The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  Nothing happened next. Even without our guidance, Northern Magic continued on her former path, meeting each wave at an angle on her stern, rising and falling just as before. We sat there for half an hour, reassuring ourselves that we were safe in her hands before we finally went below in relief.

  Inside, it was actually quite comfortable. In the warm homey cabin, free from assault by the wind and rain or being forced to watch those terrible marching waves, everything felt much less dramatic. To some extent, we managed to rest. We had a strong sense that Northern Magic was taking care of us, doing what she was meant to do.

  We each rested in turn while the other kept watch, sticking a head out every few minutes to make sure we weren’t being run over by another vessel. In fact, our radar showed there were three large ocean liners within a few miles of us, all of us retaining our positions relative to each other. The storm was so bad even the big ships had given up trying to fight it and were riding it out the way we were. There was little we could do except keep a good watch and hope it would end soon.

  We were nervous the storm would prevent us from entering the harbour in the morning. With winds and seas this high, we simply could not afford to try to enter the narrow channel. Losing control of our boat and being driven onto rocks would be the most dangerous kind of disaster. If the storm continued, we would have to head back out to sea or continue north to the next harbour, about two hundred miles away. Either way, it would mean several more days at sea. The very thought of this filled us with despair.

  Around midnight, the Inmarsat alarm went off. I jumped to it, hoping for news. I could have kissed the machine when I read that the storm was moving away from us and the winds would begin dropping within six hours. The knowledge that an end was in sight made the small hours of that dreadful morning immeasurably easier to bear. It looked like our nightmare passage would soon be over.

  I tried to rest while Herbert took over his watch, but sleep was impossible. The best I could manage was a fitful doze. Around 3:00 a.m., I was jerked out of bed by the Inmarsat again; now only three hours remained before our deliverance. How I loved those faithful Australian forecasters, working late at night to send us those much-needed words of hope.

  By five in the morning the wind and waves were distinctly calmer, dipping below forty knots for the first time in almost twenty-four hours. We were now fewer than twenty miles from land.

  At six-thirty we raised Brisbane on VHF radio and asked what the conditions were for entering the harbour.

  “No worries,” answered the harbourmaster in his Queensland drawl. “It’s a great day here. We’ve got fifteen knots of wind, and you’ll have no problem at all.”

  Herbert and I were almost numb with exhaustion as Michael woke up from his makeshift bed in the salon and said brightly, “Well, that wasn’t so bad!”

  All we could do was look at him in stunned silence, then head back up to the cockpit to raise our sails and at last turn our battered boat for shore.

  10

  Mechanical Mutinies Down Under

  Our planned seven-day passage from New Caledonia had taken twelve days. Herbert and I had not eaten or slept in the previous thirty-six hours. Practically every muscle from my thighs to my shoulders was stiff and sore. My right arm, which had taken the brunt of the steering during the storms and for months before, felt numb to the wrist. My right thumb was so useless I couldn’t even hold a pen. That arm continued to be numb for another whole month.

  Although I hadn’t been seasick during the worst of the storm – protected by adrenalin, perhaps – that morning I found myself racked with nausea and bent over the toilet repeatedly with the dry heaves. It took us until seven-thirty that night to make our way around the reefs and into the safety of the harbour.

  We jumped to the dock to stretch our legs and look for a suitable spot to kiss the ground. A sandy-haired man with a big moustache sauntered over and spoke to us through a fence. “Welcome to Australia,” he said with a broad smile and that unmistakable Aussie accent. “You’ve made it.”

  “We are very happy to be here,” we answered, shaking our heads with a rueful smile. “You have no idea what we have been through.”

  “Oh yes I do,” he answered, his grin suddenly replaced by a grave expression that chilled my heart. “You’ve been through some real bad storms. You can congratulate yourselves that you made it. Lots of boats didn’t. There have been four boats lost, and at least four people are dead.”

  Those words hit us like a shot. Until that moment, the enormity of our escape hadn’t really penetrated our fog of fatigue. I staggered back as questions crowded into my mind. Who had died? Did we know them? What happened to their boats? Had we really been that close to ultimate disaster? Northern Magic, our tough and sturdy little ship, had brought our family through unscathed. Although safe at last in Australia, Herbert and I found ourselves reeling.

  The winds had blown Northern Magic to Scarborough, just north of Brisbane, a lovely little town on Queensland’s west coast. It was now our second day Down Under, and we were still suffering from fatigue, shock, and disorientation from our difficult passage, especially once we learned that one of the boats lost in the storm belonged to friends. They had been rescued by helicopter as they stood knee-deep in water inside their sinking boat.

  At Northern Magic, there was a knock on the boat, and a pleasant-looking gentleman named Brian Shoobert introduced himself. He was a representative of the local Rotary Club, and he was at our service. (My father is a Rotarian in Calgary, and he had sent an e-mail about our arrival to his counterparts in Australia.) Over the next few days, Brian really did put himself at our disposal, doing all manner of favours for us.

  But the best thing Brian did was to introduce us to Steven and Melissa Griffith. A few days after our first meeting, Brian tracked us down on one of our early morning jogs along the waterfront. Hailing us from his car, he introduced us to a smiling couple in their thirties. From the adoring looks they gave each other, they were clearly head over heels in love. It turned out they had been married only a few weeks. On that day, loading us down with apple pie and chocolate milk, Steve and Melissa gathered us under their wings and adopted us.

  Steve was a studious-looking chiropractor, understated but with a sly sense of humour. Melissa was a gorgeous buxom blonde who oozed warmth and generosity, sprinkling her speech with words like “darling” and “divine.” They invited us to their “love shack,” a charming two-bedroom bungalow, for dinner. Then they gave us the keys to their house so that we could go there the next day while they were at work and finish off the leftovers. At first, we were a little shy about intruding into their home when they weren’t there, but Melissa insisted that their house was ours and that she’d take offence if she found I was hand washing on the boat instead of using her machine and backyard clothesline.

  I must say how much fun I had with Melissa’s electric washing machine after a year of washing by hand. In fact, many of the things we took for granted at home rated as major pleasures in Australia: grapes, fresh milk, non-soggy crackers, frozen waffles, and the biggest and best of these, the long, hot shower. Cruising had certainly given us real appreciation for the luxuries that seemed like necessities back at home.

  A few days before Christmas, on a hot, humid, Queensland summer day, there was another knock on our boat. I emerged through the companionway, and there was a young woman with a big smile on her face.

  “You must be Laura,” I said, climbing out of the cabin. I had been told to expect a visit from a friend of my sister.

  “Yes, I’m Laura,” she said, “but I’m not your sister’s friend. I’m Laura Robin, from the Ottawa Citizen, and I’m here to deliver your mail.” In her hand was a gigantic plastic bag filled with hundreds of letters, all tied up with a huge velvet bow.

  “Yeah, right,” I said with a cynical smile. I, the worldly-wise traveller, was not going to be taken in that easily.

  “No really, I work for the Ottawa Citizen,” she
insisted.

  “I don’t believe you,” I answered. Yet some tendrils of doubt were now beginning to sprout.

  “Do you want to see some ID?” she said, laughingly. “It’s true! The Citizen actually sent me here to deliver these Christmas cards. All these people have written to you.”

  I looked more carefully at the bulging sack of letters, and it occurred to me that she might actually be telling the truth. The camera-bearing photographer standing behind Laura’s shoulder also tended to lend credibility to her claim. But it was the letters that clinched it. It was true; hundreds of people, readers of my weekly reports back home, had actually sent us Christmas greetings. I was stunned. There were six hundred letters.

  As Herbert and I, helped by the two older children, began opening the letters, tears began rolling down our cheeks. We started reading through our tears and couldn’t stop until we had read every last one. Many of them contained small gifts. I don’t have the words to express how much each and every one of these letters meant to us. It was the first time we understood the degree to which people back at home had been caught up in our adventures, hoping and praying for us as the months went by. The impact on us was enormous, and the downcast spirits we’d been struggling with since the storm seemed to wash right away.

  We spent four months at our home base near Brisbane, fixing up Northern Magic in a major binge of painting and repair work, and waiting out the cyclone season. During that time we did an extensive overland camping trip, had a visit from my parents, encountered kangaroos, emus, possums, and koalas, and sent the kids to an Australian school. Our life was busy and full of adventure and new friends.

  Gradually, the sweltering hot summer days began melting away, until there was a refreshing cool tang to the humid evening air. Autumn was coming to Australia, and it was the signal for sailboats to loose their dock lines and begin dispersing on the winds. The cooler temperatures were quenching cyclonic activity in the warmer waters north near the equator, making it safe at last to continue on our track. We celebrated Easter on our last day in Scarborough before commencing our long trek north.

  Just before leaving, we received a wonderful gift from my father, a $15,000 piece of equipment known as the Windhunter. It was a state-of-the-art autopilot and wind-operated self-steering device that was even supposed to generate energy, truly the answer to our dreams after endless hours of hand steering across the Pacific.

  We left Scarborough with high hopes for our fresh start at sea, but the Windhunter didn’t work. No matter what we tried, it would neither steer us nor produce energy. And the British manufacturer proved unwilling to help. This, coupled with a seemingly endless series of other mechanical problems, most of them involving brand-new equipment Herbert had installed in Scarborough, made the next two months one of the most painful and frustrating periods of our circumnavigation.

  We pushed our way shakily up the east coast of Australia, dogged by mechanical and steering problems, seasick and heartsick, all the way. Eventually we made it behind the southernmost end of the Great Barrier Reef. Now we had the world’s largest coral reef to shield us from the big Pacific swell, which is generated by distant winds and continues sloshing right along for thousands of kilometres until interrupted by land.

  Protected by the reef, we discovered a magnificent Pacific Ocean that was, for the first time, truly pacific. With almost no wind, we found ourselves motoring alongside leaping dolphins in a huge, glassy pond. This was quite an unaccustomed feeling, because in the open ocean, even without wind, that long restless swell is always present. But here it was supremely calm, with only the dull roar of the motor to detract from a feeling of total peace. Christopher actually woke up one morning saying sleepily that he had dreamed we had been on a passage overnight.

  “We were on a passage, sweetie,” I said with a smile, “and we still are.”

  We had a very exciting time at the small town of Bowen, when we witnessed a horrific harbour fire. It had begun on a catamaran and, whipped by high winds, spread rapidly to six fishing trawlers. Herbert noticed it when the blaze was in its very early stages, being drawn on deck after hearing a sound like a gunshot. Boat after boat went ablaze, burned through its mooring lines, and drifted into the next boat or launched exploding propane tanks like giant rocket-propelled grenades into other vessels. Fortunately, our boat was safe, since we were in another part of the harbour, but my video of the fire and its huge propane explosions was played for days on all the national Australian TV networks. Eventually, my video made it onto NBC’s World’s Most Amazing Videos and was shown all over North America.

  Having filmed the conflagration and been interviewed on TV, we became instant celebrities. Even a policeman made an appearance at our boat on a jet ski and asked if he could get a copy of the tape. The fire department wanted one to study as a training video. The local paper wrote a little story about us entitled, “Baptism of Fire for Canadian Visitors.” I have to confess I was strutting pretty proudly around town, especially after I was stopped by a lady at the library who said – and I kid you not – “Hey! You’re that famous TV personality!”

  We continued up the coast, from Bowen to Townsville, and Cairns. Like a festering boil, our problems with our new self-steering system came to a head. When the Windhunter wasn’t sending us in 360-degree circles, it was making us waddle from side to side like a drunken duck. Our relationship with the manufacturer became very strained when they refused to answer our questions or help us troubleshoot the problem. They tried to stop us from e-mailing them – our only practical means of communication – and insisted we send faxes instead. Passage after passage we tried different things to make the system work. Our daily – and hourly – struggles with it, and our guilt that Dad’s generous present was giving us more anguish than it had saved, were constant companions during our problem-fraught weeks of sailing up Australia’s windy east coast. Finally, we had no choice but to admit defeat.

  In Cairns we removed the failed Windhunter from the boat and replaced it with a new unit, costing a third as much, also paid for by my father. The autopilot we chose, the TMQ, was an Australian-made hydraulic self-steering system that had been recommended by a number of other cruisers. The gleaming TMQ was to be our knight in shining armour, whose job it was to free us at last from the tyranny of the wheel, and of the Windhunter. In a fit of optimism, the boys decided its initials stood for The Magnificent Q, suggesting that it was superior to our original old electric autopilot, Q (named after the omnipotent but capricious Star Trek character).

  As for the Windhunter (now re-named Windblunder), we packaged it up and returned it to England, demanding a full refund on the grounds that after two months of daily trials and two thousand kilometres of sailing, it continued to turn us in circles and was manifestly unsafe. My father started digging around on the Internet, and found more than a dozen other cases of people – including engineers and, literally, a rocket scientist – who’d had similar experiences. In fact, other customers had picketed the company and even involved the police in England. I was beside myself with anger over the way the company had treated us. My days became filled with impotent rage at how my father’s generous gift had gone so wrong.

  Eventually, Windhunter agreed to refund the price of the unit. They refurbished our autopilot and resold it, but contrary to what they’d promised, they only refunded three-quarters of what Dad had paid. They suggested they would refund the rest only if I retracted what I had said about the unit in the Citizen. This, of course, I could not do. Soon after, my father assembled a group of more than a dozen equally angry former Windhunter owners and began organizing a class action lawsuit. Windhunter declared bankruptcy. They now continue in business, although under a new name. My father ended up losing more than five thousand dollars.

  We left Cairns for an overnight sail to Cooktown on a sunny, breezy day. Our mood was as upbeat as the weather. It was our first chance to try the confidently named Magnificent Q and free ourselves at last from endless hour
s at the wheel. So hopeful were we, we couldn’t wait one minute longer than necessary and actually called it into action inside the narrow channel leading out of the Cairns harbour. We put ourselves right in the middle of that long avenue of red and green markers and engaged our new autopilot for the first time.

  Northern Magic responded by shooting joyfully down that course like an arrow, straight and true. A flood of relief and joy broke over us, and all five of us sat in the cockpit, whooping and hollering in delight. As the wild green mountains of Cairns receded behind us, we broke out soft drinks and peanuts and had an impromptu party.

  From that first moment on, The Magnificent Q performed flawlessly. For the next three years, it steered us all the way back to Canada without so much as a hiccup. Even in the North Atlantic, where we were battered and slewed around mercilessly by violent waves, The Magnificent Q performed heroically. How we loved it! Never again did we have to worry about self-steering. Soon, our terrible memories of anguish and struggle with the benighted Windblunder receded into the past. We began to shake off our mechanical problems and learned to enjoy life again.

  After Cairns, the Great Barrier Reef presses closer and closer towards the mainland, making navigation increasingly difficult. The famous navigator James Cook explored here during his world-changing voyage on Endeavour in 1770. He was unaware the reef even existed and had no idea he was heading into the world’s most dangerous waters. Endeavour sailed the same path we were now following 229 years later almost to the day. On a calm and moonlit night, just like the one we were now enjoying, Endeavour smashed into a coral reef, holing her hull and almost putting an end to that historic voyage. Unlike Captain Cook, we had charts, lights, and GPS to guide us, and as we carefully picked our way through the labyrinth of reefs, we couldn’t help marvel at Cook’s amazing feat of navigation. At one point, there was just a small channel through the large patches of coral blocking our way. Just as Herbert was gingerly piloting us through in the darkness, carefully plotting our position on the chart every few minutes, the lights of two large ocean liners and a flock of fishing boats converged on us alarmingly, all jostling for sea room.