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Captain Norman and Manuelita, 1975
by Vic Head
All the skippers in the famed San Diego Tuna Fleet knew and loved Captain Norman like a brother. Oh, there were times when he took the helm of the Wiley V. A. and tried to squeeze between an estimated 15-ton school of bluefin and another vessel such as the Chicken of the Sea. The first mate pilots of both vessels would stand by while the skippers took the helms and behaved seemingly like two crazy teenagers playing chicken. But unlike the teenagers they always avoided a collision when by some unwritten rule of common sense one vessel started to set the net while the other veered away in a huge curved wave. Then pilots would return to the helms while skippers shouted unprintable epithets across the water (at least there was a time, regrettably long gone, when they were unprintable). But by evening, one would lower the power launch and go to the other boat for an hour of conviviality in the other's galley.
First, Norman in 1912 and then two sisters had been born in or near Somerville, MA. His father, a telephone engineer, had made a great hit with the neighborhood children by stringing wires at second floor level between houses, even across the street, for an improvised kids’ telephone system. That was fun of course, but Norman was thrilled by the ocean and the coming and going of vessels small and large, pleasure boats, huge steamers, and small lobster boats and trawlers, and even at the age of five it seemed unlikely that he would follow his father in an engineering career. His father had studied transmission line theory and was sent by Bell Telephone Co. to the west coast in 1917 to help design and install long distance lines between cities up and down the Pacific coast.
His kid brother was born that year in East San Diego in the days when there was still open country between this small town and San Diego proper. When the terrible influenza epidemic followed the return of soldiers from Europe after the first World War, his family was fortunate to find refuge in the country near Oakland on the east side of San Francisco Bay. But his parents split up when he was seven, and the father remained in San Francisco while the mother and four children moved to a ranch in the Sacratero Valley wilderness east of San Diego for nearly two years. Then it was five years in a private school on Point Loma when he was scarcely aware of the kid brother's existence, but where he enjoyed his roles in dramatic presentations. But best of all was the sea, oh, the sea coast of Point Loma, where a cliff with crude steps dropped down to the booming surf! Where the setting sun painted a red path among the sailboats and right to your feet! Where starfish and abalone shells and a hundred other sea things could be found among the seaweed or in the wave-scoured caves!
Then for only a few months in his early teens the four and their mother lived in the inland town of La Mesa where the noonday sun would soften the pavement. One day at high noon he bet his kid brother a nickel that he couldn't stand barefoot on the blacktop for a full minute without lifting his toes. The foolish kid stood out the time with tears streaming down his face, but big brother only produced a cardboard nickel from the Milton Bradley toy money set. The kind of thoughtless acts which big brothers perform and promptly forget but which kid brother victims remember for a lifetime.
Soon he had a job on the Flegal's grape ranch near Alpine and never lived with his family again. He finished high school near La Mesa after his mother and three other siblings had returned to New England to take care of his aging grandmother. He earned some money digging graves from San Diego to Alpine. Worked for a while as grounds keeper on a ranch owned by Julian Eltinge, the famed stage performer and woman impersonator. Once on a visit to Tijuana the spirit of mischief took control and he stood in the middle of a busy intersection directing, but mostly fouling, the rush hour traffic, and spent seven nights in jail and days with Tijuana's street cleaning contingent. This Mexican city had a good thing going, arresting obstreperous youths from the States, jailing them, and putting them to work until some friend from the north crossed the border to bail them out.
For a while he worked on highway construction and maintenance and a series of other jobs, but there came a time when he signed onto a small tuna boat and felt suddenly as free as the sea breezes he had always loved. Only the skipper spoke English, so he had a firsthand education in several languages, both Scandinavian and Hispanic. Incidentally, he probably spoke more Spanish than English for the rest of his life.
In those days a tuna boat, carrying a large tank of bait fish, would sail into a school of tuna perhaps skipjack or yellow fin or bonito, and release a few hundred of the bait fish to swim freely. Fishermen with poles and lines would cast bare shiny hooks in among the bait fish. The hooks were barbless and the bent part almost as large as a horseshoe, and the tuna in a feeding frenzy would as soon take a shiny hook as a bait fish. As soon as a line went taut, a mighty heave would toss it over the fisherman's head into a pit amidships, where, given slack, the hook fell free. So until the school was largely caught or dispersed, a half dozen men or more along the gunners would heave, cast, heave, cast, heave again, until exhausted, when other fishermen of the crew would step in, and on a really good school the first mate, the cook,, and even the skipper might put their backs to the task.
Often in the days of movie newsreels his brother back east would watch at the theater as the fame of the San Diego tuna fleet grew, and wonder if Norman was among the crew of the boat on screen. If they sang as they heaved in the fish, the sound was not recorded, but Alan Lomax, the collector and historian of “The Folk Songs of North America,” reports that sea chanteys may have had their origins among pre-Christian Sicilian tuna fisherman, who may have sung as they cast or hauled in their nets or lines and hooks. Fishhooks are mentioned in Amos 4:2, while nets were certainly in use. Their weakness is attested in the story of the breaking of a loaded net, Luke 5:6. When tuna fishing grew from family enterprise to modern industry, nets were found to be impractical. They wore out so fast that crews would have spent more time repairing nets than pursuing tuna schools. Hooks remained in vogue until a decade after the invention of nylon.
Early tuna boats could never go far from the canneries, but when refrigeration boats with huge brine tanks were developed so that fish could be frozen as fast as they were caught, the range increased to four or five thousand miles. Now within range were the fisheries off northern Peru associated with the famous cold water upwelling that is part of the Humboldt current flowing north from the Antarctic, along the Pacific coast of South America. Now, expeditions from San Diego with ever larger vessels became a matter of several months, perhaps half of which was consumed on route at eight or ten knots headway.
Through the 1930's Norman advanced, was granted a master's license, and acquired part ownership together with Van Camp's Seafood Company in a beautiful vessel, the Costa Rican Segundo, which often stopped for water and supplies including bait fish at Puntarenas on the truly pacific waters of the Gulf de Nicoya. There he befriended a fishing family, Moreno by name, some of whom sailed with him. But it was the dark eyed sister Manuelita who kept him finding excuses to mix, with his fishing business, trips to Costa Rica, surely the most beautiful and peace loving nation in all the Americas.
Then came Pearl Harbor and U. S. involvement in World War II Night flights over Germany as well as several Pacific theaters of operations severely stressed the bomber crews, particularly with eyestrain. This could be alleviated with certain vitamins found in high concentration in shark livers. Accordingly, Captain Norman was commissioned to abandon tuna fishing to go after sharks for the duration.
In 1944 he swept the beautiful Manuelita off her feet and they were married in Puntarenas amid songs and prayers of the Moreno family and friends and the entire crew of the Costa Rican Segundo. Now it was time for a long deserved vacation and honeymoon. The two of them found a three mile strip of totally deserted Costa Rican coast where they camped and swam and ran on the beautiful volcanic black sand and had only the parakeets and chattering monkeys for company. Day and night there was the booming surf of the Pacific, and the backdrop of coconut, mango and banana trees. They fell so in love with the spot that they bought the entire three miles, though it later became the property of squatters who, in poverty, had invaded it in their absence. They hadn't the heart to sue.
In time they settled in a charming home built into the side of a Point Loma hill within blocks of the home sites chosen by other skippers of the famous San Diego Fleet.
At war's end it was back to tuna fishing for the Costa Rican Segundo, and Manuelita's nephew Miguel, still a child, got his parents' permission to sail with Uncle Norman. By 1946 they had covered much of the coast. Once the dreaded El Niño, that rare warming of the equatorial Pacific surface waters, struck and temporarily upset the cold upwelling off Peru. This drove the tuna elsewhere. The Costa Rican Segundo ventured ever further from shore, and had only half a load after weeks of searching for rare schools. Then like a bolt from the blue one day there came the cry of “WE'RE CAPSIZING!” as the starboard gunnel went under. As Captain Norman wrote to his brother later, it took what seemed like only five minutes for the vessel to sink. A neglected refrigeration system had failed, and ice ballast in the hold had melted and shifted. The crew was unable to free the power launch. Captain and crew owed their very lives to the eleven year old Miguel who had succeeded in cutting loose a rowboat.
Eighteen hours through dark of night and glare of sun can seem like as many days to twelve men wedged into a small boat without power. There were oars, but what course? Most of the crew wanted to head west for the coast, but this was over a hundred miles away. Captain Norman's firm order was “south to the nearest transport shipping lane,” and he was reluctantly obeyed. Then he expressed gratitude to God and praised the quick thinking and action of young Miguel. The captain's efforts to make a joke of the situation alternating with prayers preserved calm. Drinking water ran low until a rain squall filled a tarpaulin. There was not room for despair while moving and bailing kept the crew busy until at last they were spotted by a Czechoslovakian steamer.
The insurance policy was in Van Camp's name, and Captain Norman recovered little of his investment. He resolved that thereafter he would be a fifty-fifty partner with one or another boat owner.
The marine operator reached me on a mid-August day in 1963 with a call from my brother Norman, skipper of the purse seiner Wiley V. A. An El Nino had disrupted west coast fishing, and news of plentiful bluefin off Long Island and New Jersey had brought the whole San Diego fleet through the Panama Canal. Several days of gale winds were threatening and nylon seines needed mending. Could I be on the northeast shore of Block Island Thursday afternoon? Could I?! I packed in a rush and bought some anti-seasick chewing gum (which I never used--”Eat hearty and you'll never need it” he told me.) I reached Montauk Point at the east tip of Long Island at mid morning Thursday and chartered a plane to Block Island. There was a grass runway closely bordered with trees, and when the tail lifted just before takeoff and slewed from side to side—whew! Finally safe on Block Island I could see the name Wiley V. A. on one of several boats through my binoculars. Also, standing at the starboard beam was my nephew Bob Williams, then in his twenties, but my waving drew no response. Minutes turned to hours. A Coast Guard man tried a sun signal mirror and bullhorn to no avail. At 10:00 p.m. I was dozing off in a shore side hotel when Bob pounded on my door. “Where were you all day?”
Scarcely on board, and the diesel with its eight huge cylinders of several thousand horsepower started up. I was well fed and spent several hours in the chart room. Norman had plotted the paths of two hurricanes, one close enough to bear watching. (For years in the Pacific, he had reported location, barometer, air and water temperature and wind speed to the U. S. Weather Bureau, and continued the practice later when this Atlantic adventure was over, ultimately receiving a citation from NOAA for this valuable service.) I asked to be treated as a novice crew member so he settled me in the main bunkhouse amidships. Here pitch and yaw were at a minimum but roll was strong, a strange sensation, for the bunks lay athwart and your head would sink while your feet rose and vice versa like a wrong way cradle.
Breakfast? Wow! The crew ate fruit, cold cereal, hot cereal, ham and three eggs and a high stack of flapjacks of which “Cookie” was justly proud, twice as much as I could eat at a main evening meal. No they weren't fat but quite athletic, their work demanding many thousands of calories each day. I ate half a slice of ham and two large pancakes, stuffing myself as Norman had advised. Then I heard from Cookie. He was an Aztec Indian from Peru, the only crew member shorter than I. He grunted in Spanish, and Norman translated, “What's the matter? Lost your appetite?”
As the sun climbed out of the morning haze a one-engine plane appeared overhead. Soon Norman was on the phone with the plane's pilot noting the bearing of a large school of blue fin. This spotter plane had followed the fleet from San Diego, and was paid by each captain so much per ton. After a quarter hour on the suggested course came a hail from the crow's nest, “TUNA!" The ship speed was cut, and the hailer in the crow's nest became the skipper pro tem, directing needed course corrections until a black yet somehow sparkling patch of water came into view of us down on the deck. Now two men boarded the power launch where it was perched precariously atop the eight-foot-high mound of nylon which was the seine.
Nylon was invented in 1935, but then came World War II and production was diverted from stockings to parachutes. Girls were inking lines on bare legs to simulate stocking seams. But in the late forties the nylon purse seine finally replaced the hook and line for landing tuna.
One end of the seine was attached to the launch and at the command “SET” a sledge hammer released a cable and dropped the launch—what a fall, twelve feet perhaps! The Wiley V. A. slowly encircled the school, while the seine formed long standing waves in mid air, a beautiful sight, before settling to the water. The launch used all its 600 horsepower just to sit still against the pull of the unloading seine, which was 200 feet wide and nearly a half mile long. One edge was packed with floats, the other with steel rings perhaps 14 inches in diameter threaded by a one-inch steel cable.
At last the Wiley V. A. closed with the launch and the process of closing the purse under the school began. What drama! Before closure was completed it was necessary to drive the tuna away from the ships to the far side of the seven or eight acres which the seine surrounded, to prevent their escape under the vessel. Chiefie the chief engineer handed us a couple of ten-pound sledge hammers with which to make noise by pounding the portside cleats. That kept me and Bob busy while Chiefie used his fat cigar to light one waterproof cherry bomb after another. These would sink 20 feet or so before exploding. Cookie convinced himself that he was doing his part by striking the stern rail, click, click, with a cooking fork.
High on a structure over the stern deck was a set of hydraulically driven pulleys. One drew in the steel cable to close the purse under the fish, and then the other drew most of the seine up, over, and down to the deck where several men were busy folding it and stacking it neatly. These men wore heavy raincoats and hats to ward off the water being wrung out, which might contain the juices of a Portuguese man-of-war or other jellyfish, highly toxic to the skin. Later they would shower, as we all did, in salt water.
When the remaining net had crowded the fish together, one of the strongest men of the crew worked the brailer. “C.Q.” we called him, for his hobby when off duty was ham radio operator. The brailer was a net six feet in diameter with a fifteen-foot handle. C.Q. would put his full-weight on the handle to push the brailer under the fish, and a crane would lift it and drop the fish on the deck. Unwanted sharks and fish species were thrown overboard while the tuna were put down a slide into the brine freezer tanks. In one brailer load I saw my only hammerhead shark, surely one of nature's wonders, with eyes so far apart it must have better stereo vision that any other sea creature. Fifteen times the brailer dipped, and fifteen tons of bluefin were taken on the first set of the seine that I witnessed.
On a cool moonlit evening while Bob took the helm, Norman and I leaned on the starboard rail watching the foaming white bow wave slide by. He told of watching bow waves in the tropics aglow with phosphorescence with his beloved Manuelita at his side. He told of many trips when she could not be with him and how every return home was another honeymoon. And we talked of how a split between our parents had scattered us four kids. For the first time within my memory I discovered what it means to have a brother. He said that his crew could not understand why a scientist would spend a vacation working so hard and pretending to be a crew member.
A few other highlights will have to suffice:
Once Bob challenged me to climb the rope ladder to the crow’s nest. Halfway up as I found myself over water to starboard, then rolling over water to port, I panicked and quit, but Bob made it all the way. He took to the water like his Uncle Norman, and later earned his doctorate in oceanography at Scripps.
Once Norman yielded the helm to me and turned off the servomotors so I could steer the old-fashioned way, but my full weight would not turn the wheel. Neither would his. Chiefie was seriously reprimanded, for he’d neglected to lubricate the steering shaft ever since San Diego. Somehow Chiefie seemed unfriendly after that.
Then there were the moments I spent in meditation in the small chapel large enough for one person to stand in front of a crucifix, with niches on either side, one for Saint Elmo, no doubt.
One afternoon Cookie dragged a charcoal broiler on deck and cooked a dozen tuna steaks two inches thick. No, these fishermen did not live on fish. The refrigerator was stocked with tenderloin, lamb chops, fresh frozen vegetables and fruit, bread and rolls—you name it—but Cookie’s tuna tasted as good as any charred rare fillet mignon in Kansas City! Through Norman I asked for his basting recipe. No way. His secret.
One time half the crew including Chiefie had shore leave. I heard later that Chiefie got drunk and tried to promote a mutiny. Norman demoted him but wouldn’t put him off the ship until they got back to San Diego.
An east coast cannery paid only half of what they had promised for a 200-ton load, falsely claiming that the fish were undersize. Norman told how west coast canneries always honored their telephone contracts and he didn’t think much of these Yankee sharp practices—“but we’re doing o.k. It takes us two or three months per load in the Pacific, but here we deliver a load in three weeks or less.”
So the days of my one week vacation passed swiftly. About the fifth day I could take the companionway to the galley no hands in spite of the unpredictable lurching in pitch, roll, and yaw. Norman warned me that when I first got ashore the land would lurch just as badly until I got my “land legs” back.
The nominal end of vacation came and went. Tough! There are tuna to be caught. I’d be put ashore where and when my docking wouldn’t interfere with business. After three more days a violent thunderstorm covered the night sky of southern New York state and northern New Jersey and we dropped anchor a few hundred yards from Shinneycock Inlet’s light and bell buoy. Another precious few hours of brotherly converse and off to bed. Nephew Bob rousted me out before sunrise and helped me down a rope ladder into a small fiberglass boat, and an hour later I and my baggage were alone on a deserted dock. With a wave and a “let’s do it again” he was gone.
Solid ground seemed steady enough, and I caught an eastbound bus to pick up my car. It was mid afternoon driving west when I stopped at a diner and ate at a bar. Then it started. I slowly became aware that the far end of the bar had a slight motion. Bit by bit the pitch and roll and yaw built up. That night at home I made sleep impossible for my wife until I moved to the davenport. Next morning the RCA Space Center lurched uncontrollably, and it took nearly a month to get my land legs back.
Local sports fishermen were unduly concerned about the presence of the huge San Diego Tuna Fleet in the waters off New Jersey, Long Island, and New England, back for a second year in 1964. Some shouted obscenities as they passed, believing that their sport would be destroyed. Actually, the commercial boats were only interested in 8 to 80 pound fish which machinery at canneries could handle, while sportsmen were out for prize fish weighing several hundred pounds.
The wrath of sports columnists was triggered when Captain Norman’s Wiley V. A. delivered 45 tons of bluefish (not tuna!) to New York City’s famous Fulton Fish Market one day. The wholesale price plummeted from 20 cents a pound to 10 cents or less for a few days. One editorial called the event “the plundering of the outer harbor bluefish schools by calloused commercial tuna skippers.” In reply the Wiley V. A. published their explanation. The seine had been set on a school of skipjack tuna with no knowledge that bluefish were schooling under them. Should they have dumped the dead fish overboard? The market paid 6 cents a pound, not nearly enough to cover the cost of fuel and lost time repairing the seine which sharp-toothed bluefish had damaged.
After six years Norman sold his share in the Wiley V. A. and over many years he was navigator or master of a succession of boats many much larger than the 200-ton capacity Wiley V. A. Once he was asked to test a government-designed vessel intended to be equally useful in tropical and Arctic water. “Not much good for either until we sank another $100,000 into her.” As the years passed, tuna were harder to find, and several normally competing canneries pooled their resources to send Norman on a research expedition to study the water temperatures which different species of tuna preferred and to find new fishing grounds.
This took him all the way to Samoa. There he saw the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose “Child’s Garden of Verses” had been an early companion and whose sea adventures such as “Treasure Island” had added to teenage Norman’s allure for the sea. While the tuna taken on board scarcely paid the expenses of such a long meandering trip, the ultimate payoff to the industry led to the construction of far-flung canneries in Samoa and elsewhere, including the Philippines. Also because of abject poverty in Puerto Rico, Uncle Sam gave tax-fee status to new industries including new canneries there, and many a load of Pacific tuna went through the Panama Canal and 1100 miles across the Caribbean, saving several thousand additional miles that would have been necessary to deliver in San Diego.
In a letter dated September 11, 1971, Norman wrote that in spite of the scare over mercury contamination canneries couldn’t fill public demand.
Soon multimillion dollar vessels were being turned out “almost like an assembly line and I fear the saturation point will soon be reached and there will not be enough tuna in the oceans to fill the holds of these Super Clippers some of which pack as much as 2000 tons.”
For some years the tuna were plentiful off Ecuador, but a territorial limit dispute arose, Ecuador claiming sovereignty out to 12 miles while we granted only 3. When Captain Norman ventured inside the 12-mile line, the Ecuadorian air force strafed his vessel. Of course they were careful not to hit the vessel, the bullets splashing all around it, but the action made good press throughout Ecuador. Later a very satisfactory compromise was worked out. Ecuadorian tuna boats were small and had no refrigeration. They were able to eliminate their daily round trips from shore and spend twice as much time fishing when Van Camp provided large refrigerated “motherships” or tenders to buy up the daily catches of the small boats.
One such vessel was the Azoreana, the oldest wooden tuna boat still afloat, built in 1936, and Norman had a three-year contract to operate it among the smaller tuna boats in the Gulf of Guayaquil. Ecuador was almost as beautiful as Manuelita’s home country of Costa Rica and so the family spent vacations now and then aboard the Azoreana. Once she and Norman drove from the port of Salinas to Guayaquil and loaded the Land Rover with supplies. On the way back, rounding a mountain curve at 25 MPH they killed a heifer which had suddenly jumped from the bank. “Poor cow,” said Manuelita. “Poor car,” said Norman. By Ecuadorian law the heifer could have become their property and its owner responsible for the cost of car repairs, but they couldn’t lift the heifer nor find its owner.
In May, 1973 Norman wrote, “Why don’t you and Flo come down and sped at least two months in this beautiful country and live on this ancient wooden boat?” But two months later the gallant ship was no more. From a copy of the statement prepared for the insurance company we learned that on the evening of June 30 as she lay at anchor in Salinas Bay an engine room alarm sounded, followed by a sound like a muffled explosion. With dense smoke pouring from engine room doors and port holes they were unable to operate the CO-2 valves. Suddenly all lights went out and auxiliary engines died. Norman gave the order to abandon ship and the power launch took all but three away. “We managed to get into my quarters and rescue from the safe the ship’s documents and a small cash box. The smoke was so thick that the stern was the only place we could breathe.” There they waited a quarter hour for the launch to return and pick them up. They were scarcely aboard another small tender when they saw flames break through the deck. None of the vessels in the harbor had pumps of sufficient pressure to help. They could only speculate that ancient electrical equipment or wiring had shorted and that the dense smoke was from the wooden hull soaked by engine room oil drippings over 37 years.
Norman saved only his typewriter, and lost his irreplaceable address book with names of friends and relatives and business acquaintances all over U.S., Central and South America, and clear out to Samoa, Palau, etc. Fortunately he could remember one phone number, and was able to call Manuelita.
By the late 70’s the world renowned oceanographer Jacques Cousteau reported, after more than two decades of ocean research, that the world supply of fish had been depleted by 30% through man’s activities, partly through pollution and partly by the ever more aggressive fishing by larger and larger boats. Those of some nations were even equipped with on-board canneries. By 1988 the worldwide catch of all species had increased to 88 million tons, and the turning away from high-cholesterol red meat had driven the per capita fish consumption to over 35 pounds a year, more than double that in 1950. Since then through international agreements the worldwide catch has stopped growing, but the per capita consumption has been dropping as human population rises out of control.
Through the late 1960s the yellowfin of the tropical Pacific had been a major tuna catch, but then quite legitimate complaints by environmentalist, condemned the practice of setting seines around schools of dolphins. Accidental entanglement was drowning some 250,000 dolphins per year. For reasons not understood, yellowfin tuna would assemble in large numbers under a school of so-called porpoise. A friend of Norman’s, another San Diego Skipper, invented an “apron” or gateway to let the dolphin escape, and a dramatic 90% reduction in dolphin deaths resulted. With extreme lack of diplomacy, giving the fleet no credit for its voluntary action, environmentalists promoted the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, restricting the dolphin kill by the U.S. fleet but of course having no control over the kill by the fleets of other nations. Not good enough. The kill by the U.S. fleet must be zero, and the “dolphin safe” label on cans meant for all practical purposes that yellowfin would be off the market, while there was no international agreement. MASS FLIGHT TO FOREIGN FLAGS THREATENED read one San Diego headline in December, 1976, but only 10 or 15 San Diego Vessels did register in foreign nations.
Most continued fishing for yellowfin as usual while court appeals continued. Then in letters 1 ½’ high, TUNA BAN ORDERED; BOATS CALL IT QUITS. Norman wrote “We are still hoping Congress will repeal before some 20,000 people in this industry lose their jobs.” Norman never lived to see the legal relief passed early in 1998. Through 1997 environmentalists were split, some calling the proposal the “Dolphin Death Law” while others including Greenpeace declared that without it no INTERNATIONAL agreement to protect the dolphin could be achieved. In July of 1997 I talked with Dr. Naomi Rose, marine biologist with Humane Society U.S. in Washington, who explained that while the kill seemed small compared to the many millions of dolphins worldwide, there was only one species, the eastern spinner, involved, at that 90% of all eastern spinners worldwide had been destroyed. So I have much sympathy with my environmentalist friends who opposed any relaxation of the meaning of the “dolphin safe” label. Now, for the time being, the relaxing legislation has passed and only time will tell while the struggle will doubtless continue.
In 1977 Norman wrote that he was now 65 but couldn’t afford to retire because of Social Security restrictions on income. In 40 years he had roamed the Atlantic and Pacific and been through shipwrecks and violent storms. Three times he had promised God that if he survived this storm he would never sail again, and then trusted he would have God’s forgiveness for breaking the promise. Now as the years passed he and his family were free to spend more time camping at high altitude sites overlooking Death Valley or King’s Canyon, occasionally standing watch on a docked vessel, and now and then standing in as temporary master or navigator. In 1876 Flo and I joined them to see the desert in bloom for the first week in April, and Flo’s heart attack and bypass surgery turned a week’s stay into a month. Just before this trip we’d had a card postmarked in the Philippines and dated February 13, 1987:
“This time I really made a trip of it. Flew S.D. to Seattle, then 11 hours to Seoul, Korea, then south to Manila and finally to Zamboanga on the island of Mindanao, and supervised the unloading of a large tuna vessel. Will take this vessel to Guam where its regular skipper will take over, and fly home via Tokyo.”
Then in April at the age of 75 he was applying for a 5-year renewal of his Master’s License.
Captain Norman died in 1990 after a very experimental heart valve implant. He left his eyes to the San Diego Eye Bank, and his ashes were scattered on his beloved Pacific Ocean. As for his wife Manuelita, she was and is every inch the woman of that line in the old song, “The sailor’s wife the sailor’s star shall be.”
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