Once Upon a Gypsy Moon

by Michael Hurley

  Annapolis Harbor may be crowded and the town may be overrun with tourists, but I have always enjoyed the convenience of its well-run water taxi service. Hailing a pontoon boat with a canopy to come alongside and take you from your anchored boat to the town dock, for the price of a few dollars, beats wrestling a dinghy onto the foredeck, inflating and launching it, and rowing it ashore—especially because the funds available for the repair of the Gypsy Moon had not included money for a suitable dinghy. Her last tender had disintegrated under the Bahamian sun two years earlier.

  But the comforts of the water taxi extend only to the shoreline. Before I knew it, I was less in need of a dinghy than of a good set of weathers as the rain intensified. Running and dodging barhoppers from one sidewalk awning to the next in the sudden downpour, I finally arrived at Fawcett Boat Supplies in hopes of finally replacing my dime-store vinyl rain gear with the latest technical offshore racing duds. Alas, Fawcett’s has always been extremely proud of their foul-weather gear, and I found the prices no different that night. I settled for some waterproof charts instead, and a waterproof tube in which to carry them. The captain would have to get wet.

  Feeling like a cat scolded with a garden hose, I arrived later that night, a sodden mess, at the door of Middleton Tavern. This is the very place where Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington came to dine not long after the Revolution, although with better clothing, I suspect. Even so, I had declared my own independence and lived through my own revolution of sorts, and I felt in some way a part of that honored tradition in that historic town that night.

  I had plans to meet two old friends—a college fraternity brother and his wife—at Middleton’s. He had been a groomsman in my wedding in 1981, and we had stayed in touch through the years. He’d followed me to the same law school in the Midwest, did exceptionally well there, and returned to the Washington, DC, office of a big, top-drawer law firm, where he worked long hours for his clients and reaped the rewards—as well as the stress—of life as a silk-stocking corporate lawyer. A few years younger than I, he had always been thin and in annoyingly good shape. I could not constrain my disbelief when he told me, at dinner, of his recent heart attack. This was a young man. But he was characteristically upbeat and well versed in the medical science that now required even more careful attention to diet and exercise. In that moment I had the palpable sense that I was leaving on this voyage not a moment too soon and perhaps a good deal later than I realized.

  We suppose that when pivotal moments in our lives finally arrive, they will be accompanied by the sound of trumpets on high or some outward epiphany of inner clarity. For me, nothing in my surroundings seemed different at all when I raised the anchor on that Sunday morning in August. My head was still in a fog of sleep when I began a voyage that would change my life forever.

  Starting an ocean voyage is like asking a pretty girl to dance. There is nervousness and apprehension at first. When leaving for any length of time or traveling any distance, there is inevitably a feeling, at the beginning, that it all must be a terribly foolish undertaking, which you suppose is the reason why none of your wiser friends is aboard. But as master and vessel take their turns in the dance, as one leads and another follows, the dancers acquire a reassuring rhythm, and man and boat settle into the voyage as one.

  There was barely a puff of wind, and within an hour of heading out of Annapolis, bound for the open ocean alone, I scarcely felt like Magellan. The flies were running circles around my boat. After a full day of sailing, I anchored in a cove still forty miles north of Hampton Roads, unable to catch any sleep under sail in the busy shipping lanes of the lower bay.

  There wasn’t a whisper of sound after I tucked the Gypsy Moon into her snug anchorage that first night. I was the only boat around but for a few crabbers coming and going far off in the distance. The lights in the windows of houses onshore gave off a soft glow, and I imagined that families inside were sitting down to dinner. I missed my own family. It is in just these still, calm moments when the naysayers of conscience seem to arrive. They disturbed my mind that night with rude criticism: “What are you doing here all alone? Do you notice that no other boat is anchored out in this godforsaken place tonight? Don’t you suppose there’s a reason for that? All the boats are in their slips, and their owners are with their families, getting ready to go to work tomorrow, where you should be. When are you going to grow up? Why must you always be looking over the horizon? Trust me, you’re no Magellan. Besides, it didn’t work out so well for Magellan, either. Or Columbus, for that matter. Give up this nonsense and put the boat into Norfolk or, better yet, put her up for sale and take up golf, like normal men your age. You’re going to regret this, mark my words…” And so on.

  The criticism got a good bit louder the following morning. I hit the snooze button and slept later than planned, but I was up like a rocket when I heard the noise of sails flogging in a sudden thunderstorm. Bolting out on deck in my skivvies, I felt the wind come in cool gusts from the southwest. It had caught a corner of the headsail stowed on the foredeck and had raised it halfway up the forestay. The sheets were snapping at me like a cat-o’-nine-tails as I tried to grab the flailing sail and tamp everything down on deck. When I finally won the battle and the storm had passed, I sat for a long moment in the cockpit. The naysayers returned to my thoughts. I knew why: I was coming to a point of decision. If I weighed anchor, I would be committing to the voyage offshore. I was scared already, and the storm hadn’t helped matters, but whenever I thought of turning back, an awful sadness—almost an ache—welled up in my gut. There was something about this voyage that already owned me. I had to go. The idea of turning back seemed like a psychic death, a defeat, a resignation to an unkind fate. I raised the sails, and soon the Gypsy Moon and I were off again.

  The Chesapeake Bay is a long, long thing. It was nightfall before I passed over the bridge-tunnel at Cape Charles and finally faced the ocean again. I had sailed many nights in the Atlantic before, but never alone, and never here. As I came through the shipping channel, the first difference I noticed was the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of the Gypsy Moon as she rode over the long swells rolling in from far out at sea.

  At the mouth of the bay several shipping lanes converge, and in the night sky the navigation lights of huge freighters scarcely reveal their true size until they pass abeam, silently and slowly, like giant elephants tiptoeing into the harbor. The Gypsy Moon was entitled to the same navigational privileges as any other sailing vessel, but not being so restricted in her ability to maneuver, she owed a duty of deference to these behemoths in the close quarters of a channel. I knew, too, that like a mouse under their feet, my little ship would make them nervous with any sudden, unexpected change of course. I did my best to keep a careful heading toward the first waypoint, well out to sea and down the coast near Virginia Beach.

  Very soon, it seemed, all the channel markers were behind me, and all that was left was the inky black of the night sky. The occasional crackle on the radio of the coast guard sector in Hampton Roads reminded me that I was not very far from where I’d started two days earlier. The sails were set for a gentle beam reach on a starboard tack, and the electronic autopilot whirred distractedly in short bursts, every few seconds, to keep the Gypsy Moon on course. I calculated the distance to my next marker as the lights onshore faded to starboard, set my bunk alarm for ten-minute intervals, and with the heel of the boat to port keeping me snug in the pilot berth, drifted off to what, over the next four days, would pass for sleep.

  Chapter 7

  Whistling in the Graveyard

  Diamond Shoals was my biggest worry. I don’t know why, exactly. I had never been there before. It marks an area just off Hatteras Island where, spreading south along the Eastern Seaboard, the ocean floor suddenly rises up in sandy shoals to ensnare and swallow the keels of passing ships. Of the many ghost stories about the banks, one from Diamond Shoals had stuck with me. It told of a young woman aboard a passenger freighter that had run aground at night
there in the nineteenth century. Terrified, she stood by the rail holding her infant child as the pounding surf rapidly broke the ship apart. One giant wave overtook them and, in an instant, swept the baby from her arms into the churning chaos of the night sea.

  It was night when I arrived at Diamond Shoals, and the ocean was what any writer would feel compelled to describe as eerily calm—eerie like a murderer’s smile. This is a place so long associated with violence and death that even in placidity, it cannot escape its legend.

  Legend or not, I could plainly see the hazard on the chart: an area of shallow water, now clearly marked by a buoy with a flashing red light that had replaced various earlier lightships and structures used to mark the shoals. Most of these had sunk or been swept away in storms over the years. It seems as if it should be child’s play to avoid the shoals in our GPS age, with a bright blinking light out in the darkness telling us where not to go. In fact, one sailor who read a newspaper account of my voyage asked me whether all that was needed to safely navigate the shoals was not simply to “go around it”—true, but not so simple.

  What makes Diamond Shoals and all of the Outer Banks the Graveyard of the Atlantic is the Gulf Stream. The stream comes close inshore as it passes the banks and collides with colder waters from New England. Moving at a constant speed of two to four knots, the stream kicks up big seas most of the time, and enormous seas whenever waves carried by the current are opposed by a north wind. In fair weather, the combination of the current and the waves impedes a sailing vessel from making headway to the south within the stream—like trying to go up a down escalator. In foul weather, the issue is not making headway, but surviving.

  There are two ways to avoid the Gulf Stream. One is to sail directly across it at something less than a right angle until you’re a hundred miles or so out into the open Atlantic, then turn south. That’s a fine plan if you’re headed to the West Indies and don’t need to cross the stream again to make port. If you’re headed anywhere on the East Coast, you will prefer to sail right down the coastline, inshore of the western edge of the stream. In most places from Maine to northern Florida, you’ll have anywhere from fifteen to forty miles of sea room in which to travel between the current of the stream and the shallows onshore. At Diamond Shoals, that margin thins to fewer than three miles in some places—a veritable bowling alley where rolling a gutter ball can be deadly.

  I didn’t fully understand all the foregoing particulars until my night alone on Diamond Shoals that August. I was happy to be cruising well out to sea, far from the storied dangers of the banks, with the wave-swept young woman ever in my mind’s eye. But as I came farther south from Virginia, I felt the boat making slower and slower progress. At first, I assumed the wind had died, but when it became apparent that it had not, I realized that I was being carried northward by the western wall of the Gulf Stream. I found it necessary to tack farther and farther inshore, until it seemed I could almost read by the light of the Diamond Shoals marker. I marveled at just how close to the shoals I had to come to escape the effects of the current. Here, I learned, is where the devil and Diamond Shoals must be given their due.

  Run aground on these banks at night in a storm, and help will be far from you. Your boat will lie on its side while the surf steadily pounds it to a wreck. That is why I love the open ocean: there is nothing to run into and no place to run aground. In fact, there are few things more frightening to a sailor in the dark than the sound of a clanging bell on a channel buoy or ocean waves hitting a beach, because both signal an unseen impending disaster. (Incomprehensibly, these are two of the “soothing” sounds programmed by the manufacturer into a clock radio that I own, along with thunderstorms and a babbling brook, presumably to help people sleep. I turn them on whenever I want to stay absolutely awake.)

  I had not made much distance by the following morning. Looking back over the starboard rail, I could see the now-abandoned platform of an old light station rising from the ocean, atop Diamond Shoals. Like a haunted house in the daytime, it looked less frightening—though perhaps only because I was sailing safely away from it.

  Chapter 8

  Landfall Beaufort

  Distances at sea can be deceiving. Although I was back in North Carolina waters, I was, on the morning after my passage around Diamond Shoals, still far from port. Beaufort, North Carolina, was where I planned to lay the Gypsy Moon over in a slip for what remained of hurricane season until she and I could be off again, by Thanksgiving.

  Diamond Shoals was not the only mudbank of concern in these parts. It was nightfall before I approached the northern end of Cape Lookout, which protects Beaufort from the sea. Unlike the nightmares told of Cape Hatteras, the stories I associate with Cape Lookout are more familiar to me and more ordinary. More than once have I sailed into the bight at Cape Lookout and enjoyed a peaceful summer afternoon with dozens of anchored boats and hordes of tourists who come by land to see the old checkered lighthouse that stands there. But I had never approached Cape Lookout from offshore.

  There would be no hazard for me at Cape Lookout, but I must confess I was unprepared to witness the wall of green water that I saw curling in one milelong wave after another, marching ashore on the ocean side of the cape. I mentioned it to friends later and was informed that Cape Lookout is prized by surfers. I can well understand why. From the Gypsy Moon’s position at sea, beyond the shoals, the waves seemed more like rolling fields than water. The “bigness” of that place in the ocean impressed me, and I should think I would almost rather be skirting Diamond Shoals than trying to round that cape in a storm. Thanks, though, to the wonders of modern weather forecasting, I had occasion to do neither.

  Upon spotting the outer markers of Beaufort channel from my position at sea, I felt a little like the Tin Man running through poppies to the Emerald City. It was seemingly just over the rainbow, but after hours of sailing, the shore remained elusively distant. By the slow application of wind to canvas, I eventually found the harbor, but not until nightfall.

  A kind voice over the radio at Town Creek Marina, in Beaufort, gave me careful directions through the serpentine channel, as I would be arriving in the dark—long after the marina staff had gone home. The channel is bordered in some areas by water not more than inches deep, and great care is needed to avoid running hard aground. Feeling every inch a Down Easter, I found my way to the fuel dock at Town Creek and came alongside for the night. By the next morning, I was back in my office in Raleigh, in the world of suits and ties, lawyers and judges, deadlines and discovery, and other duties too numerous to mention. But I was better for the voyage, and I planned to continue at the first opportunity that work and weather might permit.

  LATITUDE 34.72.64 N

  LONGITUDE 76.47.61 W

  BEAUFORT, NORTH CAROLINA

  Chapter 9

  A Homecoming

  There is a God. Of this I was sure when I was a child, and this I know to be true today. The knowledge of Him is written in our hearts. Our every breath, our every joy and sorrow, and every element of the physical world, from its otherwise inexplicable existence to its well-ordered symmetry, fairly shout His name. That we have ears with which to hear this sound and minds with which to conceive that it is God who speaks to us is yet a further call to belief. But this belief, however certain, brings us only to the edge of a vast sea. From there, all else we yearn to know of God lies hidden and awaiting our discovery, on a voyage that each of us must make through the forbidding latitudes of faith and doubt, history and myth, hope and despair.

  It is a strange journey that one begins by heading home, but that precisely describes the first leg of this voyage. The early spring of 2008, more than a year before this voyage began, was for me a time of emotional drift. It was then that I had brought the Gypsy Moon from North Carolina to Maryland at the reassuring invitation of family and old friends. My boat found a snug resting place in Annapolis Harbor. Those waters became an anchorage during the storms raging in my personal life at the time, and a dis
tant refuge to which I often escaped. But Maryland was no longer my home.

  From that northern offing, the voyage that is the subject of this memoir began. Thus it was that after sailing the first three hundred miles, I found myself in the fall of 2009 closer to home than when I’d started. Beaufort, North Carolina, where the Gypsy Moon came to rest after the first leg, is a mere day’s sail from the sheltered harbor of New Bern, near the mouth of the Neuse River. New Bern is the first place in North Carolina where I had chosen to live, in April 1992. How I got there is the story of another epic journey in the small contours of my own life.

  In 1984, at age twenty-six—newly minted by a Jesuit law school that had taught me more questions than answers—I struck out for Texas to find fortune and glory in the burgeoning litigation mills of Houston. Fortune, however modest by the standards of my peers, I did indeed find. But eight years into a legal career, with the birth of my second child, my notions of glory shifted, and the bloom fell off the Texas yellow rose.

  With two babies in my charge, I woke up one morning in Houston to the realization that I was far from family and out on the frontier of a place very different from the one I had known growing up. I longed for the smell of balsam and spruce; for fiery red maples on crisp fall days; for city sidewalks and stone cathedrals; for green mountains; for old neighborhoods filled with two- and three-story houses; and for cohesive communities with roots as deep as the American Revolution. All of that may sound a bit odd to some, but when you have been reared an arm’s length from taverns and meeting halls where the Founding Fathers knit together the fabric of our freedom, everywhere else has a temporary air. I felt the interloper in Texas. The scrub-brush savannahs and desolate coastlines just didn’t seem permanent to me.