39 – Entropy
Life adrift—hundreds of miles from countries and their borders—became routine. Solar panels generated electricity. Electricity provided freshwater, refrigeration, entertainment, and even virtual social interaction via The SIMs computer game. We had plenty of food. At the sound of the fishing reel and Elena's clarion cry, “Deeenner!” I hid below with my headphones turned up. I begged her not to fish, but inevitably, it was death that provided our protein.
Winter wore on to the north, and we watched its ugly weather on the satellite charts. Gigantic storms spun out of Kamchatka to race across the Pacific. Thousand-mile cold fronts churned the waters north of us. We, however, were safely drifting in the tropical ocean, all alone, unmolested by weather or man. It was so easy just to shut down and give in to entropy.
Despite the relentless passage of time—and life becoming kind of meaningless—we made a pact that should Elena be denied entry to Canada, we would return to the doldrums to live the rest of our lives adrift. She had become convinced—and frankly, so had I—that the only safe place on Earth was a thousand miles from the worlds of men.
One afternoon, I dived into the warm, glassy-blue mid-Pacific for some desperately needed space and solitude. What I had, instead, was a mystical encounter with an ancient sea turtle. She seemed as curious about me as I was about her. We hung there, gazing at each other, miles above the abyss. I looked into her enormous eyes and imagined all she had seen through the centuries. My own life changed forever that afternoon. It defies analysis, but something happened to me a thousand miles from land, out there, in the infinite deep. Something I will never forget. Something that, even now, brings tears to my eyes and shivers up my spine.
Imperceptibly, the weather in our watery paradise was changing. We don't know when the sea surrendered its glassiness to ripples, or gentle breezes started raising goosebumps on our wet, tanned bodies. The endless goods train of storms raging across the North Pacific was leaving longer breaks between the gales and fronts. It was time to go, or we never would. We packed up our ocean homestead and began the inexorable crawl northward.
Typically, clouds built up throughout the morning and into the afternoon. With them, so did our delusions of wind. Even the tiniest breeze raised our spirits. By sunset, though, the clouds evaporated, along with any hope of wind. Every morning, like some eldritch flag-raising ritual. We ran the spinnaker up the mast. It hung there miserably, like a kid’s beloved kite impaled on a utility pole; until its snagging and tangling on just about everything, drove us crackers.
Seabirds roosted on the deck and solar panels overnight. Part of our morning ritual was rinsing off their mess with buckets of seawater. We were so lonely by then, we welcomed their company and loved having them aboard. We started naming the repeat visitors, including dolphins that checked up on us daily.
Finding a way home was a dream we had all but given up on, when the tiniest breeze imaginable filled the spinnaker. Breathless, we waited for another puff. It felt like hours would go by, then the spinnaker would fill and drag the boat slowly through the water. When it started to feel like just maybe we were going to make it out, the wind would die, and we would come to a slowly rocking stop. Aarrrg!
If you think that's bad, try catching breezes at night. I couldn't see the puffs coming, so I held the spinnaker lines like a horse's reins, ready to catch every last puff of air movement the still atmosphere gave us. When there was any breeze at all, water trickled past the hull for a few glorious minutes before the lines went slack, and I muttered the foulest language this side of Key West. This went on all night for me and all day for Elena. Miraculously, we managed about twenty miles a day like that. But every mile further north brought slightly stronger and longer-lived puffs of wind. Eventually, we were finally starting to put some real miles under our keel.
A couple of hundred miles west of sunny Puerto Vallarta—that's about halfway up Mexico—a cold wind swept down from the north. It was a blustery wake-up call for what lay in store outside the tropics. Adding insult to injury, it was right on our snout, leaving us tacking back and forth, beating our brains out in a rotter of a current flowing south. Something I must have overlooked in the planning stages of our run for home, or just didn't give a rat's arse about at the time.
Sailing into the wind, against the current, in swells and big choppy waves, turned every mile into an uphill battle. Every today was colder than yesterday. Clothing was no longer an option, but a necessity, and that took some serious getting used to. Believe me!
“Can you smell it?” Elena asked. “It's land.” We were about forty miles south of Cabo San Lucas. She has a sense of smell that puts a bloodhound to shame. When the south end of the Baja Peninsula came into view, she was pretty sure she could smell a couple of kids sharing a spliff behind McDonald's.
The current we were sailing into grew stronger by the mile. We figured it was doing a couple of knots against us by the time we had to face up to some cold hard reality. Given we were tacking back and forth with a measured speed through the water of five knots, this pegged our net water speed north at three knots. And that was through water that was flowing south at about two knots. Go ahead and do the maths. We didn't have to. We knew we were standing still. Not to mention, taking a major thrashing in the violent chop, and all of that, just for the ugly pleasure of going nowhere.
I thundered below deck and looked it up in a huge pilotage manual. “It's something called, The California current. It runs the whole coast, though. Not just California!”
“So, what does that mean for us?” Elena asked.
“It means we aren't sailing up the West Coast.” I jabbed a finger northward. “According to the British Admiralty, the only way up the West Coast in an underpowered vessel is by avoiding it. From Cabo San Lucas, one puts the wind on their right-hand side and spends weeks, maybe months, looping out into the middle of the Pacific, and then, back into Juan de Fuca Strait.” Defeated, we hung a left, said goodbye to land, and tracked right back into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Six hundred miles west-south-west of Cabo San Lucas had to have got us clear of the California current. That it did, leaving us right back where we started from, deep in the Tropic of Cancer. Again, we were faced with fighting an uphill battle north or sailing all the way to Australia. Don't think that thought hadn't crossed our minds—and in hindsight, how I wish we had! Each day further north, the harder the sailing became. We had, so far, managed to avoid the cold fronts spiralling off the deep lows to the north. It was by sheer luck, the Pacific had not yet shown us its true colours; luck, which finally ran out, five-hundred nautical miles west of Los Angeles.
Just the tail end of a cold front off one of those monster, North Pacific storms clobbered us. Sailing went from this-sucks! to what's-the-point-of-living? in a matter of hours. The sky was overcast, low, dark. The temperature dropped like crazy. The wind picked up to gale force and clung tenaciously to thirty-five knots for days. We tacked back and forth on eight-hour shifts, fifty-five degrees off our intended course. Infuriated by the lack of progress and how hard we had to fight for it, we put the wind on our side and headed west-south-west. Again.
Being defeated by conditions, and sailing away from one's destination for like, the zillionth time, is incredibly depressing. Throw Hawaii into the mix, and it's a wonder we didn't just give up, then and there. Taking the official warning we were given about steering clear of the USA seriously, we drew a line of skulls and crossbones two hundred and fifty miles out from any US shore. We had come too far and gone through too much to cross that line.
No matter how far west we went, climbing north meant rapidly deteriorating conditions. It came down to going north and taking on winter, or turning tail and living as castaways. Going feral in some jungle was disturbingly alluring. I might have been losing my mind, and that scared the crap out of me. Insidiously, safety goes away—like reality erodes hope into dust—until nothing really matters any more.
Jon spared no satellite data bytes, sermonizing that the wind further north was like nothing we had ever seen. It would come from the north-west, and when it did, we had to have it on our tail to survive. On the side, on the front, it would smash our small pleasure-craft in a heartbeat. With the thousand-mile chasm between Tijuana and Vancouver, we had to climb as far north as possible before turning east. Once we were running from that north-west wind, there would be no stopping and no more going north. We were coming ashore, like it or not, and everything we fought for rested on landing in Canada, and not the USA.
It was cold. Not just nippy, but bone-chilling, freezing cold. There was no escape from the wind-driven, flying spray. It soaked through everything and never dried. Our clothes became stiff, greasy, itchy and ripe. We wore just about anything we had left—including my mammoth hide hoodie—under our offshore, heavy-weather gear. Day in and day out, we watched our track, a deranged zigzag with occasional loops to the south-west. Desperate retreats from the battle, when neither of us could take another icy wave in the face without losing it completely.
Once in a million waves, we'd crest a swell and see a distant ship tracking a course, straight and true. Elena envied them. Telling me, “I think of the crew, dry and warm, going about their duties, sitting at a table with a plate to eat from, talking to friends about families and home. Maybe an officer on the bridge sees white sails, looks in binoculars, wonders who is so insane to be out here.”
Further north, the nights grew longer. The weather, heavier. Every movement was excruciating. We communicated less and less. I felt as though we were inmates serving hard time with nothing left to say. Elena kept a list of milestone cities taped to a bulkhead. As we crossed their latitudes far out to sea, she crossed them off. So far, Cabo San Lucas, San Diego and Los Angeles had fallen to her scratch-off pencil; San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, perched on their own clean lines at inconceivable latitudes.
I cursed Boadicea's lack of heater. But who thinks of something like that in sunny Türkiye? Bloody hell! Who in their right mind would consider sailing that far north in the dead of winter? Waves had grown into a continuous barrage of marbled slate mountains pushed by monster, winter cyclones in the Gulf of Alaska. The cold fronts they spun off were thousand-mile whips, each packing a gale worse than the last.
One day, marking our position, I ran out of chart. “Lenna! We are, well and truly, off-the-map!”