October 28, 2005 - I'M NOT SUPERSTITIOUS. THAT'S BAD LUCK!
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

	This is the 5"x7" bronze St. Christopher that looks after us from his decorative position on the salon bulkhead.

Like so many other bluewater cruising sailors, I would never dream of opening a can of bully beef - or anything else for that matter - upside down. Those of us who lead this somewhat precarious existence - where a moment's inattention or an ill-weighed decision can cost us everything we own - can't afford to miss a trick. It's not that we are superstitious exactly. We simply realize that we need the cards stacked in our favor when there are so many unexpected things that can go wrong, some self-inflicted, some caused by wear, some brought about by random forces or haphazard quirks of nature, others a matter of plain bad luck.

A bronze Saint Christopher hangs on a bulkhead in our main cabin. There's a magnetized one on the oven door. Yet another bronze medallion is blue-tacked to the brick heater hearth. Not that we are practicing Christians. It's just that we need everything on our side. So we didn't pay any attention when Pope Pius demoted the patron saint of travelers to secondary stature. We bring him along for the ride in many guises just the same.

Nor would we consider leaving port on a Friday. Our Belgian friend and cruising companion Patrick Van God openly scoffed at this commonly held sailors' superstition, leaving Papeete that very day. But less than a week later he left his steel ketch Trismus to rust on Rangiroa's wreck-pocked reef.

We decided to clear Kiwi customs on a Friday once. We thought it wouldn't count if we left quietly, without fanfare, thinking to ooze out of the Whangarei River to anchor in a remote coastal anchorage in order to relax and put the ship to rights, then put to sea - not on a Friday - but on another day of the week, when the weather was right and the wind from a favorable quarter.

The customs and immigration officials had no sooner stepped off the vessel when a gust of wind piped up from nowhere, renting the morning calm. By the time we'd cast off our lines, a healthy un-forecast wind was funneling up the river. We decided to take shelter behind Whangarei Heads, but even that eight-mile journey was not without incident and accident. The engine inexplicably overheated. In the wild sail handling and narrow channel tacking that ensued, we sailed ourselves aground. We lay at anchor in Urquharts Bay in the lee of the Heads for three days waiting for gale-force northeasterlies and driving rain to let up, licking our wounds and vowing never to clear on a Friday again. But the gods hadn't finished with us yet. We set off in the calm (and heavy surge) that followed the blow only to be headed by STORM-force nor'westerlies a day-and-a-half later. It was a passage memorable for misadventure.

Belgian ketch Trismus, lost on Rangiroa after leaving Tahiti on Friday the 13th.

We are sympathetic with those who refuse to change the name of a newly purchased boat even if it is a name that they abhor. It is well known that changing names can incur the wrath of whatever Gaseous Invertebrate is lying in wait for such breaches of nautical etiquette. People we know got around that one cleverly by translating the boat's name into another language. Booby became the Latin equivalent Sula, a nice evasion and one seemingly acceptable to the Celestial Jury.

Some folk insist on going still further and naming their boat with a name containing seven letters. Seven is a lucky number it seems - Seven Seas, Seven Sisters in the Pleiades and so on. But I have evidence that that particular belief is of minor consequence and can be negated by stronger omens of ill portent. Like the unlucky number thirteen.

In a period of thirteen days in August 1978, three thirteen-meter yachts were wrecked on New Caledonian reefs. We were exploring those tricky waters at the time, and I remember wondering whether it would be easier to add a bowsprit or to cut off the swim grid. Forty feet plus swim grid and pulpit is uncomfortably close to thirteen meters. Off the main pass to the atoll of Ouvea in the Loyalty Islands lay a hulk with the seven letters L O R I L E I on its transom in foot-high letters, easily read even at dawn as we lay hove to, waiting for the day to brighten enough to enable us to venture into the pass. Lorelei was a thirteen-meter, thirteen-ton schooner, one of "La Serie Noire".

There are various ways of out-foxing the gremlins that bug us. One way is to be nonchalant, to pretend to be going nowhere. Just slip off casually on a transoceanic trip as though you were off on a weekend outing. It is safest not to mention aloud an itinerary to be followed or even a course to steer. Most of the time it works, we found, and for years we used this very ruse. But a couple of time we got caught with leaky hatches and improperly stowed gear and we lived to rue the day we used the Ploy of Un-preparedness. Perhaps the mistake we made was to put on our list "Replace gaskets in hatches". Maybe gremlins can read.

Our present ploy is to get everything watertight, battened down, lashed tightly. Lists ticked. The thinking behind this tactic is that perhaps the gods will see a well-found, well-stocked, tight, sturdy vessel and after scrutinizing it carefully decide that there is no use wasting a storm on it. The trouble with this particular gambit is that if you are too strict about implementing the rules you may never leave. "If you wait until you are ready you'll never go" is a truism of some proven weight.

Perhaps the best system would be a combination of Preparedness plus Guile. One must be wiley, get to know the machinations of the devils, the psychology of mischief, and play the system in your favor. Harness it.

To give an example of the sort of manipulation I am referring to: once when we were about to head north to Victoria, British Columbia from Newport Beach, California, not an easy trip at best, I was horrified when my normally cagey skipper-husband announced to all and sundry not only the day of our impending departure but also the very hour.

He gleefully eased my nervous apprehension by pointing out to me that this was the time of the start of the Ensenada Race, locally known as 'The Ensenada Stampede'. Over six hundred yachts were to participate that year in the downhill race across the Mexican border for a few days of gringo high jinx, cerveza and good fellowship. "The gods won't even notice our departure with that lot to foul up. The last couple of races have been easy spinnaker runs. That's why so many boats are taking part. They figure it'll be a cinch." Sure enough, we were shot up the coast right speedily and in record time by tail winds which would have been hell to buck into. Our radio told of the culling of the southbound fleet as dismastings, gear failures, leaks and seasickness took their toll.

It wasn't until the race was well and truly over that the cockpit drain came unglued, as did the pumps. Then we got fogged in. The radio beacon indicated on our chart had been moved across the channel in the years since we'd last passed thataway, giving us some anxious moments. (THEY had noticed that our charts were outdated.) Then the transmission packed up so we had to short tack in uncomfortable head winds into the precarious shelter at Port Orford, Oregon. We'd forgotten that the racing fleet had to make their way home. And then...

But that's another story.