The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  The more we investigated, the more Herbert and I became convinced that we were meant to do this as a family. Undertaking this challenge together would be an incredible gift to our boys’ development, and to our relationships with them. We felt that in particular Michael, our oldest son, really needed a fresh start and the boost that would come with tackling such a lofty goal. For some reason, his self-confidence had been in a steady decline. We were certain the trip would help give him a stronger start in life.

  With this as our goal, however, we had no choice but to leave immediately. In a few years Michael would be too old to want to stay cramped up in a small boat with his parents. So within days, our initial ten-year strategy evolved into a one-year plan. Considering that within that year, we would have to find a suitable boat, sell our business, rent out our house, take courses, and prepare for this monumental trip, this might have seemed an impossible goal. Yet in a strange way we knew, irrevocably, that we would move heaven and earth if need be. Somehow we would make it happen. Once the passion of this great dream had seized hold of us, we could no more fight it than we could have stopped an avalanche.

  Our first priority was finding a cruising boat before the snowy Ottawa winter set in. After searching the Internet, we found a listing for a well-proven but inexpensive thirty-seven-year-old boat, named Tarwathie, in Beaufort, North Carolina. The very next day we were hammering down the I-95. Our eighteen hours of non-stop driving were accompanied by a definite sense of making a rendezvous with fate.

  The boat was old and in poor shape cosmetically. From our years of renovating houses, however, we knew we could spruce her up. Built in 1960 in Holland, her sturdy steel hull was soft-chined and graceful. She was built along the lines of a classic bluewater cruising yacht: a deep, full keeled, heavy, and sea-kindly vessel. This was clearly the kind of boat that was meant to have a hundred fathoms of water beneath her keel.

  Inside, the boat looked nothing like the sleek, apartmentlike yachts of today. This boat was unmistakably nautical: round portholes, beautiful, well-worn dark teak, gimballed brass kerosene lamps everywhere. She was strong and proven, had been thoroughly updated, and best of all was loaded with all the heavy-duty gear we would need for cruising and a wealth of spare parts to boot. Since we were not sailors ourselves, we wanted a boat that knew more about sailing than we did. Tarwathie, built for the rough and stormy North Sea, was just the confidence-inspiring vessel we needed. That afternoon, subject to a professional survey, Tarwathie was ours.

  A few weeks later, Northern Magic, as she would soon be named, had been trucked to Canada and safely installed at a small marina about fifty minutes away from our home. We all went there together to see her as a family for the first time. It was a moment of high expectation, like the children getting their first look at a brand-new baby brother.

  “What?” exclaimed Michael, age ten, upon looking at Northern Magic for the first time, “We’re going to sail around the world in that green piece of junk?”

  She didn’t look great, that is true. Her hull had been stripped and sandblasted, then painted with a coat of ugly green primer. Several welding jobs had been done afterwards, and the four or five new plates that had been welded in had rusted around the edges and left long, red stains bleeding down the belly of the boat. An ultrasonic sounding had been done to detect other weaknesses in the hull, and painted marks and lines all over the hull showed the results of this. The cabin top’s stained teak was marred and peeling, its finish moulting off in giant unsightly scales.

  Our future home, in which we were going to tackle the seas of the world, looked like – well, a green piece of junk.

  Herbert quit coming to work in order to refurbish Northern Magic full time, working under a tarp with an electric heater as the snow fell two metres deep around him. He took that boat apart from stem to stern, often working in temperatures of -30° Celsius. By spring she was ready to launch and he knew her intimately, inside and out.

  We also began more formal preparation: Herbert in celestial and coastal navigation and basic first aid, I in ham radio and wilderness first aid. Both of us passed our scuba certification and all ham and marine radio licences. And every spare minute we spent researching a thousand decisions about a cruising life we knew nothing about.

  All this took place while we were still running and attempting to sell our business, finding a tenant for our house and a property manager for our small income property, taking care of our three children, hosting our German nephew, Marco, for six months, and me even serving as a Cub Scout leader. Those were an unbelievable eleven months, and they passed in a dizzy, tiring, and exhilarating blur. Getting a boat and ourselves ready to sail around the world in less than a year might have seemed too much to accomplish, but we never questioned whether it was doable. We just put our heads down and did it, taking energy and inspiration from the strength of our desire.

  Sometimes, especially in the dark of night, we worried. Every time I saw a globe, a tremor of fear would ripple through my body. I would take a big gulp when I looked at the incredible expanse of the Pacific Ocean, that immense body of water that seemed to stretch on forever and ever. We would actually dare to sail across that? Many times I dreaded the day we would have to head off into three thousand miles of emptiness. But other people did it, I would tell myself, and if they could do it, so could we. Overcoming fear was just another challenge, another part of our growth. Still, I hated to look at that unspeakably empty gap on the globe. Even today, I still catch my breath when I see a picture of that vast ocean.

  Over and over we asked ourselves whether it was right to expose our children to the dangers of the sea. Plenty of statistics were on our side, but we made a resolution that whenever we had to make a choice on our trip, we would always make it on the side of safety, for the children’s sakes.

  We were so busy renovating the boat, finishing up our courses and selling our business that by July, two months before we planned to leave, we hadn’t had time to think too much about packing up or renting out our house. When, late in the month, a nice American army family said they needed the house in two weeks, we had no choice but to say yes.

  But how could we manage to clear out the house in only fourteen days? July had already been a disaster. With all three kids out of school, we were now trying to juggle a complicated schedule of summer camps and babysitters. Often as not, I brought one, two, or the three of them into the office with me, setting them up in the meeting room with activity books, or letting them play computer games on a free workstation. Herbert was working frantically to get the boat ready. Now we had two weeks to finish the boat, pack up our large four-bedroom house, move everything we needed into the boat, and take care of the kids – all while still working full time.

  My parents came to the rescue, offering to take care of the boys for three weeks at their home in Calgary. It was a generous offer, especially because the idea of us sailing around the world had to have been the last thing my Mom would ever have wanted. She hadn’t said much when I first told her of our plans, hoping perhaps that the idea would go away. Dad said later he thought I was joking. But now they swallowed their objections and extended their hands in help.

  Without needing to bother about the children, Herbert and I could really pick up our pace. We planned to create an area in our basement in which we would store all our worldly possessions. Aunt Gina Nichols, my mother’s sister from Washington, D.C., hopped on a plane, rolled up her sleeves, and helped us from morning until midnight, getting our house put away. Friends and neighbours also came and lent a hand. Even with everyone’s help, however, it seemed as if we would never get it done. Twenty-four hours before our new tenants were to arrive, every room in the house was still full of stuff.

  We were in a race: could Herbert, Gina, and I clear out each room faster than the cleaning lady could clean them? She was vacuuming right behind us, nipping at our heels like a fox terrier as we frantically worked to clear the stuff out. Breathing down the neck of th
e cleaning lady were the carpet cleaners, who were followed hotly by Herbert and a friend with paintbrushes. Like everything else, we somehow managed to get it done before the tenants arrived. The sight of all our things, piled from floor to ceiling in a solid wall, packed so tightly you could barely fit a credit card in between, was really something, a feat worthy of the famous Inca builders of Peru. We had built Machu Picchu in our basement, a monument to consumer excess!

  Ever since my cancer three years before, doctors had been keeping a very close watch on my body in case it resurfaced anywhere else. Melanoma is a strange cancer. It’s easily curable, if it remains on the surface of your skin. But unlike other skin cancers, melanoma has the tendency to spread inside your body. It’s simple enough to cut out a chunk of skin, as they had done on my right calf, but having malignant melanoma spread to your lungs, liver, or lymph nodes is virtually a death sentence.

  A few weeks before, I had had a thorough pre-departure check-up. My doctor looked troubled as she palpated the lymph nodes in my right groin. One of the nodes felt enlarged – sometimes a sign that the cancer has spread. It was probably nothing, she said, but considering that we were going away, and she’d have no way of following up, she felt it was best to have that node removed to check whether it contained any malignant cells.

  So just five days before this last twenty-four hours of frenzied packing, I had undergone minor surgery to remove a lymph node in my groin.

  It was a Sword of Damocles hanging over all of us. It was impossible not to think about it as I put away all our belongings. Our business was now sold, our home rented out, so if we didn’t leave on this trip we’d have nowhere to live. Herbert and I didn’t talk too much about it, but from time to time we shared an anxious look as we waited to hear the results of the surgery.

  The test results had been promised at eight that Friday morning, the same day our new tenants were moving in. As their moving truck arrived, I was on the phone to my doctor. The results of that conversation would decide whether I was going to sail around the world or die.

  The answer: we were going to sail around the world.

  I ran to the driveway in a flood of tears. All my pent-up anxiety, all the stress and rush of selling the business, packing up the house, finishing the boat, and worrying about my health came bubbling out. As our tenants stepped out of their car, I just stood there, blubbering like a baby. They must have thought I really didn’t want to be leaving our home. But I felt just the opposite: I had just been given my life. Now it was up to me to make the most of it.

  Soon the kids came back from Calgary, not to their old home or their own bedrooms, but to a cramped, messy boat that wasn’t entirely ready to receive them. They were, especially Michael, a little disappointed. This plan to sail around the world was now disturbingly final, and Michael began wishing he hadn’t agreed to it so readily the year before. Suddenly it occurred to him that he was going to be losing his friends, his bedroom, his bicycle, everything that was important to him. More than once I know he wished we would change our minds. But it was too late to turn back now, and he adapted to his reduced circumstances with reasonably good grace.

  Jonathan, nine, was more excited, probably the most enthusiastic of the three. I’ll never forget when we were motoring down the Ottawa River on a beautiful summer day the year before, when Jon, sitting at the bow of the boat, had turned around, stretched, and said, “This is the best day of my life!”

  “No, Jon,” corrected Michael, “the best day is going to be when we’re on the ocean.” I replayed that exchange a hundred times in my mind as I imagined the luxury of endless time with my children, learning about life with them, discovering the marvels of this earth with them, and helping them grow into the kind of men we wanted them to become.

  Cheerful Christopher, our five-year-old sunshine boy, was just along for the ride and had nothing much to say about it one way or the other, as long as we could reassure him that we wouldn’t be going over any waterfalls or encountering any giant octopi.

  By now we had sold our two cars and were running around town in a rented car. There was an unbelievable list of details to sort out before we could leave. It’s a good thing I’m a list-maker. I had read and read and read, so I had everything pretty well thought out, from medical kit to books. Address changes, radio licences, consultations with doctors, sprucing up our sails, creating an extensive medical kit (even down to IV lines and catheters), setting up powers of attorney, banking, paying bills, getting inoculations, taking care of school books, these things and a million others filled page after page of lists. My list for August 26, 1997, was seventy-three items long, not including a separate shopping list. We had lists of what things we had left in our house. We had lists of instructions for our tenants. We had lists of what we had on the boat and where it was stored. What we lacked in personal experience we made up for in research. And lists. There are people in my very own family who make fun of me for these lists, but as far as I’m concerned they are what held us together.

  On September 10, 1997, the last day before leaving, we set out early with one final list of the last twenty-three things we had to do before departing first thing next morning.

  All day we sped from stop to stop, returning to our neighbourhood around the end of the afternoon, stressed out and exhausted. The kids were tired and complaining about being cooped up in the car without so much as a lunch break, so we drove each of them, uninvited, to his best friend’s house to spend the remaining hours before departure. Each of the three families, seeing the distress on our faces, offered to keep the boys and feed them for as long as we needed. What a relief! When the mother of Christopher’s best friend tried to press some dinner into my hands, I was so overwrought with stress and gratitude I burst into tears.

  We returned to our house, where our tenants were still busy settling in. There was a problem: squirrels had entered the attic and chewed a hole in the corner of the roof. It had rained the night before, and water had poured in. So there we were, adding “roof repair” to our list for the day. Number twenty-four. Herbert climbed up on the roof and patched up the damage while I continued running around.

  It was ten-thirty that night before Herbert and I began going from house to house to collect our kids from the kind people who had temporarily adopted them. My body sagged from stress and fatigue and my brain felt soggy.

  We picked up Michael last, along with his best friend, Ian Villeneuve, whom we had invited to join us for the first week of the trip. It was almost midnight when we loaded four tired children into the dinghy and travelled in darkness over a forbiddingly black Ottawa River. We hadn’t had time for a proper meal in two days.

  It was cold and windy, and the waves hitting the little overloaded dinghy were choppy. We all got splashed, and were shivering and wet by the time we arrived at the place we had anchored the boat in the river. I felt ready to collapse. I’ve said it before, and I still believe it today: about the toughest thing we did on our trip sailing around the world was leaving.

  And so, just one year after we had decided to undertake our odyssey, as the warm summer air began to take on the tang of colder days to come, we pulled up anchor and set off on our circumnavigation. We were untried sailors, in a vessel we had never sailed. Our entire sailing experience consisted of six afternoons on the Ottawa River in a twenty-three-foot boat. We weren’t 100 per cent ready, it is true, but we were ready enough to leave. During the next four or five months of cruising down the eastern seaboard we would have time to sort out the myriad details unattended to and begin learning about the craft to which we were entrusting our family’s lives.

  That crazy, harried, impossible phase was behind us. Now the whole world lay ahead.

  2

  The Adventure Begins

  We left Ottawa in a grey drizzle, with a dozen last-minute bags of dripping groceries leaving puddles on the freshly varnished teak floor. There was nobody there to see us off except for Wayne Cuddington, a photographer from the Ott
awa Citizen. A few weeks earlier, I had agreed to write a weekly report about our trip for Ottawa’s largest daily newspaper, and Wayne’s photo of our rainy departure made the front page in Ottawa and was reprinted in many other newspapers across Canada.

  Herbert and I took turns steering in the rain. In between shifts at the wheel, we continued to work away at the things that had still not been stowed away. Despite the dreary start, it felt great finally to be leaving. I found myself heaving endless sighs of relief. In the scramble of our departure I’d hardly had time to feel excited, but now that tremulous feeling of anticipation we had once felt when planning our grand adventure had returned.

  I had been mentally prepared to say goodbye, and left our home for the last time without looking back. But what I had not expected was the tremendous outpouring of help and kindness from friends, family, and even strangers. Virtually everyone who knew what we were doing did something to make our preparations easier. We had been the beneficiaries of a hundred helping hands. Little did we know that this stream of helpfulness and goodwill would be a constant feature of our trip around the world, something we would experience virtually everywhere we went, and something that would change us profoundly.

  Our work on the boat was far from finished, a fact that was made perfectly clear as our first day progressed, in the form of a CD player that ate up our CDs, leaky hatches we hadn’t got around to fixing yet, and the realization that we had a lot more rain gear than we had hooks. Outside, we still hadn’t managed to fix up all the rust spots, paint the decks, or refinish the outdoor teak. The boat, particularly the deck, was splotched with ugly rust-coloured blotches of primer paint. The teak deck, cockpit coaming, and trim were still unfinished and ugly. Somehow, we hoped to complete all these undone tasks somewhere along the way. But the weather was already starting to get cold, and soon the locks ahead of us would be closing for the winter, so we had no time to wait. In fact, it turned out to be an unseasonably cold autumn, and after Washington we had frost on our decks almost every morning, all the way down to Florida. We had left not a moment too soon.