This was by far the most dangerous task for me that night. Cables that had been stays tangled amid jib sheets, and sections of rope work from the widow’s net, stretched across the deck in a dark maze of materials which shifted with each wave rolling across the deck, arced and looped, half hidden in the blackness and the roiling sea, like a horrendous fish trap, waiting to seize me under. I felt like a canny raccoon trying to get a piece of food out of a box he knows is a trap. Each time I reached out, I risked a snag that could pull me overboard.
I leaned down and forward to grab a piece of the wreckage pitched atop the deck, but the next wave ripped me away from the mast and tumbled me down the deck, in amid the wreckage and hard across the safety lines. My leg and thigh slipped over the side and into the sea, but I grasped the toe rail, and the safety lines stopped me from falling completely into the ocean. The wave rolled past and I climbed back aboard and crawled to a safer spot before the next wave crashed over the bow.
After a few breaths, I tried again, reaching down into the debris. I got ahold of a piece of heavy line entangled in all of the cables, wood, ropes, and sails that banged against Valkyrien’s side. I pulled on that heavy line, inch by inch, dragging the mess up and onto the deck. I forced Jasper’s knife through the jib halyards, which released the tension in those dragging sails and let them trail behind us. Then, working my arms like a fireman holding a trampoline, I wrestled the jibs aboard. Finally I pulled in the gigantic piece of the bowsprit and tied it down tight along the inside of the gunwale.
Check Four.
Once out of the sea, this detritus no longer pulled at the masts, turned the boat, or twisted her hull. We smoothed out even more.
But I had created a quagmire of debris on the bow that threatened to ensnare me, hold me underwater, or pull me overboard at the slightest misstep. I moved carefully forward again and raised the storm jib. This sail was able to further stabilize Valkyrien, and she became ever more able to hold her course. I moved back to the jibs and unhanked the first one, rolling it up tight before half dragging it back to the galley.
Check Five.
The bow had stopped diving. Waves no longer smashed across the deck but merely spumed over the sides, which seemed almost relaxing by comparison. I rolled the second jib and passed it into the galley, then returned one final time to the center of the deck, checking the braces I had made, then pulled tight the makeshift forestays a bit more.
I made my way back to the cockpit and into the cabin. Kit returned to the cockpit and took the helm. Jasper and I carried scrap wood from the carpentry room, and using a hammer and mallet, we jammed as many bits of wood as possible into the frames holding the masts, which succeeded in halting the last of their movement.
Check Six.
I am afraid a lot, partly this is because I put myself in frightening situations. But I am afraid at home, too. I’m afraid when my phone rings late at night. I am afraid of green pants in the dark. And I am often afraid in a storm.
My close friends and my brothers and sisters say that they have never seen me afraid of anything at sea. The truth is, I loathe my own fear and try very hard to hide it. I think a good captain should never seem afraid. Fear on a boat is contagious, and if seen from the captain, can be destructive. It is best to put that kind of fear aside.
But I also carry with me a general level of anxiety that is more accurately called fear. This fear is my near-constant companion. It has been with me for as long as I can remember, even when I was a child. I have always wanted to be rid of it.
I think one of the reasons that I am so willing to place myself in physical danger, is that experiencing fear of a certainty—some thing that certainly may hurt me, or even kill me, helps me to deal with, to live with, to bear and become less molested by, the fear I carry with me to nearly every sanctuary. Perhaps the only times that I feel the complete absence of fear are those that I spend in the embrace of my wife and my children. Most of the time I do not consciously experience the sensation of fear. I am, I suppose, like a goldfish, having no idea of the existence of water, until I splash out of the bowl.
I have heard it said that fear is an absence of faith. I don’t know much about that, but I do know that I pray a lot harder when I am in danger on a boat than when I am lying on the couch at home. There are some who may find my account to be merely the recollections of an adrenaline junkie. I do not deny that I enjoy the sense of adrenaline pumping through my veins, but I’m not interested in skydiving. Sailing is different.
A couple of hours before dawn, Jasper and I started the engine again. The power it generated allowed us to run the bilge pumps. Seawater had come up over the floorboards in my compartment and seeped down through the deck, soaking everything in my cabin. The lightning drew further away, the rain let up, and soon the moon came out, though the wind and the waves remained. In the clear moonlight, the scudding of the foam across the sea appeared beautiful beyond all imagining. We were making 1/2 knot, headed toward a harbor in Guatemala.
Exhausted, I said good night and stepped below, taking with me one of our two-gallon bottles of springwater. In my cabin, I took off my clothes and poured the water onto my face and down my body, clearing much of the salt away. I had nothing dry, so, dripping wet, I pulled my water-slogged sleeping bag over my body and fell into a deep sleep.
You are the meaning deepest inside things,
that never reveals the secret of its owner.
And how you look depends on where we are:
from a boat you are shore, from the shore, a boat.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
22. Jasper Gets into a Scuffle
What would be left of our tragedies if a literate insect were to present us his?
—Emile M. Cioran
The storm passed an hour after dawn. The wind and waves fell away, the rain stopped, and the sea became completely calm. The night had been shivering cold, but by ten a.m., anyone up on deck stood drenched in sweat. The Bow had been split in half. The coamings on either side of the snapped bowsprit moved back and forth slowly with the steady swaying of the boat. This in turn pressured the deck, which subtly changed shape with each movement.
We needed to stabilize this area. Jasper and Kit wrapped a ratcheting cargo strap from my truck around the broken bow. When we cranked down hard on the ratchet, the bow came together, firming up Valkyrien. We chugged along, repairing what we could, tightening stays, and cleaning up spilled cargo the rest of the day and into the night.
Early the following day, we pulled into Guatemala’s tiny Puerto Quetzal. In order to purchase fuel we had to officially enter the country and have our passports stamped. But Guatemala did not yet have customs officials stationed at Puerto Quetzal. We were told they would be on their way soon.
We topped off Valkyrien’s tanks. The cracked flow meter on the dock’s fuel pump no longer measured how much fuel flowed, so the dockmaster “estimated” that we owed him $800 for a paltry amount of fuel.
The customs officials finally arrived, but told us they were too hungry to do their work. They told us in an informational, but instructive manner that the nearest restaurant they could afford was a couple of hours away. Catching on, I suggested that I pay for their lunch at the local restaurant. They agreed. Once I put a free lunch on the table, several more customs officials mysteriously arrived.
While they feasted, we rechecked Valkyrien, working through the areas of the boat that were unreachable while sailing. We unfastened the bronze shackles and pins that held the snapped bowsprit to the whiskerstays and the bobstay, and took apart the dolphin striker. The three of us worked together to tighten the halyards we had set to act as forestays, and retightened the side stays and backstay. Then we gave Valkyrien’s storm-tossed interior a thorough cleaning.
I called Vicki and told her about our adventure. Summer had just begun and my children were about to finish school. I had been away a long ti
me and needed to go home, but before I could leave Central America, we had to find a place to make repairs on Valkyrien and store her until the fall.
Vicki went straight to work, calling nearly every marina between Guatemala and Nicaragua. There are very few yards on the Pacific Coast of Central America with facilities that will allow them to lift out a boat as large as Valkyrien. Those with sufficiently powerful lifts are designed for commercial vessels whose owners will pay a fortune to get their boats back to work. Every day ashore for a commercial boat is a day of lost income. These yards had all the work they could handle, and none of them wanted to risk lifting Valkyrien and having her fall apart on them. As a consequence, every quote that Vicki received was outrageously expensive.
Finally, Vicki found a small estuary in El Salvador at the Rio Lempa, which at one time had had a marina with a lift that could pull Valkyrien up. She could not get anyone on the phone there, but we decided it was worth a try. The inlet to the estuary was one of the most dangerous on the Pacific Coast. We figured few commercial boats would risk those waters, so we were likely to get a good deal at that yard.
After lunch, the half-dozen or so customs employees dutifully looked at our documents and had us fill in numerous forms. Finally, in the late afternoon, they stamped our passports and allowed us to leave. We cruised along the coast of Guatemala, and then El Salvador, seeking a haven where we could leave Valkyrien safe and sound during the summer months. I wanted to go home, to spend the summer with my wife and children, sailing in the relative safety of Nantucket Sound.
Vicki purchased plane tickets for Jasper and me to fly out of San Salvador. Kit’s flight left the same day. We cruised through the night, and in the morning came upon the Lempa shoals, blocking what would otherwise have been one of the finest natural harbors in Central America.
The entrance to the Estero Jaltepeque is blocked by a horseshoe bar laden with detritus carried 250 miles down the Lempa River from the Sierra Madres in southern Guatemala, then through Honduras and half of El Salvador. Every filthy bit of trash discarded into the stream beds of San Salvador eventually flows down the Rio Lempa. Huge fallen trees, rocks, and sand wait to snag passing vessels, and the shoal itself is constantly moving and changing position with wind and tide. We sailed well off the coast to avoid it.
In order to enter the bay, passing sailboats have no choice but to run a narrow unmarked channel about eight or ten feet deep at low tide (though the depth changes, and little hills develop each day, which can make the water even shallower). We called on VHF channel 16 which is monitored at a local bar. The bartender put us on hold, then asked the patrons if anyone wanted to guide us in for $20. A local Salvadoran agreed to show us the way.
We waited in safe water until the start of high tide. As the current switched direction and began flooding the bay, a small hand-built wooden boat appeared atop a wave. It disappeared a moment later, in the trough, and we marked its progress through a mile of heavy breaking waves—not big by the standards of the bay, but for us, at eight feet high and breaking over a shoally ground, these types of waves were new, and scary.
The pilot, a local Indian named Alejandro, pulled up near us, but I could not understand what he was saying, so I dove off of Valkyrien and, much to his amazement, climbed into his little boat to receive directions as specific as possible about how to cross that bar. Satisfied, I swam back to Valkyrien and we followed our indigenous bar guide through the waves. At times Valkyrien surfed breaking waves for several hundred yards, like a gigantic surfboard manned by Lilliputians. Twenty minutes later we passed through the narrow entrance and into the estero.
We found a small marina/hotel north of the entrance to the estuary, the place where the VHF radio was wired to the bar. I tied up to the marina dock, walked ashore, and ordered lunch.
The lifting facilities had closed down, but I spoke with some dock workers who said that a local man on the island across the estero had a couple of moorings in front of his house available for a small fee. I needed to meet him, make a deal with him to care for Valkyrien while I was gone, and keep her safely moored, all before our flight departed that same evening.
I tried not to appear in any hurry, because gringos in a hurry pay a much higher price than people who don’t have much to do and no place in particular they need to be. I didn’t tell the bar men that our flight was leaving later that afternoon. Instead, I made arrangements with the bartender to have customs meet us and give us entry visas later in the day, then we jumped back in the Whaler and drove across the estero to a completely different world.
On the hotel side, a colony had developed of people who were trying to live as though Salvador were a normal country with normal rules of behavior and public safety. But on this, the other side, lay the real El Salvador, mud huts with tin or grass roofs, electricity enough for one television and a DirecTV dish. These locals experienced the internet on small cheap cell phones and heard gunfire every night.
We met Cesar, a lean ambitious man, determined to lift his family out of poverty. He agreed, for a very reasonable price, to take care of Valkyrien on his mooring until I returned. He would clean the bottom, run the pumps, and do carpentry work. In this way, I felt I was also doing my little part, taking business away from the foreign-run operations across the water and giving it to someone who really needed it.
Cesar was a bit surprised when I asked for a ride to the airport in an hour, along with his phone number and email. As soon as we sealed the deal, Jasper and I rushed back across the estero to the hotel to check in with customs and have our entry visas stamped. We then motored Valkyrien over to one of Cesar’s moorings, tied the Whaler up behind, and walked Cesar through Valkyrien, explaining her various systems. After paddling ashore in Cesar’s canoe, we climbed into a 1980s vintage red American sedan owned by his neighbor, who rushed us to the airport. When we got there, I became concerned when I saw that Jasper had brought only his carry-on luggage. I knew that he had come aboard Valkyrien with two humongous bags of tools, so I made him open his carry-ons for me to view.
Seeing what he’d packed, I said, “Jasper, you cannot bring a compound bow on board the passenger compartment of an airplane.”
Jasper got really mad. He didn’t generally get angry more than two or three times each week, but I always became aware of how strong he was when he was ticked off at me.
I took away his compound bow and had a cab drop me off in San Salvador at some kind of mall where I went in search of a cheap piece of luggage I could throw Jasper’s tools and his bow inside. But when I got back to the airport an hour later, I saw no sign of Jasper.
Jasper often did things his own way, and I was so tired of him disobeying specific directives (mostly things I had told him not to do) that I considered simply boarding my flight and going home. I wanted to get home to Vicki and my children. But my conscience worked on me as I sat waiting for the boarding call.
I could tell that the energy in the airport had changed. All of the police seemed to be on extra alert, and higher uniformed officials walked briskly through the passenger areas, talking quickly but quietly to each other and shaking their heads. I realized that Jasper must have been arrested.
I walked up to a guard and said, “I am with the American you are holding. May I see him?”
The guard asked me how I knew someone was being held, then quickly corrected himself to say he did not know of anyone being held. He told me to wait there, and he walked vigorously away.
A military officer arrived and escorted me to a back room in the immigration area. I explained that my friend Jasper had a number of disorders and disabilities which made it very difficult for him to understand customs and rules, and that I had taken him to El Salvador as part of a special program for people with these kinds of disabilities.
I did not tell the official that Jasper was the only person in the world I had ever encountered with this particular type of disability. I tho
ught it quite possible that Jasper had fallen asleep while being questioned by the officials. And I thought that if he had lain down and gone to sleep, snoring, in the middle of a formal questioning, that the Salvadorans who, like police everywhere, value respect, might have become considerably angry. Especially because it was sometimes very difficult to waken Jasper during a bout of narcolepsy.
The senior officer told me Jasper had tried to get on the plane carrying a hammer and a Skilsaw, among a great variety of other tools. And when they took his baggage, Jasper had gotten into a scuffle with them. One should never try to take away a carpenter’s tools.
I forced Jasper to apologize individually to each person at customs and baggage, and they agreed to let us on our plane. I was really angry until I realized that Jasper had never been on a plane before. His passport was brand-new. He had never left the United States, and Valkyrien was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him in his life. My relationship with Valkyrien was more complex.
The Valkyrien and I sailed together. From the cold of the North Pacific in February through the long hot days of tropical torpor, we continued our journey. I had helped her to harness the wind and the explosive power of compressed diesel. She had helped me to escape and to apprentice to a life on the sea. Together, we stayed afloat through storm and wind and gloom of night. I left her, happy to be going home and looking forward to the next leg, which would take us through the Panama Canal.
23. Life in the Estero
You see I rather chummed with the few mechanics there were in that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally despised—on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose.
—Joseph Conrad, Marlow in Heart of Darkness
I returned to the United States without further incident, and spent a calm summer in Hyannis Port, sailing and scuba-diving with my wife and our children, catching fish and eating family dinners with my mother, my brothers and sisters, and their many children. We played Capture the Flag and touch football, and spent most of our time together as a family.
Sea Change Page 14