CHAPTER SEVEN

Thirty Days

W

e set off across the expanse having exhausted all of our checklists, and still knowing there would be circumstances ahead we could never have prepared for.

One month in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but water in front, behind, and all around can be a long time...but it really wasn't. I remember that even after many days, we never found the 360° vastness of an ocean landscape to be boring. Yes, it was water, water, and more water, but it always evolved. It changed color, it varied in tempo, it altered its direction. The horizon would transform from smooth to choppy, from endless to enshrouded by clouds. Flying fish abruptly erupted through a rippled surface in large schools. Sudden pods of dolphins jumped around us and surfed in the wake of Cowabunga, or led the way just ahead of our bow. Sometimes at night, the inky water surrounding us would transform into an eerie field of hundreds of bioluminescent needlefish darting below the surface in an otherworldly tableau.

In their quest to cross the Atlantic, many cruisers start from the Canary Islands, sailing to the closest point in the West Indies, and eventually arriving in St. Barth, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Martinique, or Barbados. Such a crossing is about 2500 nautical miles and usually takes about three weeks with the trade winds. We wanted to take a passage less often pursued—crossing directly to South America. This trip would be about 2700 nautical miles and would take an extra week. We hoped to arrive in time for Carnaval in Rio. There wasn’t any halfway stopping point, no place where we could quickly anchor, catch our breath, or rest up for a few days before continuing onward. Although we were going to cross some major shipping lanes, the chances of seeing many other boats were slim. It's a big ocean out there.

For our month at sea, we planned for everything we could think of. Along with food and water for two adults and two children, there were diapers to account for, baby bottles, "what-if" first aid items, etc. What if there were many windless days? What if there was a major mechanical malfunction? Or worse yet, what if we were to sink and have to seek refuge in the life raft? Consequently, we planned provisions for two or three months instead of just one.

Early on in our trip, I would think about our upcoming Atlantic crossing and wondered if we would get to the other side of that huge ocean safe and sound, and exactly to the spot we planned to land. As crazy as it seems, Michel only learned to use our sextant one week before our departure. Since there was no GPS in those days, we had no choice but to use an old-fashioned sextant for all our navigation. An early satellite navigation system was just beginning to make its debut for pleasure boats, but at $10,000, it was well beyond our means. Michel became very precise in his predictions within a day or two for our landfalls. He is a quick study, has a mathematician's knack for numbers, and he had proved his capability in using the sextant over the past six months, guiding us assuredly every inch of the way. There was never any doubt in my mind that we would arrive at Rio de Janeiro.

Navigation was an ongoing sore point between Michel and me because I didn't know the technical aspects of navigation. Manipulating the sextant, knowing how to do the calculations in figuring out our position, etc. I wasn’t eager to learn. It didn't tempt my curiosity, and I kept putting it off, which irritated Michel. While I was an excellent crewmate, I was not a good sailor in the aspects of understanding how to properly set the sails. I didn't have a good feel for where the wind was coming from and how the sails should be set accordingly. I decided that we each had our strengths and weaknesses. Michel still thought I should be able to do his part, though, in case something was to happen. I had then, as I still do today, an extreme aversion to anything related to complicated mathematics, and computing sextant calculations fell into that category for me. I simply wasn’t interested.

We set out during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer after Michel had pored over the Pilot Charts. These are very elaborate ocean charts that indicate the prevailing winds and ocean currents for each month in minute detail, square-inch by square-inch. From these, Michel projected our route. We knew, however, that we would have to cross an area around the equator known as the doldrums, infamous for a total lack of wind that would most likely last for a few days. The doldrums were always present, shifting geographically north, south, east or west of the equator, depending on the season.

Up to this point, we thought we had become pretty intimately acquainted with ship life, but this month-long sail proved to be perfectly blissful. We were in harmony. Our daily routine was dictated by navigational duties, daily sextant sun sights, sail maneuvers, repairs, taking care of the boys, occasional fishing, and cooking.

Cooking on board was often an acrobatic endeavor. Even when sailing conditions were relatively tranquil, I still belted myself into the galley corner so I wouldn't get thrown about while working. Even when the waves and wind were calm and rocked systematically to a certain rhythm, I could easily get tossed to the other side of the boat with a hot pot of something in my hand. Michel had installed a standard, wide strap belt made of multi-purpose webbing which boxed me in and gave me something strong to lean against. I could even sit on it like on a swing and grab the counter, should the boat suddenly jerk. My body got used to anticipating the rock-and-roll motion, and I became quite adept a putting a liquid quiche into the oven under sail.

Michel often recounts our luck that we were able to eat well. The sea air and rocking movement of the boat made me hungry rather than sea sick. I remember the times of bad weather when Michel and the boys would go to sleep, hoping that it would be over when he woke up. I, on the other hand, would strategically place my body against the cupboard and gauge the swells to perfectly time opening a door for a snack so everything didn't tumble out. Besides, I was just too nervous to sleep! With a chocolate bar in hand, a few crackers, or whatever I could grab, I'd consistently poke my head outside, all-so-briefly, to monitor the situation.

Since we didn’t have refrigeration on board, food and meals were planned accordingly. There was a whole separate strategy for keeping fruits and vegetables as fresh as possible. I bought them in various stages of readiness at the last minute: unripe and green, those that would ripen within a week-to-10-days, and those we could eat immediately. Cabbage eventually substituted for lettuce, and we grew our own sprouts on board.

I spent a lot of time in the days approaching the departure canning and preserving meats and fish, as well as preparing other dishes with my pressure cooker. With one "starter" yogurt, I was able to make yogurt throughout the whole trip. I was also able to make a basic cottage cheese and fromage blanc.

I had calculated how much bread I would need to make daily over a 30-day period, and made the same calculations for other items like eggs, milk, butter, fruit, vegetables, and other staples. My galley was well set up with plastic, airtight containers for rice, flour, pasta, etc. which kept the ingredients dry. One big advantage of launching from a third world country like Senegal was that many people didn’t have refrigeration in their homes, making it easy to find items such as canned butter, canned heavy cream, and long-life milk in cartons. I even found some stew meat boxed in a vacuum-sealed brine solution. Almost as a joke, but to have on hand as a real last resort, we did have a few cans of Spam on board—the brunt of many cruiser’s jokes.

As an added bonus, we carted along two live chickens which were designated to be our fresh Sunday dinners the second and third Sundays of our trip—and they were. Eggs were also always good fallback items if there wasn’t much else to eat, and since I enjoy baking, I knew I would need quite a few. There were some handy strategies passed around in the boating community for keeping eggs fresh for several months without refrigeration. Some would dip their eggs for just an instant in boiling water; others would hard boil and pickle them. I subscribed to the Vaseline method, which consisted of coating each individual egg with a thin film of Vaseline. As an added precaution, we also turned each egg upside down once a week. The theory was that while the Vaseline prevented air from passing through the porous shell, inhibiting the egg from rotting, a traveling yoke couldn't settle on the shell and add to the egg's deterioration. We made space for 200 eggs to be stored during our crossing and were careful to be sure and turn them each week.

Any fish caught at sea was a bonus. If we somehow had the good fortune of capturing too much, there was certainly no throwing it overboard. On the few occasions when we did hook too much for just one meal, we immediately preserved the surplus through salting, drying, and canning.

Early on during our passage, Michel, who is not a fisherman, set about learning how one should fish while sailing, especially in deep ocean waters. With thirty days of sea ahead of us, he had plenty of time to study the question.

The most important idea he came away with was from a book in our onboard library which discussed the need to create an environment similar to a school of fish. To create such an effect from our deck, Michel devised a way of spreading out multiple fishing lines that trailed behind the boat. They were all different lengths and sported various lures and bait paraphernalia.

Sailboats such as ours carry at least one pole on deck, which is used for the downwind sail known as a spinnaker. The pole holds a bottom corner of the sail, jutting well out over the water to capture the most wind possible. As the course was charted, we found would probably have most days as a downwind trip, so we would be pushed by seasonal trade winds. Thus, in order to get the maximum speed out of our boat, we equipped Cowabunga with two spinnaker poles. This would allow us to hoist two downwind sails at the same time, on either side of the boat, putting us in a "wing-and-wing" position. With the two poles, we had a combined total of about thirty feet of potential fishing area to trail our lines from. This effectively gave the impression that we were a school of small fish, which then attracted bigger fish or at least we hoped that would be the case.

One afternoon, the wind slightly shifted, and we needed to change our angle downwind a bit. The fishing lines had been up for several days with no nibbles. They had become part of our on-deck landscape, blending into our routine. We hardly noticed them anymore. Michel shifted the angle of the wind vane, and in a domino effect, caused the trailing fishing lines in our wake to converge, all mixing and mingling until they became one big tangled web trailing behind us. No fish was going to be interested in that.

So Michel sat at the back of the boat for several days, untangling his "school of fish." After such an ordeal, I was of the opinion that the spinnaker pole technique was not ideal. Michel thought otherwise and wanted to give it another go. French men have a reputation for being difficult, and my husband is certainly French. Determined, Michel launched his school of fish apparatus several more times with new techniques, which only resulted in several more tangled messes. I thought it was comical and a huge waste of time, but he seemed to enjoy the test of his ingenuity. He finally began fishing with one or two lines at a time, and eventually did catch some fish.

Michel and I were strict about adhering to our scheduled four-hour watches. Typically, I took the midnight to 4:00 a.m. watch. I would nap from around 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. until midnight, and then take over from Michel. We tried variations on the watch schedule, every two or three hours, but these options didn’t work for us. Admittedly, the fourth hour of the watch until 4:00 a.m. wasn’t easy, but at least the person off-watch got a four-hour stint of sleep in. Two or three-hour sleeping periods were just not enough.

"Keeping watch" didn’t necessarily mean keeping our eyes constantly fixed on the horizon. It meant keeping an eye on things in general: sounds that suddenly changed, the wind direction, the sails, the automatic wind vane pilot, the sleeping children, and also the horizon. Any red or green light in the distance would signal a boat: red lights on the port side, green lights on the starboard side. This international signal system is handy because depending on what color you see, you know from what angle the boat is approaching. A full-frontal view of a red and green light is not good, portending a head-on confrontation. We actually hoped to see a cargo ship or fishing trawler on occasion so we could initiate radio contact and confirm our position.

We didn’t have to spend much time at the steering wheel thanks to our third crew member, the automatic wind vane pilot at the rear of the boat. Through an ingenious system of ropes rigged to the steering wheel, a wind vane sensor synchronized the rudder to the steering, and we were free to go about our day.

Sean and Brendan were always busy. Sean would play with his Lego blocks or what he called "mon bateau" (my boat) that we trailed in the water behind us. He would fish, draw, feed leftovers to the chickens who were perched in their cages on deck, and always, he talked. He asked questions about the sails, the sextant, the maps, and about fishing. He loved to fish and tweak ropes, or the "sheets," in the sailing parlance. He played well with Brendan, and they both spent a lot of time in our cockpit pool—a little inflatable bathtub we filled with seawater that they splashed around in.

Toys on board were a challenge. At first, both boys had a small toy chest with various cars, blocks, games, etc. But as they got older, we homed in on the Legos as our key toy. We didn't have room for big trucks, and many of the metallic toys quickly rusted. Sean and Brendan could easily piece parts together and bring to life their unique creations. We found ways to keep them organized and nicely stored away (in later years we devoted whole drawers to them), but this still didn't eliminate the occasional middle-of-the-night stomp on a sharp stray piece. By now Brendan was quite the crawler, and I was amused at how his body rolled with his environment. Having been on board since birth, the boat’s movement was now part of him.

Conserving fresh water was a priority of daily life. We had an ample reserve of fresh water in our onboard water tanks, supplemented by additional jerrycans which we stored on deck. We used salt water as often as we could, mostly for showering and washing up dishes. We discovered that baby shampoo lathers up well with salt water, so that became our personal hygiene product of choice. Our soap and salt water showers were followed by a very stingy fresh water rinse, and we were clean every day crossing the Atlantic.

February third was a milestone for us—we hit the halfway point as we crossed the equator. We celebrated with champagne, having officially ventured into the Southern Hemisphere for the first time. On February eighteenth, we spotted land for the first time since leaving Africa: the Brazilian coast. As we grew closer, we were welcomed by huge manta rays jumping in the distance. It was quite spectacular, and as we sailed closer to them, they weaved in and out, gliding beneath us in the crystal turquoise water. At ten feet wide and forty-two feet long, our boat was dwarfed by these giants.

Having seen a few flashes from a lighthouse, Michel figured out we were about 300 nautical miles (about 345 miles) north of Rio de Janiero, and he announced that in another three days we should arrive. Around 1:00 a.m. on February twenty-first, I spotted a beacon: a very bright light that seemed to be in the sky, not on the coast. It looked more like an airplane, but much too bright and close. I was confused. As we approached and dawn shed the dark, the "sky light" proved to be the iconic statue of Christ, on the Corcovado. Michel and I were taken aback and emotional. After lifting anchor on January twenty-second, we slipped into Rio de Janeiro 30 days later, as Michel had perfectly predicted.