Seven at Sea

by Erik Orton

  In Anguilla, all the parents went ashore together. After a quick exploration and shopping run—which did, in fact, include ice cream—we decided the real gems of Anguilla were the outsider islands.

  We piled into Discovery, since she was a motor yacht, and zipped out toward the Prickly Pear Cays and Dog Island. It was a full boat: twelve kids, six adults, two dogs, and a cat. Two captains would have the day off. Peter and I high-fived, and John was more than happy to give his mostly-at-anchor engines a workout. Everyone—dads, moms, and kids—was stoked. It was the first time any of us had been to these places. We would be discovering them together.

  John fired up his engines and we set out for Dog Island. When we arrived, I was immediately glad he’d talked me into getting out of the lagoon. There was nobody else on this island. The water was perfectly clear. We could see tiny ridge patterns in the sand below as we set anchor in twenty feet of water. Nothing larger than a small bush grew on Dog Island. There were no fish and no shells to collect. It was barren and bleak in a way, but beautiful. After snorkeling, kayaking, swimming, and burying each other in the sand, we were ready to return to Anguilla. The kids from each boat brought homemade bread they’d all baked together. They made grilled cheese sandwiches. Then the Bigs, with some help from the Middles, created a distribution system to feed everyone as Discovery pushed through the exquisitely aqua and blue water back to Anguilla.

  It was a fun eight-hour vacation from captain responsibilities. But now I was back on duty. Fezywig was nearly tapped out of water. We were only in Anguilla a few days, and I didn’t want to spend half a day shuttling water into our tanks. Emily and I continued studying our water maker options but had yet to pull the trigger. It was an expensive and—for my skillset—complicated project. This little excursion was teaching us we couldn’t safely sail for any real length of time without the threat of running out of water. We could live without solar panels. We could live without a wind generator. But we would always need water. What to do in the meantime?

  John and I put our heads together. John filled his water tanks any time he ran his engine, so he was already full. In the end, our solution was a combination of Discovery design and Fezywig ingenuity.

  John and I ran a hose from their boat to our water tanks. Now we had a hundred-foot hose floating below the surface in an anchorage with people coming and going by dinghy. Hoses don’t take kindly to outboard propellers. We enlisted the kids to swim out and attach floaties and life jackets to the hose about every ten feet. Any lifeguard would be proud of our consideration for safety. John started up his engines and, over the next couple hours, 160 gallons of water miraculously transferred to our tanks. It sure beat hauling jerry cans from shore. I was starting to see how this was all going to work out, and I liked it.

  EMILY

  Back in Saint Martin, Grandma and Grandpa arrived to a flurry of hugs, stories, and questions. Karina, Alison, and SJ thumped luggage up the cement stairs to the second-floor room. Eli chased Lily down hotel corridors, corralling her back to the room. Their room was a basic space with a bathroom, two beds, and a dresser. Sadly, the shower held only three minutes’ worth of hot water. Happily, there was a small outdoor balcony overlooking the pool, and it had a dinette set, a refrigerator, a sink, a toaster, and a burner.

  Grandma produced a bright yellow bag of peanut M&M’s and a DVD from her tote bag. The kids immediately tucked in, relishing a normal bed. Erik and I sat with his parents at the dinette, taking in the balmy evening, palm trees, and the lagoon.

  “That’s us over there,” Erik pointed out Fezywig.

  “I’m sorry you’re stuck here,” Grandpa said. He wasn’t being ironic. “They’ve kept you two and half months behind schedule.”

  Schedule? I remembered schedules. They sound like a foreign concept in this new life.

  “We don’t feel stuck,” Erik said. He meant it. I could’ve kissed him.

  Unusually heavy rains poured down for the next few days, soaking us on our commutes from Fezywig to the hotel. But we had enough sunshine that week to take Grandma and Grandpa for a day sail. Grandpa diplomatically pronounced Fezywig “snug.” We showed them a few beaches, Grandma snorkeled for the first time, they joined us for church on land and a Taco Night on Day Dreamer—the deluxe tour of our new life.

  If not the highlight of their visit, Alison’s birthday was the most memorable event. That morning the boat-kid girls joined us on Fezywig to celebrate her with thoughtful, homemade gifts. We spent the rest of the day with grandparents. I prepared a pasta salad while the kids swam in the pool below. I noticed Lily walking away from the pool pulling at the crotch of her swimsuit.

  “What do you need, Lily?” I called down.

  “I gotta poop!” she shouted.

  “Alison! Hey, Ali. Will you bring Lily up here to use the bathroom?” Alison was in a good mood with all this birthday attention, and she hopped right out of the pool.

  “Mom! She’s already pooped in her swimsuit. It’s just hanging there,” Alison called up.

  “Oh, dear. Let me throw you some wipes or paper towels. Hang on,” I called back. I tossed her a package of baby wipes. They landed on the ground and she picked them up. Alison deftly grabbed the poop out of Lily’s swimsuit without ever touching it with her hands.

  “What should I do with this?” She shouted. With the poop in her hand, I was starting to wonder what the other tenants were thinking of this conversation.

  “Just throw it in a garbage can.” I advised. Alison shook her head and started looking for a garbage can—this is where it goes wrong—but she slipped on the wet tile surrounding the pool, falling to her hands and knees. The poop package went flying into the air. None of us saw where it went.

  “Now what?!” Alison cried, eager to be relieved of these duties (I cannot help myself). After all, it was her birthday.

  “Find it,” I said. Alison started crawling on her hands and knees looking under tables and chairs and in the bushes.

  “I found it!!” She shouted as if it were a good thing, which it was, but you wouldn’t ordinarily imagine shouting with that much enthusiasm when you’d just found a package of poop.

  Apprised of the situation, Erik had only one question: “Was it in the turd place you looked?” Alison’s best birthday present was a story that never gets old.

  ERIK

  During my parents’ visit, Sunsail proposed a compromise: they would rebuild our port engine if we would return to Oyster Pond. I wasn’t excited about passing through that channel again, but after my parents left, Emily and I agreed to go. Then we had to break the sad news to our kids and the other boats.

  “I have bad news, John,” I said as we hung out in Discovery’s cockpit. “They’re gonna rebuild our engine.”

  “Are you kidding? That’s great news.”

  “But we have to go to Oyster Pond. They say it’s gonna take two weeks.”

  “So?”

  “I know you all need to get going. Hurricane season isn’t going to wait for our engine. You guys need to get south.”

  “Yeah, but listen: Michelle is heading back to the States for some work. It’s easier for me to solo-parent on the dock. We’ll just come with you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’ll be fun,” he laughed. John’s laugh always reminded me I didn’t have to make everything a big deal.

  Word must have gotten around, because next thing I knew, Peter told me, “Yeah, we need to do some deep cleaning on our boat. I think we’ll head to Oyster Pond and pick up a mooring ball.” I couldn’t believe it. The band was not breaking up.

  Once again, we all set sail together, like the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María. After we docked in Oyster Pond, I ran into Joachim, our reliable Phase-Out Director.

  “I told them from the beginning they needed to rebuild that engine for you,” he said. “It would have saved everyone a lot o
f time and money if they’d done it then, but I’m glad it’s finally happening.”

  I was new to this boat ownership thing, so I was insecure throughout the whole process. I appreciated Joachim helping me feel like I wasn’t crazy. We’d stayed the course, and I trusted everything would get resolved.

  With two weeks on the dock, I doubled down. We bit the bullet and ordered a water maker ($5,500), a generator to run the water maker ($1,000), and the replacement parts ($120) to fix the Wi-Fi booster I’d soaked, plus shipping for everything ($400). It was hard to spend that money because it was a lot of sand out of our hourglass, but Emily and I agreed it was the best way to keep us safe, and the dock was going to be the best place to install it.

  Emily took advantage of the dock to get the kids’ end-of-schoolyear online tests done, even though most of what they were learning wouldn’t be on those kinds of tests. We were cleaning house, too. The kids’ only goal was to spend as much time together as possible. Once school tests were done, the kids had lots of outdoor options: play in the windward hills overlooking the ocean, swim in the marina pool, or chase iguanas.

  Emily or I swam with Lily every day, gradually regaining her trust. She increased her solo distance daily but stayed close to the perimeter for a quick escape. Eli asked if he could bake cookies for another boat in the marina he wanted to befriend. It turned out to be the ferry to St. Barts, which brought in dozens of people a couple times a day. We ate the cookies ourselves.

  Everyone had somewhere to go, and I was thrilled to have an empty boat while I planned the water maker install. It would require drilling a hole into the underside of the hull. This made me nervous. In truth, it all made me nervous. I was now dealing with “big juice”—220V power, the kind that hurt when you touched it. I would be drilling holes in bulkheads, running water through parts of the boat I really wanted to keep dry, and connecting high-pressure filters to remove biocontaminants. In essence, if I didn’t do this right, I was looking at electrocution, a leaking hull, and drinking water that could make us sick. As I always tell my kids, “Don’t mess up.”

  I laid it all out, ran it past John and Peter, who gave me their advice and ultimately their thumbs up, and then I started drilling. Like the Wi-Fi router, nothing came with a plug. I had to buy wires and connectors, fixtures and adhesive. I had to solder, jigsaw, and plumb my way through our floating home. This cheap, do-it-yourself approach still tapped out about thirty percent of the total budget for our trip. If this didn’t work, it’d be tough to afford another approach.

  It was a sweet victory when I ran the kitchen faucet and out came delicious, clean water made from our own water maker. I felt as though I’d discovered some mystical alchemy, like we had a money-printing machine in our basement or something. We could go anywhere and have unlimited clean water. Everything was open to us. We could go anywhere in the world and have a drink.

  The Wi-Fi router was a quick fix once I had the right parts. The Sunsail IT guy even came out to our boat and asked about it. “Your signal is very strong. I am picking up your boat from way over at our office. What system are you using?” I have to admit I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.

  All we needed was an engine.

  Chapter 9

  Shakedown

  Oyster Pond, Saint Martin

  117 Days aboard Fezywig

  EMILY

  The day had finally come when the rebuilt engine would be installed. Erik motored Fezywig to a slip closer to shore so a crane could lift the massive engine into place. We all gathered to watch. The mechanics weren’t used to having a crowd cheer for their work, but they liked it. We all smiled and took photographs with the mechanic, with his assistants, and with our perfect, practically new, port engine. I left Erik to enjoy the whole process. Michelle, Lisa, and I went on one last provisioning run before the shakedown tour.

  When I returned with food, Erik said, “Listen to this.” He turned on the port engine and it purred to life.

  “Are you coming on to me?” I asked.

  “Mom! Geesh,” Karina said. “He’s been doing that all afternoon.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” Erik said as he turned off the engine. Then he switched it on again and smiled.

  ERIK

  “You’ll want to take a shakedown cruise,” John and Peter said. This was sailor common sense. After having such significant work done on the boat, we should take it for a spin and make sure it was working properly before heading off on our own. We could go anywhere in the world. We had everything we needed. That’s a heady feeling. We talked about the Panama Canal, the Pacific Ocean, and circumnavigation. Emily topped up our provisions. We had a water maker. We had Wi-Fi. We had a trustworthy engine. But we decided to start by moving in slowly expanding circles.

  When Michelle returned from business in Florida, we’d head southeast to St. Barts; then sail almost directly south to Sint Eustatius. From there we’d sail northwest to Saba. It was a little triangle of the three southern islands closest to Sint Maarten, but who knew where that might lead? We were feeling confident. This would be the shakedown sail of a lifetime. From Saba, Day Dreamer would continue on to Grenada or maybe loop back to Sint Maarten. Discovery would definitely return to Sint Maarten to wrap up some business ashore. Fezywig would wait and see.

  “Last time in this stupid channel!” I called as we pounded our way out of Oyster Pond. Both engines were purring. Day Dreamer had left earlier in the day. They planned to sail the entire way and had plenty of tacking1 ahead of them. Discovery was enjoying a leisurely morning. As a motor vessel, they could travel much faster—one, because of their speed, and two, they didn’t have to tack.

  “Next stop: Philipsburg Bay!” I said. We were in full party mode. School tests were done. The engines worked. We were hitting the seas with friends. Music was blaring, and we started our no-seasickness dance party. In the interest of time, our plan was to motor to fuel dock in Philipsburg Bay, fill up the fuel tanks there, and then sail to Ile Fourchue, a small outer island of St. Barts, where we’d meet up with the other two boats.

  We weren’t more than fifteen minutes out of the channel when the port engine sputtered and died. All of the party went right out of us. I turned off the music. Everyone stopped dancing, and we stared at each other. We were deflated balloons.

  “Should we go back?” Emily asked. I didn’t say anything. I looked out to sea. None of us wanted to pass through that rocky channel ever again, especially on one engine.

  “Let’s get to the fuel dock. We’ll figure it out from there.”

  While Fezywig was refueling, I opened up the port engine locker to take a look.

  “Hey, mon,” the dockhand said. “We close in an hour.”

  “It’s the middle of the day,” I said.

  “Holiday. We close in one hour,” he repeated. I pulled myself out of the engine locker and grabbed a VHF.

  “Hey, John, they close in an hour. You may want to get here ASAP.”

  “Copy that.”

  “By the way, the port engine conked out.”

  No response.

  “Maybe you can take a quick look with me when you get here?” I added weakly.

  “Sure thing. We’re casting off.”

  I told the dockhand, “We have some friends coming. They’ll be here in thirty minutes to fuel up.”

  “We close—” the dockhand began.

  “I know. You close in an hour.”

  “What are you thinking about the engine?” Emily asked. By this time the kids were groaning because it was hot on the concrete dock and they worried we were about to get left behind.

  “I’m not going back to Oyster Pond,” I said. “Let’s see what we can figure out once John gets here.”

  John and I took a quick look and couldn’t figure it out. It was nothing obvious. We’d all heard it running fine the other day. The sun was lowering a
nd none of us wanted to arrive at Ile Fourchue in the dark. We decided to cast off and take a closer look there. Discovery motored off and we did our best to keep up.

  Ile Fourchue, the Fork, is a little crescent island with nothing on it except super steep ridgelines and rocks. It’s roughly the halfway point between Sint Maarten and St. Barts. The only hospitality we hoped for there was a calm anchorage. The sky darkened and we imagined Day Dreamer and Discovery tucked inside, preparing their evening meals. We didn’t want to eat. We all felt seasick. We expected that for the first couple of days. We simply wanted to arrive, anchor, and sleep.

  I set my eagle eyes on Ile Fourchue. We closed in none too quickly in our race against the sun. We pounded headlong into the trade winds and the oncoming seas. With only one engine, it was slow going. We were still a couple miles out when what to our wondering eyes should appear but John Alonso catching air in his super speedy dinghy, zooming straight for us. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t recommend taking a dinghy that far out into open, choppy water. But John was our friend. Indeed, the other two boats had anchored and eaten dinner. They had their eye on the sun as well. We couldn’t reach each other on VHF because the anchorage was surrounded by steep cliffs. Every minute they didn’t see Fezywig, they worried. John, who loves to sit around and enjoy the sunset just as much as the next guy, decided to get up and come find us. We could hardly believe he was out there with us, screaming with a high-pitched girl voice every time the boat hopped a wave. We love John.

  He called to us to see how we were doing. He said he would guide us in. It was dusk. They had the perfect mooring ball all picked out for us. John’s daring-do lifted our spirits. I followed him into the cove and he floated in his dinghy off our bow, helping us get our lines through the mooring ball. The crews on Day Dreamer and Discovery came out on deck to wave and cheer for us. We were the last runner in the marathon, but we had crossed the finish line.