Ñandú

It’s great to have someone aboard who’s always on top of things. Then again, maybe not.

It was hard to believe but one miraculous day we found ourselves floating again, although with some incomplete and still unresolved tasks. We headed to Hampton, close to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay to get ready to jump to the Atlantic Ocean and reach the Caribbean in just one leg. A very long leg. We joined dozens of other boats as part of the Salty Dawgs Fall Rally, a loose but well-organized migration of boats escaping the winter. The original destination was Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands, but due to the devastation brought upon by Irma, it was changed to Antigua, some 1500 nautical miles away. For reference, the distance between Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa and Natal, Brazil is 1400 miles, so this passage should count as an ocean crossing, shouldn’t it?

We tried to recruit additional crew among our friends, and Mariella, a childhood friend of Kathy was brave enough to accept the challenge. Never having stepped on a sailboat before, she flew from Chile to Virginia to join as second mate. Lucky captain. We loaded the boat to the brim with fuel, water, beer, dark chocolate and some lesser provisions, Kathy cooked three double-portion meals in one day to freeze, and off we went. We pointed roughly East to cross our old temperamental friend, the Gulf Stream, as quickly as possible, and then turned a slight right. Well, it wasn’t really that simple, as we had to take currents, eddies, wind here today and wind there tomorrow into account, so our actual track looks more like we’re lost than we know what we’re doing.

It was day after day of Atlantic Ocean and very little else, but it was never boring. With our crew of three, a typical day starts with Kathy and I having breakfast while Mariella sleeps to join us later. Correction: every single day, typical or not, start with feeding the cat. There’s simply no way to accomplish anything until you’ve completed that ritual. After a quick review of the morning chores (radar and navigation lights off… check; boat position sent to the shore coordinators… check; decide what to thaw for dinner… check), the day is spent leisurely. Provided the conditions are stable and don’t demand sail changes, the crew rests, takes a nap, or entertains themselves. Activities may include cooking (for the one of us who knows how to), fiddling with the sails to make the boat go a fraction of a knot faster (for the one of us who obsesses with efficiency), or fighting seasickness (for the one of us who hasn’t grown sea legs). Dancing to loud music and playing ukulele is also on the menu, but most of the time is spent chatting about every possible topic, from polyamory to bitcoins to hen breeding. A disorganized lunch based on leftovers or about-to-go-rotten stuff follows, usually so early that purists would not call it lunch. Then there’s more free time in the afternoon, with talks about exercising, doing yoga, trawling a fishing line, and cooking a chocolate cake that never go any further than well-intentioned words. On some special days there may be bread making. And on some very special days there may be a midafternoon bathing ritual: stop the boat, rig a safety line, skinny dip into the deep ocean (insert your favorite Jaws joke here), get back to the deck to liberally apply soap that never foams, dive to rinse the soap and then rinse the salty water back on deck with fresh water.

Sunset comes quickly (around 4:30 boat time) and with it a delicious dinner prepared by our lovely first mate. After the captain cleans the table and the second mate washes the dishes, the night shifts begin. It’s only 6pm but we’re all tired and ready to sleep. Kathy takes the 6 to 9 shift. She wakes me up and takes my place in bed. I operate the satellite device to get the daily weather report and make a routing decision. I keep myself awake by reading the weather report multiple times, navigating the interface of the chartplotter to the most obscure settings and options, sewing velcro tapes to the straps that hold the rolling windows open, and looking at the stars to hopefully learn a new constellation each night. At midnight it’s Mariella’s turn, but I typically nap in the cockpit during her shift in case she has any question. At 3am Kathy comes to the cockpit to replace Mariella and I. At 6am it’s my shift again, but by then there’s daylight and the strict shift schedule starts to morph into the day activities with breakfast.

Day 1. Saw a whale! At least the rear end of one. A sonic boom from a fighter jet scared us all to death. It’s mostly motor-sailing because we’re in a hurry to reach the other side of the Gulf Stream before a cold front turns it into a cauldron. Second mate starts her brave struggle with seasickness.

Day 2. It’s a full moon, so we get to see the sun setting and the moon rising in opposition. We reach the Gulf Stream and get a nice current boost to the East, but we also get a bit of a washing machine cycle.

Day 3. Cold front brings wind early in the morning. Lots of it, but fortunately we’re out of the Stream. It does get bumpy, and we have to explain Mariella that all that noise and violent shakes are normal. She trusts, but remains seasick until she tries my “Navy Cocktail” of pills. We don’t get much sleep.

Day 4. Sailed all night and Mariella takes her first shift. We’re treated in close succession to a beautiful sunrise, a tiny bird that takes a break to rest in our lifelines, and a pod of playful dolphins that keep us company for a while.

Day 5. Nothing happened. At least according to my log.

Day 6. We saw a cargo ship and made radio contact with Elusive, another Salty Dawg sailboat. That was enough social interaction for a whole week. Very calm seas and a dark night provide a spectacular bioluminescence show, which is then stolen by the moonrise. The autopilot disengaged and we went in circles for 15 minutes until I noticed. I unearthed the sextant to take some star sights.

Day 7. Keep motoring in calm seas, very slowly to save fuel. Dilemma: go South to get wind or East to avoid squalls? Some fluids make their way where they shouldn’t (leak in the watermaker), while some others refuse to go where they should (fuel blockage in the starboard engine). On average, we are perfect. I run the calculations from the celestial sights I took the night before. I’m surprised that I still remember how to do it.

Day 8. I plot the lines of positions from yesterday’s calculations. Now I know where we were, according to the stars, two days ago. Very useful! The GPS disagrees by 4 miles; looks like there’s still room for improvement with GPS technology. We reach the halfway point. I get my toenails painted. We get wind! Lots of sail changes though. We expect a squally night and are not sure the radar is working. Mariella remains seasick on and off.

Day 9. Radar is working (whew, we can see the squalls at night). We have the first of an epidemic series of flying fish suicides (by smashing their heads against our windows).

Day 10. Great progress sailing with the screecher at a sustained speed of 8+ knots followed by a very rough, sleepless night.

Day 11. Tropic of Cancer! Squally weather, reefing and shaking reefs back and forth.

Day 12. Are we there yet?

Day 13. Are we there yet? There’s more traffic out there: had to radio a cargo ship to make sure he saw us. We’re feeling the tropical heat. Another rough night in rough seas. Land ho! (Sombrero Island). Tamos llegando, chubai chubai. We should have nice and useful easterly trade winds; instead we get wind on the nose, so we motorsail.

Day 14. It’s D-day, as in “disaster day”. Only 12 miles from our destination the starboard engine suddenly stops when I’m in the head (that’s the toilet if you’ve been following). I suspect it’s the usual fuel flow problem. The smoke I see when I open the engine room hatch tells me otherwise. On closer inspection I find the culprit: our nemesis, the alternator bracket strikes again. This time insidiously, because no-one hears the overheating alarm. Maybe we just became desensitized to the engine panel buzzer, because we’ve had to endure it for hours when it triggered falsely due to an entirely different problem. In the end we made it limping with the other engine, but we now face more boatyard time to get things fixed.

The passage in numbers. Distance sailed: 1646 nautical miles. Best day: 168 miles. Worst day: 64 miles. Wind:  0 to 25 knots, usually closer to 0 than 25. Time with wind abaft the beam: 0. Consequently, number of jibes: 0. Beers consumed: 1 (seriously; I impose a dry regime while on passage—made an exception for a small celebration and shared one beer among all the crew). Sailboats sighted after the third day: 2. Flying fish found dead on deck: 4.

You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave. After so much work and effort to reach a tropical paradise, the landscape around us is not that much different from that in Deltaville. We are floating and don’t need to haul out, but we are tied to the “work dock” of a boatyard. It’s hot, just as in Deltaville. Our view is not that of sandy beaches but the familiar view of boats on stands on the ground. The ambient noise is not of that of gentle surf but the familiar grinding noise of sanding machines. The wind doesn’t bring the delicious smell of unspoiled nature; it does bring instead loads of fiberglass dust from the boat closest to us, just as in Deltaville. Please excuse our sinful thoughts of quitting and our lust for a conventional life with conventional alternator brackets.

Welcome to the Hotel California…
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!
– Eagles

It’s getting dark and it’s time to call it a day. We are dirty, hot, exhausted, thirsty and hungry after making a minuscule amount of progress in our daunting list of projects. All our dishes are dirty, piled up in two overflowing buckets in the cockpit. Washing the dishes outside—with a hose in our improvised washing station made out of a block of styrofoam—is such a chore that we keep cooking to a minimum and try to reduce, reuse and recycle. “Was that the bowl I used for oatmeal this morning? Then it’s perfect for tonight’s lentils!”

A bunch of tools, boxes, books, some trash, half-used clothes, shoes, a cat and the occasional frog contribute to the mess that covers the entire floor. As we fail to find any energy (and any clean dish too), we decide to innovate and order pizza. There’s one catch, though. We have no cell signal reception.

We walk half a block to the boatyard’s office. It’s closed, but we can still use the wi-fi from the porch. Fending off the also-hungry mosquitoes, Kathy calls the pizza place, and with an amazing amount of willpower from both ends to repeat every sentence three times, they manage to agree that it’s all about one large vegetarian pizza (through a lousy wi-fi connection chilean and virginian accents seem like entirely different languages). She gives the address, and warns them it’s not a house but a boatyard.

“Our boat is…”

“No, just the address is fine.”

“But it’s a boatyard. There’s a hundred boats here.”

“The address is good.”

There is no point in arguing, since most likely the driver is going to get just the address anyway. We have to be alert for any signs of pizza coming in our direction, so we spread out: Kathy stays in front of the office while I grab one of the yard bikes and move to the boat. 45 minutes later our fears materialize: a car comes into the yard, the driver figures it’s the weirdest place to deliver a pizza, and decisively U-turns without a hint of slowing down, right in front of Ñandú. Before I can react he’s gone, leaving a faint smell of cheese and olives behind. I bike back to the office to give Kathy the news. She calls the pizzeria again. They say the driver will be back soon. They tried to show confidence, but were clearly just guessing. They were not entirely wrong, though. A long while later, when we were already resigned to a bowl of cereals for dinner, the driver comes back, this time actually looking for a potential delivery target. He apologized profusely, but that didn’t change the fact that the pizza was cold. Oh well. Still less depressing than corn flakes.

At least we escaped the cold pizza/warm beer combo, since the ice I brought on the bike from the gas station was still keeping things cold in our non-working freezer. When the boat is out of the water our keel-cooled refrigeration system doesn’t work. We downgraded the refrigerator to a pantry and the freezer to a cooler, which needs to be regularly replenished with ice. The ice of course takes half the space of an already small box.

Life on a boat is complicated when the boat is on the water. It’s twice that much when the boat is on the ground. And thrice as bad when she’s on this particular boatyard. That’s in part because of the water issue. The well water here has so much iron it will stain the boat yellow if you dare to use it straight from the well. The water in the restroom and showers is treated with salt which somehow makes it “softer”, less yellow, and, well, salty. Very salty. (If someone can explain to me how adding even more minerals to already impure water makes it better, I’m all ears). Since we don’t fancy brewing coffee with brine, every few days we have to request the boatyard’s courtesy car to drive to the fire station where drinkable water is provided at 10 cents per gallon, and survive for as long as we can with our 8-gallon load of potable water.

With so much time and effort needed just for the day-to-day domestic tasks, there’s little time and energy left to make progress with the boat projects. And the longer we take, the more likely we’ll break something or find more things to fix, in a never-ending, inescapable misery. And just in case you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a non-exhasutive list of our projects, large and small:

Retune the rig. Wax the entire hull. Fix gelcoat dings and cracks. Replace a chafed screecher sheet. Bring the jib to the sail repair shop. Clean stains from all of the metal parts. Mark anchor chain, again. Replace anchor rope with a longer chunk (after ordering the wrong size, returning it at a discounted price, and ordering the right one). Install clips to secure boat hook. Install padeye to shackle the main halyard when not in use. Make and install the final version of the rain catchers. Remove and reinstall two leaking hatches. Reorganize anchor locker. Protect tank tender hoses. Rethink and implement better way of attaching bridle to anchor rode. Put duct seal where the manufacturer forgot to. Change anchor shackles for ones with known rating. Fix watermaker, again. Pickle the watermaker. Change watermaker filters. Build and install spice rack. Improve food storage with hammocks, hooks and boxes. Heck, get boxes (of very specific sizes) for everything. Fix port diesel tank leak. Install box for bilge storage (to improve our autonomy without having to reload beer). Fix leaks in three windows. Fix daggerboard damage caused by angry anchor chain. Find freaking fuel blockage issue. Fix leaking diesel valves. Install mosquito-screen curtains in owner’s berth. Install latches to hold screens open for each hatch. Tighten a bunch of loose nuts and screws. Install shelves and holders. Install hatch for better access to storage space where the holding tank would have been. Install fairleads to prevent the screecher lines from ripping the composting toilet’s vent cover. Revarnish dinghy oars. Reinforce dinghy’s daggerboard. Fix dinghy scratches. Install additional oarlock (for sculling). Reinstall, correctly, a fairlead and block for the dinghy’s mainsheet. Bring dinghy outboard to a technician to change shaft seals. Repaint everything below the waterline: hulls, daggerboards, transducer, rudders, saildrive legs, propellers (requiring four different types of paint in total, each with its own idiosyncrasy and different instructions for surface preparation, application, and number of coats). Change saildrive, propeller and frigoboat anodes. Grease the propeller. Change engine oil and oil filters. Change fuel filters. Check raw water impellers. Wash the air filters. Retension alternator belts. Change saildrive oil. Reglue portside saildrive boot. Realign rudders. Align them again after I was told a more precise method. Find and fix source of rainwater leak into port engine room. Protect propane valves and regulator against potentially flying things in the propane locker. And there’s still a couple of things in the engine I’m supposed to check but don’t even know what and where they are (breather pipe, anyone?). And other things we should do but probably won’t, such as lubricating the winches.

Which brings me to the next issue. Having no internet access is perfectly acceptable if you are camping, but even though we seem to be camping (with a rather strange tent, I’ll grant you that), we are actually trying to get this boat ready for the ocean! And since we have no idea how to do half of the tasks in our list, we need those damn forums and youtube videos. So there you have an extra layer of complication, slowness and despair: your project is in one place and the instructions are almost one block away. And you cannot bring one to the other.

On the plus side, we do enjoy the camaraderie with our fellow boat fixers in the yard. We invite each other for sundowners, offer free and usually bad advice, make bets on who’s going to launch first, and talk about other neighbors on their backs. But mostly, we whine about our terrible life and share stories of boatyard misery and soul-crushing days.

When my parents finally moved to a boat a bit over a year ago, I was at somewhat of a loss.

To be fair, they’ve been talking about living on a boat since before I graduated high school, so perhaps I should have seen it coming. But when your parents say they plan on selling the house and taking to the sea as soon as your younger sister leaves for college, you expect them to
follow through about as much as you expect your seven-year-old nephew to win the Presidential Election. So when they finally told me to start putting my things in boxes, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that I was caught by surprise.

The change was a bit hard to get used to at first. Before they moved, I had regular contact with my family, probably more than an average college student should. I blame this on my Latino background. I lived about three hours away by train. After my last class every Friday, I would dutifully hop on Amtrak to spend the weekend with my family in our Bay Area house. The constant travelling was stressful, but I enjoyed seeing the people I had been raised by and the place I called home.

Now visiting my parents is a bit of a hassle, to put it lightly. I would only see them a couple times a year, in the brief breaks between school quarters, when I could afford to take the time off to travel to whichever remote location their boat was currently docked in. When I wasn’t visiting them, I was given emails detailing their location and sailing plans and told to contact the Coast Guard if I didn’t hear back from them in a while. I developed abandonment issues—kidding, of course (for the most part).

Socially speaking, when your parents decide to do something fairly bizarre and out-of-the-blue like move to the other side of the country in order to pursue a water-borne nomadic lifestyle, two things happen: your friends suddenly have a lot of difficulty relating to your family situation, and word about it ends up spreading faster than you’d like.

I was suddenly known by people outside of the tiny sphere of my social group. I really wasn’t that famous in the grand scheme of things, but as somewhat of a social recluse, this was more fame than I knew how to handle. People I had never met would know me as the person whose
parents live on a boat. First-time conversations were more nautically-inclined than they were before, and I did my best to seem as sailorly as possible and give off the impression that I understood what my parents were doing. Mothers of friends would feel sorry for me and offer to adopt me.

So it’s true that I now regularly experience a few minutes of fame and intrigue, courtesy of a decision that was not mine. But if I’m being completely honest, it isn’t me that holds the fame and it isn’t really my parents, either. If anyone is a celebrity, it’s the cat.

More often than not on a typical day meeting up with friends, I end up handing around pictures of my cat Oliver. Oliver riding on the dinghy, Oliver on a leash with my mom on a Bahamian beach. People would ask me for updates on how he was doing. They would also ask me his opinion on the move. I would tell them that I didn’t know, that he’s a bit hard to read at times. From what I see of him, he seems happy enough, though. He’s kinder to me when we’re on the boat than when we’re on land. I think it’s because the boat has no heater and he enjoys the warmth my body gives off.

For the most part, life on the boat (assuming you’re a guest and not a sailor) is fairly mellow. Occasionally the boat would rock around while I was asleep and I would roll a couple of feet to either side. I got used to it.

I would do small things to help my parents sail when I could. Sometimes I would help by staying up late to watch the little lights on the horizon. This sounds calming and romantic—and it is if you forget that its main purpose is to ensure that we don’t crash.

If you lack sailing expertise, though, for the most part you are useless to the crew except as moral support. There were many hours my parents spent tugging on various ropes and plotting the boat’s course that I spent primarily immersed in my sketchbook. On the plus side, I get much better at drawing whenever I go visit them.

Visiting my parents is really not as bad as what I had once imagined it would be like, despite the lack of wifi and the occasional lack of drinkable water. I used to hate the idea of sailing. I know a lot of people dislike it because they get nauseous, but I’ve always been immune to seasickness, so that wasn’t the problem. My parents used to take me sailing rather often, frequently during fairly rough seas, and I would spend the hours in the hull reading a book.

I guess I disliked the claustrophobia of it. I felt confined in those floating vehicles that did not belong to me. But now that we’re no longer renting a boat and I have a space that is (mostly) my own, surrounded by the people I love, the boat no longer really bothers me. It just feels like home—a home far away from any other place I’ve called home, but a home nonetheless.