Family Sets Course for a South Pacific Journey of a Lifetime : Adventure: A judge and his family will spend 15 months at sea, visiting exotic ports and living a dream.

Beginning next month, Santa Anita Municipal Court Commissioner Kirk Nyby will trade in the stormy waters of the judicial system for smooth sailing in the South Pacific.

Nyby, who has presided over Division 2 of the Monrovia courthouse for the past dozen years, is embarking on an adventure that most people only dream about. He and his wife, Ines, and their three children will set sail June 2 aboard their 58-foot schooner for 15 months of drifting on the trade winds, dropping their anchor at exotic ports such as Tonga, Fiji and Tahiti.

They’re not quite sure where they’ll end up. “We’re not really setting a goal--I don’t find that to be constructive when you’re on an adventure,” Nyby said in a recent interview in his court chambers.

For the first month of their trip, the Nybys plan to travel 3,000 miles over open sea to the Marquesas Islands, where artist Paul Gauguin died, and then sail on to the Tuamotu Archipelago, a group of islands in French Polynesia.

“After the first day, I don’t expect that we’ll see another boat, person or even another object until we hit the Marquesas,” Nyby said.

There is some question about how the Nyby kids--Pascale, 13, Tristan, 10, and Justine, 7--will get along being cooped up on a boat for a month, Nyby said. But he said he expects them to ease into the routine of sailing quickly.

“They’ve had a lot of living experience on the boat,” Ines Nyby said, adding that the children stayed on the boat for seven weeks at Catalina Island last summer.

The children, though all experienced swimmers and sailors, will wear safety harnesses while the boat is at sea, Kirk Nyby said.

“Justine went with us to Catalina when she was all of 3 weeks old,” he said. “Taking this trip is not as dangerous as driving from here to San Pedro, as far as I’m concerned.”

The Nyby family and some friends worked for 2 1/2 years in a Sun Valley yard building the schooner, Pilot, which will take them on their excursion. Nyby designed the boat, which can sleep a dozen people and has two heads, one with a tub and shower. They launched the schooner, which is anchored in Long Beach Harbor, in 1989.

The boat is already stocked with food and provisions for the next six months, and the family is wrapping up the details of their conventional lives, such as finishing the school year and saying goodby to friends and family.

“We’re holding our breath and hoping we can get everything done,” Ines Nyby said. They plan to rent their La Canada home, store their cars with relatives and live off their savings. Their budget for the 15-month trip is about $30,000.

The children will be expected to stand watch with their parents, help raise and lower sails, cook and swab the decks. They will keep journals and write papers on the South Pacific and will continue their schoolwork on a correspondence-style basis, being taught English and French by their mother and mathematics and history by their father.

Although Nyby has not taught before, he says he looks forward to the school days on board the Pilot. “I figure it will be very similar to the work I’ve been doing for 12 years, trying to teach people how to be responsible members of society. I think I’ll have more success with my students now than I have had in the past,” he said.

In his Monrovia courtroom, Nyby typically handles cases of drunk driving, petty theft, battery and driving on a suspended license. After 12 years, he said, he is ready for a change.

Nyby admits that most lawyers and judges are conservative traditionalists who are not expected to quit their jobs, leave positions of respect, close up their homes and sail off into the sunset. But most of his friends and staff are not surprised by his plans. Behind his somber black robe and official court demeanor, Nyby is truly a wanderer at heart.

Nyby and his wife were college students in the 1960s when they built a 44-foot catamaran and planned to spend their lives traveling. He graduated from UCLA Law School and worked for the Western Center for Law and Poverty and in the county public defender’s office before they sailed west from Los Angeles in July, 1971, on a serendipitous trip that ended three years later in the Mediterranean.

Along the way, they lived all over the world, and Nyby took odd jobs to finance the adventure. During that time, he worked as the skipper of a glass-bottomed boat in Tahiti, did civil law work for the attorney general’s office in American Samoa, manned a Greek Islands charter boat where Ines served as cook, and acted as a stuntman on a movie being filmed in Israel.

This time, the trip is not quite so open-ended. The family plans to return in August, 1992, so the children can go back to school in the fall. Nyby figures he can go back into a private law practice or work as a “rent-a-judge,” a job similar to an arbitrator, when he returns.

Although the family will be isolated for months at a time, they are not sparing any of the luxuries of home on the trip.

They are taking along a television and VCR, and a stockpile of movies on tape for special occasions; a computer and printer; a sailing dinghy; water-skiing gear; fishing tackle; spear guns; wet suits, and snorkeling and scuba-diving equipment.

Along with bathing suits, sun block and T-shirts, each family member plans to take a suit of formal wear for the occasions when they will get to dine in luxury resorts or visit places like the Grand Pacific colonial hotel in Fiji.

They will not be completely out of touch with home, either, since several friends plan to visit them at ports along the way. And Nyby is taking along his video camera and tapes so he can send visual postcards home.

Leaving their 9-to-5 world and escaping from the rat race of Southern California will be the experience of a lifetime for the children and a relief for their parents, Nyby said.

“When you’re at sea you have a whole different perspective,” he said. “There’s a different world view, and things that are really important here just are not as crucial when you’re surrounded by nothing but water.”