Ea-Going

Exan Is

Ff Again

By Alan Fitzgerald

’ELL - known yachtsman and author John Caldwell, with his wife Mary, and three kids, set from Sydney end of July in ketch Outward Bound on a Id cruise which they think may five years. )hn had to work right up till Friday before he sailed because needed the money for the trip, the two years it has taken him build the 45 ft ketch he has 1 all available funds, uring this time he has worked a yardman at the Rushcutter ht Service, a subsidiary of the Lsing Yacht Club of Australia, lushcutters’ Bay, Sydney, where and the family lived on the ward Bound while it was being pleted. i also gave lectures at the club his seafaring adventures.

Family of Enthusiasts

is plans are pretty vague at moment. He will sail up through Barrier Reef and around the t to Darwin, then via Singapore Suez to England, pending on the sales of his book, Family at Sea he may a year in England before sail to the States, and then back .ustralia which is “home”, hn reckons writing is a lot ir way of making a living than ping the hulls of racing yachts, ter he may try his hand at >n. But meantime he hopes to e a book out of the coming ge on the Outward Bound. s wife Mary, and sons John Stevie (7) and Roger (5) mately all share his enthusiasm life on the rolling wave, lough we seem to remember his books that Mary is sick he time, except when steering boat). ger was born in Tahiti during /oyage of the Tropic Seas, five ! ago, and it was this leisurely which provided the material 'amity At Sea. sold Tropic Seas after he ar in Sydney and built a home tried to face up to suburban as a personnel officer in a firm. It didn’t work out. So old the house and set to, to Outward Bound.

Blue Texan Toes

the June day on which he 3 me out to the ketch, an icy ir wind was blowing, and I in my tweed overcoat while was barefoot and wearing ns and a “T” shirt, rugging off the cold he said /as born in Texas (in 1919)

where the wind blew down off the “Pan Handle”.

Nevertheless his Texan toes were blue with the cold!

Although a seagoing Texan, John Caldwell knows how to put the Australian Slanguage to good use.

“Gripes” he said, and it sounded fair dinkum.

Actually he served with the RAAF during the latter part of World War 11, after he was re jected for the US services because of a punctured ear drum.

It was this armed service re jection that sent him to sea. The Merchant Marine was the only ser vice open to him in the States and after two years service in the North Atlantic and South Pacific he found himself in Australia.

Thinking he was putting “one over” the RAAF. he enlisted, only to find out that his “punctured ear drum” had healed.

He assured me that punctured ear drums were far from unusual

in US. “Frank Sinatra had one and that’s why he coudn’t get into the forces”.

Even the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers had a punctured ear drum.

In the RAAF he met Mary and married her. After the War he returned to the Merchant Service and bought the cutter Pagan in Panama on the recommendation of Mrs Peggy Bourke, who with her husband was piled up in the yacht Venturer on a coral reef off Queensland last month.

John sailed the Pagan across the Pacific well nearly across the Pacific (he was wrecked in the Fiji Islands) —to rejoin his wife in Australia.

It was his adventures on Pagan that provided the meat for his first book Desperate Voyage which ran to nine impressions He and his wife and son John, then returned to California and with the money from the book bought Tropic Seas. The addition to the family (Roger) arrived a few months later in Tahiti.

Below, the Texan in his T shirt (on a winter’s day); ana at right, “Outward Bound”, the 45-ft ketch he will sail round the world with wife Mary and the kids.