Maiden Voyage

by Tania Aebi

  It was my habit, albeit a dangerous one, to diagnose present conditions by referring to those of the past. The barometer couldn’t be wrong, I reasoned, and in any case, progress was good and Gibraltar only 350 miles away. Tucked into the snug bunk, I tried to rest my weary bones and take my mind off the deteriorating conditions by starting a new book. Within the first few pages, I was lost in the life of that love-torn, secret-tormented milkmaid, Tess.

  On the afternoon of August 29, a dark curtain dropped over Varuna’s western horizon, the direction in which we were headed. In the past week, we had encountered several other fronts like this, where underneath the ominous cloakings, the wind had either increased or dropped altogether, and now the only course of action was to batten things down and continue. On approach, I could see jagged streaks of lightning bursting from the low-hanging, swirling clouds.

  By nightfall, we sailed into its grizzly arms, and the wind increased to a howling velocity. Overcanvased even with three reefs in the main and no jib, Varuna began rounding up into the wind and getting slapped broadside by confused waves that filled the cockpit, as streaks of electric light crackled down to the water around us. Too tired to think straight, I couldn’t find another ounce of energy to change the sail configuration again, and decided to let Varuna lie ahull under bare poles for the duration of whatever was about to happen. Dousing the mainsail and lashing it along the boom—a sloppy, wet ordeal in all this wind—I crawled below for some relief, hoping it wouldn’t get much worse. Behind me, I pulled down a large piece of canvas attached to the spray hood to protect the open companionway from spray. A more alert mind would have made the decision to close the companionway altogether with the Plexiglas slats.

  As the canvas billowed in through the open companionway, I automatically reached up onto the shelf and pulled out the alarm clock, setting it to the time of the next weather report. Finally we had reached the perimeters of an English broadcast—before it had all been in Italian—and I had to find out what was going on. This weather was a mystery, having no rhyme or reason, and no similarities to weather patterns to which I had grown accustomed in other oceans. Wedging myself in the lee corner of the bunk and snuggling up with Tarzoon underneath a cotton blanket, I melodramatically paralleled the hardships of leaving Olivier and the upcoming trips to those of Thomas Hardy’s heroine. Tess was surviving; so could I.

  Suddenly, the din of the wind was drowned out by a huge, thundering crash, and my world turned upside down. All hell broke loose as everything on the starboard side of Varuna catapulted down on top of me while hundreds of gallons of water engulfed us. Varuna lurched and rolled grotesquely sideways and I remember thinking in panic that a ship must have hit us square on this time.

  With the first burst of adrenaline, I coughed and spit out the salt water that had rushed up my nose, pulling myself out from under half of Varuna’s interior and clambered outside. There was no ship, but the storm still raged, with lightning illuminating the frothy sea. Any lightning storm we had experienced in the past paled in comparison to the fireworks streaking all around Varuna. The damage to the boat, revealed by the light of the eerie staccato electricity, almost gave me a stroke.

  The spray hood had been completely ripped out of its aluminum supports by the impact of the water and was caught in the lifelines. The deflated dinghy that had been lashed on deck was hanging on for dear life by one line attached to the grab rail. The weather cloths that I had laboriously measured, sewed and two days previously installed with new grommets were completely ripped out and gone. Forty liters of fuel in jerry cans that had been lashed in the cockpit were gone. The solar panel that had faithfully sustained my electricity supply since Tahiti was gone, as well as my foul-weather gear, which had been placed under the protection of the spray hood so I could grab it easily before going out on deck. A sailbag of sand for kitty litter that probably weighed about thirty pounds had been lifted from the cockpit floor and was now lying like a bag of wet concrete halfway overboard. Holding on as the boat rolled around and the wind blasted across the deck, I hastily hauled it in along with the spray hood and the dinghy.

  That was outside, but the chaos that greeted me below was even more of a nightmare. Everything from the starboard side of the boat was on the port side, where my bed used to be, spilled, broken and strewn about under water as if we had gone through a blender. Water was sloshing up to one foot above the floorboards, with floating cassettes, papers, cameras, food, water bottles, Tupperware and books. The contents of the toolbox, which had been on the cabin sole underneath the middle section I had added in Tahiti to make a larger bed, was in the icebox and locker above the sink. Judging by the damage, I knew we had come close to having a complete 360-degree rollover until Varuna’s ballast had pulled her upright like a weeble wobble before she could make the sidewise somersault.

  With one look at all this, and with my heart racing, I tore back outside to pump the bilge with the salvaged handle of a file. Clogged! Oh my God, what to do. The electrical bilge pump had failed eons ago. Through the lightning, I swept the hair out of my face, trying to think straight. We were in the middle of a full-fledged tempest of biblical fury, and Varuna was wallowing about, pregnant with sea water and in dire peril. Uncontrollably, my body began to shake itself to pieces.

  Suddenly, from nowhere, the twinkling white lights of a ship appeared on the dark horizon. In the throes of panic, I jumped down below, grabbed my emergency-distress beacon and turned it on, praying that the ship was monitoring the frequency and would pick up the position-indicating signal. Turning it on, I knew, meant to anyone who picked up the signal that I had abandoned hope of saving myself and sought rescue.

  Seconds passed. I stopped and sat on the starboard bunk, stripped of everything, and tried to calm myself. A pack of cigarettes floated by, and thanks to the cellophane wrapping, the interior was miraculously dry. I lit one with a lighter that had been in the dry hammock above my head and scrummaged for the little airplane-sized bottle of whisky that I had been saving for a special occasion. The burning liquid settled in my stomach and an inner glow began immediately to suffuse me in warmth.

  I gazed at the drenched souvenirs on the wall in front of me, the tapa drawing from the Marquesas and the bolts of Balinese fabric. They glared down at me; my photo albums screamed out; my soaking clothes howled; my soggy books yelped and the dripping-wet Tarzoon meowed. Mr. T was the most important. Abandoning Varuna would mean leaving everything, and maybe even him, behind. I couldn’t do it. We were still floating and I had come too far to fail now.

  Five minutes after turning it on, and seeing that the ship had pressed obliviously westward anyway, I turned off the EPIRB and prayed to God that no one had heard it. “As long as I have an ounce of strength left,” I thought, “I’ll do everything in my power to save Varuna and make it to the next port alive.” As I started to bail out with a bucket, the fatigue of moments before dissipated and my thoughts became very clear as scenarios ran through my head about what would have happened if someone had come to my assistance. Having summoned help, I would have been obliged to accept it.

  For an hour I bailed bucket after bucket of water out into the cockpit. Picking up my soggy floating belongings, when the water was finally beneath the floorboards, I went back out into the exposed cockpit to dismantle the bilge pump. Several hours later it sputtered to life, after I discovered a crease in the hose that had blocked off the suction. Pulling out the kerosene heater that Morris and Ursula had given me in Port Said, I turned it up full blast to start drying things out.

  By daybreak, the crisis had passed, things were slightly more ordered, and the activity had helped me to forget the seismic emotions of my fright. My nerves had been as tight as a drum for the six hours since the knockdown, and now as the tension drained with the dawn, every muscle in my body ached. As the wind died, I raised the mainsail only to find that it also had been ripped.

  “What else have you got?” I screamed, as I ferreted out my repair kit and s
tarted sewing. “Come on! Let me have it now! You’ll never have another chance. As soon as I get to land it’s bye-bye birdie. I’ve HAD it!”

  After I raised the tattered mainsail, we continued making for Gibraltar and I began to jury-rig repairs to the most important items that had taken the brunt of the wave. It was worse than I thought; all the new electrical wiring that Olivier had installed, as well as the old, was shot. The cassette player and masthead light blinked on and off haphazardly until I took a scissors to the wires. The RDF, VHF, shortwave radio and tape recorder were all dead. Inside, the electronic terminals of every last one of them had turned a moldy shade of green. All that was left to me for navigation were my wet HO 249 tables, a soaked Nautical Almanac, the sextant and, for entertainment, the half-finished, waterlogged Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

  At least the navigation situation made me smile. Now, Varuna would be just like the convenience-free Akka, and, like Olivier, I would be obliged to find land with help only from the sun and stars—no backups from the radio-direction finder or VHF.

  While we plodded onward, I brought out books and the mattresses to dry in the sun and unscrewed the RDF terminals, admiring the intricacies of electronics and reflecting on what had happened. My mistake had been running under bare poles.

  Had my wits really been about me, I would have put up the jib for some stability, using it to run with the wind. And when the conditions worsened, I would have taken down the jib, replaced it with the trisail and headed Varuna into the wind and waves where they would have been deflected on the bow. Fatigue is the sailor’s worst enemy. I knew it. But you always think you’re doing the right thing until it’s too late.

  Looking at the charts, I decided to use my last rations of fuel and motor to the southern coast of Spain. The wind had disappeared, I still hadn’t gotten any sleep and Varuna needed more diesel to make it to Gibraltar. For strength, I cooked up a couple of meals of rice and tomato paste and shared them with Tarzoon on our one remaining dish, making long lists of things that had to be done, and not knowing where and if I would ever be able to find the energy to do any of them.

  In between watching out for ships, keeping course and making the few repairs that were possible to effect at sea, I carefully separated Tess’s soggy pages one by one, only to find that, she, too, had come to a tragic end.

  Almería was the closest town drawn onto my chart of the Mediterranean, so I headed for it in desperation. Three days of coursing adrenaline after the knockdown, an intermittent flash from a lighthouse beamed across the oily-looking calm, darkened here and there by cat’s paws of a breeze, and we were drawn toward the vista of Costa del Sol. Within hours, I was trying to use my few words of Pidgin Spanish to figure out where and how to tie up at Almería’s marina, negotiate a price with the secretary and ask how to make an international telephone call.

  I vainly tried to follow the instructions and make the collect call from the public phone, while the marina handyman kept offering to help, with wandering hands that kept touching my breasts. Unable to cope, I rushed into town to place the call at an international telephone office, thinking I’d have a nervous breakdown if I couldn’t talk to my father soon. I wanted to tell him what had happened and ask him to please come to Gibraltar and help me make repairs and bring new equipment. The seasons had no intentions of waiting for me and there was only one week to do all the work myself.

  The telephone office was closed for the three-hour siesta usual in southern Europe, so I returned to Varuna’s smelly, damp cabin and opened the Bible on my lap. Trying to halt an incurable case of trembling, I read the Thirteenth Psalm at the same moment as Olivier, wherever he was, at 12:00 G.M.T. letting David’s lament soothe my racing mind: “How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me forever?” Crying over the irony of the psalm and thinking of Olivier, I leaned back and fell asleep.

  As the sun was setting that afternoon, I was back at the Offica de Telefono in town placing an order for a collect call to the States, huddled up on a bench, rubbing my arms in the freezing air-conditioned air. An hour and ten cigarettes later, the call still hadn’t gone through and I began to crack up. The language barrier, fatigue and the knockdown caught up with me all at once. I tried to hold in the tears but there was no stopping them.

  Self-conciously hiding my tear-stained face as a group of younger people came into the office, I heard the familiar sounds of English and new hope made me look up. I asked one of the girls if she could please ask the lady in Spanish why the telephone was taking so long. She looked at me kindly and after getting an answer, said that there was an operators’ strike. Christine was her name, and she was like an angel sent down from heaven. After a while, the operator signaled and I leapt into the booth to take the call.

  “Oh, Daddy, I’m so scared,” I blubbered, telling him what had happened. “You can’t possibly imagine how horrible it was. I lost so many important things. I need so much stuff and don’t have enough money for it all. I promise I’ll pay you back.”

  “Stay right there in Almería,” he said firmly, “and sleep. Only head to Gibraltar when you’re good and ready. Don’t worry, Schibel-puff, I’ll come right away.” Hearing his voice and knowing that he was coming to Gibraltar made me think that things could work out after all.

  Ever since Australia, thanks to Olivier, I had been able to keep up the hectic schedule that would enable me to arrive in New York early enough to set the record. After the delays in Malta, every passing day counted drastically when it concerned the crossing of the Atlantic, not so much because of the record, but because of the brewing winter. Now, with all the repairs that had to be done in such a short time, I needed help.

  When I got back to the boat, my mind was in a tailspin, trying to sort out everything that had happened. I continued to ponder the tantalizing images of quitting and found, now that we were moored safely again, they really weren’t as compelling as the image of stepping ashore in New York from the deck of Varuna. I was just too close to finishing the biggest thing I had ever started, and giving up the ship now would leave me wondering for the rest of my life if I had made the wrong decision to take the easy way out. I knew I couldn’t live with that.

  Almería, my first and second-to-last touch with the European mainland, was a place for regaining my resolve. For two days, I rested as Tarzoon jumped ship to kiss the ground and tell his own version to the Spanish cats that roamed the marina. I tried to fatten up with fried calamari and peppers, paella, steaks, salads and fruit ice creams at the lively outdoor terraces of the modern coastal town. When I felt ready again, after replenishing the fuel supply and scooping Tarzoon back on board, I cast off my dock lines and we headed down the coast for Gibraltar.

  Varuna’s engine faithfully puttered through one day, into the night and into the light of the next, as we skirted the margents of Spain toward the Pillars of Hercules. After thirty-six hours, the famous promontory, looming like a sentinel over the 8-mile-wide avenue of escape to the Atlantic, rose from the tail end of the landscape on the horizon.

  Night fell again before Varuna could make it in, but the lights of Gibraltar illuminated the port and we motored slowly through a tidal rip that pitched us around a bit and then into the calm waters, that were only disturbed when gusts swept down from the great rock itself. Spying some masts in the distance, I motored to where a bevy of sailboats was anchored at the foot of an airstrip and let go the anchor. The next landfall, I thought as I fell off to sleep late that night, would be New York.

  As I checked in at the customs dock the next morning, a little dinghy skittered across the marina, and there was my father rushing up to hug me, so beginning Varuna’s brief pit stop in a race against nature’s clock. Finally, the ultimate goal was almost close enough to reach out and touch, and after that moment everything began falling into place.

  • • •

  Only two winds blew consistently through the narrow strait separating Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, from the tip of Morocco in northern Af
rica—either from the west or from the east—for days at a stretch. The easterly Levanter wind was the messenger that would carry Varuna through. If cirrus clouds appeared over the Rock of Gibraltar, they would herald an unknown number of days of the opposing westerly Poniente, and there would be virtually no way for Varuna to fight through the straits against the wind and current. Every morning for a week, I would listen for the regular easterly blowing across Varuna’s cockpit whispering to me that we still had time.

  On the first day, my father helped bring Varuna alongside Lone Rival, the boat of a family friend named Mark who was also from New York. Together with Mark, and a Canadian named Doug, who had singlehanded a sister ship of Varuna’s to Gibraltar, my father had been waiting impatiently with a new VHF, RDF, shortwave radio, tape recorder and all kinds of other gear that he had assembled before jumping on a flight at Kennedy Airport.

  After the encounter with the tanker outside the Suez Canal, there was no way that I wanted to cross the Atlantic without the confidence that I could save myself if something as unforeseen as that should happen again, so I had ordered a life raft in Malta, and now it was waiting for me. Cruising World had also sent over an ARGOS satellite transmitter that would enable the magazine and my father to follow my daily progress across the Atlantic. That there would be crowds of press and people anticipating my safe arrival only served to heighten the pressure. There would be no room for error now.

  With Mark, Doug and my father, I was blessed with a refit crew of willing helpers. We worked from morning to last light every day, buzzing frantically around, repairing, rebuilding, reprovisioning, rewiring and preparing Varuna for her next opponent. Standing before the job that had to be done in such a short period of time, I wondered how it could have ever been possible for me to even think about doing it alone.