Free Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi

St. Thomas, tacking her gingerly back and forth through the eye of the wind,making slow progress into a channel congested with rocks and transparent shallows.
    Inch by inch we rounded the south side of the island and sailed into Charlotte Amalie Harbor, which was bustling with at least a hundred boats at anchor and skirted with cruise ships, ferries and a busy-looking harbor front. Scouting out a clear spot with plenty of leeway at the back of the fleet to drop the anchor, I maneuvered Varuna over to it and, at the right second, headed her into the wind, rushed to the bow and dropped the hook. The chain paid out and hit the bottom; I waited to feel it dig in as we drifted back a bit, then let out about 75 feet of scope and cleated the whole thing off.
    At 1:30 P.M . on July 1, I turned proudly and looked around the busy harbor; no one had noticed my spectacular entrance. I inflated the dinghy, rowed ashore to the Yacht Haven dock, bought that longed-for Coca-Cola and stood surveying my surroundings.
    The urge to talk to somebody, anybody, after the ocean passage was more overwhelming than I ever could have predicted, and I looked hungrily around the docks for an unsuspecting victim. Grinning, I said Hi to everybody and had the feeling that if someone so much as uttered a “So, how was the trip?” floodgates of giddy description would burst open. Deciding to call home instead, I headed for a pay phone.
    Soon after my arrival, my younger sister, Jade, joined me in St. Thomas, and brought with her my new crew member, Dinghy. One week before leaving New York, I had gone uptown to the ASPCA on 96th Street to adopt a cat. I was determined to sail with a friend, and if it had to be of the feline variety, that was all right with me. There, among the pathetic prisoners all desperately lashing out at the bars on their cages, I found the cat that was destined to sail with me halfway around the world. He was one year old, black, except for his white paws, face and belly. I had read that a black cat was good luck on a boat.
    The last thing I needed was a frustrated tomcat, so Dinghy’s departure for the wild blue yonder had been delayed to accommodate a neutering trip to the veterinarian. I had left New York with lots of cat food, cat litter and vitamins, but no cat. Once set free on board, Dinghy immediately curled up to sleep in the spot that was to become his favorite from then on—anywhere that was the most inconvenient for me. One night, he fell off the dock into the water, quickly learning that he loathed swimming, and from then on he seemed extra careful about his footing.
    Jade stayed with me for two weeks and together we dinghiedaround St. Thomas, went swimming, and took a ferry to St. John for carnival. Rio de Janeiro and Trinidad had fired our images of carnival and we pictured wild costumes, parties, singing, dancing and calypso. Sitting in a restaurant overlooking the streets, we were pretty disappointed to see drunken tourists and locals stumble along to the blaring rhythm of reggae and disco, pumped full volume from old trucks. No colorful costumes lent an air of gaiety to the spectacle and, stuck there until we could catch the morning ferry back to St. Thomas, we reminisced about other July Fourths in other places, found a couple of unoccupied benches away from the fanfare and fell asleep under the tropical night sky.
    Back on Varuna , I vowed to solve the problem of the engine and leaky chain plates and found a local jack-of-all-trades, Mike, who had some experience with boats and offered to help. While Jade worked on a tan to impress her friends, Mike came aboard and immediately pointed to where I had put a hard epoxy over a flexible silicon, which my father had covered over again with more silicon. Mike shook his head. “There’s your problem. The chain plates flex when they’re under pressure,” he explained, “and they need to have some give. The epoxy cracked and your father’s