ChapterOne
Being lost on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean seemed romantic in the movies, but in all those movies the captains were handsome, capable men, not the drunkard woman I hired. I should have known better than to venture into the South Pacific on a whim and while this wasn’t my dream, it had become my nightmare. Trying to focus, I reminded myself that every challenge could be turned into a learning opportunity, but it didn’t work. The only wisdom I could extract from this particular situation was not to trust strangers, and not to be so cheap the next time I chartered a boat. If there was a next time.
Below deck, I slammed a drawer shut and glared at the mess of clothes, charging cables, books, kitchen tools, towels, broken Christmas lights, and other whatchamacallits now on the floor. I’d turned this piece-of-shit boat upside down twice and still nothing. Leaving the galley in chaos, I marched up to the lounge and found Bambi—the halfwit captain I’d hired a month and a half ago—on a chair near the helm. The small-framed woman with leathery, sun-darkened skin had fallen asleep in the sun. Eyes closed, her head bobbed from side to side, lolling with the boat’s movement. Her right arm hung down with the other curled inside her light windbreaker.
“Wake up!” I yelled. She didn’t flinch. “Where’s the GPS? And the satellite phone?”
Bambi mumbled something incoherent.
At the last marina, I caught her trading my solar charger for a small bottle of liquor. I leaned in closer to hear better. “Did you sell them?”
She opened her eyes and squinted at me. “Hi, Sydney,” she said with a crooked smile. Her breath reeked of alcohol. “Whatcha want, babe?” she garbled, sounding exactly like the radio on the boat, and took out a nearly empty bottle from under her shirt.
I grabbed it from her hand, almost pulling Bambi out of her seat along with it.
“What is this?” I made a big show of checking the label on the bottle as if I didn’t already know what it was. “Where’d you get it?”
Soon after we’d sailed from Australia, I’d learned Bambi was a not-so-recovering alcoholic. She had conveniently forgotten to mention this detail during our interview regarding captaining a sailboat for a three-month journey. Her face was kind, but battered by weather and sun. She spoke knowledgeably about the areas where I intended to scatter my father’s ashes on the tropical islands. Her résumé listed as many years of experience as any other captain I’d met. But I was a thirty-year-old software engineer, with no self-defense training. If a man were to attack me on a boat in the middle of nowhere, all I could throw at him would be complicated algorithms and lines of code. Bambi seemed a safer bet.
Turned out, I was wrong. Shocker.
Bambi’s head sagged, and her body started to slide off the chair. I caught her just in time and propped her up, steadying her against the back of her seat. “We agreed you wouldn’t buy any more booze.” I fought to keep my voice even.
After her last bender, Bambi had surrendered her cash willingly and showed me where she had stashed bottles, which I poured out. At each island, we shopped together for provisions, then a taxi would take us to a peaceful cove. Bambi would stay in the car with our hired driver while I said goodbye to my father one more time. Not much booze-buying to be done there. The only other times we’d been separated on the trip were when she had to do whatever captains did to take care of their boats—maintenance or whatever. I’d used that time to find a place with decent Wi-Fi and reconnect to the life I’d left behind. It wasn’t that much of a life, really. Still, I needed to check my email and send my friend Tina an “I’m okay” note at every stop or she’d worry.
“Open your eyes, Bambi.” My hands started to shake from anger or nerves (or both) and I inhaled the salt air and slowly let it out. “Tell me the truth. Did you sell my GPS and the phone to get this brandy?”
“It isn’t brandy. It’s rum,” Bambi slurred.
I gritted my teeth. “Answer the question.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe?” My eyes went so big they hurt. “What the hell? How are we supposed to know where we are or where we’re going? The navigation on this stupid tin can of a boat has failed, and you sold our only backup. We have no way to call for help.”
“We’ll be okay. The stars will guide us.” Bambi threw her arm out toward the sky, nearly falling out of her chair again.
“Damn it!” I hurled the glass bottle into the ocean.
A brief wave of regret coursed through me—should I have placed a message inside? A harsh chuckle escaped me. We were probably goners. In all my meticulous research I knew that innormalcircumstances, a sailboat would have at least one backup GPS device, if not several. ButBloody Marywas clearly anything but normal. In retrospect, the boat name should’ve been my first red flag.
I walked as far as I could from the drunken fool, making it to the foredeck. A full forty feet away. Not far enough.
“Well done, Dad,” I muttered staring into the vast expanse of nothing but blue water and sky. “Well. Done.”
Okay, so it wasn’t technically my father’s fault I was in this predicament. He wasn’t to blame for my rock bottom after mom died and he got sick, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that my husband had filed for divorce.
It took two years of suffering before I decided to change my life. At first, the thought of me chartering a boat for three months was absurd. But the more Tina pressured me into it, the more the idea grew on me. Until in the end it seemed to be cathartic, necessary even, and with each passing minute, the idea ofnotsailing worsened.
Until now.
Standing at the bow’s edge, holding onto the lines, I let the cool mist from the waves bring back some semblance of normality.
Returning below deck, ignoring a moaning Bambi, I tidied my stateroom and the galley, both in shambles after my frantic search. I ran my finger over the engraving on the urn, allowing myself a smile, “Follow me at your own risk.” My father had always been a wisecracker. He’d written those words into his will, but I bet he hadn’t thought it would be used before he turned sixty. Or that I’d follow his mapped-out sailing pipedream. I carefully placed my father’s ceramic urn back into its bright green flotation bag, having pulled it out earlier in my frenzy—even though there’d been no reason the GPS or phone would’ve been inside it.
Damn it, Bambi. The reason I’d bought a portable GPS at our second stop a month earlier was because she didn’t have navigation aboard theBloody Mary—correction: the navigation was spotty. Up until tonight, secured with a functional GPS (or I foolishly thought we had them), things had been going well. Bambi taught me to catch and fillet fish, some boating etiquette, and how to tie different knots. I got used to short showers and sleeping without air-conditioning, and I enjoyed sunny days filled with trouble-free tasks.
Except nothing Bambi had shared about sailing was valuable right now.
