Once Upon a Gypsy Moon

by Michael Hurley

  Knowing where I was bound, this mechanic disregarded my initial request that he complete merely a routine, seasonal change of the Gypsy Moon’s oil and fuel filters and decided to look closer—close enough to see that her aging engine was in a worrisome state of disrepair. He scolded me that the boat wasn’t safe to take out into the bay (where I had been sailing for the past year), much less on the ocean. Some of the repairs she needed most, in fact, were no longer even possible. I took his comments with the grain of salt reserved for advice given by those who stand to profit by it, but I also knew enough about the condition of the engine to recognize the ring of truth in what he said, even if I didn’t care to hear it.

  An inboard diesel engine is bolted at four corners onto reinforced fiberglass struts that form a rectangular mounting platform on the inside of the hull, near the stern. From the rear of the engine the propeller shaft emerges and exits the hull through a series of fittings designed to allow the shaft to turn freely while keeping the ocean from entering the boat. Because the propeller shaft must be angled and aligned to strictly measured tolerances in order to exit the hull cleanly, the engine must likewise be mounted at a proper height, angle, and alignment. Unlike a car engine, which spends its life in a more or less fixed, horizontal plane, the engine in a sailboat might be tossed up, down, and sideways by the motion of the boat and the condition of the surrounding seas. A boat that has spent its whole life serving lunch while chasing puffy white clouds on protected waters will subject its engine to little stress. The Gypsy Moon was not such a boat, nor had she led such a life, at least since I had acquired her in 2003.

  The mechanic informed me that the position of the engine had shifted and that the propeller shaft was badly out of alignment, causing vibration that threatened eventually to rattle everything loose and sever the heavy shaft, which was already damaged and had to be replaced. To make matters worse, the large bolts and nuts of each of the rear motor mounts had rusted so badly over thirty years of exposure to salt water, salt air, and the humidity of southern waters that they were now an immovable lump of corroded metal. Any attempt to loosen and adjust them would break the mounts and cause irreparable structural damage to the engine block. The forward motor mount on the starboard side could be adjusted, I was told, but the mechanic offered to attempt that repair only if I understood that this might not succeed in aligning the propeller shaft, making all his work for naught.

  I recognized in the mechanic’s defeated tone as he explained the possible repairs, the same impassivity expressed by the doctors caring for my mother when they offered surgery to install a pacemaker in her heart just a few days before she died. Of course we went with the pacemaker, and of course this was never going to save her, and of course we, her well-meaning children, regretted suffering her the distraction and discomfort of that further ordeal during what turned out to be her last days on Earth. The mechanic, skilled though he was, hesitated to say what we were both thinking: that after thirty years, the necessary repairs were no longer worth the cost, and that the time had finally come to put the Gypsy Moon out to the gentler pastures of protected harbors, closer to home.

  Of course I told him to attempt the repair, and of course he succeeded in completing it, because that is what watermen do. Men of this fellow’s ilk have been keeping old boats together with wire and sealing wax for generations, along with the families who are fed by them. Before he finished he found many other, lesser flaws, some of which were added to the list of repairs and prolonged his work. More than five months passed before he was done. For his efforts I was presented with a ponderous bill that likely exceeded the market value of the entire vessel, but I would have paid even more to be spared the loss of what the Gypsy Moon embodied for me at that time in my life.

  When I came to meet with this man on the Magothy River in August 2009, my boat was floating high and proud beside the dock. What improvements and repairs he’d been able to perform were complete, and she was as ready as she would ever be for the journey that over the next two years and two thousand miles would become the story of this book. As he stood with me in the cockpit, I could see that in the end he, too, had been infected by the romance of what I planned to do. I could tell him nothing about the boat’s engine or electronics that he did not already know, but when he tentatively asked about the operation of the wind vane, the characteristics of the boat under sail, and my intended ports of call, I could see the dream in his eyes. It is not wind or diesel or water but the engine of imagination that drives a man to begin a voyage, and that engine was running at full throttle. You could almost feel it in the air. It was not a matter of millimeters or angles or the metrics of mechanical propulsion anymore. What propelled the Gypsy Moon was a force far less powerful than what compelled her. She was compelled by a dream.

  The dream was still alive when I landed at the airport in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, more than two years later, with plans to sail alone to Panama. It was January 6, 2012, almost a full year since the Gypsy Moon had arrived at Cofresi on a passage from the Turks and Caicos with my wife, Susan, as a slightly seasick but willing passenger. After signing a yearlong lease on a berth at Ocean World Marina, Susan and I had returned several times by air to visit the island while staying aboard the boat. We campaigned all across the country—from the ancient cobblestoned streets of the Zona Colonial in Santo Domingo, to the French bistros of Las Terrenas, to the hip seaside cabanas of Cabarete. We found these to be places of great beauty but also great sadness, where grinding poverty, limited opportunities for education, and petty official corruption consign so many people to the margins of society. Here in the Dominican Republic, as in so much of the Caribbean, the contented, smiling face presented to (mostly American) tourists at upscale resorts is largely a false one that conceals a darker and more desperate reality for the native population. Over the months when I visited the island, I began to feel an ugly sense of vanity in pursuing this rather expensive and pointless means of entertaining myself.

  Were I a better man, or perhaps just a younger or more naïve one, I might have been compelled by these sympathies toward some heroic mission to improve the lot of native islanders, but I was not. On such matters I have become something of a cynic in my old age. I made a point of treating every man and woman I met with fairness and deference irrespective of his or her station in life, but beyond this I tried to check the uniquely American impulse to insist that everyone else in the world live as I do.

  Over beers and hamburguesas con queso that night in Cofresi, in January 2012, I asked an American friend how he and his wife were enjoying living aboard their boat, which occupied the slip next to ours. It had been almost a year since they had arrived, having sold their house and most of what they owned. During that time they had provided invaluable help to Susan and me, while we were back in the States, by periodically running the Gypsy Moon’s engine and tending to her dock lines during a near-miss encounter with a hurricane. Now that I was about to cast off for Panama, a thousand miles away, it seemed the right time to ask some of the harder questions about just what it was we were all doing down there, so far from home.

  The Dominican Republic is indeed a natural paradise, so it came as little surprise that my American friend and his wife had found happiness in their life aboard a boat in that foreign land. More surprising was my growing realization that this same contentment had somehow eluded me. The squalor and poverty I had passed on my way to the marina from the airport were still jarring. The opulence of the marina seemed only more garish and contrived by comparison. I was still very much a stranger in this place where my friends felt at home, even though I spoke the language and they did not. I feared that I had at last become an Ugly American, that loathsome creature incapable of long-term survival outside of tour buses, time-shares, and other escape pods of Western civilization.

  For Susan, her passage of three days on the open sea to arrive in Cofresi had been a mildly unpleasant endurance contest, but living aboard the boat in a marina had pro
ven to be little reward for the journey. The Spartan accommodations gave her a sore back and fitful sleep. Although she was a good sport and willing to endure these discomforts for my sake, I became less willing over time to ask her to do so. Yet still the dream of cruising the world that had first inspired the voyage persisted, and the thought of giving up that dream still represented a kind of psychic death that terrified me.

  As I wrote in the preceding (and intended final) chapter of this book, I had two choices for the way ahead: one west, the other east. On that night in January 2012, drinking a beer with my American friend in Cofresi, I resolved to take the westward course.

  My plan was suitably grandiose. I would leave the next morning and sail a thousand miles nonstop through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti to arrive in Panama in ten days. I would leave the boat there, returning five months later to transit the canal and cross forty-three hundred miles of the Pacific in forty days to reach the Marquesas. As time permitted, I would continue around the world, covering as much water as I possibly could to finish the voyage as quickly as I could. If I were careful in my planning, I thought, I could complete a circumnavigation by sailing only a couple of months out of each year. At worst, I would plant my flag in some suitably remote part of the South Pacific and declare a fitting end to my quest.

  Susan did not plan to accompany me on this voyage, nor did I wish for her to suffer that hardship. But she understood my need to go and vowed to wait patiently for my return from each leg. That was the plan.

  I awoke to cloudy, drizzly skies in Cofresi but a continued beneficent forecast of eleven-knot winds and one-to-two-foot seas. The wind was expected to diminish to less than five knots between Haiti and Jamaica, with the seas becoming nearly calm. I worried about how much fuel I would have to use in that section of the passage just to keep moving. My worries were unfounded, though for reasons I scarcely could have imagined. On the morning of January 7, I set sail.

  My first launch was a false start, as it had been on that rainy Thanksgiving Eve in Beaufort two years earlier. I unwittingly provoked a minor incident with the Dominican Navy and immigration department over the suspicious nature of my sudden, unannounced departure for Panama aboard an old sailboat moving at five knots, which apparently fits someone’s profile of a dangerous drug runner. When I was an hour west of Cofresi, barefoot and reaching for the Windward Passage, I was suddenly overtaken by a motorboat manned by five armed guards screaming in Spanish about a form I had failed to fill out. One came aboard and escorted me back to my old slip in the marina, where for the next hour every compartment of my boat was subjected to a thorough ransacking under the guise of an “inspection.” If I had been looking for a reason not to make the voyage that day, this would have been a good one. But after putting my vessel back in order and making encore farewells to my American friends, I paid the twenty-dollar departure tax I had foolishly overlooked and was permitted to leave.

  The wind was not merely light but entirely absent that first morning and most of the afternoon. Both sails were limp, slapping haphazardly against the rigging as lumpy seas, rolling in from the northeast, gently rocked the boat from side to side. I rigged the wind vane with a large airfoil made to be lighter and more sensitive to gentle breezes, but there was not enough wind to hold a course. A frontal system that had been moving through the mountains of Hispaniola appeared to have stalled and was standing still. A misting rain fell. Nothing moved. I was loath to use the engine, knowing that even with a full tank and four spare cans of diesel lashed on deck, I had insufficient fuel to motor the entire distance to Panama. I needed to sail as much as I could, but I also needed to move. Looking at my watch and considering the schedule I had planned to follow to make eleven hundred miles in eleven days, I fired the engine and set the electronic autopilot for 314 degrees. The motor purred reassuringly as the Gypsy Moon settled into a six-knot pace on a following sea.

  Several times that afternoon, when wavelets crested with foam would briefly appear, I stopped the engine and set the sails, only to lose speed and come to a standstill as the wind died. It was not until late in the day that the wind began to blow steadily from north of east. With this, the steering vane snapped to attention and went to work. I marveled once again at how effortlessly this device kept the boat on course, despite the unsteadying motion of following seas working against the rudder. I resolved someday soon to write a glowing letter to the manufacturer about the days, weeks, and hours of strenuous effort I had been spared by this astonishing contraption. I knew that when the time came for this device to mind the helm not for an hour or a day but for forty days and four thousand miles, across the Pacific, it would do so perfectly. But I also knew in that hour, perhaps for the first time in my life, that I never wanted that time to come.

  Looking out on the open ocean that I have known for so many days and nights and for which I have so often longed, I felt a new loneliness and a deeper longing than I have ever known at sea. I missed Susan as I always do on those rare occasions when we are apart, but it was more than that. Why had I not seen or felt this until I was two days into the voyage?

  We all suffer the handicap of varying degrees of blindness and deafness to the most obvious and urgent realities that surround us, and if I have been more blind and deaf than most in the past, it has not been without consequence. But as I write these words in the stillness of a winter morning, looking out from the window of the tiny office Susan has made for me on the second floor of our home, I can see things a bit more clearly. The fog of thirty years has begun to lift, and what has been for so long a mystery to my own mind is drifting slowly into plain view.

  Sailing has been a love of mine for almost as long as I can remember, and that love endures. The lift and forward motion of a hull responding to the unseen force of wind upon canvas is pure magic and one of the essential delights of life. I highly recommend it. But over the years, the idea of sailing long distances over oceans, unobliged to return, became for me less about adventure than escape—a kind of trapdoor beneath the uncertain footing of a marriage and a personal and professional life that seemed at various times to teeter on the brink of collapse. Whatever the impending real or imagined “worst-case scenario,” I believed I held the trump card as long as there was a boat waiting for me somewhere with a clear escape route to the open ocean. But this kind of defense can be an obstacle to the growth that comes only when we allow ourselves to be fully exposed to, and accepting of, the vicissitudes of life. With no escape hatch, we have to face life head-on, admit our weakness, rely on our relationships, and trust others to catch us when we fall. In short, we have to join society and become fully immersed in it, for better or worse. This is a good thing. Man is a social animal.

  Unwittingly, for me, the call of the open ocean began slowly to fade as this voyage and the people and experiences I encountered along the way dispelled my sense of despair and increased my sense of society. I had fallen in love, yes, but like a growing child for whom a teddy bear gradually becomes a less essential defense against the bogeyman, I had also become less fearful of the unknown and more willing to trust myself and those around me. Yet still, I had begun this last voyage, a man of sound mind, with plans to venture far away, alone, from everyone and everything I know and love. Why?

  Truly, I do not know. Perhaps I needed to confront for myself, in the spiritual and physical darkness of an empty sea, the stark reality of what it would mean to leave a woman I truly, deeply, and passionately loved to pursue a quest that would separate us for months and thousands of miles. The voyage I had just begun would do that, I knew, and I had known that before I began. But I had not known until that moment, in my innermost heart, that this was no longer my dream, nor perhaps had it ever been. For the first time in my life, I was not afraid to say so. Somewhere in the ocean northwest of Haiti and northeast of Cuba, the bearings of a new plan and a change of course began to emerge.

  I decided that the Gypsy Moon and I would have one last great sail together—no
t west or east as I had only recently intended, but north, six hundred miles to Miami. In the coming week I would bear safely off the coast of Cuba until I could turn north to reach the Florida Keys and Biscayne Bay. Once there I would find a marina that could arrange for the boat to be hauled and trucked to North Carolina, where the leaders of a summer camp who once imagined that they might have an oceangoing boat on which to train young sailors would see their dream fulfilled at last. Susan and I would find a small boat to scratch my sailing itch on day sails that would not unduly afflict her with the kind of sickness known to the open sea. This was my new plan, and my plan, once again, would be the occasion for much laughter among the angels.

  On the morning of the second day at sea, after the moon had given way to blue skies and scattered clouds, I tried several times to reach Susan on the satellite phone and tell her of my change of heart. The satellite signal was uncharacteristically weak in this part of the ocean and had been for the past day. Only intermittently would the phone receive a signal strong enough to complete a call. Finally, at nine in the morning my call to Susan went through.

  As our voices went in and out with the signal, there was little chance of a lengthy conversation, so I blurted out what I thought she most needed to hear. “I’m going to Miami instead of Panama,” I shouted. She was tracking my position in real time over the Internet, through a GPS device on board, and I did not want her to worry that the boat was unmanned when it failed to turn south. Through her broken reply, I heard her ask why. “Because I miss you too much,” I said, “and this is no longer fun for me. It’s not my dream anymore. It’s not what I want to do.” Then the phone went dead.

  The wind vane stood watches in the afternoon of the first day, all night, and all of the second day, until the Gypsy Moon was squarely in the teeth of the empty, trackless sea amidst Hispaniola, Cuba, and Great Inagua known as the Windward Passage. Throughout this time I lay awake in my bunk or slept in ninety-minute intervals, rising at night to scan the moonlit horizon for any sign of a ship. At one point on the first night, I spotted the lights of what might have been a cruise liner far to the north, but otherwise I saw not another vessel for two days.