Enchanted Voyage

The classified ad in a Los Angeles paper was calculated to stir up the wanderlust and unseat the judgment of many a steno with a new Toni:

"Hawaii vacation. Will pay two-thirds cost of 30-day all-expense cruise to Hawaii in return for your appearing in colored motion-picture travelogue on Hawaii."

The ad was placed by "Tours of Enchantment," a travel agency operating out of rented desk space in a Long Beach (Calif.) airline ticket agency. "Tours" was mostly a mail drop and slight, soft-spoken Charlie Otterman, 37. For a mere $385 the tourists would be lapped in luxury aboard a slim, rakish yacht, served the "finest of foods . . . five times daily," and by night would dance beneath the golden Pacific moon.

Charlie sold 18 people, 14 of them women, half of them young and unattached. Of the four males one was a three-year-old boy. They boarded the Pasado Manana, ("The Day After Tomorrow," Charlie explained) at San Pedro one morning four weeks ago, and were dismayed.

Floating Luggage. The Pasado was a yacht all right, but she had been built in the mid-'20s to accommodate six people. The 96-foot vessel had done a hitch in the Coast Guard during the war, and she was greasy, grimy and sooty. Later the passengers agreed that they should have backed out right then & there. But Charlie said things would be cleaned up on the way to Honolulu.

The enchanted voyage began. A fuel line broke and the Pasado took a whole day to clear San Pedro. Just past the breakwater, the engine coughed and quit; it took another hour to fix it. The old tub pitched with a horrible intensity and all the passengers were sick long before she got under way again. Soon the toilets backed up and floated the luggage. The second day out the lone shower was turned off--there was a water shortage--and nobody had a bath for the rest of the voyage. Nobody, for that matter, bothered to take off his clothing, either.

After a while the automatic pilot went out of commission and the passengers stood watches at the wheel to spell the crew. The drinking water turned brown. Those who could eat chewed miserably on bologna sandwiches and cheese crackers, or starchy concoctions slapped up by lola Nicholas, a fry-cook who had never been aboard a ship before.

Soggy Pancakes. About 475 miles from Honolulu the Diesel gave up altogether, and at that point passengers discovered that one of the two lifeboats was loaded with cases of soda pop. The other had a hole in it. The passengers prayed; Captain E. M. Nicol radioed the U.S. Coast Guard. Almost five days later, the Pasado was towed into Honolulu. As she approached the harbor the stove blew up and splashed its soggy batch of pancakes against the overhead.

Last week, the Coast Guard fined Charlie Otterman $1,000 for operating without a certificate of inspection and failing to carry a properly qualified crew. The 18 angry romance-seekers were promised their money back. Mused Passenger Frank C. Crans, 65, a retired Sears, Roebuck executive: "I was told the trip would be unusual. It was."

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