by Tania Aebi
Fritz had never been on a sailboat before, and both he and Nina were afraid of the water, so it was with a different sense of adventure that the four of us left the Canary Islands for the Caribbean two months later. On November 24, 1983, we bid farewell to the last piece of land for 2,776 miles and twenty-eight days.
Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic—I’m not sure where—a plan hatched in my father’s head. He was apprehensive about our arrival home, fearing that I’d fall back in with old friends and bad habits. Aimlessness is a condition unthinkable to Ernst Aebi, a man true to his Swiss-German background who must either have a clear plan or be changing a plan at all times. For my father, living with someone without a plan is just about as bad as not having one himself. The closer we got to New York, the more it gnawed at him. Sitting back in the cockpit one evening, as he watched the sunset over a glass of brandy, he blurted it out.
“Tania, you know you must start to make some decisions about your future,” he started. Oh, here we go, I thought. This was beginning to become a familiar conversation-opener. “OK, you don’t want to go to college, but you still have to do something with your life.” Although I sighed with exasperation, the trouble was that I knew he was right. I did have to do something, and, in truth, I had been giving it some thought. It was just that no great inspirations had come to mind.
“I’m going to go back to being a messenger for a while and then decide. Don’t worry about it, Daddy.”
“What do you mean? I am your father and I have been worrying about it. Anyway, I’ve come up with an idea.”
“I really don’t want to hear it,” I said, in no mood for an argument.
“How about . . . if you sail around the world . . .” he was talking and conjuring at the same time, a dangerous thing. “How about if you sail around the world, and I’ll buy the boat. I’ll buy the boat and you can use it for the trip. I mean, I’d have to spend the money on tuition anyway if you went to college. You obviously have no intention of going to college, right?
“You mean to tell me you’d give me a boat?”
“Ernst, you mean you’d give her a boat?” echoed Fritz, looking up from his own brandy.
“Well, let’s say I’d let you borrow a boat, but you’d have to be resourceful and support yourself along the way.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said.
“Yah,” said Fritz, “and then Nina could cross Siberia on crutches, right?”
“Don’t be narrow-minded, Fritz,” answered my father. “You’re too much of a chicken to even jump in the water. Tania would even be able to write articles about the trip to support herself, especially since she has always liked writing. This way, she could begin some sort of career with a bang.”
This didn’t sound half bad to me. I had loved sailing on Pathfinder and thought how great it would be to sail to all kinds of exotic places, have my friends from New York join me along the way as crew and meet tons of interesting people.
“Not bad,” I said.
My father took another sip from his brandy. “But, to make it really something, though, you’d have to do it alone. . . .”
“Whaddaya mean—alone?”
“I mean alone. Singlehanded. To make it really interesting you’d have to go around the world singlehanded. What do you think, that I’m going to buy you a boat for pleasure? No way. This would be a job.”
“Alone? ME? That’s nuts. Forget it.” I stopped listening. The idea no longer held any appeal.
“Ernst Aebi,” interrupted Fritz, “you are a crazy Schweizer. You know Tania. She could get herself killed.” But my father was like a dog with a bone.
• • •
After a respite in the Caribbean, except for one knock-down, drag-out storm, our grand finale leg up the East Coast home to New York was an uneventful passage of a combined 1,700 miles in twenty-one days. There was plenty of time to reflect while still on the ocean. My plans for the future were modest. Whenever anyone had ever asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I had always said, “I want to travel around the world and see as much as I can.” I had entertained visions of working as a messenger and saving up enough money to make that goal come true. My father’s tales of his wanderings all over Europe and Asia when he was twenty years old had made me dream.
But going around the world on a sailboat alone, what kind of an idea was that? I was only seventeen. We had only sailed Pathfinder on three passages and I didn’t even know how to sail a boat by myself. Anyway, how would I learn everything? Celestial navigation? Electronics? Coastal navigation? Heavy-weather sailing? Mechanical repairs? Meteorology? The list was endless. I didn’t even know how to drive a car.
“You wouldn’t have to learn it all at once,” my father replied to these qualms. “Sailing is based on common sense and you’ll learn very quickly once you start.”
“But, Daddy, going out to sea all alone? How could I possibly handle everything on a boat all by myself?”
“It’s easy, I’m telling you. You can read my books. Don’t worry about the little things. They will take care of themselves. Think big! Think about the world that you will see. Think about sailing your own pretty little boat into an exotic foreign port and seeing it in a way that no Mickey Mouse tourist in a bubble-topped bus will ever see it. And this would be your job. That’s the beauty of the plan. It would be your job to pay for the trip by being a writer. Writers need something to write about, right?”
“I guess so, but what if . . .”
“Yah. Yah. If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bus.”
I let him talk. Crazy as it sounded, the more he talked and the closer we got to New York, the more the plan began to grow on me.
When we got back home, I went to visit my mother in Switzerland for two months and enrolled in a summer course at the University of Lausanne. People my age came from all over Europe to improve their French and make new friends. It seemed as if everyone I met had solid plans. They were continuing school or entering apprenticeships or going into family businesses or traveling for the summer before starting jobs. I felt like a tumbleweed. Except for this loco idea of sailing alone around the world, I had no ties to the future.
One evening, I put the idea forward to my mother and she surprised me with her support. By then, she knew that life wasn’t blessing her with endless amounts of time and she philosophized, “Don’t be scared of what may eventually happen. Live for the day, Tania, and always try to do great things.”
The next time one of my classmates asked me what I was going to do once school was over, I hesitated, “I’m planning . . . to go around the world, alone, on a sailboat.” I gave a nervous laugh. The push was on.
• • •
It was dark by the time I came out of my reverie and I began to feel a bit embarrassed over the earlier anchoring procedure. Hoping no one had been around to witness it, I peeked out the companionway. Another sailboat had come in and anchored next door, but I didn’t feel like talking to anybody and ducked back below, staring through a porthole. Preparing my bed, a narrow bunk that stretched from the sink to a cubbyhole under the cockpit on the port side of the boat, I wiggled my way into my sleeping bag and after a few more tears for the loved ones and the life being left behind, fell into a deep sleep.
“Hello, are you awake in there?” The next morning I awoke to a man’s voice and the sound of a dinghy circling Varuna and clambered outside.
“Hi. I’m awake.”
“Could you use some breakfast?” asked the man in the dinghy. He didn’t have to ask twice. I jumped in and we motored over to his boat to join his girlfriend for bran flakes, fresh strawberries, herbal tea and honey while they told me, “Hey, we saw you on TV last night. But, we figured you needed some sleep, so we didn’t bother you.” After an hour, I left my first friends of the trip and wached them sail out of the cove.
“Good luck, Tania! Good luck!” they called, sailing away.
“Thanks!” I called back. “I’m going to need it!” Good luck—
that was practically all I had heard during the past few months.
I went back down below and reread all the letters of best wishes and examined presents that became Varuna’s first assortment of decorations. My mother had given me a Chinese doll she picked up in Chinatown on the way down to see me off. She had made my favorite apple pie and wrapped it in plastic wrap with a paper heart taped on top. I held the little doll in my hand, wondering if my mother would be there to welcome me home when I finished the voyage and thinking about her face as she said goodbye. We had said goodbye many times before, but this time we both knew it was different. I broke down again, but not for myself. My future was as limitless as this morning’s horizon. The tears were for the cage of my mother’s reality, for people born under the wrong star and for whom life can be so unfair. “I am doing this trip for you, too, Mommy,” I said aloud. “I want to help you dream, and give you something to hope for.”
Lost in thought, I organized all my belongings and cleaned up the boat, finding a bagful of wrapped gifts from Tony, Nina, Jade and my father, with tags telling me when to open them: “Congratulations on crossing the equator,” said one. “Happy Birthday” said another. Others said, “Merry Christmas” and “To be opened 300 miles from Australia.” I shook them and held them up to the light, finally stowing them in a safe, waterproof area. Then I found the sealed envelope from my mother. It was thick; there was something of a strange texture inside and, in large, gangly printing it said simply: “To be opened in the middle of the ocean.” I quickly put the envelope away, deciding to save it for a special occasion.
Back to business, I tasted all the donated foods and threw out what wouldn’t keep. Tiny though it might be, this was my first home. For the first time in my life, I was completely on my own. So many things were about to happen. I inhaled deeply, counted to ten, exhaled slowly to calm myself, and offered a silent prayer: “I’m scared, God. Be good to me, please. I’m off to see your beautiful world.”
I bled the fuel system, listened to the engine purr for half an hour, finished cleaning up and slept one more night. In the morning, I called my father for the last time from America.
“Good luck, Tania,” he said. “This morning I listened to the weather report and everything is A-one perfect.”
On the first of June, under a clear sky, I turned on the engine and headed Varuna’s bow out into the blue unknown. A U.S. Coast Guard whirlybird hovered overhead, and a man leaned out to wave, screaming, “GOOD LUCK!” I squinted up into the sunshine and waved back. “Thanks,” I called. “See you in a couple of years!” Behind me, the towers of the World Trade Center shrank in the distance and began to disappear beneath the horizon.
Two hours under way and about 10 miles into the shipping lanes, Varuna’s engine faltered again. “Oh well,” I said to myself. “I have a sailboat. I’ll sail.” Finding the mainsail and jib halyards—one red-striped and the other black to avoid confusion—I pulled up the sails and felt them fill. Varuna gently heeled over, baring the starboard side of her maroon hull, and began to glide along in rhythm with the sea and wind. Perfect. We were on a beam reach, with the wind perpendicular to the boat, the point of sail at which any sailboat makes its best performance. The boom was sheeted in and she pranced along like a filly.
Varuna could be steered by an electric autopilot, adjustable to course changes. Without the engine, energy had to be conserved or the batteries would be drained within two days. Disengaging the power-hungry autopilot, I decided it would be better to figure out how to use my new Monitor wind-vane self-steering gear while the weather was still fine. Rather than running on electricity like the autopilot, the Monitor had a rudder attached to gears connected to the tiller by a block-and-tackle system. From the stern, it steered the boat with wind power. A wooden-paddle wind vane was set into a position determined by the relative direction of the wind and a compass course.
Although I knew the general concept, I had never used the piece of equipment before now, so I fiddled and adjusted the vane fractions of an inch in different directions. The fiddling made Varuna swing in wild deviations from the proper course until, finally, I began to figure it out. The Monitor was of the same system and similar design to the self-steering mechanism on Pathfinder. Already, it was clear how little attention I had paid aboard Pathfinder. It had been so easy to let my father do everything, to claim ignorance or to half-listen. From now on, there would be no such thing as excuses. The outcome of every situation would depend on my ability to cope.
With a gust of wind, Varuna suddenly tilted over at a 15-degree angle, sliding me to the other side of the cockpit, where my elbow banged against the winch. “Ouch!” I cried, rubbing the bruise. “Varuna is nothing like Pathfinder. She’s so tiny.” I couldn’t remember ever having been this close to the water on a boat. Today was the first time that Varuna had ever been out of sight of land, and this little cockleshell was as untested as I.
Varuna was named for the Hindu goddess of the cosmos. She was a graceful 26-foot sloop and I was beginning to feel her spirit. Already thinking of Varuna and me as “us,” I felt we were a couple and, as a couple, we’d have to forgive each other our shortcomings and help each other to learn. Continuing to fuss over the Monitor, I reflected on our search for the perfect boat for the trip.
My father and I had pored over the classified listings in sailing magazines for secondhand boats. The possibilities were narrowed down to anything between 20 and 30 feet that seemed seaworthy. I wasn’t the world’s most proficient mariner, and a smaller boat would help me learn more easily than a larger one. If problems arose on a small boat, we figured, they would be small problems. I would have to pull up small sails, and fix small leaks. My father even equipped Varuna with a mini tool kit with all sorts of miniature tools he had picked up at the bargain stands on Canal Street. Although they seemed perfectly adequate at the time, they were destined to corrode, disintegrate and be jettisoned one by one, within a month or two of my departure.
In October 1984, I had driven with my father and Christian down to the Annapolis Boat Show in Maryland. If we couldn’t find a used boat, we’d have to try and find a good new boat. I had never been to a boat show and, although I eagerly explored every last display, nothing made my heart skip. I knew that I would instantly recognize the right boat when I saw her.
We had gone to the show not only to find a boat, but also with the hope of selling an article I had written about our voyage on Pathfinder to Cruising World, a reputable sailing magazine. They accepted it and, after some discussion, a verbal agreement was reached that they would publish the writings chronicling my voyage. But, in order to write those articles, I had to find a boat.
On the last day of the show, hidden among the hundreds of flashy boats on display, we found the Contessa 26 built by the Canadian company, J. J. Taylor. My father thumped around up on deck, checking to be sure the superstructure wouldn’t flex under pressure. Christian knocked away on the hull, feeling the thickness of the fiberglass. I sat down below in the compact cocoon of the cabin, looked around and heard myself say, “I think this is the one.”
She felt more right than any other boat had up until that point, and after several days of thinking it over, we went to Canada to visit the factory, a common thing to do before purchasing a boat. Satisfied with the diligence of the builders, at the end of the day my father and I sat with the president and a salesman who had sailed his own Contessa 32 around the world. They all looked at me. Say yes now and there would be no turning back. “Well, here goes,” I thought, and sealed my fate.
• • •
I watched a tanker on my reciprocal course, probably heading toward New York Harbor. The sun was shining and the water was emerald green. Twenty miles down, 730 to go. I thought about how to read the barometer. “Does bad weather make a barometer go up or down,” I wondered. “Up? Yes. No, down. I think.” I glanced down through the companionway to the bulkhead over the sink where the barometer was mounted, and gasped. There was water slos
hing all over the floor of the cabin!
“Oh my God,” I screamed, “we’re sinking!” I jumped below, trying to trace the leak and threw open the cabinet behind which were the sea cocks and valves for the sink. “Daddy always said to check the sea cocks first,” I said aloud, remembering how he showed me where the cut-off valves were stationed, wherever intake and discharge holes passed through the hull of the boat—at the sink, at the toilet, in the engine compartment and in the bilge. A broken sea cock could sink Varuna in minutes.
His words rang in my ears as I located the two sea cocks under the sink. Miraculously, they seemed dry. Then I noticed a rivulet of water trickling from above, behind an upper locker, and pulled it open. Inside was one of the steel struts onto which were bolted the chain plates that passed through the deck. Chain plates were the hull attachment points for the rigging; they held up the mast and sustained a great deal of pressure. It was one of the six chain plates at deck level that was leaking; it was not an underwater problem and, therefore, not life-threatening.
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” I pronounced with a sigh of relief.
In the last two weeks of preparations, my father had kept on bringing bags of different tools down to the boat—most of whose functions mystified me: caulkings, rivets, electrical tapes, glues and all sorts of synthetic troubleshooting materials. They always landed with a thump in the cockpit as he ran off to do more shopping. I was left to sort them out and, with a million and one other things to do, just dumped the bags into any free space available, figuring they would be pulled out and organized when I had some free time.
With feet up in the air, and one hand holding on to prevent me from falling headfirst into the locker, I dragged out the underwater epoxy and remembered my father tossing it to me saying, “Hey, Tania, here’s something that I’ve never seen before—an epoxy that cures underwater. It might come in handy.” I opened up the two components, mixed them together, ruining my first spoon of many, and went up on deck to slather it around the base of the chain plate. It molded like so much Silly Putty and hardened; finally the leak dribbled to a stop.