by Tania Aebi
For a while, the boats managed to stay within radio contact, and this was both good and bad. It was great to have the company, but it changed the rhythm of my days. Instead of developing a natural routine, as on previous passages, my day began to revolve around the radio. I measured time not by the transit of the sun, but by the number of minutes left before I switched on the VHF to talk to Luc. I found myself jumpy and more moody than usual, but attributed that to the fact that I was out of whack with life at sea.
After our first beautiful evening, thunderstorms began to march like armies across the muddy-looking ocean. Apathetically, I read and dried up leaks, waiting for the radio calls. The sea was churned up as plastic flip-flops, tree trunks, barrels and floating garbage rode by on the swells. My hands had become rather soft during our stay in Panama, and now began to wear raw from the constant sail changes as squalls came and went.
After four days of our fighting the contrary winds, currents and calms after the squalls, and four nights of sleeping, eating, reading and writing while living on the walls, the inevitable conversation occurred between Varuna and Thea. We would have to skip Cocos and would have to forge onward without stopping to the Galápagos, 500 miles farther to the southwest. If all went well, it would take me a week.
I read and reread my reference books dealing with the chilling Humboldt Current. The water around Varuna was very cold, even though we were approaching the equator. During the nights, I illuminated a masthead light while Jean Marie and Luc kept watch to stay within sight. During the day, the sky remained furiously dark as the strong current kept Varuna in a clutch that seemed, at times, to be pulling her backward. One day my taffrail log said that we had covered 100 miles and Luc’s SatNav registered 75. For every mile we plowed through the water, the current had carried us back a quarter of another. Much to my surprise, Varuna kept up with and even surpassed Thea’s speed. She was quick, which pleased me, and capable of heading several degrees farther into the wind. Luc was envious, forgetting that, for me, the performance really didn’t seem worth the discomfort of being within the confines of such a small vessel beating into the wind.
Every day, I turned on the engine to recharge the batteries for night lights and radio power. On the sixth day, the monster didn’t want to turn off. I discussed the problem with Luc over the radio, and he told me to put my hand over the air-intake filter and it would stop on its own. Not knowing the air filter from Adam, I put my finger over the air vent for the fuel tank, which was easily accessible in the cockpit. After a few minutes, the engine rumbled to a halt.
The next day, I turned on the ignition switch, and the oil, amp and temperature lights illuminated the dark recess of the starboard berth under the cockpit. Outside, I pressed the starter switch, heard the starter turn the flywheel, but there was no combustion. “Oh no, not again!” I cried into the wind, fearing the isolation confronting me if it wouldn’t start. I fetched my tools, unscrewed the cover for the umpteenth time and tried the only troubleshooting technique I knew—bleeding the fuel line. Nothing. Staring down at the fat little red monster of an engine, I tried to curse it, kick it and, finally, shame it into working. It just stared back at me.
“Luc, my engine stopped and won’t start again,” I said when I talked to Thea that morning. “We have to separate. I don’t have enough juice to talk on the radio or to leave the lights on at night.” My voice cracked and his came back out of the receiver.
“Did you bleed it?”
“Yes.” I answered. “But I don’t know what else to do.”
“Well, let me think about it. Don’t use up all your electricity, and turn off the radio. I’ll call back in exactly half an hour.” For thirty minutes I prayed that he would offer to rendezvous and help me make repairs. As the seconds on my Cassio registered 60 in the twenty-ninth minute, I flicked the radio switch on.
“Tania, can you hear me? Answer, please.”
“Yes! Yes, I’m right here. What do you think I should do?”
“Listen, sail downwind in our direction and when we get close, I’ll throw you a line and swim over to see what I can do.”
I was euphoric. We were going to have a mid-Pacific rendezvous. Disengaging the self-steering gear and unsheeting the mainsail and jib, I pushed Varuna’s tiller over. We rounded until the wind was at our back and she cantered down toward Thea.
No longer a toy sailboat somewhere on the horizon, Thea got larger and larger as the distance between us shrank and I welcomed the familiar sight of her gray aluminum hull. Varuna rapidly made it to the other boat, gliding about 20 feet by before I rounded up, tripped to the foredeck and pulled down the jib.
As Jean Marie steered, Luc launched a line into my arms. The waves reverberated in between the boats as I wound the line around a cleat, completing the incongruous scene of two sailboats tied together in the middle of the ocean. Luc took one look of distaste at the frigid water, screamed a warning to the sharks and jumped in. My guardian angel quickly pulled himself along the line and then heaved his soaking self over the gunwale, landing in a heap on deck.
“Hello, ma petite Tania,” he smiled. “Long time no see, eh?”
Like a nurse, I handed him instruments while he fiddled around with the engine, tinkered, shook and rescrewed things, basically the same contortions I had performed, before saying, “Well, I think you are engineless.”
“No. I can’t be. We have to be able to fix it somehow.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Tania. I have no idea what is wrong with the beast.” There was nothing to do but accept the predicament. The batteries would be drained in a couple of days, there would be no more power and therefore no navigation lights, reading lights or radio. Once again, just as on the way to Bermuda, Varuna would be totally powerless and isolated, but this time, the passage was a more complicated one. Also, without the radio, there would be no way to stay in touch with Thea.
“Tania, you are the bravest person I know,” Luc said, as we sat in the cockpit eating a cabbage-beetroot salad that I prepared in a zombie trance to postpone his departure.
“Me? You’ve got to be kidding. I am the last of the cowardly lions. Look at me. I’m a complete mess. I have no power. We have to split up. Nothing’s going right.”
“Yes, you are brave,” he said. “The mountain climber who climbs the most dangerous peaks is not brave. He likes to climb mountains. Bravery is doing something that you are afraid of and confronting your fears. Now, stop crying. You can do anything you want to do. We will separate now, but in four days we’ll see each other again.” We kissed each other goodbye and he jumped into the water, pulling himself along the line through the waves to Thea where Jean Marie stood waving. I waved as we each pulled up our sails and got underway again. At first light the next morning, Dinghy and I rushed up on deck to check the endless horizon. We were alone.
I would think of Luc’s words on bravery many times during the next two years, whenever I thought I couldn’t go on. I saw the truth in them, and the knowledge that I might really be brave, no matter how frightened I was at any moment, kept me going.
For the next three days, Varuna beat into the strong southwesterly winds and chop, as I read, did the chores around the boat, played with Dinghy and daydreamed about the future. Once in a while, when the sun peeped out of the cloud-fretted sky, I’d grab the sextant, take a sight and try to plot it out properly. But the fixes still weren’t working out the way they should have.
My navigation was based on the occasional fix from the SatNav of a passing ship. With that I could easily advance my own position with some degree of accuracy by dead reckoning. But ship fixes were rare and from my own sun sights I felt no security. There was something very wrong with what I was doing and I couldn’t figure out what. When I did get the occasional fix from a ship, it never agreed with my own calculations. Worry began to infect my days.
On September 11, my navigation confirmed a monumental occasion; we had crossed the equator and entered the Southern Hemisphere
. For the inaugural milestone of the trip, there were presents to open and I decided to cheer up, throw myself a party and do it right. First, I cleaned the boat and then, wedged into the cockpit, took a bucket bath. Drying out in the sun, I noticed that the boat immediately began to smell better.
Next, I arranged the packages from my family on the bunk, made a festive meal of macaroni and cheese and, after feeding Dinghy, sat down and feasted till I was satiated. The great moment arrived and I ripped open the packages that everyone had earmarked for the equator. Tony had secretly made a cassette of the family dinner-table squabbles that he titled “Family Bullshit Tape.” Nina gave me a bag of camper’s chicken stew. My father gave me an envelope full of pictures of the family, snowy mountains and glaciers, a hundred dollars, candy, balloons and a hat umbrella. Gathering the loot together, I hooked up the camera. When everything was arranged and the camera focused, I looked down and saw my naked body.
“Oh my, Dinghy, look how silly I am. This will never do. I can’t send this kind of picture home.” Hurriedly rearranging the gifts to cover myself, I propped the hat umbrella on my head and clicked the shutter. Dinghy chewed on the balloons while I devoured the candy and that evening we drifted off into a contented slumber, dreaming about home.
In the middle of the night I woke up, went on deck for a routine horizon check and saw a fishing boat in the distance. I had been trying to hail several boats and it had seemed that no one kept radio watches, so it was a great surprise to have this one answer my call. The world crashed around me when the fix they provided still pinpointed us north of the equator. My navigation was completely wrong and we wouldn’t cross that line until tomorrow.
Anxiety-ridden for the next couple of days, I checked and rechecked the calculations but couldn’t find the error. “Please, God,” I prayed, “let me find land.” I worried myself literally to tears and dreamed of arriving up a strange river on the wrong island in the Galápagos. On day 14, after many calculations and minus a couple of fingernails, I convinced myself that I would see land. I awoke hopeful and turned on the RDF. Theoretically, we should have been within range, but no signal verified my beliefs. I worried that San Cristóbal’s beacon, which was listed in the Admiralty List of Radio Beacons as having a range of 200 miles, might be out of commission and that I’d have to find the island without its help. “My navigation better be good,” I muttered to Dinghy, and spent the day hallucinating clouds into land until I thought I would become cross-eyed.
Tantalizing images of potential land flew in the form of birds. There were hundreds of them, all scouting for schools of fish, their squawks combining with sounds of wind and waves into a din of confusion. I looked at them for a sign, for one of them to point me in the right direction. “If there are birds, there’s gotta be land around here someplace,” I said, peering ahead. The dolphins came in all their squealing glory and surrounded my disoriented home. I tried to communicate with them, pleading for an answer. Clouds were everywhere, teasing me with broken promises and false identities. My eyes burned as I endlessly scouted the horizon for a fishing boat that knew its own position.
Finally, the tension was too much. I turned Varuna around and headed east, away from supposed land, to avoid passing it accidentally. Pulling out my Bible, I read a passage from the Psalms and prayed for inspiration. I was a quivering mess and for good reason. If we missed the islands of the Galápagos, turning back would be close to impossible. The currents and winds of the trade route would not allow for the magnitude of such an error. From there, it was almost 3,000 miles to next land.
In an attempt to calm down, I concentrated on appreciating the beauty that surrounded me. The Humboldt Current, thick with plankton and the siege of anchovies that feed on it, was like a rich corridor of marine life. Often, I found Dinghy dragging in scaly flying fish or squid that had become marooned on deck. Pleased that he had provided for one of his own meals and that I wouldn’t have to open another can from the dwindling supply, I wasn’t quite so happy with the mess that his snacks left behind. Flying fish hold such a gluey substance to their scales that it wouldn’t be surprising if rubber cement was derived from it. The squid invariably would leave behind a smelly inkspot on the fiberglass deck or my bed and Dinghy never cleaned up after himself, no matter the meal.
Hoping and praying for salvation, I sat in the corner of the cockpit and watched the waves. Varuna’s wake was fiery in the moonless night as the phosphorescent plankton gave an eerie neon glow to the rooster tail of water behind us. Staring, I just refused to believe that we were very far off the mark and pulled out that lovable RDF one more time. Lo and behold, the signal came through loud and clear.
“Hallelujah!” I wrote in my logbook. “Land, here I come!” I adjusted my course to home in on the beacon and by the next afternoon, after tacking in through the eye of the signal, finally saw the very definite knobby shape of San Cristóbal’s volcanic peak sticking above the water. I sat and cried in relief.
Now that I had found land, for some reason Neptune did not want me there right away. The wind that had harassed us for sixteen days decided to quit the game and left us wallowing. Shaking out one reef, then another, replacing the jib for the larger genoa, I tried to catch every last waft of breeze. Varuna tried to make headway but was beating into it and going nowhere. Sitting in the cockpit, I hand-steered, trying to make up for the Monitor’s slightly unsteady course in these conditions, until my bottom became sore from the hard surface. The wind remained feeble through the day and night as we drifted with the tides in and out of sight of the jutting peak. Frustrated, I vainly tried the engine, and even took out the dinghy oars, trying to row Varuna in, but it was useless. We just had to wait it out.
It was the next afternoon before a faint breeze returned and Varuna could make headway. What had seemed at first like a thousand tiny islands, slowly merged into one as San Cristóbal rose up from the horizon. Mirages formed between the peaks, creating an illusion of water, and steering in closer as the afternoon progressed, I realized it would again be impossible to make it into the harbor by nightfall.
This was unbelievable. I had been within sight of the island for two days and just couldn’t fight my way into its harbor. I turned Varuna around for the second time in as many days and pointed her bow east. When night falls, it is dangerous to be this close to land with weariness setting in and no engine. When we were safely offshore, I heaved to by backwinding the jib. This way the actions of the sails canceled themselves out, keeping Varuna under control in the same place, with her head to the seas. That accomplished, I tried to get a little sleep before attempting another approach the next day.
As the rosy colors of dawn began to bathe the morning sky, I was already at the tiller heading for the security of a safe harbor. The primordial scene that awaited as I drew closer was something for which no reference book or geography lesson could ever have prepared me. The jagged islands, of the Galápagos rose like ebony pyramids from the sea ahead, each an ancient volcano that erupted 7,000 to 10,000 feet up from the sea floor to stand over 5,000 feet above sea level.
Charles Darwin had called these his enchanted islands, where he had found inspiration and the proof he needed for his theories of evolution and natural selection. As Varuna inched closer, I knew I was seeing the islands for the first time the way Darwin had seen them aboard the Beagle over one hundred years before, from the deck of a sailing vessel that had made the long voyage from the Americas.
The swell of the South Pacific, unbridled since Chile and the southern latitudes, thundered and crashed against the menacing walls of rock ahead. Approaching with trepidation, I began to fear for the safety of my boat as we were clutched by the strong currents that surrounded the islands. The breeze that morning was dwindling and, as it did, steerageway was lost, the current overpowered us and we began to drift helplessly close to the nastiest shoreline I had ever seen. Several hundred feet closer and Varuna would be picked up by the breakers and dashed against those cliffs.
Following the coastline, I saw Thea’s mast popping above a headland and at 8:30 A.M. on the eighteenth day of this not quite so uneventful trip, I sailed into Wreck Bay, San Cristóbal, dropped the hook and pulled down Varuna’s sails. This had been my longest passage, if not in mileage, definitely in time. Coiling Varuna’s lines and folding the sails, I sat on deck to view my first truly alien harbor.
In the Galápagos, time stands still. These are the islands of the giant sea tortoises, of the kooky blue-footed boobies, of the prehistoric marine iguanas that cover the coastal rocks by the hundreds. They are islands of contradiction, where creatures of the Antarctic—penguins and seals—live in harmony with the most ancient of tropical species. Isolated from man, animals live and play together and fear no predators, and I was looking forward to going ashore and seeing them for myself.
From the deck of Varuna, I could see a small fishing village of colorful cement houses dotting the arid landscape, dominated by boulders and scrubby, alien-looking plants. The long-unheard sounds of people doing everyday things reached my ears as my eyes followed the line of the volcano up to the calderas that disappeared into a permanent cloud. Several small fishing boats swung at anchor nearby and directly in front, a couple on their sailboat smiled and waved. I waved back, looked closer and saw their nationality. “Wow, nice going, guys,” I thought, “you’re even farther from home than I am.” They were from Japan, the Rising Sun draped around their backstay.