Maiden Voyage (48 page)

The wind eventually returned, still from the north, and we began to skip along, feeling a bit happier with the knowledge that miles were once again being laid behind. I started writing letters to friends I had made along the way and had neglected since Djibouti—Margot and Claude, Fred, Dean and Faye, and Luc. One by one, writing the letters rekindled memories of our times together in different lands and days, and also reassured me, because as each word was committed to paper, I imagined the person reading them. If they read them, it meant that I had arrived to mail them.

When my time wasn't occupied by writing, it was spent anticipating my birthday—which was going to be on the full moon—and listening to the radio. The choice of stations was somewhat limited, as many would broadcast only on certain frequencies at certain times of the day; the reception on one station that had been good in the morning became a symphony of static in the afternoon.

After the frustrations of sorting out the time schedules and being cut off mid-song or mid-sentence, I became a connoisseur of the best talk shows and music programs. Radio France was my favorite. It played lots of music and had funny conversations, bulletins and so on, perfect background for the morning routines. Its antithesis, the BBC, talked about economics, the Persian Gulf crisis, England's industry and other food for thought such as an interview with a goldfish farmer in northern England. Voice of America played baseball and football games, and ran endless anti-everything commercials. Also, Radio France attracted me because it was the only station
where I had managed to locate weather reports for my sector of the ocean. We would not pick up the American Coast Guard station's broadcasts until we hit the longitude of 30 degrees, just past the Azores.

The closer we inched toward home, the more aware I became of the news of the world. Although rarely able to find current copies, I had always bought a
Time
or
Newsweek
whenever possible. Even so, my information had been sporadic and I only knew about things I had seen firsthand or had heard about through the grapevine. Until this passage home, I had grown to prefer that perspective. Now I began to crave up-to-the-minute news, and diligently turned the dial and plugged myself into world politics and updates on obscure natural disasters, as well as hearing what was new in music after two and a half years out of the mainstream.

One day, to my surprise, I even heard a hit song by some of my old friends from New York. Before I left, they had been just a bunch of kids playing tuneless tunes in city haunts and wherever the neighbors wouldn't complain. Nobody had ever heard of them then or paid much attention to the inane lyrics of their songs, except those of us who hung out with them. That they had made it big meant that a lot of things had probably changed. To be in the middle of the ocean and hearing the songs of people I once knew triggered memories of the old days, and I felt nostalgic for my teenage years and the carefree life on the streets.

“Hello, it's the 4th of October, only three days away from my birthday. I ended up having to put up the handkerchief jib last night, and haven't really gone anywhere since. There was just too much wind. The waves have gotten bigger and wetter, and I feel very small. The ocean is everywhere; it's coming in through the chain plates, crashing over
Varuna
in through leaky hatch gaskets and the Dorade vent, overflowing into the cockpit and down to the lockers. Tarzoon and I have the slats closed up tight, making the cabin air quite stale, and we scrunch up together watching Father Time march onward. What a way to grow old
.

“I went through the major hassle and acrobatics of cooking a meal of dehydrated Chicken Supreme with rice. I also started crocheting
a
bag with the leftover wool, which unravels from the little balls that Tarzoon helps to wind. The sweater is finished, and it might even fit Olivier. I've forgotten how big he is. Crash, Bang, splash, boom . . . Goodnight.”

The next day, thanks to the waning wind, life got a little bit more civilized and I did my navigation: we had progressed only a pathetic 275 miles since our last fix, three days earlier. With the calm and the sunshine, I resiliconed the chain plates on deck, which had been leaking steadily since the first storm out of Gibraltar. Tarzoon chased the ends of the toilet paper that I was using with some alcohol to remove the old gook. The dolphins came gliding through the transparent water to see what I was doing.

Before the chill of evening set in, I took a bath in the cockpit and washed my hair with dishwashing liquid, the cheapest kind of soap that would lather in salt water. Afterward, feeling my silky hair, I relished the sight of clean long johns that hadn't yet stretched to the point of hanging to my knees. It seemed a proper way to enter into my twenty-second year, smelling like Palmolive.

Sitting on the bunk at nightfall and staring out the companion-way at the skies glowing in lunar light, I thought how comical my predicament was. Imagine the utter simplicity of a life whose highlight for the day is marked by a bath—and a saltwater bath, no less. Had I sunk down deeper than deep? No, not at all, I decided. Regardless of the primitiveness of my pleasures, that night I rejoiced, for the morrow would bring the anniversary of my birth. Although on the eve of my birthday, my wish of being halfway across the Atlantic by now still had not been granted, the wind had died, the moon was almost full, and I felt privileged. The majesty of a slumbering ocean, softly lit from horizon to eternal horizon, was all for me alone to behold.

The night was nimble, and waking up the next morning, I forced myself to make a cup of coffee and perform my ablutions before savagely ripping open the presents. There were cards full of jokes and stories from Mark and Doug and strips of candle wax from Maurice. Reading all the notes made me feel as though a party of friends was aboard
Varuna
, and I enjoyed the festivity while it lasted. Olivier's card was a picture of an old man with a striking resemblance to Uncle Sam, pointing his finger at me, saying, “You are 21.” Inside, the card said, “I am jealous.” Ironically, his present was a sweater made with almost the same stitch as the sweater I had just finished for him. From my father, there was a half-spilled bottle of Lily of the Valley perfume.

“Well,” I thought, “I'm twenty-one and don't feel very different, except that I have to cook my own birthday dinner and then, on top of it, do the dishes.” Apart from the Barrier Reef birthday gala with
Olivier, this was the second of the last three birthdays that I had spent alone at sea. There was no denying the fact that they had all been unforgettable.

Before the trip, I'd had seventeen birthdays, and could not remember the celebrations of more than two of them. How would I ever be able to forget my nineteenth birthday in the middle of El Pacifico, twentieth on the Australian Barrier Reef off a pearl farm, and twenty-first here in the middle of the mighty Atlantic Ocean. Well, actually, we weren't technically in the middle of the Atlantic yet. That waypoint was still 300 miles distant, and the present absence of wind seemed reluctant to help us make it up.

Three days later, still nothing. Puffy clouds crisscrossed the sky, taking hours to pass from one horizon to the other. At night, they marbleized the black heavens with veins of light and I watched them, waiting for a burst of speed in their lumbering movements that would signify some wind in the neighborhood. In the heat of the afternoon of one of those days, when the bath bucket seemed incredibly heavy, I thought, “Wouldn't it just be easier to lather up and jump in the drink to rinse off?” For the very first time ever alone, I dived overboard while
Varuna
wallowed back and forth.

During the Atlantic calms, which in other oceans had been great annoyances, I began to immerse myself in the solitude, for I knew this was a last chance and it would soon be left behind. Daily duties were done like a spiritual epitaph to a beautiful story. Every night, I made my bed into a real one, with sheets, blankets and a plumped-up pillow to snuggle into. I religiously read every last word in my books, cleaned the dishes pronto, properly folded the sails when they weren't being used, brushed my teeth and hair on cue, kept the cockpit clean and the cabin dusted and marveled for hours at a time on how wonderful nature was to have created such an exquisite creature as Tarzoon. But, as venerable as the calm originally seemed, after six days, it began to get on my nerves.

“Hallo, it is October 12th. GMT-wise it's 12:33
A.M
. How's it going? Me? Well, not so hot. For lunch I had canned spare ribs—a foul British invention—and a sweet and sour rice package of Chinese derivation. I just saw the first ship in a while. It came pretty close and I talked with the Russian radio man who spoke a little English. He said that there were no imminent storms and gave me a SatNav position setting us 300 miles east of where I thought we were. Scared that something was dreadfully wrong with my navigation, I asked
him if he was sure; he double-checked, came back and admitted error. Phewee. I'd have jumped overboard. With the past three days' progress, that fix would've put us back 10 days. We've been out here for 26 already and aren't even half-way yet. This will definitely be our longest passage
.

“There's a pretty cloudless sky, but I don't care a bit, at this point preferring dark black clouds and lots of wind, just as long as
Varuna
moves forward. I sit staring at the sea, reading, daydreaming. The freshwater drinking supply is running low and I wouldn't mind a good old-fashioned squall to replenish it. I heard an incredibly loud boom this afternoon, shattering the absolute silence around us. It was an airplane zipping across the sound barrier overhead. Then, a little canary plopped in and Tarzoon wanted to make a lunch of her, so I shooed her off the boat for her own safety. “

Going out on deck at about midday, I saw before us our first pod of whales, and in awe, I watched as the leviathans, each seeming to be three times the size of
Varuna
, rolled over in the water ahead of the boat. About 50 feet away a gray lump surfaced and a spout of water spewed out with a great whoosh, then disappeared followed by a V-shaped flipper tail that made another resounding wet splash. It was a little too close for comfort. I held my breath, expecting the moment when one of the swimming blimps would surface again from right below us and topple
Varuna
over. Waiting motionless, I listened for the rumbling bell notes of the whales' songs and sniffed for the ripe air from their blowholes. Recollecting stories of disastrous collisions with the oblivious monsters, I turned on the engine to make our presence known. Totally unconcerned, they continued their migration onward, without so much as a backward glance.

After a little while, kind of hurt that, for them, we had not existed, I looked at the bubbles passing by the hull. Even if only for the small pleasure of seeing a wake, I decided to leave the engine running, whereupon it promptly stopped. The customary grimy, slimy, smelly mechanics of sucking, pulling apart and inspecting ensued, and eventually, the fuel line revealed itself to be clogged.

In tightening the fuel return banjo bolt with my new marvel tool of a socket wrench, I exerted too much pressure and the bolt broke off, leaving the bottom half firmly screwed into the injector. Even if it had been possible to remove it, there weren't any spare bolts available, so that afternoon I reconciled myself to being quite permanently engineless.

With the onset of evening, a steadily escalating breeze began blowing in from the southwest, which could only be the messenger of a depression that was worming its way into the calm high. By morning, I was obliged to replace the reefed working jib with my personally modified storm jib and took three reefs in the main. That accomplished,
Varuna
started climbing the waves that had been part of a serene lake hardly twenty-four hours earlier. The idyllic days of Portuguese trades and Azores high were a thing of the past.

“October 14. The waves are building and, with this wind, it won't be long before the worst hits. Here we go. We're approaching the ominous 5-degree squares on the pilot charts—tons of wind, big waves and high storm frequencies. I've begun to monitor the U.S. Coast Guard's weather station. Hurricane Floyd is off Florida, headed in our general direction, but far away. Maybe it'll converge with a trough north of Bermuda, become an extratropical cyclone and stomp its way elsewhere. This depression's center is several hundred miles northwest of our position, a taste of things to come. My path is blocked by a very nasty little area, and I'm getting cold feet. Thank God we had the prolonged calm and plenty of rest and fortification . . . looks like we're going to need it. “

In Malta, Olivier had warned me that progress on the North Atlantic would have to be accomplished mainly by using the depressions to advantage, and he had shown me how to manipulate things to get the most mileage. On a piece of paper, he had drawn the counterclockwise spiral of the average depression as it traveled on its easterly course north of 40 degrees latitude, and showed me how I would have to face it.

“After the barometer starts falling,” he had said, “pay attention to the direction of the wind. It will tell you where you are in relation to the center of the depression.” If it starts from the southwest, he explained, pointing to the right below the spiral's center on the mock-up chart, that would mean that we were south of the center and should head on a northwest tack. As the center moved eastward, I could expect the wind to begin to veer slowly around to the west. At that point, we would be close to the center.

“Then there will be too much wind to make headway, and you'll have to tack, take down the jib and wait until the eye passes over. When it does,” he continued, “the wind will veer to the north and begin to weaken. Then you'll be able to head west on the proper
course for New York on a beam reach. The wind will continue to die, all the while veering easterly, until you'll have to put up the spinaker pole.” When the wind died, that would mean that the depression had passed and then there would probably be a calm, “unless you get lucky,” he had said, “until the next depression, where you'll have to start from the beginning again. Do you understand?”