(Part Two) As The Boat With No Name sailed away from us forever in July 2018, Laura and I watched, sadly, and then with alarm as it entered the “slot” of fierce wind sucked off the ocean into San Francisco Bay through a constricted throat called The Gate.
“Surely Jon remembers our warning not to put up all the sails until he is past it,” Laura said. We had told him how we made that mistake when we were young and nearly lost the boat. It was one of many warnings and advisories we overloaded the new owner with in the month before he left. One of them came in a text exchange:
Terry “Remember, you didn’t buy the boat…you married it.”
Jon: “Married it, haha I like that. Hope she’s sweet then. J”
I told Laura not to worry. But I was worried. There were so many things I had wanted Jon to do before venturing out. The fuel tanks..the filters…the thru hulls…the rigging…the sails…the hull….the…
“Enough!” Jon said. If he did everything I asked, he’d get old and never sail the seven seas – like the first owner. Like me, I thought, shoulders drooping. He vowed to leave on the afternoon tide come hell or high water. Now he was headed straight into both.
Just outside The Gate – almost every afternoon in July – thick fog, heavy winds and crazy-rough seas sometimes keep even heavy container ships away. “It’s an evil bitch out there,” I said. Jon grinned. He liked the phrase. “Aarrrgh!” he said and raised a pirate’s flag before setting off.
He expected a quick two or three day downwind sail along the coast and around the infamous Pt. Conception, nicknamed “The Cape Horn of The Pacific” for its ship-sinking stew of currents and weather. Native people of the region thought it was a gate for souls to pass through. Jon said he was well provisioned for such a quick voyage, opening up the huge refrigerator/freezer I had built to hold weeks of supplies. It was full to the top with beer.
I recoiled for I am a former, ferocious alcoholic whose last drink was 30 years before with a guerrilla comandante on a Guatemala volcano (it’s in a book I’m writing, “A Voice Came Down The Mountain.”). “Easy, Terry,” I told myself, “not everyone’s like you.”
When the boat vanished, Laura and I went home to reminisce.
A few hours later, the texts and phone calls began.
No Name’s prow had barely gotten under the Golden Gate Bridge when hounds of hell came snarling from every direction at once. Gale-force winds shrieked in the rigging. Towering seas lifted the boat almost vertical and slammed her down. Swirling current spun and rolled and sucked at her. Heavy fog smothered daylight and chilled the poor crew’s hearts. Then the forestay – a heavy cable that keeps the mast from falling backwards – let loose and started swinging in the tempest like a devil’s whip, cutting a slice in one of the sails as it threatened worse to the crew.
They turned back and limped into little Sausalito bay to lick their wounds and fix a myriad of storm-stressed issues. I gave some calming words – although to be sure, Jon, like any true sailor, was undaunted – and within a few days had pulled things together enough to motor sail out the Gate on a calm morning and head south.
“Hi, uncle Terry,” Jon said hours later over the phone from Half Moon Bay, a port just down the coast from San Francisco. Things had gone so well and he was treating me like family. Me, he, Laura and No Name. The crew was resting overnight. Tomorrow, on toward Killer Conception!
After a few miles the next day, the engine cut out and they limped into Santa Cruz with a clogged filter. John called to say that the crew now was muttering “Terry fucked us” every time something broke. Typical family grousing. They made more repairs, then off to Killer Conception!
The engine cut out just before entering the jetty at Moss Landing, where the crew jumped ship while it was getting more repairs. John found a couple of women walking the docks and off they all went toward Killer Conception.
They limped into Morro Bay and Jon – unwilling to face K.C. until No Name could be trusted – parked her for 4 weeks of stem-to-stern refitting. And he hired a professional captain. No more hale fellows and high-heeled boat candy.
Here we come, Killer Conception!
It was all glass. Hardly a breeze. Nary a comber. Easiest stretch of the trip.
Eventually he ended up in Long Beach Harbor, but he had lost his job along the way and needed a place to stay because there were no liveaboard slips. He found both in Santa Monica. Time passed, girlfriends came and went. Financial and life pressures built. No Name kept demanding expensive attention – a paint job, new rigging, new sails, new this, new that. And lots of time. All that he had and more.
Young Jon was learning, as we all do – young and old, priest or sinner – that a boat is life with all its sweetness and thorns. You want one? Take hold the other.
“Hi, uncle Terry,” he said in early 2020, on a telephonic update. He had just ripped out a bunch of delicate tile work Laura had lovingly placed piece by piece. She gulped when she heard it.
“What about Lizardo?” she said softly. It was a fanciful tile of a bas relief lizard carefuly cemented in a secret spot.
“Lizardo?”
“It was the boat mascot,” I told him. We called him Saint Lizardo, our self-denoted protector from all evil. John had saved the holy object, but Lizardo no longer held its place of protection, if you believe such silly superstitions….as sailors do.
Jon was a little downhearted after spending all of his money and all of 2019 doing upgrades and repairs. There was one bright note in October when he sent me this text: “Yarrr! Epic sail to Catalina”. But, otherwise, his crusing dream was stuck in backwaters and he had decided sell No Name. My heart sank. I like this fine fellow and hated the idea of him divorcing…our boat.
Suddenly in June, he was all aflame again in texts. He had a steady girlfriend and cockroaches infested his apartment – clear signs that he should keep the boat, bathe her with affection, move aboard and head for the horizon. Since March, he had been pouring money into upgrades.
And one more thing: he had decided on a name for No Name – the first real one it would have in nearly 30 years. He had even designed a dramatic way to display the name and sent me a computer-drawn concept to look at: Long, black tentacles came up from the water line around the stern and clutched the new name:
KRAKEN’S EMBRACE.
Kraken!?! The legendary Nordic octopus-like creature that rose out of dark depths to enwrap whole ships and pull them and their crew to doom? The Kraken of Johnny Depp’s nightmare in “Pirates of The Carribean”?
“Yup.” I could see Jon’s grin. Would I come down for the re-christening?
I laughed to myself at his swashbuckling irreverence, but I just couldn’t watch him baptize No Name with That Name. I turned down his kind offer. A few weeks later, he texted again:
“June 28
Finaaaaaallllyyy!! After buying in SF in 2018 and having my @ss handed to me trying to bring her down to LA in 2018 (and finally making it 3 months later) I got the Harken ESP furler and new 100% high cut yankee…The original hank-on 110% jib was a bit torturous in many conditions (nearly killed me day 1). Just hoisted the new one up the foil today and she’s a beauty! Can’t wait! Time to start enjoying the experience. So excited I can’t sleeeeep! Been waiting and saving 2 years, finally did all the research and got it all done right. Ill lyk how she sails…”
He still hadn’t put on the new name, though he had painted a single, evil-looking tentacle reaching around her butt.
One week later, last Sunday, I got this message:
“Well you were right uncle Terry…it was an evil bitch. No matter what I did it was destined. Freakish currents and large waves as we made our approach in Newport last night. She got hit with a couple waves and ran aground and the huge waves finished her off. I dont remember too many details as I got knocked out before it broke up.
“Everyone somehow made it off safe but it was close. I guess my Westsail 42 days are over.”
WHAT THE FUCK!
“Call me,” I texted. He couldn’t – his phone had been lost in the waves. We agreed to chat through our computers in 10 minutes. That gave me time snap on the TV and – with fascinated horror – watch the death of No Name in the shorebreak of Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula.
I spent my teen years fishing that stretch of beach at night and bodysurfing it in the day. I knew every inch of that shoreline intimately, and as I watched huge waves beat and roll and pound and tear at No Name, I felt their familiar pummeling on me as a young man who had learned to spin my body as they crashed on sand so that I landed on my feet. But I was twisty and supple and crafty while the boat was heavy and inflexible and out of its element. She belonged out there where even the biggest waves had no thrall over her, not here on this lee shore of no mercy.
She had broken in two on video by the time Jon called and told me what happened.
———
Five friends, including one woman, joined Jon that morning for what should have been a fun downwind sail in wind building to around 20 knots on a sea of unspectacular lumpiness. Hell, he’d recently aced 26 miles to Catalina. This was nothing and Killer Conception was far behind. Onward to Newport for 4th of July!
As they headed south, invisible forces were gathering in the water. Not the Kraken, although – who the hell knows? The moon was rising full that night and pulled the sea landward in a tidal surge higher than anyone could remember. Not even the old-times had seen what was about to happen. And that includes me.
It’s not that the tide itself was so high – 6.5 is unremarkable. Tides reach over 7 feet high sometimes. And the surf size of 6 to 8 feet, while impressive, was nothing like the 20’+ sets I’ve seen crash over the piers and jetties. Something else was going on – a climate-change induced rise in sea level? Jon felt No Name twist and roll in the opposing forces of wicked current, close-packed swells and brisk wind. It was getting dark. The tide was peaking. Everything at once.
“Why that tide, why that current, why those waves, and why that spot with so much meaning to me?,” Jon said with shock and pain and wonder in the weeping of his voice. “What called me below in that moment?”
Jon doesn’t know much about what happened – before or after – he went down the companionway. The boat lurched in a big wave and he was throw headfirst against something hard – perhaps the heavy, curving teak handrails I had spent many weeks fashioning and installing. He fell unconscious.
On shore, the sea had risen into the streets of Balboa, to become rivers that flooded homes and businesses. This had never happened before – what’s going on, people cried as they waded the torrents onto the high ground of sand and stared seaward in horror.
A large boat with its foresail up was wallowing in the shorebreak. They ran toward it. Rescue personnel brought lights. Lifeguards prepared to make rescues. A crowd gathered as figures on the boat began jumping into the sea.
Jon awoke to hear his buddy’s girlfriend screaming – what do I do, what do I do? Another wave struck and he helped her jump off like all the others. Then he jumped. He struggled ashore through the shorebreak and like the others was wrapped in a yellow emergency blanket. He was beaten, he was bloodied, he was schocked. But everyone lived. Everyone but No Name.
As Jon watched the boat perish, cops approached him. Perhaps with coffee and a donut? No. They were grim. “They were pounding on me with hard questions.”
How did this happen? How do you not remember?
Jon wished he had gone down with the ship. He was in shock. He was bleeding. He was already beginning to mourn. What’s with these guys? Eventually, they let him go off to the hospital for treatment. As he left, people were swarming the surfline, grabbing everything they could – of almost everything Jon owned that floated ashore.
Soon, after all the pummeling and pilfering, only bits and pieces remained of The Boat With No Name.
Jon hung up. Laura and I spent the day mourning. The next day, John texted me:
“July 5
Preparing myself to take full responsibility. People will judge me, some will condemn, some will know there’s always a deeper truth. At the end of the day, she remained the boat with no name – and I the captain with no home.
“Time will tell what this world wants to do with me yet
But I have a feeling deep inside the waves arent done pummeling me yet.”
Yesterday, Jon sent me this:
“July 6
Fortunately everyone was physically okay but it feels as though I lost a dear friend, my home, and my hope at one time. I can’t sleep with the pictures in my mind and losing my apetite just thinking about everything.”
———
My heart is breaking – not so much for the boat, which is, after all, just a thing – but for a good young man who is facing the greatest crisis of his life. If you see his posts on this or any site, give him a shout-out of support, a pat on the back, anything that will help him get back on course. I know what I’m gonna tell him next time I have the chance:
There is only one true vessel in life you can count on. It’s inside you. And its name is yours.