Fathers and Sons

By Peter Stoler

CUTTING LOOSE by JAMES LIPSCOMB 304 pages. Little, Brown. $10.

Every sailboat man dreams at some time of cruising across the Pacific, running for days under warm breezes, dropping anchor for weeks at islands with names like Raratonga. Citybound mariners mostly learn to content themselves with a few weeks' cruising on inland waters or slashing around the markers in cutthroat weekend races. But young John Lipscomb, 18, and his father James, a writer and first-rate cinematographer (Blue Water, White Death), realized the total dream. James Lipscomb was able to sell the idea of a film about such a voyage. As a result, Son John became skipper of a 60-ft. schooner, the Four Winds. With a crew of four other boys, plus two camera technicians, the Lipscombs left San Pedro, Calif., on Nov. 9, 1971, for a 16,000-mile voyage to Singapore.

The trip, chronicled by Lipscomb pere in Cutting Loose, was viewed by the boys as a lark. "All I wanted was to have fun," explained young Lipscomb. What he got was a lesson in growing up. The boys withstood the ocean in fine style.

But they found the storms that raged within their boat harder to handle. From the start, Lipscomb Senior resolved to leave the decisions to his son and the young crew and merely record their adventures on film. The presence of a camera inevitably affects the way people behave. The fact that the camera is also wielded by a father cannot help influencing the behavior of a son, particularly if the father is, like Lipscomb, a skilled sailor. Before Four Winds could cross the equator, it had to get over the generation gap.

Lipscomb recounts that passage with understanding, humor and painful honesty. John, as expected, grew tense as he made the dozens of daily decisions about handling the boat, and his testiness helped create problems keeping the crew together. One of the boys was arrested for possession of marijuana during a stopover in Mexico; Four Winds sailed on without him. Another crewman proved to be an almost pathological worker who resented the fact that other crew members were not so energetic as he. A third was an easygoing child of nature who never did any chore that he could possibly put off. The author, who weaves entries from the boys' diaries to gether with his own observation, has produced an often moving and entertaining account of the voyage. He describes, with no attempt at ridicule, the boys' affairs with Polynesian girls, their meetings to hash out problems: after nearly 14 weeks at sea, they finally agreed that below-deck work duties would have to be formally assigned. Nor does Lipscomb spare himself in describing the strained relationship with his son. As John became more confident, he more and more resented his father's presence on the boat. At one point, he blurted out his feelings about his father, who had never allowed him to crew for him during local Thistle-class races back home: "I could crew for you," John says angrily. "I could be a pair of hands for you, but you could never crew for me." The remark, Lipscomb acknowledges bitterly, was just. So was John's anger on another occasion when his father playfully tried to throw him into a tropical harbor. Furious because his father could take liberties that he could not, John offered to fight.

Fortunately, that fight never happened. The love between Lipscomb and his son, though altered, survived. "John's childhood is past," writes Lipscomb in the book's closing pages. "His idealization of his father is history." But, like many a father, he hopes that his son's respect for him now encompasses a wider view of the old man's faults, failings and possible virtues. For that reason alone, concludes Lipscomb, the voyage was worthwhile.

Peter Stoler

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