Tiny Bubbles — A Love Story in Deep Water • Chapter One
Tiny Bubbles: A Love Story in Deep Water
Chapter One: In Which Two Fools Set Sail and Immediately Regret It
It began, as all great love stories do, with someone losing control of a boat in the dark.
“And so begins the true unauthorized story of Tiny Bubbles,” Heidi announced into the void, with the kind of misplaced confidence that has launched a thousand doomed expeditions. Luittown. Hanukkah Harbor. The night air smelled of salt and optimism, two things that would prove to be in very short supply.
Joshua S. Holloway — the S. standing for, one imagines, Seriously, What Are We Doing — echoed his agreement from somewhere in the darkness. “Here we come,” he said. The ocean, for its part, said nothing, but was already formulating a response.
Their vessel was called Tiny Bubbles, which is either the most charming or most ominous name for a sailboat ever devised, depending on whether you’re watching it from a comfortable bar onshore or actually aboard the thing at two in the morning in a confused chop off the coast of Maui. Heidi and Josh were emphatically in the latter category.
The night passage up the Maui coast had begun pleasantly enough — the way most catastrophes do. There was wind. The boat moved. The stars, presumably, were lovely. Then nightfall arrived and the ocean, apparently having consulted some internal agenda, decided that pleasant was not the vibe it was going for.
The wind died.
Not the graceful, gradual fading of wind that a sensible ocean might arrange — but rather the sudden, total, mocking disappearance of it, leaving Tiny Bubbles wallowing in a confused sea of swells that came from every direction simultaneously, as though the Pacific had spent several weeks engineering the maximum possible nautical discomfort and was now quite pleased with the results.
They had a self-steering system. They called it Mr. Belvedere, because sailors, left alone on the ocean for extended periods, will name anything. Mr. Belvedere, it emerged, had opinions about minimum wind speed, and without sufficient breeze to work with, he simply gave up — which, Heidi would reflect later, was more honest than most people she’d met.
So she steered. Or tried to. “At one point,” she reported, with the flat affect of someone recounting a trauma, “I had an entire watch where I just had the boat do circles.” The swells came from the side. The zephyrs came from nowhere. She attempted to cook black-eyed peas and rice, because nothing says I am managing this situation like preparing legumes in the dark on a lurching vessel. Josh ate them. Around midnight, Heidi made the executive decision that the hour-on-hour-off watch system was, as a lifestyle choice, not for her.
Also, the topping lift broke.
This is the line that holds up the boom, for those of you sensibly reading this from dry land. Without it, the boom drooped with the resigned expression of a man who has been told the project deadline has been moved up. They couldn’t reef the mainsail. They lowered it entirely and sailed on under storm jib alone, which is rather like crossing a mountain range on a skateboard — technically possible, spiritually questionable.
They entered the Alenuihaha Channel — the stretch of open ocean between Maui and the Big Island — sometime around five-thirty in the morning, a fact they deduced not from any navigational instrument but from the immediate and dramatic worsening of absolutely everything. The swells, previously unpleasant, became magnificent in their hostility. Waves broke over the sides. The boat was thrown sideways with enough enthusiasm to suggest the ocean was having a wonderful time.
And yet.
Mr. Belvedere, given sufficient wind, turned out to be rather good at his job. Josh had coaxed him to life, and now the self-steering held course while its two human companions rotated between wedging themselves into corners below deck and staggering up to check that the horizon still existed. They wore safety harnesses. They clipped in before going outside. They had become, without entirely meaning to, competent.
At four-thirty in the afternoon, Josh put the main back up, double-reefed, to make more easting. The GPS reported that the Big Island was thirty miles away. You could see lights on it, like a party you’ve been told you might be able to attend, conditions permitting.
“I can’t really see it,” said Josh, peering into the gathering dark. “It’s getting dark out.”
This was, Heidi reflected, technically accurate.
The question of how much longer the passage would take was raised, as such questions always are, at the worst possible moment.
“Another twenty-four to thirty hours if we hit the doldrums,” Josh estimated. “Twelve to fifteen if we don’t.”
Heidi relayed this information to the recording device with the cheerfulness of someone who has already decided to find the whole thing funny, which is, when you think about it, the only sane response to being at sea in the dark with a droopy boom and a steering device named after a fictional butler.
“We’re kind of looking forward to the doldrums,” she added, “because we need baths pretty bad.”
This is love, in its truest form: two people, exhausted and salt-encrusted, finding something to look forward to.
Monday arrived. They were out of the channel. The Big Island was visible — still thirty miles away, having apparently also drifted during the night, which seemed unfair. The wind was coming from the east, which was precisely where they needed to go. They tried the spinnaker. It flopped around in the insufficient breeze with the enthusiasm of a wet flag, and they were afraid to rip it, so they took it down.
Then they took a bath.
Not a bath bath. This was an open-ocean bath — jump in, grab the ladder fast because the boat is still moving, soap up with dish soap, jump in again, rinse with approximately four tablespoons of fresh water. Heidi reported that it felt great. Given the alternative, this is entirely believable.
Josh put the other self-steering system on — a different arrangement, let’s call it Stan — to see if it handled light airs better. Mr. Belvedere was good in heavy conditions. Stan was, perhaps, a fair-weather friend.
Breakfast had been peppermint tea, soy milk, luna bars, and peanut butter cereal. Maybe some carrots later, if things got really wild. Heidi’s mother was expected in Kona that day. Heidi and Josh were approximately thirty miles away with no wind and no particular arrival time to offer.
“Anything’s possible,” said Heidi. “We’re praying. Please send us some wind.”
Tuesday. Day Four. The Doldrums.
Heidi wished to make clear that she took back everything she had said about looking forward to them. The doldrums, it turns out, are not a pleasant interlude for bathing and reflection. They are a specific variety of maritime purgatory in which you can see your destination — Kona, right there, tantalizingly visible — and yet slowly drift away from it, like a nightmare in which you are running and the finish line is getting farther away, except the nightmare costs boat fuel and takes place over four days.
The self-steering hadn’t worked since the channel. There wasn’t enough wind. They took watches through the night. Josh and Heidi did not get to sleep, which anyone who has tried to coexist with a beloved partner on a small boat under conditions of sleep deprivation will recognize as a situation requiring either profound love or very good noise-canceling headphones.
There had been a squall around one in the morning. Cold rain on Heidi’s face, then more rain, then a brief theatrical display of heavy winds that prompted them to drop the genoa and put up the storm jib — unnecessarily, as it turned out, because the squall was mostly interested in rain rather than wind. They shut the hatch. They got rained on anyway. The squall passed, satisfied with its work.
Heidi, on a subsequent watch with absolutely no wind, biked. This requires some explanation. Tiny Bubbles, in a triumph of either ingenuity or madness depending on your perspective, had no engine — but it did have a propeller and a shaft, and Josh, in a moment of inspired tinkering that said everything about the man, had connected the two via a bicycle pedal mechanism and a length of bike chain. The physics were sound. The execution was genuine. The result was that a human being could, by pedaling with sincere conviction, spin the propeller and propel a full sailing vessel across the Pacific Ocean at a maximum speed of one quarter of a knot.
One quarter of a knot is approximately 0.29 miles per hour. A determined tortoise covers similar ground. A shopping cart with a wobbly wheel, given a slight downhill grade, might edge it out.
And yet there was Heidi, pedaling away in the windless dark, the sails hanging limp and useless overhead, each one banging back and forth in the swell with the rhythmic resignation of someone who has also given up, while Tiny Bubbles crept — crept is generous, inched — toward Kona at a pace that would have embarrassed a glacier. Thirty-seven miles to go. At one quarter of a knot, this was mathematically a six-day journey by pedal power alone, which even Heidi’s optimism could not reframe as encouraging.
She pedaled anyway. This is the thing about Heidi. She pedaled anyway.
Then the dolphins arrived.
Josh, on watch at seven in the morning, found himself surrounded by a school of spinner dolphins — playful, acrobatic, completely indifferent to the logistical difficulties of the voyage. They stayed for twenty minutes. Later, a single bottlenose came by to have a look. And following the boat, for reasons known only to itself, was one small brown fish. A snapper, possibly.
Josh had been sad that the dolphins might have eaten his fish friend. Then he got out a fishing rod.
“He was calling him friend,” Heidi reported, “and then suddenly he was hoping to call him food.”
She paused.
“I’m a little worried about that.”
“Those are some nice meaty legs you got, Heidi,” said Josh.
This is also love, in its way.
They had, Heidi noted, an enormous quantity of food. Seventy-one soy milks. Things to cook. The problem was that cooking required motivation, and motivation required not being four days into a becalmed passage with one fly — described by Heidi as “the most irritating fly ever” — as your primary companion.
The carrots were gone. The fruit was gone. The crackers were gone. There remained: seventy-one soy milks and the memory of a bowl of refried beans and chips that had given Heidi a stomachache.
“Something fresh,” she said, gazing toward Kona. “Something cold.”
Josh said nothing. He was watching the fishing rod.
Heidi’s mother was already there. Waiting. In Kona. With, presumably, cold things.
The GPS said thirty-seven miles.
The wind said nothing at all.
“Next time I talk to you,” Heidi told the recorder, “we better be out of the doldrums.”
She did not sound entirely confident. But she said it with the conviction of someone who has decided to be in love with the adventure, regardless of what the adventure thinks of her.
Which is, when you think about it, the only way to do any of this.
To be continued — weather and wind direction permitting.
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