Sea Change

by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

  The cabin lights did not work on Valkyrien, and her two portholes allowed little light in. My cabin was dark inside even on bright afternoons. My first night a particularly vicious winter storm blew through. Valkyrien sidled up against the pilings, preventing the faint light of the storm-filled sky from entering. Old sailboats can be spooky at night; the wood groans even in calm harbors. Lines and shrouds rub up against each other, or screech along the mast. I sat reclining on my bunk, typing an email to Vicki. When I shut off the computer I lay in near total darkness, not realizing then that my first night and last night aboard Valkyrien, I would be alone. The wind outside the porthole blew hard enough to create tiny little whitecaps of blowing foam in our narrow channel.

  Everyone at the wharf seemed terrified of the moment when Valkyrien might actually—finally—leave the dock. I knew that they would never, ever say she was “ready.” She had sat idle at that dock for years. I think most people thought she would never move—that eventually, she would sink at the dock and be pulled up by a crane, then cut into pieces and taken to a landfill.

  If I did not get her moving south, very soon, we would have to give up. The Pearl Coalition could not wait. We could no longer afford the high dockage fees in San Francisco, or to lose momentum. So, one rainy day, I decided just to take her out by myself, for a little spin, to see what might happen.

  In the early morning, under the still-dark sky and a pelting rain, I started the engine and cast off her lines. Valkyrien moved amidships like a huge old retriever, stretching as it rises from a long sleep, and we sidled a bit off the pier. I engaged the engine and drove Valkyrien to a nearby fuel dock, filling both her tanks with clean diesel before returning her to the pier single-handed.

  This was the first time in six months that I had seen a single boat cast off from that pier. The two or three people working on nearby boats watched me with something close to disbelief. One persnickety Frenchman stepped aboard his boat carrying a long wooden stick. He held it pointed at Valkyrien, threatening, and seemed to hope more than anything that I would foul up and bump into his neatly kept, though never-sailed, vessel. The people on that wharf, I realized, loved boats. They loved to talk about boats, and they loved to repair boats, but none of them, it seemed, actually wanted to go sailing.

  4. Poor Troy

  There gloom the dark, broad seas.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

  I asked my friend Troy Campbell from Oklahoma to join me for the first leg of the Valkyrien’s journey. Troy is one of my closest friends, and may be the most capable man I have ever met. When the boat boys complained to Troy about how wet and cold they got from the water leaking through the deck, he answered, without guile or irony, “Why don’t you fix the leaks?”

  I first met Troy about fifteen years ago when he answered an advertisement I took out on Craigslist in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I needed someone to crew aboard the Glide, my old Casey yawl in Hyannis Port. The advertisement included these lines:

  Deckhand on Wooden Boat (East Coast)

  Hard work. Must know how to swim. Must be able to improvise.

  Not absolutely required, but good if you know something about boats; diesel engine experience a big plus . . . send note why you would be good at this . . . and very hard work.

  This job mainly involves preparing the vessel for sail and work on the vessel while she is moored, but you will sail or be in powerboats every single day. This is a summer job. It will most likely not last past September.

  Basically a deckhand must be a jack of all trades—you will have to purchase groceries for trips, make sandwiches, coil lines. The following things are done often, so it would be good if you knew how to do some of them, but in fact, you can succeed in the job with no knowledge of any of these things:

  • tying fishing knots and bowlines;

  • climbing ropes;

  • finding things that someone left on board cleaning out a head after a child has pulled the wrong pipe

  • cleaning out a bilge;

  • changing belts on an engine;

  • working with hammers, nails, screws, grinders, amp meters, flashlights, headlamps, driving trucks, jumping batteries, 12-volt electrical, plumbing pipes, compressed air, folding sails, washing clothes, cooking at sea and at home, making BBQ, climbing trees, cutting grass, catching fish on lines and in nets;

  • dealing with injured birds, and almost certainly with an owl (I have a raptor rehabilitation license and an animal rehab permit); also, we currently have nine dogs—a huge pain in the tail, to be frank—and you will have to deal with them probably a lot. You will probably have to jump overboard now and then. And there are generally a hell of a lot of children around (often there are at least 15 children aboard the boat.)

  Troy was one of the few who answered the ad. I like hiring people from Oklahoma because they work harder than most East Coast folks. People from the Midwest often don’t know much about sailing, and are therefore much less likely to question my orders than some snide New England prep school sailor (like me).

  Troy grew up in rural Oklahoma. His grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee who chewed tobacco and watched professional wrestling matches on television in the afternoons, shouting at the fighters and grimacing at every painful hold. His parents loved Troy, but they did not baby him. In the summertime they would drop him off at a piece of land their family owned beside the Cherokee reservation. He and his cousins were left completely unsupervised for two months each year. They prepared all of their meals on outdoor fires, and noodled for catfish. Meat was a rare treat.

  His cousins received a “new” (used—but not as badly used as the one they lived in) trailer home in the middle of one summer. Rather than take the time to move the old one out, they set their former home on fire, and then all sat down to watch it burn. This did not go over well with the local fire department. Troy’s next-door neighbors had eight children, all boys. Their names were Joe-Bob, Jim-Bob, Sammy, Pedro, T. J., Clinton, Nate, Wade, and Peanut.

  The summer that Troy first came to work for me, I was living in Massachusetts and had purchased a huge wooden mast from an old ketch on eBay. I wanted to erect it in my front yard to use as a flagpole, so I asked Troy to go pick it up for me on the boat trailer. When he got back with it, we built a substructure that weighed more than half a ton, carrying and mixing cement from twenty-pound bags. We built steel and cement anchors and laid them out around the flagpole like stays on a boat, holding the enormous mast well in place. We convinced the driver of a telephone company bucket truck to tie the mast to his boom and raise it vertically.

  Late in June, a big northeast wind blew in, bending the mast precipitously. We decided to tie a couple more stays to it, but in order to create any real stability, this second set of stays had to be placed high up on the mast and pulled tight. We set up a twenty-foot orange Werner extension ladder on the flagpole, fully extended to about thirty-eight feet. Troy held the ladder while I climbed. The pole swayed in a manner that concerned me. We placed the ladder at a nearly vertical angle, to keep as much pressure off the mast as we could, and to allow me to attach the new stays as high as possible. I stood on that ladder, scared as hell, while the mast swayed back and forth in the nor’easter.

  Unfortunately, the flagpole cracked and fell (and me with it). I broke my pelvis in three places and had a rib break off and tear through my lung, collapsing it. Fluid filled my chest cavity so the lung could not reinflate. I had difficulty speaking because of the lack of air going through and past my vocal cords. I recall thinking to myself, even as I lay on the ground experiencing intense pain: This poor boat boy. He will feel guilty that he did not hold the ladder well. And I will exploit that guilt all summer long, because I love practical jokes. I can’t help myself.

  Troy loved laughing—at me or himself—and the thought of the two of us laughing all summer made me feel better even as I lay on the ground before the ambulance
arrived. I beckoned to Troy, barely moving my chin, and whispered something. Troy couldn’t hear, so he bent down on one knee and leaned his head down. I think he thought it was my last breath. I whispered in a tone as earnest as I could muster: “Why did you let go of the ladder?”

  Poor Troy. He held on to that ladder a lot longer than most men would have. I just could not resist teasing him.

  Troy later tortured me at his every opportunity, as well. He once put a thin zip tie on the driveshaft of my truck so that every time I drove forward, the zip tie spun around, lashing the undercarriage of my Ford and making a horrible sound. Each time I heard the noise I stopped and crawled underneath, searching the axles and joints where the driveshaft attached to the transfer case and differential. I could find nothing seriously amiss. It took me a long time to notice the zip tie.

  On another occasion, Troy walked into our house, pretending to be upset with himself, telling me he had put regular gasoline in my diesel truck (and I fell for it). A couple of times Troy dressed up in a terrifying Halloween costume and hid in a bush to scare the hell out of me. I didn’t tell him that I had been kidding about him not holding the ladder for more than a year.

  That first summer, Troy and I sailed up and down New England with Vicki and our young children. On many days we sailed with at least a dozen children on board, along with their parents, my brothers and sisters, cousins, and my mother. Troy became part of our family, and we have remained close friends ever since.

  I was excited to have him join me those first few weeks on Valkyrien. I knew that I would be safe as long as I could get Troy to sail with me. Unfortunately, Troy wanted to go home the minute he saw Valkyrien. He said he had a bad feeling about the boat. He said, deadly serious, that in his opinion she was absolutely not seaworthy.

  The new boat boys who had replaced Bryan and Steve told me they were quitting the same day. They slept on Valkyrien one last night, saying they would catch their bus home in the morning. I knew I couldn’t sail the boat alone, and I was not ready to give up on bringing this schooner to Washington. I decided to use the old captain’s trick of leaving port while the crew slept. They couldn’t quit very easily once we were at sea. Resolving to push off that night, and using Troy’s greatest weakness—his absolute loyalty—I convinced him that he, at least, should not abandon a friend.

  We waited until the boat boys fell asleep in their bunks. I had a tough decision to make as to whether or not to start the engine before leaving the pier. I knew that it would take thirty seconds or so to start, and I didn’t not want the boat boys sleeping below to awaken and have time to abandon ship. On the other hand, I did not want to end up drifting into a crowded seaway if the engine did not start. I decided to do both at the same time. I had Troy undo all of the lines save one. I started the engine, and we pushed off and headed out into the San Francisco Bay, bound for Panama.

  A cold rain began to fall.

  The boat boys came running up on deck just as we left the pier, but it was too late for them to quit. And we were all freezing our tails off. I gave my ski gloves to them—an offering of empathy, and to warm their hands, making them feel at least a little bit cared for. To their credit, they both managed rather quickly to get over their irritation at being pressed out to sea.

  We had a tough time for the first few hours because the green and red navigation signals on Valkyrien’s sides refused to illuminate. An annoyed tug pilot, determined to teach us a lesson, bore down hard on us, matching our every turn and ignoring our radio signals.

  We snuck across the bay to San Francisco and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge. Around midnight, and sixteen or so nautical miles into our journey, a US Coast Guard Special Purpose Craft–Law Enforcement (SPC–LE) vessel cruised alongside and hailed us. They ordered us to heave to, as we had no navigation lights. I radioed the guardsmen on channel 162 and asked them to switch to channel 11.

  I told the captain of the Coast Guard interceptor that we were bound for the Pacific, outside the territory of the United States. He did not answer on the radio. Instead, after a quiet fifteen seconds or so, the Coast Guard captain bellowed on his loudspeaker: “Not my problem anymore.” He spun his boat around and headed back into the bay.

  Mild fog lifted as we sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific, watching rolling waves begin to break as they approached Land’s End and we began our journey in earnest, bound south toward Half Moon Bay.

  * * *

  2. The emergency channel that is always monitored by the USCG.

  5. Under Way At Last

  This is one of the coldest days of this most damnable

  and interminable winter.

  —Diary notes of Samuel Clemens

  Valkyrien’s prior owner had installed quite a bit of cheaply built wooden furniture, apparently in anticipation of living aboard. None of these feeble accoutrements could survive a real storm, and I determined to jettison it all at the earliest possible moment.

  Troy had taken most of the night watch, and he slept late the following afternoon in the “guest” cabin on the port side, at the bottom of the second companionway. This cabin had a single porthole, custom-built for Valkyrien. The bronze frame was nearly four inches thick and covered by a heavy glass, closed tight against water by four screw-type clamps called “dogs.” The porthole had been laid only a foot and a half above the waterline. While under sail, the porthole would be underwater much of the time, or half under.

  People who work often with diesel engines become accustomed to their sounds. And every older diesel has its own rhythm and clanking. The slightest change in rpms will waken a watchful crew out of even a deep sleep, often with great alarm.

  As we headed out of San Francisco we made an agreement that before the skipper adjusted the rpms he would always announce it to the crew, so that they would not be needlessly startled and come running on deck while trying to get their scant four hours of sleep.

  Given the unique set of circumstances—Troy asleep, a scary window, and lots of useless wooden furniture on board—I could not resist playing a practical joke.

  I asked the boat boys to bring all of the slipshod furniture on deck and lay it out just forward of Troy’s porthole. Then I searched the charts for a hellish area on the bottom—where the seafloor rose up near the surface, but not all the way. This rise would cause the long, smooth swells to break the surface and slap the boat hard, while not endangering us in any way. I found a perfect spot and drove Valkyrien to the lee of this submerged hill. The rollers all around us flowed gently, about ten feet high. But at this acclivity, the waves lifted up steeply and then broke in a cold stream of white water, just after the bottom rise.

  We had been motoring at a constant 850 rpms. The engine had settled into a regular rhythm, and Troy was sleeping peacefully to that beat. But as we slipped up to the breaking waves, the Valkyrien was lifted violently and twisted at a steep angle, dipping Troy’s porthole well below the water, and turning his room first green, then dark. I dropped the rpms down to nearly nothing, then quickly climbed up to the deck and dumped all of the furniture overboard. The crash of the wave on Valkyrien’s side pushed Troy against the wall, his face pressed up against the cold glass porthole.

  The engine sounded as though it had stalled, and Troy woke in anxious alarm. As the boat rolled back to starboard Troy looked out the porthole to see the ocean around him filled with pieces of furniture from the boat. He bolted from his bunk and ran to the cockpit, agitated and ready to jump into action. Instead, he saw me laughing and heard the engine go back up to regular running rpms. It took him a minute to figure out what was happening, and then he roared with laughter—a kind of Oklahoma guffaw that always cheered me.

  One of the reasons I love and value Troy, apart from his great sense of fun and his loyalty, is his amazing mechanical prowess.

  When Troy was a teenager, he saved all the money he had earned for tw
o summers and purchased the hulk of a yellow Camaro from a junkyard. One of his uncles got a friend to tow it back to their land. One piece at a time, Troy took the engine down. He cleaned every part—each screw, each washer, each nut—with gasoline, diesel fuel, and a wire brush, until they shined. If any part looked worn, he’d get a ride to the local auto shop and buy a replacement. He bought rolls of rubber gasket material and cut all of the gaskets himself to save money. Then, before he’d take the next piece off, he would put the one he had rebuilt back on. By the end of the summer, he had replaced every single bit of worn material in that old wrecked engine.

  Troy was fourteen years old.

  No one had taught him how to be a mechanic, and no one thought his car would work. But just before school began, Troy borrowed a battery. The Camaro started right up and ran perfectly. It took him two more years to rebuild the body, but the day he got his license, Troy had a Camaro.

  No one in Troy’s family had ever gone to college, and Troy could see no point in going himself. He wanted to work with his hands, to literally make things better for people. But someone convinced him to take the SAT. He received the highest score in the history of his high school. Troy got a letter from Dartmouth College, asking if he would interview with an alumni who lived in Norman.

  Dartmouth offered Troy a full scholarship—tuition, dorm, meals—even some money to get back and forth between New Hampshire and Oklahoma. He decided to give college a try. Troy showed up at Dartmouth with a single suitcase of clothing and three guns. He had no idea that one needed a license to have a handgun in many states on the East Coast. Dartmouth, it turns out, was one of the few Ivy League colleges that maintained gun-storage rooms in each dorm.