Authors: Tania Aebi
“God
dammit!”
I screamed, throwing over the helm and turning
Varuna
on a tack toward St. John. “Why me? Of all the people on the planet that have engines, why does mine have to be such a bloody lemon?”
Still ranting, I scrambled down into the cabin and ferreted a screwdriver out of the toolbox. With a wild eye on land and boats, I dismantled the storage compartment in the middle of the cockpit, under which was the engine cover. As quickly as possible, I unscrewed the dozen stainless steel screws bolting down the cover to get to the engine under the floor of the cockpit. “Why? Why couldn't it break while I was at sea and not when I'm in the middle of a bunch of islands!” I continued my litany as jerry cans, sailbags, funnels, and coiled lines from the storage compartment fell on my head from the cockpit seat where I had thrown them. One screw refused to loosen, having oxidized itself to the aluminum thread. Just short of breaking the cover in frustration, I threw everything back into the cockpit and grabbed the harbor chart. The only way to get into the harbor and anchor was under sail. I pored over the channel and entrance markers and then headed
Varuna
back toward St. Thomas, tacking her gingerly back and forth through the eye of the wind,
making slow progress into a channel congested with rocks and transparent shallows.
Inch by inch we rounded the south side of the island and sailed into Charlotte Amalie Harbor, which was bustling with at least a hundred boats at anchor and skirted with cruise ships, ferries and a busy-looking harbor front. Scouting out a clear spot with plenty of leeway at the back of the fleet to drop the anchor, I maneuvered
Varuna
over to it and, at the right second, headed her into the wind, rushed to the bow and dropped the hook. The chain paid out and hit the bottom; I waited to feel it dig in as we drifted back a bit, then let out about 75 feet of scope and cleated the whole thing off.
At 1:30
P.M
. on July 1, I turned proudly and looked around the busy harbor; no one had noticed my spectacular entrance. I inflated the dinghy, rowed ashore to the Yacht Haven dock, bought that longed-for Coca-Cola and stood surveying my surroundings.
The urge to talk to somebody, anybody, after the ocean passage was more overwhelming than I ever could have predicted, and I looked hungrily around the docks for an unsuspecting victim. Grinning, I said Hi to everybody and had the feeling that if someone so much as uttered a “So, how was the trip?” floodgates of giddy description would burst open. Deciding to call home instead, I headed for a pay phone.
Soon after my arrival, my younger sister, Jade, joined me in St. Thomas, and brought with her my new crew member, Dinghy. One week before leaving New York, I had gone uptown to the ASPCA on 96th Street to adopt a cat. I was determined to sail with a friend, and if it had to be of the feline variety, that was all right with me. There, among the pathetic prisoners all desperately lashing out at the bars on their cages, I found the cat that was destined to sail with me halfway around the world. He was one year old, black, except for his white paws, face and belly. I had read that a black cat was good luck on a boat.
The last thing I needed was a frustrated tomcat, so Dinghy's departure for the wild blue yonder had been delayed to accommodate a neutering trip to the veterinarian. I had left New York with lots of cat food, cat litter and vitamins, but no cat. Once set free on board, Dinghy immediately curled up to sleep in the spot that was to become his favorite from then onâanywhere that was the most inconvenient for me. One night, he fell off the dock into the water, quickly learning that he loathed swimming, and from then on he seemed extra careful about his footing.
Jade stayed with me for two weeks and together we dinghied
around St. Thomas, went swimming, and took a ferry to St. John for carnival. Rio de Janeiro and Trinidad had fired our images of carnival and we pictured wild costumes, parties, singing, dancing and calypso. Sitting in a restaurant overlooking the streets, we were pretty disappointed to see drunken tourists and locals stumble along to the blaring rhythm of reggae and disco, pumped full volume from old trucks. No colorful costumes lent an air of gaiety to the spectacle and, stuck there until we could catch the morning ferry back to St. Thomas, we reminisced about other July Fourths in other places, found a couple of unoccupied benches away from the fanfare and fell asleep under the tropical night sky.
Back on
Varuna
, I vowed to solve the problem of the engine and leaky chain plates and found a local jack-of-all-trades, Mike, who had some experience with boats and offered to help. While Jade worked on a tan to impress her friends, Mike came aboard and immediately pointed to where I had put a hard epoxy over a flexible silicon, which my father had covered over again with more silicon. Mike shook his head. “There's your problem. The chain plates flex when they're under pressure,” he explained, “and they need to have some give. The epoxy cracked and your father's silicon never stuck to it. He just went and made a bad leak worse.”
Together, we scraped away all the compounds around the chain plates and started all over again with a super-strong flexible polyurethane bedding compound. The screw on the engine cover was removed with proper tools and lubricated. I still didn't know where the air leak in the engine came from, and Mike couldn't find it either, so after bleeding the fuel line, we decided that all systems were go. I saw a dark brown Jade off at the airport. The lockers were filled with fresh vegetables, long-life juices and more cat supplies and, on July 18, 1985,
Varuna
, Dinghy and I sailed out of the harbor.
Except for missing Jade, I shed no tears over leaving the busy port of Charlotte Amalie, with its five cruise ships a day of tourists swarming the streets in a mad rush of duty-free shopping, and its fast-food joints, Shop Rite and boutiques. Our next destination was Panama, the funnel into the Pacific, and except for the prospect of the lonely passage, I was eager to be under way and log some real miles between
Varuna
and the commercialism of home.
Upon leaving the Virgin Islands, we were once again in the trade winds, but this time running with them. This was
Varuna's
most glorious point of sail; with the wind at her back, her jib poled out on one side and her main let all the way out on the other, she went her
fastest and the motion was the most comfortable. Because this was the beginning of hurricane season, I began to steer a course that skirted south of their stomping grounds toward the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia. The first night, I sat in the cockpit and watched the glimmer of Puerto Rico, St. John and St. Croix disappear under the inky horizon. With the sails and Monitor set, I stretched out under the stars and enjoyed our speed. We were making 6 knots, sometimes 10, as we surfed down the waves. In the first twenty-four hours,
Varuna
logged 129 miles into the 1,056 miles to go. “Wow,” I thought, “at this speed, I'll be in Panama in no time flat.”
The trip was promising so far except for one unfortunate situation: poor Dinghy was terrified and frantic, trying to figure out why our home was sloshing around like a washing machine. He hid inside the cabin meowing, his legs splayed out in all directions as he tried to minimize the motion. With eyes like saucers and ears straight up in a state of panic, he was probably wishing he were back in New York at the ASPCA. “It's OK, Mr. Dinghy,” I consoled him, “this is how it's supposed to be.” Hearing the sound of my voice, he would hesitantly venture out of the cabin and sniff the air. Every little wave would send him meowing back inside. Feeling responsible and guilty for his misery, I was reminded of myself on that first day out of New York, and I had to laugh.
“Don't worry, little buddy,” I said, “you'll get used to it in a hurry. Just be glad you came aboard in the trades.”
I was happy to have another living being on
Varuna
upon whom I could lavish attention. I felt ridiculous talking to myself, but now there was somebody who would at least perk up his ears at a noise. There was a warm body to cuddle up with at night and with whom to share a meal. After a while Dinghy began to acclimatize himself to his new lifestyle. On July 19, I wrote in my logbook,
“Dinghy finally ventured outside and even stayed a while. With his black and white coat, he looks like a dinner guest in tie and tails. I'm finding little fish stranded on deck and offer them to him, but he turns up his nose. I awoke this morning to find him in good spirits, mutilating all my rolls of toilet paper.”
With the trade winds,
Varuna's
motion was steady and swift and she remained upright. I thanked God for small favors and enjoyed living aboard a level home, no longer having to sleep, eat, write or change sails in a vessel that was heeled over at a 30-degree angle. I no longer had to walk on the walls of a house that felt as if it had fallen over on its side. The sails didn't have to be changed once on
this entire trip other than for little tweaks and adjustments to the course. The wind remained steady and true at about 25 knots from east. For a couple of days the waves swelled and broke over the Monitor into the cockpit. But no matter what happened, I just rejoiced as the taffrail log ticked away the miles. “No more of this nonsense about beating into the wind anymore,” I thought. “Now, I'm just going to zoom my way around the world with the wind at my back.”
For the first time, my days took on a shape and character. I awoke with the sun, around five-thirty or six.
Varuna
was heading west and the rising sun in the east shone in through the companionway and right onto my bed. The sun was my alarm clock, and if a pillow over my head permitted me a few extra minutes of sleep, Dinghy would prod me with his nose and begin walking all over me, anxious for breakfast. When the sun rose to about 15 degrees above the horizon, I would take the first sight with the sextant, then calculate and plot it on the chart. The next one was at noon and, in the meantime, I worked around the boat, making repairs, rearranging things, cleaning out the litter box, reading, munching away on crackers or fruit. At noon, after taking the second sight and crossing the lines of position with the earlier one, what I thought was an exact fix could be established. By then the sun was at its zenith and
Varuna
turned into an oven. During the afternoon, it was too hot to do anything too strenuous other than fitfully read, munch and drink, and throw buckets of water over my head. This simple way of life was broken up by the odd ship wandering over the horizon, or frighteningly nearby, with whose radio operator I would chat over the VHF.
I was becoming very much at home with myself and content with my monastic lifestyle, knitting or crocheting when the text of my books began to blur. Loneliness was never a problem, although whenever there was a particularly beautiful sight before my eyes, and there were manyâa breathtaking sunset, a pod of pilot whales or a herd of cavorting, squealing dolphins playing in
Varuna's
bow waveâI wished there were someone to share the moment or to share my enthusiasm when a sun sight worked out. Dinghy was there, but he didn't get too excited.
In the evenings, after the sun had made its full arc across the sky, the temperature cooled and I'd pull out my pressure cooker, chop up an onion, potato or cabbage, mix in a can of something and a cube of bouillon and make my meal for the day. This became standard fare and I never tired of it. I fed Dinghy, celebrated the sunset, then curled up in my bed again to read until the Sandman arrived.
I made my permanent bed on the port bunk with a lee cloth tied by two lines to the rail above on the ceiling stretching the length and forming a sort of cradle that stopped me from falling out as the boat tossed around. I arranged a sleeping bag inside the cradle for maximum comfort and I'd bundle up in this cocoon with Dinghy, as
Varuna
rocked us to sleep.
For my stimulation-starved unconscious, sleeping at sea was an adventure of its own. Every time I drifted off, my imagination created a dream world gone wild. Often, I'd awaken, calling out to somebody or reaching up to grab for a roast chicken, an ice cream cone or a fresh salad. After the food dreams, which were the worst, I could never go back to sleep and worked myself up into a state of salivation over the gastronomic mirage. Upon awakening, I would reach up onto the shelf above my head for the flashlight, pull myself out of bed and go outside to check the course and the horizon. Black shadows of clouds cloaked the constellations that were becoming as familiar and reassuring to me as old friends. There was Orion, the hunter, and the Dippers, twinkling signposts in the indigo sky. Occasionally on the horizon, the tiny green, red and white lights of a ship plowing to its unknown destination reminded me that I wasn't the only one left on the planet.
“The wind diminished a little today,”
I wrote on July 21,
“and, oddly enough, I don't miss land very much any more. On perfect days like today, I feel as though I could live autonomously on
Varuna
and happily sail the oceans of the world forever.”
Two days before our estimated arrival in Panama, the jutting curve of Colombia blocked the trades and wind dwindled to zero. Ships and tankers followed and passed us by, bound for the Canal and Costa Rican ports.
Varuna
chugged along under power after them, eager to join her big brothers at the Canal and, with them, leave the Atlantic behind. An electric excitement thickened the air that evening as we slowly inched toward our rendezvous with one of the greatest of manmade phenomena. But, as night fell, Mother Nature created excitement of another kind.
By nine-thirty, thunder booms and fiery lightning began to cut through the air. I quickly battened things down and closed all the hatches as rain began hammering the deck as if trying to pound
Varuna
to the depths. Relentless drumbeats of thunder deafened me, and the night sky was alight with the strobe of jagged-edged lightning bolts crackling down to the water. I huddled below for nine hours, holding a quivering Dinghy in my arms, sweating in terror of the heavenly Armageddon, crying, praying and waiting for the fateful
moment that
Varuna's
mast would be hit by a megavolt and we'd be burned to crisps. The thought of her little lightning-rod mast, the only object of height for miles around, petrified me into a motionless trance until the fury of each thunder squall finally wore itself out and died away. Two days later, on July 27, when I called my father from Panama, he informed me that my worries were for naught.
Varuna
had been fully grounded at the factory and, theoretically, we were safe from electrocution.