No Regrets

ocean, he longed to smell the salt spray once more and ride the pitching deck in a storm where the giant waves tossed ships like toys. Rolf was still very young—only seventeen. With World War I looming in Europe since 1913, going to sea wasn’t the safest option, but Rolf had never put safety first. He took the advice of a Swedish sea captain who told him to register with the Norwegian Consulate in New York and to take that opportunity to add a few years to his age. He did that, and gave his birthdate as July 7, 1897. Overnight he was twenty years old, old enough to go to sea. He went down to the docks of New York City, willing to sail on any ship that had a job he could fill. He was soon hired on as a mess boy for theBritish merchant ship
Ganges.
In June 1917, he found the shipping line where he would remain for the next twenty-six years: the Luckenbach Steamship Company.
    Rolf’s miraculous luck began to reveal itself a year later as he worked as a quartermaster/helmsman on the
Harry Luckenbach.
Although his ship was torpedoed by a silent, deadly German submarine, and at least eight of his shipmates perished, Rolf survived and somehow made his way to France.
    By the time he was really in his early twenties he was exceptionally strong. Soon, he was working on another ship in the Luckenbach line. He continued his steady progress up the ladder, through all the on-deck ranks and, by 1926, to his first command. Rolf Neslund became master of the
Robin Goodfellow.
    One of the diciest jobs on ships is that of pilot. It requires great skill and natural instinct to guide mammoth vessels from the oceans through narrow waterways leading to city ports where they are loaded and unloaded. Being a ship’s pilot is one of the most prestigious jobs in the shipping industry. After commanding a number of Luckenbach ships on intercoastal routes for ten years, Rolf became a pilot. He was in particular demand to direct vessels in and out of the intricate harbors of Puget Sound.
    In 1935, the Puget Sound Pilots’Association was established, a brotherhood of skilled seamen who shared a special camaraderie. Most of them were, like Rolf Neslund, once captains of their own ships. Rolf was one of their earliest members. The association exists today, licensed by the State of Washington and the U.S. Coast Guard with very strict codes of training, experience, skill, and conduct to protect both citizens and natural resources.
    Although he was a good-looking man, a fine exampleof his Norwegian background, it isn’t surprising that Rolf married later in life than most men. He had dropped into many ports and been consumed with his duties, and that left him far too busy to think of marriage, but not too busy to think of women.
    He was thirty-four when he married his first wife, Margot, * in 1934. With that marriage, Rolf Neslund began a most complicated round-robin of romantic entanglements. Margot was also a native of Norway, the country where Rolf felt most at home. In 1935, he met her baby sister, Elinor, who was only eleven years old at the time. He scarcely noticed her, but Elinor found him very handsome, a hero larger than life, and she never forgot him. Rolf, of course, was old enough to be her father.
    Elinor didn’t see Rolf again for twenty-one years. When they met once more, it was in Seattle in 1956. She was thirty-two, a single mother of two young girls, and he was nearing his middle fifties.
    Rolf had had many adventures during the two decades since he’d last seen Elinor. If possible, he was even more heroic and attractive to her.
    But he was married to her sister.
    Margot and Rolf had never had children. That wasn’t surprising. Initially, he was scarcely around often enough to impregnate his wife. After three years as an independent pilot, Rolf Neslund had again decided that he missed the open sea. The 1940s was not an era in which most men would have chosen to be at sea. There was, of course, a new world war going on, and submarines prowled, silentas sharks, beneath the ocean’s surface. Rolf wasn’t worried; he had been on a ship sunk by a submarine before and emerged safely.
    In 1943 he walked up the gangplank as master of the
Walter A. Luckenbach.
Later that year, Rolf commanded a huge freighter—the
Andrea F. Luckenbach
—as it traversed the Atlantic Ocean headed out of New York City and bound for Liverpool, England. Upon its arrival in the city that would one day be most famous as the home of the Beatles, Rolf’s