The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  But as I opened the bench where the potatoes were kept, my already overburdened olfactory sense went on high alert. Was I imagining it or could it be that my carefully stored Galápagos potatoes were already …

  “Arrghhh!”

  Having sailed south to the same latitude as our destination, we turned due west to take advantage of the trade winds blowing strongly and steadily at our back. Northern Magic had her jib and mainsail poled out on opposite sides, wing-and-wing, to catch as much of the easterly winds as possible. This gave her the appearance of a giant butterfly as she flew through the silvery waters of the South Pacific.

  Unfortunately, this sail arrangement was much less comfortable than it had been when we were heading southwest. On that tack, we had been stabilized by the wind coming from one side and we assumed a calmer position, slightly heeled but relatively stable.

  Now, everything aboard Northern Magic, which had been organized to stay put on a comfortable starboard tack, began flying from one side of the boat to the other, as three-metre waves rolled us mercilessly back and forth. Cooking, working, and even using the toilet took on new and sometimes exciting aspects.

  As we each attempted to go about our tasks, you could hear in turn the same anguished cry coming from different throats as pantry contents tumbled out, scattering noodle shells and cream of wheat to create an almost beach-like display on the floor, carefully constructed Lego space-ships took off prematurely in disastrous flight across the salon, toilet lids came banging down on someone’s bare back while they were occupied with important business, freshly washed cutlery took on new life as deadly projectiles in the galley, and glasses of juice and bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios upended themselves on people’s laps.

  This was simply daily life on a small boat in the open ocean.

  Twelve days after leaving the Galápagos Islands, we celebrated our passing the halfway point of our passage. In the aftermath, this time it was the cockpit of Northern Magic that was a mess, covered with the remnants of our “Midpoint Party,” in which we had sprayed each other with little cans of foam streamers and stuffed our faces with treasured morsels of marzipan saved for the occasion, all while balancing ourselves against the tremendous rolling forces of the large Pacific swell. That halfway-point party, 1,500 nautical miles from land, marked the end of the easy part of our passage.

  The day after our festivities, little remnants of colourful foam streamers still festooning the cockpit, we were rollicking along with the trade winds at our back, making good speed. I was on watch and didn’t hear anything remarkable, but suddenly I realized that the boat was rolling much more than before. I popped my head out the hatch to see why.

  I couldn’t have been more surprised. Our main boom, the huge wooden beam leading out from the mast, had snapped in two. It was loosely banging around the solar panels, held up only by the straining, flogging mainsail. It had been severed just at the point where a preventer had secured it from accidental swinging.

  “Come out here quick,” I yelled to Herbert, who had just gone to bed. “Our boom is broken!”

  He looked up at me sceptically from the bed, clearly imagining that some minor fitting had given way. He didn’t budge. He was off watch, and intended to stay that way.

  “I mean it! The boom is completely broken!”

  I could see in Herbert’s disbelieving face, as he slowly and with exaggerated deliberation swung his legs over the side of the bed, that he was attributing some kind of feminine hysteria to my assessment of the situation. No doubt as soon as he spotted the problem, his demeanour said, it would be easy to fix. But to humour me, he got up anyway. His attitude changed as soon as he stuck his head out of the hatch.

  While I began to prepare myself mentally for a much longer voyage under mizzen sail alone, Herbert was already making plans to patch the boom back together. By nightfall he had created an entirely functional plywood splint that enabled us to continue on our way only slightly the worse for wear with mainsail flying. Now, though, we had to watch the boom like hawks in case our band-aid solution did not hold. This became especially important as, throughout the next day, the winds became ever stronger and the waves ever higher. Soon, we found ourselves negotiating an endless series of ugly squalls in which the twenty-knot winds could suddenly double in intensity.

  During these mini-storms, which typically lasted half an hour to an hour, we discovered that if a particularly strong blast of wind coincided with us being tipped over by a large wave, we would slew around broad-side to the waves. The autopilot, tenuously held together by Herbert’s penny parts from Panama, would be unable to correct it. We had to be on constant alert to prevent these dangerous accidental broaches. In this state of nervous watchfulness, we passed many sleepless days and nights.

  With each day of strong winds, the ocean swell grew larger and larger. One morning I crept out of bed and found myself awestruck by the rolling masses of water that were approaching us from behind. Ominously, relentlessly, each watery wall would sweep up until it was right upon us, towering well over our heads as we stood in the cockpit, looking for all the world as if it would consume us whole. But then Northern Magic would always do as she was intended and rise buoyantly on top of each crest, letting the wave slide harmlessly under her keel.

  On the third day after the breaking of the boom, we noticed that the repairs were beginning to give. The stress of these winds and waves was taking its toll, and the boom was slowly forming an inverted V, raised in the middle and down at the ends. To reduce the stress on it, we shortened sail even further and put ourselves back on a less rowdy starboard tack – a route that, while more comfortable, would require us to zig-zag back and forth and cost us time and mileage towards our goal. We had been used to many days of 150 miles of progress. Babying the boom in this way cost us severely, dropping our progress as low as a depressing eighty miles in twenty-four hours and adding days to what had earlier promised to be a quick passage.

  Herbert and I had, by now, developed a system of watchkeeping in which we each took two periods of six hours on followed by six hours off. With six consecutive hours of rest rather than the more typical four that many other couples use, we found we were more refreshed. We were learning how to live on the constantly heaving surface of the world’s largest ocean, seeing nothing but endless water from morning to night. We experienced what it’s like to be totally alone in the universe, dependent upon no one but ourselves for our very survival. We spent hours watching the world around us – always the same, and yet ever changing.

  We never had a day at sea where seabirds did not accompany us, even right out in the middle of the ocean. Many of them were surprisingly small, no bigger than a swallow. How they could survive thousands of kilometres from land is still a mystery to me.

  The only signs of human life we observed were two large commercial fish factories. We could hear their chatter on the radio as they circled around, looking for their quarry, but they didn’t respond to us. And once, in the middle of the Pacific, we saw a deep-sea weather buoy. After that first day at sea, we lost sight of Mahili, although we spoke to them at least once a day on the radio. We ended up losing radio contact with Futuna, although we kept calling out to them and talking to them at the appointed time, just in case they could hear us. Then we got a satellite e-mail from them, saying they could hear us and to keep on talking; their transmitter was broken but they liked hearing our voices every day. The three sailboats relied on each other to keep some kind of reassuring human contact going. Our brief radio chat with Mahili was usually the highlight of each day.

  The other contact we had was by e-mail to home. Each night, to reassure my parents that all was well, I would compose an e-mail and send it by shortwave radio. One particular night not long after the middle of the passage, I had just finished composing my nightly message before going off watch at 1:00 a.m. I had been feeling proud that Herbert’s creative repair of the autopilot was performing well, and mailed Dad to say I was very happy not to be stand
ing in the cockpit hand steering, as it was stormy and the cockpit had already been flooded a number of times by particularly aggressive waves crashing into it.

  Ten minutes after transmitting that message, the autopilot failed, and I found myself standing in the cockpit, my hands wrestling with the wheel, waves crashing down on me, while Herbert attempted yet another repair. For two hours I stood there, one hand bracing myself against the motion, the other hand gripping the wheel, one eye on a menacing black squall line advancing from behind, and the other on the unforgiving compass and its single, glowing eyeball. I could hear, from somewhere close by, the violent, flapping death throes of a fish pitched into the cockpit by a breaking wave. I was helpless to save it from its sad and useless death. Inside, I could hear unwashed dishes and a mixing bowl clattering around and spilling onto the galley floor, covering it with muffin batter. Those cursed words to my father echoed in my head as I became convinced that I had brought on this miserable fate. It is not without good reason that sailors are a superstitious lot.

  In the days to come we were beset by new problems and challenges of every kind, as if to test the limits of our patience, resourcefulness, and sheer stubbornness. The autopilot got fixed, broken, and refixed twice more; the wind vane required repair; the topping lift for our spinnaker pole wrapped itself inextricably into our furling system; and, in the latest variation of Herbie’s Law (which is what my father was now calling our personal law of boating: “if it can break, it will”) three different inverters, including the one supplying power to our computer, sputtered and died. In order to send my dispatches to the Citizen or my nightly e-mails, I had to type without seeing the monitor; our last working inverter could power either the computer, or the monitor, but not both.

  By the last day of our passage, twenty-two days after we had set out from Galápagos and eleven days after it had first broken, the jury-rigged boom began really giving way. We were forced to take down the mainsail entirely. Thirty of the forty large bolts Herbert had used to secure the plywood splint had either worked themselves loose or sheared right off from the strain.

  Yet our long-feared voyage across the Pacific was coming to an end. Gradually, it started sinking in that we had actually accomplished this darkly anticipated feat. It was like getting a black belt in karate, or producing a baby after long months of uncomfortable pregnancy – you have to grit your teeth and endure a lot, but at the end of it you’re left with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. As the distance to the Marquesas diminished to fewer than a hundred miles, we were vibrating with excitement. At the start of the trip we had organized a family betting pool on how many days the passage would take. Bets ranged from twenty-five days (Herbert and Christopher) to twenty-nine days (mine).

  Herbert was the first to spot land. His exclamation brought four more eager bodies and straining sets of eyes on deck. Christopher wrestled in the cockpit with his dad for the grand prize of a red tube of Pringles potato chips. Barely visible in between the thunderheads that surrounded us were three misty mountainous green islands. There will never be anything to compare with that magnificent vista, the sight of land after twenty-three days at sea.

  6

  Hopping Across Friendly Islands

  Most sailors who have sailed across the Pacific and finally landed at the Marquesas describe it as the most beautiful landfall in the world. These remote and fascinating islands have captivated many sailors, writers, artists, and dreamers over the centuries. They are spectacular: towering green volcanic peaks with rounded tops, tumbling waterfalls, and a profusion of spectacular growth. The majestic Marquesas, cloaked in a beautiful green mantle, certainly fit our dream of a lush Polynesian paradise.

  As we finally entered a tiny bay on the island of Tahuata, our greeting committee wasn’t an outrigger canoe full of handsome Polynesians, but Mahili’s rubber dinghy, containing a broadly smiling Renate and Hans and a load of fresh grapefruit. We arrived at dusk, and couldn’t go ashore until the next day. When we finally did, I was amazed at how dizzy and disoriented I felt – I could have sworn the whole island was swaying under my feet. All our legs were weak after more than three weeks on Northern Magic.

  After one day of exploring the exquisite sandy beach and learning how to walk again without swaying from side to side, we headed for the larger island of Hiva Oa. We arrived on a Sunday, and were treated to a moving Christian procession through a series of beautiful flower-bedecked outdoor altars, with the entire congregation singing in harmony as they walked from shrine to beflowered shrine through the streets. The village of Atuona was a small, simple place, a hilly two-kilometre walk from the harbour. Some friendly villagers driving by stopped and offered us a lift back to the harbour when they saw us walking. We gratefully piled in the back of their pick-up truck and bounced happily along the road, making conversation with a beautiful but shy young Polynesian girl who shared the ride with us.

  One day, we hiked up a mountain path to find ancient stone petro-glyphs. The scenery was stunning as we walked through lush living tunnels of the most fantastic oversized vegetation. As we entered a grove of huge taro plants with leaves as big as an elephant’s ear, Michael remarked that he felt we had been transported to the set of the movie Honey I Shrunk the Kids. At another spot on the island, a family of wild horses awaited us on a lovely dark brown sand beach flanked by two freshwater streams. The rounded mountains towering over us were covered with what looked like plush green carpeting. Bounding freely over the mountaintops, and sending their bleats down to welcome us, were wild goats whose ancestors once belonged to the inhabitants of this now deserted valley. We discovered a spring-fed waterfall bubbling right out of the mountainside into a little pool full of small crayfish. Around the pool, arranged artistically by Mother Nature herself, were huge hibiscus trees, coconut palms, banana trees, and other flowering bushes, creating a perfect scene of a tropical paradise. We explored an ancient overgrown alley lined with lava rock that led us to the remains of a village abandoned a thousand years ago. The kids held coconut shell races in the streams.

  At Fatu Hiva, the southernmost of the Marquesas Islands, the scenery was unforgettable. The bay in which we anchored was surrounded by towering rounded pillars of rock. Early French sailors stopping at this bay called it Baie des Verges, or “Bay of Penises,” due to the suggestive shapes of these remarkable rock formations. Later, missionaries found this name, however apt, to be unacceptable. They made a slight modification, from Baie des Verges to Baie des Vierges, thus transforming penises into virgins and protecting their Victorian sensibilities.

  We alighted from our dinghy and walked past copra drying sheds, where giant trays of drying coconut were laid out in the sun. We passed a primary school just as school let out, and Jonathan, who happened to be carrying his Nintendo Game Boy, immediately became the most popular boy in town. Literally, the entire school, including teachers, crowded around to get a peek at this miniature computerized marvel. It took no time at all before we had made one or two special friends among the children, and we found ourselves being escorted from house to house to inspect the handicrafts made by virtually every inhabitant of the village.

  The women, who were attractively plump in the Polynesian fashion, were typically dressed in wrap-around skirts and lacy black brassieres that made you feel you ought to avert your eyes. They made beautiful hand-made paper, called tapa, with intricate paintings in Marquesan designs.

  The men, who were adorned with the most interesting intricate tattoos on their upper bodies, carved statues of tikis, ceremonial knives, and masks out of local hardwoods. We had seen these crafts before, and they were, like everything else in French Polynesia, very expensive. But one of the reasons we had wanted to visit Fatu Hiva was a report that the people here were willing to trade their handicrafts for goods instead of money. And as Northern Magic was packed more with things than cash, we had come to Fatu Hiva ready to barter.

  Herbert’s collection of hand tools for trade made him a very popular man in
Fatu Hiva. In exchange for a router, hacksaw blades, a sander, sandpaper, a Dremel tool, and a vise, we obtained a fabulous collection of exquisite Marquesan carvings in wood and bone worth about seven hundred dollars, and made friends in virtually every home in the village. By the end of our two days in Hanavave, in fact, Herbert had developed a reputation as Herb “The Tool Man” Stuemer. Men began flagging him down in the street, asking about his tools or seeking his help repairing some of their own, which he gladly did, creating more admirers in the process. We left Hanavave staggering under a load of gifts and bartered-for booty. We were laden not only with carved wooden bowls, masks, and tikis, but also with gifts of fruit and baking from the storekeeper whose power drill Herbert had fixed.

  After a second visit to Tahuata Island, we were sad to be taking to the sea once more, but it was time to leave. Herbert had by now make a more durable repair to our dismembered boom, and so we set off for the six-day passage to Tahiti.

  From the moment we were underway, it felt very natural to be back on the ocean. For the first time, there was no period of adaptation, no lethargy or queasiness. We all felt alert and comfortable right from the start. Even when our autopilot had its customary failure, causing us to hand steer for considerable periods of time, I found myself enjoying the long hours in the cockpit. I spent my time just looking at the surface of the ocean, watching for flying fish and birds, and appreciating the shapes of the clouds and the colours of the sunset.

  For the last two days to Tahiti, the winds gained in strength and blew from ahead. The idyllic conditions of before were soon nothing but a memory. Earlier, our Aries mechanical wind vane had been able to take over some of the steering, but we now found it was unable to hold our boat on course in these more difficult windward conditions.