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

by Michael Hurley

  The wind vane stood watches in the afternoon of the first day, all night, and all of the second day, until the Gypsy Moon was squarely in the teeth of the empty, trackless sea amidst Hispaniola, Cuba, and Great Inagua known as the Windward Passage. Throughout this time I lay awake in my bunk or slept in ninety-minute intervals, rising at night to scan the moonlit horizon for any sign of a ship. At one point on the first night, I spotted the lights of what might have been a cruise liner far to the north, but otherwise I saw not another vessel for two days.

  After my phone call with Susan, the weather began to change. In the dangerous game of escalating rationalizations that so often presages disaster, I looked for reasons not to be alarmed into action when the wind speed increased and exceeded the forecast. I told myself that the temporary effect of thermal inversion was the cause of the boisterous weather, as it had been last year around this time off the Berry Islands. I told myself that by sundown the wind and the motion of the boat would ease again. Had I not been so eager to justify this premise, it might have occurred to me that, unlike my position south of Grand Bahama and north of the Berry Islands the year before, there was nothing but open ocean to the north and no landmass for three thousand miles in that direction that could create a localized thermal inversion. The weather was changing, and for the worse. I just didn’t want to believe it.

  Further obscuring my sense of reason was the fact that I was on a heading off the wind, not slogging upwind against the waves. On a downwind point of sail a boat can carry much more canvas for much longer, as the wind rises, than would be comfortable sailing in the same weather upwind or on a beam reach. Even as the wind speed passed twenty knots, it made no sense to me, in my hobgoblin logic of the moment, to reef or change sails on my offwind heading. This seemed particularly true in view of my persistent assumption that the rise in wind speed and wave height that day would be brief. I thought it very likely that I would soon be lollygagging about the ocean in light winds again, making slow forward progress and casting longing glances in the direction of the boat’s diesel engine.

  By midafternoon, I had been neatly maneuvered by my own wishful thinking into a predicament. The wind was up, but the sea state seemed to have worsened disproportionately to the wind. The boat was now yawing uncomfortably with each passing wave, and the large light-air paddle on the wind vane was whipping about so wildly that it was nudging the vane off course. I found myself climbing into the cockpit every ten minutes to adjust the vane back to a proper heading and keep the boat from riding up into the wind. On one of these trips, I lost my footing in the cabin when a big wave passed under the keel. I was thrown hard to port as soon as I stood up, as though I had picked a fight with a man twice my size who had insisted that I sit right back down. The back of my head slammed hard against the teak cabin top—hard enough that I was more startled to be awake and seemingly unhurt than by the blow itself. I felt the back of my head for blood and found only a knot, then rested a moment to ensure that I wasn’t going to black out. I made a mental note that I must be considerably more hardheaded than even my worst critics have imagined, and I thanked God for that.

  As sloppy and unseamanlike as my sailing was, under these conditions, I was elated to see that the Gypsy Moon was keeping a steady seven-knot pace and regularly spiking eight to nine knots. We were hauling ass. At this rate, I thought I might make Miami in six days.

  Yet as the slow rise of wind and seas continued unabated, it became clear that I should have reduced sail hours earlier. Before long, I decided that it would be imprudent, because of the unsteady motion of the boat, to go forward on deck at all unless it was absolutely necessary. Instead, from the security of the cockpit I slackened the mainsheet even further, to a lubberly and pitiful degree, in order to reduce the area of the mainsail exposed to the wind. This worked marvelously to steady the motion of the boat, but it also caused the jib—now obscured almost entirely by the main—to luff badly. I could hear the jib flapping like a tattered flag in a storm, but I was confident that it could take this abuse for a few hours until the wind slackened enough to allow a course change, when both sails would be needed once more. Again, my confidence was merely wishful thinking in disguise.

  Two days and 191 miles into the voyage I had begun in Cofresi, I was half-asleep in the pilot berth when I heard a loud and unusual noise on deck. Peering above the cabin top, I could see that the leeward jib sheet had gone slack. Investigating further, I saw that the running block for the jib sheet, which should have been upright and held fast by the taut line pulling like a rein on the sail, was dangling below the rub rail and banging against the hull. The jib had descended to a pitiful attitude at half-mast, like a worn-out sock falling down around a man’s ankle. Going forward, I looked up to see that the jib halyard had parted at the top of the mast, allowing the jib to collapse to the foredeck and slacking the sheets. I was unable to retrieve the halyard and, as a result, would be unable to hoist a headsail until I reached a port for repairs. Without a jib, I could no longer sail effectively to a port or anyplace else that was not downwind of my position.

  Whether it was laziness or wishful thinking that had kept me from going forward to reduce sail earlier in the day was now a moot point. My headsail had been reduced for me, and it was now my job to go and get it. I slipped on a safety harness, shackled myself to a jack line running fore and aft along the high side of the boat, and moved ahead in a crouch. The rise and fall of the boat had a familiar feel. Walking on deck in heavy weather was never as difficult to do as it was to imagine, and there were plenty of handholds along the way.

  When I reached the bow, I planted my backside on the foredeck just aft of the anchor locker and braced my feet against the port and starboard bow chocks. The jib was still dangling halfway up the forestay and flailing badly. As I pulled it down hand over hand, most of the sail and the sheets washed over the leeward rail, creating a parachute effect that made it impossible to do anything but let the sail go. It remained connected to the boat only by two lines trailing in the water. The sail and lines swimming beside the boat, beneath the waves, seemed not unlike a man overboard, fouled in the wreckage of a ship’s rigging, being pulled along and drowned. I recalled in that moment the king’s ransom I had paid a well-known sailmaker, in Annapolis, to stitch that jib together by hand for me. I hired him to make that sail for twice the price I would have paid a faceless seamstress in the discount lofts of Kowloon, because I knew this jib would be my go-to sail for offshore conditions. I wanted a sail that was as bulletproof as it could be, and I wanted to look the man in the eye who would make it so. None of that seemed to matter now.

  Watching this sail founder in the waves, I saw that the leech was battle-scarred and badly torn over two feet of its length from the flogging it had endured. The sail had survived no better than I in this test. I remembered the rigging knife in my pocket and considered for a moment simply cutting the sail and sheets loose to let all drift and sink in my wake, but something stopped me. That smacked of desperation and despair, and I wasn’t ready to embrace either. The sail was repairable and still worth it, and so was my boat. From a seat in the cockpit, I bent loose the bowline knot that attached one of the sheets to the clew of the jib and began to haul the wet sail back into the boat, hand over hand, like the net of a Gloucester fisherman. It was a long and tedious process, followed by an equally long and tedious process of getting the tattered jib stowed in a sail bag, but eventually the rescue of the jib was completed. There would be no burials at sea that day. All the while, the Gypsy Moon continued to pull for Cuba under mainsail alone, slightly diminished in speed but still racing into danger.

  Of the six hundred miles that separated me from Miami, four hundred passed through Old Bahama Channel—a navigational one-way street between the inhospitable shores of Cuba, to the south and west, and the impassable sand flats of the Bahama Banks, to the east and north. On the banks, ocean depths shoal rapidly in places from thousands of feet to just two or three, posing a risk of g
rounding to any boat that wanders there. With insufficient fuel to reach Miami under power and no effective means to beat upwind, if I kept my present heading I would soon pass a point of no return from which I would be unable to sail for any safe harbor outside of Cuba. For the time being, however, the gates of the Windward Passage were still open to me, south of my position. I was not yet in Cuban waters, and I could still head safely downwind in search of a repair port—if a repair port were to be found. That, it became clear, was very much a problem in this part of the world.

  The only available port south of my position for the next three hundred miles was Port-au-Prince, a city that had become a crumbling, cholera-infested hovel of refugee camps, rape, and rampant violence in the wake of the earthquake that had devastated Haiti two years before. The chart books, all of which were written before the earthquake, advised strongly against any landfall in Haiti because of crime and poor facilities. Port-au-Prince was also well off the heading of my newly revised intended destination. I imagined the malevolence that likely awaited me anywhere in Haiti as the captain of a well-stocked, hobbled sailboat in need of new rigging for a pleasure cruise back to the United States. I needed a better option.

  The island of Great Inagua was well within my fuel range, to the north, but the chart books warned that it was encircled by dangerous reefs. It offered only an open roadstead for an anchorage that was untenable in anything but a due-east wind. There was no marina or repair facility—only a government dock affected by a strong tidal surge, where boats were not welcome to linger. Motoring there could take days, against the northeasterly winds and swells. A landfall in the Turks and Caicos was out of the question, for the same reason.

  With a growing sense of defeat, I resolved to turn east and give back all the hard-won miles I had traveled in two days since leaving Cofresi. By going back, I thought, I would at least find a safe, navigable harbor and a place to gather my thoughts for the next step. As I jibed the boat to find my new heading, it was a sign of growing mental fatigue that I made no effort to ease the sheet as the boom, whipped like a reed by the rising wind, swung smartly across the deck and crashed to a stop.

  Headed east for the first time in two days, the Gypsy Moon reared up and bucked unwillingly against the trade winds and seas slamming into her bow. With the engine at full throttle, I could barely make any way. No sooner had I resolved to return to where I had started than it was clear that like it or not, I was going someplace I had never imagined.

  I looked again to Haiti. Cap Haitien on the northern coast was more renowned among sailors, but it was too far east, separated from my position by seventy-five miles of contrary wind and waves. I was much farther from Port-au-Prince—a hundred and seventy-five miles away—but it was due south of my position and a straight downwind shot, with the waves behind me. Cholera and crime be damned, that was the place where I knew I must go. In fewer than twelve hours, if all went well, I would be in the lee of Haiti’s northwestern point, where I could expect the wind and the seas to diminish considerably for the remaining hundred miles or so of the journey to Port-au-Prince. Perhaps there was a poor fisherman there, I thought, for whose family the Gypsy Moon would make a better gift than the well-loved children of a summer camp on the North Carolina coast.

  It was by then getting late in the day. I was very tired, fairly banged up, and having difficulty keeping the boat on an even keel through the troughs of large waves approaching just aft of her port beam. The port and starboard steering control lines for the wind vane had somehow slipped off the steering wheel and become a disorderly mess during the various tacks and jibes of the past hour. The port control line was supposed to wrap counterclockwise around the wheel guide (or was it clockwise?) and the starboard line in the opposite direction, leading through two pulleys stacked on the port cockpit coaming, then aft to the vane rudder on the transom. As I attempted again and again the seemingly simple task of reorganizing the steering control lines and resetting the vane, I was having no success in restoring the proper operation of the self-steering gear. Unable to discern my error, I sensed my resolve weakening as the first tinges of seasickness in twenty years of offshore sailing began to wash over me. This is how it must happen, I thought, when otherwise competent people, under the stress of deteriorating conditions and physical and mental fatigue, lose the ability to solve simple problems and start compounding their mistakes. I began to feel strangely frail and unsure of myself. One hears such stories, told of experienced mountain climbers who become disoriented and freeze to death, their bodies later discovered lying mere yards from safety. If this were the valley of the shadow of death, I thought, surely goodness and mercy were not following in my wake at the moment.

  Blast the damned self-steering, I finally decided. I had more than enough fuel to reach Port-au-Prince under power, and although I could make better time sailing in this wind, running the engine would keep the batteries topped up, the electronic autopilot whirring, and the running lights burning brightly as I moved slowly closer to shore amid hazardous shipping traffic during the night. I snapped on my harness and tether, grabbed a rat’s nest of sail ties in one hand, and made my way forward to lower the main. This would be a real rodeo, and I knew it.

  The mainsail dropped to the deck obediently enough, but flaking it down onto the boom and getting it secured in those conditions was like a calf-roping contest involving a very large and unhappy calf. My task was to use one arm to gather and tie down 207 square feet of flying mainsail into neat accordion folds on top of the boom while using the other to keep a choke hold on the boom as the boat rocked from side to side and rose and fell between six and ten feet with each passing wave. My conquest of the mainsail in these conditions restored my confidence, and I moved back to the cockpit with renewed resolve. I was ill and tired, but I had at last found a sustainable heading and a plan that appeared likely to succeed in getting me and my boat to safety. Then, in an instant, everything changed again.

  I don’t remember seeing the wave. It is difficult to estimate the size of these things, but the larger ones I had seen so far that afternoon rose well above my head as I stood upon a deck that was already three feet above the waterline. Most were ten feet high, I would say—hardly the stuff of sailing lore but plenty big enough to make life awkward aboard a thirty-two-foot boat, and a far sight larger than what the weatherman had promised. The smaller waves were six feet or so. No matter what the weather, though, every once in a while anomalous waves do come along. I’m not talking about apocalyptic events or legends of Hollywood fame. Some waves just happen to be a good bit larger than the mean, as any kid floating expectantly on a surfboard at the beach will tell you. I would recognize the passing of such waves on long watches at night. For hours on end the boat would keep a familiar rhythm of movement until, suddenly, one particular swell would lift dishes and cups out of their racks and send them hurtling like missiles to leeward. The wave would roll past just as quickly as it had come, and I would return the scattered tableware to its hidey-hole, where it would rest again undisturbed for hours or days thereafter.

  This wave was different, though how much so I cannot say, because it hit me from behind. I dare not guess its size. Given any license whatsoever, the Irishman in me would embroider it with an undeserved order of magnitude and malevolence. I can tell you only that I was facing forward, in the companionway, when I felt the weight of my 11,700-pound vessel being lifted upward and turned sideways, the way a child might lift a bath toy. This was followed by a brief interval during which the entire boat seemed to drop through the air, as if she had been rolled off a tall building. Then came a loud crash as the boat landed hard on her beam end in the trough of the wave, followed abruptly by an unnatural silence.

  Diesel engines are hard to kill. I know this from years of murderous effort. I have run them to within an inch of their lives on empty crankcases, clogged seawater intakes, dirty fuel filters, and fluky alternators. In the face of these depredations the diesel engine will succumb—never
suddenly but slowly—by throttling gradually downward to a begrudging, lingering end, like an aging prizefighter. On this day in the ocean somewhere between Cuba and Haiti, in a knockdown from an unseen wave, the engine of the Gypsy Moon was stopped like a man bludgeoned with a sledgehammer. There was not a cough or a rumble or a sputter. There was only a crash from the engine compartment, followed by the cessation of all noise and movement. I knew in that instant that the damage was grave and the prognosis grim.

  The Gypsy Moon’s engine had not “run out” of anything. It had plenty of fuel and oil and water. The considerable force of its revolving motion had been stopped, physically and abruptly, by an immovable object. I was in no condition to empty the cockpit lazarette and lower myself to the bilge for a close inspection of the tight spaces under the engine, but it didn’t matter. I knew that what had happened was exactly what a trusted mechanic on the Magothy River had told me could happen.

  Human nature being what it is, hope springs eternal in such moments. And so I climbed into the cockpit and pressed the ignition switch to express the polite request that the engine simply dust itself off and get back to work. The starter responded with a thin electric buzz and nothing more, as I had known it surely would. I was dead in the water, with no headsail and no engine, with no ability to sail anywhere but downwind, and with no serviceable repair port within three hundred miles downwind of my position.

  No longer underway, the boat began rolling badly in the swells, and I became violently, impressively ill. Succeeding involuntary spasms of projectile vomiting into the galley sink momentarily relieved the nausea, but these were followed by painful dry heaves. The unmistakable return of the pineapple juice I had drunk eight hours earlier was a complete surprise.

  It was at best a guess, but I surmised that the force of the engine falling sideways in the knockdown had sheared off or shifted the rear motor mounts. An engine runs by manner of revolution, and the only thing that could have stopped the motor so abruptly had to do so by stopping it from turning. This meant that the propeller shaft had been jammed sideways against the hull in the knockdown, and for that to occur the engine must have moved. A moving engine meant a broken engine, and a broken engine, at this age and place in the life of the Gypsy Moon, meant a worthless engine. From years of yacht ownership I have acquired an intuition that tells me when something has occurred that is going to cost an obscene amount of money. This was one of those times. My royal carriage had very abruptly become a pumpkin shard, and the wise warning of the mechanic floated to me over the ocean like the unheeded advice of a fairy godmother. The Gypsy Moon was now a drifting wreck, and I was a man in need of help.