Spirit of the Wind by Bunny Throckmorton

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This book is the story of sailing across the ocean from Guam to San Francisco on our wonderful sailboat, the “Spirit of the Wind”, a forty-one foot Taiwan-built Ketch designed by William Garden. A group of twenty-something kids went to Guam looking for the meaning of life, bought a boat, fixed it up, learned to sail across the ocean. It was a beautiful and spiritual journey while at times was totally and completely terrifying. It introduced me to the South Pacific Islands and the wonderful and gracious people there; it was truly “A Paradise.” The warm trade winds that I can feel sometimes in my dreams, the feel and sounds of the wind in the sails and moving through fear. I learned to improvise in the moment, how to deal with life then there was no land for weeks on end with just the horizon all around as if we were sailing on a mirror. It introduced me to the wonders of the ocean and its inhabitants.

This trip changed my life and what I thought the world was. It enabled me to see, feel and do things that I didn’t know I was capable of. It was a serious lesson in being with three other people, all men, in a forty foot sailboat with very little privacy. It taught me that the weather goes on; it doesn’t help to pray for it to change and is bigger than us. It was transformational in so many ways, facing death almost daily.

Bunny Throckmorton was born and raised in the Central Valley of California, as a young child in Salinas very close to Monterey where she found her love for the sea and then in Sacramento. She was always involved with bodies of water, the Sacramento River and the American River converge here Lake Tahoe is a couple hours away and the bay is the same. She has a degree in Psychology from Sacramento State College, has three children and four grandchildren. In the 70s, she was involved in the spiritual revolution and became interested in “group work”. It is with one of these groups that she decided to go to Guam to search out the “meaning of life” taking her 15-year-old son with her and leaving the two smaller children with their father for eight months, bought a 42-foot sailboat, repaired it, learned to sail and sailed it around the Marianas Islands in the South Pacific, and then home to the west coast. Always up for an adventure as she was growing up, she made up for her small stature with a strong will. Racing hydroplane boats on the Sacramento River, taking a train to Washington alone when she was 13. Riding a bus to Florida and meeting the civil rights marchers that were headed to the south and experiencing face to face segregated bus waiting rooms. Camping, fly-fishing and exploring the beautiful back country of the Sierra Nevada Mountains with her family and Chip. She and Chip later raced in the bay on a 22-foot Santana sailboat after sailing across the Pacific Ocean.