mirror and see a hopeful eleven-year-old boy, finally realizing after forty years the dream of that day when an unbroken horizon would meet a stalwart ship and a man with the freedom and the will to take her there. I did not judge the man or the boy, and I prayed that God would not judge either.
In that hour I prayed, too, in a way that I had not before. Lying in my bunk, stymied in my efforts and feeling quite annoyed with the whole situation, I lifted to the heavens a prayer of a single word: “Why?” It was the second petition of that passage.
I knew not to wait out there on the open ocean for an answer. God sometimes seems in no more of a hurry to read my letters to Him than I am to read His letters to me. But as St. Paul teaches, we see the contours of God’s plans now only as through a glass, darkly. What my eyes could not see, and what I did not know, was that my prayers had a single answer, and that answer was already at hand.
Chapter 21
A Harbor Homecoming
Charleston is a harbor well familiar to me. I had gone there in 2003 to acquire the Gypsy Moon from her former owner. Her name then was Moonlighter , formerly The Gypsy in Me . In a nod to seagoing superstition against renaming boats, I incorporated both names into Gypsy Moon . Neptune, so far as I can tell, has been pleased.
I had intentionally come back to Charleston once before, in 2007, when the Gypsy Moon was en route to the Bahamas with a crew of four men. In that more modest undertaking, I had arranged to sail to the Abaco Islands in a series of 120-mile legs over six weekends, coastwise down the Eastern Seaboard, with each leg manned by enough crew to keep a twenty-four-hour watch. However loftier my ambitions had been for this second expedition to be nonstop, it appeared that I was following much the same herky-jerky heading as before, only without the crew.
It was a bracing upwind sail for the twenty miles back to the channel at Charleston. Had I been headed to the open sea it would have been thrilling, but knowing that my destination was a marina and an admission of defeat, the voyage had all the excitement of a cab ride. In the interminable hours it took me to fetch the Fort Sumter Range again, I came to appreciate just how far and long my battle with the wind vane the previous night had gone on.
By midday I was finally in the channel, and the Gypsy Moon ’s two-cylinder diesel engine rumbled once more to life in the shadow of a large container ship coming to port beside her. It is a long, tedious way through the Fort Sumter Range, and the absence of any significant hazard to navigation for all but the most foolhardy makes for mind-numbing boredom on a slow-going sailboat under power. My mind was already miles away and busy with plans for my return to Raleigh when boredom was banished. The engine transmission suddenly refused to answer, and I could make no way.
I let the helm fly free and ran up on the cabin top to raise the sails. The Gypsy Moon , now leaderless, dodged and veered of her own accord across the channel. Finally catching the wind and the ability to steer, I maneuvered into a protected anchorage amid the shallows and dropped anchor with sails still flying. The plough dug into the sand and snubbed up the anchor rode smartly in the bow chocks, whipping my little boat around to attention like a mother grabbing a wayward child by the nose. I lay there in the shadows of Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and wondered who, exactly, had decided to shoot out both my autopilot and my engine transmission on this voyage. There would be no leaving Charleston anytime soon, while repairs were made.
A likable towboat captain (they are uniformly likable fellows, I have found) was quickly on the scene. He threw me a bridle to pull the Gypsy Moon against the swift tide that flows in the Ashley River up to Charleston City Marina, where I had first made my boat’s acquaintance nearly seven years before.
The
In that hour I prayed, too, in a way that I had not before. Lying in my bunk, stymied in my efforts and feeling quite annoyed with the whole situation, I lifted to the heavens a prayer of a single word: “Why?” It was the second petition of that passage.
I knew not to wait out there on the open ocean for an answer. God sometimes seems in no more of a hurry to read my letters to Him than I am to read His letters to me. But as St. Paul teaches, we see the contours of God’s plans now only as through a glass, darkly. What my eyes could not see, and what I did not know, was that my prayers had a single answer, and that answer was already at hand.
Chapter 21
A Harbor Homecoming
Charleston is a harbor well familiar to me. I had gone there in 2003 to acquire the Gypsy Moon from her former owner. Her name then was Moonlighter , formerly The Gypsy in Me . In a nod to seagoing superstition against renaming boats, I incorporated both names into Gypsy Moon . Neptune, so far as I can tell, has been pleased.
I had intentionally come back to Charleston once before, in 2007, when the Gypsy Moon was en route to the Bahamas with a crew of four men. In that more modest undertaking, I had arranged to sail to the Abaco Islands in a series of 120-mile legs over six weekends, coastwise down the Eastern Seaboard, with each leg manned by enough crew to keep a twenty-four-hour watch. However loftier my ambitions had been for this second expedition to be nonstop, it appeared that I was following much the same herky-jerky heading as before, only without the crew.
It was a bracing upwind sail for the twenty miles back to the channel at Charleston. Had I been headed to the open sea it would have been thrilling, but knowing that my destination was a marina and an admission of defeat, the voyage had all the excitement of a cab ride. In the interminable hours it took me to fetch the Fort Sumter Range again, I came to appreciate just how far and long my battle with the wind vane the previous night had gone on.
By midday I was finally in the channel, and the Gypsy Moon ’s two-cylinder diesel engine rumbled once more to life in the shadow of a large container ship coming to port beside her. It is a long, tedious way through the Fort Sumter Range, and the absence of any significant hazard to navigation for all but the most foolhardy makes for mind-numbing boredom on a slow-going sailboat under power. My mind was already miles away and busy with plans for my return to Raleigh when boredom was banished. The engine transmission suddenly refused to answer, and I could make no way.
I let the helm fly free and ran up on the cabin top to raise the sails. The Gypsy Moon , now leaderless, dodged and veered of her own accord across the channel. Finally catching the wind and the ability to steer, I maneuvered into a protected anchorage amid the shallows and dropped anchor with sails still flying. The plough dug into the sand and snubbed up the anchor rode smartly in the bow chocks, whipping my little boat around to attention like a mother grabbing a wayward child by the nose. I lay there in the shadows of Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and wondered who, exactly, had decided to shoot out both my autopilot and my engine transmission on this voyage. There would be no leaving Charleston anytime soon, while repairs were made.
A likable towboat captain (they are uniformly likable fellows, I have found) was quickly on the scene. He threw me a bridle to pull the Gypsy Moon against the swift tide that flows in the Ashley River up to Charleston City Marina, where I had first made my boat’s acquaintance nearly seven years before.
The
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