Authors: Tania Aebi
“Forget it,” I said to Olivier. “It'll work in an emergency as long as I keep pumping the bilge. In Port Sudan I'm throwing the whole bloody thing overboard and buying an outboard.” We jammed the stuffing box back in, this time with some underwater epoxy and called out to Len, who was waiting. I dropped Olivier back off on
Akka
and on the evening of March 24 sailed out of the harbor with Olivier following and Len behind.
At the port entrance, Len lagged back a little, changing a sail, while
Akka
and
Varuna
picked up speed. Through the night, we tacked toward the notorious straits of Bab el Mandabâtranslation: “Gates of Hell,” “Gates of Tears” or “Gates of Lamentations.” We were in for a doozie. My cruising guide warned that the northeast monsoon marched into this narrow neck, funneling its way through the straits and building up quite a momentum. There was no trace of Len behind us, but with his beautiful boat, we figured he'd catch up soon.
Sure enough, like clockwork, as we made our way in, the wind increased and began to howl from astern, eliminating any chance for conversation between the boats. By late afternoon, it was blowing 55 knots and spray was flying over the lumpy water. All of a sudden, I heard, “Pop,
rrrip
, pop,” and so began my anticipated trauma with the mainsail.
Catching up with Olivier, who was sitting on
Akka's
deck, protected by a foul-weather jacket, I found him also sewing up his mainsail. Taking down the jib and tying the main to the boom as we drifted closer, I hollered over the wind as it pushed
Varuna
quickly out of hearing distance, “Look at this mess. What are you going to do?”
“I have to fix my sail,” he screamed back, his voice nearly drowned out by the racket of a thousand wailing souls.
“So do I. Let's leave the sails down for the night.”
“OK . . .
bonne nuit,”
he answered.
“Watch out for me. We can't lose each other,” I shouted, but we were out of hearing range already and Olivier didn't look up from his mending. The masthead light no longer worked and I had to do something so that all the shipping funneling with the wind in through the straits would be able to see
Varuna
. I unscrewed the fluorescent light from above the bunk, attached one of the old log's
trailing lines from it to the battery, and tied the light onto the backstay.
During the night, every other wave filled the cockpit, my ten-dollar bottle of Djiboutian grenadine syrup dyed the floor red and Olivier and I lost each other. But I didn't worry too much; 80 miles north lay the Hannish Islands, the first stop that Len, Olivier and I had planned. We would see each other the next day and have a happy reunion listening to each other's descriptions of the wrath of Bab el Mandab.
The next morning, I dragged out the storm jib that hadn't seen light since Bermuda and we took off at hull speed. By midafternoon, we zipped past the sinister, dark Hannish Islands as the wind still blew at a good 40 knots. Poring over the charts of the anchorage, I made the decision to forgo the group and carry on to Port Sudan. My nerves couldn't handle making a landfall without a working engine in this horrible wind. “If they stop in the Hannish group,” I thought, as we passed the northernmost rock and didn't see Olivier or Len anchored there, “they'll be able to figure out my absence soon enough.”
The following morning the wind evaporated and I used the respite to resew the mainsail. The north wind that would fight us all the way up the Red Sea began as a gentle breeze that afternoon. I heard some people from other sailboats talking to each other on the radio, and upon contacting them, found that they were 5 miles away. There was a small island that lay directly in our paths and we set a rendezvous.
They were three boats coming from Aden and sailing in company:
Annatria
with a Swedish and New Zealand couple;
Penny
, with an Austrian family of three; and
Tres Marias
with a Brazilian single-hander who had fallen out of radio contact with the other two boats until I chimed in and reunited them.
Annatria
and
Penny
were at the island first, waiting, when I saw a sail behind me. It was the missing third,
Tres Marias
. I loosened the jib sheet and as the sail flapped freely in the wind waited for Alexio, the first singlehanded Brazilian circumnavigator. He sailed up alongside, I winched back in the sail and we continued on toward the rock, making introductions over the distance. He really could put on a show.
“Sometimes, when I am on the ocean,” Alexio said animatedly, with a lot of hand waving, “I get all excited about seeing a floating plastic bag. Now look! Here I am, sailing along and minding my own business when all of a sudden, I see a
girl, alone
on her boat,
waiting
for me. What more could I ask?” With the gregariousness typical of many South Americans, he blabbed away about his good fortune in running into me. After more conversation along the same lines on Alexio's part, we caught up to the others. He told them how I had flirted, while I furiously denied any such thing.
Thus I made the acquaintance of Runa and Eileen on
Annatria
, a 26-footer; and Franz, Anna Lisa and Bernard on the 32-foot
Penny
. With big welcoming smiles, they waved greetings to me. While they had drifted, waiting for Alexio and me,
Penny
caught a fish. Franz steered over in my direction wearing a leopard G-string, Anna Lisa smiled from under a hood of long gray hair and Bernard stood on the foredeck to throw me a fresh filet.
Like a group of kindred souls meeting up in an unknown land, the others invited me to join their flotilla and we took off in synchronization, beating into the idyllic wind. I thought about Olivier and Len, somewhere behind, and hoped that they had met up; otherwise, it wouldn't be fair.
A lot of other sailors with whom I had talked often said that they carried firearms aboard in case of life-threatening emergencies. Even my father had a dreadfully lethal Winchester aboard
Pathfinder
. When I left New York, we had seriously discussed my bringing one along in case of a situation where I'd have to defend myself. It was decided that there was a very slight chance that once confronted with a life-threatening situation, I would be able to use a gun to my advantage. It is worse to have a firearm and be scared to use it then to have nothing, and I was pretty sure that I could never shoot another person. Instead, I had left New York with an empty hand grenade and some fake hair for a bearded disguise that I'd bought on 14th Street.
My father and I had assumed that if ever somebody wanted to board, maybe a bearded man would make the predators think twice. If that didn't work, I could pull out the pin, hold up the grenade and say, “If you come on my boat, we all go.” If they still ignored the twerp with bold words and decided to come anyway, well, what the heck, I tried.
Thanks to our little nucleus, if there were any shady characters rolling around in the Red Sea, I never had to meet them, although I did wonder about the occasional sinister-looking native dhow that puttered across our horizon. But my cruising guide said that most of them were laden down with sheep being smuggled to other countries.
We formed our own little sailing community at sea, and the VHFs were permanently tuned in to Channel 78. I forgot my pariah engine, whose starter once again refused to work and got to know my new friends through a constant stream of funny chatter that emerged from the little black box over my bed.
Annatria
and
Tres Marias
had SatNavs, which made life easier for the rest of us, although Franz and I would double-check the computer's veracity by taking sun and star sights. Two or three times, while we were bobbing around during the intermittent calms that disrupted the feeble northerly winds, one of the boats would tow
Varuna
while it motored. It was a kind gesture because, with the additional dead weight, speed was greatly diminished, and the others could have very well left me to wait and fend for myself. And so we averaged 40 miles of progress per day, which was typical of sailing north on the Red Sea.
Annatria
and
Penny
also had ham radios, which were very useful in this part of the world. All the hams traveling the Red Sea had set up an informational network of news and weather reports that were passed down from those who had weather fax machines, as well as plenty of gossip from the cruising grapevine. Reports of murderous 45-knot winds had us trembling in our boots, and then news of calms had us breathing hopeful sighs of relief. Often, Franz or Runa would tell me about a boat I had met in Sri Lanka or Djibouti that had reached the sailing mecca of Port Suez at the end of the Red Sea and I would feel glad for the owner, knowing that the biggest sailing obstacle had been conquered. I wished I could be up there with them. Sometimes the news wasn't as good as at other times.
One day, our VHF airwaves were buzzing with chat about some horrible news Runa had received on the grapevine.
Debonaire
had gone on a reef outside Port Sudan, he said, and Henry had lost his boat. A pall drew over me. I knew by now that a boat becomes part of the owner's personality and for old Henry, who had lived and traveled with
Debonaire
for many years, it must have been like losing a wife.
On that same day, there was an eclipse of the sun and an empty moon and I discovered that Olivier's passport and boat papers were still in my bag. We had forgotten about them during checkout in Djibouti and he was without all his personal credentials in one of the most paper-happy areas of the world. There was no question about it. I absolutely had to arrive in Port Sudan first. More than ever I hoped he and Len were watching out for each other.
As soon as we passed out of the territorial waters of Ethiopia,
Penny
and
Annatria
wanted to cruise up through the Suakin group of reefs and islands to Port Sudan, but Alexio and I decided to beg off. Preferring the safety of deeper sea to day sailing amid a network of reefs, we separated from the other two and began tacking out on a northwesterly course. The last 60 miles to Port Sudan took three sleepless days of pounding and tacking into viciously steep and short waves in strong 35-knot winds.
The wind howled like a hurricane through the rigging; waves crashed over the deck, sloshed down through the Dorade vent and splashed onto my bed. Going out to check on Alexio's whereabouts and survey the surroundings guaranteed me a cold bath, a reminder that we were no longer in tropical latitudes. The chilly north wind and cooler water temperatures had me digging through the piles of summer clothes in search of something warm to wear.
Varuna
plodded onward, burying her nose in every other wave.
Finally, on the night of April 5, we were just off the reefs leading into Port Sudan. We could make it in on one tack, but because it was nighttime, we doused the sails instead, drifting in the light of Sanganeb Reef lighthouse as its welcome beacon swept the water.
In the morning, the wind died down and we sailed carefully toward the harbor, past the spot where Henry's
Debonaire
had sunk. Keeping a very close watch for anything unexpected, we arrived without consequence several hours later and I anchored next to Alexio, behind
Christina
and an abandoned freighter named
Captain Handy
.
The quarantine launch arrived, and after the formalities, I sat down, relieved, and struck up a casual conversation across the water with the people on another sailboat whom I recognized from Djibouti. We shared the usual happy Hellos and How was your trips? and Awfuls.
“Hey, did you hear about Len?” they asked.
“No, what?”
“He's dead,” they said.
“What?”
“Just as he was leaving the harbor of Djibouti, the boom jibed, hit him in the head. He was killed instantly.”
My knees went weak and I sank onto the seat of the cockpit. When Olivier and I had seen Len lagging behind and thought he was changing a sail, it must have been after the accident when his crew member had been turning around to head back to port. I couldn't believe it. I pictured Len, full of plans and ideas and wondered what his last
thoughts might have been. One minute you're happy and full of life, and the next . . .
All afternoon and into the evening, I tried to let the news sink in and stop worrying about Olivier. I had assumed that he and Len were together and now my imagination was going off on a series of tangents. What if he couldn't receive the shortwave time-tick station that constantly emits the universal time (reception in the Red Sea was very bad) and he didn't have the correct time for navigation and had foundered on a reef? I worried that he had wandered too close to shore and, without boat papers and passport, had been picked up by the Ethiopian gunboats and now was in some dingy jail. As darkness poured in, I sat numb in the cockpit, thinking about Len and Olivier, and searched the night sky for falling stars.
M
isery loves company, and no matter how hopeless things seemed, it was funny how nothing helped to alleviate anxieties more than to read about or listen to the woes of others. Oftentimes at sea, whenever the weather had gotten out of hand, I had grabbed a book and tried to gain some consolation from the accounts of other people's hellish difficulties.
On that storm-plagued maiden voyage to Bermuda, it had been Dr. David Lewis's northern transatlantic crossing in a folkboat just as small as
Varuna
that had cheered me up. He had encountered a parade of terrifying gales while keeping a fearful watch for icebergs; and the immensity of the minor depressions that had engulfed
Varuna
dwindled in the face of a trip that had been even worse. In turn, Dr. Lewis had sought consolation by reading the accounts of Hanns Lindemann, another doctor who crossed the Atlantic in a fold-up canoeâboth braver, more adventuresome people than I.