Nov. 24 2011
1338 local time
Mackay, Queensland, Australia
Kristian and I have been ashore for about a month, and we have yet to blog about our longest sea voyage yet. Not only have we been very busy here in Australia, we have also not been particularly eager to drag up recollections that would put a damper on our enjoyment of our time here. But you learn from everything that doesn’t kill you, I guess, and anyway, some of the events are actually pretty entertaining, retrospectively.
Our voyage from Raiatea, in French Polynesia, to Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia, would try the patience of a very saintly person. With the trade winds becoming weak and irregular in the South Pacific as cyclone season approached, what was supposed to be a two-week trip became more than twice as long. We were twenty-seven days at sea between landfalls, and the entire voyage took thirty-one days. Even if we’d been having a blast aboard Escargot de Mer (“Snail of the Sea,” in French), as we not-particularly-fondly called the under-maintained catamaran our captain was delivering from Raiatea to Australia, this would have been too much of a good thing. It turned out to be way too much of a bad thing.
I sometimes remember with amazement my jubilation on the day that Joe, the captain who was hired to deliver Escargot from Raiatea to Australia, asked us if we wanted to come on board as crew. Perhaps the challenges of merely getting underway should have foreshadowed our later problems. Our departure from Raiatea had only come after about a month of frustrating delays. The boat was scheduled to get hauled out to repair the starboard sail drive (which, it turns out, is a rather important part of the engine), and a crack in the aluminum mast (which, it turns out, is a rather important part of the rig), but the date for the haul out was rescheduled several times. In the mean time, there were numerous other minor issues.
I noticed during the month that we spent on board waiting to finish our repairs, that our captain had a rather extreme way of reacting to crises. It didn’t matter if the crisis was as minor as a glitch raising the main or as major as a fire on board, he responded by stringing together expletives. No explanation to his crew of what was going on, no instructions. Just a veritable Korean War of F-bombs. These were directed at everything—the f*&king engine, the f*&king ocean, this f*&king piece of s*&t boat, the f*&king idiot owner, or the f*&king screwdriver that’s gone missing. If you had anything to do with the crisis at hand, even if your participation was as minor as simply being in the vicinity, he would sometimes inquire, “What the f*&k do you think you’re doing?” The best you could do was to stand by ready to assist in solving the problem, and hope that the river of expletives would just flow around you, leaving you relatively unscathed, like a strong tree during a flood. Be a strong tree. Be a strong tree.
Kristian and I also noticed that he had become gradually less friendly toward us. As the maintenance dragged on and on, he practically stopped talking to us. Even when we tried to be polite, to say good morning, to offer him dinner, all we got were glares. Kristian, optimistic as usual, hypothesized that he was just frustrated about being stuck there for so long. That it wasn’t anything personal toward us. I hoped that was the case, but it eventually proved to be false.
Our departure was a culmination of Joe’s general frustration, and the gradual buildup of his negativity towards me and Kristian. On the day of our departure, we couldn’t get the port engine (the one we thought had been working correctly), the dinghy outboard, or the anchor windlass to work. This caused yet a few more hours of delay. Joe was cranky, to say the least. Our crewmate, who had never before crewed on a yacht and spoke primarily French, “nearly cut off the captain’s f*&king hand” while performing a task that Joe had ordered him to do, but whose execution and function he had never explained. Despite all this, Joe eventually fixed the engine and the windlass, decided to say “screw it” to the outboard, and we got underway.
As we were leaving the lagoon, we started trying to raise the mainsail. With a new crew, it usually doesn’t happen perfectly the first time. Things weren’t going particularly badly. We had plenty of space, the winds weren’t high, and there was no real hurry. We were all trying to get coordinated, learning where the lines were, figuring out what needs to happen when. We had set the genoa first, and though there weren’t high winds, it was flogging obnoxiously in the face of the person at the main halyard winch (who happened to me be). As we raised the sail, the batons kept getting stuck in the lazy jacks. No big deal. Usually, someone (oh, for example, the captain, who’s at the helm and doesn’t have the genoa obnoxiously flogging in his face) keeps an eye out for it, and lets the person on the winch know to slow down while someone unfouls them. Our captain, on the other hand, must have figured, as usual, that “f*&k” was the only real instruction we needed, and that any further communication, if there were any, was certainly aided by the addition of that word.
After we all managed to bungle through the setting of the main, Joe threw a fit worthy of reality television. With his little monkey face looking like it was going to boil off his skull, he shouted that Kristian and I were arrogant idiots, that all we’d done since we got on the f*&king boat was brag about what great sailors we were, and that we couldn’t even raise a f*&king mainsail. He’d sure learned his lesson about taking on crew. This was going to be a great f*&king trip, all right. I managed to agree with him on that point.
This was only the first of many such instances of horrendously poor communication, extreme overreaction, and hatred directed towards us. Except when he’d really screwed up, our other crewmate usually got off relatively un-cussed-at. Kristian and I, on the other hand, suffered through the “you arrogant, ungrateful assholes” rant several more times. Since I don’t really think of myself as an arrogant person, this insult stung the first time I heard it. We had, in fact, told him that though we had experience on tall ships, we were relatively new to yachts, and happy to learn from him. Perhaps sharing stories of our experiences on tall ships counted as bragging, in his mind. In that case, he was as guilty as us. We’d heard all of his sea stories twice or three times.
For the first couple weeks, we tried very hard, through our actions and willingness to help, to change Joe’s opinion of us. But eventually we realized there was no pleasing him. He was able to interpret even our efforts to help as arrogance. Any sign of competence or knowledge, such as how to tie basic knots, was a form of bragging. He himself couldn’t even tie a bowline properly. I suspect that insecurity about his poor seamanship made him constantly suspicious that we were criticizing his decisions and trying to suggest that we knew better, when we had no such intention whatsoever.
As a captain and a leader, Joe was an utter failure. He did not clearly state his expectations of crewmembers, or provide adequate instruction on how he wanted things done. It was impossible even to infer his wishes from his reactions to our attempts to help, because his standards simply weren’t consistent. One day, he’d cuss us out for not going ahead and shaking the reef in the main when the wind died (even though doing so would have lead to serious technical difficulties because he had earlier solved a chafing problem in the reefline by wrapping it in several layers of duct tape. A highly professional solution.) The message we got from this cussing was, be aware of what’s going on, and be more proactive. One night a few days later, when Kristian and I decided to be proactive and furl the genoa by ourselves so that the captain could keep sleeping, he came out on deck in a rage, took over the relatively simple operation from us, claimed we were doing it entirely wrong, and said, “I know how you arrogant kids think. Think you can do everything yourself.”
Joe’s lack of communication and leadership skills, combined with his dodgy seamanship, on one occasion actually had the potential to put his crew in considerable danger. During our twenty-seven straight days at sea, when Escargot wasn’t completely becalmed or damn near, she was dodging or not-quite-dodging thunderstorms. We hit a couple of relatively serious storms, with winds up to forty knots. During one of these, while Kristian and I were sleeping off-watch, we woke up to the sound of Joe stomping around in the salon, shouting, “What the f*&k! What the f*&k!” This sounded more serious than his usual mumble-cussing to himself. We jumped out of our berth and ran up to the salon to find smoke pouring up out of the starboard hull. There was a fire on board the vessel.
A fire, during a storm—wow, I thought, could this possibly get any less awesome? I did not want it to. As crew on tall ships, I had done many drills for such an emergency, and was surprised to find myself relatively calm and able to think through what to do next. I located the nearest fire extinguisher—which I immediately dropped. Luckily, it didn’t go off. Kristian picked it up. Apparently my calm was not perfect. Around this time, our third crewmate woke up and came into the salon to see what all the commotion was about. After realizing there was a fire, Joe had never even gone into the port hull to wake up his crew or issue instructions. Unlike us, our other crewmate had not drilled for emergencies such as this, and I suppose some calmly-delivered instructions and an explanation of what was happening would have eased his mind, especially since he didn’t speak great English and probably had no clue what was going on. But, as usual, Joe just handled the crisis by stomping around and cussing.
Joe was shouting for someone to go see if they could find the source of the smoke. All three of us headed for the starboard hull. I suggested that at least one of us should stay up in the salon, in case the person down in the smoke lost consciousness or needed help. I went down into the hull to try to locate the source of the smoke, trying to breathe in as little as possible. I did not yet open any windows, in case that would increase airflow to the fire.
There was not as much smoke in the hull as I had thought. The fire was clearly not actually in the living area; the smoke must be leaking in from somewhere else. Under the aft berth, the bulkhead that separated that storage compartment from the engine bay was quite warm. Joe had apparently guessed where the fire was, and had gone out on deck to the engine bay hatch and thrown it wide open. If I were a fire in that engine bay, I would have been like, “Sweet! Thanks for all that air, man! I’m totally gonna burn down your boat now!” As a fire, when I saw that he didn’t even have a fire extinguisher with him, I would have even tried to give him a high-five.
Luckily, the fire was all sound and fury. Though it filled the starboard hull with acrid, burnt-plastic smoke, it was only a small electrical fire, and had already put itself out by the time Joe thoughtlessly threw open the engine bay hatch. The little box that regulated the electricity flow from the solar panels was now a melted glob of plastic. A bummer, sure, but an ignited sailboat would have been a slightly bigger bummer.
The significance of Joe’s behavior during this crisis took a while to sink in. At the time, I didn’t realize how irresponsible his actions were. As Kristian and I later discussed the events of that night, we realized that Joe’s lack of communication and improper response to the emergency could have put our lives in danger. This probably sounds pretty scary to my parents. However, it has taught us that before we get on another boat, it is essential to discuss with the captain exactly what his protocol is in the case of shipboard emergencies, and make sure he has onboard, and knows how to use, essential safety equipment.
Joe’s behavior towards us continued to be erratic, at best. Some days, he was relatively pleasant. When he was in a talking mood, we had the occasional privilege of hearing his views on politics and other issues, which were generally self-contradictory and not very well thought-out. His racism was so shocking that your jaw hit the floor and you had to get your friend to come scrape it up. His time in Australia had taught him that the Aborigines were all kleptomaniac drunks who didn’t really have language or culture before Europeans showed up. He was also the only person I’ve ever actually encountered who believed that the world would be a better place if Hitler had just finished what he’d started with the Jews.
On other days, he was in a bad mood, or perhaps we did something to piss him off—the way we chewed our food, our efforts at being proactive and trying to handle sail by ourselves, questions about what people wanted for lunch. On these days, he basically ignored us. Any question we asked him, whether about meal preferences, sail trim, ship’s systems, whatever, was answered rudely at best, or, just as often, was completely ignored. Eventually, I gave up trying to be polite. I no longer thanked him when he cooked a meal. I no longer said good morning or good night. I tried to stay out of his way, and hoped the wind would pick up so we would get there already.
We eventually realized that, in addition to our arrogance, our lack of gratitude was the other quality about us that annoyed him most. This was linked to food. His “you arrogant, ungrateful kids” rant started including references to how he’d fed us for two months, even while we were on shore, and all we did was complain and screw things up. This was a clue to another possible source of his dislike for us.
When he had asked if we wanted to be his crew, he’d said we could come on board and stay during the maintenance period. He was generously willing to pay for our food during the voyage, and we said we would provide for our own food while we were still in Raiatea waiting for the haul out. We made what I now see as a serious mistake by using some of his spices and condiments. Apparently, in his mind, this amounted to “feeding us” for the month that we were with him on Raiatea. Someone with reasonably developed communication skills would simply have asked us to stop using his condiments. We would have said sorry, and changed our ways. Or, if he found us so difficult to live with, he should have asked us not to come on the trip with him. Instead, he formed a powerful grudge against us, refused to engage us in any productive discussions about how we could get along together, and got in the habit of interpreting all of our behavior, even our attempts to help, in a way that further fortified his negative opinion of us. By the end of the trip, he had stopped even letting us help. He would literally take lines out of our hands. He would rather do a job himself, or call our other crewmate out of the salon, than ask or even permit us to help.
As our long, dull voyage dragged on, we ended up a couple hundred miles north of our original course, and Joe decided we would make landfall at Lifou, a smaller island in the country of New Caledonia. Hopefully we could go through immigration there, re-provision, and head directly to Australia. A couple days out from Lifou, Kristian and I decided we couldn’t take any more of Escargot de Mer. We would get off at Lifou, despite our original commitment to continue on to Australia. We even suspected that our captain would be happy to be rid of us. The day before we made landfall, we broke the news. He was visibly flustered, but remained relatively calm.
My mood had improved greatly when we decided to get off the boat. My bubble of good humor deflated somewhat when we arrived at Lifou. We discovered that we could not complete immigration procedures there, but had to go all the way to Noumea, a couple hundred miles away on a different island, in order to legally enter the country. Someone could either take the ferry to Noumea with all of our passports, do the paperwork, and come back, or we could all just sail there. We decided to sail. But knowing our luck, what was supposed to be a two-day voyage from Lifou to Noumea would surely take longer. Since Kristian and I were eager to get off the boat, and we wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be stuck on it for another week, Kristian asked Joe if we could motor if we found ourselves becalmed, and Joe suggested we could.
We got underway, and, of course, after about twelve hours the wind died. We bobbed around for another day. On day three, Kristian brought up the possibility of motoring. Kristian had even used the charts on our computer to plot the shortest route to Noumea. Although Joe had seemed willing to at least consider motoring before, when Kristian approached him about it he threw another epic fit, declaring he had never f*&king motored before, and he wasn’t going to now. He’d been generous enough to pay for our food for two f*&king months, and all we do now is bitch about how slow we’re going. If we’re in such a f*&king hurry to get there, we can pay for the fuel ourselves. So Kristian offered to pay for the fuel.
This did not calm him. He raged some more and eventually declared there was no f*&king way we were motoring. End of discussion. The next morning, I woke up to the sound of the engine starting. He also eventually decided to use the channel inside the reef, as Kristian had suggested, rather than taking the long way around outside. We were in the bay just outside the city at five in the morning.
The next ten hours were very long. Joe didn’t know where to take the boat, and spent an hour on the VHF butchering the vessel’s French name, trying to get someone at the port to give him instructions. We started heading for the port, and although someone did try to tell us where to go, the directions were unclear. On top of this, the one day we didn’t need any wind, it was blowing twenty knots, which didn’t help in our attempt to anchor. We dropped the hook successfully in one location, but the harbor police came and told us we couldn’t anchor there. But fifth time’s a charm, right? After a last-minute anchor swap, we finally got it to hold in a legal anchorage. Now we just had to get to shore.
You may remember the day of our departure in Raiatea, and the several technical issues we experienced as we tried to get underway. That non-functional dinghy outboard I mentioned continued to be non-functional on the day of our arrival in Noumea. Joe declared there was no f*&king way we were going to row to shore in this wind, and spent about an hour trying to fix it, with the wind kicking up seas even in the harbor, sending water into the engine and slamming the dinghy against the boat. We stood by to hand him tools and help out if we could. Eventually he gave up, and went into the salon. I had no idea what the plan was now, since he had said that we couldn’t row in this. We’d been in the region of Noumea for seven hours, and still hadn’t managed to get ashore. I dug deep and pulled up the last dregs of my stoicism. I resigned myself to waiting, and leaned back against our gear, which was on deck and ready to go whenever we figured out how. Joe came out of the salon, saw me kicked back against my backpack, and said, “So are you going to get the oars out, or what?”
“Are we rowing?” I responded, getting up.
“How the f*&k did you think we were getting to shore?”
Since he had earlier said quite forcefully that there was no f*&king way we were rowing in this, I honestly wasn’t sure how he planned to get to shore. Hence my position of resignation. The last and most impressive of all his tantrums then ensued. His face turned red, and his eyes burned like he wanted to smash something. He screamed that we were lazy, arrogant complainers; that I was “pissing on thirty,” and Kristian was “pissing on forty,” and we still behaved like f*&king fifteen-year-olds, arrogant and full of ourselves, going around moping and whining about how long the trip was taking. I didn’t point out that he was really the only one verbally complaining, daily cussing at the weather. He didn’t forget to add, as usual, that we were rude, ungrateful a*&holes. At this point, I finally couldn’t help myself, and tried to interrupt in order to point out that the word “rude” must certainly also apply to the person who cussed out his crew fifty times, while they stood silently and took it, and even continued to say “thank you,” “good morning,” and “what would you like for lunch?” Of course, Joe shouted right over me before I could manage to squeak more than, “You’re calling us rude?”
Though I wouldn’t have been too upset if a freak giant squid burst forth out of the harbor, tentacled his face, and dragged him overboard, I kept my cool and got out the oars. We loaded all of our stuff into the dinghy, which, in addition to having no functional outboard, was half-deflated and handled in the water about like a soggy plastic grocery bag. Joe wouldn’t let me and Kristian help row. We made it to shore, and, after a long, sweaty wander about town with all our gear during which we managed to get separated from Joe and our other crewmate, Kristian and I arrived at immigration when it opened after lunch. Eating on Escargot had become so awkward that Kristian and I had not eaten since the night before, and very little the previous day. We sat and stood in various offices for a couple hours. I had no idea what exactly was happening; people kept taking my passport, giving it back; I just stood around, hoping no other unfortunate delays would pop up.
Someone handed me back my passport. We all left an office. Joe said, with a nasty, sarcastic note in his voice, “Good luck,” and walked away, not looking either of us in the eyes. We’re done already? I thought. The first moment of freedom. As a very large smile was growing in my heart, Joe turned back to us from across the street and asked, “Umm, do you guys want to get a beer or something?” Kristian and I were more than a little surprised. I figured that our other crew member had suggested that he ask, since Joe didn’t sound very excited about the idea himself. “No, that’s all right,” I replied. “But thanks for asking.” Apparently Kristian couldn’t keep up the politeness in this last exchange, and simply grimaced in disbelief.
And so unceremoniously ended our time aboard Escargot de Mer. It is sometimes tempting to see the two months spent aboard that vessel as an unpleasant waste of time. We could have been lounging on a beach somewhere; we could have been sailing with someone who wasn’t a racist, bipolar basket case. But a journey around the world should be about learning, and there that experience was certainly educational.
Kristian and I have thought a lot about how we will choose a boat in the future. We will always make sure to get to know the captain and crew before getting underway. If, in that “getting to know you” period, we see any signs that we won’t be able to get along with each other, we will not travel with them, no matter how inconvenient it may be to give up a ride once we’ve found it. It’s far more inconvenient to be stuck in the middle of an ocean with someone who hates your guts for over a month. We will also make sure our future captains are up to our standards in terms of seamanship. We will explicitly discuss emergency situations and protocol before we get under way.
In addition to teaching us about how to be safer, happier hitchboaters, being on Escargot also made me a better sailor. To some extent, being on the ocean for that long in a sailboat is bound to teach me something new about sailing. But, in a roundabout way, our captain’s lack of leadership skills actually forced me to improve my seamanship faster than I perhaps would have otherwise. Having to predict the thoughts and decisions of a guy with a short fuse and the communication skills of a piece of roadkill forced me to think independently about how a sailboat interacts with wind and sea, and what I would do in different situations, rather than relying on the captain to just tell me.
Surprisingly, the trip also strengthened my love of the sea. As always, we saw wonders. I was awoken from a nap by the song of a humpback whale; I was involved in the capture of my first large pelagic fish, and experienced the strangeness of its death; I saw the green flash for the first time. I can think of so many moments where I thought to myself that if only I were on my own boat, the sights, the sounds, the joy of interacting with the sea through the sail boat would have been exhilarating, calming, or meditative, depending upon the ocean’s face that day. I would make this decision, that decision; everything would be all right, and I’d never cuss. I’m quite convinced that I could find happiness on my own boat, free from trying to please someone else, making decisions based on the mood of the sea and not that of another person.
But boat ownership is still a long way off. Even the next volunteer gig is a few months away. For now, Kristian and I live on land, waiting out the cyclone season. But I’m proud to have accomplished a goal that I’ve held for years—to sail across an ocean. Perhaps I haven’t enjoyed every second, but it has been pretty much as life-changing as I expected it to be, so in that respect I’m not disappointed. And there are still a couple more oceans to go. Come April or May, hopefully we’ll find a sturdy boat and a sane captain and set off across the Indian Ocean. I can’t wait.
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