Green Ghost, Blue Ocean

by Jennifer M. Smith

  While we waited for the new autopilot to arrive, we went up the mast again to take a look at our reinforcements and make sure everything else was okay. Our jury rig looked fine but, I was alarmed to find a one-legged cotter pin where the forestay attached to the top of the mast. We’d had this problem on the Indian Ocean, having found that same cotter pin sheared right off upon our arrival at Rodrigues. We replaced it again, but it worried us because we didn’t know the cause.

  I’d relaxed a little and enjoyed our Ascension distractions on shore, but Nik remained feisty and hyper through much of our stay. He was seeing the bigger picture. It wasn’t just a matter of waiting for the new equipment; once it arrived, he was the guy who had to install it, and he fretted about the responsibility. What if, after all this time, he couldn’t make the new autopilot work?

  When our long-awaited parcel finally arrived late in the afternoon of our twenty-fifth day on the island, we excitedly unpacked the boxes, read the directions (me) and looked at the parts (Nik). We hoped to have the unit installed and tested by the end of the following day.

  But the next morning Nik got up and put his clean laundry away, a task that had been left undone for a week. Then he made the bed. He never makes the bed. I knew what was happening – these were avoidance tactics. I understood. As long as the new equipment remained in the box, it represented our escape. Once we got started on the installation, if anything went wrong, if there was some extra part that we’d need that would take another three weeks to arrive, well, neither one of us could face that outcome. We wanted to wallow in the positive possibility just a little while. So we both had a second cup of coffee and tidied up the boat, enjoying the feeling that an exit was possible, before we set to the task of proving it.

  It took all day for Nik to complete the installation. I helped out as assistant, doing some of the satellite jobs, and locating tools that had been in hand one moment and were lost the next. The following day we picked up the anchor and moved in circles around the harbour testing the new equipment on all points of sail. All good.

  We reanchored and went into town to complete our checkout procedures. Immigration stamped our passports OUT, the port captain handed us our clearance papers, garbage was dropped off, groceries were picked up, and we made one last visit to The Oblivion to send e-mail.

  “I can’t believe it, but tomorrow’s Friday,” I said as I looked at the calendar back on the boat.

  “Don’t even start,” Nik said.

  “Well, you know what they say, ’Never leave port on a Friday.’ The last thing we need is more bad luck.”

  “I’m not listening to that superstitious hocus-pocus,” Nik said. “It’s probably some bullshit British Navy saying. I prefer the Serbian expression.”

  “What’s that one?” I asked.

  “Fuck Friday – we’re outta here.”

  After twenty-eight days, we pulled out of the harbour at Georgetown, leaving the tiny island of Ascension in our wake.

  CHAPTER 28

  Fernando de Noronha

  (April – May 2014)

  The trade winds blasted us off Ascension’s leeward shore and rocketed us out onto the big blue. As the island disappeared in our wake, I contemplated the folks we’d met who lived on that tiny island, only ten by thirteen kilometres in size, for more than twenty years. This wandering soul couldn’t understand how they did it. And yet my feelings were mixed. After so much angst over our month-long stay, it felt strange to be leaving. I knew I’d never see Ascension again. I wondered, Had I lapped it up? Had I made the most of my time there? The island had been good to us, a safe haven, a unique experience. But as always, we were pushing on, seeking more of the same, but different.

  You’d think we would’ve been bright-eyed and well-rested, but oddly we were both dejected and tired. In its own way, the delay had been exhausting. Gear failure was a given in offshore sailing. You’d think we’d learn how to take it in stride. But we could never completely relax when Green Ghost wasn’t fully operational. Gear failures always took a toll, rattling our nerves and eroding our resolve. The long wait had crushed our momentum. Having lost so much time on Ascension, we’d given up on the idea of cruising continental Brazil. We decided to sail to Fernando de Noronha, then on to French Guiana, and then straight to Trinidad.

  “Did you hear that?” Nik asked me in the afternoon our first day out.

  “What?”

  “I thought I heard something like a thunk, thunk, thunk.”

  I listened carefully for a moment. “I’m not hearing it.”

  Out of practice with the sounds of being at sea and too used to things going wrong, Nik looked around, scanning the deck and the rig, then looking over the stern at our rudder.

  He was hearing things. There’d been no thunk, thunk, thunk in the afternoon, but later that evening a loud bang followed by a slam, slam and a flap, flap, flap had both of us wide-eyed and scrambling.

  “Turn on the spreader lights,” Nik called from the cockpit.

  I leapt from my bunk and flipped the switch.

  “The lines for the downwind pole have gone slack,” Nik said. “The pole has collapsed. I think it’s broken.”

  “Oh, geez. Give me a sec and I’ll come up,” I said, dressing to assist him in the cockpit.

  The foresail, no longer supported by the pole, was flapping around. Nik quickly furled it, then put on a harness to go forward to take the pole down and secure it on the mast.

  Another gear failure on our first night at sea was distressing. We were sailing with reduced mainsail due to the broken tang discovered in St. Helena. The thought of having to sail the remainder of the Atlantic without a downwind pole to improve the efficiency of our foresail was terribly discouraging.

  “What’s the diagnosis?” I asked when I got up for my morning watch.

  “Haven’t got my feet dirty,” he replied.

  He meant feet wet or hands dirty, but for once, I left it alone.

  “I’m going to sleep for a couple of hours, then I’ll get up and get at it.”

  We juggled the watch schedule through the afternoon so that Nik could examine the pole. He found that the line that secures the pole in its telescoped-out position had chafed through at its attachment point inside the pole. An afternoon of dismantling began. Out came the liquid wrench, the impact screwdriver, the hacksaw, and the torch to deal with seized bolts. There was some violent persuasion with the rubber mallet accompanied by a great variety of swear words. There were stripped threads, sheared heads, and rivets that had to be drilled out. Replacement bolts and rivets of just the right size were located from the bowels of the tool chest. With no manual to assist him and the motion of the ocean complicating every move, Nik worked through the afternoon. By sundown, we had an operable pole. Once again, yay, Nik.

  We relaxed into the pleasant conditions of the voyage. Sunny skies and a fifteen-knot southeast breeze gently guided us toward Fernando. Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish drifted by. The moonless nights were star-filled. Each night, on my graveyard shift, I watched Mars slowly setting to the west. Saturn sat a little higher in the sky. Later I watched the lovely Venus rising in the east, so bright she cast a beam across the water from the horizon to our home.

  “That sounds like Dave,” Nik announced.

  Morning and night, we faithfully tuned in to the prescribed channels for the Atlantic Crossers’ Net.

  “I think that’s Mike now,” I chimed in.

  Reception was so poor we made a guessing game of it.

  “That’s Diane!” we said jointly, thrilling in the familiarity of her voice.

  But transmission and reception remained poor, and most often everyone sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher: “Wah-wah-wah.”

  When we were unable to talk to anyone on the net, I wrote e-mails to friends and family instead. I described the sea state, the wind strength and direction, and the forecast of what was to come. I spoke of the moon, knowing that my family and friends, wherever they were, wou
ld be seeing the same: the waxing and waning, the rise and the set. Each note gave a latitude and longitude and a miles-to-go countdown. We were disconnected from people but hyper-connected to our physical world. When I read back over my e-mails from that time, I feel the intense kinship we had with the sea and the sky, our acute awareness of our own well-being. What I wrote – the small details of building winds, the number of apples left in the fruit bowl, the thumbnail of the crescent moon, the damp sweaty smell of our laundry – the minutiae, all of it was important to us. I realize now that none of these details mattered much to our followers back home. They put up with my fine-point fixations for the four words at the end of each transmission – All well on board.

  “Are we there yet?” Nik asked on the ninth day out.

  “Not yet,” I replied.

  We’d met other sailors who told us they loved the offshore legs so much that they felt depressed as they neared their destination, knowing their passage would soon be over. We didn’t feel that way. For us the getting there was taxing, the being there was grand. At times, at sea, we became quite grouchy.

  That night, the wind died with the sunset and with insufficient sail, we were moving oh-so-slowly and rolling around a great deal. Kalunk, kalunk. A repetitive noise began. The straps holding the propane tanks snug in the locker had loosened, allowing the tanks to slide around. Kalunk, kalunk. Frustrated by this disturbance to his night watch, Nik decided to put a stop to it.

  He lifted the hinged cockpit seat and leaned it back to rest against the coaming. He should have kept one hand on it because of course, on the next big swell, the boat rolled to port and the hinged lid closed heavily, right on his head.

  He reacted quite violently. There was the shock of being attacked by a locker lid, there was the immediate testosterone-fuelled inanimate object rage, and, of course, there was the excruciating pain. Then there was the bleeding. Next came the cursing, the heavy-heeled stumble down the companionway, the noisy flailing in the head as the door was slammed shut and cupboard doors were flung open. There was an encore of swearing with bitter curses along the lines of, “We never have any first aid equipment on this boat!” and something more about the where-abouts of the Band-Aids.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, sitting up in my bunk.

  I got no reply.

  I got out of bed and stood outside the closed door. “Are you okay?” I said, trying to open the door.

  “Don’t open it! The drawers are open!” he shouted from inside. If the vanity drawers were pulled out in the head, you couldn’t swing the door open without damaging the woodwork.

  “Tell me what’s happened!” I demanded.

  There was more cursing and many contemptuous remarks about our first aid supply.

  “Get a grip on yourself, for heaven’s sakes!” I yelled through the door. “Tell me what’s happened! Have you hurt yourself?”

  “This is bullshit!” came the reply. “We never have any bandages on this boat!”

  “Just because you don’t know where they are, doesn’t mean we don’t have any!” I shouted back.

  “If I can’t find them, what good are they?”

  I had only one response.

  “Why you not marry Thai girl? Thai girl very niice!”

  It was a ridiculous scene. While the two of us engaged in a full-on domestic row through a slammed bathroom door, Green Ghost carried on, oblivious, under a starry sky, lurching and rolling across the dark Atlantic.

  I sat on my bunk with a “Hmph!” and waited for Nik to calm down.

  When I was finally let into the head, I found Nik with a blood-soaked wad of toilet paper up against the back of his skull. He had an inch-long gouge in his scalp. It bled, as only head wounds can, but it was a clean cut and, with pressure, the bleeding soon stopped. I flushed it with saline solution, applied alcohol and an antibiotic cream. I was sure it would heal up just fine left on its own and, eventually, it did.

  After a slow and gentle eleven-day ride, the islands of Fernando de Noronha appeared. The skyline was stunning, dominated by the phallic Morro do Pico and pierced by dramatically eroded volcanic rock silhouettes in every direction. The shoreline was sand-fringed with beautiful beaches of golden muscovado sands tucked between the headlands.

  We arrived in the anchorage with perfect timing – 8:30 p.m. ship’s time, just late enough that the officials had gone home for the day, not too late for cocktail hour, and still early enough for a proper night’s sleep. We anchored off the steep rocky headland beneath an old fort, Forte de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios.

  “Did you hear that?” Nik asked once the engine was off.

  The Atlantic swell slapped the near-vertical cliffs at the shoreline, forcing air through fissures and crevasses, producing a sound like a fire-breathing dragon.

  “Ah! The Dragon of Fernando!” I said, a little overly dramatic. (What can I say? I was reading Game of Thrones at the time.)

  “I’ve never heard a blowhole so loud.”

  We went below, poured ourselves generous G&Ts, and later fell asleep to the hissing respirations of a sea dragon.

  Despite the thrill of making landfall, on our first day in the anchorage we dug deep into our locker of self-control and remained on board to complete our job list rather than making a beeline for the famed beaches of Fernando.

  We didn’t normally get cheeky with officials, but anchoring fees at Fernando were expensive. So we decided that a little cheekiness was worth the risk. In the customs office, when asked what day we’d arrived on the island, we answered coyly.

  “Arrive here?” gesturing to our feet. “Today,” we said, suggesting the truth – that we’d only just come ashore that day.

  There was a flurry of Portuguese among the men in the office, but our claim went unchallenged, even though Green Ghost had been anchored in full view of the port captain’s office for the previous two nights. We were given a table of costs that escalated for a three-, four-, or five-day stay. We pointed to the four-day option and were given a bill for R$1,060 (about C$500) to sleep at anchor in our own bed, at hotel Green Ghost.

  Knowing that Fernando was expensive, I’d anticipated an island of high-end development and a clientele to match, but I was wrong. The sparsely populated island is rugged and natural. The tourists were mostly vacationing Brazilian nationals dressed down in comfortable go-to-the beach clothing. On the beaches themselves, much less was worn – much, much less. My cheek-encasing bikini seemed downright frumpy next to the fashion sported on Fernando. No one does butt cheeks like the Brazilians. Even the men were in tiny togs.

  The local Baía do Sancho had recently turned up on a list of the Top Ten Beaches in the World. Naturally, we had to see it. To get there we took a bus to a national park, passed through the park gateway, then proceeded along a raised walkway through lush green forest to a vertiginous platform perched on a cliff. We descended through a hole in the platform, climbing down two long vertical stainless-steel ladders, squeezing through the narrow crevice in the basaltic rock. Once on the sand at the bottom, we were surrounded by a crescent of high cliffs on one side and the sapphire sea on the other. We swam and snorkelled, enjoying the company of turtles and rays and the ever-present eye-popping sight of the few other tourists in their oh-so-tiny Brazilian swimwear. There was no doubt this beach had earned its place on the list of the best.

  Perhaps in reflection of our long-faced stay on Ascension we were determined to have as much fun as possible in our ninety-six hours on Fernando. We were all-in, ignoring our budget, splashing out on an expensive meal at a fancy restaurant overlooking the port, trying out premium versions of the national drink, caipirinha, the taste of Brazil.

  We rented a dune-buggy – a green machine on a Volkswagen chassis with fat tires and low gearing – and felt particularly authentic when Nik brought his surfboard ashore. We ripped around on the rough dirt tracks hunting for the best surf spots. A surfboard in a dune buggy – it felt so very Barbie and Ken.

  Four days
of fun on Fernando had been a welcome respite and had energized our flagging spirits. On deck on our final evening, we readied the boat for offshore. We knew what had to be done: lifting and securing the outboard and the dinghy, checking the rigging, stowing any items left lying around, plotting our course for the morning. The tasks were so familiar now, we barely had to converse. As we quietly worked together we marvelled again at the loud exhalations, the ever-present bellowing that pulsated with the roll of the sea. Soon, Green Ghost was ready. Change, it seemed, was as inevitable as the next breath of a dragon.

  CHAPTER 29

  One Hundred and One Atlantic Nights

  (May – June 2014)

  I got a Brazilian. Cold, that is. I suppose my immune system wasn’t up to interacting with the South American population on Fernando. Retribution crossed my mind – shades of historic voyages and transmission of disease – only this time it was the English (descendant) going down.

  We were en route to French Guiana. At 1,300 NM, it was another long passage and it wasn’t much fun being at sea with puffy eyelids, packed sinuses, and a dripping nose. Had I been at work, I would’ve stayed home, but you can’t take a day off when you’re offshore sailing. So I took my watches with a box of tissues. Fortunately, conditions were gentle and, because of our watch schedules, I got to go back to bed every four hours.

  The wind was only four to six knots, much too light for a seventeen-ton boat with a double-reefed mainsail. We were in the doldrums again, sailing only eight of the first thirty-seven hours of the voyage. After three days, northeast winds filled in, putting us on a beam reach and we began to make good mileage toward French Guiana. This was a big change from months of southeasterly wind patterns and, although we were still two degrees south of the equator, the conditions suggested that we had crossed into the weather patterns of the North Atlantic. Our speed was improved by the north equatorial current that moves up the South American coast. With a full moon lighting our nights, no squall activity and the gentle wind, we settled in to enjoy the last leg in the open Atlantic.