The Muirín was Meg’s sanctuary. She had been sailing in her since she was a baby, strapped to a special seat at the helm, a seat that was now occupied by her baby brother Sean. The rolling and rocking of the boat was the most comforting feeling she knew and the salt air held the smell of home to her. Meg’s love of the water was as much a part of her as her love for her family, and she wanted to spend every minute she could on or near the water.
Meg’s whole family loved the water except Eileen, who was the only land lover of the family. She preferred to be on her bike, on a stage dancing, or doing just about any activity that she could on land. It wasn’t that Eileen hated the sea; she had grown up on it like they all had, but she just had too many things to do on land to waste time floating around on the water. Even so, Eileen had enough salt water in her blood that even she felt at ease while sailing on the Muirín.
Because it was her birthday, Meg was at the tiller and in control of the boat. In fact, as soon as Meg knew the difference between a close haul and a beam reach, Shay had allowed her to man the helm whether it was her birthday or not. All her mom would do during these trips would be to tell Meg how and where to navigate, but Meg knew what she was doing. With her own lifelong sailing experience and great instructors, Meg eventually knew as much as her mom and Nanny did about this body of water and didn’t need much help. She quickly learned to navigate around the sound in almost any wind and tidal condition.
They sailed across Fishers Island Sound and then followed the northern shore of the island past Chocomount Cove and West Harbor. The wind was stiff and the sailing was fast, but Meg handled the boat like an artist with a brush.
Meg felt completely alive at these moments. Hair blowing in the wind and the salty water misting in her face, it was as close to heaven as a girl could get, at least a girl with seafaring blood like Meg. She kept a close eye on the telltales, or tattle tales as she liked to call them, which were small pieces of fabric attached to the luff, or leading edge of the sail. Sailors used the telltales as indicators of how efficiently the wind moved over the sheet. If the green telltale towards the top was streaming and the red one at the bottom was fluttering, Meg knew she needed to tighten up the sheet to get better speed. She kept one hand on the tiller, the other on the lines that controlled the sheets, and her eyes on the course she needed to take.
Each part of the course is called a leg, and each leg has a landmark towards which the boat is steered. As they sailed across the sound, the wind was on the port, or left, side of the boat. When the wind is on that side it is called a beam reach. No matter which way a sailor is turned, port is always the left-hand side of the boat, looking forward to the bow and starboard is always the right. Meg’s first landmark was Chocomount Cove, which she kept in sight over the bow. She just had to tweak her course every now and again to avoid certain things she had been trained to look for on the surface of the water.
Shay had taught Meg to read the water like a book. Meg was always looking ahead for cat’s paw patches, where a light wind ripples the surface of the water and could cause her to lose speed. When the waves in front of the sailboat went from long and slow to short and fast, Meg knew that the seabed was closer to the surface of the water and that she had to avoid the shallow water. This is called wave shoaling. Meg knew to read these and other signs from the surface of the water to help her on the course she was sailing.
As she turned starboard off of the island’s shore, the wind was now directly behind the boat. This left Meg a couple of options on how to approach the next leg. She could turn the boat so that the wind was directly aft of the boat, and let out each sail as far as they could go on both sides so that they looked like a pair of wings. This is called butterflying. It was not her best option because a shift in the wind could cause one of the sails and its boom to violently swing in the opposite direction in an accidental jibe, which could snap the rigging, or worse, knock someone overboard. Shay and Meg only butterflied when they were alone and only with perfect wind. Meg decided instead to keep the wind on a broad reach, or just slanting to the rear of the Muirín, and start jibing towards the North and South Dumpling islands, her next landmark. It was a little slower but much safer.
North Dumpling Island was a local legend. It was owned by the famous inventor of the Segway, the two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter. He had turned an old lighthouse into his residence and the island into a small compound. When the government turned down an attempt by him to build a wind turbine to power the island, he jokingly seceded from United States and refers to his property as the Kingdom of North Dumpling. The eccentric inventor even had a replica of Stonehenge built on the northeastern corner of the island. Meg kept this in her sight while doing controlled jibes port and starboard of the wind.
The chain of islands the Murphy family lived around started in the sound and ended up in the ocean at the very popular Block Island. Fishers Island, where Nanny lived, was secluded and did not get the large number of visitors that Block Island, the next island up the east coast, received. Both islands were first charted in 1614 by Dutch explorer Adrian Block who named the larger island after himself. The smaller island, Nanny’s, was named either for Block’s First Mate Mr. Visscher or for the local Pequots who fished on this island they called Munnawtawkin, meaning place of observation. The Native American name was quite appropriate for Fishers Island, and the Murphy family spent a day every now and then walking around the island “observing” when they visited Nanny. Shay loved to show her kids where she grew up and Mark loved to gawk at the classic cars that traveled the island’s roads. There were not many cars on the island, but the few there were all seemed to be the most beautiful old cars from a bygone era.
Meg turned the boat port after passing the Dumplings and headed up the west coast. The wind was now in front of them which made the sailing a little more challenging. Every sailboat has a no-go zone when headed windward. This is a thirty-to-fifty-degree arc where the wind cannot fill the sails to produce forward motion. When Meg turned the boat into the wind they were in the no-go zone for just a moment, but the boat drifted into a payoff and the wind filled the sheets again.
A close haul is when the boat heads into the wind just slightly to one side of the no-go zone. This is when the telltales come in really handy. When beating into the wind, Meg paid close attention to the telltales and pulled the sheets in tightly to get the most efficient air movement, steering as closely to the no-go zone as possible without them luffing.
Race Rock Lighthouse was Meg’s next landmark. It was in the no-go zone, so she had to turn the boat back and forth into the wind in a zigzag motion called tacking. Meg kept the grey stones of the lighthouse in sight as she tacked back and forth towards the most challenging part of their trip: the dangerous channel between Race Point and the Lighthouse.
Race Rock Light, as it is called, is a nineteenth-century stone building that was constructed on a massive concrete and granite turret-like foundation built on top of a reef. With the help of divers who placed riprap on the underwater ledge to level it off above the water, the foundation itself took seven years to complete. The solid foundation was capped with a beautiful, story-and-a-half, solid stone house where the lighthouse keeper was quartered. The keeper’s house was connected to a tower that held the light. The lighthouse, in comparison to the foundation, took only nine months to complete, a fact which always amazed Meg. No matter how long it took to build, Race Rock Light was needed to guard boats from The Race, that fast and powerful current that moves in two directions, depending on the tide at the opening of Long Island Sound. The lighthouse was placed off Race Point because of the dangerous reef and rocks below the surface in the area of The Race that had sent many boats to a watery grave before the construction of the lighthouse.
The wind was blowing heavily and the Muirín was on a close haul headed to port. Meg could just make out Race Rock Light over the starboard bow when she heard something she had never before heard in her life.
4
An Old Woman on the Rocks
At first Meg thought the sound she heard was the wind, which can sometimes make a noise when whipping through the rigging of a boat. The sound she heard, however, was not coming from the lines on the Muirín. From somewhere in the distance she heard a high-pitched wail. It started at a very high pitch that slowly went down and back up in a mournful-sounding cry.
“Do you hear that?” Meg shouted to her family.
“It’s just the rigging singing, Sweet Pea,” said her father.
“Meg, you know that sound!” added her mother.
“No. It’s too loud and it’s not coming from our boat,” Meg said.
“It is probably coming from that big sloop moored near the shore on the port side,” Eileen said, pointing to a beautiful boat anchored just off of the island.
“No. It’s coming from the starboard side where there are no boats, and it sounds like a woman crying.”
“Meg, honey,” Shay said with a big smile, “sound travels very strangely on the water. It bounces off waves and buoys and other things and can trick a sailor into thinking it is coming from somewhere that it is not. It’s just the lines on that sloop vibrating with the wind.”
Meg’s father gave her a kind look and added, “Sounds like the rigging singing are what made old sailors come up with all sorts of tales of mermaids, sirens, and sea monsters when it was just their minds playing tricks on them.”
“I know what I am hearing, guys, and it is a woman crying!” Meg defiantly shot back.
“Yeah, like the big crash you heard last night that no one else heard,” teased Eileen. The family chuckled. Meg shot her sister a threatening look—she was always teasing her—and Eileen returned the glance by sticking her tongue out at Meg. Eileen wasn’t a bad big sister like the ones you see in the movies, but she never made things easy for Meg. She often taunted her and made sure Meg knew who the oldest child was. These two girls with such different hobbies rarely had anything to share with each other. Meg had no interest in dancing and sports, and Eileen had no interest in the sea. Perhaps because of their differences, they usually got along okay, even if it was because they were never in each other’s way. But Eileen still bugged Meg at times.
The sound Meg had heard was soon lost in the cacophony of the strong headwind whipping the sails and the waves crashing around them. She concentrated on tacking towards the historic landmark, closely watching the water in front of the boat. The tide was going out, and Meg knew that the huge amount of water emptying through The Race was helping the Muirín in its battle of forward motion against the heavy wind. With the tide going out, the headwind was actually a good thing to have at this particular leg. If the wind had been with them, both natural forces would combine to push the boat at top speed towards the underwater reef—the reef the lighthouse warded boats away from. Beating into the wind allowed Meg a little more time to execute the maneuvers she knew by heart to get the boat through the rarely used channel. Few boats and captains attempted to go between the point and the rock, but the Murphy girls never steered clear of a challenge.
As they neared Race Rock Light, Shay was the first to spot a woman sitting on the high granite wall that formed the foundation for the light house. “Look at that!” she said. “Some lady must have paddled out to the Race Rock Light.”
They all looked and saw a woman sitting on the sea wall. She had long, white hair, and was wearing a flowing, grey dress. Everything about her seemed drab and grey. The wind was blowing her hair and dress in all directions, and it looked as though she was combing her white locks. It was such a strange sight that the whole Murphy family was silent for a moment while they stared. The grey woman was bent over as if she was shielding herself from the wind, so they could not see her face.
“There’s no boat tied up to the pier,” Shay said, pointing. “It must be a kayaker.”
“She’s dressed kind of weird for a kayaker,” Mark said. “You know, ever since that ghost show on cable did an episode at the lighthouse, there have been all sorts of weirdos sneaking their way on the rock to ghost hunt.”
Meg knew what her father was talking about. One night a while back, she heard her father yell and it had woken her up. She wanted to know what he was yelling about, so she went downstairs to snoop. She found him on the edge of the couch talking to the TV. “No way!” he had yelled at the screen, which, to Meg’s surprise was in black and white. The image on the screen was a rocking chair in a corner of an attic that started rocking all by itself! Mark explained that the show was using night vision and that it was in the keeper’s house of Race Rock Light. He allowed Meg to stay up with him to watch the rest of the show because he said what they were watching was in their own back yard and of interest to her, but Meg always thought he had kept her with him because he was a little scared of the footage. At the time, Meg didn’t get what the big deal was; the show had probably rigged a fishing line or something to move the chair (it was on the Sci-Fi channel), but she happily stayed up and watched the rest of the show with her dad. That night came back to her as they sailed past the island.
The air around the Muirín seemed to be charged with electricity and the hair on Meg’s skin stood on end. She needed to concentrate on where she was going and how to get there; she could not just stop and stare at the sight of the strange woman. When she turned the boat port, into the channel, the wind changed and she was forced to alter her plan mid leg. She tweaked the tiller and pulled in the forward sheet tight while tacking with the aft sail. Meg was able to sneak a peek at the grey woman between tacks, and it was as if her vision had blurred. Although Meg saw the lighthouse and the seawall in perfect focus, the details of the woman’s lines were soft and had no definition for her. It was very strange.
Meg could tell her mother was also bothered by the sight of the woman. Shay never took her eyes off the woman as they passed, which showed just how much she trusted Meg to navigate this hazardous spot. This caused Meg to try even harder not to look at the grey woman and just pilot the boat.
The Coast Guard had automated the lighthouse in 1978 and made it off limits to boaters. Shay did what any good captain should do: She radioed in their sighting of the woman on the wall.
“Coast Guard Station, this is the Muirín. Over.”
“Hi, Shay. What’s up?” was the informal reply she received from the voice at the other end of the radio.
“We are just rounding Race Point and see a woman trespassing up on Race Rock Light.”
“Thanks, Shay. We’ll send out someone to investigate… By the way, could you ask Mark if I can swing by tomorrow and pick up a few lobsters for dinner? Over.” Mark smiled and nodded.
“He said ‘no problem,’ but radio orders cost extra. Over,” joked Shay, and they all had a laugh at their family’s close connection to the local Coast Guard guys.
Meg heard the wail again over the sound of the wind and she looked back to Race Rock as it grew smaller in the distance. The sight of the grey woman gave her goose bumps. Was she the one crying? Meg had steered the boat expertly through the channel in the heavy wind. They were beating against the wind, and Meg was forced to do some tight tacking, swiftly turning the tiller left and then right while trying not to lose momentum or control of the boat. Meg kept the dock of her grandmother’s house as her landmark and soon the Muirín was tied up at Nanny Sullivan’s on Wilderness Point.
5
The Isle of Youth
Nanny Sullivan’s house was tucked in the back corner of the property of an estate house on Wilderness Point. The small parcel of land had been a gift to her and her husband from one of the ‘old money’ families because Sean Sullivan landscaped their property and took care of their house when they were not on the island, and Kathleen had become very close with the family through teaching their children sailing every summer. It was an astoundingly generous gift and Kathleen and Sean never stopped thanking the family that had given it to them. The Sullivans built themselves a small c
ottage on the parcel. It was hidden behind a stand of trees but had a great view of the Atlantic Ocean.
Meg’s grandfather Sean had died before she was born and Nanny Sullivan lived in the beautiful cottage by herself. Shay always said that she hated the thought of her mother living all alone on the water, but Nanny would have it no other way; she had built the house by hand along with her husband and had raised Shay in it, so she would never leave.
The Sullivans called their house Tír na nÓg (pronounced teer na noog), after the Irish mythological Island of the Young. Legend has it that in the far off mists to the west of Ireland, a magical island exists where the fairies live and you never grow old. When the Sullivans first sailed to Fishers Island, they were so amazed at how much it looked like Ireland that Sean was convinced it had to be the legendary Tír na nÓg. This was one of the reasons Nanny so easily convinced him to move to the island.
The Sullivans had lived a charmed existence on Fishers Island from the moment they landed. Summers were filled with clam bakes and sunsets and, although they did not see much of each other during the day, they made up for it when the weather got cold. When the summer residents of Fishers Island left for their “regular” houses, the Sullivans looked forward to nights spent around the fire reading and telling each other stories.
It really was a magical place and they lived happily there, but even the spell of their own Tír na nÓg could not save Sean from the heart attack that stole him from his family one fateful day years past.
When Sean Sullivan passed away, Mark and Shay had just bought Sweet Haven and they invited Kathleen to live with them in Mystic. They were worried about her living by herself on an island, and Shay wanted her mother nearer to her. Kathleen politely refused. The cottage held too many dear memories to just abandon it. She also said that, according to the old stories, the moment you set foot off of Tír na nÓg, you would shrivel up and die, and she didn’t want to chance that happening to her.
The Pirate Princess: Return to the Emerald Isle Page 3
