by Erik Orton
We stayed for three days.
* * *
1.Shroud: cables—maybe as thick as a #2 pencil—running from the deck to the top of the mast. Sometimes the best thing a mom can do for her child is look away. That’s what I did. Jane is our child most likely to run away and join the circus.
Chapter 15
Apparent Wind
Matthew Town, Great Inagua, Bahamas
5 Months, 13 Days aboard Fezywig
ERIK
We cleared in with customs and I checked email for the first time since Culebra. I had a lot to be grateful for. My old job wanted me back. They just had to check with the client first. The Andersons had signed the lease agreement and sent a deposit. Our named storm insurance provision had been approved. We now had an additional month to get north of Jacksonville. I shifted from leaning forward to leaning back in my chair.
With pieces falling into place, we bought the girls’ airfare from Florida to New York. They would fly out in a couple weeks. We would keep our word, and SJ would get to go to camp with her sisters. We had some expectations. In Matthew Town, there were several things that we didn’t expect. A stranger gave us a ride into town. We found the library and Emily read to a group of children. Her dream job. A former mayor and his daughter taught us to eat guineps, a tart fruit, on the dock. They played us their favorite country songs until their truck battery died. The kids found a public trampoline next to a BBQ shack. We were deemed harmless by homeland security, and we killed hundreds of flies. We were there only two nights.
Our next stop was Long Island, Bahamas, a 120-mile jaunt. We had full water and fuel tanks, and all the bureaucracy was behind us. Plus our confidence had grown. Before, our biggest crossing had been 80 miles. That had grown to 500 miles. We were inside our new comfort zone.
The only spot that gave me pause was the Mira Por Vos Passage, a narrow squeeze we would pass through at night around the halfway point of the crossing. It was not quite as notorious as the Mona Passage, but the meaning behind the name unnerved me: the “Look Out for Yourself” or “Be Careful” Channel. We pulled anchor and headed north.
From the minute we cast off it was night and day from our previous crossing. We hit eight knots even in the lee of Great Inagua, and it was off to the races. Like so many things in life, it’s easy when you have momentum. With the strong winds we cruised along, skimming across the waves as the water quickly turned from turquoise to emerald green to cobalt. We were now in open water, out of the lee of the island, and the trades coming across the Atlantic hit our sails. We picked up an extra knot and a half of speed. For our little boat this was quite a ride.
There’s a beautiful balance you can feel when a boat, a course, and the wind align. I would call it harmony. In this case the wind came across the side of the boat, creating forward momentum. The only reason there’s forward moment, instead of sideways momentum, is because under the water are two keels—thin, large, and heavy fins at the center of each side of the boat. The key, though, are the rudders: two small dagger fins at the stern. They pivot left and right to steer the boat.
With the wind coming from the side and the boat racing forward across the wind, a vibration starts to occur in the boat. As the sails are adjusted and rudder tweaked, the boat gets tuned. Sailors actually use the term ‘tuning the sails.’ The vibration quiets and the boat is in harmony. Fezywig was tuned, and we sliced northward gracefully and smoothly as the sun set on our portside.
I’d felt out of tune, out of sorts, for some time. I’d felt alone, frustrated, worried. I’d felt pulled in many directions and was struggling to make forward progress. But I felt like with the good news, the successful crossing, and more confidence, I was more in harmony.
The trick with the Mira Por Vos passage was you sailed through it going north, with an island on the right and coral rocks on your left. The wind and current come from the right, wanting to push any boat left (west) onto the rocks. This is what we didn’t want to happen. To be extra sure, I stayed up and did a double watch.
The passage was plenty wide, roughly eight miles. But we cheated toward the island to the east, knowing the current would try to carry us west. Given our speed, we were through the channel before the current could carry us far.
Emily was with me on the first watch. Alison joined me for the second watch. “We’re going too fast,” I said. I’d clocked our top speed that night at around 10.4 knots, a speed record for short, stubby Fezywig. The winds were holding steady at about 20 knots. “We’re going to get in before sunrise. We need to shorten the sails.”
“Okay. Do you need me to do anything?” Alison said.
“Can you help with the winches?” We peeled ourselves off the benches where we’d been chilling and went to work. Trimming the jib slowed us a bit. We left out a small triangle of it to keep the boat balanced.
Now for the mainsail. I’d vowed not to do any deck work at night, but we’d been getting the hang of things over the past couple weeks. Alison and I were both tethered in and she was a good sailor, so we went for it.
As she lowered the sail, something wasn’t right. The boom1 was coming down with the sail. That wasn’t good.
“Hold on, Alison,” I said. I looked around but couldn’t figure it out. “Lower it a little bit.” She started to lower the sail and again the boom lowered as well.
“Okay, stop,” I looked some more. I saw a scrap of snapped rope hanging out from the end of the boom. I looked up and could see the rest of the line from the top of the mast wafting back and forth in the wind. Sometime in the night it had silently broken.
“I guess we worked it too hard in the night.”
“Guess so. So what do we do?”
“Just leave the mainsail up. I don’t want to deal with this in the dark.”
“Okay.” Alison hoisted the main back up to full height, I pointed the boat north again, and the sail filled with wind.
The sky started to lighten and the stars slowly disappeared against the twilight. We caught sight of Long Island and watched as the depth gauge came up once again from unfathomable to less than ten feet. The water was clear and the bottom was sand in every direction.
I pointed the boat into the wind, and we slowly lowered the boom and rested it atop the bimini frame. Alison went to the bow and lowered the anchor. It set easily in the sand, and I cut the engines.
“Thanks for all your help, kiddo.”
“I’m going to get some sleep,” she said.
“Good idea.” I stopped and looked around. We sat tucked behind the tip of Long Island. The ocean, as usual, extended forever behind us. The sun continued to rise in the east. It was a lovely spot. We were getting better at this. I went below and promptly fell asleep.
We’d been away from civilization for quite some time. By civilization, I mean grocery stores. Our last good shop was the Super Walmart in Puerto Rico. We needed a proper shop, and we missed cruisers.
We knew we’d find both in Georgetown on the Great Exuma chain.
The Bahamas are a series of oceanic shelves that create expanses of shallow water surrounded by steep drop-offs back into ocean depths. Crossing from Great Inagua to Long Island brought us across more of the deep ocean, but now we found ourselves on the shelf of the Great Bahama Bank. We had to pay careful attention to our depth.
Day Dreamer had told us about a place called Hog Cay, and we wanted to check it out. It was the most southern tip of the Great Exuma chain to our north. It was a small, uninhabited island, but the perfect stopover on our way to Georgetown. To get there we would sail in the lee of Long Island following an underwater channel that got increasingly narrow and shallow until it wove between Hog Cay and the Exumas. The only slightly scary crossing that remained was jumping the Gulf Stream to Florida, but for now we had everything to look forward to about the Bahamas. The wind was steady and plentiful. Aside from our topping l
ift, the boat was in great shape. We were long since reacclimated to being at sea (no nausea), and we knew more than ever what we were capable of.
The turquoise water met the blue sky at the horizon. Overhead were wisps of white clouds, and in the middle of it all was a little white sailboat with thin blue stripes down the side and sails with red trim. If I could have floated overhead and looked down on ourselves at the moment, I would say it was the perfect moment of sublimity.
Approaching the cut leading into Hog Cay, we could see sand dollars resting on the ocean floor as we passed over them. We worked our way around and through the rocks. The tide must have been out, because the water got extremely shallow. I would not have been surprised if our keel fins carved two lines through the sand beneath us. But I wasn’t worried. Sand is forgiving, and we’d been through much worse.
Once through the cut, the water deepened and we knew we had arrived. We motored close to the cay and dropped the anchor into a perfectly clear field of sand. We bore down to set the anchor, and once again everything came to rest.
One of the frequent tasks that had evolved since moving more often was diving on the anchor. When you park a car, you can generally walk away knowing it’s secure, unless of course it’s on a hill in San Francisco. With a boat, once you park it, it’s a good idea to check the anchor to make sure it’s secure. Sometimes this is a dreaded task, because the sailing has been lousy and everyone’s tired. It involves putting on fins and a snorkel mask and getting wet. The ridiculousness of this strikes me as I write, because sometimes nobody wanted to do it. After all, who would want to go snorkeling in warm Caribbean waters at the end of a day of sailing? But alas, such was the case from time to time. Fortunately, on this day, it was a welcome task and Jane won the lottery. As a young, kinetic twelve-year-old she was quick into the water and quick down the chain, which was easy to spot against the white sand in clear water. The anchor was buried in the sand. Perfect.
Some people tend to think a sandy seabed is a terrible place to set an anchor. In fact, it is ideal. They think you want rock in which to set your anchor. This is the worst scenario. An anchor holds fast by digging into the ground beneath the boat, not by latching on to it somehow. Sand is ideal; mud is next best. The anchor is designed like a plow, so the more it is pulled from the end of a long chain at a narrow angle, the deeper it digs and the more secure the boat. The longer the chain, the more secure the anchor. To pull anchor, you simply move your boat over the location of the anchor, pulling in the chain as you go. Once you are directly above the anchor, you pull up, much like pulling the tab of a soda can. It pops the anchor free from its embedded place in the sand or mud. Suffice it to say, it was sand down there and we had a perfect anchorage.
I was learning anchoring was much like life. Locking onto something with no flexibility was the surest way to destroy it. The worst kind of anchor would be to bolt a boat to the ocean floor with a short steel cable. Gripping too tight would rip the bow off the boat. An anchor worked on these principles, and these anchoring principles were sound and fast. Correctly applied, a boat would always be secure. I wanted to be sound and fast, as well as flexible.
The kids knew we would be arriving in the evening, so they had taken the initiative and prepared food while underway. Dinner was served upon arrival: curried red lentil soup. We’d sailed nine hours over forty beautiful miles. After dinner we all went to the front of the boat and settled in on the trampoline.
“I love it here,” Jane said.
“Me too,” Alison added.
“I miss Day Dreamer and Discovery,” Karina said. “But it’s kind of nice being just us.”
“Yeah, but we’ll see them again,” Alison said.
“How do you know?” Emily asked.
“I just know. I think things just work out like that.”
“But there’s no Wi-Fi,” Eli smiled—not a happy smile.
“I like it that way,” Emily smiled back.
The sun set and stars twinkled against the darkening sky.
“I think Day Dreamer was right,” I said. “This is a lovely spot.” I missed my dad cocaptains, and Emily missed the other moms, but Karina was right. This was what we’d come for: to be together as a family, just us.
Below, the water lapped quietly against the inside of the hulls. Looking into the sky we spotted two falling stars. There was almost no moon that night, so we lay there watching the stars become clearer and clearer. It had been a good day. We all went to bed early.
We had two more weeks to spend in the Bahamas. That’s kind of like walking into a library and saying, you have two weeks to read as much as you want. There’s no way to read everything, but you can undoubtedly find a couple good books and really enjoy them.
I awoke the next morning and couldn’t have been more pleased. The night had been calm and flat. The tide had gone out quite a bit. A fleshy sandbar had emerged from Hog Cay and now extended out about a hundred yards toward us. It looked like a thigh almost entirely submerged in a bathtub, with the topmost section peeking through the water. With the sun rising higher in the sky, the cove felt like a bathtub. “I vote we stay a while,” I said as we all munched on our breakfast.
“Okay,” was the common consensus from all the other munchers.
We still had plenty of food and fuel. I’d put in the water maker for situations like this. We could create fresh water, and the weather was perfect. Why go anywhere else?
I intended to wait until Georgetown to look at the topping lift, but this was as good a place as any. I used my lighter to fuse the frayed end of the rope descending from the mast. I then asked Emily to open the deck cleat so I could pull down enough rope to reach the end of the boom.
“Which one?” she asked.
“It’s that one.”
“This one?”
“Yeah.”
She opened the cleat and I pulled slightly on the line. I needed only a few additional feet. That’s when Emily’s end of the line slid all the way through the cleat, up the mast, and over the pulley at the top and dumped the entire line, limp on the deck.
I looked at Emily and she looked at me. Technically it wasn’t her fault that she had let the line slip away. There was no stopper knot on the end to prevent it. But she also hadn’t thought of checking. This two-minute project became a two-hour project. I would have to go to the top of the mast, rethread the line through the pulley at the top, snake it down through the inside of the mast, and lace it out of the mast and through the deck cleat. I tried to not let daggers come out of my eyes.
I went to get my climbing harness. Several hours later, the project was completed. The line had been rethreaded through the top of the mast. I ran it through the cleat and locked it in place. I tied a stopper knot on the end. Emily had done her best to be cheerful throughout the afternoon, but I did not smile back. With the project completed, I put on my snorkel fins and jumped into the water. I was trying to get out of my grumpy-pants mood.
“I’m swimming to shore. Anyone else want to come?” I asked.
Alison joined me. Emily followed later in the dinghy with the Littles. Once Lily was to the sand, she could not have been happier. She lay on her stomach and kicked her feet.
“Daddy, I so happy,” she said as she smiled at me.
“Yeah, this is pretty nice, isn’t it, Lil?” I said.
“We stay long time?” she asked.
“We’ll see.”
In true Fezywig fashion, we worked hard and we played hard. The next morning we did boat cleaning. The water was shallow enough that we could stand on the sand and clean the hull. Alison and I worked on the submerged portions. Matthew Town’s dock had left a big black smudge on the starboard side. Emily, Eli, and Lily piled into the dinghy and scrubbed that away. Karina and Jane scrubbed the deck, washed the windows, and wiped down the kitchen. Everyone got to take turns picking the music and, with no one el
se around, we cranked it up.
We spent three days and two nights at Hog Cay. Then it was time to go find another book.
We pulled anchor and headed north, skirting the east edge of Little Exuma Island. It was about eighteen miles to Georgetown. A downwind sail.
Sailing downwind is ironic. Most people have an image of good sailing. It involves a boat with full sails, heeled over slightly, or a lot, slicing through the waves with the wind in your hair, and maybe the people aboard look and dress like the Kennedys. We don’t look like the Kennedys. Nor do we dress like them. Sailing with the wind in your face can look dramatic, but it also turns out to be a long way to anywhere. Sailing into the wind is what you do when you’re out for some kicks and thrills on a day sail, or you have no other choice.
If the wind is coming from behind you, that’s a good way to get where you want to go, but it’s also boring. It’s slow and boring because it feels like nothing is happening. Sailors use a fancy term called “apparent wind”: the wind you perceive because of your movement through the air. When you ride a bike it feels windy. When you stop, it’s no longer windy. Apparent wind. When you sail with the wind, the wind is moving but you’re moving with it, so it feels like there’s no wind, which makes it feel like nothing is happening. This is when you have to look at the water and watch the speed of bits of floating reed and sea-foam gliding past. You have to look closely at the things right under your nose to notice the movement.
