Seven at Sea

by Erik Orton

  Once into Fajardo Bay, we quickly set the anchor and I opened the engine compartment. My palms were sweating. This was an auspicious beginning. Our weather window was open, and I didn’t want to miss it. I sighed, climbed down into the engine compartment, and looked around.

  The throttle cable had come loose. It was literally as simple as tightening a screw, which I did. Karina started the engines and moved the throttle forward and back. Everything worked fine. I wiped my palms on my shorts and climbed out. I closed the engine compartment and we pulled anchor. I pulled down my sunglasses and settled in. “It’s no big deal. Everything will be fine,” I told myself.

  Chapter 13

  80% Boring, 15% Beautiful, 5% Life-Threatening

  The Atlantic Ocean, North of Puerto Rico

  5 Months, 5 Days aboard Fezywig

  ERIK

  The reason we had left Culebra was because there would be no wind for days. That’s what we wanted, at least for the Mona Passage. We wanted flat, boring, and safe. That’s what we got. Reading made me queasy, the scenery changed slowly, and I could take only so many naps. So we motored along listening to Jim Gaffigan’s Dad Is Fat. I like Jim Gaffigan. I think he’s funny and I can relate to him. We both belong to an exclusive club: the married, father-of-five, living in a two-bedroom-apartment-in-Manhattan club. I think there are maybe six of us in that club. So it’s like we’re brothers.

  We found out it takes quite a while to sail the length of Puerto Rico. We’d left early in the morning, and by 2:00 a.m. the next morning we were getting close to the other end of the island. We’d zigzagged our way along the coast to avoid having the wind directly on our stern. No more accidental jibes at night, thank you very much. The last town along the coast was Arecibo. We were cutting in toward it before turning out and committing to cross the Mona Passage.

  I prepared to jibe when, in the abyss that is the open sea at night, I saw something off our starboard stern. It was big, black, and close.

  “Holy crap!” I shouted.

  “What is it?” Emily came out to the cockpit.

  It was a boat. A black, silent boat. It took me two seconds to realize it was a coast guard boat, but with its lights off. Their goal was to sneak up on us. What they didn’t know was we were about to turn—right into them. Boats don’t come with turn signals.

  After I pointed them out to Emily, they turned on their searchlight and “looked us up and down.” I waved. What else do you do? There was nothing stealthy about us. We had all our running lights on. All the lights in the main salon were on. Emily and I were even wearing our big bulky orange nerd life jackets. We didn’t mess around with safety when it came to overnight passages. We were the opposite of Miami Vice.

  After another look they seemed to conclude we were harmless, or least not carrying cocaine, and peeled off. But jeez! Really? Did they have to sneak up on us like that? If they hadn’t been on that boat with a mounted machine gun, I would have punched them in the arm.

  We sailed on through the night and crossed the Mona Passage. It was a complete non-event. Flat and windless, as we’d hoped. We motored along at five or six knots and reached the other side by the end of the next day. That’s when it got interesting.

  We were skirting the northeast coast of Hispaniola.1 It was right around noon when our starboard engine sputtered to a stop.

  “Seriously?” Alison said. She and SJ raised their heads from the cockpit table. Karina, who was filming giant clouds with my smartphone, stopped to find out what had happened. Eli and Lily kept watching Wallace and Gromit—surely this did not concern them. Emily popped her head through our cabin hatch where she’d been napping.

  It was one of those dying engine sounds that was actually peaceful. In fact, it sounded familiar. It didn’t seize up and grind to a halt. Even so, I could feel sweat pushing through my skin. We had a lot of miles to go. I tried restarting the engine. That didn’t work. I opened up the engine compartment and checked the oil and sail drive fluid levels. They looked good. I went below, opened up the floor in our cabin, and tapped on the fuel tank. Big, empty, echoey sounds. Somehow I’d miscalculated the fuel consumption. Because of the lack of wind, we’d motored and motor-sailed most of the way.

  “I’m not sure where I screwed up,” I told Emily. “It’s pretty basic math.”

  The truth was we hadn’t done too much motoring up to this point. These were the longest distances we’d covered in a single stretch. And our fuel gauges didn’t work. Peter on Day Dreamer had convinced me trying to fix fuel gauges and keep them working was a fool’s errand. Whether he was right or not, we didn’t have functioning fuel gauges, and now we had to deal with at least one empty tank, possibly two.

  “What do you think?” Emily asked. “Should we stop and get more fuel?” It was a good question. I didn’t know the answer.

  “Let’s think this through out loud,” I said. “We still have some fuel in the port engine, I think. I’ll open it up and try to see how much. Plus we still have two jerry cans. They’re five gallons each. Let’s pour some in to make sure it’s actually a fuel issue. Assuming it is, we can sail.” That was my logic.

  Emily continued, “The scary part’s over. We crossed the Mona Passage.”

  “Are you comfortable if we try and sail the rest of the way?” I asked.

  “I think we’ll be okay. What do you think?”

  “We know there’s fuel in Matthew Town. There’s not really anywhere to stop in the DR without backtracking. Let’s check the engine first.”

  I unlashed one of the yellow fuel jugs and pulled out a hose. Karina held a funnel at the top of the hose and I did my best to pour in fuel while we sailed along. We decided to put in only two gallons. If this was an engine issue, I didn’t want to put a whole jug of fuel into an engine that didn’t work.

  I climbed into the engine compartment and pushed the little metal lever with my thumb to manually pump fuel into the line. All those repair attempts were paying off. Karina turned the key and the engine started up. I closed my eyes and smiled.

  “Okay, you can turn the engine off,” I called from the compartment. Karina killed the engine. It was time to sail.

  “Matthew Town?” Emily asked.

  “Matthew Town,” I said.

  The sun had gone down and we were moving fairly well under sail. It was nice to have the quiet for a change. That’s one of the peaceful things about a sailboat. You can move yourself, everyone and everything aboard, by harnessing the power of nature. We were well stocked from Fajardo and no one was seasick so we had a good lunch: homemade bread with canned New Zealand butter and strawberry jam. Dinner was black bean soup with corn chips and salsa. We cleaned up and were enjoying a quiet evening, moving toward bedtime for the little kids, when I thought I saw something over my shoulder. No ninja coast guard boat this time. It was the opposite. This was a light. I looked behind me but it wasn’t there. A few minutes later I saw it again. I missed it a second time. I turned around and stood still, looking off the stern.

  We were north of Samaná Bay, Dominican Republic, when I saw the clouds light up like a flickering light bulb. My hands went cold. “There wasn’t even supposed to be rain,” I said to myself. Now this.

  “Emily, we’ve got lightning,” I called down into the boat. She was in the middle of putting Eli and Lily to bed. She immediately came up on deck. We both looked off the stern until it flashed again. We both looked up at our tall metal mast. We went to our charts.

  I started to spill out my thoughts. “Samaná Bay is directly south of us. It’s the only place to ditch for another hundred miles.” I looked over my shoulder again to watch the sky. “The entrance is super out of the way, and even once inside it’s a long slog to any kind of anchorage.”

  “But if that storm comes up on us, it’d be better to be in there than out here,” Emily said.

  “True. But it will use up m
ost of our fuel.”

  “Can we get more in there?” she asked.

  “We’d have to.” We both looked at the sky. Another flicker. “Why don’t we do this,” I started. “Let’s sail toward the bay. If the lightning looks like it’s moving closer, we’ll turn on the engines and high tail it in. If we sail for a bit and it keeps its distance, we can always change course.”

  “It still makes me nervous,” Emily said.

  “Me too.”

  We pointed the boat toward the massive bay. We watched the sky for a long, slow, sweaty-handed hour. The sky reminded me of a vintage light bulb with a shorted power cord; lots of bright flickers, but electricity never came down out of the sky. There were no bolts of lightning, just flashes up high, wrapped in the gauzy haze of clouds. Sheet lightning. If I hadn’t wanted to pee my pants, I probably would have thought it was pretty.

  The little kids were now asleep. Emily came and watched the night sky with me. There were still stars overhead, but we knew how quickly that could change.

  “Looks like it’s keeping its distance,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. We kept watching. “I think it’s pretty far away.”

  The older girls were below, reading in their beds. We would fill them in when we changed watch.

  We turned the boat northwest toward Matthew Town.

  We were grateful for our kids’ trust in us. We were all in new territory in terms of risk, but we hadn’t come here by chance. This was by design. We’d made deliberate efforts to prepare and be safe. We’d installed a new radio with distress-broadcast abilities. We had all the necessary safety equipment aboard. We’d trained and practiced together for years. We had a good plan for this crossing, including contingencies should something go wrong. But we’ve long taught our kids, all life is a risk. Driving a car is a risk. Getting on a plane is a risk. Getting out of bed is a risk. Quitting a job is a risk. Taking a job is a risk. Going on an adventure is a risk. But what about not going? There are big risks that come with playing it safe. We teach our kids, the safest thing is to learn how to handle risk.

  A friend once said to me, “I want to take risks. But I don’t know how it will turn out.” It’s an inside joke in our family reminding us that we can’t predict the future. All we can do is our best. Here, just north of the Dominican Republic, we’d done our best. We trusted ourselves and we trusted each other. We sailed on through the night.

  There was practically no sign of civilization on the northern Dominican coast. We sailed past uninhabited mile after uninhabited mile, not seeing any lights on shore: no houses, stores, or streetlamps, just a black ridgeline against the night sky. We were on our own. Sheet lightning continued behind us in the distance.

  Luperón was our last chance to ditch. It was a small cove before reaching the Dominican-Haitian border. As a deep, well-protected harbor, it made for a good hurricane hole. It was one of the stops on the itinerary I’d sent the insurance company. Legend has it Christopher Columbus once sailed his ships into this harbor to avoid a storm.2 If we were going to stop anywhere, it was here. The only thing we wanted at this point was fuel and an updated weather forecast, but the guidebooks showed no fueling docks, and the storm seemed to be holding off.

  After Luperón the coast fell away to the southwest while we continued northwest, making a straight line for Matthew Town. If anything went wrong, the only places to go were Haiti or Cuba. I found myself looking at Guantánamo Bay not as a name on the news but a port of call in event of a storm, injury, or some other accident. That was a direction I did not want to go.

  We sailed past the lights of Luperón and watched as the coast beyond became black again and faded into the distance.

  We were three days out from Fajardo. My throat went dry at the thought of leaving the coastline. I felt like my captain’s training wheels were coming off. The only thing to do was continue sailing northwest and keep listening to Jim Gaffigan.

  Our friend John said, “Sailing is eighty percent boredom, fifteen percent beautiful, and five percent life-threatening.” I was starting to understand what he was talking about.

  We’d left Fajardo on Sunday. It was now Thursday. When motoring, we were making about six knots. Sailing, we were now lucky to break four knots. There’s nothing quite as tedious as waffling around at two or three miles per hour in the middle of the ocean.

  Thursday I woke up and took a shower. We’d been rotating through night watches for the past three nights. Two hours on, two hours off. The girls were still nervous about the lightning, so they woke me up during my two-hour bits of sleep to tell me about it. I poked my head out of my hatch and watched the sky. Once I could tell it was still hundreds of miles away, I comforted them, closed the hatch, and grumbled into my pillow as I tried to get a few more minutes of sleep before I was back on watch. I like to think I’m generally a congenial person, but when my sleep gets broken up, my cheerfulness fades fast.

  I dare say even the most organized of families would struggle with this kind of sleep schedule. We had been underway four days nonstop. Beyond breakfast, lunch, and dinner we had no structure to our days. Our boat looked slightly like the sloth enclosures at the zoo; a bunch of long-armed, funny-faced mammals sprawled across any flat surface, trying to find shade and stay adequately hydrated with the minimum amount of physical exertion. When any physical exertion did occur it was mild at best and was accomplished at a pace even slower than the speed of our boat. One exception was when Jane asked if she could get in the water and swim. She pushed on the stern and kicked her feet. The boat went from one knot to two knots. It didn’t take long for her to remember we were sailing over the deepest spot of the Atlantic Ocean, the Puerto Rico Trench: 27,500 feet deep. We hadn’t seen any sharks, and they were not likely, but imagining what five miles of depth could hold will get in your head. She got “tired” and got back in.

  Our stomachs stabilized, and we’d long since finished Jim Gaffigan’s Dad Is Fat in its entirety. But we still had gobs of time on our hands. Karina wrote a new song and wanted to make a music video, so she was shooting footage with my iPhone.

  How to tell what I’ve felt

  Find my fit, find myself

  Ignorance and impatience are a bad mix

  Get out of the muck, ask for too much,

  Go with your gut, and make your own luck

  As mountains of clouds keep rolling by

  Castles I’ve built up for myself up in my sky

  Most of my ideas won’t fit inside my wallet

  But if I hear a good band name you know I’m gonna call it

  And keep building my castles in my sky

  The rest of us were too drained for philosophy or poetry. We made a list: “How Long Does It Take to Sail from Puerto Rico to the Bahamas?” Here are a few:

  • Longer than it takes Mom to get a tan (she’s a redhead)

  • Longer than it takes Dad to put a shirt on (I hate wearing shirts)

  • Let’s say Congress balanced the budget

  • Long enough for Eli to reenact the Lego Movie five times (he’d memorized most of it while underway and could reenact entire thirty-minute sequences)

  • Longer than a community production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle3

  • Let’s say global warming has run its course

  • Let’s say all our kids have now gone through puberty

  • Let’s say Eli is now shaving

  • Think of downloading Gone with the Wind over a dial-up connection

  • Remember plate tectonics?

  This was all the eighty-percent boring part John had talked about. I would say the sheet lightning went in the captain’s log as the five-percent life-threatening part. Slowly the island of Great Inagua crept into view over the horizon. This was part of the fifteen-percent beautiful.

  I can’t say it was a particularly beautiful island from a distance.
All the islands were blurring together for me. Although, you know how once you’ve been camping for a week, any warm food with sugar or salt tastes amazing? Or a carpeted floor feels like a Posturepedic mattress compared to your sleeping bag? I’m sure that’s part of why Great Inagua was so beautiful. After being at sea for five days straight, even a slab of concrete probably would have looked good. But now in front of our bow was land, a new country, and it was lined with palm trees and—as best we could tell—a lovely, white, sandy beach.

  It took us most of the afternoon to get close enough to see any details, even with the binoculars. But land was on the horizon, so the sloths turned into something more akin to fifth-grade kids in a math lesson: sitting up straight and looking forward, but brains were still a bit mushy. This is when I started to do some math of my own. Given the distance to Matthew Town and the hours of daylight left, we would get into port after dark. I never like to pull into a new harbor or anchorage in the dark, and this was no exception. However, on the south side of the island were a couple options that looked okay.

  I couldn’t find anything about them in any guidebooks, but then again, this was the nether regions of the Bahamas. The only thing on this large, flat island was a flamingo sanctuary and one of the world’s largest salt manufacturing operations. Let’s say it didn’t have a rich history of tourism.

  “Okay, guys, here are our options,” I said. “We can sail west around to Matthew Town, but we’ll probably arrive after dark.” A general groan ensued. “We can head east to Lantern Head. It’s the next most protected anchorage, but it’s the opposite direction of Matthew Town.” Some head nods. Everyone wanted a flat anchorage. “Or we can go to White Bluff, which is that beach straight ahead. It looks like there’s a hotel or something on shore, but I can’t tell yet.”

  Emily chimed in, “Karina, it’s your birthday tomorrow, so your vote counts double.”

  “I want to record my song while everyone is off the boat,” Karina said, “and then get some Wi-Fi to post my video4 and connect with friends.”