Seven at Sea

by Erik Orton

  Upper Manhattan, New York

  ERIK

  Our table is square. One side is normally pushed against the wall to leave more space in the room, but to fit everyone at mealtimes, we pull it out and sit on all four sides. This is generally where we hash things out as a family. This was where Emily and I tossed around the idea of buying a Chilean island (asking price $8 million as I recall) and turning it into an eco-resort. I sent the agent a query for more info but never heard back. This was where we bandied about the idea of affixing solar panels to our minivan and driving to Patagonia (that was Emily’s idea). I contacted a Chinese solar company about sponsorship but never heard back. This was where we discussed going to live with traveling Romani in Wales to make a documentary. That was a close one. We got passports for the kids and I’d arranged a leave of absence from work. But then our contact in Wales got in a bad car accident and our financial sponsor backed out.

  There was no shortage of out-there ideas discussed around the Orton table. These big ideas and close shaves sometimes sent our kids on emotional roller coasters. They imagined leaving friends and familiarity behind. Karina got wise and told the younger kids, “Don’t get all worked up. Mom and Dad just like to dream.”

  We continued to follow the Nortons, Bumfuzzle, Totem, Galactic, and several others.

  Miss Tippy (the Nortons) had crossed the Atlantic when their dad accidentally cut his head deeply when some rigging broke loose. The twelve-year-old son took the helm and steered fifty miles as they made an unplanned stop in Puerto Rico. Mom was a nurse. She bandaged up Dad and stayed on the radio with the coast guard. The two daughters kept their dad company so he wouldn’t go unconscious. Those kids grew up a lot that day.

  Scary, painful experiences teach us. Nobody wants them to happen, but they do. In Puerto Rico the Norton children were comforted with pizza, ice cream, and sleep, but nobody could take away the growth. They knew things about life and its fragility. They knew how precious a family is. They’d faced a crisis with a clear priority. They had glimpsed a world where the only thing that mattered was a child’s love for Dad and Mom and their love for their child. The whole family had some intangible, special thing after that. I wanted that thing for our family.

  Emily and I started yet another breakfast-table conversation. Karina looked up from her pancakes and asked, “Do you have the guts to do it?” She had my attention. “I hear a lot of talk, but I don’t see any action.”

  I took this personally. Karina had taken sailing lessons with us. She and all her siblings had sailed with us in the Long Island Sound. Emily and I had just gotten back from our sailing class in the Caribbean. We were taking action. I was also proud of Karina. She’d learned that doing what you say you’re going to do matters. She continued, “You just keep talking about it. Why don’t you just do it?”

  Why didn’t we? What was stopping us? Our credibility and integrity were on the line. We knew our kids were watching us.

  In How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie asks, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Then he asks, “If that happened, how would you deal with it?” Finally, he asks, “How likely is that to happen?” We figured the worst that could happen would be death, with financial ruin and/or embarrassment in close second. They seemed pretty unlikely, but if they happened, we felt we could handle them. And it would be worth the risk. That’s when we came up with a question of our own: What could go right?

  This question stumped me. The prospects were endless, but I hardly spent any time contemplating them. I was good at bracing for failure, but not so good at allowing for success. In a best-case scenario, we would sail safely, enjoy our time, see some beautiful places, make some wonderful memories, and come home happy. I had a limited imagination. Was that the best I could do?

  I think it’s important to manage risk, but to not acknowledge the vast array of positive outcomes was to ignore half the reality of the situation. Positive possibilities are unlimited. In taking a risk, I want to acknowledge the worst-case scenarios, but I couldn’t stop there. What were the potential best-case scenarios that I’d give up if I didn’t go for it? What was the risk of not going? Looking at the full picture includes answering that question: What could go right?

  EMILY

  Two Years before Fezywig

  “Can I show you some boats I’ve been looking at?” Erik asked.

  “Sure, I’ll take a look,” I said. I sat next to Erik at his desk and he opened a world of boats for sale.

  “I like that one with the Jet Skis loaded on the back,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Erik smiled. “The one with the helipad looks pretty good to me. I’m a simple man. I just need one plain vanilla yacht and a basic helicopter.”

  After that, I got emails with the subject line “Boat of the Day.” That was a misnomer. Sometimes there were three or four boats a day from exotic locations all over the world. Erik believed in gathering information. “It never hurts to ask,” he would say. I knew gathering information usually led to opinions and decisions. Eventually, the Boat of the Day prices dropped below the millions and high six figures into a price range that felt more doable.

  “What would you think about going to see a couple of boats for sale on our anniversary? We’ve never done that before,” Erik asked. We have a tradition of celebrating our anniversary by doing something new. Being beginners makes us feel young and unified. We both feel a little uncomfortable, but we’re in it together. This would be our sixteenth anniversary.

  “In winter?” Rhetorical question. “Where are they?” I asked.

  “One is in Connecticut and one is in Rhode Island.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “They can come with us. It will be romantic,” Erik winked.

  As it turned out, boat shopping was like dating. It was good that all of the kids came along, because we needed a boat to match our whole family. In Connecticut, we met the broker in his office next to the marina. He was tall and slim, wearing pressed slacks and a tucked-in polo. He matched his office. It was the kind of place with wainscoting, brass desk lamps, and cut-glass candy dishes. The children helped themselves to toffee and sat bouncing on the tightly upholstered seating. Erik and I reviewed the boat specs in a glossy folder. The broker guided our little parade across the parking lot. It was the off-season, so boats were shrink-wrapped in thick white plastic and stacked in a multi-level storage facility. There were hundreds of boats. We only needed one.

  The boat we had come to see was lifted onto blocks and steadied on stilts. The outside was covered in white shrink wrap, but we climbed a ladder to get a look inside. We had more children than the broker had eyeballs, so he kept turning to see where they were and what they were doing. Alison tested the helm. Eli and Lily wandered into the cabins. SJ and Karina sat on the cushions. It was an older boat, rough around the edges, but it was a boat. It was for sale. We were looking at it. We didn’t know the process for buying a boat, but Erik figured the first step was to look at one. So, that’s where we started. Erik and I thanked the broker for his time and for the glossy folder.

  “What did you like about that boat?” I asked the kids at Subway twenty minutes later. They were deep into their sandwiches.

  “I liked climbing the ladder,” SJ said.

  “It would be fun to have a boat like that,” Ali said.

  “Are we going to see another boat?” Karina asked. It had already been a long morning for the kids. Outside of the few minutes unnerving the broker, it had been a lot of boring sitting around.

  “There is one more I’d like to see,” Erik said. “But it’s in Rhode Island. So it’s far. It will be dark when we get there, and this boat is in the water, so it will be really cold. And way past bedtime when we get home. Are we up for that?” It wasn’t much of a sales job, but I think we all appreciated the honesty. With a majority consensus, we went for it.

 
; We found the marina and realized why the owner was willing to meet us on a holiday with short notice; he lived aboard. He was like Santa Claus on a sailboat. He had the white hair, beard, and bowl full of jelly. He welcomed us aboard and told the kids to explore wherever they wanted. That took my anxiety way down and gave this boat about a million points in my book. Then he invited us downstairs. It was so warm and cozy we felt like we’d been sledding all day and come home for a bowl of chili. “Santa” had heaters placed throughout the boat. Being warm matters to me. A lot.

  Everything was in order, but nothing was too precious. The interior was flanked by dozens of drawers. Few things make a big family happy in a tiny home like lots of organized storage.

  “What kind of wood is this?” I asked opening and closing various drawers.

  “Ironwood,” Santa said. That sounded sturdy and safe.

  “What did you think?” I asked Erik as we buckled up for our late drive home.

  “It needs some work. I took some pictures and I’ll take some notes, but I liked it. It felt good,” he said.

  “I liked it too,” I said. “I think we could make it work even though it only has two cabins. For sixty-five grand I’d be willing to put down the salon table at night and make up a bed for two kids there.” We had a winner. This was happening fast. I was excited. Erik put in an offer.

  “It’s not you. It’s the boat.” The news from the loan officer broke our hearts. We knew we didn’t have enough to buy a floating home outright, but we could make a down payment. We had excellent credit, so we assumed we’d be able to get a loan. But this boat, our boat, was too old to finance. Apparently, banks don’t finance old, custom boats. They finance new, mass-produced boats with predictable resale values and a strong collateral position. They didn’t care about our dream. We had the consolation that doing something for the first time makes it easier to do a second time. Back to the drawing board.

  ERIK

  1 Year before Fezywig

  Emily and I didn’t even know if the kids would be able to adjust to life on a boat. It seemed like a good idea to try before committing. That year the stars aligned. The winter holidays fell perfectly between two weekends. I used only three personal days to get eleven days off. Our big idea: drive to the Florida Keys and charter a boat. That was even cheaper than flying to the Caribbean. Of course, I haggled and nickel-and-dimed the charter company for weeks over the phone. I got them down to about $1,500 for three days.

  We spent Christmas Day with my parents in Virginia. Then we drove ten hours to Georgia and spent that night with friends. The next morning, we were off. After three days of driving, we arrived in the Keys and tossed our duffle bags aboard our charter boat. We weren’t allowed to sail after dark, so Emily and Karina raced to the grocery store and returned with dozens of shopping bags that we simply piled on the counters in the galley. We would unpack later. We were supposed to leave the slip by 2:00 p.m. to allow enough time to sale to our anchorage. It was 2:30 p.m.

  I pulled out, turned to port, and then suddenly jerked back to starboard. I’d forgotten to release one of the docking lines. Rushing wasn’t helping. We sorted that out without running into anything or anyone else and were off.

  We weaved our way out of the marina and through the channel out to sea. We were in the Atlantic Ocean aboard a forty-two-foot Hunter monohull motoring north at six knots. We were all onboard and sailing as a family. Victory.

  The kids were giddy. Eli opened and closed cupboards as quickly as he could find them and then ran above deck to open and close hatches. Lily tucked into a bookshelf, pretending it was her bed, and then jumped out and ran to find another bookshelf. From a seat in the corner of the cockpit, Jane surveyed the boat with the eye of a monarch, then scurried off to scout the rigging. Karina practiced rocking the oven that swung on a gimbal. Alison inspected the dinghy on deck, trying to figure out how to lower it into the water. Emily stowed provisions below deck in the galley.

  “I think they like it,” she called up.

  “Yeah,” was all I could manage. I was still getting acclimated. We had picked an anchorage twenty-two miles up the chain called Newfound Harbor. I did my best to read all the instruments and indicators. None of the boats we’d sailed in the Long Island Sound had had any electronics, and our BVI trip hadn’t been long enough for me to get it all in my bones. I tried some speed and distance calculations in my head. We had the sails up and the engine was running, but we weren’t making fast enough time to beat the sun. The moon rose over the horizon, directly in front of me, with the sunset directly behind. I was caught between trying to enjoy this celestial moment and gunning it so we weren’t anchoring in the dark.

  Eli screamed. He’d gotten an Indiana Jones-style fedora from my parents for Christmas. In all his excitement and jumping, the wind had blown it off his head and overboard. Giant tears rolled down his little round cheeks. I was alone in the cockpit with the sails up. I needed a hand.

  “Hat overboard!” I called out into the wind. The family went into recovery mode. We’d practiced this dozens of times in daysailers. I assigned Eli and Alison as spotters. Their job was to continuously point at the hat so I would know where to steer. In the BVI, Matt had taught us to put the most worried person in charge of pointing. In this case, Eli. We would sail four or five boat lengths on our current course, do a one-eighty, sail a figure-eight course, and come up on the windward side of the hat. We would extend a boat hook to the overboard sailor—or in this case, hat—and bring it back aboard. We performed the maneuver correctly. SJ kept Lily safely out of the way while Emily and Karina looked for the boat hook, but there was no boat hook aboard. We drifted past the hat and watched it fade behind us.

  “We’re coming around again,” I yelled over the wind.

  I pointed the boat downwind and repeated the figure eight, but this time with a tool in hand. Eli’s other Christmas gift was a Nerf sword. As we came alongside the hat, Karina reached down, snagged it with the hilt of the sword, and brought it safely aboard. Eli wiped the tears from his eyes and clutched the hat close. Despite all we did not know, we now knew we could recover a brown felt hat in the ocean with a Nerf sword. That was something.

  I wasn’t eager to navigate into a new harbor in the dark, let alone drop and set anchor. I was still getting used to the GPS. In the BVI our destinations had been hilly islands clearly visible in the distance. Matt knew the water like a local. Here we were new to town and on our own. The Keys were incredibly flat and deceptively shallow. To sail toward land—despite there being wide-open fields of water—it was crucial to find and navigate up grooves on the ocean floor. And beware running aground. The reason the Keys have not been eroded away is because they are essentially stone. The hard coral floor is not friendly to fiberglass hulls.

  The sun was below the horizon and the moon continued rising beautifully. Daylight slipped away as we reached the mouth of the channel into Newfound Harbor. From the helm, I fixed my eyes outward, looking for markers and reflectors. Karina and Alison did the same at the bow. We worked our way slowly and gently up the channel and watched as the depth rose to just under our keel. It was now dark.

  We found, essentially, a shoulder on the road, pulled off, and anchored. I killed the engine and took a deep breath.

  During the sail, Emily prepared macaroni and cheese with hot dogs. Tomorrow there would be bacon. Her idea was that with enough comfort food, the kids would love living on a boat. I felt comforted.

  We raised anchor the next morning and headed for a new destination. Halfway out the channel, we realized we were perfectly happy in Newfound Harbor. We didn’t have to move for the sake of moving. We could stay and enjoy. We turned around, wound our way farther up into the channel, and tucked ourselves into a nice little cove. Our boat stood at anchor in turquoise water behind two flat islands, each no more than 200 or 300 feet long, with a shallowly submerged bed of bleached coral connecting the
m. We’d have to explore those. Eli walked around the deck taking in the scene. “I like wearing my pajamas outside,” he said. City kids don’t get to do that a lot.

  We spent the rest of our charter there. Alison and I lowered the dinghy into the water and attached the outboard motor. She and Karina took turns driving laps around the boat as their younger siblings waved enviously from the deck; heady stuff for kids without driver’s licenses. We ferried ourselves to the smaller of the two spits of sand—Picnic Island—a few hundred yards away. I dropped off Alison and Jane near a cluster of mangrove trees. They scampered to the top branches and waved with smiling eyes back to Emily and Karina on the big boat. I took Eli ashore and we found a swing set. This was clearly a party spot. I went back, picked up Emily, Karina, and Lily, and brought them ashore. I put Lily in a tire swing, hung out on the beach, and generally chilled until the sun set. We learned one of the best parts of sailing was staying at anchor. This sailing as a family thing was going to be easy. I liked relaxing.

  We didn’t have to move for the sake of moving. We could stay and enjoy.

  The next day, when it was time to go, Sarah Jane asked, “If we go live on a boat, will I still be able to go to go to girls’ camp?” That was really thinking ahead. Every year our girls went upstate to one week of camp sponsored by our church. It was a big deal for them. Twelve years old was the minimum age to attend. Jane was then ten. She had vision. Karina and Alison looked at Emily and me for an answer. Emily looked at me with questioning eyebrows.

  “If we ever live on a boat, I’m sure we can figure it out,” I said as I winked at Emily. We pulled anchor and headed to the marina.

  We could do this.

  * * *

  1.V-berth: a bed and/or cabin at the forepeak of a boat.

  Chapter 3