The summer between fifth and sixth grade, I set myself a project. I would write a book: The Complete History of the United States, Starting with the Explorers, by Cheyenne, age ten. Clearly, I was destined to become a writer. I checked reference material out of the library and filled page after page of binder paper in loopy handwriting.
I never finished that epic. The summer ran out long before the centuries did, and I learned a solid lesson about the scale of my ambitions. But I spent much of those sweltering months with Christopher Columbus, who—to a kid from California—marked the starting point of world history. The two of us got tight.
I pored over the maps he would have used, looking for anything I might have recognized from the National Geographic Atlas, but the coastlines, country names, and illustrations matched nothing I knew. It took me quite a while to realize how little he and his explorer-compatriots actually understood about the places they were going—and most of what he thought he knew was dead wrong.
On he sailed anyway.
This came to mind for a particular reason this past month. We’d just finished welding some leaks in the transom and were getting ready to head out on our next passage to Madeira, when we had to consider a danger that Columbus would have recognized right away but that is hard to square with our modern concept of marine biology.
Sea monsters.
The stretch of coast we were pointing into is one cruisers call Orca Alley. Over the past few years, a particular pod off the Iberian coast has developed a very specific hobby.
Eating rudders like potato chips.
Nobody knows why. There are theories—play, hunting practice, one matriarch’s grudge against hulls. What we know is that a rudder goes through a very precise hole in the bottom of the boat. Bang it around enough, or remove it entirely, and it leads to a very unwanted outcome.
The orcas have been sinking boats left and right.
I’m sad to say that’s not hyperbole. While we were in A Coruña, a boat was sunk outside the harbor two days after we arrived. Another went down outside Vigo the day before we got there. In our marina, one crew was still putting their boat back together after an attack, while the remnants of yet another boat’s rudder lay on the dock, bitten into pieces.
Now, we love these gorgeous giants of the dolphin family. Colin even once (accidentally) swam with them in the Sea of Cortez. And if you’ve seen the way they hunt seals by tipping them off ice floes, you know how smart they are. But they even scare the bajeezus out of great white sharks.
And they’ve been so active this year that some cruisers we know have canceled their sailing plans. We didn’t go that far, but we did change ours. Rather than sail to Lisbon, we headed for Madeira to get outside their hunting grounds as quickly as possible.
What day did we choose to run that freaky apex predator gauntlet? Why, the very day of the total solar eclipse in Spain last month—breaking every superstitious sailing rule in the book. Probably, Columbus’ crew would have mutinied before we even left port.
You’re allowed to wonder about our sanity.
But off we went into hostile territory anyway, as the light over the water turned thin and strange and wrong. Surreal is an overused word. But scanning the ocean for sea monsters while the sun disintegrated in front of us, I think, earned it.
By nightfall we’d reached open water without incident, and most of the rest of that 750-mile passage was tiring but glorious. Running downwind in twenty-five knots and two-meter seas, Pristine sailed like butter. A simple rhythm emerged, and we naturally found our way with the watch schedule. It was the new moon, so the five nights we spent at sea were blacker than black. No horizon. No seam between the water and the sky. No way to scan for danger. You just listen.
It’s a strange feeling to be so far out of range of help. There is a lot of ocean. Plenty of time to think about the same things crews have feared since the days of the explorers: sea monsters, leaky ships, and winds that send you forth into the unknown.
Happily, we encountered no dangers from the outside, but one challenge did appear from the inside. In the middle of the night, the bilge alarm went off, and we found a couple of liters of the Atlantic sloshing around in the very compartment we’d just worked so hard to seal. Not enough that we were in danger of sinking, but at 2am, all I could imagine was more weeks of trying to source the leak, find a welder, haul the boat, unplug all the electrics, test the work, plug it all back in. I saw the calendar for the adventure we’d planned slipping away, and a big unknown taking its place.
Honestly, it crushed me for a bit.
But sleep and daylight intervened with perspective. Pristine is an incredibly complex hand-built vessel, we’re finding the kinds of problems all new boats have, and we have the full support of the builder. These guys are good. And Colin has since upgraded the sealant on the swim-ladder bolts that might—might—be the solution. We won’t know until we can put her back in two-meter seas and see what happens. We hope to test that somewhere between Madeira and the Canaries.
But the upshot is our cruising plans are as unknown as Columbus’ Atlantic. Patagonia next? Panama? Halifax? We honestly don’t know. The boat, the calendar, and the weather will decide. And that’s something sailors of all eras share to varying degrees.
You never get certainty out here. You get a heading, and the discipline to keep adjusting it.
For now, that heading is toward Madeira and the Canaries. And so we’ll point the bow south and sail on, and eventually the unknown will reveal itself. Probably, it will be amazing. For his willingness to trust the universe, Columbus was rewarded with the sight of three mermaids off Hispaniola. Though in truth, he found them “not so beautiful as they are painted.” (Ahem, they were manatees.)
Uncertainty is a familiar refrain for me, really. It’s the same story for the way I write. Compare my original outline of Book 2 with what’s quickly becoming the finished manuscript, and it reads like a portolan chart next to a modern atlas. Sometimes stories need to reveal themselves as much as the seas do. And this one is nearly ready to tell both of us when it will launch. The finished chapters are really making me happy, though. I hope they make you happy too.
I’m writing this at anchor, and it’s just so peaceful here. The boat is still, the water is warm, and I’ve had time and space to come back to myself, finally. I couldn’t tell you when this life became home. It just did. The welds and the 2am alarms are the price of admission, and I’d pay it again tomorrow. I feel so lucky to get to do this.
Right now, for instance, the views are gorgeous. The tiny Madeiran island of Porto Santo sits just outside the cockpit. A unique place I’ll probably see only once in my life. Beautiful beaches, volcanic cones, and one very special building tucked up a twisting alley on the hillside.
The home of Cristóvão Colombo.
That’s right. Columbus lived here in the early 1480s, when he was a mere sugar merchant and Madeira marked the outer edge of the known world—almost exactly five hundred years before the summer a kid from California launched her writing ambitions by studying him. Last week, as I walked through the small stone rooms of his house, I peered out the arched windows, and thought—however much he’d studied the known facts and planned his voyage, he could never have imagined how much bigger, and richer, and more fascinating his actual journey would be. Kind of like life, really.
So that’s what I’m trying to remember as I face the twin unknowns of sailing plans and book chapters. That is where all the magic lies.
In the big reveal.
On we sail.
Fair winds,
Cheyenne
P.S. Worth a mention that Columbus’ voyage also led to the enslavement and death of millions of Indigenous people, but we’ll save that discussion for another day, shall we? We’re honoring our inner ten-year-olds today.
Where are we now?
Solar eclipse in Orca Alley
How Columbus might have thought about the same passage. Look carefully and among the many sea monsters, you'll find an orca (orcha) eating a whale (balena).
Arrival in Porto Santo
Modern explorers
Where to next? Our maps have far more detail and far fewer monsters, but the ocean is the same.
