The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey Read online

  Copyright ©2002 by Diane Stuemer

  Cloth edition published 2002

  Trade paperback edition published 2004

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Stuemer, Diane King, 1959–2003.

  The voyage of the Northern Magic : a family odyssey / Diane Stuemer.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-522-9

  1. Stuemer, Diane King, 1959–2003. 2. Stuemer family. 3. Northern Magic (Yacht) 4. Voyages around the world. I. Title.

  G440.S88A3 2002 910.4’1 C2002-902633-4

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  All maps by Diane Stuemer

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Northern Magic

  1 Let’s Do It!

  2 The Adventure Begins

  3 The First Link in Our Chain

  4 Galápagos: Wonder and Despair

  5 Facing Fear and Grief in the Vast Pacific

  6 Hopping Across Friendly Islands

  7 We Were Kings on Palmerston Island

  8 Forced to Drink Muddy Sawdust Water

  9 Life and Death in a Force Ten Storm

  10 Mechanical Mutinies Down Under

  11 The Land of Dragons and Smiles

  12 Standing on the Front Line

  13 Magic and Heartache in the Jungles of Borneo

  14 Water Spouts and Lightning Strikes

  15 Long Neck Ladies and Singing Apes

  16 Staring Down the Wrong End of a Gun

  17 Rorschach Test

  18 We Place Last at the Chagos Fish Olympics

  19 Africa Awakening

  20 Plinking Stones Down a Mountain

  21 Pirates and Terrorists in a Lawless Sea

  22 Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire

  23 The Trouble with Egypt

  24 Culture Shock in Reverse

  25 Captain George to the Rescue

  26 Facing the North Atlantic

  27 The Best Maple Doughnut Ever

  Epilogue

  Photo Insert

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Credits

  About the Author

  Northern Magic

  Authors note: All references to miles are nautical miles, which are about 10 per cent longer than statute miles. Thus a nautical mile equals 1.15 statute miles, or 1.85 kilometres. Boat speeds and wind velocities are expressed in knots, or nautical miles per hour. Thus 55 knots of wind equals 63 miles per hour, or 102 kilometres per hour.

  1

  Let’s Do It!

  Herbert had always spoken longingly of his dream to sail around the world. Born in Berlin, Germany, my future husband grew up the son of a barge captain and spent the first six years of his life on his father’s ship, travelling the inland rivers and canals of Europe. A natural genius with all things mechanical, he was capable at five years old of single-handedly piloting his father’s three-hundred-ton ship into a lock. When Herbert was a teenager, his father’s ship once towed a sailboat that had come all the way across the Atlantic. This boat grabbed his imagination, and from then on he secretly – and then not-so-secretly – began nurturing a dream that he, too, might one day cross oceans in his very own vessel.

  In the twenty years that I’d known him, I’d often heard him describe this wish. Because I’ve always believed in big dreams, I never actively tried to dissuade him. I’d mumble something mildly encouraging, like, “That’s a great dream, honey, and everybody should have big dreams,” all the while praying he’d come to his senses and not force me to confess that I was too chicken to accompany him. Travel around the world I’d gladly do, but in a sailboat? Not likely. The idea of sailing across large bodies of water was only marginally more attractive to me than spending time in a Siberian gulag. But I humoured him as the years went by, trusting that eventually he would give up on this crazy idea. If he really was going to do it, my last-ditch plan was to meet him by plane at the other end.

  Then all at once, everything changed. It was a positive change that first appeared, as so often happens, disguised as calamity.

  It was Mother’s Day, 1994, and Herbert was, as usual in our busy lives, taking down Christmas lights a little late. He fell off the roof, breaking his leg and elbow. Complications from these injuries partially disabled his right arm, forcing the sale of his thriving home renovation business and throwing him into a depression.

  Just two months later, while we were still struggling to cope with the aftermath of his accident, we were rocked again – a suspicious spot on my right calf turned out to be malignant melanoma, a potentially fatal form of skin cancer. Our family, still reeling after Herbert’s brush with catastrophe, now had my very survival to contend with.

  The cancer didn’t kill me, but it did force a dramatic change in my outlook on life. While surgery removed the malignancy, no scalpel could excise the worry from my mind. At thirty-five, the thought of dying while still a young mother shocked and terrified me. I’d always assumed, as most people do, that I had plenty of years ahead to do the things I wanted to do. Now I woke up crying from recurring nightmares in which I was dead and my youngest, who was then two, was going to grow up with no memory of me.

  In the year that followed, Herbert and I both went through a period of introspection and adjustment in which our commitment to each other was severely tested. I found myself reviewing my life’s goals and realizing that I had a long way to go before reaching them. Suddenly the quest for more material success seemed hollow. I lost interest in the successful advertising business I had built from a modest start in our basement ten years earlier. Other things seemed far more important.

  As a twenty-year-old, I had set myself three goals in life: to write a book, to have children, and to travel the world. By our year of crisis, I had achieved two of these challenges. I had written a book, the biography of my grandfather, William Hawrelak, who had been a prominent business and political figure in western Canada. We had three wonderful boys, Michael, Jonathan, and Christopher, born in 1986, 1988, and 1992, respectively. But in the quest for more and more material success, we had completely put aside the third goal, to travel the world. We had become a very busy, materialistic, and conventional yuppie family.

  Travel is what had brought Herbert and me together in the first place. I was a long-haired seventeen-year-old in platform shoes in 1976 when I first set eyes on a dark, leather-jacketed young German who was touring North America on his Honda 750 motorcycle. He was close to running out of money, and had purchased a cheap standing-room ticket to see the rodeo at the Calgary Stampede, where I was working as an usherette for the summer.

  The fireworks of the midway that night paled in c
omparison with the sparks generated by our first meeting. If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was something very close to it. Herbert followed me to Ottawa, where I received a degree in journalism at Carleton University. After years of night courses, Herbert, who was an automotive mechanic, entered teacher’s college at Queen’s University, becoming qualified as a technical teacher. Throughout our university years, we had continued travelling whenever we had two dollars to rub together, but as the years went on, we became trapped in the conventional pattern of home, job, and family – all of which caused us to put aside our passion for travel for almost two decades. I worked for the federal government for many years, after which I purchased a failing advertising company. Herbert, after a stint as a high-school teacher, built an award-winning renovation business. After his accident, we worked together in our now thriving advertising business, but we both still dreamed of something better.

  One hot summer day, a year after the beginning of our bad times, Herbert and I went for a long walk by the river. We were still mired in despair and fear for the future. It was there that he turned to me and asked, “What would you do, if you could do anything you wanted?”

  Instantly, my heart made an unaccustomed leap. An unbidden yearning jumped out of my throat. “I’d travel,” I said without hesitation.

  “Well then, let’s do it. You pick anywhere in the world, and I’ll take you there.”

  My heart bounded for one glorious moment before my mind attempted to squelch the seditious thought. But once liberated, that flash of joyous truth could not be suppressed. My heart knew, even if my brain didn’t, where my passion lay. It was time I stopped worrying about what society expected of me and began listening to my soul. Three weeks later, the kids farmed out to camps and babysitters, we found ourselves in Egypt, a couple again for the first time in ten years.

  It was there, in the shadow of the pyramids, that we rediscovered ourselves. How can I begin to describe how alive, how whole this magical place made us feel? We laughed ourselves silly as a new friend attempted to teach us the proper Muslim pre-meal blessing. I smuggled myself, giggling, inside the massive stone sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid of Giza and crossed my arms over my chest, as if holding an imaginary crook and flail. We marched alone down the Avenue of Sphinxes at the temple of Karnak, in the ancient city of Thebes. As we walked, we felt we were the great Pharaoh Ramses himself. The hairs on my arms stood up, thrilling to the sound of drums and music throbbing from within the temple. As I write this and remember, those hairs quiver in their own recollection and stand up again. In Egypt, the world opened itself up to us, and we rediscovered the way we needed to live. Now we knew the people we wanted to be.

  Oddly enough, this change was first remarked upon by two complete strangers.

  “You have a good husband,” a Cairo taxi driver said to me one day.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “Because he is quiet,” was the enigmatic answer.

  Quiet? My Herbert? Not many people who knew my demanding and often-difficult Prussian husband would call him quiet.

  A few days later another taxi driver said exactly the same thing. “You have a good husband.”

  Wondering if there was a conspiracy, I pressed him for an explanation.

  “Why? Because he laughs a lot,” he responded knowingly.

  Laughing? My Herbert? Not in a very long time. But I realized it was true; I did have a new, quiet, laughing husband. And what was more, I had become a quiet, laughing wife. The magic of the Pharaohs had worked itself on us and we returned to real life healed and renewed.

  For me, the renewal meant I began spending less time at work and more with our children. I’d long been denying the feeling that I wasn’t doing enough for them. For Herbert, though, it meant the revival of his old dream to sail around the world.

  Not long after we returned from Egypt, Herbert made an announcement. Next summer, he said, he was going to buy a small sailboat. If we were ever going to sail around the world, we had to start somewhere. He described to me in precise terms the little boat he had in mind.

  I rolled my eyes inwardly, but knowing better than to reveal my true feelings, I simply hoped he would put his plans aside as he had in the past. I shouldn’t have underestimated my new quiet, laughing husband.

  By next spring, Cruising World magazines had begun infiltrating our home. This was a bad sign. I ignored them, but they didn’t go away. Herbert began babbling to me in an incomprehensible nautical language. He wanted a good starter boat – one that we’d trade up for a larger model in five or so years, finally graduating to an ocean-going boat when we retired.

  As I began to see that he was serious, I confessed my doubts about the scheme. “There’s nothing in this for me,” I said. “I’m not supposed to be out in the sun. I don’t like sailing. Every time I’ve ever been on the ocean I’ve been sick. I don’t want to be away from our kids for years, even if they are grown and away.” But Herbert is nothing if not tenacious, so he had an answer for each of my objections.

  One day, in the spring of 1996, Herbert came home with a strange, excited look on his face. He’s not an especially religious man, so what he said next was surprising.

  “Something weird happened today,” he began, pulling out a picture. His face was glowing. “I think God wants me to buy this boat.” My eyebrows went up. God was in on this plan?

  He had been at a sales call, and after successfully signing up a new account, the client had whipped a photograph out of his pocket. Throwing it on the table, he had asked casually, “Want to buy this?”

  There it was. It was a sailboat. The sailboat. Our sailboat.

  The boat in the photo was exactly what Herbert had been describing to me for months.

  “I had said I was going to buy a sailboat this summer,” he explained sheepishly, “but I wasn’t actually doing anything to make it happen. Somehow I feel God means us to buy this sailboat. What more can He do than put it right in front of my face?”

  Well, who was I to argue with the Almighty?

  But before we went too far with this, I sat my new quiet, laughing husband down.

  “This boat is your dream, not mine,” I began sternly. “I’ll support you in it, but you need to understand that I don’t share it.”

  “I understand,” he said, in a manner that was strangely – uncharacteristically – docile.

  “I don’t mind if you take the boys out sailing on weekends, but don’t put on a long face if I don’t want to come.”

  “Yes, dear,” he said quietly.

  “I don’t expect you to pull weeds in my garden, so don’t you expect me to swab your decks.”

  “Yes, dear,” he said laughingly.

  What choice did I have but to go with him to pick up our sailboat?

  When I stepped aboard our little twenty-three-footer for the first time that July day in 1996, my previous experience with boats was scanty. Apart from two ocean trips on large ships in which I had, both times, developed an intimate and unhappy knowledge of the insides of their plumbing fixtures, most of my experience had been in renting houseboats on the Rideau Canal system, which we had done a number of times as a family.

  We had, it is true, had a great time on the houseboats, but I attributed the feeling of inner peace and contentment to the bucolic surroundings. So none of my previous experiences prepared me for the feeling that overtook me as we motored our little boat down the Ottawa River to her new berth at a marina near our home. All the vibrant feelings of happiness and connectedness that we had felt in Egypt were right there. Everything around us looked bright and new and beautiful. It just felt right.

  Suddenly, spending weekends on our boat seemed a lot more interesting than putzing around in my garden. Now, as Herbert began planning weekend outings alone with the boys, I found myself piteously bleating, “What about me?”

  Finally, I managed to sign myself on as crew and we did our first overnighter on the Ottawa River – in a raging gale. S
cudding along the water in our sturdy little craft under a tiny handkerchief of sail, we laughed out loud, exhilarated. The kids screamed in delight, begging to be steered into the biggest of waves. When we returned home, windblown and energized, the storm we had weathered was front-page news. The Ottawa Citizen newspaper quoted the head of the Nepean sailing club saying that no one in their right minds had gone out sailing that weekend.

  What did that make us?

  The next morning I had to face the sad reality of returning to work after this weekend of revelation. Wanting to delay the inevitable, I paused at our home computer to check for e-mail. While it was down-loading, I picked up one of the ubiquitous sailing magazines that were now invading every horizontal surface in the house. The headline was “ONE FAMILY’S TERROR IN THE NORTH SEA.” Did I dare read it? I did. I turned immediately to the article and devoured every word. Twice.

  All I could think after I finished reading was “I could do that.”

  Then I spotted an article on the cost of a three-year circumnavigation. I discovered, to my surprise, that we could sail around the world for about half as much as it cost us to live three years in the suburbs. I drank it all in. The pictures the story conjured up in my mind were so vivid I simply knew this was for us. And when I put the magazine down, I knew our lives were forever changed. Not only did I want to sail around the world, I had to do it. This was the answer, the positive change I’d been seeking.

  What did it matter that there were a thousand other perfectly valid reasons why we were crazy to be thinking about sailing around the world? All I knew was that we had to do it.

  So I went to work, plopped myself down in front of my quiet, laughing, and soon-to-be astonished husband, and said, simply, “Let’s do it.”

  After almost twenty years of Herbert’s trying to get me to warm to the idea of sailing around the world, I had finally been convinced.

  We had owned our first sailboat for all of two weeks and had sailed her once. Now we were going to sail around the world, but a mountain of preparation stood between us and that lofty goal. Yet strangely enough, we knew with absolute certainty that we could, and would, do it.