Maiden Voyage (50 page)

The pace and character of their lives had made an irrevocable impact on my own, and as long as I was still at sea, their presence still seemed immediate to me. Once I arrived home, I feared that they would be sealed away into the foggy scrapbook of my brain, and that thought filled my days with a confused melancholy.

“Happy Halloween. Boo. It's the 31st and there's a tropical storm (a.k.a. hurricane) brewing down south, and if it takes the same route as Emily did, then we're right in the path. Yep, we're in the same stomping grounds as a hurricane. A first for Tarzoon
, Varuna
and me. I desperately need sleep and to conserve electricity, we now live by kerosene light down below. “

When we were 310 miles away and only 100 miles from switching to the chart indicating the approaches to New York, I was able to pick up a radio station in New London, Connecticut, and could hear the call toll-free commercials for a set of three LPs with the greatest hits of whomever. It seemed that some regional elections were coming up and all I could hear was Italian names. A weather announcer said that the tropical storm that had worried me a couple of days earlier had headed toward the Gulf of Mexico, staying with the warmer water that those systems crave.

November 1 was my mother's birthday and, as if she were watching over me, we had wind all day that helped guide us in the right direction, across the Gulf Stream coordinates that were broadcast on the weather station. All sorts of eddies, rips, weird waves, birds and jumping fish surrounded us, as sometimes, out of sheer nerves, I even hand-steered, not wanting to let the river set us back one mile. Sandy Hook, the little cove where I had spent my first night out of New York twenty-seven months before, was as far into my future as I could see, and I dreamed about how to sail into it on every tack, with every kind of wind, even rehearsing in my mind where the anchor would be dropped when I arrived.

It took me a week to get through
Dr. Zhivago
and it was only at the very end that I found out that my namesake was a laundry girl. Next I started trying to concentrate on
Dune
. The wind was irregular
in strength and direction, but my spirits were high by November 2 because we had made good mileage, using a Gulf Stream eddy to advantage.

As we crossed the westernmost perimeters of the underwater current, the water changed color from a nutrient- and phosphorescence-rich blue to the murky greenish-brown of the eastern coastal waters of the United States. Also, the warm current that flowed up from the Gulf of Mexico gave way to the icy northern November waters, and for the first time, I pulled out of the Ziploc bags the heavy-knit sweaters that Olivier had given me and the sleeping bag I hadn't used since the trip to Bermuda.

Making up for lost time, I started navigating with a passion, using the moon, sun, Venus and Polaris, cherishing the taking of each sight, and promising myself never to forget any of the sailing skills I had learned, especially the navigation. I had always loved joking and complaining about having no SatNav, but toward the end, I realized that taking a sight, plotting it with another sight, and finding a cross in the middle of the watery void on a chart created an addictive feeling of mastery and connection with the Earth and the stars.

White night after white night of anticipation, I probably slept a total of four hours in the final week, and on the evening of November 4, the weather station reported a gale warning and small-craft advisories in effect. The southwesterly winds that had helped us make the last hundred miles at a good clip began gusting, and I fearfully waited for them to veer west and strengthen into something that would oblige us to heave to and wait it out.

“We're 75 miles away and I'm getting so excited that I can't even listen to the radio. It makes me all jumpy. Can you imagine how I feel? It's been 48 days. I'm so close, and I get these feelings, New York feelings. I can almost feel the subway, the East Village, the house. Most of all, I feel Sandy Hook. Ninety-five percent of the time, my mind is locked into that muddy curved sandspit. The chart is full of holes. I spot a few ships. I'm beginning to see planes. I see fishing boats and I can smell land!”

All around us, there were trawlers and fishing boats to be avoided, probably hailing from North Jersey and Long Island harbors. Every plane that thundered overhead across the sky I knew was headed in the direction of Kennedy, LaGuardia or Newark airports. The ocean's salty smell began to resemble that of vegetation and
smog, and I inhaled the air as the familiar scents began to re-identify themselves.

At twilight, on our last evening alone, I made my last fix using Polaris and Venus and planned our approach. Then I took down the jib and stopped
Varuna
for several hours to gather my wits, calm down and sort things out neatly. It had been forty-nine days for me, in the immediate ocean sense, but in reality it had been almost two and a half years.

All my worries about how I would fit in and how everything that had changed would affect me seemed to dissipate. I remembered back to the days before leaving New York, when I worried if I would ever adapt to life at sea on my own. Having done it, I realized now how much more is possible. But I could never have known had I not tried.

Now, in the same spot as I had been as an eighteen-year-old, setting off on her maiden voyage, scared and apprehensive of the future, I realized that the future wasn't something to worry about. If living at sea had taught me anything, it had revealed the importance of taking each new dawn in stride and doing the best that I could with whatever was presented.

It wouldn't even matter if I didn't fit in anymore. What is “fitting in” anyway, I thought, being accepted by a peer group? I could no longer play my roles in life to make other people happy. The most disturbing thought at the root of my contemplations was that I could never again be a twenty-one-year-old who was witnessing the fulfillment of a two-and-a-half-year dream.

“But, isn't that what life is all about?” I told myself. “To move forward and keep adding to the memories?” Everyone else would have changed, but perhaps none more than I. There seemed nothing sadder than to think back to a childhood lost, or to remember innocent times when the world was a smaller and simpler place to know. But, I reasoned, come forty, I would again be envying the person I had been at twenty-one. We just can't stop time.

The next morning, I put on my last pair of clean long johns, washed my face with the last drops of the fresh water, bundled up and hoisted the jib. I couldn't stay out there forever. We were going home.

Around 11:00
A.M
., still about 30 miles away from the Ambrose Light that indicates the approaches to New York, a powerboat roared in from the clear horizon toward
Varuna
, filled with a crew of people frantically waving and screaming congratulations. I eagerly looked
for a familiar face, but I recognized no one, and went below to turn on the VHF. The man who answered said he was from a national news station covering my arrival for the afternoon broadcast and that they had been out searching for
Varuna
since dawn. Other people on board were taking pictures and filming, and I waved for them and talked with the man until they revved up and headed back to the city to make their deadline.

“November 5th, 1:00
P.M
. Oh, God. I'm so close. I've got a horrible case of jitters, my heart is drumming and my stomach is one gigantic knot. I haven't slept in a week, and now I'm a new kind of scared. The people who just came were talking about fireboats and helicopters and press boats and TV cameras and press conferences. Oh my, how should I act, what should I say, how will it be? I feel like laughing, crying and turning around and heading out to sea again. The camera crew were all seasick over the windward side of their boat and they still managed to yell questions. I never expected this
. Varuna
and I continue to plug on through the 30-knot winds toward the hullabaloo. I can't believe it, but I'm just beginning to see the outline of the World Trade Center.”

The wind veered to the west and, reefed down to the smallest sails we had, I sat below with a bewildered Tarzoon, crying over what we were leaving behind and savoring our last minutes alone together, as
Varuna
pounded through the chop. Several hours after the first boat, a roaring noise had me running out into the cockpit to see another powerboat muscling through the steepening waves. Automatically waving, I peered at the group hoping, praying to see a familiar face.

First, I saw another group of microphones on extension poles and TV cameras. There was a great commotion aboard, people jumping around, screaming and waving frantically, and then . . . yes, there was my father separating himself from the blur.

“Hello,” I screamed, jumping up and down in the cockpit. “Hi, Daddy! It's
over!
I made it!”

“Hey, Ding-a-ling,
you did it!”
he screamed back over the roar of the engines, and jumped around the deck of the boat. “You really
did
it! I am so proud of you!”

Babbling back at the top of my voice how the trip had been, I suddenly saw on the foredeck Olivier's blond head, popping above a yellow foul-weather jacket.

“Oh my God,
Olivier!”
I screamed. “You're here!”

Laughing, he held on to a grabrail as the boat maneuvered closer and shouted back, “I blong you, Tania!”

I blong you.

March 9, 1989

More than a year has passed since my arrival home at South Street Seaport on November 6, 1987, where I found out that because of my having a friend aboard
Varuna
for 80 miles in the South Pacific I didn't get the world record. Oh well. I survived my allotted moment in the spotlight, the initial bombardment of cameras, journalists, interviews, television appearances and the like; after two months Olivier and I decided to leave New York for more quiet ways. We moved to a basement apartment in Newport, Rhode Island, where I could write and where we got married in May 1988. Tarzoon is with us, alive and well with a calico New York girlfriend named Suki.

My father is off on his own again, this time in the African Sahara, 200 miles north of Timbuktu, where he is trying to teach agriculture to the handful of inhabitants of a desert village. When I first got back, he thought that it would be a good idea for me to do the Iditarod Trail race to Nome, Alaska, with a sled and pack dogs. I turned the suggestion down.

The final separation from my voyage came during the summer of 1988. In between trying to fill up blank computer screens with words, I paid my father back after selling
Varuna
to her perfect new owner, and she started out her new life by sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. On our last trip together forever,
Varuna
took Tony, Nina, Jade, Olivier and me out to Brenton Reef in Narragansett Bay, where we granted one of my mother's last wishes and gave her ashes to the ocean.

Because we still believe in taking life one step at a time, Olivier's and my plans for the future are open. With both of our energies combined—Olivier's work concerning anything having to do with boats, such as deliveries, general repairs, construction, teaching, and my writing—we hope to find the means to return to the sea. Perhaps some day we will have children who will be able to grow up in the environment of the different world we have come to love. For our future boat, Olivier, who is interested in chartering, wants 60 feet, I want 38, so we'll work out a compromise. As always, in the end what was meant to be will be.

P.S. I now weigh 124 pounds and I'm trying to shed a few.

In the course of the past year, while I was writing my story, the thought that I was actually circumnavigating twice occurred to me on several occasions—once in reality, and the second time as I relived the entire range of emotions, beauty and hardships on a chair in front of a word processor. Now, in both respects, the voyage truly is over as I sit down to write my thanks to those who helped.

Olivier comes first, most of all for helping me get around half the world, and then later as the book unfolded, for all the grilled cheese sandwiches, dinners and love. I hope my father already knows how grateful I am for his having had the foresight to see just how feasible the whole idea was from the beginning and for all his help in seeing it to the end. And then there's Jeri, who has been through thick and thin with me and knows it all.

Thanks to
Cruising World
magazine; Hans at Monitor, the people at J. J. Taylor and Bukh; Rau Daschl; the Manhattan Yacht Club; Teddy Charles at Sagman's Marine; the Museum of Yachting; Gilles Huccault, who is responsible for my most beautiful pictures. And particular thanks to Bernadette, who through many a white night and over many teas helped me articulate sentiment after sentiment.

Thanks to all the people who selflessly pitched in and aided me along the way, and there were many; for everybody who thought about and prayed for me or wrote letters of encouragement; and to Mr., Tarzoon, who also did his stint with me through most of both stories. And then, last but not least, a last salute to Ocean U.

Tania Aebi lives in Brooklyn with Olivier.

Bernadette Brennan lives in Newport, Rhode Island, and is the Editor of
Cruising World
magazine, a
New York Times
publication.