Ben Oostdam's Autobiography: 1960-1963

page 61

Hawaii I I I - oh! Honolulu March/April, 1963

From March 24 till April 5, I was in Honolulu, spending time with Eve and her kids and helping her move once again. I went to the University on the 26th which proved to be Prince Kuhio Day and got a message that a Swiss student by the name of Max de Rham had asked for me and even gone to Maui to meet me. Today - a cold January 22, 2003 - I decided to try that name on a Google search on WWW, and found some interesting stuff: that he had been coauthor with diver Michael Hatcher of "The Nanking Cargo", the story of the discovery of the Dutch vessel 'Geldermalsen', loaded with porcelain and gold; the Christie auction in Amsterdam on May 1, 1986 brought an unexpected $ 20 million! See what all I miss out on, sent E mail to Herb to see if he knows more.... anyhow, that same holiday I met Dr. Paul Hoffmeister, a corpulent gynacologist from Arizona who had just gone through a messy divorce and had decided to spend a year diving in Hawaii....we got along fine and became my next Maui diving buddy.
I also sold $ 65 black coral, and passed the check on to Eve for rent; and I lived off the $ 24 which Marine Advisors paid me for 8 hours of scouting in Maui...unfortunately, the Kaanapali project had run into some snags. I also had real Dutch "snert" with Smeenk, and made several trips to the Pali and Hanauma Bay, including with two presently unremembered (and WWW untraceable) girls I was scheduled to pick up at the airport: Rita and Elizabeth Leis (draped around one's neck on arrival...) . I sold my car for $ 150 to Lucky MacCracken and rented it back for $ 20 per month. I only saw Doak and Ralph a few times, wrote my P.R. for them with copy to Doug Inman, and also visited with Townsley and Helfrich in Biology.
At 06:00 on Friday, April 5, Jim Doherty took me in his boat bound for Lahaina, with a lunch stop around 11:00 in Kaunakakai, Molokai (from where I tried in vain to call Lilian Anderson, our last year's hostess). This was a marvelous, fast and rough boatride, putting us in Lahaina at 15:00.

My new diving buddy, Paul, only arrived after midnight, since the University jeep he had expected to find in the airport parking lot, had been towed away by the police... : a harbinger of poli-tical problems to come after a night of celebrations and the first dive with Paul and Rose the next afternoon off Kihei on our way "home" to Jason at La Perouse Bay.