NORTH SOLO
SAILING ALONE ACROSS A CHANGING ARCTIC
adventures in one small boat across a very big wilderness
Act 1 - Arctic Dreams
I’ve always been a lucky guy. Pretty much my whole life I got paid to take pictures. I married late in life to a better woman than I ever deserved, and have settled into a life of dog walks and cocktail hour and domestic contentment.
Some nights, though, the old itch returned
After dinner, cocktail in hand, I climbed the stairs to my office, sat down at the computer, and began my search again. This longing has haunted me for years; quest to change my life into something more grand, more dangerous, more adventurous.
I logged onto the website, typed in my preferences from memory, and began to scroll through the offerings. Most were the same old story, out of my class, or beneath even my tattered dignity. But then, I saw her. A little rough around the edges, and some hard miles on her, but still. Maybe, just maybe, there’d be some connection there. A spark.
The rest is a bit of a blur. A perfunctory response, but signs of interest. Pictures sent. More questions. Short notes flew back and forth, twice, sometimes three times a day.
My heart quickened. Could she be the one?
Suddenly there was talk of buying a ticket, getting on a plane, a personal meet-up. But first, my bank account information. I knew love like this wasn’t free, but the cost seemed just a little too cheap; the bargain reached a little too easily.
I wanted to know she was real, so I grabbed my phone and went for a walk around the block. “Just heading down to the store, honey. I think we’re out of milk,” I hollered upstairs to my wife. Then I stepped outside to dial an unfamiliar, foreign area code. I chatted with her “broker,” amicable and reassuring, but with a sense of newfound urgency. “You’re making the right decision, but you better move quick. I’m not supposed to tell you, but there is another guy ready to fly out next weekend; I know he’s interested. Heck if you don’t take her, I just might.”
And with that, the hook was set. I had just received a not-inconsiderable windfall. Not a fortune, but by some cosmic coincidence almost the exact amount needed to consummate the deal.
I did sleep on it, knowing that, for good or ill, I would be changing my life inalterably. In the morning, I showered and dressed, then walked through the bank lobby’s doors and sent $18,000 winging off into the ether.
And even before I pulled the trigger, I regretted it. But the money was gone, and she was mine.
The “she” in question was a twenty-year-old, 43-foot long steel-hulled sailboat named Ocean View. Located more than three thousand miles away from my home in Seattle, she sat in another country, on a different ocean, along the shores of distant Nova Scotia in Canada’s Maritime provinces. She sounded more like a down at the heels beach rental than a vessel for battering ice and crossing oceans.
For years, I dreamed of buying a proper expedition yacht to explore arctic waters on my own. And now, for my sins, I owned one.
Act 2 - Welcome to Boat World
After flying across the continent, my turn came at Canadian immigration. I strode up, handed over my worn blue passport, and made a conscious effort to turn my eyes into perfectly blameless blanks.
“What brings you to Canada?”
“I bought a boat up here.”
“But your passport says you live in Seattle. Why’d you buy a boat all the way out here?”
“Funny. My wife asks that same question.”
Evidence to the contrary, I’m not a complete idiot. I asked a friend of a friend, a sailor of some note in Nova Scotia, to give the boat a once over. He pointed out some issues, ripples in the hull’s steel, a bit of rust, common problems with a home-built boat. Nothing a weekend with a steel brush and a can of paint couldn’t take care of.
Sailors are, by their nature, optimists. My friend was no exception.
I stepped off the plane in Halifax, stopped off at the hardware store for the prescribed steel brush and quart of paint, before finally setting eyes on the boat of my dreams.
My heart did not sing with joy.
I started out gamely enough. attacking patches of rust, and painting them over. But I already sensed this was only the first of many, many coats of lipstick that I would be applying to this particular pig.
If I started out knowing nothing about sailboats, Ocean View would be my school. I started with low hanging fruit. Grinding off rust and slapping on a new coat. When new rust bled through, I took her down to bare metal and started over.
The electrical system, a random rat’s nest of random wires held together with electrical tape and wishful thinking, I tore out miles of the stuff, replacing it with my own tangle of overpriced, marine-grade wiring.
I got to know the strange and terrible beauty of power tools. Showers of sparks flew from my grinder. Clouds of toxic paint, too. I became a fixture in the small town’s hardware store, and a not-unfamiliar familiar patron at the emergency room, too.
But slowly, an expedition yacht began to take shape. New radar on the mast. Powerful electric windlass to haul up my new anchor and chain. Depth sounder and state of the art GPS chart plotters.
I had everything I needed, except the slightest clue of how to sail the damn thing.
Act 3 - Steep Learning Curve
Though I’d banged around on small power boats for years, I knew nothing of sailboats that I hadn’t picked up by osmosis. I’d read dozens of books describing grand yachting adventures, arctic, antarctic, and every latitude in between.
I’d idly watched charter skippers hauling lines, cranking winches, performing all manner of inscrutable manual labor with a drink in one hand and curse on their lips, all in the service of expedition boats.
On no planet in the known universe did this mean I was prepared or even remotely qualified to single-hand a 20-ton floating death trap across arctic waters.
And yet, one sunny summer day, the lift truck rolled up, and they dragged all 43-feet of steel and wishful thinking down to the water line, stuck around just long enough to be sure the boat floated, then cast me adrift.
It went about as well as you’d expect. I scraped the dock. I scraped bottom. I headed toward shore and scraped some rocks for good measure. Setting out on a sunset cruise, I climbed down steps to the swim platform and fell overboard. With one hand on the ladder, I scrambled soaked and cold and just a little surprised at how close I’d come to death.
It slowed me down…not at all. I stripped off my soaking clothes, toweled down, waved to the folks on shore, and kept right on going.
In my spare time I continued to slap on paint, wire in electronics, bolt on gear, until all the money was gone. I guessed that meant it was time to go. I set sail, steering north and east out of the protected bay that had served as our home waters for the first time. I rounded a low cape and sailed into unsheltered North Atlantic, and deep ocean waves rolled into greet me.
It turns out I posses at least one superpower. I’m not a puker. Throw the gnarliest seas you want at me and I’ll grumble, I’ll whimper, I’ll wave my arms and scream like a little girl, but I won’t get seasick. If you plan on haplessly bobbing around the North Atlantic for months at a time, that turns out to be a very useful skill.
Ocean View rolled and wallowed in brisk onshore winds. I raised the mainsail without too much drama. Then hanked on my small jib. Upside down. I had some learning to do.
Every day brought new lessons. Storm handling. Anchor handling. But foremost in mind was the care and feeding of my enfeebled Perkins diesel engine. Bolted directly to the steel boat frame, every vibration rumbled through the boat, up my spine, and bounced around my skull. It proved deafening, and exhausting.