Green Ghost, Blue Ocean

by Jennifer M. Smith

  CHAPTER 2

  Gale Force

  (September 2000)

  The wind increased and the hum of the water flying past the hull got ever louder. There were cheers and exclamations from the crew on deck as spray exploded over the rails and rushed astern. At times a wave curled over and boarded Green Ghost, swishing about the cockpit floor before draining back into the sea. A wave slapped the port quarter hard enough that a geyser of cold saltwater shot up through the cockpit drain. From my bunk, it sounded as if Kathleen and Tiro were on a carnival ride, laughing and swearing in astonishment. Then they got quieter and their remarks were less jovial and more urgent, which only increased my worries. What was going on?

  Suddenly Tiro opened the companionway doors. “Guys,” he said, “we’ve got to get some sail down. We need you on deck.” It was three a.m.

  I abandoned the mental hand-wringing I’d been doing, swung my legs over the settee, and sat there. Undo. I was tired and desperately cold. I felt sick. I hadn’t slept at all. Undo. I was shivering in whole-body shudders. I couldn’t bear the thought of going out there. I can’t, went through my mind, and I don’t want to followed in close succession. I wanted someone else to do it. But there were only the five of us. There was no one else to do it. And this was my boat, our boat. If anyone should be doing it, it should be me, it should be us.

  We donned our foul-weather gear and went on deck. The wind had reached gale force with a sustained speed of thirty-nine knots and gusts to forty-five. The seas had picked up too, and we crested on frothing white rollers fifteen feet high.

  Nik took the helm and started the engine. I put the spreader lights on so we could see what we were doing. The bright light was great for anyone handling lines or wresting-in sails, but it was hell on the helmsman. The blinding light created a sense of detachment. In the dark, with the lights off, you saw less detail, but you saw farther. Night vision allowed you to orient yourself in the larger setting of the boat and its position in the sea. But with the spreader lights on, Nik had only the instruments for orientation. This exacerbated his seasickness and soon he was repeatedly retching overboard, flinging himself astern to port or to starboard, whichever way the boat was rolling.

  We didn’t have the lines rigged for a third reef in the mainsail, so our aim was to take the mainsail down altogether and run before the wind with staysail only. We needed to head up, to point the bow into the screaming winds, to get the mainsail down and to get the boom secured in the gallows. As Nik tried to head up, I saw him steer the boat through the eye of the wind and set us on the opposite tack.

  “You’ve got to keep it into the wind for us!” I yelled at him.

  I watched the needle on the wind indicator. He tacked back, again over-steering. I stopped looking at the instruments and looked at Nik. It was then that I realized how sick he was. He was pale and green.

  “Jenn, take the helm!” he yelled as he flung himself aft. With his head over the stern he violently heaved. For weeks before the trip Nik had been concerned about being overcome by motion sickness. Now his worst fear was rocketing up through his gut and hurtling itself into the sea.

  It frightened me. I’d never seen him that sick before. I steered into the wind while the rest of the crew dropped the mainsail and secured the boom in the gallows. I returned us to our southerly course, running downwind with only the staysail deployed. Without the mainsail, we were rolling a little more, but we were under control.

  Nik went back to bed and I went below with him. Jordan offered to take the helm while Kathleen and Tiro donned warmer clothing before continuing their watch.

  I went forward to brace myself against the hanging lockers to peel off my heavy-weather gear. Tiro and Kathleen were standing below the companionway. Suddenly the boat lurched violently to starboard and I saw Kathleen flung six feet across the width of the cabin. She put her hand out as she went hurtling into the galley stove. She popped back up as the boat lurched to port. Tiro was standing behind her and she slumped into his arms. She was holding her head. I felt sure that she was passing out. I expected a bleeding forehead but, thankfully, there was no broken skin. She’d hit her hand and her head on the metal rim of the galley stove. It was her hand that was injured.

  “My hand! I think I’ve broken it,” she gasped.

  To add insult to injury, as she was thrown into the galley Kathleen had landed in the cat box that had slid there during the sail change. Her damp clothing was covered in clumping kitty litter.

  I felt a rising panic. Nik lay in the port-side berth, incapacitated by seasickness. He was clutching the stockpot and retching into it. Kathleen remained slumped in Tiro’s arms. Two down, three left, I thought to myself. Maybe I’d been reading too many disaster-at-sea books but I couldn’t stop thinking that this was how bad things happened. It’s rarely one terrible event where everybody gets done in at once; it’s usually a sequence of small accidents, little turning points that lead to total failure. At that moment, I looked up through the companionway to see Jordan at the helm, the only non-sailor among us. I cursed aloud. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Tiro helped Kathleen remove her gear and climb into the starboard bunk. She needed ice for her swelling hand and drugs for the pain. I dug some ice out of the freezer, put it in a Ziploc bag, and gave it to her. Then I set about finding the Tylenol No.3 with codeine. I grabbed the prescription medicine box and read a dozen labels before finding the right bottle. I gave Kathleen two pills and a glass of water. At that moment, the reading of fine print caught up to me and I rushed to vomit into the galley sink. Fortunately for me, this was only task-oriented seasickness. I recovered as soon as I went back on deck into the refreshing forty-knot breeze.

  Tiro crouched beside the port bunk to discuss storm tactics with Nik. Nik believed we had more control with some sail up and some speed. He knew that Green Ghost liked her stern to the wind. With the staysail alone in the current conditions we were not over-canvassed. Because we had plenty of sea room to run, there was no need to attempt to slow or stop the boat. Tiro agreed and went back on watch to spell Jordan off at the helm.

  “Jenn!” Nik yelled at me from his bunk. “I think we should call the Coast Guard!”

  “What?” I said, balking at the idea. “How would that change anything?” I was embarrassed at the thought of it. I didn’t want to be one of those pathetic uninformed rookies who brazenly bit off more than they could chew, then expected the Coast Guard to come to their rescue.

  “It’s not a call for help. It’s a call to give and receive information. We should let them know our position and our conditions and ask if them if they have further weather information. They might be able to tell us if conditions are predicted to deteriorate. If they are, we can plan accordingly.”

  Nik was right. Despite his seasickness he was still coming up with good ideas.

  “I can’t believe it’s come to this.” I continued to grumble some resistance as I turned on the radio.

  Normally a simple task, operating the radio became a difficult endeavour in the violent motion on board. To move around safely we all needed two hands to remain upright. Seeing that I was going to have to forfeit a handhold in order to hang onto the microphone, Jordan gripped the navigation table on either side of me, pinning me in place so that all I had to do was hold the mic, think and speak clearly.

  It was nearly five a.m. when, with a shaky and emotional voice, I called, “United States Coast Guard, United States Coast Guard, United States Coast Guard, this is the sailing vessel Green Ghost, Green Ghost.”

  The reply came back, “Sailing vessel Gringo, this is the United States Coast Guard, go ahead.”

  Gringo? We laughed with comic relief.

  “Negative, not Gringo. Green as in the colour, Green, and Ghost as in phantom. This is the sailing vessel Green Ghost,” I corrected him.

  I gave them our position and our heading as well as details of the people on board and their state of health. The Coast Guard read us the weat
her forecast including that cute little bit about the maximum twenty-five-knot wind speeds.

  “Bad forecast,” I complained into the mic. “It’s sustained near forty and gusting forty-five out here.”

  They suggested we set up a schedule with them and call them at the top of the hour every hour until conditions abated. Unlike us, they’d done this before and they knew a little hand-holding would go a long way.

  Eventually, Jordan went back to bed to salvage what was left of his off shift. Tiro and I stayed up until daylight. The radio schedule with the Coast Guard alleviated our distress and gave us a distraction as the hours passed.

  All seemed better in the light of day and we quit our schedule with the Coast Guard by nine a.m. Finally, Tiro and I got a chance to sleep when Kathleen got up and sat in the cockpit in the morning. While her one-handed status made it difficult for her to do much, she was still able to stand watch for other marine traffic.

  Conditions eased through the following day but this didn’t change anything for the captain. Nik remained horizontal for another twenty-four hours.

  “So I guess things are going to change for you,” Jordan said to me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re going to have to change your plans. Look at him,” he said, nodding at Nik comatose in the bunk with the stockpot of dried barf beside him.

  I looked at my husband lying there and wondered how Nik and I would ever be able to do long-distance voyages alone. Jordan’s comments were pointed. How could I think we would make it to Mexico, let alone cross the Pacific as we’d hoped? The scopolamine patch had not worked for Nik, nor had the Stugeron. Considering these were two of the most widely used anti-seasickness drugs among offshore sailors, his prospects weren’t looking very good. If Nik became that sick when we had no other crew on board, I would be left to sail the boat alone. I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  Jordan’s question was reasonable but I didn’t like it. This was a private matter. If I was going to talk to anyone about our plans changing, it was Nik, and I wasn’t going to have that discussion in front of three friends in forty-two feet of space. Our dream and its possible demise was not up for public scrutiny. It was something we would figure out together after the crew left the boat in San Francisco.

  On our fifth day at sea the captain returned to a vertical position. In gentle conditions, we set the spinnaker and enjoyed a beautiful downwind run through a warm and sunny afternoon. But the delightful conditions, as with all things at sea, were not to last.

  The winds began to build again toward the end of the week and naturally it was nightfall when wind speeds reached thirty knots. This time we were unfazed. With those few days of experience we’d fallen into a proactive routine. For this second round of rising winds we put the mainsail away to run with the genoa alone for the night.

  This proved to be a brilliant decision as the winds continued to build. On the two-to-six a.m. watch I was looking at gusts to forty-five knots again. It was remarkable how relaxed we were this second time around. The difference was that we were ready, and we had the right sail plan implemented before the worst of the weather hit. We were chuffed that we managed the second gale so readily, without calls to the Coast Guard, without any issues at all.

  The wind blew at gale force for twenty-four hours. We flew south with the genoa furled to the size of a tablecloth. After sundown on our sixth day, Nik spotted the light at Point Reyes. We were closing in on San Francisco.

  On our seventh day at sea, overwhelmed with a sense of achievement for getting through those dark and stormy nights and for managing the longest sustained gale-force conditions we’d ever experienced, we sailed under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and into our new life. It was then I realized it didn’t matter that we’d sold the car. I knew Green Ghost was all we needed to find our way forward from here.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Steamer Trunk with a Mast

  (before 1996)

  There were steamer trunks in the basement of my childhood home. They were the real deal, complete with tarnished brass knobby corners, hefty locks, and faded stickers from far-off places haphazardly slapped on all sides. I was fascinated by the trunks and often emptied their contents to sift through old letters, tarnished school awards, and 78 rpm vinyl records. They’d belonged to my grandad, from his days travelling the world as the china buyer for Eaton’s, once Canada’s largest department store. Or maybe they’d belonged to his brother, my great-uncle Don, an author and a bit of a playboy, who’d also travelled the world.

  I imagined the trunks perfectly packed for a journey. The idea of reducing your possessions down to the contents of a steamer trunk thrilled me – the delicious efficiency of it! I loved the thought of being nimble, of being ready to go. But to go where exactly, I didn’t know.

  At eighteen, feeling both adventurous and rebellious, I enrolled in Geology, Energy & Fuel Science at Lakehead University in northern Ontario, a thousand miles from home. Ever since my grade two teacher had taught us about the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, I’d wanted to be an archaeologist. But a high school aptitude test had strongly suggested a career in engineering for me. The results left me in a quandary. I wasn’t really sure what engineering was. After reading the description of a career in geological engineering, I decided the geology part sounded pretty good. It seemed the right combination of physical geography and science – both subjects I loved. And besides, the subject retained the air of a treasure hunt – there might still be some digging for gold.

  I followed my undergraduate studies with a master’s degree in geology at the University of Alberta, a farther thousand miles away. In 1987, halfway through my graduate degree, I took a summer job working for a junior mining company doing gold exploration near Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, not far from the Arctic Circle. There, in a tented bush camp on the icy shores of Happy Lake, I met my future husband, Alex Nikolajevich, a geology graduate from the University of Toronto. His friends in the camp called him Nik and since meeting him that summer, I’ve never called him anything else.

  Nik’s dark brown, almond-shaped eyes twinkled with mischief under his knitted Mongolian hat. His brunette hair and sun-browned skin, together with his sloping eyelids, carried a hint of Asian ancestry. In that setting, there on the tundra, there was something almost Inuit in his looks, but a mass of facial hair said otherwise.

  Nik had a physicality about him, a body-confident presence that seemed to shout: “Bring it on!” With his unruly hair, unshaven face, and rough bush clothes, he looked like he’d stepped from the pages of my favourite public school textbook, Breastplate and Buckskin: A Story of Exploration and Discovery in the Americas. But he was no illustration of a man: he was the real thing. At the day’s end, when he entered the camp kitchen for dinner, he didn’t merely step across the threshold – he burst in with a swirl of Arctic air, carried on a gust of potential. As I sat in the cozy cook-tent watching his dramatic entrance, my heart leapt. Whenever Nik arrived in a room, it felt like something exciting was about to happen. There was an immediate mutual attraction and once we’d admitted it to each other, it took him only three days to tell me he was going to marry me. I was a bit more cautious.

  We endured a long-distance romance between Edmonton and Toronto for a year while I completed my master’s degree and then the two of us set off to Australia to backpack with a working-holiday visa.

  In Sydney, we bought an old orange Toyota HiAce van that we affectionately dubbed The Tangerine Dream. Our job hunt began in Sydney and we continued our search in every major city on a route south and west. Three months later we landed contract jobs as drill geologists at an open-pit gold mine in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. After six months of work, we enjoyed another three months on the road completing our circumnavigation, venturing north up the Western Australian coastline and then east across the sunbaked top of the country. In Darwin, we exchanged engagement rings and planned our wedding for December 1990, several months after returning
to Canada.

  We married in Oakville, but settling in Ontario was not for Nik. He saw life in Toronto as a materialistic rat race and yearned for the more laid-back outdoorsy west coast. Immediately after our marriage, we moved to Vancouver, our new home.

  Little did I know of the faint flicker of a dream that Nik carried west in his heart. Although we had much in common, Nik had enjoyed some experiences in his youth that I’d never had – in particular, sailing. Long before we’d met, Nik had attended the Toronto Boat Show where he stood patient and shoeless in a long queue to view the beautiful Whitby 55, a self-sufficient cruising sailboat that could take you anywhere. The lovely Whitby fanned his sailing interests into a small flame, a pilot light to his heart’s desire.

  In our first year on the west coast, Nik tossed me an idea.

  “The Pacific’s on our doorstep,” he said. “We ought to take advantage of it. We should take sailing lessons.”

  It was a simple thing to say, a little idea pitched to me randomly one day, an idea that changed our lives.

  We set about establishing ourselves in Vancouver. In March 1991, we bought a modest raised ranch home in a family-oriented suburb in North Delta, an hour from downtown Vancouver.

  We took our first Canadian Yachting Association beginner level sailing course in the fall of that year. With thoughts of the Whitby in mind, we learned to sail on keeled boats, 30-footers, large enough to take a group of six students and complex enough for us to learn the ropes on a vessel with a mainsail, a foresail, and a spinnaker. Below decks I took in the sleeping berths, the head and shower, the icebox and the stove. The layout was efficiency perfected. I recognized it immediately – this was a steamer trunk with a mast.