Sea Change

by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

  When we first started dating, Vicki and I visited my mother often in Palm Beach. We would get up in the morning, walk down to the clear ocean beach and then swim out together, away from the long unbroken line of white sand, toward the darker water offshore. Vicki’s long legs and lithe form glided beautifully through the water.

  On one of our first swims, I challenged her to a race, and swam quickly past Vicki. She caught up with me after ten or fifteen seconds, and kept swimming. Three minutes later I had slowed considerably but, like a baby bluefish, Vicki continued outward, far outdistancing me.

  We usually swam together, side by side. After an hour the two of us would stop and tread water and talk for a while, and then Vicki would swim back to shore and I would continue out toward the Gulf Stream. I swam until I couldn’t see land, and I kept swimming until I couldn’t see the tall buildings on Singer Island. I returned each day a little after lunchtime.

  Vicki, her shining brown hair falling around her head, would be stretched on the lawn reading beneath a palm tree, gently holding a thick paperback with small print—James Agee, perhaps, or a collection of American short stories. My mother sometimes worried about these long swims, but not Vicki. Vicki knows that the ocean will not kill me.

  And for this reason alone, she knew I would return.

  The Pearl Coalition authorized the purchase. Before setting out, Valkyrien would need to be hauled, her bottom painted, and the rot on the deck repaired. I contracted Jerry to do all of this work.The wharf owners had given me a two-month grace period on rent, no doubt secretly happy at the prospect of our leaving soon afterward. (I realized later that they were deeply concerned that Valkyrien would be abandoned by the previous owners at their yard, or would sink on their wharf.) But after the first two months, Jerry had not yet finished, and we began paying a fortune to keep her docked in San Francisco Bay.

  Each week, Jerry would send me an invoice. Without flying up to San Francisco from my home in LA to personally check on things, I waited patiently, thinking and trusting that the work progressed. Jerry had promised that Valkyrien would be ready to sail in November. But November passed, as did December and January, and he kept making excuses, ending with, “Well, you can’t take the boat south until winter is past, in any case, so don’t be in such a hurry.”

  When I realized Jerry was not caring for the boat properly, I hired two boat boys,1 Bryan Idler and Steve Spring, to live aboard Valkyrien and take care of her while assisting Jerry in his carpentry. The two young men were twenty-somethings and appeared at Valkyrien, ready for hard work and an adventure. But they were not prepared to spend day after day in port, waiting for Jerry to complete repairs.

  The boys spent nearly three months in port, holed up in Valkyrien during what was an unusually cold and rainy San Francisco winter. If that wasn’t discouraging enough, Valkyrien’s deck leaked like mad, despite what Jerry had said. Water seeped through, dripping maddeningly on them as they slept in their bunks whenever it rained—which seemed like every day.

  Wet, cold, and with hopes of their tropical cruise fading, Bryan and Steve became increasingly frustrated and, in the end, they quit. In desperation, but still unable to fathom Jerry’s lying, I flew back to San Francisco to give Valkyrien a surprise inspection. As I approached the Valkyrien I heard a terrible noise and nearly fell over when I saw Jerry with a gas-powered chain saw in his hand, cutting away at the stern of the boat. I shouted at him to stop immediately.

  Jerry seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him cutting up my boat with a chain saw. Wooden-boat shipwrights normally use carefully crafted and precisely applied hand tools—chisels with wooden handles, carving gauges, and bevels. These artisans are often so fastidious and exacting that they insist on fashioning their own tools. One of my favorites is the kugihiki—a flexible Japanese saw with a flexible blade and more than twenty extremely sharp but tiny teeth every inch. This saw is used to make flush cuts, and allows a careful user to cut nothing beyond what needs to be removed.

  Jerry’s version of the kugihiki was a chain saw that screamed as it chopped roughly through Valkyrien’s sides, tearing at her hull, shaking the boat and violently chipping away at everything near its line of cut. I should have fired him on the spot (I probably should have fired him many times before that), but it’s tough to fire a ship’s carpenter in the middle of an overhaul. I knew that if I did, it would take a new carpenter weeks just to figure out the layout of pipes and lines, and locations where deteriorated wood rotted out our boat. Jerry was the entire build team; he served as general contractor, advisor, designer, and purchaser and purveyor of hardware, and he did all of the physical labor himself.

  It was imperative to get Valkyrien into good-enough shape to head south to Central America, where dockage fees might be cut by as much as 80 percent. Keeping Jerry on seemed the most efficient way to get Valkyrien moving. I did think of taking Valkyrien to a professional yard, but my budget was an issue: Boatyard shipwrights would charge more than three times what Jerry was billing us, and we were already burning through money merely by paying rent at the dock. And so, my relationship with Jerry continued, even though I knew he was lying to me.

  The phone conversation recalled below is fairly typical of my talks with Jerry after I became aware that he had completed almost no work for months.

  Me: “Jerry, you are the biggest liar I have ever dealt with in my entire life.”

  Jerry: “What’s that, Max? I can’t hear you—you’re breaking up.”

  Me: “You, Jerry, are the biggest liar I have ever met. Please, just tell me the truth.”

  Jerry: “Max, I heard you say my name, but everything else came out garbled. The boat is nearly done, though, so that is great!”

  Me: “Jerry, the boat is not done, and you know it. You’re lying to me again, right now.”

  Jerry: “Max, I am in a place with really bad reception, I will call you later.”

  Me: “No, no, Jerry—wait! Wait—wait! Please . . . Can you hear me now?”

  * * *

  11. Boat boy is a nautical term used in New England to describe the young men who work aboard a boat, usually for a set term. They are expected to deal with all matters above- and belowdecks. Most will be competent to navigate, handle lines, and steer the vessel in heavy weather, as well as service the engine, run the galley, cook, provide first aid, and care for the needs of passengers. Boat boy should not be confused with cabin boy, whose duties are to see to the needs of officers and guests in the cabin.

  3. Plotting

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky.

  —T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

  In early February, I once again flew back to San Francisco, and boarded Valkyrien in a blinding rain, alone. Jerry had redeemed himself somewhat. He had finished her bottom paint to fend off the worms that eat through wood in the warmer waters, where we were heading. He had replaced some of the cables that hold the masts up, which made everything much more stable, and he had rebuilt the bowsprit and the boomkin using an awl and other antique tools. But each day of continued dockage in San Francisco cost us a fortune. I knew that if I didn’t get her out of there before the end of the month, we would run through so much money that The Pearl Coalition board would give up and sell Valkyrien. I had to get her out of Dodge.

  I spent day after day running around light industrial centers across San Francisco Bay, searching for various small parts—links of a certain gauge chain, or special putty that can be applied underwater. Each night I slept back aboard the Valkyrien, contemplating my journey ahead.

  Back then, people would often ask me, “How big is your boat?” Boats, especially wooden boats, are extremely personal, and boaters tend to develop a relationship with their boat, which is, in some ways, quite intimate. So when you ask a captain how long his boat is, he may well take offense, findin
g it nearly akin to asking how long any thing he holds intimate might be. Most of the time landsmen are not really sure what they are asking when they say, “How big is your boat?,” but essentially, they want to know how long the boat is. The proper way to ask this is to say: “How many does she sleep?”

  Valkyrien had bunks for eleven people, more or less, but could be properly modified to sleep many more. She was a very large boat to sail with only three people on duty. Sailing her became much more difficult when one of the three was asleep. Her deck was nearly sixty feet long. Her total length was even greater, because she had a fifteen-foot bowsprit and a boomkin hanging ten or twelve feet off the stern. The total length of a boat is abbreviated “LOA,” for “Length Overall.” This is the total distance from the tip of the bowsprit to the end of the boomkin. Valkyrien’s overall length was close to eighty feet; she was sixteen and a half feet wide; and the bottom of her keel sat eight feet below the waterline.

  LOA: 77 feet, 6 inches (Length Overall)

  LOD: 57 feet, 9 inches (Length On Deck)

  Beam: 16 feet, 6 inches

  Draft: 8 feet

  Full keel with aperture and full rudder

  Ballast: 18 tons lead

  Scale weight: 40 tons

  Most striking about Valkyrien, though, was her freeboard. This is the distance from the waterline up to her deck. At the stern she had about eight feet of freeboard, and even at the lowest point of the deck, near midships, she was still about six feet above the water. Lots of freeboard generally means a dry boat.

  Her deck was about fifty-eight feet long. The bowsprit rose off the bow at about a 30-degree angle, so the tip of the bowsprit hung nearly four feet higher than the tip of the bow, putting it about twelve feet above the sea when the boat lay at rest on the mooring. (It proved to be great fun climbing out on the bowsprit and jumping off into the water before breakfast.)

  Valkyrien did not have a boarding ladder—which could be an issue in a storm—but at the mooring, the portholes were so deeply set in the hull that they formed a sort of built-in ladder. And atop the portholes were all sorts of stays and balustrades that could be used to get a leg up.

  In addition to questions about my boat, many people wanted to know about the journey itself. Some of my friends in LA looked at me in near astonishment when I said I intended to sail to the Panama Canal. The first question asked was usually “How will you find it?”

  For me, the coast—any coast, really—just appears as a line that connects every beach on the continent. I remember reading Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs. When it was time for Tarzan to leave the jungle, he simply set out walking down the beach. Eventually he came to a village, and then a larger village, and finally, to a port where he jumped on a ship to another continent.

  That’s basically how I saw it. When they asked me how I would find the Panama Canal, I thought to myself, I will sail down along the coast until I see a whole bunch of tankers and container ships headed to the left, and then I will follow them into the Canal. It turns out this navigation method probably would have worked. I saw very few trade vessels until I got near the entrance to the Canal, where the sea was full of them.

  Of course, with modern GPS systems, many boats will sail this route without the captain ever looking at paper charts. But I learned to navigate as a child using parallel rules, a chart, and a compass rose. So that is how I began thinking of this journey. The electronic navigation would make the trip a relatively simple matter, but I cannot resist a paper chart. I love the feel of the paper. I love spreading out a chart and envisioning the coastline. Most good charts will give enough information for a navigator to imagine fairly accurately just about every beach along the route. The chart is marked to show cliffs and rocky beaches, and whether the bottom is filled with seaweed, or muddy, or only sand.

  We often think of landmarks as historic buildings or monuments, but the term came into use on ships, and is still used today on charts. Nearly every large object that can be seen from the sea is marked onshore. The United States Department of Transportation maintains a list of special symbols for water towers, radar towers, steep cliffs, lighthouses, airport lights. Anything that might help you to place where you are in the world is marked on the charts.

  No matter how lost, with a good chart, and if I can see the shore, I can nearly always figure out where I am. And for the vast majority of this trip, I would be near enough to see the shoreline, so, in reality, it would be very tough to miss the Panama Canal.

  Charts outside of the United States are less accurate. Essentially, as a country becomes poorer, farther away, or less likely to be occupied by American forces, the information on the charts becomes increasingly sparse and speculative. To compensate for this, before the trip I read blogs written by other travelers, and spoke with every captain I could find who had navigated those waters. They provided the best information of what lay ahead, but I also read the cruising guides and various guidebooks for each of the countries in Central America. Perhaps more than anything I monitored various online weather sites.

  The fact is, though, that even the best navigator will not be able to place you more accurately than a GPS, which even at night and in bad weather can locate you on an electronic chart—often within a few feet of your actual position.

  I began plotting my trip by going to Google Earth and drawing a path down the coast from Port Richmond to the Panama Canal. Google Earth is beyond belief amazing when it comes to trip planning. According to Google, wending in and out of the larger bays, the voyage to the entrance of the Panama Canal would be at least 4,300 miles at sea.

  Traveling 4,300 statute miles means about 3,700 nautical miles. Valkyrien cruised under power at about 7.3 knots. With a good wind she would make 8.7 knots. So, if you figure an average speed of 7 knots, to be generous, the trip would take 530 hours, or about 22 days. I intended to sail day and night, putting into port only to see something interesting or, occasionally, to fuel up. It seemed unlikely that the trip would take more than 90 days of sailing.

  I planned to buy the boat, have some essential work done in San Francisco to make sure she would make it safely to Panama, then, once in the tropics, take her to a local marina where artisans could re-create her to be as much like the Pearl as possible. Once she was finished, we would re-christen her The Spirit of the Pearl and bring down a corps of young people from Anacostia who would sail her up to Washington, DC, with me, where we would inaugurate the museum.

  My grand plan was to sail the boat past Big Sur before Christmas, then spend Christmas with my family in the United States. Then, I would sail Valkyrien down to Cabo San Lucas where Vicki and our children would meet me for a long weekend, perhaps Dr. King’s birthday, or, at worst, Presidents’ Day in February. I’d cruise down the Mexican coast and Vicki could meet me again in Acapulco, where my parents had scuba-dived fifty years before. I would then take Valkyrien past Guatemala, stopping in El Salvador to explore the various Central American estuaries in the Boston Whaler dinghy I planned to tow. I would then cruise past Nicaragua in a couple of days, stopping in Costa Rica for another reunion with my family, then sail the coast in a leisurely way, stopping at various resorts and surfing beaches. Finally, I would sail the boat to Panama with a group of friends and have the final work completed upon her. Then we would all go together when school got out and sail her through the Panama Canal.

  This sounded like a pretty great trip: Every couple of weeks I could come home for a week or two with Vicki, and my whole family would join me at times on this extraordinary adventure. I thought that if I could slow our progress enough to do some exploring and spend some relaxed time with my family, this could be one of the greatest trips of my life. Hard to imagine a better, more fun, or more interesting way of seeing and experiencing America, and to be able to do all of this with Vicki and my children seemed like a dream come true. As it turned out, my family did not end up joining me for much of the jo
urney, although Vicki made several brave trips to Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama.

  We needed a dinghy to get ashore at various ports and a life raft to escape in case of disaster. I decided to buy a Boston Whaler and tow it behind us to serve as both. This might be considered an unusual choice; Whalers can be heavy to pull, might fill with water in rough seas, and could damage the Valkyrien from bumping against her—not ideal qualities for a dinghy. And Whalers are not great lifeboats because they offer little protection from wind, rain, and sun. But the Whaler still seemed to me the best option by far to do both jobs. Whalers are unsinkable, even when they are sawn in half. They are also the most fun motorboat ever built. I spent countless childhood hours bombing around the harbor of Hyannis Port on my brother’s Boston Whaler, or alternatively, watching Wayne repairing the Evinrude at Hyannis Marine, or merely drifting, squeezing the ball pump, trying to get the engine restarted. (The old outboards on our Whaler seemed to be broken about half of every summer.)

  I found a 17-foot Boston Whaler Montauk for sale on Craigslist about halfway up the coast from Los Angeles. She was built in 1967, two years after I was born. All of the original wood seats and trim had been torn out, so I was able to buy her for $2,000. We screwed in a couple of four-by-four wooden posts to strengthen the center console, and rigged up a towline to pull her behind Valkyrien.

  Back in San Francisco, rain fell on most of those winter days before my departure. I moved aboard Valkyrien. Water seeped through cracks and fissures in the deck and the house-top. It percolated through heavy layers of paint and dripped down on me as I typed away on my computer. I picked up a damp towel—everything by then was damp—and lay it across the top of my Dell, to keep the water from dripping onto the keyboard.