Drop Anchor, Maintain Position, Chew a Drink

The great thing about sailing is that after awhile, the earth moves.

Or seems to, anyway, every time you come ashore and try to stand still on it. Sailors have a phrase for this. It’s called getting your “sea legs.” Sailors have a phrase for every damn thing.

I was pretty sure, until five of us chartered a bareboat for a nine-day sail around the Virgin Islands in the spring of 1989, that “sea legs” was what Safeway calls those red-tinged, extruded-whitefish things impersonating crab meat in the seafood bin.

Now I can safely say that my concept of seafood is forever changed by having lived among it--with the attendant ever-present risk of becoming part of the food chain--for a week and a half.

It was exhilarating, yes. It was gorgeous, yes. It was sailing the deep-aqua seas and famed trade winds of the Caribbean. Need I say more?

Yes.

It’s true that Michael, Ed, Megan, Lynn and I had a definite vacation aboard the aptly named Nirvana--in the sense that for nine days we all very definitely vacated the premises and preoccupations of our workaday lives, in the process taking roughly 200 pictures apiece and layering on a combined total Sun Protection Factor of approximately 950.

But a couple of us also got a definite education, and relearning “sea legs” is nothing compared to the thrill of comprehending compass headings or chart markings upon which your hull depends for its continued watertight state; or staying up all night when the wind is blowing you toward a rocky shore and your anchor won’t hold; or fathoming that if you let the wind cross behind the mainsail on your current course, the boom will switch sides with enough force to tear off most of the deck, not to mention any friends of yours who might be on it at the time.

Maybe these seafaring types just don’t want you to forget that everyday necessities--like sleep or shelter in a storm, or mixed drinks that don’t fling themselves into your lap--are not to be taken for granted when you’re hitched to a couple of ancient and almighty forces like wind and sea. Maybe that’s why sailors have a different word for everything: to keep outlanders on their toes.

Still, on a boat like the 35-foot O’Day we chartered out of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, everything is tied to everything else, right? But are there any ropes on this boat? Hah.

“Just lines . . . and sheets,” as Ed said knowingly on one of the first days out. He was bent over the winch on the port side of the companionway checking the halyard at the time. I remember because we were on a beam reach and I was trimming the jib sheets as the captain was shouting, “Helm’s a-lee!” Got all that?

I didn’t, but I do now. I was probably the least experienced sailor aboard; I’d logged a few hours on the six-foot sunfish of my lakefront youth, numerous water skiing-inclined powerboats and a couple of Cape May-Lewes ferries.

Michael, our captain, sails every chance he gets, mostly on Chesapeake Bay, where he keeps his 25-footer in the water year-round. A Maryland state mental-retardation consultant during the work week, Michael dreams of someday living aboard his own boat, making an annual summer sail up the coast to Maine before heading back home--to the Virgin Islands or thereabouts--for the winter.

Masking his intense passion for sailing’s finer points behind a wry smile, an occasionally lit pipe and an always-calm demeanor, Michael is a real sailor. Ed, a writer in real life, could easily be a real sailor, too . . . if he had a boat. In any case, for the rest of us--two more writers and a folk singer--real sailors were a good thing to have around. I mean aboard.

We spent the first few hours in Charlotte Amalie harbor getting to know the boat. This meant, for Michael and Ed, learning the diesel engine’s peculiarities, where the lines and tools and winch handles were stowed, how the radio and instruments worked, and how the craft sailed on various tacks and under differing conditions.

The rest of us got to know other sailing essentials. While Michael and Ed got the official briefing from the barefoot, beer-bellied, sunbaked charter agent-mechanic, Lynn and I learned how to make 12 bags of groceries disappear into half a dozen tiny cabinets and two small top-loading refrigerator compartments.

And Megan learned how to make pina coladas with the canned pineapple chunks she inexplicably bought instead of pineapple juice. And since few boats this size have blenders, much less AC current, for the duration of the trip we chewed our drinks.

We got used to it.

On the water for nine days, actually, you get used to a lot of things. You get used to standing, walking, eating, napping and even pouring boiling water into a drip coffee basket while the floor beneath you is pitched at about 30 degrees. You get used to damp clothes--and soggy shoes, sheets, towels, potato chips, whatever.

You get used to the smell in the “head” (that’s sailor talk for “astonishingly small bathroom that doubles as an exercise room because you have to pump the toilet by hand”), and the smell in the refrigerator compartment that persisted for days after an early accidental frozen-fish thaw.

You get used to it--you even grow fond of most of it--with good reason: When you go to sleep, gently rocking in a surprisingly comfortable berth that a moment ago was a booth for a party of five; when you wake up at sunrise or just before, rested and (unless you chewed one too many the night before) refreshed; when you’re plotting a course made at once easier and more exciting by a wind that always blows--strongly--from the same compass point, the reason becomes as clear as the water beneath you: You’re in the Caribbean.

Moreover, you can go anywhere or do anything you like.

Well, almost anything. If you’re with Megan you almost have to go snorkeling every 10 minutes, the ultimate goal being snorkeling the sublime (and, as it turned out, slippery) Caves of Norman Island. And if you’re with Michael and Ed--well, they tend to steer most of the time.

Actually I steered (OK, OK, I “took the helm”) for a while on the third day, when we headed north from the waters between U.S. territories St. Thomas and St. John to the small, barely populated British Virgin island of Jost Van Dyke.

The charts said we were to clear British Customs at a grand-sounding place called Great Harbour. The first thing we saw, after we dropped the sails and were motoring into a small bay lined with multicolored shacks, was a goat wandering the narrow beach. In the Virgin Islands, you learn quickly, the local definition of “great” is not the same as, say, the San Diego version. And you get used to it.

Inside the tiny customs office, which was about to close for the day at 4 p.m., was a not-so-tiny line of other mostly pleasure-craft captains and crews, whose papers were being processed by two white-uniformed officers, one of whom kept cheerfully but ominously warning that he’d be quitting for the day any minute.

We saw a decidedly less fettered side of British hospitality that night among the rowdy pleasure-boat crowd at a little restaurant/night spot called Sydney’s Peace & Love, up the coast a bit in Little Harbour.

Sydney’s, which is more or less a covered patio right on the beach, was covered this night with a capacity crowd that included a dozen loud and lubricated young Canadian guys, the apparently hard-working crew of the huge 75-foot-plus yacht we’d passed on the way in.

By the time we arrived, their party had logged 45 drinks in the book at the self-service bar. By the time we’d finished our Caribbean lobsters and logged a few ourselves, one of them had fallen asleep in his dinner plate.

Sydney’s did not constitute the typical night for the serious sailors of the Nirvana, however. About half the time we did eat out--which usually meant dinghying in from our mooring or anchorage in a safe harbor (in the Virgin Islands, reefs and rocks make night sailing a perilous pastime to all but those intimately familiar with the channels) and dinghying back for an aperitif, some star-gazing and amateur philosophizing and, possibly, again depending on one’s share of pineapple chunks, a skinny-dip or two.

The rest of the time we cooked aboard the boat--there was a barbecue grill that clamped to the stern rail--cleaned up, sat around and fell asleep early.

As the days passed, a routine developed. It mostly involved getting used to the all-but-routine things that happen when you’re living on top of an ocean.

First one up in the morning made coffee, supposedly. Unfortunately, the first ones up were usually Michael and Ed, which meant that the third one up (not Lynn, not Megan) had to make coffee during a close haul, which is sailing terminology for cutting across the wind on a specific angle that causes the boat to heel sharply and the hot water to miss the filter basket.

We spent one afternoon snorkeling and exploring at Green Cay, a truly tiny unpopulated island east of Jost Van Dyke in the British Virgins that we dubbed Gilligan’s Island--until an unwanted rescue party (actually another boat full of tourists with better snorkeling equipment) showed up.

The morning that we sailed out--about two hours had passed under sail--Michael turned to us from the swim platform on the stern, where he had been standing for some minutes.

“Hey,” he said calmly, cheerfully. “Has anyone seen the dinghy lately?”

We had been towing a dinghy. We looked back and saw what Michael had seen. Or not seen.

We turned around and headed back. We searched. We got on the radio. We searched some more. When we were about to give up (this is a nautical term denoting the start of discussions about what the charter insurance does and does not cover), Lynn cocked her head toward the radio. Someone had seen a dinghy! They couldn’t pick it up for us--they were a “vessel under sail,” as the real sailor on the radio put it--but they told us where they’d seen it.

Though I was assigned the “bow watch”--I wedged myself between the bow rail and the jib as we crashed through a choppy, deep channel and pretended I could see something besides blue blur when I looked through the binoculars--Megan spotted the dinghy from the stern. We were saved. (About $500, we reckoned.)

Near the end of the trip, after a luxurious mooring at the Bitter End Yacht Club on Virgin Gorda, we visited Virgin Gorda’s much-touted Baths--giant rocks and formations tossed into a series of caves with warm, swirling pools of water inside.

What the guidebook didn’t mention were the giant tourist and vendor formations, or the dangerous swell along the tiny, not-quite-rock-free stretch of beach where we attempted to land the dinghy. (Lynn was almost crushed by the dinghy after we jumped out and a large wave tossed the 500-pound fiberglass thing on top of her.)

On the way out we bent the stock of our Danforth anchor, which was wedged under a rock, rendering it useless. Luckily, we had another--a plow anchor.

Unluckily, it was not the best anchor for the grass-covered bottom at Norman Island, our next stop. We reached the small harbor just at sunset, squeezed into one of the few remaining spaces in the harbor, anchored and dinghied in during a sudden squall (rain and wind to you and me) to the island’s sole restaurant in a permanently anchored boat called the William Thornton, for a nightcap.

Rum costs less than drinking water in the Caribbean, they say. In any case, one thing led to too many others in the cramped bar of the William Thornton, and by the time we were all back in the Nirvana’s cockpit/family room we were singing in French, acting silly and starting to yawn. It had been a particularly long day.

About that time I noticed that we seemed to be closer to our neighbors than we’d been. There followed a healthy racket of denial. Then Michael got up, and Ed got up, and the rest of us got up, and we began checking our position against landmarks. We were drifting toward shore. It was midnight. We had to start the engine, pull up the anchor (that was my job, and there was no handy-dandy winch involved), keep watch off the bow (Michael) and relay directions (Lynn and Megan) to the helm (Ed)--all this in the dark. We probably would’ve functioned more like a well-oiled machine had we not spent the last three hours getting so well-oiled. We got the anchor fixed a couple of days later at Cruz Bay, a nifty little village at the opposite end of St. John (most of which is a U.S. national park), and we hit Norman Island again on the way back to St. Thomas--and snorkeled at the Caves.

Some guys we had met at the William Thornton bar had passed on instructions to feed the fish bread crumbs while we snorkeled. Scores of multicolored fish swam right into Michael, Megan, Ed and Lynn while I kept anchor watch aboard Nirvana.

Sure enough, a few minutes after the brave snorkelers departed, the anchor began to drag. Another boat was anchored 20 feet downwind, so I had to act quickly: I started the engine, sprinted up to the bow and hauled up the anchor, ran back to the cockpit and chugged off.

When the snorkelers exited the Caves, there I was, puttering in a lazy circle, feeling satisfied--proud, even--for having done the right thing.

Sailors have a word for this kind of serendipitous tumult, too, by the way. They call it “sailing.”