World Voyagers
Amy P. Wood, Philip J. Shelton and Stewart P. Wood
This book is dedicated to all the furred, feathered and finned creatures that nourish our souls and enrich our lives.
To our parents, for teaching us how to appreciate all that is good in the world, and to always look at the dessert menu first.
And especially to Ben and Than, who suffered the most, while gaining the least, during the three years we sailed over the far horizon.
Book Orchard Press Inc
Introduction - The Boat, the Plan, the Dream with a Lot of Dirt in Between
We built a boat at the end of the earth and sailed it around the world. We did this because it was a desire that burned in our hearts like the glowing embers at the end of a forest fire. Smoldering and smoking, the red-hot coals of circumnavigation retained their heat long after the woods had been destroyed, the wildlife displaced and the landscape permanently altered. It was a goal we could not abandon despite divorce, death threats, scant money and extreme seasickness. While en route following our dream, we were chased by pirates and cyclones, saw huge waves that towered over our boat blocking out the moon, and buried our most valuable crewmember at sea.
Our boat was named “Iwalani”, which means “Heavenly Seabird” in Hawaiian. My husband Phil’s eldest son gave her a name long before she ever had a backbone. She was the realization of a lifelong dream for my husband and the end of a tempestuous nightmare for both of us. Phil used to lie on the beaches of Long Island, New York watching yachts sail by and would say “Someday that will be me out there, sailing next to a beach with some kid lying in the sand wishing he were me.”
But as a wooden boat builder, he knew his trade was becoming a dying art, not a get rich quick scheme. Phil had over twenty-five years of boat building experience behind him after apprenticing with his grandfather in Long Island and teaching his skill to others. One after another, he built schooners, dinghies, duck boats, or yachts, only to see them sail off to fulfill their ambitions and specifications, sometimes making their owners very rich. But, coming from meager finances, he had not yet built a boat for himself.
Me, I wanted to sail around the world in a catamaran. Fast. Beating the records for circumnavigating held by women. My childhood best friend had already set sailing records. Why couldn’t I? But, I was a veterinarian working for someone else. I barely could afford one hull, let alone two, and I didn’t have the necessary racing experience.
“Why go fast, when you can go slow?” Phil asked me one time when I still knew him as Mr. Shelton. It was fate and a reality check on my part that brought us together. I owned my own boat and supported a boyfriend to maintain it. The maintenance on the boyfriend was becoming increasingly more expensive-especially after he fell off a ladder and shattered his arm, resulting in long trips to Portland for rehabilitation. I enlisted him in the boat building apprenticeship program at the Maine Maritime Museum where Phil was his instructor. At first I paid no attention to the daily stories coming from across the dinner table about the “incredible Phil,” who could scarf a joint with a chainsaw, steam bend and fit a plank by eye, or drill a four-foot hole straight and true for a prop shaft, whatever that all meant.
Whoa. Stop a minute. My mother says all the rest of this is unnecessary. The Publishing Manager says to leave it in. Whom to believe? Mother? Boss? Skip ahead to Chapter 1, if you are one of those who listens to your mother.
On one of my days off I decided to bake some cookies and drop them off at the Apprenticeshop. I was curious about this “Phil” who could do all these amazing feats with wood, bake a pizza and do all the household chores, with a baby strapped to his back, while his wife was away earning her doctorate.
I will never forget the afternoon I first saw him in the fall of 1992. He was standing at the far end of the Apprenticeshop. The light from the long stretch of windows on the south side was pouring through thick and yellow, illuminating each speck of saw dust suspended in the air like tiny fireflies. Phil, alone, was illuminated by the Vermeer-like lighting.
“Oh god no!” I said to myself when I saw him. Twelve years earlier while I was still an undergraduate student I had had a dream about a man. Not just about any man, but the dream, about the man. In the dream I had been looking up a boat’s companionway at a man holding onto a long tiller. The intense devotion I felt in the dream stayed with me for long after I woke up. The man was wearing a heavy wool sweater, had a beard and the most incredible blue eyes I had ever seen. As with some dreams that twist, roll and end up plunging into macabre Freudian territory, this too, ended with the man in the boat being replaced by a man in my chemistry class, the “cretin of chemistry” the others called him. If I squinted hard enough and with the right stretch of imagination, the man in my chemistry class could be converted into the man in the dream. One day when the chemistry cretin sat at my laboratory table, I asked him if he knew how to sail. “Sure” he replied. “I love it.” We were married much to everyone’s confusion several months later. After I discovered that he had a sixties notion of fidelity, didn’t know a toe rail from a taffrail, and posessed a violent temper punctuated with punches, I cut my losses as soon as I graduated from veterinary school and moved to Maine,
I wanted a partner with the devotion of a Labrador retriever, minus the drool, and found it with my next beau. However, I soon discovered a successful relationship requires a true partnership.
In my spare time I stayed on my sailboat “Petrel” alone, trying to think up a unified field theory or an equation to test for prime numbers. I began painting landscapes and caring for orphaned baby birds and rodents. I was a practitioner of the tweezer method of global salvation, plucking one animal at a time out of the cauldron of chaos. I felt like the clock was ticking and I was racing for an unknown destination. It wasn’t babies my body craved for, but some other quest for life,seeing, knowing or experiencing all there was to offer. The Labrador was content in coming home and watching TV. I thought television was a varied menu tempting the palate but offering cardboard fare. There were too many things to eat, flowers to smell, and bird calls to hear.
After the first few moments of seeing Phil at the Apprenticeshop, I knew trouble lay ahead. Falling in love with a man while caring for a boyfriend provides fodder for soap operas. Falling in love with a married man is the stuff of tragedies. Our lives became no different.
A few months after our meeting, the Labrador invited Phil over for dinner. Phil’s wife was in Russia and their kids were staying with the grandparents. Phil arrived carrying a loaf of his own freshly baked bread in one hand and a letter in the other. Wordlessly, Phil handed the letter to the Labrador and the bread to me.
“That is the most outrageous thing I have read!” panted the Lab as he handed the letter over to me a few minutes later. “I know a really good lawyer.”
The letter was addressed to Phil’s wife and was a love letter from a man she had been secretly meeting for the past twenty years in New Hampshire. Phil had found it while putting his wife’s laundry away.
“Do you know this Chris?” I asked Phil.
He shook his head. “I have no idea who he is.”
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the letter was the familiarity with which the paramour wrote about Phil, like he was an old sailing buddy.
“And how is Iwalani coming?” he wrote. “Has Phil been able to do much work on it? I shall miss you when you are on the high seas but will have to content myself with the many years of love we have shared together…”
“You don’t need a lawyer,” I said. “You need a marriage counselor. A divorce is just too drastic and doesn’t solve anything.”
“It is too late,” Phil replied, “I always told her, I would give her three strikes and then she was out. Strike one was a long time ago, strike two was with one of my students, not too long ago. And now this. This is her third strike. I just can’t trust her anymore. How can I? I should have caught on to the fact that it doesn’t take most people twenty years to get their doctorate. All these years of marriage have been a complete lie. I cannot sail around the world with someone I can’t trust.”
For most of my life I have kept a journal, an unlined book where the confusing assortment of thoughts, paintings, poems, inventions or mathematical equations of day to day life gets sorted out from the neuronal heap in my brain and organized into black and white. For that day, I wrote one line- “I have now found out who the man in the dream is, and it is very bad.” I kept the journal hidden inside the cushion of a couch rarely used by humans.
One night several months later, the Labrador appeared at my office with tears in his eyes and my journal in his paws. I felt like a person who had kicked a puppy. I tried explaining to him that nothing had changed, my feelings toward him were still the same; they would never change. The man in the dream meant nothing. It was a dream. This was reality.
He felt he could no longer live with me if I was in love with someone else. He said he needed to talk to Phil. I told him that if Phil knew of my feelings, none of our lives would ever be the same again.
The Labrador drove down to Phil’s house, located at the end of a dirt road, at the tip of a peninsula, on the furthest island of an archipelago twenty miles south of Bath, Maine. Dripping tears onto Iwalani’s keel, the Labrador changed the course of all of our lives forever, revealing to Phil what I never would have.
For the next five years Iwalani remained in suspended animation while the four of us fought over the future of Phil’s children. Phil lost his sons, and gained a new wife. I kept my boat, sold my house, gave away my inheritance and gained a new husband, one with a beard and eyes bluer than the sea. Phil’s ex-wife finally got her doctorate and moved their children to upstate New York, against the court order. The despair over losing his children and not being able to do a thing about it, was replaced by the belief that at least they were attending a great school system. All of us became half as rich, but twice as wise.
In the meantime, Phil built the world’s largest rotating globe for Delorme mapping company in Yarmouth, Maine. I started making money selling my paintings and became a part time veterinarian. Planks began appearing on Iwalani’s bottom. Lists were started for all the things we needed for a long distance cruise. Tears became nothing more than water stains on concrete.
Phil’s ideal boat for a circumnavigation was a traditional Colin Archer pilot cutter. Just pouring the lead keel would have exceeded the budget for the entire project.
One day, years before I knew him, Phil happened to find his students at the Apprenticeshop furtively gathered around something. On closer inspection, he saw they were reverently fingering the pages of a paperback book. Expecting something of a lascivious nature, he, too, joined in on the page turning. That was when he saw her, Olga. In profile, she was remarkably similar to his ideal Norwegian: big up front, narrow to almost a point in the rear. She had a straight deep keel and looked rugged enough to take any punishment that Neptune and the other gods of the sea could dish out. The book was George Buehler’s Guide to Backyard Boat Building. What was exceptional about Buehler’s design was that instead of the complicated process of traditional carvel construction, George had modified the design to a simpler V-bottom plan. Instead of being round and curvy under the waterline, Olga was slab-sided. What difference would that make? The fish were the only ones who would know of her unconventional underside. The main advantage of this type of construction was that she could be made of short, thick planks of clear Southern yellow pine. The advantage for Phil was that he could build the boat on weekends and evenings after work by himself. He didn’t need an assistant to help him steam bend long planks.
After Phil secured a copy of the book for himself, Iwalani soon began to take shape. Phil raised the middle of the boat a foot from Olga’s design, erasing the banana sheer. Over and over he worked George’s figures for the displacement, not coming up with the same numbers at all. George’s weight seemed off by ten thousand pounds. Finally, Phil gave up and and called him in Washington State.
“Yes,” George said while clearing his throat. “She was a little high on the waterline. We just backed up a concrete truck and poured cement in the bilge until she floated like a duck.” Another secret to Buehler’s unconventional success is to use concrete and scrap iron for ballast. Phil had a friend, an expert in underwater concrete, who helped devise the formula. Iwalani’s ballast keel has lots of large stone aggregate concrete surrounding full-length interwoven bars of heavy gauge railroad track.
* * *
A boat is much more than a rudder, a hull and some sails. It represents freedom and the physical manifestation of the dreams that can lie deep in a person’s imagination. Iwalani grew from the ground up, frame-by-frame, bolt-by-bolt, quietly sprouting in the dark of our barn, from the deep pools of Phil’s imagination. First, in 1990, he built the barn to house the dream, and then with the help of heavy machinery and curious friends, he poured the keel. In 1998, he began building again in earnest. Illuminated only by cantankerous fluorescent lights, which in winter hummed and flickered, he barely had enough light to see a plank, let alone the screw to fasten it by.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, while most people were worried about Y2 compliance, we began to worry about sail rigs. Buehler’s book mentioned a marconi rig but didn’t include a sail plan. Phil made another phone call to George. “What do you want to build that design for?” he asked when Phil mentioned what he was building. “That was one of my worst designs. She’s too heavy…”
“Uh, George,” Phil interrupted, “I’m almost done and am working on the rig.”
“Where are you?”
Unsure if he meant location or stage of construction, Phil answered “In Maine.”
“I used to live there. Worked at Holden’s boatyard. I hate Maine. Too many bugs and the people will drive you crazy.”
Phil obviously hadn’t caught George on a good day.
After weeks of going over George’s sail plans, days of head scratching and a constant feeling that something wasn’t right, Phil took a day off and went to visit his friends at North End Shipyard in Rockland, where gaff rigs rule. His list for equipment to complete a Marconi plan was getting longer by the day and more expensive by the hour. When he returned from Rockland, he asked me, “What about a gaff rig for Iwalani?”
“Uh, well,” I stammered, “it sure would be pretty.”
My own boat is a thirty three-foot Rhodes Swiftsure centerboard sloop. She is Marconi rigged with roller furling and a shoal draft, a quintessential old ladies boat. “Petrel” is designed for sailing during the day, anchoring just before teatime, having a gourmet dinner and then settling back next to the woodstove against fluffy chintz pillows with a glass of sherry, a cigar and a good book. She is easy for me to handle alone. It will only be a matter of time before more women discover the joys of owning their own sailboat.
A sailboat is a moveable cottage where time can stand still and responsibility for your own destiny is held in the hand like a teacup. Despite all my precautions with navigation, anchoring, fog, engine maintenance, and a cantankerous alcohol stove, my worst experiences on Petrel always involved the roller furling. It would jam at the most inopportune moments. I decided that no matter what, Iwalani would have no roller furling, just old fashioned hanked on jibs. But a gaff rig?
“My own experience,” Phil went on, “is with dead eyes and lanyards, rope stropped blocks, lace lines and pinrails, not this complicated thing,” he said picking up the marconi sail plan and tossing it to the end of his drafting table. “Besides, the mast will be shorter. It will be easier to build, stronger. If, heaven forbid, we roll over in a storm, it would be less likely to snap off. We might lose the topmast, but we would still be able to sail. If something fatigues or breaks, I’d be able to repair it. This thing is just too complicated and expensive, too.”
He had me there. I wasn’t looking forward to buying thousands of dollars worth of stainless steel fittings that would be destined to fatigue and break after two years of hard use. But my knowledge of gaff rigs was limited to just two words- “peak” and “throat.” Everything else was a mystery. I did know they sailed to windward about as well as a cardboard box.
“We aren’t going to windward,” Phil placated me. “And, if we do, we have an engine to assist.”
With renewed vigor Phil started tackling the gaff sail plan for Iwalani. For days he punched numbers into the calculator and went through several pencil erasers. On the fourth day, I saw that he had several paper cutouts of Iwalani’s underwater profile folded lengthwise and balanced on a pin.
“What the heck are you doing?” I asked.
“I am determining the center of lateral resistance.”
“The what?”
“It’s a single point on the hull, which, if pushed on while the boat is in the water, the boat would move evenly sideways.”
“Oh.” I went over to his drafting table and saw that he had made cross hairs through each sail in the sail plan.
“Is that for target practice?” I asked.
“No. I have to determine the center of effort for each sail.”
“What good is that?”
“The difference between the center of lateral resistance and the center of effort is called the lead. This will determine where the mast will go.”
I looked at his technical drawing. “I think it should go here,” I offered, pointing to a spot a few inches ahead of where he had drawn the mast.
“Why?” he asked, showing no sign of the usual irritation he has whenever I am contrary.
“Because it looks right. And besides I don’t want the mast in the middle of the salon table.”
“I’ve been working on this for days! Right there? Hmmmm. Well, I am a boat builder. It’s not like I can’t move it. Besides, I’ve never known a boat with lee helm. OK, maybe.” That was how we decided where the mast would be.
* * *
Iwalani is ruggedly built of two-inch southern yellow pine and Douglas fir. Her cabin top and decks are double sheets of three-quarter inch thick MDO board. Denser than plywood and used for road signs, it is more expensive than regular plywood but better adapted to handling moisture. The entire deck is covered with sheets of dynel and epoxy, ensuring no leaks below decks. Sandwiched between the MDO sheets we laid copper foil to form the mysterious ground plane, which helped to turn Iwalani into a giant antenna so we could speak by radio to virtually anywhere on the planet.
I made a list of all the electronics I wanted to bring: microwave, Cuisinart food processor, ice cream maker, blender, microscope, electric clippers (for shaving animals and Phil sometimes too,) single side band radio, vacuum cleaner, VHF radio, Inmarsat, mixer, computers, scanner, CD writer, stereo, autopilot, radar, depth sounder, navigational lights, ten interior lights, a twelve volt TV and VCR (which we used once, before it died and then we turned to the computers for watching DVD’s), and countless power tools. Phil designed and installed the electrical system to handle it all. An inverter handled the 110 side of the electronics, but the main storage system were two Lifeline AGM battery banks, yielding us a total of 1200 amp hours of electricity. These could be charged from running the engine, by a 160-amp alternator on a sixty-three horsepower Westerbeke diesel, or the Wind Baron wind generator designed for land use.
Coming from a Northern climate, we opted not to include solar panels, a decision I regretted later as they would have been great for the top of the hard dodger we installed in Australia.
I told Phil I would not go without a toilet. He reluctantly acquiesced, saying a bucket would be easier. A toilet needed a holding tank, as well as a direct overboard discharge line. Phil hates having unnecessary thru-hulls. So the entire head was plumbed with two seacocks, using a complicated system of y-valves and diverters. He also hates plumbing, so I consented to having all the hoses visible instead of hidden behind some compartment. As a result Iwalani’s head looks like the final fray between an octopus and a plastic pipe salesman.
For health reasons, I decided it would be safer to desalinate our own water, rather than relying on water from foreign ports or drinking water with chlorine in it. This necessitated buying an expensive watermaker system, which could work off the batteries. In hindsight, an engine drive system would have been cheaper and just as reliable, as we rarely used the watermaker when the engine wasn’t running. We had not figured on the boisterous conditions preventing the seawater water pick-up tube from working while at sea. Due to the movements of a boat at sea, the seawater pick-up tube spent half of its time out of water, unable to suck water into the watermaker. When it was calm, it was usually from no wind, so the engine would be on anyways; but, it was true freedom being able to make drinking water from wind power, which we did at many unspoiled anchorages.
The watermaker gave a virtual unlimited supply of water, which meant we could have a real shower. This necessitated pressurized water with back-up hand pumps at each sink. While we were in luxury mode, we installed a hot water tank, which could run off engine heat or excess electricity from the wind generator. I never regretted hot showers on cold days.
Instead of a windvane self-steering system we opted for an electric autopilot attached to a trim tab of Phil’s design. After an aborted attempt using my father’s antique Tillermaster, we switched to the most robust Raytheon Autohelm. The Autohelm was attached to the railing surrounding the boomkin and the retractable arm fit on a stainless steel bolt shaped by a grinder. This “nubbin” as I called it, was threaded through a six inch bronze rudder steering which slipped over a steel pole, locked in place with a bolt for a key, and welded to the trim tab. The trim tab was bolted to the rudder above and below the waterline, using locust blocks and angle iron. The trim tab itself is a rudder of sorts, only instead of steering a boat, it steers Iwalani’s main rudder. The main rudder of Iwalani is massive. Four inches thick, it weighs close to three hundred pounds. Thus it is, with each “arm” steering the rudder in front of it, that all forty four thousand pounds of Iwalani can be steered with just two fingertips, by steering with the “nubbin” (or, more conveniently, pushing the buttons on the remote control.) This is what the autopilot did, day after day, year after year, while drawing only one amp of power. This, by far, was the single most important piece of equipment on our voyage. It would have been impossible to hand steer Iwalani by the enormous tiller which dominates her cockpit.
Because of my fears of hitting a partially submerged container fallen from a ship, I had a piece of plywood, a large stone, hammer, nails and snorkeling gear ready for instant deployment, stored in the galley near the pizza pans. If we were holed, I would be overboard in less than two minutes ready to nail on a patch. I wasn’t sure a hammer would work underwater, hence the stone. Phil laughed and made fun of my “holing kit,” but he realized it allowed me to sleep at night, so he never disturbed it nor borrowed the orange-handled hammer.
Together we laminated Iwalani’s spars from two-inch thick fir and gallons of epoxy. The mast lay curing for days, taking up the full length of the boat shop with eight hundred and forty two clamps sandwiching it together. I could not see how this mangled block of laminated wood could ever become a highly varnished round spar, but it did so, by Phil removing the edges with an electric planer. Four sides became eight sides, which soon became sixteen sides, and so on, until finally the wooden beam became a round, tapered, smooth sided, beautifully varnished mast.
The hardware was designed by Phil and built by a local blacksmith named Jerry Galuza. We had one hundred and ten individual pieces of ironwork-goosenecks, chainplates, deadeye strops, gudgeons, pintles and crows nest hardware, all of which were totally alien to me. As I wasn’t sure what their purpose in life was, until much later, nor their correct names, they became the eyeball thingies, the strap doohickey, the loopy bits, the hinges, the cage. I was responsible for getting them galvanized in Massachusetts and making sure none of the pieces were lost in the process, since we had no spares.
Every night Phil worked building Iwalani until nine p.m., then came in for supper and worked on the web page. He got the URL, worldvoyagers.com, and began in earnest writing and researching the information contained in its pages.
“What on earth are you doing that for?” I would keep asking him as he worked some nights until two a.m.
“You’ll see,” he’d reply.
I thought it was a huge waste of time. It wasn’t until much later that I began to appreciate how writing a weekly log made us take longer glances at scenery and people; how a weekly chore kept us from becoming too bored.
I was in charge of the interior painting on Iwalani, which I did the week Phil was away in Long Island studying for his Captain’s license. How it happened to coincide with the coldest time of year in Maine was anyone’s guess. At six a.m. I went out to the shop and stoked the woodstove, then went inside Iwalani and turned on the two electric space heaters. By three in the afternoon I would have the inside of the boat to forty-five degrees Fahrenheit, the minimum temperature needed for the house paint we used. I painted until three in the morning when the paint fumes forced me to quit.
I didn’t want anchor decorations, illustrations of knots, sailing ships, blue cushions with white piping, or any of the other nautical motifs used on yachts. I knew we were on a boat and didn’t need the décor to remind me. Instead, I wanted Iwalani to look like the interior of an English cottage. I painted the bead board walls a faint yellow and did rose flower designs on the settee backs. A few years later these were replaced with scenes of Iwalani sailing around the world. Our cushions were dark green velvet and we had twenty-four chintz flowered pillows of varying sizes to stuff into holes in the hull if the need ever arose.
The bilges and anchor locker were painted with red lead. The former was soon repainted with bottom paint when I thought about the possibility of marine worms eating a wooden boat from the inside out.
We were among the first Americans guilty of Chinese offshoring; our sails were made in China. It was too bad we couldn’t have used one of the local Maine sail makers, but we were on a strict budget. The Maine quotes varied from seven thousand to fourteen thousand dollars; the Chinese sails cost us three thousand dollars and were exceptionally well made, with very fine hand stitching and needlework. I did have to swallow hard when we removed the tightly packaged sails and saw dirty bare foot prints on the mainsail, but at least they were adult sized. The mainsail lasted the entire trip with no problems. It and the Foruno radar were the only things on board that worked full time and needed virtually no maintenance for the three years we were gone.
On April 27, 2000, Iwalani was launched not far from our house. Phil’s superstitious beliefs prevent the movement of any boat on a Friday. As a result, Iwalani was moved by truck on Thursday, so she could sit at the Robinhood boat yard ready for the Saturday launch. We spent our nights and days working, feverishly painting the bottom, installing bilge pumps and through hulls, all the things we would not be able to do once she was in the water.
I had been forewarned by Phil of the bad luck that would befall us should I not shatter the bottle of champagne on the first swing. Every boat we knew whose christening had gone awry had either sunk, burned in a fire, or was lost at sea. Hours before the launch, I passed the job onto Phil’s eldest son, Ben, who had been responsible for naming her Iwalani in the first place. “Sure, I’ll do it,” he said. “How hard can it be? Just whale on it.”
At the time of the launch, I almost thought the job would come back to me. Ben looked around at the large crowd, a little nervous at first, tapping the champagne bottle in the palm of his hand. Wordlessly and with a mighty swing, he sent bits of green bottle and bubbles of champagne toward every point of the compass. Iwalani was christened on the first blow.
Slowly she was lowered by travel lift into the water. Phil said later he felt the cold April water on his back as Iwalani’s keel touched the water for the first time. She floated high and proud, looking a bit strange to us. We had built her in the boat shop where we continuously knocked our heads on the overhead rafters; at fifteen feet above ground level they were still not high enough. We had always seen every part of her up close, never being able to stand back and see the whole picture.
At first she looked a little like a headless duck floating on a small pond. She seemed outrageously big for just two people to sail. Her waterline was high, she had no mast, no spars of any kind, no lifelines, a temporary bowsprit, no boomkin. We had the next two months to install all this before our departure date (as well as load and store hundreds of boxes of equipment and supplies). We lived by lists, which only seemed to get longer, while our own fuses became shorter, and shorter….
Chapter 1 - Azores Aborted
July 2000
Gulf of Maine
What on earth am I doing out here? It’s three a.m., cold, foggy. I have been on my watch for three hours, one more to go. What day is it? I can’t remember. We left Georgetown around eight p.m. I’m pretty sure it was Monday. What day is it now? Tuesday. We’ve only been gone seven hours. Already I am confused. We should be about thirty miles off midcoast Maine. We are motoring into a southeast wind, right on the nose, heading for the Azores. I am wearing a heavy sweater underneath my foul weather gear. I’m still cold. It’s July but it feels like January. I check the compass. We’re still heading 135°.
The radar screen casts an eerie green light around the cockpit. Un-stowed gear lies strewn about. Some of it is tied down, some not. Milk crates full of tools slide back and forth with each upward and downward pitch she makes as she pounds into the head seas. Slide, slam. Slide, slam. I look about in the dark for a piece of line to make some of this junk more secure. The only line I can find is the end of the main sheet.
Oh well, it will surely piss Phil off if I tie some of this stuff down with the main sheet line, the bitter end, as he would call it. But what the hell? Bitter, you bet. I am pissed that we are out here in the first place. We were not ready to leave for our circumnavigation and at the last minute began suffering from cold feet, wondering whether we were doing the right thing at all.
I finished the cloth dodger on Saturday. I made all of the soft stuff on board: the cushions, sheets, pillows, dodger, after I got a quote from a professional for way too much money. As a veterinarian, I was trained to sew flesh, not fabric. Overnight I became a seamstress. It didn’t bother me that everything looked like it had been sutured, not stitched. The dodger looked like Frankenstein’s umbrella. But at least it was doing its job now. I was relatively dry. So what, if it was puckered and threads hung down like icicles on a Christmas tree? Visible incisions and suture lines showed where I had gotten pissed off and decided to take a little tuck here and there. It was functional and very ugly. Weird. Usually, I am the one more worried about how something looks.
We had left Georgetown despite my cries to the contrary. “The boat isn’t finished!” I whaled.
“Zip it” was my husband’s catchy new phrase. “We need to beat the hurricanes.”
My clients at work had been saying either one of two things to me- “It must be nice,” or, “You must be nuts.”
“I don’t want to be eighty years old and sitting in a rocking chair wondering what its like off the coast of Madagascar,” Phil would say when asked why on earth we were leaving our lives behind. The life we had built together on land had finally come close to being idyllic. And yet, when Iwalani was out in the barn, tied like a horse to stanchions, quietly waiting for us to climb on her back and take off, we could not ignore her, no matter what our families or friends said to us.
We live on a saltwater farm in Maine. Our land, bordered on three sides by fields, trees, rocks and marsh, is shared with no other humans. Our neighbors vary, depending on the season, from nesting songbirds, eagles, and osprey to moose, deer, or the occasional porcupine as the days become short and the grass long. At other times, when the land scratches lean and the light hangs low, more aggressive predators move in as they scour our barns and outbuildings looking for a quick scurrying lunch.
The nature of a saltwater farm is such that from the front door one can cross over the vegetable garden, where tomatoes and cabbages outdo each other to produce the most explosive and colorful heads, to the calm shores of any one of hundreds of small rivers and tributaries which perforate the Maine coast. From our river and front door, we can throw out a line and catch striped bass, bluefish or even sturgeon. Further downstream, mussels, clams, lobsters and cod can be found by anyone possessing the time or the boat.
And, where river meets sea, sits the lighthouse. As the last lookout, it perches high on a tawny humped up island, warning neophytes with a flash and a moan, like a tired grandmother knitting on a porch rocker, that should you pass beyond her, you will be on your own and out of the reach of her protective gaze.
Beyond the lighthouses, blue acre after blue acre of sea can be furrowed away until one day, a person wakes from a constantly moving pillow and sees that the fog shrouded granite ledges and balsam fir have been replaced with sandstone parapets and spice scented trade winds. This is the nature of a saltwater farm and from where we built Iwalani.
* * *
Three fifteen am. I check the radar screen. It is set to check for a radius of three nautical miles. I push the buttons for six miles. Bingo. There is a small blip five miles to the east of us. I check the engine gauges. Oil pressure, temperature all OK. I zoom the radar out to eight miles, twelve miles, twenty miles. The blip and I are the only things that seem to exist.
It is time to write down our position on the chart and in the logbook. I struggle down the companionway ladder after wrapping the now un-clipped end of my safety harness around me. It is awkward maneuvering with so many clothes and a five-foot nylon umbilical line. The chart is nowhere to be seen. Boxes of screws, cables for the computer peripherals, pens, pencils, spare batteries, sunglasses, all litter the surface of the navigation table. The chart is somewhere underneath. I scrape a small square area away. Pencils go rolling. Some tumble off to the left under the electrical panel where they will travel downward into the unreachable corners of the bilge.
Stewart jumps off a settee, comes over to my feet and meows. I pick him up and press his purring motor to my chest and rub his cheek with mine. Early on I thought I would be bringing my entire menagerie on the trip. Phil convinced me otherwise when he told me each pet would cost roughly one thousand dollars to go through Australian quarantine. Stewart would be coming no matter what; he is too much a part of my life, and neither of us can stand to be separated from one another. My sister took Sydney, my old Labrador cross, and we got housesitters to take care of my dachshund Polly, and Emily, my older three-legged cat.
Already I miss the other animals, but, Stewart has a gift for making me feel better, no matter what I am going through. I kiss him on the lips and put him down on the floor where he staggers like a drunken sailor over to his dry food dish to see if anything is left in it. It’s empty. He looks over beseeching me for food.
“Breakfast, lunch and dinner, Stew. You know the rules. No snacks, even if our schedule seems screwed up to you.”
He yawns and jumps back up on the settee.
We are using a GPS “road map” program to navigate. Using paper charts, which we both still insist on having, we plug in the latitude and longitudes of buoys and get a graphic picture on the computer of where we are in relation to where we are heading.
I am not completely familiar with the use of the program. On the computer screen I see a dotted line indicating the position of the course we are following and a green arrow with a green box-like tail trailing behind. The green arrow is right on the dotted line. It appears we are right on course. But the program has no navigational features; the sea, as indicated on the computer screen is just one big blue expanse.
At the bottom of the computer screen I read off the latitude and longitude and record it in the log book, along with our course, speed, wind direction and current position. I had failed to notice I was reading off the latitude and longitude of the cursor for the mouse, located somewhere off screen, not our current position. I go back up and re-check the position of the small target on the radar. It has moved one mile toward us. Hoping to see this other boat’s lights, I peer futilely into the foggy mist. Nothing reveals itself through the green and red running light reflections on the damp cloud surrounding our own boat. The visibility is about ten feet. Judging from the size of the return on the radar screen, I can see that it is not a large ship, most likely a fishing vessel of some sort. I am not happy that it is coming toward us.
I watch on the radar as the larger target, now two miles off our stern, starts heading north. Instead of one target it has now split in two. A smaller weak target remains in its original position. Did they leave something behind? Another faster boat closes in on the small target. I am getting a bad feeling about what is going on out here and want to put as much distance as possible between all of us. I have heard rumors that the Gulf of Maine is the ideal spot for drug running. I feel like we may be caught in the middle of a large transaction.
The clock chimes eight bells. It’s midnight, and my watch is over. I go back up to the cockpit for a look around. Drops of moisture splatter down on my head from the boom. It is wet everywhere. Reluctantly, I go back down below to wake Justin for his watch.
My husband Phil, had daydreams of his two sons sailing around the world with us. While this might have been a great experience for them, I also saw that it wasn’t going to be a reality, as neither boy showed much interest in any stage of Iwalani’s ten-year construction. Neither Phil nor I were in any position to say they had to go. They lived with their mother, and she, according to the courts, provided primary residency. We had always hoped they would join us for the first leg, the trip to the Azores, and maybe to other parts further along, depending on school vacations and interest. Nathaniel was the first to bail out. “Too boring,” he said, when we asked him why.
We signed Justin up as Nathaniel’s replacement. A friend of Phil’s older son, Ben, Justin is a talkative, bright fellow anxious to travel beyond the woods of Maine. He is equipped with numerous novels, several prepackaged US army meals, and an enviable assortment of long underwear.
Ben and Justin were going to help us get the boat to the Azores and then fly home. Justin arrived two weeks before departure and helped Phil with many small details. He built our ratlines and whipped the ends of every line on the boat, earning the name “Whipping Boy,” whereas Ben lay supine in his bunk down below, sometimes for hours doing nothing but staring at the ceiling. We called him “Bunk Boy.”
Two days before we were due to leave, I went down below and talked to Ben. “You don’t want to go, do you?”
“Not really” was the somewhat reluctant reply coming from behind the curtain that gave each pilot berth a modicum of privacy.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to leave my friends behind. I don’t have my computer, and it’s going to be boring.”
“Maybe at times it will be boring, but think of all you will be missing if you don’t go! You’ll only be gone for five weeks, three of those at sea. Justin will be with you so at least you’ll have one friend. It will be hard on your father if you don’t come.”
“I know. That’s why I haven’t said anything.”
“Well, you can’t live life just to make other people happy. I think your father will be very disappointed, but I am sure he will understand.”
Phil understood but wasn’t pleased about it. Rejection hurts in whatever form it takes. So neither of Phil’s sons were with us–only Justin, Ben’s best friend. Little did we realize then that this casting off the lines which tied Phil to his sons would weigh all three of them down every day for next three years.
I reach my hand between the curtains of Justin’s bunk and gently shake him. I feel sorry he has to get out of a warm dry bunk for a dripping cold watch. But he gets up without complaint. I head forward carrying Stewart and join Phil in the fo’c’sle berth.
One watch down, two thousand, one hundred and ninety more to go.
* * *
The next day we are still punching into four-foot seas. I am beginning to feel seasick and throw up a roast beef sandwich from lunch. We have an entire icebox filled with sandwich meats and the very idea of having to eat it all, makes me feel even sicker.
At three thirty every afternoon one of us has to check in with Herb Hilgenberg on the single side band radio. Every day Herb volunteers his time from his home in Canada to give weather forecasts to yachts on passage in the Atlantic. However, if a yacht fails to check in, or can’t conform to Herb’s strict protocols, they must suffer the consequences of a “Herbal” lashing. I have heard erudite people become so nervous and tongue-tied that they can barely stammer which hemisphere they are in. For this reason most yachts just listen in and get entertainment from the embarrassment of others.
After talking to Herb, Phil reports to us that a cold front is due to pass at midnight just about the time I will be getting off my watch. The fog has cleared off, but it is still cold and gray. We are finally sailing with a twelve-knot breeze from the southwest. I am still not feeling great but manage to open some cans for supper, chili for Phil and myself, Spagetti—O’s for Justin, as he says the chili is too spicy, and for Stewart, canned cat food. Battling the can opener is about as much effort as I want to put into dinner.
While on land daydreaming about life at sea and falling to sleep on a bed that didn’t buck, I had visions of creating stir-fries, curries and sushi. But the reality of chopping and containing all those little bits when the cutting board itself was moving about hadn’t been part of the fantasy.