Maiden Voyage (25 page)

The Samoans keep their dead close to home and often, on the front lawns of the houses, there were brightly whitewashed graves decorated with flowers. There are no fences or walls marking boundaries of pastures and property, and the people still proudly rode around on horses bareback, through the flocks of goats and cattle that seemed to belong to everyone.

The Samoans are immense people, not fat but rather healthy, seemingly well fed and well muscled. Because of their Polynesian and Melanesian heritage, a lot of them have fuzzy hair, close to an afro, and many of the men's light brown skin is covered from head to toe with elaborate tattoos of animals and exquisite geometric designs. They wore their beautiful tattoos with such great pride that I began to toy with the thought of having one myself.

The terrain of Apia was flat around the harbor and the sun reflected hotly off the pastel-colored colonial buildings. There was a peaceful, sleepy air about the place, such as I imagined Tom Sawyer's village would have had. There wasn't the inherently fiery Latin personality that I had come across in the French and Spanish countries; rather the islanders seemed more to take after the peaceful, slow-paced Germans and later, the New Zealanders who once colonized the island. The second language is English and almost everyone speaks it with a charming New Zealand lilt mixed with the music of their own accent. To me, Marquesan, Tahitian and Samoan all
sound pretty much the same, a sort of phonetically spoken Asian language laced with many twists and rolls of the tongue, and I stuttered along with my usual Please's and Thank You's in Samoan, unable to get much further in the short time I was there.

Aboard
Varuna
, meat and dairy products could last no more than twenty-four hours, but eating out of cans was to be avoided as long as possible. Because of the steamy-hot climate and lack of refrigeration, going to the market for provisions was a daily ritual, until I met
Kreiz
.

The 65-foot French schooner
Kreiz an Ael
, which had arrived in Pago Pago the day before I left, arrived in Apia soon after
Varuna
, and dropped her anchor nearby. Colleen remembered meeting the captain in Tahiti, and before leaving
Varuna
, she introduced me to Fred, who introduced us to his crew—Patrick, a Tahitian boy, and three girls, Estelle, Laurence and Marie—who were all headed for New Caledonia.

I immediately felt like a gawky teenager around these three gorgeous French girls, but they all made me feel right at home and comfortably included me for meals or whenever there was something fun going on. They were a boisterous group and with the exception of Estelle, for whom this trip was a vacation from a dancer's life in France, all had been bitten by wanderlust and were out to see the world.

Kreiz
was a commodious beauty; Fred had designed the interior and, once inside, you almost forgot that you were on a boat. There were several sleeping cabins arranged around the main salon, with its dining table, galley and lounge. An immense freezer stored all sorts of goodies like steak, chicken and fish. Being able to store these things and consider them a part of provisioning was completely alien to me.
Varuna
only had an icebox, and providing I could even find ice, things could only be kept one step below warm for not more than a couple of days. After gourmet feasts, I would either cuddle up in Marie and Laurence's cabin with Estelle for discussions on hand creams, foot massages and picture shows, or sit around with Fred in the main salon and discuss engine lubricants and water pumps. There was time for silliness with the girls and a time for seriousness between two captains.

Patrick, the Tahitian, was a shy, handsome boy and he said he wanted to get a new tattoo to add to the one on the back of his shoulder. He and Colleen found a local skin engraver named Sam and we went together to his
fale
to watch Patrick get a new adornment.

A group of huge Samoans gathered around guzzling beer while he lay down on the floor to await his surgery. It took two painstaking afternoons for Sam to create the design that encircled Patrick's thigh. I watched carefully for any aftereffects or signs of excessive pain, but Patrick assured me it wasn't too bad. That afternoon, I decided to have a permanent Samoan anklet tattoo engraved the next day.

When Sam and three of his friends arrived at
Varuna
early the next morning, Colleen ran to purchase a painkiller bottle of rum, I boiled the water and Sam mixed it with the black soot from a kerosene fire to make the dye. Unwrapping a package of sewing needles, he strapped five of them onto a wooden stick with tightly bound string. While preparing, he told us that a real man gets a tattoo with a shark's tooth instead of a needle. The tooth with the dye, which is considerably less pointed than a needle, is tapped into the skin with a mallet. One of his friends wanted to show off his tattoo of a flying fox, and turning around, he revealed the enormous South Pacific bat that covered his entire back.

As I looked at all the pockmarks from the tooth, I began to feel a little queasy; the idea of five needles was bad enough. Colleen arrived back just in time, poured a coffee cup full of rum and, because I'm normally a nondrinker, I inhaled it and surrendered my trust and ankle to Sam's ministrations. For three hours, I lay stunned on my bunk, as he painstakingly designed and then carved away with the sewing needles the most beautiful anklet I could have ever hoped for. Sam assured me that all his designs were one of a kind and that mine was an original. “I can't remember any of them well enough to duplicate anyway,” he said.

Patrick was so inspired by my tattoo that he asked Sam for another one, also around the ankle, as soon as mine was finished. But Sam had been slowly draining my bottle of rum and, unfortunately for Patrick, the next creation turned out to be a little erratic. That evening, almost everyone in the anchorage came by to either sneak a peek or to take pictures of my ankle. The next day, when the effects of the rum had worn off, Colleen had a ring tattooed on her finger, and a trend was started.

As a last thank you to each other, I gave Sam, who loved to make music, my guitar. He was so grateful that he turned around and carved for me a pair of oars with
Varuna's
name on each of them. One was crafted from the wood of a lime tree and the other, mango.

One evening, I returned to
Varuna
from dinner on
Kreiz
to find an anonymous note attached to my lifelines.” We just want to tell you that someone wants to spill the beans about your crew from Pago
Pago to Apia. We strongly urge you to go back to Pago Pago and remake the trip alone.” No signature.

Feeling as though someone had kicked me in the guts, I read and reread the note, with the hackles rising up and down my spine. As far as I was concerned, taking Colleen was no secret. In Pago Pago, it had never entered my mind that taking someone for 80 miles out of a 30,000-mile voyage could be detrimental to a record, should I ever reach home in time to attain it anyway. That someone would assume I had any intentions of keeping Colleen a secret was an affront to my integrity, and now, to return would go against the grain of what my trip meant to me. I was doing this trip to see the world, not to be in the
Guinness Book of Records
. Even though several other people urged me to retrace my steps alone, I remained adamant. “I didn't bring Colleen on a passage,” I insisted, “I only brought her on a one-day trip of 80 lousy miles out of so many. We didn't even sail, we motored.”

All these were cavalier thoughts. What my father would say and how disappointed he would be never entered my mind. After all, it was only 80 miles and it wouldn't have killed me to resail it. But in the end, I felt that my honor was at stake, so without regret, I carried on with life and put the whole issue out of mind.

•   •   •

I told Fred that I had been entertaining the notion of going to Wallis Island, a French territory a little to the west of Samoa that boats rarely visited. A friend in Tahiti had told me all about it, insisting that it was a place that shouldn't be missed, even with my hectic schedule. “Please go,” he had said, “it's only two days from Pago Pago and on your path.” I had promised to meet Magrete and Reidar there and was looking forward to it. I fired up Fred's imagination about Wallis, he described it to Patrick and the girls and everyone was in agreement. “It'll be fun,” he said. “We'll sail together and throw dinners to you.”

I said good-bye to Colleen and all the other cruising people I had gotten to know in Pago Pago. Taking the route north of Tonga and Fiji, the island groups where almost everyone was heading after Apia, I knew that this was the last common meeting ground. From here on in, I would be taking a sailing route a little less traveled and wouldn't be seeing many familiar boats; the itineraries of the majority were more relaxed than my own, and their courses would take them to islands farther south.

On June 21, at 3:00
P.M
., I hauled up
Varuna's
anchor hand over
hand and then motored out of Apia Harbor. Behind me, the girls on
Kreiz
huddled on the foredeck, giggling and pressing the button that automatically gathered in their anchor chain. A gentle, fresh wind was blowing from the east. I raised the sails, boomed out the genny, and watched
Varuna
take off down the waves, whispering a phrase I wanted to remember,
“Tofa soy fua. Tofa soy fua. Tofa soy fua . . .”
Thank you in Samoan.

It was a gorgeous 250 miles to Wallis.
Kreiz
was reefed down so that
Varuna
could keep up, and I hoisted as much sail as possible to maintain speed. As a result, we went faster than ever before. My star fixes worked out perfectly when I checked them over the radio with Fred, and I ate like a queen.

With the new solar panel, energy consumption was not the problem it had been on other passages. Thinking up ways to use all my newfound power, I talked with the girls on the VHF when they were bored on their watches and compared notes on the full moon that rose above us. They called to tell me what was on the dinner menu and I called back just to say hello. Every once in a while, they would increase their sail volume and come close to
Varuna
so that we could take pictures of each other.

By late afternoon on June 23, the low, rounded hump of Wallis peeped above a horizon afire in the orange and yellow rays of another setting sun. Even with the security of
Kreiz
, I was nervous about this landfall. Wallis island would be the closest thing to an atoll that I ever had to deal with. The fringing reefs extended well beyond the limits of the coastline and there was only one cut large enough to enter the lagoon. The pilot books bore ill tidings for boats attempting Honi Kulu pass, and had warnings of nasty 5-knot contrary currents and huge waves. The lagoon filled up with the breaking Pacific swells that thundered over the reefs, but the water exited mainly through this one pass. Worried that it would be impossible to enter, we approached,
Kreiz
first and
Varuna
following sheepishly, engines idling.

With a go-ahead signal from Fred ahead, we revved up and forged our way in. Even with
Varuna's
engine up to full revolutions, the current was so strong that it took nearly twenty minutes to cover the 500-foot-long pass. The evening wind had picked up, too, and I motored against it in the dwindling light to where
Kriez
was anchored, protected from the ocean swell behind a reef. It was too late to navigate our way through the coral heads to a safer anchorage, so we decided to do it early the next morning, when the sun would be at our backs. Otherwise, the glare of the sun in front would obscure
proper visibility through the water, and the first hint that a reef was there would come when we heard it crunching against the boat's hull. Early, before the next morning's calm had a chance to be taken over by the trades, we tied
Varuna
behind the larger boat and towed her around the coral heads to an anchorage in the lee of the island.

Ever since we'd met, Fred had been eager to teach me everything he knew about boats, and as Patrick and the girls went to explore the island, we spent the next few days going over
Varuna
with a fine-toothed comb. At twenty-eight, Fred was master of his own magnificent vessel and he hadn't achieved it through sloppy practices. Before attacking
Varuna
, he proudly showed me his engine, his new galley pump, and the master cabin with all his electronics. I commented on his diligence concerning the engine compartment, which was squeaky clean. He said, “When I was taught how to care for a boat, I learned that you should be able to touch any part of the engine with white gloves and they should remain white.” I thought about
Varuna's
little red beast and how rarely I would even lift up the cover, much less bend over to wipe it down.

“Boats are tender,” he said. “You have to treat them like vain women who need lots of care.” Fred tried pumping
Varuna's
toilet and shook his head. As we talked about our lives, he dismantled the pump, and painstakingly explained the working of it in detail. In no time, all the gaskets were exchanged for new ones and reassembled again. Up until now, I had never seen the insides of a toilet pump, simply praying that mine would be the special one that never broke.

We hooked up my radio's antenna by running it out the companionway, along the deck grab rail, and taping it up the side of the mast. In the past, I used to go outside with the radio and rotate the small telescopic antenna until I received a faint time tick by which I set my watch. That was the extent of my demands. But the radio was invented for a much grander scheme, and if it has a high enough antenna, it can reach its potential. Suddenly, with Fred's improvements, I could receive all sorts of medium-wave music and news stations in different languages from the surrounding islands. I could hear the BBC, Voice of America, Radio France and Radio Moscow on the shortwave lengths. The world was at my doorstep and I was excited by the new pastime awaiting my next ocean passage.