Authors: Tania Aebi
The Galápagos were a brief but beautiful respite from the days at sea. Cactus took the place of hedge, and the streets of the small town were made of dusty sand. Everything I saw made me think of what a colony on the moon would be like. But, in order to protect the ecology, the Galápagos have strict visa laws and we were allotted
only five days. We had to get serious and find out what was wrong with my engine. Luc spend a good day huddled over the monster, trying to figure out the problem, and the sad result was that the fuel injection pump seemed to be shot and the starter had seized up.
“Tania,” he informed me, “you're going to have to make it to Tahiti under sail alone.” I acknowledged that there were no two ways about it and felt my heart sink.
Luc still wanted to show me Santa Cruz, 25 miles away, so we provisioned well with produce, mutant watermelon-sized cabbage and every kind of vegetable. The largest supermarket was smaller than the bodega on our block in New York and had a very limited supply, so all I could buy was some margarine and canned sardines for Dinghy. These people were not rich, and weren't confronted with material wealth and its accouterments, like the Panamanians. As a result, everyone was equal and all seemed happy with their lives and secure enough not to resent us. Rather, in every restaurant or store or market, they tried to make us feel at home.
I handed out my meager supply of magazines and some spare T-shirts to the village children. They were so spellbound by the glossy pictures that they didn't even realize they were looking at the pages upside down. The only thing the older men requested was snorkeling gear to dive on their reefs. They even offered to pay, but we had none with which to oblige. If ever I return, I will stock up in Panama and make the Galápagos fishermen very happy.
Water tanks topped off, we set sail for Santa Cruz accompanied by dolphins and barking seals. At first, I did a double take to see their happy, whiskered brown faces. These adorable animals stoutly swimming away between islands were the last thing I expected and I wondered how to ever describe to anyone the marvel of seeing them paddle through the water alongside
Varuna
.
On the north shore of Santa Cruz, there lies a small bay in the crater of a volcano almost entirely closed off by walls of rock. We entered through a small passage and were greeted by an explosion of sound. Hundreds of seal cows, bulls and pups were barking to one another, lining the perimeters of a zoo with no bars. Iguanas strolled through the colony highlighted by San Pedro's cactus plants and bright fuchsia-red prickly scrub. The seals leapt into the water and barked in welcome as we sailed to anchor. They were completely unafraid of
Varuna
and me and it seemed all they wanted to do was play. Birds abounded, swooping into the water and resurfacing with fish between their bills. Pelicans honked and came to beg for food
with baby seals who abandoned their toy red crabs, squealing in joy over a new kind of animal come to visit.
We caught some fish and witnessed a dance of the macabre. When we threw the entrails into the air, frigate birds came swooping down from their lofty patrol and performed aerodynamic feats to be the first to get the treat. Whatever they missed was fought over by the honking childlike pelicans. A little bird who had lost a foot in one of her battles even came to eat out of my hand.
The last matter to straighten out before leaving Santa Cruz was the navigational problem. My celestial navigation had been off for some reason and I had found the Galápagos only with the help from the RDF signal. The next landfall, the Marquesas, 3,000 miles away, had no RDF and by now, I should have mastered the art anyway. Luc sat me down and pulled out all his reference books. I found some old calculations and plotting sheets from my last passage that I thought I had properly attacked. We went over them step by plodding step and it soon became evident that Luc was quite rusty on celestial navigation, and used to having his SatNav do the work instead. I had calculated and recalculated the figures so many times trying to get the proper results, that I could do it with my eyes closed. The final result was Luc's admission that I seemed to know what I was doing better than he.
What could be the problem? The sextant? We looked at each other and I leapt into the dinghy to go back to
Varuna
and fetch it. To every problem there is a solution. This time it
was
the sextant. I had been using the plastic one that had been aboard my father's boat,
Pathfinder
. Through the years the plastic must have warped because the angles I was getting between the sun and horizon were slightly off. An unaligned sextant will get you nowhere.
Luckily, in the bottom of one of my lockers lived an excellent aluminum Freiberger sextant. I hadn't wanted to use it because it was heavier and more complicated than the other. When I looked through the plastic model, the sun and horizon were both in the same frame and all I had to do was bring down the sun in the mirrors and line them up together. On the other hand, the Freiberger had a split image with the sun in half of the frame and the horizon in the other. With
Varuna
erratically bouncing around at sea, it was an acrobatic feat trying to keep the two visible while getting them to meet. From
Thea's
deck, I practiced taking sun sights, did all the calculations, and hit our position spot every time.
We had no more reasons for delay and our visas had expired.
Three thousand miles of Pacific Ocean separated us from the Marquesas Islands to the west-southwest. This journey was four times longer than any I had undertaken so far and I knew that it could take as much as five weeks to make landfall. To say the least, I was apprehensive about leaving.
Sailors who had already made the voyage recounted tales where boats with malfunctions were at sea for eighty days and others about calms that had gripped vessels for weeks. The 3,000 miles were already intimidating enough without considering that any of these woeful occurrences would befall me. I hemmed and hawed, finding always another minor technicality on
Varuna
waiting to be fixed. Finally, Luc said, “We are going. If you want to come, let's go. If not, stay.” With such an ordinance, I had no choice. Luc gave me a package to open on my nineteenth birthday, and we said goodbye.
I watched
Thea
sail out of our crater anchorage and wondered where on the ocean we would be when I opened his present on October 7. Slowly taking a last look at the magnificent lunarscape of strange animals, I raised the mainsail, pulled up
Varuna's
anchor from the last piece of land I would see for at least three and a half weeks and got under way.
O
nce upon a time, in a wall-to-wall concrete mega-city, there was a teenage girl who wanted to sail around the world. People came from far and wide to meet this courageous child. She feared nothing and no one. The oceans parted before her and the sea life serenaded her passage. The wind gods smiled down and blessed her with the gentlest of breezes as she swiftly conquered the world. This girl's name was not Tania.
The Galápagos skies were heavy with cloud and fussy with irregular wind as
Varuna
moved skittishly away from the islands toward the open sea. Luc had proposed that we stay within sight of each other until leaving the currents behind and I was more than happy to comply. During the first couple of days, over the radio, I compared the results of my navigation with Luc's SatNav.
Varuna's
batteries had been freshly charged at the local generating plant in San Cristóbal, so now there was plenty of energy for emergencies, but not enough to waste on lengthy radio chatter. As soon as I was satisfied with my navigational capabilities, I was to be on my own.
The first two days, I felt tired and dizzy as
Varuna
beat past the islands, first San Cristóbal, then Santa Fe and Santa Maria. As they disappeared behind, sheathed in their spooky mist, I began to cry, thinking of the daunting 3,000 miles between us and our next landfall. Nowhere but in my minuscule
Varuna
, in the middle of an ocean, could the enormity of planet Earth make me feel so privileged yet so
completely like a speck of nothingness. Today, it was the latter that produced my tears. They cooked into my stew; they dampened Dinghy's fur; and they formed circular wet spots on my pillow and charts. The more the anxiety welled up, the more my attention and energies focused on
Varuna
, and as we crept farther into the blue void, we drew even closer together. When I steered, her tiller was an extension of my own hand. When I slept,
Varuna
held me in an isolated cradle of safety.
As stubborn squalls and gloomy skies darkened my mood, Luc and Jean Marie tried to cheer me up whenever we talked on the radio. “Somebody is smiling on you,” said Luc, “otherwise you wouldn't have gotten this far. After you make enough southing, you'll be in the South Pacific trades and this voyage will be one to remember. Immerse yourself in the beauty, and think about how lucky you are, doing something that most people can only dream about.”
On the morning of October 1, I woke up and turned on the radio for the morning reveille. “Luc? Jean Marie? Can you hear me?
Hallo?
Can anybody hear me?” There was only static. Now that the dreaded moment had arrived and we had finally parted ways, I felt relief, knowing what had to be done. I had to find those faraway isles by myself.
I had a pilot chart of the entire Pacific Ocean, all 64 million square miles of it. On the chart, the Marquesas were a blurry peppering of dots below the equator, almost exactly between South America and Australia. My dividers continuously worked their way across the distance and measured the miles down to the last millimeter. Dinghy attacked the end of my pencil while I designed another chart, where I drew columns and in them wrote out the names of the days of the week from September 29 through October 23, their numbered dates, and mileage by the hundreds up to 2,800. I knew myself well enough to think in terms of small daily increments, because looking at the trip in its entirety was too overwhelming. A hundred miles at a time, or one day at a time, was manageable.
I took out my guitar and a music book of Luc's, set a personal goal to learn “The House of the Rising Sun” inside and out, and started picking away. In the Marquesas, I would give a concert if it killed me.
Now, with the first wave of confidence returning, I set out to master navigation. It fascinated me that I could successfully use a sextant, tables and plotting sheets to figure out exactly where we were on this vast chart, and I developed a series of sun-sight times
for maximum efficiency. I even took extras, just for good measure. The first I took upon awakening, about seven-thirty; the second came ten to fifteen minutes before midday and then again just when the sun reached the apex of its saunter across the skyânoon sight or meridian. Just to be sure, I took one more sight in the afternoon. Sometimes I did without this last one because once the sun began its descent, it disappeared behind my winged-out mainsail and jib, which both faced west, and it became too much trouble to be worth the effort.
Maybe it was the fresh air and lack of tension; maybe it was my mind's total resignation to the fact that it would only have the present ingredients for stimulation, but I began to have whoppers of dreams that were so vivid I had trouble differentiating them from reality. Often, they were set in places I had never been. New York suddenly became Italy; then Tampa Bay, Florida; then Greece. Friends turned up in the oddest places and we would have long conversations. I was always stopping the boat and having fantastic adventures at imaginary tropical pit stops on the way to the Marquesas.
I felt happiest during the nights, when I knew I would soon sink into the dreamworld of sleep. There, I would be with old friends, doing and eating all sorts of things and having lighthearted adventures. It was like going to the movies every night, except I didn't have to pay to get in. I sat back with my feet up on the imaginary chair in front of me and watched as the dreams overflowed into my days, triggering a vast variety of memories and solutions to problems worked out during the night.
Twice daily, I checked off days and miles, and centimeter by centimeter, my pencil extended
Varuna's
position on the chart. On the first page of the logbook, I wrote the name “Baie Taaoa, Hiva Oa,” as if I might forget my destination en route. No way. I mouthed the words in English, Spanish and French, awake and dreaming, while crossing out the milestones on the chart. Although buffeted with cold wind and shadowed by grim skies for many days,
Varuna
barreled along at quite a pace with the trailing log beating a rhythm into my world, a metronome ticking away the time and miles as I strummed and sang away the afternoons.
October 7 was my nineteenth birthday and I was as excited as if I had just put a quarter into a Vegas slot machine and the whole casino was emptying onto my lap. Around 10:00
A.M
., the sun made a dramatic and permanent appearance through the clouds; the few
that remained became little puffs of lamb's wool prancing across the sky in the warming wind. I wrote in my logbook, “Thank you, God. What a beautiful birthday present,” and took a sight, marking 138 miles from noon the day before. We had made 936 miles in eight days and my dividers triumphantly flew across the chart calculating the leftover distance and time. Only 2,029 miles to go.
I read, worked around the boat, adjusted the sails and the course, played games with Dinghy and planned my birthday meal. Notes were attached to the packages that awaited: “Happy Birthday, Tania. Love, Jade.” “To open on your birthday, from your Daddy” and
“Pour ma petite
Tania.”
For the previous thirteen days, the ocean and air had been too frigid to inspire indulging in much more than a bird bath. But today, sunny and relatively warm, was the big day, and I lathered up in the cockpit with my first bucket bath in almost two weeks. As the salt water poured over my head, I washed down the cockpit with the soapy water, and poured more over my head, and it flushed the drains clean. Happy birthday, body and nose.