Spring Odyssey

Lyle Tara, a reckless 19-year-old Irish lad, is that possessed of the sea that his mother's heart sometimes aches. Since he was a shaver along the Santa Cruz waterfront, on California's Monterey Bay, fishermen had taught him the ways of sailing, knew him as a lad to trust with a boat. But no boy with the sea in his heart can scan the horizon long without yearning. Lyle Tara yearned to sail the 3,000-odd miles to Cocos Island, off the Costa Rican coast, where legend says pirates of the Spanish Main used to bury Inca gold. Into the pattern of his dream fitted the snug white 52-foot ketch Tira, which most of the time rode baresticked at her mooring because her owner, well-to-do Lew Foote, a busy Santa Cruz merchant, had little time for long cruises.

One morning late in May the Tira was gone from her mooring, and gone from their Santa Cruz homes were Lyle Tara and two of his Irish messmates, 17-year-old James Henninger and 16-year-old William Grace. For weeks there was no word of boys or yacht. Merchant Foote broadcast descriptions of the Tira up & down the coast. Then, 28 days later, the Tira heeled swiftly down Banderas Bay into Puerto Vallarta, 2,000 miles from Santa Cruz, on the west coast of Mexico. News travels slowly from Puerto Vallarta, an isolated fishing village hemmed in by coast ranges, but last week the captain of a tuna boat radioed a brief account of the Tira's odyssey. Although the Tira had an auxiliary Diesel motor, the boys had journeyed entirely under sail. After many days at sea they put in at Magdalena Bay, near the tip of Lower California, but the Mexican coast guard sent them on their way. Days later they missed their next landfall, Cape San Lucas, sighting no land until the Tres Marias Islands, south of the Gulf of California, hove into view. Thence they sped to Banderas Bay with a tropical typhoon whistling in their wake. They said they had put in for supplies, but Puerto Vallarta authorities questioned them, detained them after hearing the whole story.

Last week Merchant-Yachtsman Foote set out for Puerto Vallarta to claim his $25,000 Tira, undecided as to what sort of punishment should be meted out to boys who would swipe a yacht to hunt buried treasure. Some people thought Merchant Foote would exact no greater penalty than making the boys, as crew, sail the Tira back to Santa Cruz. "Gosh," he said wistfully as he departed, "I wish I had been on that trip. . . . I have been used only to cruises around Monterey Bay."

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