When I was asked to do security at East Garden and then became Father’s bodyguard, it was my mission to escort Father, and go with him many times to the water. It was my mission as security to go with him on the boat.
So ever since 1974 I have been going to sea with Father. 1974, 1975, 1976 and 1977. When I left East Garden in 1978 he told me to go tuna fishing but he didn’t come.
We did tuna fishing without Father, and in 1979 we did it again. It became my tradition. When Father was tuna fishing, Gerhard had to be there. So I spent three months in Gloucester every summer. Then in 1980, I went tuna fishing again at Father’s request.
Father came to America December 18, 1971. He left everything behind in Korea. In 1974 Father bought the New Hope, a 48-foot Pace Maker for deep-sea fishing. Then he bought The Flying Phoenix for river fishing, which is a 24-foot Well Craft speedboat. It can go as fast as a car can go. He went on the Hudson River with it.
The problems of the world and America, and the problems of the Messiah were solved at sea. He went out for 18 hours or more at a time, then went home to sleep for a couple of hours and then, he’d say, lets go back out again. That’s how he got spiritual victory. He would go out and pray. That’s why the New Hope is such a precious boat. He really saved America on that boat. He solved the problems on the water.
Father goes to sea because it is the purest place in creation. There’s nothing fallen around him, just the driver, and a crewman or two. It’s a pure atmosphere. Jesus went to the desert to pray where no one else was. When Father is at sea he doesn’t talk much. He can come closest to God there. He meditates and does some fishing. He sits on top of the boat and meditates.
Father wanted to have 3000 members then. Father wanted 3,000 to join in New York, and 3000 in LA. We did not deliver the number. The goal was never reached.
Later on Father was asking the church membership to get 30,000 members. Father never gave up on the 30,000-member idea. He wondered how we could reach it. He thought maybe we could use some sort of method to attract more people. He wanted to design a beautiful boat that could attract people. He hoped for a floodgate, and he thought it might be Ocean Church.
The idea was that since the land church couldn’t bring the 30,000, maybe Ocean Church could. He wanted to build 300 boats to bring people. He built many boats. The most important point was to get five people per boat. Father said the boats would witness to the people. But people didn’t really want to run after the boat and want to be on it. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t easy to bring five people just because we had the boats. We did everything else that he asked us to do except bringing the five people per boat.
Later he said that we failed. We said, "We thought we did everything." He said, "You didn’t bring the people." We couldn’t really attract the people that the land church couldn’t bring. Father scolded us and said we betrayed his hope. We sat there so sadly; we couldn’t do what he hoped. We brought some members but sometimes when things were changed around, the spirit was lost.
Still, our program got bigger and bigger and bigger. All the fishermen knew us from Maine to Long Island. Everyone knew us along the whole coast. In 1984 and 1985 we still fished during the tuna season. We had a great season in 1985. Father went to prison in 1984. Towards the end of the season in 1985 he was able to come and fish with us and he caught one tuna. I was on the New Hope then, the head of the fleet. I taught them fishing in Father’s tradition. Mr. Sugiyama came and asked me to teach all of Father’s tradition, like a 200-year-old tradition.
So I prayed all night long about what to teach them. I made lectures, many kinds of lectures. I taught the content of Father’s content. When Father came from Danbury to go fishing, he said to Mr. Sugiyama that it looked like Ocean Church was inheriting Father’s tradition. So that was the best season. We caught more tuna than any other season, even when Father was spearheading everything himself.
we made Ocean Challenge. Through endurance they could have a great experience. Not just enduring the elements but also catching a tuna fish. By going out and fishing all day they could have a great experience winning over the odds. At first we had just our church members come to participate, very few outside people. Sometimes another group came, but the money involved was too much. Most people were not so eager to do it. It wasn’t such an attraction to outside people. Outward Bound has less of an experience than Ocean Challenge in my opinion. Fight the waves and the elements, from morning to night, and into the night. A typical day of Ocean Challenge, we left the dock at 4 am which was Father’s tradition. The first day everyone is really hot. Everyone wants to go out at 4 o’clock.
But after two or three days with no end in sight, people are not so hot to go out again. Members usually thought they needed morning service, and then breakfast, and then leave at 4 o’clock. It was maybe a 1 or 1 1/2 hour-ride to the spot. Then you find the anchor spot, bait the hook, set the lines and start the work of fishing with a prayer. Then chumming, cut the fish and throw the fish in and fight the sharks. Then you cut up the fish and they make the line dull. Then if you get lucky someone gets a strike. On a normal day nothing happens. Sometimes at 6 p.m. we head back. We go out and come back in a V formation. It looks really incredible, 100 boats in formation.
Sometimes if you’re not used to the elements, motion sickness comes, and then you see your breakfast and you’re fighting with yourself. After someone throws up they want to go to sleep. You can see the outline of the boats and people completely flattened out. Father doesn’t like that; he doesn’t like people giving in to seasickness. He wants people to fight against it. It’s hard to be seasick and have no rest. Then the sun is so bright, and the reflection is so intense. Even with sunscreen the sunburn is really bad. Sometimes you get scrapes or cuts and get fish juice in it and bacteria gets in it and you get fish poison where your hand swells up and you can’t move it. It’s numb. The fish poison, intense sun with no shade in sight -- the boat itself, there’s so much spray, so unless you have rubber clothes and rubber boots you get soaking wet. If you’re not prepared, you get completely wet, and fighting the dogfish, and then rain, and you get completely soaked. Your skin becomes like prunes.
Wrinkles. You have to deal with all that. Then the tide is changing so you constantly have to adjust the lines and check if the bait is there, and fight the seagulls and chase the sharks away. You get rid of sharks by cutting one up and throwing it among them and hope it scares them away. But sometimes they’re so thick they just eat their own guts. They eat anything, their own meat, anything.
You just keep working. If there’s nothing on the hook, you won’t catch a tuna fish. If another boat comes close to you, you have to deal with that.
You have to deal with the insanities and difficulties of the other fishermen. You can hear so easily. They can hear you sneeze. Sometimes there are two or three people on a boat. One year Father asked me to go out alone. I had to do everything myself. He didn’t give me a mate. Then he gave me a broken-down boat. It took me four weeks to fix it. But he said, Gerhard will catch the most fish.
And of course, on the boat, the bathroom is a bucket. And that is another experience. For brothers it’s not as difficult, when it’s just brothers. It is not as easy with sisters on the boat too. One time I had terrible diarrhea. It was awful. I had to dump everything overboardWe had at that time a visiting baby whale that followed the boat and swam around it constantly. When I had to dump the bucket into the water, the whale saw it and aimed for it and began to jump through it -- his head was halfway through -- then the whale smelled it and he stopped and backed up the way he came. He didn’t continue, he went backwards!
After working all day, your fingers are prunes, you’re soaking wet or sunburned, you can’t live and can’t die...for some people they thought it was a miracle to have solid ground under their feet again. Then you need to get chum, bait, ice, fuel and food for the next day. You need to fix your fishing equipment, and wash the boat down. Then you can have dinner, and then it is about 8:00 or 8:30 pm. Sometimes we would have an inspirational talk or I would speak, or there would be testimonies.
One time I got angry at people. People took it so easily. It was the best year fishing, and no one knew how hard the foundation had come, what people had gone through until then. I was so angry and I scolded them.
Ocean Challenge lasted 70 days. People got so tired after a while. It was hard to challenge them and inspire them to do better. Some people tried to escape the pressure and avoided going out. Once one sister got tired of going out; it was boring, enduring the work and the difficulty. So one day, she didn’t go out. And that day her captain caught a tuna. So she missed the one day of getting the tuna.
I had to push myself all the time too. I never get up easily. During tuna season, to get up every morning to leave the dock at 4 am was really hard. On my boat I didn’t let anyone sleep and I didn’t sleep myself, but sometimes people slept on the boats. They weren’t supposed to, though. Sometimes I got cramps in my legs. That can be a sign of overwork. I had that every morning, fighting with the cramps.
In the evening people liked to enjoy each other. They would get excited late at night, but no one was excited in the morning. There was activity there until midnight sometimes. When there was really bad weather, it was so welcome because it meant we weren’t going out. Everyone went back to sleep until 10:00 o’clock. People had breakfast, wrote letters, went to town, just enjoyed themselves. It was a wonderful relief not to go out.
When there was really bad weather, it was so welcome because it meant we weren’t going out. We were so grateful for a rough day. Sometimes we went to other ports too, not only Gloucester. We would go to a restaurant and mingle with the townspeople. Ocean Church was an experience that everyone will remember who did it.
From 40 years in America, pp. 256-61.