Into the abyss, and still able to talk about it

By Tom Snyder
One of the most entertaining benefits of the huge number of cruising boats being sold in this heated economy is that now we can read in cruising magazines about cruising adventures by people who have recently bought their first boats. To put it mildly, they have yet to pay their dues. Here’s my cruising adventure.

I decided in June to sail single-handed around Chebeague Island in Casco Bay. I realized that I may not have been the first to attempt this, but I was going to be the most authentic. Therefore, I took no electronics other than GPS, radar and depth sounder. I asked National Geographic if they wanted to sponsor me, but did not hear back before I left Peaks Island on a fair tide on June 1.

What do you take on a trip like this? Food, of course. Books. Items for trade. A salad spinner. Fishing hooks. A journal. Which brings up the inevitable question: Should one take a gun? The answer is “no” because there is simply no way to keep ammunition dry on a boat. If pirates become an issue, which they did not in my case, it is best to simply say you have a gun. Most pirates are not well educated so you can mess with their minds.

By the end of my first day I had reached Little Chebeague. What a somber and forbidding place, and yet, ironically, what a welcome haven for a man driven close to insanity from hunger. I have heard that a man will behave oddly when confronted with starvation, but I always hoped I would be different.

Let me backtrack, dear reader. I had brought pre-made sandwiches for my voyage – one sandwich for each day – and I had specifically requested no pickles. First rule of single-handed cruising: If something can go wrong, it will. Pickles on all the sandwiches and I am delirious from about 2 p.m. until dinnertime. Did I behave oddly? I hope you will forgive me when you hear that I cursed like a sailor, clung to the rigging and howled until exhaustion took over.

The next morning, against contrary winds of 3 to 5 knots, I beat my way out of an anchorage that now seemed more like a friend than a dark cauldron of hunger and exhaustion. Funny how time heals.

Anyway, I expected the winds to round in my favor, but this never happened. For every league I moved forward, I was driven back in kind by a wind that seemed to say something inappropriate the way sometimes wind will almost seem to talk – but this is only an illusion experienced by a man driven insane with isolation.

I began to speak to myself in a tongue so foreign and beguiling I can only guess that it was maybe Iraqi or one of those kind of insistent languages. A seagull, sensing another of God’s creatures in distress, accompanied me for several seconds as he flew hundreds of feet overhead in a completely different direction. I waved and hoped that I could one day return the favor. (That also did not happen.) Defeated by the elements, I returned to Little Chebeague where I accepted that which I could not change. It might interest the reader to know that one of my predecessors, Captain Cook, spent many months trying to round the Horn. I was in good company.

I decided to row ashore in search of Chebeague people. They were friendly and more than willing to trade. A simple native woman offered to give me some lettuce from her cottage garden in exchange for a pack of double-A batteries. I showed her how one pushes on the white dots on the side of a battery to determine the remaining available charge… as if she had the slightest idea what I was talking about! It was as though we were speaking a completely different language because apparently she regularly uses a recharger and does not use the same kind of batteries. Different worlds, but both people nonetheless.

Caked in my own sweat and filth, I returned to the boat and showered for what seemed like an hour. Then I slept deeply and dreamt of the seagull, the woman, and the man who sold me the sandwiches. The next morning I felt that pull known by sailors around the world – the pull homeward. I had not completed my circumnavigation of Chebeague Island, it’s true. But is that really the point? As I hope to one day say to fellow voyager Dodge M., why do we do it? Are we just crazy bastards or what?

Tom Snyder lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife Anne and children. He sails his Island Packet 350, Blue Moon, out of Hingham, Mass., and Peaks Island, Maine.