Maiden Voyage

by Tania Aebi

  A wave could come crashing over us; she’d delicately shudder, come out from under, shake it off and rise to the crest of the next. Buffeted from side to side, she always came back up again while I waited for her to break up into a million pieces. How much can a hunk of fiberglass take? I wondered. Slowly, I learned to trust her strength. Every time she rose to the top of a crest, I would hunch up in the cockpit under the scant protection of the sprayhood and hold on. She would pause, almost suspended in midair, before dropping down to the deep trough. My stomach was in my throat as we nosedived and slammed into the sea, only to begin the ascent again. Rise . . . Pause . . . Drop . . . SLAM! Over and over and over.

  On the chart, I had made a dot just north of Bermuda and marked it as the goal. For the past ten days, I had concentrated on that dot and scrutinized the inches between it and our position. On the eleventh of June, when the weather finally calmed, I took another sun sight, crossed it with the RDF bearing and found myself 40 miles north of Bermuda on the chart. I swallowed hard and stared at the dot. Even allowing for a large margin of error, I couldn’t be too far off. The reality quickly sank in. At our present speed, the same time the next day, I could be on land! I gathered my senses and looked around. “The boat is a mess,” I thought, “and I must stink like a goat. What will the customs man think if he sees this bedlam?”

  I hurriedly began to organize the boat, arranged my papers and then stripped down and took a bucket shower, shivering with the shock of the water. As my body dried under the warm rays of the sun, I noticed I had shed several pounds since leaving New York almost two weeks before.

  Next, I began to plan my approach. Memorizing the jagged outline of Bermuda’s reefy coast, I crossed and recrossed the bearings and took countless sun sights to determine the optimum angle for landfall. With one more night at sea before attempting it, I thought it would be good to get a bit of sleep and restore some strength for the morning approach. Every time my eyes closed, something jogged my memory and I’d jump up and pull out all the books and plotting sheets again to recheck the calculations. Many a sailor has tragically ended his journey atop the reefs of Bermuda and I had no intentions of joining the ranks of the unfortunate.

  Up all night, I scanned the horizon ahead, peering through the blackness until I saw the objective. There ahead, like a pinprick star flashing its silent call, was the lighthouse marking the entrance to Bermuda. As we slowly closed the distance, I could see the sweeping beacon and, beyond it, the faint glow of lights from civilization. Nothing had ever looked so beautiful. “I’m coming!” I called out. “I’m coming as fast as I can!”

  By dawn, the winds had eased mildly to the south. I tacked Varuna out to the east and aligned her, by compass and RDF bearings, to the entrance of St. George’s Harbour. Approaching, it became possible to make out other sailboats slipping in and out of a narrow corridor of cliffs and, as we crossed the paths of those leaving, I waved to the crews. At the mouth of the harbor, a fishing boat bobbed up and down and I sailed up to it.

  “Hello,” I called to the elderly couple aboard. “Is there anybody around here that could help me out with a tow? And would you mind calling them on your radio? I have no more electricity and no engine.” I was too unsure of my capabilities to risk navigating through the fringing reefs of the entrance or tacking back and forth past the walls of those looming sentinels of cliffs.

  “Get some lines ready to throw to us. We’d be happy to tow you in,” the skipper called back. They cheerfully pulled in their fishing lines and did the honors.

  Fifteen minutes later, at 11:00 A.M., the twelfth of June, after 751 logged miles, I tied Varuna up to the dock and hopped ashore. After twelve days at sea, I weaved and wobbled with a severe case of rubber legs. Weathering two sizable storms and a possibly fatal leak, I had taught myself a mongrelized version of celestial navigation, the engine had conked out and we’d had no power. I had truly learned everything the hard way and headed straight for a telephone to call my father.

  3

  Collect call from Tania to Ernst,” the New York operator’s nasal voice crackled over the phone lines. “Will you accept the charges?” A rush of excitement seemed to pour out of the earpiece of the public telephone on the quay.

  “Yes! YES!” exploded the familiar voice. “What in the holy hell were you doing out there?” boomed my father, cleaning out my ears in the process. “I have been worried sick. We almost sent out a search party. Hey, everybody! It’s Tania!” he screamed to the rest of the house. “Every skipper in Bermuda is on the lookout for you. Plus the Bermuda Coast Guard.”

  I smiled as he spoke, and leaned against the wall of the telephone cabin gazing out at the sailboats rafted up together in front of me. Flocks of seagulls squawked and soared across the clear June sky. The St. George’s Harbour was a beehive of activity, full of sailboats stopping over on their ways to Europe and the East Coast of the United States. Mopeds zoomed back and forth on the narrow cobble-stoned streets lined with rhododendron. Suntanned crews scurried to and fro with armloads of provisions. Honeymooners sipped Mai Tais on the shady terraces with blooming bougainvillea overlooking the busy harbor. I stood drinking in the wonderful sounds, smells and visions of civilization.

  “Tania, are you listening to me? There were other boats that left here the same time as you and arrived in Bermuda in five days! What happened? Oh, thank God you are safe.”

  “Well, I had a couple of storms and some dead calms and, with no engine, it just took a little longer than expected,” I said. “But, Daddy, you know what? All things considered, it wasn’t bad.”

  “Jesus Christ, Tania, I can’t stand it. I have to come down and see you right away. Everyone here has been calling me a murderer. But I knew you could do it. I knew it! Do you need any help? I’ll bring you whatever you need.” The pride in his voice was something I had been waiting to hear since my turbulent early high school days.

  “All I really need is something to eat,” I said. “If you want, you can come and help me figure out what’s wrong with the engine. Otherwise, everything’s OK.”

  “Yah, that’s just what I’ll do. I’ll be down there in two days.” We said goodbye, and with my head straight up in the air, I wobbled away from the phone, breathing in the medley of scents associated with a land of sunshine and its inhabitants—grilled hamburgers, carbon monoxide, flowers, coconut suntan oil and warm garbage. I was most certainly the only girl on the small island to have sailed there by herself, and damn proud of it.

  One year after being in Bermuda with my father aboard Pathfinder, here I was again, but now as the captain of my own vessel. For the first time, I felt initiated into the sailing fraternity as an equal, not just as the daughter of the skipper. Instead, my father arrived to face the new reality of being considered Tania Aebi’s father. I found myself standing in pubs, sipping orange juice and comparing notes on navigation, the cantankerous weather and the “bloody Gulf Stream” with other sailors who actually listened to me.

  Varuna’s diminutive 26 feet was rafted up alongside a 60-foot blue schooner named Lady Dorothy, whose Israeli captain, Eli, was a large man of about thirty-five, and whose cook, a Canadian named Doug, was a little older than I. Immediately they took me under their wing and included me in every evening jaunt to the local restaurant, every game of Trivial Pursuit and every rambunctious after-dinner philosophy session under the stars. After my father arrived, they stayed up to all hours drinking Hennessy, preparing meals, comparing sailing routes and regaling each other with tall sailing tales.

  My father stayed with me on Varuna for one week and paid a mechanic who got the engine purring again. I still hadn’t made enough money from my articles to cover the expenses of leaving, plus the repairs, and promised to pay him back as soon as I could. He liberally smeared caulking around all the stanchions and possible leakage points on deck, while I cleaned up after him and raced around on a moped, buying charts, supplies, parts and provisions. One night, when we sat down to work out the fine
r points in navigation, he was appalled to discover that I didn’t know that two lines of position are needed for a fix. I had been navigating all the way from New York with only one.

  He was incredulous. “How? How could you possibly locate this tiny island with your navigation completely screwed up?”

  “I dunno,” I answered. “I just homed my RDF in on Bermuda.”

  “You just homed your—ay-yi-yi. No, Tania, face it. You made it here by pure dumb luck.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Tania, listen to me carefully. There are no RDF beacons that will help you find St. Thomas. You’ll have to find it entirely on your own. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, sure. I know. But I had a lot of bad weather and hardly any time to work on my navigation. I’ll get the hang of it on the way to St. Thomas.”

  He grimaced in pain. “You better get the hang of it. If you miss St. Thomas, you’ll end up in Puerto Rico. If you miss Puerto Rico, God knows where you’ll end up. You better be sure you understand everything before you leave. Ask Eli next door how to use the sextant properly. Bleed him dry of everything he knows.”

  “I will, I will, OK?” Truth be told, I was too embarrassed to let on that I was still having problems with this fine art. So far, there had been nothing that I couldn’t figure out on my own by trial and error, or from books, and I was comfortable with the idea of keeping it that way.

  Shortly after my father left, on my tenth day in Bermuda, I came face to face with another problem that was a little more pressing, a problem that would continue to haunt me for the entire voyage—leaving a safe haven behind and heading back out to sea alone. It took me two days of procrastination to cast off from Bermuda, from calling home for the last time until the fateful moment when I bid my last farewell to the crew of Lady Dorothy. Finally, I forced myself to stutter out the words.

  “Well, guys,” I said tentatively, “I guess I’m really off now.” For me, no word will ever be more difficult to utter than “goodbye.”

  With my stomach in a constricted knot, on June 20, beneath another Bermuda-perfect sky, I waved to my friends and steered Varuna under power through the buoyed pass and reefs out of the harbor. The droning hum of helicopters, airplanes, cars and motor-boats filled my ears when I turned off the engine, raised the mainsail and jib and set the Monitor self-steering on a compass course heading south to St. Thomas.

  The rhythm of the gentle winds from the northwest helped push Varuna out of sight of land and calm my nerves, frayed from four days of preparations for departure. That evening, I pulled out the logbook and made the first entry.

  “The weather today is warm and beautiful, we’re jogging along at 5 knots, and already I miss Bermuda. The crew of Lady Dorothy gave me a net vegetable hammock, which is now hanging above the starboard berth and filled with the bounty of Bermuda: onions, potatoes, green apples, limes and carrots. The cornucopia swinging above my head is a sweet reminder of Varuna’s first landfall, now just a memory in our wake.

  “The past ten days have been a whirl of repairs to the boat, drying out her damp recesses, provisioning, studying my navigation, writing an article, trying to get some sleep, talking to tons of people and listening to Daddy. My whole visit to Bermuda flew by in a flurry of errands, shopping and mechanics. Now that we’re finally underway, all I can think of is going back. I’ll try to sleep now and forget about it all.”

  Psychologically, the first couple of days at sea were the most difficult to accept. After being abruptly cut off from civilization—the tearful frenzy of goodbyes, the tense conning of the boat out of a congested harbor and the dwindling proximity of land and its solidity—it took me a while to adjust to the radically altered life condition. It felt almost impossible to slow down and swallow the sudden peace and quiet, as my mind worked overtime conjuring up navigational nightmares and weather worries. Over it all, homesickness loomed like a dark cloud.

  But, as the days went by, my inner clock gradually slowed down. It was as if my metabolism eventually calmed and my thoughts were able to attain a degree of clarity difficult to achieve on land, where everyday distractions buried the instinct for introspection. My senses were heightened by the simplest of tasks—trimming the sails, brushing my hair, studying the water or even slicing a carrot for a stew. They completely isolated themselves from one another and each became the most important thing at that moment.

  But it would take several ocean passages before I could begin to understand how well—when there is no alternative—our bodies can adapt to a given environment. On this, only my second passage and the first day out of Bermuda, it was impossible for me to know that this contentment would always be mine. All I knew was that, for some reason, tomorrow would be better than today, and I went to sleep that night longing for the new dawn.

  Our course for St. Thomas, a 900-mile passage that was expected to take about ten days, led directly into the Bermuda Triangle. The storied perils of that infamous area, whose boundaries comprised a vague triangle connecting Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda, had been built up from a century of fanciful stories about disappearances and extraterrestrials. Not being the overly superstitious sort, I pressed onward without much trepidation, half hoping to feel the legendary force field or sense the presence of a watching R2D2. But these idle musings were overshadowed by an eerier vision of a different sort as Varuna plowed into the Sargasso Sea, a free-floating swamp of seaweed in the middle of the Atlantic.

  The clockwise spiraling of the North Atlantic ocean currents corrals the lumpy fields of Sargasso weed into an area of 100 square miles and up to 30 feet deep. Even Christopher Columbus on his journey to the New World wrote about being mired for days in the yellow-greenish hydro-mistletoe.

  Varuna’s experience may not have been quite as dramatic as Columbus’s, but on day three out of Bermuda, the weed indeed came a-knocking, winding itself around Varuna’s rudder, the paddle of the self-steering gear and the propeller of the taffrail log, trailed to determine the speed and distance covered. Our speed decreased by two knots, and most of my time was spent hanging over the stern with the boat hook, trying to unseat the unworthy passengers.

  As far as I could see, the berrylike bladders of the plants bubbled up through the warm water like an ugly alien bouillabaisse. Plodding slowly on, I had hideous nightmares of camouflaged creatures of the black lagoon, as big as the Empire State Building, just lurking in wait for me.

  Varuna found it slow going through the Sargasso, with its squalls and dearth of wind, and after I had spent three days warring with the clinging weeds, the trade winds finally arrived. They introduced themselves slowly at first, with one gust—poof!—then another. I gleefully turned off the engine that had been vibrating my skull for seventy-two hours and prepared to acquaint myself and Varuna with the trades, the steady winds that dominate the tropics and subtropics around the world.

  Southeasterly and moderate, they streamed overhead with uniform puffy white clouds dancing like Valkyries across the sky. In the freshening breeze, the last remnants of the Sargasso finally floated in our wake. The waves built up into an easterly swell and Varuna’s sails filled with the wind that for hundreds of years has propelled sailors across the trade routes of the world. We were on the road again.

  This was the trade-wind belt, where we would remain for half our voyage around the globe. There was still some southing to do before we could run straight downwind with it, and Varuna leaned her shoulder to beat into the chop. Bracing myself against the spray hood, I watched the seawater run over the lee side of the deck, but unfortunately, not all of it drained through the scuppers to rejoin the ocean. Rather, some of it dripped below by way of those weepy chain plates and dribbled into the spice locker. If I procrastinated pumping out the locker for more than one hour, it overflowed onto my bed and proceeded to submerge all the food in the locker beneath the mattress. I hand-pumped the locker every hour thereafter—day and night—for four days. Finally, the wind eased to a more comfortable easterly direction, Varuna was abl
e to straighten up a little and the leaks slowed.

  My spare time between pumpings was spent trying to figure out where we were by dead reckoning and the occasional sun sights, which more often than not still weren’t working out the way they should have. I kept changing sail and course according to my latest calculations until the estimated afternoon before landfall. Sitting in the cockpit, confident that I would be enjoying a cold Coca-Cola in St. Thomas the next day, I spied a ship on the horizon and hailed it on the VHF radio just to make sure. The radio operator’s satellite fix notified me that, with our present course and position, Varuna would hit land somewhere in the middle of Puerto Rico. Shocked, not to mention a little worried about my dubious talents, I thanked him, signed off and quickly readjusted our course to the southeast.

  Once her sails were trimmed, Varuna heeled over, washing her rail underwater, and headed as close into the wind as possible. Throughout the rest of the day and into the night, I fidgeted and scanned the horizon with nerve endings that were livewires of anticipation. The skyline was unchanged from earlier on in the passage, but soon, I hoped, land would begin to appear in the vast emptiness.

  As the night progressed and the moon crossed the sky, I searched for that feeble little glow of life from the horizon that would become distinct separate lights by twilight, and by dawn would unfold the panorama of hills. I was anxious to get to land and very edgy. What if the island we were approaching wasn’t St. Thomas? Ever so slowly the sun rose and, after having chewed my fingernails to the quick, I became more certain. Finally, the indistinguishable lump of land on the horizon separated into the fringing islets that were identifiable on the chart. The new agony of it all was that we were approaching nirvana at only three miles per hour! I could have walked faster than Varuna was sailing and I felt like jumping off the boat and running over the water to land.