The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  The monotony was relieved by a whale surfacing just a few metres away. It was a humpback, longer than Northern Magic, with a broad, glistening black back. We all got excitedly on deck and noticed that periodically we could see what looked like puffs of grey smoke on the horizon. Two of these puffs would appear simultaneously, sometimes three, as if from a steamship. Thar she blows! All day long, three whales kept pace with us, moving just slightly faster than we were. Our whale book showed us to be in the middle of the humpback migration route.

  Most days we saw a ship or two, and twice during the middle part of the passage we had to take evasive action to avoid a collision. Once it was a sailboat travelling the other way that hadn’t shown up on radar until we were almost upon it. Herbert changed course, and as we passed at uncomfortably close range, he couldn’t detect any evidence that anyone in the other boat was keeping watch at all. If we had been a big ship relying mostly on radar, that little sailboat would simply have disappeared into the deep.

  Tiny wavelets began ruffling the water’s surface, like a ripple chip. The wind was picking up, right on the nose. We adjusted course a bit and managed to motorsail at an angle just sufficient to keep the mainsail filled. We were still reliant on our motor to keep us moving forward. This way we could continue ploughing steadily ahead, logging about 140 miles every twenty-four hours.

  Over the next two days, the wind continued to build. The puffy white popcorn clouds were consumed by an evil-looking, amorphous grey mass. Our barometer began to drop. Dad, in his e-mails from Northern Magic Weather Forecasting Central, warned of a low front approaching that would bring even-stronger west winds with it. It now became a race to make it to the Azores before the front made it to us.

  Bam! Bam! Bam! We slammed endlessly into the waves. Mostly, our bow parted them, and they peeled away to the sides like an extravagant moustache. But from time to time, our bow became buried in a particularly large wave, or one that we entered at a bad angle after see-sawing down into it from the wave before, and we’d be temporarily submerged in water. Christopher’s hatch began letting in water. Soon, everything in his cabin – mattress, sheets, blankets, books, toys, all his clothes – was damp. Within a day, the boat began smelling of mildew.

  We still had 350 miles to go to our destination, the island of Faial in the Azores. As the wind picked up, we had to keep revising our confident earlier predictions of our day and time of arrival. Gradually, we began to discuss ending our voyage prematurely, at the island of São Miguel, about 150 miles closer.

  It became impossible to eat or sleep. Herbert and the boys lived off small munchable junk foods after my chili dinner, painfully reheated at great personal cost, remained mostly uneaten. My stomach decided to evacuate itself no matter what I attempted to put into it. The lurching motion caused a small African mask mounted on Jonathan’s wall to fly right across the cabin. Michael’s bunk, directly under the hatch used by the person on watch, got soaked, as did the person on watch. Our hair was constantly wet, thick with salt, and plastered against our heads. It began to rain, forcing more salty water down the backs of our necks. It was pure misery.

  After receiving an e-mail from Dad that the weather was going to get even worse, it took us all of five seconds to decide to head for São Miguel, even though it meant a southerly detour of twenty or thirty miles. Not long after we adjusted course, the wind switched to the southwest as well so it could continue to blast directly against us.

  Focused as we were on wind, waves, water, and fatigue, we were completely unprepared for the jewel-like beauty of São Miguel. When it finally, slowly emerged from the low-lying clouds, it revealed itself to be a tall volcanic island completely draped in emerald green. Every surface of the bold, upward-thrusting shoreline was draped in this soft, living green velvet cloth. It looked like paradise. It was as welcome to our eyes as a cool spring in the desert. A giant outcrop guarded the tiny harbour, looking like the paws and haunches of a headless Sphinx, loosely draped in a luxurious mantle of green. Hundreds of circling, plunging, gluttonous boobies greeted us from the air, while in the water, dozens of skipping dolphins did the same.

  We entered the harbour, which was surrounded by towering rock cliffs with an old windmill at the very top. Fishermen had pulled ashore their small wooden boats and were cleaning their nets while young boys jumped from boulders and splashed in the water. A sprinkling of tidy white houses was visible at the top of the cliff. But we didn’t need all this superfluous beauty. The simple prospect of a calm anchorage, a hot meal, and a good night’s rest was all the paradise we required.

  After a meal, our first in thirty hours, we collapsed into bed, looking forward to a good sleep at last after seven nights at sea. The boobies and seagulls, returning to their crevices in the cliffside for the night, made a cacophony of squawks all night long. But at least we were safe from the battering waves. Safe, that is, as long as the wind didn’t shift to the north, because our tiny harbour was totally unprotected from that direction. Of course, overnight, that’s exactly what it did.

  By the middle of the night, a large swell was rolling into the harbour, tossing us around mercilessly. “I had a terrible sleep,” said a bleary-eyed Michael as he staggered out of bed before dawn. “It was worse than being on the ocean.”

  As much as we hated to face the sea again, the direction of the wind left us no choice but to leave. We cast off at 6:00 a.m. to motor thirty-five miles around the southern tip of the island to the town of Ponta Delgada.

  Ponta Delgada was a tidy collection of white buildings, whose red tile roofs contrasted pleasingly with the vibrant green of the surrounding fields. São Miguel was certainly one of the three most beautiful islands we visited on our entire trip. Most of these volcanic mounds had long since been tamed by humans, and had been turned into lush pastures separated by dark green hedges. The whole effect was spectacular. The many natural domes around Ponta Delgada had a distinctly mammarian shape, as if you really were looking at the living body of Mother Earth herself.

  The next day a man with the extravagant name of Felipe Le Velly de Sousa Lima arrived at the dock. He was a slim, articulate, casually dressed, native Azorean whose family controlled many of the island’s businesses: grocery stores, a vegetable oil factory, a chicken farm, hotels. He was also the honorary Canadian consul, whose office on a quaint cobblestone street we’d already noticed because of its billowing Canadian flag. He worked there every day, helping travelling Canadians with their problems.

  Felipe had been alerted to our arrival by our ally, Paul Dole, who had introduced us to Captain George. Friendly, voluble Felipe and his beautiful wife, Ana, whisked us away and brought us to the top of one of the huge volcanoes, Sete Cidades, that dominates the island. They wanted to show us two famous lakes inside the caldera. The lakes, although side by side, are different colours – one blue and one green – because of the way they reflect the light of the sky and the surrounding vegetation.

  On the way down through a cloud to the inside of the crater, Felipe told us the legend of why the two lakes have different colours. A grieving princess, he explained, had been exiled to the top of the mountain by her father the king, because of a forbidden love. This princess had one blue eye and one green, and as she cried, her tears transformed the lakes into different colours.

  We emerged from the mist and stopped by the shore of Green Lake. From one angle it looked quite green, but from another the water plants around its edge and the dark sunless sky overhead made it look yellowish, even brown.

  “I wonder,” Michael whispered into my ear, “what did the princess do to make the lake turn yellow and brown?”

  Felipe stopped at the end of Blue Lake, where the air filled our lungs with the invigorating scent of living green. Flowering hydrangeas, azaleas, lilies, Norfolk pines, maple trees, a carpet of grass, and small flowering plants – everything was bursting into life, lush and verdant. It could have been the Garden of Eden. We were blown away.

  “Can’t you see w
hy I love this island?” murmured Felipe, his arms opened wide.

  As usual, we were monitoring the weather carefully. One day Dad alerted us to a small, two-day window, just big enough to jump to a more westerly island. We grabbed the chance and motor-sailed the 140 miles to the island of Faial in twenty hours. As we arrived, we were greeted by fifty or more dolphins who leapt for joy and came rushing at us from all directions. In dolphin language, they were shouting, “They’re here! They’re here!” They took turns riding along beside us, leaping in our bow wave, five and ten at a time. A quarter-mile away we spotted the spouting of sperm whales, followed by four whale-spotting tour boats.

  The pavement of the quay at Horta was covered with creative paintings made by yachts that had stopped before us. We had wanted to make our own, but we didn’t get the chance. Within two days of our arrival, the weather charts suggested another opportunity to go, this time all the way to Canada.

  We were eager, very eager, to get going. That’s not to say we weren’t nervous about this, our last long passage across the Atlantic. We were mightily nervous. But there comes a point when you’re so tired about dreading something that you just want to get it over with.

  We were attempting a very unusual route west across the North Atlantic. The definitive book for sailboats crossing the Atlantic said only something like, “It is rare for boats to travel west to the northern U.S., but not unheard of.” It didn’t even mention the possibility of a passage to Newfoundland, which we were contemplating. Our route, although shorter, was against the prevailing winds as well as the strong Gulf Stream current, and went through an area notorious for weather, fog, and often icebergs. Yet we felt this was the only choice for us; it would take us a whole extra year to get home on the traditional southerly route. Somehow, we were going to have to drag ourselves across the North Atlantic, by willpower alone if need be.

  And so we headed out, feeling a strange combination of anxiety and excitement, eager to get the 1,280-mile passage over with. It was a relief to finally be facing our fears. Every mile, we kept telling ourselves, was one mile we wouldn’t have to do ever again.

  During the afternoon of the next day, we saw Flores and its neighbour island of Corvo, which had a flying saucer of cloud over its volcano. The wind was picking up as we pushed along, hitting us at twenty knots. We began getting slammed by steep seas two and three metres high, topped with frothy whitecaps. The large swell suggested even stronger winds ahead. We lay in our bunks and counted out the miles. When that became too slow, we began counting out the minutes.

  I told the others it was like having a baby: hard at the time, but later the pain would be forgotten. I began singing the old Helen Reddy song, “I am Woman.” This probably had the opposite of its intended effect on the rest of the crew. “I don’t wanna have a baby!” Herbert lamented.

  Our engine hissed and bubbled and began to overheat. For the moment, we just turned it off and left it, because it was hopeless trying to motor into that strong a wind anyway. On a northerly tack at a forty-five-degree angle to the wind, our speed dropped dramatically, down to four, three, sometimes even two, knots. The motion at the bow of the boat, rearing up into the air at the crest of a wave and then plunging down with a mighty thud into its trough, was horrendous. We all competed for space in the aft cabins, where the motion was the least. Christopher wedged himself beside me into Michael’s tiny bunk, a space barely wider than my shoulders, where we snuggled together and sang songs.

  We slowly hobby-horsed past Corvo as the sun started to fall. Both Herbert and I privately wondered if we were stupid not to be stopping there in the face of the rising wind. But we just wanted to go home. Every mile was bringing us closer … every mile was bringing us closer …

  Herbert was steeling himself for the horrendous job of coaxing our engine back into life. He, like the rest of us, was queasy and weak, but he now had to hang head-down in the stinky fuel-smelling engine room to try to find out why we were overheating. Half a day earlier, he’d already had to replace a failing cooling-water pump, which in the process of spraying seawater all over the engine room had also temporarily disabled the charging system. This repair had exacted a terrible price on our poor captain’s stomach and made it even tougher for him to begin anew. Every time he sat up, he emitted huge belchy sounds that in happier times might have encouraged Michael to respond with an indignant “Is that a challenge?” But no one dared engage in any belching contests right now.

  Three times over the next day and a half, Herbert attempted to fix the overheating problem. Each time, he came up from the engine room trembling and greener than the time before. Finally, he had no choice but to rest.

  By the middle of the night, we had winds against us of up to thirty knots. In one particularly bad lurch, our bathroom vanity mirror, fixed permanently to the wall, crashed down and shattered against the sink just inches from my head as I was on the toilet. We were barely making one knot of westerly progress, two kilometres per hour. At this rate, it would take us forty-three days to get to Newfoundland and we would run out of fuel.

  The next morning, with Herbert sicker than ever, the motor still not fixed, the wind still blasting the tops off the whitecaps, we got another e-mail. “New low advancing with heavy thunderstorms,” it read, ominously. “Suggest Flores for R&R, fuel and better weather.”

  We knew Dad wouldn’t have suggested turning around for nothing. In a day and a half of tough sailing, we’d advanced only fifty miles beyond Flores Island. Still, it was painful to admit defeat. We had struggled so hard for those miles, it broke our hearts to give them back up. We had never abandoned a passage before. But we did it now.

  We arrived back at Flores Island almost two days after we had first passed it.

  Refuelled with the first good food and sleep we’d had in three days, we set out to explore the town of Santa Cruz. It was small but very pretty, with cobblestone streets, narrow sidewalks, attractive white houses with red tile roofs, all perched on the cliff side overlooking the ocean, with cultivated green hills behind. Flamboyant lilies, azaleas, and hydrangeas bloomed everywhere. Northern Magic was snugly moored in a tiny rock-bound harbour barely larger than she was.

  Every day we walked to the Internet café, and every day we left it stressed by what we had seen on the weather charts. The entire North Atlantic, from Newfoundland to the Azores, was convulsed in a series of gales. At least we could congratulate ourselves on having made the difficult but correct decision to turn around

  During our period of enforced waiting, we developed a new strategy for getting to Canada. Instead of trying to buck the prevailing winds on the direct route to Newfoundland, as we had on our first attempt, this time we’d head south on a much longer, indirect path. This would give us a chance at better winds. We would cross the Atlantic a few hundred miles south of our original route, make as much westing as we could while those wild northwesterlies raged farther north. We’d head north to Canada only at the last minute. With this new strategy, landing in Newfoundland was no longer the obvious choice. Coming from our southerly path, Nova Scotia was a possibility as well. While underway, the wind would make the choice for us.

  Soon the first gale swept over us, knocking us around in our tiny harbour. Luckily, Herbert had reinforced the lines holding us off the rocks, so we were restrained by a spiderlike web of criss-crossing lines, like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians.

  We were still tossing, two days later, when an even worse storm hit. Wind bullets of fifty knots or more shot down the mountainside, making Northern Magic shudder in a way she had done only once or twice before. Rain drove at us horizontally from the hillside. We were now not only bucking fiercely, but rolling as well. The motion inside the harbour was worse than on many ocean passages. I hated to think what it was like in the open ocean beyond the protection of the island. We could so easily have been out there, instead.

  Worst of all was the shrieking of the wind. That unholy sound – the sound of death, of evil spirit
s, of people being torn limb from limb – just about made me go crazy. With the shuddering, the bucking, the rolling, the slamming of our halyards against our masts, the fear that if our lines broke we’d be cast upon the rocks that hemmed us in on all sides, it was impossible to sleep, or even close our eyes. At one point in the middle of the night, I thought I just couldn’t stand it another minute. I jumped out of bed and paced around the boat like a tiger imprisoned in a cage. I did sit-ups, tried some deep knee bends, stared outside. I prayed for that evil wind and its insane shrieking to stop. I prayed for our lines to hold. I prayed for just a few hours of rest. I prayed to be safe and sound back at home.

  By morning the storm was passed, and the sky was blue and friendly again.

  The next day, the thought hit us like a lightning bolt. Perhaps we, ourselves, were accountable for this spell of foul weather. The wind gods always demand their due, and we had not paid it. We’d ignored the long-time sailors’ tradition in Horta by leaving without painting a picture on the harbour pavement. Until we paid homage in this way, we’d surely be doomed to stay.

  We started on our painting project immediately. We decided two murals on the harbour wall would be even better than one. Herbert painted a black square with a picture of Northern Magic similar to one he’d painted in Cuba three and a half years earlier. The boys and I painted a map of the world, showing the path of our voyage. The line we had completed was so long compared to the tiny dotted line that still remained. How close and yet how far Canada seemed!