Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (7 page)

I arrived off
Masonboro Inlet on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, happy to be alive and marveling again at how the slow accretion of wind and time can move an 11,700-pound vessel such a distance so easily. I was anxious to make the docks at Southport, some twenty-five miles away, because of the difficulty in navigating the shallows of Snow’s Cut in the Intracoastal Waterway at night.

One has to go through the waterway on the route from Masonboro Inlet to Southport to avoid Frying Pan Shoals off Bald Head Island. Bald Head is the thorn-shaped southeastern tip of North Carolina that juts out into the Atlantic. The seas heap up here where the ocean rises from deep water onto the shoals.

The shoals extend far out to sea, near the western edge of the Gulf Stream. To sail south, offshore, and get safely around them, you would have to enter the Gulf Stream and fight your way against a current pushing north at three knots. It is easier and safer to motor the shorter distance down the Intracoastal Waterway and come out at Southport, where the offshore route all the way to Florida is deep water well west of the stream.

I had made the inland passage through Snow’s Cut a half dozen times at night by necessity. Each one was as nerve-wracking as the last, but one in particular stood out in my memory.

It was January 2007, and three men had sailed with me to take the
Gypsy Moon
from New Bern to Bald Head Island. After a windless night on the offshore run from Beaufort, a brisk southwest breeze arrived at midmorning off Masonboro Inlet, and we could not resist riding it well offshore, just to let the boat stretch her legs. That worthwhile diversion cost us daylight, however, and we found ourselves crawling through Snow’s Cut after dark.

The cut is wide and deep where it passes under the highway bridge, but farther south, in the Cape Fear River, the distances between markers in the channel grow longer, and the water outside the channel shoals to inches thin. To avoid running aground, I had one man on the bow using a spotlight to find the next channel marker, one man on the helm, and one man below, calling out depths from the chart. I was watching the depth sounder and the three of them. The helmsman was following a compass course based on the chart when depth soundings that had been steadily above twenty-two feet started to fall. The boat needed close to five feet of water to float. The channel depth was not uniform, though, and there were some places within the channel proper that had shoaled. It was not immediately clear that we were off course.

As the number on the depth sounder continued to drop and passed sixteen, I asked the chart man what our depth should be at that part of the channel. “Twenty-two,” he shouted back. Fearing we were only a few seconds away from knee-deep mud, I grabbed the wheel from the helmsman and whirled the boat around 180 degrees to retrace the course over which we had just come, back to safe water. At that moment, a calm voice clearly spoke over channel 16 on the ship’s radio.

The voice was addressing the crew of a boat heading through Snow’s Cut between markers that he numbered correctly, for our location, and he called for us to answer. He did not identify himself or ask us, as the coast guard would certainly do, to switch to a working channel. He simply instructed us what compass course to steer from our present location to return to the channel, and where to steer from there. His instructions were dead-on.

When he signed off without further ado, I looked around the water, expecting to spot a shrimper or a workboat at anchor within visual range whose skipper had observed our error and called us on the radio to put us back on our way. The hair on the back of my neck stood up when I realized there was no one on the water that night but us.

I called for the man on the radio to thank him for his assistance, but no one answered. I looked again, far out into the river that leads into Wilmington, and, again, saw not a soul.

The coast guard trains all its radiomen in the same seamanlike elocution. They will hail only—never talk—on channel 16 before insisting that you switch to a working channel, 22 Alpha. This fellow was not coast guard, nor was he anywhere to be seen. We never heard from him again.

As time went by, I surmised that the events of September 11, 2001, had brought many unseen changes to our nation’s borders, including the need to know who and what is riding around our coastlines. Perhaps nowhere was the need for these changes more acutely felt than close to Southport, next door to the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant. I could be wrong about that. What I do know is that the lone wolf who helped us that night had some awfully big eyes, the better to see us with.

On that blessedly
fair Thanksgiving Day in 2009, I made good time coming down the waterway and was well past Snow’s Cut, nearly to the docks at Southport Marina, when the light started to fade. I arrived there after hours, tired and feeling more than a little sorry for myself for being alone on this sand spit of the Carolina coast with nothing much to eat on Thanksgiving.

The marina staff had all gone home, so I brought the
Gypsy Moon
alongside the fuel dock. I planned to spend the night there and get my regular slip assignment in the morning. No sooner had I landed than I had to rodeo the boat around to a new location, because the space close to the fuel pumps had no electrical power—a fire precaution. Finally, I got the old girl all tucked in among some pretty fancy company, including a rather large and well-loved cabin cruiser directly abeam. It felt odd that my boat was no longer moving, as I certainly still was.

After shaking off as much of the sea as I cared to, I set about the doleful task of inspecting the candidates for Thanksgiving dinner from the ship’s larder. A lovely can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli won the prize. With opener in hand, I was just about to do the honors when a knock came on the hull.

I stepped outside and saw a woman standing on the dock beside my port lifelines. She asked me if I would care to have some of the Thanksgiving dinner she had prepared for herself and her husband aboard the shiny cabin cruiser next to me. More than a little astonished and wondering whether she might be the vanguard of an intervention team, I managed an enthusiastic acceptance. I returned Monsieur Boyardee safely to his locker, and my serendipitous host returned with a steaming plate of sliced turkey, homemade gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, dinner rolls, and a side of pumpkin pie. Had I not saved one hand for the ship, I likely would have fallen overboard in my amazement.

The woman on the dock grinned at my excitement. I insisted that she let me snap her picture with plate in hand, and she snapped one of me with the unopened can of ravioli. She and her husband were retired and cruising the waterway between Georgia and New Jersey. She asked me where I was bound. When I said the words “Nassau” and “solo,” I got the by-then expected reaction of admiration mixed with envy and concern. In truth, though, I was the envious one.

The woman left me to my feast. I knew she would be returning to a well-fed and well-loved man who would share with her across a pillow, that night, the details of the day—including the story of the strange ravioli lover on the boat next door—as they drifted off to sleep together. I wanted that. I wanted that more than the meal I was starving to eat. I wanted that more than anything.

Late that night, after dishes had been returned with profuse thanks to my hosts, I opened my laptop and went online. I had a mission in mind.

It had been almost a year and a half since I’d ventured into the online dating world. My earlier travels in this strange land of ritualized head-hunting had run mostly in circles, but the road I was on was clearly a bridge to nowhere. My profile wistfully described a “sailor seeking pearl.” I paused awhile to consider whether I really wanted to take this journey in addition to the one I had just begun, but the answer had already come to me in the middle of a delicious meal. For my safe passage, for that meal, and for all that it signified to me, I truly gave thanks. Then I hit the button marked “send” and lay down for a deep and dreamless sleep.

What I have
so long disliked about being a Yankee sailor is the cold. Not just the cold, but the cloying frigidity of cold air mixed with the mist and rain of brooding, sunless days. I shudder as I write these words. Lo these many years I have spent in the South, yet I have not escaped it. Well do I recall winter mornings even on the gulf coast of Texas that warranted every stitch of my wool socks and every inch of my leather boots—the same armor I once wore atop leafless Tennessee hills in pursuit of phantom deer. (The deer were much warmer than I, and therefore content to wait in stillness, unseen, until the oddly shivering archer departed their woods for easier quarry at the nearest hamburger stand.) Ever thus has been the source of my attraction to distant tropic islands. Ever thus has been my longing and my aim.

The cold is worse for sailors, because the lower temperatures cling to water and linger there well after the rest of nature has given up the grudge of winter. Yet a man’s addiction to boats and the sea usually cannot abide the slow arrival of spring, and so the hapless sailor returns to open the shuttered cabin of his sleeping vessel and ask her again to dance, to relieve his wintering despair. When he does so and leads her out onto the steps of a chilled morning, in a harbor empty of other vessels, the scene unfolds with all the awkwardness of a couple arriving at a party that no one else has chosen to attend. Still, the dance goes on, however briefly and regrettably in the freezing rain, until the captain—his haste by then to all apparent—leads his ever-willing partner back to her berth to await a warmer afternoon.

So was the scene in December 2009 when I arrived at the marina in Southport, North Carolina, with the intention of departing for the open sea. It was, naturally, a gray day with a fresh breeze a bit too cool for comfort. The sky seemed low enough to touch and filled with what would surely become a lingering rain. It was, in other words, another signature beginning in the logbook of the
Gypsy Moon
.

As usual, more than a few logistical contortions preceded my departure. A recalcitrant opposing counsel, renewing for a fourth and unsuccessful time a motion to compel the production of some privileged and impertinent document, had scheduled a hearing with the minimum of notice, requiring a postponement of the voyage. I arrived at the courthouse to argue the point, then continued to the nearest telephone booth for a costume change from corporate lawyer to vagabond sailor. Once matters were finally in order, I came by rented car to Southport with plans to leave aboard the
Gypsy Moon
, bound for Nassau.

There is a
by-now familiar dynamic in my conversations with strangers onshore while preparing to leave on a voyage. A sailor planning to go somewhere beyond the outer channel marker is easy to spot amid the general lethargy of life in a marina, so questions inevitably arise about where he is bound. When the answer entails a long voyage on the open ocean, in the listener’s eyes I see quick flashes of worry as images of disaster flicker in the imagination. Such concerns are often obliquely expressed for fear of giving offense. To my stated intention to take the
Gypsy Moon
to sea on her first voyage to the Bahamas, in 2007, one dockmaster’s only reply was, “In that boat?”

To be fair, the
Gypsy Moon
’s length, at 32 feet 4 inches overall, has become something of an anomaly among oceangoing vessels in the same way that the 5-foot 10-inch, 165-pound halfback has become an anomaly in professional football. It’s not that the average man can’t play the game well. It’s just that fans are more entertained by seeing the game played by men twice his size.

It was not always so. In an old photo album I have the picture of an old girlfriend standing at the rail of the harbor ferry in Annapolis in 1975. Behind her one can clearly see an assortment of boats in the harbor. The girl having long been forgotten, the first thing I notice in looking at that picture is the wide array of sailboats moored in the same place where today you would find a great predominance of powerboats—further proof, as if any were needed, of the continued general trundling along of things to hell in a handbasket. The second thing I notice is that the largest of the sailboats in the picture appears to be about twenty-eight feet long, among many smaller vessels. Today, most boatbuilders don’t make a sailboat smaller than forty feet long. Americans’ taste in boats has changed in ways no different than their taste in homes, which have tripled in average size since the 1950s, just as the size of the average American family has shrunk by similar proportions.

Yet there are naysayers to every trend, and I am happily among those who still sing the virtues of the simpler, smaller boat. Two of my heroes are Lin and Larry Pardey, famous for their many round-the-world voyages aboard engineless sailboats smaller than thirty feet long overall. I had occasion to step aboard their twenty-eight-foot cutter,
Serrafyn
, when she was on display one year at the Annapolis boat show. Her head (toilet) was a simple manual system that the Pardeys indelicately described as “bucket and chuck it.” With no engine, she had sailed around the world—twice. In tight harbors where sailing was impractical or when winds were light, the Pardeys used a single long oar passed through chocks on the stern railing to scull the boat forward.

Like
Serrafyn
, the
Gypsy Moon
will never spend a day in port waiting for the arrival of a new watermaker pump, radar scanner, single-sideband transceiver, generator valve spring, electric-winch motor, or new ideas on how to make a refrigeration system three degrees cooler than lukewarm. She is outfitted with none of these extravagances. She is free not only from their cost and complication, but also from slavery to their insatiable demand for fuel and engine-driven battery power. She is a simple boat, commanded by a simple (if not simpleminded) captain.

The boatyards and marine supply stores in the United States are filled to the rafters on most Saturdays with wannabe naval engineers of every stripe, secretly delighted that a faulty macerator pump or corroded water heater will consign them to the deepest recesses of the bilge for the duration of the weekend. I have always made a point of waving at these men in polite encouragement as my little boat sputters out of the marina on the way to go sailing.

There are economic advantages to a boat not merely simpler but smaller than today’s normative forty-five- or fifty-footer. For every foot of increase in a boat’s length, the expenses associated with maintaining and rigging the vessel become exponentially greater. A longer boat needs a taller mast with bigger sails and heavier rigging—all at a disproportionately greater cost. The thirty-six-footer that cannot fit into her owner’s old thirty-foot slip must take another slip in the marina in the next available size—usually forty or fifty feet, for thousands of dollars more per year. The prices of haul-outs, bottom paint, cleaning, storage, insurance, and hull repairs all rise dramatically with even modest increases in boat length. When J. P. Morgan famously said that anyone who had to ask how much it costs to own a boat couldn’t afford one, he was standing beside his 302-foot steamer
Corsair
, not a humble vessel the likes of
Gypsy Moon
.

There are practical advantages to the sailboat of moderate length, as well. One man can sail her alone or with a wife appointed only to the task of calling for a taxi should he drop dead, whereas the skipper of a well-found fifty-foot beauty is forever trolling the neighborhood for crew, pleading for able-bodied men as the English navy once did in the press-gangs of yore, only without the threat of violence. Those who join him he will entertain lavishly in exchange for their help in tiptoeing his expensive baby, like a nervous elephant, out of her slip. When the afternoon thunderstorm arrives, his startled crew will be sent aloft to attack and wrestle the enormous, flogging tarpaulin of a mainsail onto a slippery, pitching deck. Having thus traumatized his friends, he will try with increasing difficulty to replenish their numbers on later voyages, until at last his well of goodwill runs dry. When that day arrives, his beauty will retire beside her enormous kin at the marina until the barnacles or the boat brokers overtake her and she is delivered happily to some other unwitting would-be Lord Nelson. From this cycle in most sailors’ lives comes the adage that owning a boat is like standing in a raincoat in a cold shower and tearing up hundred-dollar bills. The smart ones get out and dry off when they’re tearing up twenties.

But I digress. All of this serves only to explain why I bristled when a dockhand at Southport Marina reacted with a whiff of astonishment upon hearing my plan to sail the
Gypsy Moon
offshore, nonstop, to Nassau. I felt that he was slighting my boat as she lay alongside the rows of enormous stay-at-homes sleeping in their slips, although he likely intended no such thing. In truth, the dockhand’s raised eyebrows were all the more irritating because they reflected my own unspoken doubts.

I knew, on that fourth of December 2009, when I stood on deck readying sails and running through my checklist to take the
Gypsy Moon
to sea, that I would make good on my intention to set sail. I knew that with the same certainty that the Little Leaguer knows, when his name is called, that his feet will trudge to the batter’s box, even as he doubts with equal fervor that his swing will ever meet the ball.

I honestly didn’t think I’d make it all the way to Nassau. For whatever reason, I had allowed Nassau to become in my imagination, with each passing day, a destination of Homeric proportions.

Before I left, my pastor had given me a book as cargo. The book told the history of the old stone cathedral of Christ Church in Raleigh. I was charged with the task of presenting it as a gift to the pastor of Christ Church in Nassau, whose steeple was raised in 1830. Though I didn’t know it then, my voyage would be an occasion for some to wonder whether I ought to have enlisted a few good Baptists to pray for me along with the Episcopalians.