We were finishing a 500-mile crossing that had turned out to be one of those passages sailors dream about when they’re sitting in a bar telling lies about how good the sea can be. For four days and three nights, we had fifteen knots of wind almost dead behind us, about 120 degrees off the bow. The boat settled into that wonderful rhythm where the sails pull, the hull slides, and everybody aboard starts believing that maybe, just maybe, this sailing thing isn’t such a stupid idea after all.
We hardly touched the sails. A few times, when we got impatient and wanted to see how much speed we could squeeze out of the old girl, we popped the spinnaker. Otherwise, we just sat back and let the Pacific do the work.
We were about thirty miles from Manihi, and there wasn’t much to see. Manihi’s highest point is about sixty feet above sea level, and that sixty feet is the top of a palm tree. We had an agreement that the first person to spot the island got a cold beer. Naturally, I went topside. Andy got the beer. He cheated by climbing the mast.
About fifteen miles out, Andy yelled that he could see it. A little while later, the rest of us could see it too. Manihi appeared exactly as we had been told it would: a strip of dazzling white sand wrapped around a lagoon so blue it looked like somebody had spilled a bucket of Caribbean water into the Pacific.
Getting into the lagoon was another matter. We later discovered that we had entered at high tide, purely by accident. At the end of the pass, the depth sounder was showing seven feet six inches. Our hull draws eight feet. There are moments in a sailor’s life when religion suddenly becomes much more interesting. That was one of them.
We somehow made it through and found a little motu, one of those postcard-perfect scraps of sand covered with palm trees that make civilization seem like a terrible rumor. We dropped the hook, and everybody was in a hurry to get ashore. Andy and John swam off toward a little bay while Jody, Neil and I headed straight for the beach.
We walked along the sand picking up shells and staring at the scenery. There are places where you look around and realize that somebody, somewhere, must have had a pretty good reason for putting humans on the planet.
Then we heard Andy and John yelling.
I couldn’t tell whether they were being attacked by sharks, natives, or some combination of the two, so we ran toward them. John came charging down the beach waving something over his head. It was a propeller for a 25-horsepower Johnson outboard. We had been looking for one for more than a month. John had kicked it while coming ashore.
Only in the South Pacific can you go for a swim and come home with an outboard part.
The prop was a little tweaked, but the rubber bushing was still good. We rushed back to the boat, bolted it onto the dinghy and, miracle of miracles, the thing worked. We had a functioning dinghy again.
Life was perfect.
Which should have been our first warning.
Later that day, we hoisted anchor and headed toward a little hotel that looked as though somebody had designed it specifically for people who had never actually been on a boat. Small white cabins on stilts, blue roofs, crystal-clear water underneath and palm trees waving in the breeze. It was straight out of a travel brochure.
We decided we could tolerate civilization for a couple of days. We ate food prepared by somebody else, used somebody else’s dock, drank somebody else’s beer and slept without listening for the anchor dragging across coral. It was wonderful.
Then we got the bill.
About five hundred dollars, and that was just food and the bar tab. We taped the bill to the refrigerator, where it became our onboard financial advisor. Every time somebody suggested going ashore for dinner, we’d point at the refrigerator.
After a few days, even the pain had faded enough that we moved on.
Five miles south was Ahe, a smaller atoll about four miles across. Once again, there was white sand, palm trees and a lagoon containing enough shades of blue to make a paint manufacturer jealous.
Getting inside was another story. The entrance was only about six feet deep over the bar, except for a tiny section, perhaps ten feet wide, where there was eight feet of water. We drew eight feet.
Naturally, we went in.
The water was so clear we could see the bottom as though we were flying over it. Coral heads appeared below us, each one looking large enough to reach up and introduce itself to our keel. We eventually found a tight little anchorage, dropped the hook and went ashore, where we cracked a coconut and toasted the most beautiful island we’d seen yet.
Unfortunately, we were anchored in the middle of a coral garden.
I figured I would sleep like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
Then we discovered the sharks.
These weren’t the little reef sharks we’d been swimming around with for weeks. These were sharks. Big gray sharks. The kind that make you suddenly remember every shark movie you’ve ever seen.
John, Jody and I took the dinghy out to the pass for a drift dive. The idea behind a drift dive is simple: you take the dinghy to the outer end of a pass, jump into the water and allow the current to carry you through the reef and into the lagoon. It’s one of the great pleasures of cruising.
The reef was spectacular. Then we saw a shark.
No big deal. We had already been swimming with white-tips, black-tips and nurse sharks. They were practically part of the local population. Then we saw another, and then another. The first couple were down in the depths, but soon seven of them were visible.
I started thinking about the structural integrity of the dinghy.
I was climbing into it when John followed. Jody was about thirty feet away, and she wasn’t moving. She had frozen. The sharks were coming up from below her.
We motored over, grabbed her and hauled her aboard just before the sharks reached her. At this point, any sensible person would have gone back to the boat, opened a beer and written off the dive.
We decided to try the other side of the pass.
Obviously, the sharks couldn’t possibly be in two places. That would be unreasonable.
On the second pass, we stayed close to the dinghy. As we approached the end of the pass, we saw eight or nine big sharks below us. Jody and I were back in the boat before you could say “fresh bait.”
John, meanwhile, was trying to maintain his British dignity.
Then he turned around.
There were another ten sharks coming up behind him.
British dignity has its limits.
He got into the dinghy with a speed that would have impressed an Olympic swimmer. We counted twenty sharks before we finally decided that maybe the fish were trying to tell us something.
We left.
The next day, we decided to leave Ahe. That turned out to be a mistake.
It began innocently enough. The wind started building in the afternoon, then built some more. Our cute little anchorage, which had seemed so peaceful the day before, suddenly became a place where every coral head looked hungry. The boat began yawing around the anchor, the wind increased, and we started hauling anchor.
We barely got out. Had we waited another few minutes, the coral would have been eating fiberglass for dinner.
Once clear of the anchorage, we headed across the lagoon toward the pass. John and Neil went forward, and their job was to watch for coral heads and shallow water. They watched, they looked, they discussed, and they watched some more.
And then we went aground.
Apparently, they were still discussing whether it was deep enough.
It wasn’t.
We hit hard. Fortunately, the current pushed us over the bar and dragged us into deeper water. In the process, we donated about an inch of fiberglass from the bottom of the keel to the reef.
There is nothing quite like the sound of coral grinding against your hull. It’s a noise that reaches directly into the wallet.
The boat heeled about fifteen degrees while the reef scraped along underneath us, and I was mentally calculating the cost of a new keel before we even cleared the pass. Fortunately, the rudder never touched. Once we were outside, everything seemed to work.
So naturally, we continued sailing.
That’s the wonderful thing about cruising. Something breaks, you fix it, and then you immediately sail somewhere else where something else can break.
We headed for Rangiroa.
By 3:30 in the morning, we were off the entrance, bouncing around in a storm. I enjoy entering unfamiliar anchorages at night about as much as Zsa Zsa Gabor enjoyed Beverly Hills traffic, so we tacked back and forth for two hours, waiting for daylight.
When the sun finally came up, Rangiroa looked as though the Pacific had decided to show off. There were perhaps two hundred shades of blue in the water. The lagoon was enormous and well protected, and the atoll stretched roughly forty miles long by twenty-six miles wide. Rangiroa is the third-largest atoll in the world, and it’s also the kind of place that makes you forget about keel damage, hotel bills and sharks.
For a little while, anyway.
We met two crew members there, one from Denmark and one from San Francisco, who needed a ride to Papeete. We had room, they had a destination, and we had fuel, so we did what cruisers do.
“Sure. Hop aboard.”
After a couple of days, the wind finally settled down enough for us to leave, and we sailed on. Eventually, we reached Moorea and prepared for an overnight passage to Huahine.
The eighty-five-mile trip started beautifully. We had eight to ten knots of wind off the beam, six knots of boat speed, and a cooperative sea. The sails were happy. The crew was happy.
I should have known better.
Mother Nature has a wicked sense of humor.
A squall rolled in, then another, and the wind climbed to forty knots. Rain came down so hard that visibility disappeared. It was the kind of rain where the ocean goes from blue to gray and the boat starts feeling less like a yacht and more like a cork someone forgot to put back in the bottle.
It lasted most of the night.
By dawn, we were about five miles from Huahine. We were exhausted, wet, cold and very happy to see land. We got inside and anchored, and for a while, everything was good.
Then Andy and John decided they were going to drink the island of Huahine dry.
They gave it a hell of a try.
At some point during the evening, they managed to run the inflatable dinghy onto a reef. Not gently. They drove it onto the reef hard enough to punch an eighteen-inch hole in the bottom. When they finally reached the boat, they were knee-deep in water and couldn’t understand why.
I could.
Then Andy dropped the handheld radio.
It disappeared into the Pacific.
So, in the space of a few minutes, we had lost a $5,000 dinghy and a $350 radio. I began to wonder whether Andy was actually an employee of some marine insurance company.
We went to sleep.
The next morning, I woke up and realized Andy was gone. Not asleep, not ashore. Gone.
He had taken the return ticket I’d purchased as a bond for each crew member, packed his bag and left without saying goodbye. No farewell, no explanation, nothing. I suppose after destroying the dinghy and dropping the radio, he figured he’d contributed enough to the voyage.
And that was how our South Pacific paradise kept turning into hell.
The strange thing was, we kept going.
That’s cruising. You can lose a propeller, find another one on a beach, nearly grind your keel off on a reef, dodge twenty sharks, get soaked in forty-knot winds, lose a dinghy, lose a radio and lose a crew member. And the next morning, you’ll still be standing in the cockpit with a cup of coffee, staring at some impossibly beautiful island and thinking, “Where do we go from here?”
Because that’s the disease.
The ocean beats the hell out of you, empties your wallet, tests your judgment and occasionally tries to kill you. Then it gives you a sunset so spectacular that you forget every damn thing that happened five minutes earlier.
Heaven turns to hell. Hell turns back into heaven. And somewhere between the two, you realize you wouldn’t trade the whole crazy mess for anything.
