Maiden Voyage (43 page)

All too soon, it was time for Tony to return home. His airplane was leaving from Rome, so Olivier and I decided to take the ferry as far as Siracusa on the island of Sicily and see him off. We nearly made the trip with him by lingering on the train too long until it started drawing away. Just in time, Olivier and I leapt off to be reprimanded by a station guard, who softened up when I sadly explained,
“Mi brothero
, say bye-bye for
mucho tiempo.”

Back in Malta, Olivier and I were inseparable, wanting to savor every last minute and make it into a pleasurable memory to be carried through the next couple of months. Doing everything together, we went to the showers every evening, took the bus into town for mail every other day and even managed to get my new taffrail log through customs—a long-drawn-out hassle. My doctor befriended us and invited us for dinner with his family, and took us to see the village nestled in the corner of a little cove where the movie
Popeye
was filmed—a sea shantytown of houses all built a bit off kilter. We took buses to different parts of the island for meals and on other evenings spent time with friends on their boats.

Malta's location out in the middle of the Mediterranean, between Sicily and Africa, meant that the small 95-square-mile island had been virtually defenseless against the conquering civilizations of old. Countless forts, where each ruling empire had tried to ward off the armies of the next—Mesopotamians, Phoenicians, Moors, Greeks, Romans, British and French—were the bastions of the capital city of Valletta, which was all carved from the same golden rock. People who lived there, except for the sun-thirsty tourists, buried themselves in their homes during the heat of the day and, like raccoons, crawled out only at night to sit along the waterfront in clusters. Everything about Malta had a lively Mediterranean ambiance, with grandparents, parents, teenagers and children gaily chattering the evenings away.

Finally, it was time to leave. We had already been stationary for three weeks.
Varuna
was ready, the clock was ticking and I felt strong enough to carry on. Every morning, Olivier and I would look at each other and I would say, “Well, I guess it's time. . . .” And he would answer, “Yes, winter is approaching fast.” Tears would flood my eyes and one of us would postpone the inevitable by saying, “Yes, but what's one extra day?” From past experiences, I knew well that the hardest part of leaving was the actual untying of the mooring lines. Once that was done, I was gone and the sea warp would help to heal the open wounds. But the act of untying those lines, or lifting the anchor was like facing a sheer 100-foot wall that had to be climbed and I thought of a million and one reasons not to.

Finally, one day I looked at the North Atlantic pilot charts for October, and that lit a fire under me. Seeing for the first time on paper the ominous weather patterns, instead of just speculating about them, frightened me to the point of leaving almost immediately.

Trying to think of something that we could do simultaneously
that would connect us in spirit until New York, Olivier suggested we each read a passage from the Bible at 12:00 Greenwich Mean Time every day. We decided to start the next afternoon with Psalm One.

We packed several boxes of Olivier's belongings that I would take aboard
Varuna
to New York. One box contained his shell collection, cherished mementos from far-flung beaches around the world, and as I held some of the shells in my hand, I remembered Olivier free-diving from
Akka
and emerging with the delicate trophies. We also packed his wet suit and some sweaters on
Varuna
, and he gave me his favorite cassettes.

Looking at the coral fronds that had once decorated
Akka's
walls and were now hanging from
Varuna's
portholes, I felt good knowing that a part of him would always be with me, yet achingly sad that all our voyaging together was finished.
Varuna
would now be the tiny carrier that had to deliver this precious cargo and our hopes safely home.

“I promise I'll try not to sink with all this,” I choked, trying to make a joke.

“Oh, there's one more thing,” he said, handing me two wrapped packages. One was marked, “Happy Birthday,” and the other, “For your first rain.” It was a private joke we had shared about the joys of the first real rainfall. The skies hadn't wept over the deserts since Sri Lanka, and we had both been looking forward to the moment they would.

The next day, on August 22, Olivier and I were both crying while he untied the lines for me, and after we hugged each other goodbye, I watched through a veil of tears as he and his dinghy shrank away in the distance.

“Sia chinta camo,”
I called in Indonesian.

“Isuguru,”
he hollered back in Sri Lankan.

“Ana ahabek inta,”
I said in Arabic.

Then, “I
blong
you!” he finished, forcing a smile and raising his hand in a last wave. No matter how mutated the forms had ended up, we had tried to memorize the ways of saying I love you in every language we had encountered. They would have to last us for a long time.

The pain was deep as
Varuna's
engine put more distance between me and the rocky shores of Malta, and I had a very hard time not pushing the tiller over and turning back. What was I doing? I was leaving one of the best things that ever happened to me, and here I was with Tarzoon, alone again. To have had Olivier sailing on the
same oceans to the same destinations had given me great courage and strength.

The greatest joys over the past two years had been the simple pleasures of sharing everyday experiences with him. The memories, work, repairs, shopping and even the bureaucratic red tape had been more tolerable because we were together. Olivier was someone with whom I wanted to share the future. He supported my capriciousness with unlimited supplies of patience and love. He had always been there for me, seemingly unaffected by whatever we were going through at any given moment. He was my teacher, my pillar to lean on, and my shoulder to cry on. What had I given him, I wondered, to deserve all this? Olivier and I had lived the same life, together yet on different boats, and this goodbye almost shattered my world.

T
he mental strategy I had adopted for dealing with “those packets of miseries that we call ships,” as Kipling once called them, had always depended on percentages. Countless times I had asked myself, “How many chances could possibly exist for
Varuna
to be at any precise time in exactly the same spot as another boat on these thousands of square miles of ocean?”

In the good old days, before the close encounter outside Suez, the notion that those chances were slight had enabled me to sleep many a peaceful night. But now those nights were gone, killed by the memory of the collision that played and replayed in my mind whenever my head hit the pillow. That moment had irrevocably altered the darkness.

In the narrow confines of the Red Sea, all the shipping had been headed in more or less the same directions, either north or south, while sticking to a fairly well-defined perimeter. All I'd had to do was pay attention when crossing that busy highway. The same had applied to all the other shipping routes in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. On the pilot charts, in addition to probable weather patterns, there were also lines delineating the most commonly traveled routes of commercial shipping that had forewarned me about congestion.

The Mediterranean had a completely different story from any body of water I had known. Shipping of every variety clogged the 1,000 miles from Malta to the one natural exit at the Strait of Gibraltar
at the western frontier. Between that objective and our present position,
Varuna
was smack in the midst of a maritime gridlock of fishing boats, pleasure boats, tankers, navy boats on maneuvers, freighters and cargo carriers that crisscrossed all points of the compass, all with different destinations to the legion of ports in North Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Notwithstanding the shipping, on the first day out of Malta, and every day thereafter,
Varuna
was dogged by numerous logs, barrels and other hazardous flotsam, highlighted by thousands of plastics in every imaginable form. I had read that the Mediterranean was a sea dying slowly of pollution, but had never dreamed that I would encounter a solid pavement of rubbish.

For the first few days, Tarzoon sat in his corner, watching me alternate between crying, talking into a recorder to Olivier, playing solitaire and changing sails. There were still a little more than 4,000 miles to go until home, and to me, those 4,000 miles seemed more intimidating than the entire voyage thus far. To it all was added a sense of foreboding that nipped at the back of all my thoughts. I couldn't explain it and couldn't shake it. Behind were the landfalls of a lifetime; ahead was that one stop in Gibraltar and the preparation for the longest ocean passage yet, the crossing of the North Atlantic.

Day in and day out, I thought of what was left to be done, the little time there would be to do it, and made list after mental list. Those first few days out of Malta, my worries wore me down to a condition of perpetual tears as I religiously kept watch, snatched a few minutes of sleep here and there, and tried to keep the boat moving as fast as possible.

The outcomes of the games of solitaire began to put a flicker of chance into every move. As the red queens found their places on top of the black kings, we slowly passed through the watery blight that was once called the sea in the middle of the earth, situated as it is between the European olive trees to the north and the North African palm trees to the south.

Concentrating on the cards helped me to keep my mind off how much I missed Olivier, and kept me awake and alert when I thought my eyes would close from the dizziness of hardly any sleep. It became common for me to pop out on deck and see a ship so close that several months earlier it would have been something to write home about. Now, it was such a regular occurrence that I no longer had to steel myself before doing the habitual horizon scan.

The Med was true to its reputation for flaky weather. Every day we alternated between motoring over glassy seas with the sails down, to hoisting some combination of the sails to gain a modicum of quiet mileage in the fitful winds. Passing through the Strait of Sicily and westward to the south of Sardinia, my hands began to wear into raw slabs of meat from all the sail changes and adjustments. The wind was capricious, totally incapable of staying in the same direction or force for more than an hour at a time. It was either forward of the beam or, more often, from astern, always just at the point where a little more variance required changing the spinaker pole tack on the mast to stay on a proper course.

Jibing the boat as she canted downwind was the most complicated maneuver on
Varuna
, because the boom was all lashed down with preventers to keep it from slamming to the other side and the jib was poled out on the opposite side. To alter the arrangement meant uncleating the preventers, retrimming the sails and rerigging the pole. Then, just when I thought that we were in for a night of calm downwind sailing, the wind would veer around 180 degrees to the west, requiring the spinnaker pole to be taken down altogether and preparations made for beating. Just then, the wind would invariably increase to the point where I had to take in reefs. That maneuver accomplished, it would wane. Eventually, the engine and Autohelm would take over the sailing responsibilities, whereupon the wind would return from the east in feeble puffs and the pole would have to be reemployed.

The vicious circle of contrary wind was an indefatigable slave driver that didn't allow much time for eating or sleeping properly. My ocean schedule was thrown completely out of whack, and was now dependent not only on the daily progress of the sun, but also on the moodiness of the wind. It was a small consolation that at least we
had
wind, as irregular as it was, and I prayed that it would stay that way, not looking foward to surprises of a different sort.

Either wind voids or full-throttle tempests had seemed characteristic of the Mediterranean voyages of friends we had met in the Red Sea. Discussed over many a dinner table, storms in the enclosed basin bore reputations as hellions, first for popping up out of nowhere, then for stacking up steep chop with winds capable of raging at hurricane force until, as suddenly as they appeared, they dissipated. Although the sea has a surface of over a million square miles, its greatest depth is only 4,688 feet; the Pacific, in comparison, is almost three times as deep. The Mediterranean swells are much more
susceptible to confusion than those in the open ocean, built up as they are by regional winds like the storied mistral, which flows down the Rhone Valley, and the sirocco, which blows up from the deserts of the Sahara.

As
Varuna
plodded over the bumpy swells, persecuted by the wind gusting down the unseen mountain ranges of Europe, I idly compared the conditions to other oceans. The Pacific, I decided, is like blowing over a full bathtub, where the ripples can keep on moving until they disappear, and the Med like blowing into a thimbleful of water.

The occasional foreign weather reports and chatter on the radio in different languages kept me aware that we were creeping by Italy, Tunisia, Sardinia and Algeria, approaching and then passing France, with Morocco and Spain just over the western horizon.

Legs akimbo, I was in my own world, playing countless games of solitaire all day long, every day, believing that the winning or losing of each game dictated my fate—whether I would get home safely or die trying. If the game came to a standstill before all the cards were numerically stacked up on top of the aces according to suit, I was sure we were doomed. That only launched me into dealing the cards with renewed fervor until they had all left my hands and I finally won a game. Then, and only then, was I able to get on with sailing. If a game was in progress, it was of no consequence that we were veering off course; it was of no relevance that the wind had died or picked up, just as long as the cards kept turning. The more fatigued I became, the more I dealt the cards with a vengeance, and once in a while the thought occurred to me that I might be going a bit mad.