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A STORY BOOK TALE
Edwin P. Cutler

ONE IN A MILLION


     Edwin P. Cutler     spaceship79@hotmail.com     1992

     We are not gamblers, at least we really never meant to be. But I began to wonder when, at two company Christmas parties in Bermuda, each attended by a hundred people, Wendy won the door prize two years in a row. Actually we hadn't meant to be in Bermuda for those parties, but maybe we're just lucky.
     We sailed out of the Chesapeake, in November of 1986, bound for Bermuda as a quick stop on our way to St. Croix where we hoped for employment as computer programmers to augment the cruising kitty. As we passed over the Chesapeake Bay tunnel a Coast Guard boat hailed us.
     We had just hauled the boat and painted everything, including the topsides and since we were leaving the country had not put our state registration numbers on the bow. They let us go but the last voice we heard as we left the states was, "You're breaking the law, you know."
     To get to Bermuda, you sail east. But the wind had different ideas and when it came up out of the northeast the best we could do was to sail close hauled down the shore of the dreaded Virginia Beach -- another graveyard of ships. So there we were, navigating with a sextant and sailing a classic wooden ketch with tanbark sails built in 1938. In 1986, GPS was still too expensive.
     For two days it was overcast and we were forced to head southeast and resort to dead reckoning. To our relief, huge freighters made their way between us and the shore we could not see, so we figured we were out far enough not to catch our keel on the mast of a sunken Spanish treasure ship or on some pilgrim's progress.
     And then, one day, we saw Booby birds and flying fish. The grey water cleared to turquoise and the chilly November air warmed in a matter of minutes. We were in the Gulf Stream and took off our foul weather slickers and stowed them. The sailing was superb and we dashed along recalling days spent circumnavigating the Caribbean the previous two years. We first left Annapolis in November of 1984 and went south via the Intercostal Waterway and island hopped all the way around the Caribbean.
     This 600 mile passage to Bermuda was to be our longest offshore Atlantic passage, and as we headed out into the Atlantic we remembered Wendy's brother, who had been in the merchant marine, had warned us that the Atlantic often had waves over twelve feet high. Low and behold, another blast from the northeast, opposite the Gulf Stream current, and the seas steepened to monstrous but uniform well ordered waves. Up, up, up then down, down, down.
     We remembered the words of the surveyor who checked out the Romarin when we bought her, "She's okay in the Chesapeake but don't take her out into the Ocean. But we had Mammy with us.
     We ate, slept and stood watches holding on. I would have exhausted myself steering, but Wendy reads books about sailing, and in one of those mysterious non-fiction works she discovered the trick of running a line from the wheel out to the foresail sheet, balanced by some surgical tubing. Standing watch consisted of marveling at how her cat's cradle kept us on course as we climbed each wave then gently slid down its backside into the trough.
     We admitted waves as high as eleven feet, eleven inches, to her brother, but in our log we recorded 15 feet. A man on the spreader could probably still see the horizon when we dropped into the troughs, but I couldn't get Wendy to go up the mast to prove it. Have you ever been in a boat with four foot topsides riding on fifteen foot waves? It's sort of like a twenty four hour roller coast ride.
     East of the stream the wind eased and the seas subsided to four feet. We saw a sloop coming up astern. The Holly Ann, using Loran and dead reckoning, had a position 76 miles closer to Bermuda than our sextant sight a few hours earlier at dawn. They said they were going to winter in Bermuda and we told them we planned to stop there for a week -- little did we know.
     As they sailed ahead, in their faster boat, they said, "See you in Bermuda."
     Sailors never agree on where they are or how long it took to get there, so shouted, "You'll get there a day sooner, since you're already so much closer." The fabled island was still three hundred miles away, three days sailing if we were lucky.
     To avoid the numerous reefs on the northwest side of Bermuda, we sailed around the south end, and saw an island like a flower garden with rainbow colored houses planted in the hills.
     We explored the various Bermuda Islands, all connected by Outerbridges, a family surname, and visited various naval and submarine detection bases, some secret and mysterious, always with our resumes in hand.
     We were told, "You can't get a job here. It takes months to advertise the position and then go through immigration." However, we found a prospective employer who could not believe that two mathematicians, just what he needed, had come ashore in a little wooden boat. We arrived in late November, and were working by January 1987.
     We kept quiet and acted like tourists because our status was not clear to us. We were told that if anyone came through with a necktie on, we were to leave the computers and grab brooms and start sweeping. We became aware as time passed that all the locals in St. Georges knew who we were and where we worked. After six months, we wrote a letter to immigration requesting a six month extension to see more of the lovely island -- we were granted this request.
     When customs came to confiscate our boat we found we were also required to write to them to get an extension for the boat. People and boats are two different things.
     Work went well, we made progress in reorganizing and adding functions to some programs written to track satellites using small computers. But we are sailors, and when our year was almost up, we requested a six month leave from our employer to visit the windwards. This visit, off island, would also renew our status with immigration and customs when we returned.
     We left in November of 1987, promising to return by the end of May in 1988.
     As the passage south progressed, Wendy became anxious about the condition of the boat and the weather -- she seemed to cast a spell and I realized later that I was not thinking clearly. The inner forestay broke and, though I had gone up the mizzen several times to fix things, it never occurred to me to go up the main mast and reattach the stay. Go up the mainmast at sea in a bosun's chair? Never!
     It was cloudy for days, and we had trouble getting sextant sightings of either the stars or sun. As we approached the islands we were forced to use our radio direction finder which is famously inaccurate. The result of this was that instead of coming down on the east side of St. Martin so the tradewinds would blow us into the harbor, we were on the west side and on Thanksgiving morning we were fifteen miles west of Margot Harbor with the tradewinds on our nose.
     "I don't want to eat Thanksgiving dinner at sea!" by Wendy, prompted us to put up too much sail. With the inner forestay missing, the main mast kept bending back in the middle. I thought the mainsail was pulling it back but later figured out that the foresail was putting a tremendous compression force straight down on the top of the mast; stand a piece of spaghetti on end and press down on the top. Everything is fine until it bends.
     I went forward to check the mast and saw it bending like a bow about to launch an arrow. A two foot bend in a wooden mast!
     Too late, I shouted, "Ease the sheets!"
     I had heard that column failure is catastrophic -- now I knew! With a thunderous crack, the mast broke at the spreaders. Everything came tumbling down. I got a scratch on my leg, but Wendy, in the deep cockpit, ducked down and wasn't touched by the falling mast. All the sails and rigging and wires and ropes dangled harmlessly just above her head. Fortunately everything landed on the boat, nothing fell into the sea. We were lucky, I guess.
     Wendy wailed, "Oh, Romarin, I broke you."
     I commented, "Well, that's an experience not many sailors live to tell about."
     We tried to start the engine and failed. We called for help and Saba Island Radio contacted a small inter-island freighter. The Arctic North towed us into Margot harbor with no mention of charging us. As Wendy had wished, we ate Thanksgiving dinner in port.
     Where to get a forty five foot grown mast? Ed was a carpenter in his youth. He bought an old mast, built a mitre box and spliced a 17 to 1 scarf, nine feet long from point to point.
     With some local help, we stepped it just after Christmas and had a mast that was better than before. Good thing it happened so close to a convenient harbor. Guess we were just lucky.
     In January of 1988, instead of heading back to Bermuda, we sailed farther south.
     By now the engine had seized and as we sailed in and out of the island ports, we were pleased to find that we could handle our old wooden ketch in close quarters without an engine.
     We rounded Guadaloupe which is shaped like a butterfly, anchored in the Saints which are the peaks of sunken mountains, became trapped for hours in the wind shadow of Dominica, were guided into Fort de France on Martinique at night by the light of a burning department store, and anchored off Reduit Beach outside of Rodney Bay in St. Lucia in perfect peace. Finally, we made the Tobago Cays and Petit St. Vincent to visit the couple we had bought the boat from in Annapolis in 1981.
     We had mailed the card seven months earlier to tell them we were coming, and were surprised that they were surprised to see us. The mystery was solved when while we were there our card caught up with us. We finally headed north again, up the lesser Antilles islands and out into the Atlantic. We sailed into Bermuda, as promised, on 30 May, having covered 3000 miles without an engine.
     It was a holiday and the customs man was in a hurry. "Any guns?"
     "No."
     "Sign here."
     We entered with three cases of rum and one of Scotch and realized it is only profitable to smuggle when there is a duty. How nice of countries to encourage smuggling by raising import duties.
     By now we had learned that the base can hire Americans and they can clear immigration if the job was offered to them before they arrived. The proper letters were sent by our employer, an American company, and we were able to establish a permanent overseas residence which helped us fend off the US income tax people.
     After a summer of work, with lunches at a picnic table overlooking the blue Atlantic, and in anticipation of a company Christmas party, Wendy bought a full length evening gown for which she was complimented lavishly -- It cost $2.50 at the church store in St. George!
     It was at this party, with over a hundred people present, that she won her first, first prize -- one in a hundred. It was a radio-tape player that we enjoyed for years.
     During that year, 1988, Bermuda passed Switzerland as having the highest per capita income. Yet, at the church store Wendy found a wallet for Ed, just what he wanted and had failed to find in the expensive stores in Hamilton and paid 50 cents for it. We put down a mooring and found ourselves with a lifetime lease on waterfront property for $15 a year on a island that Mark Twain compared to heaven.
     Another year, work, work, work, and another Christmas party. Another dress, two this time, one red and one black with a seductive veil, $2.50 each. Like I said, we don't gamble, but the chance for a door prize came with the ticket to the dinner and dance. And you guessed it, Wendy won first prize again! Now the odds were up to one in ten thousand.
     For the fait accompli, she was asked to draw a ticket for second prize. She drew mine! The odds were a hundred times a hundred times a hundred or ONE IN A MILLION!
     We asked Mammy our VooDoo doll if she had been fooling around, but she cast her evil eyes and smiled.
     Since we are not gamblers we purchased a GPS which permitted us to find ourselves anywhere on the ocean with the push of a button. We no longer had to rely on mother nature to reveal her stars and sun so we could navigate our way across her waters. By now we had saved a little money and requested that our employment be discontinued with the plea, "We have seas to sail and islands to explore."
     And so, in November of 1992, with our boat carefully refitted, leaving nothing to chance, we sailed south again, heading out across a thousand miles of open ocean, bound again for the beautiful Caribbean islands, and trusting that Aeolus, the God of the wind, would be kind to us.
     It only took nineteen days to go the 950 nautical miles to Antigua, or roughly 50 miles per day, which, since we sail all night, is 2.0 miles an hour -- less than walking speed.
     But that's the chance you take and we always say, "If we were in a hurry, we wouldn't have come in a sailboat."


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