Maiden Voyage

by Tania Aebi

  Christoph and I caught each other up on our doings since leaving Tahiti four months before. We had traveled completely different routes with one exception. After Tonga and Fiji, it turned out that he had been only the second boat to visit Futuna that year. Kreiz and Varuna had arrived two days after he left. Small world.

  “Well, I have to go ashore to make a phone call,” he said when the first excited rush of conversation had ebbed. “The party’s on Akka. Come over later on.”

  A few squawking birds skimmed the surface of the water hunting for their evening meals as I climbed down into the cabin to begin cleaning up. Making a landfall always frustrated all attempts to keep order. Binoculars, coffee cup, spilled powdered milk, charts, sunglasses, dividers, hat and sunscreen were all needed at one point or another, and there was never time to arrange them until arrival. I put new sawdust into the cats’ litter box and watched Dinghy step in. In Tahiti, I had noticed that he often went into the box, crouched and came out, leaving no messages. I had taken him to a vet and was told to feed him more wet food. But there had been no change and I began to be troubled, not knowing what else to do. After feeding the cats and making a cup of tea, I lay down to take a nap.

  A full moon was shining down through the hatch and loud voices and laughter disrupted the stillness of night, waking me up with a start. It was the party, already in full swing on Akka. From the port cockpit locker, I pulled out the sun shower, filled it up with the three remaining gallons of water in the jerry cans and lashed the bag to the boom. As the spout gently swung like a pendulum with the movements on Varuna, I draped a towel over the lifelines for some privacy, crouched down into the cockpit and took my first freshwater shower in a week.

  Christoph’s voice called across the water, telling me that I was missing everything. “Let me get dressed first,” I called back, assuring him that I was coming.

  By the time I finally rowed over and made my appearance in Akka’s cabin, which was warmly lit by brass kerosene lamps, one bottle of whiskey had been polished off and, needless to say, things had reached a level of confusion to which I, basically a nondrinker, found it difficult to rally. Nevertheless, I sat in a corner listening, scrutinizing Akka and watching these men let themselves completely loose, not wanting to make my presence too obstrusive in a celebration of friends meeting again in yet another land.

  Souvenirs of Olivier’s travels were arranged all over the boat—South American masks, carpets, pictures and beads studded the walls. Hung between two bronze hatches was a Brazilian ukelele-type of instrument made of a coconut hull, branch neck and a single string, and colorful shells and coral fronds were strewn about everywhere. I studied everything curiously and listened, smiling at little snatches of conversation that stood out like short excerpts from a six-hour comedy.

  Didier from Penelope showed me his drawing book of sketches and a sculpture he had carved, and insisted on making a portrait of me. Meanwhile, Christoph was off on a tangent about how life is all an illusion and we are just playing out a cassette that somebody else recorded.

  Michel, Penelope’s captain, had come in late, after trying to sell some shells to a souvenir shop in town to pay for his next meal, to find that his share of whiskey had been inhaled. Before he had a chance to put his hands on another cache, we talked together about a series of French comic books called Les Passagers du Vent When I told him that I too had enjoyed them, he felt it was his duty to recount the lengthy history of the drawings and the individual personalities of those people who were used for models—an opaque monologue that left me puzzling how he would know so much about something so obscure, but Michel turned out to be a man with many answers that didn’t always add up.

  He told me of his trip, how he had bought Penelope for two thousand dollars in the Canary Islands. She was a tiny, ten-year-old day sailer that had been accustomed to playful sailing around protected bays, but Michel saw her as a boat that had enough spunk to take him places. Crossing the Atlantic to Brazil, the Antilles, then to Panama with a mixed crew, Penelope had survived being hit by lightning and sinking. Michel made it all the way to Vanuatu, where his last crew member, Didier, was about to catch a plane to continue his art career in New Caledonia. “I can’t go to any French territories,” Michel said, taking a swig of whiskey, but he didn’t mention why.

  Throughout the evening, Olivier too had been rambling on about everything and nothing. I vainly tried to follow his train of conversation as it skipped from the stars to desert islands, to the universe, to aliens, to landfalls and missing forks. Although I was unable to grasp his words, I watched his suntanned, handsome face, convincing myself that he was even managing to sound somewhat poetic. Also, he was the only one of the men who wasn’t trying to impress me—if anything, he was rather ignoring me—and human nature being what it is, that’s probably why I paid closer attention.

  Christoph disappeared and then returned, bringing a girl, Lillianne, who lived on the island, and later, as I watched her dance with Olivier, I felt a stab of jealousy. All night, while I sat in my corner on Akka talking to Michel, and afterward in Lillianne’s jeep, when we drove around the dark streets to a beach, I watched this intriguing brown-eyed, blond man and tried to make sense out of him. “Fred said he really liked Olivier,” I told myself. “He was always talking about what a good person he was. I’ll just have to wait to judge him properly.”

  As the light of dawn crept over the party, I slipped away and dinghied back to Varuna to get some sleep. At ten that morning, stretched out on my bunk and mulling over the events of the previous evening, I heard a splash in the water nearby. Throwing back the covers, I jumped out into the cockpit to see the subject of my thoughts surfacing next to Varuna.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Would you like some coffee . . . and some aspirin?”

  “No, thanks, I’m all right.” He smiled, pulling himself into Varuna’s cockpit.

  “That was quite a party,” I said hesitantly. “How does your head feel?”

  “Swimming did the job,” he said. “I haven’t had so much to drink in years, but sometimes it’s good to decompress like that after being at sea. Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, it was good to talk and laugh.”

  That morning Olivier and I began to get to know each other, and although he was very quiet and reserved, I gently probed and he opened up. He was thirty-three, he said, and from Neuchâtel, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, near where my mother’s apartment had been and the château where we had gone to boarding school. He had a degree in geology, but said he had never worked at it, preferring a life connected to the sea. He had worked as a skipper on charter boats, had navigator positions on racing boats and spent seasons as a sailing and ski instructor.

  “Three years ago,” he said in French, with the familiar Swiss accent to which I was warmly accustomed from my days in Switzerland, “I was at a crucial moment in my life. I felt I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. Most of all, I wanted to have my own boat and see the world.”

  After skippering a boat from Taiwan to Martinique, he felt his future was a big question mark. One day he saw a message in the classified section of a small newspaper from a man who said that his boat was lying unused in a Spanish marina and had to be moved. He was looking for a qualified person who would like to sail her. Olivier met the man, they came to an agreement and Akka came into his life.

  Working day and night as a taxi driver for six months, he saved enough to pay the hefty Spanish marina bill and left to see the world, spending time in Brazil, Colombia, Panama and Tahiti. Always on a shoestring budget, he earned money along the way with a variety of interesting and adventuresome schemes—buying rum in Martinique and selling it for good profit in Tahiti, crafting jewelry in South America and taking on a position as a charter boat captain. He was modest about his adventures and slowly, over many days together, told me about all the exotic nooks and crannies to which Akka had carried him.

  In those early days of Vanuatu, w
e were to become inseparable, and I tried to forget that my destiny was to follow a route that Olivier might not be able to travel with me. During that month on the island of Efate, we simply tried to make the most of every minute.

  Aboard Akka’s time-worn 32 feet of steel, one could sense her well-seasoned age of twenty years. She had probably thought retirement was at hand, definitely not a circumnavigation, when Olivier moved aboard. She was pure basics, the only instruments on board being three little cabin lights, his Freiberger sextant, a watch and an antique shortwave radio. For nighttime running lights Olivier used kerosene lamps of green and red glass. Relying almost solely on Akka’s sails and antiquated self-steering gear, he had come far, sometimes with crew and sometimes alone. Olivier was as basic as his boat, having no desire to maintain the superfluous, no need to accumulate objects. The few he had were simple and beautiful.

  “Until I met you,” he said after we had spent two weeks together, “I was planning to go to Australia and Papua New Guinea to search for gold. Now we’ll see what happens.”

  The town of Port Vila stretched along the shoreline for about a mile, with supermarkets, clothing stores, a few restaurants and bars, government offices and souvenir shops on both sides of the main street. Except for when an occasional cruise ship debarked loads of pale Australian tourists, the stores were empty and the deserted streets had the air of a sleepy town at siesta.

  It could have been any island in the Caribbean except that the people spoke Bislama, a Melanesian Pidgin, but our communications were in French or English, the official national languages. Olivier and I noticed one word in particular that seemed to be on every sign and in every sentence: Blong. We asked Lillianne, who was a translator for the government, what it meant and she said it was a sort of derivation from “belong” and meant pertaining to, of, with. The word struck Olivier and me as comical and, before either of us could become comfortable with endearments, we took to saying “I blong you” to each other for lack of something better.

  Vanuatu was my only confrontation with the Melanesians and their culture, and with Lillianne we went to kava ceremonies, and learned about the traditions and unusual customs of the island. On Vanuatu, to please the gods and ensure that their yam harvest would be profitable, men performed Naghol, jumping from bamboo contraptions 250-feet high, their ankles bound by long, flexible vines called lianes, calculated to stop their fall inches short of the ground. I could only think that these people must be especially fond of yams.

  The kerosene light marking the kava hut after sundown drew us like mosquitoes one evening, as we were curious about this ritual of Pacific Island chiefs, who drank the kava before gatherings to be touched by wisdom. In the shelter of these pandanus-roofed gazebos, one man ground up the root and another pressed the water through the pulp into coconut-shell halves as customers came up for refills. Talking was allowed, but in hushed tones, accentuated by others who would step to the side to hack up and cough out the foul remains. Apparently, the older the root, the more potent the kava.

  Lillianne, Christoph, Olivier and I sat down in our turn and forced down a few vile coconut shells full. I couldn’t understand the fascination. Around us, grown men were drinking something that tasted like filthy dishwater left to stagnate for a month, coughing it up and sitting down for more. Suddenly, as my tastebuds numbed, the annoying, hacking, spitting noises dulled and a 100-watt light bulb seemed to illuminate the inside of my head. For the next couple of hours, all sorts of incredible thoughts emerged in a nonstop, stream-of-consciousness conversation between Olivier and me, as we became philosophers with the answers to every problem.

  During that evening, we found out more about each other than in the two previous weeks combined, and I could understand why the chiefs drank kava before any important discussion. Unfortunately, under its influence the brain is in great shape but disassociates itself from the limbs. When Lillianne signaled to us, I found that I had a bad case of rubber legs, and it was only a very concentrated effort that got me back to the car and the Waterfront Restaurant in time to vomit it all up. For several months after the kava experience, all I had to do was imagine its taste and my bile would rise.

  One day, the Waterfront Yacht Club sponsored a 20-mile race around an offshore island, and we entered Varuna. Our main competition was Adonis, sailed by Christoph and Lillianne. As we motored toward the starting line, they jeered, “Hey, you’ll be lucky if you get back before dark with that little dinghy. We’ll have dinner waiting on the fire for you. Don’t wake us up.”

  Throughout the day, Olivier played the captain and Michel and I jumped to his orders. He had raced many boats and, for the first time, I sat back with no worries about where we went, knowing Varuna was in capable hands.

  On the downwind leg we hoisted the spinnaker that Michel had brought along and, for the first time, Varuna felt the edge that a light sail could give. As we sped down on the quarantine buoy, there was a small crowd of people onshore watching the finishing contestants. Proudly, with Michel steering, we rounded the yellow marker, doused the spinnaker and rounded up into the wind, heading for the mooring at a good clip. Olivier and I started coiling the lines, when all of a sudden there was a crunching sound, we lost our balance, lurched forward, and Varuna’s mast jerked back as Michel frantically maneuvered the tiller to get us off a reef. Apologizing profusely, he bounced Varuna over the coral head gonkers with grinding sounds that made me think that her keel was being ripped out from under her.

  Rushing below and pulling up the floorboards to listen for incoming water, I heard nothing. Michel was laughing when I came back out. “If what just happened gave you a hole, then this boat is a piece of junk,” he said. “We’ve hit many reefs inside different lagoons and the most damage was a couple of scratches in the paint job.”

  “I don’t care what you say,” I retorted shakily. “We are diving and checking the hull as soon as we tie up.”

  Later, after finding that the damages were, indeed, only a few faint scratches, we went ashore to watch Adonis crawl in, the last straggler. Thoroughly upset over nearly imperiling my boat for an unimportant race, and embarrassed by going aground in front of a crowd, I didn’t go to the after-race ceremonies and later found out that Varuna had won on corrected time. Instead, I left Olivier and Michel sitting on a bench in front of a spectacular sunset and went alone to the Waterfront Restaurant’s bathroom feeling profoundly depressed. Lost in thought, I passed the mirror and was stopped by my own reflection.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked myself. “Why are you still here? You should have left over two weeks ago. And you haven’t even written anything since that miserably short article in Tahiti. You’ve been having one continuous ball, hanging out and doing nothing other than enjoying yourself. Daddy didn’t give you a boat for a gift; he gave you a job.”

  I had stayed overtime in certain places before, but always with good reason. Here in Vanuatu, it had already been three weeks instead of the two I had allotted myself, and still I was making no gestures toward leaving. Varuna had just hit a reef, it could have been serious and I was feeling guilty about all the time I spent with Olivier, as if I had no responsibilities. Most of all, there was the pressure of the steadily advancing seasons.

  Every ocean has a hurricane season during its summer months. In three and a half months, the Indian Ocean’s hurricane season would begin and by then I had to be in South Africa or else run the risk of getting tangled in the fury of its off-season. Every extra day spent on land was at least 100 miles lost in making that goal. A clock had begun to tick, getting louder with every passing day.

  Looking in the mirror and filled with self-reproach, I made a resolution to write the next morning and to start preparations for leaving. I had a sneaking feeling that it was already too late to get to South Africa in time, but laid that thought to rest and narrowed my worries down to one: just get to Australia first; the rest will come later.

  Feeling a little better about my plans, I w
ent back to the boat that night and found Dinghy bleeding from his genitals. “Oh my God,” I cried. “No, not Dinghy, please.” I tenderly wiped him off and gave him some of his favorite snacks. He lay there limply, quietly meowing his pain. Mimine meowed, too, as she circled his penguin body, nosing him to respond. Feebly, he tried to move about but was too weak.

  I scratched his ears in his special place, trying to console him with my voice. He looked so small and helpless. I edged a bowl of water to his lips. He lapped a little and I was swept with hope. All of that sleepless night I spent trying to push away the thought that something could alter the one precious relationship that had sustained me for almost half the world.

  First thing the next morning, I bundled him into a large towel, and Olivier brought us to shore in the dinghy where we caught a taxi to the only veterinary clinic on the island. It was actually the department of agriculture, whose job it was to inoculate the vast cattle herds, but they also had a small-animal section. A young Australian man brought Dinghy to a stainless steel table.

  “Where does this cat live?” the vet asked as he felt his stomach.

  “On a sailboat, with me,” I answered. “We’ve come all the way from New York together.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows rose to his hairline. “What! You brought a foreign animal ashore? He could bring diseases. You’re not supposed to do that.”

  I began to tremble, suddenly struck with a premonition that Dinghy wouldn’t be returning home with me. “Look at him. He’s bleeding and he never even touched the ground. I carried him the whole way here. What should I have done? Let him suffer and bleed to death on the boat?” I began to sniffle.