We’ve been at sea for a week and a half now, and The Wanderer has traveled over 1,300 miles. We are over halfway there, halfway to Bompie! We’ve gone through two time zones, so that our clocks are now two hours ahead of what they were when we left. There are three more time zones ahead. Each time we change the clocks, Cody says, “Bye-bye, hour!” Where do those hours go?
We’re about 500 miles east of Newfoundland, and 900 miles south of Greenland. I keep expecting Uncle Dock to say, “Hey, let’s stop in Greenland” or “Let’s stop in Newfoundland!” and then we’d stop and he’d go off hunting for Rosalie. But so far, there’s been no mention of stopping.
It’s been very cold the last few days, but it’s warming up as we near the Gulf Stream. Uncle Stew says the combination of the Labrador Current (the coldest current in the Atlantic, coming from the north) and the Gulf Stream (the warmest current, coming from the south) makes for “very interesting weather patterns.”
“Which means what?” I asked.
“Oh, you know, sudden storms, violent storms—”
I can’t tell whether Uncle Stew is testing me when he says things like this—trying to see if I will get scared and cry—or whether he says these things to prepare me for what might come.
I’m not going to show if I’m scared, and I’m not going to cry.
Yesterday, when we came on the edge of a thunderstorm, Uncle Stew went into a flurry of shouting orders. “Turn off the electrics!”
“Why?” Cody and I asked.
“Do you want to be a humongous lightning rod?”
Massive dark clouds hovered in the distance and a surge of wind whipped The Wanderer.
Uncle Stew rattled off a list: “Radar!”
Cody flipped it off. “Checkerino.”
“GPS!”
“Off-erino!”
“Loran!”
“Zap-o!”
Uncle Stew shouted at Cody. “What the heck are you saying? Are they off or not?”
“Off-erino!” Cody said.
I didn’t stay to hear the end of it, because I was on watch. We were racing along and it felt so terrific, all that wind! We had our foul-weather gear on, so we didn’t mind the torrents of rain beating down as we plowed through the water. It felt as if we should have some loud, dramatic classical music sounding in the background. You feel as if every inch of you is alive and you are working hard to stay alive and the boat is helping you and you are helping it and everyone is in there together, and whoosh, away you go!
We’ve been making contact with civilization nearly every night, and Cody has surprised everyone by becoming the ham radio king. There’s a ton of lingo involved, and you have to be on your toes at all times to know what’s going on. Our call number is N1IQB Maritime Mobile, and in ham radio lingo, you say it like this: November One India Quebec Bravo Maritime Mobile. It’s really cool to listen to Cody talking in what sounds like a foreign language:
“This is N1IQB Maritime Mobile … November One India Quebec Bravo Maritime Mobile … Over.”
Uncle Mo taught us these new bits today. It’s more code-talk:
QSL = Do you copy?
88 = Hugs and kisses.
So here’s Cody on the radio:
Cody: “Roger, this is N1IQB Maritime
Mobile trying to get in touch with WB2YPZ
Maritime Mobile, Whiskey Bravo Two Yankee
Papa Zulu, over.”
Ham net: “Roger, N1IQB, send your traffic, over.”
We haven’t been able to get through to anyone we know yet, so we have to ask at the net for somebody in Connecticut we can leave a message with or make a phone call through. Cody says most ham operators on land can make a phone patch; they hook their phone up to their radio, call the number collect, and then you can talk to whoever you want by phone.
The voices are distorted and unclear, but it’s like a miracle when it works, which has not been very often. We’ve tried to get through to my father, but without any luck.
When Cody is working the radio, I get so excited. You really want to hear a familiar voice! But then as time goes on and you can’t get a connection or you can’t hear well, it makes me so annoyed that I wish we weren’t even trying. And it still feels as if we are cheating by being able to contact other people.
I said as much to Uncle Dock, and he said, “What? You want to be cut off from everybody else? From the world?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just that we’re supposed to be doing this on our own.”
Uncle Dock said, “Sophie, it’s not a bad thing to rely on other people, you know.”
I’ve been thinking about that all day. I don’t know why it is that it seems important for me to be able to do everything myself and not rely on anyone else. I’d always thought that was a good way to be, but Uncle Dock made it sound selfish. I don’t get it.
At lunch today, one of those rare occasions when we all happened to be awake at the same time, Uncle Dock said, “Hey, remember the time we found that rubber dinghy? You know, when we were kids—”
Uncle Mo said, “Yeah! The blue one?”
Uncle Stew chimed in, “Hey, I remember that! It was washed up on shore, right? And we claimed it as our own—”
“And we named it—remember what we named it?” Uncle Dock said.
Mo and Stew thought about that a while. Then Stew got a huge smile on his face—maybe the first smile I’ve seen on that face—and said, “I know! The Blue Bopper! The Blue Bopper, right?”
Mo laughed. “Yeah! The Blue Bopper!”
“And remember,” Stew said, “how we were so excited to get in it and we pushed it out into the waves and we were laughing like hyenas—”
“And we were laughing so hard that we didn’t even notice—”
“That we were being pulled out farther and farther—”
Stew was choking by now, he was laughing so hard. “And—then we realized—”
“We didn’t have any paddles!”
They were all laughing by this time. At first I was laughing, too, because they were laughing—it was very funny to see them all acting so goofy. But then I couldn’t figure out what was so funny about them being in a dinghy without paddles, and it gave me goosebumps, thinking of them floating, floating, helpless.
“So what happened?” Cody asked. “How’d you get back?”
“Hmm,” Uncle Mo said. “Don’t really remember that part.”
“But we got back somehow,” Uncle Stew said.
Of course I should have known that they all got back safely, because here they were telling the story, but somehow it wasn’t until Uncle Stew said that they got back that I felt this huge wave of relief slide over me.
“And then Bompie—oh, boy!” Uncle Dock said.
“What?” Cody asked. “Did he give you a whipping?”
“Bompie?” Uncle Stew said. “Bompie never laid a hand on us in his entire life.”
“That’s right,” Uncle Dock agreed.
“So what did Bompie do when you got back?” Cody asked.
Uncle Stew said, “He took us out to the shed and said, ‘See these here wooden things? These wooden things are called paddles. You might want to take a couple of these here paddles next time you go out on that ocean.’”
It sounded pretty funny the way Uncle Stew told it, and they sat around on deck laughing a long time. I had to go down below because I couldn’t get that image out of my head, of them floating out in the ocean in the dinghy without any paddles.
I went up the mast again yesterday, this time to the very top! The flag line broke and was stuck in the block at the top of the mast, so I tied a new line to my harness, and Cody pulled me up. The boat dipped and rolled and the wind raged, and it was all I could do to hang on. It was like a test between me and the wind, as if the wind were saying, Can you do it, Sophie? Bet you can’t! And as if I were saying, I can do this! Watch me! The hard things sometimes turn out to make you feel the best.
We also noticed cracks in the ends of the booms, where they come together. This is a big problem. Uncle Dock says we will lash-and-tongue them and hope that the cracks don’t get any bigger.
Also on the big problem list is the water maker—that broke, too. Nobody’s really sure exactly what the problem is, but Brian is determined to take a hot shower tonight, so we’ll power through and try to fix it. And speaking of showers, we all stink! Everything on the boat stinks, too.
Uncle Stew is yelling at me to help him fix something, so I guess this is over and out from Sophie: Sierra-One-Papa-Hotel-India-Echo.
QSL?
88.