Mariner sailed the world engineless
On a perilous westerly course bound for Cape
Horn near the southern tip of South America in 2002,
Larry and Lin Pardey made their approach into the hazardous currents of the
Strait of Le Maire aboard
Taleisin, their 29- foot, engineless wooden yacht.
Well after midnight, with
Ms. Pardey on watch and
Mr. Pardey asleep below, she lost sight of navigation lights but realized, suddenly, that several large rocks were in front of her, not the open water that she had expected.
“I threw the helm and tacked to turn and reached out to sea on a reciprocal course,” she said in an email. “At the same time, I yelled for Larry to get up on deck. He ended up being thrown from the bunk on the cabin sole, then scrambled quickly into the cockpit.”
They were, for a short time, lost. Mr. Pardey took the helm as his wife studied their charts to determine the safest course back to open water. They eventually passed through the strait and headed to Cape Horn.
By then, the Pardeys were more than 30 years into an adventurous life at sea, twice circumnavigating on boats that Mr. Pardey had built. Their voyages brought them renown among cruisers: sailors who take their time on long trips, often to foreign parts.
“Without exaggeration, Larry is one of the greatest small boat sailors of any era,” said Herb McCormick, executive editor of Cruising World magazine. “The degree of difficulty — of sailing boats without 200,000 miles an — engine is an amazing for thing.” Mr. McCormick, who wrote the book “As Long as It’s and Fun: Extraordinary The Epic Voyages Times of Lin and Larry Pardey” ( 2014), added: “Larry’s little motto was, ‘ If it was easy, everybody would do it.’ He almost went out of his way to make it harder: building the boats, engineless, and sailing upwind around Cape Horn.” Mr. Pardey, who embarked on his final long ocean voyage in 2009, died on July 27 in a nursing facility in Auckland, New Zealand, near his home. He was 80. He had a stroke last year and had learned five years ago that he had Parkinson’s disease, his wife said. Life aboard their boats — first the 24- foot Seraffyn, then the Taleisin — was simple. They had a compass, a sextant and a radio transmitter but used no GPS systems and no engines. The lack of complexity suited Mr. Pardey’s facility for navigation and reduced their costs. They fulfilled that dream many times over. Their first circumnavigation, starting in 1968 on an eastward route, spanned 11 years and took them to 47 countries. Beginning in 1984, they spent 25 years traveling west on their second circumnavigation, touching land in 30 more countries.
Lawrence Fred Pardey was born on Oct. 31, 1939, in Victoria, British Columbia, and was raised in Shuswap Lake and in Vancouver. His father, Frank, was a butcher; his mother, Beryl ( Peterson) Pardey, was a homemaker. Earl Marshall, his grandfather, who worked in sawmills and construction, preached to Larry that he should earn enough money to do what he loved.
As a boy, Larry had a dugout canoe and then a rowboat rigged with a wool blanket for a sail. But his serious interest in sailing did not peak until he was about 17, when he bought an 8- foot sailboat while working for a waterfront sawmill in North Vancouver. He then purchased a keelboat and, in 1959, a sloop, which he called Annalisa.
By late 1964, Mr. Pardey had left British Columbia for Newport Beach, Calif., and was working on a schooner when it went to Hawaii so that the crew could film background shots for a TV series, “The Wackiest Ship in The Army.” Mr. Pardey, in a hula skirt, appeared briefly in the show.
He was soon skippering a ketch and, in May 1965, met his future wife, Lin Zatkin, in a bar. Three days after they met, they were together for good.