Dreams in the Dirt
A downwind run with no autopilot, a boatyard full of unfinished stories, and a list that refuses to get shorter.
A wooden hull on the hard at Vuda, her lines coiled and waiting for a day that may or may not come.
We left Nuku'alofa on Saturday the fifth of September with the trades blowing twenty to twenty five knots and Fiji sitting almost exactly dead downwind. There was no autopilot. What we had was a pin, and the pin was not going to be used until I could pick up the rose joint waiting for us in Vuda. So the call was the Hydrovane and the headsail, and nothing else, because the main was still jammed in the mast and had shown no interest whatsoever in helping with the journey. It sat up there like a crew member who had signed on for the beer and not the watches.
For three of the four days the arrangement worked better than it had any right to. The vane steered, the headsail pulled, Cloud Nine rolled her way west through the trades and I did very little except eat, sleep, admire the system and be happy that we were somewhat on course. On the fourth day the wind died, which is what wind does when you start to trust it, and we finished under headsail with the engine helping. That last night was the hard part. There were islands in every direction and more boat traffic than we had seen in months, and the only thing I wanted in the world was to close my eyes, which was the one thing I could not do. I stood in the cockpit and talked to the boat. She did not answer, but she did not run into anything hard either.
