“Is water coming out?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe check the raw water strainer?”
“Strainer’s clean. How could the exhaust temperature be too high?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the sensor’s going bad?”
Colin’s guess would prove correct—for all the good it did us. We were floating in the middle of the Bay of Biscay 300 miles from land, couldn’t run our motor, and despite having carefully logged and stored a total of 304 spare parts on board—none of them was an extra exhaust temperature sensor.
Luckily, we’re a sailboat. So we just—
Nope. If you read about that huge high pressure system that sat on Western Europe like an overheated hippopotamus and turned chic Parisians into sweaty messes, that same system also stole the wind right out from under us.
No motor, no move.
No wind, also no move.
We had food and water enough. We weren’t taking on water, we just weren’t going anywhere. Asking for a tow from our position would have been like calling for AAA for roadside assistance in the middle of the Sahara.
So we waited for wind.
Before we left Cherbourg, France on what was supposed to be a five-day trip to A Coruña, Spain, I’d worried about a lot of things. About the infamous currents of the Alderney Race and the equally infamous sea states of the Bay of Biscay. But mostly I’d been worried about how I would fare on a longer passage. Our longest to date had been three days and that was many years ago.
I wondered whether sleep deprivation and the constant movement of the boat would feel miserable or whether I’d get into a groove, whether I’d experience the joy of adventure along with the challenge of it. I felt older than I wanted to and wondered if I’d grow into a newly hardened sea self or break down?
There was only one way to find out. For all my fears of failure, my fear of not trying is quite a bit stronger.
We untied the lines.
Which is how, days later, we came to be going absolutely nowhere at all.
It’s a concept as old as sailing, being becalmed. Today, the word is so foreign it sounds like something you’d find on a day spa menu just after the reiki treatments. Not so very long ago, it was something that worried sailors as much as storms and the black tongue.
I knew all that in theory. I’d even written a full becalmed scene in an early draft of what will become Book 4 of The Navigator Series—searing heat, an improvised canvas tarp, a passenger singing opera to keep spirits up.
Living it was another matter. For all our safety and modern communications, I felt a profound sense of vulnerability and a deep uncertainty, wondering when the winds would arrive, from which direction, and—in my darker moments—if they’d ever come at all.
But more than that, I was genuinely surprised to find myself with zero agency. It happens so rarely in our modern world that I literally experienced utter disbelief that the answer could possibly be that there was nothing I could do.
Surely we could MacGyver something. Action adventure Cheyenne would have 3D printed an exhaust temperature sensor out of parts cannibalized from the fridge and an old bobby pin, but this me, the real me, just had to wait it out.
The closest modern feeling I can compare it to is being in traffic. You know how your discomfort level changes by degrees of forward motion? Moving slowly but surely is mildly frustrating. Stop and go is tougher. But when you hit actual gridlock and lose any ability to forecast future progress, it changes everything about the experience. Your blood pressure climbs and emotion kicks logic to the curb as you wonder if you’ll still be stuck in front of that deli between 3rd and 4th Street come November.
In the sailboat version, every time a little puff of air came up, we’d scramble and use every light air sailing trick we knew to make a 15 ton boat ghost forward in 3 knots of wind. Then that would die out and we simply bobbed like a cork. Currents swept us forward, then backward. We counted our victories one mile at a time. As weather forecasts shifted, our destination changed from A Coruña to Bilbao and then La Rochelle.
And I spent a lot of time imagining my heroine Ellen sitting beside me during that voyage. I think she would have been genuinely confused by my surprise (though perhaps not my angst) at being unable to control whether we reached port in 5 days or 50.
“Uncertainty is inherent to voyaging, Cheyenne,” she may have gently said. To which I would have responded—since I had plenty of time to imagine this hypothetical meeting—“Stick around and get used to driving with Google Maps ETAs for a couple decades, and then get back to me.” To which she would have said: “Driving?”
When three days stretched to five, and then five stretched out to seven, I was pleased to find myself writing things like this in my journal:
Coasting along through the slinky, inky night. Out here we could be anywhere. At least anywhere in the northern hemisphere. The bright, shining Big Dipper gives that one geographical clue. Even though our bow wave was more like a ripple, dolphins came to play today. Big bottlenose, splashing around, clicking, and whistling.
I’ve been surprised by how the quiet has grown on me. The gentle rush of water at the stern like periodic tropical heavy rain, the washing machine whoosh up forward, the occasional slam of a wave that got cheeky.
No ambition, no drive, no boredom, even. Not really. I’m contented to watch the waves slide by, same as the last waves. I’ve stopped thinking about arrival, only counting down the time left on this one watch before I can sleep. I just am. An unusual state for me. And oh how I’ve missed this. This freedom from desire. I’d forgotten how much I missed it.
Eventually, we made it safe and sound to La Rochelle, and—greatest surprise of all—the tech who showed up the very next morning to fix our sensor brought a plate of fresh pastries with him. Pastries! Really, really good French croissants and pains au chocolat and pains au raisin. Pastries I would have gladly sailed 7.5 days for.
So the universe, she knows what she’s doing. I’ll see your A Coruña in 5 days and raise you a La Rochelle in 7.
Which brings me back to that scene in Book 4—the tarp, the opera, all that noble suffering. I wrote it years ago, certain I knew what being becalmed would feel like. Dramatic. Desperate. Faintly heroic.
The real thing had no opera. Just the two of us squinting at an error code we couldn’t fix, a sky that wouldn’t cooperate, and a great deal of bobbing. It was quieter than I’d invented, and stranger, and somehow truer—full of things I never would have thought to make up.
So I’ll be rewriting that scene before the book comes out. Turns out the sea is a better editor than I am. I keep handing it my careful draft of how the passage ought to go, and it crosses out my best material and pencils something better in the margin. I don’t expect I’ll ever stop being surprised by what comes back. And I’m fairly sure I don’t want to.
Fair winds,
Cheyenne
Departing Cherbourg with no idea what we were in for.
This was a lot of the voyage. Sea, sky, sun in various combinations and quantities.
And dolphins!
We became light air experts with our punk rock gennaker.
I wasn’t exaggerating about those pastries in the least.
This little guy is what sent our voyage in a completely different direction. Pretty much the same size as last month's Blue Triscuit.
La Rochelle had spectacular sights of its own that we would have missed.
I can never resist a maritime museum, and this one had a very rare treat. If you are a sailor, you may well know of Joshua, Bernard Moitissier’s boat. It’s the red one behind me.
