Authors: Tania Aebi
One day, just past the Strait of Sicily, a little pitter-pattering noise on deck launched me out the companionway like a jack-in-the-box. Joy of joys, it was drizzling! It was the first heaven-sent water to dampen
Varuna's
deck since seven months earlier in Sri Lanka. By no means a deluge, it was still a rainfall, and I stood there in the cockpit as happy as if the sky were hailing silver dollars.
Jumping back below, I dug out Olivier's present and unwrapped it. As I had suspected, it was a book. Olivier knew that, after a slow start, I had grown to love reading volumes of James Michener on the ocean, and this one was
Caravan
, a novel about an American embassy official in Afghanistan who had to leave the safe confines of officialdom and join a caravan to the outback. Thanks to Olivier, I was transported to another world for a few days, one similar to the one we had just seen together in the Red Sea.
The wind continued to blow erratically from astern, which the pilot chart said was normal, while predicting a zero percentage chance of serious storms, so I remained unconcerned. For several days, I attended to my duties like a robot between chapters of the book and games of solitaire, as the skies changed above from a semi-cloudy haze to a heavy-looking gray accompanied by gusty winds. By the morning of August 28, as finally a somewhat steady wind began to escalate, I had finished reading
Caravan
and wasn't very worried, especially since we proceeded to make the exhilarating progress of 140 miles during the next twenty-four hours under double-reefed main alone. As the wind jumped way out of the force bracket predicted on the pilot charts and began blowing at about 40 knots, I chalked it off to strong trades, because my pilot books didn't mention these characteristics for Med storms, and the barometer hadn't budged.
It was my habit, albeit a dangerous one, to diagnose present conditions by referring to those of the past. The barometer couldn't be wrong, I reasoned, and in any case, progress was good and Gibraltar only 350 miles away. Tucked into the snug bunk, I tried to rest my weary bones and take my mind off the deteriorating conditions by starting a new book. Within the first few pages, I was lost in the life of that love-torn, secret-tormented milkmaid, Tess.
On the afternoon of August 29, a dark curtain dropped over
Varuna's
western horizon, the direction in which we were headed. In the past week, we had encountered several other fronts like this, where underneath the ominous cloakings, the wind had either increased or dropped altogether, and now the only course of action was to batten things down and continue. On approach, I could see jagged streaks of lightning bursting from the low-hanging, swirling clouds.
By nightfall, we sailed into its grizzly arms, and the wind increased to a howling velocity. Overcanvased even with three reefs in the main and no jib,
Varuna
began rounding up into the wind and getting slapped broadside by confused waves that filled the cockpit, as streaks of electric light crackled down to the water around us. Too tired to think straight, I couldn't find another ounce of energy to change the sail configuration again, and decided to let
Varuna
lie ahull under bare poles for the duration of whatever was about to happen. Dousing the mainsail and lashing it along the boomâa sloppy, wet ordeal in all this windâI crawled below for some relief, hoping it wouldn't get much worse. Behind me, I pulled down a large piece of canvas attached to the spray hood to protect the open companionway
from spray. A more alert mind would have made the decision to close the companionway altogether with the Plexiglas slats.
As the canvas billowed in through the open companionway, I automatically reached up onto the shelf and pulled out the alarm clock, setting it to the time of the next weather report. Finally we had reached the perimeters of an English broadcastâbefore it had all been in Italianâand I had to find out what was going on. This weather was a mystery, having no rhyme or reason, and no similarities to weather patterns to which I had grown accustomed in other oceans. Wedging myself in the lee corner of the bunk and snuggling up with Tarzoon underneath a cotton blanket, I melodramatically paralleled the hardships of leaving Olivier and the upcoming trips to those of Thomas Hardy's heroine. Tess was surviving; so could I.
Suddenly, the din of the wind was drowned out by a huge, thundering crash, and my world turned upside down. All hell broke loose as everything on the starboard side of
Varuna
catapulted down on top of me while hundreds of gallons of water engulfed us.
Varuna
lurched and rolled grotesquely sideways and I remember thinking in panic that a ship must have hit us square on this time.
With the first burst of adrenaline, I coughed and spit out the salt water that had rushed up my nose, pulling myself out from under half of
Varuna's
interior and clambered outside. There was no ship, but the storm still raged, with lightning illuminating the frothy sea. Any lightning storm we had experienced in the past paled in comparison to the fireworks streaking all around
Varuna
. The damage to the boat, revealed by the light of the eerie staccato electricity, almost gave me a stroke.
The spray hood had been completely ripped out of its aluminum supports by the impact of the water and was caught in the lifelines. The deflated dinghy that had been lashed on deck was hanging on for dear life by one line attached to the grab rail. The weather cloths that I had laboriously measured, sewed and two days previously installed with new grommets were completely ripped out and gone. Forty liters of fuel in jerry cans that had been lashed in the cockpit were gone. The solar panel that had faithfully sustained my electricity supply since Tahiti was gone, as well as my foul-weather gear, which had been placed under the protection of the spray hood so I could grab it easily before going out on deck. A sailbag of sand for kitty litter that probably weighed about thirty pounds had been lifted from the cockpit floor and was now lying like a bag of wet
concrete halfway overboard. Holding on as the boat rolled around and the wind blasted across the deck, I hastily hauled it in along with the spray hood and the dinghy.
That was outside, but the chaos that greeted me below was even more of a nightmare. Everything from the starboard side of the boat was on the port side, where my bed used to be, spilled, broken and strewn about under water as if we had gone through a blender. Water was sloshing up to one foot above the floorboards, with floating cassettes, papers, cameras, food, water bottles, Tupperware and books. The contents of the toolbox, which had been on the cabin sole underneath the middle section I had added in Tahiti to make a larger bed, was in the icebox and locker above the sink. Judging by the damage, I knew we had come close to having a complete 360-degree rollover until
Varuna's
ballast had pulled her upright like a weeble wobble before she could make the sidewise somersault.
With one look at all this, and with my heart racing, I tore back outside to pump the bilge with the salvaged handle of a file. Clogged! Oh my God, what to do. The electrical bilge pump had failed eons ago. Through the lightning, I swept the hair out of my face, trying to think straight. We were in the middle of a full-fledged tempest of biblical fury, and
Varuna
was wallowing about, pregnant with sea water and in dire peril. Uncontrollably, my body began to shake itself to pieces.
Suddenly, from nowhere, the twinkling white lights of a ship appeared on the dark horizon. In the throes of panic, I jumped down below, grabbed my emergency-distress beacon and turned it on, praying that the ship was monitoring the frequency and would pick up the position-indicating signal. Turning it on, I knew, meant to anyone who picked up the signal that I had abandoned hope of saving myself and sought rescue.
Seconds passed. I stopped and sat on the starboard bunk, stripped of everything, and tried to calm myself. A pack of cigarettes floated by, and thanks to the cellophane wrapping, the interior was miraculously dry. I lit one with a lighter that had been in the dry hammock above my head and scrummaged for the little airplane-sized bottle of whisky that I had been saving for a special occasion. The burning liquid settled in my stomach and an inner glow began immediately to suffuse me in warmth.
I gazed at the drenched souvenirs on the wall in front of me, the tapa drawing from the Marquesas and the bolts of Balinese fabric. They glared down at me; my photo albums screamed out; my soaking
clothes howled; my soggy books yelped and the dripping-wet Tarzoon meowed. Mr. T was the most important. Abandoning
Varuna
would mean leaving everything, and maybe even him, behind. I couldn't do it. We were still floating and I had come too far to fail now.
Five minutes after turning it on, and seeing that the ship had pressed obliviously westward anyway, I turned off the EPIRB and prayed to God that no one had heard it. “As long as I have an ounce of strength left,” I thought, “I'll do everything in my power to save
Varuna
and make it to the next port alive.” As I started to bail out with a bucket, the fatigue of moments before dissipated and my thoughts became very clear as scenarios ran through my head about what would have happened if someone had come to my assistance. Having summoned help, I would have been obliged to accept it.
For an hour I bailed bucket after bucket of water out into the cockpit. Picking up my soggy floating belongings, when the water was finally beneath the floorboards, I went back out into the exposed cockpit to dismantle the bilge pump. Several hours later it sputtered to life, after I discovered a crease in the hose that had blocked off the suction. Pulling out the kerosene heater that Morris and Ursula had given me in Port Said, I turned it up full blast to start drying things out.
By daybreak, the crisis had passed, things were slightly more ordered, and the activity had helped me to forget the seismic emotions of my fright. My nerves had been as tight as a drum for the six hours since the knockdown, and now as the tension drained with the dawn, every muscle in my body ached. As the wind died, I raised the mainsail only to find that it also had been ripped.
“What else have you got?” I screamed, as I ferreted out my repair kit and started sewing. “Come on! Let me have it now! You'll never have another chance. As soon as I get to land it's bye-bye birdie.
I've HAD it!”
After I raised the tattered mainsail, we continued making for Gibraltar and I began to jury-rig repairs to the most important items that had taken the brunt of the wave. It was worse than I thought; all the new electrical wiring that Olivier had installed, as well as the old, was shot. The cassette player and masthead light blinked on and off haphazardly until I took a scissors to the wires. The RDF, VHF, shortwave radio and tape recorder were all dead. Inside, the electronic terminals of every last one of them had turned a moldy shade of green. All that was left to me for navigation were my wet HO 249
tables, a soaked
Nautical Almanac
, the sextant and, for entertainment, the half-finished, waterlogged
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
.
At least the navigation situation made me smile. Now,
Varuna
would be just like the convenience-free
Akka
, and, like Olivier, I would be obliged to find land with help only from the sun and starsâno backups from the radio-direction finder or VHF.
While we plodded onward, I brought out books and the mattresses to dry in the sun and unscrewed the RDF terminals, admiring the intricacies of electronics and reflecting on what had happened. My mistake had been running under bare poles.
Had my wits really been about me, I would have put up the jib for some stability, using it to run with the wind. And when the conditions worsened, I would have taken down the jib, replaced it with the trisail and headed
Varuna
into the wind and waves where they would have been deflected on the bow. Fatigue is the sailor's worst enemy. I knew it. But you always think you're doing the right thing until it's too late.
Looking at the charts, I decided to use my last rations of fuel and motor to the southern coast of Spain. The wind had disappeared, I still hadn't gotten any sleep and
Varuna
needed more diesel to make it to Gibraltar. For strength, I cooked up a couple of meals of rice and tomato paste and shared them with Tarzoon on our one remaining dish, making long lists of things that had to be done, and not knowing where and if I would ever be able to find the energy to do any of them.
In between watching out for ships, keeping course and making the few repairs that were possible to effect at sea, I carefully separated Tess's soggy pages one by one, only to find that, she, too, had come to a tragic end.
AlmerÃa was the closest town drawn onto my chart of the Mediterranean, so I headed for it in desperation. Three days of coursing adrenaline after the knockdown, an intermittent flash from a lighthouse beamed across the oily-looking calm, darkened here and there by cat's paws of a breeze, and we were drawn toward the vista of Costa del Sol. Within hours, I was trying to use my few words of Pidgin Spanish to figure out where and how to tie up at AlmerÃa's marina, negotiate a price with the secretary and ask how to make an international telephone call.
I vainly tried to follow the instructions and make the collect call from the public phone, while the marina handyman kept offering to help, with wandering hands that kept touching my breasts. Unable
to cope, I rushed into town to place the call at an international telephone office, thinking I'd have a nervous breakdown if I couldn't talk to my father soon. I wanted to tell him what had happened and ask him to please come to Gibraltar and help me make repairs and bring new equipment. The seasons had no intentions of waiting for me and there was only one week to do all the work myself.
The telephone office was closed for the three-hour siesta usual in southern Europe, so I returned to
Varuna's
smelly, damp cabin and opened the Bible on my lap. Trying to halt an incurable case of trembling, I read the Thirteenth Psalm at the same moment as Olivier, wherever he was, at 12:00 G.M.T. letting David's lament soothe my racing mind: “How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me forever?” Crying over the irony of the psalm and thinking of Olivier, I leaned back and fell asleep.