Feared Lost at Sea, Maui Man Completes His 47-Day Odyssey

Steve Fisher couldn’t have picked a better place or time to make landfall: Leilani’s on the Beach in Kaanapali, Maui, where he and his many friends hang out, just before one of those beautiful Hawaiian sunsets.

Indeed it was the happiest of happy hours for Fisher, who was greeted by about 200 people, many of whom had given the 37-year-old Lahaina resident up for dead.

Fisher had not been seen or heard from since he left Marina del Rey on July 18, riding a gentle wind out of the harbor on a homemade 18-foot sailboard he calls Da Slippa II because his friends told him it looks like Aladdin’s slipper.

After 47 days, with his mother in Florida finally insisting that the Coast Guard go looking for her son, the 5-foot-8 Fisher was spotted rounding Maui’s northwest coast late Wednesday afternoon, and as afternoon turned to evening, he hit the beach at Kaanapali, climbed off his bright-orange craft and waddled into a sea of hugs and handshakes.

Fisher, an easygoing and philosophical sort who embarked on this journey with the intention of becoming the first person to windsurf from the West Coast to Hawaii, did not jump with joy or thrust his fists in triumph.

In somewhat of a daze, with a windburned face and sporting a scraggly beard, he merely smiled a lot while enjoying “this really cool ice-cream cake” and slugging a margarita before eventually going home and hopping into bed with his two black Labradors, Gypsy and Kai.

Fisher, who recently submitted an entry to “The Guinness Book of World Records” for the longest swim by two dogs--Gypsy and Kai swam 9 1/2 miles from Lanai to Maui--hopes now to be mentioned in the record book as well.

That may happen. But Fisher, his feet on solid ground for the first time in more than six weeks, also found himself knee deep in skepticism. Not that he cares.

“What, people think I hitched a ride or had my board towed over and hid out until now?” he asked a reporter. “Well, tell them I did that, I don’t care.”

There are several reasons for the skepticism. Fisher left Marina del Rey with two special radios for communication, yet nobody heard from him after he left Catalina Island--after making minor repairs to his craft--on July 24.

He says his radios simply didn’t work.

Experienced open-ocean sailors say the 2,400-nautical mile route from California to Hawaii is no milk run, even on a conventional sailing vessel.

“It takes two weeks on a sailboat and it’s not that easy,” said Carol Hogan, a Kailua-Kona-based ocean sports promoter who once sailed the South Pacific with her husband, Bob. “You run into all kinds of weather and have to have navigational skills.”

Fisher said he once sailed to Hawaii with his girlfriend. It took him about two weeks. It was a milk run. Years ago, he sailed the Montgomery Street, one of the boats competing in the Trans-Pacific yacht race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, back to San Francisco for owner Jim Denning.

Fisher says, and anyone who follows the weather will agree, he never had to sail in high winds or negotiate rough seas. Winds were unusually light from start to finish, which is the reason it took longer than the 30 days he expected.

“Oh, God, it was, like, incredible,” he says. “I had light wind the entire time. I had probably two days of 20- to 30-knot winds and I was loving it, then it backed down to 10 and then five knots at night.”

Skeptics also say that if Fisher had been at sea that long, exposed most of the time--his custom sailboard weighs 250 pounds, has a foam core encased in fiberglass, and a hollowed-out cabin with just enough room to sleep and store supplies--his skin would be burned and covered with sores.

Fisher, who is not particularly sunburned and has very few sores, says he wore long sleeves, veils and gloves and managed to stay dry throughout most of the trip because of the placid weather.

“I haven’t seen him yet, but after 47 days at sea you’d be pretty baked, I don’t care what precautions you take,” said Buzzy Kerbox, a famous surfer and long-distance paddler from Maui. “It’d be quite a feat to pull that off. If he did do it, my hat’s off to him.”

There’s also a question whether his craft, which has a cabin and a seat atop the cabin enabling Fisher to rest while not actively sailing, can be called a sailboard?

Fisher said that all of the fittings are where they are on a conventional sailboard and that the vessel sails like a sailboard so it is, in essence, a sailboard.

Regardless, his was apparently a remarkable journey. Fisher passed his time, when he wasn’t actively sailing, turning saltwater into freshwater with his desalination device, eating freeze-dried food and peanut butter sandwiches, or using a small barbecue to cook mahi-mahi he caught.

“I’m a chef. I had it four different ways,” he says, adding that he still lost 10 pounds on his excursion.

Fisher says he navigated using a global positioning system, a compass and the stars. He deployed a para-foil at night that caught the prevailing winds and kept him on course while he slept.

He says being so alone was depressing at times, but listening to tapes on his Walkman and thinking about running with his dogs cheered him. The only company he had were the many creatures that visited him.

“The open-ocean birds are really cool,” he said. “I had a kite I would fly and the birds were always coming over to check the kite out. I also saw dolphins, which was really cool.

“I saw one small shark, and a couple of open-ocean freighters, but that was basically it. It was me, myself and I. . . . It was just me talking to the wind, and with vulgar words because there never was enough wind.”