Uncharted

by Kim Brown Seely

  * * *

  Fast-forward fifteen years. From the cockpit I spied my husband on Heron’s stern deck. It was summer in the Northwest, and he was wearing old chinos and a plaid flannel shirt. A gust of wind across the water caught his hair, which was more salt than pepper. Fog coated the cove, the surrounding evergreens swirled in mist. A rigging knife rested easily in one hand. A line of rope in the other.

  So, he was splicing line. I took a long sip of coffee. A pair of binoculars sat at my side. A new book I couldn’t wait to start lay on the table. I was supposed to be practicing knots and line tying but had some sort of mental block against the nautical arts.

  When did my husband learn to splice line? I wondered. Who was this person? How could it be that even after twenty-some years of marriage, there were still pockets, holdover skills from earlier lives I didn’t know?

  We did not need knots to run our house on land just outside Seattle. But here in our new water life, the minute a rope left the store and landed on your boat it was never a rope again. It was a line. Lines and knots are ancient technology, and even in our digital age, they’re indispensable—but up until that year, I’d never tied much more than my shoelaces.

  Evidently, there is only one way to tie knots and cleat lines and coil them, Sam and James and I were learning—the right way, unless you wanted to look like a landlubber. In addition, the minute you take ownership of a boat, you are fighting the elements: wind, water, mildew, mold, rust, decay. A shipshape boat is a matter of character. In our case it was also two people trying to hedge their bets against chaos, disintegration, and disaster.

  My husband and I were in this battle with the elements together. But he was the one with the original hands-on skills. He’d learned how to sail during summers growing up at the Jersey Shore. For years before we met, he also crewed aboard a fifty-one-foot boat named Gannet that raced weekends in Long Island Sound and every two years to Bermuda.

  He completed an end splice on a new dock line so it wouldn’t unravel. This is good! I thought—brushing off Boy Scout skills, these tangible, handheld remnants of maritime culture in Seattle, the city of virtual reality. And although I was a reluctant learner, I vowed to become a decent line coiler and cleater—just the basics—without feeling too threatened by the seamanship gap that loomed as wide as an ocean in our relationship.

  Because if I dwelled on that, I figured, we’d never go anywhere.

  * * *

  It was morning again aboard Heron. A slice of crisp dawn air slipped through the hatch above our bed. We liked to keep the cabin cold at night and slept buried beneath a comforter and worn cotton sheets. But that made the first step out of bed a tough one. And so we burrowed deeper.

  Trying to wake under these circumstances wasn’t easy. In addition to the scent of briny air, like opium for sleeping, there was also the gentle rocking—the lap, lap, lap—of water brushing against the hull. The effect was similar to being an infant rocked in a cradle. Or what I imagined it might be like to be an infant rocked in a cradle. I was a rather large infant, now in my late forties and curled next to my husband, who was in his early fifties. Our New York City days felt lifetimes ago.

  How did we get here? Two middle-aged people naked as oysters, floating in a fifty-four-foot shell of a sailboat while the Northwest tried to warm a new day on the Salish Sea. A girlfriend had texted me while we were still in cell phone range, a few days’ sail north of Seattle: “But where will you sleep?!”

  Now this message was frozen on my phone, a relic from the world of connectivity…There had been no others since.

  Where would we sleep? I opened my eyes, feeling guilty. Heron, or Mighty Heron, as our friends had nicknamed her, was not only a large, seaworthy sailboat, she was a comfortable sailboat. There was honey-colored wood all around—the raised floor beside my berth, the cabinets that wrapped past my ear, the wall at the foot of the bed. Our bed was, in fact, an actual mattress tucked into a wood frame, and beyond the bed, which dominated the boat’s rear cabin like a small island, everything was burnished cherry veneer—the walls, the built-in drawers with their stainless spring-release knobs, even the two slim hanging lockers.

  It was like waking up inside a chestnut, I thought, or maybe a cello case—if the case were made of the same lustrous wood and had the same amplified resinous scent as the cello. No, I thought, drifting off again with the gentle rock, splash…rock, splash…of the hull: It was like waking up inside a cello itself. A cello afloat on a lake, under a sky as vast as the sea.

  And so, we drifted and dreamed. By the time I dragged myself out of bed and walked the four steps from the sailboat’s aft-sleeping cabin to the main salon, Jeff—who was a morning person with the energy of armies, as well as chief underwriter, oil-filter changer, hull cleaner, macerator fixer, ham-radio operator, DJ, and I’ll admit it, captain of this unlikely ark—had already showered and made a pot of coffee.

  “Here, your latte is ready,” he said with a wink, handing me a cup.

  He sat down a foot away, beside the VHF radio, tuning in the marine weather forecast. He was wearing old jeans with a hole worn through the left-rear pocket, a flannel shirt, leather Top-Siders detaching from their soles. He had skin the color of a brown olive, crow’s-feet that wrinkled beside startling blue eyes, dark hair starting to silver at the temples, cropped short. At the crown of his head his hair stood straight up, the kid he once was still mischievously present. We’d been married twenty-five years, not all of them easy, but he’s the kind of man who has a grouchiness that’s surprisingly winning, and the stories he tells still slay me, even though—and here’s the key: I’d heard most of them about a million times before. I sipped my coffee, watched him dial in the VHF.

  A disembodied voice intoned, “Winds moderate, northwest ten to fifteen.”

  “Probably a good day to cross the Strait of Georgia,” my husband said.

  “Sounds great!” I exclaimed, already buzzed on coffee.

  It was Day Four of our Maiden Voyage—a fun two-week family trip that would forever be remembered as the Disastrous Maiden Voyage or the Infamous Maiden Voyage. We were anchored off British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island, and it was still cold on the boat, too cold to do much more than pull on flannel pajamas and slide into my command post on the built-in green leather couch that wraps the dining table and take a quick survey. Past the table—which anchors our twelve-by-fourteen-foot living space and serves as ground zero on Heron—nearly everything we’d need to survive was within arm’s reach. The galley, big enough for one cook at a time, was tucked into an alcove directly across from me. Next to that was another, shorter fir-green leather couch, also built in. That was the extent of our furniture. There were some cherry-veneer cabinets on either side of the small couch: one held shatterproof wineglasses; the other, crucial life-sustaining foods—almonds, dried apricots, potato chips, chocolate chip cookies. Between them was an oblong porthole flanked by two antique-brass ship’s lanterns my husband had carted around since lifting them from his parents’ basement in the seventies, and a few feet of books we planned to read in all our spare time.

  “It’s not a boat, it’s a library!” my husband had quipped a few days earlier, eyeing the books, many of them heavy hardbacks, including a Merriam-Webster dictionary for Scrabble, an exploration section (biographies of Captain James Cook and Joseph Banks and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast), lots of current fiction, some classic fiction (we’re a family obsessed with Moby Dick), and a little history and nonfiction and poetry wedged beneath the portholes so the books wouldn’t tumble too far when Heron was heeled on her side in a stiff wind.

  To my right was a two-foot passage leading to the forward berth, a head, and a tiny paneled office with a fold-down bunk. Our world below, in terms of physical space, consisted of four snug rooms, a warren of concealed lockers, and an engine compartment. But our world, in terms of created space, felt like a free-floating cabin adrift at just the right distance from the shore’s inform
ation overload and nonstop pace.

  Next to the companionway, a wall with a built-in bookshelf crammed with the kinds of books you tend to collect when you’re all hope, heading out for your first season on the water: Chapman Piloting & Seamanship; a Waggoner Cruising Guide, billed as “the Bible for Northwest Cruising”; the daunting Current Atlas: Juan de Fuca Strait to Strait of Georgia, which opened to pages of tables for calculating the Northwest’s strong currents; and the true bible for Northwest waters, Ports and Passes, an annual volume in which tide and current information is listed on a page for each day of the year, including high and low tide. Next to these were guides to the night sky and its constellations (we’d finally learn the stars!), and the pocket-sized Audubon Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest, with its illustrations of sponges and sea anemones, mollusks and snails, jellyfish, oysters, barnacles, crabs and sea stars; working up to all the Northwest seabirds: the loons, the grebes and pelicans, graceful cormorants and egrets. Even the words describing the things we hoped to learn in our new floating world sounded lovely and strange.

  Across from the books was the navigation table, one of Heron’s best places: a built-in desk with a green leather bench and a desktop that lifted to reveal all kinds of useful stuff stashed within. A mess of charts for plotting your course. Notebooks, pens, rulers, tide charts. On the wall adjacent to the nav table was an electrical control panel as complex as a pilot’s, blanketed with marine radios and gauges, and a daunting thirty-seven switches. The switches were labeled: Sockets. Immersion Heater. Engine Battery Charger. Auxiliary Battery Charger. Air Con Pump. Fresh Water Pump. Gray Water Pump. Macerator…All the things that controlled the complex world that made up Mighty Heron’s many systems. Most of them were completely baffling to me.

  As Jeff liked to joke, “If you really want to scare yourself, just lift up one of these floor panels.” Then he’d pry up one of Heron’s floorboards for an unsuspecting visitor and cry “Aaaaahhhh! What is all that down there?” before slamming the panel back in place. Just a glimpse of the dark bilges, with their subterranean tangle of snaking hoses and pipes and dank filters, was enough to make you think about heading straight for land.

  * * *

  Jeff and I had sailed dinghies together before Heron, but neither of us had ever captained anything close to the forty-eight thousand pounds of teak and fiberglass we now commanded, for better or worse. While I fell in love with the notion of the boat as a sort of floating cottage, my husband fell for the very boatness of Heron, her classic lines (to a sailor’s eye), perfectly proportioned to a seventy-five-foot mast and technical rig, the big Yanmar diesel engine, the quiet Kohler generator—and most of all, the way she handled, what she felt like with eighteen knots of wind off the stern quarter. “Not too different from a runaway freight train,” he’d say, only half joking.

  So when we found ourselves about to cross the Strait of Georgia, the 135-mile-long, 20-mile-wide waterway, actually a small sea in its own right, separating Vancouver Island from mainland British Columbia, for the first time, we were all acutely aware—even the boys—how vulnerable we were, how seriously out of our element.

  We were still learning a new language: the very words we used, even words for basic directions, were different. It was never “right” or “left” on the water but instead “starboard” or “port.” Similarly, the front of the boat was always the “foredeck” or “bow”; the back was “aft,” or the “stern.” There were words for parts of the boat we rarely saw, subterranean places where frightening things happened if you weren’t diligent: the bilges (where water could collect), the keel (which could scrape rock or grow barnacles). While we were seated in the center cockpit, our heads were covered from the elements most days by a length of canvas stretched tight called a bimini. The canvas that provided shelter from wind and rain pummeling the bow was the dodger.

  “Let’s raise the main!” one of us had suggested. Finally, we had enough room to point Heron on a beam reach (when the wind comes across the boat at a right angle), and raise and trim the mainsail.

  “Wahoo! It’s blowing seven and a half!” I’d yelped, making light of the Northwest’s notoriously fickle wind.

  “Okay, load up the winch!” Jeff called out.

  One of us grabbed a metal winch handle and fit it into one of two stainless-steel winches, gleaming bright as shiny hubcaps atop the cabin.

  “Let’s go!” urged my husband, who—used to the competitive intensity of Big Yacht Racing, having crewed in open-water races to Bermuda, grinding winches in the midnight rain—was not impressed by his clueless, lackadaisical crew.

  And for good reason.

  “Uh, which one is it again?” I asked, eyeing the eight lines arrayed atop the cabin.

  “Which one do you think it is? The one that says Outhaul!” snapped the captain.

  I took over the helm while Jeff showed the boys how to wrap the thick blue outhaul line around the winch. Then Sam and James started cranking the handle, which in turn began wrapping the outhaul, pulling the clew of the sixty-foot-tall mainsail out of the mast.

  “Okay, honey, raise the mainsail!” Jeff yelled back to me at the helm.

  “From here?” I said, frozen.

  “Push the frickin’ button!”

  I stared at a half dozen black switches to the right of the helm. They all looked alike. Which one was it? One had a white symbol like a sail on it, but so did another.

  “JESUS! Push the Goddamn button! Sam, you do it!”

  Sam hustled back, managed to find the right switch, pushed it, and the leading edge of the mainsail began emerging from the mast and sliding out along the boom. We all stared up, watching the enormous white sail fill the space above our heads.

  “Okay, that’s it!” Jeff called out.

  James clamped down the lever securing the outhaul, cleared the winch, and Heron heeled over on her side, slicing through small crescent waves, picking up speed.

  I sat numbly. Clearly, the captain and I had a lot to learn together.

  But there was no time for hurt feelings. It was thrilling to ghost across the strait, electrifying! I would, I told myself, learn this and become spectacular at it, even though it wasn’t going to be easy. “What do you think?” I said casually. “Put up the jenny?”

  “Mom’s the boss,” Jeff said, eyeing me.

  It was blowing an easy ten. The jenny, also called a genoa, is a large foresail, (fuller than a jib) that sweeps back past the mast. I took the helm again while Sam and James got the lines ready and Jeff loaded up a third, smaller winch, which would sustain even more force; it sat farther back, on the edge of the cockpit, with its twin on the opposite side. Once everything was loaded up, Sam began pulling out the genoa…all 830 square feet of her.

  “Whoa,” James said.

  We were really moving—the sun bouncing off all that canvas, now two enormous shimmering wings stretched taut—hurtling through our first open-water crossing. Heron heeled farther and farther to the right; we cut the engine.

  Perfect silence: as we sped along there was only the rhythmic beating of waves splashing one-two, one-two, against the hull, the powerful hum of wind filling big sails a faster staccato—one-two, one-two, one-two, one-two—in a deep blue sky. All that space and stillness and the hum of the boat made me think, for some reason, of God.

  “Dude, wanna put up the staysail?” Sam ventured.

  The staysail is our third sail, a small sail, compact enough that in a light wind you can pull it in and out by hand, just by tugging a line. On a cutter rig like Heron’s it’s designed to direct the wind more efficiently between the two big sails.

  “Sure, let’s go for it,” someone said.

  “We are hauling ass!” noted the captain, putting appreciative heft into each word.

  We were now shredding the water, heeled over on one side, truly clueless as to how much power we’d harnessed, how much sail we’d raised…It took your breath away, flying along on that big blue boat, dependent upon noth
ing but wind. I loved speeding through the crisp sea air, salty and bracing. Loved all that canvas. Loved having every sail up, the engine silenced. It felt like life itself. Chaotic, true…but alive!

  Naturally, what goes up must come down. And now every sail, every line—and there were so many of them—was under hundreds of pounds of pressure. Only one of us had the slightest idea what he was doing out there, understood how much force was actually on those lines, what would happen if one of them caught an unsuspecting finger in a winch under five thousand pounds of pressure or flew loose, cracking faster than a whip and took out an eye. And, evidently, Jeff was also under too much pressure…

  We lost our wind ghosting behind the uninhabited hump of Texada Island, which rises menacingly on the far side of the Strait of Georgia. It was time to bring in the jib. “How many times do I have to tell you where the jib furlers are?!”

  We chugged our way across the far side of the Strait of Georgia as the sun lowered; edged our way up BC’s southern Sunshine Coast; then tired, and spent, attempted to anchor the Mighty Heron in a narrow, shallow inlet that grew narrower and more shallow the farther in we ventured.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you!” a wiry bearded man hollered ominously from his ramshackle dock, warning us away from the inner harbor. Evidently, our chart didn’t show just how shallow things got. We managed to maneuver our way around and get the hell out of there, beating a lumbering retreat. Exhausted, we next tried anchoring in a cove at the inlet’s entrance, but our anchor dragged on the shale bottom. Grouchy and hungry, we then motored on to Thormanby Island, where we found eighty-five feet of water and finally anchored off this improbably lovely place called Gill Beach.