Outfoxing Japan's Guardian Winds by Tere Batham continued…                           commercial port with our yellow Q flag flying and moored at the main wharf next to a coastal freighter. Soon Japanese officials in neat blue uniforms climbed aboard, unlacing their gleaming black shoes to lay them aside to come belo "You know that Chi Chi Jima is not an official port of entry," the custom's officer asked in careful English? "But is there something you need?" he continued. "Water, fuel, food?"
"Yes, we are in need of water," Michael answered.
The Japanese, we were to learn, do everything by the book but are often willing to help bend the pages a bit here and there if you keep smiling.
Chi Chi Jima is a fascinating island that was originally not Japanese at all.  The group had remained uninhabited except for the birds for millennia until a Nantucket sailor by the name of Coffin, aboard a British whaling ship happened to write a story in the local papers when he returned home characterizing the rugged islands as a paradise for a new settlement.  Eventually that is just what occurred.  Sailors and whalers soon followed, and they settled there with their Micronesian wives.. The community suffered the usual growing pains but hug on, though they never prospered. Today, their descendents, taller people with gray-green eyes and anglo-American names, still live in Chichi Jima's convivial Yankeetown.
Our week to take on water flew by so that one morning, we readied ourselves to sail the last 600 miles to the mainland. Our Swiss friends on Companion had left the day before to cruise the chain of islands of the Nanpo Shoto towards Tokyo, hoping for a vision of Mt. Fuji above the clouds. Ready to leave, we were just about to drop our lines when an American-Japanese family that we had befriended only days before tumbled from their jeepster to bow polite good-byes and thrust into our arms flowers and cases of bottled water and tinned fish! This was our first taste of the Japanese propensity for gift giving.
Crossing the Kuroshio.
Our big challenge on the last leg to the mainland was to cross the Kuro Shio, the Black Current. This current, sweeps along at several knots, from below the southern tip of Okinawa right up along Japan's south coast past Tokyo.  We were concerned that should we enter the Kuro Shio too soon, we would be swept past our planned landfall and be carried too far to the east. So we set a new waypoint at 32°N 134°E, somewhere off the middle of Shikoku, figuring that once we knew we were in the current we could ride it northeast to Tanabe in the Kii Suido.
Oddly we did not experience the very strong currents we had expected, only picking up a knot or tow.  Four days out we must have hit the change of season when the the monsoon give way to the SW monsoon, for the wind slowly went round the clock: by the time it was out of the SW the sea was forebodingly calm; rain fell and we gently drifted in circles.  By noon we found ourselves enveloped in a furious spring storm.  In forty knots we reduced to storm sails. To ease the heavy lunging motion we ran under bare poles through the night. Though visibility was poor we began to sight more and more ships. At dawn, just as quickly as the blow had begun, it quit to leave us with little wind, a choppy sea, ---and then fog.
With no radar on board we regularly broadcast our position in very careful English.  If the broadcast did any good we hand no way of knowing. Early in the morning with the fog wrapped close and visibility perhaps one hundred yards at best, Michael was dead asleep below after almost twenty-three hours awake when the white hull of a silent ferry slid from the gray mist ahead and then just as silently disappeared.