Part 1 - The Preparation

I left Winnipeg two-and-a-half years ago for a year off from school. I was taking the eight-year engineering program and knew that I needed a change. I decided I would spend the summer planting trees, and then travel for a year. But instead of finding a job planting, I found a sailboat crossing the Atlantic. Little did I know, it would be a crossing that would change my whole outlook on life, sending me from one boat to the next around the world. This is the story about my first Atlantic crossing, and why I now call myself a professional sailor, instead of an engineering student.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to be an engineer. I’ve always loved fixing things, and coming up with ways to make jobs easier. Usually I’d come up with wacky contraptions that took longer to make than doing the job would have taken in the first place. I would spend a good part of my summer modifying little things on the family sailboat, and inventing boat ramps and the likes at the cabin. I even went so far as to come up with a way to vacuum the living room while sitting on the couch. It was only natural that I went to university in the faculty of engineering.

After three years of study, however, I realized that I had no desire to be an engineer at the age of 24 or so. I then decided to take a year off and go traveling in Europe. It was a little unorthodox to do this in the middle of a degree, but I’m essentially unorthodox in all my ways. I came up with a plan to plant trees for a season to make some big bucks, and then run away for a year.

My brothers had already both been planting, and assured me that I had “what it takes to make some serious cash.” My brother Jeremy was just finishing a year in Costa Rica, and would come back just in time for the season. That left me, the one unschooled in the lore of tree planting, to find us a place to work. I fell to my usual research medium of the Internet, and plugged away, looking for the best company. Somehow, I ended up stumbling upon all sorts of sailing jobs. I was qualified, so at the same time as I looked for planting jobs, I put my name in for some boat jobs. Inside of a week, I had my pick of the field and decided to forget about planting and cross the Atlantic.

The crossing would be made on a boat named Malandro. She was going from Beaufort, South Carolina to Lisbon, Portugal. The owner, a stereotypically overweight, middle-aged American, was looking for a couple of young, competent crew members to make the trip less strenuous. After a few e-mails, and some phone calls, I was satisfied as to his character, and he as to mine. Arrangements were made for me to head down to South Carolina. The plan was that I would come a few weeks early in order to familiarize myself with the boat and captain, as well as a chance for each of us to develop confidence with the other’s abilities. However, the week before I left, Jeremy showed up from his year abroad, and I had to tell him that I had decided to skip out on planting and would be crossing the Atlantic instead. This of course piqued his interest, and he said he would like to go as well. An e-mail and a phone call later and he was the second crewmate.

Although the best way to get to Beaufort was by plane, we were both strapped for cash, he having just finished traveling, and myself having forsaken work before travel. We had no option but a 96-hour, but much cheaper, bus ride down south.

The trip down was rather uneventful; after the usual two-hour hassle at the border, and a brief visit to an art exhibition in North Carolina where we found a wine and cheese reception that must have been held on our behalf. Suffice it to say, after not having seen each other for a year, we managed to spend a lot of the ride talking. We arrived at the depot looking for a big, tall American with a beard, named John Torgerson. Instead we were met by his wife Mary-Ellen, a bastion of hospitality. She would not be joining us on the trip, having given up passage making after the last voyage had her sailing with ice-covered decks through a snowstorm. I could have taken this as some sort of warning, that the man’s own wife wouldn’t sail with him, but I still think I’m invincible.

The next day, we went down to see the boat. She was in decent shape, but to our dismay, we found out she hadn’t been sailed in several years. There is nothing worse for a boat than to leave her sitting. It would take Jeremy and me almost a month of steady work to bring Malandro up to par. In the next month, we went through the boat from top to bottom, doing minor things such as greasing bearings to major things such as installing an autopilot and replacing the water tanks. Since it was our first crossing, we were entirely ignorant of the fact that this wasn’t the way things should be.

A week before leaving Beaufort, the other two crew members showed up: Roger and Terry. They were Canadians who used to be British, and were highly experienced passage-makers. This made my brother and me much more comfortable, because after seeing the state of the boat, we were a little nervous about the competence of “Herr Capitan.” Terry and Roger lived together on their own boat in the Mediterranean sea, and made a part of their living delivering boats. They would be a continual source of knowledge and stories throughout the trip, and become my personal mentors.

After the usual last minute rush of activities, we left Beaufort for Cape Canaveral, which would serve as our jumping off point to Bermuda, the Azores, and finally Lisbon, Portugal. It was an easy trip down the intercoastal stretch of the U.S., finding us at the Cape just in time for a shuttle launch. The launch was an amazing thing; we could actually feel the heat of the jets all the way from our boat as the vessel went skyward. The original plan was to install a new motor in a day or two, and then head out. Even with my lack of experience, I knew the captain was overly optimistic about our timeline. Jeremy and I managed to go to the beach, the space centre, and even some local parties for the week and a bit that it took to put the new motor in and get it up to snuff.

Part 2 - Across the Atlantic in a sailboat

Life during the Atlantic crossing, and most other big trips I’ve done, consists of daily living: eating, cleaning, sleeping, reading, a bit of sailing, and minor maintenance. It was a real thrill to spend that long a time constantly in motion, even though the average cruiser only does 125 nautical miles a day. On the ocean in fair weather, a boat practically sails herself. The biggest danger to mariners is the risk of collision with massive cargo ships. They travel about seven or eight times faster then a sailboat, and take up at least a half dozen football fields in space. It takes them a couple of miles to turn, and it is practically impossible for them to stop in under five miles. They are so huge that they’re almost invincible, which means that their crew aren’t too worried about us little sailboats. They’re the reason that there must always be someone on watch, as it takes less than 10 minutes for them to go from the horizon to collision. One must constantly work at keeping vigilant, as it can be weeks between so much as sighting their lights at a distance.

To begin our Atlantic crossing, we left Cape Canaveral, Florida, setting sail for Bermuda in perfect weather. It was a cakewalk through the triangle, and we arrived after a beautiful week of sailing. My brother Jeremy and I settled in to the routine of passage making practically without a hitch. Since there were five of us on the crew, we split the watch up so that we would do three hours on and 12 hours off—a breeze.

We arrived in Bermuda to water that was so clear we could see the bottom at 200 feet! I showed my ignorance by shouting “hard to port, I see bottom!” On Lake of the Woods, in Ontario, where I grew up sailing, when you see bottom, it’s almost too late to turn before you run the boat aground. The captain and the other two crew had a good laugh on my behalf.

I found myself really split on whether I liked Bermuda. It has beautiful water, and the local sailors who were incredibly hospitable. As well, we showed up in time for the Tall ships race, and got into some pretty wild parties. On the other hand, the prices there were out of this world, and there was absolutely no nature to be found, (there were over a half dozen golf courses taking up all of the free space). While there, I turned down at least a half-dozen offers to work on other boats.

The next day we met up with “Ernesto” (a pseudonym so his girlfriend wouldn’t hear about his escapades when she visited), an Argentinean who was sailing single-handedly around the world. We got along great with him, and he put our pictures in one of the papers he was writing for.

After Bermuda we had a 20-day sail over to the Azores, Portugal, again in near perfect weather. The only part that I didn’t like was that the captain would run the motor whenever we were doing under five knots (10 km/h). Jeremy started to get a little annoyed at the captain by that point, because he was always telling him how to do things, especially when Jer was cooking. Ever resourceful, Jer soon solved this by putting on his walkman whenever cooking, or doing other menial tasks that needed not the captain’s interjections. We also ended up spending more time at “the beach.”

The beach is my name for the foredeck of the boat, because it’s an area where you invariably get a little wet, and catch the most sun. It’s a great refuge, because for some strange reason, most owners never go near it, perhaps because that’s where all the work’s involved during sail changes and the likes. For that very reason, by the end of the trip, Jer and I spent almost all of our time chatting with each other, reading, eating, napping, and working out at the beach. I don’t remember a single occasion at sea or in harbor, when the captain, John actually made it to the foredeck.

In the middle of the crossing, we encountered Ernesto on his 30 feet yacht, an incredible thing if you consider the vastness of the ocean, the fact he left a week before us, and that he had chosen a different strategy than ours to begin with. Jer and I went wild as we approached him, and he snapped off shots of us halfway up the mast, hanging from the spreaders. After half an hour or so of shouting to each other we parted ways again, back to only seeing the lights of distant ships once every few days. At the time, I didn’t appreciate the rarity of the occasion that was, and have promised myself that if a like occasion occurs again I will make much more of it.

We arrived in the Azores, and weighed anchor in the port of Horta, a picturesque island belonging to Portugal. The entire Azores chain is formed of long dormant volcanoes, and has been a stop off point for centuries. Sailors know it for two famous things: the PeterSport Café, and the painted seawalls.

The PeterSport Café has handled sailors mail and care packages for as long as there has been mail sent across. It’s also a great drinking establishment. Most nights, it’s so packed that the patrons spill out along the road in both directions, drinking in the open air, making their own music, sitting along the roadside benches.

Traditionally, when you come to port in Horta, someone from your boat must paint a scene or at least your boat’s name along the seawall, either as plain or as creative as you choose. Before painting ours, we went on a stroll around the port, enjoying the creativity of others. Then my brother and I got the paint together and painted away for half a day while sipping beers in the sun. By the end, our bodies had as much paint as the mural, but we were thoroughly satisfied with the job. On returning to the boat, we were given some paint thinner, and told to return clean. Our clothes didn’t make it, but our skin did eventually come clean (and very pink). I can’t wait until the next time I am there, so I can find it and see how our artwork has fared.

We spent the whole time there sleeping in my tent, rejecting the relative luxury of the boat in exchange for some peace of mind: a new environment as well as space away from our fellow crew and captain. It was not that we disliked them, on the contrary I still hold them all dearly to my heart, it’s simply that after 20 days straight of sharing the same 40 by 10 feet of space, a change is very much in order.

We had almost nothing but good relations with the locals, and enjoyed their restaurants, and nightlife. One night however, Jer and I returned to the tent in a drunken state to find our sleeping bags stolen, as well as our breakfast of sardines and crackers eaten. We went looking for the culprits, because we were sure it was just youthful disruptiveness (we saw signs of drunken vandalism all around our tent), in the hopes that they simply ditched our sleeping bags in a bush. While searching, we ran into the cops, who were incredibly kind and helped us with our search. They assured us it was not a usual occurrence. Unfortunately, it was to no avail. We spent a chilly night huddling beneath our jackets. The next day our captain demonstrated for the umpteenth time his generosity and bought us new (Portuguese) sleeping bags. A month ago I received a letter saying that they had apprehended the thieves, and were taking them to court.

We left Horta after an amazing week of R&R and headed for Lisbon. It was another beautiful passage that lasted 10 days. Just before leaving, we ran into a Tall Ship that offered Jer and I a job upon arrival in Europe. By that time, we had just about reached our wits end with the captain’s little annoyances, and were ready to leave. While sailing to Lisbon we decided to leave Malandro in Portugal, and head overland to be in time for the job. Armed with that knowledge, we got along great all the way to mainland.

We arrived in Lisbon, to find out that it was a Mecca for backpackers who were looking to party, essentially, we were in heaven. The events that would follow form a whole different story altogether.