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

by Michael Hurley

  I did consider for a moment the prospect of just sailing my way in, blind to the location of the reef, in hopes that I’d get lucky. The helpful Brit on the radio even made it sound easy and encouraged me to give it a try, which I knew meant that it was nigh impossible for mortal men and should not be attempted. Anxious though I was to reach the harbor, I eventually concluded that attempting to navigate the unmarked path through the coral heads at night under sail, under the effects of tide and current and without hope of aid from a working engine, would be more foolish than any mistake that had brought me to my present circumstance.

  Never one to give up, my helpful British friend, who was still near enough to my position to reach me by radio, suggested that I sail fifteen miles south to an anchorage for the night at West Caicos Island, then sail fifteen miles back to meet the tow in the morning. I considered this as well. But looking at the chart for West Caicos Island and imagining the coral heads that might similarly complicate a landfall under sail there, I opted instead to heave to for the night in the safety of the open ocean. As namby-pamby as I’m sure that must have sounded to Mr. Churchill, I felt it was the right decision at the time. In one of the many ironies that seem to follow the Gypsy’s wake, I later learned that a sailboat overloaded with Haitian refugees wrecked on West Caicos Island just about the time of my arrival at Provo.

  After tidying things up on deck and setting the initial heading on which the boat would be hove to for the next two-hour watch, I went below to boil some water for tea and make something comforting to eat. Before the kettle came to a boil, I noticed flashes of blue light coming through the cabin portholes. Running out on deck, I could hear the voices of several men in the darkness. Eventually I saw the dim outline of an approaching runabout. It was a police boat. The manager of the Caicos shipyard, true to his promise to send a tow for me that day, had arranged for a police boat to find me after the towboat operator had gone home.

  I expressed my sincere gratitude that the men on the police boat had come to fetch me, after hours and this far out at sea. One asked if I had a towrope, which I did not. It was of some momentary concern to me that a boat had appeared to perform a tow without a proper towrope, but I quickly shrugged that off and went below to retrieve a spare halyard that could serve that purpose. Nylon halyards are long and strong but otherwise not ideal for towing, because they sink—a quality that would lead to an unexpected bit of fun later that night.

  Before long the halyard was in place and ready for service. Now tethered to the Gypsy Moon, the police boat drifted away into the darkness. I could see very little other than a blue flashing light. I heard a voice ask for the draft of my boat, and I answered “Four feet two inches.” “We should be fine, then” came the unseen reply. Hearing this remark, then seeing the police boat’s initial heading on my GPS, I surmised that it was the driver’s intention to cut across a corner of the reef and enter the channel from the side, rather than take the longer way around to enter the channel head-on from deep water. He must know the depth of the coral heads, I thought, and by asking for my draft merely wanted to confirm that my boat would pass safely above them. Local knowledge, after all, is what the prudent mariner is taught to prefer above all else—even printed nautical charts—when making navigational decisions. I didn’t suppose that the knowledge in these parts could get any more local or reliable than a police boat.

  It was a long way to the island. About a half hour after being given the assurance that “we should be fine,” we were anything but.

  Without warning, I felt the Gypsy Moon ride up sharply at the stern and careen to port, accompanied by a sickening, crunching sound, as if she’d been grabbed by the jaws of something beneath her. I was thrown off balance from my position behind the wheel when the boat abruptly stopped and leaned sideways. A second later, she slid forward, dropped, and righted herself in the water.

  We had run up one side of a coral head and down the other. At that moment, I realized, the hull could be holed and the boat could be sinking, but the good news/bad news was that the Gypsy Moon was now afloat again and free to sink in deep water, where she would be beyond any hope of recovery. My imagination raced with the possible logistics and expense of what had just occurred.

  To make matters worse, the sudden grounding had jerked the much smaller and lighter police boat to a stop. This caused the nylon towrope to go slack, allowing it to sink beneath the police boat’s stern. The sinking line promptly fouled the propeller of one of the boat’s twin outboard motors and parted.

  In the darkness, I could hear the conversation of people aboard the police boat working to free the fouled prop, to no avail. That engine was out of service for the night. Eventually, what remained of the towrope was made fast again, and the towing operation continued under power from the remaining outboard engine. Now being propelled off center and towing the weight of a larger boat behind her, the police boat moved forward slowly in wide arcs, weaving from side to side like a drunken snake.

  After running up on the coral head, I radioed the towboat to suggest to them that we had cut the corner of the reef and that we ought to look for deeper water going forward. The news that I could see our location and depth from a GPS unit and depth sounder on board cheered the crew of the police boat, which had neither device. From that point forward, they asked me to broadcast my depth on the radio at regular intervals, remaining especially alert to any depth below twelve feet. They used this information to choose a safe path to shore.

  Though I find some black humor in the retelling of this tale, I hold my rescuers in no contempt. My mistakes that day preceded and greatly exceeded theirs, and I was fortunate and grateful to have their assistance. I was on a sailboat, for God’s sake, and yet because of my needless rush to make port, I was calling for a tow like a child for his mama.

  The police boat set me adrift where I could safely anchor in calm water, just outside Chalk Sound. Another tow would arrive the following morning to take me the rest of the way to Caicos Marina & Shipyard. Once at anchor, I checked the bilge and found it reassuringly dry. This meant that the boat had not been holed in the grounding on the reef, but there was still a possibility of serious structural damage. Early the following morning, I donned a swim mask and jumped into the preternaturally clear water to inspect the hull and rudder.

  Recalling the painful sound I had heard the night before when the Gypsy Moon hit the reef, I was astonished to find not even a scrape in the paint from the bottom of the keel to the tip of the rudder. There was no damage at all. Herod’s ghost had done his worst and had nothing to show for it. For this, thanks goes not only to my maker but to Endeavour Yacht Corporation, the maker of the Gypsy Moon.

  Endeavour, formerly located in Largo, Florida, was once a mainstay of the boatbuilding industry in the United States. It has since gone the sad way of Pearson and other defunct boat builders, capsized by the ten percent “luxury tax” on boats that was enacted by Congress in the 1980s. Intended to soak “the rich,” this tax instead dried up new-boat sales and decimated American manufacturers along with thousands of good jobs. Now the rich buy their boats from France, but the Gypsy Moon and hundreds of similar stout vessels made by Endeavour between 1974 and 1988 are still plying the seas in a testament to American craftsmanship.

  Chapter 46

  The Stranger

  As happy as I was to arrive there with my boat in one piece, Providenciales itself was something of a disappointment. In fact, after having a look around I rather regretted that I had not kept going and taken advantage of several more days of fair weather to reach a more indigenous and diverse Caribbean culture in the Dominican Republic or even Puerto Rico.

  Provo is the largest of the Turks and Caicos Islands, which geographically are part of the Bahamas. Like the Bahamas, they are marked by low elevation, poor, sandy soil, and low-growing vegetation. Politically, the Turks and Caicos are a territorial possession of Britain and under that nation’s financial control. Locals blame the Brits for raising pric
es and making life generally more of a pain in the ass than it need be.

  Owing perhaps to the fact that commercial development of the island first began only in the mid-1980s and has paused during economic downturns since then, what I found on Provo were nondescript expanses of land loosely connected by long, dry, dusty roads. Unlike Nassau, where it is possible to travel anywhere by bus, Provo has no system of cheap, dependable public transportation. Most people here either own or rent a car to get around, and those who cannot afford to pay the high island prices for gas walk or hitch a ride.

  I was able to ride into town with a crew member of a dive boat at the marina when he left to buy spare parts. I planned to rent a car at the airport and scout out as many places as I could find that might be of interest to Susan whenever I returned to the island with her.

  The traffic on Provo drives on the left side of the road. Although this was my first experience with left-handed driving, in no time I had the hang of it—or so I thought.

  After renting a car at the airport and making sure I knew how to return there to catch a flight the next day, I found my way back to the marina. I got the Gypsy Moon tucked into her slip, signed papers for the harbormaster, and left for town again with pen and paper in hand. I was ready to learn everything there was to know about the island in the next six hours.

  The roads on Provo are lonely, and the one that leads several miles off the main highway into Caicos Marina & Shipyard is lonelier than most. I had just begun driving obediently on the left side of this road when I came upon a trim, middle-aged man of Asian descent. He wore a collared shirt and long work pants that were covered in dust. He was on foot, but he was not hitchhiking. He was instead walking determinedly for the highway that was still a long way off. I slowed down to offer him a ride, and he got in.

  This was the first time in thirty years that I had stopped along a road to offer a stranger a ride. I don’t know why I stopped on this day. Perhaps I hoped to learn something of the local culture, but it was soon apparent that I would learn nothing from this man, as he spoke no English.

  In silence we rode the remaining miles to the main highway. It was a long distance, and as we traveled it I thought about the time and effort I was saving the man who sat beside me. I imagined how grateful he must be for my kind gesture. I felt good about myself and about the good deed I had done.

  When I stopped at the highway, I intended to turn left toward town. I was concentrating on driving on the left side of the road and focused intently on staying in the correct lane during the turn. What I was not concentrating on, and what I did not see, was the traffic speeding at me from the right. Thankfully my passenger was paying attention, as I otherwise would not be writing these words to you now.

  As I began to turn left, the man seated next to me shouted, “Stop!” Startled, I abruptly obeyed. A second later, a line of speeding cars whizzed past my front bumper. I was so shaken by this near-death experience that I scarcely heard the man tell me, in perfect English, that his street would be coming up another mile after the turn.

  Driving on the left side of the road is only part of what Americans planning to rent a car in Provo need to remember. Learning to look right before turning left is another. More important than even these skills, though, is the knowledge that when we give comfort to strangers, we are sometimes saved by the grace we receive in return—on the loneliest of roads, in the unlikeliest of places, and in the moment of our greatest need.

  Chapter 47

  The Gift

  Standing in stark contrast to the rest of the island of Providenciales is an opulent greenway of high-end hotels, restaurants, and shops along the beachfront known as Grace Bay. Here I found wealthy vacationers and expats enjoying the high life beside the famously cerulean water. The fact that the nice grocery store on Grace Bay finds it necessary to pay for an armed guard to stand by the entrance and make eye contact with everyone who enters tells you all you need to know about the prevailing socioeconomic disparity.

  There are ultrachic jewelry and clothing stores and luxury design studios clustered around the hotels and villas of Grace Bay, but if there were colorful colonies of artisans on Provo selling indigenous handicrafts and art, I never found them in the day I spent driving a rented car. Most of the local culture I did find seemed to have sprung up in service of the new tourism. Grace Bay had a born-yesterday kind of inauthenticity that reminded me of a movie lot in the California desert.

  In every desert, however, there is an oasis. I found one on Provo at the Church of St. Monica, an Anglican church.

  I was on the island, after all, partly in service of a mission I had borrowed from the two-thousand-year-old story of the Magi, and I had in my possession a cargo of gifts meant to be given in honor of the Christ child. So I set out to find him. As the angels would have it, I found her instead.

  A telephone call to the rectory of St. Monica’s was answered by the rector’s wife, who of course knew nothing of me or my voyage. She paved the way for my welcome nonetheless, and moments later a gentleman named Leon appeared at the marina. He extended official greetings on behalf of the pastor, who was visiting a sister parish on another island.

  Leon came aboard and told me something of his former life working aboard cruise ships. He learned of my voyage, taking special interest in the Gypsy Moon’s self-steering wind vane, and he invited me to the Sunday service. There I would have the pleasure of hearing him accompany the choir on trumpet. He would also relate to the congregation the story of my seven-day solo voyage from Nassau, which I sensed they received as proof that God must indeed protect the fools of this world.

  I arrived at St. Monica’s early that Sunday morning, carrying under my arm the bundle of handmade treasures entrusted to me by the children in Raleigh. I took a seat halfway to the altar in the empty pews. All was quiet, and I was alone. At sea I had succumbed to the baser impulses of bachelor living, neglecting to shave or wash my face for two days. A clean shave that morning before church revealed the resulting eruption of scaly red skin across my nose and chin—a tendency inherited from my Irish ancestors. I looked like a man no more than two steps from a halfway house.

  As I waited in the pew for redemption, I was struck by the contrast between the serenity of that setting and the chaos of the one at sea only two days before. It occurred to me that those separate worlds of peace and pandemonium envelop the same Earth and that we err to suppose when we are in the midst of one that we have somehow banished the other. The challenge is to find peace within the tumult. We achieve this not through wishful thinking that life on Earth will always be just, but by recalling the promise of Him who said, “In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

  A child—a girl of ten years—also arrived in the sanctuary early and, with a confidence unlike that of other young children, chose to sit directly behind the red-faced stranger and engage him in conversation. I learned of her life as the oldest of several children and her daily devotion to making lunches for, and looking after, her siblings. She told me of her father, who had died. Hearing of this sorrow, I straightened my posture and focused more keenly on her words, wondering if it was not perhaps out of some tender need that she had chosen to speak to me.

  For my part, I told her of my journey and my gifts. I saw her eyes sparkle when I described the brilliant star that rose above the southern ocean on my last night at sea and that now seemed, however implausibly to a doubting world, to have guided me to this child, on this morning, in this place.

  The other children would soon arrive, and they would be delighted to unwrap the many cards and small emblems of friendship I had brought. But before they did, I asked the little girl who had come to sit with me to accept the flag that had flown above the Gypsy Moon throughout the voyage, thoughtfully sewn by the children of my parish with the symbols of our faith: the cross, the cup, a fish, an angel, and a dove. She good-naturedly posed at the altar for a photograph, holding this flag. In her beaming smile at
that moment, I found my way at last to the place where the Star of Bethlehem had come to rest.

  Chapter 48

  Maiden Voyage

  Within a month’s time the Gypsy Moon’s engine problems had been resolved. (I was told that a faulty fuel pump—not insufficient oil—had been the chief culprit.) It was February 2011. The boat was again ready for sea, and I was eager to head south. This time, Susan would be coming along for the planned offshore passage of three days to the Dominican Republic—her first.

  I found the service at Caicos Marina & Shipyard friendly and the rates affordable, but this remote, undeveloped corner of the island suffers from an overabundance of sand fleas and no-see-ums after dark. That won’t bother you at all if you’re staying aboard an air-conditioned megayacht, but it made the one night Susan and I spent aboard our boat on Provo something less than a vacation. Her soft, smooth skin was a prime target for the little buggers, and she awoke the next morning looking as if she had been stricken with the chicken pox.

  The highlight of our return trip to Provo was a chance meeting with some friendly Swiss sailors. They have spent half of each of the last twelve years wandering around the Caribbean and homeschooling their charming daughter, returning to work and live in Burgundy, France, for the other half. They invited us aboard their boat, the Taua, for wine and cheese the night before we were due to sail for the Dominican Republic. They planned to follow us there once they finished fitting out. It was good to share the camaraderie of people who didn’t need us to explain why, exactly, we were bothering to cross an ocean in a sailboat.

  The clear, shallow waters that extend sixty miles southeast of Providenciales mark the outer edge of a vast limestone shelf. Formed 135 million years ago in the Jurassic period, it supports the low-slung islands within the six-hundred-mile contiguous range of the Bahamas, including the Turks and Caicos. South of this rim, the sea runs much deeper and the islands rise markedly higher than any in the Bahamas, owing to eons of seismic activity in the Caribbean Plate.