The Immigrant Ship
1989
I was sitting in an Avon dinghy in the parking lot of the Pier House Restaurant in Key West, Florida, waiting for a girl named Betsy to return with my shoes. I was sitting because the parking lot’s asphalt surface was too hot for bare feet. I was in the parking lot because when I had rowed Betsy out to RESURGAM for a daysail, she had left her shoes on another boat. When I tried to row back, the current was too strong, and we couldn’t reach the marina where the boat she was staying on was moored.
I rowed for much too long in one spot just off the restaurant’s balcony, where tourists sipped cool drinks and exchanged pleasantries with us, and where I pointed out that people buy rowing machines just to get the exercise I was getting without even enjoying the benefits of the scenery and conversation . I decided that I had had enough exercise for one day and headed to a nearby ladder, which we clambered up, pulling our dinghy behind us. Portages are not dishonorable . However, Betsy was barefoot and it was impossible for us to carry the dinghy the three blocks to her boat, so I loaned her my shoes to go get her shoes. Considering my past, it is not easy to have new experiences, but I try.
Sitting in a dinghy in a parking lot out of sight of water is an enlightening pastime. Comments from passersby were uniformly friendly, ranging from “That must have been some high tide” to the parking lot attendant’s, “We park anything here.”
Soon I developed a standard response of “I love boats, but I’m afraid of the water.” Finally Betsy returned shod, and we carried the Avon nonchalantly through the Easter vacation crowds. On Duval Street nothing is eccentric.
That I was sitting in a dinghy in a parking lot is not particularly out of character or surprising, but that I was in Key West--in the United States--was. In three circumnavigations, I had sailed in mainland U.S. waters only from San Francisco to San Diego, and I had not sailed my own boat in the States for more than a decade. In fact, less than six months earlier and a hundred or so miles north of Key West, I had most emphatically declared that the likelihood of my bringing RESURGAM to Florida was ‘absolutely zero.” I really should have known better.
After crossing the equator in April 1988 and reaching the Azores as intended, RESURGAM had ended up in Portugal instead of England, and I ended up sailing her alone across the Atlantic to the British Virgin Islands.
The passage was easy and uneventful. I stopped in Road Town, Tortola, to get mail, buy charts, and, most importantly, to replenish my cookie supply. All the bareboat charter companies make the BVI an extension of American civilization, and it was a pleasure to be within Pepperidge Farms’ sphere of influence.
I daysailed from Road Town to Culebra, in Puerto Rican waters, where a zealous official spent several hours filling out forms before charging me $534 duty on the boat. I fully expected to pay this in Key West, having stopped in Culebra in the same English-built boat five years earlier without difficulty. I had some doubt about the validity of this procedure, but the official really was official and, after more than a circumnavigation during which no other government anywhere cared, RESURGAM was finally legal.
Culebra to Key West is about 1,000 nautical miles. With strong easterlies, RESURGAM covered the first 500 miles in three days. I had no special interest in making a fast passage, but I become uneasy if RESURGAM is not sailing as well as conditions allow. When the wind increased to 30 knots while the seas remained under 5 feet, we smoked along the north coast of Hispaniola.
There is a curious pleasure in sailing along an unknown coast, watching hills come down to the sea and house lights come on at night, musing about the people you might meet if you stopped, but choosing instead to sail into a different future. There is a sense of endless possibility, that dozens of potential lives lie before you, but you will sail and live only one.
On our fourth day at sea, we moved onto a new chart, titled “Cuba” by the British Admiralty. The Old Bahama Channel figures prominently on this chart, or at least looms that way in the sailor’s mind. Although it could be called a stricture or a narrows, I thought of it as a funnel, with a wide mouth leading to an 80 mile long 10 mile wide dogleg spout running southeast to northwest, bounded on one side by the shallows of the Great Bahama Bank and on the other by the reefs and cays of Cuba. I was just beginning to calculate when we would enter the channel when RESURGAM declared a Breaking Day.
The Aries self-steering gear was first. I was in the galley preparing a cup of coffee when the sloop surfed down a 5’ wave and then turned around and tried to surf back up the next. Under a poled-out jib, this resulted in considerable flogging and shaking.
My first thought was that one of the Aries control lines had broken, but when I scrambled into the cockpit, I found that they had not. Disengaging the vane, I feared for a moment that the rudder was damaged; so I was relieved when RESURGAM obediently turned back downwind. Between waves I was able to return to the cabin and grab the Autohelm.
Once RESURGAM was proceeding smoothly on her now electronically steered way, I lifted the Aries and saw a space vacated by a bolt that had fallen out. The Autohelm would have to snick-snick us the rest of the way.
After the Aries broke, the wind moved forward, so I lowered the spinnaker pole in order to trim the jib properly and raised the main. At about 10:00 a.m. I was watching a cruise ship and a tanker pass a mile away when the gooseneck pulled from the mast.
Five bolts and nuts were still attached to the gooseneck fitting. Five large holes were in the mast. One bolt had broken off in the mast. Later in port I learned that one of the United Kingdom’s most respected sparmakers had backed stainless steel bolts with iron fasteners, which inevitably ate through the aluminum mast.
A few years earlier in Australia I installed a solid boom vang. This supported the boom until I could lower the sail. In moderate seas and wind, I was able to unbend the sail, remove the vang, and lash the boom to the toerail without doing anything worse than bend one of the vang end fittings.
I’ve often sailed RESURGAM without the mainsail, but never before without a boom. This provides a greatly increased sense of spaciousness, something like being in a room from which the roof has been removed, but it does not improve performance.
Darkness was almost complete that evening, and I had retired to my berth to read, when a metallic pop caused me to make a trip to the deck. There was just enough light to see the upper port shroud swing far out over the water and then back into the jib. After a few more swings of the pendulum, I managed to catch the shroud and with relief found that only a clevis pin had come loose. By flashlight I managed to fit a spare. As I kept telling myself that day, it could have been worse.
The following morning I heard a weather forecast on a Nassau radio station. A cold front was passing over the islands, bringing a wind shift to the northwest. It was as though the front had radioed ahead to arrange a rendezvous at noon in the Old Bahama Channel. Both of us were on time.
Concern about how I would know we had reached the channel was unfounded. Diamond Point, at the eastern side of the entrance, is an unmarked extension of the Great Bahama Bank where contiguous fathom numbers on the chart are 485 and 3.
The SatNav had not come up with a useful fix for several hours and the sky was too overcast for a sextant, when two cruise ships came charging up, racing along only a length or two apart. They passed 1/2 mile south and then turned northwest a mile ahead of us. Navigation was simple: Follow that ship. The problem with this method became apparent when both ships disappeared into an approaching line squall.
Relatively smooth seas were quickly replaced by a 4’ chop into which RESURGAM, under a scrap of furled jib, made no headway. Not wanting to sail across the now invisible line of ships heading the other way in the channel or to approach the low cays on the Cuban side, I started the diesel and tried to power directly to windward.
I knew that RESURGAM would not be managing the 6 knots her diesel can provide, but I did think we were making some headway. Even 2 knots would bring us in the evening near a Bahamian light on Lobos Cay, the reference point for making the turn into the west dogleg.
As night fell RESURGAM was still punching into waves and wind. At 7:00 p.m., with the usually accurate B&G log showing 19 miles covered since noon , I was getting facefuls of water as I futilely tried to locate the 20 second light on Lobos Key. Finally a flash from the wrong direction caught my eye.
I ducked below and studied the chart, which was one of the only two of the hundreds I owned that was supposedly corrected to date. A light to the west simply made no sense. A sailor shouldn’t have sinking feelings, but I did.
I stuck my head through the companionway and timed the flashes at 7.89 seconds. The chart showed an interval for the light I thought to be miles behind us of 7.5 seconds. Unfortunately close enough for government work. We had motored at full power for 8 hours in one spot.
At 10:00 p.m. the wind finally began to veer to the east, and under a half furled jib we were able to pull away from the Cuban shore. As the front passed and the wind continued to veer, we started to make a good 6 knots over the bottom and proved conclusively that the light on Lobos Cay was not in operation. So much for corrected charts. And Bahamian lights. Good sailing the next day was followed by two days of calm and light winds from ahead.
In Europe I had met various American sailors who related their experiences of being boarded by the Coast Guard. I began to think that somehow I was going to miss this pleasure when, on my last afternoon at sea, about 50 miles off Key West, a black hulled vessel roared over the horizon. Hoping it was the good guys, I went below briefly to get the handheld VHF. On further reflection, I decided there were no good guys.
We were boarded for 2 hours by three men, one of whom sat in the cockpit with me and was very polite. One man said nothing. Perhaps that was just as well, for I glanced down in the cabin and saw him using a knife to pry open the cutlery bin in the top of the saloon table. “No!” I said as calmly as possible as he scratched the varnish. “Just push down on the forward edge.” And the third man was moderately rude. It was an interesting welcome to America.
After the departure of my uninvited guests, I spent a night standing on and off Key West and entered the harbor at 9:00 the next morning. Customs and immigration officials were satisfied with my Culebra clearances. I was free either to find a space at one of the marinas at outrageous prices or to anchor on the far side of the harbor. Once RESURGAM’s anchor was set, I remained in the cockpit.
For the first time in 11 years, the shore I was looking at from my own boat was American, but I did not feel as though I had come home. I knew no one there. My future was more uncertain than it had been since I sailed from San Diego on my first attempt at Cape Horn in 1974. I had returned as an immigrant. For the moment Key West was my Ellis Island. Ancestors of mine had stood on the decks of ships from England and looked at the American shore as I was, wondering what it would bring and hoping it would be a land of promise.
I must admit to feeling some apprehension, as all immigrants must. There was a strong impulse to reraise the anchor and sail back to sea. Instead, after making RESURGAM as shipshape as possible with the boom lashed on deck, I inflated the Avon and rowed ashore.
Although as we live we carry ever-heavier cargoes within us wherever we go, I was determined to treat America as a new land. Who knew what new adventures lay ahead of me on this exotic tropic shore? What nubile maidens, quaint customs, and parking lots to sit in?