Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (21 page)

Looking out on the open ocean that I have known for so many days and nights and for which I have so often longed, I felt a new loneliness and a deeper longing than I have ever known at sea. I missed Susan as I always do on those rare occasions when we are apart, but it was more than that. Why had I not seen or felt this until I was two days into the voyage?

We all suffer the handicap of varying degrees of blindness and deafness to the most obvious and urgent realities that surround us, and if I have been more blind and deaf than most in the past, it has not been without consequence. But as I write these words in the stillness of a winter morning, looking out from the window of the tiny office Susan has made for me on the second floor of our home, I can see things a bit more clearly. The fog of thirty years has begun to lift, and what has been for so long a mystery to my own mind is drifting slowly into plain view.

Sailing has been a love of mine for almost as long as I can remember, and that love endures. The lift and forward motion of a hull responding to the unseen force of wind upon canvas is pure magic and one of the essential delights of life. I highly recommend it. But over the years, the idea of sailing long distances over oceans, unobliged to return, became for me less about adventure than escape—a kind of trapdoor beneath the uncertain footing of a marriage and a personal and professional life that seemed at various times to teeter on the brink of collapse. Whatever the impending real or imagined “worst-case scenario,” I believed I held the trump card as long as there was a boat waiting for me somewhere with a clear escape route to the open ocean. But this kind of defense can be an obstacle to the growth that comes only when we allow ourselves to be fully exposed to, and accepting of, the vicissitudes of life. With no escape hatch, we have to face life head-on, admit our weakness, rely on our relationships, and trust others to catch us when we fall. In short, we have to join society and become fully immersed in it, for better or worse. This is a good thing. Man is a social animal.

Unwittingly, for me, the call of the open ocean began slowly to fade as this voyage and the people and experiences I encountered along the way dispelled my sense of despair and increased my sense of society. I had fallen in love, yes, but like a growing child for whom a teddy bear gradually becomes a less essential defense against the bogeyman, I had also become less fearful of the unknown and more willing to trust myself and those around me. Yet still, I had begun this last voyage, a man of sound mind, with plans to venture far away, alone, from everyone and everything I know and love. Why?

Truly, I do not know. Perhaps I needed to confront for myself, in the spiritual and physical darkness of an empty sea, the stark reality of what it would mean to leave a woman I truly, deeply, and passionately loved to pursue a quest that would separate us for months and thousands of miles. The voyage I had just begun would do that, I knew, and I had known that before I began. But I had not known until that moment, in my innermost heart, that this was no longer my dream, nor perhaps had it ever been. For the first time in my life, I was not afraid to say so. Somewhere in the ocean northwest of Haiti and northeast of Cuba, the bearings of a new plan and a change of course began to emerge.

I decided that the
Gypsy Moon
and I would have one last great sail together—not west or east as I had only recently intended, but north, six hundred miles to Miami. In the coming week I would bear safely off the coast of Cuba until I could turn north to reach the Florida Keys and Biscayne Bay. Once there I would find a marina that could arrange for the boat to be hauled and trucked to North Carolina, where the leaders of a summer camp who once imagined that they might have an oceangoing boat on which to train young sailors would see their dream fulfilled at last. Susan and I would find a small boat to scratch my sailing itch on day sails that would not unduly afflict her with the kind of sickness known to the open sea. This was my new plan, and my plan, once again, would be the occasion for much laughter among the angels.

On the morning of the second day at sea, after the moon had given way to blue skies and scattered clouds, I tried several times to reach Susan on the satellite phone and tell her of my change of heart. The satellite signal was uncharacteristically weak in this part of the ocean and had been for the past day. Only intermittently would the phone receive a signal strong enough to complete a call. Finally, at nine in the morning my call to Susan went through.

As our voices went in and out with the signal, there was little chance of a lengthy conversation, so I blurted out what I thought she most needed to hear. “I'm going to Miami instead of Panama,” I shouted. She was tracking my position in real time over the Internet, through a GPS device on board, and I did not want her to worry that the boat was unmanned when it failed to turn south. Through her broken reply, I heard her ask why. “Because I miss you too much,” I said, “and this is no longer fun for me. It's not my dream anymore. It's not what I want to do.” Then the phone went dead.

The wind vane stood watches in the afternoon of the first day, all night, and all of the second day, until the
Gypsy Moon
was squarely in the teeth of the empty, trackless sea amidst Hispaniola, Cuba, and Great Inagua known as the Windward Passage. Throughout this time I lay awake in my bunk or slept in ninety-minute intervals, rising at night to scan the moonlit horizon for any sign of a ship. At one point on the first night, I spotted the lights of what might have been a cruise liner far to the north, but otherwise I saw not another vessel for two days.

After my phone call with Susan, the weather began to change. In the dangerous game of escalating rationalizations that so often presages disaster, I looked for reasons not to be alarmed into action when the wind speed increased and exceeded the forecast. I told myself that the temporary effect of thermal inversion was the cause of the boisterous weather, as it had been last year around this time off the Berry Islands. I told myself that by sundown the wind and the motion of the boat would ease again. Had I not been so eager to justify this premise, it might have occurred to me that, unlike my position south of Grand Bahama and north of the Berry Islands the year before, there was nothing but open ocean to the north and no landmass for three thousand miles in that direction that could create a localized thermal inversion. The weather was changing, and for the worse. I just didn't want to believe it.

Further obscuring my sense of reason was the fact that I was on a heading off the wind, not slogging upwind against the waves. On a downwind point of sail a boat can carry much more canvas for much longer, as the wind rises, than would be comfortable sailing in the same weather upwind or on a beam reach. Even as the wind speed passed twenty knots, it made no sense to me, in my hobgoblin logic of the moment, to reef or change sails on my offwind heading. This seemed particularly true in view of my persistent assumption that the rise in wind speed and wave height that day would be brief. I thought it very likely that I would soon be lollygagging about the ocean in light winds again, making slow forward progress and casting longing glances in the direction of the boat's diesel engine.

By midafternoon, I had been neatly maneuvered by my own wishful thinking into a predicament. The wind was up, but the sea state seemed to have worsened disproportionately to the wind. The boat was now yawing uncomfortably with each passing wave, and the large light-air paddle on the wind vane was whipping about so wildly that it was nudging the vane off course. I found myself climbing into the cockpit every ten minutes to adjust the vane back to a proper heading and keep the boat from riding up into the wind. On one of these trips, I lost my footing in the cabin when a big wave passed under the keel. I was thrown hard to port as soon as I stood up, as though I had picked a fight with a man twice my size who had insisted that I sit right back down. The back of my head slammed hard against the teak cabin top—hard enough that I was more startled to be awake and seemingly unhurt than by the blow itself. I felt the back of my head for blood and found only a knot, then rested a moment to ensure that I wasn't going to black out. I made a mental note that I must be considerably more hardheaded than even my worst critics have imagined, and I thanked God for that.

As sloppy and unseamanlike as my sailing was, under these conditions, I was elated to see that the
Gypsy Moon
was keeping a steady seven-knot pace and regularly spiking eight to nine knots. We were hauling ass. At this rate, I thought I might make Miami in six days.

Yet as the slow rise of wind and seas continued unabated, it became clear that I should have reduced sail hours earlier. Before long, I decided that it would be imprudent, because of the unsteady motion of the boat, to go forward on deck at all unless it was absolutely necessary. Instead, from the security of the cockpit I slackened the mainsheet even further, to a lubberly and pitiful degree, in order to reduce the area of the mainsail exposed to the wind. This worked marvelously to steady the motion of the boat, but it also caused the jib—now obscured almost entirely by the main—to luff badly. I could hear the jib flapping like a tattered flag in a storm, but I was confident that it could take this abuse for a few hours until the wind slackened enough to allow a course change, when both sails would be needed once more. Again, my confidence was merely wishful thinking in disguise.

Two days and 191 miles into the voyage I had begun in Cofresi, I was half-asleep in the pilot berth when I heard a loud and unusual noise on deck. Peering above the cabin top, I could see that the leeward jib sheet had gone slack. Investigating further, I saw that the running block for the jib sheet, which should have been upright and held fast by the taut line pulling like a rein on the sail, was dangling below the rub rail and banging against the hull. The jib had descended to a pitiful attitude at half-mast, like a worn-out sock falling down around a man's ankle. Going forward, I looked up to see that the jib halyard had parted at the top of the mast, allowing the jib to collapse to the foredeck and slacking the sheets. I was unable to retrieve the halyard and, as a result, would be unable to hoist a headsail until I reached a port for repairs. Without a jib, I could no longer sail effectively to a port or anyplace else that was not downwind of my position.

Whether it was laziness or wishful thinking that had kept me from going forward to reduce sail earlier in the day was now a moot point. My headsail had been reduced for me, and it was now my job to go and get it. I slipped on a safety harness, shackled myself to a jack line running fore and aft along the high side of the boat, and moved ahead in a crouch. The rise and fall of the boat had a familiar feel. Walking on deck in heavy weather was never as difficult to do as it was to imagine, and there were plenty of handholds along the way.

When I reached the bow, I planted my backside on the foredeck just aft of the anchor locker and braced my feet against the port and starboard bow chocks. The jib was still dangling halfway up the forestay and flailing badly. As I pulled it down hand over hand, most of the sail and the sheets washed over the leeward rail, creating a parachute effect that made it impossible to do anything but let the sail go. It remained connected to the boat only by two lines trailing in the water. The sail and lines swimming beside the boat, beneath the waves, seemed not unlike a man overboard, fouled in the wreckage of a ship's rigging, being pulled along and drowned. I recalled in that moment the king's ransom I had paid a well-known sailmaker, in Annapolis, to stitch that jib together by hand for me. I hired him to make that sail for twice the price I would have paid a faceless seamstress in the discount lofts of Kowloon, because I knew this jib would be my go-to sail for offshore conditions. I wanted a sail that was as bulletproof as it could be, and I wanted to look the man in the eye who would make it so. None of that seemed to matter now.

Watching this sail founder in the waves, I saw that the leech was battle-scarred and badly torn over two feet of its length from the flogging it had endured. The sail had survived no better than I in this test. I remembered the rigging knife in my pocket and considered for a moment simply cutting the sail and sheets loose to let all drift and sink in my wake, but something stopped me. That smacked of desperation and despair, and I wasn't ready to embrace either. The sail was repairable and still worth it, and so was my boat. From a seat in the cockpit, I bent loose the bowline knot that attached one of the sheets to the clew of the jib and began to haul the wet sail back into the boat, hand over hand, like the net of a Gloucester fisherman. It was a long and tedious process, followed by an equally long and tedious process of getting the tattered jib stowed in a sail bag, but eventually the rescue of the jib was completed. There would be no burials at sea that day. All the while, the
Gypsy Moon
continued to pull for Cuba under mainsail alone, slightly diminished in speed but still racing into danger.

Of the six hundred miles that separated me from Miami, four hundred passed through Old Bahama Channel—a navigational one-way street between the inhospitable shores of Cuba, to the south and west, and the impassable sand flats of the Bahama Banks, to the east and north. On the banks, ocean depths shoal rapidly in places from thousands of feet to just two or three, posing a risk of grounding to any boat that wanders there. With insufficient fuel to reach Miami under power and no effective means to beat upwind, if I kept my present heading I would soon pass a point of no return from which I would be unable to sail for any safe harbor outside of Cuba. For the time being, however, the gates of the Windward Passage were still open to me, south of my position. I was not yet in Cuban waters, and I could still head safely downwind in search of a repair port—if a repair port were to be found. That, it became clear, was very much a problem in this part of the world.

The only available port south of my position for the next three hundred miles was Port-au-Prince, a city that had become a crumbling, cholera-infested hovel of refugee camps, rape, and rampant violence in the wake of the earthquake that had devastated Haiti two years before. The chart books, all of which were written before the earthquake, advised strongly against any landfall in Haiti because of crime and poor facilities. Port-au-Prince was also well off the heading of my newly revised intended destination. I imagined the malevolence that likely awaited me anywhere in Haiti as the captain of a well-stocked, hobbled sailboat in need of new rigging for a pleasure cruise back to the United States. I needed a better option.