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

  In midsummer, Alan, who also worked in the Caneel boatyard with me, heard of a course being given in Red Hook to study and take the exam for US Coast Guard licences. He and Tom and I signed up, and then J., not wanting to be left out and forever, it seemed, competing with me, signed up too. For the next week, after work, the four of us jumped into Alan’s whaler and powered across lumpy Pillsbury Sound, past the rooted Xanadu, into Red Hook. We bought smoked marlin for our suppers at Johnny Harms’s sport-fishing marina and chewed it through our classes, and powered back to St John in the dark, when fish would leap out of the water beside us. It was a cram course in the Coast Guard syllabus; we learned basic rules of the road, lights, signalling, elementary navigation, some stuff we knew, some we didn’t. We all passed, and J. and I both scored 100.

  Because of the time we claimed, backed up with some written testimonials, of work aboard several large yachts in the Mediterranean (J. had worked on a ferry in Mallorca), and our time on Viva, we were given USCG hundred-ton Ocean Operator’s licences. At the Caneel boatyard there was resentment among some of the older ferry captains that we had come by our licences with such apparent ease. I didn’t care. It meant that I could drive the Caneel ferries – or any other boat as a professional – when a position opened up. I would get better money. And I would be a captain, no little thing in a boat-oriented world.

  The turnover in boat-related jobs, filled as they usually are by boaters – a wandering breed – is high, and within a few weeks I was driving the ferries and enjoying, for a while, my exalted new status and pay cheque. It was a dull job, like driving a bus, and I had little contact with my passengers. But the twenty-minute trip across Pillsbury Sound was always beautiful, and it kept me on the water, where I wanted to be. From the wheelhouse I used to see small white butterflies flying precariously from one island to the other, and I tried to avoid smashing into them. I would swerve the sixty-ton ferry when I could make them out ahead, and this eventually brought complaints from unseated passengers. I learned to gentle my swerves.

  Caneel Bay was good to us. I was able to buy screws and nuts and bolts at cost from the boatyard, and to use the facilities there after hours or on weekends. I made a magazine rack for Magdaleña’s saloon, a cutlery box for the galley, and a teak box for binoculars that I screwed to the bulkhead inside the companionway. When I became a captain and drove the ferries, I found myself elevated in the Caneel staff hierarchy and J. and I could now take tea with the guests and eat meals on the dining patio for cost, the most splendid of which was the twenty-five-foot-long Sunday buffet, which looked like the feast the Tahitians laid on for the Bounty’s crew, with the addition of baroque ice sculptures.

  This should have been a good time for us, but instead J. and I seemed to start spiralling down towards a crash. After the first thrilling rush of independence we felt living aboard our boat, we grew steadily unhappier. We felt trapped, immobilized by a listless ennui, the lack of a plan, a want of discipline. We were lulled by our easy lifestyle, its absence of demands. We felt worthless because we were doing nothing and going nowhere. It is the common trap of the indolent tropics.

  After a few months at Caneel Bay, I grew anxious coming home each day after work. J. had not found a job ashore. I was rowing myself in and out because she had no wish to leave the boat without me. Alone in the boat all day, anchored offshore, she was becoming severely isolated. She seldom felt like mixing with anyone else and didn’t want me to go anywhere without her. She was plunging into depression and I was of little help to her. I wanted us to sail around the world, I lived and breathed the idea, read all the books I could find on the subject; but I also ranted about what a pokey wreck our boat was and talked about selling it and buying a cottage and growing organic vegetables. Or returning to London and getting back into advertising, making commercials, as Martin and my brother David were then doing. They were both living in London, seeing each other regularly, and I missed them. I felt left out and left behind. I lay around the boat thinking about life elsewhere. I felt trapped in J.’s narrowing cocoon and I wanted to get out.

  Her diary towards the end of this second year of our marriage thins to cryptic, depressed remarks on odd days and is blank altogether for its last three months.

  In the fall, at the humid, active end of the hurricane season, heavy rains flooded the islands with streaming mud, and the pellucid blue water in Pillsbury Sound turned to a thick brown equatorial soup filled with trash and flotsam. Instead of dodging butterflies, I had to steer the ferry around the bloated carcasses of goats that had washed out to sea. I grew tired of Caneel and my job, and our life in St John had become isolated and claustrophobic for both of us. I wanted to try using my new licence in the sailboat charter game, so we sailed back to St Thomas and I began making the rounds of the bareboat charter companies.

  A ‘bareboat’ charter captain is an oxymoronic position, since a bareboat is one that charterers rent without a captain or crew; but often, if they are inexperienced, the charter company requires that they take a captain along. Living on my own sailboat, with a big licence, I appeared to qualify and I was soon sailing professionally, a week at a time, once every two or three weeks.

  It was hardly work. The charterers wanted to do most of the sail-handling and steering. They would typically be a family, full of inside humour and friction, or two couples, or occasionally a mix of singles – stressed, anxious people, larval-white and slathered with sunblock. I’d take them from St Thomas to Virgin Gorda and deliver them back a week later brown, relaxed and usually much happier. I found, almost to my surprise, that it was rewarding work.

  It also gave J. and me week-long breaks from each other, and the opportunity to miss and appreciate and look forward to seeing each other.

  On my very first trip, I had never been beyond Tortola and disappeared frequently below to swot up on the next stretch or anchorage in The Yachtsman’s Guide to the Virgin Islands. In time, I discovered which islands, anchorages, shoreside restaurants and routes between them worked best and made for the happiest crew, and the forty-odd-mile trip up to Virgin Gorda and back became somewhat unvarying.

  I soon got to know others going the same way, other bareboat skippers, and couples running their own private charter yachts, like Bruce and Sarah Comstock, former computer programmers from Boston who owned and lived aboard and chartered a fifty-foot fibreglass ketch, Arawak. I might introduce my charterers to theirs, or we might all find ourselves eating together at Stanley’s in Canegarden Bay or the Virgin Gorda Yacht Club. They told me about the Tuesday night barbecue on the beach at Peter Island, put on by the yacht club there. This was the closest thing you’d find in the Virgin Islands to a luau, and Bruce and Sarah told me they always took their charterers there. I started fetching up at Peter Island on Tuesdays too.

  Bruce was short, barrel-chested, bearded, bald and always wore a hat. He was an unrelenting curmudgeon, scathing of his charterers and everybody else in the world out of earshot. He would tell long anecdotes illustrating the uselessness, the ineptitude, the low qualities of anybody you might mention. Sarah, on the other hand, was a peach. She was warm, compassionate, funny, very bright and more than made up for Bruce. She was peach-coloured, too: dark blonde hair, honey-and-peach skin, and I thought she was altogether beautiful. I rarely saw her and Bruce exchange a word. I never saw them touch each other.

  It seemed to me that I often found a seat next to Sarah at the Peter Island barbecue, or that she was ready to swim ashore with me if I paddled past Arawak. She was intuitive, and probably knew I had trouble at home, and I saw the same was true with her. Soon, without saying much, we had gone a long way together on a few swims and meals ashore, all the while surrounded by Bruce and our happy charterers.

  Our boat – for a few months at this time called Coquelicot in J.’s diary – was now anchored off the Sheraton Hotel and Marina at the edge of Charlotte Amalie. It was convenient to the charter companies I worked for, and J. had finally found work helping run the s
horeside operation of one of these companies, which had its office right in the marina.

  One night we were ashore in the marina bar when another boater from the anchorage rowed in to tell us that our boat had been wrecked. We jumped into our dinghy and rowed out to find it afloat but mastless, or so it seemed in the dark. In fact, the mast was lying horizontally on top of the boat, folded straight back from its tabernacle hinge on the cabin roof, supported at the stern by the smashed framework of the home-made wind vane, and sticking out another fifteen feet beyond. In the dark and crowded anchorage, the skipper of a much larger boat, equipped with a powerful anchor windlass, had raised his anchor, snagging ours without realizing it, breaking it out from the muddy bottom, and steamed off through the anchorage towing our boat and startled cat Minou astern. Coquelicot had slewed sideways, the bowsprit colliding with another boat, and the fitting on the end of the sprit, to which the forestay was attached, had broken. That was all that was holding up the mast – a thick, solid Scottish fir tree – which then simply fell backward with the full force of its dead weight. We discovered Minou burrowed deep in our bunk below, puffed up into a round freaked-out ball. After fifteen minutes in J.’s lap he was purring, his fur almost flattened to normal. But our life – bumpy as it may have been – was derailed for six months.

  The boat that had pulled ours on its brief sleigh ride was fortunately insured (we were not). A settlement was worked out, and Billy Walker came in his launch and towed Coquelicot around the south shore of St Thomas, back through the labyrinthine channels of the Lagoon, back to the boatyard where we had first seen it.

  In addition to the accident damage, the boat also had a slew of pre-existing problems that we had put up with or consigned to the someday: the cracked frames – we still weren’t sure how many – that Newt Farley had pointed out when he’d performed his abbreviated survey; rusty rigging; rotten cordage; a series of leaks all over the roof and the decks, which brought miserable drips in the almost daily tropical downpours. And a galley – a crappy makeshift with a rusty stove, a discoloured plastic sink, a pump that didn’t want to deliver water – that we both hated. All this had been tolerable while we were anchored in clear blue water and had a characterful, if run-down, sailboat that we could take sailing. Now we were towed back into the Lagoon, wrecked and squalid.

  The dock where we tied up at Antilles Yacht Services was almost exclusively filled with other wooden boats in states of terminal renovation. Owned by young couples like ourselves who had bought them because they were run-down and cheap, these projects had become an all-consuming lifestyle. The typical boat had a cockpit filled with rusty tools, pots of paint, tubes of glue and caulking. The male owner, in cut-offs and a glue-caked T-shirt, was seen, or heard, contorted inside some locker or the bilge, banging and grunting, or sitting at the grounded hulk of the Pinafore bar, which sat directly at the head of the dock, with a Heineken in his hand talking with another renovation dreamer about sailing down-island in just another few months. In the evenings, his mate would appear, wethaired from the scummy boatyard shower, but pretty in a skirt and frilly island top, setting off for her job as a waitress. She supported the effort financially, and applied the paint and varnish, while her husband/boyfriend/captain did the ‘skilled’ work: the planking, the refastening, the mystical application of epoxy glue, gutting the entire interior and rebuilding the new and vastly improved arrangement, and knocking back greenies at the bar in the company of fellow experts.

  We had seen these same boats and people here a year earlier when we had bought our boat and sailed away. Without exception, the projects all appeared to have regressed until they looked like early stages of new construction using recycled materials. The story was always the same:

  ‘Well, man, like, we figured if we were going to glass the cockpit we might as well do the decks at the same time, and, you know, the decks were shot anyway.’

  Once we got the paint off we found some rot and we had to put in the new planking. But man, she’ll be stronger than new.’

  ‘Well, you know, once we got this far we decided … ’

  These people had all run hard aground. They did not look up from their glue joints. They were embarked on curves of effort that bent farther from their dreamed-of ends the longer they worked. They became lost in the details, and the projects mired in cost and heartache. Couples split up, the first mate usually disappearing back to the States, the captain left with the rotting ship, and soon some sweet new mate would buy into the dream, or need a place to crash, and on it would go.

  We looked around, we looked at our wrecked boat, we looked at ourselves, and we knew we were that close to the same scenario. With this spectre before us, J. and I joined forces with unspoken, unswerving agreement and went to work. It was, for a while, the making of us.

  We too decided that if we were stuck here for a time doing major work, we might as well do as much as possible at once. But we would not languish here. This was not our idea of Caribbean utopia. The Lagoon water was brown and murky, particularly around the community dock: the plumbing system aboard boats was either a marine loo that pumped its contents straight into the water next to your boat, or, for those renovating the head, a bucket. The man-grove swamps creating and encircling the Lagoon to seaward shut out the breeze, hindered the circulation and exchange of water, and bred billions of mosquitoes. Yet Antilles Yacht Services had the facilities we needed, and it had Billy Walker, a testy, harassed Englishman a little older than me, who would for some reason always stop his work to tell me or show me how to do something, and come aboard and see how I’d done it and shake his head in grim, pitying encouragement. Billy was worth the price of admission.

  I still went off chartering. J. quit the charter office and began waitressing in the evenings at a nearby restaurant. We weren’t making a lot of money, but it was all cash and the bulk of it, and all our time not spent working, went into the boat. Compared to the other boats at the dock, ours transformed like a flower growing in time-lapse photography.

  This is what we did to our boat: we found seventy-five cracked oak frames between stem and stern, enough to indicate a rough grounding at some point in the past, and together a serious weakness. Billy Walker showed me how to laminate ‘sister frames’ – thin, bendable strips of Douglas fir nailed and epoxy-glued one on top of the other – alongside the cracked ones, temporarily secured to the hull with little boat nails. When we later hauled the boat out of the water, each frame was fastened through the hull planking from the outside with twelve bronze screws – nine hundred altogether, screwed in with a handbrace in one weekend.

  We tore the delaminating, leaking canvas off the entire decks and cabin top, sanded down the bare wood beneath and replaced it with fibreglass and resin. Our decks leaks stopped absolutely, and we whooped and grinned at each other inside our boat when the next rains came.

  We gutted the inside of the hull aft of the saloon and built in a new galley and chart table. We got a deal from a charter company on a three-burner gas stove, with grill and oven, which we gimballed so that it would remain flat when the boat heeled. We had no engine, so we built in a mass of stowage room aft and beneath the galley.

  A beautiful old mahogany Chris Craft cabin cruiser lay rotting at the boatyard, its owner long gone with unpaid bills. The night before the yard bulldozed it into scrap wood, Norman, a renovation dreamer, and I crawled over it from end to end with screwdrivers and wrenches and came away with armfuls of bronze cleats, naval pipes, hasps, latches and other arcane bits of bronze hardware too wonderful to leave behind.

  We heard of a German blacksmith in Sub Base (site of the former US Navy submarine base west of Charlotte Amalie) and went to see him about replacing the boat’s old galvanized but now rusting bowsprit and bumkin cranse irons and chainplates. Dieter was a very small, slight man who dressed in pale pink or blue shorts and shirt that made him look like a schoolboy. He rode a bicycle everywhere. A sixty-five-foot-long aluminium yacht was nearing completion outsi
de the front of his shop, built entirely by himself. I showed Dieter our old rusty bits and pieces and he knew immediately what he was dealing with. He said, ‘Ja, ja, ja, von of zose boats,’ and he made new ones, on the spot, in stainless steel, and charged me only the stock weight of the metal. He left these fabrications rough and sharp and gave me a file, pushed me towards a vice and checked on me as I smoothed the rough edges. Then he polished all this new hardware with a fine carbide grinder until it looked like silver sculpture. Finally, he took me aboard his own boat a-building. Along with everything else aboard, he proudly pointed out the artwork: a ghastly print of an old mariner in sou’wester smoking a pipe which he had bought at Woolworth’s.

  Billy Walker scooped the deep crack out of our mast and scarfed in a fir ‘dutchman’. J. and I sanded down the mast and put ten coats of varnish on it.

  We replaced all the old galvanized rigging with new stainless steel wire, tightened it up with new bronze turn-buckles ordered from England and bolted Dieter’s new chainplates to the hull. I rebuilt the wind vane. We bought fifty fathoms of new anchor chain. We bolted and bedded new mahogany toerails and rubrails the whole length of the boat at the joint of the hull and deck, and new teak trim pieces to the cabin roof, and varnished them all. We painted the whole boat again, inside and out.

  ‘Wow, man,’ everybody on the dock said, in slightly hurt tones.

  When we were nearly finished, the boat looked as we had long imagined it might. It still wasn’t a sleek or classically pretty craft, yet it had a characterful, purposeful look that we both now liked. But enough with the pretty names, we decided. The strong, seaworthy-looking phoenix that rose from this rebuild was called, finally, Toad. J. painted this name on the stern – the first time we had done this – and after that it never ocurred to us to change our minds again. People who had known the boat before and saw it now didn’t recognize it and thought it was a new arrival in the islands. ‘Look at Toad,’ we heard people say, and it sounded right to us.