by Tania Aebi
René was the character of the group, distinguishable from the other two in many subtle ways, and in one way not so subtle. The only thing René ever wore was his bushy black beard and a beret to cover his balding scalp. That’s it. Save for the hat, he paraded around stark naked in all his skinny, suntanned glory. I was taken aback at first, not knowing where to look whenever René approached, until I realized that Luc and Jean Marie never gave him so much as a passing glance. I finally got used to René in the buff, but I always wore my bathing suit.
Luc was the glue that held the group together with the wild stories from his travels and adventures, and the first few nights I went to bed with a pounding head from trying to understand the bawdy French, full of clichés, innuendos and different dialects. Luc’s passionate Gallic narrow-mindedness reminded me of my father, and Jean Marie and René reminded me of the rogues’ gallery of my father’s eccentric friends always huddled around our kitchen table back home—everybody laughing or arguing, full of great stories to tell about the exotic places they had lived and all the crazy things they had done.
During the ribald dinner conversations around Thea’s table, my thoughts went back to our loft in New York and the artists, yodeling and fun of those childhood days. Over the years, as my father’s artwork finally started meeting with success, he had made a lot of the kind of off-the-wall friends that can only be found in the art world. Most came and went, but the two main fixtures were always Christian and Fritz. Christian, who had immigrated with my father to New York, and Fritz, who arrived soon after, were his oldest friends, and so close to us that they had become part of the family.
In my father’s circle of friends, one hand always washed the other. Once, before Fritz met success with his own artwork, he found himself short of cash and my father tried to help him out.
“Fritz, my building needs a paint job,” he had said. “If you’re interested in doing the job, it’s yours.”
“Great,” Fritz answered. “Ernst, I’ll do it right away.” My father came back from a trip to Switzerland three weeks later and found his five-story Soho apartment building painted baby blue and covered by a mural of gigantic flying milk cows wearing parachutes. Now, 2,400 miles away from my family and friends, sitting around Thea’s table of eccentrics, I was reminded of those days and friends and felt comfortably at home.
• • •
I lingered in Taboga for many reasons, not the least of which was Luc. But also, Varuna, as well as Thea and Saskia, needed repairs and some general maintenance to prepare for the next passage. Luc and I helped each other, René spent his days methodically fixing things around Saskia and Jean Marie amused himself wandering around the island. On one of his excursions, Jean Marie met a striking elderly beauty who owned a Popsicle stand on the beach. He brought her out to Thea on our third evening at Taboga.
“This is Kerima de Lescure. She is very special,” said Jean Marie, “I wanted you to meet her.” Kerima spoke no French or English, so we had to get by with Jean Marie’s broken Spanish, filled in by lots of sign language. But when she spied Luc’s guitar, the communication problems were over. She picked it up and began to sing the songs of a dreaming, stargazing poet. Every evening at her Popsicle stand, she would read to us from one of her volumes of poetry, always referring to el sol and las estrellas, the sun and the stars. Easily enchanted, Kerima was fascinated by my voyage and Dinghy and often repeated with her tinkling laugh, “Muchacha solita con su gatito,” little girl alone with a cat.
One day, in a fit of back-to-business, the three guys put their brains and hands together to fix the starter of Luc’s engine, a dirty job. The day was a scorcher, so for relief while they sweated, I jumped overboard to scrub Varuna’s bottom. If left unattended for long, the hull began to attract all sorts of marine life and barnacles which would hamper speed when we were finally under way. Dinghy meowed down at me from the deck, while with a mask, snorkel and a coarse brush, I dived under the boat to scrub away the plants. Varuna’s underbody looked as if it had five o’clock shadow, and as I scrubbed, tufts of the hairy green beard floated down and dropped away. Even though all the barnacles growing on her underbody had died and fallen off after passing through the fresh water of the Canal, it was quite a job scouring off what was left. The results were worth the effort. Varuna’s speed, with a clean bottom, increased by at least half a knot, sometimes more.
All of a sudden, with one-quarter of the boat done, a burning sensation rushed over my body and, within seconds, I was in agony. Unable to scream, I also couldn’t pinpoint exactly from where the pain was coming. It seemed to overwhelm me from everywhere—arms, shoulders, back, guts. Panicking, I surfaced, somehow managed to pull myself up on deck and began to go into shock.
Luc looked up from his starter toward Varuna and, seeing that something was wrong, threw down his tools, jumped into the dinghy and roared over, followed by Jean Marie and René. I had been caught in the tentacles of a giant man-of-war jellyfish, and the barbed threads of its venom were still stuck to my back, dribbling around my stomach and over my arms. Luc and Jean Marie tried to pull off the phlegmy filaments while René jumped back into his dinghy and headed to Saskia to concoct a Breton old wives’ remedy of clay powder and water to paste on the welts appearing all over my body. As the initial shock began to subside, I started to tremble, imagining the size of the Medusa that had hugged me.
I felt lucky to have had friends around to come to my aid, and the numb jellyfish welts were merely a red badge of courage for two days before they slowly disappeared with the help of René’s soothing potion. When all was well, we decided to reprovision the boats and prepare to head out to the Perlas Islands, 50 miles into the Bay of Panama. On one of our last nights with Kerima, she composed a poem and did a painting on a T-shirt of Dinghy and Varuna at anchor and presented it to me as a gift. With Kerima’s fingers elegantly fluttering over the guitar strings, Luc by my side and Varuna shipshape enough to take on the world, life felt like a series of endless possibilities.
During our ten days on the Pacific side of Panama, the only wind we had encountered had been very light day breezes. Otherwise, conditions had been benign, so we didn’t worry much that the anchorage area of the Club de Yates y Pescas off Panama City was unprotected. After all, we were only going there for two days.
I had been lulled into a sort of complacency by the relatively tideless Caribbean. The Pacific was a new ocean to me; I had yet to know her moods and learned quickly that one should assume nothing with the sea. Although the boats were anchored nearly 1,000 feet offshore, the depth sounder indicated that the bottom was still a shallow 20 feet. But that’s good, we rationalized, it’ll be easier to pull up the chain when we leave.
Jean Marie prepared a spaghetti dinner that evening aboard Thea, and René brought two bottles of bordeaux. As I hopped in the dinghy and rowed over to join them, Dinghy became agitated and meowed across the water, calling me back to Varuna. During dinner, the tide began to ebb and a swell built up over the sloping underwater shelf and shallow bottom. I felt the increased rolling of Thea and went out on deck to check on the other boats.
“Oh my God!” I screamed. “René, come here fast! The waves are breaking next to Saskia!” He scrambled up on deck and saw that the tide was on a roll, moving out from under our feet. As we watched helplessly, the breakers retreated farther and farther back until they started unfurling over Varuna, then Thea.
Just as the reality of the situation penetrated, a wave came up from behind and swamped over Thea’s high transom. There was no way for us to row to our boats without great risk. It was like watching a cascading surf line on a Hawaiian beach from behind. Each wave picked up Saskia and then Varuna, throwing them on their sides and burying our homes under avalanches of filthy water. Screaming reassurances over to Dinghy, who was crying, echoing my fear, I tried not to think about the sewers that emptied into the bay nearby. All Varuna’s portholes were open and I cringed to think of the stinking wet cabin that would await
me when I was able to get back.
For six hours, through the tide cycle, we helplessly watched our boats pitch and roll, while the sea level dropped an astonishing 15 feet. One more foot and Varuna, with her 4-foot draft, would be aground. Saskia already was; every wave landed her with sickening thuds. Fortunately, the bottom was soft mud, which is good holding ground, and the anchors held fast. When the tide rose, René and I dinghied back over the calmed waters to survey the mess. Climbing on board and hugging Dinghy, I could have kicked myself for not having anticipated such a devastating tide and finding out about it before leaving the boat. I vowed that it would never happen again.
A day later, after moving to another anchorage, while provisioning in the crowded marketplace in Panama City, we heard a man scream. Police and a curious crowd surrounded him and we pressed closer to see what was the matter. Somebody had cut off his finger for a ring. It was time to leave.
• • •
On August 20, 1985, I pulled up the anchor, raised the sails, hooked up the autopilot to the tiller, and headed Varuna southwest for Contadora in the Archipelago de las Islas Perlas. Many Panamanians to whom we had talked in and around the Canal had told us not to bypass the Perlas. “They are very beautiful. Deer run free on the island of Contadora, and on San José, you will find not a soul. Go and see the real Panama.” “Why not?” I thought. “These will be my first semi-isolated Pacific island landfalls.”
René had departed earlier that morning and Jean Marie and Luc left at the same time as I. Watching them ahead on the horizon as Taboga shrank away in our wake and the sea began to flow past Varuna’s hull, I mused over the happenings of the past two weeks. Luc was at the center of my thoughts.
I had never craved solitude. If anything, completely isolating myself from civilization as I was doing in sailing singlehanded on Varuna felt more than a little unnatural. Before meeting Luc, I could remember moments of great despair, when I felt I should be surrounded by friends, or finally be having a meaningful relationship with somebody special. Until meeting Luc, I had been having trouble accepting the fact that finding that person would be practically out of the question for the two years it would take me to get home. That thought had made me feel more alone in St. Thomas, Bermuda and Panama than I ever had in the middle of the ocean.
But almost from the moment we met, Luc swept all those fears away. In a matter of days, we had opened up to one another as I had never done before with anybody. He was fifteen years older than I. His gentleness when we were alone belied the carefree attitude he displayed to others, and made me feel loved and secure. I had never before met anyone like him.
For a 33-year-old, he acted like a little boy, and that charmed me. He had a passion for good conversation and, even better, for a good argument. Slightly chubby, he was sensitive about his weight and was forever asking if he was fat. I would answer, “Yes, you are an obese fat pig.” He would smile.
• • •
Readjusting the autopilot to stay on course, I stared at Thea in the distance. They had just caught a fish and were hauling it in, the victim of a school trying to escape the hungry dolphins that squealed around the boats. I leaned back in the shade of the spray hood. Aside from the heat—it was about 100 degrees, without the slightest breeze—life was great.
The only problem in my little universe was the time schedule. Back in New York, my father and I had pored over the pilot charts and calculated the amount of time each passage would take with how many days would be needed in port before recommencing. According to our planned itinerary, I was to leave straight from Panama for the Galápagos, nonstop, and from the Galápagos straight for Samoa. This tight schedule was to be continued from port to port all the way around the world. The circumnavigation, according to our program, was to last two years. Now, as I tried to live it out, it became clear to me that keeping up with the original plan was going to be impossible. Here I was, not even one-quarter of the way and theoretically two months behind schedule.
The plan for circumnavigation had grown mammoth in scope since its modest inception on Pathfinder one year before and now seemed to have taken on a life of its own. My father had done some digging and discovered that if the voyage were completed before November 1987, I would break the world record to become the youngest person ever to circumnavigate the globe solo, and he fell completely in love with the idea.
Two years can feel like an eternity when you stand before them, but already I felt the pressure of a deadline. Varuna needed all kinds of work that hadn’t been anticipated. Without a shakedown voyage to get the kinks out before leaving New York, she now needed caulking to repair the leaks; the engine cover, which formed the floor of the cockpit, was also leaking badly and needed to be rebuilt; and the bunk had to be enlarged so that I could sleep in some kind of relative comfort. It was so small that I spent one hour every night trying to remember the position in which I had fallen asleep the night before.
I made up my mind to spend the hurricane season in Tahiti after arriving in November. It would be the first substantial island with everything required to do the work. Halfway across the South Pacific, I could wait out the dangerous weather and continue on to Australia by the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn. This was slightly different from the original plan, according to which I should already have been 4,000 miles farther, in Australia, for hurricane season. I intended to write to my father about it that night after arriving in Contadora and didn’t look forward to his reaction.
After an extremely hot ten-hour day, with the engine faithfully put-putting away, I saw the low brown hills finally emerge from the haze ahead. A welcome wagon of dolphins joined in Varuna’s wake as we motored to the anchorage where we had arranged to rendezvous with René. There he was, coiling his lines in minimum attire, waving and grinning. Anchoring about 50 feet from Thea, I shut off the engine and breathed a sigh of relief as the sounds of water lapping against Varuna’s hull calmed my frayed nerves. Silence can never be as sweet as the split second after a diesel engine has been squelched after a long day of motoring. Luc hollered, snorkel, mask and speargun already in tow, “Hey, everybody, I am going to catch a feast.”
I sat down on deck with a carton of soy milk and leaned against the mast. It was that perfect time, neither day nor night, when the light is saturated with oranges and reds. Anchored close to the rocky shoreline, I could make out nooks and crannies where little crabs were running in and out of crevices foraging for food. Just above the rocks, stately palms, frangipani, and pandanus blocked any view of houses. A small dirt road disappeared into the vegetation and called out to be followed tomorrow into an island yet to be discovered.
Farther along the coast, an old fisherman prepared to cast his net. He methodically gathered it into his arms so that when he cast it over the water, it unfurled like a bedsheet, with hunks of lead weighing down the edges. As the net opened, the nylon glittered in the waning light before dropping into the water of El Pacifico.
The Pacific! I’m really in the Pacific! My thoughts tripped, slid to a grinding halt and came up with bloody knees. It already felt as if I had been away for years, yet I was only at the threshhold of my voyage, far from the Indian Ocean and seemingly light years away from the Atlantic. Going below, I found paper and a pen and went back out on deck.
“Dear Daddy,” I wrote and then stared at the paper.
The lone angler began to haul in his net. Glimmering shards of wiggling diamonds strained to be free as he pulled them clear of the water. I knew from fishing with Luc on Taboga that all the fishes’ attempts at freedom would be for naught, only making trouble for the person who had to disentangle them from the net, often ripping them apart to do so. Luc had shown me how to catch small sardines for fritters. Casting the net, I discovered, was a practiced art and, thinking of my own nets landing in a ball, I admired this lone fisherman’s style, as he eyed the water, spied the ruffle on the surface that indicated a passing school, cast perfectly over it and pulled it in.
; I looked down at my paper, hopelessly lost for words, and tried to explain myself to my father. The sky began to darken when I headed over to Saskia for a dinner of langoustes, and the letter remained unwritten.
Contadora was an island of exquisite tableaux, and wherever we went the black eyes of little roe deer followed our every move like Munchkins. During explorations ashore, these delicate long-legged animals would sprint out of our way, their tan and speckled bottoms disappearing into the brush. The roes were a rather miniature race of deer, about the size of a foal—the males balancing dainty antlers on their heads—and the island was full of them. Every so often, walking into the bodega, the little grocery store that had a few cans, some powdered milk, Tang and Popsicles, we found their souvenirs on the bottom of our sandals.
The air of Contadora carried the rich smells of a lush, rampant vegetation, barely held at bay by local machetes. Birds squawked, whistled and flew in between the trees while a few Contadorans played soccer on the rare clearings. The Contadorans are a handsome race of black-skinned, Spanish-speaking people whose ancestry dates back to African tribes of the sixteenth century. Today, most of the islanders work as domestics and handymen for the mansions hidden in the far corners of the island.
One day our wanderings brought us to an overgrown golf course and a duo of elderly gentlemen playing Petanque. I remembered seeing men in Little Italy near our loft in New York playing the Mediterranean lawn game at the neighborhood playground. The French regard Petanque with reverence, so Jean Marie, René and Luc just had to meet these two kindred spirits. We plowed onto the golf course and introduced ourselves like long-lost friends to Roland de Montague, an executive with a passion for isolated country houses on remote islands, and Roberto Vergnes, an explorer and avowed eccentric.