Authors: Tania Aebi
“Nope,” I answered, “the ship that was here before has disappeared. There is definitely nothing on my horizon.” And then it dawned on me. “Hey, wait a minute. Is the sailboat that you see black with two masts?”
“Yes, I believe it is.”
“Oh my God,” I realized, “he sees
Akka.”
“Listen,” I said, recommencing the airwave conversation, “I know who that is. Would you please give me your exact position. I want to try to find him and give him a surprise.” Sparky was happy to comply and, giving my profuse thanks, I set out to find my missing half. Plotting and charting the estimated speeds, courses and convergence zones, I doused the jib and headed more south. All night I scanned the horizon from a lofty perch on the mast steps and even frantically sent flashlight signals to a star, but no one appeared. Dawn revealed the looming peaks of Socotra off the coast of Somalia, where many
stories of piracy were set by our friends at Don Windsor's. Still I saw nothingâneither a single Jolly Roger nor Olivier.
The next morning we passed the first peaks of Yemen bordering the Gulf of Aden. With the weakening winds befalling us in the narrowing neck of water that stretched between the Arabian peninsula and northeast Africa to the entrance of the Red Sea, the sails began to slam incessantly against the rigging. I prayed that they would make it without needing too much repair as we fought our way up the Red Sea, but looking at the threadbare areas, I could see that this would be asking a lot. The slamming in the lax Arafura Sea and the exasperating doldrums combined had made sure of that. The synthetic fabric was beginning to turn yellow, taking on a glossy, sun-fatigued look about the seams. There was nothing to do about it but pray, and pray I did. As the sails continued to slam, my only consolation was that, even though progress was slow, we were moving, and the bubbles of
Varuna's
wake kept disappearing steadily behind.
In the meantime, my kerosene and food stores were dwindling. Most of the yummy tins from Christmas Island had already become new fish condos. Tarzoon had mistaken my vegetable bin for the litter box and I had to summon up a great deal of imagination for digestible meals without using too much kerosene for cooking them. Therefore, I didn't eat much except for cookies, crackers and canned soups straight from their coffins. Tarzoon also meowed in distaste and grumpily sniffed his meals of sardines in oil. “Don't worry,” I told him. “Djibouti is full of French people. And we know what that means, Mr. T. That means good food.” Then I lapsed into daydreams of steaming hot, fluffy baguettes, juicy steaks, runny Brie and cold, fresh, crisp salads.
On the evening of March 6, after twenty-four days of blue, the course had to be altered south toward Djibouti across the shipping lanes that led to Bab el Mandab, the entrance to the long Red Sea corridor. Just off the port of Aden, the lights on the horizon became a continuously moving glow and with an unreliable spark of a masthead light and a kerosene lamp that wouldn't stay lit in the wind, I sat in the cockpit through the long hours of the night, signaling with the flashlight whenever one of those rumbling monsters lumbered too close.
While I flashed, one ship bore down from astern, giving no signs of altering course. I began hopping up and down in agitation. At about 200 feet, it suddenly made a 90-degree turn and I could clearly make out the silhouettes of the crew against the lights as they stood
along the bridge deck. As they grazed by, my knees were shaking uncontrollably and I began to wonder, what if they hadn't been watching? What could I have done?
Varuna
was heading downwind and it would have taken at least five minutes to drop the pole and jib and rearrange the sails in order to still have speed to get out of the way. In a brief twenty minutes, a ship could cross my horizon from first sight to last. If they could cross that distance so fast, five minutes and 200 feet would be scarcely enough to change my fate.
Sitting there, after those few anxious minutes, I found myself wondering which prospect had frightened me more: taking a dive into the inky water at night or having to make a major repair or jury rig at sea if we had been hit. With morbid amusement, I realized that it wasn't really the possibility of getting killed that had frightened me. If my time was up, I decided, I'd easily take drowning in the Gulf of Aden in the midst of an adventure over the slow agony of cancer. I remember my mother telling me, when she finally realized she was dying, “Tania, I wish to God I still had enough strength to take a dinghy, head out to sea and never come back.” Now I could understand.
Such weighty thoughts were rare, usually triggered by a close encounter with a ship or some other stress-filled moment. Usually, my daydreams were on a much lighter noteâhow I would decorate if I had a roomier 32-footer; what Olivier's and my children might be like if we ever got married; ideas on saving the world; and incredibly witty remarks for past arguments with my father. Sometimes I tried to write these thoughts down, but they vanished as fast as they had occurred to me at the sight of a piece of loose-leaf paper.
On the afternoon of March 8, after twenty-six days at sea, we followed the lighthouse beacon, then the buoys, past the fringing reef of Djibouti Harbor and I called goodbye to the group of dolphins that had followed us in. In the distance, I could see that
Akka
hadn't yet arrived, but Henry's
Debonaire
from Sri Lanka and the German
Christina
were there. Steering
Varuna
toward them and a clear spot, I dropped the sails and let loose the anchor.
Olivier made landfall the next afternoon, and together we walked the hot and dusty desert streets of our first African city, which was brimful of starving refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia, who came to pick through the garbage of the affluent French army stationed there. The jetty near our anchorage stretched three miles out of the harbor and into a town of contrasts, both Muslim and Christian. A haunting chant to Allah was belted out from every mosque four times a day when almost every man pulled out a straw mat and knelt in
the direction of Mecca to the northwest, while little nuns in blue habits went about their shopping.
On one side of a street, there were expensive restaurants and boutiques, and on the other side, entire families lay sleeping on the sidewalk, testament to the almost mind-boggling poverty. Wherever we went, hordes of urchins, lame or blind adults and pitiful pregnant mothers with numerous children hanging onto their skirts followed us imploring, “Baksheesh, madame. Baksheesh, monsieur.” I felt helpless in the face of such need, wanting to give every last one of them a little of what I had. In the beginning, I started by giving one-franc pieces or fifty centimes at a time. But we quickly learned that as soon as one person received a coin, the entire street found out and we'd end up being surrounded by a crowd of others who wanted the same. By the time we left, I could only hand out pieces of bread. It was all I could do without emptying my wallet of meager funds onto the streets.
Some people told us that those who were starving to death were isolated to the northern desert province of Eritrea, where freedom fighters had been fighting for independence from Ethiopia since World War II. Word was that the Eritrean frontage for ports on the Red Sea was too valuable to the Ethiopians, and they were dealing with the insurgency by starving the people to death. We did our business in Djibouti sadly, unable to reconcile ourselves to a disaster due purely to politics and greed.
March was the last month of the dependable northeasterly monsoon, which funneled up through Bab el Mandab as southerly winds, and we hoped to use them in getting to Port Sudan, halfway up the Red Sea. If we missed them, the entire 1,200 miles would have to be done beating and tacking into the teeth of ferocious weather. As it stood, we still had a good chance of making 600 easy miles.
I met a Kenyan mechanic named Shabani from a tug in the harbor whose crew was hanging around waiting to be paid by an insurance company for Nixon's old presidential yacht, which they had salvaged off the coast of Somalia. With plenty of time to kill, Shabani was working on
Christina's
engine. Telling me to bring
Varuna
behind his tug, he agreed to come and fix the stern tube problem. He refit a new greasing nipple and put on a stronger hose clamp. We made several tours of the harbor and it seemed to work, so I cleaned up and we went for lunch aboard his boat while the captain regaled us with wild stories from his salvaging days up and down the sometimes hostile North African coast.
Stomachs filled, we went back to
Varuna
, and I put the two wires
together to hotwire the engineâthis had become standard procedure since the ignition had failed long agoâand there was a click, spark, and then, nothing. . . .
“Oh no!” Olivier wailed. “That is exactly what happened when my starter broke.”
“Oh no!” I moaned in return. In order to remove the starter for repairs, we had to remove the entire engine. Cursing, the three of us launched ourselves into the odious task. By sunset, all the connecting pipes, gears, shafts and electrical wire relays were undone. We lifted up the engine with a block-and-tackle system attached to the boom and removed the starter. Another of the tug's mechanics fixed it, and the next morning, we reinstalled and reattached all the parts to find that from all the jarring and wedging of the previous day, the fuel filter was no longer airtight and had even bigger holes than before.
We tried everything from silicone, tapes, new gaskets and epoxy, all to no avail. Deciding to buy a new one, we stomped around in 115-degree heat and hitchhiked to a number of stores, each one on the opposite side of the city. Handing over my last hundred dollars for the new mount and filter, I almost cried. As we leaned over the engine, our backs cooked under the Middle Eastern sun and the tools became branding irons that had to be handled with rags.
Varuna
grew greasier and greasier. Once the new filter was installed, the contact to the starter had no reaction again. Next, we checked all the connecting electrical wires, replaced all the old battery cables with new ones, tested, scraped, loosened and tightened all the contacts. Still there was nothing.
“I think that it's the starter again,” I groaned. Olivier exhaustedly nodded in agreement as we felt the month of March slowly slipping through our fingers. It was already the twentieth and only two choices remained: leave without a working engine, or stay for as long as it might take to fix it and run the risk of horrible weather on the nose. The lesser of two evils definitely was to have a working engine for the Red Sea, which was narrow and crawling with shipping and reefs. Again we re-created the block-and-tackle system and manhandled the engine out of the boat. Now all that was left was to find the real problem.
On the day we had spent hitchhiking in search of a new filter, we had been picked up by a charming Mr. Hassein Mohammed Ali, who wanted to do anything he could for us and started by insisting on inviting us to lunch at his house. Fate, deciding not to be exceedingly cruel, also turned Mr. Ali into a mechanic and he offered to help fix the degenerate part.
The problem, he said after another day of sweat, was a worn-out bushing that was making a false contact. We fixed it and reassembled the engine for the second time and, thanks to Mr. Ali, congratulated each other on a dirty job finally well done. The engine purred like a kitten.
Mr. Ali's kindness was not the exception to the rule. Throughout the engine ordeal we discovered how friendly and helpful the Djiboutians could be. While hitchhiking, we never had to wait for more than two cars to pass to catch a ride, and I had received several free parts and pieces, despite my efforts to pay for whatever was needed.
During the engine tribulations, we heard that a singlehander friend, Len, whom we knew from Sri Lanka, was laid up in a hospital with a bacterial infection and we spent some time with him, visiting and bringing chocolates. Len was British, about fifty years old and reminded Olivier of one of his favorite professors from college. He had stopped in Aden, stubbed his foot, and once he was at sea again, the scratch had become infected and a red stripe began shooting up his leg. He had come to Djibouti in a hurry to get some help. Gangrene had set in, and it was touch and go for several days while he was pumped full of penicillin, which saved his leg.
When Len got out of the hospital, we shared meals together and often took strolls into town. One day we stopped at our favorite bistro for a drink and a quick bite to eat, but then changed our minds and headed back out to the boats. After dinner on
Akka
, Olivier and I were sitting out on deck, when we heard a large explosion. Startled, we turned in the direction of the blast and saw billows of gray smoke ascending like a cloud. The next day, the local yacht club where we landed in the dinghies was abuzz with the horrific story. Rumor had it that Palestinians, angry at the French for arresting one of their leaders, had dynamited the bistro, killing eleven people. We rushed to the scene to find the spot where we had enjoyed a drink shortly before the bombing and found it blown to smithereens. We checked Mr. Ali's house, which was just next door, and were relieved to see that the family had been left unscathed.
As soon as Len had recovered enough to depart, we all decided to sail together the 600 miles up to Port Sudan. Supposedly, with the war in Ethiopia, the entire coast was patrolled by unfriendly gunboats and we had started thinking about safety in numbers.
With Olivier's remaining funds, we provisioned sparingly in the exorbitantly expensive French shops, limiting our fare to lots of pasta and rice. Len took on a French crew member. The dinghies were stowed on deck and all spirits were high. For the final formalities,
Olivier and I took
Varuna
under power to the other side of the port to check out. As we tied up along the quay, once again water began rushing in through the stern tube. This was too much.