Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (14 page)

Do you know
how a voyage begins? By untying a line.

So it is when we begin our life on Earth. At first the umbilicus and then the apron strings are parted, and we leave our mothers. These necessary acts foreshadow all that follows. Nothing that is tethered can grow and survive.

Untying the lines at Port Canaveral, I was soon underway among the behemoth cruise liners that gather in this port, awaiting passengers. The road between here and Orlando is a tourism pipeline that each year carries thousands of people to an experience of ocean voyaging vastly different from the one I was about to encounter. Passing beneath the enormous bows of these ships in the broad terminal canal, I had a sense of myself as David in the shadow of Goliath. But my feelings of vulnerability would soon be swallowed up by the immensity of the ocean itself, whose breadth and depth make every boat a bath toy by comparison. Indeed, ships the size of these would soon be no more than pinpoints of light in the darkness on the vast night sea that lay between me and the Bahamas.

Taking a sailing ship through a channel out to sea is, I imagine, something like taking a Thoroughbred to the starting gate. In the initial going, there is a slow and ordered calm. The steady march that leads to the winner’s circle is, as it begins, indistinguishable from the one that leads to the glue factory. But the rider knows where he is headed, and with a studied tension he anticipates the swell of movement that is about to erupt beneath him. Then the bell sounds, the traces fall away, and the Thoroughbred emerges in all his power to claim what is rightly his: the race to be run.

So it is with a ship. She is often necessarily in a safe harbor or a protected channel, but that is neither her home nor her element. She was made for the open sea, and the man or woman who would follow her there must prepare for the same. When the bow edges past the shelter of the breakwater and first encounters the unbridled power of nature, the helmsman’s heart may pause, but the well-found ship joins the fray without hesitation—dipping her shoulder to the waves and turning the ocean’s energy into speed and distance run.

I was struck
again as I left Port Canaveral by the expansive flatness of the Florida landmass. From the sea in daylight it appears to be scarcely there and could be missed entirely but for the long formation of hotels whose ranks lead all the way to Miami, broken only by the occasional inlet. It was midafternoon, and I was running on a reach down the coast, about five miles off.

My plan on this day in April was as it had been on that cold Christmas Eve in December—to stay within a few miles of the coast until I was well south of West Palm Beach, then break away for the Bahamas, arriving south of West End on my way to Nassau by way of the Berry Islands. With the assurance of a gentle southwesterly breeze, I put the diesel engine to bed as soon as I was safely clear of the channel at Port Canaveral. All sails were brightly flying, and my little ship was pulling hard for glory.

Anyone planning to cross the Gulf Stream cannot help but be awed by the tidal wave of advice awaiting the eager student of navigation. Being so close to the US mainland and within reach of hordes of weekend boaters, the Gulf Stream and its proper approach between the Bahamas and Florida are the subject of intense and constant editorial comment on the Internet. In these forums, wave heights, wind speeds, and navigational algorithms are hotly debated by anonymous admirals from the safety of suburban bedrooms. The certain calamity that awaits the uninformed is darkly described amid a cross fire of rejoinder and rebuttal until even the most careful reader can discern no safe path across the abyss.

Having studied all the available wisdom, I had a simple plan: to avoid turning into the Gulf Stream until I was far enough south that, turning east, I would hit my mark farther north on the other side, dead-on. By this method, crossing the stream is like shooting a bird on the wing. Aim directly at the bird, and by the time the bullet arrives, the target will be too far ahead. If a boat turns east too soon, the Gulf Stream will set it far to the north of its desired latitude. For this reason, it is necessary to make extra southing first, in order to make sufficient easting later, i.e., to aim the boat well below its intended landfall in the islands as though the entire Bahamas were a fat goose flying south for the winter.

It was a wonderful plan, but like so many other well-formed plans, it turned out ultimately not to apply. In fact, I slept through most of it.

By the time I came abeam of West Palm Beach, barely on latitude with the northernmost corner of Grand Bahama Island, the southwesterly breeze had blown me well offshore. To compound matters, West Palm is almost exactly the point at which the coast curves inward and westward on a slope toward the Florida Keys. To stay obediently on a course close to shore, I would have had to tack west and wait before crossing, and this is exactly what the experts would have advised.

In the end, I said good riddance to “the plan,” threw the helm to leeward, prepared to cross the blasted stream at a sharp angle (verboten, say the experts), and decided to let the devil take the hindmost.

Now, I should here acknowledge to any who might carelessly follow my example that there are several reasons why the prudent mariner should be cautious about crossing the Gulf Stream. A friend and I once had a raucous sleigh ride from West Palm to Little Bahama Bank, trying to beat a spring wind that was clocking north as fast as we were sailing east. There are wooly-bully waves in the stream, to be sure. But for the life of me, I cannot tell you where they were that night in April as I was bound from Port Canaveral, because I hit the rack.

If necessity is the mother of invention, the Monitor Windvane self-steering gear must have been designed by a desperate insomniac. I have never been so gently rocked to sleep as aboard my own boat with old Mo at the helm. On that night, after I bore off to the east and tucked myself into the pilot berth, so steady was the helm that I scarcely stirred at all save for an occasional brief sleep-muddled gaze above the companionway at the dark horizon. More surprising, though, was the apparent absence of any significant swell during the crossing. I was still waiting for those rowdy bouncers to roll me out of bed when I realized that I was indeed safely and serenely in the shelter of the Bahamas. The
Gypsy Moon
had made the passage without much ado.

Taking my position
via satellite in the hours just before dawn, I was astonished to realize that the current of the Gulf Stream had barely set me to the north at all. Under the wind vane, I had sailed sixty miles or more on a relatively straight southeast line across the stream. The southwestern cape of Grand Bahama Island was now bearing two points off my port bow. I was on my intended heading for the Berries.

Although a comfortable harbor at West End on Grand Bahama Island was a short sail away, I dismissed the idea of making port anywhere but Nassau. It would be fitting that I should land there and nowhere else after leaving Florida. Besides, the
Gypsy Moon
was sailing like a champion, and the entire ocean was ours. The petty entanglements and precautions of making landfall would become necessities soon enough. For now, I just wanted to sail.

The moment when I first realized that I would indeed complete a solo voyage to Nassau recalled for me the day when I first realized that I would actually—not theoretically or on some hypothetical future date—graduate from college. Both goals had at one time grown to mythic proportions in my mind. Both had remained well beyond my grasp after first attempts, and early timetables for their achievement had been wildly optimistic. It never occurred to me that I might actually pass the portals of higher education until the day I stumbled through to the other side, and I am not sure I truly believed I would ever step off my own boat onto the streets of Nassau until I had done just that. But first, there was still the matter of a hundred and forty miles of ocean to cross.

My euphoria ran high when I saw the water of the Bahama Banks glowing neon blue in the low light of dawn. I was well on the way to my destination. The next morning would be Easter. I still carried within my hold a book about the history of Raleigh’s Christ Church, taken aboard five months earlier to be a gift to the parishioners of Christ Church in Nassau, though the pastor probably had abandoned any serious expectation of actual delivery. I kindled a tiny flame of hope that I might arrive in time to deliver this gift at the Easter vigil. That, too, would prove overly optimistic.

Morning waned into afternoon and afternoon into another night at sea. The
Gypsy Moon
was sailing well. Now, however, I did not have the reassurance of ample sea room to let her run. I slept in fits and starts of only minutes at a time or not at all between trips to the cockpit to mark my position, tack, and adjust my heading. By now I had picked up the easterly trade winds, and they were blowing with characteristic gusto. The boat was sailing on her ear to windward. I was luffing every sheet to ease the weather helm and calm the motion of the boat, but I knew the rise in wind speed was merely a temporary effect of thermal inversion from nearby land. There was no weather on the horizon. Besides, I was too eager to reach Nassau and too excited about the swift pace of the boat slicing through the night sea to shorten sail.

So fast did the old
Gypsy
run, in fact, that I could not in my night blindness easily gauge how close she was coming to the shallows in the lee of the Berry Islands, where no boat can be assured of sufficient depth outside well-marked channels. As a result, I was tacking sooner rather than later to be safe in the straits south of Grand Bahama. Nothing, after all, is more frightening in a boat with four feet of draft than three feet of water.

By dawn of the third day at sea, Easter Sunday, my vigil was nearly complete. I could now well see the sandy shores of the low-lying Berry Islands to starboard and a few boats coming in and out of Great Harbour Cay. Ahead in the distance, a large freighter appeared to be making way toward Nassau, but when I poked my head into the cockpit again after breakfast, I was less than a mile from her stern and closing fast. She was at anchor, not underway, and out of a hundred miles of ocean I had somehow managed to choose a collision course. I quickly came about and left her to starboard, reminding myself never to assume that a ship on the horizon is underway until that assumption is verified by time and distance.

The Berry Islands have a reputation as a rich man’s paradise. I knew I had to leave the
Gypsy Moon
somewhere, and I had flirted with the idea of leaving her at an elegant new resort on Chub Cay, shown in pictures to be painted in saltwater taffy hues, but the prices there were too dear. Besides, I was looking forward to settling into the vibe of Nassau—a city that still held for me all the campy mystique of late-night James Bond movie marathons from my childhood. I could not have been more excited.

The coral-colored spires of the Atlantis resort appeared to rise higher from the sea with each mile I made south toward New Providence Island. At first I could not be sure of what I was seeing—a storage tank onshore or another ship, perhaps—but as the architecture rose farther skyward it became unmistakable. There would be no occasion for sleep this night. I was very close to Nassau by sunset, and I would make the harbor long before sunrise.

Nassau still appears in some areas today as it did to the eye of Winslow Homer, who found the city a rich subject for his work in the 1890s. Approaching from the north, I struggled to see the dim glow of the old lighthouse at the harbor. Homer had depicted this scene in 1899 as viewed from the shore, looking north, where abandoned cannons were scattered on the sand. When I was finally within range, the contours of the beach and jetty came slowly into view under the night sky. I roused the engine from its sleep of three days, pulled the throttle back long enough to throw a stiff shot of diesel down its throat, and heard it cough to life. Sails dropped to the deck. Lining up on the channel, which was dug wide and deep to allow cruise ships to come and go daily, I was soon steaming into the port that had so long been the object of my dreams.

Caught up as I was in the moment and thinking myself every inch of Balboa, my reverie ended abruptly when I nearly collided at flank speed with an unlit concrete piling. Swinging the boat’s helm around at the last moment in a sudden and ungainly yaw, I narrowly escaped my just comeuppance. I could hardly complain of the hazard: I had drifted well outside the marked channel. Thus was I again reminded that a sailor’s greatest peril is not a dragon of the deep but the places where little children go a-wading. Duly chastened, I skittered back into the channel and fixed my gaze tightly on the red and green lights ahead.

Nassau’s advantages as
a natural harbor are unique in this region of the world. The name “Bahama” is a contraction of the Spanish phrase “
baja mar
,” which means “shallow sea.” Unlike other ports of the Bahamas, which are rimmed by limestone banks and accessible only through narrow, shoaling inlets, the entrance to Nassau benefits from a wide natural lagoon that opens directly to deep water and is protected by a barrier island.

Nassau’s charms were first and best appreciated by hordes of pirates—the infamous Blackbeard among them—who infested that port in the early 1700s. Today, a statue of Englishman Woodes Rogers, Nassau’s colonial governor, stands at the entrance to the British Colonial Hilton hotel in the city. The inscription recalls his singular achievement: “Piracy expelled, commerce restored.” More’s the pity, if you ask me.

Nassau is indeed a commercial city. However, much of its infrastructure has been in decline since the 1970s, when the island gained independence from the British government. Some roads are in awful shape. There is no significant farming or manufacturing anywhere on the island, and the major export—fish—accounts for only a small percentage of the population’s gross domestic product. The soil is poor, and as a result the island imports eighty percent of its food. The local economy depends heavily on offshore banking, tourism from cruise ships, and foreign-owned resorts and casinos.

The Atlantis resort is the city’s major private employer. Here I found well-heeled tourists willing to blow hundreds of dollars a night on a hotel room and hundreds more in the casino, all the while enjoying a Disney World send-up of Bahamian life that bears little resemblance to the surrounding reality.

Still, everywhere around Nassau the natural beauty of the island and its culture breaks through the concrete and commercialism. Coconut palms sway overhead, flowers bloom in every crevice, and the aroma of fish and mango roasting on Arawak Cay travels on the ever-present breeze. Even in the shallowest, most obscure corner, amid grubby workboats, the water of the harbor is still as clear as a Beverly Hills swimming pool. The most remarkable gem to be found on this island, however, is its people. The King’s English is spoken here, and as I would learn in traveling the breadth and length of New Providence over the next eight months, the quaintly formal British manner, imbued with strong native pride, is everywhere in evidence.

It was nine o’clock in the evening on Sunday, April 4, 2010, when the
Gypsy Moon
arrived at the anchorage in Nassau Harbor. The area reserved for transient boats lies just west of the two high-span bridges that arch over the harbor between East Bay Street and Paradise Island. Of the several boats at anchor, none had lights on below to indicate that a crew was aboard. Circling twice to find a spot with adequate swinging room, I noticed that depths in the anchorage shoaled quickly to six feet. A half-submerged derelict near shore warned me to stay well out in the harbor, which I was only too happy to do.

Gypsy Moon
’s plow anchor dropped with a splash from her bow, and forty feet of chain and rode paid out slowly in the gentle evening breeze. I tested the holding ground with the engine under reverse power, watching the lights onshore to be certain I wasn’t dragging anchor, then throttled down to full engine stop.

All was quiet. I felt the singular joy of having come a great distance under sail that at the outset had seemed unimaginable and impassable. I had made good on a promise to myself. I had done the thing I’d said I would do, and that meant much more to me than it likely meant to anyone who’d heard me say it. Mercifully, I had sailed this final leg under a benevolent star, such that my voyage was without storms, equipment failures, or errors of navigation or seamanship. It had all gone so remarkably well and quickly.

In my mind’s eye, the docks at Annapolis were as clear as those I could see behind me. I recalled with a satisfied nostalgia the mixed feelings of dread, anticipation, and uncertainty I had felt when departing from that city’s harbor one thousand miles and eight months ago.

From my view on deck, the now brightly lit towers of Atlantis were prominent against the night sky and gave an air of enchantment to the place where I had just arrived. This was no banana backwater, I thought. This was Neptune’s playground. I tidied up the sails that I had furled in haste before coming through the channel and then organized the general clutter below from the previous days spent living at a steep angle of heel. Before long, all was well aboard my tiny spaceship on Planet Nassau, and I was deeply asleep.