the beach. I seldom saw very many people there and I was there three times."

It could get cold there, but he was prepared for that, with a wood stove to provide heat and wood stacked neatly under the floorboards and into the keel.

His dreams pulled him south and west. His next trip was from the mouth of the Columbia to Puerto Vallarta and on to the islands in the South Pacific before reaching New Zealand.

Dutcher became a master at heaving to, a skill that would keep him out of trouble for the most part.

"You set up the sails so they are pulling the boat," Dutcher said. "At night, I would generally sail with everything up. I was making so much better time. I could lay down and go to sleep."

Not that Dutcher got a whole lot of sleep.

"People say it must be so quiet," he laughed. "God no, it's not quiet. Crash, bang bang, roll boom, splash. It's so noisy you can't believe it. It's not scary after a while, this is just how it is."

If he had a crew mate, they would take shifts. Alone, he had to keep going. He'd set the sails so it would be as smooth as possible, and turn on the lights so other vessels would see him. Then he would go below and sleep for a little while, getting up every 90 minutes or so to stick his head out to look around.

"You can ride out a storm below," Cheryl said, "You can set your boat in the heave to position and go below and be safe. A lot of people don't understand the concept that well and so they get into trouble, abandon their boats and call the Coast Guard, who comes and shoots holes in the boat to sink it so it isn't a hazard. They lose their boats and everything."

"The boat is inherently very safe by itself," Dutcher said. "But people fall overboard. I'd hear about boats that would crash on a beach on New Zealand. Nobody aboard. Groceries are there, coffee is in the pot and it's cold and the eggs are rotten."

It took him about a month following a constellation to get to Nuku Hiva.

Getting where you are going to go with celestial is not much of a trick at all," Dutcher said. "I had a sextant. I used it once in a while, when I could find it."

"Mostly you are out there at night, all night long," he added. "Every night it's clear and the stars are so bright and you are looking at the same stars.

"Not everybody, but a lot of people I talked to felt like I did," Dutcher said. "After you'd been there for say a week, and been up in your own concern about your own safety and anybody that's with you, and you watch the whole thing go by, you get this comfortable feeling that you aren't out there by yourself. It's fine, you'd think, I can't see it now, but as soon as it gets dark I'll see these friends appearing again. You really get comfortable with that."

He'd intended to circumnavigate, but after awhile, he got the feeling of "been there, done that" and decided to head back to the US.

One day out on the open sea, he smelled dirt.

"Just like you're out in a garden," he said. "You could see it. There wasn't any weeds in it. It just came up and floated for a while on the surface. You could see the organisms and bigger fish in it too. When you see those things you think you are about to run ashore, but you'd look at the fathometer to see how deep it was. 400 feet. It was an underwater eruption."

Being brave, according to Dutcher, comes from being scared so many times and having nothing happen.

The biggest trouble he ever had brought him to Necker Island while on the way home. And it brought the Coast Guard to him.

"He loves the Coast Guard, because the Coast Guard saved his life," Cheryl said.

During a bad storm, some rigging that held up the mast was broken. Necker Island, 800 miles from Hawaii was the closest place for him to go.

"There was nothing there," Dutcher said. "There is no village, no roads, no houses, no nothing. It's just a cinder cone sticking out of the water with smoke coming out of it. I got hold of the Coast Guard on the radio, and they came down. There was nothing they could do for me unless I was drowning, and then they would want to pick me up and take me home and I would have to let the boat go."

Not an option. Dutcher built that boat by hand.

He was able to communicate a description of the piece he needed to fix the rigging to the Coast Guard.

"I read the dimensions to someone on the radio for a couple three days before they brought the piece out to me," Dutcher said. "They put the part in a really big ketchup bottle, which would float if it missed the boat when they dropped it from the plane."

Before the plane completely disappeared from the horizon, he had the part in place and the damage repaired.

The Coast Guard came over in their boat to make sure if he was okay. They brought bags of groceries. Things like oranges and bananas, bread and flour.

"They loved his boat," Cheryl said. They stayed and visited with him awhile before they told him they had to do a safety inspection."

Dutcher told them he would never pass, his stuff wasn't up to date or it was worn out.

They passed him.

"I gave them warm beers," Dale said. "I never got a copy of their safety inspection. It would have been quite a keepsake."

The best thing about it all, according to Dutcher? The people. The people he met on the islands as well as his fellow travelers.

He once stood in as a minister and married a couple.

"Maritime law," Dale laughed. "We got all duded up. I wrote the ceremony. it was really nice.There was a tremendous amount of camaraderie amongst the people out there. We really took care of each other."

"It was just so damn exciting," Dutcher said. "I had some good times."