Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley Page B

task of presenting it as a gift to the pastor of Christ Church in Nassau, whose steeple was raised in 1830. Though I didn’t know it then, my voyage would be an occasion for some to wonder whether I ought to have enlisted a few good Baptists to pray for me along with the Episcopalians.

Chapter 18
A Following Sea
    The mouth of the Cape Fear River is a wide, forlorn, and featureless place where the land of North Carolina points its southeasternmost end to the sea. A few well-to-do residents, tired service workers, and returning vacationers taking the private ferry to Southport from Bald Head Island looked with passing interest at the thirty-two-foot sloop making her way, alone, toward the open ocean. The sky and sea were a continuous pale gray. Here, in a deep shipping channel that requires constant vigilance against shoaling from swift, swirling tides, great ocean freighters come and go.
    There is a feeling of desolation to the waters around Southport that holds no welcome. No brightly colored little sloops filled with laughing children dither back and forth among the sandbars there. People and ships pass through these roads quickly and with determination to be somewhere else. It is a place between places—like a graveyard in the evening—that urges one not to linger. I, too, was eager to be away. I hurried along until I could look back and see the sweep of the Oak Island Light in my wake. I was at sea at last, again.
    I passed through a gentle chop at 1700 hours on my way to the outer channel marker and took a bearing on Frying Pan Shoals, to stay well off. I was headed 197 degrees magnetic, just west of due south. Flying at first only a working jib to starboard and then only her main, the Gypsy Moon hiked up her skirt, put her shoulder down, and ran at six knots on a broad reach. This point of sail is where she finds her heart. With the wind whipping at her heels, she pulls like an old racehorse who hasn’t forgotten the thrill of the chase, even if she can’t match the younger fillies for speed.
    As night set in, a light rain began to fall, and I headed for the shelter of the cabin. I was still on the uphill slope of the learning curve on how to use the Monitor self-steering wind vane, which in the early stages of the voyage had been only so much ornamental steel hanging off the stern. Once I understood the rather mysterious incantations of line tension, vane direction, and sail trim necessary to make the thing work, it proved itself an amazing device capable of sailing the boat on a straight and steady course for days on end without my bothersome interference at the helm. What the Monitor clearly could not do, however, was steer a straight course dead downwind. And in the norther blowing that day off Southport, dead downwind was where I needed to go.
    The electronic autopilot, which gobbles power but respects neither the speed nor the direction of the wind, was my only respite from an unending rain-soaked vigil at the helm to keep the boat on course. So, with the sail nicely trimmed and tight, I set the autopilot to the compass course dead off the wind and went below to enjoy the wonderful peace of a warm cabin in a boat moving well at sea.
    It was a short-lived peace. As I sailed through the night under the stoic guidance of the autopilot, running from gusty weather and rain, the waves rose to about four feet high. The stern would ride up the front and slide down the back of each successive roller, and the autopilot would fight against the boat’s instinctive wish to turn and face the wind. As the wind strengthened, so did the forces bearing on the autopilot, which groaned and creaked and clattered from its effort to get the Gypsy Moon to the church on time.
    By late afternoon on the second day, the log recorded “high winds, rough seas near Charleston, 28 miles northeast.” It was time for a sail change. I’d known I was doing the “safe” thing when, during the preceding summer in Annapolis, I had arranged