“Smart lady!” I responded with a gruff Captain Ron impression. A character from one of the DVD movies Gavin had sent. We’d watched it together, using the laptop as our home-theater, enough times to almost have it memorized. Since then we’d taken to cracking each other up and lightening the stress-load with impressions of Kurt Russell’s feckless Captain Ron. Looking around, I noticed the fog, almost a misty drizzle, made everything wet. Droplets hung from the rigging and the lifelines and water ran down the sails in rivulets. “Hey, that’s actually a good idea. I was a little afraid to mention that this coffee’s the last of the water from the tanks. Let’s try harvesting some your way.”
Using clean hand towels, we soaked condensation from the sails and rigging and managed to fill a couple of pots with cloudy water by wringing them out. Accumulating water with the wipe and wring method was slow going during the day, but at night every surface exposed to the air perspired.
I used muted daylight and the hardwired solar panels to keep up communication with the satellite modem. Frustratingly all we got over a week’s time was a terse reply from Gavin:
Renting your place to Sandy… Help with the $$$ hemorrhage plus incentive for my by-weekly maintenance visits since you’re doing the long-haul. Thermostat set accordingly; can’t expect her to freeze! Think: priority = safety!
There was still nothing from Tom. In desperation I sent him our GPS coordinates and my weather report, hoping he might respond.
Deciding I couldn’t put off doing battle with the electrical problem any longer, I hauled everything out of my cabin, including the mattress, to expose the battery banks. With no word from Tom, I sacrificed the satellite modem’s direct connection to the solar panels and wired the panels directly to the isolated engine starter battery. It was the smallest battery on board and the one most likely to benefit from the trickle of electricity I could wring from nature. The wind generator had been spinning uselessly in the breeze so I connected that as well and then waited.
We hadn’t seen a sunrise or sunset in ages. There were only increasing and decreasing levels of light through constant fog as the earth moved around a sun I assumed was still up there somewhere. That evening when light levels dropped below the solar panels’ charging threshold, I was astonished to find an electrical charge in the engine’s starting battery. Maybe even enough to get it running. Anna manned the helm while I obsessively traced circuits through unbending thumb-diameter sized wires. From a rotary charge-selector switch, a red wire descended into the bilge. Absolutely impossible to follow without removing batteries, each weighing as much as a person.
Anna’s tiny digital camera, the mini Mag light, a bendy stick and some duct tape provided a solution. From a video, I’d made by shoving the camera and flashlight along the wire, I saw a fuzzy greenish brown artifact suspended between two spans of wire. That was it: an in-line fuse installed in an unreachable location by Turkish electrical installers. Unfortunately, the fuse dangled into the bilge where it had been submerged during our various inundations. The combination of electricity and seawater literally dissolved the fuse.
With the corroded fuse bypassed and the electrical system cobbled together, I hollered up the companionway, “Let ’er rip!”
Anna turned the key and precious electricity heated the glow plugs until she engaged the starter. Relays and solenoids closed like pistol shots, the motor turned over, and over, and over… and stopped. “Sorry, forgot to open fuel shut-off.”
I ground my teeth thinking, what idiots we were! and hoped there was enough charge left for a second try. Anna verbalized how I felt about our oversight and slapped the fuel shut-off open. With a preliminary groan from the starter, the engine came to life. “We did it! We did it, we did it!” I shouted over the glorious roar. To my immense relief, the alternator put out a massive surge of current and I hollered urgent instructions to increase the RPM to prevent it from stalling the engine. It struck me that such hardship came down to an incompetently mounted fuse and a bilge pump hooked up backwards. I brooded, resenting the implications stupid little things like that had for our survival.
The air had been getting progressively drier as we tracked southwest. I figured we’d been following a course at least a hundred nautical miles off the northwest African coast. Over the week, daytime condensation had dried up completely and night watches produced little in cloth-harvested water. The Canary Islands were out there somewhere. I just wasn’t quite sure where. Coffee had become a forsaken luxury and we’d taken to sipping vinegar laced fluid from tins of Turkish vegetable-medley. Bringing the electrical system back online provided another source of condensation — meaning drinking water — from the evaporator coils of the now functional fridge-freezer. It had been hard-won but probably a lifesaver.
With the fuse bypassed and the batteries recharged, the solar panels and wind generator kept up with our electrical needs. Having electric light made sunsets less ominous. Unfortunately, the water maker, the radar, the autopilot and computer navigation remained unserviceable. I emailed Gavin to reassure him that, thanks to my brilliance, we were back in action electricity-wise, and then on a whim, I once more tried sending our GPS coordinates to Tom.
This time we got a reply, a terse message with coordinates, instructions and some hope for a landing in Las Palmas, Canary Islands.
“It’s about bloody time! I figure he was ticked off and embarrassed about Gibraltar.” I said to Anna. “I wonder how much we can trust him on Las Palmas?”
THIRTY-THREE
After a couple of days, following Tom’s emailed instructions, the lacy outlines of huge cranes coalesced through a smoky haze a few miles north of Gran Canaria.
“Jess, we’ve made it!” Anna pointed at the cranes.
“Not until we’re sitting at the dock sipping fruity blender cocktails.”
It would be a far cry better than the seawater I’d stupidly started sucking from soaked washcloths. It’s probably what gave me a nasty case of the runs. Regardless, the intestinal distress kept me running below often enough that satellite emails had little time to sit in the inbox unnoticed. The latest provided Tom’s final instructions for landing in Las Palmas. I followed them to the letter, but without the confidence I’d felt pulling in to Gibraltar. As instructed, we kept radio silence and tied up to a Texaco fuel dock just after closing time.
Tom’s orders were to keep Anna hidden while waiting for his friend to take over. By the time a harried looking Spanish government official showed up, he was over an hour late. He made sure we knew he owed Tom a favor, a debt he wasn’t terribly happy settling by helping us. Nonetheless, he was going to let us in as long as we stuck to his rules which he made very clear. He was adamant that he had never seen Anna and knew nothing about her. He granted me, and only me, one week in the country. Wrapping up his visit, he called a couple of his sail-maker friends to help ensure that the week was as productive as possible for me and the boat.
“Only seven days. One minute more and I must report you myself. The girl must stay hidden. If anything happens, I only know I checked you in, I inspected your boat and only saw you on board.” The official instructed.
“I understand that I cannot leave the boat. Thank you for this, sir.” Anna said.
“You can do what you like, but if you are caught, I must arrest your friend and you will go to a camp for detention before you are sent back to Russia. Illegal immigration, the smuggling of people, is the most big problem facing the Canary Islands now.” He looked at Anna. “Believe me, you will not want to be caught.”