“Do any of these carpets fly?” I joked to the main floor brother on my way down the stairs. He didn’t get it, but tried his best to assure me that he would take care of the shipping and even the customs clearance formalities for my new rug.
Omar’s Yacht Sales looked far more likely to offer a solution to someone needing do-it-yourself transportation to the other side of the planet. The brokerage’s building wasn’t clad with rugs and was located in the heart of that huge gamelan marina. I wandered in, looking like a tourist, and asked about, “Something one can cross oceans in.” It was an easy guess the dark eyed, gorgeous receptionist thought I couldn’t be serious. To her credit, she set me up with an impeccably well dressed young man who looked like he’d never sold anything in his life, let alone a yacht.
The Turkish man, early twenties, slight, and terribly nervous, introduced himself as Erdem. He started right in. “Madam, what type of yacht did you have in mind?” Then the same sort of questions Alexi had asked in Odessa: power, sail, price. He didn’t refer to a computer or a website, though. He just listened to my answers: “Probably a sailboat. We need to get to Canada and a motorboat won’t have the range… Am I right?” Money came down to, “As little as possible,” and size and type was, “Whatever two people can reasonably handle over long distances.”
Erdem considered my criteria then pulled one of many large binders from a shelving unit. In it were pages and pages of sailboat listings. Some looked like bigger versions of the sailboat I raced around buoys back in Vancouver; some resembled oversized bathtubs with masts, and a disturbingly large number of them looked like set pieces from the Costner flick, Waterworld.
TWENTY-THREE
Day three in Marmaris and the clock was ticking.
Out in front of the apartment-hotel, I cowered from the sun in a sliver of shadow. Barely 9:00 am and the heat was relentless. The only clothes we had were what we wore leaving Odessa. I was sweating in a turtleneck, dark slacks and the same heavy boots I’d kicked at doors with in Kiev. Anna had taken a knife to her jeans, making crude but oh-so-stylish cut-offs.
Erdem, the youthful yacht broker I’d met the day before at the gamelan marina, pulled up in a late model, compact sedan the color of old nylons. Disintegrating pavement crunched under his dress shoes when he got out to greet us. I didn’t know anyone in Marmaris could possibly be dressed warmer than me, but Erdem was. I figured he was mere seconds from heatstroke in his three-piece suit and tie. He hadn’t a trace of perspiration, and the windows of his sedan were rolled down. Meaning: no air conditioning. It was downright spooky.
Miles of tooth-loosening road, mortised into near-vertical rock faces, led to an aerial view of an isthmus far below. Erdem double clutched, geared down, and the car pitched forward into a steep dive. Approaching the isthmus, haphazard white rows of objects resolved into a myriad of boats lined up like enormous tombstones.
“Ookh-tee!” Anna said from the backseat. “All of those white things are boats? Sure is a lot of them!”
“There is where we are going, dry storage.” Erdem pulled one hand off the wheel to point. “My uncle Omar has many boats there. Bad charter season he says, this year very bad, indeed.”
“You have an uncle in the charter business?” I asked.
“Not anymore. Now he is in the brokerage business. He says selling boats is better than sailing them.” Erdem grinned at his play on words.
The wind-swept isthmus we’d seen from above was a desert at ground level; an improbable expanse of gravel, canopied by row upon row of yachts propped up on flimsy looking stands: tree limbs, boards, oil drums, or even stones. Up close, the boats were surrealistic behemoths. They towered overhead like the huge stone heads of Easter Island. Winter storms had sand blasted the upside-down dorsal fin keels where the concentrated weight of vessel meets Earth. Cloudbursts and flash floods had spackled them with mud. Dust was everywhere. It was not an inspiring sight.
From a pile of wreckage, Erdem located and extracted a homemade ladder. Half a dozen or so feral cats scattered. He didn’t notice them, but Anna did. The junk pile was home to a number of cats and their kittens. Anna crouched down, held out a hand and mewled, “Koshka, kotichka… kiss-kiss-kiss.”
Erdem shook his head slowly then propped the ladder against one of the delicately balanced boats. After a couple of good, reassuring shoves, he invited us aboard.
Anna preferred the wild kittens. She hung back by their junk pile dens. I called her over, but hearing a lot of hissing, snarling, shrieking, and the occasional Russian expletive, left her alone.
Erdem climbed the rickety ladder with carefree abandon and called me up to join him. The deck was easily as high off the ground as the roof of a single story house. The difference being, houses are rarely propped up with sticks. Staring down at a sun blasted desert landscape from the deck of a sailboat was deeply disturbing.
On deck, I was hyper-aware of every vibration and nuance of angle throughout the delicately balanced monstrosity. I actively concentrated on Erdem’s patter. “Rigged with such and such steel, so and so pulley things, Kevlar — bulletproof? — rope.” I knew what most of the stuff did. Saturdays at the yacht club with friends hadn’t been a total waste. I just didn’t know the nomenclature. I gleaned what I could from Erdem’s performance, guessing at components, like life rafts and things I’d seen before.
The sheer size of the components was nearly beyond my comprehension. The boat was only twice the length of what I’d sailed on back home, but parts more than doubled in size. It was obviously not a simple factoring of length that determined the size of parts. These were orders of magnitude bigger and heavier. I reminded myself, the Vendee Globe racers sailed boats like this around the world all alone. Hell, we had only half the distance to go and there were two of us! Yeah — a piece of cake.
Looking up, the towering mast did nothing to alleviate my anxiety, gastric reflux or sudden hypoxia. The rigging was filthy, neglected and worn out. It was nothing like the carefully tuned and maintained day-sailor, racing boats at the club. Down below, however, was a completely different story: curtains, cabinetry, furniture, toilets with doors, sinks, shelves. Now we’re talking. It was a miniature, deluxe chalet compared to the fiberglass crawlspace I was used to. I was dreaming about sailing that baby into the Vancouver yacht club when Erdem intruded on my reverie. He wanted to make sure I knew about the non-romantic stuff. Things I was truly unfamiliar with: on board electrical, refrigeration, septic systems, inboard engines, and navigation equipment rivaling aircraft I’d flown.
The charter, cruising yacht I salivated over moments before was a complicated beast that not only had to sail, but accommodate the people on board — in style. Kind of a weird combination of sailboat and bungalow. I had experience with both, but never in a million years thought the skill sets required for either would intersect.
The next boat we shinnied aboard was much like the first, dirty and worn out, but with a heavier, more seaworthy, look to it. One thing in its favor was its make, Beneteau — a brand I’d heard spoken of around the yacht club in those same hushed reverent tones reserved for prestige automobiles. Anna, her arms and legs covered with nasty bites, scratches and welts, joined us on that one. Erdem asked if she’d enjoyed the kittens. Anna didn’t want to talk about it. She peered down below deck from the cockpit and asked, “Is that all there is?”
Never having been on or near a sailboat in her life, Anna maneuvered awkwardly down the companionway — sort of a deluxe ladder into the living area below deck — and looked around. She went through the cabins, sticking her head into closets, tapping on walls like a termite inspector. She seismically explored the area below the floor, tapping her foot with greater intensity when the sound was particularly hollow.