Maiden Voyage (5 page)

We had gone to the show not only to find a boat, but also with the hope of selling an article I had written about our voyage on
Pathfinder
to
Cruising World
, a reputable sailing magazine. They accepted it and, after some discussion, a verbal agreement was reached that they would publish the writings chronicling my voyage. But, in order to write those articles, I had to find a boat.

On the last day of the show, hidden among the hundreds of flashy boats on display, we found the Contessa 26 built by the Canadian company, J. J. Taylor. My father thumped around up on deck, checking to be sure the superstructure wouldn't flex under pressure. Christian knocked away on the hull, feeling the thickness of the fiberglass. I sat down below in the compact cocoon of the cabin, looked around and heard myself say, “I think this is the one.”

She felt more right than any other boat had up until that point, and after several days of thinking it over, we went to Canada to visit the factory, a common thing to do before purchasing a boat. Satisfied with the diligence of the builders, at the end of the day my father and I sat with the president and a salesman who had sailed his own Contessa 32 around the world. They all looked at me. Say yes now and there would be no turning back. “Well, here goes,” I thought, and sealed my fate.

•   •   •

I watched a tanker on my reciprocal course, probably heading toward New York Harbor. The sun was shining and the water was emerald green. Twenty miles down, 730 to go. I thought about how to read the barometer. “Does bad weather make a barometer go up or down,” I wondered. “Up? Yes. No, down. I think.” I glanced down through the companionway to the bulkhead over the sink where the barometer was mounted, and gasped. There was water sloshing all over the floor of the cabin!

“Oh my God,” I screamed, “we're sinking!” I jumped below, trying to trace the leak and threw open the cabinet behind which were the sea cocks and valves for the sink. “Daddy always said to check the sea cocks
first,”
I said aloud, remembering how he showed me where the cut-off valves were stationed, wherever intake and discharge holes passed through the hull of the boat—at the sink, at
the toilet, in the engine compartment and in the bilge. A broken sea cock could sink
Varuna
in minutes.

His words rang in my ears as I located the two sea cocks under the sink. Miraculously, they seemed dry. Then I noticed a rivulet of water trickling from above, behind an upper locker, and pulled it open. Inside was one of the steel struts onto which were bolted the chain plates that passed through the deck. Chain plates were the hull attachment points for the rigging; they held up the mast and sustained a great deal of pressure. It was one of the six chain plates at deck level that was leaking; it was not an underwater problem and, therefore, not life-threatening.

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” I pronounced with a sigh of relief.

In the last two weeks of preparations, my father had kept on bringing bags of different tools down to the boat—most of whose functions mystified me: caulkings, rivets, electrical tapes, glues and all sorts of synthetic troubleshooting materials. They always landed with a thump in the cockpit as he ran off to do more shopping. I was left to sort them out and, with a million and one other things to do, just dumped the bags into any free space available, figuring they would be pulled out and organized when I had some free time.

With feet up in the air, and one hand holding on to prevent me from falling headfirst into the locker, I dragged out the underwater epoxy and remembered my father tossing it to me saying, “Hey, Tania, here's something that I've never seen before—an epoxy that cures underwater. It might come in handy.” I opened up the two components, mixed them together, ruining my first spoon of many, and went up on deck to slather it around the base of the chain plate. It molded like so much Silly Putty and hardened; finally the leak dribbled to a stop.

To celebrate my first evening at sea, dinner was spaghetti with pesto, one of the buckets of food donated by friends. I inaugurated my new pressure cooker, boiled up some water from
Varuna's
tanks and threw in the pasta. The weather was calm; my first sunset was flashing brilliant, burnt-red shards of color across the sky and an occasional tanker meandered across the horizon. I shoveled a couple of forkfuls into my mouth, swallowed and immediately retched. What now? I thought, spitting out the last bits of pasta. Then it dawned on me. “Oh no. It can't be.” I checked my water supply at the sink tap and moaned. It was true. The brand-new water tanks were contaminated with fiberglass from the factory and my entire water supply was useless. The only consolation was that I had
brought aboard a supply of bottled mineral water, as well as sealed boxes of juice and soy milk. Making a mental tally of the potable liquid aboard, I figured that with rationing, it was possible to make do.

The following morning the barometer had fallen from 1020 millibars to 1005; a low-pressure system was approaching and I began to prepare myself for the first storm of the trip. It started quietly with puffs of wind coming from random directions. By 8:00
A.M
., the sky had darkened and the wind piped up, bringing with it an icy chill. Putting on my foul-weather gear, I stuffed my hair into the hood, zipped up the jacket and went outside into the cockpit to wait. By 10:00
A.M
., a full-fledged gale arrived, knocking
Varuna
all the way over on her side and keeping her there for the duration of the storm.

Squall line after squall line thundered over us, spitting out bolts of lightning.
Varuna
was lifted to the top of every boiling crest and then was sent careening down to the trough. I hunched in the cockpit, transfixed and petrified. As every dark cloud approached, the wind picked up and
Varuna
flew down the backs of the waves, heeling 35 degrees over on her port side. “We must have entered the Gulf Stream,” I thought, with its warm water surging upward like a river in the sea from the Gulf of Mexico.

I checked my life harness, whose line attached me to a U-bolt mounting in the cockpit, and watched with awe the wrath of the ocean. White water roiled over the foredeck and back into the cockpit from both sides and my stomach leapt with every jolt to
Varuna
. Violently seasick, I just clung on and fervently prayed that my fate wasn't to go up in smoke from a bolt of lightning. I had grounding cables, but no idea how to use them.

After retching my guts up over the side, I crawled across the cockpit and headed below to find something to drink. I couldn't believe my eyes!
There was six inches of water above the floorboards!
Grabbing the bilge pump handle from the cockpit locker behind me, I shoved it into the pump sprocket near my feet and began pumping like crazy. After ten pumps, it seized up. God damn it! What happened? The emergency electric bilge pump came to mind. I jumped down into the sloshing cabin, pulled the switch, heard the pump churn to life, then flew up the two steps out to the cockpit to disengage the Monitor, grabbed the tiller and headed
Varuna
into the wind. She rounded up and her sails began to slap back and forth in the howling winds.

Stumbling up to the foredeck, I frantically began to pull down
the storm jib. I had to right the boat to determine where the water was coming in. It was already higher than the sea cocks, so I couldn't tell whether or not it was coming in through a through-hull fitting. As
Varuna
straightened up, the washing-machine cycle began to calm belowdecks; above was the same blustery, squalling mess. “Dear God, help me!” I cried. Buckling my harness to a jack line running almost the entire length of the deck, I hurriedly began to search for the leak by scrutinizing the deck in minutest detail. What on earth could be responsible for this calamity?

Checking the anchor windlass at the bow, I couldn't believe my eyes. Beneath the windlass was a gaping hole for the anchor chain to pass through the deck and down a pipeline into the bilge. With every wave, water funneled down the hole, slowly drowning
Varuna!
I had been so damned ignorant that I had never even thought of blocking up this artery now pumping the sea into the bowels of my boat.

The wind continued to howl as the waves buried the bow where I crouched. Cold water streamed down my neck, drenching my clothes with salt water as I struggled to stuff the hole with the first thing I could get my hands on—Grand Union shopping bags covered with duct tape. I crammed in as many as possible, taped over the opening and pulled the jib back up. Running down below again, I stuck my head into the opening in the bilge where the chain was stored. The water influx had slowed to a trickle. I stopped to breathe. “Two emergencies down,” I said, feeling the adrenaline still surging through my body. “How many more to go?” and turned around to survey my soaking-wet little home.

“Maybe Daddy was right,” I thought. In two days, I had solved two major problems, and it really wasn't that hard. Maybe sailing doesn't require tons of deep dark secret knowledge. It was beginning to seem that everything could be handled with common sense.

“Hey,” I realized with a sudden burst of euphoria, “I'm not seasick anymore!” My days of living under the influence of this horrible malaise were over. Through some miracle, I never got seasick again.

The storm eventually passed, and I fiddled with the boat, testing her in the changing winds. Although I was awed by the sea and fully aware of its threatening potential, surprisingly, it did not scare me. Before leaving New York, I had often slept on my comfortable futon at Jeri's, dreaming of being alone on the ocean, wondering if its depths and immensity would intimidate me once I was out in the middle of it. Now, I found myself relieved to be able to sit out in the cockpit, day or night, clear or overcast, and feel relatively at ease.

Around day six, there began a droning period of flat calm. The ocean was a perfect mirror, unruffled by even the slightest hint of breeze, reflecting
Varuna's
shapely body and limp sails while Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish glided by. Dolphins came squealing out of nowhere, accompanied by flocks of squawking ocean terns overhead. They circled for a while, and then took off in search of a more responsive playmate.
Varuna
wallowed and rolled in a dreary rhythm, going nowhere for two days.

I had forgotten that there was always a swell on the ocean, and I began to experiment with ways to keep the boat from rolling so uncontrollably with it. First, I tried sheeting in the mainsail as tightly as possible. As
Varuna
began to roll in one direction, the sail slammed violently to the other side. Every time this happened—about once every fifteen seconds—she shuddered and her rigging emitted resonant twangs. I suffered, too, cringing with every slam until I couldn't take it anymore.

“There has to be a way to stop this boat from rolling without the slam,” I thought, and went below, dug out my
Learn to Sail
book and flipped through it searching for inspiration. “Maybe if I take in a couple reefs,” I said to myself, “it won't slam as hard.” After shortening the mainsail by two reef points, I anxiously waited for the sharp retort and only heard a soft flapping every now and then. If there was a better way to do it, it was beyond me.

With the calm, I set about fixing the engine. In order to bleed the fuel system, it was necesary to unscrew two nuts before a little pump could milk the fuel out of the openings until there were no more air bubbles in the fuel line. But I couldn't get it to work. After a whole lot of pumping, there were still air bubbles in the line. Whenever my father did this, he always got rid of the air. What else did he do when the engine quit? Maybe he changed the filter? This was easier said than done. He had given me a special extractor that wound around the filter with a handle to give leverage. I slid it on and pushed and pulled. No response. I pushed a little harder. Still nothing. I positioned my foot on the handle and exerted all my force, twisting the filter canister out of shape, and then gave up. Two weeks later, in Bermuda, a mechanic who had to remove the filter with a vice grip told me I had been trying to unscrew it in the wrong direction.

During the evenings of the previous winter, after delivering messages on my bicycle, I had tried to study books on sailing and took night courses in coastal and celestial navigation. I passed the coastal course, having sailed aboard
Pathfinder
, but flunked the celestial navigation
course, probably as a result of exhaustion after biking all day and not being able to keep my eyes open for the two hours of celestial triangle theory. Photocopying my father's mail-order course, I figured I'd learn the techniques along the way. It had been easy to procrastinate during the past few days because I had seen and talked to enough ships on the radio and they had given me my position with the aid of their sophisticated electronics. But now I needed to get cracking and teach myself celestial navigation.

I sat on deck with the sextant, pointing it into the sun, burning my pupils through the two mirrors, aligning the sun with the horizon to determine the exact angle between the two. The second they were lined up perfectly, I looked at my watch and recorded the precise time of the angle. With these two vital bits of information, taken twice a day with about a four-hour interval, one is theoretically supposed to be able to figure out a position, or “fix.” I tried and retried it; the fixes just didn't seem right.

It was hard to imagine that these books, my calculations, the plotting sheets, the compass rose and the sliding rulers could ever possibly tell me where I was. It would have been a luxury to have a SatNav aboard
Varuna
—a machine where I could press a button and get my position from a satellite. Not only was a SatNav too expensive—probably over a thousand dollars—but my father and I had a mutual understanding that I would learn how to do everything on board without the aid of electronics. With electronics, there would always be the chance of failure or of power loss, just as I had now with no engine to recharge my batteries. Where would I be then, if I didn't know the age-old concepts of navigation? I sat for hours double-checking the instructions, taking sight after sight, trying to get two lines of position that agreed, until I got dizzy and the figures blurred.