Metanoia Sailing with Tania Aebi

Metanoia Metanoia

By Tania Aebi Sailing!

In May of 1985, an 18-year-old Tania set sail from Manhattan, New York, and became the first American woman and youngest sailor at the time to circumnavigate the globe. Upon her return to Manhattan in November 1987, Tania had visited 23 countries and sailed 27,000 miles. Nowadays, Tania runs charters and delivers boats all over the world when she’s not at home helping with her granddaughter, battling snow in the winter and weeds in the summer, or dreaming about writing her next book.

Last week, I returned from an offshore passage somewhere and found a message in my inbox, a picture simply captioned: “boat is in the water and here is the proof.” I don’t get many emails from Christian, this was very big news.

There she was, floating at a dock, his 43-year-old dream being realized. I looked at my calendar, Independence Day weekend was clear for the 7-hour drive down to the Jersey Shore along with all the other holiday goers. July 2nd was a momentous day for The Boat that still doesn’t have a name.

I’ve already written about Christian in these pages, so here is a quick recap: Christian is one of my father’s two best friends. Street artists, they met in Paris’s Montmartre, immigrated to the USA together on the Queen Mary just before I was born, and he has always been part of our family story. When I was twelve, he bought the bare hull of a Westsail 32 and between selling paintings to fund his habit, spent the next four decades building her — literally.

Reclined on her main cabin settee thinking about how to put this in words, I’d look up at the little wood stove at my feet, attached to its Charlie Noble smokestack. Charlie Noble, a cool term, is just one of many Christian learned about intimately as he gathered and forgot more about boat building than most of us will ever know. Every single piece of deliberately measured, cut, shaped, and sanded teak trim and molding is part of a girl with no name made real, one piece of wood and quart of varnish after another, all leading to the story of July 2nd.

The marina owner is Richie, son of Richard, Christian’s good friend who passed away several years ago. Richie grew up watching Christian strolling back and forth with tools and parts in hand as The Boat took shape. He runs the yard now, a place where things are always being done — new docks, new buildings, a restaurant. He likes progress, and this year, he told Christian The Boat was going in the water and did it. More than half a life spent working toward making this happen, it was time.

When I arrived, two of Richie’s guys — another Richard they call Washington because he’s from the west coast and puzzling over how he got roped into living in hot, humid New Jersey, and Reggie — were in the engine compartment, giving it the once over and forcing a pipe bend in the exhaust system that had been vexing Christian. Washington was fixing up his own boat in the marina with every intention of getting her to the Bahamas by this winter, he told me, while we watched Christian turn the key, listened to the Perkins rumble to life for the first time, sounding perfectly installed and aligned.

Christian didn’t put endless thought and effort into every step of the way without seeking perfection. The engine compartment is so beautifully laid out and designed Washington didn’t mind hanging out and sweating in the hole longer, reviewing and

admiring the fuel lines and electrical wiring arrangements before leaving us to the sails.

The afternoon was pretty windy. Christian and I did what we could to be ready for the next morning before the breeze kicked in. Blasting water with a hose from the gooseneck end, we emptied the boom cavity, which had languished unused long enough for feeder lines to disintegrate into fodder mingling with all kinds of other bird nesting material. Washington loaned us a fishing tape and with some string, we pulled through the first and second reef lines, redoing them

until correctly positioned over the right blocks. Christian had forgotten about installing deck leads for the furling line, and we tied a series of blocks to the foot of each stanchion, ending with a jam cleat.

Christian has lived in this marina for decades, a solid and focused presence among a cast of other Jersey Shore characters who call it home. On the top floor of one building, Richard Senior made an apartment available when Christian’s daughter was young, creating some four-season stability for her. The Boat was on the hard just out the doorway, and the apartment and adjoining deck turned into a boat builder’s workshop and storage unit. Boxes brought back from a zillion projects lurked everywhere, filled with empty paint cans, rags, old brushes, specific tools, and sandpaper. Lots of sandpaper. Used sandpaper everywhere, pushed aside in search of tackle to get The Boat ready for her first sail. Christian’s boat-building hoarding made it all happen. Living in a chandlery and salvage shop chock full of blocks and cleats and shackles and pins and lines and tools, there was anything we needed for every job.

The next morning, July 2nd, Washington came over to help bend on the sails without a hitch. Up went the mainsail with battens and reef lines performing exactly as they should. Up the furling gear went the foresail, furling and unfurling exactly as it should, with sails that worked, exactly what we’d end up needing most of all. I cleared the decks, stowed building materials, containers full of screws, bits and bobs belowdecks to prepare for heeling. And then, the moment arrived, we cast off from the dock.

There was no swelling music soundtrack, just an excited Washington and me with a trepidatious Christian, nervously waiting for something critical, forgotten, or overlooked, to reveal itself. The engine took us out the marina fairway, down a narrow channel alongside a public dock strung with crab pot lines, rounded a marker, and headed onto Barnegat Bay. I revved up the engine, standard breaking-in procedure, and within minutes, it abruptly cut out for no apparent reason. So, we sailed.

The wind blew stink, and a thunderstorm assembled in the distance. We let out some foresail, the boat heeled over and one of the companionway slats — which had been safely placed in the same spot on the level cabin top for 43 years, every time Christian went in and out of The Boat — slipped overboard. Swoosh, and there it was, floating on Barnegat Bay, the distance between us rapidly increasing.

This board, one of the first piece Christian had crafted, was made from a large slab of quarter-sawn teak, something that would be nearly impossible to find nowadays, before being converted into the perfectly fitting slat. I felt like crying. Nobody had to say out loud that we’d immediately practice man overboard maneuvering as if we’d lost a child. We just did it. Struggling to keep the lovingly varnished board in sight, we tacked back and forth under jib alone in the gusty wind, crawling upwind of it, until the tense moment when we passed by, with one chance to grab it, or start all over again. Leaning as far overboard as I could while clinging to a stanchion, a lifetime of uncaught balls, misaimed snowballs, and all-around lousy coordination with items in motion was vindicated by the moment when my right hand felt it, grabbed it, held on to it, and swept it back onboard where it belonged.

Clearly time to call it a day, we continued tacking further upwind until we could sail down the channel, then turn dead into the wind to pass the public dock lined with people and their crab pots. The engine obliged. Washington thought it was a transmission issue, and as long as we didn’t run it too hard, it wouldn’t cut out. Indeed, we made it back to her slip, and only then did Christian relax into a beaming smile. Other than the glitch with the engine, everything had worked, we’d gone sailing.

If it weren’t for Christian, boats probably would have never become part of my story, and I wouldn’t be telling this one today. He will be 84 in several weeks, years of living the journey, not the destination. I have witnessed, I have listened, I have loved, I have learned. Now, The Boat needs a name.