by Tania Aebi
The closer we inched toward home, the more aware I became of the news of the world. Although rarely able to find current copies, I had always bought a Time or Newsweek whenever possible. Even so, my information had been sporadic and I only knew about things I had seen firsthand or had heard about through the grapevine. Until this passage home, I had grown to prefer that perspective. Now I began to crave up-to-the-minute news, and diligently turned the dial and plugged myself into world politics and updates on obscure natural disasters, as well as hearing what was new in music after two and a half years out of the mainstream.
One day, to my surprise, I even heard a hit song by some of my old friends from New York. Before I left, they had been just a bunch of kids playing tuneless tunes in city haunts and wherever the neighbors wouldn’t complain. Nobody had ever heard of them then or paid much attention to the inane lyrics of their songs, except those of us who hung out with them. That they had made it big meant that a lot of things had probably changed. To be in the middle of the ocean and hearing the songs of people I once knew triggered memories of the old days, and I felt nostalgic for my teenage years and the carefree life on the streets.
“Hello, it’s the 4th of October, only three days away from my birthday. I ended up having to put up the handkerchief jib last night, and haven’t really gone anywhere since. There was just too much wind. The waves have gotten bigger and wetter, and I feel very small. The ocean is everywhere; it’s coming in through the chain plates, crashing over Varuna in through leaky hatch gaskets and the Dorade vent, overflowing into the cockpit and down to the lockers. Tarzoon and I have the slats closed up tight, making the cabin air quite stale, and we scrunch up together watching Father Time march onward. What a way to grow old.
“I went through the major hassle and acrobatics of cooking a meal of dehydrated Chicken Supreme with rice. I also started crocheting a bag with the leftover wool, which unravels from the little balls that Tarzoon helps to wind. The sweater is finished, and it might even fit Olivier. I’ve forgotten how big he is. Crash, Bang, splash, boom . . . Goodnight.”
The next day, thanks to the waning wind, life got a little bit more civilized and I did my navigation: we had progressed only a pathetic 275 miles since our last fix, three days earlier. With the calm and the sunshine, I resiliconed the chain plates on deck, which had been leaking steadily since the first storm out of Gibraltar. Tarzoon chased the ends of the toilet paper that I was using with some alcohol to remove the old gook. The dolphins came gliding through the transparent water to see what I was doing.
Before the chill of evening set in, I took a bath in the cockpit and washed my hair with dishwashing liquid, the cheapest kind of soap that would lather in salt water. Afterward, feeling my silky hair, I relished the sight of clean long johns that hadn’t yet stretched to the point of hanging to my knees. It seemed a proper way to enter into my twenty-second year, smelling like Palmolive.
Sitting on the bunk at nightfall and staring out the companion-way at the skies glowing in lunar light, I thought how comical my predicament was. Imagine the utter simplicity of a life whose highlight for the day is marked by a bath—and a saltwater bath, no less. Had I sunk down deeper than deep? No, not at all, I decided. Regardless of the primitiveness of my pleasures, that night I rejoiced, for the morrow would bring the anniversary of my birth. Although on the eve of my birthday, my wish of being halfway across the Atlantic by now still had not been granted, the wind had died, the moon was almost full, and I felt privileged. The majesty of a slumbering ocean, softly lit from horizon to eternal horizon, was all for me alone to behold.
The night was nimble, and waking up the next morning, I forced myself to make a cup of coffee and perform my ablutions before savagely ripping open the presents. There were cards full of jokes and stories from Mark and Doug and strips of candle wax from Maurice. Reading all the notes made me feel as though a party of friends was aboard Varuna, and I enjoyed the festivity while it lasted. Olivier’s card was a picture of an old man with a striking resemblance to Uncle Sam, pointing his finger at me, saying, “You are 21.” Inside, the card said, “I am jealous.” Ironically, his present was a sweater made with almost the same stitch as the sweater I had just finished for him. From my father, there was a half-spilled bottle of Lily of the Valley perfume.
“Well,” I thought, “I’m twenty-one and don’t feel very different, except that I have to cook my own birthday dinner and then, on top of it, do the dishes.” Apart from the Barrier Reef birthday gala with Olivier, this was the second of the last three birthdays that I had spent alone at sea. There was no denying the fact that they had all been unforgettable.
Before the trip, I’d had seventeen birthdays, and could not remember the celebrations of more than two of them. How would I ever be able to forget my nineteenth birthday in the middle of El Pacifico, twentieth on the Australian Barrier Reef off a pearl farm, and twenty-first here in the middle of the mighty Atlantic Ocean. Well, actually, we weren’t technically in the middle of the Atlantic yet. That waypoint was still 300 miles distant, and the present absence of wind seemed reluctant to help us make it up.
Three days later, still nothing. Puffy clouds crisscrossed the sky, taking hours to pass from one horizon to the other. At night, they marbleized the black heavens with veins of light and I watched them, waiting for a burst of speed in their lumbering movements that would signify some wind in the neighborhood. In the heat of the afternoon of one of those days, when the bath bucket seemed incredibly heavy, I thought, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to lather up and jump in the drink to rinse off?” For the very first time ever alone, I dived overboard while Varuna wallowed back and forth.
During the Atlantic calms, which in other oceans had been great annoyances, I began to immerse myself in the solitude, for I knew this was a last chance and it would soon be left behind. Daily duties were done like a spiritual epitaph to a beautiful story. Every night, I made my bed into a real one, with sheets, blankets and a plumped-up pillow to snuggle into. I religiously read every last word in my books, cleaned the dishes pronto, properly folded the sails when they weren’t being used, brushed my teeth and hair on cue, kept the cockpit clean and the cabin dusted and marveled for hours at a time on how wonderful nature was to have created such an exquisite creature as Tarzoon. But, as venerable as the calm originally seemed, after six days, it began to get on my nerves.
“Hallo, it is October 12th. GMT-wise it’s 12:33 A.M. How’s it going? Me? Well, not so hot. For lunch I had canned spare ribs—a foul British invention—and a sweet and sour rice package of Chinese derivation. I just saw the first ship in a while. It came pretty close and I talked with the Russian radio man who spoke a little English. He said that there were no imminent storms and gave me a SatNav position setting us 300 miles east of where I thought we were. Scared that something was dreadfully wrong with my navigation, I asked him if he was sure; he double-checked, came back and admitted error. Phewee. I’d have jumped overboard. With the past three days’ progress, that fix would’ve put us back 10 days. We’ve been out here for 26 already and aren’t even half-way yet. This will definitely be our longest passage.
“There’s a pretty cloudless sky, but I don’t care a bit, at this point preferring dark black clouds and lots of wind, just as long as Varuna moves forward. I sit staring at the sea, reading, daydreaming. The freshwater drinking supply is running low and I wouldn’t mind a good old-fashioned squall to replenish it. I heard an incredibly loud boom this afternoon, shattering the absolute silence around us. It was an airplane zipping across the sound barrier overhead. Then, a little canary plopped in and Tarzoon wanted to make a lunch of her, so I shooed her off the boat for her own safety. “
Going out on deck at about midday, I saw before us our first pod of whales, and in awe, I watched as the leviathans, each seeming to be three times the size of Varuna, rolled over in the water ahead of the boat. About 50 feet away a gray lump surfaced and a spout of water spewed out with a great whoosh, then
disappeared followed by a V-shaped flipper tail that made another resounding wet splash. It was a little too close for comfort. I held my breath, expecting the moment when one of the swimming blimps would surface again from right below us and topple Varuna over. Waiting motionless, I listened for the rumbling bell notes of the whales’ songs and sniffed for the ripe air from their blowholes. Recollecting stories of disastrous collisions with the oblivious monsters, I turned on the engine to make our presence known. Totally unconcerned, they continued their migration onward, without so much as a backward glance.
After a little while, kind of hurt that, for them, we had not existed, I looked at the bubbles passing by the hull. Even if only for the small pleasure of seeing a wake, I decided to leave the engine running, whereupon it promptly stopped. The customary grimy, slimy, smelly mechanics of sucking, pulling apart and inspecting ensued, and eventually, the fuel line revealed itself to be clogged.
In tightening the fuel return banjo bolt with my new marvel tool of a socket wrench, I exerted too much pressure and the bolt broke off, leaving the bottom half firmly screwed into the injector. Even if it had been possible to remove it, there weren’t any spare bolts available, so that afternoon I reconciled myself to being quite permanently engineless.
With the onset of evening, a steadily escalating breeze began blowing in from the southwest, which could only be the messenger of a depression that was worming its way into the calm high. By morning, I was obliged to replace the reefed working jib with my personally modified storm jib and took three reefs in the main. That accomplished, Varuna started climbing the waves that had been part of a serene lake hardly twenty-four hours earlier. The idyllic days of Portuguese trades and Azores high were a thing of the past.
“October 14. The waves are building and, with this wind, it won’t be long before the worst hits. Here we go. We’re approaching the ominous 5-degree squares on the pilot charts—tons of wind, big waves and high storm frequencies. I’ve begun to monitor the U.S. Coast Guard’s weather station. Hurricane Floyd is off Florida, headed in our general direction, but far away. Maybe it’ll converge with a trough north of Bermuda, become an extratropical cyclone and stomp its way elsewhere. This depression’s center is several hundred miles northwest of our position, a taste of things to come. My path is blocked by a very nasty little area, and I’m getting cold feet. Thank God we had the prolonged calm and plenty of rest and fortification . . . looks like we’re going to need it. “
In Malta, Olivier had warned me that progress on the North Atlantic would have to be accomplished mainly by using the depressions to advantage, and he had shown me how to manipulate things to get the most mileage. On a piece of paper, he had drawn the counterclockwise spiral of the average depression as it traveled on its easterly course north of 40 degrees latitude, and showed me how I would have to face it.
“After the barometer starts falling,” he had said, “pay attention to the direction of the wind. It will tell you where you are in relation to the center of the depression.” If it starts from the southwest, he explained, pointing to the right below the spiral’s center on the mock-up chart, that would mean that we were south of the center and should head on a northwest tack. As the center moved eastward, I could expect the wind to begin to veer slowly around to the west. At that point, we would be close to the center.
“Then there will be too much wind to make headway, and you’ll have to tack, take down the jib and wait until the eye passes over. When it does,” he continued, “the wind will veer to the north and begin to weaken. Then you’ll be able to head west on the proper course for New York on a beam reach. The wind will continue to die, all the while veering easterly, until you’ll have to put up the spinaker pole.” When the wind died, that would mean that the depression had passed and then there would probably be a calm, “unless you get lucky,” he had said, “until the next depression, where you’ll have to start from the beginning again. Do you understand?”
I had thought that I did, but just for good measure, had folded up the diagram and had brought it along. Now, in the throes of our first depression, I pulled it out and began poring over the meteorology chapter of a book, marveling at how fast a postcard-calm ocean could turn so quickly into a frothing boiling mess.
“October 15. Staring at the chart, the X marking Varuna’s position is still miserably far from home. We are pitching wildly in the howling winds, slamming and beating, and it is getting difficult even to write. “
The days to follow were a blur of sail changes, veering winds and unprecedented weather systems. Following Olivier’s directions sometimes helped me along, and other times nothing in the meteorology chapter or whatever I remembered or had experienced previously could explain the weather or how to better cope with it, other than waiting it out, as it worsened into a full gale.
“October 18. I don’t know if I should cry, scream, head back to the Azores or what. We haven’t had 24 hours of navigable weather in the last three days. It’s been 40-45 knots since 4:00 A.M. and Varuna can’t make progress in that kind of velocity. Every tenth wave crashes over us. I slipped and fell this morning and think I sprained my arm; there’s a persistent nagging pain. I want to wash my hair, my bed is damp, the sky is villainous, the waves are vicious, and it’s howling in the rigging. I can’t get up the nerve to go out to the foredeck and tie up the reefed jib and hank on the smaller one. But it must be done. “
To leave the relative protection of the cockpit and to go up forward on the lurching foredeck was petrifying, and I abhorred even the preparations for the ordeal. Except for the life harness, I went out naked to preserve my dry clothes. There in the darkness, the silhouettes of gigantic waves bore down on us like freight trains as I struggled to take down a wild piece of fabric with boomerang lines attached. Each time, the fear was more overwhelming and, fighting with the flailing canvas, I wished that it were possible to stay locked up in Varuna and get to land without moving a muscle.
“October 19. This weather bears an awful resemblance to my Mediterranean knockdown caper. Black skies, huge waves and tons of wind. But at least everything is battened down this time; the companionway is completely closed and we seem to be keeping up with the waves. Now it’s also pouring. When we go this fast, I look at the chart nonstop and calculate. At this rate we could be home in ten days. We have now entered the last square of the 3’s. The next two boxes are 5’s, then 4, then the last one before New York is a 2. The hard part is next. “
Aside from the trips into the cockpit for horizon checks and the sail changes, Tarzoon and I stayed huddled together on the sodden bunk, as I tried to read, crochet or concentrate on the radio to get my mind off the conditions. Determined not to let my physical strength deteriorate to the point it had in the Mediterranean, I forced myself to perform the galley acrobatics of concocting a simple daily meal. I cooked rice, some canned thing or another and vegetables in a pressure cooker and ate it from the same pot.
After we had been engulfed by waves for almost six days, there was hardly anything dry aboard, unless it was lucky enough to be in a sealed Ziploc bag. And because I’d been living so long on the wet bunk, without enough fresh water for a real wash, my skin was sticky from the salt water and my hair matted and itchy. After stripping down and before I pulled on the loathsome foul-weather overalls and jacket to go out on deck for another drenching, I could see the stinging saltwater sores that were beginning to develop on my bottom. There were still almost 1,000 miles to go and I counted the seconds.
I had to add extra days and dates to the bottom of the chart because we had reached the end of my original hopeful calculations and were only two-thirds of the way across. As I stared at the chart, my dividers recalculated the time of arrival over and over again, piercing holes through the paper along the way until it became a mushy pulp that had to be handled with care.
Most of my longest passages had been an average of twenty to thirty days, during which I usually had spent the first ten days agonizing over th
e departure, and the next ten anticipating landfall. By the twentieth of October, we had been at sea for thirty-four days and could realistically count on at least fifteen more. As the debilitating conditions persisted, everything aboard that was not soaked was dripping with dampness. My morale bottomed out and I grew tired of being the sole person responsible for our progress. There was never anyone who could pop out on deck, just that one time, to relash an errant sail or to look out for ships on my behalf. Sometimes, a crew member conjured up in my dreams would offer to go outside for me but never came back in, and I would have to do the odious chore again.
“October 20. Time is crawling by. I hear things on the radio that stun me. A commentator might say, ‘Mr. So and So made a statement on the proposition that was made two weeks ago.’ I shake my head and look again at the dates in the Nautical Almanac. I can remember the proposition being made, but was it really two weeks ago? As far as my time frame goes, it could have been yesterday, or this morning, even five minutes ago. “
VOA and the BBC were running continuous bulletins on the stock-market crash and I listened for updates on the Black Monday debacle as the Dow Jones average slowly began to climb again. Not that I had any stocks or bonds to worry about, but world news had become my fix, my private soap opera, the connection to a home that was getting closer and more real with every passing mile. Wall Street was New York, New York was my singular objective, and I listened more hungrily for news as the weather worsened.
My energies were continually refocused on small calamities aboard—a spilled container of sugar, the solar-panel wiring that corroded through, needing to be respliced and retaped, and the loss of the Swiss Army knife’s tweezers. One day something that resembled horrible foot odor permeated the cabin, and after checking my own feet, I was unable to identify its source.
I checked all the lockers, and finally found the culprit behind the sliding panels of the locker next to my bed. A UHT carton of milk that had survived since Malta had exploded, spewing forth a vile lumpy white mixture that covered the bottles of oil and vinegar, wood splints, cans and the rest of its neighbors. As a result, I killed two good hours lugging buckets of water into the cabin, keeping them balanced with Varuna’s motions, shoving a curious Tarzoon out of the way and scrubbing and drying all the contaminated objects and the locker itself. Two days later, with the first inkling of the malodorous scent, I knew where to look when my last carton of milk expired in yet another glorious ascent to milk heaven.