A Sailor’s Reunion Before the Race to Alaska
By Brianna Randall, published in SAIL magazine
The brothers came to our hotel after dinner, the summer sun still shining bright above Victoria, British Columbia. They were men now, though I could see the echoes of the boys they were below the beard scruff and thicker muscles. My husband and I hadn’t seen Gavin and Rowan since we sailed with their family to the South Pacific 11 years before.
The timing of the brothers’ unexpected visit felt serendipitous: I was leaving the next morning for another passage. On a much smaller boat and in much colder waters, I would sail 700 miles from Victoria to Ketchikan with two girlfriends as part of the Race to Alaska.
Gavin and Rowan had seen my post on Facebook about the impending voyage and reached out to say they’d relocated from the East Coast to Vancouver Island. I was excited to reunite, and grateful for the chance to distract myself from the pre-race butterflies with a walk down memory lane.
“Remember how Gavin used to try to use fake words for Scrabble on Llyr?” I asked them, putting an arm around my son, who was the same age Gavin had been when we bobbed across the Pacific. “And Rowan, you’d get so furious that he was cheating.”
Rowan laughed. “I think we played 5,000 games of Scrabble on that crossing.”
It had been a long one—33 days from Panama to the Marquesas. One month of endless blue above and below. One month of rolling decks and instant coffee and miraculous stars and salty hair. One month stuck with the same seven humans aboard a 50-foot-long, 16-foot-wide steel ketch: a family with three boys, plus Rob and me.
We’d never met Gavin, Rowan, or the rest of the Steele clan before we stepped aboard Llyr in Colón, Panama. It was April 2013, and Rob and I had just quit our jobs, sold most of our belongings, and rented our home in Montana to hitchhike as crew for a year.
Since we were in our mid-30s at that point, we knew better than to simply stick out our thumbs at a random marina and hope for the best. Instead, we vetted the Steeles (and they, us) through several phone calls after we responded to their “crew wanted” ad on a cruiser’s forum.
It was a good fit. We were all environmentalists, fairly new to long-distance sailing, and happy to ask each other’s advice. Rob taught Gavin how to identify the small fish that landed each morning on deck and how to reel in the line we trolled (mostly unsuccessfully) off the stern. I took the 2-4 a.m. watch, since I was the least seasick of the adults. I also did most of the cooking for the same reason, becoming a whiz at chopping onions on a 20-degree tilt.
In Victoria with the now-grown-up Gavin and Rowan, we relived notable memories from our month-long passage. The lone orca that surfaced beside us 10 days west of the Galápagos, rolling to stare at us with its dinner-plate-sized eyeball. A confused shearwater that landed in our cockpit and stayed as our de-facto mascot for a few days. Taking bucket showers of saltwater. Dodging midnight lightning storms and bioluminescent dolphin pods as we motored through the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone. Celebrating the high school graduation of Connor, their older brother, after we crossed the equator.
By the time we made landfall in Nuku Hiva, we could predict everyone’s Scrabble words before they played them. Every day was Groundhog Day. And we were all sick to death of canned food. I remember smelling the sweet stench of rotting fruit first. Then Gavin saw coconuts floating by. We all cheered when the cloud-swirled mountains of the Marquesas came into view, jutting up like green hands from the sea as if to stroke the sky.
After clearing customs in the small village of Taiohae, we headed straight to the island’s only grocery store, swaying precariously with land sickness on slick tile floors beneath the fluorescent lights. The boys remembered the French baguettes fondly. I waxed poetic about the giant grapefruit that tasted like Skittles. Rob said his highlight was gulping down an icy soda after drinking warm water for weeks.
I noticed our children listening to these stories in fascination. “What was it like,” I asked the brothers, “being pulled away from school and friends each year to go sailing with your parents?”
“It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure,” confessed Gavin. “But now, looking back, I’m glad they did it. I wouldn’t be who I am if they hadn’t.”
That reassured me, as a parent who tows kids on adventures. Our son was conceived on a tropical isle in the Kingdom of Tonga six months after we parted ways with Llyr. I had hoped he would grow up aboard a sailboat in the Pacific. Envisioned, while pregnant, that we would buy our own floating home and drape cloth diapers like white flags from its rails, wandering between warm water ports to show him how life is simpler yet richer at sea.
But instead, we got sucked into currents that pulled us back to Montana. I struggled at first, resisting “real” life with its overwhelming pile of domestic chores, daily deadlines, and boxed-in walls. But then I surrendered and was infinitely grateful to set our anchor among a community of friends and family who supported us as we learned how to become parents.
As a mother, I replotted my course. We became part-time sea gypsies instead of full-time ones. When the kids were little, we shared a catamaran in the Bahamas and spent six weeks aboard each winter, teaching them to snorkel, read charts, and explore deserted islands. We also bought a 50-year-old Catalina 22 to trailer to lakes in Montana where they learned to sail with a tiller and catch trout for dinner.
Part of me thought that Rob and the children would love these snippets of boat life so much that they—like me—would fantasize about casting off our dock lines and crossing all the oceans.
But they didn’t.
We sold the catamaran and the Catalina one year ago to pursue land-based travels. They are not called as incessantly by the sea as I am.
And so, to fill my sailing cup, I would set out alone from Victoria. Embark on a new passage across a different part of the Pacific. The Race to Alaska would be the longest I’d ever left my family, and the longest I’d lived aboard since our crossing to the Marquesas.
I cried as we hugged Gavin and Rowan goodbye. My tears honored the journey we had shared. They honored the children the brothers used to be and the men they have become. They acknowledged the course my own children will chart, watery or otherwise. They mourned the life I might have led. And celebrated the life I get to lead.
I swallowed the salt and let it settle in my veins, heading inside to pack for my next rite of passage.