by Tania Aebi
The next system to hit, a stationary cold front, started as something comparable to steady trade winds from astern on the twenty-second, and by the next morning, we had three reefs in the main and a poled-out storm jib. The puffy clouds stacked up into an ugly black canopy that covered our skies from horizon to horizon.
Unlike the eastbound depressions of days gone by, the wind howled from the southeast, pushing us up and dropping us down the monster waves like a roller coaster gone berserk for thirty-six sleepless hours, whereupon it stopped and poured down rain as we thrashed on beam ends over the bumpy swell. During the four hours of torrential rain that followed, I climbed out into the cockpit and managed to collect several buckets of fresh water as it streamed down the face of the mainsail and channeled along the groove of the boom.
Then, out of nowhere, the wind rushed in from the northeast, picking up at a furious clip until the next day, when the mainsail became too much for the conditions and had to come down. The only foresail that could handle the spasmodic weather was the tiny storm jib, whose miniature size had earlier convinced me that we would never find a use for it. Now it was to be our salvation, as any other piece of canvas aboard would have been too much.
“October 23, and I’m really scared. I can’t relax, sleep, eat or think about anything other than staying alive. The waves around us now are the biggest I’ve ever seen—probably 25 feet high. The weather guys said that we have a cold front passing overhead. My heart is thumping so hard in my chest and I can’t stop the tears of fear. Varuna is carried and thrown with each breaking wave, breaking over us, on our sides, in front and behind. The sky is black. There is very little sail up, we’re going practically downwind, and we’re going fast. I am wedged into my bed with Tarzoon as we listen to the noise and pray. I haven’t been able to get a sight, but according to my DR we’re about 880 miles from home. It’s not like the Med, where after a storm there is a calm. Here it’s just one giant, non-stop storm. “
The waves steadily grew into the size of alps, and in terror I watched through the Plexiglas slats as they caught up to us from astern, dwarfing Varuna and picking her up and throwing her down the slope to wait for the next. The heaving swells crashed everywhere around the boat and hissed and pawed menacingly underneath us as they carried us along on a boiling froth. Varuna was continuously swamped, and the type of knockdowns that she had endured near Sri Lanka and in the Mediterranean became an hourly occurrence, except this time we were prepared for the worst, and that made all the difference.
The jerry cans, sails and cat-litter sacks in the cockpit were lashed down, the cubbyholes were stripped bare, and inside everything was securely lodged. As the thundering waterfalls flooded the cockpit, the water slowly funneled out by the way of the drains until it was empty and ready to swallow the next deluge. Unable to take a sight for days, I prayed that I was grossly underestimating our progress and hoped for a wonderful surprise if and when the sun ever shone again.
“October 24. It’s the next day, the waves are even bigger and my DR says we’re still 780 miles away from the mark. The sun hasn’t been out in days. My heart is working overtime and I can’t stop the trembling. The looming outlines of the waves are humongous, and we are so small and insignificant. This day feels like it will never end. “
Continuing to stare out the hatch, and hypnotized by the towering seas overtaking us, I lived on the edge of existence through that gloomy day and pitch-dark night. For forty-eight hours, I feverishly dealt out game after game of solitaire on the bunk beside me; if anything would get me through this, other than the taffrail log ticking away the miles, it would be my cards of fate.
“It is evening of the 25th, and my prayers are finally being answered. Last night, I reread Psalm 106—’And the waves thereof were still’—and things got less dramatic and began to clear today. This evening, there are no clouds in the sky and I can see the twinkle of stars on the horizon. The wind has veered to the west and is weak right now, but there’s another depression coming up. I heard on the news today that this is the 365th day for some girl in a box on top of a pole who is going for the pole-sitting record, and laughed out loud for the first time in weeks. I wondered if she has a television and a telephone to call for take-out Chinese food. “
In the aftermath of the storm, there were gentle winds and clear blue skies. I thought about the past three days and how the ocean’s fury had brought me closer to the brink of a watery grave than ever before. When the storm had died, the ebb of adrenaline left me bobbing in the wake, feeling strangely empty. The storm had piqued all my senses, and with the calm came an emotional withdrawal.
On the twenty-eighth of October, my calculations established that we had reached the longitude of Bermuda, and so had crossed our outward-bound track of two and a half years before. Crossing that track meant that I was officially finished with the circumnavigation. I felt triumphant and shouted with joy, but then, a sadness began to gnaw away at the excitement. My round-the-world odyssey with Varuna was drawing to a close, and that thought began to make these last days at sea all the more sacred. Soon, all the tumultuous emotions, the endearing solitude, the beautiful days and nights at sea, and even the challenges of yet another storm would be no more than memories. This was the beginning of the end of the life I had come to know, and I knew that soon I would leave my ocean friends behind to play the role of an adult in New York City. Every mile Varuna laid behind was now over familiar ground, and the tension of homecoming began to build up a flock of butterflies in my stomach. We were really close now.
“October 30. It’s 9:00 P.M. and I just saw my first ship in two weeks. I’m dying to talk to them but my electricity is very low. The engine is inoperable, so there is no way to get a charge from the alternator; the new solar panel is too small and the sun is far south and not very strong. I need to conserve power to call when we approach New York. The ARGOS will let everybody know where we are in case I can’t use the radio. I hope it’s working. I keep catching myself holding lengthy conversations and arguments with no one. We’re 450 miles away and I hope I won’t go completely nuts before getting home. I forced myself to start Dr. Zhivago today, the book where Daddy said he found my name just before I was born, and am curiously waiting for a heroine named Tania to pop up from the pages. “
As if trying to prolong my days with Varuna and Tarzoon in our own little world, I put off raising the optimum amount of sail. My mind skipped and jumped, not only through the future and what it held in store, but over the days and the cast of characters I had come to know—Stubby, the tire-repair man in Borneo whose business depended on the migration of red crabs; Roberto Vergnes, the eccentric con artist searching for treasure on Cocos Island; Ibrahim in his flowing robes and turban pontificating on the balance between the sexes and swigging from a bottle of desert firewater; Fred showing me how to take care of Varuna properly; Kerima de Lescure quietly strumming her guitar and singing her poetry of peace and beauty under the Panamanian palm trees.
The pace and character of their lives had made an irrevocable impact on my own, and as long as I was still at sea, their presence still seemed immediate to me. Once I arrived home, I feared that they would be sealed away into the foggy scrapbook of my brain, and that thought filled my days with a confused melancholy.
“Happy Halloween. Boo. It’s the 31st and there’s a tropical storm (a.k.a. hurricane) brewing down south, and if it takes the same route as Emily did, then we’re right in the path. Yep, we’re in the same stomping grounds as a hurricane. A first for Tarzoon, Varuna and me. I desperately need sleep and to conserve electricity, we now live by kerosene light down below. “
When we were 310 miles away and only 100 miles from switching to the chart indicating the approaches to New York, I was able to pick up a radio station in New London, Connecticut, and could hear the call toll-free commercials for a set of three LPs with the greatest hits of whomever. It seemed that some regional elections were coming up and all I could hear was Italian names.
A weather announcer said that the tropical storm that had worried me a couple of days earlier had headed toward the Gulf of Mexico, staying with the warmer water that those systems crave.
November 1 was my mother’s birthday and, as if she were watching over me, we had wind all day that helped guide us in the right direction, across the Gulf Stream coordinates that were broadcast on the weather station. All sorts of eddies, rips, weird waves, birds and jumping fish surrounded us, as sometimes, out of sheer nerves, I even hand-steered, not wanting to let the river set us back one mile. Sandy Hook, the little cove where I had spent my first night out of New York twenty-seven months before, was as far into my future as I could see, and I dreamed about how to sail into it on every tack, with every kind of wind, even rehearsing in my mind where the anchor would be dropped when I arrived.
It took me a week to get through Dr. Zhivago and it was only at the very end that I found out that my namesake was a laundry girl. Next I started trying to concentrate on Dune. The wind was irregular in strength and direction, but my spirits were high by November 2 because we had made good mileage, using a Gulf Stream eddy to advantage.
As we crossed the westernmost perimeters of the underwater current, the water changed color from a nutrient- and phosphorescence-rich blue to the murky greenish-brown of the eastern coastal waters of the United States. Also, the warm current that flowed up from the Gulf of Mexico gave way to the icy northern November waters, and for the first time, I pulled out of the Ziploc bags the heavy-knit sweaters that Olivier had given me and the sleeping bag I hadn’t used since the trip to Bermuda.
Making up for lost time, I started navigating with a passion, using the moon, sun, Venus and Polaris, cherishing the taking of each sight, and promising myself never to forget any of the sailing skills I had learned, especially the navigation. I had always loved joking and complaining about having no SatNav, but toward the end, I realized that taking a sight, plotting it with another sight, and finding a cross in the middle of the watery void on a chart created an addictive feeling of mastery and connection with the Earth and the stars.
White night after white night of anticipation, I probably slept a total of four hours in the final week, and on the evening of November 4, the weather station reported a gale warning and small-craft advisories in effect. The southwesterly winds that had helped us make the last hundred miles at a good clip began gusting, and I fearfully waited for them to veer west and strengthen into something that would oblige us to heave to and wait it out.
“We’re 75 miles away and I’m getting so excited that I can’t even listen to the radio. It makes me all jumpy. Can you imagine how I feel? It’s been 48 days. I’m so close, and I get these feelings, New York feelings. I can almost feel the subway, the East Village, the house. Most of all, I feel Sandy Hook. Ninety-five percent of the time, my mind is locked into that muddy curved sandspit. The chart is full of holes. I spot a few ships. I’m beginning to see planes. I see fishing boats and I can smell land!”
All around us, there were trawlers and fishing boats to be avoided, probably hailing from North Jersey and Long Island harbors. Every plane that thundered overhead across the sky I knew was headed in the direction of Kennedy, LaGuardia or Newark airports. The ocean’s salty smell began to resemble that of vegetation and smog, and I inhaled the air as the familiar scents began to re-identify themselves.
At twilight, on our last evening alone, I made my last fix using Polaris and Venus and planned our approach. Then I took down the jib and stopped Varuna for several hours to gather my wits, calm down and sort things out neatly. It had been forty-nine days for me, in the immediate ocean sense, but in reality it had been almost two and a half years.
All my worries about how I would fit in and how everything that had changed would affect me seemed to dissipate. I remembered back to the days before leaving New York, when I worried if I would ever adapt to life at sea on my own. Having done it, I realized now how much more is possible. But I could never have known had I not tried.
Now, in the same spot as I had been as an eighteen-year-old, setting off on her maiden voyage, scared and apprehensive of the future, I realized that the future wasn’t something to worry about. If living at sea had taught me anything, it had revealed the importance of taking each new dawn in stride and doing the best that I could with whatever was presented.
It wouldn’t even matter if I didn’t fit in anymore. What is “fitting in” anyway, I thought, being accepted by a peer group? I could no longer play my roles in life to make other people happy. The most disturbing thought at the root of my contemplations was that I could never again be a twenty-one-year-old who was witnessing the fulfillment of a two-and-a-half-year dream.
“But, isn’t that what life is all about?” I told myself. “To move forward and keep adding to the memories?” Everyone else would have changed, but perhaps none more than I. There seemed nothing sadder than to think back to a childhood lost, or to remember innocent times when the world was a smaller and simpler place to know. But, I reasoned, come forty, I would again be envying the person I had been at twenty-one. We just can’t stop time.
The next morning, I put on my last pair of clean long johns, washed my face with the last drops of the fresh water, bundled up and hoisted the jib. I couldn’t stay out there forever. We were going home.
Around 11:00 A.M., still about 30 miles away from the Ambrose Light that indicates the approaches to New York, a powerboat roared in from the clear horizon toward Varuna, filled with a crew of people frantically waving and screaming congratulations. I eagerly looked for a familiar face, but I recognized no one, and went below to turn on the VHF. The man who answered said he was from a national news station covering my arrival for the afternoon broadcast and that they had been out searching for Varuna since dawn. Other people on board were taking pictures and filming, and I waved for them and talked with the man until they revved up and headed back to the city to make their deadline.
“November 5th, 1:00 P.M. Oh, God. I’m so close. I’ve got a horrible case of jitters, my heart is drumming and my stomach is one gigantic knot. I haven’t slept in a week, and now I’m a new kind of scared. The people who just came were talking about fireboats and helicopters and press boats and TV cameras and press conferences. Oh my, how should I act, what should I say, how will it be? I feel like laughing, crying and turning around and heading out to sea again. The camera crew were all seasick over the windward side of their boat and they still managed to yell questions. I never expected this. Varuna and I continue to plug on through the 30-knot winds toward the hullabaloo. I can’t believe it, but I’m just beginning to see the outline of the World Trade Center.”
The wind veered to the west and, reefed down to the smallest sails we had, I sat below with a bewildered Tarzoon, crying over what we were leaving behind and savoring our last minutes alone together, as Varuna pounded through the chop. Several hours after the first boat, a roaring noise had me running out into the cockpit to see another powerboat muscling through the steepening waves. Automatically waving, I peered at the group hoping, praying to see a familiar face.
First, I saw another group of microphones on extension poles and TV cameras. There was a great commotion aboard, people jumping around, screaming and waving frantically, and then . . . yes, there was my father separating himself from the blur.
“Hello,” I screamed, jumping up and down in the cockpit. “Hi, Daddy! It’s over! I made it!”
“Hey, Ding-a-ling, you did it!” he screamed back over the roar of the engines, and jumped around the deck of the boat. “You really did it! I am so proud of you!”
Babbling back at the top of my voice how the trip had been, I suddenly saw on the foredeck Olivier’s blond head, popping above a yellow foul-weather jacket.
“Oh my God, Olivier!” I screamed. “You’re here!”
Laughing, he held on to a grabrail as the boat maneuvered closer and shouted back, “I blong you, Tania!”
I blong you.
March 9, 1989
More than a year has passed since my arrival home at South Street Seaport on November 6, 1987, where I found out that because of my having a friend aboard Varuna for 80 miles in the South Pacific I didn’t get the world record. Oh well. I survived my allotted moment in the spotlight, the initial bombardment of cameras, journalists, interviews, television appearances and the like; after two months Olivier and I decided to leave New York for more quiet ways. We moved to a basement apartment in Newport, Rhode Island, where I could write and where we got married in May 1988. Tarzoon is with us, alive and well with a calico New York girlfriend named Suki.
My father is off on his own again, this time in the African Sahara, 200 miles north of Timbuktu, where he is trying to teach agriculture to the handful of inhabitants of a desert village. When I first got back, he thought that it would be a good idea for me to do the Iditarod Trail race to Nome, Alaska, with a sled and pack dogs. I turned the suggestion down.
The final separation from my voyage came during the summer of 1988. In between trying to fill up blank computer screens with words, I paid my father back after selling Varuna to her perfect new owner, and she started out her new life by sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. On our last trip together forever, Varuna took Tony, Nina, Jade, Olivier and me out to Brenton Reef in Narragansett Bay, where we granted one of my mother’s last wishes and gave her ashes to the ocean.