The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea

by Mary South

  Still, every morning at 7:00 A.M. the place came to life as mechanics, painters, woodworkers, electricians and expediters arrived for work. The deserted yard blossomed into a small, nautically obsessed town every time the sun rose. I knew just about everybody who worked there. True to the spirit of boaters everywhere, they were mostly laid-back and friendly-even when I knew they were running behind on jobs and under enormous pressure. Several of the workers carried biscuits in their pockets, just in case they ran into Heck or Samba, who were greeted with affection and treats every time they went for a walk. I liked it there, living aboard my boat.

  As for Chapman, in all fairness, most of the staff knew more about seamanship than I'll learn in my lifetime. And many of the instructors were very generous with their time and eager to see us succeed. I knew nothing when I went in but when I came out, I was crammed full of information, some of it very useful, some of it not, and much of it forgotten as quickly as it was learned. Still, there was simply no way I could be forced to learn so much and not leave there better prepared than when I started. Despite its weaknesses, Chapman gave me a great foundation for real-life experience, and it definitely built my confidence.

  My classmates topped off the course with an extra three weeks of prep for the Coast Guard exam, but since I had virtually no at-sea experience, I decided to take the test later, when I had accrued enough sea time to qualify as a captain. In the meantime, Chapman loaned me the phenomenal Captain Bob Swindell for three boat-handling lessons aboard the Bossanova, to compensate for a makeup class in electronics that I missed. Captain Bob, who was a professional tugboat captain, met me at the dock one sunny morning. "Good morning, Mary," he hailed me in a booming voice. "Permission to come aboard, Captain?"

  "Permission granted, Captain Swindell." Bob climbed aboard, clipboard in one hand, briefcase in another, polarized sunglasses hanging from a cord around his neck. After a short, mandatory love fest with the two vicious guard dogs, I gave Captain Bob a tour of the boat. He whistled when we were through. "This is a great ship you've got here-my kind of boat."

  Captain Bob started me off with the basics: "Okay, Mary. We're going to leave the dock in a little while. What's the first thing we should do?"

  "Run through a pre departure checklist." I confidently responded. "Check the oil, the fuel, the batteries, the VHF, the lights and steering."

  "Nope," he said with a grin. "Those are the next things you do. The very first thing you always do is check the weather to see if you should even think about leaving the dock."

  We tuned the VHF to WX and Captain Bob asked for my ship's log. "Well, I don't have one yet, but I'll get one." "Good. And Mary, you don't need to get a fancy one-a simple spiral notebook will do the job. Have you got one of those? We'll use that for now."

  We jotted down the date, our location, the wind speed and direction, and then we recorded the morning's forecast. "Now, we know the weather's going to be fine-let's run through that checklist. Let's see how you do that."

  Captain Bob watched me as I did my engine inspections. When I showed him how I moved diesel from my port and starboard tanks to a day tank, he nodded approvingly, then suggested I get another log to keep in the engine room. "That way when you check your fuel-tank levels, you can jot down what you had, what you moved and what you wound up with in your day tank."

  Back in the pilothouse, we fired up the engine and then stepped out on the deck. "Now, Mary. You're going to have to back out of this slip. What's your approach going to be? We checked the weather, so we know the wind's blowing north-east at 6 knots. Pretty mild. So, which lines would you untie first and what's your strategy going to be once you're out?"

  Captain Bob had a wonderful manner as a teacher. Not too hard (he never made me feel stupid) and not too soft (he never let me feel like I knew it all, either). His whole attitude was one of great confidence in my ability to think. This was more important than I can say. The idea of finally running my boat, of starting the engine and getting off the docks, was fairly terrifying to me, despite my nine weeks of intensive schooling. That had all been theoretical. There was nothing remotely abstract about maneuvering 30 tons of steel, tightly berthed between two million-dollar fiberglass Hinckley yachts.

  But Captain Bob's teaching manner took the panic out of my gut. You know the answers, he seemed to imply, and we're not in a hurry. Good seamanship isn't the thoughtless instinct that salty dogs make it seem to be. It's the good habit of always asking yourself the right questions in the right order and answering them thoughtfully. I suppose that over time, as that becomes second nature, it starts to look effortless. In just a few hours, Captain Bob gave me enough practical information and experience to make me feel I could handle my boat, which was about 10 feet longer and 10 feet higher and 20 tons heavier than any of the boats I'd handled at Chapman. He taught me not to be afraid of her, to maneuver her with big, short bursts of power, and above all to watch my momentum and put her in neutral well before I approached a dock. The first two days we tried this, I heard him but never quite remembered everything when it was time to put his advice into action. On our last trip out, though, I got it.

  Things just clicked. Getting my boat off the dock and feeling like I could run her were huge morale boosters. This was why I had come to Chapman, and though all the education I had helped prepare me, it was only Captain Bob who gave me the confidence and practical skills to competently captain the Bossanova.

  Back at Chapman, my classmates were sweating out their final hours before the exams as I prepared for my long trip north. My observations of the first day were true-we were a motley crew-but it didn't take long for us to form a rock hard bond built on a kind of mutinous camaraderie. I may have thought we'd have little in common, but I had overlooked the enormous fact that we were all voluntarily sitting in a classroom because we wanted to learn about seamanship A nine-week commitment of more than forty hours a week and over $6,000 is not something anyone takes on whimsically. And spending more than nine hours a day, five days a week, with the same people, in a stressful situation where you feel allied against your captors, is an extremely bonding experience, as I'm sure studies of other hostage situations have confirmed.

  It was this camaraderie more than anything else that had started tipping the balance of the Chapman experience from awful toward good.

  Several weeks into our coursework, we had a midterm exam in seamanship, one of our easier classes. It covered the basic principals of boating: safety requirements, anchoring and towing techniques, and so forth. So imagine my surprise when I flunked the midterm. No, really, surprise is too mild a word. I was flabbergasted, appalled and, I'm ashamed to say, terrified. The only tests I had ever failed were occasional math tests. And not only had I studied for seamanship, but I felt fairly confident that I'd do well.

  Snuggled in among the difficult questions on points-of-sail that I had spent hours (as a non sailor) memorizing were three questions on different classes of fire extinguishers. They had seemed relatively unworthy of my attention among so much meatier fare, but they did me in. I discovered the hard way that there was no such thing as relative worth where the Coast Guard was concerned. What was worse, I was the only one who had failed, and I was now in a panic. If I couldn't pass my easiest midterm, how would I pass my other classes?

  My despair over the midterm result was exacerbated by the fact that I didn't think I could study any harder than I already did. I was exhausted and anxious. But that weekend, I gave up my precious and much-needed time off to study some more. I knew that somehow I was going to have to do better, and looming before me were much tougher midterms in marine weather and chart navigation.

  So I gloomily parked myself in an empty classroom on a gorgeous Saturday, and within an hour, about eight of my classmates had trickled in to join me. I knew they didn't need the extra studying half as much as I did, but they all insisted they did, and we worked together all day-reviewing everything, quizzing each other, helping each other out when one of us f
orgot something.

  This team spirit was the most remarkable thing about my time at Chapman. As different as we all were, we felt connected to each other by our common experience. There was an unwillingness to see anybody fail, as though all of our fates were interconnected. For instance, Collin, a South African guy who had grown up around engines, spent hours re explaining our marine engines classes to us. Without his selfless hours of brilliant tutoring, I'm positive that at least two of us would have failed our engines midterm. Instead, we got grades in the high nineties-slightly better than his, proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished.

  A sense of humor was key to our survival, and we quickly developed an arsenal of inside jokes, nicknames for the teachers and each other and routines to let off steam. Most of us ate a quick lunch together almost every day at a tiny place around the corner called George's. Every few weeks someone would host a party where we'd all drink too much and talk trash. But our most touching routine developed organically, after every exam.

  The Chapman dormitories, a disgraceful conglomerate of small, rundown apartments across the parking lot from the classrooms, was where about half the student body stayed-mostly the younger guys, who didn't mind the dark, dingy units that seemed to be furnished with items that had seen better days at an SRO: tattered plaid Barcaloungers, velour loveseats, paintings from the Starving Artist liquidation sale, plastic cups and glasses. The first few people to finish an exam invariably went to buy beer and brought it back with copious amounts of ice and sometimes a bottle of rum. They'd kick back on one unit's screened-in patio and hail exiting students as they trickled out of the exam. Almost everyone came to these impromptu get-togethers. We'd compare results, commiserate and celebrate putting one more hurdle behind us. You can't really imagine how oddly meaningful this tradition was unless you can picture Roger, a silver-haired, suave and successful executive knocking back a couple of Bud Lights with Mike, the ponytailed long-distance trucker. Or Chai, a ruddy-faced, slightly insane Alaskan fisherman clinking cups with Susan, the blond pony-tailed documentary filmmaker. Or me, a staunch liberal with an "alternative lifestyle," raising a glass with John, a die-hard Republican who drove a Cadillac and referred to women as broads. ("No offense, Mare," he'd always add.)

  John was usually the first out of the exam room. Short and slightly paunchy, he had a booming voice, a big heart and a broad Chicago accent. His gods were the Cubs, Auggie Busch and Bud Light-not necessarily in that order. He was only 33 but was escaping a successful career as a strip-mall developer that had caused him anxiety attacks and high blood pressure. John wasn't sure what he wanted to do in his new life, but he thought getting a captain's license was a good start.

  John and I happened to be assigned to the same boat handling team, and it was in this milieu, as we chugged up the murky Manatee Pocket toward a view of the Atlantic and the freedom that was just beyond our reach, that we developed a grudging liking for each other. Despite the almost countless differences between us, we had one huge, unspoken thing in common: a love of being out on the water that bordered on narcotic addiction. Like me, John would often stretch out on the bow with his face tilted up to the sun, smiling blissfully. A former Formula speedboat owner, he had spent weekends zooming around Lake Michigan with his pals and had already mastered a lot of the rudimentary boat-handling skills that I was just learning. And though a smart Republican is an oxymoronic concept to me, John was also a very intelligent guy who quietly did well at every task the course demanded of him.

  But his academic success was the only quiet thing about John. He talked a little too loudly, and this tendency became an unstoppable and amplified habit after he had a few drinks. John was supremely generous and outgoing, always insistent on picking up the tab when out with large groups, and as he drank more, he often became sentimental. ("Mare, you're the best," he'd scream, wobbling slightly on his feet. "No, no.

  Listen to me. I mean it. You're all right.") More than once, we were out with John, and some overly aggressive lout would get sick of hearing John yelling and try to pick a fight. John would apologize, offer to buy the guy a drink, the guy would refuse, John would get pissed off and turn to us and say in what he probably thought was a whisper but was actually very loud, "Asshole." Then we'd have to step in and convince the belligerent fellow not to clock John, and drag him from the bar while he shouted that it wasn't his fault-it was just the way he talked.

  Whether we were in a bar, studying for an exam or complaining en masse about the lack of modern electronics in the lab, we increasingly acted as a family. Sure, we were a very weird, diverse and sometimes dysfunctional family, but the level of care we had for each other, despite our different backgrounds and lifestyles, was truly amazing.

  Near the end of our course, before the three weeks of prep for the Coast Guard exam that I had not enrolled in, we had an all-day class in emergency medicine at sea. Our teacher was a part-time EMT volunteer in his thirties, a Chapman graduate who now ran a yacht maintenance company. He was sunburned, crew-cut and walleyed. He had on new, bright white leather sneakers, jeans and a golf shirt. He had the look of a second-string high school jock who's gone soft, and his midriff was vying, unsuccessfully, for room against the beeper on his belt. He launched the class by letting us know how stupid he thought his clients were and how rich they had made him. Charming. And it went downhill from there.

  He spent most of the day telling us marine emergency horror stories. He had seen an 18-year-old dockhand get his arm ripped off when it tangled with a line as a yacht pulled away. We were treated to a vivid description of the severed limb hanging from the rope while the young man stood staring in shock at the geyser of blood shooting from his stump. Mr. Compassion had also seen a man rush into an engine room right before a steam explosion. When he emerged, his skin was hanging from his body like a loose suit.

  What was ugly about our teacher was not so much that he enjoyed telling us these stories-which he obviously did-but that he seemed to relish the actual catastrophes. He also displayed a shocking callousness toward human life-advising us, for example, not to give mouth-to-mouth to the homeless, because they might have infectious diseases. He also said that he would refuse to resuscitate someone that might throw up on him-unless it was a family member, of course. He delivered his horror stories and advice with such gruesome relish that it was hard to learn anything from the lessons except the depth of his dispassion.

  Unfortunately, real life provided us with a much more valuable-and tragic-lesson while we were still in school. Carol and her husband, Mike, who were buying a fancy trawler from a nearby company, went to a cocktail party their boat maker sponsored one evening. The next day, they told me about another couple they'd met there and really enjoyed. Like Carol and Mike, this couple had retired early and had just taken delivery of their luxurious 47-foot PassageMaker. They were about to set off on the first of many journeys on their beautiful new boat, and they found plenty to talk about with Carol and Mike, who were making similar plans.

  Just four days later, we heard that the wife-who was only in her mid fifties-had died in a tragic accident. As the couple prepared to leave the cove, their anchor line tangled with a nearby sailboat's mooring line. The sailboat was caught and pulled toward the trawler. The wife, who was on deck while her husband manned the helm, ran around the deck to fend off the sailboat and was impaled against her yacht by the sailboat's bowsprit. She was instantly crushed to death.

  Probably the most common and deadly of nautical accidents occurs while fending off another boat or a dock. The desire to protect your boat from bumping into someone else's vessel or a big wooden piling is completely instinctual. Unfortunately, so is the tendency to use your hands or body weight as a force to push the object and your boat apart. Even a little bit of thought would suggest this is a lousy idea, but most people aren't thinking in this sort of situation. Chapman instructors were relentless in teaching us never to use any part of our bodies to fend off docks or other boats, and they d
efinitely squelched this gut reaction in most of us.

  This tragedy had more of an impact on me than anything the gruesome EMT guy had thrown at us. It highlighted how very quickly and irreversibly smart people do stupid things.

  The biggest danger of boating isn't necessarily the fickle weather or the merciless sea but the simple human error that leads to loss of limbs or loss of life. My boat was big, and I knew very, very little about all the things that could go wrong. For several days, I was deeply afraid of all the ways I could screw up, but I reminded myself that people die in car accidents every day, get hit by buses while crossing intersections and croak from eating undercooked hamburgers. I would be as careful as I could, but there was no point making myself sick about it.

  By the time graduation rolled around, I had recovered academically. I missed a final exam on boat systems and took a zero instead of making it up: it dragged me down to a respectable 87, which was good enough for me.

  Now it was time to put myself to the test. The Bossanova and I were going to leave Florida and head northeast. While I had initially planned on making the trip alone, I began to see the ridiculousness of this idea. It was foolish enough that my first trip off the dock for more than a few hours was going to be a trip up the entire East Coast. At my boat's cruising rate, running alone, it would be at least a four-week trip. Standing at the helm for eight hours a day, seven days a week. . .well, it didn't seem like the smartest idea, though I knew it could be done. Reluctantly (because I hate asking for help), I looked for someone among my classmates who'd be willing to make such a long journey without pay. There was only one classmate who was crazy enough to volunteer, and that was John.