Tales from the Inland Sea: Part one.
The well-heeled, gut-knotting, yacht life.
By AMY CHAVEZ
http://www.amychavez.com

I wanted to sail through the Seto Inland Sea as my great-grandfather had done 100 years ago on a U.S. Navy ship. He had kept a diary of his experiences, and I yearned to be a modern great-grandfather like him. I started near the Kii Channel, where he would have entered Osaka Bay, located at 33 degrees 45 minutes north, 134 degrees 50 minutes east. From there the crew and I headed west to Miyazaki on a 40-foot (12-meter) yacht called Louise. It would take a month to get to Miyazaki, just beyond where we would reach the end of the Inland Sea. We would have plenty of time to take in the culture and traditions of the Japanese islands and ports along the way.

Awajishima, the biggest island in the Seto Inland Sea, is a long island wedged between Honshu and Shikoku, separating Osaka Bay from the rest of the Inland Sea. The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge connects Awajishima to Honshu, and the Naruto Bridge connects it to Shikoku. This gap, the Naruto Strait, is the site of the famous Naruto whirlpools, which will spin you around and spit you out if you're a small vessel entering the gap at any time other than the highest or lowest tide. These are the slack times for the water that rushes through the gap into the Inland Sea from the Pacific Ocean on the rising tide and is drained back out during the falling tide. The middle of either an incoming or outgoing tide is when the water is rushing at its fastest, 20 kph. For this reason, boats can be seen gathered around Naruto Bridge on either side, waiting for the right time to enter the strait.

We timed our tides and currents carefully, entering the strait on an incoming current just as the tide was changing from low to high, so we would be pushed along with the current through the gap and not get sucked into any whirlpools.

My first day at sea taught me a lot, mainly that I would have to get used to living on a sailboat heeling at 25 degrees. The whole boat leans over in the wind, so life on board is conducted at a slant. You eat at a slant, walk at a slant and use the toilet at a slant -- not always successfully.

Standing in the cockpit steering, you can stretch one whole side of your body, then tack in the other direction and stretch the other side. Imagine banking a turn on roller skates and holding that position for the rest of the afternoon. Then attach a yacht to your hands, and you've got the idea. The boat heeled so much, I wondered why they even bother building cockpits on top of sailboats -- they ought to install them on the sides.

When the bigger waves forced the boat to heel even more, scaring me enough to make my stomach knot, I realized that a great abdominal workout is built into yachting as well. But isn't there some way to hang the body from the backstay so you could just hover over the cockpit rather than having to stand in it?

With the constant heeling and stomach-knotting every time I looked down and noticed the leeward side of the boat way down at the bottom of the soles of my feet, I felt compelled to ask the skipper, "Has this boat ever tipped over?"

"It's rolled twice," he said.

"So, um, this rolling thing -- what exactly happens?"

"The boat turns over but comes up on the other side."

Great. Like four-wheel driving in the sea, but without the roll bars.

We pulled into Maruyama Port, the most southern part of Awajishima, at dusk. We awoke the next morning amidst a quiet port lifestyle where women sat in wooden sheds threading fishing hooks and their husbands tended to the fishing nets from the night before. The pace was excruciatingly idyllic.

That evening, a storm kicked up, and even with Louise tied up inside the harbor, she rocked all night long.

"I'm sure glad we're not out sailing in that weather," said the skipper as we went to sleep.


Little did we know that the next day, we would be sailing through a typhoon.

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Tales from the Inland Sea: Part two.
Stomach lining jumps ship in a typhoon
By Amy Chavez
http://www.amychavez.com

At 1 p.m. I received a message on my cell phone from my husband: ``I hope you're not sailing today. A typhoon is coming.'' Too bad I didn't see this message before we left Awajima at 1:30 headed for Shodoshima. As a matter of fact, at 1p.m., we were still sitting in an ``onsen'' overlooking the Seto Inland Sea practicing our
math by counting the cars crossing the Naruto Bridge for (yen)7,000 per shot - one way. Besides, the sea had looked perfectly calm from the bath way up on that hill.

An hour later, however, the main sail was reefed to the No. 3 reef and the head sail to the No. 4. If you don't know what that means, consider yourself lucky to be a sofa sailor. Oncoming winds were blowing at 25 to 30 knots (45 to 55kph) - yikes- with gusts of up to 38 knots (70 kph) - double yikes - and the boat was heeling
to 45 degrees. For sofa sailers, 45 degrees would be enough knock you out of your sofa and onto the floor if someone came up from behind and tipped it.
But at least you wouldn't have water running onto your sofa like we did into the boat. While waves crashed over the deck, the boat continued heeling - and heeling, now 60 degrees. My stomach heeled too - I was seasick.

Seasickness is a condition that requires all your mates to sail the boat for you while you attempt to calm down your insides, which are about to jump ship. And I'm not just talking about food. If my stomach lining decided to jump ship too, I would have to sail the rest of the trip without any stomach.

So I did what the skipper told me to do and concentrated on a
stationary object, in this case an island ahead of us. But with seasickness, a phenomenon occurs where even though the boat may be blowing along quickly, the stationary object you're focusing on never gets any closer no matter how fast you sail. In this case,
I'm quite sure the island even retreated! This would explain why on some days you can see the islands in the sea less clearly than others - the islands actually change position. So the next time you look out at the sea and can't see the islands clearly, you'll know the islands are retreating because someone out there is seasick.

The other cure to seasickness is, believe it or not, eating! This
seems a waste of food to me, like being offered a pizza when you have the flu. I was thinking a cocktail might rather balance me out.

Luckily, the two male crew members, with years more sailing
experience than me, easily got us through the storm and into a darling little harbor at Shodoshima where the mountains cradled the port. I had a new appreciation for the other crew members, and as soon as we had sat down to a pasta dinner and a glass of red
wine, I had already forgotten about the heeling, heaving and holding on to my stomach lining.

The next day we would explore Shodoshima, the second-biggest island in the Inland Sea, before sailing on to Honjima, part of the city of Marugame off Shikoku. This part of the Inland Sea, full of small islands huddled together in groups, is called the Aegean Sea of Japan and is considered one of the most beautiful parts of
the Inland Sea. On our way, we would pass under another one of Japan's great bridges - the Seto Ohashi, a 9.4-km bridge connecting Shikoku to Honshu. Luckily they charge the toll bridge fee only to those crossing over the bridge, not under it.

Little did I realize that in Marugame, I would get to know my crew even better, but in a very different way: we would get naked together!

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Tales from the Inland Sea: Part three
Cow Island and a naked bath in the sky


By AMY CHAVEZ
http://www.amychavez.com

Perhaps the best part about sailing through the Seto Inland Sea is stopping along the way at the islands. The Inland Sea has over 150 islands, and each one has a different atmosphere. After passing under the Seto Ohashi Bridge, we stopped at a small island called Ushi Shima. The name of the island (Cow Island), as well as its population of just 19 people, had long intrigued me.

No one is sure where the island got its name, but if you spend an afternoon drinking the local sake, then look at the island, it vaguely resembles a cow standing halfway in the water. Since this is the deepest part of the Inland Sea, that would have to be a cow with 70-meter legs, but after having been on a sailboat for a week already, taking a walk around the island was enough to convince me we were walking on the back of a cow -- the island took on the same motion as the sea.

There are no other cows on Ushi Shima, but there is a goat and a "gaijin." Yes, a gaijin! Kurt VanVolkenburgh and Keiko Yokoyama live off the land and welcome strangers such as myself into their house for lunch. They own a guest house called Island Girl, where people can safely enjoy the rugged island life as a weekend-only thing. Their own house Kurt built himself, and for their yard, I am quite sure they scraped off a patch of the English countryside and sent it here by container ship.

When I stepped onto Cow Island, I was overwhelmed with the silence. There are no cars or machinery. A small community of people lives to the rhythm of bird songs and the tranquillity of the sea. It was a moment I had never before experienced on land in Japan.

Next we stopped at neighboring Honjima, a good jumping-off point for a day trip to the "Konpira Shrine" (Kotohira-gu Shrine), the highest temple in Shikoku -- 1,368 stone stairs if you go all the way to the top -- and where the guardian god of the sea, Konpira-san, resides. Seafarers come here to pray for a safe journey. This was an obvious stop on our itinerary, as we'd certainly need help on our monthlong journey through the Seto Inland Sea. Konpira-san's effigy, usually in the form of a wooden sculpture, is a jolly well-bellied bald man. Perhaps his hair was blown off in a gale.

How I went from praying at a temple to sitting in a bath with five naked men is not so clear. The town of Kotohira, where Konpira-san is located, has several "onsen." I was quite surprised to head to the outdoor "rotenburo" bath only to find naked men sitting around the top of it. I had heard of the Japanese custom of communal bathing, but who would guess it would take place on a hotel roof in full view of the surrounding buildings? The sales of binoculars must be exceptionally high in this town.

The site of a naked foreign woman was enough to scare a couple of the men out of the bath, but I did have a very nice chat with a stark-naked electrical engineer while another man wandered off in a towel to smoke a cigarette and another cowered in the corner of the tub. Every time I'd look over, he'd quickly divert his gaze. It did cross my mind that a communal bath might encourage a lot of perverts -- clean ones.

When two large, pot-bellied male gaijin came into the bath, I knew the Japanese bathers were truly getting entertained. Our crew was complete now, naked and formidable, ready to take on even unchartered onsen waters.

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Tales from the Inland Sea: Part four
Sacred flames and burning Tahiti dreams


By AMY CHAVEZ
http://www.amychavez.com

On our sail through the Seto Inland Sea, whenever we pull into a harbor for the night, we never know what to expect. At Shiraishi Island, we found people wearing deer skins, blowing though bull horns and shooting arrows into the air. What's this?!

The islanders were having a festival to honor Kobo Daishi, the founder of Shingon Buddhism. At the temple where the ceremony took place, we were welcomed with ``tsukemono'' and a drink of `amazake.'' Invited to observe, we took a place with the locals standing around a heap of green tree branches that would soon be lit into a blazing bonfire. Around this circle was passed a long
``juzu'' rope with wooden beads the size of tennis balls, and each person passed the beads from hand to hand to the rhythm of three priests chanting sutras.

As a torch lit the greens, smoke furled from the heap, and one man wearing a deerskin flicked a bundle of wooden sticks into the fire one by one with his left hand while holding a large knife in his right hand. Each piece was inscribed with a message of hope from one of the worshippers. Around and around the
circle the juzu beads traveled as more and more sticks were tossed into the fire, and the flames grew so hot that people turned their faces away from the heat. Last into the fire were old scrolls, masks and other traditional household decorations, no longer wanted but still too sacred to throw in the trash. I wondered how many of Japan's antiques had gone up in flames in ceremonies such as this.

In contrast, our welcome into the port at kinojima was quite different. The harbor master ran out waving his hands: ``Stay?''

``Yes,'' we said, and he directed us to an open berth.

The price, he said, was Y100 per foot (30 cm). We had a 40-foot boat, so this would not be a cheap stay. We hedged.

``What kind of facilities do you have?'' I asked.

``Toilets, coin laundry, and showers are Y100 per two minutes.''

It was getting more expensive.

The harbor master noticed our worried faces. ``I can make it cheaper, but you cannot stay for free,'' he said firmly. I translated this to the crew members.

``Are there any sightseeing spots on the island?'' I asked. There were none.

``I can make it cheaper, but you cannot stay for free,'' he repeated. Our crew exchanged glances.

``We'll leave at 8 a.m.,'' I promised. ``How much cheaper can you make it?''

Suddenly, as if having kept a secret for a very long time, he burst out, ``Please, stay for free!'' his smile nearly jumping off his round face. A few moments later, he reappeared with beers. ``Tonight, come to my house And drink `shochu,' '' he said, leaving a six-pack with us. I suspected he had
Another secret, but wasn't sure what it was.

When we dropped in at his house that night, he brought out a large Bottle of shochu and filled our glasses repeatedly. After we were completely sauced, had revealed our ages, and the harbor master was comfortable with us, he prefaced his secret with, ``I have a question.'' His question was directed at the
older, more experienced crew members who were nearer his age.

``I want to sail through the South Pacific Islands some day.'' He took a deep breath then burst out with, ``Tell me where the beautiful girls are!''

The two male crew members said, ``Moving east through the South Pacific, the girls get more beautiful. Tahiti has the most beautiful women.''

``I think 60 percent Japanese women beautiful,'' the harbor master said in broken English. ``What percent Tahiti women?''

One crew member said 80 percent, but the other disagreed entirely: 90 percent!

``I go Tahiti!'' exclaimed the harbor master with joy, his smile nearly jumping off his round face.

With that, he shook our hands and thanked us for visiting.

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Tales from the Inland Sea: Part five
Miyajima to Oshima: sailing back in time

By AMY CHAVEZ
http://www.amychavez.com

"The Inland Sea is a dangerous one unless the ship has a pilot of the greatest skill and one who thoroughly knows the channels," wrote my great-grandfather on his passage through the sea in 1900.
My own experience sailing it, however, is quite different. On a 40-foot (12-meter) sailboat with an auto-helm, depth sounder and a Global Positioning System, we don't have the worries my great-grandfather had. Instead, we have different problems, the main one being garbage. Up until now, we have had to dive into the sea three times to release garbage such as plastic bags that became clogged in the boat's propeller. The Inland Sea offers an amazing variety of garbage parading past the boat as if it were a Thai floating market. Standing on the bow doing plastic bag patrol, I found myself not only warning of plastic, but also yelling: "Get the net out! Oranges on the starboard side, potatoes on the port! Anyone need an extra sandal? Hey, what's that? A brand new mag wheel!"

It was beginning to sound like Christmas.

"Old Japanese boats were constantly coming upon the scene and now and then we passed an ancient temple or shrine in some secluded spot."

Surely my great-grandfather would have passed Itsukushima Shrine on Miyajima when it was still a secluded spot, as opposed to one of the "three most beautiful spots in Japan." Indeed, the best way to glimpse the beauty of Miyajima, (birthplace of the rice scoop) with its large "torii" gate in the sea, is by boat. The contrast of the beauty of the torii with the floating garbage accompanied by the stench of raw sewage was, well, overpowering. I prayed I would not have to dive into this water for any plastic bags caught in the propeller.

From a distance the torii is like a tiny replica of itself, with a backdrop of a tall tree-covered Mount Misen. As our boat drew closer, the torii grew bigger and bigger until it engulfed every inch of the view finder in my camera. Through this gate, which stands 200 meters in front of Itsukushima Shrine, is how commoners entered the shrine as far back as the sixth century.

After leaving Miyajima, we sailed to the small island of Oshima, just at the end of the Inland Sea where it opens up into the Pacific Ocean. Oshima, just one big mountain in the middle of the sea, greeted us with an earthy fragrance of its mountain forest as we entered its port. A handful of freshly painted white-and-blue fishing boats, with electric lanterns strung across the deck for nighttime fishing, occupied the port, and just like the fishing boats, Oshima Island was well tended to by its people.

Here I found a pleasant loneliness that to this day I have found only among the islands in the Inland Sea. Oshima's population is just over 300, the number of people outnumbered by feral port cats. The few people who were at the port were busy going about their daily routines, never giving us a second glance, as if giant white people often stopped in on their island. I asked a man the weather forecast, and although he didn't know, he quickly ran off to find out for me. On the opposite side of the island in a small shack, a man stuck plastic pellets into oysters to make cultured pearls while his wife shuffled the oysters back and forth for him. Not a word was spoken, and the man, peering through bifocals, never once glanced up at us.

Even I was beginning to see Japan through my great-grandfather's eyes:

"They are the most genial, best natured people I ever saw. They never quarrel, are polite and honest in their dealings with men, are intelligent, progressive, enterprising and industrious . . . and someday Japan will be one of the leading nations of the world."

Amen.

This is No. 5 in a series on Amy's voyage through the Seto Inland Sea. Get her "Guidebook to Japan: What the other guidebooks won't tell you," at http://www.mooooshop.com