from wave to wave, flat and fast and leaving little rooster tails in back of her two hulls like a speed boat.
She is a Crowther design, forty-three feet long, twenty-six feet wide, built by a yard in Sydney, Australia, a proper blue-water cat, a sea cat, and nothing about her allowed me to go back to the way I had been, just as a good lead dog once changed my life forever. She has taken me to Hawaii and the miracle of the northeast trade winds, and then down to Samoa and the southeast trade winds, and then Tonga and over to Fiji. She has taken me riding the great South Pacific swells at twelve knots, and taken me sliding through moonlight in my shorts and sleeping on the trampolines between the hulls while the moon shines on and through the waves. On the cat I have watched the dolphins as they leap in silver. And now, she takes me back to Mexico to show me the coast of Baja again and then the Sea of Cortez.
To show me the sea. To show me myself. And never, ever to look back.
Of course, it didn’t happen that smoothly. Nothing ever does.
It has been a long and strange and wonderful trip, a long and strange and wonderful life in this boat—California, where I bought her, to Hawaii, to Samoa, to Tonga, where I tore the rudders off on a reef, to Fiji, back up to Hawaii, back to California, down Baja and up into the Sea of Cortez. But for now . . .
Now it is just before dawn and a soon-to-be hot sun is appearing in back of a range of high peaks that look for all the world like jagged broken teeth. The lagoon is called Balhambra. It’s not a completely secure anchorage because it is slightly open to the northwest, where the wind sometimes comes in. But it would be hard to find a place more idyllic. The water is a gentle blue-green with wraparound white sand beaches and stone cliffs that come straight down into the sea.
Small bait fish have congregated around the cat at anchor, trying to hide in her shadow from predators, but it is no use. All around the boat, above and below the water, there is carnage, pure slaughter. Dolphins are feeding, slapping the water with their tails to stun the fish before gobbling them up, and should the dolphins miss any, the pelicans have arrived and are diving to take any fish still alive.
Some of the bait fish try to escape the water, swim up into the air, fly. These are not the flying fish in the Pacific that actually fly, flapping their fins to stay airborne while they dodge predators; these are normal, small fish, terrified, trying to leave their environment, trying to live—and dying in hundreds, thousands, on this beautiful early-summer morning.
The kettle on the propane stove in the galley begins to squeal now. The galley is between the two hulls, the “amahs,” as the Polynesians call them, and I go below to make the first cup of tea for the day. Another boat came in the previous afternoon and I scored four Double Stuf Oreo cookies from the crew. I’ll have two of them this morning with my tea.
There are morning rituals to perform. Clean the boat, drink tea, sit and think, listen to the shortwave for the weather, where I find Guam is being hit by a typhoon with a staggering, measured 240-knot wind. Though I am many thousands of miles away in a beautiful, calm anchorage, I feel something cold on the back of my neck when I think of what such a wind and the attendant seas would do to my boat, and my life. Shattered bits of both scattered across the water.
I turn on the water maker to change seawater into fresh. The cat—and it is strange that I still think of her thus not as “she,” as with other boats, and only rarely by her name,
Ariel
—has taught me many things about technical sailing, but the most important thing to know about sailing a catamaran is that weight is bad. Consequently, she has only two small water tanks, thirty gallons in each hull, and they seem to empty inordinately fast. The water maker is good but slow—a wheezing gallon an hour—but there is plenty
She is a Crowther design, forty-three feet long, twenty-six feet wide, built by a yard in Sydney, Australia, a proper blue-water cat, a sea cat, and nothing about her allowed me to go back to the way I had been, just as a good lead dog once changed my life forever. She has taken me to Hawaii and the miracle of the northeast trade winds, and then down to Samoa and the southeast trade winds, and then Tonga and over to Fiji. She has taken me riding the great South Pacific swells at twelve knots, and taken me sliding through moonlight in my shorts and sleeping on the trampolines between the hulls while the moon shines on and through the waves. On the cat I have watched the dolphins as they leap in silver. And now, she takes me back to Mexico to show me the coast of Baja again and then the Sea of Cortez.
To show me the sea. To show me myself. And never, ever to look back.
Of course, it didn’t happen that smoothly. Nothing ever does.
It has been a long and strange and wonderful trip, a long and strange and wonderful life in this boat—California, where I bought her, to Hawaii, to Samoa, to Tonga, where I tore the rudders off on a reef, to Fiji, back up to Hawaii, back to California, down Baja and up into the Sea of Cortez. But for now . . .
Now it is just before dawn and a soon-to-be hot sun is appearing in back of a range of high peaks that look for all the world like jagged broken teeth. The lagoon is called Balhambra. It’s not a completely secure anchorage because it is slightly open to the northwest, where the wind sometimes comes in. But it would be hard to find a place more idyllic. The water is a gentle blue-green with wraparound white sand beaches and stone cliffs that come straight down into the sea.
Small bait fish have congregated around the cat at anchor, trying to hide in her shadow from predators, but it is no use. All around the boat, above and below the water, there is carnage, pure slaughter. Dolphins are feeding, slapping the water with their tails to stun the fish before gobbling them up, and should the dolphins miss any, the pelicans have arrived and are diving to take any fish still alive.
Some of the bait fish try to escape the water, swim up into the air, fly. These are not the flying fish in the Pacific that actually fly, flapping their fins to stay airborne while they dodge predators; these are normal, small fish, terrified, trying to leave their environment, trying to live—and dying in hundreds, thousands, on this beautiful early-summer morning.
The kettle on the propane stove in the galley begins to squeal now. The galley is between the two hulls, the “amahs,” as the Polynesians call them, and I go below to make the first cup of tea for the day. Another boat came in the previous afternoon and I scored four Double Stuf Oreo cookies from the crew. I’ll have two of them this morning with my tea.
There are morning rituals to perform. Clean the boat, drink tea, sit and think, listen to the shortwave for the weather, where I find Guam is being hit by a typhoon with a staggering, measured 240-knot wind. Though I am many thousands of miles away in a beautiful, calm anchorage, I feel something cold on the back of my neck when I think of what such a wind and the attendant seas would do to my boat, and my life. Shattered bits of both scattered across the water.
I turn on the water maker to change seawater into fresh. The cat—and it is strange that I still think of her thus not as “she,” as with other boats, and only rarely by her name,
Ariel
—has taught me many things about technical sailing, but the most important thing to know about sailing a catamaran is that weight is bad. Consequently, she has only two small water tanks, thirty gallons in each hull, and they seem to empty inordinately fast. The water maker is good but slow—a wheezing gallon an hour—but there is plenty
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