The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  “We knew today is your son’s birthday,” the man with the flashlight explained. “We’re from the coastguard, and one of us saw it on his passport when you arrived. We baked him a cake!”

  Herbert and I started laughing. This sure was a surprise! Only in the Maldives would a bunch of strangers break into someone’s home in the middle of the night to wish him happy birthday! While Herbert entertained our guests in the darkened cockpit, I went below and shook the birthday boy awake.

  “Wake up, Jon!” I said, laughing. “There is a bunch of visitors here for you. It’s your birthday, and they’ve come to give you a surprise party!”

  Jonathan emerged from his bed, sweaty and tousled, barely comprehending the fact that five grown men had come by boat in the middle of the night to wish him happy birthday. I was by now wide awake, and still having trouble believing this myself. For a while, Jon could hardly talk; he just sat there in a daze, as the five men, all but one Maldivian coastguard officers, gleefully presented their gifts – a pink birthday cake they had baked themselves on their ship, moored nearby, and a bottle of fruit drink, both done up in fancy metallic wrapping paper.

  The whole gang squeezed into our salon, where we ate pink cake and drank fruit cocktail. Every few minutes, I found myself bursting into laughter at the absurdity of the situation. We had never laid eyes on any of the men before, except the nice young immigration officer who had been on our boat the day we had arrived, and who was the one who made note of Jon’s approaching birthday.

  “But why did you come in the middle of the night?” I asked Captain Hassan.

  “Because we really wanted it to be a surprise!” he answered with a grin.

  “Oh, it was a surprise, all right,” I nodded, wondering if he realized that there are plenty of places, and plenty of boats, where this kind of surprise might have been greeted with the wrong end of a loaded gun. Yet what wonderful things it said about the peaceful and generous Maldivians, who had probably never even contemplated this possibility.

  Jon awoke with a grin on his face the next morning and could hardly wait to tell his brothers about the midnight surprise. It still seemed a little hard to believe, like a strange but pleasant dream. From time to time during the day, I found myself giggling aloud as I recalled it. That evening, after the traditional birthday cheesecake, I told the birthday boy, “Well, it’s a good thing that the coastguard brought you those presents last night, because, as we told you, we weren’t able to find you anything this year.”

  “Why don’t you check, Mom?” Herbert interjected. “I thought there was that one little thing.”

  “Oh yes, the Magic Cards,” I said and hurried away, returning with one tiny pack of fifteen collectible playing cards – a really old set, not a particularly useful one. Jon gamely opened it and did a creditable job of expressing delight at his one and only present, as chintzy as it was. He gave each of us a big hug, saying with genuine gratitude that this was better than nothing at all. He is quite a special boy, our Jonathan.

  “Oh, yes,” I said finally. “I forgot. Maybe there was one more thing …”

  Much later, after all the unwrapping was finished, I asked a beaming Jon if he really had believed that we had forgotten to buy him presents.

  “I wasn’t sure,” he said, “but the more you talked, the more I believed you. Anyway, I couldn’t see how or where you could have bought them. But now I realize why you kept on dragging me away in Sri Lanka every time I saw something I liked.”

  In the end, however, it was the five midnight strangers who so thoughtfully remembered a young boy celebrating his special day far from home who had brought the best gift of all.

  A few days later we left for Chagos, but we had a rough time getting there, battling adverse winds and currents. We arrived on our fourth day at sea, battered and weary, the floor of the cabin covered with books, toys, and kitchen implements that had launched themselves in various new and innovative ways from their particular storage spots.

  We anchored in impossibly blue water at a place that was nothing but an apostrophe in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a tiny speck that doesn’t even show up on most world maps. As soon as we arrived, we realized that we were now in company with a different bunch of sailors altogether. Here, we discovered a whole new breed of overgrown hippies who had specifically come to Chagos for the chance to live cheaply off the land. They spent decades sailing back and forth between Malaysia and Africa, staying at this place, devoid of other humans, for three, five, seven months at a time, existing mainly off coconut, breadfruit, and, of course, fish.

  They lived their entire adult lives on board, stopping from time to time to work at anything they could find to earn a few dollars, then continuing to cruise another year or two. They had leathery skin and long beards (the men, at least), ate homemade muesli for breakfast, and guzzled home-brewed beer and wine in the afternoon. Those with children gave them names like Ocean and Forest. On board, they often went without clothing.

  There were two older American men there with young female partners, one from the San Blas Islands in Panama, and the other from Thailand. These long-haired, dark-skinned beauties were widely admired for their uniquely tropical talents. During the days, we would see them at semi-permanent camps they had ingeniously erected ashore, with tables made from split bamboo and hand-woven mats, a hammock hanging from the trees, and a few opened drinking coconuts scattered around. At one party on the beach, they actually showed up wearing hats made of palm fronds that they had woven themselves.

  Then there were the two British couples who had cut all their ties to home. One had three older boys who had long hair, spent most of their time surfing, and did not worry about schooling. The other was a younger couple, a nice-looking woman in her late thirties and a husband with very bad teeth. They explained to me that they still had a property back in England, but the tenants had moved out a year earlier and they hadn’t bothered to re-rent it. By now, the house had probably been repossessed; they didn’t know and they didn’t care. The previous year, they had arrived in Tanzania with a broken motor and only twenty dollars to their name. I don’t know if they were joking, but they claimed to be living on a thousand dollars a year. That just about matched my annual budget for chocolate.

  The family with the children pooh-poohed their uptight relatives back at home, who were worried about things like savings and pensions. “I think pensions are a load of rubbish,” the husband said vehemently. “Of course, when we’re old, we’ll probably be living on the streets!” said the wife with a giggle.

  Our closest friends were an American couple we had met in Sri Lanka, whose twelve-year-old son, Falcon, had never lived anywhere but on a boat. Falcon and Jon spent a lot of time palling around together, swimming, and building secret forts in the trees. Falcon was a fanatical fisherman. His mother told me he had eaten five entire dried tuna over the previous two days – in addition to his regular meals, which consisted mainly of fish and rice.

  The most interesting boat was a little twenty-six-footer on which an Australian couple had lived for eight years. The boat was so small the husband couldn’t stand upright inside it and was now suffering from back problems. They didn’t have an oven or even a toilet on board (“We just bucket and chuck it!”) and spent almost all their energies gathering food and cooking it at a campfire ashore, since their single-burner alcohol stove was almost out of fuel.

  Among this eclectic group, the crew of Northern Magic, feeling boringly conventional and middle class, was forced to make a heretical and shameful admission that caused us to fall under quite a cloud of suspicion among the rest. We didn’t like fish.

  This had never struck us as a crucial issue before. In Chagos, however, our spurning of fish made us somehow suspect – freakish, even. We were constantly forced to run a gauntlet of questions about why we weren’t fishing, why we didn’t eat fish, and what was wrong with us that we were not in on all the fun? Why, the whole point of being in Chagos was fish!

&
nbsp; “We just love fishing,” Falcon’s bearded father told us, looking supremely content as he relaxed in a ragged T-shirt under a palm tree. He was explaining that he didn’t know how he would eat all the multitudes of fish he had caught that morning. “I don’t know what we like more, the eating or the killing!”

  When somebody had a particularly good haul, as our bloodthirsty friend did that day, the proud fisherman called for a communal barbecue on the beach to show off his catch. I’m sure there was some kind of point system in which they competed to be the one to announce the barbecue. In fact, the whole thing was some kind of Chagos Olympics, where the team to talk about, catch, cook, and eat the most fish wins.

  When all the athletes were assembled on the beach at the appointed hour, the men launched the Olympics by engaging in the manly exercises of chest-puffing and muscle-flexing, an event required of all successful hunters since time immemorial. “I caught five tuna today!” our American friend announced proudly. “I caught three rock cod!” another said, preening. And of course a third piped in with the obligatory, “My grouper was a full fifteen pounds!”

  Herbert did very poorly in this event, with nothing to contribute but “I fixed my bilge pump today.”

  Next was the Cavalcade of Fish, in which the women paraded around, handing out samples of their creations. Your score was based not only on the taste and creativity of your own dish, but also on the extent to which you raved over others’. Herbert opted out of this event entirely, but I did my best, gamely nibbling on fish with tomato sauce, fish with lime, fried fish, grilled fish, dried fish, raw fish. Well, maybe not the raw fish. I’m competitive by nature, but one could only take this thing so far.

  “Isn’t that great?” the rest of them said with enthusiasm, reaching for another drippy piece. You could just see the scores tallying up. “Have you tried Jen’s sushi? It’s to die for!”

  I nodded enthusiastically and pretended to agree, but the judges weren’t fooled. It didn’t look good for the Northern Magic team. We were only hanging in there because of Christopher, who was holding his own by gobbling down piece after piece of fish marinated in coconut milk.

  But I hadn’t given up yet. Lack of suitably fishy raw material forced me to greater heights. I had shamelessly been searching my cookbooks for something that would really make a splash – figuratively, I mean. Now I proudly produced my contribution, a two-tier banana cake, with real sliced bananas between the layers (thereby also cleverly using up some of our last remaining bunch of bruised brownish-black Addu bananas, all seventy of which had ripened at the same time). I heard “oohs” and “ahhs” from the crowd. A murmur ran through them. Fresh fruit! The judges looked impressed. The cake disappeared quickly; everyone else had run out of bananas a month before.

  My banana gambit was a bold move indeed, but, alas, the clear winner was the Panamanian girl, whose entry contained a most alarming collection of purple tentacles and was accompanied by a real heart-of-palm salad, from a palm tree she had selected and chopped down herself.

  Two weeks after we arrived in Chagos, a front went through. When it left, all the boats had swung on their hooks and were now facing southwest. The trade winds had arrived!

  We set off on our thousand-mile passage to the Seychelles after one last visit to a deserted village to fill our water jugs in an abandoned well and take one last delicious cold bucket shower. We were as ready as could be: cinnamon buns baked, three advance meals waiting in the freezer, spare pizza slices in the fridge, boat scrubbed and painted.

  We were really looking forward to getting to a place with a grocery store. Our forty kilos of Addu potatoes had exploded, oozed, and stink-bombed their way to oblivion weeks before, most of them consigned to the bottom of the sea. We had used up all our flour, and had been reduced to some rather clumpy and smelly Kenyan flour we had scrounged from the Australians. Tomatoes, apples, oranges, bananas, were, of course, gone. We were down to the last of the slightly rancid butter, cheese, and oatmeal. As we had dug deeper into our long-term stores, we discovered many of the things we had counted on were no longer in prime condition – tinned fruit from Australia that tasted sour, packaged noodles with an unpleasant aftertaste, containers of UHT milk that, when opened, were only full of curds and whey. Our last precious tacos, saved for a special occasion, turned out to be black with mould.

  About the only fresh food we still had was our beloved stash of carrots, which we had managed to track down in Addu. We still had about a kilo, only slightly slimy and starting to sprout.

  Halfway through the passage, we were making good progress under our spinnaker. It was pulling us nicely, and not only were we making about four knots of speed, but, under its moderating influence, hardly rolling at all. Then a rain cloud approached, and the wind began to rise. Although it was Jonathan’s watch, both Herbert and I were on deck, nervously watching as the wind surpassed ten knots. This would be nothing for our regular Dacron sails, but for the light nylon spinnaker pulling on twenty tons of boat, it was quite a bit. Northern Magic picked up speed, making more than five knots through the water.

  Herbert and I began nervously chewing on our bottom lips. This was probably too much wind for the spinnaker, yet, on the other hand, in ten minutes or so it was sure to return to its usual five to eight knots. By the time we pulled the spinnaker in, we would have to put it right back out again. So we chose the lazy route and left it flying, praying it could handle the extra strain. That’s the problem with playing chicken: how does one ever know what is too much, until it is too late?

  It was too late. With a loud bang, the spinnaker exploded, its fabric ripping from top to bottom on each side, like two long zippers parting in an instant. Suddenly, all we had left of a few thousand dollars worth of sail were large shreds of red and purple fabric billowing in the wind. We had gambled and lost.

  Without much comment, we ruefully hauled in the remains of our spinnaker and raised our jib and mainsail, which, of course, began slatting back and forth as soon as the wind resumed its normal lazy pace a few minutes later. Every few seconds as we rolled, the jib would collapse against the spreaders, and the mainsail, its boom secured to stop it from flying across the boat, would bang as the wind filled it first from one side, then the other.

  “At least you have other sails,” my dad responded optimistically by e-mail when we told him of the demise of our spinnaker.

  It was this fate-provoking sentence that we blamed, the very next day, when our mainsail suffered a similar disaster. It parted, not from top to bottom, but from side to side along a seam about three quarters of the way up. Suddenly, it, too, was dangling, fluttering loosely in two pieces held together only by the ropes along its edge.

  “Well, you could use pyjamas,” suggested ever-resourceful Dad in his next e-mail. “Just make a new sail out of Michael’s, Jonathan’s, and Christopher’s pyjamas. But don’t use Herbert’s; we don’t want him running around naked all over the boat in the middle of the night.”

  I e-mailed Dad back that since I was the only one on board who used pyjamas, I was vetoing that plan.

  Instead, Herbert rummaged around in our sail locker and came out with an ancient mainsail we carried around as a spare. Once up, the thirty-year-old sail rewarded us with an extra knot of speed. It was made of a much lighter material than the sail that had split, and so it was actually better suited to the conditions. It filled better, and when it became backwinded on a roll, its bang was not as violent.

  Over the next days, the wind remained steady out of the southeast and gradually picked up, until our sails remained bellied out full and stopped slamming around from side to side as we rolled. We began to heel over under the wind’s firm pressure, returning more respectable speeds of four and five knots. Eventually, the winds grew even stronger, and in the end we actually had to take down the mainsail to save it from too much strain.

  It was, however, a difficult passage, both psychologically and physically. Towards the end, most of us began complaining of sh
aky, weak legs. Upper bodies on a sailboat tend to be exercised automatically – not just in turning winches or pulling on ropes, but in bracing yourself or hanging on to grab bars as you move around. Probably the best source of arm exercise we had was pumping the toilet, an energetic but not entirely pleasant activity that Christopher couldn’t always manage on his own, and which, therefore, fell disproportionately on Herbert and me.

  Our lower bodies, on the other hand, got next to no use, and soon my legs were feeling like flibberty gibbets (and my mid-section like flibberty giblets). On my late-night watch, I began forcing my reluctant body to do deep knee bends, sit-ups, or calf exercises whenever I got up to check the horizon, both to help in the de-flibbertization of my under-used muscles and to help me stay awake. This doesn’t sound like a big achievement, but on a rocking, heaving boat it takes a lot of self-control and careful bracing to complete even simple physical movements. Depending on the attitude of the boat at that particular instant, my feeble efforts at sit-ups would either be very easy – if we were pointing down-hill – or impossible, and I’d frequently find myself straining but stuck in mid-sit-up until the boat began to tip the other way.

  Our bones were also aching from too much lying. When rolling it’s tiring to sit, since you slide around on your seat and have to use both arms to brace yourself. Even lying on your side is impossible, as you tip over from side to side like an unsteady log. So we were forced to spend much of each day lying flat on our backs, either sleeping, trying to sleep, or reading.

  Our minds as well as our bodies began rebelling. This passage just seemed to go on forever, and we began having talks about the things we missed most from home.

  “I’d love a Caramilk bar,” Michael was musing dreamily.

  “I’d like a chocolate truffle mousse cake,” I contributed with a wistful sigh.