Swell

by Liz Clark

  Thankfully, Taputu, who helped me guide Swell into the haul-out cradle, has taken to me in a fatherly way. In my deepest moments of frustration I go to him. Mostly using sign language, he figures out how to help. Some mornings he even tosses a chocolate croissant up into my cockpit. As the midday heat burns, the noise stops for one short hour while the workers gather to eat in the shade of a dry-docked boat. Taputu insists I join them daily. I sit with my French-English dictionary, notebook and pen, picking words out of their conversations and vegetables out of my beef curry. The secretary isn’t thrilled about my presence, but day after day I turn her poison into medicine, giving her only kindness. Clock strikes 1 pm, she pulls one last heavy drag on her cigarette, flicks the butt, and everyone gets back to work.

  The Ever-Expanding Project List

  Life with fewer boys around is simpler, but not easier. To avoid the twenty-minute bike ride to the store, I get by on black coffee and plain oatmeal, lunches from the food truck with the yard crew, and chopped cabbage salads for dinner mixed with whatever canned food I dig out of my stocks. I can deal with the boring food, but the mosquitoes are relentless, and materials and yard fees are quickly adding up.

  I finally start grinding the paint off the skeg with the power tools, and end up with toxic bottom paint in my ears, mouth, and eyes, so I copy the yard workers’ look, and wrap an old T-shirt around my face. My arms tire quickly, though, and my strokes come out swirling and random. Every now and then Taputu walks by, grabs the grinder, and passes over the skeg in flawless, methodical strokes to show me how I should do it. I take mental notes, but I’m not strong enough to do it quite like he does. My muscles burn while dragonflies inspect morning puddles.

  Once I strip the skeg down to bare wood, the small gap between it and the hull is more visible, so the next step is to fiberglass over the skeg-to-hull joint to create a watertight seal. The only fiberglass repair I’ve done is on my surfboards; this is a whole new level. So I set the project aside to gather more information, and tackle a job that seems less complicated: removing the paint around the waterline.

  There must be sixteen layers of old paint on the boat and it happens that the very deepest one is bubbling and cracking—so it’s back to the unwieldy grinder, which constantly wants to jump out of my hands. If I don’t stay focused, it eats quickly past the paint and into the hull itself.

  After a couple weeks, I finish what feels like a heroic paint-stripping performance, but Sylvain, the local fiberglass specialist, gives me some bad news. Because I have made deformities in the hull with the grinder, I’ll have to sand the whole area again to flatten out the worst of them, fill the deepest nicks with two-part epoxy spackle, and sand it level with the hull when it dries.

  “And zen, you muss poot seex coats of epoxy resin to make eet wa-tair-proof,” Sylvain says. “And you weell haff to sand lightly between eech one.”

  Over lunch one day, Taputu asks me when I’m going to glass over the skeg. I shrug my shoulders. Cesar, a guy who paints boats on the other side of the yard, has joined our lunch circle today and after some discussion, he volunteers to help.

  “It’ll only take a couple hours,” he says. “Then maybe you can help me with a big paint job on a boat I’ve got coming up soon.”

  I learn volumes about large-scale glassing from Cesar, and the skeg gets glassed to the hull perfectly, but the work list just keeps getting longer. I discover the fiberglass at the back edge of the keel is cracked and rotting, there are several deep blisters in the hull, and the rudder is waterlogged. Sometimes after lunch, I squeeze in a few questions to the yard crew, and if I’m lucky, someone comes over to have a look.

  Thierry, the mechanic, lays a hand on my prop one day while looking at the cracks in the back of the keel. The prop shaft wiggles. “Too much loose,” he says, “you need a new bearing.” Sigh.

  To deal with this means pulling out the propeller shaft, which looks simple enough, but the bolts on the shaft are corroded. I douse them in penetrating oil for a few days, and then spend hours banging with a hammer to loosen them. Once I finally get the shaft out, Thierry and Taputu help me extract the cutlass bearing from the hull. But it turns out there are no replacement cutlass bearings in the right size on the island, so I have to order one and wait.

  One day after lunch Sylvain pokes at a small depression in the hull that appears wet. “You muss be see what’s underneath, looks not good ...”

  I grind it down to find an old thru-hull that had been shoddily sealed from the inside with caulking.

  “I can’t take it anymore!” I cry to the passing clouds as another grinding and glassing job goes on the list. I lie in the grimy cockpit; tears flow down my cheeks. “I’ve had enough of this yard and all the projects and the toxins and being dirty all the time and the gross food and bugs. And the kisses. I hate those disgusting morning kisses!”

  I’ve tried to embrace the customary French greeting—kissing a person on both cheeks—but I’ve decided that there are times and places where this custom is not appropriate, boatyards being high on the list. By 8 am everyone is sweating, but each new day calls for more kisses. There is no way to avoid crossing paths with the many workers and boat owners in the yard each morning. The awkward two seconds of facial proximity feel like an intrusion into my personal space with the bonus souvenir of commingled sweat and saliva. And everyone thinks it’s totally normal!

  I’ve learned who to tolerate and who to avoid, slinking around the yard to evade the lonely, unshaven French singlehanders who clearly take advantage of the custom, but often they pop out of nowhere and come at me, with their chapped and saliva-coated lips perked before they even say bonjour.

  The Boatyard School of Enlightenment

  Most days, it feels as if I’ll never get out of here. I can’t give up, though, and the only way out is through. The sun comes up and goes down over the rows of masts. Boats come and go, but Swell remains. One, two, three, nearly four months now.

  The day arrives to help Cesar with the paint job in exchange for his assistance with my skeg. We work into the evening hours and then sit on a couple of palm stumps near the water’s edge as he recounts his own path to arriving here. He left his home in Brazil straight out of high school to camp his way down the coast. Later, he went to Nepal and trekked through the snowy highlands in jeans and a pair of Converse. After that he traveled through Europe eating out of trash cans and living on the streets, mostly for the experience.

  “I’m struggling,” I tell him. “The labor is so physically intense. I’m not eating or sleeping well, either. And I dread the cold showers with these chilly September trades.”

  He looks at me sprightly. “You know, for a while I was living in England working as a prep cook in a restaurant, seven days a week. The hours were grueling and some days I could hardly find the strength to get up. It was ice cold in our flat and we had no hot water. I’d fill the tub with freezing cold water straight from the frosted pipes and force myself to get in. At first I hated it, but little by little I realized that the cold water revitalized me. After a while, I looked forward to those cold baths.”

  Over the next few days, I work at embracing the cold showers. With a changed perspective, I actually begin to appreciate the invigorating properties of the cool water on my skin.

  I buy a net to deter the mosquitos, but my bunk is so narrow that the netting clings to me and the little blood-suckers stick their noses right through into my bare skin. But if adversity is the way to enlightenment, then I guess I should be thanking these mini-vampires, and the secretary, the newly discovered blisters in the hull, the clogged carburetor in my outboard, the cold showers, mud, constant noise, and my broken headlamp. Fighting them does nothing to change my situation; I’ve tried that. It makes everything worse.

  Acceptance is all that can save me.

  Each day brings another challenge—be it with my own morale or a difficult person or project—but with more acceptance comes humor, new energy, and small miracles. By
and by I stop itching as my body grows immune to the mosquito bites. I feel myself toughening to the discomfort and labor, brushing off irritations, and finding moments of solace in the morning dew, the cool evening breeze, and the silence of night. Reading from a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, I understand that anything done with love can be an act of devotion, so I try to put heart into the jobs instead of dreading them. Maybe this is karmic entanglement from past-life choices? Or maybe it’s just boat life.

  Either way, I do my best to find opportunities to work on myself— spending evenings studying French and Tahitian, or replaying the day’s interactions in my mind to see where I could have reacted with less emotion and more control, less sensitivity and more humor. I realize that my reactions to the secretary’s lack of compassion might come from my own demanding nature. Maybe when a man belittles my competence, it strikes a soft spot because of my own insecurities. Sometimes I do okay; other times I fail miserably, but the gods unfailingly present exactly what I need to work on.

  Every day I get a little closer to the end, but now it’s not only about getting Swell out of here, it’s about who I am becoming in pursuit of that goal. The work, both on my boat and on myself, is the means to the dream, so it’s really all a labor of love. For the dream, I’m willing to push myself further, both mentally and physically, and that’s what breaks us through our own perceived limitations.

  By becoming aware of my own internal struggles, I gain the ability to sense the individual challenges of people around me. I realize they are either going to look at their issues, or keep encountering them again and again in the universal struggle to find meaning, happiness, security, balance, love, and peace amongst the seas of life. I feel less alone when I see that everyone is dealing with similar stuff, and I feel a new softness toward all of them: the courageous yard workers, the street kids, the secretary, the weeds that push from below the used oil collection tank, the stray cats hunting for their next meal, even the creepy kissers. Suddenly I’m connected to all living things through our struggles.

  First-World Problems

  I take my dad up on his offer of a frequent flyer ticket home for the holidays. Swell isn’t finished, but after five grueling months in the boatyard, I’m ready for some family hugs and first-world problems. I hop a plane with a small bag of Polynesian souvenirs, a hand-carved wooden cane for Barry, and the clothes on my back.

  Shortly after my arrival, my sister, Kathleen, and I head off to the supermarket. Stunned by the variety of products available, I wander aimlessly through the aisles, just marveling. A businessman bellows into his bluetooth earpiece about a merger while he bags a handful of bean sprouts, then saunters over to the meat counter and uses an exasperated display of sign language to order his desired cut. Over in the dairy section, a thin middle-aged woman thrusts her cart frantically past a mother and her kids by a stand of fruit roll-ups, as if the containers of fat-free cottage cheese on the other side are running away. I stand in quiet awe until Kathleen nudges me a little.

  “Helloooo?” she coos, flashing Mom’s list across my view. “Can you go grab some green tea for Dad?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I reply, and wander off to find the tea section. I stand in front of the massive selection dumbfounded by all the colorful packages, prices, and varieties.

  Does Dad like green tea with jasmine? Or a hint of mint? Or maybe green apple blossom? Green tea with lemon essence? Pomegranate proclivities?

  Kathleen appears a moment later, rolls her eyes at me, and selects one off the shelf. We head back to the one-bedroom condo my parents have downsized into near our family sailboat in the heart of San Diego. It’s great to be back—the hugs, hot showers, conveniences, and food varieties are divine—but living in a 550-square-foot space with my mom, my sister and her dog, and my father when he’s in town, soon revives some of our less pleasant family dynamics. My sister and I fight over the car. Mom says I’m selfish. Dad drinks, Mom and Dad bicker, then they both drink excessively to try to forget about it. Dad flies away on business. I’m frustrated over their continued sorrow. Rita, my sister’s dog, looks at us like we’re all crazy.

  City life feels suffocating and adds to my irritability. I find myself pointing fingers. Ugly parts of my character resurface. Applying my new wisdom here with my family proves to be the most challenging and probably the most important. Once in a while, I talk about Melanie’s principles, or the Four Agreements, or positive thinking, but it’s clear that if I don’t embody the ethics, my words are useless. Truly changing myself will be the only real way to spur change in anyone else.

  I drive up to Santa Barbara to take Barry sailing on Freya. His health is good and he’s thrilled to be out on the water. Then I track down needed boat parts and meet with sponsors. The good news is that the folks at Patagonia, who have been helping a bit since the beginning of the voyage, loved my blogs from Kiribati and they’ve invited me to be an official surf ambassador for the brand. It won’t be a ton of money, but it definitely helps.

  Sweat, Blood, and More Work

  Back in the yard, my California polish quickly wears off. By midday my first day back, there is grime under my fingernails and sweat in my eyes. It’s the height of summer in the South Pacific, which means stifling temperatures and less wind. I feel like an ant under a magnifying glass. By the third day I have pierced my left thumb with a screwdriver and ground the skin off my wrist with 40-grit paper on the power sander. I’m already longing for a salad and a hug.

  There are only a few more tasks to finish: install the roller furler, fill and fair the rudder, paint the waterline stripes, roll on bottom paint, and polish the hull. Sylvain helps with the roller furler, and when I’m ready to paint the anti-fouling, a sweet French girl from another boat offers a hand. By early afternoon, Bernadette and I have slathered Swell with two coats of thick blue bottom paint. It took seven months, but Swell’s blue skirt is finally back on!

  The next morning, I use nearly everything left in my bank account to pay my yard bill, and Swell floats gracefully off the haul-out track. I maneuver her to the marina, then buy a case of beer for the yard workers. It’s Friday; we dance and celebrate inside the garage with local music as the rain plinks and patters on the corrugated metal roof.

  Freedom is so close, but right away the days blur together again into another project marathon. It turns out the headsail Holly gave me doesn’t fit the new roller furler, so I take it to a local sailmaker to have it cut down. I run a new halyard to replace the one that broke on the crossing with Mom all those months ago, but the job turns out to be ridiculously complicated. I install the new wind generator Patagonia bought me, replace the solar charge controller, and remount the refrigerator cold plate since I had removed it to fiberglass the insulation into the cold box. After three more weeks of nonstop work, the amount of chaos accumulated inside Swell is mindboggling: wood and metal scraps; half-used glues and caulking tubes; bits of wires; dirty rags; random screws, washers, and nuts; cans of paint, varnish, thinners, resins, and fiberglass; cat food from feeding the stray cats; used-up sandpaper; and tools everywhere!

  Finally, on a Sunday afternoon, the tools and materials are stowed, the newly refinished floors swept, water tanks filled, decks scrubbed, bosun’s chair put away, and sails and sheets back in place. I quietly cast off Swell’s lines and disappear across the turquoise lagoon.

  14,659

  Nautical Miles Traveled

  Tube

  Trials

  Eight Tahitian Dads

  Afloat again, Swell and I rush to meet an Aussie filmer to finish up the footage needed for the Dear & Yonder surf film. After a jam-packed ten days spent tracking down waves together, I settle back into life on the sea: My lagoon swimming pool shimmers each morning; I enjoy open-air showers on the aft deck, the chilly air in my refrigerator, and sleeping under the stars without mosquitoes buzzing. The new wind generator boosts the amount of power to the batteries, so now I’m able to use the lights, fridge, stereo, and computer without hau
ling out the portable gasoline generator every evening. Plus, I have the freedom to sail again.

  I decide to see parts of Tahiti I haven’t yet explored. It’s time to face the wave phenomenon at Teahupo‘o. Professional surfers fly in from around the world to challenge themselves and hopefully ride through one of its enormous round tubes.

  There is a swell on the way and after building my skills surfing reef passes, I’m ready to give it a shot. I’ve seen the photos, and part of me wants nothing to do with its menacing thick lip, ledgy takeoff, and shallow reef, but another part of me—that slightly insane part—knows I can’t sail away without at least making an attempt.

  I spot two masts in a small fishing marina, as I steer Swell into the calm waters of the Teahupo‘o lagoon between the green and red markers. A man in a single outrigger canoe with a surfboard across the front guides me around the coral heads of the shallow entrance. I hop to the bow to tie on dock lines and throw out bumpers, then back to the wheel to spin Swell 180 degrees into the premier Teahupo‘o parking spot.

  Fishermen gathered near an ice house stare from across the marina. A crowd of young Tahitian girls gather at the end of the dock watching curiously. I wave and smile. They wave and smile. The fishermen raise their beers. The girls go back to playing. It’s Saturday afternoon in the quiet little town at the end of the road. The opposite side of the marina hosts a colorful lineup of local fishing boats. I introduce myself to the girls, then hop on my bike and pedal over to make sure it’s okay to park Swell here at the dock.

  “‘Iaorana!” I offer, skidding to a halt with my bare feet as brakes. The salty-looking Tahitian fishermen of ranging ages are sitting on crates, car hoods, a cooler, and a rusty-wheeled dolly. “O vau Liz.” (I’m Liz.)

  For a moment they’re silent and I feel a wave of shyness coming over me.