by Megan Lyles

We almost didn’t sail on the Starlight Serenade in the first place. We’d e-mailed the captain after we saw the information tacked up on a Panama City hostel notice board, “Sail to Colombia,” exactly what we were looking for. But when Michael asked him a few questions, common safety questions brought up by a quick online search, the response we got was not what we were looking for.

“Michael I have every things onboard my ship and are the most velequiped boat you can find all over a boat to 1 milliones dollars, so if you not trust it, I’m sorry to tell we have many peopel waiting just here, but I said to this peopel here they have to wait for your confirm of your trip with us. This internet here in porto bello cloose at 4 pm today and I will look after your finaly respons if no one I have to give your reservation to the next on our list.”

We had a long discussion while our Internet minutes ticked away. Do we get on this potential maniac’s boat even though he’d refused to answer all the questions we thought we were so smart for asking?

“It would be one thing if we’d never asked him anything.” I said. “I mean, if we were going to accept not knowing, why bother to ask in the first place? But we did ask. And if he won’t answer, isn’t that worse than if we’d never asked at all? We wanted peace of mind and now we have the opposite.”

“We don’t know of any other boats,” Michael said. “If we don’t get on this one, we could be waiting around Panama City forever.”

“Or we’ll have to fly.” I grimaced. We were doing an overland trip from our home in New York to the tip of South America. Flyingso boring, so… pedestrianwould ruin it. “Maybe we just misunderstood his tone. It’s easy to do with e-mail. And clearly English isn’t his first language. Maybe that’s why he comes across so pissed.”

“Well, we have to make a decision,” Michael said. “What do we do? Sailboat or fly?”

Sailboat, I thought. But I didn’t want to be the one to say it, in case it turned out to be a bad idea. We were quiet for a long time. Sailboat, Sailboat, I silently urged. Finally we agreed we’d at least go and have a look at the boat. So Michael wrote a conciliatory response to Captain Erik and told him we’d meet him tomorrow in Portobelo. I was thrilled.

The bus was agonizingly slow and we arrived in Portobelo much later than we had intended. It looked like an interesting little town, narrow and crumbling between bright green hills and the Bahía de Portobelo, but we didn’t have time to do any sightseeing. I waited at an open-air restaurant with our packs and a polite bottle of Coke while Michael went down to the dock to figure out how to get to the Starlight Serenade.

He came back in a hurry. “We have to get down there right away,” he said, grabbing his backpack and swinging it onto one shoulder. “And there’s a very drunk gringo down there, so look out.” I’ve always hated his cryptic warnings and this one just made me even more flustered when we encountered Dennis, the drunk gringo, clutching a bottle of beer and berating the local guy who was to take us to the sailboat in a panga.

“Por fa-fucking-vor!” Dennis was shouting. “Por favor! Por fa-fucking-vor!” He continued to shout this and nothing else. I stepped gingerly off the concrete dock and into the panga and was dismayed when Dennis climbed in after me, making the narrow little boat tip precipitously. His shouting seemed marginally more friendly during the short ride, but I was extremely relieved to hear that he had his own sailboat and would not be mixed up in our trip.

Captain Erik knew us immediately. “Ah, Michael and Megan,” he exclaimed as we hoisted ourselves from the swaying panga up a short ladder and clambered onto the deck of the Starlight Serenade. He looked like one might imagine an old Danish sea captain to look: tanned and sinewy, gray-haired and blue-eyed, with a goatee. But more importantly, he did not look like he resented us for daring to ask questions about his boat.

And there they all were. All the people waiting on the list I guessed, sitting on every available surface, windblown and half naked, like they’d been at sea for weeks. The Starlight Serenade was a 52-foot sailboat. Captain Erik had said she slept ten, but this was more than ten people. Once I’d freed my sweaty feet from my heavy, dusty hiking boots, I did a discreet headcount. Eight, ten, twelve, fourteen… it seemed he hadn’t turned anyone away.

The big haze of strangers gradually began to clarify into individuals of assorted nationalities and personalities. I sat on a cooler full of beer, enjoying the feeling of the warm, sunbleached wooden deck under my bare feet as we chatted. There were sixteen of us on the boat, including the captain and his girlfriend, Mildred. If Erik looked exactly like a sixty-year-old Danish sailboat captain, Mildred looked nothing like the twenty-five year old Venezuelan girlfriend of a sixty-year-old Danish sailboat captain. A brown-skinned woman with a thick, solid body, a platinum-dyed buzz cut and a nose-stud, she looked as though she could sail the boat herself, crash it, and build us a new one.

Soon Dennis putted up in his dinghy, hauled himself aboard and started drinking Captain Erik’s rum. “I used to do this trip,” he yelled, “But I don’t like Portobelo anymore. Too many gringos.” He glared at us. “I hadda get out of this area.” Erik politely tsked in the right places, but paid him very little attention. After a bit more shouting, Dennis went away, still swigging from his paper cup of rum. I remained grateful that we were not on his boat.

Erik took Michael and me on a tour of the Starlight Serenade. This was the first sailboat I’d ever set foot on so I had nothing to compare it to, but it seemed very pretty with its warm golden-brown varnished wood and clever little nooks and crannies. There was a lot more to the boat than it looked like from the outside, but I still didn’t see where everyone was supposed to sleep.

Downstairs in the back, beyond the dining area, was the captain’s bedroom, a small but efficient cabin, like a wood and plush velvet cave, consisting mainly of a bed platform surrounded by shelving with windows all around and a skylight above.

“You can sleep here,” Erik said. “Only, you must be able to trade if someone else is not comfortable.”

“Oh, we couldn’t take your room,” I said.

“No, it is ok. Everyone has found spaces already.”

“And where will you sleep?”

“Mildred will sleep here on the floor, and I will sleep somewhere above. Do not worry. Now I must take your passports and you will please give me $270 each. Twenty dollars is for visa stamping in Colombia. And if someone should ask you did you pay for this trip, I will ask you to say ‘no, no, we are only friends sharing expenses.’ Is it ok?”

The plan had been to see the boat and then decide, but Michael and I never discussed it again. When we got to the Starlight Serenade, we boarded as passengers and simply stayed aboard. When Erik asked for passports and money, we handed them over. He seemed very nice; we trusted him easily. I decided that his e-mail had meant to convey not “how dare you ask what my radio call sign is” but “don’t worry, be happy.” He even spent some time showing me the radar, and the autopilot screen with the tiny red boat poised at the beginning of the route, ready to follow the course he had plotted through the San Blas Islands.

Mildred cooked some chicken legs and potatoes, and we all ate. The half of us who could fit around the dining table crammed in there, and the rest of us found corners in which to sit or stand and eat. Afterwards I gnawed on bit of sharp raw ginger to preempt seasickness and then, not trusting it, ate a chewable Dramamine.

Shortly after 5:00 pm, which is when the Panamanian Coast Guard goes home for the day, we raised anchor and started our trip. (This was about two hours after we’d boarded, so who knows why Dennis had screamed, “What are you doing? Hurry the fuck up! You’d better get down there right the fuck now!” when he found out Michael was looking for the Starlight Serenade.)

Everyone was excited to be going at last. The deck and roof were crowded, yet we each managed to find a little place apart from the others. Someone had hooked an iPod up to the boat’s sound system and Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was playing. The speakers were good. The music seemed to come from the sky, which had suddenly gone heavy and low with thick, dark silver clouds. James from England stood by the furled up mainsail, shirtless with his long hair blowing in the wind. The Starlight Serenade rode up and down the swells, rocking us and sending occasional sprays of seawater across the deck. We were all silent as Captain Erik stood at the wheel and the music swelled and rays of blinding white gold burst through the clouds and we quite literally sailed off into the sunset, leaving Portobelo, Panama and the murky bay behind and heading into the greenblue water of the Caribbean Sea toward Cartagena, Colombia… South America.

It was, to be perfectly honest, rather overly dramatic. I mean, come on, chiaroscuro sunrays knifing through cumulus clouds, arcing seaspray, naked chests, and a chorus of Hallelujahs? Still, it was impossible not to be moved by the overall effect and I smiled at Michael and thought, this is so much cooler than flying. I’m glad we took this chance.

I went to bed at 7:00 pm. The random sprays of cold water smacking me in the face were annoying, and the boat was pitching and rocking so much I couldn’t keep my balance even sitting down. Despite the Dramamine and its resulting sleepiness, I still felt slightly nauseated, so I went below and climbed up onto the bed in my clothes. I curled my hand under the thin mattress to keep from rolling across the bed and fell mostly asleep.

A terrible pounding on the window by my head startled me awake. Scrambling to my knees, I peeked out just in time to see something swing right for my face. I ducked, though whatever it was was checked by the thick windowpane. Mildred, sleeping on the floor at the foot of the bed, had gone running up the stairs at the first noise.

With no idea what was going on, I went up on deck after her. The sky was dark. Michael was furiously winding rope and most of the others were tussling with something hanging over the side of the boat. It turned out that the dinghy’s motor had detached itself and had almost been lost. The motor was eventually recovered and strapped into place and I went back to bed.

The sea was rough, or at least it seemed so to me. The boat pitched and rolled and bounced in the water. When I felt my feet, which pointed toward the front of the boat, rising and my head dipping, I knew that next would come an eerie moment of weightlessness and then we’d fall forward again with a jarring splash. This happened constantly.

Michael came to join me after an hour or so, subdued in a way that I rarely saw.

“Did you get sick?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he admitted. Apparently quite a few people had gotten sick. I felt almost fine, but had a plastic bag ready just in case.

I rolled from side to side with the boat, grateful for the plush barrier between me and the wooden cabinets. Often I found myself unable to keep from rolling into Michael, even though I was clutching at the lip of the shelf next to me. All around us was the white noise of waves and wind punctuated by smacking sails and various creakings. It was noisier on a sailboat than I could have imagined.

I was nearly asleep when I rolled into Michael yet again. I started to apologize and roll away again, but I couldn’t. Something was wrong. The boat was tipping to the starboard side, and also rising up into the air and I was rolling over Michael and couldn’t stop myself.

Then we were going down, falling, weightless, further than we had fallen yet. But instead of dropping back and displacing seawater as we had been doing, there was a stunning, tooth-cracking, bone-jarring crash, an explosion of sound all around us as we slammed full speed into something solid.

The impact slammed open all the cabinets and shoved us partially off the bed and we grabbed at the shelves through a shower of falling books and DVDs to stop ourselves from falling further. Water poured in around the port side windows as a wave crashed over the deck. A horrible, dark, grinding noise shredded the air and we were tipping… tipping… as though the boat was about to lie down on its side in the water. Barely perched on the foot of the bed, I clutched at the sheets, at Michael, trying to find something to keep me from sliding sideways as the Starlight Serenade leaned. Ghostly hands slapped against the skylight above us, the other backpackers trying to find a grip and then sliding away again. I felt like my brain was swelling with cold, white terror. “Hang on, baby,” Michael kept saying. “Hang on baby, hang on baby, hang on…”

I thought: I can’t swim.

There was another crunch of impact, less severe, but still wrong. We’re in the ocean. What is there to crash into? I struggled to breathe. Another wave broke over the boat and more water poured down on us from the closed skylight, streaming down my chest and all over the bed. We’re going to sink. I gritted my teeth against a scream.

The boat leveled off somewhat and Michael said, “Wait here” and jumped up and ran upstairs to the main cabin. “What are you kidding me?” I went after him, my bare feet splashing through water puddled on the slick varnished wooden stairs. I checked my Indiglo watch. It was 9:30 p.m. Despite my terror, it seemed important to know the time.

Part of me had wondered if it was all in my head, if the crash had sounded worse than it was. The detachment of the dinghy motor had sounded bad too, but ultimately would not have been life-threatening even if we’d lost it. But I was certain that something truly serious had happened when I emerged from the stairwell into the dark confusion above.

Someone shouted, “Is anybody hurt?” There were frantic snatches of talk. “We’ve run aground,” someone said. “We hit something that wasn’t on the radar,” someone else said. The radar screen was still lit up in green, but the screen which earlier in the evening had shown our course through the islands was ominously black.

There was stuff everywhere. Books, potatoes, gear in puddles of water. A carton of eggs lay strewn along the passageway outside the kitchen. Michael frantically opened doors and drawers looking for the life jackets, and found only snorkeling gear and boxes of cornflakes. Everyone I saw looked like I felt, wide-eyed, stunned. I could easily have cried. The crying was right there inside my chest and behind my eyes but I forced it back because I didn’t want to call attention to myself, or distract anyone from more important pursuits. I didn’t want to give in to panic.

“Erik! We need lifejackets! Now!” Michael ordered.

“No, no, you don’t need lifejackets. Everything is ok now,” Erik said. He was busily rushing about, but seemed otherwise very calm.

“Mildred! Dónde está lifejackets?”

Mildred gave Michael an odd look but went to a cabinet and fished out two orange lifejackets, which she gave to him. He passed one to me. “Put this on right now,” he ordered. Then, from the passageway, he flung himself through the opening between the bottom of an overhead cabinet and the surface of a counter and vomited over a broken wineglass in the kitchen sink.

I hung one arm through the lifejacket but didn’t put it on fully because no one else had one and things seemed to be getting better. The frantic scramble was ebbing. Everyone was accounted for and apparently we weren’t sinking, at least not yet. There seemed nothing to be done. Erik tried again to calm us, but Michael wasn’t having it.

“You almost killed us,” he said.

“Shh, Michael, no,” I murmured, pulling at his arm.

But Erik didn’t get upset at all. “No, no, no,” he tsked soothingly, just as he had done with drunk Dennis at Portobelo. “Everything is all right now. We are in deep water again.”

Upstairs was wet and crowded, and full of talk that only made it scarier (Paul had seen the depth gauge dropping, Emily had almost fallen overboard in her sleep sack and had barely stopped herself with her foot, possibly breaking a toe in the process…) so Michael and I went back down to our assigned room.

I crawled back onto the bed and lay down in my bulky, grubby lifejacket on the wet mattress topped with twisted, matted wet sheets. My clothes were wet. My hair was wet. The boat was rocking as much as it had been before.

“I would have killed someone to get you a life jacket,” Michael said. I smiled at the uncharacteristic machismo. I knew he would never kill anyone, but I also knew that his first thought, his first act, had been to get me a life jacket. We lay on our backs holding hands and sweating. The crash had taken out the air conditioning and because we were moving, the windows had to remain closed. The air was thick and humid and sour.

With every new pitch or roll my eyes snapped open and I whimpered, completely uncontrollably. I didn’t know where we were, if the captain was sane, if we were going to hit something else, if there was a hole in the boat, if we were taking on water, if there were sharks, and every roll too far to the side felt like it was happening all over again.

This is what happens when you go out into the middle of the ocean in a flimsy little boat with some maniac who scoffs when you ask him for his radio call sign. You see, you see? We should have said no after he wouldn’t answer our questions. We should have waited, we should have flown. We’d be in Colombia now if we’d flown. We don’t even know if he has an EPIRB, because he wouldn’t tell us.

I thought with surprise, we could really die. These people that I just met, or Michael, or I, could die. The funny Irish guy could die. The couple with the PacSafes around their backpacks could die. How many Reader’s Digest Drama in Real Life! stories had I read growing up? The hotel fires, the flash floods, the plane crashes, the guy who somehow ended up in the freezing Atlantic and wedged himself into a buoy and had to burn strips of his rubber boots to keep his face from freezing. The guy floating in some body of water somewhere who’d scratched “143″ and then the first letters of the names of his family members into the frame of his lifejacket so they would know he loved them. That could be us, bobbing about in the Caribbean for days, getting sunburned and dehydrated and scraping out little messages, and then what? Our families would be frantic, but posters on travel websites would say, “Well, really, what kind of idiot gets into a random boat with a perfect stranger? And one of them couldn’t even swim? Serves them right.”

Gradually, and with some deliberate concentration and purpose, I managed to stop whispering “no, no, no,” with every extra-big swell. After a long time I slipped the sweaty, bumpy lifejacket off and out from under me. But still, I clung to it.

Between the motion and the humidity and the nausea and the fear it was impossible to sleep, but I fell into a dreamy, trancelike doze that helped carry me through the night. And it was a long night. Every time I checked my watch it seemed so early that I shouldn’t even be in bed at all.

At around 3:00 a.m. the motion stopped. It was calm, as it had been in Portobelo, and there was the sound of ropes and chains. Michael and I ventured upstairs again to find that we’d arrived at our destination, wherever that was, and were dropping anchor. I didn’t care where we were, I was just glad to be somewhere besides the middle of the ocean. There were lights of several boats around us. We were back on the map. The air was cool and the Starlight Serenade was no longer slopping back and forth, so Michael and I went back downstairs, opened the windows, and fell into a decent sleep in the fresh air and wet pillows.

In the morning everything seemed lighter. What had happened in the night was almost like a joke, the way a nightmare recedes and becomes silly as you get up and brush your teeth, though we all admitted to having been terrified at the time. Apparently we’d been going along normally when the depth reading dropped abruptly from thirty meters to eight, then seven, and then all the way to three meters and two and then - bam - we hit a reef. Maybe. Some thought it was a reef, but there was also the suggestion that it could have been a drug-running submarine. Most likely it was a reef, but we’d never know.

Michael told me that he had spent the night making careful mental plans for what he would do if the Starlight Serenade capsized. He said so many people drown because it’s against natural instinct to dive deeper when you’re sinking, but that’s what you have to do if your boat turns upside-down, swim deeper to get up the stairs.

He had no memory of accusing Erik of almost killing us.

“Yes, you did,” I told him. “You said, ‘Erik, you almost killed us!’ I was standing right there when you said it. I tried to stop you.”

“No, I probably said, ‘Erik, is it the mast or the keel?’ I thought maybe the mast had snapped.”

Maybe. With everything going on, I suppose I could have heard wrong. “Erik, is it the MAST or the KEEL?” “Erik, you alMAST KEELed us.” I let it go.

I didn’t even know what a keel was until that morning, but soon learned that the multi-ton keel protruding down from the hull counterbalances a sailboat and keeps it from capsizing. Some of the guys dived off the side of the boat with snorkeling gear to check out ours and came back reporting that it had a huge gouge taken out of it. I stayed on deck and took their word for it.

We discussed the crash endlessly the way people do after anything scary happens, from a fender-bender to September 11. “I was standing here,” “I was doing this,” “The first thing I thought was that.” Reliving, rehashing, memorializing the fear and shrinking it into a compact and harmless little anecdote. Personally I was disappointed that my life hadn’t flashed before my eyes. What with all that abject terror, it seemed like kind of a rip-off not to at least get a cool flashback out of it.

At any rate, we had reached land. We were at El Porvenir, and Erik had taken our passports to get them stamped. There was a small airstrip on the island, which received flights from Panama. Some of us joked about flying out, back to Panama or ahead to Colombia, but no one was serious. Ahead of us en route to Colombia were the San Blas Islands aka the Comarca Kuna Yala, home to the Kuna Indians, a people who had retained their way of life since before Columbus. The sky was high and blue, the water warm. It was like a paradise-themed screensaver made real. We were alive, we felt alive. We knew we had made the right choice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 12:12 am and is filed under Cruise Story, Fourth Annual Solas Awards Winners, Great Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.