Finding the Perfect Getaway : Couple Sails to Pitcairn Island, Refuge of the Bounty’s Fleeing Mutineers

When visitors leave Pitcairn Island, the natives--all descendants of the mutineers from the Bounty--sing a song called “The Bye and Bye.”

“It’s a tear-jerker,” says Gene Carapetyan, who went out in a longboat one day to see a passing freighter off. “I was sitting behind Betty Christian, Tom’s wife, and I was crying . . . really sad, because we would be leaving the next day. If you can get to Pitcairn, they know you won’t be coming back.”

Carapetyan and Louanne Peck found that there really is a Pitcairn Island and that there really was a ship called the Bounty. Pieces of the 1790 wreckage still show up around the tiny island. Only a mile wide and two miles long, it’s not easy to find, and if you find it, it’s difficult to land because it has no harbors or beaches. It is so far out of the normal shipping lanes that only three or four steamers stop there in a year. Tom Christian’s ancestor, Fletcher, knew what he was doing.

For Carapetyan and Peck, it was the first of 42 ports of call on a 20,000-mile Pacific odyssey that took two years and four months, with prolonged stopovers in Hawaii, Japan and Okinawa. They did it on a Catalina 38 sloop, not an ideal long-distance cruising sailboat, and they did it on a budget, but the important thing to them is that they did it.

And, Peck says, “I’d do it again in a minute. I didn’t want to come back.”

Carapetyan met Peck at a Single Sailors Club meeting in Long Beach in 1987. Recently from Phoenix, he lived on his boat, “My Sweet Lord,” and sold aircraft maintenance services. She marketed health care in Orange County. He asked her if she would like to go sailing.

Pitcairn lies about 3,600 miles due south of Long Beach, from which they set sail on May 1, 1988. With more than 4,000 pounds of stores, the boat rode five inches below the waterline. Peck was the navigator.

“The first time I did a celestial navigation off the dock, I put us in Barstow,” she said.

But she learned, and 27 days later, after using only sextants, she spotted Pitcairn 33 miles off the bow, dead ahead--a feat of navigation that Capt. William Bligh might have acknowledged.

Carapetyan had struck up an acquaintance with Christian on his ham radio before he left Long Beach and asked if he could bring anything. Betty Christian said she needed cooking oil to bake her daily bread, and Tom said--hesitantly--he was having a radio repaired here.

“A lot of people say they’ll bring things to Pitcairn but never get there,” Carapetyan said.

Pitcairn has no television but it does have VCRs, so they also took videotapes, including the movie “South Pacific.”

“It turned out to be Betty’s favorite movie,” Peck said.

From Pitcairn, they retraced the Bounty’s route back to the island of Tubuai in French Polynesia, south of Tahiti, where the mutineers had first considered hiding out. After stopping at Tahiti and Moorea they proceeded to Huahine, where they had their most serious incident of the trip.

A storm blew up while they were asleep at anchor and dragged the boat into shallow water. They awoke to a severe heel, with the the keel pounding on an underwater reef. They collected their passports, put on life jackets and prepared to abandon ship.

“What made it even more frightening was that it was still dark outside,” Carapetyan said. “All of the lights on the island had disappeared, probably because of power failure caused by the winds. We did not know where we were.”

At daybreak, a tourist, Jeff Hartborn, saw their predicament and swam out to help. After 11 hours of swimming around setting anchors and winching their way through the coral heads, they were able to work the boat into deep water again.

The boat sustained only minor damage, and they continued north to winter in Hawaii. Carapetyan got a job working in the gift shop of the Ilikai Hotel. Peck found work with a real estate listing firm. They planned to sail to Seattle in the spring.

Carapetyan said, “This Japanese gentleman walked in one day and had a sailing shirt on, and I had a sailing shirt on. I said, ‘You must enjoy sailing,” and he said, ‘You must, too.’ ”

“Then he said, ‘There’s a race from Honolulu to Hiroshima, Japan. Would you like to take part?’

“I said, ‘That sounds like a good idea, but everybody says you can’t go to Japan because there are storms, and there’s no way to get back if you get there.’ They’re almost right.”

The clincher was the bottom line, where it said anybody finishing the race would receive 500,000 yen, or $3,475. Funds being short, they decided to go--even after spending $4,800 to buy safety equipment required by the Japanese organizers.

“We were the first boat to enter the race,” Carapetyan said.

The race started in June of ’89. Carapetyan is an experienced racer, with a Catalina 22 national championship and three Transpacs as a crew member. There was one glitch at the start when he tried to raise the headsail and the halyard jammed, forcing him to jury rig until he could go to the top of the mast to fix it.

After struggling in light winds for 4,000 miles and 37 days, they passed the Ipsukushima Shrine finish line off Hiroshima on Japan’s inland sea. My Sweet Lord placed sixth among 10 boats in its class, 15th among 21 boats overall. Only one-third of the fleet arrived in time for the awards banquet.

“We thought we’d missed the party,” Peck said. “We didn’t know the Japanese.”

They got to know them over most of the following year, which they spent in Japan to avoid the Pacific storm season. They found hospitality everywhere they went, from Tokyo to places most tourists seldom see--such as the village of Kagoshima, where a nearby volcano constantly emits light ash that falls on everything, including visiting sailboats.

“We estimated there were 12 foreign cruising boats in Japan the whole year we were there,” Carapetyan said. “Very few (sailors) go there. It’s sort of the end of the world.”

In October of ’89 Carapetyan was hitching a ride with a truck driver, who “didn’t speak a word of English, but he’s very excited and pointing at the radio. He keeps saying, ‘San Francisco.’ ”

Carapetyan, who had studied limited Japanese, figured the driver wasn’t raving about the World Series. He pulled out his dictionary.

“I looked up the word for earthquake, which is jinshin. I said, ‘Jinshin, ‘ and he says, ‘Jinshin! Jinshin!’ They have a lot of earthquakes in Japan, so it was very important to them.

“We were pretty well informed. Our ham radio was a lifesaver. We just didn’t always know the outcome of things.”

After a five-month stay on Okinawa off the south end of Japan, they met Carapetyan’s daughter Page, 23, who joined them for the 4,400-mile, 38-day sail across the north Pacific to Seattle starting last June. Twenty-one days were spent in fog, and the temperature averaged 45 degrees.

That part of the trip, Carapetyan said, was “cold, wet and miserable.”

They spent time cruising the San Juan Islands, then returned to Long Beach Aug. 31.

Carapetyan said he would have preferred to have a heavier, cruising-type boat, with a roller-furling jib that can be adjusted like a window shade for changing winds without switching headsails.

“We had to take the boat we owned,” Carapetyan said. “If we’d changed, we’d have been wiped out financially, and then we couldn’t have gone.”

What did they miss? “That’s easy,” Peck said. “Hot and cold running water for showers.”

What Carapetyan didn’t miss: “I have all these keys. I have a key to get on the dock, a key to go to the bathroom, a key to start somebody else’s car. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house, and I’m carrying nine keys. We haven’t locked anything for 2 1/2 years, and nothing happened.”

There is a moral to their story.

“Do it when you can. You do take a risk. I took the gamble that I was never going to get a job again in my field. I would take it again. Life is too short not to accomplish what you really want to do.”

That’s what Louanne Peck said . . . or was it Fletcher Christian?

Gene Carapetyan and Louanne Peck will tell the story of their voyage in a slide presentation at the Edgewater Hotel in Long Beach Friday, Jan. 4, at 7 p.m. Admission will be $6.