Sea Change

by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

  Sailing a long way in an old boat is a lot like driving a car amid a snowstorm. The competency of the captain or the driver makes a huge difference—up to a point. When a storm grows too big, there is little or nothing a captain can do to save a ship; you simply have to stay in port or you are risking too much. The captain’s trust is to weigh the chances and the consequences and in the end, bring his boat and his crew safely to their destination.

  While in port I constantly ran through various scenarios in my head, trying to determine whether to sail, or wait it out. And when sailing I spent much of my days figuring out when we should return to port. I had much less confidence in my decision-making on these matters than did my wife. I was afraid that I had placed so much importance on completing the trip that I would make a mistake and sail when I should have stayed in port.

  Vicki knew what I did not: that as a person—a father and a husband—my value was in no way connected to Valkyrien. Vicki never mentioned this to me—I would not have had any idea what she was talking about in any case. It is so funny to me how problems that are desperately complex and unfathomable to me are understood with complete clarity by my wife and dearest friends. So often after getting through an ordeal they point out the obvious—and I say, “Well, why didn’t you just tell me this in the first place?” They all laugh. My friends know that we could avoid a lot of angst and heartache if I could learn these lessons by reading or thinking or being told, rather than experiencing.

  It is my very fortunate lot in life to have gained a wealth of experiential learning. Not all of my friends are as enthusiastic about sharing this form of education with me. A few no longer like to go sailing when it is raining.

  13. Kevin

  Half a league onward.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade

  Maxey flew home at the end of the long weekend. Nixon returned to his filming. I missed them both immediately. Valkyrien was hurting after the storm. Jasper and I made repairs to her, squeezing Loctite on every bolt we could find. During a break, I called my friend Kevin Ward and asked him to come out to join us.

  Kevin is a disruptor. He graduated with honors from Harvard despite being kicked out of boarding school. In addition to English, he speaks Farsi and Arabic. He’s done many things in his life and is one of the finest thinkers I know, but despite—or maybe because of this—he is rarely employed, at least in traditional ways. So I was not surprised that he jumped in his old Subaru, drove to the Denver airport, and took the next plane out to Monterey.

  We set sail off of Big Sur the following daybreak, an epic California winter morning of clear blue, cloudless sky, and were carried by a gentle breeze over smoothly rolling swells and barely cresting waves along the cliffs, sailing easily through to the following night.

  That evening, a school of dolphins swam in to play in our bow wave. Their darting excited the bioluminescent plankton, which marked their paths in streams of green light. Bioluminescence in the Pacific can be so bright that the fighter pilots during World War II used the green light trails left by navy fleets to find their way back to their aircraft carriers after nighttime raids. PT boats, in enemy waters, rode with only a single one of their three engines running to reduce the signature of the bioluminescence that lit them up as targets for the predatory Japanese destroyers.

  We sailed that night amid a quiet storm of underwater sparklers and fireworks, all various shades of luminous green. And I thought of those days when my son was younger, and he would swim in from the mooring with me, at night, watching the tiny blue-green creatures quietly light the sea around us.

  I was glad to have Kevin spell me at the wheel of Valkyrien, but concerned by his usual blasé attitude. Kevin’s demeanor suggested tranquilizers more than mere tranquility. At first I thought he had gotten high. I knew that the throttle-control cable on Valkyrien was wound a bit too tight (we had installed it ourselves, and the cable ended up being a little too long, as a consequence of which the skipper had to lean forward uncomfortably, holding the throttle in place for hours on end). Then I noticed that he had tied down the throttle into position with a white ribbon.

  No matter how convenient it might seem to him, I couldn’t countenance the danger and un-seamanly nature of his laziness, so I told Kevin to remove the ribbon immediately. He did so reluctantly, although being the rascal he is, he would later surreptitiously replace the ribbon with a thin strand of nearly transparent monofilament fishing line.

  Later that evening I took down the sails as we prepared to enter Morro Bay. I climbed below and removed the ladder to gain access to the engine compartment. I had by then gotten rid of the hot-wiring system of starting the engine and replaced it with a starter solenoid. But the mechanism for exciting the solenoid had quickly burned out, so the solenoid, which manages the starter, had to be powered up by hand. I had rigged two twelve-gauge wires to this new starter mechanism. By touching them together, they closed the circuit to the solenoid, which in turn closed the circuit to the batteries and engaged the starter. It was almost as easy as using a key, but had the advantage of forcing the captain or crew to open the engine compartment and always look at the engine and fuel filters when starting the engine. It certainly made me much more aware of the mechanics inside the engine room.

  Unfortunately, though, this arrangement left me quite blind to what was happening on deck and in the cockpit at the moment the starter engaged.

  That evening, the engine started right up but made a terrible screaming sound. I leapt up the companionway (climbing along the side walls because I had removed the ladder) and lunged into the cockpit. I shifted the throttle as far as it would go, reducing the flow of fuel to what I thought was a bare minimum, but the engine continued to make a horrible screaming sound, and when I looked at our stern, a huge cloud of dark, nearly black smoke obscured the aft deck. (I did not see the fishing line Kevin had tied to the throttle, which kept the fuel flowing at cruising speed.)

  Horrified, I jumped back below and climbed over the engine to shut it off manually. I knew that the black smoke meant the diesel fuel was not being fully combusted, and with almost no fuel running through the engine (or so I thought), I knew somehow something awful had gone wrong again.

  I went through the fuel lines section by section. We checked each fuel tank and all of the oil levels. We changed all of the fuel and oil filters. We checked the coolant levels and the raw-water intake hoses. I was reluctant to run the engine a second time, lest we do more damage, but everything seemed fine, so I touched the ignition wires and the engine started screaming immediately, pouring out more black smoke.

  At that point, I became almost wholly despondent. A flash of so many of the things that had gone wrong with Valkyrien over the last few months ran through my mind—tearing the sails, the steering wheel falling off, the engine burning out, pulling the propeller, the boat boys quitting in frustration, and the ever-present leaking. For a few moments I felt utterly defeated.

  But I was the captain of a vessel at sea, so I dealt with the situation at hand. We raised the sails back up and sailed into Morro Bay, coasting up to a mooring far out at the edge of the mooring field. I hated to pay the enormous cost of a diesel mechanic, but could find no other option. I found a fellow who was willing to come out, at a four-hour minimum fee. We waited two days for him. When he finally arrived, before starting the engine, he went through the fuel system as we had, checking all of the fluids and hoses. Everything seemed fine.

  He was a bit thrown off by our ignition system, but said that our ragout of hot wires culminating near the starter could not cause the black-smoke problem. Then he started the engine and looked genuinely shocked at the grating scream of the diesel. He rushed up to the cockpit, stared at the horrendous black cloud forming, and shouted at me to shut it down immediately. He stood there, dumbfounded.

  After thinking things through, he checked the exhaust pipes and the outflow while I
swam down with a scuba mask to the through-hull pipes, where cooling water entered the boat, to check for blockage. Everything seemed fine.

  Finally, the mechanic climbed up to the cockpit and joined us. He looked as puzzled as we looked sad and distressed. We could not afford to buy another new engine. The next level of troubleshooting—which would require taking the engine apart—would be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.

  I looked at the mechanic, who was staring intently at the throttle. He leaned forward and reached out slowly. His eyes had caught the glint of fishing line, holding the throttle in the open position. He snapped the line off, with no small measure of violence, and pulled the throttle down an additional inch.

  We started the engine again. It sounded perfect. No more black smoke. No more hideous shrieking.

  I looked at Kevin, severely irritated. He stared back at me. We glared at each other for about thirty seconds, then we burst out laughing. Kevin and I have been camping together since we were teenagers. Both of us had made so many ridiculous mistakes in our lives that this one, in the scheme of things, was not even worth more than a sideways glance.

  I remain loyal to old friends essentially no matter what they do.

  We can be pissed off at each other, or even angry, or despondent…it does not really matter. We’re stuck with each other, and we will be friends forever.

  14. Into Stranger Waters

  As though to breathe were life.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

  Kevin, Jasper, and I set off again that afternoon, sailing past Point Conception in a light breeze, flying six sails. We cruised lazily along the Santa Barbara Channel off the straight coast of California, slipping past Platform A, which in 1969 caused what was then the worst oil spill in American history. The oil rig had been painted light blue, sprouting with cranes and lifting booms, and looked like a gigantic prehistoric water bug, consuming something just below the surface. Anacapa and California’s Northern Channel Islands hung low on the horizon to our right, and we sailed by Carpinteria, Ventura, and Oxnard on our way to Malibu.

  Sailing in New England, shoals abound, and the terrain varies almost from mile to mile. The entire bottom of the ocean from the beaches out three hundred miles to Georges Bank was, not so long ago in geologic time, dry land. The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered New England in ice two miles thick. For eighty thousand years the ice pressed against the continent, forcing the edge down. When the ice receded, the sea flooded in. The actual New England coast is three hundred miles out at sea; that is where the continent ends. And the sailing there is so excellent in part because the terrain and views change constantly, as though one is off-roading in a jeep. Along Cape Cod, just on an afternoon sail, you could depart outside of a kettle pond and into an inland waterway not unlike Florida’s coast, past a stream, then through an inlet protected by a breakwater and a barrier beach, then around a series of shoals out past giant boulders to a rock ledge—and that is just the first five miles. Sailing in New England never requires a purpose. Useless curiosity and courage are at the heart of cruising, especially in New England.

  Southern California, relatively speaking, has almost nothing to offer the casual cruiser. The continental shelf is often within a few miles of shore. When sailing south, if you look to your left, you see an unbroken white line of surfing beach, and to the right is open ocean—unbroken for two thousand miles. If you stay twenty-five miles out, there is virtually nothing to hit except some other boat. Cruising southern California requires a destination.

  We cruised close to the shore along Zuma Beach and around Point Dume and Paradise Beach and the Malibu Pier, looking at the beach houses through our binoculars. The wind blew steady at just below 10 knots. Valkyrien passed by Santa Monica Canyon and the pier at Venice. We dropped the sails and pulled in beside the municipal pier at Marina del Rey. We had some of the finest, most calm, simply delightful sailing days, and I began to feel the possibilities for this trip really becoming what we had planned: a challenging but beautiful beginning of a real Pearl Museum in Washington, DC.

  I had a little difficulty getting permission to land at the LA County dock, because I was required to show the vessel’s registration. The Coast Guard was almost hopelessly backed up at that time, so we had been waiting on a registration since we’d closed on the boat at the end of December. I showed dock officials the registration for the Glide (a very different boat—about twenty feet shorter, and with a black hull). The official said, “She looks bigger; is that really fifty feet?”

  “Well, I don’t know who measured her; maybe they just looked at the deck?”

  The officer shrugged and allowed me to keep Valkyrien on the dock for a week.

  I still had not found a second boat boy for the sail to Panama. I interviewed four young men on the evening of our sixth night on the dock. One was drunk, another, an apparent stoner. I asked him if he had smoked marijuana recently. He looked at me, and said, as though it were both reasonable and an achievement, “Not since lunch.”

  I hired him, along with two of the others. When I assess crew I tend to see their potential more than the reality. Also, I had no alternative. They were surprised when I told them we would leave at sunrise.

  The following morning my friend Daniel Voll joined me an hour before sunup, at the Burton Chace Park municipal pier. Daniel is a gifted writer, but even more than that, he is a man who thinks deeply before he talks. Lack of loquaciousness is a well-appreciated character trait at sea. Daniel has the great gift of talking only when he has something interesting to say.

  We waited a few hours for the boat boys. Two of the three I hired showed up—the pothead and a geeky computer kid who still lived with his parents. The geeky kid’s mother drove him to the dock, and after getting a good look at Valkyrien and her captain, she beseeched him not to sign on. This young man had lived an extraordinarily pampered life. Though not well-off, his mother had taken constant responsibility for all of his needs. He had no idea how to care for himself. Later, when we were out at sea, he refused to clean a cast-iron skillet. I dropped him off in Mexico.

  On the other hand, Kit, the pothead, turned out to be one of my luckiest hires. He had decided to stop smoking weed for thirty days, and so signed on to Valkyrien for thirty-one. (I had a pretty good idea of how he was planning to spend his last night on board the boat.)

  I did not have particularly high hopes for Kit at the outset. Every time he ran down the deck, he seemed to stub his toe on a pad eye or cut his fingers on some sharp corner. He could not tighten a screw without tearing the grooves on the head. His tender hands couldn’t take the rough rope work of sailing. On the third day, he asked me for a Band-Aid. I handed him a crushed roll of duct tape, its silver threads almost black with dirt. Kit protested; it was too dirty.

  Shaking my head, I unrolled the first circle of tape, revealing the clean silver duct tape beneath. Somehow, slowly, steadily, he caught on.

  Each day without marijuana Kit seemed to grow smarter and more mature. He ate scoops of creatine at breakfast and dinner, and his arms and legs grew strong. On the fourth day he stopped complaining that his hands hurt. The next morning he had wrapped his palms and most of his fingers with duct tape and pulled up the sails without being asked.

  His toe had become badly infected from smashing it over and over again against the same wooden block on the port side of the deck. He cut the fingers out of a rubber glove and slipped them over the injured toe. Eight days into the trip his hands became calloused. After two weeks, he had the swollen hands of Popeye, and could pull in a salty line in the dark without a word. (Recently, I heard that Kit has become a millionaire selling his own brand of legal medical marijuana in numerous California counties.)

  The first night, several miles off the coast of Palos Verdes, Daniel and I sat in the cockpit below an absolutely clear and star-filled sky and I listened to him speak for hours. He told me how he had left h
is home in Indiana and become a journalist, and how he tracked down and interviewed war criminals in the former Yugoslavia, and American spies in Iraq. These were interesting, even exciting stories, but I loved most when he spoke about his own father and working their old family farm near the Mississippi. This was truly one of the finest nights aboard Valkyrien.

  Two days later, we arrived in San Diego. My wife Vicki drove down with our children to see me off on the next leg of the trip. I had been missing Vicki a lot, and I was grateful that she had driven all the way down to say good-bye. What I really wanted was for them all to come with me, even though I knew that was impossible. Certainly if I had known all that would take place over the next year of trying to get Valkyrien through Panama, I would have sold the boat that morning and driven home with my family.

  My daughter Summer lifted off the bow line and tossed it aboard. Then she ran down the pier and took off our stern line. I smiled, acknowledging how smartly Summer handled the lines, but so sad to be leaving my loving daughter behind. She pushed our stern off the dock as Vicki stood there with Noah and Maxey. I called out “See you soon, my loves,” and slowly motored down the channel.

  I looked back every few moments, hoping that the worst part of the trip lay behind me. But part of me knew we were now leaving the United States behind, traveling into strange waters, and that anything could happen. The three of them stayed by that dock, like Nantucket families seeing off a whaling ship, until I passed out of sight.

  15. Brave Men Run in My Family

  He works his work, I mine.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses