Sea Change

by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

  Troy is perhaps the most likable person I have ever met. During an hour of questioning Troy’s amiable charm and sincere grace allowed him to make fast friends with the arresting officers. They gave him a ride to the little harbor where I was being held, and that is when he re-joined me. Both of us now stuck in a strange state of non-arrest.

  At sunrise the Coast Guard forced me to weigh anchor and took us under tow for about six hours to their main Coast Guard base at Puntarenas (secretly fine with us, because it saved us us paying a $10,000 tow fee). Puntarenas is the only port within a hundred miles that had the proper facilities to repair Valkyrien.

  The route to the Coast Guard base around the little peninsula at Puntarenas took us past all of the residences, nautical supply stores, restaurants, and commercial piers in the ramshackle town. As we passed these enclaves, the CG vessel announced over their loudspeakers that they had caught the American smugglers and would be holding us at the station. We drew large crowds at the end of each dock as we passed by.

  At the Coast Guard base, they tied Valkyrien alongside a gunship. After towing her, though, the Capitan seemed to grasp the fragile nature of our vessel and realized that we posed no threat to law and order. The base commander concluded that no criminal with any self-respect would use a boat like Valkyrien to run guns or money or drugs—and in any case, what American would bring drugs into Costa Rica? After a twenty-four-hour hold, we were free to go once we’d completed the necessary paperwork to enter the country (unfortunately, because of our improper entry, we had a lot of paperwork).

  Troy good-naturedly accompanied me during the next four days, waiting for hours in long lines at various bureaucratic offices in Costa Rica: customs, immigration, Coast Guard, captains of the port, federal and local tax offices, and other locations.

  All the while, of course, Valkyrien continued slowly sinking.

  I moved her to a mooring and hired a young man named Gustavo, the nephew of one of the nicer coast guardsmen, to live aboard and keep her pumps running. But when I told him that he would have to scrub the bottom to keep ocean plant life from establishing itself there, he refused.

  “Listen, Gustavo,” I said, “you simply must do this. The green stuff growing on the side of the boat will destroy the wood, and eventually the boat will sink.”

  “Well, here in Puntarenas, we pull the boats out of the water at marinas to have the bottom cleaned.”

  “Gustavo, we cannot spend money to have the boat hauled out merely to clean the bottom. It is easily done with a hard brush. It will take several hours only.”

  “No, I cannot do that because I would have to swim.”

  “Gustavo, are you telling me you cannot swim?”

  “Well, I can swim, but if I swim here I will be eaten by a crocodile.”

  I tried to reason with him. “Gustavo, there is no way a crocodile is going to eat you. Watch . . . I will jump in and clean the boat for a while.”

  “No, no! Please don’t!” Gustavo grabbed hold of my arm, pulling me away from the side of the boat.

  “Gustavo,” I said, “all over the world people are told that they cannot swim because a shark might eat them, or an alligator will kill them, but these things are completely blown out of proportion. You are more likely to be struck by lightning than eaten by a crocodile.”

  “Not here—here, people get eaten all the time!” he said.

  “If you can tell me the name of a single individual you have ever heard of who was eaten by a crocodile, I will never ask you to clean the bottom again.”

  “Juan Carlos,” he said.

  “Who is Juan Carlos?”

  “The person who was eaten last spring.”

  “How do you know the story of Juan Carlos is true?” I replied, figuring it was an urban myth. I arrogantly assumed I knew more about this local harbor than Gustavo.

  “We went to high school together, and grade school, and we used to clean boats together.”

  Costa Rica, it turned out, has one of the highest rates of crocodile attacks of any country in the world. Humbled, I apologized and put off the bottom cleaning. I later saw the humongous crocodile that ate Gustavo’s friend, sunning himself on the beach, a few hundred yards from our mooring.

  30. Whaler

  Unfinished task . . .

  —Abraham Lincoln, Address at Gettysburg

  Several days after the Coast Guard released us, Troy returned to Los Angeles while I remained in Puntarenas alone, watching with some dismay as the local mechanic I hired began dismantling Valkyrien’s engine. Panama was less than five hundred miles out—a distance I could sail at home in four to five days. But as I watched the mechanic take down the busted engine I began to think that I might never make it to the Panama Canal. The boat leaked badly, her batteries had drained, the masts had dangerously loosened, she had no bowsprit. Her boomkin had weakened, our Whaler was missing, and the engine was broken, perhaps beyond reasonable hope of repair in this faraway place.

  The mechanic started by removing the broken alternator, then a water pump, both of which seemed reasonable steps, as those parts are really independent systems that can get in the way during a repair. But soon enough his tinkering lost all sense of order. It appeared that he was deciding what to remove based on its proximity to where he was seated.

  The engine seemed to slowly disintegrate before my eyes. Everything that the mechanic could reach, without actually standing up, he removed from the engine. He took apart the cylinder head, the injectors and their springs, the valve train. Soon everything sat covered in thick grease combined with a homemade mix of chemicals, mostly from the oil pan.

  Meanwhile, the Whaler remained wherever Troy had abandoned her, somewhere on the Nicoya peninsula. He couldn’t recall the name of the beach except to say vaguely that the town was “somewhat idyllic.” He did, however, remember the name of the fisherman who had promised to look after the Whaler. At least I had that to go on.

  I needed to find a truck and a boat trailer; then I would try and locate the fishing village and the fisherman who now had my Whaler so I could haul it back to Puntarenas and get it fixed. Sailors develop special relationships with their boats. We give each a name, and the vessels quickly become anthropomorphized in our heads. I thought of the Whaler as a loyal friend. She had ridden with me across thousands of miles of ocean. She offered protection and salvation in storms. She helped me get supplies, food and fuel, to save sea turtles, and to catch fish for sustenance. She was nearly as old as I was, had survived so much of the same world, and I really felt I could not just abandon her on some beach at the end of an isolated peninsula in Costa Rica. I could not find anyone who would tow the Whaler for me, so I wound up purchasing a nearly completely wrecked Toyota Land Cruiser (also called a “jeep,”) to tow the Whaler back. I figured that I would eventually drive the Toyota to Los Angeles.

  I called the Toyota Land Cruiser variously “the jeep” “the Toyota” or the “Land Cruiser.” It had no side doors, no windows, no roof, no heater. Its rear doors were cut in half. I traded the air conditioner for a PTO winch. The steering column was held together by a piece of a tire. The starter was frozen up and resisted my attempts to fix it with a hammer, so a bit like Fred Flintstone, I had to get out and push to start it (which was fine as long as I remembered to always park it pointed downhill). The jeep had no parking brake (I carried rocks to prop against the wheels to keep it from rolling away). The headlights were out, so I wired off-road lights and screwed them to the front bumper. But it worked, and it had a hitch—which was the main point.

  I planned to take a ferry from Puntarenas across the Gulf of Nicoya to one of the villages at the end of the Nicoya Peninsula. I jumped in the Land Cruiser early in the morning, and drove like mad the 800 meters to the ferry dock, sliding on board just as the uniformed deckhands closed the gate.

  Nicoya is the largest peninsula in Costa Rica, seventy-five m
iles long and up to thirty-nine miles wide. Nevertheless, every fisherman had by then, I was certain, had heard the story. Not many Whalers in Nicoya, and not many gringos leaving boats on beaches.

  It turned out that the little village that so enamored Troy was probably the most touristy town in all of Costa Rica. It was inhabited mainly by teenaged Americans and those Costa Ricans inclined to profit from the excesses of young Americans on generous travel budgets.

  Troy is a trusting soul. Unfortunately, the fisherman who had graciously offered to keep a safe eye on the boat for Troy was a well-known criminal. Late that night, I found the Whaler behind the fisherman’s house. This unscrupulous brigand had stolen the keys, all of the lines, the fuel tanks and gas hoses; he did leave the engine, and surprisingly, the propeller was still attached.

  The next day, with only a few misadventures, I ended up back in Puntarenas with the Whaler and the Land Cruiser. I lay the Whaler down on a couple of blocks of wood in the driveway that led to the wharf where Valkyrien was tied up. The outboard’s gears had ground to bits and the engine’s lower unit needed to be rebuilt.

  I now had a broken truck, a broken Whaler, and a broken Valkyrien. I set to work, trying to get everything running, but circumstances impeded me at seemingly every step. Often I could not even get electricity to run my tools. The guy I rented dock space from in Puntarenas promised me electricity, but every time I connected to the wiring, his whole house lost power. I hooked up an extension cord to a “Frankenstein” switch on a pole. This got electricity to the boat, but the precarious setup often caught fire. I needed someone standing at the spot where the extension cord entered Valkyrien to tell me whether it lit up at the moment I threw the switch. If the cord didn’t catch fire in the first ten seconds, it was usually fine.

  The raw-water pump and electronic fuel pump on the generator had both failed, so when shore power from the Frankenstein switch also failed, we had no way to run electric tools or anything else electric on Valkyrien. I cut some long clumps of wire from the engine room and used this bonus collection to rewire the genset fuel pump directly to the battery. I also rebuilt the system I had used to wash down the bilge in El Salvador. I ran the discharge from this pump through the genset, which kept it cool. With these two temporary fixes the mechanic could run his tools, and continue—for better or worse—to take apart the main engine.

  Friends had continuously asked me to give up the trip, and, finally, I decided that if we needed to buy a new engine, I would agree and come home. But if the mechanic could repair the engine for under $2,000, I would stick it out. With a working engine, I could easily cover the remaining distance to the Panama Canal in under a week.

  And once in Panama, the Valkyrien could be rebuilt to become the Spirit of the Pearl.

  I was once again running out of money, and with each passing day, Valkyrien seemed to deteriorate more. Like a man floating on a chunk of ice, I was desperate to get south before I had nothing left to float upon. But I had other obligations, too, and so I left the mechanic to work on Valkyrien’s engine without me. I returned to Los Angeles to spend Christmas and New Year’s with Vicki and our children.

  I finally returned to Costa Rica near the end of January. The diesel mechanic, who had disassembled Valkyrien’s engine in such an apparently haphazard way, surprised me by putting it all back together successfully, particularly given the limitations of his tools and the availability of spare parts. He billed me about $1,200, plus the cost of a new starter.

  After tedious, seemingly endless days spent in drab government offices (mostly dealing with paperwork regarding my initial manner of entry into Costa Rica), I was finally able to secure permission to leave Costa Rica aboard Valkyrien.

  My friend, Bryan Tarr, a contractor in Los Angeles, flew to San Jose at the beginning of February and met me at the boat for the final leg to Panama. We planned to leave the morning after Bryan’s arrival, but Bryan and I wound up spending ten more days in Puntarenas, finishing repairs. We ended up sailing less than a hundred miles together, to the municipal dock at Quepos, Costa Rica.

  By the time Bryan arrived I had become absolutely desperate to leave Puntarenas. Whether it was madness or paranoia or the heat of the tropical sun, I felt as if I were stuck in a hole from which I might never escape. As nice as the people of Puntarenas are, as helpful as they were in assisting me to get back out to sea, it also felt as if each time I got close to departing, they would find a way to keep me there for just one more day. They didn’t want to kill me, they did not want to destroy—they just wanted to keep me there with them, to bleed me slowly, keep me hanging on, because they too wanted and needed to get out. It has been said that if Central America ever needs an enema, Puntarenas is where they will insert the tube.

  Bryan and I spent the days on Valkyrien adjusting the rigging, tuning the engine with the mechanic, and stopping some of the leaks. Bryan rebuilt the mast frames, which helped enormously in stabilizing the rig. Leaks behind the rudder and at the edges of the stuffing box were our greatest challenges after that. We tried covering the box, caulking the sides, hammering tin, forcing rubber. But I never got it to stop leaking. You may have noticed that I have only sparingly used the word “sinking.” I will say it here, just this once, because like all New England sailors, I know it is a word that brings no good aboard a boat. But with Valkyrien, the reality of sinking was never far from my mind.

  31. Dugout

  A lonely impulse of delight . . .

  —W. B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

  Late one evening, as Bryan and I sat talking after a long day working in the engine room, still with many repairs left undone, we decided to leave Puntarenas that very night. We simply could not bear to spend a single day longer in that awful city

  But my loyal Boston Whaler was still sitting up on blocks with her outboard engine in two pieces, in the driveway in Puntarenas, and the broken-down Toyota Land Cruiser, sat parked beside the Whaler. I had a choice: I could stay in Puntarenas and wait God only knew how long until the Whaler was running again, or I could duck out and leave the Whaler and the Land Cruiser behind.

  I still had the dugout canoe we had purchased from the indigenes in El Salvador. The canoe moved beautifully through the water, and was unsinkable in the sense that it had almost precisely neutral buoyancy. If it filled with water, it would sink only until the sides sat just at the surface level of the sea. This meant that in a terrible storm, the captain could lie down in the canoe and be safe, as the old fisherman had done during the terremore. I figured it would make a decent substitute as a dingy or a life raft. And we had so little distance left to Panama.

  I knew Bryan wanted badly to leave, and I thought that if I didn’t take him sailing soon, he would probably abandon the trip and fly back to LA. So we left Puntarenas and my forlorn Boston Whaler and the Land Cruiser behind. I hoped that in the future I would find my way back to retrieve them both.

  I had fished often from the stern of Valkyrien since leaving San Francisco. When I am messing about in a boat, there is nothing quite so good for me as eating fresh-caught fish. The biggest fishing problem I’d been having was that the line fouled constantly in the Whaler—and then, after El Salvador, in the Whaler and the canoe. I spent hours on the stern untangling the line, knowing it was unlikely that we would find replacement monofilament in any of the small coastal villages where we stopped. In any case, I didn’t like to be wasteful with fishing equipment.

  After we left the Whaler behind in Puntarenas, I hoped to have better luck not tangling the fishing line. Unfortunately, the rough wood of the dugout canoe caught up the line every bit as often as the Whaler’s outboard. Finally, I resolved to lay out about 125 yards of steel wire to drop the lure below the level of the canoe. About six minutes after I trailed the wire back, a sportfishing boat came racing out of some secret anchorage near shore. It sped along, completely unmindful that someone might be fishing off a sail
boat.

  I jumped up to the transom, picked up the rod and held it over my head, waving it back and forth. Despite my towering vantage on Valkyrien’s stern, the sportfisherman did not give me even a passing glance. Moments later his propeller caught my wire and began winding it out. The fishing boat was traveling at close to 30 knots. I have no idea how fast their propeller turned, but clearly the line was wrapping around their shaft incredibly fast. I used steel wire and heavy test line because I was not fishing for sport but rather to eat. I did not want to lose a fish to broken line, and I didn’t want to lose my line to a fish.

  I watched, horrified, as the line spooled out so quickly that the reel literally began smoking. It raced away until there was none left and the rod flew out of my hands. Only a moment later, the line snapped, and I watched the hollow rod, floating just below the surface, slowly drifting aft of Valkyrien.

  I determined not to jump in after it; I had spent way too much time untangling line. But I kept staring at my old rod. The Lott Brothers had built it for me when I was in college, and I just could not let it go. I jumped into the cockpit, pulled the gearshift back to neutral, and shouted loudly at Bryan to come on deck and take the wheel. Then I dove over the stern, swimming overhand rapidly toward my rod, not realizing that I had pulled the gearshift past neutral, all the way into reverse.

  I had tied the canoe about sixty feet behind Valkyrien, and I thought that if I swam quickly, I could grab the rod before the canoe passed us. I would then climb into the canoe and pull myself back to Valkyrien.

  Valkyrien did not stop, nor reverse direction immediately. Her momentum carried her forward. I dove in, swam, sprinting, using up all my energy. But I grabbed the rod with my left hand and at the same time caught the stern of the canoe with my right. Valkyrien’s momentum jerked me hard, and I lifted up and threw the rod into the canoe, being careful to keep the pressure of my right hand along the centerline. I didn’t want the canoe flipping or filling with water while I was being dragged.