Just after midnight I saw a large dark blob marching across the radar screen, and no, it wasn’t a cockroach. It was the outline of a rain squall and it was rapidly bearing down upon us. I put my book down. The boat shifted as we heeled over in the already increased winds. I took a moment to put the laptop computer away. As I stowed it, the boat lay over a little more and the rain began. I scampered up on deck as quickly as I could.
Nik awakened, conscious of the increased angle of heel.
“Do you need some help up there?” he shouted from the comfort of his sea berth.
“No, I think it’s going to be okay, but I think I better be in the cockpit for this. I might need to hand steer through it – it’s probably a little much for the autopilot.” I took the helm.
Nik appeared in the cockpit. “You’re going to need some help out here,” he said. “I didn’t tell you that the wind was so light on my watch that I fully unfurled the genoa. You’ve got a full headsail up there.”
I was already finding the boat hard to steer. We had too much sail up and Green Ghost was trying to round up into the wind. Nik eased the mainsheet to spill some wind out of the mainsail. He tried to furl the genoa but of course it wouldn’t roll in. The wind burst from the night sky, punching us with wicked forty-five knot gusts. I swore as I fought with the helm. By now the rain was blinding. I could barely make out the instruments above the companionway ten feet in front of me. Nik put the spreader lights on to see what was going on forward. As usual, the overhead lights were disorienting and I quickly lost my bearings.
“We’ve got to get some sail down!” Nik shouted over the roar of the wind. I steered downwind as Nik eased the sheet to allow the sail to billow out in front of us. We hoped we could coax it to furl around the foil without one of us having to go to the bow. There was very little line left on the winch and suddenly the sheet got away on him. The line was ripped from his hands and whipped forward – the sail was now loose and flapping wildly in the wind. The stop knot at the end of the sheet kept it from passing through the block amidships, but it was out of reach of the cockpit, unrecoverable without going out on deck.
Nik was about to dash out to grab at the stop knot to regain control of the sheet and the sail. But he wasn’t wearing a harness – he wasn’t tied on. I didn’t want him out there. The thought of a man overboard in those conditions terrified me. Dramatic thoughts raced through my head and I screamed above the wind, “Do not go out there! I will never find you!”
Annoyed with me for playing the safety officer, Nik reluctantly grabbed a harness, clipped the tether to the jackline, and stepped out onto the deck. My white knuckles on the wheel were all that secured me to the boat. I braced my bare feet against the walls of the cockpit well. Ill-equipped for the weather, in a T-shirt and undies, I was soaking wet, and I shivered in the cold dark downpour.
In the brief time it took Nik to harness up, the unsecured sail and the sheet attached to it had been thrashing in the squall. The sheet had whipped itself into a tangled mass that got wrapped around a nine-foot stainless steel pole. The pole, an inch in diameter, was part of an awning system. It had been stored vertically, neatly tied to the shrouds, never in our way and never catching on anything all the way from Vancouver. Suddenly it was a serious liability. As the foresail continued to flap uncontrollably, the knotted sheet shook the awning pole and that in turn shook our rigging like a dog shakes its prey.
As he went out on deck, Nik heard the rip of sailcloth. He was frantic to stop the violent shaking of our rig. He tried to dislodge the knotted sheet from the pole, but it shuddered just out of his reach, about eight feet off the deck. Unable to grab the sheet, he decided to untie the pole from the shrouds. It wasn’t such a good idea because when he did, he found himself holding a nine-foot pole, caught up in the tangled genoa sheet, attached to 640 square feet of sailcloth buffeted by the forty-five-knot squall. It was a terrifying moment. He barely had the strength to hang onto it, but letting go was not an option. To let go would’ve allowed the pole to whip around freely, to be flung through the shrieking black night against the boat, against the rig, or worse, against him.
Within seconds that same reckless, random wind that had tangled the line around the pole in the first place miraculously whipped the line off, leaving Nik standing on deck holding only the once straight pole that was now bent like a pretzel. He quickly lashed it to the deck while the sail continued to wallop the sky. By this time it was torn and useless. Rolling it up no longer mattered; we wanted only to get it down.
“Let’s drop the halyard!” Nik instructed me. “Put a wrap on a winch, take the line brake off! Ease it down when I get to the bow!”
I did as instructed, but when I released the halyard nothing happened. The sail appeared to be jammed in the foil. Nik pulled at the sailcloth. Nothing. Just then I saw that a small twist in the halyard had jammed at the line brake, and without thinking, I took it off the winch and gave it a flick to release the snag. Bam! With one flick of my wrist I’d cleared the obstruction and the halyard flew out of my hands. The entire sail dropped instantly, landing half in, half out of the water. There was some yelling. With great effort Nik managed to drag the torn salty sail back on board.
With the shredded genoa on deck and the wind speed dropping, thinking we were finally under control, I put the boat on autopilot, harnessed up, and went forward with bungee cords to help Nik tie the genoa down. At that moment, the staysail unfurled. The bungee we’d used to secure it in Tahuata let go and now the loose staysail was battered by the wind. Our 2 percent sheer terror wasn’t over yet.
The big weather we’d experienced at the very start of our voyage off the coast of Oregon had been unnerving, but I’d never felt in imminent danger then. This was different. The metal block I’d partially reattached to the clew of the staysail was whipping through the air at head level in thirty knots of wind. We were both trying to grab hold of the staysail, trying to bring it under control. I was certain a head injury was seconds away. I might have screamed for strength or luck but I didn’t bother because I knew I was out of both. What frightened me most was, worse than being at the edge of my limit, I could see we were at the edge of Nik’s, and Nik’s strength was always my fallback. It took everything he had. He wrapped himself around the inner forestay and controlled the sail with his whole body. He instructed me to get back to the helm and to bring the boat into the wind so that we could drop the staysail also.
Our foredeck looked like a war zone. Both our foresails were piled in crumpled heaps among bungee cords, knotted sheets, and a twisted metal bar. We were exhausted and soaked to the skin. We were so spent, we could have sat down and cried. Instead we took turns getting out of wet clothes. Nik crawled back into his bunk and I resumed my watch as stars reappeared in the now clear sky. The squall never looked back. She marched on through the black Pacific night, unleashing her fury on all that lay in her path.
We arrived in Makemo Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago with the boat a shamble after four days of travel. Aside from the squall activity, we were fortunate to have terrifically consistent winds that kept us travelling briskly south even when all we had left was our mainsail. If it had not been for that one terrible midnight hour, it would’ve been the best four days of sailing on the whole trip.
CHAPTER 10
French Polynesia
(July – September 2001)
I had a preconceived idea of what it would be like anchored in the inner lagoon of a Tuamotuan atoll: peaceful, calm, serene, as though anchored on a pond. It was not like that atoll (sorry, I couldn’t resist). But seriously, it wasn’t. Not at first anyway. At Makemo Atoll we anchored off the village of Pouheva and found ourselves exposed to a brisk southeast wind. It was blowing across a 10 NM fetch, creating a notable wind wave inside the reef. Our bow bounced wildly in the chop. It was the last thing we needed after a four-day sail-tearing passage, but the visibility was too poor to navigate around the many uncharted coral bommies to a better anchoring pos
ition inside the reef.
When the weather settled, we moved across the inner lagoon. We anchored next to half a dozen other cruising sailboats tucked in behind a motu, a small island created where a portion of the atoll was high enough above sea level to sustain plant life. We were an instant community, this wee group of boats. Dried palm fronds, coconut husks, and driftwood were collected by day and ablaze by evening. By sundown there was a circle of glowing faces around the beach bonfire: one couple cooking dinner on a grill, a guitar player singing, others roasting marsh-mallows on sticks, while hermit crabs scrawled their zig-zag paths through the sand – these were the kind of nights that, to me, were exactly what cruising was all about.
There were no houses, no stores, no shopping, nothing to be done. Each day was about snorkelling expeditions, bocce ball tournaments, Frisbee, beachcombing, shell collecting, and the hope of laying eyes on the elusive coconut crab. At night it was simple – we returned to the fire.
We took some time to lick our wounds, removing the torn genoa and replacing it with the higher-cut Yankee we had stored under the V-berth bed. We also removed not only the staysail, but the entire self-tacking boom apparatus to give us more space on our foredeck for dinghy storage.
This was such a beautiful place and a restful stop that it wasn’t easy to leave, literally and figuratively. Everyone had trouble getting anchors up off the bottom when it came time to go. In the shifting winds our chain had wrapped itself in a complex pattern around old coral heads in thirty feet of water. To pull the anchor up, Nik stood on the bow and shouted directions to me at the helm while I drove the slalom course forward in an effort to retrieve our ground tackle from the rocky bottom. It didn’t work.
Nik jumped in with mask and snorkel to take a good look at what was going on. He dived down and found that our chain had slipped into a coral crevasse so narrow it was as though we’d threaded a coral needle with our anchor chain. We enlisted the help of our neighbour, Gord on Elakha, to be our go-between. Nik dived thirty feet to the bottom to pull our chain free from the narrow trap. Gord watched from the surface to tell me exactly when I could activate the windlass on the bow. We couldn’t have done it without two in the water.
From Makemo, we sailed overnight to Fakarava. Here, we enjoyed one of our most remarkable experiences ever – drift snorkelling in an atoll pass. By timing the tides to ensure we had an onshore current, we picked our time of day. On the flood tide, we took our dinghy out the atoll pass, jumped in the water, then held onto the dinghy handholds for the ride. The pass at Fakarava was deep but the slopes were lined with a craggy coral forest and crowded with more fish than I’d ever seen. The several-knot flood current whisked us into the lagoon along the navigable pass. We floated, drifted, and soon flew into the anchorage, past a huge Napolean fish and countless groupers with their khaki camouflage scales. Moray eels protruded from holes in the reef and swayed sinisterly in the current. Marauding blacktip reef sharks passed below us, while sleek barracuda hunted their prey. Gliding over that underwater world, whisked along by the strong current, I felt like Superman. It was better than a ride at Disney World. No tickets, no crowds, no waiting. We did it again and again and again.
With only four hundred gallons in our tanks and no water-maker, after two weeks in the Tuamotus, our low water supply forced us to move on. I didn’t want to leave Fakarava, but I was also glad to be going. I’ve always believed that it’s better to leave when you long to stay than to stay ’til you can’t wait to go. If you stay anywhere until you’re pining to leave, a negativity develops that forever taints your memory. For me, the bittersweet taste of a too-soon departure pins a deeply satisfied positive memory to an experience. I relish the longing to return. We left the Tuamotus when I hated to go and the barren, wild, untouched Tuamotus remain one of my favourite places.
Our three-day, two-night trip to the island of Tahiti was wonderfully boring. We were plagued by light air and ended up motoring most of the way.
We arrived in the Society Islands unprepared for the culture shock of Papeete. We hadn’t been on an island with a population of more than twenty-four hundred people in three months. We hadn’t seen fresh milk or done our laundry by machine in that time period either. Tahiti, with a population then of about 150,000 (half in Papeete), not only had fresh milk and launderettes, it had two McDonald’s restaurants, an international airport, and gorgeous grocery stores. We were wowed by rush hour, dazzled by the crowds downtown, and thrilled by the five different kinds of lettuce in the Continent grocery store. I laughed at my Canadian tendency, taking items off the shelves in order to turn them around to read the English side of the label. Of course, both sides were in French, but otherwise it was no different from shopping at a grocery store back home, but better – the food was French.
We worked hard for a week hoping to restock, repair, and be ready for fun before a Vancouver friend arrived for a visit. We ordered the new forestay and roller furling, and booked a rigger and dock space for the installation. We took our staysail in for repair and threw out the shredded genoa.
Cockroaches still danced “La Cucaracha” across our countertops each night. Shopping for insecticide, we asked a local man in a hardware store what could be done.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “There is nothing to be done about cockroaches. They do what they do, you do what you do, that is all.”
We couldn’t embrace his charitable nature toward our little Mexican friends and so we prepared for war, filling our shopping basket with sprays and bombs and mysterious white powder. None of them worked.
When our friend Scott arrived, we set sail for Bora Bora, the perfect distraction for our guest and ourselves while we waited for our new Profurl system to be delivered from France.
After regaling Scott with tales of our high seas adventures, the trip to Bora Bora was boring boring. There was no wind, not a breath. No waves, not a one. Not even a ripple. No fish. No squalls. After all our storytelling, our friend caught a thirty-hour ride on a pond-like Pacific by way of the iron genny.
If the Inuit language has twenty-six different words for snow, surely the Polynesian language must have as many for the shades of blue in the lagoon of Bora Bora. The island was too perfect to be real, as though it was the Hollywood creation of a South Pacific paradise. We rounded the lagoon with Green Ghost, anchoring off Motu Piti Aau where we ate BBQ dinners, snorkelled with graceful manta rays, and studied poisonous lionfish from a distance. We rented scooters and circled the island’s single road. We read books on the beach and soaked in the turquoise water. Toward the end of our stay we visited Marama, the master tattooist on Matira Point for a group ink outing. In three consecutive appointments, Nik’s arm, Scott’s leg, and my mastoid (behind the ear) were permanently decorated with some Polynesian art. After all, tattoos are like potato chips – you can never have just one.
When Scott flew out of Bora Bora we found ourselves experiencing our usual post-guest melancholy. Guests distracted us and enforced a play time that might otherwise have evaporated in days of boat chores. They reminded us to be tourists and enjoy the moment, to step out of the endless get ready mindset. They also gave us a break from one another and introduced a fresh dynamic on board. After our personal failures on the long crossing, I’d worried that Nik and I had become so insular, we’d lost our ability to socialize. Scott’s visit relieved us. We’d learned our lesson. For us, entertaining guests in port was good fun; entertaining guests offshore was not a good idea.
We’d sent messages home raving about the Society Islands and beckoning family to join us there. I didn’t think anyone would come – we hadn’t given them enough time. Much to my surprise, with less than two weeks’ notice, my mom booked a ticket, packed a bag, and jumped on a plane to make the twenty-seven-hour journey. I was thrilled, if a little taken aback, that my never-travelled-alone-before, seventy-year-old mom would embark on such an adventure. Then again, maybe it runs in the family. We sailed back to Tahiti via Mo’orea to pick her up
.
Not only was Mom on the scene but our roller furling had finally arrived. For installation, we traded our Maeva Beach anchorage view of moonsets over Mo’orea for sunsets over fuel tanks at the Nautisport dock on the more industrial side of town.
Green Ghost was soon whole again with her full complement of sails repaired and functioning properly. After sailing to Mo’orea and back for some fun with my mom, it was time to check out of French Polynesia. Ahead was the longest offshore leg we would have in the islands and we’d be doing it alone.
On our way out of the island group, we stopped again at Bora Bora. On our final night, we treated ourselves to dinner on shore and we fell into deep discussion about our future.
We’d set out with the goal to cross the Pacific, to get to Australia in a single season. But now that we were underway, we realized very few other boats had that plan. Friends in the fleet planned to go as far as Tonga before heading south to New Zealand for the antipodean summer where they would enjoy the off-season in safe waters, below the cyclone belt. They planned a second season of sailing the southwest Pacific through Fiji, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia before crossing the Coral Sea to Australia the following year. It made us wonder – was there a way for us to do that too?
What we were doing no longer felt like a single expedition. Nearly twelve months in, it had begun to feel like a lifestyle. We felt we’d discovered a secret world, a magical life that was there for the taking. We knew two things for sure: the cruising life was fantastic and we weren’t ready for an ending. We decided to make it our goal to extend our time in the Pacific. There had to be a way to sail on.
CHAPTER 11
West and South
(September – November 2001)
We flew out of French Polynesia on a brisk beam reach rushing westward toward Suwarrow atoll in the northern Cook Islands. The seas slammed us down thirty-five degrees to starboard and with each passing trough we rolled back fifteen degrees to port. The motion was relentless and it made for an uncomfortable ride.
Green Ghost, Blue Ocean Page 8