Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
His sailboat sank in the middle of the Atlantic, but how he found his way back to sea was even more unexpected.
Jun 6, 2001 | When I was sailing alone across the Atlantic a few years ago, from England to Maine, my 40-year-old, 27-foot-long wooden boat sank. I'd lived aboard it for seven years and it was carrying not only me but everything I owned in the world.
I was picked up by a giant container ship and dropped off in Galveston, Texas. I knew nobody in Galveston, nor in Maine, where I'd planned to live aboard my boat, so I got on a Trailways bus to go stay with my cousin Matt, who lived in Manhattan. A few days later I found myself enjoying a rather nice apartment on West 87th Street, a few yards from Central Park. Few shipwreck survivors can have done as well, and so quickly.
Matt was a prince. His couch became "mine," and he offered to lend me some money, for I had come ashore with $67 and a credit card with a $200 limit, now used up on my bus fare. But I didn't want to borrow, so I went out to look for work.
I bought the Times and read it with a desperate sense of déjà vu. I'd lived in New York before, driving a cab while trying to write, though it was more years away from earning my living as a writer than I ever imagined. Ten years later, that summer of my shipwreck, I had come ashore with a damp, half-written novel. I had hopes for it but knew it might be some time before that brought me any money. I knew only that I had to start earning right away.
Life afloat, even penniless, is quite different from life ashore. You carry your home and your few precious possessions with you like a turtle's shell, and you can drop your anchor off the nicest real estate in the world: Bar Harbor, Marblehead, Newport, Palm Beach, Mustique. And if your boat is old and beautiful -- and especially if it doesn't have an engine -- then when you row ashore at these places, you're greeted as a salty character. People ashore fantasize about your life; they want to talk to you, and entertain you. At times, life is almost glamorous when you live aboard an old wooden boat.
But come penniless ashore off a bus, and you are a long way from glamour. Particularly in New York.
I couldn't even get through the ads in the Times. I was sick with the loss of my boat and the full knowledge of what this had done to my life. I could not have been more reduced without beginning to lose body parts.
In this awful state, I left the newspaper in Matt's apartment and wandered west. I headed instinctively for the water and soon reached the Hudson River. I found the 79th Street Yacht Basin and I stood on the wrong side of the chain-link fence looking at the boats tied to the dock and keened for my sunken home and my lost identity.
It was early August and hotter than the tropics. I walked south and stayed as close to the river as possible. I didn't want to look inland. I walked all the way down to the Battery and headed up the East River.
In the middle of the afternoon I reached Pier 11 off South Street Seaport. The Seaport was not as developed then as it is now, and Pier 11 was just a pier, splintered and run-down. The Circle Line ferries docked on one side, and on the other side that afternoon lay a tired, hog-backed yacht named Ventura, rocking in the slop and the river tide. It was 48 feet long and its wooden deck looked as sooty as a subway platform. Beside the boat was a sign advertising fabulous lunchtime and evening cruises aboard the Ventura. One of the owners, a guy named Stuart, was aboard. He was fixing something. I asked him if he ever needed another captain.
"You got a license?" Stuart asked me.
He meant the U.S. Coast Guard operator's license, which is what the captain of any boat in American waters must have to carry paying passengers. I told him I had a 100-ton ocean operator's license, which is a pretty good one to have if you're looking for work in the water trade.
"I might need someone," said Stuart, as if thinking about it for the first time. He asked me to come out on that evening's cruise so he could see if I knew what I was doing. "Come back at 7. We go out then."
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