EVERETT — Nearly three decades ago, Brad Tinius sailed from Australia to the Evergreen State in a 29-foot-long boat called the Chencharu.
At 4 a.m. Sunday, the Hat Island man plans to climb aboard the same wooden sailboat and set off on a 2,600-mile solo journey across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii.
“I’m just hoping for good weather,” said Tinius, 56.
The shipbuilder for years has dreamed of taking his old boat to Hawaii.
It almost didn’t happen.
Tinius reluctantly sold the Malaysian-built boat years ago. His two daughters were young, he owned an Everett boat shop and the boat slid down his priority list.
The sailboat changed hands a few times. Years later, his brother had a chance encounter in San Francisco Bay with its new owner, who was willing to sell it back.
Tinius jumped at the opportunity and he and the Chencharu were reunited.
Many have taken the transpacific journey without incident. Still, it is not without risk and some have never returned home.
Even the most skilled mariners sailing state-of-the-art boats have fallen into trouble when hit by strong squall lines in the Pacific.
Tinius is confident in his maritime skills and the seaworthiness of his nearly 60-year-old boat, which is made of teak and has a small outboard motor. He wouldn’t have taken the odyssey, or invited his daughters on the return trip, if he thought otherwise.
While the trip should take 24 days or so, he is packing enough food and water to last 40 days, which he figures he could stretch to 60 days if rationed.
He will also bring an emergency radio beacon, capable of sending out a distress signal.
He’ll avoid shipping lanes, but he has a reflector that should place him on the radar screen of any unexpected large ships he might encounter.
Mindy Tinius is remarkably at ease about her husband’s trip. She commutes by boat from the Tinius home on Hat Island. She also came up in a boating family that spent time on Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, Md.
She won’t be able to talk with her husband until he reaches land in July, although Brad Tinius every day will radio his position to operators of a Web site that will track his movements.
“It’s always been part of an understanding that he will make the trip someday,” said Mindy Tinius, a fourth-grade teacher at Highland Elementary School in Lake Stevens. “That’s part of the package deal.”
He expects to arrive in Lahaina on the island of Maui by the Fourth of July. From Lahaina, he’ll sail to Honolulu then to Kauai.
His daughters, Sarah, 21, and Megan, 18, plan to join him in Hawaii for a few weeks then sail back to Everett in early August.
“I am super-excited, because I’ve always wanted to sail on the open ocean,” said Megan Tinius, who has been sailing with her dad for as long as she can remember.
Sarah Tinius, who is studying physics and astronomy at the University of Washington, is looking forward to star-gazing during the monthlong journey home.
“The skies out there are going to be so amazing because there’s no light pollution,” she said. “You can’t even see the Milky Way in Seattle.”
Since January, Brad Tinius has spent evenings and weekends redoing the rigging, installing new water and fuel tanks and making other improvements.
Tinius, who was born in Seattle and raised in Los Angeles, is no stranger to open-ocean sailing. Once he was caught in a violent storm hundreds of miles from land and had to “hove to” or stop in course for four days as his tiny vessel was hurled by 20-foot swells.
Tinius bought the Chencharu for the first time in 1977 and sailed around Australia with his girlfriend at the time.
The pair later spent 1-1/2 years traveling to Washington by way of New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Guam, Japan and the Aleutian Islands, where they met up with Tinius’ parents who sailed to Dutch Harbor.
Tinius’ boat was built in 1950 by a British civil servant who owned a plantation just outside of Panang, Malaysia. He hired a boat builder who built two exact vessels using a design by Thomas Harrison Butler, a British opthamologist and amateur boat designer.
Kevin Quigley, president of Everett Shipyard where Tinius works, identified immediately with his spirit for adventure.
Quigley, a mountain climber, has traveled to several mountains on most continents, and has climbed Mount Rainier a dozen times on 10 different routes.
Climbing mountains is one thing. Braving the open seas is another, Quigley said.
“I’ve been 2,000 feet above a sheer rock wall, and yet what Brad is going to do, being days and days from the sight of land, in any direction, takes a lot of courage in my mind,” he said.
Allen Hughes, a member of the Singlehanded Sailing Society, has never met Tinius, but praised him for following his dream. Hughes, who lives on a boat in Seattle, has sailed three times from San Francisco to Hawaii and will do it again next year.
“More people talk about it their whole life than follow through with it,” Hughes said. “Too many people wait, wait, wait.”
David Chircop: 425-339-3429, dchircop@heraldnet.com.
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