Maiden Voyage (46 page)

On the last night, my father and I went over the charts one more time and I finalized my route. For every month on the North Atlantic pilot charts, the ocean was divided up into a checkerboard of 5-degree squares, and each one had symbols and numbers translated into information on the winds, currents and other prevailing conditions. In the corner of the chart was a graph, also divided into
5-degree squares, containing numbers indicating the average percentage of ship reports where winds of at least Force 8 had been recorded for the month.

For all the pilot charts I had ever used, I had never crossed a square with more than 1-percentage factor of Force 8. The few times that
Varuna
had passed over a 1—once in the Pacific and another time in the Indian Ocean—my fingernails had been chewed to the quick in nervous anticipation until we were safely out of the danger zones.

The October chart for the 3,000-mile North Atlantic crossing was a scary vision of l's, 2's, 3's, 4's, and two 5's. Also, there were bold red lines curving down from the northern seas, indicating that no matter what route we took, somewhere along the way
Varuna
would have to pass through the perimeters where average wave heights exceeded 10 feet.

Unless we ducked the strong current of the eastbound Gulf Stream by heading in a more southerly route below the Azores, it would impede progress and we would be faced with fearful storms kicked up by the underwater river. But then, there was the risk of heading too far south into the fringe of the horse latitudes, a belt between the latitudes of 30 and 35 degrees north, characterized by a dearth of wind altogether.

My fear of the passage increased as I stared at the 3,000-mile distance and the expected no-win conditions separating me from home. As the days plodded on toward Old Man Winter, the news from the November chart held even gloomier tidings. So, choosing the lesser of two evils, I decided to take the straight path from Gibraltar to New York, passing south of the Azores to avoid the contrary Gulf Stream and the higher risk of storms.

“Yah, but there you will get a lot of calms,” my father warned.

“Well, I'd much rather run the risk of a few calms than storms,” I insisted. The sole advantage of taking the Great Circle route north of the Azores would be that it was 400 miles shorter, but I didn't really care about speed.

“Well, you know best,” he said.

“Anyway, Daddy,” I chimed in, as we folded up the charts that evening, “you should be concerning yourself about my twenty-first birthday present that I will have a lot of pleasure opening in the middle of the ocean.”

“Hah!” he laughed, and we headed off with Mark and Doug to have a last feast at Maria's.

The next morning, I awoke and looked outside the companionway.
The sky was bright blue, and puffy clouds streamed across the famed rock towering above the anchorage. The easterly Levanter was still healthy and in full swing, as if it wanted to help me onward. This was the big day. It was now or never.

After wolfing down some breakfast on
Lone Rival
, Mark, Doug and my father were ready to follow me out to the entrance of the strait, catching
Varuna
on video before she turned westward and headed out to sea. Before the pandemonium of casting off the dock-lines, everyone gave me wrapped presents and cards to open on my birthday, and my father slipped me a letter to be opened on the tenth day out.

I climbed back on
Varuna
, shuffled Tarzoon below to the safety of the cabin and undid the mooring lines for the last time. We were off. For better or for worse, my final game of solitaire was almost played out.

S
eptember 19. It's dusk, our third day out. I've just come back in from battening
Varuna
down for the night, and finally there's inspiration to write. It feels so nice to put ‘Destination: New York' at the top of the page, although I feel lonely after being cut off so abruptly from all the excitement in Gib. The quietude is screaming out at me
.

“This passage frightens me more than any other in the entire trip, but
Varuna
feels good. It's such a pleasure to open her lockers and find them brimming with delicacies, and the ARGOS and life raft give me the security I felt when Olivier and I were sailing together. This is the last crossing and I pray that it will be a safe one
.

“Ever since Australia, the journey has seemed long and hard, and the truth is that the ocean can still terrify me. Most of the time, I think about things that a girl my age doesn't think about, and I'm bugged with thoughts of my future. Now that I am on my way home, everything is a big question mark. What will I do? Can I settle back down to do things a girl my age would do? Why are these questions still lurking after so long? Right now, I feel much older than I want to
.

“My fix today said that we've made 285 miles since departure. The barometer has begun to fall, so something's brewing. I made a day, date and mileage-by-the-hundreds chart again, and am making a tape for Olivier that I hope we'll listen to together. There are 3,115 miles left to go. I think about Olivier and pray that he is waiting for me. . . .”

Very slowly, the frenetic week at the famous rock was beginning to sort itself out, and I felt a certain relief to be out on a big ocean again, where navigation wouldn't be as crucial anymore, and shipping would no longer be confined to an enclosed body of water. It was taking longer than usual to wind down from the activity on land, and instead I remained idle, dwelling on my questions and feeling them loom larger the more I searched for the answers.

For the first few days, the wind had continued to blow steadily at our back from the east, pushing
Varuna
along at a good clip through the Strait of Gibraltar and the thick of the Europe-Africa, Europe-America shipping routes. It was weary enough duty, and on the second night, when I had grown so tired that the thought of getting crushed by one of the never-ending stream of ships didn't seem to matter anymore, I dozed off in a shallow sleep. Some kind of internal warning signal had awakened me, just in time to run out on deck, grab the tiller and dodge an oncoming freighter.

On the eighteenth, we had finally passed the last outcroppings of Portugal somewhere over our starboard horizon and had forged out into the sanctuary of deeper ocean. Until New York, except for the island groups of the Azores 1,000 miles to our northwest and Bermuda 2,900 miles to the very far west, there was nothing but a vast expanse of gunmetal gray.

This trip, I knew, would bear no resemblance to those already laid under the keel, and my mind kept racing over the knowledge that everything done on
Varuna
was being done for the last time. Foreign landfalls and new people were a thing of the past, and the finality that the name New York conjured up played the largest role in my uneasiness.

Putting the logbook away, I reached for the radio knob to get rid of some static, and tuned in the BBC. The radio was going to become a good friend, and I congratulated myself on buying those extra batteries before leaving Gibraltar to keep it well fed.

Lost in thought, I bent over to rearrange the floorboards that had splintered into five pieces during our Mediterranean fiasco, and then crawled into the forepeak for a snack. Reaching down into the storage tank, I felt around, pulled out a package of gingersnaps and then lurched back to the bunk. Opening up the cellophane, I took out two cookies and put the rest into the overhead hammock, unclosed. If they stayed exposed, then the humidity of the sea air made them chewy, instead of crispy and hard, and I liked my cookies better that way.

After so many passages, I had begun to humor myself with eccentric time-killing techniques that had formed almost instinctively; one of these was the fine art of playing with my food. A simple bite of an apple took on a whole new meaning as the pulp had to be separated from the skin without ever leaving my mouth. The same went for the almonds in chocolate bars; they were never crunched along with the chocolate, but had to be singled out, rolled around and savored. Cans of food lasted forever as I made little designs in the soups, pastes or sauces with my tongue on the spoon and admired them; and that same spoon prolonged cups of coffee, which had to arrive in my mouth spoonful by spoonful. Crawling out on deck with a gingersnap for the evening's entertainment, I stared at the water and watched
Varuna
nod slowly west. As we rocked downwind, I began nibbling away like a gerbil, around and around the cookie, letting the spicy little pieces crumble up in my mouth.

Just then, flying in from the echo chamber of approaching nightfall, a yellow canary landed on the boom's downhaul. I gulped down the few remaining crumbs and called out to it. Responding to the sound of my voice, my new friend assessed the situation and then hopped up onto the boom. I cooed again and then he hopped right onto my head! What an ornithological wonder! He wasn't the least bit afraid of me. I ruminated for a moment on the piles of gooey white poop that always seem to be underneath birds, and shooed him out of my hair. It was too cold to take a bucket bath just because a bird couldn't control its bowel movements. Taking one last scan around, I went below, leaving the feathery hitchhiker to feast on the crumbs in the cockpit. A while later, the sound of a crunching noise pulled my attention out the companionway. Mr. T had a bloody mess of feathers sticking out of his mouth.

“Oh my God!” I screamed. “You murderer!” But it was too late. Except for a couple of feathers blowing away and bloodstains on the deck, there was nothing left. In my eyes, that heartless scoundrel had been soiled and I couldn't bear the thought of touching him for the rest of the day.

Waiting for the wind to sort itself out, I listened to the slamming mainsail and opened up the bag with the letters and birthday presents to look them over, shake and squeeze things. There were only two and a half weeks to go until my twenty-first anniversary with life.

All that day, I had fiddled with the sails, trying to make progress in the wimpy wind. According to my references, this wasn't normal.
We were supposed to be in the belt of the Portuguese trade winds that blow steadily from the north, and they now seemed to be nonexistent. Frustrated beyond belief at being entrapped by a calm so early in the trip, my body continued acclimatizing itself, and that night I awoke to see the dark shadow of a boorish squall passing astern.

Unable to relax, I whipped up a midnight snack of Ryvita crackers, Miracle Whip and some dried beef strips that Tony had brought to Malta. Settling down again to munch, I listened to a narrated story on the BBC and waited. Dawn showed up with a gloomy disposition, and the puffy clouds of the day before were replaced by their wicked stepsisters. Soon the wind became confused, making a reappearance from the opposite direction, obliging us to trim in the sails and beat.
Varuna
heeled over on her new point of sail and from then on life carried on aboard sightly tilted.

“September 20. I'm
a
little confused about the time in America. Europeans with their ‘summer hours' have me all mixed up in relation to GMT. They all change at different times. I started knitting a sweater and then pondered my big question of the day: Are there one or two hours' difference in the States?

“The dophins of the Atlantic just arrived in welcome, snorting, whistling, jumping and beating into the waves like us, but they seem to be enjoying it more than
Varuna
and I. The chill is becoming increasingly uncomfortable and I've started wearing long johns at night. I can hardly wait to be way out in the middle of the ocean and away from these ships; then I can start wishing to see them again. The BBC was talking today about a hurricane that is bringing bad weather to my area. The weather is definitely deteriorating. I sit and wait. . . .”

By the twenty-third, the first storm of the passage glided over our coordinates and
Varuna
began her preliminary gyrations on a cantankerous ocean. I awoke from a dream of New York—where over and over, Jade was calling me a social klutz—stretched my creaking limbs and checked the barometer. It had made a crash landing since the night before, and going outside for the morning horizon scan, I found a parade of wispy mares tails flying in our direction. It was a little worrisome.

September 23 was the day of the equinox, eclipse and the empty moon, all at once, and after seven days of inspecting the
Nautical
Almanac
for endless verifications, I had been expecting this. Judging by past experiences and all Olivier's advice on things celestial, the storm had every chance of getting worse. Eclipse? Equinox? Empty moon? What more could I hope for?

As
Varuna
pounded into the building waves, I knitted and tried to get my mind off the brewing storm by thinking of Olivier and wondering what he might be thinking about at that moment. If all went well, he would be back in Switzerland now, seeing his friends and family for the first time in five years and, if I knew him at all, he would be feeling out of place in the life he had left behind. Perhaps he was already missing the sea and
Akka
, wishing he were here alongside me and
Varuna
. Would I feel that way too?

The thought of impending separation from my boat was sobering and I looked around the secure little home that was protecting Tarzoon and me from the watery elements outside. At that moment, I couldn't have loved her more. Pulling out the tape recorder, I installed a new cassette and began talking to Olivier. Of all people, he would understand exactly how I felt, having gone through it himself by leaving
Akka
in Malta.

Telling him about my feelings and whatever was going on around
Varuna's
isolated world connected him to me in a way that even the Psalms were unable to do. As I talked, I imagined us sitting together sometime in the future, in a cozy apartment in a faceless city, listening to my voice from a day long gone by.