Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat Read online

  We fell in love with Tortola. I remember it now, at least during our earliest days there, as an unspoiled Caribbean island, deserted by all but its indigenous natives. Perhaps it was the season, or perhaps because we were always on foot and made our own paths over the island and were as shy as pandas in avoiding all signs of civilization, we seemed to find only empty beaches and an untrodden landscape. We stumbled dry-mouthed out of the hills into corrugated-tin-roofed native settlements, found the wooden shack that passed for a village store and bought icy bottles of Malta, a sweet non-alcoholic malt drink that neither of us had ever tasted before. For all we saw of any sign of tourism it might have been the forties. I carried a machete on our treks, and sometimes, like Stewart Granger in a cheesy old safari movie, I actually hacked paths for us through the scrub. I sliced open wild papayas for my woman to eat and shinned up coconut trees for young nuts and chopped their tops off so we could drink the milk. It felt like remotest Polynesia, and as we explored we chattered about boats and where we would someday sail in one.

  We met Mike Underhill, an Englishman who lived with his two children, Sally, fifteen and Ian, twelve in a corrugated tin shack hidden in the trees above West End. Mike was bald and looked like the actor Robert Duvall. At home he never wore anything except brief swimming trunks; outside he would add a shirt and cap. The two kids were dark, straight-haired and beautiful; their mother was from British Guiana, lived in Road Town and visited the family infrequently. Mike dived for crayfish, which he sold to Rick at Poor Richard’s and to others. This was his primary source of income, although he also had a well-equipped metalworking shop, including a large lathe, in one half of his living room, and he did repairs for the odd boater who somehow found him. He was intelligent, had thousands of books stacked everywhere, was seriously well read, had a great sense of humour, and had a full-blown paranoia concerning the local natives. He was always sure several of them were lurking in the brush nearby intent on stealing something, and he kept a number of loaded guns stuffed under the cushions of his decrepit drawing-room suite. He was reserved when we first met him, but after several weeks he eased up. We spent hours in his shack talking with him. Over our three years in the Virgins he became a great friend. He lent me books and taught me to hyperventilate before diving.

  April 23 was our first wedding anniversary. We visited Mike, then put on good clothes and hitched into Road Town, where we had a beer at the Moorings, dinner at the Fort Burt Hotel overlooking Road Harbour, and danced to a steel band, which, J. writes, even I enjoyed.

  We learned of an interesting boat for sale in St Thomas and took the ferry over to look at it: Fomalhaut, a thirty-six-foot, plumb-bowed cutter designed by Sam Crocker, built in 1939 by the now famous Bud McIntosh in New Hampshire. We saw her alongside the dock at Antilles Yacht Services, a boatyard in a mangrove-encircled inlet on the south-east side of the island, known to locals as ‘the Lagoon’. It was a place we would come to know too well. We liked the boat right away, we thought she was beautiful, we saw ourselves living aboard her. So we were disappointed to hear from Billy Walker, the boatyard’s resident shipwright, that Fomalhaut was in poor structural condition, that it would require a long time and too much money to put her in shape. In addition to much else, she needed complete ‘refastening’, he said, and we didn’t know what that meant. ‘It means replacing every screw in the hull,’ said Billy. Bummed, we took the ferry back to Tortola.

  It was clear to us that to find a boat we would have to move to St Thomas. We’d seen everything in Tortola, and there were at least ten times as many boats in St Thomas. We even had a place to go. At the boatyard in the Lagoon, we had met and talked with Newt Farley, a marine surveyor who lived aboard his own boat, Xanadu, in Red Hook on the east end of St Thomas. He had offered to let us stay aboard the boat in return for doing some varnish work. That sounded a little too cosy until he told us that Xanadu was a 110-foot-long steam yacht and we’d have our own suite.

  But we were reluctant to leave Tortola. We hung on for a couple of weeks, and then our impossible fantasy-island existence came to an abrupt, ignominious end. Tortola’s immigration officials, imperious and intractable as sultans (the tiresome colonial legacy in all the formerly British islands of the Caribbean), refused to extend our visas, and we were given one day to pack up and leave the British Virgin Islands. We had been there just a month.

  I phoned Newt Farley who again offered us room and board for a little work on his boat, and we packed up hurriedly in a day and took the ferry to St Thomas. We bussed to Red Hook where Xanadu lay at anchor, arriving in the tropical twilight. We met Newt on the dock at Johnny Harms’s sport-fishing marina, with his wife Deirdre, home from her day at work, and Bob, another Xanadu live-aboard. We all motored out to the great yacht in Newt’s whaler.

  It was much too fast for J. Her diary entry written that evening in our new stateroom has a frantic, bewildered tone. She felt desperate, cornered and unprovided for …

  It quickly became clear to us that living aboard Xanadu was only an uneasy stopgap arrangement. The boat was extraordinary. Built in Maine in 1915, formerly owned by J. P. Morgan, later a Vanderbilt, she had a long clipper bow, a bowsprit, a slender fantail stern, a tall funnel and two masts, the aft a little taller, all raked at a slight angle that gave the ship even while sitting still an impression of graceful speed. She was a grand yacht, the most gorgeous I have ever been aboard. But her beauty came all from her lines and the echoes she gave off of the great period in which she had been built, for she was now run-down and owned by a dreamer who couldn’t afford her insistent upkeep. Weed grew at the waterline (‘… few things look more slovenly’, Eric Hiscock has written sternly of this condition), the varnished teak, acres of it, blistered in the tropical sun, which dried out her deck and hull planking and caused her to leak like a sieve. Her steam engine was ‘temporarily’ not working, and to go anywhere she had to be towed, but there was nowhere to go. She was a lovely relic from another world, useless in this one.

  Living aboard her in desperate, cracked glamour were Newt, marine surveyor who knew too well the state of his boat, and Deirdre, the Mrs Rochester of the high seas, although she didn’t stay locked in a stateroom but went ashore every morning to work in a tourist boutique in downtown Charlotte Amalie. She would come home in the evenings with steaks bought not from the Pueblo supermarket where the peons shopped, she told us with manic disdain, but from Jerry’s Meats, elitist purveyor of flown-in-direct-from-Texas meat who sold only to the best restaurants in St Thomas, and to Deirdre Farley. We would dine like Vanderbilts in Xanadu’s mahogany-panelled dining room, while Deirdre would rant about the cruise-ship hoi polloi who had trekked through her shop that day. Later on, as every evening progressed, both she and Newt grew drunker and began to yell savage things at each other. Then J. and I would creep away, out onto the deck, or we’d take the whaler and go ashore, or we’d just slink down the bannistered stairway to our panelled stateroom and try to read or comfort each other or plot our way out, while somewhere away through the bulkheads Newt and Deirdre shrieked and barked.

  Bob, the other member of our shipboard family, was a large, cheerful, red-bearded man from Maine, living aboard under the same arrangement we were: food and a state-room in return for some daily effort against the onslaught of Xanadu’s decay. He seemed perfectly happy aboard. He paid no attention to Newt and Deirdre’s fights, but amused himself about the boat, taking small pumps, winches and unimportant machinery apart, down to their minutest components, which he would lay out neatly and fondle with oil. These things, which required only a wrench and elbow grease, one could do aboard Xanadu. Basic repairs like fixing the huge antique engine, refastening and caulking the hull, repairing the rot, would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; millions would have been needed to bring her back to her glory. But Bob remained industrious. And in the evenings, after dinner, while Newt and Deirdre went berserk in the dining room, Bob would go out and sit on deck with a beer and throw chum for sharks,
as happy as an angler on Moosehead Lake.

  He and J. became great allies with their shared shark fixation. One evening Bob came home with six feet of chain and an eight-inch shark hook from Harms’s marina, onto which he and J. stuck one of Jerry’s elite sirloins and started jigging for Jaws. Happily none was caught.

  In the mornings we worked on Xanadu, and in the afternoons we went ashore to look for work. Eventually, I found part-time evening work bartending, and J. got a waitressing job at a Mexican restaurant, El Papagayo. She often got a ride to work with another Papagayo waitress who was living aboard a boat at Antilles boatyard in the Lagoon. One evening she came back to Xanadu and told me about a twenty-seven-foot-long English cutter she had seen at the boatyard. We both went to look at it the next day.

  Suky, a tubby little boat hauled out of the water while its owner worked on the hull beneath a handwritten FOR SALE sign nailed to the planking, looked all wrong to me. But J. saw it – what the boat could be and us in it – before I did. I didn’t like its high boxy cabin – which was painted orange – I thought it spoiled the boat’s looks. It wasn’t at all beautiful. Characterful, maybe. Maybe. Definitely funky inside, where it looked more like a VW bus heading out from Haight-Ashbury in 1968. It was a mongrel boat. But it had a nice long bowsprit. And it had just sailed across the Atlantic.

  Its owner, a Dutchman named Henry, who wore lots of shells around his neck, told us it was a very easy boat to sail. The engine had conked out somewhere down in the Grenadines and he’d thrown it overboard and never missed it, he said. We asked why he was selling. Henry shrugged and smiled. He just wanted to try something else for a while.

  What a flake, I thought, and it was a flake’s boat. He was doing something with cloth and glue to the hull below the waterline and when I asked him about it he said it was this great stuff, man, Cascover sheathing, you glue it on and it keeps the worms out and you never have to caulk the hull. He was just glueing on a new patch where some of it had come loose. Henry wanted $7,000 for the boat.

  We went off to work. A few more days on Xanadu and we began to think more about freaky Suky. The orange cabin could be painted white, for a start. Get Henry’s junk out of there and the interior would actually much resemble the Hiscocks’ Wanderer III. Suky, in fact, had much in common with the Hiscocks’ boat: it had been built in 1939, eleven years before Wanderer; both were traditional English cruising cutters and shared many features, the main differences being Wanderer’s additional three feet in length, and one deeper foot in the keel which gave the His-cocks sufficient headroom without the higher cabin top. But Suky’s shallower draft would enable the boat to sneak over thinner water. It would be a great boat for the shallow Bahamas, where, Eric had complained in Atlantic Cruise in Wanderer III, a five-and-a-half-foot draft had made them anxious, even barred them from many anchorages. Suky was Wanderer’s runty, short-legged sibling.

  The boat’s greatest attraction was that we thought we could scrape together enough money to buy it. We could have our own boat, which no one could sell or tell us to move off of. Our own home. Our independence.

  A few days later we went back to the yard and looked at the boat again. It would certainly look better painted. Spruced up. A mongrel, yes, but you can love a mutt. It had a look that might become endearing, but at that moment it appeared forlorn and neglected with its hull exposed, unpainted, splotched with cloth and glue. And that god-awful cabin top – it was the colour of sauce rouille, which looks good in bouillabaisse but not on a boat. Not on an ugly duckling that needed some help and understanding to look its best. It made me angry: Henry was clearly a philistine, a lout with no sense of boat aesthetics; a boat abuser.

  He wasn’t aboard. We found him at the other end of the yard, sitting at the HMS Pinafore, the wreck of an old hull dragged up out of the water, chain-sawn to bartop height, a roof erected over it, now serving Heineken. We offered $5,000, subject to survey. He countered with $6,500 and the yard bill. We countered and dug in at $6,000 and the yard bill – depending on what his yard bill was. He agreed.

  That night we excitedly told Newt and Deirdre and Bob about Suky. They were very nice about it and encouraged us. Deirdre had some old sheets she could give us. Newt said he’d survey the boat for free.

  He did, a few days later. He started diligently in the bow, sticking a small screwdriver into the stem, the frames, looking for soft wood, an indication of rot. He worked aft into the bilge. Then he slowed down and stopped. He was sweating and pale, painfully hung-over. He couldn’t find any rot, he said, sitting down in the saloon, panting. There were a few cracked frames, which could be ‘sistered’ – new ones built alongside the cracked ones – but nothing that needed serious attention right away. It was a small, simple boat, there were things we’d undoubtedly do to it in time, but Henry had sailed it in, so we could sail it out. His basic message was: it looks clean, what do you want for $6,000? Which was our feeling. It obviously wasn’t a blue-water thoroughbred ready to punch its way around Cape Horn, but we could live on it cheaply in the Caribbean for a while and have some fun. What about that cloth all over the hull? I asked Newt. He shrugged. If it works …

  We gave Henry $1,000 and waited for the rest to be wired from the States. All we had and some borrowed from J.’s father. Henry packed two small duffles and disappeared, and J. and I moved off Xanadu and aboard our new home. Immediately, J.’s diary changes its tone again. The pages are filled with details of our days of work on the boat. On Tuesday, June 21, her birthday, she woke to a treasure hunt aboard. Still brand new to the boat’s many hidden places, this was fun for both of us, hiding and finding her presents. She got a Caribbean cookbook, and, as she had given me a year before in St Jean aboard Viva III, a pair of docksiders. That evening we ate fish at Daddy’s, a native joint near the boatyard.

  Under the amused guidance of Billy Walker, the boat yard’s shipwright (we had no idea what we were getting into, but he did), J. and I worked to get the boat back in the water. First we cleaned it, pulling years of filth out of the bilges, back into which we poured gallons of wood preservative which the holistic freaks who spent most of their time at the Pinafore bar insisted was full of Agent Orange. We replaced rusty fittings, bolts, tried to find and stop deck leaks revealed by a sudden rain, painted five-fathom marks on the anchor chain, and finally stripped the exterior of the boat of all its paint and repainted it an off-white enamel, a colour named by its manufacturer ‘White Sand’.

  We discovered huge reserves of love inside us for our new boat. As it transformed almost hourly under its many coats of paint, we would step back and stare at it with profound wonder, admiration, and exactly the sort of love you’d feel for a dog you’d found abandoned in a swamp and taken home to wash off – a mutt, to be sure, but all the more lovable for its dopey imperfection. And beyond this, the thrill of knowing that we would get into this thing, with all we owned, and live in it, and start sailing around these tropical islands, and anchor for free off beaches we’d only glimpsed from ferries. We stared and stared at this little boat, and stared anew every time we left the yard and came back to it. All its bits and pieces and wood and fastenings and wire and rope and sails were ours. Never had any corporeal thing meant as much to either of us, and probably for both of us in this life, nothing ever will again.

  One thing we were determined to change immediately was that name. Sailor’s superstition has it that changing a boat’s name is unlucky. However, Suky was not its christened original, but Henry’s fond idea, and now terminally tainted by its association with him. We saw Henry now only when he came around to ask if the wired money had come through, and in response to our many questions about the boat he would tell us nothing whatsoever beyond the condescending remark, accompanied by a flaky grin, that ‘Shuky’s sho shimple’ that we would figure it all out ourselves. He was right, and when we did, we changed almost everything aboard the boat.

  J.’s diary records the names we mulled over like expectant parents: Papaya. Beagle (I st
ill like this one, partly for its nod to Darwin’s and Fitzroy’s doughty Beagle, and also because the boat, in its stocky compactness and eagerness, much resembled a nice beagle). Magdaleña. Sobrasada. The last an indigenous Mallorquín sausage that J. loved. They’re not great boat names, but most boat names are fatuous, and they had meaning for us (we liked papaya and ate a lot of it). Magdaleña was the exception; it meant nothing to us, but for some reason that’s what we started calling the boat, although we didn’t yet paint that on the boat’s transom stern.

  The money came. Henry took it and was gone for ever. Launch day arrived. The boat went into its natural element at the end of the day and we lay at anchor off the boatyard for the night. We watched the bilge fill up with water, which Billy had told us to expect after the long haul-out. It would take a night and a day, he said, for the dried-out timbers to swell up and keep the water out. We would have to pump, off and on, until then. It wasn’t bad at all; a few minutes every few hours – as I’m doing now, but on that happy day it grew less and less each time.

  It was almost motionless in the sheltered waters of the Lagoon, but we could feel the floating, solid stability of our new home as it heeled slightly, ponderously, when we moved about trying to orient ourselves to the new and changing views out through the portholes. In the few weeks we had known the boat, it had sat up on the hard and pointed one way, the same views seen from each side. Now it turned a little this way and that around its anchor chain and the world around us slowly shifted. We lit the cosy kerosene cabin lamps. We ate on deck, marvelling at the utter satellite isolation afforded by a boat even a short, swimmable distance from shore. We had left the land and were no longer dwellers upon it (and for the next five years, neither of us slept more than fifteen or twenty nights ashore). We looked across the water at landlubbers walking around the boatyard, to and from the Pinafore bar, and we pitied them. I slept fitfully, getting up often to pump and to look out of a porthole to see if we had dragged anchor or were already aground. I did not yet know of the holding power of our thirty-five-pound plough anchor attached to forty fathoms of five-sixteenths-of-an-inch chain, and I was unassuaged by the windless calm. But Magdaleña lay still on the flat water.