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## The Hazana and the Job
The yacht they had been hired to deliver was not their own. It belonged to someone else — a friend, by the account of multiple sources — and had been left in Tahiti to be transported to its home port of San Diego. Delivery voyages of this kind were, and remain, a standard feature of the offshore sailing world: a boat needs to be moved from one place to another, the owner cannot or does not wish to make the passage themselves, and so they hire crew — typically experienced sailors willing to combine work with extended time at sea — to sail it for them.
The Hazana was a 44-foot fiberglass sloop. The specific make and model are not established with certainty in the sources consulted for this article. What is documented is its length, its rig configuration as a sloop, and the fact that it was fitted with the standard navigation equipment that an offshore yacht of that era would carry: GPS was not yet a civilian navigation tool (it would not become reliably available for recreational use until the 1990s), so the vessel would have been equipped with an electronic navigation system of some kind — likely a Loran receiver, which used land-based radio signals to determine position — along with a sextant for celestial navigation as backup, and an emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB) for distress signaling.
The plan was straightforward: sail northwest from Papeete, work north across the tropics, pick up the North Pacific High’s favorable winds, and sail east to San Diego. The passage, under normal conditions, would take approximately three to four weeks.