Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (22 page)

The island of Great Inagua was well within my fuel range, to the north, but the chart books warned that it was encircled by dangerous reefs. It offered only an open roadstead for an anchorage that was untenable in anything but a due-east wind. There was no marina or repair facility—only a government dock affected by a strong tidal surge, where boats were not welcome to linger. Motoring there could take days, against the northeasterly winds and swells. A landfall in the Turks and Caicos was out of the question, for the same reason.

With a growing sense of defeat, I resolved to turn east and give back all the hard-won miles I had traveled in two days since leaving Cofresi. By going back, I thought, I would at least find a safe, navigable harbor and a place to gather my thoughts for the next step. As I jibed the boat to find my new heading, it was a sign of growing mental fatigue that I made no effort to ease the sheet as the boom, whipped like a reed by the rising wind, swung smartly across the deck and crashed to a stop.

Headed east for the first time in two days, the
Gypsy Moon
reared up and bucked unwillingly against the trade winds and seas slamming into her bow. With the engine at full throttle, I could barely make any way. No sooner had I resolved to return to where I had started than it was clear that like it or not, I was going someplace I had never imagined.

I looked again to Haiti. Cap Haitien on the northern coast was more renowned among sailors, but it was too far east, separated from my position by seventy-five miles of contrary wind and waves. I was much farther from Port-au-Prince—a hundred and seventy-five miles away—but it was due south of my position and a straight downwind shot, with the waves behind me. Cholera and crime be damned, that was the place where I knew I must go. In fewer than twelve hours, if all went well, I would be in the lee of Haiti's northwestern point, where I could expect the wind and the seas to diminish considerably for the remaining hundred miles or so of the journey to Port-au-Prince. Perhaps there was a poor fisherman there, I thought, for whose family the
Gypsy Moon
would make a better gift than the well-loved children of a summer camp on the North Carolina coast.

It was by then getting late in the day. I was very tired, fairly banged up, and having difficulty keeping the boat on an even keel through the troughs of large waves approaching just aft of her port beam. The port and starboard steering control lines for the wind vane had somehow slipped off the steering wheel and become a disorderly mess during the various tacks and jibes of the past hour. The port control line was supposed to wrap counterclockwise around the wheel guide (or was it clockwise?) and the starboard line in the opposite direction, leading through two pulleys stacked on the port cockpit coaming, then aft to the vane rudder on the transom. As I attempted again and again the seemingly simple task of reorganizing the steering control lines and resetting the vane, I was having no success in restoring the proper operation of the self-steering gear. Unable to discern my error, I sensed my resolve weakening as the first tinges of seasickness in twenty years of offshore sailing began to wash over me. This is how it must happen, I thought, when otherwise competent people, under the stress of deteriorating conditions and physical and mental fatigue, lose the ability to solve simple problems and start compounding their mistakes. I began to feel strangely frail and unsure of myself. One hears such stories, told of experienced mountain climbers who become disoriented and freeze to death, their bodies later discovered lying mere yards from safety. If this were the valley of the shadow of death, I thought, surely goodness and mercy were not following in my wake at the moment.

Blast the damned self-steering, I finally decided. I had more than enough fuel to reach Port-au-Prince under power, and although I could make better time sailing in this wind, running the engine would keep the batteries topped up, the electronic autopilot whirring, and the running lights burning brightly as I moved slowly closer to shore amid hazardous shipping traffic during the night. I snapped on my harness and tether, grabbed a rat's nest of sail ties in one hand, and made my way forward to lower the main. This would be a real rodeo, and I knew it.

The mainsail dropped to the deck obediently enough, but flaking it down onto the boom and getting it secured in those conditions was like a calf-roping contest involving a very large and unhappy calf. My task was to use one arm to gather and tie down 207 square feet of flying mainsail into neat accordion folds on top of the boom while using the other to keep a choke hold on the boom as the boat rocked from side to side and rose and fell between six and ten feet with each passing wave. My conquest of the mainsail in these conditions restored my confidence, and I moved back to the cockpit with renewed resolve. I was ill and tired, but I had at last found a sustainable heading and a plan that appeared likely to succeed in getting me and my boat to safety. Then, in an instant, everything changed again.

I don't remember seeing the wave. It is difficult to estimate the size of these things, but the larger ones I had seen so far that afternoon rose well above my head as I stood upon a deck that was already three feet above the waterline. Most were ten feet high, I would say—hardly the stuff of sailing lore but plenty big enough to make life awkward aboard a thirty-two-foot boat, and a far sight larger than what the weatherman had promised. The smaller waves were six feet or so. No matter what the weather, though, every once in a while anomalous waves do come along. I'm not talking about apocalyptic events or legends of Hollywood fame. Some waves just happen to be a good bit larger than the mean, as any kid floating expectantly on a surfboard at the beach will tell you. I would recognize the passing of such waves on long watches at night. For hours on end the boat would keep a familiar rhythm of movement until, suddenly, one particular swell would lift dishes and cups out of their racks and send them hurtling like missiles to leeward. The wave would roll past just as quickly as it had come, and I would return the scattered tableware to its hidey-hole, where it would rest again undisturbed for hours or days thereafter.

This wave was different, though how much so I cannot say, because it hit me from behind. I dare not guess its size. Given any license whatsoever, the Irishman in me would embroider it with an undeserved order of magnitude and malevolence. I can tell you only that I was facing forward, in the companionway, when I felt the weight of my 11,700-pound vessel being lifted upward and turned sideways, the way a child might lift a bath toy. This was followed by a brief interval during which the entire boat seemed to drop through the air, as if she had been rolled off a tall building. Then came a loud crash as the boat landed hard on her beam end in the trough of the wave, followed abruptly by an unnatural silence.

Diesel engines are hard to kill. I know this from years of murderous effort. I have run them to within an inch of their lives on empty crankcases, clogged seawater intakes, dirty fuel filters, and fluky alternators. In the face of these depredations the diesel engine will succumb—never suddenly but slowly—by throttling gradually downward to a begrudging, lingering end, like an aging prizefighter. On this day in the ocean somewhere between Cuba and Haiti, in a knockdown from an unseen wave, the engine of the
Gypsy Moon
was stopped like a man bludgeoned with a sledgehammer. There was not a cough or a rumble or a sputter. There was only a crash from the engine compartment, followed by the cessation of all noise and movement. I knew in that instant that the damage was grave and the prognosis grim.

The
Gypsy Moon
's
engine had not “run out” of anything. It had plenty of fuel and oil and water. The considerable force of its revolving motion had been stopped, physically and abruptly, by an immovable object. I was in no condition to empty the cockpit lazarette and lower myself to the bilge for a close inspection of the tight spaces under the engine, but it didn't matter. I knew that what
had
happened was exactly what a trusted mechanic on the Magothy River had told me
could
happen.

Human nature being what it is, hope springs eternal in such moments. And so I climbed into the cockpit and pressed the ignition switch to express the polite request that the engine simply dust itself off and get back to work. The starter responded with a thin electric buzz and nothing more, as I had known it surely would. I was dead in the water, with no headsail and no engine, with no ability to sail anywhere but downwind, and with no serviceable repair port within three hundred miles downwind of my position.

No longer underway, the boat began rolling badly in the swells, and I became violently, impressively ill. Succeeding involuntary spasms of projectile vomiting into the galley sink momentarily relieved the nausea, but these were followed by painful dry heaves. The unmistakable return of the pineapple juice I had drunk eight hours earlier was a complete surprise.

It was at best a guess, but I surmised that the force of the engine falling sideways in the knockdown had sheared off or shifted the rear motor mounts. An engine runs by manner of revolution, and the only thing that could have stopped the motor so abruptly had to do so by stopping it from turning. This meant that the propeller shaft had been jammed sideways against the hull in the knockdown, and for that to occur the engine must have moved. A moving engine meant a broken engine, and a broken engine, at this age and place in the life of the
Gypsy Moon
,
meant a worthless engine. From years of yacht ownership I have acquired an intuition that tells me when something has occurred that is going to cost an obscene amount of money. This was one of those times. My royal carriage had very abruptly become a pumpkin shard, and the wise warning of the mechanic floated to me over the ocean like the unheeded advice of a fairy godmother. The
Gypsy Moon
was now a drifting wreck, and I was a man in need of help.

I have carried an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon aboard the several oceangoing boats I have owned since 1987. In twenty-four years, I had never turned one on. I did that day.

If my confidence was warranted, the EPIRB would send a signal identifying my vessel and giving the coordinates of my position to a satellite monitored by a search and rescue center somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard, where the coast guard would with all deliberate speed determine whether my signal, among the dozens of false alarms and prank signals they receive every day, was genuine. The brilliant strobe light of the EPIRB confirmed its operation, and in the darkness of the cabin it appeared for a moment that an ambulance had arrived on the scene. Climbing the companionway steps only part of the way in order to lean into the cockpit, I used the enormous bag containing my torn jib to wedge the device in place, upright, where the antenna could transmit a clear signal into the night sky.

For a few minutes, I simply waited in the darkness for help. When I had last checked my position, I had been more than seventy miles from land and thus well out of VHF radio range. I also hadn't seen another ship for two days, so I hardly thought there was much point in a radio call. All the same, in a nod to proper seamanlike procedure, I decided to make a Pan Pan call just to be sure. “Pan Pan” is the radio code one step below “Mayday” in degree of urgency and is used to request assistance in moments of dangerous but non-life-threatening distress.

“Pan Pan, Pan Pan, Pan Pan. This is the sailing vessel
Gypsy Moon
,” I began my broadcast. I told the unseen listener, believing all the while that I was talking only to myself, about the loss of my jib halyard, the knockdown that had damaged my engine, and my resulting inability to make way in any direction but downwind. Only Jamaica and South America lay in my direct path, some three hundred and six hundred miles away, respectively.

To my surprise—no, my astonishment—the captain of a British-flagged freighter, the
Paramount Helsinki
, answered my call and, in a thick Eastern European accent, stated that he had already begun heading for my position. He was eight miles away. Sticking my head out into the cockpit, I surveyed the night horizon and saw nothing—not even a light. When he asked what assistance I needed, I said I wanted a tow to a repair port. There was a long silence. The captain came back on the radio to say, with an almost quaint politeness that I scarcely deserved, that he was a “
beeg
freighter” and could not effect a tow. He could rescue me, not my boat.

About this time, a young American voice from a vessel identifying itself only as US Warship 913 hailed me and asked for the coordinates of my position. He, too, could offer only a rescue, not a tow to a repair port. After some initial particulars, he pointedly asked whether I would agree to abandon ship. His question dumbfounded me. I had never heard of abandoning a ship unless it was sinking or on fire. But the officer's request helped me to understand the hard reality of my situation.

I was six hundred miles from American waters, floating in the ocean on a mortally wounded boat between two Third World countries, neither of which presented any realistic options for dockage or repairs. This was not a Florida towboat operator calling me on a Sunday afternoon to arrange for a trip back to a marina in Biscayne Bay. This was big-boy trouble I had gotten myself into. I made sure the radio was off while I vomited ferociously again.

It was time to take stock of my position. My thirty-year-old boat (thirty-three, to be exact), which leaked like a sieve from every port light and deck fitting and on a good day in a better economy might be worth $10,000, was likely damaged beyond her value. Even if she could be repaired, there was no competent repair facility within three hundred miles of my position. The boat was not only uninsured but uninsurable, due to her age and condition and the remote waters in which she was sailing. I was in no mood and no shape to float three hundred miles to Jamaica, where I planned to do God-knew-what, on a boat with (soon-to-be) dead batteries, no lights, no motor, and only one working sail. When I considered the additional cost of storing, repairing, and retrieving the boat intact from her current predicament, not to mention how smoothly a Jamaican engine replacement project would likely go, the dollar signs whirred in my imagination like a financial horror movie.