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In July, “Tomaida” showed up in the Oriental harbor for a few days, then disappeared. But she hadn’t gone far. The Westsail 28 is in Sailcraft Marine boatyard where her owner John Kudulis is prepping her for a new diesel engine.

It was a chance visit to Cocos Island off of Costa Rica that indirectly brought John to Oriental.

Originally from the Chicago area, John has been living aboard “Tomaida” for about two decades and has cruised to the Indian Ocean, Hawaii, Alaska among other places. This summer, John wanted to add Mystic, Connecticut, Nantucket and New Bedford, Massachusetts to that list. Those old New England whaling towns draw him because he is trying to learn more about the whaling ships that sailed from there to hunt whales in the Pacific in the 19th century. His interest in this was sparked in 1985 when he was on his way to the Marquesas, and the winds in the Pacific weren’t cooperating. “I went on another tack,” he says, and ended up in the Cocos Islands.

He made his way to Chatham Bay at night, and the next morning awoke to find he was the only person in an anchorage ringed by high land and trees with whitish trunks. “It was just as Captain Vancouver described it on his voyage there” in the 1790’s.

But an even bigger surprise awaited John as he dinghyed to shore of what is now a Costa Rican National Park. On the rocks facing the water, he found name after name after name of ships. Chiseled alongside the hundreds of boat names were the dates the boats had stopped there. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is really special.’ especially when I saw some of the early ones.” Dozens of the boats and dates were from the early to mid-1800’s when whaling ships, on journeys that took years at a time, basically made a pit stop at Cocos Island. At the pristine outcropping, they’d replenish their fresh water supplies, get some wood for heat, and stock up on the coconuts that give the island its name.

“It was a thrill to go ashore and find the names” says John. “My first impulse was to put Tomaida’s up there.” But his humility got in the way. “I cheated!” he says, contrasting his arrival there in 1985 to that of the whalers a century and a half earlier. “ I got there using Sat Nav. I have nylon sails. I felt that putting my boat’s name up there would be like grafitti.”

And so began the reverent fascination John has for the whaling ships. He recorded the names and dates of many and has been doing research in to them. He returned to Cocos Island two years ago. After spending this past winter on his boat near family in Florida, John set his sights on the New England towns where many of the whaling ships hailed from. He was on his way up the East Coast this summer when his Volvo 2-cyclinder — part of the Westsail’s original equipment when he had it built in 1976 —- started showing its age. He’s getting a replacement diesel from Beta Marine in Arapahoe, which is why he and Tomaida are now in Alan Arnfast’s boatyard.

John hasn’t calculated how many miles he’s put under the keel of his cutter, and though he has traveled literally halfway around the world more than once, he says he never circumnavigated. “The idea,” he says, “is to pick a destination and go there … or at least make the attempt.” Sometimes that one destination — the Marquesas in his case — can put you in line with others you never thought of.. such as the Cocos … and Oriental.

Posted Saturday August 24, 2002 by Melinda Penkava

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