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  To celebrate my first evening at sea, dinner was spaghetti with pesto, one of the buckets of food donated by friends. I inaugurated my new pressure cooker, boiled up some water from Varuna’s tanks and threw in the pasta. The weather was calm; my first sunset was flashing brilliant, burnt-red shards of color across the sky and an occasional tanker meandered across the horizon. I shoveled a couple of forkfuls into my mouth, swallowed and immediately retched. What now? I thought, spitting out the last bits of pasta. Then it dawned on me. “Oh no. It can’t be.” I checked my water supply at the sink tap and moaned. It was true. The brand-new water tanks were contaminated with fiberglass from the factory and my entire water supply was useless. The only consolation was that I had brought aboard a supply of bottled mineral water, as well as sealed boxes of juice and soy milk. Making a mental tally of the potable liquid aboard, I figured that with rationing, it was possible to make do.

  The following morning the barometer had fallen from 1020 millibars to 1005; a low-pressure system was approaching and I began to prepare myself for the first storm of the trip. It started quietly with puffs of wind coming from random directions. By 8:00 A.M., the sky had darkened and the wind piped up, bringing with it an icy chill. Putting on my foul-weather gear, I stuffed my hair into the hood, zipped up the jacket and went outside into the cockpit to wait. By 10:00 A.M., a full-fledged gale arrived, knocking Varuna all the way over on her side and keeping her there for the duration of the storm.

  Squall line after squall line thundered over us, spitting out bolts of lightning. Varuna was lifted to the top of every boiling crest and then was sent careening down to the trough. I hunched in the cockpit, transfixed and petrified. As every dark cloud approached, the wind picked up and Varuna flew down the backs of the waves, heeling 35 degrees over on her port side. “We must have entered the Gulf Stream,” I thought, with its warm water surging upward like a river in the sea from the Gulf of Mexico.

  I checked my life harness, whose line attached me to a U-bolt mounting in the cockpit, and watched with awe the wrath of the ocean. White water roiled over the foredeck and back into the cockpit from both sides and my stomach leapt with every jolt to Varuna. Violently seasick, I just clung on and fervently prayed that my fate wasn’t to go up in smoke from a bolt of lightning. I had grounding cables, but no idea how to use them.

  After retching my guts up over the side, I crawled across the cockpit and headed below to find something to drink. I couldn’t believe my eyes! There was six inches of water above the floorboards! Grabbing the bilge pump handle from the cockpit locker behind me, I shoved it into the pump sprocket near my feet and began pumping like crazy. After ten pumps, it seized up. God damn it! What happened? The emergency electric bilge pump came to mind. I jumped down into the sloshing cabin, pulled the switch, heard the pump churn to life, then flew up the two steps out to the cockpit to disengage the Monitor, grabbed the tiller and headed Varuna into the wind. She rounded up and her sails began to slap back and forth in the howling winds.

  Stumbling up to the foredeck, I frantically began to pull down the storm jib. I had to right the boat to determine where the water was coming in. It was already higher than the sea cocks, so I couldn’t tell whether or not it was coming in through a through-hull fitting. As Varuna straightened up, the washing-machine cycle began to calm belowdecks; above was the same blustery, squalling mess. “Dear God, help me!” I cried. Buckling my harness to a jack line running almost the entire length of the deck, I hurriedly began to search for the leak by scrutinizing the deck in minutest detail. What on earth could be responsible for this calamity?

  Checking the anchor windlass at the bow, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Beneath the windlass was a gaping hole for the anchor chain to pass through the deck and down a pipeline into the bilge. With every wave, water funneled down the hole, slowly drowning Varuna! I had been so damned ignorant that I had never even thought of blocking up this artery now pumping the sea into the bowels of my boat.

  The wind continued to howl as the waves buried the bow where I crouched. Cold water streamed down my neck, drenching my clothes with salt water as I struggled to stuff the hole with the first thing I could get my hands on—Grand Union shopping bags covered with duct tape. I crammed in as many as possible, taped over the opening and pulled the jib back up. Running down below again, I stuck my head into the opening in the bilge where the chain was stored. The water influx had slowed to a trickle. I stopped to breathe. “Two emergencies down,” I said, feeling the adrenaline still surging through my body. “How many more to go?” and turned around to survey my soaking-wet little home.

  “Maybe Daddy was right,” I thought. In two days, I had solved two major problems, and it really wasn’t that hard. Maybe sailing doesn’t require tons of deep dark secret knowledge. It was beginning to seem that everything could be handled with common sense.

  “Hey,” I realized with a sudden burst of euphoria, “I’m not seasick anymore!” My days of living under the influence of this horrible malaise were over. Through some miracle, I never got seasick again.

  The storm eventually passed, and I fiddled with the boat, testing her in the changing winds. Although I was awed by the sea and fully aware of its threatening potential, surprisingly, it did not scare me. Before leaving New York, I had often slept on my comfortable futon at Jeri’s, dreaming of being alone on the ocean, wondering if its depths and immensity would intimidate me once I was out in the middle of it. Now, I found myself relieved to be able to sit out in the cockpit, day or night, clear or overcast, and feel relatively at ease.

  Around day six, there began a droning period of flat calm. The ocean was a perfect mirror, unruffled by even the slightest hint of breeze, reflecting Varuna’s shapely body and limp sails while Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish glided by. Dolphins came squealing out of nowhere, accompanied by flocks of squawking ocean terns overhead. They circled for a while, and then took off in search of a more responsive playmate. Varuna wallowed and rolled in a dreary rhythm, going nowhere for two days.

  I had forgotten that there was always a swell on the ocean, and I began to experiment with ways to keep the boat from rolling so uncontrollably with it. First, I tried sheeting in the mainsail as tightly as possible. As Varuna began to roll in one direction, the sail slammed violently to the other side. Every time this happened—about once every fifteen seconds—she shuddered and her rigging emitted resonant twangs. I suffered, too, cringing with every slam until I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “There has to be a way to stop this boat from rolling without the slam,” I thought, and went below, dug out my Learn to Sail book and flipped through it searching for inspiration. “Maybe if I take in a couple reefs,” I said to myself, “it won’t slam as hard.” After shortening the mainsail by two reef points, I anxiously waited for the sharp retort and only heard a soft flapping every now and then. If there was a better way to do it, it was beyond me.

  With the calm, I set about fixing the engine. In order to bleed the fuel system, it was necesary to unscrew two nuts before a little pump could milk the fuel out of the openings until there were no more air bubbles in the fuel line. But I couldn’t get it to work. After a whole lot of pumping, there were still air bubbles in the line. Whenever my father did this, he always got rid of the air. What else did he do when the engine quit? Maybe he changed the filter? This was easier said than done. He had given me a special extractor that wound around the filter with a handle to give leverage. I slid it on and pushed and pulled. No response. I pushed a little harder. Still nothing. I positioned my foot on the handle and exerted all my force, twisting the filter canister out of shape, and then gave up. Two weeks later, in Bermuda, a mechanic who had to remove the filter with a vice grip told me I had been trying to unscrew it in the wrong direction.

  During the evenings of the previous winter, after delivering messages on my bicycle, I had tried to study books on sailing and took night courses in coastal and celestial navigation. I passed the coastal course,
having sailed aboard Pathfinder, but flunked the celestial navigation course, probably as a result of exhaustion after biking all day and not being able to keep my eyes open for the two hours of celestial triangle theory. Photocopying my father’s mail-order course, I figured I’d learn the techniques along the way. It had been easy to procrastinate during the past few days because I had seen and talked to enough ships on the radio and they had given me my position with the aid of their sophisticated electronics. But now I needed to get cracking and teach myself celestial navigation.

  I sat on deck with the sextant, pointing it into the sun, burning my pupils through the two mirrors, aligning the sun with the horizon to determine the exact angle between the two. The second they were lined up perfectly, I looked at my watch and recorded the precise time of the angle. With these two vital bits of information, taken twice a day with about a four-hour interval, one is theoretically supposed to be able to figure out a position, or “fix.” I tried and retried it; the fixes just didn’t seem right.

  It was hard to imagine that these books, my calculations, the plotting sheets, the compass rose and the sliding rulers could ever possibly tell me where I was. It would have been a luxury to have a SatNav aboard Varuna—a machine where I could press a button and get my position from a satellite. Not only was a SatNav too expensive—probably over a thousand dollars—but my father and I had a mutual understanding that I would learn how to do everything on board without the aid of electronics. With electronics, there would always be the chance of failure or of power loss, just as I had now with no engine to recharge my batteries. Where would I be then, if I didn’t know the age-old concepts of navigation? I sat for hours double-checking the instructions, taking sight after sight, trying to get two lines of position that agreed, until I got dizzy and the figures blurred.

  On the evening of June 4, the barometer began to drop and I quickly set to battening things down aboard to prepare for some more nasty weather. Anything that could fly around in the cabin below was stowed: books, the pressure cooker, tools, food and clothes. Double-checking all the lines that were holding the deflated rubber dinghy securely in the cockpit, I took down the bigger genoa, replaced it with a smaller working jib, and took in a reef point on the mainsail, shortening its size by about four feet.

  By the next morning, the swell had grown and strong gusts began to blow erratically from different directions. The sky transformed itself before my eyes into a dark ceiling of swirly gloom. I went below and bundled up into my warmest clothes and foul-weather gear. It was important to prepare myself and the boat before the worst of the storm hit because, after that, every trip up to the pitching foredeck would be extremely wet and risky.

  I set and reset the Monitor, repositioning its vane into the wind, trying to find the point at which it would work best. I shortened the mainsail another reef point, but Varuna’s till pitched violently in the worsening conditions. There was still too much sail up. Finally, I took the working jib down altogether and shortened the main down to its last reef point until it was almost the size of a handkerchief.

  With so little canvas up, Varuna rode the waves, pointing into the 40-knot winds. When the seas crashed over her bow, they were deflected by the spray hood shielding the cockpit, rather than hitting us broadside. All through the sleepless night and next day, I sat crouched in the cockpit, the life harness connecting me to the boat, and watched the sea change from a placid lake into this pot of boiling bouillon. Varuna pitched and yawed through waves that seemed as high as her mast. Jags of lightning spewed forth from the sky, one right after another, heralding thunderclaps that seemed loud enough to crack open the world. I counted the time between the lightning and the thunder trying to figure out the distance between Varuna and the bolts, “One alligator, two alii—” KABOOM! “Oh no, they’re practically on top of us!”

  For almost two days, we battled in the teeth of the storm, endlessly changing sails, changing tacks and changing direction. When it was possible to tear my eyes away from it all, I went below for refuge in Varuna’s wet, coffinlike little cabin. Although 26 feet long, she was only 71/2 feet wide, with a living area below of about 15 feet, most of which was taken up with the bunk, sink, stove and head. There was no standing headroom, and even if there were, it would have been virtually impossible to remain standing anyway.

  Heeled over on her side at 35 degrees, Varuna was like the house of no gravity at a carnival; to get around below I had to stretch from handhold to handhold like a chimp, or crawl along on the tilted sides of the boat. My bunk was soaked through from the leaking chain plate and from opening and closing the companionway slats, so I curled up in my rain gear on the lee side of the boat and tried to take my mind off the conditions with a book. Every hour, I went back out into the cockpit to check the horizon for ships, check our progress and adjust the sails. Lurching to the companionway, I removed the slats and timed my move to avoid the waves crashing over the deck, jumped outside and shoved them back into place before a wave could thunder down into the cabin. One second too early or too late and my bunk would be soaked anew.

  I pulled out my meteorology books and charts, trying to understand those weather systems; the explanations seemed to be written in Chinese. Unbeknownst to me, the depressions were huge spirals—some 100 miles wide—rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise south of the equator, careening across the landmasses and the seas like whirling dervishes. As each depression approached, the barometer dropped; next, the wind gradually increased, eventually dying down, which indicated that we were in the center, and after a short while piping up like crazy from the opposite direction, meaning that we were sailing through the other side of the circle.

  It would be two years before I would properly learn how to use a depression to advantage and have it actually help propel Varuna toward our destination. But right now I made the mistake of sailing directly into the depression. Not knowing any better, I wasted days of progress and completely jumbled my already shaky navigation. And, exhaustingly, Varuna had to be put through every point of sail: tacking into the wind, beam reaching perpendicular to the wind, quarter reaching ahead of the wind and finally sailing directly downwind with the sails boomed out on either side of the boat like butterfly wings. “Until I get the hang of reading the conditions,” I reasoned, “I’ll just have to muddle along and wait them out.”

  I was beginning to wonder exactly where we were. During the storm, it had been impossible to take a sight with the sextant. Not only was the sun blocked by clouds, but in order to take a sight, I had to retain a semblance of balance, and Varuna had been lurching through the waves like a bronco. June 8 was my first opportunity to pick up the sextant and, once again, aim it at the sun. With the mirrors, I lined up the sun and the horizon umpteen times saying, “Aha, I think I’ve got it.” When I noted the time and angle and got to the paper with the myriad of calculations, my vision began to blur.

  All over my chart I had plotted my DR or “dead reckoning” positions, the positions where I had thought we were during the storm, figured out by just advancing the last confirmed position with time and speed. Nothing added up. As a shot in the dark, I turned on the FM radio to see if I could hear anything from Bermuda. I heard a Canadian station and my mind went blank. Good grief! Did this mean we were up near Canada? It couldn’t be. If that were true, we had been heading in the opposite direction from Bermuda for days. I worked and reworked the calculations until my eyes crossed. Even though they wouldn’t come out the same way twice, I decided to trust my instincts, carry on and follow the original course.

  As the saying goes, after every storm, there is a calm. The day of calm that followed the second weather system was a chance to dry out the boat and clean up. The shredded ice in the icebox had just about disappeared and I sat over my books slurping all the yogurts that would soon go bad. I began to distrust the calms, looking at them as great voids, just waiting to be filled by hellfire. I wasn’t far wrong.

  The next sy
stem that hit was different from the last two. It wasn’t a spiraling depression. The sky remained wintery blue and clear instead of dark and stormy, but the winds were very strong at 35 knots. Varuna had her smallest sails up as we punched into the enormous waves kicked up by the Gulf Stream. It was my tenth day at sea, the batteries were dead and there was no more power to use the VHF radio. But, despite the deteriorating weather, there was the sense of a different energy in the air. On a hunch, I went below, grabbed the radio-direction-finder from its bracket and took it up to the cockpit. As I turned it on, to my amazement a faint signal came through the static in the headphones. Scanning the RDF slowly around the horizon, I heard the signal become stronger and louder until it homed in on the direction of St. David’s Head RDF beacon in Bermuda. These beacons emit signals only out to a certain radius—St. David’s Head was 150 miles—so at that moment we were somewhere within 150 miles of our landfall. The built-in compass on top of the RDF gave the exact heading. We were home free!

  “All my navigation problems are over,” I sang. “All we have to do is head east enough of the beacon to avoid the reefs.” I double-checked the chart. The reefs surrounding Bermuda begin 30 miles offshore. If we made our approach to the east, we would be safe. This was no time for guesswork. I checked and rechecked my lines of position, hoping for the best.

  During this clear-sky gale, I couldn’t leave the cockpit and sat outside watching, wondering and worrying if I was doing the right thing. There was no one to help me figure anything out, no one to answer any of my thousands of questions, no one to tell me if I had too much sail up or if it was normal that Varuna was heeled over 35 degrees and if water should be pouring over the rail into the cockpit. I looked up at the mast and rigging and hoped that because they were new, they could handle the extra pressure of whatever I might be doing wrong. The Monitor steered merrily away, right on course, taking on all the waves intended for the helmsman. Varuna held up just as bravely.