Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (20 page)

Susan and I
landed safely at Cofresi, near Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, on February 24, 2011. On this island paradise, the voyage that began in Annapolis in August 2009 came to its happy conclusion, and with it, the story that this memoir was written to tell. So it seems, my friend, that you and I have reached at last our long-awaited harbor. I trust you have found something of value in the voyage and will take well-earned satisfaction in this rest from your labors.

As I write these words in early November 2011, the hurricane season is nearly over. With its passing, a new story will unfold for the
Gypsy Moon
and her crew. When that story will begin, where and how far it will lead, and what may be written of it, I cannot say. But wherever the stars may take us, a story very different from the one you have just read is sure to follow—not about a search for love, happiness, or the perfect mahimahi, as all of these treasures are now safely in your keeping. What waits for the
Gypsy Moon
over the horizon are waters yet uncharted and tales yet untold.

Plainly speaking, there are two choices immediately ahead: one is west, the other east. One takes the Windward Passage across a thousand miles of ocean to Panama and the canal, then forty days and forty-five hundred miles nonstop to the Marquesas. The other takes the Thorny Path through each of the well-loved islands of the Caribbean and goes no farther.

The first path leads around the world to latitudes of the heart so unfamiliar to a boy from Baltimore that he may never truly find his way back. The other follows a shorter and more familiar route, closer to home and safer from the dangers of wild imagination. Along either course, a man’s only guiding light will be his heart, and from his heart alone will he find his heading.

I have learned enough on this voyage not to presume that I myself know, much less have the ability to tell others, what my heading will be. You and I will both know where the
Gypsy Moon
is bound when we see her wake, and no sooner. From whatever harbors may come, I hope to write of the wonders large and small as yet undiscovered there. Until that day, as every day, I ask for your prayers, and I give you mine.

Peace be with you, dear friend, and may you find in my words some sign of God’s peace.

 

 

 

 

 

In life there
are dreams, and there are delusions. Wisdom lies in the ability to tell the difference between the two.

In the spring of 2009, when I resolved to begin the voyage that I boasted (but scarcely believed) would take me from Annapolis to Nassau, I sought the advice of a man technically proficient in the ways of diesel engines and the labyrinthine system of pumps, pulleys, gears, filters, and conduits necessary to make them go. This fellow was renowned throughout Chesapeake Bay as something of an oracle. He could be trusted, I was assured by more than a few sailors, to tell the truth about the repairs necessary to keep a boat off the bottom, and to work faithfully (albeit not cheaply) to complete them. For that reason, among others, I probably should have listened more closely to what he had to say.

Knowing where I was bound, this mechanic disregarded my initial request that he complete merely a routine, seasonal change of the
Gypsy Moon
's oil and fuel filters and decided to look closer—close enough to see that her aging engine was in a worrisome state of disrepair. He scolded me that the boat wasn't safe to take out into the bay (where I had been sailing for the past year), much less on the ocean. Some of the repairs she needed most, in fact, were no longer even possible. I took his comments with the grain of salt reserved for advice given by those who stand to profit by it, but I also knew enough about the condition of the engine to recognize the ring of truth in what he said, even if I didn't care to hear it.

An inboard diesel engine is bolted at four corners onto reinforced f
ib
erglass struts that form a rectangular mounting platform on the inside of the hull, near the stern. From the rear of the engine the propeller shaft emerges and exits the hull through a series of fittings designed to allow the shaft to turn freely while keeping the ocean from entering the boat. Because the propeller shaft must be angled and aligned to strictly measured tolerances in order to exit the hull cleanly, the engine must likewise be mounted at a proper height, angle, and alignment. Unlike a car engine, which spends its life in a more or less fixed, horizontal plane, the engine in a sailboat might be tossed up, down, and sideways by the motion of the boat and the condition of the surrounding seas. A boat that has spent its whole life serving lunch while chasing puffy white clouds on protected waters will subject its engine to little stress. The
Gypsy Moon
was not such a boat, nor had she led such a life, at least since I had acquired her in 2003.

The mechanic informed me that the position of the engine had shifted and that the propeller shaft was badly out of alignment, causing vibration that threatened eventually to rattle everything loose and sever the heavy shaft, which was already damaged and had to be replaced. To make matters worse, the large bolts and nuts of each of the rear motor mounts had rusted so badly over thirty years of exposure to salt water, salt air, and the humidity of southern waters that they were now an immovable lump of corroded metal. Any attempt to loosen and adjust them would break the mounts and cause irreparable structural damage to the engine block. The forward motor mount on the starboard side could be adjusted, I was told, but the mechanic offered to attempt that repair only if I understood that this might not succeed in aligning the propeller shaft, making all his work for naught.

I recognized in the mechanic's defeated tone as he explained the possible repairs, the same impassivity expressed by the doctors caring for my mother when they offered surgery to install a pacemaker in her heart just a few days before she died. Of course we went with the pacemaker, and of course this was never going to save her, and of course we, her well-meaning children, regretted suffering her the distraction and discomfort of that further ordeal during what turned out to be her last days on Earth. The mechanic, skilled though he was, hesitated to say what we were both thinking: that after thirty years, the necessary repairs were no longer worth the cost, and that the time had finally come to put the
Gypsy Moon
out to the gentler pastures of protected harbors, closer to home.

Of course I told him to attempt the repair, and of course he succeeded in completing it, because that is what watermen do. Men of this fellow's ilk have been keeping old boats together with wire and sealing wax for generations, along with the families who are fed by them. Before he finished he found many other, lesser flaws, some of which were added to the list of repairs and prolonged his work. More than five months passed before he was done. For his efforts I was presented with a ponderous bill that likely exceeded the market value of the entire vessel, but I would have paid even more to be spared the loss of what the
Gypsy Moon
embodied for me at that time in my life.

When I came to meet with this man on the Magothy River in August 2009, my boat was floating high and proud beside the dock. What improvements and repairs he'd been able to perform were complete, and she was as ready as she would ever be for the journey that over the next two years and two thousand miles would become the story of this book. As he stood with me in the cockpit, I could see that in the end he, too, had been infected by the romance of what I planned to do. I could tell him nothing about the boat's engine or electronics that he did not already know, but when he tentatively asked about the operation of the wind vane, the characteristics of the boat under sail, and my intended ports of call, I could see the dream in his eyes. It is not wind or diesel or water but the engine of imagination that drives a man to begin a voyage, and that engine was running at full throttle. You could almost feel it in the air. It was not a matter of millimeters or angles or the metrics of mechanical propulsion anymore. What propelled the
Gypsy Moon
was a force far less powerful than what compelled her. She was compelled by a dream.

The dream was still alive when I landed at the airport in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, more than two years later, with plans to sail alone to Panama. It was January 6, 2012, almost a full year since the
Gypsy Moon
had arrived at Cofresi on a passage from the Turks and Caicos with my wife, Susan, as a slightly seasick but willing passenger. After signing a yearlong lease on a berth at Ocean World Marina, Susan and I had returned several times by air to visit the island while staying aboard the boat. We campaigned all across the country—from the ancient cobblestoned streets of the Zona Colonial in Santo Domingo, to the French bistros of Las Terrenas, to the hip seaside cabanas of Cabarete. We found these to be places of great beauty but also great sadness, where grinding poverty, limited opportunities for education, and petty official corruption consign so many people to the margins of society. Here in the Dominican Republic, as in so much of the Caribbean, the contented, smiling face presented to (mostly American) tourists at upscale resorts is largely a false one that conceals a darker and more desperate reality for the native population. Over the months when I visited the island, I began to feel an ugly sense of vanity in pursuing this rather expensive and pointless means of entertaining myself.

Were I a better man, or perhaps just a younger or more naïve one, I might have been compelled by these sympathies toward some heroic mission to improve the lot of native islanders, but I was not. On such matters I have become something of a cynic in my old age. I made a point of treating every man and woman I met with fairness and deference irrespective of his or her station in life, but beyond this I tried to check the uniquely American impulse to insist that everyone else in the world live as I do.

Over beers and
hamburguesas con queso
that night in Cofresi, in January 2012, I asked an American friend how he and his wife were enjoying living aboard their boat, which occupied the slip next to ours. It had been almost a year since they had arrived, having sold their house and most of what they owned. During that time they had provided invaluable help to Susan and me, while we were back in the States, by periodically running the
Gypsy Moon
's
engine and tending to her dock lines during a near-miss encounter with a hurricane. Now that I was about to cast off for Panama, a thousand miles away, it seemed the right time to ask some of the harder questions about just what it was we were all doing down there, so far from home.

The Dominican Republic is indeed a natural paradise, so it came as little surprise that my American friend and his wife had found happiness in their life aboard a boat in that foreign land. More surprising was my growing realization that this same contentment had somehow eluded me. The squalor and poverty I had passed on my way to the marina from the airport were still jarring. The opulence of the marina seemed only more garish and contrived by comparison. I was still very much a stranger in this place where my friends felt at home, even though I spoke the language and they did not. I feared that I had at last become an Ugly American, that loathsome creature incapable of long-term survival outside of tour buses, time-shares, and other escape pods of Western civilization.

For Susan, her passage of three days on the open sea to arrive in Cofresi had been a mildly unpleasant endurance contest, but living aboard the boat in a marina had proven to be little reward for the journey. The Spartan accommodations gave her a sore back and fitful sleep. Although she was a good sport and willing to endure these discomforts for my sake, I became less willing over time to ask her to do so. Yet still the dream of cruising the world that had first inspired the voyage persisted, and the thought of giving up that dream still represented a kind of psychic death that terrified me.

As I wrote in the preceding (and intended final) chapter of this book, I had two choices for the way ahead: one west, the other east. On that night in January 2012, drinking a beer with my American friend in Cofresi, I resolved to take the westward course.

My plan was suitably grandiose. I would leave the next morning and sail a thousand miles nonstop through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti to arrive in Panama in ten days. I would leave the boat there, returning five months later to transit the canal and cross forty-three hundred miles of the Pacific in forty days to reach the Marquesas. As time permitted, I would continue around the world, covering as much water as I possibly could to finish the voyage as quickly as I could. If I were careful in my planning, I thought, I could complete a circumnavigation by sailing only a couple of months out of each year. At worst, I would plant my flag in some suitably remote part of the South Pacific and declare a fitting end to my quest.

Susan did not plan to accompany me on this voyage, nor did I wish for her to suffer that hardship. But she understood my need to go and vowed to wait patiently for my return from each leg. That was the plan.

I awoke to cloudy, drizzly skies in Cofresi but a continued beneficent forecast of eleven-knot winds and one-to-two-foot seas. The wind was expected to diminish to less than five knots between Haiti and Jamaica, with the seas becoming nearly calm. I worried about how much fuel I would have to use in that section of the passage just to keep moving. My worries were unfounded, though for reasons I scarcely could have imagined. On the morning of January 7, I set sail.

My first launch was a false start, as it had been on that rainy Thanksgiving Eve in Beaufort two years earlier. I unwittingly provoked a minor incident with the Dominican Navy and immigration department over the suspicious nature of my sudden, unannounced departure for Panama aboard an old sailboat moving at five knots, which apparently fits someone's profile of a dangerous drug runner. When I was an hour west of Cofresi, barefoot and reaching for the Windward Passage, I was suddenly overtaken by a motorboat manned by five armed guards screaming in Spanish about a form I had failed to fill out. One came aboard and escorted me back to my old slip in the marina, where for the next hour every compartment of my boat was subjected to a thorough ransacking under the guise of an “inspection.” If I had been looking for a reason not to make the voyage that day, this would have been a good one. But after putting my vessel back in order and making encore farewells to my American friends, I paid the twenty-dollar departure tax I had foolishly overlooked and was permitted to leave.

The wind was not merely light but entirely absent that first morning and most of the afternoon. Both sails were limp, slapping haphazardly against the rigging as lumpy seas, rolling in from the northeast, gently rocked the boat from side to side. I rigged the wind vane with a large airfoil made to be lighter and more sensitive to gentle breezes, but there was not enough wind to hold a course. A frontal system that had been moving through the mountains of Hispaniola appeared to have stalled and was standing still. A misting rain fell. Nothing moved. I was loath to use the engine, knowing that even with a full tank and four spare cans of diesel lashed on deck, I had insufficient fuel to motor the entire distance to Panama. I needed to sail as much as I could, but I also needed to move. Looking at my watch and considering the schedule I had planned to follow to make eleven hundred miles in eleven days, I fired the engine and set the electronic autopilot for 314 degrees. The motor purred reassuringly as the
Gypsy Moon
settled into a six-knot pace on a following sea.

Several times that afternoon, when wavelets crested with foam would briefly appear, I stopped the engine and set the sails, only to lose speed and come to a standstill as the wind died. It was not until late in the day that the wind began to blow steadily from north of east. With this, the steering vane snapped to attention and went to work. I marveled once again at how effortlessly this device kept the boat on course, despite the unsteadying motion of following seas working against the rudder. I resolved someday soon to write a glowing letter to the manufacturer about the days, weeks, and hours of strenuous effort I had been spared by this astonishing contraption. I knew that when the time came for this device to mind the helm not for an hour or a day but for forty days and four thousand miles, across the Pacific, it would do so perfectly. But I also knew in that hour, perhaps for the first time in my life, that I never wanted that time to come.