Maiden Voyage (3 page)

My range of vision was a foggy perimeter of 100 feet. I grabbed the little hand-held VHF radio and steered
Varuna
on the same heading as when I lost sight of them. “Daddy, Daddy. This is
Varuna,”
I called, over and over, beginning to cry again. “Can you hear me? Daddy, this is
Varuna
, come in
please
.” Finally, they came back and I screamed, “The engine is broken again. What should I do?”

“You know the problem is in the fuel line,” my father called, “and I showed you how to bleed the system. Come on now, you have a sailboat. You don't even
need
an engine. Put up those sails and let's go.”

Gasping and hiccuping, I turned the boat into the wind, found the jib halyard, wrapped it around a winch, pulled it up and cleated it off as the sail flapped noisily. Heading
Varuna
downwind, I trimmed in the slatting sail until it filled with wind and we took off. This was the first time in my life that I had sailed a boat all by myself.

•   •   •

That morning, I had gone to say goodbye to Jeri, promising her I'd be back. I gazed around at the familiar space of her TriBeCa loft, which had been my home since my father had kicked me out of the house two years before. I climbed up to the cozy platform she had built for me over our walk-in closet, and hugged her cats, Bumblebee and Bula. Bumblebee put her nose up in the air, delicately licked my face and pranced off. Bula scratched and hissed at me for the last time. I took mental snapshots, trying to savor for the last time every essence that was New York.

When we arrived at the boat, journalists, TV cameras and microphones came swooping down on us. Once again, my responses to their questions were awkward monosyllables. I just didn't really want to go to college, I said. This seems like a great way to see the world and write about what I see. Yes, my father bought the boat in lieu of college tuition, but he's only letting me borrow it; I'm going to pay him back and support myself along the way by writing articles for
Cruising World
, a sailing magazine. No, I've never handled a boat by myself before, I stammered, but I have a lot of books and did take a course in celestial navigation. Why am I doing it?

“I dunno . . . why not?” I said, with a nervous laugh. The journalists all looked at me as if I were nuts.

On board
Varuna
were last-minute presents and mementos tucked into every corner by well-wishers. There was an apple pie and a doll from my mother, homemade soups, chocolate chip cookies, green apples, sacks of books, a harmonica,
Fat Freddy's Cat
cartoons, a flute, letters and little packages marked to be opened at milestone points of the trip.

I shivered and sweated, looking for Jeri. She was standing inconspicuously behind the crowd. I ran to hug her and she held me close. I couldn't begin to express what I wanted to say to this generous lady who had helped me so much over the hurdles of the past two years. Crying uncontrollably, I kissed her goodbye. “Tania.” she said, crying, “for me, you will always be my daughter. I love you. Be careful and always follow your heart.”

I looked around. There was my mother, standing straight, trying to answer the reporters' questions, insisting to everybody how proud she was. I was in a daze. What do I do now? Is it time to go? There were Christian and Fritz, two of my family's closest friends, both artists—one a Yugoslavian and the other a Swiss—who, along with Jeri, had been surrogate parents to us for as long as I could remember. Christian put his hand on my shoulder. “Now be careful,” he said, trying to be happy. “We want you to come back home.” Fritz pounded me on the back, then hugged me, “See you in two years, little one,” he said. “Take care of yourself.”

I climbed over
Varuna's
lifelines into the cockpit and through the companionway into my home—home for the next two years. Putting on my foul-weather gear, I took a deep breath, went back up into the cockpit and feebly waved for the last time to all those who couldn't come on the
UBS
.

Four hours of sailing later, with my hand numb on the tiller,
Varuna
was threading her way through a barrier of fish traps and rounding the bend into Horseshoe Cove at Sandy Hook where I was to spend the night, get organized and gather my thoughts before setting out to sea. My father coached me from the fishing boat in anchoring
Varuna
under sail, another first. The engine still had a little sputter left and therefore a small influence on headway. I dropped the jib, ran up forward, disengaged the brake on the anchor windlass and let the anchor and chain slide out.
Varuna
backed up sideways to the wind, just as she was supposed to, before reaching the end of the anchor rode. But then she kept on sliding back, headed for the beach, still with a broadside breeze.

“Daddy!” I shrieked. “Help me! The anchor isn't holding! I'm going aground!” The fishing boat quickly maneuvered itself into a
position next to me. My father jumped onto
Varuna
, grabbed the chain and effortlessly pulled it back up.

“You didn't let out enough chain, Tania. My God, you let out only five feet when you can see that there is
fifteen
feet of water here. You know better than that.” He was right. The chain hadn't even touched the ground.

“You're on your own now. Get some rest. Everything will seem fine after you sleep. Look how frazzled you are. I know that you are able to at least anchor a boat. Just get some sleep and call me on the radio before you leave. Goodbye, my daughter. Lots of strength and courage to you. I know you can do it. Now, show everybody else.”

“No, Daddy, wait!” I cried. “Please stay with me a little while longer. I don't want to be alone yet.”

“No,” he replied, “the longer I stay, the harder it will get.” He boarded the fishing boat, they pulled away and we waved until they were swallowed into the mist. Dazed and petrified, I was alone.

I climbed down in the cabin, found a pack of cigarettes and lit one with trembling hands. What was to become of me? Suddenly my future seemed as complicated as the pilot charts that were strewn about the cabin. My father and I had pored over them as he showed me how to decipher the curling lines, circles and symbols that covered the oceans of the world like hieroglyphics. Those symbols were a finger on the pulse of the sea. With them, I could second-guess her moods at certain times of the year, figure out the monthly averages of her currents, her prevailing winds, wave habits, probabilities of storms. From the pilot charts, I already knew more about the sea than I thought I would ever know about myself.

I tried to imagine all the exotic people I was going to meet and the wonderful things I would see in those places where
Varuna
was about to take me—Bermuda, the sun-drenched islands of the Caribbean, the Panama Canal, the prehistoric beauty of the Galápagos, Gauguin's paradisiacal South Pacific, my Shangri-la in Sri Lanka, the Seychelles, St. Helena and carnival in Brazil. Until today, those names had just been pushpins on the map of my brain. One by one, they were about to become my realities.

•   •   •

In 1983, two years before my departure day, I had never even set foot on a sailboat. We all liked to tease that it was my father's midlife crisis that set in motion the series of events that would change our family—and especially me—forever. After his forty-fifth birthday, his mind had started to work overtime and he began a period of
constant worry. What had he done with his life? he asked himself. Was he enjoying it all? Was he missing out on something? He slowly lost interest in his artwork and seldom sat down at his drawing board anymore. When he did, it was to doodle wild-eyed monsters with exaggerated genitalia. His days were spent either worrying about the comings and goings of teenagers or maintaining his real estate. Rents from the buildings he owned had made him financially independent; he no longer had to sell his paintings to make a living and, in his eyes, there were no more emotional Everests to climb. He had time to think, to look at his life. He didn't like what he saw.

One day, while sitting on the toilet at Christian's house and flipping through a sailing magazine, he suddenly came upon the solution. Within a month, he had taken a mail-order course in celestial navigation, flown to Florida for a one-week learn-to-sail course and headed off to England to buy a 38-foot sailboat,
Pathfinder of Percuil
.

His plan was ambitious. With his children as crew, he would sail the boat from England to the Canary Islands by way of Spain, Portugal and Morocco. Then, with some friends, he would take her across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and then up the East Coast to New York. It was to be a real family adventure. At first, he was reluctant to have me along, fearing that the potential for arguments between us was too great within the confines of a 38-foot sailboat. But finally, his girlfriend, Jeri, convinced him that it was just the thing the two of us needed to repair our relationship, which had been severed when I was fifteen.

Sailing is an activity that can take years to master before heading off into the wild blue yonder. My father was itchy to get going, so instead, we had three days. He figured that whatever we didn't learn from
Pathfinder's
previous owner, we'd learn as we went along. Those three days were a blur of sailing practice and man-overboard drills, where we learned the basic workings of the boat, how to raise and lower the sails with all the different spaghettis of lines, how the wheel or tiller is used to steer. The hardest concept to grasp was how the boat uses the wind to move forward. No matter how many times and ways it was explained to us, it wasn't until later on, as we crossed the Atlantic, that it all began to sink in. Only my little brother Tony, with his mathematician's mind, managed to grasp immediately the aerodynamic principles. With just a tiny glimmer of understanding, this lone hyperactive adult and three of his children sailed past the heads of Cornwall and out to sea.

The next month took us to Vigo and Bayona in Spain; Lisbon,
Portugal; Casablanca and finally to the Canary Islands. Seeing a new side of Europe was thrilling, but the real excitement for us was life at sea aboard
Pathfinder
. She was a kind and patient teacher, taking our clumsy handling in stride. We brutalized her every time we tacked; we manhandled the wheel, and sent the boom and sails flying across the cockpit to bash over to the other side, sending shudders through the rigging. We overtrimmed the sails and she'd heel so far onto her side that the roiling sea would come sloshing over the deck. We'd scream and uncleat all the sails in a panic, the sheets would whir through the mainsheet block and she'd round upright again, in irons, ready for the next exercise, while we tore around like the Keystone Cops trying to figure out what we were doing wrong. My father spent the lion's share of his time down below in the cabin, fiddling around with the navigation equipment, trying to figure out exactly where we were, while Tony, Jade and I rotated watches, trying to keep
Pathfinder
on course.

Aboard this forgiving boat, we became a closely knit team. Slowly and surely, we learned every nuance of her motions, separating her strong points from her weak ones. Aboard her, we all worked together with the sea and the wind to reach a goal and, for the first time in years, we took the time to get to know each other.

My father was right about one thing—sailing was special. Thoughts became clearer and simpler at sea, uncluttered by the pressures of responsibilities and familiar habits. It was easy to be happy. And during the night watch, my favorite time, the inky darkness of the sky would be lit by a twinkling mantle of stars; the boat would jog rhythmically through the sea swells, and sometimes, if I struck it lucky, pailfuls of phosphorescence sparked like fireflies in
Pathfinder's
wake. It was during these times that my father and I slowly began to bandage the wounds of our past and know each other again.

We left
Pathfinder
in the Canary Islands for the winter and returned to New York—my father, Tony and Jade to their house and I, once again, home to Jeri. But this time, things were different. I had plans. I wanted to work for a few months in the city and make enough money to join Nina, Fritz, my father and
Pathfinder
for the 2,800-mile trip across the Atlantic.

I took a job in Manhattan as a bicycle messenger. Every day at eight in the morning, I jumped on my ten-speed and headed into the world of rush hours, elevators, crowded streets, traffic jams and outraged taxi drivers, delivering envelopes back and forth across the metropolis of New York City. Whatever the cons were in handling a
bike through the mainstream of Manhattan's business day, the pros outweighed them. There were no fixed wages and no fixed hours. The faster I pedaled, the more money I made. It got so that I could get across the city in eleven and a half minutes flat and deliver an average of twenty messages a day.

Fritz had never been on a sailboat before, and both he and Nina were afraid of the water, so it was with a different sense of adventure that the four of us left the Canary Islands for the Caribbean two months later. On November 24, 1983, we bid farewell to the last piece of land for 2,776 miles and twenty-eight days.

Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic—I'm not sure where—a plan hatched in my father's head. He was apprehensive about our arrival home, fearing that I'd fall back in with old friends and bad habits. Aimlessness is a condition unthinkable to Ernst Aebi, a man true to his Swiss-German background who must either have a clear plan or be changing a plan at all times. For my father, living with someone without a plan is just about as bad as not having one himself. The closer we got to New York, the more it gnawed at him. Sitting back in the cockpit one evening, as he watched the sunset over a glass of brandy, he blurted it out.