Sea Stories

Here follows three sea stories from Tom's chequered sailing career:

Dances With Whales - July 20, 1999

Curdling the “Milk Run”

Meanwhile I taught anatomy in a huge farmhouse in the rolling Bavarian hills, while Quan toured her mother around to her various German relatives. Unfortunately, Quan’s Mom got very ill and spent nine days in the hospital in a very bad way. They left for home a few days before I was to fly to Tenerife, such a nip-and-tuck trip that I kept my participation in the sailing trip up in the air until I knew they were safe. In fact she made it home just fine and is now better than ever, but Mike was left wondering whether I was coming right up until I got off the plane in Tenerife - a sort of heralding of my waffling commitment.

But after the last minute phone calls and the tearful blessings from Quan, I found myself, tired
and a bit frowzy from the post-class celebratory party, chasing a gibbous moon over the Alps, thinking of my friend Konrad down below, driving to a training with the masterful osteopath Didier, wondering what the next arc of my own career will be, and whether inspiration would strike me, as I hoped, on the boat trip. (Spare the suspense: it didn’t.)

Despite a decade of living in Europe, this was my first time in Spain, and also my first time going from country to country without Passport kontrol - Spain and Germany are both EEC treaty signers, so I just picked up my bags and walked outside. James awaited me on the sidewalk.

We struggled the little Fiat up and down the hills to Santa Cruz, getting to know each other while I watched the scenery - not very impressive this Grand Canary, quite frankly: West Texas to the left, industrial, broken, arid shoreline to the right. We stopped at one of those vertical versions of an American mall that the Latin countries favor - a kind of shopping aviary - to pick up some muesli. Neither of us had much in the way of pesetas, so we only got two tins. Had I known how little we were to have in the food department for so long a trip, I would have changed money.

Tammy Norie, freshly fueled, steamed back under the huge commercial jetty just as we arrived at the dock. We tied off to 3’ bollards - there were only a couple of other able but scruffy sailboats along the same stretch - and I leapt down from the concrete to get the briefest of orientations from Mike and Joel while Jim returned the rented car. I made one last desperate phone call to Quan from a phone booth next to a jackhammer, and without further ceremony we cast off just after noon, ending my three-hour visit to Spain.

The crew was already seasoned and I was not: Mike, totally at home in his boat and incredibly attentive; Joel, all the joy, emotional ‘coo-el’, and attention span of Generation X, sporting a hot new deltoid tattoo of a Maori deity he took on in Amsterdam; and James, conscientious and self-effacing nearly to a fault, whose exposed scalp showed signs of too much sun as well as early and repeated contact with cabin trunks, the boom, and the dodger. As we motored down the length of Grand Canary, I stowed my gear and began to feel the swell in the pit of my stomach. By sunset we were sailing and the watches began, our physical watches all set, for the next 32 days of four time zones, to Zulu time - known to landsmen everywhere as Greenwich Mean.


Incessa
nt motion

In every moment that follows, the boat is constantly moving. Even in the periods of calm, the boat is on top of a 24-hour earthquake and never stops pitching, rolling, yawing, quartering, or something. In fact the boat is most stable when we are sailing in a good breeze, heeled over and plowing through the water instead of horsing on top of it. One gets so used to this motion that the lack of it was the strangest part about stepping onto the quay in Bermuda a month later. However, in the first couple of days, getting used to it was the first order of business.

The first evening (and the first real wind and waves) came on as we cleared the south end of Grand Canary. I went to sleep in my bunk, and found that within the hour I was actually pitched out of bed onto the cabin sole by the boat’s extreme motion. Nauseated and groggy, I rigged a lee cloth to hold me into my berth, and slept in spite of the boat’s determined efforts to unseat me. The first night watch was not a comfortable time. Awakened at midnight, I stumbled around looking for Bill’s foul weather gear, trying to find all that I needed - sweaters, lights, knife, survival vest - while being pitched about in the near dark of the red night lights. Especially at night, you never know whether you are about to put your foot on Jupiter or the moon.

Mike and James both sported half a patch of scopolamine behind their ears, but I had elected to tough it out, and this meant I spent the second day being pretty sick, unable to hold anything down or stay below unless I was asleep. This passed after about 36 hours out, and none of us was bothered by the motion for the rest of the trip. But one does wish for a rest from time to time, an anchorage to put into for some blessed stillness. For some of us, the motion was constipating, and cooking while being thrown around was especially difficult; James and I compared it to having an infant on your hip - you can do everything, it just takes so much longer.


Noises

Boats speak. Aside from the creaks and groans made famous by the movies (and justly in this case - Tammy Norie was an old wooden boat full of many such, very authentic sounding), there is the champagne gurgle of the sea on the hull a few inches from your head as you sleep. Below you is the lugubrious complaint of the water tanks. Above, especially at night, is the envious hiss and shrug of the water that must get out of the boat’s way, and a young colleen s
ings in the rigging. At the helm I occasionally hear the barely audible pneumonic sigh of a dying old man - perhaps air being forced through a drain or the exhaust tube? You learn to sleep with noise as well as motion. Even in our dead calms the sails slapped in the roll.

Of course, we make noise too - someone’s always up, scratching in the log, heating tea water. Attentive sailors are always listening carefully - the hum you hear may be Jim reciting a sonnet or tracing a Portuguese fado, or Mike and
Joel huddled over the binnacle with the sextant, or Tom and Jim plumbing the depths of experiences in foreign lands, or Mike beeping and being bleeped at by faxes or radios, or it might be something going awry. It bears checking out.


Watches

Besides the constant motion and noise, the determining factor of our shipboard life is the watch schedule. Four hours on, four hours off was the prevailing rhythm. I was on from midnight to 4AM, 8-12 Noon, and 1600-2000, with Mike on the opposite schedule. Joel and James were on similar schedules, but staggered so that they overlapped two hours with me, two hours with Mike. On only one night, halfway across in a dead calm, we all simply went to sleep like normal people, setting our sails again in the gentle breeze that came with sunrise.

Though it might seem monotonous, you have to remember that we crossed four hours worth of time zones over the 2100 “crow flies” miles, so that my 8am to noon watch gradually came to begin in the dark and e
nd in sunrise, as if it were 4 - 8am. By staying on Greenwich Mean Time the whole way, we all got to see every part of the day.

You get used to three-and-a-half hour sleep cycles. Sure you do. At least I began waking up often enough just before my watch started. When the weather was easy, we would sometimes leave one person on watch so that somebody else could get a six-hour stretch. When the wind was up or the weather dodgy, we liked to have two men up and alert. (The only major element I have left out of this account are dreams - I had some major doozies on the boat, but it would just take too long.)

As the voyage wore on we fell into a rhythm that bent the watches a little but suited us. Jim would often cook after his watch, conjuring up an amazing array of baked goods from the ship’s not meager but honestly unimaginative stores. (How can you leave Spain and Portugal without tins of olives, oil, feta cheese, spices?) I was amazed: we had fresh pizza one day, cinnamon rolls another, scones,
croissants, various kinds of breads, puddings - all cooked as we pitched from one side to the other.

His supply of flour was the more limited through an inadvertant misinterpretation of Spanish: instead of two bags of corn meal, someone picked up two huge bags of corn startch. Yet even this he employed heroically, thickening puddings and soups until we were all a bit thick ourselves.

I would often let Joel - of an age where bed is the finest place to be - sleep through the morning watch, as four hours at the helm ofte
n felt like a fine thing to do first thing in the morning, but we would all wake up to taste the fruits of Jim’s labors.

One of the nice things about the company of only men, a condition I had not partaken of for some time: these gives and takes (you cook, I’ll clean, you cover for me here, I’ll cover for you there) pretty much developed without talk or lengthy considerations of fairness.

Jim had a birthday on the trip which he only barely announced. Unprepared, I had no present, but his gastronomic feats inspired me to write him a sonnet:

When to the sails we bend a calloused hand
And feel them take the wind and fill away
Beyond the mast we smell the coming day
That beckons us from off the sleepy strand.
Now free from sheltering arms of foreign bay
We draw a curving geodesic band
Across a paper chart from land to land
Trimming sheets and wheel to track its way.
Our fragile craft with watchful mammals manned
On wrinkled curves of swell and chop and spray
No weather gods, but only God can say
How threads unwind - a longer trip than planned?
Our trip so long the well-fed crew exclaims,
“Stand, stay, and purely honor James”

Scheherezade

A fixed star in my night were the conversations between James and myself. From midnight to two, night after night, I had some of the finest conversations of my life - rich, intricate, full of digressions, tangents and descriptions - and during the month we had plenty of time to get at all the stories, the nooks and crannies of each other’
4s life. The first one, I noted in my log, ranged from Chaucer to Chaos theory, but by the time we reached Bermuda, Jim had been up the slopes of Himalayas with me, and down into the hell of my divorce, and with him I had been through numerous outlandish adventures in Brazil - the night he waited to be killed, the morning he spent as a God when his plane was forced to land on an isolated beach - and the heart-stopping wrench of his daughter’s auto accident.

“A friend,” Robert Browning said, “may not always agree with one on the answers, but agrees on what the important questions are.” James and I found that link that led to complete confidence, complete freedom, and complete delight in each other’s expression. The moving boat and the night sky are great conversational lubricants, and James and I were ca
>reful each to give the other the time and encouragement necessary to let a story develop in full, sometimes letting a story pause for a day, never mentioning it until our time of night came around again.

It was a particular chemistry between us. Joel and I often sailed in silence, very comfortable to slightly uneasy depending on the stage of the trip, but few words were necessary between us. Mike and I talked always to some purpose, as his sincere enthusiasm never quite meshed with my cynical detachment. You can manufacture getting along, and the other two were easy to get along with, but meshing is rare and either comes natural or it don’t.


The Sky

Connecting with the celestial sphere was a central part of the trip. A cynic might sneer that there was nothing much else to look at, but one’s concentration was
rewarded. We were out for a full moon cycle, so that early on we were treated to brilliant starlight - enough to see by, and Jupiter made a sea trail all by itself (as of course we did also - the phosphorescence often stretched out a hundred yards behind us). We watched the planets work their way through the astrological signs, the fingernail moon appear on the horizon, the golden road between the orange sun and silver moon, sunrises and sunsets of every description, as we sailed westward, ever westward.

Joel and Mike, and latterly myself, also used the sky in a less poetic way to find out where we were. Although with characteristic zeal we had no less than two GPS machines, with still more zeal we confirmed their readings with star, sun, moon, and planet sights, often taken in the early dawn light, when both the heavenly body and the horizon were clear. I learned to swing the se
xtant, but the mathematics of it all remained a bit obscure to me, for instead of Bowditch’s tables and calculating cotangents, we plugged the data through a special little calculator that did it all for you. Oh well.

Wildlife

The sea was, to our taste, remarkably empty. The predominant life forms were Portuguese Men-O-War, pinkly floating along and occasionally wrapping their tentacles around the impeller we dragged behind to generate electricity. We did have some dolphins with us near the beginning; they bring such joy with them. One day a couple rode the pressure wave, and another day a pod of about 15 swooped along with us for about half an hour, dancing in the water with the greatest of ease and incredible economy of motion. At one time, because we were in the midst of large waves, I looked straight across at a perfectly outlined shape in the green of a wave, an aquarium view.

Otherwise there were occasional whale spouts far off, a fin or two momentarily above the surface. Joel swears he saw a breaching humpback and a sperm whale, but enthusiasm may have gotten the better of him. For fish there were flying fish, scared up from the waves in front of us like partridges. One surprised Mike at night by hitting him in the shoulder, meaning that the fish was about 8 feet off the surface. One day we saw a couple of dorados, but they would not take our lures.

Neither were birds numerous. A storm petrel - was it in fact the same one, or a succession of similarly acting individuals? - seemed to follow us for a thousand miles, showing up regularly off the starboard quarter to fly a particular pattern. Tammy Norie in fact means storm petrel, so we took this as a good omen. We had some others of the gull-gannet-tern family, large and quite at home a thousand miles from anywhere, often cruising in the troughs between the rollers, searching I guess for small surface fish we never saw.

Two other birds were less at home - they tried to land on the boat. One, a beautifully translucent white tropicbird, circling us many times on several occasions, approaching the masthead, the spreaders, even the pulpit, but never got the courage to land. The other, a swallow, was beyond courage and perched on the lifeline in total exhaustion, at least eight hundred miles from the nearest land. We put out water and soaked crackers for her, but she never hopped down to get it, and after about a half an hour, some untoward movement of the boat made her fly off, almost certainly to her deBath, for she was not equipped as the others to fish, to float, and to ride the wind without effort.

Man’s effort to mine the sea of whales and fish has been apparently very successful. Read Melville, Conrad, or O’Brian with their descriptive profusion of sea- and wildlife, and weep. To be fair, the sea was cleaner than I expected it might be. There was little flotsam or jetsam, and no detectable oil or other pollution. Styrofoam and bottles (without messages) were the most common offenders.


Hygiene

After a week of high winds and mountainous waves and night squalls (and fine sailing), we settled in to a period of greater calm. One sunny noon we trailed a docking line behind and jumped off into the cerulean blueness of the warm ocean (only three at a time, of course). What a strange feeling! It quite takes your breath away to realize that the water hauls below you for five miles down, and for hundreds of miles in any direction before you reach land. “What monster is even now rising from the deep, its maw agape,” your stomach whispers to you involuntarily.

We were making little way, and it was possible to swim faster than the boat, watch it coming at you and grab the bobstay for a ride, or dive off the bow, going deep and coming up lazily to grab the trailing line for a tow.

With a little salt-water soap we were all clean, and toasted our buns in the afternoon sun. It was a great rest after the first few days harder running. Later in the trip we had other swims, but we could also have fresh water showers by pouring a hot kettle into a little pressure tank with a sink sprayer on it. It worked fine, and a gallon left you feeling wonderfully clean and refreshed. At home, I like one or two showers a day, but on the boat once a week seemed to suffice.

This period of calm is restful at first - a swim, a laundry and a general dry-out. A disc of Delft sea under a robin’s-egg sky, the horizon stiletto-edged. By the next day, the sea was impossibly calm for the mid-Atlantic, gently swelling but without wavelets - the features of the few cumulus clouds could be read on its surface as in a Chinese silk painting. Time as well as our speed slows down, and simple tasks take longer than ever they should. It is like a desert - we seem to be stuck in the same spot for days, and although the instruments say we are moving, the seeming creep makes us lethargic.

Mike has hired expert weather guidance, and we await further advice on the single-side-band radio. The days of calm use up our fuel supplies, which are generous but not limitless enough to get us to Bermuda. The advice comes to go south to catch more wind.

Fear

No more than half an hour after we got the weather word and angled left to
ward 25 N Latitude, the engine started racing out of control. An oddity rapidly became a menace as she raced beyond 2000 rpms toward a screaming 3000 and more. It is difficult to convey the frozen feeling that raced through us and crawled over our skins. Alone in endless ocean, it felt as if the engine must simply but surely explode its way through the very sides of the boat. Joel throttled back - nothing. I yanked the kill-wire - nothing! How can the kill wire not work? Mike hurled himself below and tore the covers off the engine, turned off the fuel line - this all in seconds but it feels like hours - and went forward for a screwdriver to get at the air intake but before he got back the engine, finally out of fuel, shut itself down.

Mike set to work on it, theorizing a water leak, and after hours of black-handed work, we started her again. Great hope as she kicked in and ran sweetly, dashed as she started to knock so badly we shut her down again. After a long, electrically dark night of calmly turning in circles, Mike set to work on it again, pulling pulleys, adjusting valves, bleeding the fuel lines, with the rest of us helping as we could. To make a long story short, we were to have several hopeful starts followed by depressing failures. The problem was a broken seal on the fuel pump, which had leaked diesel into the oil jacket, and the engine ended up being usable only for an emergency five minutes We saved that possibility for Bermuda harbor.


Whether

Without an engine, we return to the 18th century - find the wind. The first eight days we sped westward, riding the flo
#w our Camden weather expert said would be this far north. Now we are becalmed and he says go south, to a latitude more usually associated with the trades. This is annoying, as we could have gone more southward on the seven days of wind - now we have no engine or wind to go south with.

Up to this point, we had miles in the bank; now anything could happen and the angst began: would I make it home in time to pick up the threads? My private log from here on in is a series of calculations of days and miles and possibilities and gnashing of teeth as the days slip away.

The highs go clockwise, so we want to be under them to get a easterly flow. The lows go anti-clockwise, so we want to be north of them to get a easterly flow. We are stuck in the middle, under the lows and on top of the highs
, and what winds we get are straight on our nose. The rest of the trip alternates between maddening calms and foul westerlies. Tammy Norie is a great and solid boat, but she does not do very well making to windward. We take the best angle we can given the wind, and zig-zag slowly over the bottom.

Being in the belt between the weather systems, we start to get some storms - line squalls, really - though they reach gale force a couple of times. They start with a line of white smoke on the horizon, under which you can see trails of wind and rain as it gets closer. The line comes over the water at you, and suddenly the world changes as the boat heels and the rain pelts. One day we had a really sustained storm. The winds climbed suddenly to just under 40 knots, sending us scrambling over the deck to shorten sail even further, the rain as hard and cold as ice and the sails reluctant to come down to the heaving deck.

It soon settled down to wind in the mid-20’s, but it was still hard to look into the rain, even hard to breathe. The rain changed the sea surface to molten metal, strangely smoothed and soft and combed with a vaporous sea-smoke. We saw sea birds being thrown and tumbled downwind, totally out of control. That day, eager to use the wind for what it was worth, I stayed on the wheel for eight hours while James fed me cups of soup and innumerable crackers. When Mike offered me relief, I told him I was “building up Frequent Sailor Miles.”

By the time I crashed, sleep was difficult in the pitching, rolling ride, but by the time I returned for my midnight watch, conditions werie perfect - 12 knots of southerly wind, a steady if rolling sea, some lightning trailing off with the departing storm. When James went down I stayed at the wheel alone under a silver moon, all sails set, sometimes topping 7 knots, even 7.5, the sea singing under the hull. Knowing that Joel would want to reef, I let him sleep, wanting to put miles on our clock. The wind continued to rise over the hours, and by the time Joel rolled out on his own, it was getting up to 17-18 knots. For me this was just up to the danger point, but for Joel it was well past it, and he quickly and adamantly took in the mizzen and reefed the main. To me this feels like being scared of the wind, but, despite being ‘second watch captain’, I don’t feel I have the authority to over-rule him.

And apparently I don’t: Next morning Michael came to me as I was at the wheel and in his diffident and careful way raked me over the coals for crowding too much sail on his poor old boat.

It scares me how reluctant you are to shorten sail.” Joel has told him that I was piling it on, rail under and 4 spokes of weather helm. It’s all a bit exaggerated, but I let it pass and simply take his point: If something major breaks out here...


Communication

We have a radio for talking to local ships passing in the night, and a GPS to tell us where we are, but our main contact with the world beyond our tiny toothpick was a single-side band radio. By hooking it up to a computer we were able to receive weather faxes, first from Germany and later from the US, but it also allowed us to ‘speak’ with Mike’s father, Hank, a marine radio engineer by trade, on his ham set in Maryland. Mostly, we could hear his voice, as his transmitter was strong, but we, with a 12-volt system, had to communicate back via Morse code. Mike and his Dad were so adept at this that they could tell what kind of day the other was having by the way they keyed the dots and dashes.

Mike would relay our current position, and then any cogent or urgent messages, and Hank would relay messages he had, and then sometimes do a phone link-up with Mike’s wife Connie or Bill, who started researching the engine, the autopilot, and the weather for us. One day just after the engine quit Hank got Quan on the phone - totally unexpectedly for her - and when she was told that she could talk to me but that I could not speak back, said spontaneously, “Ask him if he’ll marry me...” “Y-e-s”, Mike keyed back, smiling at my vigorously nodding head. Well, she had me pinned, didn’t she? - I’d been at sea for two weeks, didn’t know when I could get back, and was worried about losing her.

“Tell him to name a date” “Aug 10th” I wired back. “That’s my birthday!” she cried in protest. The rest of the crew was excited - “This must be history-making! How romantic, a proposal from a boat by Morse code.” I wasn’t sure how real it was - we kid a lot - but it felt so good to hear her voice.

The proposal was great, but more substantial and detailed conversation about business was impossible. It used a lot of power we couldn’t spare with the engine no longer charging us up, and it was a game of Chinese whispers anyway: I tell Mike, who taps it to Hank, who tells Quan to pass on to my teaching compadre Janet... No way.

As it became evident that three weeks was not even nearly going to do it and that I was facing ruinous professional consequences about which I could do nothing, I became increasingly agitated. The reality of the price I had to pay for taking this trip began to sink in on me. I had made provision for being a little late, though it meant losing a door-opening business opportunity, but in the weeks following I had serious obligations, and in any case I had throttled the bejeesus out of my finances to get the three weeks necessary for the trip, and that was before Quan’s Mom got so sick - I had to be back.

There is little room for disguising feelings on a 40’ boat.
As my self-centered anxiety boiled over, an insufferable attitude of urgency, frustration, and disappointment began to pervade the ship. The ups and downs with the engine lifted and dashed my hopes. A day or two of wind was followed with damning calms or westerly storms that drove us north or south but covered few of the miles toward Bermuda. It was all my own doing - to have said ‘Yes’ to the voyage while having set responsibilities that potentially conflicted - but my selfish and spoiled attitude, though bottled for a while, spilled out onto my messmates. Mostly I railed at the weather gods and our weatherman ashore in Camden, but Mike took it as personal slurs on his judgment.

And I did begin to have problems with their judgment - the feeling of “I could do this better”. Slowly my frustration began to extend to my shipmates: Mike is a cautious man, a good quality in a doctor, and in someone responsible for getting a ship in off the ocean. Joel had learned from him, and carried the lesson further - reefing at the drop of a hat, an hour ahead of the line of clouds, which would often turn out to be empty of wind in any case. These procedures ensured the safety of the boat, but I began to see them as personal put-downs - don’t they see the urgency? I wanted to be on race footing 24-hours a day, but they didn’t.

One day Joel said, with the emotional economy characteristic of today’s young, “I wish you weren’t in such a hurry to get there.” I considered this, and said, “Yup, I’m sorry about that, but it’s a fact of life on this trip, like the wetness of the water.” He seemed to accept this, and we said no more about it.

Choices were limited. I had asked Mike about getting aboard a passing freighter, but we never even saw one for the next week or two. As the situation got more desperate, I even had him get Bill to investigate a seaplane pick-up, but Bill radioed back that it was prohibitively expensive, about 10 grand, and we were still out of reach of it anyway.

What I could not tell me mates (until James and I had reached a greater degree of intimacy in our conversations some nights later) was that money and job commitments were only part of the agitation. About a week into the trip I had felt a strange pulling and coldness in my heart, a strong feeling that Quan was pulling away from me. (I had had a similar feeling last year, coincidentally also on a boat, only to learn later that it was the exact hour when my father had a heart attack. With this and other experiences I had learned to listen to these intuitions.)

The marriage proposal had temporarily reassured me, but nevertheless a real conversation was impossible, and the anxiety ate away at me, the feeling that her guru (and my imagined rival) Rick might gain ground, confuse and storm her while I was away. “Foolish man!” I told myself, “to go off on this selfish trip.” In the lonely hours of the late watch on those nights when the wind screamed against us from the west, the jealous fantasies grew, and I screamed blues at myself:

When them bad, bad feelings
Come in spite of all you planned
To see your good, good woman
Hooked away by another man.

Music or no, I could not seem to get my mind off the situation thousands of miles away, so I was hardly present, hardly here and now, in no way Buddhist about it all. Bent out of shape about describes it - and Joel’s wandering attention and S-shaped courses, Mike’s extra cautions, and the shifting vane of our weather advice - go north, go south, go north again - just scraped cheese graters across my flayed soul.

I had asked for another conversation with Quan, ostensibly to talk about the classes I was being forced to cancel, but really to hear her voice; I felt sure I could tell the state of things if o
nly I could hear her voice. And suddenly one day there was enough connection and Hank had her on. The transmission was weak however, so her voice was legible but unreadable, going from deep bass to chipmunk as Mike diddled with the knobs to try to keep it at all. Faced with mental telegraphy, I yelled my instructions about the classes down the microphone, and tried to add how much I loved her, how much I had been trying to push the boat to Bermuda by sheer force of will. And then in a minute it was done, my voice hoarse, my sails deflated.

I went out on deck while Mike finished up getting some serial numbers for the engine repair, and then, appearing in the companionway, he exploded at me - “I’m so pissed at you constantly carping at my judgment and abilities, as if you’re the only one trying to get this boat to Bermuda - I’ve been up at all hours trying to get us there, and you ...” - even as I cringed I could see how it hurt him to do it, his face crumpling like a kid about to cry in his anger. His tirade went straight to my heart, echoing the voices I have within myself: why can’t I contain these frustrations within myself, why do I put them out onto others?

And then James, gentle even-tempered James, but now with a face demonic under his safari hat, joined in right behind him, unexpectedly vehement even as he mixed praise with his excoriation - What was I doing there if I didn’t have the ability to stay the course? How could I think of leaving them in the lurch? “How can such a smart guy be so self-centered and immature?” Their hot faces and thundering voices filled my world as they hurled my frustration back at me. I was devastated, not realizing how personally they had taken my complaints, and crushed to have ruined the trip with my pettiness. Their anger ran out in a minute or so, and red-faced, I therapeutically coiled rope for a while, letting the adrenalin drain from us all, and then tried to make amends by talking it through with them both singly. Joel, though right there at the wheel, did not take part in the diatribe, just letting his expression pass from worried to amused.

This explosion lanced the boil of tension and soon it was healing and an object of jokes, though like most boils it remained a little tender. It still felt bad to me to have thrown turmoil into the trip, selfish of me to have taken so much time away from Quan, stupid to have put my business so much at risk, and strange that it had all augured so well at the beginning. Mike took on my projected frustration because he felt responsible for getting me into the situation, but it was my gamble, and I hadn’t intended to impugn anyone else.

“Yes, so...” was James’s method when we reestablished contact in our midnight meeting. “Take your fears and make them bigger. What would happen if your business just folded up, you lost your house, you went bankrupt...” I played the game, but it was when I confessed the fears about losing Quan that this game didn’t work so well, and I think he understood.
As if in acknowledgement of the change of mood on the boat, the weather relented and we headed straight for Bermuda, everyone united in getting as much out of boat and wind as we could, everyone tired and eager for new food, land, and another schedule.


Cap’n Mike shows his stuff - A Sailor’s Interlude

As the wind abated one morning I went to trade the storm blade jib for the 120% - simple enough, Mike and Joel were asleep, James at the helm. It would not come down. The roller-furling device at the head of the sail would come down only so far, then just stop. I stare up, feeling foolish, but nothing seems to work to free it. Finally I wake Mike. While I myself might have sailed to Bermuda on the storm jib, Mike knows his boat and his capabilities, and here’s what he did:

1. Drop the main and take it off the mast track.
2. Deploy another working jib on the inner forestay.
3. Deploy the mast walker and harness for Mike to go up the mast.
4. Loosen the tack of the offending blade jib so that we can run it all the way up the forestay. Go to the top of the mainmast and examine roller-furler car, it’s ok. Try to run it down, still no dice.
5. At this point Mike, halfway up the mast, spots a backed-out set screw that helps join the aluminum sections of the roller forestay. This is what the roller furler is hitting on the way down. So, Mike comes down to:
6. Rig a shackle to the base of the roller furler, and run a line from it through a snap shackle attached to the bowsprit and from there to the main halyard winch on the mast.
7. Loosen the turnbuckles on the backstays.
8. By winching the rope attached to the roller furler, get enough slack on the aluminum forestay to free the clevis pin at its sprit end, leaving the mainmast secured by the inner stay. Bring free forestay back to the starboard shrouds and secure.
9. Mike goes back up the mast walker, leans o Wut at full stretch from the mast (now whipping from the sea’s motion) to tighten the set screw at arm’s length with an Allen wrench. (Never did figure out how he did that, even though I saw it.)
10. Put it all back.
    

By noon we are again winging our way to Bermuda.


Landfall

The food is running out - though in rummaging through the boxes we find an occasional treat like Allen’s ginger candy or another Dove bar. The meals are all from tins, and will not bear much comment; the books are getting boring, and everyone’s a deeper level of tired.

As Bermuda nears we see more freighters and more birds, but the weather is hazy and Bermuda stays maddeningly out of sight. We are aware of the ‘last’ of things - the last sun-up, the last turn at the wheel, the last shower. The brass shines, a result of boredom and pride mixed, the duffe
ls are packed on the bunks.

As we wind into St George’s harbor, we spot Mike’s family on the rocks at the entrance, waving us in and whooping. We deploy the little Avon as a helper through the thin (and headwinded) entrance. It takes us a couple of goes to get our anchor situated properly in the crowded harbor, but we do so without using our beleaguered engine.

It seems hard to believe that we covered 3119 nautical miles in 32 days, an average of 97.5 miles per day. So many days we seemed stopped stock still.

When at last we step on land, I am surprised that it which feels so incredibly solid, does not move and weave, even after a beer in the restaurant. One more night on board, with steady rain and a little kufuffle with another boat as the wind changed and crossed our anchor lines, a last bit of boating that James, Joel, and I had to handle, as Mike was ashore with Connie. The next day they all set about being tourists, but I found Bermuda cute and totally irrelevant. Late the next afternoon I said good-bye to my relieved crewmates, and waited out the plane rides to surprise her with my bearded face and lie in Quan’s arms.


Coda

It took a good couple of weeks or more to really return to my self, so says Quan. The business problems I feared really did come to pass, and I will be working my way out of debt for a while yet. The difference, and the change that the helplessness of the trip forced upon me, is that I don’t mind anymore. As with a close brush with death, those things simply do not matter in the larger scheme. What does is that Quan was true blue, and to celebrate with others how much that means to us, we were indeed married the same summer as the trip, only three days off from my spontaneous suggestion.

I move on into middle life with some modified insides - less self-centered values, I hope, and a sense of acceptance about those things I cannot change, all occasioned by a voyage I valued highly, but will never repeat.