How a ‘Dream’ Voyage Left a Costa Mesa Couple High and Dry

After 18 days in the custody of Nicaraguan authorities last August, Leo and Dolores LaJeunesse figured the rest of their sailing trip through the Panama Canal and the Pacific Ocean to Orange County would be easy.

It required intervention by the U. S. State Department to end the Nicaraguan captivity, but even that ordeal was not as frustrating for the Costa Mesa residents as the homestretch of their “dream” vacation turned out to be.

Their journey, which began in July aboard a 65-foot, twin-masted craft stocked with supplies, ended early this month--two destroyed boats and $50,000 later.

Leo LaJeunesse, 53, a former associate dean at Orange Coast College who left the institution in 1981, and his wife Dolores, 53, had been living for several years in Fort Myers, Fla., sailing the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Their troubles began after they decided to sail back to Orange County aboard their boat, the Wahine. In early August they anchored off Big Corn Island in the Caribbean, about 50 miles from the coast of Nicaragua, to repair the boat’s sails and engine.

Nicaraguan sailors offered to help the LaJeunesses, but when the couple reluctantly agreed, they were taken to a military post on the island. There the boat was searched and some items were confiscated, including two firearms, they said. The LaJeunesses then were taken to the coastal port of Bluefields, where they were placed under house arrest in a hotel and accused of being gunrunners.

After two formal letters of protest and other pressure by the U.S. Embassy in Managua, the LaJeunesses were finally allowed to leave Nicaragua--but only after being charged high prices by the government for their stay, including hotel and mooring fees, they said. When they returned to the Wahine, they said, they found that it had been ransacked and many items stolen.

She Had Had Enough

After reaching Panama, Dolores LaJeunesse decided she had had enough, and she flew back to Orange County on Oct. 11, glad that the ordeal was over. But for Leo LaJeunesse, it was just beginning.

LaJeunesse said he soon found that the Wahine was “too big for me to handle” and, after doing some repair work on the ship, he sold it and bought a 35-foot boat.

On Oct. 16, he entered the Panama Canal for a passage that he now calls “a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” In Playa del Coco, Costa Rica, he hired a crew member to help him. The two men spent two months of “slow going” sailing northward, taking pains to avoid the Nicaraguan coastline. LaJeunesse said that he would sail within sight of land along the coasts of “friendly” countries, but would swing out much farther when off the Nicaraguan coast.

He said the journey’s wear and tear began to take its toll on the boat.

His Worst Problems

“We had to stop twice to get the engine repaired,” he said. By early December, the two men reached Acapulco, Mexico. Shortly afterward, near Zihuatanejo, northwest of Acapulco, LaJeunesse encountered his worst problems since Nicaragua.

“In the Bay of Petacalco there was an area of extremely heavy surf in shallow waters. We ran aground. I had no control of my boat, couldn’t get it out. At first, I could back out but could not go forward. The waves were slapping the boat around. We ended up on an isolated beach five miles from the nearest road and two miles from the nearest village,” he said.

“Luckily, we weren’t injured at all. And if we had been able to get help, we could have gotten the boat out,” LaJeunesse said.

But what might have been a simple task in the U. S. presented insurmountable problems, he said.

LaJeunesse said he tried five times to get help from the Mexican navy, but the local commander refused, saying the Navy could not help uninsured boaters.

Cost $2,000

LaJeunesse said he was befriended by Noah Gutierrez, a fisherman who helped him look for larger boats that might have enough power. “We even went out one night, Noah and I, looking for shrimpers,” LaJeunesse said. “But because it was near Christmas, all of the shrimp boats were gone.”

LaJeunesse even hired 33 men from a small village to try to pull the boat out of trouble. But their efforts were unsuccessful, he said, and “that failed exercise cost me over one million pesos (about $2,000).”

Finally, LaJeunesse said, he decided on Dec. 18 to abandon the boat. “I climbed up into the cockpit of the boat and saw four feet of sand and a foot of water and about a dozen fish swimming around. That’s when I decided that somebody was trying to tell me something,” he said.

But he found that even giving up took time. LaJeunesse had to stay in Mexico for two more weeks while he signed papers saying that he officially abandoned the boat to the government and waited for money from Dolores to arrive.

His friend Gutierrez, Gutierrez’s wife and their four children lived in a house that had been damaged by the Mexico earthquake, LaJeunesse said, but the family members did all they could to make him feel at home, sharing their food with him and helping him translate some of the government paper work.

After a week with the Gutierrez family, LaJeunesse went to Mexico City and dealt with still more paper work. Finally, on Jan. 6, the LaJeunesses were reunited in California.

Although the trip was frustrating and harrowing at times, the LaJeunesses said they plan to sail again.

“It hasn’t dimmed our enthusiasm for sailing,” said Leo LaJeunesse, who is looking for a job in community college administration. He added that they will try to sail to French Polynesia in the future.

“(Sailing) is a high-risk life style, and you’ve got to take the good with the bad,” Leo LaJeunesse said.

But for now, the LaJeunesses, living with family in Costa Mesa, said they will stay on land for a while and try to get back on their feet financially.

“We’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” Dolores LaJeunesse said.