Bye Bye Steve!   *   *   *   *   *   A friend has gone...       Steve was a Californian and proud to be it, and he had started sailing a few years before retiring from his job as a software engineer. He greatly enjoyed his new freedom and wanted to use it to discover the world. So he had become a good sailor and bought his magnificent "Solace", a powerful and strong Baltic 42, very elegant, but actually not really ideal for singlehanded sailing, as he often used to practice it, though he handled her brillantly.   From San Diego he had made a trip to the Hawaiian Islands, together with his daughter Kelsey and a friend of hers. To his lovely daughter he was just unconditionally and unfailingly linked, since they had lost their beloved wife and mum, when Kelsey was still a little girl. A very talented chef, Kelsey is also an amazing surfer, who like no one else is able to play in the impressive waves that the Pacific ocean form on the coasts of her native California.     Steve then headed south, partly with a crew and sometimes singlehanded, descending along the continent in various stages, up to Chile. And so it was in Valdivia that we got to know each other, him from the north, me from the west and the Pacific crossing. Of course that meeting of two old singlehanders could only be the start of a warm friendship, and we spent a few months of great life together in the harbours as well as sailing down the Patagonian Channels to Tierra del Fuego.   So many were the days and evenings we spent together, tinkering aboard, or simply having a good time and sharing good meals, sometimes on his boat, sometimes on mine. He loved my Italian dishes, or the melted cheese of my Swiss raclettes, I loved his rich ans so tasty sheperd's pie and we both greatly appreciated the good Chilean red wine that goes so well with... anything, especially in good company!   In Ushuaia he received a visit from his daughter and took a tour with her and a friend of her in the Beagle Channel and to the glaciers, before sailing up again the Patagonian Channels to Puerto Montt, where he hauled his boat out of the water and flew back home to spend the Chilean winter in his country's summer.     Back aboard, he then sailed back to Valdivia, that nice town that had enchanted us both, getting ready for the big jump westwards over the Pacific ocean towards its world of islands. His first stop was at Juan Fernandez, he Robinson Crusoe island, then Rapa Nui, the Easter Island, of which he had dreamed for such a long time, an important goal of his travels, whose discovery filled him with happiness.   I will never forget those weeks during which, he sailing at sea and me in Tierra del Fuego, we were in constant communication by e-mail, since Steve had started studying French with a view to his arrival in French Polynesia and I served as his teacher.   Having met there our friends Niels and Linette, the Dutch couple of "Stormalong", Steve visited the island with them. So they were together when at the beginning of March they were confronted with the arrival of a strong low, due to which the weather models forecasted strong NW winds in the vicinity of Easter Island.   As experienced sailors, Niels and his wife relied on the old sailor's wisdom, while Steve, a brilliant sailor as well, but of more recent experience, followed the urgent advice of the Harbour Master's Office of Hanga Roa: the Dutch couple set sails and steered "Stormalong" to the open sea, where a boat is in its element to fight against bad weather, while Steve, together with the other yachties visiting the island at the time, moved "Solace" to the south of the island, into the Bay of Hanga Vinapu, an anchorage protected from the forecasted winds.   At sea Niels and Linette had to fight very hard against winds of over 50 knots, irregular in direction up to the point that they even had doubts about the rightness of their strategic choice of having set sails.   But they did their job very well and ended up getting through the bad weather, after which they were able to continue their journey quietly westwards, towards the Gambiers archipelago and French Polynesia.   In the protection of the bay of Hanga Vinapu, the boats didn't have any problems to stand out that northwesterly gale.     s/y Solace Until, in the night, the wind actually had significantly weakend, but by backing to the SW and contributing so to drive a strong swell right into the bay, raising very big waves which made the anchorage extremely uncomfortable, at the very limit of holdable.   All the boats were on alert, ready to weigh anchor if necessary and a large prao even reports that they had to put one of their engines in reverse so that their boat did not come across the wave and so that the situation remained more or less controllable. They were then about 200 m away from Steve and his boat, of which they could see very well the mooring light between them and the coast. They saw Steve caring about his anchorage on the foredeck and then returning into his cabin, before a very big wave took his boat abeam and made her capsized, her anchor light disappearing and just never reappearing again. Although the neighbours were fully aware of the tragedy, they had no chance at all to undertake anything to help under those conditions and only could issue a Mayday alert. But neither the harbour master's office was then able to undertake any rescue whatsoever, no boat being able to leave the main harbour of Hanga Roa in the sea conditions at the time. And the next day just a thousand bits and pieces of "Solace" remained scattered on the sharp rocks of the shore.   One can imagine that the very strong swell was amplified to such an extent by the rise of the bottom of the bay, that it was enough to capsize "Solace", in spite of the heavy and deep ballast of this powerful sailboat, until her very strong, through deck mast touched the bottom and tore off part of the deck, filling the boat with water almost instantly. Another boat of about fifty feet, anchored permanently in the bay, was torn from its anchorage and also shattered into a thousand pieces on the rocks of the shore, luckily without anyone on board. This fact would tend to confirm how unusually bad the prevailing conditions were.   Photos Capitania de Puerto de Hanga Roa The only consoling thoughts remaining are that everything must have happened very quickly, without giving my poor friend time to suffer, and the fact that he went while living his dream, of which Easter Island was atually one of the great images.   With his engineer precision Steve documented his travels in a blog full of memories and interesting technical details: www.sailingsolace.com   Months have now passed, but lots of images and memories continue to jostle in my head, and I sometimes play on my guitar the seaman's song of Georges Brassens, "Les copains d'abord" ("Friends First"): bye bye Steve, my old chap, your hole in the water will never close again... and the souls of lost sailors return to us in the flight of an albatross...