How to Lose Several Mermaids, and your Nerves in Open Water

I am on all fours wiping up a pool of mystery fluid behind the toilet in the master head of our boat. It is 7am, I have had 2 hours sleep the night before and I am confused and scared. I’m confused because the whole boat to looks like it’s been smacked around by a playful yet aggressive giant. I’m scared because I think there are more playful, aggressive giants out there.

Let me backtrack for those of you new to my special brand of lunacy. Five months ago my husband and I sold everything, including our house, but not the dog, and bought a trawler. After months of preparation, including squeezing our remaining possessions, plus one bewildered dog, into the boat, we took off on an adventure of a lifetime. How amazing does that sound? And in all fairness it has been incredible. Right up to the point when we are a month out from our Atlantic crossing.

Over the last five months I have enjoyed watching people’s look of shock and admiration when I casually slip into conversation that we are preparing to cross the Atlantic. I can’t say I don’t feel smug and accomplished to see their awestruck reactions, and suitably adjust my own face to convey polite disinterest, like it’s really no big deal. But, while I’m on all fours cleaning up mystery fluids which no one outside of nurses, forensic teams, and mothers of young children should ever have to identify, I’m not feeling so smug and accomplished.

It all started when we left St Martin in the French Caribbean for an overnight passage back to the British Virgin Islands. It is a 15 hour night passage. Night passages are essential if your average speed is about 7 knots and you want to get somewhere this year. At night there are also usually less other boats to avoid, and also the wind sometimes (but not always) tends to die down a bit. When we started this boat life, my body initially refused to adapt to night passages. At night my eyelids would start filing for closure after four hours no matter how much coffee I poured into the situation. But I have been slowly building up my resistance to Morpheus’s embrace with the help of strong French coffee and chocolate, which feels like the most civilized way to suffer….at least sober.

This is important because on a long crossing such as the Atlantic there are at least 15 nights and days to navigate through. Given that we are a crew of only two (if you don’t count the dog, who has shown no interest in watch duty), that means there are many night shifts in my future. So I was very proud that I managed from 11pm to 5am. Pie-eyed but pleased with myself, I woke my refreshed husband as land came into sight. Tada! Good morning Captain!

I went down to get some well-earned sleep feeling proud of myself. I’ll make a sailor out of you one day my gal, I chuckled to myself as I drifted off. A few hours later I was awakened by some rather vigorous wave motion. I stumbled up to the pilothouse to see where we were. We weren’t much further than when I had handed the controls over to my husband two hours earlier. What the heck?

That’s when he reminded me that we had “discussed” (he had told me) that before we reached our next destination, we were going to practice something called parrot anchor deployment. There was a big red bag that had appeared on the deck for this exercise, but I hadn’t seen anything resembling a parrot. Perhaps it's called a parrot because it's red and flaps around in a storm, I remember musing.

“You mean you have just been circling in the ocean waiting for me to wake up?” I blinked in astonishment as he confirmed that was indeed the case. I was also mildly alarmed that he had been burning all that expensive fuel unnecessarily. “If you wanted to stop, why didn’t you just stop the boat instead of burning fuel?” I asked in what I felt was a tone of polite restraint.

“Because,” he replied. If we do that, the digital stabilizers won’t function and we would be rolling all over the place.” This sounded like the most logical sentence I had heard in the last 24 hours, so I decided to try one of my own. “I have slept for two hours in the last 24. I do not feel in the best condition to try a new thing. Is it essential that we practice the parrot anchor now?” Ken responded equally firmly, “It is absolutely essential as this is the only deep water we are going to encounter before we leave for Bermuda, and I need to know if it works or if I need to buy some items to modify the setup. And it’s a para anchor, not a parrot anchor.”

Fair enough, let’s get on with this shit show then, I thought, as internally I began laughing manically like someone who has just tipped slightly over the edge and past the point of reality. Although I was deeply disappointed that it wasn’t called a parrot anchor, admittedly “para“ did sound more military and serious, and made sense because it turns out it is an actual parachute that goes in the water and kind of points the boat into the waves. And given that this type of anchor is only used when the weather is really terrible and you are exhausted, and just want to reduce the possibility of dying, it did seem it needed a serious name.

Dazed and tired, I watched as my husband eagerly donned a serious-looking life jacket, complete with whistle, mysterious high-tech dangly things, and bright orange handles (presumably for when I had to fish him out of the ocean). He launched into detailed instructions on how I was going to helm the boat just so. Now, my helming skills are marginal at best. My greatest nautical achievement to date is that I once navigated slowly around an anchorage without hitting anything expensive. And here was this man, dressed like a Navy SEAL (which would have been hot in any other context), giving me a rapid-fire tutorial on how to deftly maneuver the boat while he deployed the para anchor.

“Are you going to video it?” he asked encouragingly, knowing I love documenting new things. “I’m not sure I have enough arms for that,” I replied, eyeing the helm controls, which include differential throttles, a rudder stick, and a bow thruster that I had, up till now, treated as decorative. “Let’s just get on with it.” I sighed.

Ken leapt into action. I swear this man lives for disasters, which is probably why he married me. When there are no pending disasters, he practices for them. Which is probably why I married him. Our life is not boring.

He slowed the boat down, giving me a running commentary. “So you need to turn the boat into a quartering wind by applying the differentials and also the rudder, and possibly the bow thruster until you slow the boat to a stop, and you have to keep it there while I deploy the para anchor over the bow. Given that we are in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight, we will use that small piece of seaweed floating over there” he randomly pointed at the choppy waves. “….to measure when we have stopped all forward motion”.

We didn’t need the piece of seaweed I couldn’t even see to know we had stopped. Suddenly the boat started to sway wildly from side to side in an alarming fashion. Do you remember the child’s toy, Weebles? The jingle went “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.” You could smack one of those toys as hard as you liked and it would not fall over, but dramatically teeter from side to side before eventually settling to a stop until you whacked it again. Of course this was prior to computer games when a game where you hit something repeatedly was all a child needed for hours of amusement. I’m definitely dating myself here…. Anyway, the motion felt like we were in a giant Weeble, with an invisible curious giant child smacking us hard repeatedly…except I was fairly certain things were, in fact, falling down. There was a crash which sounded like it came from the galley.

The dog wedged herself between my legs for stability as I clung to the lifeline -it suddenly made sense why the rails on the side of the boat are called this. I could hear more ominous crashing sounds coming from downstairs in our living area. One minute the ocean was looming alarmingly close, as if the boat was about to gracefully lie down for a little nap, and the next moment we swung swiftly back over to the ocean on the other side like an upside-down pendulum. It felt like the kind of fairground ride I would pay good money to avoid.

“Ken, I can’t do this, make it stop!” I screamed, just as from below came a series of more hideous sounding crashes.

Ken sighed and pushed the throttles forward and the swaying stopped. He sorrowfully removed his life jacket. Sorry honey, no disaster training today, I thought with a small, unkind flicker of joy.

But my relief was premature. As soon as I went downstairs, the sources of the crashing sounds made themselves very clear. There was broken stuff everywhere. My glorious china mermaid jug was missing a fin handle. A mermaid figurine, complete with clam shell bra, had shattered into hundreds of pieces. All of the lamps and fake orchids were lying on the floor like casualties of a very glamorous bar fight. A jar of coffee had performed an impressive Olympic-level long jump off the galley counter, flown across the galley, into the living room, and, like a final triumphant salute, had spilled its coffee grain contents all over the cream carpet. My new and prized French peach jam, sourced in St Martin with the reverence usually reserved for rare jewels, had attempted an escape from the top shelf of the fridge, only to land on the glass vegetable shelf below, which had shattered all over my now bedazzled onions.

And the final, award-winning performance went to the items behind the toilet in the main head, some of which had fallen into the toilet, while more adventurous bottles had knocked over the toilet brush holder, which had spilled its special anti-germ liquid all over the floor. I really do hope it’s anti-germ liquid. Although I don’t recall every putting any fluid in there…

After I had cleared up the chaos caused by the two minutes of the aborted mission, I reconvened with Ken and told him that I was truly concerned about my ability to handle a trans-Atlantic crossing if it involved a lot of Weeble activity. Unsurprisingly, he had also been having his doubts. Because despite the very best planning, no one can truly predict what a 14 day crossing across the Atlantic will contain.

So now we are at an impasse. We both agree that I am, very inconveniently, not currently an ocean-going salty sea dog capable of handling an ocean crisis, but Ken refuses to consider making the crossing with a competent crew. His opinion being he would rather not go at all. But I must get across the Atlantic. My daughter is there. My mother and sister are there. And this idea of taking our boat back to the place I came from, after 30 years living abroad, has been less of a plan and more of a quiet, persistent calling I finally get to answer: A draw to return to the country where I grew up, but experience it in a totally different way.

And now, rather awkwardly, it appears that the weak link in this bold, romantic plan… is me. What to do?

Because at the moment, somewhere between the broken glass, the coffee-stained carpet, mystery fluid, and a small graveyard of shattered mermaids, I am starting to suspect that I am not, in fact, a woman of the sea. I am, instead, a woman who bought the mermaids, believed the story, and is now standing ankle-deep in their remains… wondering if perhaps the ocean has been trying to tell me that I might not be cut out for the very life I had just built.

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