Chapter 12: Day 8
Final Leg, Last Call
The vacation wasn't over, but all that remained was cleaning up after ourselves. In a sense, the memory-making part of the vacation was over, and perhaps all of us were feeling that. I was sitting up in the cockpit with Robert, trying to think of something meaningful, if not memorable to say. About the best I could do was "Well, this sure wasn't any Carnival Cruise."
Robert pointed straight up and said "No, but that is."
I looked up, and sure enough, there was the bow of a cruise ship, hunkering down on us. The only real comfort I felt was that the tow rope would probably drag the Nueva Vida down with us.
Well, this was it. It was Saturday morning, and no one really slept that well. Or, I didn't sleep that well, and as far as I'm concerned, that meant that no one slept very well. Or, they'd better not let me hear about it.
We were, more or less, at the end of our cruise. Come hell or high water, we had to have the boats back at the Marina, cleaned up and ready to be inspected by Sunday noon. That meant that come hell or high water, we were going to have to head back sometime soon. As luck would have it, we had both hellish conditions and high water.
We didn't know where the others were. All we knew was that we couldn't reach them on the radio. The only other thing we knew was that the weather report said that some pretty nasty weather was separating us from the Florida coast. All we could do was something really stupid (like setting sail for the worst of the weather), and hope that the others were having just as bad a time as we were.
Now, theoretically, we could have kept the boats out in the Bahamas area for most of the day, and had a nice quiet night sail back, getting us back to the Marina just in time to start cleaning the boats out. In fact, the original itinerary for the trip made some vague reference to the possibility of doing just that. Of course doing just that would have either put us in even worse weather, or missed us the opportunity to nearly get killed entirely. We didn't know which. In any case, we'd long since forgotten about the original plans, which was just as well, because they didn't call for doing anything stupid.
So, we figured we'd set sail for the storm. Or maybe we didn't put it to ourselves in quite those terms, but that's more or less what it worked out to.
I'm going to take this opportunity to point out that unless you've been sailing before, you probably don't have any idea just how much of a lousy time a human is capable of having. We're talking 100% full body, no holds barred, "I wish I were dead" misery here. Rather than seeing this as a bad thing, you should on the contrary see it as a necessary life experience. This is an experience that can, all in one day, provide your life with all the contrast it needs to make everything else that happens afterwards seem delightful by comparison.
Now, when you think about it, having everything that happens from now on seem pretty delightful sounds like a useful thing. That's why I think it's really important for everyone to go out on a sailboat and do something life-threateningly miserable in the middle of a storm. Just so you'll have great stories to tell, and just so that everything else will seem so delightful.
On the face of it, this day seemed ideal for me to thus transform my life. The only little hitch in this plan was that I'd already had just such an awful experience on a sailboat, just last fall with Georgia out on Lake Champlain. Unlike all the other people on the boat, I really didn't need any more of this sort of aggravation in my life.
So, I did what any other sane (or curmudgeonly) person would do: I headed below decks and tried to sleep the whole thing off. From the way things were looking, it looked like I could make the whole experience be right on par with all the nightmares I'd had the previous night.
Well, anyway, it was with all these stupid intentions that we set sail. We un-rafted the boats, and after a bunch of messing around, managed to get our sails up and get more or less pointed in the right direction.
The sail started out ok. At first, Tom had insisted that he'd finally gotten his sea legs, and that he'd be able to hold his breakfast down just fine. Of course, once under way on those really choppy seas, Tom quickly settled down into his normal routine of puking his guts out over the side of the boat. I tried to settle into my normal routine of sitting up on the other side of the boat from Tom, but it was just too damn wet up there, and after a while, I got cranky and decided to go below.
After an hour or two, things got really bad.
Once again, I'm going to call on Cap'n Judy's characterization (from the first day) of the sailboat as a large, seagoing camper. Once again, I find major differences between sailing and camping. The biggest one is as follows:
If you're out camping in the middle of nowhere, and things start getting shitty, it's always possible to go sit down and cry somewhere. By contrast, on a sailboat, the only place you can sit down to cry (without dramatically increasing your chances of drowning) is the very place that you found so unbearably shitty in the first place. I realize that camping can get pretty shitty (mainly because I've been there), but it just can't hold a candle to how miserable sailing can get.
The other key feature is that when you're having a miserable time on a sailboat, just when you finally reach your limit and decide that you can't possibly deal with what's going on, much less deal with anything else, things have the tendency of getting even worse. And, just as things get to be absolutely, positively, 100% as bad as you can tolerate, and you know you don't have any stamina left, you'll find out from your captain that there's another five hours or so before you get to port.
The final thing to remember is that when you're absolutely at the end of your rope like this, there just isn't any room for you to be feeling sorry for yourself. Just find someplace out of the way and shut up.
I decided to skip all that being at the end of my rope stuff, and go straight to the shutting up and getting out of the way. Having survived the V-Berth during all manner of bad weather, I felt confident of my sea-legs, and knew that I'd have the entire main salon to myself. After all, most of the others would urp at the mere thought of going below.
I'd like to tell you that I have nothing to report from the day because I was successful in sleeping through the whole thing. Unfortunately, I wasn't.
For starters, my bladder decided to keep me busy with hourly trips to the head. Now, you just haven't lived until you've tried this:
- The boat is moving so quickly and suddenly in so many directions that it's impossible to get anywhere without getting bruised.
- You have to spend all your concentration on not getting sick.
- Everything has come loose from its storage and is strewn all over the floor (including your CD collection), and you have to try not to step on any of it.
- You make your way to the head that's already half full of diving equipment and beer, half of which is airborne most of the time.
- Your clothes are sopping wet, and you have to peel them off while the boat's coming at you from every direction.
- You try to do your business, and get most of it into the proper receptacle. With everything moving, you have to brace your head against the wall, and shoulder against the sink.
- You try to pull your 20 pound, sopping wet clothes back on, not quite sure how differently things would feel if you'd just wet yourself (fully clothed) in the first place.
- You try to kneel down to the toilet and operate the pump to flush it without letting anything out of the toilet, or any part of you into it.
- You try to get back to the couch you were resting on before the nausea sets in. It's important to recover before you have to go again.
Repeat this process once an hour for about ten hours. And that was the easy part.
We had a couple of problems. One was that the wind kept shifting towards the north, which made it increasingly difficult to hold our course. One was that the Nueva Vida (both the boat and its captain) kept falling apart. Another was that the bilge pump on our boat quit working.
Now, if I made it sound bad on our boat, it was even worse on the Nueva Vida. Their mizzen sail tore, their Bimini top (the thing that covers the cockpit) tore, their engine quit working and their generator quit working. On our boat, we just had a hard time with that bilge pump and the VHF rig.
It was great. We'd get a call on the VHF from Yakov who'd say something like: "Oh god, the mizzen sail's torn, and the wind's shifted so far north that I can't hold my course anymore. We're heading 010, and the weather's looking even worse, and I'm thinking of turning back."
Judy would take a quick scan around the cockpit of our boat to take an assessment of how we all felt about turning back. No one would say anything, but we all gave her icy stares that said "Look. I've got about four hours of really prime quality puking into this crossing, and I'll be damned if I'm going to turn around just so we can do it all over again. Let's just go for it."
Judy would call Yakov back with the following advice: "Drop your stupid mizzen sail, put up the main sail, and tack."
Actually, she'd start out by commenting on her perception of his lack of expertise, recount every single misdeed she'd ever suffered at his hand, suggest (forcefully) about fifteen times that if he had the slightest idea of how to sail a boat, he'd follow her advice and tack, and then she'd pretty well finish him off with a few speculations as to his ancestry and lineage in general. These dissertations of hers would start out with "Listen, you SOB," and go on for about forty five minutes, and finally end with "Over."
Yakov would respond with "Let me think about that for a few minutes," then spend the next four or five minutes leading us even more deeply into the storm. After things got sufficiently worse, he'd call us back with a new recounting of everything that'd gone wrong, ending with another plea to turn back.
This went on for quite a long time. At several times, Judy would find herself up to her armpits in the inner workings of the bilge pump, or just with her hands full trying to steer the ship, and she'd have to relay her messages to Yakov through one of us crew members. Since I was below deck most of the time (and therefore nearest to the VHF rig), it was usually I who got to play translator.
She'd shout down below decks: "You get that worthless fool Brooks on the horn and you tell him that if he had the slightest idea of what he was doing, he'd put his damn mainsail up and tack and get his f___ing boat back on course and get me the hell out of this mess, and while you're at it, ask him why the hell I ever listen to him in the first place and..." (suffice it to say that this tirade would go on for the better part of an hour, and isn't included here for the sake of brevity) "... got that?"
"Nueva Vida, Nueva Vida, Nueva Vida. This is the Sea Galls."
{sputter}{crackle} "Sea Galls, this is the Nueva Vida, go ahead." Hmm. Sounds like it might be Kathy or Dot playing translator for Yakov.
"Uh, yeah. Judy says it might be a good idea to put your mainsail up and tack." Obviously, I couldn't remember the whole tirade, and there was little point dumping it all on poor Dot or Kathy, anyway. There would usually be a very long pause here, probably while Yakov formulated his response to us. I'd get impatient. "You still there?"
"Uh, yeah, but hold on. Brooks is still shouting." ... "He says he'll think about it."
Gulp. How am I going to tell Judy? "Uh... he's thinking about it."
Whereupon Judy storms over to the radio, snatches the microphone from my hand and starts out "Listen, you SOB..." hollers for about thirty minutes, "... and you do that RIGHT NOW! Over." More long pauses. "Brooks? You still there?"
Typically, what would happen at this point was that sometime during her tirade, our radio receiver went dead, perhaps from boredom and disuse.
Eventually, Yakov got the brilliant idea to drop his torn mizzen sail, raise his main sail and tack. He reported this triumphantly on this radio, pointing out that after he tacked, he was right back on course.
After that, things started lightening up a bit, so I went to implement my all-time contingency plan. Since I'd already been through a day like this before, I knew ahead of time that if we came into weather like this, I'd find myself at the end of the day with a set of clothes soaked to the bone. Therefore, I went out of my way to keep one extra-special set of clean, dry clothes, just in case this sort of thing happened.
I just made one mistake, and that was forgetting to put that special set of clean, dry clothes in a plastic bag. When I reported to the V-Berth to collect my dry change of clothes, I found the berth had turned into a wading pool, and that everything inside was either soaked or just terribly damp. Therefore, my special set of clean, dry clothes had turned into a special set of clean, damp clothes.
Even still, what I was wearing was soaking wet, so after a moment's reflection, I realized that "damp" was an upgrade by comparison, and happily changed into my damp clothes. Rack this up as something learned for the next trip.
We got through the storm, and more importantly, we got back to the general Ft. Lauderdale area, and even more importantly, we got through most of Judy and Yakov's bickering. The only trouble was that by this time, it was getting dark, the Nueva Vida's engine, generator and batteries were dead, and there were about a jillion large ships all trying to ram us.
Here was Yakov's plan, which we actually went on to implement (after considerable protestation on Judy's part): The Sea Galls makes a harness to tow the Nueva Vida. We tow said boat at some breakneck speed into the channel, and in doing so, play chicken with (and cut off) a cruise ship the size of Nashua. ("Oh, so that's what the underside of the bow of a charging cruise ship looks like. I always wondered about that.")
Yakov nags Judy into continually speeding up so there won't be any slack in the tow rope, so that we'll get to the customs dock doing about five knots, whereupon Robert jumps off the front of our boat, ten feet straight up in the air onto the dock, where he grabs the lines being thrown from the other boat, so he can wrestle a 46 foot sailboat doing five knots to a stop.
Well, like I said, that was Yakov's plan, but for some reason, Judy didn't much care for it. There were three things that I found so surprising about Yakov's presentation of this plan:
- That he made it sound so much like he was making it up as he went along.
- The amount of vitriol Judy found to spew at Yakov after he presented his plan (we thought she'd used it all up in the crossing).
- That the plan worked flawlessly, even if Robert did accidentally tie the bow line first.
We got someone from the Marina to tow the boat the rest of the way in with a dinghy.
We got into the Marina around midnight. We tried cleaning the boat a bit. Mostly, we tried clearing a path through the boat.
For my part, I had to see dry land again, just to see what it was like. Unfortunately, it was rocking and heaving just as hard as it was back in Bimini. I tried packing my stuff and loading it onto the cargo van, which was moderately difficult, since Dot and Ron disappeared with the cargo van within seconds of our arrival at the Marina.
Tom, in a wonderful gesture of generosity, offered the overnight use of his parents' condo for the members of our boat. This condo had a washing machine (and even more importantly, a dryer), a shower, and plenty of room to sleep. It didn't take much convincing on our part.
As it was, we only spent about five or six hours there, only four of which I spent sleeping. The ground was rocking so hard that I just couldn't face sleeping on anything but the floor, so I just tried to make myself as comfortable as possible. After a few minutes of considering the alternatives, Robert joined me on the floor.
Even still, it was a damned fine
way to spend my first few hours back on solid ground. I
just wasn't sure how long it was going to be before I'd
be able to sit on solid ground without getting motion
sickness.
And, just in case you were wondering, the others had just finished spending their second evening of partying around the Ft. Lauderdale area, and were spending the night all crowded into a hotel room. I bet you can tell who had more fun that day.
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