The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  “He’s going to give you permission,” the touchy skipper huffily informed me. “But you take responsibility for anything that happens in the marina tonight. If anything gets vandalized or stolen, you’ll be responsible for it.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  The port captain hopped on a motorcycle. I pedalled hard behind him to the hut, where Merita and Francisco still waited. Many words were exchanged, and Francisco walked back to the front gate to get his father-in-law and children. I biked back to the boat to get shivering Merita a jacket. Then we waited, interminably, it seemed, as each of the guests had his or her papers inspected minutely by the port captain and his security officials. Then it was over, and we were on our way to the warm inviting glow of the supper and companionship that awaited us on Northern Magic.

  Despite the lurching start, our dinner party was a great success. Merita and her family had never had spaghetti with meat sauce before – overcooked, pink, or otherwise. We offered them the leftovers to take home, and Francisco jumped at the opportunity. When we visited the next day, he was heating it up for lunch.

  Our struggles with the overzealous Cuban bureaucracy were not yet over, however. We wanted to give away two of our bicycles to Merita’s children. This doesn’t sound like a big problem? Well in Cuba, it was.

  Over the past months, we couldn’t help but notice that rust was over-taking the bicycles we had brought along for the kids. We had hung on to them because we had the idea they would make a great gift for some poor Cuban family. Now we had found our family. When we entered Cuba, however, the Customs officials had made meticulous notes on all the items we carried on board. When it came to the bikes, we asked if it would be a problem if we left with a different number than we arrived with. Yes, it certainly would, they responded.

  But we didn’t give up, and as it came closer to our departure, we continued pressing for permission to give the bikes away. Herbert devoted hours to meeting with ever-higher echelons of officials without ever once being told why they should want to deprive their fellow citizens of our gift. If we did give them away without permission, we would face a stiff fine.

  But we didn’t want to let it go. Finally, Herbert made it to someone with the power to make the decision. If we gave the bikes to “the Cuban people,” we could do it, she informed us. But if we wanted to give them to a specific Cuban family, we would have to pay duty.

  “Well then how much would we have to pay?” he pressed. Clearly surprised at this question, the official followed him over to Northern Magic, where the small bikes awaited her scrutiny. Rusty and leprous with sea salt, they looked a million years old. She stood there for a long moment in silent reflection.

  “All right,” she said, abruptly, waving her hands and turning on her heel. “You can do it.”

  We have never had to work so hard just to make a simple gift, but it was worth it. We had already said our goodbyes to Merita and her family the day before, amid hugs and tears and promises to write and return in five years. As far as they knew, we were already gone.

  Loading the two smaller bikes in our collapsible cart-trailer, Michael and I sped over to Jaimanitas, the subject of many curious stares from villagers. Merita’s children were at school, so we didn’t get to see the their reaction when they came home to find our gift, but we had already seen their faces, hungry for a chance to try them when we visited. It was like playing Santa Claus. All of us had many happy moments creating in our own minds the good feelings our old bikes would bring to these smiling children who had so little. To this day we continue to get regular letters from Merita, who has never stopped thanking us for the gift of those bikes, and who has never ceased reminding us of our promise to visit again.

  Leaving Havana, we continued hopping around Cuba, enduring storms at anchor, feeding giant iguanas, holding the tails of crocodiles, and even riding on the backs of huge hundred-year-old sea turtles. But our over-whelming focus continued to be hunting for basic food supplies, and dealing with attempts of overzealous officials to control our movements and our friendships.

  At our last stop in Cuba, Cayo Largo, we met Octavio, who was a turtle keeper at a sea-turtle sanctuary. We found him patiently scrubbing the little turtles’ shells clean with a toothbrush, since lack of a proper water supply caused excess algae growth on the young turtles’ shells. He lent us some reading material for the kids’ school projects on endangered turtles, but regretfully declined our invitation to come aboard. Cubans were not allowed on foreigners’ yachts, he told us. By now we had begun to understand something about this, and didn’t press further.

  We suspected, in fact, that we had been marked for special attention because of our interest in befriending local folk. Many of the anchorages we had requested had been arbitrarily crossed off our cruising permit. We were denied permission to visit anywhere other than places with a military presence or harbourmaster to keep an eye on us. At Bahìa Honda, a policeman had even insisted on telling us where to anchor, at a spot where he could watch us, even though it was manifestly unsafe. He also required us to find him to get permission every time we wanted to leave the boat. No other yacht we knew of had been given similar constraints.

  Perhaps we were being monitored extra carefully; perhaps our eagerness to make friends with ordinary Cubans was considered a threat. But it had been our hope to create a chain of friendships that circled the world, and despite it all, we had managed to forge that first link in Cuba.

  After almost a month in Cuba, we made our first passage entirely under sail, bringing us twenty-seven hours later to the posh island of Grand Cayman. Immediately, we found ourselves in culture shock – or perhaps more accurately, supermarket shock. The contrast to impoverished Cuba couldn’t have been much greater.

  As a tax haven, Grand Cayman attracts the wealthiest of the wealthy, who establish their businesses and vacation homes there. We simply couldn’t be restrained, on our first day in town, from heading straight to the supermarket. Forts, museums, and turtle farms could wait, but fresh milk, fresh fruit, and Hershey’s Kisses could not. Three trips and five hundred dollars later we had calmed down a little, but our favourite part about Grand Cayman remained the grocery store. Even little Christopher shared our fascination. For homework one day, I asked him to make a collage of Grand Cayman’s attractions out of a local tourist magazine. Eighty per cent of the pictures he cut out were supermarket advertisements.

  By now, six months had passed since we had cast off from Ottawa. Since that rainy day in September, we had travelled 3,400 nautical miles and in the process begun to turn ourselves into something resembling a sailing crew. We were beginning to feel as if we knew what we were doing.

  Herbert had lost about nine kilograms and was getting browner and more youthful with every passing day. The first part of the voyage had been particularly stressful for him, as we worked the kinks out of Northern Magic while travelling hard down the eastern seaboard. After hitting Cuba, however, we had begun living the life we had hoped this trip would bring us – exploring a new country together, sharing new experiences, making local friends, and being free to do whatever our moods dictated. The difference this brought to Herbert was remarkable. He was in his element.

  Michael had been the most reluctant to join our adventure and yet somehow was the first of us to catch its spirit underway. He grew up enormously in the first six months of our trip. He faced and overcame the loss of friendships that were important to him and carried on cheerfully. He applied himself to his schoolwork, if not with total diligence, then at least with greater attentiveness than before and with a minimum of complaining. For the first time in his life, he discovered reading for pleasure.

  He discovered a new love of history and would happily spend hours learning about things that were – museums, statues, and ancient society. He became our resident expert in Greek mythology. He had turned into the primary dinghy captain, and in an interesting reversal, thanks to my experiences in Flipper, he was now the one who drove me around. He
was the one of us who would climb a coconut tree and send its bounty crashing down for the rest of us to gather. He would let his little brothers push him under large waves for hours on end with good humour. He had turned lean and brown and muscular and was thriving.

  Jonathan, who was about to turn ten, had also overcome his rocky start to the trip. Although the keenest at the outset, he had fought me the most as his schoolteacher. Perhaps because he liked school the most, he found home schooling the biggest adjustment. Michael, on the other hand, much preferred the flexibility of lessons and assignments on Northern Magic to the structured classes of a regular school. To my great delight, Michael and Jonathan had by now almost completely set aside their rivalry and were becoming real friends, laughing and sharing inside jokes together. Jon also began showing me why his teachers used to so enjoy having him in their classes. All I needed to do was say, “It’s time to do homework” or “set the table, please,” and without further ado, Jon would be at work. In Grand Cayman he gained the distinction of being the first one to finish the entire year’s math work. He wanted to be the first to earn summer holidays.

  Although Jon missed his friends back at home, he made up for it by being outgoing and friendly to everyone we met, introducing himself with a hearty handshake and a broad smile. Women everywhere were quite taken by Jonathan, who lined up for a double serving when they were dishing out eyelashes. Merita’s pregnant sister in Cuba told us if she had a boy baby, she intended to name him after Jonathan.

  Jon was quick to pick up new languages and not shy to use them. He also became our resident expert on the natural world, referring to his library of reference books about the night sky, weather, fish, shells, birds, and dolphins. He could decipher detailed weather maps and make forecasts based on his own observations. He could devour a whole book in less than a day. He started using words like “sprawled” and “incorrigible.” He took on the task of teaching his little brother, and took this job seriously, carefully marking and recording Christopher’s progress. He was responsible, honest, and generous. Jonathan would, we could see, turn into an amazing young man. Our dream that this trip would help in that development seemed to be coming true.

  And little Christopher: what a study in contradictions our last-born child was. Of the three, it was probably most difficult to know how this voyage was affecting him, because he was just at the beginning of his development. I often thought he was the luckiest of the three, because he was receiving this abundance of time with his parents at a younger age, although perhaps it made him more babyish.

  “I want to be with you always, Mom,” he would confide softly in my ear when we snuggled late at night. On the other hand, he had only just begun to know how to make friends as we left on the trip, and we weren’t able to provide him with very many playmates his age. Although he didn’t miss outside friendships the way his older brothers did, I would often find myself wishing we could have done better for him in that respect.

  As we were walking past the beautiful shops of George Town, six-year-old Christopher, his active mind always turning, suddenly stopped to ask me, “What is capitalism, Mom?” He would spend hours poring over instruction manuals and rulebooks of complex strategic games. His favourite activity was filling his personal journal with pages and pages of charts, graphs, and maps of imaginary games of his own invention. He loved math, and did it in his free time, in his head, for fun.

  Christopher was also the only child in the world who would forego Fruit Loops at the grocery store because they were not healthy. He was not by nature a risk taker, and it was a devil of a challenge trying to teach him how to swim. He was a strange combination of precocity, stubbornness, and babyishness, our little Christopher was. But he was above all our sunshine boy in those days, loving and affectionate, and I treasured each one of the endless days we shared together, living, learning, and growing.

  As for me, six months into our voyage, I was feeling pretty good, although increasingly nervous about the large stretches of ocean that lay ahead. The time of our big sea trial was coming closer and closer. I still tried not to visualize that map of the Pacific.

  Although I did like our new life, living on a boat had its own stresses. Taking care of the kids’ schoolwork was an enormous challenge, probably the toughest thing we did on the boat. It required huge discipline of all of us, and especially of me. But even living on a boat took getting used to, getting accustomed to the cramped spaces and lack of storage space.

  I hadn’t for a moment regretted our decision to undertake this voyage, although from time to time, when we had days of uncomfortable conditions, I did wonder if we were totally crazy to want to do this. I never learned to enjoy passagemaking. But then we would get a spell like we had in Grand Cayman, playing daily on the beach, walking, taking life easy, and those other feelings would fall right away. Grand Cayman, after all those months of stress and hard travel, was a real vacation.

  As we left Grand Cayman behind, with seven days at sea ahead of us, all my earlier worries about the nine-hundred-mile voyage to Panama evaporated in the warm sunshine. Thanks to calm seas, we were able to carry on a relatively normal daily routine, which included proper cooked meals, and, for the kids, homework. Herbert and I settled into a comfortable rhythm of standing watches, with one of us awake and on watch at all times. Even the children were mellow, playing together cooperatively day after day with no signs of strife.

  Around ten at night on the fourth day, while I was trying to tear myself out of a good book in order to finish off the supper dishes, the sails suddenly started flapping. I jumped into the cockpit, thinking there had been an abrupt change in wind direction. The wind hadn’t changed; it was our course that had. We were heading due north.

  Herbert arrived from below in his underwear, looking tousled and sleepy. As I took over hand steering, he began rooting around to get at the autopilot, which seemed to be the cause of the problem. This involved about half an hour’s worth of emptying lockers in Jonathan’s cabin as he slept as well as in the cockpit.

  As Herbert worked on the unit in the moonlight, we made an interesting sight. The cockpit was a jumble of six lifejackets, three safety harnesses, two paddles, a pressure sprayer with hoses, the emergency steering system, a TV antenna, power cords, various parts for replacement portlights, a gangplank, some ropes, and eight 2” X 2” pieces of 3/4” marine plywood, all of which had been emptied from the locker that contained the autopilot. I was standing in the midst of this weird mélange, keeping our recalcitrant boat heading south, my bare legs sticking out of Jonathan’s green, badge-studded Boy Scout blanket, which I was wearing as a poncho against the cool ocean breeze.

  If you had been looking for Herbert in that unsightly cockpit, you would have found him harder to spot. The chief proof of his existence was his white underpants, which shone ethereally in the moonlight from his upended bottom. Less obvious were his legs, which looked as if they were growing upwards out of those eerily illuminated briefs like two fuzzy trees. His upper body was invisible, buried deep inside the emptied locker, out of which emanated periodic muffled groans, grunts, and exclamations of distress. Several times the captain issued me instructions, in the severest terms, that I was to stop the boat from rolling.

  It was only a five-cent part that had broken, but we had no ready replacement. McGyver-like, Herbert ransacked the boat for something he could modify to replace the broken pin. Two additional lockers were emptied in the search. Finally, he rigged something together. By one o’clock the unit was working again and my weary body was given leave to go to bed.

  I never did get to those dishes, but by the time I was woken at 7:00 a.m. for my next shift, they had all been washed and put away. In fact, all the emptied lockers had been cleaned up, and there was not a bit of evidence of our moonlight escapade.

  But no sooner had Herbert returned to bed then he was forced to spring out again. Well, maybe “spring” is too energetic a word; it was more like a pathetic crawl. The pin he had fashio
ned had failed. Northern Magic was once again trying to follow the direction suggested by her name. As the kids made their way out of bed, I took the wheel while Herbert, who had worked ceaselessly since ten the night before, once more began emptying the lockers to begin all over again. I tried to convince him to grab some sleep before starting, but he wore “that look” and got right back to work, despite my suggestions.

  He worked all day, assembling and disassembling the autopilot twice before admitting defeat. There was nothing he could do to hold it together. Finally, by late afternoon, I was forced to assume my role as chief medical officer and order the captain to bed on the grounds that lack of sleep had made him medically unfit to perform his duty. Herbert hates to admit defeat, but reluctantly he gave in.

  He awoke at 11:00 p.m., still tired, but functional. Now I was beat after eighteen hours wrestling with the wheel. We were out of sync, each of us fighting accumulated fatigue from long hours standing in the cockpit. There was not a breath of wind as we motored, so our Aries mechanical self-steering wind vane was useless. For the next two days, our comfortable routine broke down as we each gripped the wheel for as many hours as we could before our bodies demanded sleep and forced us to wake our equally exhausted and depleted partner.

  Because someone had to be standing at the wheel at all times, we of course both had to be awake for certain periods like meal preparation, plotting our position, and getting the kids to bed. The children took care of each other, as well as holding the wheel for short periods. In compensation they got off homework altogether. And so we blearily made our way across the Caribbean Sea.

  I spotted the lights of Panama around midnight at the beginning of our seventh day. Suddenly, the lights of many huge ships were around us and I was actually too excited to sleep after I passed the wheel over to Herbert. We entered Cristóbal Harbor as the sun was rising over the low green mountains of Panama. By 7:00 a.m. we had found the yacht anchorage and gratefully dropped anchor amidst dozens of other boats flying the flags of countries all over the world.