Sea Over Bow

by Linda Kenyon

  SEA OVER BOW

  A NORTH ATLANTIC CROSSING

  Linda Kenyon

  © 2018, Linda Kenyon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Doowah Design.

  Photo of Linda Kenyon by Chris Hatton.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kenyon, Linda J. (Linda Jean), 1956-, author

  Sea over bow : a North Atlantic crossing / Linda Kenyon.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77324-040-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77324-041-1 (EPUB)

  1. Kenyon, Linda J. (Linda Jean), 1956- --Travel--North Atlantic

  Ocean. 2. Transatlantic voyages. 3. Sailing--North Atlantic Ocean.

  4. Sailors--Canada--Biography. 5. Authors, Canadian (English)--

  Biography. I. Title.

  G530.K35K46 2018 910.9163’1 C2018-905150-7

  C2018-905151-5

  Signature Editions

  P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

  www.signature-editions.com

  Send me out into another life

  lord because this one is growing faint

  I do not think it goes all the way

  — W.S. Merwin

  Contents

  Prologue

  No Turning Back

  May 22

  May 23

  May 24

  May 25

  May 26

  May 27

  May 28

  The Crossing

  June 1

  June 3

  June 4

  June 6

  June 9

  June 10

  June 11

  June 12

  June 13

  Clobbered

  June 14

  June 15

  June 16

  Landfall

  Hard Aground

  Postscript: I’ll fly away

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Prologue

  I am braced in the companionway with just my head and shoulders above deck, holding on so tightly my fingernails will leave marks in the wood. The cockpit enclosure protects me from the wind, which howls through the rigging. But it doesn’t protect me from the salt spray, not entirely. Water drips through every little gap in the canvas, around the zippers, between the snaps. A wave breaks over the boat, drenching the cockpit completely, and for a minute I can’t see anything through the plastic windows. Then they clear.

  I’m not sure which is better, seeing or not seeing.

  When we’re in a trough, all I can see is a wall of water moving towards us. It’s hard to tell how big the waves are. Three metres? Four? Sometimes they just lift us up, pass beneath the boat, set us back down more or less gently. When we’re on the crest of a wave, all I see is confusion in every direction, waves crashing into each other sending plumes of salt spray into the air. Sometimes a wave breaks beside the boat and we slew as the water boils around us. It’s worse when a wave slams against the side with a heavy thud and the boat rolls sharply, then rights itself.

  But not as bad as when a wave breaks right over us with a mighty crash. The boat shudders sickeningly, then is still for a moment, and water pours out through the scuppers. Then it all starts again.

  I look down through the companionway. Chris is stretched out on the starboard settee, asleep, I think. How is that possible? His face is relaxed, peaceful almost, his greying hair a tousled mess. Who is this man? And what am I doing here? I could be back at my condo right now, sitting beside the fire, a glass of wine in hand, a big fat book open on my lap.

  What am I doing?

  NO TURNING BACK

  May 22

  Day 1

  We haven’t set the anchor properly, just dropped it over the side to keep us more or less in the same place while Chris finishes scrubbing the bottom. He couldn’t see the hull clearly in the murky waters of English Harbour and wants it to be as smooth and clean as possible for the crossing — a dirty bottom can take up to a knot off our speed, he’s mentioned several times. So although technically we’re underway, we’ve pulled into a shallow, sandy bay on the southeastern tip of Antigua while he gives the hull one more going over. Perhaps he’s a little more apprehensive about the crossing than he lets on.

  I’m down below making lunch and keeping an eye on a tall palm tree on shore, making sure we don’t drift too far. I slice into a red pepper, holding it over the sink to catch the drips, core it, scrape out the seeds, dice it into a bowl, not the pottery bowl I usually make salads in — that’s tucked away in a sweater somewhere. I’m using a stainless steel bowl, part of a nested set I use when we’re underway. They’re absolutely indestructible. At least they have been so far.

  But compared to what we’re about to do, the trip from Lake Erie to Antigua was a Sunday afternoon sail. We motored down the Erie Canal, tying up at the end of each day for a good night’s sleep, then down the Hudson River to New York City, where we waited for the right weather to set out into the ocean. We hugged the coast from New York to Miami, never out of sight of shore, for the most part, and slipping into the intracoastal waterway, an inland passage running all the way from Norfolk to the Florida Keys, when we needed a break from ocean sailing. From Miami, it was just an overnight sail to the Bahamas, then after an easy sail to the British Virgin Islands, we pretty much island-hopped our way to Antigua.

  My dad has been following our progress on a big map he’s thumbtacked to the corkboard in Mom’s room at the nursing home. Whenever he hears from us, he marks our position with a pushpin, loops a piece of red yarn around it. Dad tells anyone who comes in what we’re doing, where we are now, how he would have done it. I can see the personal care worker nodding as she helps Mom onto the commode. Uh huh. Is that right? A little to the left. Joan, I need you to move to the left.

  When she’s back in her chair, Mom wheels up to the map, leans forward, peers at it.

  “Oh my god!” I can hear her saying when she sees we’ve headed out into the ocean, or “Jesus!” which is kind of funny. We kids were never allowed to take the Lord’s name in vain, as she called it. I guess she has a whole lifetime of profanity saved up. And a lot to curse.

  Mom was in her mid-sixties when she had a massive stroke. One minute she was passing the Christmas cake and the next the plate clattered to the floor, her arm gone limp and half her face collapsed. She never regained use of her right arm and had only a handful of one-syllable words left to her. Yes. No. I don’t know, she would say, when she couldn’t find the words she wanted, which was most of the time. I don’t care, when she gave up trying. She would lock eyes with you then, try to get you to understand what she was trying to say. And sometimes you could.

  One night, when she was having a particularly bad night and we were taking turns sitting with her, I watched her sleeping, reached over and wiped a line of dribble from her chin. It was too much for me. I put my head on my hands on the rail of her bed and let the tears run silently down my cheeks. She couldn’t have heard me, but then I felt her hand softly stroking my hair. I looked up and her dark eyes were fixed on me.

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I know.”

  “Jesus!” is probably the right response to what we are about to do. When we set out this time, there will be no more island-hopping. We won’t be able to
stop until we reach Bermuda, which should take us about ten days. Our plan is to rest there briefly before making the fifteen-day crossing to the Azores.

  The magnitude of what I’m doing, what I’ve done, really began to sink in as we started provisioning for the ocean crossing. Chris, an engineer, has a wealth of theoretical knowledge. He’s been reading books about ocean sailing all his life.

  “So here’s how you do it,” he instructed me. “It’s roughly 2,300 miles to the Azores, the way we’re planning to go. If we make good 100 miles a day, that’s twenty-three days at sea. Make it twenty-five. We should count on a storm every five days, easy sailing two days out of five, and rougher weather the other two. So that’s five storm days, ten calm days, and ten rough days.”

  Five storm days, I thought. I can handle that. As long as they’re not all in a row. I set up a spreadsheet on my computer, with twenty-five days down the left-hand side and breakfast, lunch, and dinner across the top. I colour-coded the days as storm, calm, and rough, then started plotting out meals. On storm days, we’d have cold cereal for breakfast, soup and cheese and crackers for lunch, canned stew for dinner. Or maybe cheese and crackers again. Calm days were much more fun to plan. I’d bake bread, make chicken cacciatore, meatloaf, shepherd’s pie. We’d heat up leftovers on the rougher days, or have pasta and a jar of sauce.

  I started my list.

  Our freezer is tiny, about the size of two loaves of bread, so I planned to fill it with meat, but there would be canned tuna, lots of it, and chickpeas, for when the meat ran out. The fresh produce would last a couple of weeks at the most, so I added canned vegetables to the list, even though we never eat them. V8, a couple of cases of it, to prevent scurvy. UHT milk, which has a shelf life of six months and doesn’t taste too bad when it’s really cold. We didn’t need butter — Chris had ordered a case of it from Australia before we left. Two dozen eggs, which he had promised would last for a couple of weeks as long as they had never been washed or refrigerated.

  Shampoo, toilet paper, soap, paper towels, dish detergent…the list grew longer and longer. And bottled water, lots of it, enough to get us to the Azores, if necessary, if our water tanks sprang a leak. Lots of tea and coffee. And chocolate, of course, for those long night watches.

  By the time we scratched off the last item on our list, we’d filled two grocery carts — and that was without the water. The bill was a staggering $2,197.

  “Holy cow!” I said.

  “Eastern Caribbean dollars,” Chris said. He inspected the cash register tape. “That’s $1,465 Canadian dollars. About $500 a week. But we bought lots of extra stuff, just in case we’re out there longer.”

  “Holy cow,” I said again.

  It took us all day to transport our provisions to the boat, one dinghy load at a time, and stow them. By the time we were done, the V-berth was full, four-litre jugs of water bungee-corded along both sides, paper towels and toilet paper wedged between them, fresh produce and eggs carefully arranged in mesh hanging baskets with lots of room to swing. The food lockers were packed tight so nothing would rattle around, cans and heavy things in the lower lockers, lighter things higher up. The cupboards in the galley were carefully stocked with things I’d want to put my hands on quickly — tea, coffee, crackers, ginger snaps to combat sea sickness.

  I collapsed on the settee, wiped the sweat off my face with a cool washcloth while Chris listened to Chris Parker on the SSB radio. A sailor himself and a serious student of weather, Chris Parker provides detailed weather forecasts morning and evening. He’d been keeping a careful eye on an early-season hurricane that had just made landfall in the Honduras. It seemed to have petered out, but we wanted to be sure the weather was back to normal before we set out. Chris took off his headphones, shook his head.

  “Another day,” he said.

  One more comfortable night’s sleep at anchor, I thought. One more hot pineapple turnover for breakfast at the bakery on shore. One more quick trip to the woman who sells produce outside the gate — maybe she’ll have fresh mangoes in the morning.

  “Too bad,” I said to Chris. “Let’s walk over to Falmouth Harbour for one last chocolate martini.”

  On the way back, we ran into the one-legged beggar who had befriended us. Or we him. I’m not sure which.

  He was one of the first people we had met after dropping anchor in English Harbour. He spotted us right away, new people in town, and hopped towards us as fast as he could go.

  “Uh-oh,” I had said to Chris.

  Then he was upon us. He leaned on his crutches, offered Chris his hand, shook it heartily. Wait for it, I thought. And it came. A long story about a man who had promised him work but then didn’t show up and maybe he would show up tomorrow but in the meantime could we spare any change?

  Chris dug into his pocket. We’d just arrived and didn’t have any change yet, so he gave the man a five-dollar bill.

  “Thanks, man,” he said, and hurried away.

  Later that afternoon we saw him sprawled out on the dock, singing to himself, smiling, all worries about work — and his missing leg — clearly forgotten.

  The next time we saw him, Chris had a fistful of change ready. He accepted it gratefully — relieved, I think, that he didn’t have to come up with another story. And so it went. We saw him pretty much every time we walked over to Falmouth Harbour. He took to greeting us by gently punching our fists rather than shaking hands like he did with the tourists, and Chris would give him whatever change he had in his pocket.

  I don’t know his story, and I was too shy to ask. He was young, maybe in his early thirties. He wore the same threadbare pants every day, the empty right leg pinned up so it didn’t get tangled in his crutches. He was skinny — his pants seemed always on the verge of falling down, and his shirt was always open, exposing his hollow stomach. What happened to your front teeth, I wanted to ask him. They were broken, as though he’d been hit hard in the mouth. How did you lose your leg, I wanted to know. Or maybe I didn’t.

  That last evening we could tell by his unfocussed grin that he had had a really good day. He punched Chris’s hand, punched mine. Chris dug into his pocket and gave him what was left of our Eastern Caribbean money — change, bills, all of it. We aren’t planning to keep a ziplock bag of money from every country we visit.

  He laughed out loud, then took Chris’s hand in his and started singing, not a song so much as a joyful chant. We couldn’t understand a word he said. He smiled and sang, kept nodding at me, then at Chris. He took my hand and pressed it into Chris’s, put his hands around ours, sang a few more lines, then gave our hands a firm squeeze and released them. He was still smiling and nodding at us as we walked away.

  “What just happened?” I asked Chris.

  “I think we just got married.”

  I check the palm tree. Yep. Still where it was. I can hear the scrunch, scrunch, scrunch of the scrub brush on the bottom of the boat so I know Chris is okay.

  A man and a woman appear on the beach. The man points to our boat, shades his eyes with one hand as he studies it. It’s an unusual boat for these waters, not a modern fibreglass production boat, but a steel boat built lovingly by hand (not our hands, alas) twenty years ago — thirty if you count from the day Marv started working on it. Marv was an electrician but his real passion was for woodworking.

  The first time I climbed down the companionway ladder I couldn’t believe my eyes. The boat is fitted with beautiful ash cabinetry, gleaming tongue and groove on the walls, ash boards with teak strips between them on the floor. But the cushions — those would have to go. As would the frying pan full of bolts and washers on the stove. Now we have leather cushions, and the brass lamp above the table is polished until you can see your reflection in it. The tools and fasteners and cable ties and bits of wire have migrated back to the engine room.

  But of course the couple on shore can’t see any of this. What they se
e is a sailboat with a pointy bow angling sharply up out of the water. The seas have to be pretty big before waves break over the bow. Our backup anchor hangs off the front of the boat, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, and there are twenty-litre jugs of water and diesel fuel lashed along the side of the deck. A life raft sits prominently on the foredeck, just behind the mast. No one could mistake us for anything but an ocean-going sailboat.

  But the most distinctive thing about our boat is the cockpit enclosure. Most sailboats have removable canvas and plastic for protection from the elements, but Chris has designed and built a permanent steel structure with a sturdy Plexiglas windscreen and canvas side curtains that can be completely closed up in bad weather. Unlike a pilothouse, which looks like a cabin plunked down on a sailboat, our enclosure follows the sleek lines of the boat.

  Though the couple on shore probably can’t see them, the roof above the cockpit is completely covered with solar panels, used to charge a bank of batteries that power the fridge, the lights, all the electronics. Behind the cockpit is a radar arch crowded with antennas, not just for the radar but for the VHF radio, the main GPS, the backup GPS, the satellite phone. There are a couple of compasses up there for good measure, and an orange life ring tied to one side of the radar arch. And a bucket. And a fishing rod. Some nice pieces of rope that might just come in handy sometime.

  I chop up a couple of carrots, an onion, toss them into the bowl, open a can of chickpeas, rinse them in as little water as possible, dump them in, add a glug of olive oil, a dash of balsamic vinegar. Hmm, haven’t heard any scrubbing for a bit. I wipe my hands on a tea towel, go above deck. Chris is at the stern, hanging from the swim ladder, catching his breath.

  “Done!” he says.

  “Good timing. Lunch is ready.”

  I hand him a towel, then go below and bring up the bowl of salad and two forks. We eat on the back deck while Chris dries off. The hills surrounding the bay are a lush green, the sky pale blue, the water a deeper shade of blue but so clear you can see the sandy bottom. I’m tempted to go for a quick swim, but we need to get underway — we’d like to clear the reefs off Barbuda before nightfall.