BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : For Father-and-Son Sailors, Blood Is Thicker Than Water : MY OLD MAN AND THE SEA <i> by David Hays and Daniel Hays</i> ; Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill $19.95, 231 pages

David Hays, then about 50, the founding artistic director of the National Theatre of the Deaf, and his son Daniel, in his early 20s, set out to sail from home in a crowded 25-foot boat round that awful symbol of sailors’ challenge and sailors’ fear, Cape Horn.

Southern California sailors know that crossing the Catalina channel in a small craft can be less than easy. The Hayses, while both experienced Connecticut sailors, faced full gales and the threat of winds of hurricane force in the awesome waters of the Southern Ocean.

In preparation they shipped the shell of their boat home from England and spent the next two years fitting it out as Sparrow.

“My Old Man and the Sea,” written in alternate sections by father and son, is a pleasure to read. The writers respect the English language and use it carefully. They are wise enough to quote liberally from Joseph Conrad, e.g.: “If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the face of the sea in a storm. . . .”5

They write affectionately of one another; their relationship, a little uncertain at the beginning, smoothes out. The father designates the son the captain; the father is his crew. By the end of the voyage, they respect each other more and love one another more. The son is out of the father’s shadow, and the father concedes to the son his full stature.

A year after the voyage, the father says, his wife (the son’s mother) asks him who his ideal person is. He thinks . . . Abraham Lincoln? Justice Louis Brandeis? FDR? “ ‘My son,’ I blurted out and started to cry.”

In fact the son, Dan, makes the entire 17,000-mile voyage; the father, David only--only--from Jamaica to Montevideo by way of the Panama Canal, the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island, Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands.

The writers-sailors recount their voyage and reflect upon it. Heading for Easter Island, David is plotting their passage, which seems so slow. He writes:

“I don’t know why it is that when you love to sail you spend your life dreaming of being at sea and then you do all you can to speed in to your destination harbor. Maybe it’s because each leg of the journey is like a little work of art, and you want to press yourself and your boat to the utmost. The practical answer is that the faster you do it, the less exposure there is to bad weather, which no one really likes.”

Just before Dan left New London, a friend gave him an orange-and-white kitten as ship’s cat. Dan named him Tiger. He has known nothing but shipboard life.

They sail southeast from Easter Island. They have gales; the prevailing westerlies send them forward through the latitudes of the Screaming Fifties. Albatrosses, soaring just above the waves, are always with them. The birds’ wingspan is wider than their boat. They must be on the lookout for icebergs now.

David thinks of his late father and of mortality. They must always tether themselves to the boat.

Southwest of Cape Horn a strong gale overtakes them. Dan writes:

“In the afternoon I came on deck. . . . The seas and sky looked furious. White streaks were smeared along the waves, the wind almost visible! Seas built and grew until it was necessary for us to look aft and steer down each wave, keeping the stern toward the following seas. Some waves were bigger than others--foaming and looking really mean. The automatic steering wouldn’t work--the paddle was spending too much time out of the water. (The whole boat seemed to be spending too much time out of the water.) We took two-hour watches.

“It’s hard to see a wave (in photos, impossible). You see the mass of it--not much height--then you rise slowly as the water floods beneath you and you’re on top. I was at the helm watching this really big one and suddenly I knew Sparrow hadn’t risen and 20 feet of wave was straight up over us.

“We surfed for a moment and fell off it to starboard, flat into the water. The boat didn’t seem to tip over but the port rail rose suddenly above me as I slid down. What I’d been standing on was above my shoulder level. I was in the ocean! The foaming waves I’d been looking at were at my chin. My tether was yanked tight as Sparrow came up level, surfed again, and fell over to port, the starboard deck abnd rail shooting up over my head. I kicked my legs and paddled for a moment in free water, then Sparrow righted and I was scooped on deck.

”. . . The gale broke up by 0100 and, with the moon full, there it was: a frozen wave at the end of the continent. A featureless gray hump. The Horn.”

On the way home from the Falklands, Tiger the cat, yes, falls overboard one night and disappears. Dan writes his mother: “Mortality sucks. Love, Dan.”