The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  But just when we were feeling most sick of Athens, everything changed.

  In Turkey, we had been contacted by a Citizen reader, Paul Dole. He e-mailed us that we simply had to meet a friend of his, a “splendid captain” and “wonderful man” named Captain George Kotsovilis. Paul had even telephoned Captain George on our behalf.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and Herbert was doing a routine oil change. The simple procedure had turned into a marathon of frustrating and stupid problems involving the old oil filter, which had been completely stuck in place, and in the course of an hour’s work trying to get it free, he had irreparably damaged some brass fittings. Now we had even more new parts to find, and wouldn’t be leaving the next day after all.

  Just as we were sitting down to a very belated lunch, with Herbert tired and crabby – all of us, in fact, tired and crabby – a gentleman with a pleasant face and white hair appeared on the dock and stood there, smiling. He was carrying several large gift baskets, wrapped up in sparkly cellophane and bows.

  “Are you Captain George?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “And you have crossed oceans in this little boat?”

  Thus, like a whirlwind, Captain George swept into our lives. For us, Greece would never be the same.

  Captain George showered us with gifts. I don’t mean a little wrapped bauble or two; I mean gifts – as in Christmas, as in Santa Claus. Northern Magic shuddered under the burden of things he had brought: not one, but three bottles of wine, a giant basket of fruit, some olive paste, a jar of gourmet pickles, a container of chocolate-covered almonds, a box of freshly baked cookies, a necklace, a brass treasure box, a beautiful full-colour book about Greece, and a giant bouquet of spring flowers. We had done nothing to deserve this bounty, and it was a little embarrassing. Plus, we were all in shabby clothes (Herbert had evidence of the just-completed oil change still in his hair) and were eating chicken-noodle soup at the time of his arrival. Captain George sat down at our salon table, already crowded with soup bowls, cracker crumbs, schoolbooks, toys, and a wrench or two, to chat.

  George was a former ship’s captain. He had worked for Aristotle Onassis before buying his own cargo ship, the first of many. After a few days with Captain George, our earlier impression of Greeks as being unfriendly had been completely wiped away. Our host was the personification of generosity, helpfulness, and hospitality. He put all his business affairs aside for us. Instead of feeling alone and shunned, we were being driven everywhere while George took care of finding our needed parts. Instead of gnashing our teeth, we were munching on delicious Greek food with our gracious host at an outdoor taverna in the shadow of the Acropolis.

  George never arrived at our boat empty-handed. “I think he must really be an enemy agent in disguise,” said Jonathan one day, shaking his head in amazement, “his mission is to sink Northern Magic under the weight of all these presents.”

  After leaving Athens we sailed through the Corinth Canal, stopping to marvel at the ruins of Delphi, then sailed along Greece’s Bay of Corinth, accompanied by troupes of dolphins. Eventually, we made our way to the beautiful island of Kefallonia, our last stop in Greece. There, we were punished by unremitting cold and rainy weather brought by an inexorable marching series of fronts, each one bearing storms and contrary winds. For ten days we waited, hoping each day for a respite. We celebrated Jonathan’s birthday there with kids from a Belgian boat, playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” on a palm tree at the quayside.

  First thing on Easter Monday morning, with foil Easter egg wrappers and a few un-found eggs still littering the boat, we got this message from Dad: “South wind is now in Sicily and Ionian Sea. Above 40 degrees N south winds 35–40 knots, forecast to decrease. New low is now forecast to be in north Italy in next 48 hours. It’s a tight hole, but this is the best chance I’ve seen in the last 10 days. You make the call!”

  Within three hours, we’d gulped down a fast lunch of canned ham and beans and hastily made Northern Magic shipshape. As soon as the last dishes were washed and the last few drying socks brought in, we cast off. We were already drifting away when there was a commotion near the Belgian boat. Two small figures were sprinting along the quay. One of these shapes was familiar. It was Jonathan. “Wait! Wait!” he was yelling as he ran frantically, hands waving.

  In our rush to set off, we had completely forgotten that Jon had gone over to the other boat for one last chance to play with his friends. By the time he breathlessly arrived, we were already drifting a metre away from the quay. Poor Jon literally had to jump across the widening gap to get on board.

  And so we set out, a little sheepishly, but with white puffy clouds and a blue sky corroborating Dad’s promises of a good passage. Motoring into the Ionian Sea, we were hoping he was right and we could make the five hundred kilometres across to Sicily before the next batch of nasty weather arrived.

  As the sun was setting on our second night at sea, still seventy miles away from our destination, we caught sight of the tip of Italy’s boot, as well as the very top reaches of Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano, poking its smoky head into the low-lying clouds ahead of us. In ancient times, the often-fiery top of Etna served as a natural lighthouse for weary sailors seeking land.

  We slowed down overnight, so as not to arrive before dawn, and motored into the harbour of Siracusa just as the sun rose over the castle that guarded the harbour entrance.

  Siracusa turned out to be a great city. It was a beautiful warren of narrow alleyways and marvellous architecture, punctuated with cathedrals, plazas, fountains, outdoor cafés, and vivid bunches of blooming bougainvillea. Our feet always slowed down while passing the numerous pasticcerias, offering the most amazing selection of delectable pastries and marzipan fruits.

  But we had chosen to stop in Siracusa for something other than its picturesque old city, its extensive Greek ruins, or even its pastries. Long before, in Australia, we’d met a Sicilian sailor named Peppino, along with his wife, Lucia, and his son, Blu, nine years old at the time. It had been two years since we’d seen them. Jonathan was especially excited to see Blu again, since they had been good friends.

  Michael was the only one of us who was not so keen on going out of our way to visit Peppino. He hadn’t liked Peppino much, since Peppino had been on his back almost daily about Michael’s failure to greet him properly. In fact, the phrase “You forgot to say good morning!” barked out gruffly and with an Italian accent had assumed icon-like status in the Northern Magic pantheon of jokes.

  The morning we arrived, we e-mailed Peppino to say we were moored in the Grand Harbour. No sooner were we back on the boat than Peppino himself was standing there, a muscular, robust fellow of fifty-three with a salt-and-pepper beard. It was definitely the same old Peppino – gregarious, voluble, almost overpowering in that passionate, uniquely Italian way. Within minutes he was whisking us away to his apartment for lunch. “I hate going to restaurants,” he told us, “not because of the money, but because they don’t know how to cook like I do.”

  As we sat at the table watching Peppino make spaghetti, we grabbed the chance to settle a longstanding Stuemer family feud on this very topic. To use knives, or not to use knives, that was the question. Jon and Herbert thought fork-twirling was the only way, while Christopher, Michael, and I felt knives and forks were much more efficient and civilized. So here we were, in Italy, with a real Italian making spaghetti for us, and it seemed appropriate to ask the question.

  “Tell me, Peppino,” I ventured, “do Italians use knives when they eat their spaghetti?”

  Peppino whirled around from the stove, where he was cutting great chunks of garlic, his eyes ablaze. “Knives?” he bellowed.

  The room went silent. Jonathan and his father looked smug. My lips were pressed together. But later, Michael, Christopher, and I defiantly used our knives just the same. What do Italians know about spaghetti, anyway?

  Over the next days, Peppino whirled around us like a tornado. What was Peppin
o’s was ours, including his car, which he insisted we take for the duration of our visit. We drove up the smoking flanks of Mount Etna, where the kids ran up and down volcanic craters. Peppino helped us with boat repairs, phoned and faxed to help track down another missing package sent from home, provided hot showers, laundry facilities, Internet access, and meals, and flooded us with wine and wonderful pastries named cannoli, filled with a cheesecakelike mixture of sweetened ricotta. Fantastic! If we’d asked for the shirt off his back, no doubt Peppino would instantly have peeled it off and asked whether we wanted his pants, too.

  One night, Peppino came over to Northern Magic for dinner (fried chicken and potato salad – knives permitted). As we sat together in the salon, he brought up the subject of his confrontations with Michael back in Australia. “Do you remember when I used to correct him for not saying good morning?” he asked. We smiled and cast a secret look at each other. Oh yes, we remembered.

  “And then one day,” Peppino continued, “when Michael appeared carrying a huge poster with ‘good morning’ written all over it in different languages? I bet he thought I was a mean old Sicilian then, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did,” I answered. “But now I think you’ve wrecked your mean old Sicilian act for good.”

  A high-pressure system had moved over the central Mediterranean, giving us relief from the stormy weather and the perfect opportunity to make the two-day sail to the island of Sardinia. And so we left Sicily on a glorious day, watching the lovely architecture of Siracusa slide by as we made our way gently out of the harbour.

  We had a good passage, and arrived at the southern tip of Sardinia, the Mediterranean’s second-largest island, late in the afternoon. We anchored on a wild-looking shore beneath a sheer cliff. A small village teetered on the cliffside, a precarious track led along the precipice, and an ancient castle turret, half collapsed, gazed gloomily down at us through the ages. The craggy rock face was rugged, fissured, and glowing golden, almost as if alive. For a moment, I felt we’d arrived at another world entirely, an ancient elemental world full of fauns and satyrs, naiads and dryads.

  We wandered through the medieval city of Cagliari, admiring the beautiful buildings, bastions, palaces, and cathedrals, and dodging the occasional car that was brave enough to venture into cobblestone streets that were barely wider than it was. We made several local friends.

  But as beautiful as Sardinia was, we were really just putting in time. In truth, we were itching to leave. We were undergoing a transformation, and suddenly could hardly wait to continue our trip as quickly as possible. Although we had Spain and the Azores still ahead of us, it was the thought of Canada that made us chatter with excitement. I remember seeing Australian boats with the same syndrome in the South Pacific; while the rest of us were enjoying the fabulous islands of Polynesia, all the Aussies were racing through their last few thousand miles. Now the same feeling of urgency had come over us. It was time to go home.

  We sailed for two more days to Mallorca, and then set off for Gibraltar, 350 nautical miles away. An increasingly large swell rose up, and Dad e-mailed us to keep sailing as fast as we could; thirty-five-knot winds were following right behind us. The two-, sometimes even three-metre swell rising up under our stern and throwing us forward with roaring force as it passed under made it clear he was right. On we went, rejoicing as we passed waypoint after waypoint without needing to seek shelter, coasting along at almost eight knots.

  These were our last few days sailing on the Mediterranean, and they contained moments of pure enchantment. In the middle of the night, in total darkness, I was adjusting the jib when I noticed that as I grasped the jib sheet, or rope, it would emit tiny sparks of blue phosphorescent light, some of which briefly stayed, glowing, on my hands. It was like the sparkles of fairy dust from Tinkerbell’s wand. As I coiled the sheet around a winch and tightened it, it sparkled merrily. Obviously, some of the waves washing over the deck had left wet fingerprints behind, in the form of tiny bioluminescent plankton.

  Another time I was on deck at night when I heard dolphins right beside us in the darkness. I heard not only the splash of their leaping and the snuffy exhalation they made when they opened their breathing holes to grab a gulp of air, but I actually heard them squeaking to each other underwater. Their torpedo shapes were illuminated by bits of sparkling plankton, as if they, too, were sprinkling blue-white fairy dust behind them. We also had overnight visits from many friendly little birds who, to our delight, chose to rest inside our cabin.

  After our third night at sea, I awoke with a start at 6:00 a.m. Herbert had sharply reduced the throttle, our longstanding signal to get to the cockpit, quickly. I bolted up. In fact, Herbert hadn’t been calling me at all; he had been trying to avoid a container ship that was turning in front of us. But at the moment I emerged into the cockpit, I was transfixed. For there, right in front of us, loomed an unforgettable shape, large, even blacker than the black expanse of sky behind it, and unbelievably grand. The ancients knew this as one of the Pillars of Hercules. It was the Rock of Gibraltar.

  The next day, the view from the top of The Rock was grand. There, to our left, through a cloud of squawking and circling seagulls, was the Mediterranean, the sea we had now successfully crossed. Ahead, on the far side of the Strait of Gibraltar, were the misty purple mountains of Morocco. But our captain had his eyes fixed on the vastness of the North Atlantic to our right, stretching out into infinity.

  Since the beginning of our trip, the North Atlantic was what had haunted Herbert in the middle of the night. Not the vast Pacific, not the Indian Ocean, not the dangerous Red Sea, not the unpredictable Mediterranean, but the North Atlantic. Now, every time I looked over at him, he was scrutinizing its ruffled grey surface – as if looking for a clue about what the deadliest of the world’s oceans held in store.

  It was time to get Northern Magic ready for her last big trial of our circumnavigation. Herbert went on a binge of inspecting, repairing, and adjusting. Each day we studied weather charts for the timing of our next passage to the Azores, a small group of islands in the middle of the Atlantic. Day after day, we frowned to see cold fronts, lows, isobars squeezing close together on our path, particularly around Newfoundland. Having just read The Perfect Storm, it made me feel pretty queasy. I began to understand why Herbert kept looking pensively west. Even when there were no lows, the wind invariably came from a bad direction.

  We had felt pretty smug, upon arriving in Gibraltar, about having made it across the entire Mediterranean in the non-sailing season without a single day of bad weather at sea. We met only two or three others who had attempted it, and they all told horror stories. The reason for our success was more than luck; it was careful planning and Dad’s assiduous weather forecasting. But now, facing an 1,100-mile passage of a week or more, it was a whole new game. Nobody could reliably predict what would happen four or five days out. We were prepared for a rough ride.

  Finally, there was no longer any reason to wait; the boat was fixed up, rigging checked, bilge pump and coupling fixed, five meals prepared in advance. We’d all showered, and Christopher had taken his last bath in our laundry tub in the marina shower stall. Sixteen loads of laundry had been hand washed and dried, and all the linen on the boat was fresh and clean. Charts were organized and studied, waypoints plotted. We were ready as we’d ever be to tackle the North Atlantic.

  26

  Facing the North Atlantic

  The first leg of our Atlantic crossing took us through the Strait of Gibraltar and west along the bottom of Spain, with the coastline of North Africa clearly visible. Once clear of the narrow strait, we angled northwest, creeping along the southern coast of Spain for another day. We sailed out on a helpful east wind that continued only until nightfall and then died, leaving us motoring into a light westerly breeze.

  Not long after I came on duty in early evening, I noticed a strange cloud formation in the sky ahead. It was as if the low, flat clouds on the horizon were leaping up, arms outst
retched, to pounce on us. A few minutes later, a little alarmingly, the same predatory clouds had closed their distance by half. I wasn’t sure what this meant, although I didn’t think it was a squall, because a squall line is usually hard, black, and well defined.

  A minute later I learned. We were suddenly enveloped by a fog so dense you could barely see the end of the boat. Ghostly tentacles swirled around and obscured our masthead light from view. Within seconds, we were in pea-soup fog, still close to the shipping lanes, but now completely blind.

  The most valuable instrument on our boat at that moment was the radar. All night we groped our way through the fog, looking for green blips on the radar screen, of which there were many. No matter how close they were, how much we strained our eyes, we never saw them.

  The fog lasted for thirty-six hours, only dissipating completely days later when we were well offshore. But now a new challenge arrived in the form of the west winds we had been dreading. Soon, we were motoring into an increasingly strong wind and waves that began slapping us and showering Northern Magic with salty spray. We endured a whole day of pounding, and the lurching motion brought me – but only me, thank goodness – to my knees with retching. My body had learned to adapt to a lot of conditions on this trip, but motoring into the wind was not one of them. Eventually, it began to calm down, however, and on the third day of the passage the wind died away almost altogether, leaving us motoring in relative peace, glad to be away from land, that devilish wind, and the claustrophobic fog.

  One day passed, then two days, three, and it became calmer and calmer. On Day Five of our passage we were treated to a North Atlantic that was as peaceful as a giant lake. We had not a breath of wind. Not even the tiniest ripples marred the glassy surface of the water. It was only the third time on the entire trip that we had seen an ocean so placid. Overhead, the blue sky was marked with the contrails of many jets, passing swiftly overhead on their way to Paris, Amsterdam, and London, while we churned slowly through the water below, invisible and unknown. In a matter of hours, they’d have crossed the Atlantic, something that would take us at least three weeks of non-stop sailing to do. By suppertime, those passengers would be eating in fancy restaurants on the Champs d’Élysées, while we’d still be on our small bobbing speck of a boat, scanning an empty horizon, wondering how long it would take before we’d see land again.