Last Monday, Ben and Lisa Miller found themselves on the second floor of a Keelung Pizza Hut, a place they sometimes go to for the afternoon special. Between 2pm and 5pm, you can get a personal pan pizza, drink and salad bar for NT$145. There are four kinds of pizza from which to choose. They usually get the Supreme.
The Millers are sailors and, while it's not the most cliched sailors' hangout, the Pizza Hut suits them well enough. And the surroundings be damned, because like all sailors, the Millers have plenty of stories to tell.
For example, there's the one about embarking on a round-the-world journey in an 11m ketch and only making it from Okinawa to Keelung. Where they got stuck. For four months now. In a city where it rains an average of 206 days a year.
That not-really-very-intrepid tale, in fact, is mostly full of paperwork that bureaucrats can't seem to get done and the perplexing things harbor officials have told them, about how they're scared to leave Taiwan before receiving compensation for their damaged boat, and also about spending much of the summer and early fall sitting around a hotel room flipping channels.
"You know, just a couple weeks ago, we lost Star World," said Lisa, referring to the satellite channel that airs American TV series. "I guess the hotel just changed systems or something."
Ben Miller retired from the US Air Force in 1993 after 20 years of service. He stayed on in Okinawa, where he'd already been stationed for nine years, and ran charter cruises.
A sailor like his father and grandfather before him, he's spent the last decade buying boats, fixing them up, and selling them to get something better. That trading cycle came to an end last fall, when he finally quit his civilian Navy job, flew to Hawaii and bought Remedy, a Pearson 365 sailboat built in 1976, the 95th of its design run. The boat is 11m long, 3.3m in the beam, and has a draft of 1.3m.
After buying it, he went on to "beef up" the hull with extra ribs and fiberglass, giving it the strength it would need for offshore sailing. Last September, he sailed it back to Okinawa via Guam, encountering 7m to 10m waves along the way.
Lisa, who's also a third generation sailor, moved to Okinawa seven years ago as a civilian social worker for the US Marine Corps. She met Ben in 1994 and married him in 1997. In the Web journal she'd originally intended as a record of Remedy's progress around the globe, she wrote: "We met sailing, fell in love sailing, and we left our first home by sailing away together."
So Remedy sailed out of Okinawa's Nase Port on April 28, carrying Ben, Lisa and a Chihuahua they'd named Crew. They passed through the harbor entrance with four other boats, a circumstance they saw as a kind of symbolic sendoff, embarking on one of those journey of journeys, a trip around the world. It was supposed to take them to the Philippines, Singapore and western Thailand. Then they'd sail underneath the southern tip of India, past Arabia and through the Red Sea. The Suez Canal would issue them to the Mediterranean, and when they finally got tired of Greece, Italy, France and Spain, they'd cross the Atlantic and return to the US.
The preparation process itself took about four to five years of saving money, rounding up equipment, planning routes and so on. When they finally cast off, the whole of their possessions consisted of what was on the boat and some furniture in storage. The first ports of call were in Japan, and from there they went on to Pusan, Korea., where a prior run-in with Russian boat thieves won them a kingly welcome from the gentleman whose yacht they'd saved.
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