Green Ghost, Blue Ocean

by Jennifer M. Smith

  We were slow learners, but after nine days in the Delta, Chris had educated us on the social norms of the cruising life. You don’t leave someone standing in their tender clinging to the toe rail alongside your boat. “You invite them in out of the sun,” he told us. “You offer them a drink.”

  “You’ll be asked for assistance and you’ll give it because sooner or later you’ll need assistance yourself,” he told us. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve never met the person before in your life.” Chris pointed out that from this point forward everyone we met would be a stranger, so it was up to us to make that stranger a friend. He told us we would find the cruising community fantastic, and that we would form bonds out there on the water that would last the rest of our lives. We will always remember him. He is the first new friend we made.

  We enjoyed the hot weather, wallowing lazily in the gentle current of the fresh water river. We jumped in and floated with the life rings, idle in the cooling water. We zipped about in the dinghy clad only in bathing suits, not minding the spray in the heat. We toured the sloughs and investigated the marinas. We ate ice cream. We got tanned.

  By the end of our week in the Delta we’d begun to see the beauty in the stand of eucalyptus trees that grew on the toolie beside our anchorage. We were charmed by the nightly symphony of frogs and crickets and bewitched by the resident owl gently hoo-hoo-hooing at dawn. The Delta had grown on us.

  After Chris’s tutelage, we’d learned that it was okay to dinghy up to another boat, introduce ourselves, and practically invite ourselves on board. With this knowledge, back in Sausalito we made more new friends. When a couple of American cruisers came by and invited us over to play board games one night we were not surprised, though we felt we had to decline as I was in the middle of making cinnamon buns and they were due to go into the oven exactly at the hour of invitation. “We’ll put our oven on and you can bake them at our place while we play,” they said. So we accepted their invitation and enjoyed a very social evening and freshly baked cinnamon buns when the gaming was done.

  After a month in the San Francisco Bay area we were starting to get the hang of the cruising life, but it was time for us to move on. It was time to head out on our own, harbour-hopping southbound down the California coast. We hoped to be in Mexico for Christmas.

  CHAPTER 5

  California Cruising

  (September – December 2000)

  I’d had some romantic notions of California cruising. I’d imagined we’d glide across the liquid surface of this remarkable planet, resting in each peaceful bay, wandering through every quaint harbour town on our route. In reality, by the day’s end, the only exploring we did was through binoculars. After a half-hearted look at the shoreline we’d retire below, too exhausted from sailing to do anything more. On our first day out of San Francisco, we made Half Moon Bay where we anchored for the night but didn’t go ashore. Next up was Santa Cruz and we didn’t set foot there either. We were boat-bound.

  It wasn’t that we didn’t want to get off the boat – it was just that we were cheap and lazy. Tying up to a dock at a marina costs money. Back then, it was US$20 or more for one night in a slip. Twenty dollars isn’t much, but anchoring is free and to the cost-conscious cruiser, free is always better. But there is a different cost to free. If you anchor out, the only way to get ashore is by dinghy.

  Green Ghost is a cutter rigged sloop, which means she has a single mast and two foresails: a genoa and a staysail. Our staysail had a self-tacking boom that took up a great deal of space on our foredeck, the very place to store a dinghy. If we’d purchased a tiny dinghy it might have fit on the bow. But we didn’t have a tiny dinghy – we had a huge one.

  Everything we’d read during the yearning years told us that when cruising, you needed a good dinghy. It was the cruising equivalent to a car and would be used to haul everything: groceries, laundry, water, fuel, bicycles, and people. Buy the biggest dinghy you can they said. So we did and we didn’t regret it.

  We loved our eleven-foot Avon inflatable with a hard-bottomed roll-up floor. The upside was that with a fifteen horsepower outboard, we could plane with four adults on board. The downside was that we had to partially deflate it to stow it on the foredeck every time we went to sea. There was some work involved before every dinghy launch and this frustrated Nik.

  When we pulled into an anchorage, in order to use our “car” we’d have to go through a twenty-minute routine of preparation. The dinghy had to be untied, pumped up, then hoisted off the deck using a halyard and the electric winch (windlass) on the bow. Once in the water, it was pulled aft to where the outboard engine was stowed on the stern rail. The outboard was then lowered onto the dinghy transom using another lift/winch set-up. Then the dinghy was kitted out with the gas tank, the fuel line, the seats, the oars, and the life jackets, then filled with any other items we wanted to take ashore. There was no way around it: launching the dinghy was a process. To give it a land-based perspective, it is like having to change a tire on your car every time you want to go for a drive. It was no wonder that after a long day on the water, when the anchor went down with the sun, when we were cold and tired and hungry, putting the dinghy in the water was the last thing we wanted to do.

  Unlike the quiet coves we’d come to love in B.C., the anchorages on the California coast were open roadsteads subject to the heaving Pacific. It was hard to relax when being at anchor felt so much like being at sea.

  We noticed some odd aches and pains developing. It was less from the sailing itself, the grinding of winches and the hauling up of sails, and more the result of being at sea and the continual hanging on tight in a seaway. And it wasn’t just exercise we got during the day; we flexed through the night as well. At times, I woke to find that my legs were swinging back and forth across the sheets with each swell that passed under the hull. My neck was stiff from gripping the pillow, my face fatigued from teeth-clenching, and my arms sore from supporting my body on its side, the way I’ve always liked to sleep. The free and easy life of the cruising sailor was proving to be a tense affair in ways we never expected.

  I was wound up about food as well. Since provisioning in Vancouver, where I’d gone wild filling Green Ghost with groceries, I’d been unable to cut back on my obsession for lockers filled with food. Each time I was in a grocery store I stocked up as if I was expecting a nuclear war. If I used one can of tomatoes I would feel compelled to buy four more cans, one as a replacement and three others, just in case. Nik didn’t think much of my squirrelling behaviour. Now that we were cruising, every item we bought had to be carried home on our backs.

  It wasn’t only me. Captain Nik was amassing his share of stuff too. The tendency to stockpile is a natural one for cruisers and it goes well beyond the pantry. Bits and bobs and scraps and spare parts are jammed into the lockers of cruising boats worldwide. It’s a problem we have. What if I need this? What if I run out of that? What if I can’t get another one? We think these thoughts quite desperately, as though our very lives might depend upon them, and they might. So we keep that last can of whatever it is, that last little bit of anything and we stuff it away in a special place, just in case. This leads to another odd little commonality among cruisers: we can’t find anything.

  A good offshore boat is designed for efficient use of space and Green Ghost has plenty of storage. Every inch of space is used to the utmost advantage. There is a place to put everything and if only everything was put in its place there wouldn’t be any trouble. But it took me a while to figure this out.

  Making a simple meal like spaghetti was like playing a game of Concentration. Meat was stored at the bottom of the freezer, the coldest spot. Cans (tomatoes) and other heavy items were stored in lockers down low, the better for stability. Glass items (tomato sauce) were either in a bin or on a shelf, but never on a shelf that did not have a lipped edge for fear they might fly out in a seaway. Dried goods (pasta and spices) were stored high to stay dry. Wine bottles were stuffed into cheap tube socks – bl
ack socks for red wine, white socks for white – and nestled into bins in the bilge.

  To keep it all straight, I made an Excel spreadsheet detailing the quantity and location of every grocery item I had on board. I could sort my list by locker or by food type and find what I was looking for fairly quickly. Soon, I had the food inventory under control.

  Underwear inventory was another thing. We needed a lot of underwear. This had nothing to do with moments of fear. It was just that laundry was another one of the chores that couldn’t be done with ease. With both water and power in limited supply, laundry was done ashore. We tended to put it off for weeks, but once we were out of clean undies, we had to step up to the task.

  Back in Vancouver when we’d first moved out of our house and onto Green Ghost I’d had a hard time adjusting to doing my laundry in a public laundromat. Getting it done was a biweekly affair that took up most of a Saturday morning. On one occasion a fellow live-aboard sailor came into the launderette while we were tediously pairing socks at the folding table.

  “You guys actually do your own laundry?” she asked. “Why don’t you drop it off? Get them to do it for you. It’s not that expensive.”

  “I don’t want some stranger handling my undies,” was my prissy reply.

  “Ha! My weekend is too precious,” she said. “They can sniff my undies for all I care!”

  I laughed out loud at her bawdy response, thinking how liberating it was to care less about things that didn’t matter. Right then and there I decided I had to be more like her. I had to lighten up.

  I’d become uninhibited about airing our dirty laundry, but the sheer volume of it was always daunting. Without a car, moving the mountain of laundry and our two folding bicycles ashore in the dinghy was a chore in itself. Three weeks of laundry barely fit on our bikes and on our backs. Like a couple of pack mules, we’d set out to find the nearest launderette. Getting it home again unsoiled and dry was no small task either.

  As we sailed south to Monterey and beyond we were schooled daily in the cruising life. Some things were the same; sleeping, eating, laundry, and taking the garbage out (ashore) were no different than the chores of a land-life, but the physical effort and the time required to complete them was.

  Our minds, on the other hand, were free. There were no more commuting stresses or long days at the office. We were detached from the rivalry for promotion, released from the tedium of meetings, and free from the pressures of work, but our heads were far from empty. Watching the weather had become a constant in our lives. Monitoring the various systems on the boat was ongoing. Planning our next move was discussed every night.

  “How long is your stay in California?” we were asked on shore when our Canadian accents were revealed in conversation with the locals.

  When we answered, “Well, that depends …” we usually ended up explaining our situation and giving details about our trip. This often led to curious looks and probing questions.

  “What does your husband do?” was a question that often came up when I was being addressed individually.

  It took me aback every time. I felt fully engaged as an equal partner in our new cruising life and I was always surprised to realize that that was not how I was seen by others.

  Most cruising sailors are retired, and as Chris had fairly pointed out, we looked young for the part. I understood that now. But it hadn’t occurred to me that I looked like I didn’t have a part at all. By leaving my high heels, business suits, and briefcase behind and donning deck shoes, shorts, and a backpack my image had been transformed. No longer a contributing member of society, in California, it was assumed I was not a contributor to much at all. Who I was or what I did had already vanished. My husband was obviously successful, and now he was the captain, that was something at least. But me? I was perceived as a tag-along, a person who was living a life provided by “what my husband does.” When I quit work to go cruising, it hadn’t occurred to me how quickly I’d be erased. I began to detect an increasing uncertainty in who I was even as I experienced an increasing certainty in what I was doing,

  We met other cruising sailors along the way. Their questions were much easier. Among the cruising fleet, everyone knew who you were. Obviously, you were a long-distance sailor and that counted. What you’d done in your life before cruising didn’t seem to matter one whit. Among cruisers, after answering the inevitable “What boat are you on?” and an introduction of first names, conversations continued on one of these three topics: your location – where had you come from and where were you going; the weather – how did it look; your boat – what was broken or about to break? On the last two topics, the skippers could talk for hours.

  From Monterey, we hoped for good weather to do our first overnighter with just the two of us on board. We planned to round Point Conception and make our way to the northern Channel Islands.

  Point Conception is the inflection between the north-south trending northern California coast and the east-west trending southern California coastline. This geographic turning point promises accelerated winds and rough seas. The Pilot Book for the area refers to Conception as the “Cape Horn of the Pacific,” and from all the reading we’d done, we’d developed a healthy respect for it.

  Eighteen hours out of Monterey we found ourselves on a windless sea in a heavy fog. The idea of motoring all day around the Point and crossing the busy shipping lanes in a dense fog was unappealing. We were tired and decided to rest in the next port, near San Luis Obispo.

  Port San Luis was alive with wildlife. Sitting on our deck at anchor was like having a front row seat at Marineland, only better. Humpback whales gracefully circled the anchorage, diving, surfacing, and snorting their salty breath into the air. Among them pelicans fell from the sky like bombs, surprising their underwater prey. Pacific white-sided dolphins capered about while the seals performed synchronized swimming routines. Chasing prey or running from it, they appeared dolphin-like as they repeatedly leaped in unison in elegant arcs above the surface. It was a remarkable place.

  And it was a good thing that it was remarkable because our plan to stop for a night became a week of waiting for bad weather to abate. The foggy flat calm that we’d chosen to forgo turned into a spell of wicked weather that we were not willing to test. We’d ducked into Port San Luis due to a lack of wind and we got stuck there because of too much of it. When we finally departed, the windless weather pattern was repeating itself. We ended up motoring around the dreaded Point Conception on flat seas – the very thing we’d wanted to avoid a week earlier.

  Despite the easy sea conditions, our night passage was not without drama, both wondrous and frightening. It was a moonless night and the slate black sky met the obsidian sea in a barely visible horizon line. Suddenly, bullets of light came streaking through the inky black water straight at our hull. Twinkling torpedoes bore down upon us. Just as we were thinking, My God, what is that? a sound – phhhhsssstttt! –burst into the air. A pod of dolphins exhaled loudly beside the cockpit. We nearly jumped out of our skin. The dolphins were enveloped in phosphorescence. Their whole bodies aglow, individually they were Pacific white-sided comets, together, an aurora borealis of the sea. Dolphin sightings were pure joy by day, but this nighttime visitation was even more wondrous. We crept forward and watched them in the pressure wave at the bow. Bathed in glittering light, they were like shooting stars showing us the way.

  Other lights were less wondrous and far more concerning. Shipping traffic received more serious attention. On my watch, I saw a freighter leave the coast behind us. The red light on her bow indicated she was presenting her port side to me. For a long while I could not tell if she was headed north up the coast or angling south in my direction. My depth perception was failing me. She was not yet on the radar screen, but as long as I could see the red port light, I knew I was on her port side and all was well. She would be crossing my stern and heading out to sea.

  All at once it became obvious that she was moving south when suddenly there were two lig
hts: red and green. That meant only one thing: we were directly in its path. The freighter had turned south and was bearing down upon us. My pulse rate increased as I stared down those lights, my heart beat quickly, red-green, red-green, red-green. When the bow of the behemoth crossed our stern and only the green starboard light of the freighter’s bow was visible, relief washed over me. I knew then there was no collision course – she would pass me on my port side. We were okay. That ship looked the size of an aircraft carrier, an immense wall of darkness a mile and a half off, blotting out the lights of the coastline as she passed.

  After a stop in each of the northern Channel Islands our plan was to sail south straight to the southern group to bypass the sea of humanity on the mainland, but the winds were against us and we were blown to Oxnard instead. Similarly, we left Oxnard for Catalina Island and found ourselves blown to Marina Del Rey, another unplanned stop. With each little hop that we made, each harbour we entered, each overnighter we did, we gained confidence. By San Diego, Nik and I had settled into a good routine.

  But our furry companion Tuzo was not settling in well at all. We had adopted her from the SPCA nine years earlier. She reluctantly took part in all our short coastal sailing trips, and when we moved aboard Green Ghost in Vancouver she moved with us. With no children to fuss over, we showered Tuzo with affection. Simply put, we loved her.

  We loved her, but we did not want to take her offshore. With a landfall in Australia in our sights we felt that a pet on board was not smart forward thinking. Quarantine issues could be problematic. We’d decided that she should remain in Vancouver but we’d been unable to find her a suitable home, so she came with us.

  At anchor, Tuzo was captive. At a dock, she was a flight risk. She was seasick every time we went to sea. On longer voyages she did get her sea legs, but we still felt it was a cruel life for her. The relentless swell, the cramped conditions, and never a chance for a walk – it all seemed very unfair. In San Diego, we made a phone call to a Vancouver friend who had expressed a slight interest earlier. We asked if she would consider taking Tuzo. She agreed and we had a new home for our cat.