In the drizzly winter of 1999 I found myself alone on a 25 years old sailing boat in Lake Union, Seattle, United States. Such event would scarcely titillate anyone’s curiosity and would not deserve any written record, was it not for the fact that a. I am not an American, b. I had barely sailed a boat like that before, let alone on the Pacific Ocean and I had no clear idea of what I was getting myself into. How, but especially why this did happen is a long story that the attentive reader will be able to nimble from the lines themselves. It should suffice for now that I was then in a period of my life when I was still unable to find a comic side in romanticism.
It goes without saying that one should never operate heavy machinery without knowing exactly how to do so, and hoping to succeed unpunished. But the close proximity of the object of our dreams is no incentive to prudence, and a bright optimism was even capable of blowing away the perpetual drizzle embracing Seattle. The obstacles ahead remained numerous, and the sole fact of being the proud owner of the vessel in question was surely a pro but by no means a counterbalance to the cons. The main hitch I had to face was the absence of hands. Modern sailboats come with a series of gadgets primarily designed to ease the handling of the lines which, when correctly trimmed, pull the vessel in the right direction. Cadeau, for such is the name of the old lady, had, with the notable ecception of the autopilot, none of it. A modern cruise boat may boast something like 3 halyards, 6 sheets and, say, other 5 or 6 regulations: all these lines come in different colours, run through a battery of stoppers that inable the trimming one at a time in swift sequence, and terminate in 4 self tailing winches, all set around a wide cockpit. I had to deal with 10 halyards, 8 sheets, endless regulations, most of them white in colour, going through numberless blocks but no stoppers and ending in an extensive cultivation of 13 winches, only 3 of which self-tailing, spread more or less all around the deck. How to deal with them by means of only two hands, both attached to a single body, mine, was a metter of serious thought. Unfortunately I knew nothing of the subtle art of recruiting crew in those days, and few timid, ill-aimed and exceedingly confined efforts brought proportional results.
What to do and where to go?
At first it was all about significance and earnestness. Flippancy was long to be achieved and the track led through a simplicity I could not grasp yet. In the meantime I could not agree better with Raymond Williams when he wrote:
‘…it’s no longer from the practice of community but from being a wanderer that the instinct of fellow-feeling is derived. Thus an essential isolation and silence and loneliness become the carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society’
The country and the City
Indeed my association with fellow humans had been rather intense in the previous years, resulting in a spiderweb of liaisons that were mostly businesslike, rarely avoidable and seldom agreable. A nearly perfect journey in the Canadian Arctic some months before did nothing to deter the balance of my preferences to lean towards places where population density was supposed to be scarce and the territory vast.
Then we also have to record a certain liking I had for mist. It all belonged to the carachter, really. A convinced, although merely self-diagnosed, sufferer of DFS, my mind had always felt a longing for fallish atmospheres of fogs and rains, of mists and drizzles. Leaning palms over white beaches and turquoise waters had never been my sort of screensaver, that was usually on the winterish side, possibly a nice forest covered in snow in the declining lights of winter, images that could nearly transport the sound of the thin wind among the branches or the barking of a dog in the crisp air.
One doesn’t need to know by heart every single Lonely Planet guide to understand that Alaska could be a perfect destination. The list of drawbacks was long, though. First, even if that huge state is nearly three times the size of Ukraine and has similar climate, fate put most women, and nearly all the beautiful ones, in the smaller state. Second, Alaska is nearly a whole Mediterranean Sea away from Lake Union, not to mention that I had to get out of the locks as well if I wanted to dip Cadeau’s keel in saltwater. Third, as we already know, was the lack of hands.
A shrewd reader have probably already got the way I could follow through all these cons, viz. to find one of the thousands eager SWF around, willing and able to go AWOL, and list her as multi-purpose crew. But, alas, blame the fact that my marriage was just over, and again that my recruiting techniques were non-existent, I decided to leave alone. Strangely enough the art of recruiting crew is not much different than the subtle talent of pulling the gentler sex. Being the latter flair slightly rusted after eight years of peaceful relationship, the main device of attraction, that is the capacity of opening oneself up, was dormant. Destiny, I thought in earnest, wants me to cast off alone. The probable upcoming devastating effects of this this foolhardy decision were greatly mitigated by a the smart choice of remaining nailed to the dock for a week, spent in studying the new thing I had moved all my personal effects into. Unfortunately I cannot claim the merit of this wise resolution unless my morals had been relaxed to the point of lying to myself. In fact abundant reasons to stay there made themselves evident during the first restless night on my specially tailored mattress, in the form of a very strong gale. The town awoke with a severed link to the outside world, having the Redmond to Seattle bridge been dislodged by the wind, and I awoke with the severe impression that my choice of waters to learn how to sail had been slightly precipitous, if not injudicious. After a week between hay and grass, with fear as the hay and the lure of the ocean as the grass, I took courage in both hands and, with the help of my ex wife and a couple of her university pals, we nervously motored out of the channels, goofily dealt with the locks and made a short but rewarding sail in the sound before docking in a saltwater harbour, that I planned to leave the following day, had the gods been auspicious such as the forecast said. Needless to say, few plans withstand the contact with the enemy. Aeolus had not read the forecast and increased his strength soon after Cadeau, and of most Seattle’s sailboats, for the matter, all engaged in a race. Thank God I had a roller furling device and I could furl the jib, but the mainsail had to stand up with just one reef in. Needless to say the second reefing line I had not rigged, and the blame I poured on myself was only partially relieved by the impossibility I would have faced if I had tried to reef. Problems shared are problem halved, and my self esteem bounced back a little when I read that the ferries had to rescue more than one boat. But that would have happened later. In the meantime the situation was critical, with Cadeau flying downwind with a captain at the helm unable to stop her. Sheer luck that the wind was blowing from the south and right down the channel towards the exit, and not the other way round, otherwise I would have finished my promising sailing career on a beach somewhere around Tacoma. I ended up in Port Ludlow instead, so lovely calm when I gybed in that one wonder how the wind actually blesses some places by avoiding them. I let go and rigged the reefing line.
Day after day of the month of March, mainly thanks to the benign winds, the Cadeau/self odd couple started sailing less and lass badly, and at every mile a drop less, but still a lot, of patience was requested from her. We sailed farther north, across the Juan the Fuca strait and into the San Juan Island archipelago, remarkably devoid of other sailboats around and, even more remarkably, devoid of rain.
When a Mediterranean sailor starts cruising around these waters, the primary sensation is that he had got it all wrong before and wonders why people is actually still sailing there. True, the water had this regrettable inclination of being cold, going up and down twice a day, and to do so it had to move rather swiftly in a horizontal direction, sometimes rather irksomely. But a finer collection of islands, bays, channels, coves and havens is hard to find anywhere. If one could move there a small Mediterranean village such as Stromboli, Korcula or Villefranche, including restaurants and butcheries, perfection would be finally achieved. Had my sailing course gone the other way around, things would have been sensibly different. I would probably never move back out of the Inside Passage ever, settle somewhere and import European culture, food and style, build the perfect village and just sail here and there for fun.
A purist, a die-hard bluewater sailor, even a dreamer at his first sailing steps, and actually even myself in those days, would probably loathe such contemptible attitude. There is more land than water there! What’s the point? Where is the call of the blue infinite? The fascinating Ocean ahead? The divine endless blue? Where, above all, is the Romanticism of the Ocean that one should look for?
Indeed it was all a question of Romanticism in those days. My friend D., of Baffin Island memory, was the first visitor aboard. My move towards the sailboat adventure had not only a Romantic spring, but also a more earthly passionate side. And she had much to do with it, for I was unquestionably eager to forget all Tilman’s advice about women aboard and sail her anywhere she wanted, even more so because she had a great liking for cold, uninhabited and mountainous places. Needless to say, while there was nothing wrong in the balance of our bodies and our minds, for they mingled splendidly not the dsame can be said of the timing. And timing is essential in most important things of life. This does not mean that I arrived too late or too early, just that our lives indeed crossed each other but while moving into completely, if not opposite, directions. She had vastly researched in the practical side of Romantic exhistence and came out with a clear vision of things, based on a simplicity I could not fathom yet, and an eagerness to settle in a city and make money. I, on the other side, had invested largely on the practical side of life, made some money and was willing to move all my stakes into the idealistic half.
It took nearly 50,000 miles for me to understand properly the meaning I attach to the Ocean, which is, to put it bluntly, a vast expanse of salty water.
Volume I – The North
The first package of lessons arrived promptly during a shakedown cruise in the small archipelago of the San Juan Islands, when Cadeau logged 317 miles in 18 days, between Seattle and Bremerton. Experience is not easy to achieve, but some small incidents can surely speed up the learning process. Great was the first ‘crossing’ of the Juan de Fuca strait, notoriously nasty, breezy that day but certainly rewarding. Needless to say a perfect crossing and sail had to end in glory, when I decided that Roche Harbour dock was not that far to jump. When mooring sideways, it’s hard to chose between a wind coming from the dock (thus diminishing the crashing speed), one towards it (thus helping the approach) or something in between. After many years at sea I decided that no wind at all is the best choice. Anyway, that day I discovered that the first kind of wind tends to increase the distance between the boat and the dock with the passing of time, and this distance is seldom small enough to be crossed with a jump with a mooring line in one hand. I can report that the water was cold.
Another important lesson is that the spinnaker, especially when exceedingly vast, is not a perfect choice of sail among shoals, narrows and rock, with and without local knowledge.
The San Juan Islands are too perfect to be true, provide amazing shelter and holding ground, they are dry and sunny, and are outrageously expensive. The charme of the place was clear enough to the Americans and the British who rushed to claim the islands when they realized, in 1860, that no one had done that before (!!). Probably caught by the pastoral beauty or by the pacific attitude of everyone traveling NW, the captains of both teams, Geoffrey Hornby (GB) and George Pickett (US), decided that a long training was far better than a short bloodbath. Needless to say the abyss between the european style and the american ‘roughin’it’ spirit that the style of the quarters still testify was never filled since. In 1872 Kaiser William called it a day and the starts and stripes was raised. Yes, it means that the two teams stood bravely their ground for 12 years, without shooting a single bullet.
How can one blame them? I cannot think of a better place to weather out a gale. Shallow sandy bottom, into a maze of calm channels and green pine forests, surrounded by wealthy but stylish villas where a small light always shines cosily by the window and a large choice of interesting books aboard, and the gale goes aways fast. Pity the same happened to the oars, that were lost when the dinghy was overturned by the wind.
Silence prevails when the wind abates, and there’s always someone behind the lights at the windows. True, there’s no less efficient corner to place a light, but the poetry, the meaning and the message of a glow behind a window is unique.
The call of the North
After a rapid resolution of some lose ends, a separation among them, on the 22nd of April Cadeau set sails northbound, with the usual crew of one for the confirmed inability of the captain to seduce anyone to leave. Soon I decided that the logbook will register both, the life aboard and a couple of thoughts. That was a wise decision. True, after years and years those words reveal a somewhat immature mind trying to justify an escape, maybe still entrapped in the Catholic dogma of guilt. But today’s me will always be more immature than tomorrow’s, and there isn’t much room for shame anyway.
Expectations for this voyage were great, and in one thing they were vastly fulfilled: the quest for atmosphere. If one loves mist, the tolling of bells, the silence of nature and the simphony of raindrop on roofs, the Pacific Northwest is the perfect destination. One discover the true meaning of many words and learns ways to put them together. Ducked, cove and valley, green and hugged, fog and silence, light and dew. Thirty days of rain in the misty, lonely and silent May of Inside Passage will certainly look interesting to a very limited number of humans. But, surprisingly enough, clear cut enthusiasts, ghost town dwellers and runaways convicts are by no means the mainstream of the wave that settled the northwest. One does not move to the north to become a trapper, but becomes a trapper in order to be able to live in the north.
One has to be able to understand how a fog bell can transform water into vapour and mist, to see the folds in the mountains like the pages of a book, to read contrasts in the veily clouds floating along the slopes, where contrasts are so delicate as to be unperceivable to most.
to be continued |
