SS Pacifica

by Coleinger, Ronnie

  While we were cleaning the fish we caught, five or six other small sailing vessels anchored near us. They all had the same idea that safety was in numbers. Maybe the fact that we were both wearing our pistols gave the others some sense that we needed to remain close together during the night. As we cooked our meals, one of the crewmembers from a nearby vessel came over to visit us in their dinghy. They asked if we could tell them where they could purchase supplies and food on the island. I explained that we had found a place on the Internet and intended to visit the store in the morning around eight o’clock and they could join us if they wished. The man said they would be waiting in their dinghy a few minutes before eight o’clock.

  While the man rowed his dinghy back towards his vessel, Becky asked why the man wanted to join us. I explained that I did not know why, but might have a better understanding after tomorrow. Becky giggled and said, “Maybe he just likes you.” I looked at her and said, “There is a lot of that going around.” As I turned away from her, I heard her giggling.

  We cooked our supper on the deck. The fish we caught were delicious. We usually melted a little of the fish fat in the cast iron skillet and then placed the fillet in. Tonight, we splurged and coated the skillet with canola oil and then dipped the fillets in flour. They turned out quite nice. With a little salt and pepper, we had fish fit for a king. Becky cooked another of the brownie mixes she had purchased over the camp stove. Using the store bought mixes saved a lot of work. The recipe that Kathryn had given me was wonderful, but difficult to prepare and required a lot of baking supplies. While the brownies cooled, the aroma of chocolate drifted over the other vessels had anchored near us. I warned Becky to keep the brownies out of sight or she would have our neighbors paying us another visit, this time with guns drawn demanding we hand over the chocolate.

  While I cleaned up the cooking utensils and returned the cooking equipment to the cabin, Becky turned on her laptop and checked our emails. In a couple minutes, she came up and joined me on the deck. She walked up to me, wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. Then she laid her head on my shoulder and said, “I have news from home to pass along to you. I must tell you that Charlie’s Father died three days ago.” I pulled her into my arms and let her cry. When she settled her emotions, she stepped back and said, “I had hoped we would be home in time to be with Charlie and Susanne in this difficult time, but that just didn’t work out. Susanne said in her email that he died much quicker than the doctors thought he would. His cancer was much more advanced than they first suspected.”

  I kissed Becky and said, “We should each write a note to Susanne and Charlie. I have a hundred things to tell them.” Becky said, “I will consider doing that, but right now I could not get the task done without crying a river of tears.” Becky sat down in a deck chair and listened to the sounds of the sea as it gently splashed against the hull of the vessels around us. The sound of laughing children from the nearby boats turned Becky’s thoughts to Charlie and the wonderful times she had spent with him.

  As the sun dipped down over the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, only the lights of the boats and town light the night, Becky came down into the cabin to see what I was doing. When she stepped behind me as I wrote an email to Susanne and Charlie, I could hear her sniffling and wiping her eyes behind me. When I finished the message, I typed Becky’s and my names on the bottom. Becky leaned down and kissed my cheek. Then she said, “Thank you for including me in your note. Your words have touched my heart.” After I insured that the screens were securely in place over the hatch doors to keep the bugs out, I crawled under the covers. Becky walked over, kneeled down beside me and then kissed me goodnight. I pulled back the covers and saw her smile as she slid under the covers with me. She said, “I need to sleep close to you tonight. My thoughts keep returning to Charlie and Susanne. Maybe your love and warmth will allow me to get some sleep.”

  When we woke in the morning, we quickly dressed and got ready for the day. We got the four backpacks out from the cabinet under my bed so we had ample capacity to carry the supplies we would purchase this morning. Becky also put the cloth shopping bags into the backpacks. They sometimes worked out well to carry bread or things that would crush in the tightly packed backpacks. The temperature was seventy-two degrees this morning and the sun was brightly shining. We realized that by late afternoon, the heat and high humidity would be suffocating.

  When we walked out onto the deck, we saw three dinghies waiting for us. Three of the people in the dinghies were young children. We had no idea why these people needed our company, but we decided to talk to them and find out where they were from and where they intended to visit. As we rowed the dinghies towards shore, we talked to the people who had joined us. We soon learned that they all needed supplies, but were concerned for their safety around the islands. Becky assured them that they were perfectly safe walking the main streets as long as they stayed in groups. Becky went on to explain that they only needed to use the same common sense they would use in any city in the United States.

  When Becky and I split up from them and entered the hotel to eat breakfast in the restaurant, we felt that our new friends seemed a little more relaxed. We still wondered about their excessive concern for their safety in the islands. Thousands of people visited the archipelago each day and managed just fine.

  When we finished an incredible buffet style breakfast at the hotel restaurant, we followed our map a few blocks to a food market and soon filled our list. Then we walked to a small general store and purchased batteries. By the time we left the store, we had spent over 2000 pesos.

  As we slowly walked back towards where we had tied up the dinghy, we realized that we had loaded the backpacks a little too heavy. Becky was breathing hard by the time we got the backpack off her shoulders and loaded. As we rowed the dinghy towards the Pacifica-Two, we realized that there were now a dozen or more small sailing vessels lined up in a row near where we had anchored. As we placed our backpacks on the swim platform and began carrying them up and down ladders to get them into the cabin, Becky said, “I wonder if it is us who should be more concerned for our safety. Everyone around us seems nervous and concerned over their own safety. Maybe we should also be concerned.” I opened the cabinet and handed Becky her pistol, holster and leg knife. She giggled but did put them on. I decided to follow her lead and buckled my pistol around my waist.

  Once we had the food and supplies securely stowed in the cabin, we began hanging the sails. Once they were up, we tied them to the mast and raised the anchors. I used the motors to take us out into deep water and then we set the sails. We sailed out of the bay and then turned east. We intended to sail around the east side of the Galapagos archipelago and then turn northwest for a couple days before turning north towards San Francisco. As we worked the math, it appeared that the trip home would take us around thirty-five days, if we had good sailing weather. We had ample food and supplies if we conserved, and we had almost full water jugs. One heavy rain midway on the way home would provide us with ample water for the trip home.

  Becky wanted to check her emails one last time before we lost cell phone service that would prevent our air card from giving us Internet access. When she came back up on deck, she spoke to me and said, “I have more news for you, however, this time the news is good. You have an email from Dawn. Stanley, you now have your first Grandchild.” The tears were again running down Becky’s cheeks, but with this cry, she was so excited she could hardly stand still as she talked to me. I hugged her and went down into the cabin to ready the email she had stored in my Dawn folder.

  When I returned to the deck, I sat down in the chair beside Becky; she patted my knee and said, “Do you feel older now that you are a Grandfather?” I chuckled and said, “I just realized how much I miss having children around.” Becky looked at me and said, “We could fix that.” I looked at her and said, “You must remember that I had a vasectomy. If you get pregnant, I will be very disappointed and may feed you to the sharks yo
u so dislike.” She punched me on the shoulder just hard enough to get my attention and said, “That is not what I meant. I was thinking about adopting a child. Not a baby, mind you, but an older child that needs some help making good decisions with their life.” I looked at Becky to discuss this revelation, but could not find words to speak. Her words had taken me by surprise. She let me think on the subject for a few moments and then said, “I will fix us some supper while you consider my words.”

  Chapter 42 – Home Again

  As the sun set that evening, we decided to stand watch in four-hour shifts. As I tacked to starboard, I saw the full moon move out from behind the last remaining cloud in the sky. The moon was beautiful and reflected off the water out ahead of the Pacifica-Two. The waves were running around three feet high with a stiff southwest wind. With the spinnaker flying, we were making good time. I had made coffee before coming up on deck and had filled my Stanley thermos with coffee. I clipped my lanyard to an eyelet in front of the bow hatch and sat down in my deck chair. I tied a rope to the handle of the thermos in case it decided to roll off the deck and visit Davey Jones’ Locker.

  As I sipped the hot coffee, I heard the sound of the first dolphin. Within minutes, the pod was swimming along with the Pacifica-Two. They jumped and played in the moonlight all around the hull. I could not see all of the dolphins, but the pod must have easily been five hundred to a thousand strong. I had never seen a super-pod before tonight, but it was sight to behold: if only they had visited us during the day when I could have gotten some video footage of them.

  By the time Becky relieved me on deck, the pod had moved on. When she settled in and I was certain her lanyard was connected, I headed off to bed. I dreamed of dolphins jumping over the deck of the Pacifica-Two while I watched from the comfort of my deck chair.

  When I woke, Becky was making coffee. I got myself up and began preparing for my shift. I stirred up some powered eggs and made toast. When I filled my plate, I headed up to the deck with food and my thermos in hand. When I sat down, I turned to my left and just about jumped out of my chair. I said, “Becky. BECKY, you need to join me on deck. You will not believe what has come to visit.” When she stuck her head up through the hatch and looked where I was pointing, I heard the air leave her lungs. There, swimming not over a football field away was the largest whale I had ever seen. It was simply huge. Its large eye was looking right at me; it was probably trying to decide if I was good to eat or not. Becky scurried back down into the cabin for the camera. When she returned, she began snapping pictures. Then she turned the camera to video and pressed the record button. Just then, the whale blew a few hundred gallons of water out its blowhole.

  We watched the whale, and it watched us for over an hour. When it finally had seen enough, it slowly sank down until it was out of sight. I remember hoping it did not surface again and capsize us. It really was large enough to do that. I got out the fish book and determined that we had seen a sperm whale. The book explained that the whales would rest on the surface for a while before diving to depths that would crush a human.

  Becky had only been in the cabin for a few minutes before she returned to the deck. She said, “Are you tapping your foot on the deck or banging something?” I had made no noises and asked her what she thought she had heard. She said, “Come down into the cabin and listen to this. Something is tapping on the hull.” When I got into the cabin, I sat down on the edge of my bed and listened. I heard the sound she was hearing. It was a clicking sound. I giggled and said, “I know the answer to your mystery. The sound is the clicking of the whale that was swimming with us. It is communicating with another whale.” Becky listened for a few minutes, giggled and then said, “Good night.” When I reached the deck, I shut the hatch door. The sun was shining into the cabin and would make it very difficult to sleep.

  On the tenth day out from Easter Island, we ran into rain. The wind switched and became westerly as we crossed ten degrees north latitude. Shortly after we corrected for the change in wind direction, the rain began. It never rained hard, but it came down continuously for the next three days. The temperature was very warm and with the added humidity from the rain, the air seemed suffocating. We kept the cabin closed up as much as possible. The hull and water in the ballast tanks seemed to remain at sea water temperature and that helped keep the cabin cooler, if we kept the hatch doors closed.

  On the fourteenth day out, the clouds finally cleared and the night air felt incredibly refreshing. We hoped the wind would shift around to a southerly direction, but that did not happen. We had to tack often to keep the sails from luffing, but we made good forward speed. Later that day, we turned and sailed northeast, hoping to get close enough to Guadalajara, Mexico to get cell phone service.

  On the afternoon of the fifteenth day, we finally got two bars of signal on my cell phone. Becky took the opportunity to make contact again with the adoption agency that was located a hundred miles or so south of our beach house. Becky was up and down the ladder between the cabin and the deck a dozen times as she and the director of the adoption agency worked the final paperwork to begin the adoption process. The agency had a twelve-year-old girl that was living with a foster family and needed a permanent home. The director had sent Becky pictures and information about the girl and was now trying to set up a time when we could all meet.

  Becky had given the woman our schedule and explained that we should be at our beach house in twenty days, weather permitting. The woman at the agency penciled in the tentative date on her calendar. Becky explained that we would make contact again by email as soon as we passed another large city where we could get cell phone service.

  As we turned and headed northwest towards home, the wind shifted just enough to allow us to set the spinnaker once again. When we were under way, we began inventorying our supplies and food. We were certain our supplies would not last another twenty days, but an inventory would tell the story. I stood the watch while Becky made a list of the items that we simply would need to stop and pick up. She realized that even if we ate fish for every meal, we still needed vegetables and fruits. We were also out of bread, peanut butter, pancake mix and many of the things that kept our bodies healthy. We decided to spend more time with the shopping list, but another stop obviously needed to take place. Neither of us understood how we had miscalculated our supplies. We originally thought we could make it to San Francisco with what he had in the galley.

  After an hour of research, we decided to stop at the city of Cabo San Lucas. It is located at the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula. The location of the marina we chose would allow us to drop anchor, get our supplies and get back out within one days time. It was only two-day’s travel to the marina, so we turned northeast and plotted our course on the maps. I put the destination coordinates for the harbor into my GPS so I could keep us on course.

  As we sailed, we carefully watched for pirates and any vessels that showed any interest in us. As it turned out, the only vessel that showed any interest was a large fishing vessel that just wanted to check out the funny looking submersible sailing vessel.

  As we sailed into the harbor at Cabo San Lucas, we dropped anchor and got the dinghy unpacked. Once we paddled to shore, we pulled the dinghy up on shore. A man was standing on the porch or a large home the length of a football field from the shore. He waved at us and we moved the dinghy up a little further onto the beach where the waves would not push it back out to the sea. We walked up to the house and talked the gentleman. The conversation was a little difficult since he spoke in broken Spanish and English. He soon understood that we needed food and supplies. We asked how to get to the nearest food store and he offered to take us to the store in his vehicle and bring us back for a small fee. We quickly agreed to the arrangement and loaded ourselves into his Mitsubishi SUV.

  When we returned to the dinghy with our four full backpacks and four cloth bags of groceries, we loaded the dinghy and paddled back to the Pacifica-Two. Once we got the groceries and dinghy
into the cabin, we untied the sails, raised the anchors and set the sails. The entire grocery shopping adventure had taken us a little over four hours.

  When we were out of the harbor, we put our pistols back on and turned due west. We would continue on this course for two hours and then slowly swing around to the north. As soon as Becky had put away the groceries, she checked the emails that had piled up. Becky answered the most important ones from the adoption agency and one from Susanne about a bank statement that needed payment. Becky had no more than sent the reply email to Susanne when we lost cell phone service.

  When Becky came up on the deck with me, she walked directly up to me and wrapped her arms around my waist. I hugged and said, “It is usually not good news when you come up from reading emails and then hug me this hard.” Becky looked into my eyes and said, “Take a deep breath and think good thoughts about being the Father of a thirteen year old girl.” I kissed her and said, “I truly hope that happens.” She said, “I have worked out the details and the foster mother and the child will come visit us within a day or two after our arrival at the beach house. The girl’s name is Sandra.”

  Needless to say, I was excited about meeting this child. It would be incredible if things worked out and we were the ones who would become her permanent guardians. I could not imagine a thirteen-year-old girl living without her birth parents to love and support her.