WARNING TO SENSITIVE READERS:
Maybe skip this one if you don’t want to think about the fragility of human life and the realities of the sea.
Toward the beginning of the third week, I think we all felt joyfully settled into our existence as the Swiss Family Robinson, marooned on the most isolated tropical island to exist. We had accomplished all the exploratory projects we had set out to accomplish by foot and by sea.
We’d met all the crabs…
We visited the old farro cement boat wreck and said hello to underwater world of turtles, sharks, and these crazy tiny fish that had no color at all, and were completely clear such that you could see through their skin to their spine, organs and brain! (Too tiny for me to take a photo, so just imagine it.)
(Thanks to Jen Bernard aboard Steel Sapphire for the underwater photo series featuring me as the wreck diver sneaking through that scary hole in the hull!)
We established an uneasy truce with the sea booby population when we let them borrow our fishing pole.
…and we had settled on the location of the “hammock room” when we were hit with a rash of bad news.
“I think our weather window has arrived." Mark declares, sending the group a morning text with a colorful Predictwind image of perfect 20 knots on the beam.
“Awwwooohhhhh, no!" The crews of Sonrisa and Steel Sapphire groan, none of us being even relatively close to interested in prying our roots out of the sand, yet.
“Yep, they are predicted to start on Monday and get lighter every day thereafter until they are completely dead again on the Tuesday after that. Perfect for a 10 day crossing!" Mark says, cheerfully. We all suspect he is ready to get back to the real internet, where he can return to trolling people talking crazy on sailing forums to his heart's content.
Secretly, the Oddgodfreys and Steel Sapphire Crew meet on the beach, swing in the hammocks, and circle around any sort of justification we can find to stay longer and eek out every last minute our permit might allow. “The end of that forecast is more than 14 days out! It's very possible the wind will hold and it won’t die at the end there.” Pete says.
“Yeah, I mean aren't these the South East tradewinds? They should be consistent and the same all the time." Andrew says.
“Yeah..." I say.
“Exactly!" Jen reiterates.
“We definitely shouldn't leave until at least Thursday, but Id'rather hold out for the next Monday."
“It's decided. I’m staying right here.” We all say.
I don't know who in our group of four decided it was decided, but Mark brought all our heads out of the clouds as soon as we mentioned this plan. “The CIA Agent and his Anonymous Wife have been fighting a 2-3 knot current on the nose this whole time, with less than ten knots of true wind. Do you want that level of misery?”
Mark was referring to one set of our friends whose names have been withheld because we are convinced the Captain was a C.I.A. agent and his wife should remain anonymous, too, so they can retire in peace. Why are we convinced he’s CIA? That is Classified.* Thank you. In any case, they have been having a really miserable go at this passage. They did not have a permit to visit Chagos, and therefore had no choice but to cut straight across from Male, Maldives. Several other sailors who had to do the same thing had such nasty winds that they had to hove-to and wait two days before sailing conditions eased. This set of friends were suffering the opposite.
“Yeah, and the Anonymous Wife said she was pinching the Former CIA Agent last night to see if he was still ‘with her’.” Mark reported.
“Oh. My. Lord.” I think, as Mark shares this latest update. One of my greater (somewhat irrational**) fears about passage making is what would happen if I woke one morning to find Andrew had died of a heart attack on his night watch, significantly more than three days out from port. You can’t just keep someone’s former “carrying case” aboard if he has departed. These are the tropics, people. A teaspoon of bile rises in my throat to think about it.
We met this pair of fellow sailors in Sri Lanka, then shared the anchorage with in Uligan during our Covid lock down. The CIA Agent fell ill while we were in Uligan (not Covid related, poisoning by Russians maybe?), and despite seeking medical treatment in the Maldives we all watched as his body weight melted away to almost nothing. The hospital in Maldives could not help him, so his wife loaded him into his sea berth and proceeded to set sail from Male direct to the Seychelles in an attempt to find him better medical care. For almost two straight weeks now, we’d been biting our nails with helplessness and hope as she slowly made her way, for all intents and purposes as a solo-sailor carrying precious cargo.
“I am a good sailor, but I can't imagine how difficult it would be to try to sail Sonrisa by myself for a two week passage.” I say to our group over a somber dinner. We all sit and contemplate a solo-sailor’s seemingly impossible sleep schedule (usually 15 minute increments, set to wake up with alarms for AIS, Radar, and/or an egg timer).
We take the CIA’s miserable passage back to our respective boats to contemplate. We all know that a good weather window makes a more pleasant passage. Does it make sense to let this one pass in the hopes that another one comes along in time before our Chagos permits expire?
A couple days later we hear even more awful news. While our Anonymous Crew continued to trudge along, we learned another set of sailors we shared the anchorage with in Uligan had been lost at sea while attempting to sail a different route.
"What happened???" We all asked in absolute horror.
“Who knows,” Mark reports. “All it says is that their boat started taking on water, they retreated to the life raft, and a tanker was sent to try to pick them up, but I guess that was unsuccessful.”
I reach for my chilled Bottom-Of-The-Barrell Rum Swill and take a generous swig. We all know when we sail out of helicopter range that there are no Coast Guard boats to come fetch us. If something goes awry, a sailors’ last line of defense is a mayday call and EPIRB locator beacon to their home Coast Guard who coordinates with shipping traffic in the area to come and pluck you from the sea. In a general way, I’ve always known it would never be easy to accomplish such a rescue mission. These tankers do not have any rescue paraphernalia; they can’t hoist you or send rescue swimmers like the Coast Guard does. Instead, you are responsible to get yourself and your crew off your boat or out of your life raft and onto the tanker. This usually means you must climb the slippery, wet rungs of a metal ladder that ascends a ship as tall as a ten-story building while it rocks and rolls in ocean swell. I swallow hard as I think of how impossible this would be if we were healthy, let alone if anyone was injured or sick on board.
"The search hasn't been called off, yet." Mark says, his voice trailing away.
While we, of course, plead with our respective choice of gods of sea, wind, or soil to bring a happy ending, we know too well what it means to have to small humans awash in the enormity of the Indian Ocean. It takes several more days before the search is called off and the family holds a memorial service in their honor.
Another of our sailing friends hauled comfortably high and dry in Malaysia emails me and confirms what I know is inevitable - the Facebook O’Sphere has been so awful to watch about this event that it's almost unbearable. It happens every time. I think it's sailing community’s defense mechanism. People speculate to find a cause for such a catastrophe that somehow exempts them from a similar fate at sea until other sailors come to the lost sailors’ defense and it turns into the most disgusting of all Facebook flame wars. And this, all while people are mourning their lost mother, father, sister, brother, grandmother, grandfather.
I have never been so glad to be in the Tropical Isolation Chamber.
The decision hasn't been officially made, but I can see the writing on the wall: we will be leaving soon. I transition from lounging in hammocks all day to slaving in the galley - two weeks worth of meals and snacks in the next three days, out of the dredges of our aging food stores! I gather the ingredients to make several servings each of lasagna with homemade meat sauce, bechemel lasagna with spinach and chicken, saag paneer over rice (an Indian dish of spinach and fresh cheese I made from our can of milk powder), pork stew, beef and bean chili with cheddar cheese and plain yogurt standing in as sour cream, the Maldivian Mas Humi I’ve learned to love so well, egg quiche muffins, cream cheese and pesto dip, homemade crackers, a loaf of rye bread, a loaf of sourdough bread. I also had two packs of ginger snap cookies I bought in the Maldives and strategically hid from Andrew so they would exist for this paricular passage. This should hold us for about twelve days.
Directly in my line of sight, though, remained pinned the quote Andrew had posted on Sonrisa’s galley table before we left the Maldives:
“We are not descended from fearful men.” Edward R. Murrow
“By way of manifesting good outcomes, it’s a terrible quote." I tell Andrew.
Andrew gets annoyed by this, and scowls. "Why? What's wrong with it?”
“Every time I look at it, all I can see is the word ‘fearful.’ It's like the ‘don’t think of Pink Elephants’ trick. Why can’t we say ‘we are descended from courageous men and their logical wives who didn't let them be eaten by a sabertooth tiger?"
How often are sailors lost at sea? I wish I could find reliable statistics on how many cruising sailors are lost on blue water passages, but alas, there just isn’t a lot of need for a statistician to measure that number. We are a very small community, and those of us making a blue water passage in any given year is even smaller. I can say I have met thousands of sailors who have collectively covered millions of sea miles, and in the time we have been watching these figures I can count on one hand the number of sailors who have perished at sea for any reason. (And, this includes one who may or may not have faked his own death.) Death at sea for a sailor cruising the world for their own enjoyment is rare. That does not make it any easier when it happens to you or to your family; it doesn’t make it less terrifying when we think of how that end must be. But, the truth is, you are far more likely to die in a car accident than in a sailboat at sea. That is an uncomfortable truth, indeed, when I think of all the people I love running around at 75 miles per hour in those metal death traps.
It doesn’t matter, though, even if our fellow sailors’ death at sea inspired any of us to move to North Dakota, that option isn’t remotely possible from where we were anchored today. We have to finish this passage, and we have to get our heads right.
It’s times like these I go back to a compilation of good advice received over the years: Stay active with the boat no matter what happens, trust yourself, trust your boat, and know that if it is your time to die it doesn’t matter whether you go inside a car or at sea. In the end, life is a fatal condition for all of us.
AND THERE IS YOUR CHEERY THOUGHT FOR THE DAY!
The day of departure, we receive word that the Possible CIA Agent and his Anonymous Wife arrived safely into Victoria, Seychelles. They whisked the CIA Agent to the hospital, and they started fattening him up on a cocktail of IV fluids and hospital food. This buoys us all, considerably.
None of us want to leave this paradise, but we all know we must let the weather and the sea dictate our schedule. Always. Sometimes that means we leave early; sometimes it means we leave late. But this time, in the wake of the sad struggles our fellow sailors have faced, we know we have to accept this weather window and go now. We enjoy one last coconut on at the Best Sand Bar of 2020, Pete graphs out our route options, literally in sand, and we say goodbye to one of the most beautiful places we’ve visited on this planet, yet.
