Famed Sailor Sets Sails for Charity

Don’t give him that Popeye stuff.

Tristan Jones, known among sailors around the world as a legendary adventurer who never learned to swim, spent five decades of wanderlust on the ocean.

He earned a reputation the hard way as a rum-loving, craggy old Welsh sailor who endured shipwrecks, tropical diseases and pirates.

“Ahh, they make me out to be Popeye or something,” he said derisively, waving his hands. “It’s bloody foolish. . . . And I haven’t had a drink since I was 50. Have you ever seen a serious navigator who was a drinker?”

Jones, 67, is also a self-taught philosopher and nautical historian who earns a living today as an author and lecturer in sailing circles.

Jones is in San Diego this week to sign his books, deliver another of his spirited talks and host a sailing movie at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theatre in Balboa Park. Most of his lectures sell out. He has opinions--lots of them--readily offered in a sort of stream-of-consciousness vein that’s as hard to follow as a greased pinball.

Give him time, and he will talk about anything from global politics and the odds of intelligent life in outer space to modern religion and the human condition. And, of course, sailing.

He looks the part of the stereotypical old sailor with his one leg, gravely voice, bushy beard, dark eyes, great hooked nose and leathery face of wrinkles. And he claims to have the world record for most miles sailed on the ocean (400,000, most of it alone).

Sitting in a hotel room by the harbor Tuesday, Jones talked only a little about his adventures as a young man. He seems most proud of surviving more than a year alone on Arctic ice after his boat wrecked. The years at sea were tough--he’s endured isolation, injury, robbery, malaria.

Today, he takes Chinese herbs to cure the asbestos fibers that clog his lungs as a result of intermittent work in shipyards.

But it is his lesser-known side--as a humanitarian, entrepreneur and blue-collar man of letters--that he promotes today.

After a lifetime of isolation on the sea, churning out 14 books and 372 magazine articles, Jones decided to focus his energy on two things: the Atlantis Society, a charity he founded in 1985 to help impoverished and handicapped children to become literate and learn the skills needed to be fishermen and sailors; and establishing private marinas along the Danube River in Romania.

Never staying in one place long, Jones will leave here for Thailand to check on the Atlantis chapter there. Forty-two children, many of them missing arms or legs, are learning to be fishermen. There’s also a branch in the Dominican Republic. They are schools of hard knocks, and Jones cuts his students no slack.

“If they come back, and some other boat (with able-bodied men aboard) has more fish, I send them back out for more,” Jones said. “They have to learn that nobody is better than them. They can do what anyone can.”

Jones’ reputation in sailing circles attracted the attention of Romanian government officials, many of whom are old-guard Communists still controlling the country. Jones said the government invited him to be an adviser in its plans to promote tourism by establishing private marinas along the Danube.

For an ardent anti-Marxist like Jones, helping the Communists is akin to kissing the devil, but he sees it as a necessary evil. He likes capitalism as much as he hates communism.

Jones surveyed the lower Danube this spring and said officials consented to his demands that Romania lower its visa fees for all boats and cancel all berthing, anchoring and mooring fees.

Negotiations, however, continue on whether the government will give complete operating control of the marinas to private enterprise, he said.

Jones also hopes his adviser’s role in Romania will allow him to establish an Atlantis chapter there. He wants to provide medical supplies for hospitals treating children with AIDS and train disabled teen-agers to read, write and speak foreign languages--and be river-pilots on the Danube.

“I’ll teach them to be the best pilots on the whole bloody river,” the old sailor says.