Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (17 page)

I have wondered
at times whether the whole idea of crossing oceans in a small boat isn’t evidence of a tendency toward delusions of grandeur. If that be so, there can be few delusions as grand as to compare such a voyage to the journey of the wise men who followed a star to the manger at Bethlehem.

The church’s liturgical calendar compels us to contemplate the sacred mystery of the Christ child each December, and during my contemplation of the impending passage south from Nassau, it occurred to me that I would be arriving somewhere—I had no idea where—around the Feast of the Epiphany. It seemed the perfect excuse to come bearing gifts.

I have had this delusion once before. In 1991, while I was still in Houston, some friends and I formed the Magi Foundation—a Texas nonprofit whose sole purpose was to raise money to purchase Christmas gifts to be delivered aboard sailboats to poor children during an annual offshore regatta from Galveston to Corpus Christi. Five boats entered that year and were loaded with several thousand dollars’ worth of new toys. They set sail the day after Thanksgiving, but only one boat made it through a squall that produced fifty-knot gusts and fifteen-foot seas. (That storm remains the only occasion when I have been sick at sea, and I was as sick as a dog.) The boats turned back by the storm put in at Port O’Connor, and the toys they carried were delivered to Catholic Charities in Corpus Christi by “another way” (airplane) that recalled the biblical course change given to the three wise men in a dream.

Nineteen years later, to the delight of a passel of Sunday school children of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Raleigh and their long-suffering teachers, I agreed to carry aboard the
Gypsy Moon
a bundle filled with their homemade Christmas cards, a video greeting, and other gifts to the unseen children of the unknown island where I might land. As it had on the gulf shores of Texas in 1991, King Herod’s ghost would again bode ill for my arrival.

It was the third day out from Nassau when I first saw the low green outline of the island of San Salvador. Thought to have been Columbus’s first landfall in the New World, it could easily have been missed altogether. Unlike New Providence Island, from which I had just come, San Salvador is more sparsely populated and less densely developed today.

The wind was backing from the east to the southeast as I approached San Salvador, and tempted as I was to land there, the gorgeous weather gave me no reason to interrupt the steady flow of miles beneath my keel. I decided instead to leave the western shore of the island to port, wending my way through the channel that divides San Salvador from Rum Cay. As I did so, an enormous jetliner lifted off from the island, causing me to double-check my location in the chart book. The book revealed that I had not strayed off course and that San Salvador does indeed have a commercial airport. I smiled to imagine what might have been the effect on Columbus and his crew had this gleaming silver bird ascended from the island when they arrived there.

As night fell, I found myself on a direct course for Rum Cay. I was having a hard time making easting against the trades to get back into deep water, where I’d have plenty of sea room. The chart book spoke of a suitable marina and accommodations on Rum Cay, but there was no major airport for me to use in traveling back to the States, if I were to leave the boat there. I began to wonder if I should have stopped at San Salvador. Still, I had been out only three days, and I had a lot of time and good weather on my hands. I threw the helm over to port and made my way north by northeast again, toward the open ocean.

In the darkness, I had difficulty discerning my distance from the sparse lights on the south shore of San Salvador as I passed it, headed northeast. The boat wanted to head farther north than I would let her, and I was luffing sails as it was to stay on a course that would keep me off the lee shore. Trying to make the most out of every tack, I relied heavily on the depth sounder and GPS to tell me when I was approaching shallow water and needed to come about. It was a busy six hours of tacking maneuvers before I was far enough offshore again to resume a southeasterly heading.

By dawn of the fourth day, I was somewhere well east of Samana Cay, having sailed a distance of 350 miles since leaving Nassau in relatively light winds. Seas had been moderate and remained so.

Each day at three o’clock in the afternoon, I had a scheduled satellite phone call, first with Susan and then with others in my office before telling Susan good-bye for the day. The rented satellite phone was a welcome luxury and an extra margin of safety in the event of emergency. But unlike the cost to use land-based cellular phones, the cost of outgoing calls via satellite is still very dear. This brief daily conversation afforded me the opportunity to stay connected to Susan and put out any minor fires at the office. As I was far out of range of VHF weather forecasts at sea, these satellite phone calls were also my opportunity to learn details of the weather forecast for my position.

During the first four days of the trip, the weather had been so stable and mild that I did not bother to ask Susan for a forecast, and the weather on the fifth day was no different. For no apparent reason other than that I hadn’t done so yet, I asked Susan on the fifth day to check what weather might lie ahead. I was very glad that she did.

Susan is not accustomed to wind speed forecasts, so it was with impressive nonchalance that she related the news that twenty-eight-to-thirty-one-knot winds were due to arrive just after eleven o’clock that night. The silence on the line when she said this attested to my dismay. I had been sailing for five days in winds of less than fifteen knots, under bluebird skies. I gently suggested that Susan recheck the numbers, but she had read the forecast correctly. Twenty-eight to thirty-one knots of wind would be blowing in six hours.

Sensing that she had said something unusual, Susan asked me what the matter was. With as much gratitude for the warning as genuine surprise, I told her that these wind speeds meant that I needed to go forward on deck, while it was still light outside, take down and stow all the long canvas I had flying, and dress the
Gypsy Moon
in her short knickers for heavy weather.

Once the sails were changed and her sail area had been reduced to a hankie-sized jib and trysail, the
Gypsy Moon
’s speed slowed to a lazy shuffle. She was moving not more than a knot or two per hour, and at this rate I would not be going anywhere soon. Still, if thirty-one-knot winds were about to hit, I knew that when they did I would be glad that I had raised the storm sails in advance.

Lying in the pilot bunk mostly wide awake, I watched the clock pass eleven that night, then twelve, one, two, and three in the morning, all the while the ocean was as calm as a sleeping baby. In my frustration, I wanted to call Susan and ask if she had not mistakenly read the weather forecast for El Salvador, a thousand miles away in Central America, instead of San Salvador, in the Bahamas. At four o’clock in the morning on a quiet sea the boat was still making very little headway, and I was kicking myself for not asking more questions about the forecast. I intended at first light to get a full complement of sails flying again.

When the clock struck five, as if on cue the wind started slowly increasing in intensity, like a man coming a long way to settle an old grudge. I was six days out, ten miles northeast of the island of Mayaguana, and at a point of decision whether to head southeast, toward Puerto Rico, or southwest, toward the Turks and Caicos. I was undecided on either course. Although the wind at that early hour was gaining strength and would clearly get stronger, the same forecast also called for winds and seas to drop on the seventh day and remain moderate for several days after that.

San Juan, Puerto Rico, was five hundred miles away from my position and at least a five-day sail. The island of Providenciales, or Provo, in the Turks and Caicos, was only thirty miles away. Puerto Rico sounded exciting, but I was tired. After a week alone at sea, I also missed my wife too much to choose a course that would require me to spend another week away from her, knowing that I had another option.

The chart book had pleasant things to say about Provo, but what drew me in was the description of the colonies of artists and craftsmen who populate the island and sell their creations in open markets. I had thought about one day opening a business for the export and sale of the handicrafts and jewelry I encountered in different countries along the voyage—something like privateering, but with a sales receipt. I took what I was reading and the occasion of this storm as reason enough to head south, not east, and make port at Provo.

What also caught my attention in the chart book, apart from the shopping advice about Provo, was the warning that anyone arriving at the island for the first time should employ a pilot to guide his boat through the serpentine maze of coral heads. One book recounted a horror story of a badly damaged boat and its stranded owners who ignored this advice. I didn’t need to read that part twice.

Checking the information in the guide about Turtle Cove Marina, on the north shore of the island, I learned that it offered a pilot free of charge to arriving boats seeking dockage, but the pilot operated only until five o’clock in the afternoon and would travel only to the edge of the reef to meet an incoming boat. My position indicated that with a kick from the engine I could make it there in time.

The diesel engine rumbled to life, and I opened the throttle wide. The oil had just been changed in Nassau, only a month earlier, and I had run the engine less than forty-eight hours since that time. I had plenty of fuel. The small storm sails were doing more to steady the boat than drive her forward in the strong northwest wind, but with the added push of the diesel engine running at full throttle, the boat was soon making plenty of speed.

By six in the morning, the wind speed passed twenty knots. By ten o’clock, the wind hit its stride, and gusts were reaching thirty knots, judging from the sea state. By noon, the waves were up to ten feet and rising in large, foamy mounds above the stern as they raced the
Gypsy Moon
south. Old King Herod apparently did not like my new heading.

I have paid the price in the past for my lack of aptitude with diesel engines, and I paid the price again that day. When using the auxiliary only briefly to get in and out of a marina for weekend sailing back home, I could go an entire season and never need more than a cup of oil. Confident that my oil change less than a month earlier made it impossible that I could be low on oil from less than two full days of engine time, I failed to account for the fact that during those hours, the engine had run wide open and continuously. That meant it had reached and maintained an operating temperature that it doesn’t usually see. That also explained why I was unaware it had burned so much oil that day on the open Atlantic.

At two in the afternoon, I was racing to meet the Turtle Cove Marina pilot before the twilight deadline. I had enough time to make it and would have done so easily if the engine had not suddenly throttled down to a stop. Never suspecting that I might be low on oil, I emptied one of the spare jerry cans of diesel strapped on deck into the fuel fill, thinking perhaps that at full throttle I had burned more fuel than usual and that the angle of heel was causing the fuel level on the cockpit gauge to read higher than it actually was. (It amazes me, in hindsight, how the human mind always prefers the most convenient explanation to the most logical one.)

I cranked the engine and got nothing. Next, I opened the primary filter in the fuel line to look for any algae or debris that might be causing a clog. It was as clean as a whistle, as was the secondary filter. Buttoning everything up and bleeding the fuel line of air as best I could, I cranked the engine again. It turned over but would give me nothing more.

Somewhere in the process of troubleshooting the engine, I used the satellite phone to contact folks at home in Raleigh, who in turn contacted local marinas until someone answered. A helpful British gentleman at one marina could offer no towing assistance but had a VHF radio with a range long enough to reach me. He hailed me on channel 16 and agreed to relay my coordinates to the Caicos Marina & Shipyard, which planned to send a boat out to that position, about ten miles away, and tow me through the reef. Reassured that help was on the way, I hove to the boat so she would come to a near stop and remain close to the position I had just reported, then went back to work on the engine.

Swearing disbelief that there could be any issue with the oil, I checked it just to be sure. The end of the dipstick was bone dry. I couldn’t believe it. I added a full quart of oil before any level was visible, then more oil to bring it up to par. Still I got no response from the engine, and I knew that before long, repeated cranking of the electric starter would begin to take a toll on the battery. I could soon be out of power altogether.

I didn’t have the good sense to give up right away. The English major in me is a little sensitive about my mechanical skill relative to other sailors, the vast majority of whom can fondly recall rebuilding the engine of their GTO in high school or some such thing. Although deep down I suspected that my efforts to revive the
Gypsy Moon
’s engine were making matters worse, not better, it was doing wonders for my self-esteem just to try.

Even drained batteries usually have enough of a second wind to start an engine if they are left alone awhile, and mine weren’t drained yet. Suspecting that when I had checked the fuel filters I had introduced some air into the fuel line that was blocking the flow of diesel to the injectors, I gave the batteries a rest while I spent the next half hour massaging the manual fuel pump, looking for a bubble of air. I saw nothing but streams of fuel flowing down the side of the bleed screw. When the engine still wouldn’t start after this effort, I knew I was out of options. Whatever the initial problem had been, it was now certifiably beyond my ability to diagnose or cure. There was nothing to do but maintain my position and keep a lookout for the towboat.