SHIPPING: Adventure’s End

Eve and Delton Conly both loved adventure. They were married last year and sailed out of Oakland, Calif. for a cruise to Hawaii and on around the world in a converted lifeboat. That trip ended just outside of Golden Gate when Eve, who was pregnant, became ill. Ashore, they moped around until their round-eyed daughter, Patsy, was six months old. Last summer the Conlys began making new plans.

They had met another sea-struck couple, Chester and Fern Thompson of San Pedro. Thompson had done some deep-sea diving. Why didn’t they all sail to the Marquesas Islands, 3,000 miles southwest in the Pacific, and dive for pearls? The Conlys were enthusiastic.

In August, the 28-foot lifeboat, sloop-rigged, christened the Wing On, was loaded to the gunwales with diving gear, radio receiving set, bedding, food supplies. The Conlys left Patsy with Delton’s sister. The Thompsons left a two-year-old daughter and infant son with grandparents.

Away they sailed from San Pedro to high adventure.

Three months went by. No ship on the Pacific reported sighting the Wing On. Her whereabouts was the sea’s secret.

Last week, radio and cable on the Fiji Islands, 2,500 miles south and west of their destination, the Marquesas, began spelling out high adventure’s ending. According to the messages, a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary, skirting the jungly, palm-lined shore of Vanua Levu Island in his ketch, had sighted a small, battered craft impaled on a coral reef. On board, to his horror, he found an emaciated woman prostrate and unconscious, another woman and a man both dead. On the stern of the boat was her name: Wing On.

The dead were Eve and Delton Conly. The still-living woman was Fern Thompson. The Wing On’s fragmentary log told the rest. After noting that the yacht had run into a “cyclone,” the entry dated Nov. 7 read: “Discovered Chet had died. What next? Help us, oh God!” On Nov. 8: “Buried Chester Thompson, 21, at 8:10 a.m.; died starvation … he was too far gone at any rate to stand any of the remaining can of apricots we had.” The last entry, on Nov. 12, was merely: “D. A. Conly, master, yacht Wing On.”

Delton Conly, according to Fiji officials, had apparently died soon after he had scrawled his signature. Eve had died just a day or two before the sea washed the Wing On up on Vanua Levu. The rest of the story of the 100-day adventure was locked behind the swollen lips of Fern Thompson, who, in critical condition, was carried delirious to an island hospital.