simply kept the line on the compass card in line with and parallel to the grid. A simple glance at the compass, even from a distance, showed if you were on course. Unless, that is, if you were 180 degrees off course! With a freezer full of fish, Martin, the boat’s owner, decided to add a little variety to the day’s mahi-mahi by making fish and chips. Even with a gimbaled stove, a pot of hot cooking oil is a bad idea at sea. All was well until Martin opened the oven door, which jammed the gimbal and spilled boiling hot oil on his arm, wrist, and hand. After his shrieks of agony subsided, we wrapped his arm in ice packs and plied him with various painkillers. Several days later, when we arrived in the Azores — 31 days out from Fort Lauderdale — Martin was treated at the hospital, free from infection. An interesting thing happened upon arrival in Sao Miguel. After a month at sea, I was anxious to get some exercise and hike into town. Sailing uses mostly upper-body muscles, and your legs don’t get much of a workout. A few hundred yards up the pier, my legs were already complaining. It didn’t take long to hitch a ride in a truck heading my way. As I struggled to communicate with my friendly driver, I was glad I had taken time to study a Portuguese-English phrasebook at sea. We stumbled along in broken Portuguese for about 10 minutes — until I discovered he was from Texas and had just arrived in a 150-foot tug from Louisiana! In good-ol’-boy Southern English, he invited our entire crew aboard for a steak dinner and strawberry shortcake. Then, as they burn several hundreds of gallons of diesel an hour, they seemed happy to give us 150 gallons of fuel. Thanks to the efforts of a young engineer on a Dutch ship, we were able to repair our broken driveshaft coupling. This repair held until we were two days out of the Azores. As we approached the Straits of Gibraltar, the levanter was blowing. The unrelenting easterly winds directly out of the Mediterranean increased the prevailing head current, making it impossible for us to make headway. After tacking back and forth between Gib and Morocco with no easterly progress, we decided to put into Cadiz, Spain, to wait out the weather. We gingerly sailed up to a commercial fishing dock, where we soon discovered another byproduct of our Jonah’s presence: Cadiz was in the throes of a cholera epidemic. At least the local fishing-boat mechanic helped us finally fix the shaft coupling. With a large cask of local vino stowed below and a dry-cured pig
rump — with hoof and fur intact — hanging from the mizzenmast, it was smooth sailing at last. With calm seas, we could do a bit of cleaning about the boat. Jonah removed all the well-used food-encrusted burners and grates from the stove and proceeded to give them a real scrubbing in a bucket of soapy water in the cockpit. The water immediately turned black with stove filth, so out with the old and in with the new, right? Does the old expression “throw the baby out with the bathwater” have relevance here? I’m afraid it does. Jonah dumped the dirty water, along with all of the stove parts, over the side. Under the burners of a propane stove, there is a tiny orifice where the gas comes out; the burner then evenly distributes the ignited gas. No longer for us. Now we had been left with only that tiny hole. With a great deal of care, a match could be held near the hole when the valve was cracked open on low. Up would shoot an 18-inch-high blowtorchlike flame, as the cook placed a pot over it to squash it down. That was how we did our cooking for the remainder of our hexed voyage. Thank you, Jonah. Our 66-day voyage from Florida landed us on Mallorca in November. I wended my way through Barcelona, Paris, and London before heading back to New York and then Florida to join my next boat and new adventures. Oh, the hot blonde in Fort Lauderdale? She moved out of state with no forwarding address. Jonah, indeed.
The South African flagged ‘Eshowe’ means “the sound of the wind through the trees.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Growing up in a commercial fishing family and spending summers on a small island, Ron could not help but be a sailor. Years of running and delivering, cruising and racing sailing yachts have provided plenty of experiences to share. Captain Ron holds a 100-ton USCG license and sails his Sabre 402 out of Hillsboro Inlet, Florida. A version of this article appeared in Cruising World July 2010. 88
voyages
