Green Ghost, Blue Ocean

by Jennifer M. Smith

  “Leave it to me,” Nik said, moving toward the middle-aged man at the counter. “Donde esta electrico ppfssst ppfssst?” he said with confidence.

  In return, he got a huge smile, a “Si, señor,” and a spray can of exactly what he wanted.

  “See? My Spanish works like a peach!” Nik boasted.

  “Like a charm,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Works like a charm. Everything is peachy or something works like a charm, but you can’t say something works like a peach – that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “I got the contact cleaner, didn’t I?”

  At the marina, we carried on with the chores. The latch on the port-side cupboard was fixed, the oil filters were replaced, and the knot meter was pulled and cleaned. The rig was inspected and tuned; the gas-powered emergency bilge pump was tested; the gas tanks and water tanks were chemically treated. The dinghy was scrubbed of barnacles, and the bicycles and surfboard were stowed. Meanwhile, I was cooking, filling the freezer with pre-made meals for the crossing. My feet became so swollen from standing in the heat I felt like I was walking on gel-pad shoe liners. The business of getting ready was so tiring that I felt no apprehension about departure. Just the opposite was true: I couldn’t wait to go to sea, to have nothing to do but eat, sleep, and watch.

  Back at anchor, we were down to the last few errands before departure: buying food and fuel and making phone calls home. Of the three items, food was by far my greatest worry. In remote circumstances, where the daily demands are high, entertainment scarce, and pleasures few, there better be some good grub on the table. If an army marches on its stomach, so does a mining bush camp (as we’d already learned), and so does a ship at sea, particularly a short-handed crew on a small yacht. Of the small prizes we had to look forward to – food, sleep, comfort, and the entertainment of the voyage itself – food was the only thing we could control. I didn’t want to get it wrong, but I didn’t want the sole responsibility for getting it right either.

  We agreed that breakfasts and lunches would be an each-man-for-himself affair. For the evening meal, we would eat together. But this was an expedition, not a dinner party, and I saw myself as a crewmember just like everyone else. So when our crewman suggested that we take turns preparing supper, I was pleased, happy for the team approach to galley duties.

  We expected a twenty-three-day crossing, but to be safe we provisioned for thirty days. I’d made and frozen a dozen dinners already, so we needed another eighteen dinners planned out. Thinking up eighteen more meals was overwhelming but with the workload divided, thinking up six dinners each was not so bad. Thinking up only two meals to serve each one three times should have been easy.

  For our final provisioning run we went on a three-hour grocery shop at the local Comercial Mexicana, tediously pushing two carts up one aisle and down the next at a slow crawl. I reminded the guys to think about the items that were needed for their six dinners and to make no assumptions about what was already on board. If you wanted to eat it in the next month, you had to put it in the cart.

  Provisioning was challenging in part because the volume of food we needed was astounding and in part because we had to think of everything. Imagine doing that at home, purchasing enough inventory to be completely self-sufficient for an entire month: no run to the corner store when you’ve got a sudden urge for chocolate, no drop in at the supermarket when you’re out of milk, no borrowing an egg from your neighbour.

  And it wasn’t just meals to contend with. What about snacks? Nik liked eating ramen noodles on his night shift. If he wanted to be sure there was one package available to him every night of the crossing he needed to put two dozen packages in the cart. If our crewman enjoyed the same snack, another two dozen packages were required. If I wanted one on occasion I needed to grab a dozen more. Sixty packages of ramen noodles seemed absurd, but I did the math and added more to the pile.

  “What are you going to make with that?” I asked, seeing soup cans being pulled from the shelf.

  “You can make almost anything as long as you have cream of mushroom soup,” our crewman answered.

  “Yeah, but if all you have is cream of mushroom soup, then that’s all you’re having,” I pointed out, wondering about the other ingredients for his meal plan.

  I could see that the concept of shared responsibilities was headed for failure. If you weren’t in the habit of doing it, planning out every ingredient required for any given meal was no small task. On the grocery run, I sensed a subtle shift in the “team approach” – when it came to galley duties, it seemed the finer details were on me. Frustrated, I made a second sweep through the store to find the missing ingredients that had been overlooked on the first pass.

  I had a flashback to childhood vacations – an image of my mother packing for a trip to the family cottage on Georgian Bay.

  “Two weeks at the cottage,” she’d say, perspiring in the summer heat, exasperated by what didn’t fit into the squeaky Styrofoam cooler. “It’s a holiday for everyone but Mom.”

  Now, I understood her.

  Back on board I packed away the mountain of inventory, taking notes on my spreadsheet as I went. Canned corn? Port side, midship cupboard behind the settee. Rice? Starboard side, aft cupboard, behind the settee. Olive oil? Starboard side, lower shelf. I printed the list, alphabetically sorted, so we all had equal access to the food. I didn’t want to be woken up to be asked where things were each time someone was hungry.

  There were more challenges to our joint undertaking. Every boat has its eccentricities. As pedantic as it may sound, there are best practices, if you will – certain ways to do everything. The fridge door needed a little bit of a slam; the freezer lid, although square, fit only one way. You had to watch not to bump your head in certain places. If you turned on the tap just right, you’d get a nice slow flow of water, wasting little. There were strict rules for the galley: never put the produce on the top shelf of the fridge. Never put a glass container there either. The beer will freeze if it touches the refrigeration plate; so will the eggs. Pack the cheese and butter there instead. If you wanted a shower, the switch for the sump pump was over here. If you wanted a coffee, the switch for the propane solenoid was over there. If you wanted toasted bread, you had to fry it because the toaster used too much power. If you wanted fresh air, one sliding porthole worked and one didn’t – it was stuck closed, and we didn’t know why.

  Our friend understood a boat’s eccentricities, but of course he was used to his own. I wondered if the odd glitches we tolerated aboard Green Ghost would irritate him. The stuck porthole didn’t bother us. We’d tried several times to fix it but nothing we tried had worked. Stuck closed really didn’t matter; on the other hand, broken open did. Worried that further efforts might break the glass or damage the frame, we left the porthole stuck shut. But what we saw as a reasonable decision, our friend might have seen as maintenance apathy.

  But now we were off, filled up with food, water, and diesel. The paperwork cleared with the officials, we were ready to go. In the late afternoon of the Fool’s Day, 2001, we departed from Zihuatanejo Bay, the mighty Pacific before us. Our tensions and misgivings were hidden behind farewell smiles as we waved goodbye to fellow sailors in the anchorage. We had nearly 2,800 NM of open ocean ahead, at least three weeks at sea. Our petty grievances and irritants were carefully stowed away. We thought we could keep them locked up for the crossing, but we were wrong. The sea has a way of shaking everything loose.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Long Crossing

  (April 2001)

  The crossing didn’t start well.

  As we departed the coast I made up the bunks. Our crewman had settled in the aft cabin. Nik and I were to sleep in the sea berths in the main salon. There would be no hot bunking. In the tropical heat, with limited water for personal hygiene, thank goodness, we didn’t have to share. But, on the first night at sea, when I climbed into bed I found I was sharing anyway. There was a co
ckroach between my sheets. In our four months in Mexico we’d been vigilant about keeping our boat insect-free, but there must have been a slip-up during the final harried days. Bug-free on departure, we hadn’t thought to purchase pesticides. We were on our way to French Polynesia in a floating roach motel.

  We’d been watching the weather for weeks, listening to discussions among the fleet of Pacific crossers, contemplating good weather windows for departure. Gun-shy from the hammering we’d taken off the Oregon coast, we chose to leave when there was no bad weather on the horizon. Again, our inexperience was showing: we left with no weather at all.

  Wind. A sailboat needs wind. Sure, you can run your engine and motor along, but on any long passage fuel conservation is always on your mind. We didn’t dare to motor-sail so early in the voyage. We used the engine sparingly. For an hour or more each day, we ran the engine at low rpm only to charge our batteries. The rest of the time, because of the very light winds, we made slow progress, racking up only 75 NM daily. We knew we were in for a long haul.

  We agreed on three-hour watches, which meant there were eight watch periods in twenty-four hours. With three people on board, we cycled through a schedule that repeated every three days. With this system, each one of us sampled the romance of the sunset hour, the tedium of the graveyard shift, and the wonder of dawn. Our watch system also worked perfectly for the agreed-upon galley duties: every three days you found yourself off watch between three and six p.m., free to cook the evening meal.

  The first few days at sea are always the hardest. Our slow progress tormented us. We were endlessly tweaking the sails trying to find another fraction of a knot of speed. At the rate we were going, it would be a thirty-seven-day trip, an unbearable thought. I worried about the provisions. I lay awake at night thinking, Pasta! Why didn’t I buy more pasta?

  Our crewman had some suggestions to increase our speed. While a captain needn’t endorse an idea simply to flatter the crew, Nik sensed the rising frustration and agreed to try the proposed sail changes, even though he was quite certain they wouldn’t work. We executed the proposals one by one, showing by demonstration the limitations we already knew. At over seventeen tons, Green Ghost wasn’t a light-air boat. In the end, after many changes to the sails, we solved nothing, achieving no greater speed, only greater frustrations all around.

  “My boat has limitations, but I love it anyway,” the captain defended himself.

  Chastened, the crewman made a stinging comeback.

  “Well, I’d never buy a boat that can’t do better than that.”

  Boat insults. Ouch. You might as well tell a man that his dog bites and his children are ugly. Short words were starting to fly. Though none of us had acknowledged it, there’d been a shift, perhaps even a role reversal, in our mentor-mentee relationship and it wasn’t sitting well. After only four days at sea, I suddenly understood the necessity of rank aboard a boat. It is not a democracy. In the years since we’d owned Green Ghost, we’d become kings of our own castle.

  Toward the end of our first week at sea we had a problem with our roller furling. Nik came off shift before sunup and told me he’d been unable to furl the genoa, but there was no immediate danger. It would be a problem only if the wind picked up. Nik wanted to wait until full daylight to take a close look at it, but in the meantime he wanted to get some rest. When I handed the watch over to our crewman at nine a.m., I relayed the information that the genoa roller furling was jammed and that Nik would address it when he came on shift well-rested at noon. Our crewman went forward to inspect the apparatus at the bow then came back to the cockpit.

  “Jenn, I can see what’s wrong up there. The line is jammed and I think I could just pop it out with a screwdriver …”

  “I don’t know – Nik asked us to wait. Let’s leave it and let him get some sleep,” I suggested.

  The chatter woke up the captain. In his zest to address the problem, our friend took Nik’s semi-consciousness as an invitation for further discussion. A foggy-headed Nik mumbled agreement to his plan.

  As our crewman went forward tool in hand, Nik bolted upright in his bunk and turned to speak to me in the cockpit.

  “I just remembered, sometimes the furling drum jams when the halyard tension is wrong. Just wait on the fix. It might just be the halyard.”

  But it was too late. Our crewman returned aft with a handful of broken parts and the news that ball bearings were rolling around on the foredeck. The captain spoke harshly.

  “If you think I broke it, I didn’t,” our crewman responded, backpedalling. “That roller furling has not been properly maintained,” he said, insinuating that poor maintenance on Nik’s part had brought about this equipment failure.

  I was taken aback that our crewman could not see the situation from Nik’s point of view. What if Nik had gone forward on his boat and come back with a handful of parts? And here, about 400 NM from the Mexican coastline and 2,400 NM from our destination, it was particularly poorly received. The roller furling bearing failure was not something we could repair at sea.

  It was not a good day. Trust was trampled. Morale took a beating. The captain was angry, the crewman was in the doghouse. There was some permanent damage done to the onboard relationships and we were not even one week in.

  Thankfully we soon picked up some consistent wind that ended our light-air frustrations. With the higher winds and larger waves all tasks on board became more difficult. The waking hours were spent hanging on for the ride. The constant engagement with the environment left us bone-tired, but in the relentless motion, we slept less soundly. Nobody wanted to do anything extra. Through the day the deep galley sinks became stacked with dirty dishes from breakfasts, lunches, and snacks. They were piled so high that they began launching themselves across the cabin in the swell. When a bowl went flying, it suggested to me that it was time to get the lot washed, dried, and put away. The guys were blind to the pile. Rather than do the dishes, dirty projectiles were picked up off the floor and wedged back in the sink a little more snugly. I had the lowest tolerance for mess and found myself doing most of the washing up. It was a petty irritation, but in that environment of heat and fatigue, the very kind that festers and grows.

  When booby birds circled overhead, we knew we were closing in on Clipperton. Nik had been hell-bent to sail by Clipperton Atoll, 671 NM from Mexico and one of the most remote places on earth. He had tuna on the brain.

  At first sight, it appeared to be nothing more than a couple of coconut palm groves growing straight up out of the ocean. The ring reef itself has negligible topography, being only about six feet above sea level around most of its seven-and-a-half-mile circumference. The barren volcanic Clipperton Rock juts nearly one hundred feet out of the water at its southeast end. A couple of wrecks on the beach stood like monuments to the dead.

  It was both thrilling and terrifying to close in on Clipperton. Land beckons you with thoughts of swinging gently at anchor, folded into the arms of a safe harbour for a good night’s rest. But when the land is a dangerous unprotected shoreline, at best it’s a menacing obstacle and at worst a potential graveyard. Land is a seductive temptress, offering a comfortable bed for a night of sweet dreaming or a nightmarishly wicked end. Other sailors we knew had anchored off the sheltered side of the atoll in uncommonly calm conditions. Nik was keen to try the same, but first, some fishing.

  He put his lures in the water as we closed the distance in the late afternoon. The Red Devil soon shrieked and we were in for a battle. The sails came down, the engine went on, and we chased his prey around in circles for more than half an hour. The catch was huge – at least a sixty-pounder – the largest yellowfin tuna Nik had ever caught. We were not going to be short of food.

  We swung in close to shore on the leeward side of the atoll. The depth sounder, having not touched bottom in a week, started flashing readings of two hundred feet and less as we approached. Even on the leeward side of the island, the swell was notable. The steep bottom was not ideal for anchor
ing – this was no place to stop for a rest.

  I turned the bow back out to sea. In a very short distance, the bottom no longer sounded due to the steep slope of the submarine volcanic cone. For some reason, our crewman believed that the on-again/off-again readings indicated that the depth sounder wasn’t working at all.

  With the sun low on the horizon we left Clipperton in our wake and sailed on.

  Southwest of Clipperton conditions changed yet again. We passed through the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ, the doldrums). We were fortunate to get through this band of windless, rolly conditions quite quickly and soon found ourselves in consistently strong trade winds. The downside to the increased wind was the increased sea state. The seas built up, becoming the large heaving Oregon Coast sort of monsters we so loathed.

  The relentless motion wore us down. None of us felt well, each with a touch of motion sickness and considerable fatigue. We craved comforts. We all wanted to sit and be handed a plate full of good food. For captain and crewman this was a possibility. For me, not so much. As the days wore on, the dinner duties began to disintegrate. I was on for an extra meal when the fishing took place. I was asked to step up when conditions were rough. I was asked what to make when it wasn’t my turn. I didn’t mind doing some extra work in the galley. I made bread, cookies, cinnamon buns, special treats for morale. I didn’t mind tackling a more complicated meal when it was my turn. But I did expect to have dinner handed to me two out of every three nights just like everyone else. I was hungry and tired too. But the more I stepped up in the galley, the more my expedition mates stepped back. I was increasingly put out.