Maiden Voyage (6 page)

On the evening of June 4, the barometer began to drop and I quickly set to battening things down aboard to prepare for some more nasty weather. Anything that could fly around in the cabin below was stowed: books, the pressure cooker, tools, food and clothes. Double-checking all the lines that were holding the deflated rubber dinghy securely in the cockpit, I took down the bigger genoa, replaced it with a smaller working jib, and took in a reef point on the mainsail, shortening its size by about four feet.

By the next morning, the swell had grown and strong gusts began to blow erratically from different directions. The sky transformed itself before my eyes into a dark ceiling of swirly gloom. I went below and bundled up into my warmest clothes and foul-weather gear. It
was important to prepare myself and the boat before the worst of the storm hit because, after that, every trip up to the pitching foredeck would be extremely wet and risky.

I set and reset the Monitor, repositioning its vane into the wind, trying to find the point at which it would work best. I shortened the mainsail another reef point, but
Varuna's
till pitched violently in the worsening conditions. There was still too much sail up. Finally, I took the working jib down altogether and shortened the main down to its last reef point until it was almost the size of a handkerchief.

With so little canvas up,
Varuna
rode the waves, pointing into the 40-knot winds. When the seas crashed over her bow, they were deflected by the spray hood shielding the cockpit, rather than hitting us broadside. All through the sleepless night and next day, I sat crouched in the cockpit, the life harness connecting me to the boat, and watched the sea change from a placid lake into this pot of boiling bouillon.
Varuna
pitched and yawed through waves that seemed as high as her mast. Jags of lightning spewed forth from the sky, one right after another, heralding thunderclaps that seemed loud enough to crack open the world. I counted the time between the lightning and the thunder trying to figure out the distance between
Varuna
and the bolts, “One alligator, two alii—” KABOOM! “Oh no, they're practically on top of us!”

For almost two days, we battled in the teeth of the storm, endlessly changing sails, changing tacks and changing direction. When it was possible to tear my eyes away from it all, I went below for refuge in
Varuna's
wet, coffinlike little cabin. Although 26 feet long, she was only 7
¹
/
₂
feet wide, with a living area below of about 15 feet, most of which was taken up with the bunk, sink, stove and head. There was no standing headroom, and even if there were, it would have been virtually impossible to remain standing anyway.

Heeled over on her side at 35 degrees,
Varuna
was like the house of no gravity at a carnival; to get around below I had to stretch from handhold to handhold like a chimp, or crawl along on the tilted sides of the boat. My bunk was soaked through from the leaking chain plate and from opening and closing the companionway slats, so I curled up in my rain gear on the lee side of the boat and tried to take my mind off the conditions with a book. Every hour, I went back out into the cockpit to check the horizon for ships, check our progress and adjust the sails. Lurching to the companionway, I removed the slats and timed my move to avoid the waves crashing over the deck, jumped outside and shoved them back into place before a wave could
thunder down into the cabin. One second too early or too late and my bunk would be soaked anew.

I pulled out my meteorology books and charts, trying to understand those weather systems; the explanations seemed to be written in Chinese. Unbeknownst to me, the depressions were huge spirals—some 100 miles wide—rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise south of the equator, careening across the landmasses and the seas like whirling dervishes. As each depression approached, the barometer dropped; next, the wind gradually increased, eventually dying down, which indicated that we were in the center, and after a short while piping up like crazy from the opposite direction, meaning that we were sailing through the other side of the circle.

It would be two years before I would properly learn how to use a depression to advantage and have it actually help propel
Varuna
toward our destination. But right now I made the mistake of sailing directly into the depression. Not knowing any better, I wasted days of progress and completely jumbled my already shaky navigation. And, exhaustingly,
Varuna
had to be put through every point of sail: tacking into the wind, beam reaching perpendicular to the wind, quarter reaching ahead of the wind and finally sailing directly downwind with the sails boomed out on either side of the boat like butterfly wings. “Until I get the hang of reading the conditions,” I reasoned, “I'll just have to muddle along and wait them out.”

I was beginning to wonder exactly where we were. During the storm, it had been impossible to take a sight with the sextant. Not only was the sun blocked by clouds, but in order to take a sight, I had to retain a semblance of balance, and
Varuna
had been lurching through the waves like a bronco. June 8 was my first opportunity to pick up the sextant and, once again, aim it at the sun. With the mirrors, I lined up the sun and the horizon umpteen times saying, “Aha, I think I've got it.” When I noted the time and angle and got to the paper with the myriad of calculations, my vision began to blur.

All over my chart I had plotted my DR or “dead reckoning” positions, the positions where I had thought we were during the storm, figured out by just advancing the last confirmed position with time and speed. Nothing added up. As a shot in the dark, I turned on the FM radio to see if I could hear anything from Bermuda. I heard a Canadian station and my mind went blank. Good grief! Did this mean we were up near Canada? It couldn't be. If that were true, we
had been heading in the opposite direction from Bermuda for days. I worked and reworked the calculations until my eyes crossed. Even though they wouldn't come out the same way twice, I decided to trust my instincts, carry on and follow the original course.

As the saying goes, after every storm, there is a calm. The day of calm that followed the second weather system was a chance to dry out the boat and clean up. The shredded ice in the icebox had just about disappeared and I sat over my books slurping all the yogurts that would soon go bad. I began to distrust the calms, looking at them as great voids, just waiting to be filled by hellfire. I wasn't far wrong.

The next system that hit was different from the last two. It wasn't a spiraling depression. The sky remained wintery blue and clear instead of dark and stormy, but the winds were very strong at 35 knots.
Varuna
had her smallest sails up as we punched into the enormous waves kicked up by the Gulf Stream. It was my tenth day at sea, the batteries were dead and there was no more power to use the VHF radio. But, despite the deteriorating weather, there was the sense of a different energy in the air. On a hunch, I went below, grabbed the radio-direction-finder from its bracket and took it up to the cockpit. As I turned it on, to my amazement a faint signal came through the static in the headphones. Scanning the RDF slowly around the horizon, I heard the signal become stronger and louder until it homed in on the direction of St. David's Head RDF beacon in Bermuda. These beacons emit signals only out to a certain radius—St. David's Head was 150 miles—so at that moment we were somewhere within 150 miles of our landfall. The built-in compass on top of the RDF gave the exact heading. We were home free!

“All my navigation problems are over,” I sang. “All we have to do is head east enough of the beacon to avoid the reefs.” I double-checked the chart. The reefs surrounding Bermuda begin 30 miles offshore. If we made our approach to the east, we would be safe. This was no time for guesswork. I checked and rechecked my lines of position, hoping for the best.

During this clear-sky gale, I couldn't leave the cockpit and sat outside watching, wondering and worrying if I was doing the right thing. There was no one to help me figure anything out, no one to answer any of my thousands of questions, no one to tell me if I had too much sail up or if it was normal that
Varuna
was heeled over 35 degrees and if water should be pouring over the rail into the cockpit. I looked up at the mast and rigging and hoped that because they
were new, they could handle the extra pressure of whatever I might be doing wrong. The Monitor steered merrily away, right on course, taking on all the waves intended for the helmsman.
Varuna
held up just as bravely.

A wave could come crashing over us; she'd delicately shudder, come out from under, shake it off and rise to the crest of the next. Buffeted from side to side, she always came back up again while I waited for her to break up into a million pieces. How much can a hunk of fiberglass take? I wondered. Slowly, I learned to trust her strength. Every time she rose to the top of a crest, I would hunch up in the cockpit under the scant protection of the sprayhood and hold on. She would pause, almost suspended in midair, before dropping down to the deep trough. My stomach was in my throat as we nosedived and slammed into the sea, only to begin the ascent again. Rise . . . Pause . . . Drop . . . SLAM! Over and over and over.

On the chart, I had made a dot just north of Bermuda and marked it as the goal. For the past ten days, I had concentrated on that dot and scrutinized the inches between it and our position. On the eleventh of June, when the weather finally calmed, I took another sun sight, crossed it with the RDF bearing and found myself 40 miles north of Bermuda on the chart. I swallowed hard and stared at the dot. Even allowing for a large margin of error, I couldn't be too far off. The reality quickly sank in. At our present speed, the same time the next day, I could be on land! I gathered my senses and looked around. “The boat is a mess,” I thought, “and I must stink like a goat. What will the customs man think if he sees this bedlam?”

I hurriedly began to organize the boat, arranged my papers and then stripped down and took a bucket shower, shivering with the shock of the water. As my body dried under the warm rays of the sun, I noticed I had shed several pounds since leaving New York almost two weeks before.

Next, I began to plan my approach. Memorizing the jagged outline of Bermuda's reefy coast, I crossed and recrossed the bearings and took countless sun sights to determine the optimum angle for landfall. With one more night at sea before attempting it, I thought it would be good to get a bit of sleep and restore some strength for the morning approach. Every time my eyes closed, something jogged my memory and I'd jump up and pull out all the books and plotting sheets again to recheck the calculations. Many a sailor has tragically ended his journey atop the reefs of Bermuda and I had no intentions of joining the ranks of the unfortunate.

Up all night, I scanned the horizon ahead, peering through the blackness until I saw the objective. There ahead, like a pinprick star flashing its silent call, was the lighthouse marking the entrance to Bermuda. As we slowly closed the distance, I could see the sweeping beacon and, beyond it, the faint glow of lights from civilization. Nothing had ever looked so beautiful. “I'm coming!” I called out. “I'm coming as fast as I can!”

By dawn, the winds had eased mildly to the south. I tacked
Varuna
out to the east and aligned her, by compass and RDF bearings, to the entrance of St. George's Harbour. Approaching, it became possible to make out other sailboats slipping in and out of a narrow corridor of cliffs and, as we crossed the paths of those leaving, I waved to the crews. At the mouth of the harbor, a fishing boat bobbed up and down and I sailed up to it.

“Hello,” I called to the elderly couple aboard. “Is there anybody around here that could help me out with a tow? And would you mind calling them on your radio? I have no more electricity and no engine.” I was too unsure of my capabilities to risk navigating through the fringing reefs of the entrance or tacking back and forth past the walls of those looming sentinels of cliffs.

“Get some lines ready to throw to us. We'd be happy to tow you in,” the skipper called back. They cheerfully pulled in their fishing lines and did the honors.

Fifteen minutes later, at 11:00
A.M
., the twelfth of June, after 751 logged miles, I tied
Varuna
up to the dock and hopped ashore. After twelve days at sea, I weaved and wobbled with a severe case of rubber legs. Weathering two sizable storms and a possibly fatal leak, I had taught myself a mongrelized version of celestial navigation, the engine had conked out and we'd had no power. I had truly learned everything the hard way and headed straight for a telephone to call my father.

C
ollect call from Tania to Ernst,” the New York operator's nasal voice crackled over the phone lines. “Will you accept the charges?” A rush of excitement seemed to pour out of the earpiece of the public telephone on the quay.

“Yes! YES!” exploded the familiar voice. “What in the holy hell were you doing out there?” boomed my father, cleaning out my ears in the process. “I have been worried sick. We almost sent out a
search
party.
Hey, everybody! It's Tania!”
he screamed to the rest of the house. “Every skipper in Bermuda is on the lookout for you. Plus the Bermuda Coast Guard.”

I smiled as he spoke, and leaned against the wall of the telephone cabin gazing out at the sailboats rafted up together in front of me. Flocks of seagulls squawked and soared across the clear June sky. The St. George's Harbour was a beehive of activity, full of sailboats stopping over on their ways to Europe and the East Coast of the United States. Mopeds zoomed back and forth on the narrow cobble-stoned streets lined with rhododendron. Suntanned crews scurried to and fro with armloads of provisions. Honeymooners sipped Mai Tais on the shady terraces with blooming bougainvillea overlooking the busy harbor. I stood drinking in the wonderful sounds, smells and visions of civilization.