Authors: Tania Aebi
“Oh my, Dinghy, look how silly I am. This will never do. I can't send this kind of picture home.” Hurriedly rearranging the gifts to cover myself, I propped the hat umbrella on my head and clicked the shutter. Dinghy chewed on the balloons while I devoured the candy and that evening we drifted off into a contented slumber, dreaming about home.
In the middle of the night I woke up, went on deck for a routine horizon check and saw a fishing boat in the distance. I had been trying to hail several boats and it had seemed that no one kept radio watches, so it was a great surprise to have this one answer my call. The world crashed around me when the fix they provided still pinpointed us north of the equator. My navigation was completely wrong and we wouldn't cross that line until tomorrow.
Anxiety-ridden for the next couple of days, I checked and rechecked the calculations but couldn't find the error. “Please, God,” I prayed, “let me find land.” I worried myself literally to tears and dreamed of arriving up a strange river on the wrong island in the Galápagos. On day 14, after many calculations and minus a couple of fingernails, I convinced myself that I would see land. I awoke hopeful and turned on the RDF. Theoretically, we should have been within range, but no signal verified my beliefs. I worried that San Cristóbal's beacon, which was listed in the
Admiralty List of Radio Beacons
as having a range of 200 miles, might be out of commission and that I'd have to find the island without its help. “My navigation
better be good,” I muttered to Dinghy, and spent the day hallucinating clouds into land until I thought I would become cross-eyed.
Tantalizing images of potential land flew in the form of birds. There were hundreds of them, all scouting for schools of fish, their squawks combining with sounds of wind and waves into a din of confusion. I looked at them for a sign, for one of them to point me in the right direction. “If there are birds, there's gotta be land around here someplace,” I said, peering ahead. The dolphins came in all their squealing glory and surrounded my disoriented home. I tried to communicate with them, pleading for an answer. Clouds were everywhere, teasing me with broken promises and false identities. My eyes burned as I endlessly scouted the horizon for a fishing boat that knew its own position.
Finally, the tension was too much. I turned
Varuna
around and headed east, away from supposed land, to avoid passing it accidentally. Pulling out my Bible, I read a passage from the Psalms and prayed for inspiration. I was a quivering mess and for good reason. If we missed the islands of the Galápagos, turning back would be close to impossible. The currents and winds of the trade route would not allow for the magnitude of such an error. From there, it was almost 3,000 miles to next land.
In an attempt to calm down, I concentrated on appreciating the beauty that surrounded me. The Humboldt Current, thick with plankton and the siege of anchovies that feed on it, was like a rich corridor of marine life. Often, I found Dinghy dragging in scaly flying fish or squid that had become marooned on deck. Pleased that he had provided for one of his own meals and that I wouldn't have to open another can from the dwindling supply, I wasn't quite so happy with the mess that his snacks left behind. Flying fish hold such a gluey substance to their scales that it wouldn't be surprising if rubber cement was derived from it. The squid invariably would leave behind a smelly inkspot on the fiberglass deck or my bed and Dinghy never cleaned up after himself, no matter the meal.
Hoping and praying for salvation, I sat in the corner of the cockpit and watched the waves.
Varuna's
wake was fiery in the moonless night as the phosphorescent plankton gave an eerie neon glow to the rooster tail of water behind us. Staring, I just refused to believe that we were very far off the mark and pulled out that lovable RDF one more time. Lo and behold, the signal came through loud and clear.
“Hallelujah!” I wrote in my logbook.
“Land, here I come!”
I adjusted my course to home in on the beacon and by the next afternoon,
after tacking in through the eye of the signal, finally saw the very definite knobby shape of San Cristóbal's volcanic peak sticking above the water. I sat and cried in relief.
Now that I had found land, for some reason Neptune did not want me there right away. The wind that had harassed us for sixteen days decided to quit the game and left us wallowing. Shaking out one reef, then another, replacing the jib for the larger genoa, I tried to catch every last waft of breeze.
Varuna
tried to make headway but was beating into it and going nowhere. Sitting in the cockpit, I hand-steered, trying to make up for the Monitor's slightly unsteady course in these conditions, until my bottom became sore from the hard surface. The wind remained feeble through the day and night as we drifted with the tides in and out of sight of the jutting peak. Frustrated, I vainly tried the engine, and even took out the dinghy oars, trying to row
Varuna
in, but it was useless. We just had to wait it out.
It was the next afternoon before a faint breeze returned and
Varuna
could make headway. What had seemed at first like a thousand tiny islands, slowly merged into one as San Cristóbal rose up from the horizon. Mirages formed between the peaks, creating an illusion of water, and steering in closer as the afternoon progressed, I realized it would again be impossible to make it into the harbor by nightfall.
This was unbelievable. I had been within sight of the island for two days and just couldn't fight my way into its harbor. I turned
Varuna
around for the second time in as many days and pointed her bow east. When night falls, it is dangerous to be this close to land with weariness setting in and no engine. When we were safely offshore, I heaved to by backwinding the jib. This way the actions of the sails canceled themselves out, keeping
Varuna
under control in the same place, with her head to the seas. That accomplished, I tried to get a little sleep before attempting another approach the next day.
As the rosy colors of dawn began to bathe the morning sky, I was already at the tiller heading for the security of a safe harbor. The primordial scene that awaited as I drew closer was something for which no reference book or geography lesson could ever have prepared me. The jagged islands, of the Galápagos rose like ebony pyramids from the sea ahead, each an ancient volcano that erupted 7,000 to 10,000 feet up from the sea floor to stand over 5,000 feet above sea level.
Charles Darwin had called these his enchanted islands, where he had found inspiration and the proof he needed for his theories of
evolution and natural selection. As
Varuna
inched closer, I knew I was seeing the islands for the first time the way Darwin had seen them aboard the
Beagle
over one hundred years before, from the deck of a sailing vessel that had made the long voyage from the Americas.
The swell of the South Pacific, unbridled since Chile and the southern latitudes, thundered and crashed against the menacing walls of rock ahead. Approaching with trepidation, I began to fear for the safety of my boat as we were clutched by the strong currents that surrounded the islands. The breeze that morning was dwindling and, as it did, steerageway was lost, the current overpowered us and we began to drift helplessly close to the nastiest shoreline I had ever seen. Several hundred feet closer and
Varuna
would be picked up by the breakers and dashed against those cliffs.
I gripped the tiller and pumped frantically, never taking my eyes from the cliffs while the rudder swished back and forth under the boat, giving us a modicum of rowing power. There was no continental shelf below, just the sheer drop of the volcano, so there was nothing for an anchor to grip. Finally, miraculously, we found a breeze that shook us free of the currents that in Darwin's time had convinced mariners that the islands themselves were moving, a misconception I could now well appreciate.
Following the coastline, I saw
Thea's
mast popping above a headland and at 8:30
A.M
. on the eighteenth day of this not quite so uneventful trip, I sailed into Wreck Bay, San Cristóbal, dropped the hook and pulled down
Varuna's
sails. This had been my longest passage, if not in mileage, definitely in time. Coiling
Varuna's
lines and folding the sails, I sat on deck to view my first truly alien harbor.
In the Galápagos, time stands still. These are the islands of the giant sea tortoises, of the kooky blue-footed boobies, of the prehistoric marine iguanas that cover the coastal rocks by the hundreds. They are islands of contradiction, where creatures of the Antarcticâpenguins and sealsâlive in harmony with the most ancient of tropical species. Isolated from man, animals live and play together and fear no predators, and I was looking forward to going ashore and seeing them for myself.
From the deck of
Varuna
, I could see a small fishing village of colorful cement houses dotting the arid landscape, dominated by boulders and scrubby, alien-looking plants. The long-unheard sounds of people doing everyday things reached my ears as my eyes followed the line of the volcano up to the calderas that disappeared into a permanent cloud. Several small fishing boats swung at anchor
nearby and directly in front, a couple on their sailboat smiled and waved. I waved back, looked closer and saw their nationality. “Wow, nice going, guys,” I thought, “you're even farther from home than I am.” They were from Japan, the Rising Sun draped around their backstay.
A smell of fires burning and the sound of people murmuring induced in me a peaceful moment of contemplation. At sea, I was never relaxed. My ears and consciousness were always on the alert for any unusual sound or weather change. The second the anchor dug into the ground, that tension dissolved.
A jetty protruded from what seemed to be the center of town and I could see Luc's blue dinghy bumping gently against the concrete wall. Although, in one way, I was anxious to go ashore, in another, I relished this moment and leaned against the mast trying to imagine Jean Marie and Luc's faces when they arrived. Looking at my knees, I noticed for the first time how bony they had become. The pants that had once fit hung loosely around my thighs. I had lost at least ten pounds since Panama, when I first met Luc, and wondered if he would notice.
I was in desperate need of a hot shower. Even here on land there was a chill in the air, not at all the way I imagined the equator would be. The pictures of snow and ice my father had given me for crossing Latitude 0° had been meant to create envy while I stewed in the doldrums, but they had gone off duty while we passed through their neighborhood. Stories of hundreds of windless miles were other people's tales. Until I neared land, the only doldrum characteristics I had experienced were the thunderstorms. Idly musing over an accomplished voyage, one quickly forgets the hard times and begins glorifying the good. As I thought about the dolphins and the whales, the phosphorescence of the night and sailing next to
Thea
, a distant shout echoed forth from the jetty.
“Tania!
Tania!
We're here!” Eagerly, I jumped up and waved to Jean Marie and Luc who leapt into their dinghy and came speeding over. “Oh, Tania! We've been crazy. What happened to you? We've been waiting for five days and I was so worried. This place is so beautiful, so many things happened to us. Oh, I have so much to say.” The words came tumbling out of Luc's mouth as we hugged each other. “Oh,
mon Dieu
. You are so skinny. We must feed you.”
It felt wonderful to have Luc care about me so much and I gladly surrendered myself to his ministrations. Jean Marie went back to
Thea
and Luc and I went ashore. Wobbling on unused leg muscles
accustomed to the sea's motion, I told him all about my trip and he told me of theirs. They had arrived five days earlier in the north of Santa Cruz, the next island. Since then, they had been biting their nails waiting for me. Tomorrow, Luc said, he wanted to take me to the mountaintop from where they had just come. Hand in hand, we walked to a little café where I devoured a steak, and then we strolled together back to
Thea
.
The next day, we took a bus to the caldera, the caved-in peak of the mountain. Disappearing over the rocky terrain into a rain cloud, the countryside altered itself dramatically from a desert to a damp and misty world. Under the clouds, gnarly trees and grass flourished, and when we got off the bus, our feet sank into moist, reddish soil.
Succulent fruit grew in abundance from orange trees. The Indians who lived up there welcomed us into their foggy midst with wide, smiling faces. Hiking through a countryside populated by more cows than people, I found myself pushing away mildewy fronds that hung heavy and wet from all the trees. Donkeys pulled the carts of the islanders that we passed, and a very occasional car rumbled by. All sounds at the caldera were muffled and absorbed by the mossy undergrowth and I wondered what it would be like to live in a place where the sun rarely showed its face.
In a small hut overrun by chickens, a wrinkled old lady sold us a burlap sack full of incredibly sweet oranges for five dollars before we went to the center of the village, where we waited for the bus to take us back down the mountain. Everywhere, smiling faces turned our way and shyly watched the strangers. A small white church was the center of the settlement with shrouded nuns herding flocks of children into groups. Hyper and unwilling to be locked away in a classroom when they could be watching us, they showed off by doing cartwheels and handsprings calling out the only English words they knew: “Hello, thank-you. How are you. One two three.” Luc laughed and, in a fit of adolescent energy, sprinted to a pile of the red dirt and tried to do a backflip. He fell over, the soil burying his embarrassed grin, and the whole square erupted into hysterical peals of laughter, young and old alike, while Luc took a bow. It must have been the mountain air.