Escape from Seahaven Island
Good stories are recycled because their messages endure. Circe’s island is one of those oft-recycled concepts; a place which ensnares travelers not by force, but willingly through comfort, decadence, and vice, transforming the ensnared so they can never leave again. In the canonical Odyssey would-be visitors are transformed into pigs (and thus permanent residents of the island). The Truman Show’s Seahaven Island is a mythic analogue to Circe’s Aeaea, where Truman is complicitly captive in the uber-safe, benign existence of pseudo-idyllic small-town American life.
“He can leave at any time. If it was more than just a vague ambition, if he was absolutely determined to discover the truth, there’s no way we could prevent him from leaving. What distresses you, really, caller, is that ultimately, Truman prefers his ‘cell,’ as you call it”
~ Christof (Producer of the Truman Show)
When Truman endeavors to leave Seahaven, the artificial universe around him reacts like an immune system - closing roads, cancelling flights, and climactically throwing the entire rage of an artificial sea at his tiny sailboat. Jesus, can I relate to that.
There is a reason I write in this blog instead of venting my refit woes at cocktail parties. The “sailing thing” is a binary good-or-bad experience to most people that ask about it, and the slog of gaining ground only to give nearly all of it right back seems like a pointless struggle if you aren’t at the center. The number, frequency and timing of setbacks have often felt conspiratorial enough to make me check my bathroom mirror for tiny cameras. When you zoom out far enough the struggles make perfect sense - Defiant is a near half-century-old vessel that was not treated well for many of her years, so of course things are going to break, and do so in cascades. But in the moment, it is hard not to imagine those inevitable avalanches of misfortune are somehow malevolently architected. I stopped sharing my immediate relaunch plans with anyone for fear of tipping off whatever gremlins/angry sea-god/reality-TV-execs before I could make my escape. I didn’t need Defiant to be perfect, but I did need her to hold together well enough to take her many imperfections with us and get underway.
Last Saturday I was still missing one last toilet part and a long-shot adapter replacement for my wind instrumentation (if that didn’t work it would mean a trip up the mast). Yes, we leave without the wind speed/direction data, but it would make single-handed long hauls much harder. No, we could not leave without a working toilet. The parts arrived Tuesday and by some stroke of good fortune (the sea-god must have been sleeping) the wind adapter worked! Leaving me only a bit of uncooperative plumbing to attend to. By Thursday the plumbing was done, and my untitled checklist (I didn’t dare to call it something obvious like “prelaunch” or “provisioning”) was pages long but dwindling quickly. The weather models said dry and glassy calm Friday, Saturday and Sunday, perfect for putting the new serpentine belt through paces.
By Friday afternoon the list was now very short:
secure the fallen name board back to the transom
drain out and cover the dinghy
fill up on diesel & water tanks
GTFO
To tackle the name board I first needed to deal with the dinghy situation (so I could use the dinghy to get to it). My plan was to lower the dinghy into the water, swim in and pull the drain plug, secure the cover, and hoist it back up. This is where things got weirdly Truman-show-esque.
Defiant was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of jellyfish. I have no idea why. No other boat in the marina had this weird fan base at the time 🤷. So I improvised. The dinghy pulled out vertical, draining enough so I could beach it on the dock. Then back into the water it went, and I was now standing on my soft-bottom tender while I screwed, taped and epoxied the board back into place. The whole thing felt like a live action game of Super Mario, my ungraceful self balancing on a wobbly plank across a tiny inflatable boat while angry sting-monsters pulsed in the water below me.
As the sun went down I quietly moved my truck out of the slip parking spot (I’ll be back to relocate it in a few weeks). All that was left was to fill up the tanks. True to form, the next bizarre nature attack took the form of a biblical swarm of mosquitos. The onslaught came from nowhere and was hard to believe - I could clap my hands and my palms would be covered with mosquito remains. Defiant’s water fill is through the window and under the settee - meaning I’d have to leave a window open with no screen for the 15-20 minutes it takes to fill the tanks. And once that brood of mosquitos gets inside the cabin, they are never leaving. I decided this was tomorrow-me’s problem, and headed off to bed.
I said no goodbyes that night, had no last rounds at the Tiki Bar. Whatever ethereal prison guards I needed to sneak past in the morning, I wasn’t going to risk giving them the head’s up. Saturday, 4am was too early for even the mosquitos; I filled the water tanks, pulled up my perfectly-tuned dock lines from the slip, and plodded over sleepily to the fuel dock to top off. To my dismay the new fuel pump refused to pump, and I was forced to bother people for the tricks to make it dispense dino-juice. My secret was out, but I was already in the channel it was too late! Nothing the angry sea-god could do to slow me down now, or so I thought.
I didn’t know it was even possible to have no wind and shit sea state, but such things do happen. And did happen, Saturday morning. 1kt of wind yet somehow my bowsprit was submerged over and over with less than a 2-Mississippi count between dunks. It was raining in solid sheets of water, and cold; I was shivering at the helm at 10am, on the last Saturday of July, in Virginia. The swell destroyed our speed - at full throttle Defiant could not make 3kts over ground. As the morning progressed it did not get better.
I started looking for a bail-out spot, figured I’d drop an anchor and wait for either the bay to calm down or the wind to pick up. At my current pace it was going to take 35 hours to get to Drum Point, and I didn’t have 35 hours of this in me. But the morning had been so slow-going that bailing out basically meant turning around. I didn’t need to do the smart thing here, or the right thing to stay safe - I needed to finally break through whatever barrier the universe had constructed around Defiant’s relaunch over the last year, or we would never escape. I turned off the plotter screen, set a course due North, and posted up on the aft coaming to wait it out.
An hour passed, then another. I forced myself to eat an orange, which was weirdly enough to settle my body without making me seasick. Then, right below the Potomac, there was suddenly wind! Not a ton, 7kts on a beam reach, but I’d take it. Our steady speed increased to 3.9kts, and the sail pressure grounded the boat enough to breathe. The swell died down, and by 4pm we were making 5kts with an 8pm ETA at the anchorage. The clouds parted, the sun burned warm on us. Bash moved from his spot cowering in the v-berth pillow mound to splayed out and sunning himself on the leeward gunnel. Jim Carrey could not have imagined a more cinematically triumphant moment.
We are now underway. I think I may start publishing a separate captain’s log for the Defiant journey stuff, and reserve posts here for things technical, uniquely eventful, or otherwise significant outside of normal sailing. Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around The World is a classic book, but a lot of it is the good Captain describing and re-describing weather. Wind is good, too much wind is bad, big seas are scary - we get it. But that, on repeat, doesn’t make for overly engaging reading in my opinion. So I’ll try to break things up.
Bash and I will make a land-trip back to Windmill soon to collect my truck, and that will be our chance to say goodbye to friends. The spell is broken and Defiant has escaped her never-ending refit.