nawl

So the most common comment I got from people I told about this trip was "Wow, I could never spend so much time with an ex-boyfriend."

A much more useful response might have been "What kind of idiot thinks it's a good idea to sail across a thousand miles of open ocean at five miles an hour?"

(Read Jan's account of the trip here.)

We flew to Antigua. Continental has one flight there a week, on Saturday. It's the kind of airport where they offer you free drinks on arrival. This means that the immigration officials also have to go around and pick up all the little half-filled plastic cups of alcohol that the arriving tourists then leave on the tables where one is meant to fill out paperwork.

After doing battle with the customs officials over Jan's 100 lb inflatable dinghy that he'd schlepped by hand all the way from Norway (who smuggles a dinghy into a country by air, anyways?) we took a taxi all the way across the island to English Harbour.

English Harbour is an incredible natural harbor, the base from which the not-yet-Admiral Nelson raided American ships trading in the Caribbean. Now there are costumed tour guides chatting at the entrance, and if you look enough like a tourist they'll charge you a few dollars to enter and poke around at the few stalls of Caribbean tourist schlock that are full of chickens at night, a tiny museum with handcrafted displays, and the variously restored ruins of the buildings and fortifications.

Two months ago, the entire place was filled with yachts and boat people for the Antigua Sailing Week, apparently the event of the year for yachts. Now it was a ghost town, and my experience of Antigua echoed the handful of sentences that the until-then florifically verbose Patrick Leigh Fermor dedicated to Antigua in The Traveller's Tree. "Alas, I can only just, after remaining there exactly twenty-four hours, claim to have been there; and I saw no evidence of it, perhaps because I scarcely saw anybody at all... the island while we were there seemed to be either empty of its folk like the village on the Grecian Urn, or locked by some spell in a state of catalepsy." It would seem that most of the tourists we did see were secreted away to walled-off all-inclusive resorts owned by foreigners, any remaining tourist infrastructure on reduced hours or closed for the season. What's more, the entire country was closed for Sunday and Whit Monday.

So we sailed for France.

Guadeloupe, that is. About eight hours sailing south of Antigua.

It really is France, in a way much more fundamental than a former British colony like Antigua might retain some vestiges of Britishness after being used up and tossed away. In the guadeloupeen town where we stopped, Deshaies, French cars with French license plates, French tourists, French restaurants with handwritten outdoor menus, and a Spar filled with imported French products.

We ate an expensive dinner where my assiette vegetarienne was filled with vegetables that I did not recognize (little French cat begging scraps from the carnivores at the table), and stocked up on all the canned soup, French cheese, and tropical fruit that we could find.

Never did manage to clear customs--another woman from a boat who trekked up to the customs office on the hill with us said it had been closed for the past three days.

And then we set sail. We lost sight of land by the end of the first day.

A couple of dolphins accompanied us during dinner, and after the sun set we watched a faraway thunderstorm illuminate clouds on the horizon.

After that we looked up in the On-Board Emergency Handbook what to do in case of a thunderstorm. (You ground the mast by running a cable from a stay into the water.)

One of the realities of long-distance sailing is that you can't steer by hand for weeks on end. You have to find a mechanism to get the boat to steer itself. There are a few options for self-steering. The boat has an electric autopilot system, but it would drain the batteries in about 3 or 4 hours, and without a gyroscope it was knocked off course by even 5-10 foot waves, a calm day of sailing in a pond compared to what we encountered later in the trip. There are mechanical wind vane systems, which are either expensive to buy or tricky to build yourself. And then there's the sheet-to-tiller system outlined in a legendary out-of-print book called "Self-Steering for Sailing Craft", which is what we ultimately ended up using.

Here's a summary of the main idea. Jan adapted it for his boat by rigging a small sail behind the genoa (that's the triangular sail in front, for non-sailors following along at home) and running lines from the end of it back to the wheel, counterbalanced with elastic. When the tension in the steering sail changes by heading too far into or away from the wind, the changing force on the rope and elastic pulls the wheel in the correct direction. This demands a lot of construction materials and a lot of tinkering to get right, and depending on conditions more modifications were necessary: a preventer to pull harder on the elastic in case of a jibe, more knots to precisely place the rope away from the inconvenient spokes of the wheel, a significant reduction in sail area and speed to keep the boat in control. But by and large it worked great.

Jan was somewhat rightfully proud of himself for getting the steering system to work so well. It's much more in the grizzled-old-man-on-a-boat-with-no-engine style of sailing than the shiny-new-yacht kind. The general opinion seems to be "Oh yeah, I've heard of that, I tried it once, it was kind of fun."

The wind out of Guadeloupe was somewhat less than could have been hoped for, so we made less than 5 knots average for the first few days.

On the sea the world shrinks to the snow globe of what's visible: boat in the center, a disk of water a few miles in diameter, the vault of the heavens above. Weather appears in the distance and moves towards or away from us, cargo ships appear on the horizon, grow closer, then retreat. Schools of flying fish leap out of the water in front of the boat and flap over the waves. The moon was near full for the first half of the trip. I was glad to see it rise luminous around sunset and light our way, silvering the crests of the waves and bathing the cabin in moonlight through the hatches.

By day five, I was going positively batty on the water. I was ready for a vacation from my vacation. So we made a halfway stop on Aruba.

When we were still 60 miles out, a gray military plane buzzed overhead, turned around, and went back the way it came.

At about 2 am we were sailing along the coast of Aruba towards Oranjestad when the Aruban coast guard swooshed up to us in a long super-fast motor boat with all its lights off. Several burly officers boarded us, inspected our paperwork, looked under the floorboards. I was amused to see such an enormous man taking down my address in a rounded girly handwriting.

I suppose such diligence is understandable, considering the proximity to Colombia and the popularity of drug-running as a funding source for boat owners who are not yet independently wealthy. But still, we could have left with bales of cocaine and a whole crew of illegal immigrants in the places they didn't look.

By 3 am we'd made it to the harbor, but when we called on the radio they told us to go away until dawn. So we drove backwards and forwards for three hours in the waves. The wind had picked up by the time the coast guard stopped us, we were going 7 knots downwind on only the genoa, and actually surfing down the waves. By dawn we were completely exhausted from banging against the waves, having both spent sleepless the hour rest from steering.

We followed another sailboat into the cruise harbor and recognized the name Cisnecito from a flyer they'd posted in a cafe in Antigua. When we docked they helped with the ropes and said "Hi! We're on our way home after sailing around the world for the past three years."

While I waited on the boat for Jan to return from immigration and customs at the cruise ship terminal, I watched hundreds of tourists disembark from their cruise ship in the most garish exercise gear, mill around and stretch for a few minutes on the concrete, then all set off at once for some sort of massive communal morning jogging routine. I hadn't seen anything but Jan, water, and boat for the past five days. Surreal, man.

We docked at the closest nearby marina, the Renaissance. Nobody was around on a Sunday morning to take our money, but we found out later that for $1 per foot per day we could use all the amenities of the associated nearby swanky resort, including a sort of private island they'd built up. Ultimately we ended up showering in the employee locker rooms, led past the employees-only door into the bowels of the hotel offices. (It's also possible to anchor for free near the airport south of the marina or along the high-rise hotels on the east, but we were hesitant to do that with no charts or guides.)

Early on that Sunday morning, all we could see of the island was an empty shopping mall, a handful of sunburned tourists wandering aimlessly among the deserted luxury shops. It's not clear to me why one would want to travel long distances only to spend one's time in a mall filled with the same stores as the Netherlands or the US, but it must be common enough to be profitable.

I ended up walking from Oranjestad nearly to the northern tip of the island, along five or six miles of nonstop white sand beach lined with luxury high-rise hotels. The whole way, I stepped over and around blissed-out tourists sprawled out in the perfect white sand and the perfect turquoise shallow water, stopped at the beachside bars for pina coladas when I was thirsty.

At the end of the row of hotels, I found the beach favored by the windsurfers and kitesurfers, and ended up talking to an Italian windsurfer managing a hotel there. He offered me water and a shower, warned about Colombian pirates who had robbed some friends at gunpoint off the Colombian shore, and gave me a ride back to the marina.

That night we had dinner with Chris and Julie from Cisnecito. They told us stories of trading empty coke bottles for lobster in Madagascar and dispensed advice for transiting the Panama Canal. Highlight of the conversation: "So about ten years ago there was this thing called string theory that wasted a lot of people's time."

The ground hadn't stopped moving the entire time I was on land.

The first two nights I slept on the boat in harbor, the mild creaking of the boat as it rocked gently in the waves had been disturbing, I didn't sleep well, and was up well before dawn. That night in Aruba I slept like a rock for twelve hours--a comparatively windy harbor was like a baby's cradle.

We left Aruba the next afternoon. Our departure was like a comedy of errors, except that it wasn't really funny.

On our first attempt out of the harbor, we unfurled the genoa only to have it collapse on deck. A shackle had lost its peg. We motored back to harbor, I winched Jan up the mast, and he installed a replacement. Moral: do not hand-tighten your vital shackles.

On our next attempt out of the harbor, Jan dropped the spinnaker pole on his head and let go of the spinnaker uphaul. It flew away in the 20 knot winds and swung about wildly above our heads in the growing waves. At this point, the sun was close to setting, and if we tried to return to harbor again we would have lost a night of sailing. In order to retrieve the swinging spinnaker uphaul of death, Jan climbed onto the boom, which jerked violently back and forth over every wave that passed underneath us. I was at the wheel under motor, but by this time the waves had built up such that we slid out of control on every swell. All I could do was try to go over the waves in a way that might encourage the spinnaker uphaul to further wrap around the mast stays.

He eventually retrieved it, put up the genoa, and poled it out in order to go directly downwind. As soon as the genoa was up, the boat pulled towards the wind harder than I could pull back, and the boat tilted so far that the the rails were underwater.

I'm not sure I can accurately convey how scary this is. At the time, I was screaming obscenities. I guess I now know why sailors are foul-mouthed.

It is perhaps important to note at this point that I was largely incapable of sailing the boat on my own. A 34 foot boat is a lot further from a 14 foot dinghy than I had expected. Most of the lines had been run back to the cockpit for ease of singlehanded sailing, which meant that there were ten unlabled ropes, several of which were the same color, to learn, remember, cleat, uncleat, let out slowly, winch up, and winch down in a variety of combinations to do any one of many operations (put up, take down, reef once, reef twice, tighten, loosen, tack, jibe) one can do involving sails. We're ignoring the actual art of balancing the sails, here, something I have little concept of. When pressed, I eventually managed to get a fair approximation of the correct ropes for commands yelled at me, but if any Jan-threatening emergencies had happened far from land, I'd have been alone and helpless.

We were sailing with the wind and current, which meant that even in the worst case, I would eventually hit land. However, in these conditions, one of Jan's sailing books suggests the following as the most realistic man-overboard procedure: a wave goodbye over the stern.

Additionally, every time the ropes tangled on the mast, or we needed to take down the main, or rig or fix the self-steering sail, or mess with a spinnaker, or any number of innumerable causes in the name of sailing, it was necessary to leave the safety of the cockpit and go up to the bow of the boat, by then likely bouncing wildly in the waves, often even worse when it was necessary to steer into the wind. We had safety harnesses, but in the dark of a moonless night with invisible fifteen-foot waves slamming into the bow of the boat and the wind screaming in whatever sliver of a genoa we were sailing on, this is a scary prospect. (Not one that I engaged in. I only went up in nice weather.)

It's important to be reminded that the wind and waves are far more powerful than we can ever be, and that if you play with them you'd better know what you're doing or hope you're damn lucky. In this case, under unbalanced sails, I might not have been able to pull the boat back in control at all. It's weighted such that it should right itself even if the mast hits the water, but that would result in far more serious damage.

The wind and the waves kept increasing as we sailed along the coast of Colombia. At its worse, Jan estimated force 7 winds, waves at nearly 20 feet, cresting above us, foam blowing off the water. In order to get the self-steering to work, we sailed on a fraction of the genoa alone, and even so the GPS told us we were going 10 or 12 knots surfing down the crests of waves. Mostly the waves slid harmlessly beneath us, but every so often one would happen to break just so beneath or over us with a loud bang and roar, send the boat spinning 180 or 360 degrees out of control, undo the self-steering, and throw anyone unlucky enough to be sitting on the wrong side of the boat across the cabin.

This happened a couple of times a night.

(It was then that we concluded that even if the Jeanneau is marketed as having a hull capable of blue-water sailing, it certainly doesn't have the interior for it. There are not nearly enough handles. We both got some serious bruises and cuts from those days. Several of the cuts that I got stayed open and refused to heal until I was back in civilization.)

One such killer wave crashed over the boat and broke the steering entirely. Jan acted quickly: the emergency tiller came out (a length of heavy metal pipe), we checked the guide for the closest safe port in Colombia (two full days of sailing at that point), and began to prepare to cut the trip short. I was ordered into the cabin to unscrew some panels and see what was wrong (in fifteen foot waves) - the cables connecting the wheel to the rudder had twisted off their pulleys. We hove to, fixed them, and were back on our way to Panama.

We spent an inordinate amount of time staring off the back of the boat. Huge wall of water towering above us, boat is lifted up, huge chasm of water opens below us. Wave TV. Endlessly entertaining.

Sleeping while the boat is underway is a surprisingly loud and restless prospect. There are a multitude of noises--the water burbles and rushes past the hull, the boat creaks and strains under stress, jars and dishes slide back and forth in their cabinets, the sails snap and pull when the boat is too far downwind, and crack violently when we accidentally jibe. You learn what the boat sounds like when it's on course, and wake up when it speeds up and tilts into the wind, or slows down when it's about to jibe.

We kept six-hour watches at night, waking up once an hour to check the course and sails and for other ships, every half-hour or continuous when we crossed paths with too many cargo boats that day. We were both jarred awake several times a night by a huge wave breaking over the boat, necessitating a bout of groggy hand-steering while the self-steering was fixed. Most mornings I was awoken by an "Oh, fuck!" or a stream of curses in Norwegian "Fan i helvete!" or my name being shouted by a captain who wanted his oatmeal and I would stumble groggily, dehydrated and exhausted, into the sunlight.

We ate a fraction of the food I'd stocked. Most days it was all I could do to dump a can of something into a pot and heat it up, or stay below just long enough to gather a snack of bread and cheese or fruit. I wasn't seasick, at least not in the vomitous sort of way, but trying to remain upright down below while braced against multiple walls as gravity pulled strongly in new and entirely unexpected directions left me rather muddle-headed until I took a break in the fresh air.

My worst failure as a cook was the day of the biggest waves. I boiled two packages of udon on the stove. The stove is hinged so that it would swing with the waves, but it tended to stick at a tilt so that the next wave would unstick it and send boiling water flying across the cabin. Half the water was lost in the boiling process. I transferred the remaining soup into bowls and another half of the broth sloshed out. I brought a bowl up to Jan at the helm, and just then a huge wave hit and overturned everything. He ate his noodles off the floor of the cockpit.

By this point I had no more moon on my watch. The stars were incredible. Venus was bright enough to cast its own reflection on the water, and I could watch the milky way rise as my watch went on. The sky was actually just slightly brighter than the water. Without the moon it was possible to see the phosphorescence in the water, leaving a little glittering trail behind the boat and illuminating the crests of nearby waves. Every night thunderstorms surrounded us on the horizon, clouds lighting up in quick flashes.

We were becalmed a day out of Panama. We took the opportunity to go swimming in the open water. We were still out of sight of land, and the water was stunningly clear, below our bodies in the ocean nothing but perfect deep blue in every direction.

We motored in the rest of the way. We sat on the bow and dolphins came up to swim alongside the boat, first one then two then ten then twenty coming and going, jumping out of the water, swerving back and forth in front of the boat to show how much faster they can swim.

Finally we arrived in San Blas. The San Blas islands are a rather unique place in the world. The native Kuna rebelled in the 20s and managed to secure autonomy for their territory. Some of the communities have chosen to remain traditional, thatch-roofed cane huts built in villages covering an island to the waterline, or small huts alone on other islands. They have dugout canoes that they paddle and sail and pole between the islands. Many of the women wear brightly colored dress with beads around the wrists and ankles. They sew and sell brightly colored cloths called molas, which are inexplicably world famous as the local handicraft.

El Porvenir, the landing port we'd been dreaming of for two weeks, turned out to be an island containing an airstrip, a cement block hotel alongside the airstrip, a mola stand, a police stand, and immigration and customs.

While Jan was away doing immigration paperwork, two sets of women and children paddled up to the boat to sell me molas, and a guy rowed out to advertise his store on a neighboring island. Even when I wouldn't buy molas, they begged candy for the children. We'd run out of chocolate by that point, so the kids got a stale Petite Beurre with Nutella. (I'd tried to study some Spanish on the boat, but I got the feeling that the mola-sellers didn't believe my "No tengo dinero." I'd bought my souvenir molas before learning that the immigration had cleaned out most of Jan's cash with extra "fees", and we had to do some serious scraping to come up with enough dollars to buy my plane ticket off the island. Credit cards are not useful when electricity is only available from a flickering generator from 6-10 pm for the tourists.)

We motored out to a set of stunning pristine islands covered with palms and went snorkeling among the reefs. I realized that for all the snorkeling I'd done in Hawaii, I'd never seen live coral before. The reefs here were incredibly alive, and full of all sorts of any-colored fish.

In the evening we anchored off an island covered in village. We tried to ask the hotel if they would sell us dinner, but the hotel only had one guest and had no food for us. They led us to the primary school where they sold Jan a plate of leftover turtle and rice for $1.50.

Outside the school three small girls were sweeping. "Camera" they said when they saw my camera, "Quiere photo?" "Si." "Un dollar." "Oh, you're clever. No." But later they came back and asked me to take a picture without paying. I showed them on the screen and this launched an extensive photo shoot where they would adopt a pose and then rush back to see the result on the camera screen. Picture previewing is just about the most brilliant camera feature ever invented.

The mother of one of the girls looked on indulgently. We talked a little, but we quickly reached the limitations of my nonexistent Spanish, and I was on edge from trying to remember my usteds.

Perhaps the pictures they took themselves (with my help pressing the shutter all the way down) are more revealing, a blurry child's-eye-view of the school, the mothers in traditional dress, the tourists towering above everyone.

For the most part, I felt enormously tall and foreign walking around the village. Mothers would send their babies running after me to try to sell us things, and I decided taking pictures felt weird and exploitative.

At night we sat on hammocks in the balcony of the hotel and chatted with Will, the one guest, who's working his way around the world by volunteering as an animal tour guide. We learned that the hotels here are all-inclusive deals, for $30 a day you get a room, all meals, and a full-time guide who schleps you off to pretty islands for beach-laying or snorkeling. According to his guide, the Colombian drug smugglers use San Blas for their dropoffs because the Panamanian police don't have jurisdiction here. Every so often, the Americans will bomb a drug ship, and bales of cocaine will wash up on shore. Best moment of the conversation: when he starts going off on how much he hates American girls, having apparently forgotten that I am one. (Worse, Californian.)

The next day we anchored off of Dog Island, snorkeled the wreck of a Colombian trading ship there (the winch is enormous), bought fresh coconuts. Jan bought two lobsters off some fishermen who sailed up to our boat for $2 each.

He winched me up the mast to take some pictures of the boat. (And incidentally, the guys who stopped by to ask us to charge a pump for them while I was up there.)

At 3 am I was up to vomit everything out of my stomach (Was it snorkeling in questionable water, the fresh coconuts, old Guadeloupan fruit? Who knows!), at 5 am to see the most incredible snunrise.

The 6:30 am flight out of Porvenir didn't leave until 7:30 am. I shared a cab from Albrook (local) to Tocumen (international) airports through Panama City with three Texans who'd flown to San Blas for one day. They paid my fare. (Thanks!)

The flight to Newark was delayed an hour in the air and almost diverted to Philadelphia when they threatened to keep us in the air long enough to run out of fuel. I made it through immigration, customs, an agricultural inspection, re-entering security, and running the length of the terminal in 20 minutes.

I was kind of shell-shocked after re-entering the first world. One of my first experiences was walking through a gourmet supermarket, not a light undertaking in any situation, positively mind-blowing after the previous two weeks.

I weighed myself and discovered I'd lost between 10 and 15 lbs on the boat, and weighed less than I have since I was 12. (This includes my post-mono weight at 16.) It took a good week for my appetite to return in full. Since then I've discovered an odd sort of aching hunger. (I'm fattening up again now.)

It was a week or two before I managed to sleep more than about six hours at a time.