Sea Over Bow Read online

  I stow the lunch things while Chris gets out of his wet bathing suit, then we pull anchor (when will it see the bottom again?) and we’re on our way.

  “Here, take the helm for a minute,” Chris says as we motor out of the little bay. “Steer for the middle of the cut.” He goes back and drops the fishing line in the water, puts the rod in the stand at the stern, then comes and takes the wheel. Just as we’re entering the cut, the line starts zinging out.

  “Fish on,” Chris shouts, but he can’t go back and land it until we’re through the cut. Once we’re out in the ocean, he goes back and checks the line.

  “Lost it,” he says, reeling it in. “Well, lost most of it.”

  I look back. There’s a fish head on the line, a big one, about the size of a dinner plate. The only thing large enough to bite a fish that size in two would be a shark. It must have been a huge one.

  “So I guess we won’t be doing a lot of swimming out here?”

  Chris tosses the fish head in the water.

  “Dessert,” he says.

  “You might have been dessert. And lunch too.”

  “No, sharks don’t come into the shallows. Besides, I would have wrestled it into submission,” he says with a grin.

  If you can cross an ocean on bravado alone, we’ve got it made.

  Our first night at sea is gentle, magical almost. The moon is full, the winds light, the seas calm. We leave a trail of phosphorescence in our wake, a swath of sparkling, blue-green light tracing our path across the dark water.

  It seems to take forever to pass Barbuda, the island just north of Antigua. We can hear waves breaking over the reefs along the east side of the island as we ghost along. Sometimes we can actually see them reflected in the light of the moon. We keep checking the charts carefully, confirming our position every fifteen minutes, just to be sure we haven’t drifted towards the rocks. They sound so much closer than they are.

  We haven’t seen another boat since we set sail. This is nothing like our very first night in the ocean.

  We’d been waiting at anchor behind Sandy Hook, a spit of land just south of New York City, for more than a week, hoping the weather would settle enough for us to set out into the ocean. But we’d woken to thirty-knot winds. Again. The gales of November were setting in. Time to go.

  We figured if we hugged the coast, we would be okay. But the wind shifted to the north and the seas built steadily throughout the day, causing the boat to wallow sickeningly as the autopilot struggled to keep up with the following seas. We were making good progress, though. By nightfall, we were approaching Atlantic City.

  Chris took the first night watch. We were overtaken by a sailboat — he chatted with the captain for a while — and a freighter passed us far off on our port side. Before going below, Chris pointed out the freighter’s lights receding in the distance. Good, I thought. The shipping lanes must be well offshore, like they are in Lake Huron.

  I was wrong. There may have been shipping lanes out there somewhere, but closer to shore, it wasn’t quite as orderly as all that. As I watched the freighter’s lights slowly disappear, I noticed two white lights, one above the other, moving towards us, closing fast.

  White over white, I muttered to myself. I grabbed the handy reference card I keep in the cockpit, switched on the flashlight. White over white…oh yeah, towing at night. It was a tugboat coming towards us, probably heading into Atlantic City. I could see that it would pass well ahead of us but I kept my binoculars trained on it until both the tugboat and the barge it was towing were safely past us.

  Whew. I lowered my binoculars. Wait, what’s that? Two white lights, one above the other, coming out from the coast. Another tugboat, and of course it was coming right for us. Clearly we were passing the entrance to the busy harbour at Atlantic City. But suddenly I could see his starboard running light. He had seen us and was altering course to pass behind us.

  This time I didn’t lower my binoculars but did a complete 360-degree scan, dividing the horizon into quarters, scanning first in one quarter, then the next. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a fishing trawler off our port quarter. Green over white, fishing at night. He was well out to sea and probably out there for the night, but I kept an eye on him anyway in case he decided to come in with his catch.

  Nothing off our port bow, nothing off our starboard bow, nothing off our stern — wait, what’s that? I peered into the darkness. In the distance, I could just make out a white light flanked by red and green lights. I didn’t have to refer to my card. This was bad. If I could see his masthead light and both running lights, he was coming straight towards us. And fast. I checked his position on radar, made a little x where he was, checked again in a couple of minutes. He was much closer. Maybe he’d see us and alter course? Nope. I had to think fast.

  I picked up the handheld radio. “To the vessel on my stern just south of Atlantic City, this is the sailboat MonArk.”

  There was no response. And the ship had closed by another half mile. I decided to try a new tactic.

  “To the ship at — ” I gave his longitude and latitude “ — this is MonArk.”

  A long pause, then a clipped voice on the radio. “To the vessel hailing, this is the — ”

  In my nervousness, I missed the name of the ship. I asked if he had me on his radar, and he confirmed somewhat brusquely that he did. Then I asked if he wanted me to maintain my course and speed while he passed me.

  Another long pause.

  “What kind of vessel are you?” he asked.

  “A forty-three-foot sailboat,” I replied. “Under sail,” I added, in case he wasn’t familiar with the rules of the road.

  An even longer pause, then he said, “I’ll alter course to pass you on your starboard side.”

  He changed his heading slightly and I found myself looking at the port side of a huge ocean freighter. What is he doing not a mile and a half offshore? I watched in wonder as he passed beside us, completely blocking out the lights of Atlantic City.

  “Thank you,” I said weakly.

  No acknowledgement.

  As his lights disappeared into the darkness ahead of me, I saw not two but three white lights coming towards me. A tugboat towing something far behind it. But word was out about the woman in the sailboat. The tugboat hailed me.

  “Two whistles,” he said.

  Huh? I struggled to remember what that meant.

  “I’ll pass you on your starboard side.”

  “Roger that.”

  He too blotted out the lights of Atlantic City as he passed, and I thought, wow, this really isn’t Lake Huron, where we see maybe one ship a night, way off in the distance. I spent the rest of my first night in the ocean in a state of wide-eyed alert.

  May 23

  Day 2

  Northeast of Barbuda

  The next morning dawns sunny and warm. The wind is light so we furl in the genoa and raise the spinnaker, a huge, lightweight nylon parachute that makes the most of what wind there is.

  Genoa. Spinnaker. It took me a while to learn the names of things. Nothing is straightforward on a boat. The biggest sail, the one that runs up the mast, is the mainsail — that makes sense. But the foresail can have many names. Ours is called a genoa. When I asked Chris why, he looked at me blankly.

  “Because the clew extends aft of the mast.”

  Oh.

  We also have a small stormsail that we don’t attach to the inner forestay, we hank on. The inner forestay — and the forestay itself, which the genoa attaches to — is part of the standing rigging, along with the shrouds, the wires that support the mast.

  The running rigging is something else altogether, and probably the most complicated system on the boat. To the untrained eye, it looks like an array of ropes attached to various parts of the sails and the boom. But don’t call them ropes! You never use the word rope on a boat. You call
ropes lines, and there are specific names for the ones that run up inside the mast and are used to haul the sails up (halyards) and the ones you use to trim the sails — these are called sheets. The mainsail has one sheet and the foresails each have two. So when Chris says release the starboard staysail sheet, I know exactly which rope — sorry, line — I should reach for. And I almost never release the halyard by mistake, which would cause the staysail to come tumbling down.

  A gentle swell from behind lifts us slowly, then sets us back down, helping us on our way. Wind-driven waves murmur against the hull. This is not what I thought ocean sailing would be like, and I know it won’t always be like this. But for now, it’s perfect.

  Once we’re happy with how the sails are set, I go below and make breakfast. We’re having the last two pineapple turnovers from the bakery in English Harbour and coffee — Joy in the Morning, it’s called, which seems appropriate. It’s a special blend we found at a little place nestled in the hills above Falmouth Harbour. We have a locker full of it, which may be a bit excessive, but the thought of running out of coffee in the middle of the North Atlantic is too grim to contemplate.

  We are sprawled comfortably in the cockpit, sipping our coffee. Chris reaches forward and adjusts the sheet so the spinnaker catches a little more wind, then sits back, stretches his arm along the back of the seat. I snuggle in. He smells pretty good for a guy who hasn’t showered in a few days. I catch a whiff of his shaving cream. Ocean Breeze, it’s called.

  “Now you really smell like ocean breeze.”

  He pulls me close to him, sniffs my hair.

  “And you smell like…my girl.”

  He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, I smile up at him. Sometimes I think his eyes are brown, but they have flecks of hazel in them, so they change with the light. They are dark brown pools today, uh oh, I know that look.

  Our coffee is cold by the time we get back to it. Chris goes below to make another pot.

  “Look!” I say, when he returns. In the distance we can see one, then a few, then many dolphins heading towards us. These don’t look like ordinary dolphins.

  “These are pantropical spotted dolphins,” I announce to Chris, who is studying them through his binoculars. I have pulled out the marine mammal guide I keep tucked behind one of the cushions.

  “How do you know?”

  “Come on, they’re easily identified by their white-tipped beak and prominent dark dorsal cape. That light grey swath sweeping upward on their caudal peduncle is distinctive, as is their highly variable degree of spotting.”

  He lowers his binoculars. I hide the book behind my back.

  “Peduncle? Really?”

  “You know…that, uh, thing with the grey swath on it.”

  “Right.”

  We manage to stretch our second pot of coffee to midmorning, by which time Chris, who has been up since 3:00 am, really needs a nap. I decide to try writing a letter to my sister. In theory, we can send email via the single sideband radio, somehow. We haven’t tried this out yet. I fetch my computer, make myself comfortable in the cockpit, open it up.

  Dear Brenda,

  I’m writing to you from the middle of the ocean — well, not the middle, actually. We’re somewhere northeast of Antigua, two days out now, maybe another five to go till we make landfall in Bermuda.

  I’ll bet you didn’t expect to hear from me while we were on the crossing. I was a little skeptical when Chris said that we would be able to use the single sideband radio to send email, but it turns out that he was right. It’s not that complicated. All you have to do is switch on the radio which is beside the nav station in the salon, then go back to the bedroom and switch the tuner on. Next you connect the modem to the computer, turn on the modem, turn on the computer, and open SailMail on the computer. Then you’re ready to tune the antenna. You push the transmit button on the microphone, then run back to the bedroom and adjust the tuner until you get the best signal possible. Back to the nav station, where you log into SailMail on the computer and you’re ready to send and receive. Nothing could be simpler.

  So far, the sailing has been easy. The winds have been light and steady, the seas calm, the days warm and sunny, and the nights — you would love the nights, Beek. The moon so bright the sails cast a shadow on the water, a stream of sparkling phosphorescence trailing behind us.

  This is not at all what I expected. I watched The Perfect Storm. Several times. Chris says that’s not what it’s really like, those are Hollywood waves. Not that he’s been across the ocean himself. But he has friends who had to motor all the way from Newfoundland to the Azores, it was so calm. They had to beg diesel fuel from a passing freighter. He also knows some people who endured eight days of gales and heavy seas on their crossing. All they could keep down were crackers and water.

  Don’t worry, Beek — we have lots of crackers on board, lots of everything, actually. In Antigua, I managed my anxiety about setting out into the ocean by making a complicated provisioning plan and spending several days shopping for groceries, stowing them, checking them, double checking them.

  As I was packing and repacking the food lockers, I kept thinking about the day I drove Brad to London. He was so sick by then, you remember what he was like. I knew that this transplant was his one and only chance. If it didn’t work — well, I didn’t like to think about it.

  I got up early that morning, changed the sheets, did a load of wash, put out fresh towels for when we came home. I checked the fridge to make sure there would be milk for our tea. Next thing I knew, I had cleaned out the whole fridge and was walking to the composter with some limp celery, a dried-up orange, half a carton of eggs well past their expiry date.

  On my way back to the house, I started picking up apples that had fallen from the tree, throwing them into the composter. Then I spotted a couple of ripe tomatoes in the garden, went to pick them. Look at this mess, I thought, and bent to pull out a few weeds. Half an hour later I straightened up, looked at my watch, it was time to go. I realized that even if I had all the time in the world, I could never be ready enough for what was ahead.

  But I don’t feel like that now. I think I’m ready. I guess we’ll find out.

  Who ever really knows what waits ahead, eh, Beek? I never expected to find myself stretched out in the cockpit of a sailboat — my sailboat — water chuckling along the side of the hull, a gentle breeze wafting over me. Right now, the morning sun is shining right through the broad yellow and green stripes of the spinnaker, bathing the cockpit in soft, warm light. I wish you could see this. I hope someday you will.

  We’re good now, right, Beek? I know you were taken by surprise — shocked, actually, and more than a little angry with me when I announced that I was quitting my job, selling my condo and my car and most of my stuff, and going to sea with a man you’d just met. I didn’t introduce him to you sooner, and I’m so sorry about that, but I wanted to be sure. I didn’t want anyone to know about Chris, in case it didn’t work out.

  I did take him to meet Mom, though. Did I ever tell you about that? I knew she would keep my secret, didn’t have any choice, actually.

  “Oh my god!” she said when I walked into her room at the nursing home with him.

  “Hello, Joan,” he said awkwardly. She wheeled her chair closer to him, grabbed him with her good hand, you know how strong it is, pulled him close to her, studied his face carefully.

  “All right,” she said, smiling, releasing his hand. “All right.”

  She knew, somehow. She was more sure about him, about what we were planning to do, than I was. I’m still not sure I have the courage. For either.

  I think you are the brave one in the family, Beek. What you’re doing takes a lot more courage than sailing across an ocean. In a couple weeks, I’ll be on dry land (with any luck) but you’ll still be navigating the shoals of kindergarten, swimming lessons, the tooth fairy. Without any help f
rom Mom, though maybe that’s a blessing. She can’t tell Anna to watch out! Be careful! Don’t touch that! And she can’t tell you what you’re doing wrong. Not that she’d tell you directly. She’d just purse her lips.

  The wind seems to be dying a little. I need to go adjust the sheet, see if I can keep the spinnaker happy, then maybe start thinking about making us some lunch. Chickpea salad again, I think, while we still have red peppers and crunchy carrots. The fresh vegetables aren’t going to last long in this heat. Then it will be soup, soup, and more soup. And crackers. Lots of crackers.

  I know you’re pretty busy, Beek, but do write to me when you can. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reread your last letter. I can picture Anna in her pink tights and leotard and her soft pink ballet shoes, admiring herself in the mirror. And I can just see her being a butterfly. I’ll bet she was good at it!

  Congratulations on graduating your first PhD, Beek. That must really feel great. Funny, eh? It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were in Montreal, waiting in the hall for the word from your committee. Yet I guess it’s more than ten years ago now. And now you’re on the committee. Amazing.

  You are such a good writer, and I am so grateful for these glimpses into your world. Funny thing — I feel more in touch with you these days, more in tune with what’s going on for you, than I felt before we left. Maybe going away for a while is a good thing, in some ways. Makes you see what you left behind a little more clearly.

  But not in all ways: I miss your face.

  I’d better go. There’s a limit to how long an email message can be on SailMail. If you exceed the limit, you will be cut off in mid —