After clearing customs, we rafted alongside our friends on the 203-foot VIRGINIAN. The harbor was packed, and there wasn’t another place to tie up. As it turned out, this was one of those situations where being in the wrong place at the right time can work out pretty damn well. For the next week, the crew of the LOST SOUL lived in the lap of luxury, and I mean luxury with a capital L.
The crew of the VIRGINIAN plugged us into their electrical system, filled our water tanks, and even gave us our own laundry room. Now, these people made 5,000 gallons of fresh water a day and had eight laundry rooms aboard. Eight! We were lucky if we could find a clean pair of underwear without conducting an archaeological dig through the lockers. They even gave us some fuel. The yacht carried 65,000 gallons, so I figured a lousy 300 or 400 gallons probably wouldn’t be noticed. Hell, you could lose that much in the plumbing.
And then there was the Jacuzzi.
Naturally, we took full advantage of that little slice of floating paradise.
The funny thing was that the VIRGINIAN’s crew preferred hanging out aboard the LOST SOUL. They said our boat was more comfortable. Imagine that. Here we were, tied alongside a 203-foot floating palace, complete with every imaginable luxury, and their crew wanted to hang out on our little boat. I guess comfort isn’t always measured in feet, horsepower, or the number of bathrooms you have aboard.
We even got into a little friendly competition over our boat names. When we painted LOST SOUL on the dock beside where they’d painted the VIRGINIAN’s name, they came along and wrote “Tender to the VIRGINIAN” underneath ours. Cute. Very cute.
Naturally, we couldn’t let that stand.
So we wrote “Supply Ship to LOST SOUL” under their name.
That seemed to even things out nicely.
While we were at the customs dock, we ran into a guy who had just been hanging out with Janet and Samantha, two of our former crew members, while they were in Aspen, Colorado, a couple of weeks earlier. He’d seen a photograph of me with the girls and recognized me.
Now, let’s see if I have this straight. A guy from New York, crewing on a boat from the Mediterranean, had been hanging out with two girls in Aspen who had previously crewed aboard a yacht from California while it was in Hawaii. And now, by some bizarre twist of the international boating universe, he was meeting up with that same yacht in the Azores, smack in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Sure. Why not?
That’s the way cruising works. You can sail halfway around the world, cross oceans, visit places most people couldn’t find on a map, and still bump into somebody who knows somebody you haven’t seen since last season. The world is a hell of a lot smaller when you’re all out there wandering around in boats.
After we’d finished our little floating reunion with Ingo, Rob, Debbie, Andre, Dana, John, Mike, and the rest of the VIRGINIAN’s crew, it was time to get off the boats and explore Horta.
And what a place it was.
Horta sits on Faial, one of the islands in the Azores, almost dead center in the North Atlantic. It’s a small island with rolling green hills, a picturesque harbor, and some of the friendliest people you’re likely to meet anywhere. For centuries, it had served as a crossroads for ships crossing the Atlantic, a place where sailors could catch their breath, replenish their supplies, repair their boats, and swap lies about the last storm they’d survived.
In other words, our kind of town.
The place had history oozing out of every stone. Columbus had stopped in the Azores on his return voyage from the New World, and Horta had been an important shipping and whaling center for generations. Commercial whaling had ended there about thirty years earlier, but reminders of that era remained. Whale teeth and bones were still around, and Horta was one of the places where you could find genuine scrimshaw, the intricate carving of designs into whale teeth and bone.
These days, most people collect refrigerator magnets. Back then, sailors carved elaborate pictures into the teeth of the very animals they’d hunted. It was a strange art born of a rough business, but some of the work was absolutely beautiful.
Of course, we weren’t in Horta to become art critics. We had a reputation to maintain, and the LOST SOUL wasn’t about to let a little thing like being halfway across the Atlantic get in the way of a good party.
So we threw one aboard.
We were still tied alongside the VIRGINIAN, which meant we had access to all the conveniences of a luxury yacht without actually having to own one. We laid out enough sushi and spicy tuna rolls to feed a small army, then settled into the serious business of consuming them. After several hours and what could only be described as mass quantities of food and booze, the party began to take on a life of its own.
Jody and I eventually wound up in the Jacuzzi, soaking in the bubbles and contemplating the finer points of decadence. There we were, floating in a hot tub aboard our little boat in the middle of the Atlantic, with a 203-foot yacht tied alongside us. Life could certainly be worse.
Meanwhile, Luke and Woody decided that the party was just getting started and headed into town at around midnight to see what Horta had to offer after dark.
This, as it turned out, was not one of Woody’s better decisions.
The next morning, we discovered Woody in blood-covered sheets, suffering from a hangover of biblical proportions. He looked as though he’d been introduced to a freight train and lost the argument. We naturally assumed there was a story behind the carnage, so we went over to the VIRGINIAN to get the details.
And that’s when the whole sorry saga began to unfold.
It seems Luke and Woody had started their evening shortly after midnight. Somewhere along the way, they encountered a couple of Girl Scouts who had some wine. Portugal, as it turned out, had a drinking age of fifteen, which put a whole new spin on the phrase “scouting for adventure.” The boys polished off the girls’ wine and then found a Portuguese fellow who was carrying a bottle of local white wine.
Well, you know how these things go. One bottle leads to another, and before long, Woody had apparently decided that gravity was a personal challenge he was determined to overcome.
Gravity won.
John, one of the VIRGINIAN’s crew, tried to look after him, but Woody wasn’t having any of it. He insisted he was fine, pulled away from John, and took off down the narrow streets of Horta under his own power. Or at least under what he thought was his own power.
He staggered along, bumping into whatever happened to be in his path, until he finally went down. And when I say down, I mean DOWN.
Woody slammed his head into a concrete bench and was out cold.
John and a local tried to help him, but they couldn’t manage to carry him back to the boat. So they headed off to get help, leaving Woody where he lay. Meanwhile, another local came across him, along with a couple of guys from the VIRGINIAN who were wandering around in a similarly advanced state of inebriation. They didn’t even recognize Woody.
By this point, it was around five in the morning, and the whole harbor was about to become part of the story.
Dawn arrived with half the neighborhood thoroughly pissed off over the noise, the VIRGINIAN’s crew ready to string Woody up for keeping everybody awake, and Woody himself passed out aboard the LOST SOUL, sporting a sizable gash in his head and enough blood on the sheets to make the boat look like the scene of a particularly unsuccessful vampire convention.
And where was I during all this?
Sound asleep.
That’s right. While the younger members of the crew were out conducting experiments in the relationship between alcohol, concrete benches, and human skulls, I was peacefully unconscious in my bunk. Being an old fart does have its advantages. I didn’t hear a thing, and I knew nothing about the entire episode until well into the afternoon, when the survivors began filling me in.
By then, the story had already acquired the usual embellishments, and I suspect it would continue growing with every retelling.
Ah, wasted youth.
Of course, the VIRGINIAN’s crew couldn’t let us have all the fun. They had their own contribution to the general mayhem, courtesy of Debbie, their cook, and her Harley-Davidson.
You see, the VIRGINIAN was so big that she carried not one but two Harley-Davidsons, a Kawasaki, three speedboats, and two sailboats. Apparently, when you own a yacht that size, you don’t really need to decide whether you want to go sailing, motorboating, or cruising down the highway. You simply bring the whole damn transportation department along.
Debbie’s problem was that she was still getting acquainted with her Harley. I say “getting acquainted” because, over a period of three days, she managed to dump the thing twice. I’m not sure what the insurance deductible was, but I imagine the VIRGINIAN could afford it.
Finally, it was time for us to move on. We’d had a wonderful stay in Horta, made some new friends, renewed some old acquaintances, enjoyed the hospitality of a floating palace, and witnessed enough late-night stupidity to keep the local gossip mill turning for months.
One of the VIRGINIAN’s deck crew, a woman named Frances, decided to join us aboard the LOST SOUL for the sail to Porto Velas. We arranged to meet the VIRGINIAN there, said our goodbyes, and headed out.
Four hours later, after a terrific sail, we arrived at Porto Velas and rafted up alongside the dock in this little Azorean port. It was the sort of place where everybody knew everybody, and the arrival of a boat the size of the VIRGINIAN was enough to bring out just about the entire town. They’d never seen anything quite like her. People came down to the waterfront to stare at the enormous yacht, pointing, talking, and generally wondering what sort of floating monster had invaded their harbor.
Unfortunately, the surge was pretty strong, and after a couple of hours it became clear that staying alongside the dock wasn’t going to work. We had to cast off, and that ended our brief rendezvous.
As we headed south, the VIRGINIAN passed us on her way to Glasgow, Scotland. We waved goodbye, not realizing it would be the last time we’d see her or her crew. Some time later, her owner passed away, and the yacht was sold. But for that one glorious week in the Azores, we’d been part of her world, and she’d certainly made an impression on ours.
Now it was back to the business of crossing an ocean.
We sailed through the night, but by morning the wind was coming directly off our nose. There wasn’t much point in beating ourselves to death trying to make progress, so we headed for a small bay called Porto Silveira on the island of Terceira. There we dropped anchor and waited for the weather to do what it was supposed to do.
We still had about 1,100 miles to go to Gibraltar, and what we needed was a favorable wind to carry us east. Instead, the weather seemed determined to make us earn every damn mile.
We waited three days.
Three days of checking the wind, watching the sky, listening to the forecasts, and hoping the Atlantic would finally get with the program. But the wind wasn’t cooperating, and there comes a point when even the most patient sailor starts itching to get moving.
We decided to go for it.
We’d been talking on the sideband radio with the crew of TICONDEROGA, a famous and beautiful 1936 ketch. She was one of those classic sailing yachts that looked as though she’d sailed straight out of another century, all grace, varnished wood, and maritime history. They were still in Horta, some sixty miles behind us, but we agreed that we’d both head out the following morning and see what the Atlantic had in store.
That same morning, we also talked with BIG O, a boat out of Sausalito owned by Richard Spindler, the publisher of Latitude 38. We’d been playing tag with them ever since we’d sailed down the Baja peninsula some seven months earlier. They were now about 200 miles ahead of us.
In trucking parlance, we were in the “rocking chair.” One boat was behind us, another was ahead, and we were somewhere in the middle, all of us trying to get across the same big piece of water without having to fight it any harder than necessary.
Our strategy was to get above the high-pressure system that was producing easterly winds. We headed a little farther north, working our way up to around forty degrees latitude before leveling off and pointing east again. The idea was to find a better wind angle and let the weather help us along instead of making us pay for every mile.
It was a reasonable plan.
The Atlantic, however, had other ideas.
The first night out, we were motoring along in a thirteen-knot breeze when something very strange happened. One minute everything was normal. The next, our staysail backed for a second, and then WHAM!
A waterspout hit us right in the ass.
The boat lurched violently, and the mast slapped down toward the water with a force that made the whole world seem to tilt sideways. It was the sort of impact that would make Zsa Zsa Gabor slap a Beverly Hills cop for looking at her funny. One moment we were sailing along, minding our own business, and the next we were all sprawled against a bulkhead, staring at one another and wondering what the hell had just happened.
There wasn’t much time to think about it. We checked the rigging, looked for damage, and made sure the boat was still in one piece. Fortunately, everything seemed intact. Within a few minutes, our hearts had slowed back down to something resembling a normal rhythm, and we went back to sailing.
That’s the thing about being offshore. You can spend hours doing the most ordinary things imaginable, adjusting sails, checking instruments, making coffee, and discussing what to have for dinner. Then, without warning, the ocean reaches up and reminds you that you’re a very small creature riding around on an even smaller object.
For the next three days, we fought winds of up to thirty-five knots and bashed into seas that made the North Atlantic one of the least popular cruising grounds on the planet. This wasn’t the kind of sailing you put on a travel brochure. It was wet, rough, uncomfortable, and exhausting. Every mile east had to be wrestled out of the wind and waves, and the boat took a beating as we pushed on.
Then, in the middle of all that, we discovered we’d lost a friend.
During a lull in the wind, Jody went forward to check on Dolly, our full-sized wooden dolphin figurehead. We’d had her carved in Hawaii, and she’d been with us through a hell of a lot of miles. She wasn’t just a decorative piece of wood bolted to the bow. She was part of the boat, part of our history, and part of the little floating family that had carried us from the Pacific into the Atlantic.
Jody returned to the cockpit a few minutes later with tears in her eyes.
Dolly was gone.
Sometime during the night, the dolphins had apparently broken her loose, and she’d slipped away into the Atlantic. There was no recovering her, no turning around to search, and no way to know exactly when she’d disappeared. Somewhere out there, our wooden dolphin was swimming with the real ones, carried away by the same ocean we’d spent so many months crossing.
I pictured her telling the local dolphins about her adventures: the long voyage from Hawaii, the trip through the Panama Canal, the Caribbean, and now the rough waters of the North Atlantic. She’d seen more of the world than most people ever would, even if she’d spent most of it attached to the front of a boat.
It was a strange thing to mourn, perhaps, but sailors get attached to their boats and the things that become part of them. Dolly had been with us for the journey, and suddenly she wasn’t.
There was a real sense of loss aboard the LOST SOUL that day.
But the sea doesn’t stop because you’re feeling sorry for yourself, and there was still an ocean to cross.
A couple of times a day, we’d make contact with TICONDEROGA on the sideband radio, comparing weather reports and checking on one another’s progress. They’d started out some sixty miles behind us, but by the halfway point we were still within a few miles of each other. We were two very different boats making the same passage, bound by the same weather and the same stubborn determination to get to the other side.
Eventually, about 450 miles west of Gibraltar, the winds finally eased. After days of getting pounded, we could relax a little, catch up on sleep, and enjoy the simple pleasure of not having to hang on to everything that wasn’t bolted down.
Both boats had come through like troopers, and so had their crews.
We were getting close.
On the thirtieth day of our Atlantic crossing, the sun began to set, and Europe was within reach. We’d left the Azores just one week earlier, and now the coastline of the Old World was finally appearing ahead of us. It was an extraordinary feeling. We’d spent days surrounded by nothing but water and sky, and suddenly the world was getting crowded again.
That night, we made our way into a large channel. By dawn, Portugal was off to one side, Spain came into view, and Morocco lay across the water on the other. We were approaching one of the great gateways of the maritime world, a place that had drawn sailors, traders, conquerors, and adventurers for thousands of years.
The radio was alive with voices. Algiers Radio was competing with Cádiz for airtime, while ships called back and forth in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Greek, Italian, and English. And not the kind of English we spoke in America, either. This was the other kind, with its “rathers,” “cheers,” and “bloody hells.”
We were getting close to the Straits of Gibraltar, and the radio traffic made it clear that we were about to enter one of the busiest waterways on Earth.
TICONDEROGAÂ was about nine miles ahead of us as we entered the Straits. The passage was tight, and the traffic was incredible. Hundreds of ships were crisscrossing the water, carrying cargo between Europe, the Far East, Africa, and the New World. Tankers, freighters, and ships of every description moved through the narrow entrance to the Mediterranean, each following its course through a maritime highway that had been important since long before anyone dreamed of diesel engines or radar.
I admit it. I was impressed.
After twenty years of cruising, I thought I’d become pretty blasé about arriving in new places. I’d crossed oceans, sailed through canals, explored islands, and visited ports that had once existed only as names on charts. But nothing had prepared me for the feeling that came over me as we entered the fabled Mediterranean Sea.
We had done it.
We’d sailed from Southern California, crossed the Pacific side of Central America, passed through the Panama Canal, made our way across the Caribbean, and fought our way through the Atlantic. Now, at last, we were entering what I’d read about in history books ever since I was old enough to understand them.
The Mediterranean. Rome’s Lake. The sea of ancient mariners, Greek philosophers, Roman emperors, Phoenician traders, pirates, explorers, and countless generations of sailors who had ventured into the unknown with little more than a boat and a dream.
And there we were, aboard the LOST SOUL, sailing right into it.
For years, the Mediterranean had been a place on a map, a name in a book, and a destination somewhere beyond the horizon. Now it was beneath our keel, stretching away in every direction.
Twenty years of cruising had brought us here, one mile, one storm, one port, and one questionable decision at a time.
Standing there, with Europe on one side and Africa on the other, I felt a sense of accomplishment unlike anything I’d experienced before. The wind, the waves, the sleepless nights, the broken gear, the lost figurehead, and all those miles of open ocean suddenly came together into one enormous realization.
We weren’t just talking about doing it anymore.
We’d done it.
And the Mediterranean was waiting.
