When the Wrong Sail is the Right Sail

 When the
Wrong Sail
is the
Right Sail
Call it fate, karma, or kismet. Call
it whatever you like, but some
encounters, and the sails that turn
up with them, are meant to be.
48 Story and Photos By
birthday gift
to his wife, Carolyn—
a cruise to Greece
from Turkey—included a closeup tour of
this working fishing
village on the island
of Mílos.
49
“B
ut I told you!”
said Carolyn in
exasperation as
we were about
to cast off from
the Finike Marina, in Antalya, on Turkey’s south coast. “This sail is
totally shot!”
Alas, my wife was correct on both
counts: She’d told me in Thailand, a year
and 8,000 ocean miles ago, that our working jib needed replacing—and now it was
obvious that the sail was almost completely worthless. Sometimes I squeeze a penny
a bit too hard, and this was a perfect example. Frugality’s fine; being too cheap
50 isn’t. I’m forever tacking between the two.
The problem was that we had neither
time nor money to order a replacement
headsail if we wanted to cruise in Greek
waters this summer. In addition, my personal income was dropping along with
everyone else’s in the West—and we were
attempting to sail the same number of
ocean miles on fewer and fewer pennies.
When you’re truly down to the bone, it’s
difficult to “cut out the extras” because
there are none. Our cruising belts were so
tight that it was getting hard to breathe.
But I’ve never allowed logic or rationality to get in the way of a good sail. We were
in the Med. A glorious summer awaited.
And I wasn’t about to allow the future to
intrude on the present.
But damn it, the sad condition of this
jib, which was faded and beginning to tear,
was a real setback. Our engine was already
running. We were just about to cast off for
the Aegean Sea. “I can nurse the sail for a
couple of more miles,” I said breezily. “It’s
been hanging in there for 12 years and
70,000 miles. Surely I can squeeze out a
few more.”
Carolyn looked doubtful.
I smiled, brushed the dark Italian hair
from her lovely brown eyes, and whispered softly, “‘We sail around the world
on the pennies that Scotsmen throw
away,’ remember?”
We were interrupted at that point by
Nadire, a Turkish cruising friend with
whom we’d recently sailed the Black Sea.
“Wild Card!” she was yelling while she
jogged excitedly down the dock. “Wait! I
have that name I was telling you about!”
Frankly, the last thing I needed was the
name of yet another old friend to look up.
We were drowning in ’em. We’ve learned
simply to listen with politeness, then ignore all such suggestions.
But we were both in love with Nadire.
She was the only Turkish woman we’d
ever met who sported the briefest of bikinis and a pierced belly button, in addition
to a bright, friendly smile. Her muscles
were totally ripped. She’d just swum the
Bosphorus from Europe to Asia—and was
a long-distance runner as well. To balance
out the physical, she just happened to be
a pediatric orthopedic physician and the
author of numerous books on the subject of children’s bone disorders. Yes, you
meet a lot of strange and delightful people
while slithering amid the backwaters of
ancient Constantinople—Nadire and her
husband Selim, a professor and surgeon,
were just two among many.
I looked around the boat—we really
were about to cast off—and smiled resignedly. Yet another interruption! But the key
to the cruising life is switching gears and
being in the moment. So I sighed, shut off
our warming diesel, and graciously asked
Nadire if she’d like a cup of tea.
“If a Turkish person is awake, they want
a cup of tea,” she said in happy reply.
As Carolyn rattled her kettle in the galley, I asked Nadire, “And what’s so special
about this Greek guy in, um, Milktoast?”
“Mílos,” Nadire corrected me. “As in
the famous statue of Venus in the Louvre.
You’ve seen it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Classic pornography at its
best. Alas, the poor dear lost her arms in
some sort of a tug-of-war between early
antiquity buyers as she was being smuggled out of Greece by a Frenchman.”
Nadire dismissed me with a wave of her
petite arm. “In Mílos lives a sailor by the
name of Pana. ” Then she strung together
about 20 incomprehensible vowel sounds.
Yes, Greek is “all Greek” to me. I can’t
fathom any of the strange-sounding
names of the people or the destinations—and have thus taken to just sticking on the first pseudo-sounding label
that comes to mind.
“And what’s this fellow Papa Gosh’s
claim to fame?” I asked.
Nadire’s English is very good, but she
looked perplexed. “He is just—himself,
” she said. “But he isn’t a mere man.
He’s a force of nature. He’s a human being, yeah, but he’s also an adventure, a
GREECE
38˚ N
Map by David Norton
36˚ N
22˚ E
story. He is, how you say—a
Full Cruising Mode. She’d
Cruising friends Selim
(far left, facing page)
character? They call him the
fallen into her Kindle,
and Nadire introduced
King of Ouzo—but he’s more
and I was lost in marlinthe
to
than that. He embodies all of
spike seamanship. We’d
Turkey and gave them
Greece. Totally. If you only visit
already completely forgotideas and contacts
one place in Greece, and you
ten what day of the week
for their trip to the
only meet one man—it has to
it was. The only problem
islands of Greece, the
be here, and it has to be him.”
was our crowded Pséricountry next door
I rolled my eyes. The Turks
mos anchorage.
(see map). Once they
are so passionate, so loving,
Perhaps we’d anchored
made landfall, Carolyn
so—crazy! I’d just let Nadire
in the only good holding
(above, left) and
couldn’t resist
read a pre-publication copy of
spot. Anyway, a number
wandering the watermy latest how-to marine book,
of boats had anchored the
front and exploring
and she’d been far too effusive
proper distance ahead of
the neighborhoods of
in her praise. The only part of
us, then dragged down
the Dodecanese and
the manuscript that puzzled
while setting. Now two
Cyclades islands.
her was how often I’d menboats, the giant catamationed the word “karma” in a
ran Papillion from Engmissive about yachting on a shoestring. land and the small monohull Froggy from
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Sweden, had ended up too close. At first
A week or so later, Carolyn and I I’d glared at them, before I caught myself.
were both finally decompressing into Hell, I don’t own the ocean or its anchorages. To atone for my selfishness, I rowed
over and invited them to Wild Card for
sundowners. Bill and Lois, the Brits, were
a tad skeptical. “Don’t worry,” I reassured
them. “I’m not selling anything. We’re just
desiring the pleasure of your company.”
A few hours later, we were all are laughing in the cockpit of Wild Card as Lou
Lou and Pelle vividly described their
A
G
wonderful North Sea adventures aboard
EA
N
Froggy. We quickly became cruising budSEA
dies, easily bound together by our muTURKEY
tual love of the sea. Just before leaving,
Bill asked to buy one of our books, but
I turned him down. “No commerce,” I
Mílos
Kálimnos
Psérimos
scolded as I gave him a complimentary
Antalya
Kléftiko Adámas
limited edition, signed and numbered,
that we’ve privately printed for just such
occasions.
“You know, we could use the money,”
30˚ E
said Carolyn, ever the practical one, later
28˚ E
that evening as we prepared for bed.
24˚ E
26˚ E
“Yeah, we could,” I added. “But friends
are more valuable than customers, even if
you never see them again.”
51
A
week later, we were sailing in the lee of Kálimnos
when we were hit by our
first meltemi. It was far
stronger than I’d been led
to believe, with ferocious 45-knot gusts
accompanied by vicious, choppy seas.
BANG!
At first, I was perplexed. It sounded
like a cannon shot, loud and stunning.
We were deeply dipping our rail to port.
Then I ducked as a white dove fluttered
past my head.
A white dove?
No, wait a minute. They were billowing
paper towels blowing in the wind astern.
52 You only get one chance at a first impression, and
the one that Papa Gosh (above, left) made on us—
with his megawatt smile, proud nose, and robust
physique—was huge.
Huge paper towels. Two-meter by twometer Dacron towels, being dispersed by
a 42-foot-long paper-towel dispenser on
our forestay.
These were the disjointed thoughts that
ran through my head as our long-suffering headsail shredded itself into the furi-
ous, frothing Aegean Sea.
That old UK-Halsey jib had been
mighty good to us. “Rest in peace,” I muttered, looking astern.
Carolyn and I both sat in dead silence
for a while. We now had no serviceable
headsail. True, we could limp along un-
der our storm staysail salvaged from a
dumpster, but only at a snail’s pace. And,
we planned on sailing about 7,000 miles
in the near future.
We looked at each other glumly. “OK,
navi-guesser,” I said wearily to Carolyn.
“We need a place to lick our wounds and
catch our breath, someplace with good
protection from a meltemi.”
She ducked below and started scanning
the chart, rattling off goofy names with
too many vowels. Then I abruptly stopped
her: “If we ease sheets and crack off, can
we still lay Mílos?”
W
e’d barely rattled out
the anchor chain in
front of the bustling
port town of Adámas, at Mílos, when
an inflatable dinghy approached. It appeared to be carrying a smile, a smile so
huge it obscured the man beneath it.
“No more scope! ” he cried. “Take up the
anchor! We’re sailing to Kléftiko! I am the
one you call Papa Gosh. Nadire called and
said you might appear. Anyway, we’re going just around the corner, and it’s the very
best place in all of Greece! You can follow
me in Glicki.”
You only get one chance at a first impression, and the one that Papa Gosh
(more accurately know as Panagiotis Avgidis) made on us was huge. First, there
was the megawatt smile. And the big,
proud nose, like Alexander the Great’s. He
was also barrel-chested, suntanned, sturdy, and glowing with robust health. Mostly
he just grinned, a maniacal, demented, enticing grin as bright as the Greek sun.
There was also something Old World
and gracious about him, as if we’d be doing him a huge favor to comply with his
modest request.
Frankly, the last thing I wanted to do
was go back to sea, so I was amazed to
hear myself happily agreeing to do just started to go aft to switch on his windlass.
that. The Grin grew even wider as I spoke.
“Just let out the clutch,” I suggested.
“Don’t worry,” the Grin said. “You are with
“It doesn’t work that way,” said Papa
Papa Gosh of Mílos now—and everything Gosh. “I wish it did. It’s a pain to always
and anything will work out perfectly!”
have to use the electrics. I even called the
Gliki turned out to be a gleaming Hall- factory in Sweden and complained about
berg-Rassy 46 whose decks were awash it, but they said this windlass model only
with Greek movie stars, local doctors, and lowers electrically.”
a gang of scientists from, amazingly, the
Now frankly, there’s something about
University of Minnesota.
expensive, pristine yachts that bring out
“She said he was a force of
the devil in me. Plus everynature,” mused Carolyn as
one was drunk and I wasn’t,
When a local like
both our vessels hoisted our
which always puts me in a
Papa Gosh (facing
luffing mainsails side by side.
feisty mood.
page) tells you that
“It’s the grin,” I agreed. “He’s
“Do you have a jackhamthey’ll take care of
just so happy! I dunno, he’s
mer?”
I asked. “Or maybe
you, they mean it.
like sunlight or something.”
some explosives?”
With Papa Gosh and
Carolyn cracked up. I
For the first time, I saw
his crew, we didn’t
grinned back. She said, “He’s
Papa Gosh’s smile slip. His
just visit Mílos; we
treating us like long-lost
teak decks were immaculate.
lived it, from its
waving flags to its
family, and we don’t even
He might be crazy, but he
carved boat names.
know him!”
was neat crazy. He glanced
Kléftiko turned out to be
nervously over to the rustan amazing place, full of gistreaked,
gelcoat-gouged
ant pools of water amid the lofty rocks, hull of Wild Card.
just perfect for spider-webbing two yachts
“Er, no,” he said.
into. We were soon aboard the pristine
“Then give me a sledgehammer,” I deGliki, which was so bright and shiny next manded. “Give me the biggest one you’ve
to our shabby, storm-weary Wild Card.
got on board.”
Papa Gosh was flitting from one conHe came up from the engine room with
versation group to the other, playing rau- a decent-sized ball peen hammer.
cous drinking games with each. I don’t
“It’ll have to do,” I said. “Any eye protecdrink, so I forced my wife to uphold our tion? Or some headphones to dampen the
vessel’s honor. “Put your liver on the line sound? No? Well, we’ll just have to take
for American yachting, babe,” I whispered our chances, then.”
to her. “At least match him shot for shot for
By this point, the entire party had
a couple of rounds.”
stopped and gathered around the fore“I’d die of alcohol poisoning within deck to watch. Some shielded their eyes;
minutes of consuming that much ouzo,” others held their ears.
she said, totally intimidated by the man’s
I dramatically reared back the hamprodigious intake.
mer as if to strike a mighty blow, but then
It was quite a boat party, spinning I only barely tapped the salt-stuck (and
more wildly out of control with every now unobtrusively unclutched) chain
bottle uncorked.
gypsy as the chain began to gently pay itAt some point, Papa Gosh wanted to self out with gravity.
let out more scope on his anchor, and he
Suddenly, the grin on Papa Gosh’s
53
face relit with the intensity of the sun. “I
thought you said you were a writer,” he
said in astonishment.
“Sailor first,” I corrected him.
W
e didn’t just visit Mílos with Papa Gosh.
We lived it; we reveled in it. We were totally swept up within
his roving, ever-changing entourage, from
restaurant to nightclub to bakery. Somehow, Papa Gosh carried his own invisible
spotlight with him. Everywhere he casually strode, he was a star, a conquering hero,
the very center of attention.
Oh, sure, he was witty and clever and
gracious, and in a dozen languages at the
same time. “Forgive me,” he once told me
as a solicitous Iranian waiter was tamping
our aromatic nargile pipes, Arabic hookahs filled with flavored tobacco. “I have
to switch to Farsi for a few moments.”
Yes, he had a yacht in Mílos, an apartment in Athens, a family house here, and
some waterfront property to build a taverna there, but he was extremely modest
about his “up by his own bootstraps as petroleum engineer” life story.
“Money isn’t the car,” he told me a number of times. “It’s just the keys to car. What’s
important in life is this meal, these friends,
this loving family—all the rich and joyous
laughter surrounding us.”
Most of our time together in Mílos
now seems like one long Greek food orgy.
Papa Gosh knew each chef on the island
personally, and lunch was always a threehour, four-bottle affair.
Did we want to meet Angelika, the
school marm? Vassilys, the miner? George,
the resident horticulturist? Maria, the tax
collector? Menedemus, the harbormaster?
We were greeted like visiting royalty everywhere we went on Mílos. “Any friend
of—what is the amusing American-ism you
use?—of the Papa Gosh is friends with us.”
54 Weeks flew by. We didn’t think or plan Tuesday!” he said.
or strategize. We just gulped it in. We
Another week went by without news.
didn’t learn Hellenic culture, we inhaled
Jimmy, an old cruising buddy from
it. This was truly Greece, and these were the Gulf of Aden, sailed in aboard Blue
her glorious, history-kissed people. We Moon and tossed us a used headsail from
just allowed it to wash over us like a joy- a Tartan 31, which would likely be far
ous wave, and we were swept away by the too small. Still, we eagerly awaited Papa
crazy, carefree hedonism of it all.
Gosh’s return.
When Papa Gosh heard we needed a
The rumor on the docks now was that
new headsail, he told us he’d bring back Papa Gosh had been called back to Jaone from Athens, just the right size, as he’d pan—no, Oman, for an oil trade—wait,
once had a 38-foot sloop very similar to no, he was sighted in Istanbul, drinking
Wild Card.
vodka with some Russians.
When would he be able to
Each day I’d tour the busbring it back?
tling waterfront in hopes of
While
“Ahh,” he said with mock
spotting Gliki. I soon nokept busy
sadness. “I have neither
ticed, however, a boatload of
with boat chores,
wristwatch nor calendar.
scruffy French kids aboard a
Carolyn took in the
I’m like a leaf in the Aegean
very basic, very shabby 28sights. The rainbowwind. So, perhaps, my timfoot sloop, which was stickcolored spinnaker
ing is a bit imprecise. But I
ing out like a sore thumb
that Papa Gosh
think I’ll return to Mílos on
amid the gleaming yachts.
delivered (facing
page) flies off Wild
Tuesday, and I’ll bring the
Wild Card was, at this
Card’s bow.
sail with me then.”
point, anchored far, far away
Suddenly, Papa Gosh was
from town in solitary splengone, and reality flooded
dor, and so I grew rather
back into our world vision. Mílos was concerned when, a few days later, I discovnow diminished to just another Greek ered the unkempt French kids anchored
isle, lovely perhaps, but the larger-than- right alongside us. Worse, they were starlife magic was gone.
ing intently at me as I came and went in
Alas, Papa Gosh didn’t show up for the dinghy.
weeks, and we heard bizarre tales of his
I’m not by nature a suspicious person,
dancing on this island, kayaking on that but I’m not stupid, either. I started douisland, and storm-sailing with a Saudi ble-locking my companionway and careprince on yet a third.
fully setting my burglar alarm. Better safe
Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer, and than sorry.
(horrors!) called him on the mobile phone
Then I realized with a jolt that, without
he occasionally carried. At first, it was ob- Papa Gosh’s influence, I was waiting. But
vious he didn’t place me in his memory life is to be lived, not merely planned for.
banks, and, then, even worse, that he’d So I dropped all expectations, and at the
totally forgotten about the sail. “So you precise moment I did so, I happened to
couldn’t find the sail?” I finally blurted out glance over at the four French hippies on
to confirm. He screamed in shocked re- the boat next door who were staring so
membrance and dropped the phone. Mo- intently at me, obviously discussing me at
ments later, the phone was snatched back this very moment.
up. “I have the sail bag in my hand,” he said
So I hopped in my dinghy, rowed over
proudly. “I will bring it back with me, on the few feet that separated us, and said,
“Bonjour! We’d like to invite you all for
dinner tonight aboard Wild Card.”
Their English wasn’t good, and they
were confused. “All four of us? Is de dinner with, like, the food and such?”
When I gently informed Carolyn a few
hours later that we were having guests,
she sighed. “Well, since they’re French,
we can’t feed them garbage,” she said and
headed ashore to shop.
They turned out to be four of the nicest aspiring young sailors we ever had
the good fortune to meet. “We came over
and anchored the hook beside you,” one
explained tentatively, “because we want
to put an inner forestay on our boat, and
heard that you had done so, and that you
were good cruising guy. But then, we
know our English no good, so we get shy!”
We had a wonderfully rowdy meal together. They insisted on returning in the
morning to hoist me aloft for a little masthead rewiring job I’d planned. We gave
them, as always, one of our special books,
signed and numbered.
While a watched pot never boils, it often bubbles immediately once you glance
away. As we were saying good-bye to our
French guests, running lights appeared
alongside—and a grinning Papa Gosh appeared on Gliki’s rail, casually tossing over
a sail bag on the way to his mooring.
The minute the bag hit the deck, I knew
it was all wrong.
Wrong!
I’d waited in vain, stupidly. It wasn’t
the right size and shape, and it bounced
wrong. I peered in. It was a brand-new
spinnaker, not a jib.
I sighed, glumly, and noticed the sail
bag Jimmy on Blue Moon had dropped off.
Maybe it wasn’t too terribly small after all.
It was a windless night with a full moon,
and I was now truly up the proverbial
creek without a paddle. What did I have
to lose? So I hoisted up the Jim’sal, which
had evidently been stuffed in the wrong
sail bag, because it fit our 42-foot hoist
like a glove.
As Papa Gosh rowed up after dropping
off his guests, I was internally laughing
about the absurdities of the cruising life
and its amazing, beautiful ironies. Papa
Gosh took it all in cosmic stride. “So I
brought back a different sail, and the one
you wanted arrived because you waited.
Excellent! Now you have two new sails for
Wild Card, a jib and a spinnaker. What did
I tell you,
when we first met? Not to
worry, eh? That everything would be all
right, correct? Well? Isn’t it?”
I had to admit that it was, better than
any sailor with empty pockets could possibly hope for.
The following morning, after I’d been
hoisted aloft by the French boys, Carolyn
and I headed out on the next leg of our
7,000-mile journey back to St. John, in
the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was rough outside the harbor. Wild Card romped along
at eight knots with her new racing Jim’sal
from North Sails. There was a lot of spray
and wind. I knew I’d be losing cellular
coverage soon, so I dialed Nadire’s number in Istanbul fast. It wasn’t easy to hear
her voice on the other end, so I quickly
blurted out my story of Papa Gosh and
the Right/Wrong Sail. I wasn’t sure we
were still connected, but then I heard her
laughing. “I get it,
I get it! It’s karma!”
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