The Gift of The Wind - Recollections of Ed Tuleja

The Gift Of The Wind

Ronny and Rod had headed back to America. Doc and I were still living in Paris getting into becoming junkies. There were a few of us that took the stuff. It was all too easy. Anyway we figured it would be good to go down to Spain and refit a 65 foot Danish tuna boat and turn it into a sailboat for charter in the Med., sort of clean up in the Andalusian sun.  We got invited to go, I suppose, because we hung around with models and knew David Hamilton and one of his friends, Tana Kaleya and her man Viktor Kornowski, a staunch mad Russian captain and owner of the boat.

So we drove across the Pyrenees and through the orange fields and down to Javea on a point of land between Alicante and Valencia where we worked on the boat. Tony Cahill, the old drummer for the Easybeats, was our bass player then and David Montgomery on drums. Ronnie Bird, a major French rock star, was also in our unusual fellowship. We were all on the boat, refugees from Paris and too much fun.

The boat was our home for six months. We did the refit in the Spanish yard, cut the wishbone out of mahogany, one piece about six feet across. Ramon and Jesus did that. And we stepped the mast, one piece of Swedish Fire Fir, basically a large tree which was a bit too wide. Viktor called for his knife which was really a short sword, to hack away at the bottom of the mast to fit it in while the Spanish crane operator kept yelling at him to hurry up. Very dramatic. 

We got underway after a few months in Javea and sailed to the Balearics, Ibiza, Majorca, Formentera, and Formentor. The color of the water around Majorca was a blue I’d never seen before, deep and clean. We’d gauge our speed by throwing Bastos cigarettes overboard. Rough Spanish tobacco that would still burn in the water so you could watch its passage. We had a transistor radio and point it to the south for Radio Morocco or some such, exotic rock from North Africa. In the other direction we’d get Radio Luxembourg and there was north. 

With this navigation system we were soon out of food and water and looking for a port. We used alka selzer once to raise some dough, but we did have a lot of garlic and anchovies and some eggs and pasta. The eggs had mostly gone bad. Our reckoning was so far off that after sailing around not knowing where we were really we finally saw a port and thought great, we’ve made it to Marseilles finally, only it turned out to be Barcelona. We did eventually make it to Marseilles where the the Gift of the Wind sank at the dock, as I heard later. Don’t know after that.

But the Gift kept us alive. On a night of those nights after we left Javea we were sailing around Punto Umbrio, Cloudy Point, or as I liked to call it Point Lugubrious. The weather was rotten and things were breaking on board. As we rounded the point the navigation lights went out which was bad business in those waters and that weather. So risking life and limb we got up in the rigging to fix the nav lights which were kerosene and lo and behold the port light caught fire and spread to the hemp rigging. Now we had a large wooden box on the deck for holding saws, keel drills, and the various rusty bits of cable and chain we carried. Doc was up on deck with me and the others at the time and a picture that lives in my memory forever is of him staggering backward, falling into the box of saws and spiky boat parts silhouetted by the burning rigging. When he extricated himself from the tool box he muttered something appropriate and brief like, “Fuck this Shit”, and went below to smoke hashish and let the rest of us handle the mess on deck. 

By the time we reached Marseilles we were pretty happy to be alive. It was then that Doc picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune over morning coffee and saw the ad, ”Doc and Eddie, Call Paris. You have a hit.” The International Trib was always good value – I remember one ad that said ”Mercenary for Hire – Six Wars – Five Successful. “ You have to love that sort of succinct statement. We didn’t call Paris, but the next day we noticed Jack Robinson who produced Dancing In the Moonlight, in a speedboat doing rings around the harbor trying to find us. Well, to cut the narrative short we scooted up to Paris, and eventually back to the states where we arrived just a little too late to take full advantage of our great success - making it a proper King Harvest story.

For reasons of brevity, I’ve abridged lots that went on aboard the Gift of the Wind. Probably for another place and another time.