Summary
Date happened: 19 69>72
Second chapter for Jim Brown’s memoir of modern multihull history and lore.

ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 – Promise Made

The author meets his first and most formative mentor, an early multihull pioneer. Schooner bumming together, they voyage from Miami to Colombia in 1956 with a very game young woman in their crew. This mentor and woman disappear from the story for the next thirty years, but the author resolves to pursue a nautical life on his own. Obsessively keeping this youthful resolution is the theme of the next nine chapters.

…………

Chapter 2
-PROMISE MADE

He is climbing up and barely hanging on, and it takes all the strength in his neck to keep his head from flailing painfully out of control. He is part way up the mast to where the yacht’s motion, as she rollicks in the tradewind seaway, is greatly aggravated by his elevation, and the boat is heeled enough to swing him way out over water. To rest his hands he loops both arms over the cross tree above and wraps both legs around the shrouds below. With his limbs and torso thus restrained he tucks his chin down on his chest and cradles his head between scrunched shoulders. The warm wind is rinsing him clean through.

Yes, it was me there, the protagonist now appearing in these “formed hallucinations” I am trying to describe. Maybe they are really just like any geezer’s snapshot memories of youth, but this one’s watercolor hologram comes together with Caribbean bathing air. I didn’t really go seafaring until my early twenties, but when I did… Well, something happened up that mast, back then in 1956, that often re-rents space in my cerebral tenement. It begins to explain how my family and I came to perch on that precipice at the end of Chapter 1:

LA BRISA, the big steel ketch in which I crewed back then, had fled in panic from the pre-revolutionary skirmishes that were heating up in Batista’s Havana. It was now near the end of our third night of sailing south. The boat was threading her way between isolated reefs lying way off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. She was well eastward of that great Central American promontory, named by Columbus as he finally rounded it in 1496, Cabo Gracias a Dios, “Cape Thank God.”

This passage, around the west end of Cuba and down into the Southwestern Caribbean, is bounded by unmarked reefs on both sides. On our chart one reef’s Spanish name, Quita Sueño, translates as “Nights of Little Sleep.” The other is named Abre Ojos, “Keep Your Eyes Open.” Cloudy weather had prevented celestial sights and made the night’s navigation rather tense, but looking up past the masthead I now saw that the overcast had thinned and a few stars were fading before first light.

The yacht’s owner and I had taken over the watch at 4 AM, and he asked ME if I could climb the rigging in these conditions. Glad for the chance to demonstrate some worth to my new employer, I said I thought I could. “Then go as high as you think safe and have a look around,” he said. “You should be able to spot the island as the sky gets lighter, but there’s no telling where on the horizon you’ll see it. I think it’s ahead to starboard, but we don’t know exactly where we are, so it could be anywhere, even behind!”

Now the motion at my perch was so violent that I imagined myself to be a booger on the little finger of God, and He was trying to shake me off. Obliged to wait there for more light, I realized in full that during the night we easily could have struck a reef or even struck the island that I was hoping now to see.

On our American chart it was called by its modern Spanish name, Isla Providencia, but we also had on board the old British Admiralty chart, made from a 1691 survey which included in its wide margins several romantic pen-and-ink renderings of the Island as seen from different approaches. Each rendering showed the Island to be dominated by a huge volcanic megalith that was split wide open down the middle. The rock was called Split Hill, and the chart’s title was Old Providence Island. The place was certainly remote.

I looked down, suffered vertigo, became agog at the sight. The wake was illuminated by multitudes of minute dynoflagilates, their glow-worm brilliance turned on by the turbulence of the hull’s passing. Except for the wake, the sea seemed to be without surface. From my vantage the yacht appeared as a romping rendering of itself painted on velvet and black-lighted against the void of celestial space.
Besides the wake there was a deeper brilliance, a long, blue-white beam of phosphorescence streaming from the keel like a moonlit contrail. The west was still night’s territory but the east was contested. No horizon was yet visible there, just a roiling muddle between sea and sky. Again I was not so much watching as being watched:

LA BRISA makes a violent pitch and that kid there tries to shift his grip with arms and legs. Finding no alternative position he continues clinging to the cross tree and shrouds. Stuck here inside this wind machine he marvels at its process of putting out real power. As the vessel’s bow climbs a wave, the masts and sails rare back and the great fabric foils scoop up gulps of fuel that cannot get away. Then, as the bow falls from the crest, the spars, sails and rigging are thrust forward through the fuel too fast, spilling lots. The sound is alternately that of gulping and howling, and there is one complete reciprocating stroke every five or six seconds. He is located at about the sonic centroid of the sails so their arching vaults produce surreal acoustics. The gulps and howls, the gabble of the bow wave and the pulsing hiss of the wake, all echo in syncopated rhythm off the sails. It is unlike the string of detonations made by other engines he has known, for this machine propels its vehicle in a sequence of sublime surges. Looking left and right, and twisting to see forward past the jib, he surveys the scene hoping not to see breakers on a reef.

Now it passes, that brief meridian between nightset and dayrise, so crisp in the tropics. It sweeps through at about the speed at which Earth’s girth whirls toward morning, one thousand and thirty seven miles per hour. Dividing east from west, light from dark, it leaves behind a high smear of heaven turning pink with purple wisps of doubt below. He mutters, “This is what I came for,” and the wind inflates his downwind cheek to siphon the enunciation from his mouth as if spoken from deep within a whistlejug.

Now all appears in gloaming, and way over there the softest vapors at the bottom of the sky are punctured from beneath by something hard but split. It has to be… It can be nothing but the very top of Old Providence Island.

Of Protégés and Mentors…

Such a snapshot image now explains a lot of why I fastened onto sailing all those five decades ago. It lurks inside my rental like a burglar caught with no way out. Trying always to steal the show, he can explain neither how it was I ever went to sea nor why it came to be in multihulls. Like him, my answer was that I had failed at other things I tried.

After trying things like digging ditches, washing cars, selling clothes and checking credit, by age twenty two I was rather down and out in Miami, an Ivy League flunkout desperate for direction. My only vocational achievement was in the new sport then called skin diving. Holding my breath I could descend to the reef sixty feet below and stay long enough to grab two lobsters or spear a nice fish and return to the surface still conscious but seeing spots. It was this prerequisite that fed me in the Florida Keys and then landed me a job on a large sailing schooner named JANEEN (later re-named POLYNESIA). We carried diving charters to the Bahamas, Cuba and Yucatan. I lived and worked in a crew of six Bahamians and Captain Mike Burke, founder of the soon to be famous Windjammer Barefoot Cruises. We sailed ten-day excursions twice a month with about twenty passengers at a time.

Coming from a weak but traditional yachting background I was soon sailing as mate in the schooner. This was a position for which I was pathetically unqualified except for my white skin. I served only with the monumental patience of the ship’s boson, a brawny Bahamian named Fred McKenzie. It was Fred who taught me the ways of a windjammer, and in time I came to regard myself as something of a swashbuckling sailorman.

Beleaguered by the U.S. Coast Guard for safety violations, Burke was soon obliged to base his vessel in Havana and fly his patrons over from Miami. I had enjoyed the diving and the people of the Bahamas, but it was in Cuba that I came to know my first real foreign port, language and culture. The first authentic Spanish lesson was taught to me by a young woman named Josepha, my mellow girl friend in Havana who worked in a laundry. The ship needed laundry services and, well, isn’t that how it happens? With two, five-day dates per month, Josepha and I became an item, and I suppose we cut quite a figure together, the tall, long blonde-haired Nordic with the also tall, long black-haired mulata. She guided me through the wondrous old city, always with her thumb tucked into my belt in back and me with my hand on her far shoulder grasping her heavy braid. She proudly presented me to her friends who, like herself, were all destitute but jivey, and we sometimes enjoyed evenings with them aboard JANEEN. The Cuban national libation, Cuba Libre (Free Cuba) was then made with the very best of rum, and real CocaCola, the stuff that still carried a touch of cocaine in the old pinch-waist bottles.

Despite Havana’s party atmosphere I began to fathom the plight of the common inner-city Cuban, who struggled daily but with good nature under Batista’s military fist. There were armed guards everywhere, and the elite lived with big dogs behind high walls topped with glass shards, their gates, windows and doors all barred with steel . Even to a New Yorker like me, the contrast here between rich and poor was troubling, but not as threatening as the machine guns. To get to the water taxis, rowing skiffs manned by old men, for going out to JANEEN, Josepha and I had to pass the Navy building, an imposing edifice on the Havana waterfront whose four corners were decorated with dome-shaped concrete pill boxes at ground level. Each three-quarter dome had a continuous horizontal slot all around with the muzzle of a water-cooled machine gun protruding from the slot. The helmeted gunners inside, whose heads could be barely seen, had a 270-degree scope of fire, and they seemed to have been ordered to swing their guns at pedestrians passing by at any pace faster than a stroll.

During one of our layovers in Havana, Josepha and I traveled by train to the far eastern end of the Island to visit her mother. There in Oriente province, the country people also faced a daily struggle to subsist. In contrast with the high-rolling humor of the Island’s elite, its tourists, bankers, pornographers and gamblers, a repressed but latent peasant anger was evident.

I had failed Spanish 1 twice at Dartmouth and now, as Josepha reached me with “the loving tongue,” I began to sense a deep delight in discovering that a second language is actually an alternate reality, another consciousness, a different life. The new life I was experiencing with this vivacious-yet-steady Cuban woman was, compared to my struggles in academia, transcendental. Besides the intimacy and the carousing we shared, there was the percolating conflict between the Cuban rich and poor that I found deeply troubling, and the poor were more authentic, more lifelike in my view. These common people were both threadbare and generous, a paradox I had not previously known, and they spoke engagingly of living so close to the bone. This “two-tongues, two lives” aspect of language was unexpected, for never had I heard it mentioned in the halls of academia.

Big Tin Cat…

It was also in JANEEN that I found my first multihull mentor. Years later I would consider him the bravest trail blazer of all the postwar multihull pioneers. He is little known, even obscure in the multihull literature extant, and his name was Wolfgang Kraker von Schwartzenfeld.

On one of those diving expeditions in the schooner, Wolfgang joined our crew. His credential was that he had fancy camera gear and the Captain needed photos for a brochure. Soon I learned that he was also a good diver, and that he had crossed the Atlantic in his own boat. It is the details of this latter episode that dragged me by the nose over that Tradition Pass and into Multihull Territory.

I barely saw Wolf’s boat in Miami, but was offended by its crude concept; it had two hulls! About 32-feet long, they were made of thin sheet steel welded over a pipe frame. Set fifteen feet apart they were joined together by a spidery bridge of welded pipe truss work, and this bridge was covered with wooden slats and chicken wire. The cockpit was a shipping crate lashed to the slats, and hatches led down into the hulls where there were tank-like accommodations. His hand-sewn sails were set on a crooked pipe mast, and the overall results had the weight of a big tin can. Obviously the thing had been built mostly of scrap, and when I asked Wolf to translate its German name, GERüMPEL, he said it meant either confusion or rubbish. This so-called “catamaran” honestly confused me. How could such a crude contraption cross an ocean?

While working in the schooner with this guy Wolfgang I soon realized that he was no phony. Initially he was flummoxed by the complicated rig of the big windjammer but in some ways such as in sail trimming and navigation he knew more about sailing than I did. The schooner jolted Wolf as much as his catamaran jolted me.

JANEEN was 151-feet long, twenty-two wide and drew almost fifteen feet of water. She had eight double cabins and a gracious saloon all finished in raised-panel English oak. There was a twelve-berth focs’l for the crew, a cushy deckhouse for the passengers, and a monumental Gardiner diesel engine with six separate cylinders the size of grease drums. Each had its own blow torch for pre-heating the cylinder head, needed to start the great machine.

Rigged as a Marconi staysail schooner she had a 26-foot bowsprit and a very long overhanging fantail. Using a double-reeve wire halyard with eight parts of topping purchase, it still took eight men to hoist the mainsail on a steel mast 176-feet high. When wet, this mainsail, which was made of flax, took sixteen angry fists to furl. The rig was clean and modern for a ship her size but was still a proverbial cat’s cradle of lines and cables. There were running backstays on both masts with four-part tackles on their whips, a working jib that was set flying – its halyard and sheets made of cable as thick as your thumb – and a gollywobbler that Freddy called “de sky blottah,” for that sail surely did blot out the sky.

Wolf caught on quickly and we began to work well together shepherding the divers and driving the ship. He made more cruises with us partly because JANEEN was so sensational to sail. We were both repeatedly amazed by the power of this vessel; when close hauled she just knocked tradewind waves aside and when reaching she would schoon at 18 knots in a 20-knot breeze. Downwind she went like a train although jibing that huge main boom was a challenge which if not met with proper handling of the running backstays could result in dismasting.

On one of our cruises we booked a passenger named Jeannie Miller, a very game and becoming young woman who also took quickly to the ship… and to Wolfgang. They hit it off hot and heavy, and the three of us formed close friendships and a tight diving and sailing team.

However, our time in Havana made us wish for other harbors, other lands. We soon took berths in the ketch LA BRISA from whose mast I was to sight the providential Island. The yacht’s owner, a German-Colombian businessman named Hans Hoffman, and the three of us were the only hands aboard. It was in this boat and this crew that I unintentionally embarked on a career-long voyage. As my account will reveal, it has been a passage through boisterous seas, over shoal waters often riled by the winds of tradition blowing hard against the inexorable current of change.

Our Triumvirate…

Three days after our arrival at Old Providence Island Hans Hoffman’s business obliged him to return to Bogota. He was the Cessna aircraft distributor for Colombia, so he simply summoned a seaplane which took him away to Cartagena and left his crew alone for a month with the boat, the island and the islanders. It also left us with one another.

The people of Providence had a rich cultural and genetic heritage. Descendants of the British pirates who sacked the Spanish Conquistadors, who of course sacked the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas, these islanders were also part African and part Carib Indian. They had been rather isolated on this island since the days of the Spanish Main. They fished their wide reef, raised a few cattle, and fed their ‘chickens coconut. Outlying reefs and steep shores almost surrounded their very real estate, but there was also an occasional white beach. Thornless jungle crowded the moist places, and unlike many small islands, this one indeed had moist places, even mountain streams, for its split volcano core protruded skyward just high enough to tear the bulging bellies of passing tradewind clouds.

With the yacht’s owner away, the three of us now began to get to know each other. Both Wolf and I were tall, long haired and thickly bearded, our blonde manes bleached by sun and brine to pale yellow. But we were different in other ways; I was, and still am, lanky, with just enough meat to cover my knobby armature. I have a protruding brow and chin and small pale blue eyes that can hardly be seen behind thick glasses. Except for the glasses I’m told I look something like the man on the Indian-head nickel. I still talk too much, and back then I could be funny, even though I was running from adolescence and academia, toward something not quite yet identified. I loved learning about boats and the sea.

Wolf’s build was almost skeletal, his rickets the result of malnutrition in his youth. His face was gaunt, and his deep blue eyes made him resemble some portraits of Christ. He was still learning English, so was often quiet, always considerate and willing to do anything for anyone. His thorough approach to keeping and operating the yacht, plus his focus and forethought, gave him a stolid worldliness. It also gave me and Jeannie great confidence in him, so Wolf was the acknowledged leader of our group.

Jeannie was tall and athletic, with wavy dark hair that swarmed around her pretty face. She had brown eyes with pronounced lashes, and eyebrows that were naturally darker than her hair. Her expression was remarkably warm, but she was running too, from an unsuccessful marriage and toward adventure. She brought stability and routine to the crew, and was as much a part of the boat as its anchor. All three of us were in our early, invincible twenties, and we kindled one another’s ebullient optimism.

The islanders, who spoke both West Indian English and some Spanish, welcomed their visitors. They called Wolf and me Las Piratas (the Pirates) and Jeannie La Magnifica. They escorted us around, invited us into their homes, and took us out fishing in the local sailing smacks. Occasionally I had sharp sensations of deja vǘ in this place, to the extent that I wondered if in another life somewhere I had been an islander.

A Name To Remember…

Our days at Providence were filled with many undertakings. Wolf and I helped the islanders rebuild an old dock, and Jeannie introduced the local bakers to her sourdough starter. Hoffman had left a list of things he wanted done to the boat, like scraping the teak deck down to new wood, re-varnishing the masts, and painting the cabin sides and top. There was rust to chip and paint, and the hull’s bottom had to be scraped free of marine growth by diving. But our evenings were relaxed, actually charmed. Sometimes we went ashore to visit newfound friends. Jeannie noticed that the Islanders’ little board-frame houses, with their myriad cracks, emitted the evening lamplight to define them as giant woodcuts that were cut through and back lighted. On board, the ketch’s main saloon was our private netherworld, a safe and homey retreat into familiar surroundings. Jeannie and I joked a lot, but that was the extent of our flirting. I was the odd-man-out in this threesome, so I made a point of giving her and Wolf the space to be committed lovers. Early morning was their time, so I often left the boat at dawn to snorkel or hike or fish:

I grab a grapefruit from the galley and a fishing rod, and board the dinghy. While rowing out to the reef I encounter Ricksey Higgins, a youth I have met ashore. Ricksey also has come at dawn to fish. He paddles a dugout canoe, and uses two hand lines at once. Immediately he begins yanking up little snapper. I am using Hoffman’s sporty rod and reel, casting lures from our fiberglass dinghy, and catch nothing. Ricksey pulls his canoe alongside and says, “Das de wrong bait, mon. You gots to use rivah lobstahs.” He gives me several of the pincer-headed grubs, which he says he has collected from underneath the boulders in a stream. As he shows me how to put one on the hook, a great black presence soars beneath our boats. I gasp at the giant ray as it swoops through a steep, banking turn, slicing the surface with one curling wingtip. It is followed by a seemingly endless, fine line tail that scribes the creature’s track. The thing flies by again, banking to show its profile. I can see that its head is molded into a nacelle as part of its body, its body is molded into its wings, and its wings are part of everything except its tail. It is the most striking sea critter I have seen. Unnerved, I ask, “What kind of ray is that?”

Ricksey laughs and says, “Das de cow ray, gots a nose look jus like Bossy. Dey harmless mon, no stinger. We call dem searunner.”

“Searunner,” I repeat. “Searunner.”

Never Seen the Sea…

Wolf’s English, now that he was living with Americans, advanced to the point where he too could tell jokes. In the lamplight of the cabin, with the day’s work done and the dishes washed, I talked about my early childhood on a Wyoming ranch, a Vermont farm, and later in New York City. I lamented my wasted years at school but confessed guilt for having let my parents down. “They so hoped I would succeed at business school,” I said, “and here I am, wandering the Caribbean as a boat bum. Well, I’ve never had a greater feeling of belonging in my life.”

Jeannie downplayed her past in Miami as a married commercial artist and confessed she had booked passage in the big schooner immediately upon finalizing her divorce. “Sailing is saving me from becoming a suburban matron,” she said.

Wolf had mentioned little of his life in Germany, and I suspected his reticence had something to do with the war. At my request one evening he began to talk about himself. English was difficult for him, and his accent was thick. Jeannie had heard only bits of his past, so now she urged him to share his story. “We can understand you just fine,” she said, “so relax and tell us how you came to America.”

At first, Wolf’s account was brief, matter-of-fact: “I vus youngest of ten childs. My family vus rich, and ve lift in Bavaria. Vhen I vus little, Nazis takes all za money andt all za landt, andt Voor takes all my family except my mozzer andt vun brozzer.” His declaration made me feel that my own life had been almost synthetic by comparison. Wolf continued by explaining briefly that he had left from Holland in his catamaran alone and somehow made it to the Canary Islands, Barbados, and Miami where, as he said to Jeannie, “I meetet you.”
Jeannie snuggled him and said, “Jim should know more about your trip.”

“Where did you learn to sail?” I asked.

“In my boat.”

“You didn’t know how to sail before?” I asked with surprise.

“No, I never see ze ocean in my life until I leaft Hollandt.”

“Now wait,” I said, “I believe what you say because I know you, and I’ve seen your boat, but I can’t understand how you could cross the Atlantic in that thing, and no sailing experience?! And why did you leave Germany, go sailing in the first place?”

“I haf to go avay.”

“Why, Wolf? What happened?”

He went on to explain that when he was twelve or thirteen, going to school in Munich, he realized that he had seen the War at an age that made it very intense for him, but he didn’t know why it had happened. He was studying French and English, and he read a French book about the War. He didn’t know what to believe, and his confusion led to an interest in philosophy. Later, when working in a restaurant and studying philosophy at university, he was even more confused. “I know somesing is vronk. I know zere is more to my life besides vhat ozzer people sinks of Germance.” After a difficult pause, Wolf continued in a very tired voice, “Zere must be somesing else in me besides kill and burn and hate, and vin and lost.” He had to find out, he said, what other people are, and show them what he is. He implored us that he didn’t want to fight anybody. “Andt za trouble is, Jim, za more I findet out, za more I know some people sinks of me the same I sinks of Hitlah!” He covered his face with his hands.

“Nobody could think of you that way,” said Jeannie, comforting him.

We all were quiet for a long moment. Then Wolf said, from behind his hands, “I cannot liff viss ziss. So I tell myself to go andt show ozzer people vhat I am.” He made a muffled sigh, which ended in a barely audible “Ach.” Then, “So, here I show you vhat I am.”

“I know what you are,” said Jeannie, putting her arms around him and her head against his chest. Wolf returned her embrace, quaking back emotion.

“So do I,” I said. “You are our friend.” Jeannie and I looked at each other, wondering what to do next.

Soon Wolf brightened, and said, “So I decidet to trrr-avel!”

I asked why he decided to travel by sea, and he explained that he had no money, and did not wish to beg or impose for hospitality. He needed a mobile place to sleep and cook his food, a habitable vehicle that did not require fuel.

“But why a catamaran?” I asked him, “Of all things…”

“I spend dace in Berlin Museum,” he replied, “studyink boats. And I findet out about za Polynesiance. So I sinks, if zey can do all zat viss catamarance in Pacific, why can’t I do same sing in Atlantic?”

At some urging from me, Wolf proceeded to offer an account of his voyage. He began by sailing on a pond with two aircraft wing tanks joined as a catamaran. He then found his way to Rotterdam where, with the help of an old machinist who wanted to travel but knew he never would, Wolf built larger tanks: the hulls of his hopeful catamaran. There on the banks of the Rhine, where there were other sailboats to observe, Wolf worked half time for the machinist, joined his new hulls together, and eventually outfitted the craft as best he could.

When at last he was ready to embark on his philosophical quest, the Rotterdam Harbormaster denied him clearance from the port. It was neither the construction of the boat nor the fact that Wolf had never seen the ocean in his life; it was the catamaran configuration of the craft. So offensive was the contraption to the Dutchman’s nautical sensibility that Wolf was restrained from leaving. A spell of illness, which he sweated out alone on board, provided time for the authorities to forget about him. Once recovered, he left Holland by way of a side canal at night and, in stages, crossed the ocean to America.

The first leg of the journey took him across the English Channel to the shores of Suffolk. “I vas so sicksea zat all I could do vas let za boat takes me.” Two days later, he heard surf at night and dropped anchor. Waking to daylight and the sound of knocking on his hull, he emerged from his bunk to see people staring up from below his boat. They were standing on the sand, and his boat was perched high on a pile of rocks. In this way, Wolf learned of the tides.

After weathering a three-day storm in the Bay of Biscay, he was run down by a freighter. “I vas asleep, but ze hit makes me, how you say?… Knockout? Andt I vakes up in vasser, but still in my boat. I put my sweater, all coveret viss grease, in ze hole, andt bails out, and zen comes anozzer storm for sree more dace, andt ven I am in Rabat, Norse Africa.”

He was befriended there by a newspaperman who published his arrival (I saw the clippings) and helped Wolf with repairs. Wolf sailed from there to the Canary Islands. “Now I know how to sail, so it vas a goot trip.” He was joined there by his brother Heinz, who recently had been released from a Russian prison camp. He brought a little money saved by their mother, and together the two of them made a neat 30-day crossing to Barbados. Wolf’s brother chose to stay in Barbados, so Wolf, alone again, cruised up the Antilles to Miami. This was probably the first modern – meaning lightweight –multihull to sail trans-Atlantic.

The spell of Wolf’s account prevailed for long moments in our silent, lamp-lit cabin. Jeannie and I were dumbstruck.

Moonsing…

Suddenly we heard a drum and someone singing. We scrambled for the deck, where the music seemed to be coming from everywhere, reverberating softly from around the quiet little bay where LA BRISA lay anchored. Soon it seemed the sound’s source was to seaward. Looking out, our eyes were led along a dense avenue of flashbulb-popping wavelets toward the moon. Brightening as it narrowed away, this path appeared blocked by a barricade at its far end, where hollow swells rose up and collapsed on the reef, their curling crests topped by veils of cold, silver steam. The soft rattle of that surf mingled with the song, and everything else was ink. Then, as if entering by a side street, a little silhouetted smack slid out onto the glitzy thoroughfare, its translucent patchwork sails metering the moon according to their many weights of rag. Protruding from the vessel’s sheer were several figures moving to the beat, heads swaying, hands clapping. There came the straight glint of a bottle being raised. “Let’s invite them over,” Jeannie said excitedly. Wolf reached inside the hatch to the switch panel and flashed the mast lights. We waited.

“Here they come… they’re coming!” Jeannie said. I ducked below to get our bottle of rum. It was not where I thought it would be, and by the time I found it and regained the deck, a wet rope was thrown up to Wolf, a sail came sliding down, and LA BRISA was boarded.

The music never stopped. While the drummer climbed up, handclapping held the beat. Singing kept the melody as a battered guitar was passed between the lifelines. There must have been ten islanders, but some stayed aboard the smack to bail, scooping phosphorescent bilge water from between the ballast stones. All sang and swayed together, including the bailers, who discharged their glimmering result exactly on the downbeat, giving swish to the rhythm like cymbals teased with the brush. I removed the bottle’s cork, tossed it overboard, and passed the rum around.

Everyone on deck was dancing. Some islanders went below to look around, passing through the yacht’s interior while wiggling in time. Through the music they all spoke with us a little, and when I asked a young woman if they did this often, she said, “Oh yes! We alltime moonsing when de weddah nice.” And then she asked me, “Which pirata you be?”

“What?”

“Ah haa! I means, what be yo name, sweet honey?”

“I be Jim,” I said, and we danced.

“I be Eeeve-alyn,” she said in a soft voice, spinning herself completely around slowly, fetchingly. “An’ you, mistah Jimsieboy, you mus comalong moonsing wiff me sometimes.” I was kindled by her advance, for she was a long-limbed siren. “But tonight,” she concluded, “dat lil bow-ut be fullup, an’ leakin’? Baahd! Ha-hHaaaa! Oh, sweet honey…”

The song wandered as aimlessly as the dancers, all changing partners, with same-sex couples common but Jeannie popular with the island men. They wandered through and over the ketch as random solos were sung for each verse, often repeated. But everyone joined the chorus as if it were an anthem. Before the bottle was empty, they left as theatrically as they had come, singing, “Way-up Suzyanna, Prov-i-dence is de place where I belongs in. Roun’ de bay of Prov-i-dence.”

Seafall…

Back in the cabin, we now finished the rum, and dwelled deeply in the spell left by our visitors. “What a great way to live, this cruising life,” I volunteered. “Times like that, with relative strangers? We couldn’t ask for more.”

Wolf added, “Zat’s why I trrr-avel for. Ve all show zem vhat ve are, and zey show us what zey are. Nussing fake in between. Ve are velcome on za islandt, and zey are velcome on za boat. Ve all haf boat andt ocean, moon andt vindt. Iss rrr-eal life!”

After a time, Jeannie said, almost apologetically, “If there’s one thing wrong with this life, it’s that this boat belongs to someone else. Hoffman is a good enough guy all right, to leave us with his beautiful yacht. And he says we’re going to sail to all those great places, like those Islands off of Panama where the women paint their bodies. And that old walled city in Colombia. Well, I hope we get there but let’s face it, we may not. After all, we really are nothing but his floating domestics, and he’s apparently got a lot of other things on his mind. We’re not really free. I get the feeling we need a boat of our own.”

Wolf said nothing, but dragged out his sketchpad and turned up the lamp. He was always drawing something, usually a boat. After a moment he said, “Ze only sing vrongk viss my catamaran is it needs anozzer boat in between.”

We all laughed, not understanding what he was trying to say, so I said to Jeannie, “Here we are, in the cabin of this juicy yacht, anchored in what must be about the nicest cove on the nicest island on earth, with the whole scene to ourselves, and yet you’re telling us we’re not really free?“

“Not the way we would be in our own boat,” she replied. “There would be nothing like that kind of freedom.”

“I vus really free on my catamaran,” said Wolf, “Decidet everysing myself. But I vus alone for a longk time. I alvays vantet someone to share my travelingk.” He grinned at Jeannie.

“Okay,” I said, “Jeannie has expressed an outrageous idea. It’s very appealing. But how the hell are we going to get our own boat?” I looked at Wolf’s sketch and chuckled.

“Vhat ze hell you laughing at for?” he asked, chuckling too.

“Vhat ze hell you drawing at for?” I replied.

Showing his sketch to me, and speaking with guttural, trilled rr’s, he answered, “Trri-marran.” We all crowded around the drawing.

“Ve must built zis sing out of fiberglass,” he concluded.

When three logs burn together, their individual heat radiates to the others, and they make a conflagration. The “triple cat,” as it was called at times that night, was sketched out and sketched over again and again. The fanciful boat was designed by committee, and so not finalized, but at least we made a plan of action. When we got back to Miami, Jeannie would get on with the airlines as a stewardess and save money. Wolf would return to Germany, finally responding to repeated requests from the TV station that had provided his camera equipment. He would submit to interview shows, and save money. I would go to somewhere to work in a boat factory and learn about the new stuff called fiberglass, saving money. And when we were ready, we would all meet again in Miami to build our boat.

Even though the plan itself was brainstormed, hypothesized, fantasized and then left hanging in mid air, our commitment was cast in concrete. We would build our own “trrimarran” and really go sailing. We didn’t know how or where or when, but we knew why; because we wanted to be free, really free, in a way we had only now begun to understand. And now we knew we could.

The Promise…

So enrapt was I by this notion that I couldn’t sleep. I went back on deck, to watch the moon glitter on the steaming swells. Of course! Anyone could build a boat and hit the briny trail. I had just never realized it. But I tried to be realistic. The prospect of the three of us hanging together, and pulling off such a caper over time, seemed fanciful. I was odd man out in our crew, and needed my own companion, but there weren’t many girls like Jeannie in the world. Poor Josepha would be challenged by this life. and even if I should find a mate, then what? Two couples on a small boat? Not likely for long.

But so what? If we couldn’t pull it off together, I resolved to pull it off alone. I could learn about building boats! I could learn about triple cats! If Wolf could do it, without any experience at all, I could do it myself. Feeling the die of fate smack down upon my being, I muttered to the moon, “And I will, Dammitall, I will!”

Note: There is no video counterpart to this chapter because, as explained in Chapter 3, most of the photos were lost at sea. The few faded photographs from my greenhorn schooner-bumming days are all that remain from this, my most formative episode as a young-adult. They may be posted in the future.