Maiden Voyage

by Tania Aebi

  With Claude’s brotherly teasing and dares, Margot and I were coaxed into doing things we would never have ordinarily considered. One day in Mooréa, we climbed Katapoul’s mast and together jumped off the top spreader to satisfy Claude’s craving for such a picture. We spent a good fifteen minutes contemplating the jump and conjuring up enough scenarios of our splattering all over Katapoul’s deck that we froze in terror. Finally, making each other laugh, we counted to three and leapt. Unlike Margot, who kept her legs together, I made the regrettable mistake of going down with mine wide open. The impact with the water made me think that someone had shot me with a cannon on the way down, but after the pain passed, I acknowledged that the experience had actually been quite exciting.

  Another day we tried spinnaker flying. Claude anchored the boat from astern, raised the colorful huge triangle of light Dacron, tied lines to the two clews of the sail and between them a board. There Margot and I sat as the sail filled with air and we were lifted and dropped with the wind. Up and down we went, screaming and plopping in and out of the water like tea bags.

  Next, Luc found a mechanic who agreed to work on my engine. We brought Varuna to shore, unhooked all the connecting fuel and electricity lines and fittings, rigged a block-and-tackle system from the engine to the boom and lifted the disabled red monster onshore and into his waiting van. Varuna’s waterline rose a couple of inches with the removal of the weight and, a month later, the engine was replaced in working condition.

  The sound of the engine had become so alien that I turned it on and off for all my friends so that they could share my joy. In order to keep it in working condition, something had to be done about the water that leaked past the cockpit cover, which was also the floor of the cockpit, and into the engine compartment. Whenever waves filled the cockpit or, on land, when I took a sunshower or threw buckets of water to wash down my patio, the cockpit drains never worked fast enough to avoid major leaking down into the engine compartment.

  Luc tried to help me solve the problem, and we had an aluminum frame welded that fit into another aluminum frame. With the smaller frame bolted onto the cover, the slightly larger one bolted onto the deck, and a gasket in between, an impermeable seal was formed. Then, with the help of a family of missionaries on their own sailboat, Varuna was hauled out at a yard in Papeete, where we scraped and sanded her underbody and applied several new coats of antifouling paint to deter the growth of speed-impeding marine life.

  One day Claude spied a notice on a bulletin board of a solar panel for sale. A man had salvaged it with several other things from his boat after it had broken up on a Tuamotu reef. Buying it brought an end to all my electricity problems. The engine could fail as many times as it wanted, but there would always be those cells slurping up the sunlight and transforming the rays into electricity that would keep the batteries permanently charged. To protect the batteries, originally lodged in the bilge, from constant submersion, I brought them up to the cabin, wedged the pair beneath the companionway steps and fitted stoppers to secure them in place, in case Varuna took a knockdown or a rollover at sea.

  I was proud of my home; she had become very pretty and comfortable. The new bed was the epitome of luxury, decorated with sheets and pillows made of colorful Tahitian cotton fabrics. I removed the door to the toilet, which always managed to work its latch open and bang around at sea, and replaced it with a curtain. Claude made a new shelf for Katapoul from the wood of the door. Waste not, want not. Everything that was removed from Varuna was eventually put to use on another boat.

  After I made friends with Claude and Margot, the stone stopped rolling and began to gather moss. I made lots of friends who helped to form beautiful memories of Tahiti. It reached a point where I rarely had a waking moment to myself. But I didn’t mind. This was the last time until the end of the trip in New York where I could stay settled for a while without worrying about a departure date.

  Through it all—the work, the fun, and, most of all, the friendships with people whom I cared about—thoughts of my mother were never far away. Margot and Claude were always there to listen while I talked their ears off, trying to sort out the past, my mother, my relationships with my father and Luc, and everything that had happened since I’d left New York. They rarely passed judgment, and Claude with his jokes, and Margot, with her serene calmness, always brought me back down to earth whenever I got too worked up. As time began to heal the open wounds, gradually my moments of depression became fewer, and the memories of my mother began to find a quieter corner in my heart.

  Every couple of days, I went to the post office and placed collect calls home to the family. My father had come back from the Paris-Dakar race after totaling his car and nearly having his leg amputated from gangrene. After navigating a souped-up Land-Rover across the roadless deserts of Africa, the day before completing the race he and his partner took a detour on a regular road, missed a bridge and crashed the car down an embankment. I suppressed my laughter over this unhappy turn of events, the calamity still a little too fresh in my father’s mind for him to appreciate any humor in the situation.

  “As soon as this leg heals up,” he said, “I’m going to Holland to pick up my new boat. Then, I am going to make the qualifying transatlantic crossing for the BOC.”

  My father never ceased to amaze me. The BOC was a single-handed around-the-world sailboat race from Newport, Rhode Island, with three stops: one in South Africa, another in Australia and the last one in Brazil. I oohed and ahed for him over the phone, but was unable to understand his thirst for thrills. Aside from a few clumsy words, there was little talk about my mother, who had died while he was gone, and I received some reproofs for staying in Tahiti too long and not writing enough articles. Soon enough, with his leg barely healed, my father hobbled off to Holland and a new adventure.

  In the evenings, instead of articles, I religiously wrote long letters and, in return, the “A” box in Papeete’s main post office’s poste restante was always full. Since leaving New York, I had written three articles that were published in Cruising World, and readers of the magazine had begun to write letters that were forwarded to me. A few said I was foolhardy and that my father was a raving maniac for putting an inexperienced teenager on a boat and letting her loose on the world. But actually, most of the letters were full of encouragement and support from people who wished they could be out there doing the same thing. Even though at first the negative letters had upset me, the nice letters made me feel good, and I began to correspond with some of the people who had written them. I realized that the commitment was no longer an obligation just to my father and myself, and often later on, when everything got me down, I’d think of them cheering me on. In a way, I was giving a few people the inspiration that if I, a complete ninny, could do this and survive, someday they could live out their dreams, too.

  Jeri came to visit for two weeks in March, then my friend Elisabeth. Together, we hiked through overgrown trails and I showed them the giant waterfalls hidden behind massive screens of tropical foliage, and then we bathed in the mountain pools and swam from volcanic black sand beaches. We zoomed around Tahiti on Vespas and then cycled around the neighboring Mooréa as I shared with them the simple pleasures of the life in the islands.

  Days in the sun melted one into another—one day, two days, two weeks, two months. The four months that originally seemed so long were finally drawing to an end. I had fallen in love with this land and began to think that I never wanted to leave my friends. Hurricane season had passed and departure day was clawing away at the back of my mind. It was time for Dinghy and me to start thinking of moving on, but there was one last matter to attend to.

  Whenever I left Dinghy alone on the boat I always felt guilty at his wide-eyed look of abandonment. When I returned, it always felt wonderful to see him happily pacing the deck, meowing a welcome as he recognized my rhythmic pattern of rowing. As soon as I climbed aboard, he would purr and glue himself to me. On shore at Arué, in a wall-less pirogue shelter,
lived a gray tabby kitten who had taken to following me around. I often brought food and played with her, leaving her on the jetty crying as I rowed back to Varuna. One day before my departure, I relented, brought her out to Varuna and introduced her to my buddy. Dinghy accepted her right away, and from that moment on, Mimine became his little Tahitian vahine. Things were falling into place.

  A journalist who had interviewed me upon arrival had kindly arranged for Yamaha to give me a 2-horsepower outboard engine for the dinghy in return for a photo session upon departure. A date was set.

  On April 28, Varuna was filled with French delicacies and everything else that I had finally learned was needed aboard. The engine was working and there were no more reasons to linger. Arué had never seemed so much like home as then. I looked around at all my neighboring boats and the people who had been so nice.

  I went to Thea for the last time and hugged the family that I had grown to love. I said goodbye to Claude, and then with Margot sailed the 20 miles to Mooréa. Before we left, Claude gave me a drawing of the world in the shape of a melon with a missing slice and insinuations about smelly cat litter, and caricatures of the Australians, Africans, and finally King Kong dressed up like Uncle Sam sitting on top of the Empire State Building.

  Margot and I idled around Mooréa for two days, and we cried as she boarded the ferry that was to take her back to Claude. It’s hard to say if we would ever have become such good friends had we both been in New York, but now with four months of sharing times in these beautiful islands, working hard on the boats and forging a relationship that had helped me get through a very disjointed time of my life, Margot was one of the closest friends I’d ever had.

  For two weeks in Mooréa, I found every excuse in the book to procrastinate—bad weather, broken trailing log, rotten vegetables, needing more books. Any excuse worked. I even managed to get back to Tahiti by ferry one last time to find a piece for the trailing log. Finally, at nine in the morning on Friday, May 9, 1986, the dinghy was deflated, folded up and lashed on deck, and there were no further means of getting to land.

  • • •

  “Never start a voyage on Friday” is an old superstition of the sea, probably because Friday was the day on which Jesus was crucified. On this Friday, I decided to flout supersitition. “If I find one more reason for not leaving,” I said to myself, “I may as well stay forever.”

  If I had stayed and waited for Saturday, I would have heard about the depression that was lurking to the west, and my ear would have started aching that night and I could have gone to a doctor for medication. Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve . . . but didn’t.

  I pulled up the anchor and motored out of the lagoon and through the barrier reef’s passage of Cook Bay. If all went well, the next landfall would be Pago Pago, American Samoa, 1,200 miles to the west-northwest. Agitated and clumsy, I stumbled around the boat, getting ready to raise the sails, and realized that it had been almost five months since I had been at sea.

  Keeping an eye on the distance between Varuna and the reef as we grew apart, I attached the jib halyard to the corner clew of the genoa and lurched back to the cockpit like a landlubber unaccustomed to the ocean swell. Heading the boat into the wind, I leaned forward under the spray hood, pulled up the mainsail and then the genny, winched them tight, and trimmed the sheets. My arm muscles burned as I rotated the handle to get the sails up as taut as possible. Varuna immediately settled in on a beam reach with the wind coming from the north.

  My heart began to palpitate as the vision of the jagged peaks of Mont Tohiea, which I had taken for granted while it towered over the anchorages of Opunohu and Cook bays, began to disappear astern. The mood was so deep that I hardly noticed the wind slowly veering west. The fact that we were beating into dying trade winds that should have been coming briskly over our stern quarter, didn’t sink in for several hours. All of a sudden, it hit me.

  “Wait a second. What’s going on?” I said aloud. “Haven’t you gods checked the pilot charts lately? On this spot on the ocean, there is a 99 percent chance for wind from behind, and it’s supposed to be Force 5. So how come I get the 1 percent chance of wind from the front at Force 2, huh?”

  I talked out loud to myself for hours and then, for the first time on the ocean, tried out the new car stereo bought on Canal Street in New York at Christmas. The sound of music was alien and I found myself antsy and uncomfortable, instinctively wanting to identify all Varuna’s creaks and groans as she reacquainted herself with the sea. The music didn’t suit the moment, so off it went.

  Restlessly, I tried to read a book, almost immediately putting it down to go outside and read the skies. The moist and hazy air didn’t have much to say, so I crawled back below, chewed on some pumpkin seeds and watched my little buddies, wondering if they felt the same way as I. They were unfazed. Even Mimine didn’t seem to be too upset about her new lifestyle.

  Slowly, we passed by the small windward island of Maiao, which I had never even heard of until now, being obliged to identify the landmass on the chart. My ear, which had been feeling a little funny that morning, became by evening almost impossible to ignore, thumping away inside my head. At just about the same time, I noticed the barometer’s needle slowly plunging. “Oh brother,” I muttered, “this figures.” We were in for a sloppy ride.

  Throughout the night, I changed the genny for my new jib and took reefs in and out of the main as squalls passed overhead. The new jib had reef points, permitting it to be shortened down in nasty weather, until now a totally unexperienced pleasure. Now Varuna had a sail that could be used in winds whereas before the sail had to be doused altogether.

  On the morning of May 10, we pounded into increasing waves, with both main and jib reefed down, and I spotted the windward island of Raiatea, my last positive navigation verification. I hadn’t had the chance to walk the shores of this island, nor its neighbors of Bora-Bora and Huahine. Mooréa and Tahiti had been so fascinating that I was content to drift between just the two. These legendary lands would have to wait for other days.

  I didn’t dwell on could-have-been’s, occupied with a much more immediate problem, the upcoming storm. We were still a little too near land for comfort over leeway, but luckily the wind took its sweet time in losing its head, and gave us enough time to achieve a safety margin with plenty of searoom. Battening everything down in the cockpit, I set the sails and self-steering onto a southerly course drifting away from land and went below to wait it out, securing the companionway slats behind me for safety’s sake and to lessen the racket.

  Once again, I left Varuna and the Monitor to fend for themselves and carry us through the familiar screenplay of a storm. Progress would be killed for an indefinite amount of time, but at least we were now heading out of harm’s way. As the storm intensified, burying us underneath the waves, it became damp below and the sloshing bilge odors of fuel and stagnant water began wafting up through the floorboards.

  The throbbing ear wouldn’t even let me eat in peace; it hurt even when I moved my jaw. The medicated eardrops a doctor in New York had prescribed for my medicine chest proved utterly ineffective, so I numbed myself with aspirin.

  I drifted into a fitful sleep around eleven-thirty and awoke with a jolt upon hearing a crashing sound. The smell of sesame oil instantly permeated the cabin. With the bucking movement of the boat, a bottle had jettisoned itself and spilled all over my bunk, making a pungent, greasy mess. In an angry fit, I pulled open the hatch and threw the bottle overboard; it crashed instead against a winch, shattering all over the cockpit.

  “I don’t believe this!” I screamed, and climbed outside. With the feeble glow of the cabin light illuminating that small patch of life in the middle of the coal darkness, I picked up the shards of glass before one of the cats or I found slivers lodged in our feet. Just before climbing below again, one shaft of light hit the mainsheet that was piled up in the cockpit and I noticed with weary disgust that it was covered with cat poop.

  Desperately w
anting a cigarette, I suddenly remembered my resolution to stop smoking on this trip and the moment of bravado before departure when I had decided not to bring any. Now, in the first throes of withdrawal, I cursed myself and ate pumpkin seeds until my lips and tongue became raw from the salt.

  Sleeping fitfully during the stormy night, I woke up several times from vivid dreams of talking to my friends or begging people for Marlboros. I took more aspirin, cleaned up new things that had spilled or catapulted from their places and went outside to check the weather and the horizon. Spray exploded over Varuna and the sea was a witch’s caldron, tamped down by pelting rain. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

  On May 13, at 5:30 P.M., I was finally able to make a logbook entry that it was over. “I just cleaned the boat,” I wrote, “and things are looking up. The storm dissipated quickly this afternoon. Now you see it, now you don’t. And now we’re just rolling around in the leftover slop. I’m making a cup of coffee with the espresso maker Claude gave me and will put tons of powdered milk and sugar into it. I need a treat. Varuna is all dried out with fresh sheets. Thank you, God, for making it nice again. I was beginning to wonder. You know, El Nino, nuclear clouds . . .”

  The anxiety over nuclear clouds stemmed from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster that had happened just before my leaving Tahiti. News in the tropics is fairly sketchy, so I didn’t really know what to think while sailing alone at sea, looking for mushroom clouds. My imagination worked up a storm, conjuring all sorts of calamities: hurricanes, water spouts, tornadoes, underwater monsters and angry whales. I experienced an almost macabre joy in tantalizing myself with these visions, like reading a juicy horror story in an abandoned house.