Sailing Faith: The Long

Way Home

The Gregg A Granger

Family Adventure

Gregg, please sign my book to:

 Wahoo!!!

After several days of easy sailing in easy seas, the wind grows tired. The water calms. We sit. We swim a couple times, which is an experience a thousand miles from land, in water where depth is also measured in miles. We motor several days until concerns of needing the motor in the future overtake the frustration of so little progress in the present. We have food on board, and the water-maker works. The food I mentally inventory doesn’t include the fish caught since leaving Isabela. It’s not that I forget to count them, but of the five fish we hook, we land zero. We know some of the fish we don’t catch are big from the song the reel sings.

We have three lures from Hampton, cedar plugs—hollow, cigar-shaped pieces of cedar with a lead weight on one end. The line runs through the hollow to a hook. After school in the first day of Greggii’s boredom, I tell him to paint whatever he wants on them using his sisters’ nail polish. He paints one of them red chrome, silver chrome, and blue chrome, in the manner you’d expect of six-year-old hands on a rocking boat. This is our all-time best fishing lure.

A good way to occupy Greggii’s hands and mind is cleaning the tackle box. He likes doo-hickeys and gadgets more than most six-year-olds, and other than the sharp pointed objects in a tackle box that our Prevention Specialist, Lorrie, makes note of, a better collection of doo-hickeys and gadgets doesn’t exist on Faith.

No wind and short on fuel. Faith drifts as fast as any coconut bobbing in the same water. Lorrie notes our heading—the direction the bow points—sometimes to Antarctica, sometimes to Alaska, occasionally to the Galapagos Islands we just left. The autopilot is turned off because it takes motion through the water for the rudder to work. We move with it, not through it and the heading doesn’t matter. The water is going to the Marquesas, and we’re stuck to the water. (page 42)

Bath time on passage

Taking a break on passage