The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey Page 11
Thankfully, we managed to spend several more days at our village of sixty people without running into any more kava. Instead, we went on long mountainous hikes, collected enormous quantities of shells, went scuba diving in a “blue hole” forty metres deep inside the coral reef and full of a wonderland of coral. We wanted to climb the mountaintop for a view of the village below, but this, our host Kimi sternly admonished us, was not permitted.
“One village woman climbed up there,” he stated gravely, “and when she came back down, her leg was ruined and she could no longer walk. It is tabu to go there. That is a holy place, where the spirits of our ancestors live.” If we went up there he could not be held responsible for the consequences.
The men of the village had gotten wind of the fact that they were in the presence of Herb “The Tool Man” Stuemer. Herbert ended up carrying out a roving two-day radio-repair marathon. His most interesting project was a malfunctioning tape deck that, upon opening, proved to house twenty three-centimetre long, very perturbed cockroaches. As they scuttled madly around looking for a new home, I leapt madly around, too, trying to make sure that none of them made that new home inside my backpack.
The children made dozens of friends, each in his own way. Christopher’s tried and true chase-and-tickle method was a success as always; Jonathan persevered in his brave attempts to play tag; and Michael engaged the older kids with his rubber-faced Jim Carrey imitations, which, even if not understood, were certainly appreciated. We made more friends, too, when many of the village’s men unexpectedly came swimming over to Northern Magic, hoping for a tour. After they were finished, most of the village ladies arrived in small boats and got to satisfy their curiosity as well. Finally, we managed to leave Ono Island, and after a few more stops in other parts of Fiji, we were ready to continue our long journey across the Pacific.
9
Life and Death in a Force Ten Storm
We’d spent a month in Fiji, making many friends and having wonderful new experiences on one hand, and racking our brains trying to fix an ever-lengthening list of mechanical problems on the other: our alternator had given up and the spare didn’t have the same capacity; the watermaker broke down, necessitating strict rationing; and, of course, the refrigerator had packed it in. But every day spent in Fiji brought us one day closer to hurricane season, and our route west was taking us directly along the path of those destructive super-storms. We needed to get going.
We began the week-long journey to the island of New Caledonia, about half way between Fiji and Australia, on the first of November, a month in which early hurricanes are known to form. For the first few days, our chief problem was not too much wind, but, rather, a lack of it. Northern Magic ambled along at a leisurely pace of about three knots, heedless of our urgent desire to get out of harm’s way. Since our autopilot was still on the casualty list, Herbert and I, spelled occasionally by the kids, were forced to spend twenty-four hours a day standing at the wheel. We spent many stimulating hours staring at the sea and then the compass. Sometimes, for variety, we stared at the compass and then at the sea.
Herbert attempted to jury-rig the autopilot – soldering, gluing, and wiring together the broken motor parts – but none of his inventive solutions lasted more than a few hours. Since the wind showed no signs of picking up, we became resigned to spending an exhausting passage this way.
After three days, our prayers were answered. The wind increased, the wind vane (which hadn’t been useful with so little wind) kicked in again, and we were liberated. For one delightful day we were able to make ourselves comfortable inside the cabin again rather than standing out exposed to the elements.
It was on my shift late the next night that the wind started really blowing. I had a nervous, edgy feeling, and the grim line of dark clouds ahead on the horizon didn’t alleviate my anxiety. I remembered how, the day before, I had pointed out thin cirrus clouds in the sky, called mares’ tails, to the kids. I had explained that they were often harbingers of a storm.
It was one in the morning. I had just finished brushing my teeth and was ready to wake Herbert for his shift when I heard the sails banging around. I put my head outside and discovered that the wind had died completely. We were wallowing in a dead calm. That ominous dark line of cloud was now very near, obscuring the full moon. Our mainsail had backwinded. We were going nowhere. As I woke Herbert, I giggled nervously and said that I was turning things over to him in a bit of a mess.
We went outside together to try to sort things out. No sooner had we jumped into the cockpit than the calm was shattered. The wind, which had been northerly, suddenly returned with a blast from the southwest. Although Herbert began reorganizing the sails into their proper positions, the wind grew rapidly stronger until, within a few minutes, it was clear we would have to drop them entirely. Ironically, after all our days of painfully slow progress, all we could think about now was slowing ourselves down.
It was 3:30 a.m. by the time I finally got to bed, but now there was no blessed sleep to embrace me. The motion of the boat was violent. The shift of wind direction, combined with the sudden gale, produced steep five-metre waves that were close together and battered us mercilessly from all angles. We staggered from one brutal slap to another, heading almost directly against the wind. Northern Magic’s decks were completely awash. Her bow was buried as it beat into wave after wave.
From my bunk in the forward portion of the boat, all I could do was brace myself against the wall. Each time we reached the peak of a particularly steep wave, we would fall off it with a sickening drop. I passed the rest of the night without sleeping for more than a few minutes at a time.
At 7:00 a.m., the children began waking up. Christopher and I staggered to Michael’s narrow, vacant bunk in the navigation station and lay there together, hugging. I instructed the older two boys not to leave their bunks. Water dripped onto our mattress and our lower bodies from the hatch above. Every few minutes, I had to stick my head out of it to make sure there weren’t any ships in the vicinity, although this was largely useless since the pelting rain had reduced the visibility to almost zero.
By the middle of the morning, the gale had abated. The kids were now able to sit up and play computer games, and I was able to make Kraft Dinner for lunch. In fact, by the time Herbert woke up from his much-needed nap, the wind had reduced substantially and we were able to raise the mainsail again, helping to reduce the motion. We all sat around, smiling and congratulating ourselves. We had been through several violent squalls before, but they had never lasted long enough to kick up ugly waves like these.
One of Herbert’s private miseries during the gale had been an excruciating toothache. When the pain had become unbearable, he had actually fashioned and installed his own tooth filling using some temporary filling material we had in our ship’s medicine chest. His repair worked, completely eliminating the pain. It even held together for the next five months. The dentist he eventually visited in Australia was amazed at it, commenting that he’d never seen a homemade filling before, much less one fashioned in the middle of the ocean, on a boat bucking wildly in a gale.
Using the radar had almost completely drained our batteries, so Herbert prepared to turn on the engine and motor for a few hours. As soon as the motor went into gear, however, there was a strange shuddering. Some equally alarming utterances began emanating from the cockpit. I rushed outside to discover that we now faced a new problem. Unnoticed by us, a jib sheet (the rope that controls the jib, or headsail), had washed overboard. When Herbert had engaged the propeller, the thick rope had been sucked right into it. It was now hopelessly tangled. Unless he could somehow work it free, we would have to complete this trip without a motor.
Herbert tried all the obvious things to get it loose, but to no avail. Wearily, we put our heads together to decide what was to be done. I thought we should continue sailing and find ourselves a little island behind which to anchor and free the prop in safety. But Herbert believed there was no choice but to free
it right where we were. Ahead of us was a nasty maze of coral reefs complicated by a tricky set of unpredictable currents. This was exactly the wrong kind of place to be without a motor. The wind turning against us at the wrong time could spell the end. No, he would have to dive under the boat and untangle the rope right here. The boys and I were queasy about our captain diving under a moving boat in the middle of the ocean, but Herbert could not be deterred.
I wanted him to do it with a scuba tank, but he vetoed that idea, too, not wanting to be hampered by bulky gear while getting in and out of the pitching boat. We hove to, by backwinding the jib and jamming the steering wheel in such a way that the boat would stand still. By now the waves were only a metre and a half high, but still big enough to bang an unprotected human against a steel hull pretty badly. Or slice him neatly open on a sharp propeller. Even hove to, the boat was still making leeway at a couple of knots, so we tied a rope around Herbert’s middle and cleated it up to make sure we wouldn’t lose him. Before diving, he climbed into the water, and Michael and I practised hauling him up to the side of the boat to make sure we could do it.
Then he was gone, and only the drag on the line in my hands confirmed that he was still there, suspended over a kilometre of dark water. Who knows what kind of evil creatures were down there looking up? The boys and I scanned the horizon nervously for signs of a menacing fin. Herbert was dangling from that rope just like a large, juicy piece of bait.
Up and down he came and went, gasping for air for a few seconds before returning to his work. After his third try, he clambered back on board, breathing hard. His shoulder was scraped open. At first it looked like his whole arm was covered in blood, but it turned out to be mainly red anti-fouling paint. The jib sheet wasn’t fully freed, but he had managed to unwind it five times. Back on deck, shivering as much with nervousness as cold, Herbert wound the line around the winch and, with superhuman effort, finally managed to unsnarl the rest. The end of the rope was frayed and much the worse for the wear. So was our captain. But the dirty deed was done, our motor was back in service, and all we had to do now was haul our weary bodies over this unfriendly ocean for four more days.
After sailing tantalizingly close by the southernmost island of Vanuatu, we finally spotted the main island of New Caledonia. It is the fourth largest island in the South Pacific, an incredibly beautiful land whose abundance of minerals gives it a stunning reddish hue. Its rosy hills are dotted with bright green stiletto-shaped pine trees, making it quite unlike any of the other South Pacific islands we visited.
Our destination was the capital, Nouméa, a surprisingly cosmopolitan and very French city. There, we found ourselves not in Melanesia, but in the French Riviera. In the streets of Nouméa, most of the faces were white, the French spoken was Parisian, and the thin, carefully made up and well-coiffed women wore tiny, body-conscious mini-skirts and high heels. Elegant fashion boutiques and restaurants lined the streets. The long, tree-lined parks with fountains would have looked quite at home in Paris. Even the outdoor fruit market was classy.
We couldn’t afford to buy anything in New Caledonia other than pineapples and baguettes. Even still, it felt like a vacation, with its clean streets, well-stocked stores, and a cultured veneer. We attended a sculpture festival that featured native artwork, and laughed to see the local children dance in traditional Polynesian style, not to the powerful beat of native drums, but to rock music. I’ll never forget the little beflowered girls, looking, just like the native girls of Tonga or Tahiti with their long dark hair and grass skirts, gyrating their hips to the rhythm of “Come on baby, do the locomotion!” Somehow, though, this seemed perfectly in sync with the reality of New Caledonia.
All of us needed the chance to recuperate and prepare ourselves for our coming journey to Australia, but none more than Herbert. Already exhausted by having to spend his whole precious month in Fiji buried in repairs, Herbert was going through a real down period in which he agonized over all the other malfunctions that seemed to be cropping up faster than he could fix them. The storm on the last passage, and his mid-ocean dive to free the propeller, had really got to him, already weighed down as he was by the coming hurricane season and by an ever-lengthening list of repairs. Autopilot, alternator, watermaker, bilge pump, toilet, a complete exterior paint job, boom, exhaust system, ripped sails, and now even a failed video camera were only the beginning of his list, which, like Jacob Marley’s chain, was getting heavier and heavier with each day.
All this prevented Herbert from really relaxing and enjoying our stay in New Caledonia. If it wasn’t repairs, he was contemplating storms and hurricanes, studying weather charts carefully each day and trying to pick a good weather window in which to make our final sprint to Australia. The weather situation did look pretty messy, with nasty fronts marching their way regularly and inexorably across our intended path. After our last encounter with bad weather, we didn’t want to go through that again too soon. One mistake in judgement, one important piece of equipment failure, or a simple misreading of a weather chart, could cost us our lives.
On November 16, our weather window appeared. Today was the day. Nine hundred nautical miles separated us from Australia, where we would be safe from the cyclone season that was about to start.
As we set out, we felt a little nervous, but relieved to finally be getting this passage over with. We sailed with almost no wind for the first day, and all night the lights of New Caledonia remained in sight. By morning we had made only twenty or thirty miles, and our new position on that big Pacific Ocean chart was not even worth noting.
On the third day something ominous began to show up on the weather charts and in e-mail messages from my dad, who, as usual, was serving as our personal weather forecaster. Some mild lows floating around south of us had done something we hadn’t predicted, coalescing into one massive low-pressure system. The barometer began falling. The weather forecast began talking about a “significant depression.” Soon, we had not too little wind, but too much. It was coming directly from the west, where we had to go.
At this point, about two hundred miles west of New Caledonia, we had a choice to make. It was impossible to head into the westerly gale that was building, so we were forced to abandon our route and run either south or north. Normally, we would have gone south, since Brisbane lay to the southwest. Instead we chose north. Even if it meant taking longer to reach Australia, going north, we figured, would take us away from the centre of the system. The next days would show whether we had made the right choice.
By nightfall the winds had grown even stronger. As the system to our south turned from a gale into a full-fledged storm, the winds around us strengthened to forty-five knots, creating steep, high waves and an increasing swell. The violence of our beating into these waves brought on the worst attack of seasickness I had ever experienced. Even Herbert succumbed, being laid flat for the first time ever. Only the kids, tucked safely into their beds, were immune. How they ever slept I don’t know.
After a long, miserable day of battling the storm, I plotted our position and was shocked to discover how far north we had been pushed. Because of the way New Caledonia tilts to the west, as we headed north we found ourselves drawing closer and closer to its northern tip. At the same time, we were considerably farther away from Brisbane than we had been two days before. By now the depression was spewing off storm force winds within five hundred miles of its revolving centre. At the beginning, we had been only two hundred miles away from the vortex, but since it was moving southeast at the same time as we ran northwest, we were now on the outer edge of its fury. We received a disturbing message that another sailboat just two hundred miles to the southwest had been dismasted and abandoned. We didn’t know it then, but two people had died on that boat when it had rolled 360 degrees and been torn apart.
So, our northerly route was taking us out of immediate danger. It was, however, putting us on a collision course with a set of mid-ocean reefs. We simply couldn’t continue on this path. Jus
t before it got dark, we braved the howling winds and tacked the boat around, heading south and back towards the centre of the storm. Several times it crossed our minds to simply turn around and head back to Nouméa. But somehow we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit that we had gone through all this for nothing.
Although the winds had calmed down now to only about thirty-five knots, the waves were still sickeningly steep. And we had something new to contend with. All around us, dark thunderheads roamed, sometimes directly overhead, sometimes to one side or another. We tried to dodge these squalls as best as we could, but when one hit, the winds would suddenly pick up by ten knots or more and we would be viciously pelted by rain.
To complicate things further, our engine had begun overheating. Herbert, who was prostrate with vomiting, dizzy, and weaker than he had ever been before, was faced with the prospect of working head down in the stinking engine room while the boat slammed and rolled in the waves. That was a sure-fire recipe for nausea at the best of times, and in these conditions almost unthinkable. So we waited for two days, fighting the storm, our batteries draining and our fridge slowly warming, until things had quieted down enough to attempt a repair.
Squalls and evil dark clouds with black horizontal lines were still all around us as Herbert finally summoned up the resolve to face the broken engine. We were down to a bare minimum of battery power, unable to use even our lights at night. He opened up a hatch in the floor of our salon to expose the engine room and got to work. I hovered around, ready to hand him tools.
Finally, his face flushed and sweaty, he asked me to turn on the motor from the cockpit and rev it up a bit to see if it was cooling. As I clambered into the cockpit, I was shocked to see a particularly fast moving black border low in the sky just ahead. As I watched, I saw it was a racing line of wind and rain. In the next instant it hit.