Ten Degrees of Reckoning (4 page)

So why do ordinary people choose to go to sea—people who are not explorers or part of the merchant marine or Jacques Cousteau associates? Long-distance sailing is popular, and increasingly so with the advent of new technologies. Yet sailboats can be costly to maintain, uncomfortable both at sea and at anchor, and they are certainly the slowest way to get anywhere. So why did the Sleavins hold fast to this idea of adventure for themselves and their children? John and I could appreciate Mike and Judy’s lifestyle because of our own experiences; perhaps sharing some of them will help you understand the appeal.

I can honestly say I loved almost every minute of our first long passage. I lost all perspective of time and place. Life at sea was mysterious and exhilarating, or intense and intimidating, or just a lot of hard work when the line squalls came through. On the clear nights, I took pleasure in staring at the stars to get my reference points, and then finding them again on my next watch as they moved through the night sky. When it was wild and squally and moonless, I felt as unsettled as the weather.

John and I were newlyweds who took turns looking after each other’s well-being. Trust and confidence in each other flourished. And we were fortunate; we had a lot of fun together. I could completely understand how Mike and Judy had been seduced by the passage-making, and why they were now moving ahead in their ten-year plan.

Certainly, John and I didn’t see everything the same way. The first time we had heavy winds and twenty-foot seas, I was quite frightened. I was on watch and the wind was from behind, creating a roller coaster effect. I called John up and we shortened the sails, then put up the storm trysail, and finally took everything down and sailed with bare poles only. John went below to get some rest while I steadied the helm, surfing down a wave into a black trough, and then climbing, climbing, climbing up the crest of the wave. I became exhausted trying to maintain a watch. I couldn’t really see, because of the walls of water all around. I found it menacing and interminable. At the end of my three-hour shift I was pulling off my foul-weather gear and John was putting his on. The wind was whipping the sea into a frenzy of mad whitecaps and foam and chaos, and then down, down, down we slid.

John hugged me and said, “Isn’t this the most magnificent, awesome sight?”

My log notes for that day read:
“Are we really on the same trip?”

Rarely are the seas flat on an ocean passage, and despite the comfort it would bring, you wouldn’t want it that way. You need the wind; but the wind creates waves. The speed of the wind, the amount of time it’s been blowing, and the distance over the water the wind has blown all contribute to the characteristics of the waves. High winds and rough seas, depending upon the direction from which they originate, often impede progress. Even if the winds are steady and moderate and the seas are fairly calm and not knocking you about, you’re lucky to cover 150 miles in a twenty-four-hour period. And if you sail against the prevailing winds, perhaps fifty of those 150 miles are actually on your course, as you zigzag your way across the ocean.

During our first voyage, at least once each day, at noon, I would unhook the windvane and take the tiller so John could take a sighting with the sextant. To get our latitude, he needed to be able to measure the angle of the sun above the horizon. Both objects could be seen at the same time with the light reflected from the sextant’s two mirrors, and then through the eyepiece. But it wasn’t an easy task with all the motion. As we reached the crest of a wave, I would attempt to steady the boat for as long as possible. John somehow always managed to hang on to the sextant and the boat to get an accurate sight. Then he would go below to figure out our latitude and longitude and our progress with the nautical almanac, sight-reduction tables, and our reliable clock, while I reengaged the windvane and remained on watch.

We also continuously plotted our position using dead reckoning: estimating where we were by using our course, speed, and the time it was taking to cover a certain distance. There were days of bad weather when it was impossible to use celestial navigation to verify our latitude and we had to rely upon dead reckoning alone.

At two a.m. on July 29, 1984, at the end of our first voyage, I was on watch. I saw the light of Cape Kumukahi on the Big Island of Hawaii—right where it was supposed to be, at the exact time my new husband had promised I would see it based upon the sun and the stars and calculations he had done for more than three weeks at sea. After twenty-three days with not a landmark in sight, or today’s technology to confirm our progress, there was Hawaii rising out of the Pacific Ocean. I knew then that my partner had all the navigation skills of Thor Heyerdahl and, I would bet, a much better sense of humor.

Despite some of the challenges we’d faced, we started planning another voyage as soon as we returned. Through their own offshore racing experiences in their Haida sailboat, Mike and Judy knew how seaworthy our twin pocket cruisers were, but they were incredulous that we wanted to take on a two-year New Zealand voyage in a twenty-six-foot sailboat.

We set off again in 1987. My husband wrote to our family: “It’s taken us 2½ months to get from Seattle to San Diego: considered excellent progress in the eighteenth century.” California was not unfamiliar territory; we had traveled around in more modern modes several times. However ironic it may seem, this drawn-out journey down the West Coast was more akin to the bushwalking that Bruce Chatwin describes in
The Songlines.
We had the opportunity to absorb the distinctive cultural and geographical changes of California as we entered each port. In every area we visited, we hiked or took a bus to find the track of missions that marked the first settlements. And the approach itself, from the sea, inspired us. I cannot describe how thrilling it was running wing-on-wing under the Golden Gate Bridge, knowing what we had accomplished with the wind and our own resources. We often got into the perfect rhythm of the sea on our passages, so perfect that we hesitated to make for land, but, still, every destination was enticing, whether we were tying up in a marina in a city of glittering skyscapes or negotiating the pass of a coral reef.

You can find the perfect dichotomy in cruising: times when you feel total freedom, and times when you feel totally trapped. Once you leave those marinas you have to be entirely self-sufficient. To do that takes considerable preparation. The sailboat must be equipped and organized and deemed seaworthy in any kind of weather. The sailors must be able to handle the boat and sails and equipment. They must be able to maintain that equipment, repair the sails, deal with possible injuries and medical emergencies, and find supplies when there are none at hand. Only a few blue water cruisers (sailors who undertake long ocean passages) would choose extreme sports in their land life, and although they know there will certainly be tests of courage, of stamina, and of patience, few go cruising just to see what a human being can endure.

Although John had made many modifications to the boat, there were things we had to do without, considering its size. One was a diesel engine; we only had room for an eight-horsepower outboard. Mostly we used the wind, because of the very limited amount of fuel we could carry, and indeed both fuel and water were usually inaccessible.

Our water tank had a capacity of a mere fifteen gallons, and this meant using up precious space in the cockpit lockers to carry jugs of fresh water. On larger boats it is fairly easy to rig a rain catchment system, and fortunately for cruisers today, reasonably efficient watermakers are available. We took advantage of the frequent squalls that blew through to have a shower, and when it was balmy, we took the time to wash ourselves, hoping for a bit of lather, with biodegradable dishwashing liquid and a bucket of seawater. Our towels were always damp and crusty with the accumulated salts of the ocean and our bodies. Without the space for an engine or a wind generator or solar panels, we mounted a little generator on the stern of the boat and towed a seventy-five-foot line with an outboard propeller. Our boat speed generated the electricity required to keep our navigation lights on for safety every night, and keep our ham radio operating so we could send our longitude and latitude once a day.

I doubt that there are prenuptial counselors who suggest learning to communicate in Morse code, but we managed to get both marriage and ham radio licenses at the same time. GPS was still not available to civilians, but we did install a satellite navigation system, which we supplemented with the celestial navigation skills gained from our first passage to Hawaii.

It may seem as though we had many restrictions on that little sailboat, but really we felt just the opposite. When we embarked on our second, much longer voyage, we set our pace and destination in line with our interests, bound only by the weather. The large square-rigged ships used in early exploration had great difficulty sailing into the wind. As voyagers observed and increased their knowledge about ocean wind patterns, sea trade routes were established where the winds were most predictable and blowing from a favorable direction. Not all of our own explorations were on these trade wind routes; there were times we didn’t mind bashing into seas in anticipation of exotic locales, instead of sailing with the prevailing winds.

We became resourceful and created new ways of doing most things. I learned to fish and to bake a cake in a pressure cooker on top of our two-burner kerosene stove. John learned the name of every fish in fifteen languages and made a mean stir-fry with shark and green papayas. The longest passage we had with no land in sight was thirty-five and a half days. Every three hours of those thirty-five and a half days and nights we switched our situations, one sleeping or reading or repairing an item, the other keeping watch in the cockpit for hazards and ships and weather changes. The confines were small, the lessons and commitment large. Our successes and failures were shared, and our lives inextricably and profoundly connected. We shed our very independent natures for love and friendship and mutual respect.

Every landfall is astonishing, whether the passage has been seven or thirty days. You first get a glimpse of what you think is a low-hanging cloud, but if your chart plotting is correct, that low-hanging cloud becomes the top of a high, lush island rising out of the sea. If your destination is a coral atoll, you have to be particularly aware of your position relevant to your landfall. Most likely you won’t see anything but the tops of palm trees, maybe just five miles away, looking like a spiked punk haircut, and only if you time your arrival so the sun is behind you.

We arrived at one such atoll in the South Pacific and carefully made our way through the opening of the reef. We set the anchor and then inflated the dinghy to get ashore. We took our time; we had to row through a coral path. As we neared the shore, we saw a crowd of people on the beach and decided to find a different landing spot, because it seemed to be someone’s private property. We rowed toward another spot, only to see another crowd gathered there. I remarked to John that it seemed like a huge population for such a little atoll. We decided we would have to trespass and make our apologies. When we landed, we were greeted by an entire village. The same folks had been following us from one spot to the next, waiting to greet us. They were ecstatic to see us sail in; we were only the second boat in a year to visit. They asked us if we would please come to meet their chief, and even though he spoke only Paumotan, we had a five-hour chat.

In these cruising adventures, you are never a tourist. You are immediately accepted just by showing up. And really, you can’t be a tourist, for in many of these places there are no stores, no restaurants, and no generators for an electrical night life. You are the villagers’ diversion and they yours. Perhaps you feel so attached to each island because your approach has been from the sea, similar to the first discoverers’ approach. You spearfish, you forage for edible fruits, you exchange items, and you provide assistance and supplies. And you are offered the most profound hospitality. In some places, it seems more appropriate to measure the distance between home and destination in centuries rather than miles.

If you picture cruisers as society’s dropouts, you might be surprised at how conventional we are, or at least how conventional the lives of most of us have been. John and I met people from all over the world, who had careers as teachers and airline pilots, engineers and homemakers, bankers and mechanics, physicians and boatbuilders. However, these cruisers resist being pigeonholed into or labeled by those conventional categories of economic or professional status, religion, or age. They want to be part of a community, based only upon shared interests and collective skills. They cherish lively discussions and camaraderie rather than debate over national and political divides. Of course there are malcontents, but they are few. Out at sea, even melancholic dropouts have to scramble to keep up with the forces of nature.

The cruising life is typically not a renunciation of lives or issues at home. I would not presume to know or declare all the reasons why people head out to sea, but most of the cruisers we met simply wanted to travel in an independent and self-reliant way. Some sailors recognize that cruising is the only possible way to visit many of the most remote areas in the world. For others it is as much about the journey as the destination, either because of a spiritual connection to the natural world or the love of sailing itself. Some sailors prefer to follow in the wake of the famed French circumnavigator Bernard Moitessier, who spent most of his time on the open ocean in solitude, never caring to sight land.

At sea, you are accountable for every action you take. On land, it is the same. Villagers and cruisers alike subsist on and share whatever is available, and this can present a dilemma. In one atoll, we were asked if we were likely to remain for two months, as they wished. The weather was perfect and the lagoon was absolutely gorgeous, but the weather had been dry for months. If we stayed, we would use up some of the precious rain water stored in the village tank. If we left early to prevent this, we would be ignoring their gift of friendship and an invaluable experience. We stayed for three weeks, until we had not one can of food left in our lockers, not one dusting of flour in our storage bins. We drank the clear juice from the fresh young coconuts to avoid depleting the water supply, and we left behind all our spoons as makeshift musical instruments.