"PUSAN"

It is almost 2 years since I left St. Lucia by plane, leaving Early Summer behind in the hope to come back to resume the "delivery trip" from Warsash to Japan in the near future. But I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I could save up enough money for my family to live on while I was having fun on the Pacific. A couple of years at the least, I feared.

Fortunately, an ARC friend of mine wanted to bring his yacht to Japan to sell it here and offered to ship Early Summer side by side with his, hoping to get some discount on the freight. I was excited at the prospect of being able to cruise around my home on Early Summer without having to sail the longest and toughest leg. I jumped at his offer and Early Summer safely arrived at Kobe, Japan three months after I left St. Lucia.

Since then, I have been sailing along the Japan Sea coasts of Honshuu Island, which area is notorious for the bad winter weather but is more secluded and as a result, much less vulgarized than the Pacific coast. Besides, Korea and Russia are only a few days’ sail across the Japan Sea.

My parents were born and raised in Korea while the peninsular was under Japanese occupation, and I had longed to see the country which they love so much that they visit it at least twice every year. So when the long gloomy winter was over and the first spring breeze hit the sea, I together with a young friend of mine set sail for Pusan, the second largest city in Korea.

The trip was uneventful: for the first I O hours we had barely  enough wind to gain steerage but after that we enjoyed force 3 winds constantly blowing from behind and 55 hours later, we were at the

entrance of the port.

It was O130 local time. Right outside the outer breakwater, there were a few freighters and a large ferry boat from Japan drifting around keeping some distance from the entrance, as if to remind me that it is forbidden to enter a Korean port at night without prior permission from the port authorities.

The permission was granted three hours later at 0430, after a couple of link calls to Japan to get my father to find a friend who would act as my agent.

An agent for a pleasure boat! I must say I had never heard of any such requirements before. Even in Portugal, where they mistakenly call a detention camp a yacht marina, one is free to walk out of the fences to see the port authorities oneself.

In Viana Do Castero, there were fences all around the "marina", and once you got into it, the only entrance from the outer harbour was locked with a swing bridge; and until you cleared into the country properly and paid a fee of Esc. 90, or 40 pence, you could not leave it.)

We anchored at the quarantine anchorage, as had been directed by the port control, one hour later at 0530. When I reported to the port control on the VHF, they told us to wait, for the quarantine officer, who he assured us would come to clear us in an hour. So we began fixing breakfast.

However, after breakfast, a few cans of beer, and then a bottle of sake (1 .8 liters), no one visited us. So I asked the port control very politely how soon he might turn up, only to be told to proceed to the Customs Headquarters located in the inner harbour.

So we weighed anchor and began motoring into the inner harbour through the opening between the two inner breakwaters. As we passed them, we saw an armoured cruiser coming out of the inner harbour.  A moment later, we heard young soldiers stationed on a barge guarding the entrance whistling the Korean cruiser bon voyage. Some were waving flags even.

"What a noisy salute!" we said to each other! waving to the young soldiers on both ships. As if to return the greetings! They whistled even louder and waved the flags more violently. “What a noisy welcome!” my friend said, as he waved his hands to them.

A few minutes later, we were passing by a Russian cargo-passenger boat, waving again to the Russians on it. Then it was that we heard a siren on top of the noisy whistles, which they had never stopped blowing.

Turning round my head I saw a navy patrol boat approaching us at its full speed. Several soldiers were holding their machine guns at ready; every one of them, even the big one on the coachroof, was pointing in our direction!

The whistles and flags were not a salute to the cruiser, they were to stop us. We were ordered both in English and Korean to follow them back to the barge, which they called the 'navy chekku point."

We were taken to a room full of soldiers, every one of them had either a rifle or a machine gun in hand. I had never seen so many guns in my life and it was more than enough to sober me up.

The interrogation at the check point was carried out by writing. None of the soldiers spoke Japanese, and neither of us spoke Korean either. It was fortunate that there were two soldiers who knew some English words and a sergeant who could read some Chinese characters. The sergeant asked something in Korean and the soldiers translated it into very broken English. I answered the question in English and when they did not understand, I wrote it down in Chinese characters.

They seemed to be very interested in my passport. Nearly all its pages were filled with the stamps from the countries I had visited during my one-year trip from Warsash to the West Indies. And my young friend's passport made the situation even worse; he had visited some communist countries when he traveiled around Europe a few years before.

They would not believe me when I said we visited those places for the same reason we came to Korea: namely, to see the people and the country and enjoy some adventurous feelings along the way.

After several irrelevant questions, however, they invariably returned to the one question: if we knew anyone from North Korea.

Except for the few catnaps, I hadn't slept for the past seventy hours by now and had barely any strength left, and I was thinking I wouldn't mind losing my face by fainting there then, when my agent (my father’s friend) came to our rescue. He somehow got them to turn us over to the Immigration Office, where he had some influence.

Even with his help, however, it was not easy to convince them that we were no spies of any communist nation. We were not allowed to step on the Korean soil until 1630 that day - 13 hours after we arrived at the entrance of the harbour. In the meantime, they had called the Japanese authorities to confirm that we had indeed left the port in Japan on the very date we said we had, or so they claimed. But when I saw my 20,000 yen, or some 80 pounds, slipped into an immigration officer's pocket with great dexterity by my agent, I began to suspect that all the trouble, or at least part of it, might not have been created by them for this particular purpose.

In any case, my young friend was so fed up with anything Korean that, as soon as we were allowed into Korea, he went straight to the ferry terminal, which was five  minutes’ walk from the customs headquarters, bought the ticket for the 1700 ferry for Japan and left the country for good. He stayed on the Korean soil only ten minutes.

Afterwards, I learned that 24 hours notice is a must for any vessel intending to call at a Korean port. If I had done that and had stopped at the navy check point without getting e gunboat to escort us, much of the trouble would have been avoided and the 20,000 yen might have stayed in my wallet, says Mr.Yu (my agent).

Despite this unpleasant beginning, my stay in Korea turned out to be very enjoyable. As if to compensate, Mr. Yu took me to an excellent Korean restaurant that night and introduced me to the richness of the Korean cuisine and would not let me sleep in Early Summer, whose forecabin he found only a bit better than a slave quarter.

Pusan Yacht Center (built for the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988) was just as gorgeous, but only one-tenth as costly and one-millionth as crowded, as the marinas in Lymington. Only about 20 berths out of the 364 were occupied.

When I brought Early Summer in, literally everyone in the marina came running to the pontoon to help me with the ropes. They said, "It's not every YEAR we have a visitor from a foreign country," and everyone wanted to invite me to dinner at his home and show me around the city. Well, I don't think anyone could remain unhappy in a country where it is very difficult to spend his own money on eating unless you insist very strongly.

My return trip was not uneventful. When I left Pusan, there was no hint of the weather going worse on the weather fax which I received on Early Summer. In fact, I had to motor for the first 8 hours.

But then, a low developed very quickly between the two highs that had covered the northern part of the Japan Sea and the high which remained stationary at the west of the Korean Peninsular began to send out fresh winds to it and it soon reached force 7 and then 8.

It was almost midnight, and probably because of the bad weather, there were no fishing boats in sight. I was thinking to myself that it was now I should take some rest leaving the helm to Eruzaburo (the windvane). In order to do so, I would have to put up the storm jib. So I was just going to stand up when it happened.

During the winter, I had replaced most of the wires on Early Summer and I was confident nothing could go wrong in this kind of weather. But there was one piece which I had forgotten to replace. It was the 5 millimeter wire hauling down the tack of the inner staysail - and it broke.

Well, I could try hauling the storm jib down using some spare rope. But I decided to sail with the yankee and the double reefed main. I would have to keep on steering

myself, but I felt I had enough strength left. Besides, I was approaching Yamatotai, where we had encountered hundreds of fishing boats on our way to Pusan.

Because the wind was coming from behind, I was able to enjoy a very fast passage across the Japan Sea using the yankee sail and the double reefed main. It took only 40 hours this time.