Couple Describe How a Sailing Venture Became Nicaraguan Nightmare

“We try not to harbor any grudge against the Nicaraguan government,” Leo LaJeunesse said in introducing the slide show he and his wife, Dolores, presented at Orange Coast College on Friday night.

Dolores LaJeunesse, however, was less magnanimous.

“Actually, we’d like to nuke Nicaragua,” she said, eliciting considerable applause from the 630 sailors and yachting enthusiasts who had sloshed in from a downpour to see this third presentation in the college’s popular “Sailing Adventure Series.”

Titled “Nicaraguan Nightmare,” the LaJeunesses’ slide show focused on the widely reported events of last August, when the Costa Mesa couple were intercepted by Nicaraguan military officers and “very hostile” immigration authorities and detained for 18 1/2 days.

Until 12 days immediately preceding that run-in with the Sandinistas, the trip had been fairly peaceful, said the LaJeunesses, both of whom are 53. In fact, for the first part of their presentation, which covered the couple’s voyage from Newport Harbor, through the Panama Canal and up to Florida, the couple showed the sort of pacific slides that grace the covers of sailing magazines--shots of palm trees at sunset, islands at sunset, exotic ports at sunset, and shots of little birds perched on the boat’s gunwales.

After spending three years in Florida, though, the LaJeunesses had decided to retrace their route back to Southern California, where Leo had been an assistant dean at Orange Coast College. The return trip was less idyllic.

The couples’ fortunes first began to change, they said, when they sold the 35-foot sailboat that had carried them from California.

Ketch With a Colorful Past

Feeling that they needed a roomier vessel for the return trip, the couple bought the “Wahine,” a 20-year-old, 45-foot, 25-ton, steel-hulled, “ice-rated” ketch with a 54-foot main mast, 12-foot bowsprit, nine sails, aft cabin, center cockpit, a galley, a salon, a forward berth and a colorful past.

“She had been used for drug running, we were told. . . . She’d been in the service of the Canadian government, and she’d been sailed around the world two times,” Leo LaJeunesse said.

“She was a decrepit-looking wreck,” Dolores LaJeunesse said as slides of the boat flashed on the screen.

The LaJeunesses went to work, scraping off seven coats of paint, patching the hull and repainting “Wahine” a light gray with black trim. By July of last year, they were ready to sail west. “One of the great times in life is when your boat’s all ready and you’re in the water again,” Leo LaJeunesse said.

But in retrospect, in one sequence of slides--the kind of loving

portraits only a devoted boater would think to take--the LaJeunesses now see the source of much of their hardship, Leo LaJeunesse said. Those slides are of the big, blue, “brand spanking new” Ford Lehman diesel engine the couple lowered into the Wahine’s engine room before the return cruise.

Immediately after the LaJeunesses set sail, they ran into “the most miserable weather we’d seen in 10,000 miles of sailing,” Leo LaJeunesse continued. The howling wind shredded their Dacron sails one by one until the Wahine was flying only a storm jib, a mizzen and a reef main--which are not sufficient to sail a boat of that size, he said. Hoping to power around an approaching squall, he fired up the engine. But it registered no oil pressure and couldn’t be used.

Two days later, assured by reports from boaters on their eastward cruise that the area was hospitable, the LaJeunesses sailed the Wahine into an uninhabited cove on Big Corn Island, about 50 miles off the coast of mainland Nicaragua, where they hoped to spend a few days repairing sails and puttering with the faulty engine.

Then, “out of nowhere a little ponga came along, with what we thought were a couple of lobster fishermen aboard,” Dolores LaJeunesse said, picking up the tale. The ponga towed the Wahine into the bay and passed the tow line to a bigger shrimp boat, which carried four armed guards, “three of them with automatic rifles, and one with a rocket launcher,” she said.

Another fishing boat with an immigration officer and two armed guards came alongside. The men boarded and for the next three hours searched the Wahine. Among the items they confiscated were Leo’s boyhood .22-caliber rifle and a shotgun--”an accepted boat gun,” Dolores said.

In part because of those weapons, however, the LaJeunesses spent the next 18 1/2 days entangled in an increasingly frightening bureaucratic knot, they said.

Taken to Mainland

The only time in that period that the LaJeunesses felt anything but powerless, they added, came three days into the ordeal. Against the couple’s will, Nicaraguan Marines attached a 300-foot towline and pulled the Wahine to the mainland port of El Bluff, 53 miles away. Midway there, though, all three of the armed guards aboard the boat became violently seasick, Leo LaJeunesse said. “At one point we even had their guns. . . . We thought about throwing (the guards) overboard.”

They decided against that maneuver, however, and on the mainland the Nicaraguan authorities continued to interrogate the couple almost daily. It was during one all-day interrogation that the Sandinistas first told Leo LaJeunesse they were suspected of being smugglers, gun runners or CIA agents.

The LaJeunesses’ slide show didn’t contain shots of their stay in Nicaragua, and their account of the visit was hardly the stuff of travelogues. Dolores LaJeunesse, for instance, was decidedly unimpressed with the Hotel Cueto, where the couple were compelled to stay for four days. “The mattress smelled so bad you had to shower every morning,” and the shower delivered only cold water, she said.

Made to Wait

The day after the LaJeunesses were towed to the mainland, they’d been allowed to make phone calls. They were only able to get through to their daughter, Gwen Swanson, in Chaska, Minn. Although the couple didn’t know it at the time, Swanson went right to work calling senators, congressmen, embassy officials and the press. Also, on the 15th day, Leo LaJeunesse was finally able to reach the U.S. Embassy in Managua.

Still, the Nicaraguans were unyielding. “They had the manana attitude,” he said. “Making us wait was a way of holding power over us.”

On the 18th day, however, Leo LaJeunesse walked into the immigration office and, for the “at least the 20th time,” he said, “In the name of the U.S. ambassador, I demand that you release me and return my passport.” Nonchalantly, the official replied, “ ‘you are free to go,’ ” LaJeunesse said. First, however, the couple were compelled to pay $80 a night for their hotel, as well as various other fees, they said.

The audience at Orange Coast College, many members of which arrived in boaters’ foul weather gear, seemed more interested in discussing sailing than politics, and the LaJeunesses seemed happy to comply.

In a phone call after the talk, however, the LaJeunesses said they do think about the politics of the situation.

“Actually, I’d like to go back there, but leading an amphibious force,” Leo LaJeunesse said.

Does he empathize at all with the Sandinistas? After all, the United States hasn’t been particularly friendly to the Nicaraguan government, and the LaJeunesses were in waters where supplies are known to be delivered clandestinely to the anti-Sandinista contras .

“I think it was obvious that they felt we had intruded on their territory, and Nicaraguan-American relationships were at a low ebb anyway with aid to the contras, CIA involvement, and the trade embargo (the U.S. has imposed). They were hurting, no goods were available, they couldn’t get their machines repaired. . . . I think they took it out on the nearest available Americans,” Leo LaJeunesse said.

But those circumstances were no excuse, LaJeunesse argued, adding that he found Nicaragua to be “a police state.” The civilians, who “were very hospitable” had “nothing good to say about the Sandinistas,” he said. And the Sandinista officials were “real bastards.”

“We were a husband and a wife and a cat and a dog. . . . You have to really stretch your imagination to consider us a couple of gun runners, CIA agents or anything else. . . . It was all a lot of trumped up ignorant nonsense,” he said.

At the talk on Friday night, LaJeunesse referred to the experience alternately as “a nightmare” and “an adventure.” Could it be that as time passes, the couple are beginning to see things in a more romantic light?

“I imagine when we start telling our grandchildren about it it will be a great adventure,” Dolores LaJeunesse said. “But now it’s still a nightmare. It’s not an adventure we’d care to repeat.”