(c) 2009 - Kim Davis
I'd met Paul in early November. We cat crews had eaten dinner and stopped for a last beer in the bar on the way out. We'd told outrageous puking punter stories. It was our favorite topic of conversation, since we all had to deal with sea-sick passengers day in and day out. The sea was always choppy on the way to St. Barths in the morning. Without fail someone would be sick, and that would set off a chain-reaction and all the others who otherwise might have kept it together succumbed to mal de mer. We crew became very adept at discretely passing out sick bags just before they were actually needed. One crew liked to surreptitiously slip a little vodka in the morning orange juice. They swore their punters didn't get as sick.
After that, I sometimes saw Paul at happy hour. He was a feisty little man with a big nose and horn-rimmed glasses who sang like an angel and played a mean jazz guitar. He really surprised me when he offered me a job cooking aboard Enchantress, an aging 50 foot ketch that carried two crew and six guests. Paul was twenty-something and this was his first Captain's job. But having grown up in New Zealand, he had done a lot of sailing. He had an older sister and brother both well known on the Caribbean-Mediteranean charter circuit, and had put in several seasons as crew aboard charter yachts.
I asked, "How do you know I can cook?"
He replied, "I've overheard you talking about cooking. You sound like you know what you're talking about." He needed a cook immediately as the French girl he'd had working with him for the past couple of charters had suddenly quit. He assured me it hadn't been because of anything he did, and since I'd had my fill of passing around sick bags on the way to St. Barths each day, I took the job.
We set off immediately for Antigua to provision and do some quick repairs. When we got there, I had a crash course on roasting lamb legs from Paul's sister, as this ability was essential to anyone working for Paul. Then I spent over a thousand dollars buying enough food and drink for eight people for a week, and off we set to collect our guests way down south in St. Lucia. The weather wasn't ideal, and more importantly, it was a Friday. There's a well-known sailor's superstition that says, "Never leave on a Friday", but we were both too young to respect the old superstitions. December in the Leeward Islands brings the Christmas Winds, which though mild and pleasant on the beaches, blow all the way from Africa. In the spaces between islands they tend to blow up some enormous seas. I'd never seen waves higher than the top of any sailboat's mast before, and while it was thrilling to surf up and down the huge rolling waves, every-so-often, an unexpected wave would come at odds to the rest and dump freezing bathtubs of water over the open cockpit. There was no auto-pilot, so one of us had to physically steer at all times, which meant that whoever was on the helm was completely drenched at odd intervals through the entire time we sailed.
About three hours out, the lights of English Harbour were almost below the horizon on our stern and the luminescent glow of Guadeloupe was growing ahead of us, the sea was big, but not too choppy. That's when the rain started. We hadn't had time to appreciate that fully when the steering gave out with a loud bang. Paul swore in the colorful way only a Kiwi can, but he kept his cool. He did a great job of managing my panic before it started, and gave me a job to do standing watch and coiling lines as we were tossed around like a cork. Meanwhile he set to work hooking up the emergency steering, a long piece of pipe that hooked directly to the rudder forming a very stiff tiller in the middle of the aft cabin. I kept my mouth shut. I don't think I let on that I didn't know sailing yachts had emergency steering systems. Paul gave quiet orders and I tried my best to follow them. There was no time to mess about or panic.
Paul wasn't tall enough to steer with the emergency tiller and see where we were going, so I had to stand on the tiller and poke my head out the aft hatch. Paul stayed on deck to manage the sails. The wind blew and stung my face all night, and it was so hard to steer with the strong current pushing against the rudder. I've never been so tired as when we finally pulled into Falmouth Harbour and anchored way out near the entrance where we wouldn't have to steer to fine a course. I don't remember the couple of hours of sleep I got that morning before the repairs and airing out of the boat began. Now we'd have to eliminate an overnight stop that had been planned on the way to St. Vincent, and that was IF we successfully got the repairs and now the laundry all done in time at all.
I didn't think about how hard I had to work on that trip, or even on that boat for the next six months. The boat was old, and the anchor windlass didn't work, so I was expected to pull the anchor by hand. We somehow managed to get to St. Vincent on time, and to get all the bunks dry and the boat cleaned up before the guests arrived, but I can't remember how. The American family who joined us that Christmas were delightful. They had never been sailing before, had never seen brownies or bread made "from scratch", and they genuinely wanted to learn to sail. Paul turned out to be a great host and teacher. Even after our first day at sea with the guests on board, we crossed those big seas brought by the Christmas winds and they all felt sick, but they trusted us completely and their determination to have a good time made it all worth while for me too.