Once Upon a Gypsy Moon: An Improbable Voyage and One Man's Yearning for Redemption

by Michael Hurley

  Yet there are naysayers to every trend, and I am happily among those who still sing the virtues of the simpler, smaller boat. Two of my heroes are Lin and Larry Pardey, famous for their many round-the-world voyages aboard engineless sailboats smaller than thirty feet long overall. I had occasion to step aboard their twenty-eight-foot cutter, Serrafyn, when she was on display one year at the Annapolis boat show. Her head (toilet) was a simple manual system that the Pardeys indelicately described as “bucket and chuck it.” With no engine, she had sailed around the world—twice. In tight harbors where sailing was impractical or when winds were light, the Pardeys used a single long oar passed through chocks on the stern railing to scull the boat forward.

  Like Serrafyn, the Gypsy Moon will never spend a day in port waiting for the arrival of a new watermaker pump, radar scanner, single-sideband transceiver, generator valve spring, electric-winch motor, or new ideas on how to make a refrigeration system three degrees cooler than lukewarm. She is outfitted with none of these extravagances. She is free not only from their cost and complication, but also from slavery to their insatiable demand for fuel and engine-driven battery power. She is a simple boat, commanded by a simple (if not simpleminded) captain.

  The boatyards and marine supply stores in the United States are filled to the rafters on most Saturdays with wannabe naval engineers of every stripe, secretly delighted that a faulty macerator pump or corroded water heater will consign them to the deepest recesses of the bilge for the duration of the weekend. I have always made a point of waving at these men in polite encouragement as my little boat sputters out of the marina on the way to go sailing.

  There are economic advantages to a boat not merely simpler but smaller than today’s normative forty-five- or fifty-footer. For every foot of increase in a boat’s length, the expenses associated with maintaining and rigging the vessel become exponentially greater. A longer boat needs a taller mast with bigger sails and heavier rigging—all at a disproportionately greater cost. The thirty-six-footer that cannot fit into her owner’s old thirty-foot slip must take another slip in the marina in the next available size—usually forty or fifty feet, for thousands of dollars more per year. The prices of haul-outs, bottom paint, cleaning, storage, insurance, and hull repairs all rise dramatically with even modest increases in boat length. When J. P. Morgan famously said that anyone who had to ask how much it costs to own a boat couldn’t afford one, he was standing beside his 302-foot steamer Corsair, not a humble vessel the likes of Gypsy Moon.

  There are practical advantages to the sailboat of moderate length, as well. One man can sail her alone or with a wife appointed only to the task of calling for a taxi should he drop dead, whereas the skipper of a well-found fifty-foot beauty is forever trolling the neighborhood for crew, pleading for able-bodied men as the English navy once did in the press-gangs of yore, only without the threat of violence. Those who join him he will entertain lavishly in exchange for their help in tiptoeing his expensive baby, like a nervous elephant, out of her slip. When the afternoon thunderstorm arrives, his startled crew will be sent aloft to attack and wrestle the enormous, flogging tarpaulin of a mainsail onto a slippery, pitching deck. Having thus traumatized his friends, he will try with increasing difficulty to replenish their numbers on later voyages, until at last his well of goodwill runs dry. When that day arrives, his beauty will retire beside her enormous kin at the marina until the barnacles or the boat brokers overtake her and she is delivered happily to some other unwitting would-be Lord Nelson. From this cycle in most sailors’ lives comes the adage that owning a boat is like standing in a raincoat in a cold shower and tearing up hundred-dollar bills. The smart ones get out and dry off when they’re tearing up twenties.

  But I digress. All of this serves only to explain why I bristled when a dockhand at Southport Marina reacted with a whiff of astonishment upon hearing my plan to sail the Gypsy Moon offshore, nonstop, to Nassau. I felt that he was slighting my boat as she lay alongside the rows of enormous stay-at-homes sleeping in their slips, although he likely intended no such thing. In truth, the dockhand’s raised eyebrows were all the more irritating because they reflected my own unspoken doubts.

  I knew, on that fourth of December 2009, when I stood on deck readying sails and running through my checklist to take the Gypsy Moon to sea, that I would make good on my intention to set sail. I knew that with the same certainty that the Little Leaguer knows, when his name is called, that his feet will trudge to the batter’s box, even as he doubts with equal fervor that his swing will ever meet the ball.

  I honestly didn’t think I’d make it all the way to Nassau. For whatever reason, I had allowed Nassau to become in my imagination, with each passing day, a destination of Homeric proportions.

  Before I left, my pastor had given me a book as cargo. The book told the history of the old stone cathedral of Christ Church in Raleigh. I was charged with the task of presenting it as a gift to the pastor of Christ Church in Nassau, whose steeple was raised in 1830. Though I didn’t know it then, my voyage would be an occasion for some to wonder whether I ought to have enlisted a few good Baptists to pray for me along with the Episcopalians.

  Chapter 18

  A Following Sea

  The mouth of the Cape Fear River is a wide, forlorn, and featureless place where the land of North Carolina points its southeasternmost end to the sea. A few well-to-do residents, tired service workers, and returning vacationers taking the private ferry to Southport from Bald Head Island looked with passing interest at the thirty-two-foot sloop making her way, alone, toward the open ocean. The sky and sea were a continuous pale gray. Here, in a deep shipping channel that requires constant vigilance against shoaling from swift, swirling tides, great ocean freighters come and go.

  There is a feeling of desolation to the waters around Southport that holds no welcome. No brightly colored little sloops filled with laughing children dither back and forth among the sandbars there. People and ships pass through these roads quickly and with determination to be somewhere else. It is a place between places—like a graveyard in the evening—that urges one not to linger. I, too, was eager to be away. I hurried along until I could look back and see the sweep of the Oak Island Light in my wake. I was at sea at last, again.

  I passed through a gentle chop at 1700 hours on my way to the outer channel marker and took a bearing on Frying Pan Shoals, to stay well off. I was headed 197 degrees magnetic, just west of due south. Flying at first only a working jib to starboard and then only her main, the Gypsy Moon hiked up her skirt, put her shoulder down, and ran at six knots on a broad reach. This point of sail is where she finds her heart. With the wind whipping at her heels, she pulls like an old racehorse who hasn’t forgotten the thrill of the chase, even if she can’t match the younger fillies for speed.

  As night set in, a light rain began to fall, and I headed for the shelter of the cabin. I was still on the uphill slope of the learning curve on how to use the Monitor self-steering wind vane, which in the early stages of the voyage had been only so much ornamental steel hanging off the stern. Once I understood the rather mysterious incantations of line tension, vane direction, and sail trim necessary to make the thing work, it proved itself an amazing device capable of sailing the boat on a straight and steady course for days on end without my bothersome interference at the helm. What the Monitor clearly could not do, however, was steer a straight course dead downwind. And in the norther blowing that day off Southport, dead downwind was where I needed to go.

  The electronic autopilot, which gobbles power but respects neither the speed nor the direction of the wind, was my only respite from an unending rain-soaked vigil at the helm to keep the boat on course. So, with the sail nicely trimmed and tight, I set the autopilot to the compass course dead off the wind and went below to enjoy the wonderful peace of a warm cabin in a boat moving well at sea.

  It was a short-lived peace. As I sailed through the night under the stoic guidance of the autopilot, running from gusty weather
and rain, the waves rose to about four feet high. The stern would ride up the front and slide down the back of each successive roller, and the autopilot would fight against the boat’s instinctive wish to turn and face the wind. As the wind strengthened, so did the forces bearing on the autopilot, which groaned and creaked and clattered from its effort to get the Gypsy Moon to the church on time.

  By late afternoon on the second day, the log recorded “high winds, rough seas near Charleston, 28 miles northeast.” It was time for a sail change. I’d known I was doing the “safe” thing when, during the preceding summer in Annapolis, I had arranged for a sailmaker to cut and sew a storm trysail and for a rigger to rivet a stainless steel external track to the mast on which to hoist it, but I never thought I’d need the thing. It’s very old-school. Only one boat in a hundred carries a storm trysail nowadays. I felt good about having one, but in truth, I thought I’d have about as much use for it on the open sea as I would a bomb shelter. Wrong again.

  When the waves rose to five feet, I mustered the storm trysail on the cabin top and tried to recall exactly which end went where, as the stiff, thick new sail spilled from its bag and scudded along the wet decks. Up in its tracks along the mast it went, pulled by the main halyard, until it snapped open in the freshening breeze with a loud craa-ack and came to a disorderly salute. Though only one-third the area of the mainsail, when caught by the wind the trysail violently jerked its outhaul line, which I held tightly in my hand. I discovered that I lacked the strength to tie it off. I had forgotten to rig a block and tackle to use in making the line fast, but I could not simply let go of the reins of this wild mustang and let her run.

  After standing there stupidly for a moment, with my arm jerking back and forth in the air like a conductor’s baton in the 1812 Overture, I formed a plan. I made my way to the cockpit, ran the line once through a wire bail on the end of the boom, and ran the free end back through the grommet on the clew of the sail, then back through the bail on the boom. With this, I immediately had more authority over the situation. Shortening the line, I pulled the flailing canvas until it was tight and all was suddenly quiet. With her sail area thus reduced, the boat’s motion slowed and eased. However, the clatter and clacking of the gears in the autopilot continued unabated as it strove against the pressure of the waves on the rudder to keep the boat and her crew on a straight and narrow path.

  Chapter 19

  A Yearning

  There was a yearning that followed me to sea and was my constant companion on bright, idle days and long night watches. Alone though I was, I was always accompanied by my thoughts: assorted hopes, fears, and regrets. They rolled on in an endless stream in my mind along with the sound of the ocean.

  Inches from where I laid my head to sleep, the water coursing across the outside of the hull sounded like a babbling brook as it rushed to become a part of my past. I cherished the memory of it. I suspect we would all better use and savor our time on Earth if we could sense each moment of our lives slipping astern with the same constancy and clarity as a sailor knows the passing of his ship’s wake.

  The thoughts of those idle hours turned always to another. I knew not who she was or even who she might be, but I yearned for her with an ache that had lingered for decades. I have learned to ask God for my longings, however disinclined He might be to grant them. And so I prayed to God as I had so often before for that prize that neither effort nor merit nor money nor my compulsion for planning and organization could attain. I wanted the Big One. With heaven yet beyond my grasp, I wanted what on Earth would be its closest foretaste. I prayed that God would help me find a good woman with whom to share my life. I remember the very moment and the supine posture from which this prayer was lifted heavenward. It would be the first of two petitions on this passage.

  We are all wounded and alone in some way, but the ebb and flow of daily life in cities and towns filled with people has an anesthetic effect. There is no greater sense of being truly, completely alone than what is to be found in a small boat far out at sea. It clears the mind. It places a man apart from everything and everyone and gives him a profound sense of his own smallness, though not a sense of insignificance. Away from the neon and the rush, far from Walmart, out of earshot of the chattering of pundits and politicians, eventually there is only God. When God is your only companion, either there is an awkward silence or there is prayer.

  American pop culture has long celebrated the steely-eyed loner who does not pray but, rather, stoically endures life’s hardships. He is ever the hero of song and the silver screen. I have never found him in my own character, but I put my young son to sleep each night for many years to the tune of “Desperado.” Sung and played however feebly on my guitar, the words of this song still rang true: “Come down from your fences…and let somebody love you, before it’s too late.” When I began this voyage, I had been trying to come down from those fences and find someone for so long that it seemed I might be destined to become the drifter pitied in that song.

  But yearning that becomes desperation is a dangerous thing. Desperation is the father of many orphans. With no small difficulty I had learned to choose patience and deliberation over desperation in my own life, after my divorce, as I began to pursue the dream of finding a true partner and friend. That, too, was a journey.

  Along that pilgrim road, I had to learn to cut away stagnant, static, and sometimes toxic relationships, eventually acquiring some considerable skill with the blade from frequent and dispassionate use. I learned to say “no thanks,” “not yet,” “no more,” “good-bye,” and “good riddance” and to value my innermost desire over concern for someone else’s disappointment. In time, a trail of bruised and broken hearts—my own among them—lay in my wake. But no one can live long by that sword.

  To avoid becoming submerged in my solitude and to find some greater purpose for my voyage (or perhaps it might be fairly said merely to appear to do so), months earlier I had written to the rector of Christ Church in Nassau to propose that when I sailed into his harbor (triumphant and covered in glory, I must have seemed absurdly to suggest), I would be pleased to be employed in some needed manual labor to benefit the church. I received no reply, I am not surprised to say. Bahamians are not aborigines in need of my beneficence. But I was undeterred at the time. This small mission, though it would go unfulfilled, gave me a brighter star to follow.

  Chapter 20

  Africa Beckons

  The wind was rising. The temperature was also falling, even as the Gypsy Moon forged her way farther down the coast of South Carolina. The night sky was spitting a cold, uncomfortable, and occasional rain. The drops flew in like random sniper fire from some unseen assassin hiding in the darkness above. The electronic autopilot continued its loud lamentations as it kept the rudder braced against an unruly following sea.

  It was late in the evening when I finally saw the sea buoy marking the entrance to the Fort Sumter Range. With the task of keeping sure footing in the cabin getting harder as the boat pitched and rolled, I had not bothered to chart the hour in the log. But I knew I was making good time—the northerly breeze had seen to that, scudding me along at a constant pace with the following waves pushing me faster still. Southport was now nearly 130 miles to the north. The Gypsy Moon had stretched her legs and run once again like a teenager in love.

  Fort Sumter Range is the name of the channel leading into Charleston. Big ships line up far out at sea on a straight line leading to two lighted range markers—a shorter one in front and a taller one behind—erected onshore. The markers serve the same purpose as the sights on a rifle. When the lights of the range markers line up, the helmsman can be assured that his vessel is aimed down the deep middle of the channel. The helmsman’s task is then to keep the two range markers perpendicular in his sights as he shoots his vessel shoreward, like a bullet through a barrel. If the lower range marker appears to move to starboard below the upper marker, he knows the ship is drifting off course into shallow water to port, and vice versa.


  I was seventeen miles out on the range from Fort Sumter at the point where I crossed the channel, heading south. Seeing the flashing light of the sea buoy passing so close abeam was a faintly startling reminder of the Hand of Man that I had left behind seemingly long ago, although in reality it was only the day before. I looked down the range as I crossed it on a perpendicular course and saw the lights of the channel markers line up like an airport runway. That was a path to safety and comfort, I knew. Although I was as safe as a babe in his cradle out on the open ocean, I was also at that moment as uncomfortable as one in a wet diaper long overdue for changing.

  But to be warm and ashore in Charleston was not the mission I had undertaken back on the Magothy River in August. There was nothing stopping me, and I would not stop. The boat held her course. The waves and wind, though a bit too rough for comfort, were merely a spate of winter weather and not a storm at all. With renewed resolve, I watched Charleston fade astern and looked over the chart for the course ahead.