Syjoli III logbook
March 15th, 2006, Panama City Harbour, Panama
Today is the big day. The engine is serviced; the batteries are topped up and floating at 14.4 volts. Danielle has worked tirelessly at prepping and storing food for the next 2 months. She has been at it for the last 2 weeks. All systems are A-OK and ready to go. I trust the boat. We have been together for 5 years now. 500 liters of diesel, 800 liters of water. We are too heavy but will lighten up as we move forward. Next stop in 3600 nautical miles in the Gambier Islands. I hope it will take only 30 days, could stretch to 40. Weather forecast is great for the next 5 days with sun and a strong easterly at 20 knots. We leave at 1600. I have the first watch at 1800 dodging all that cargo traffic converging on the
Panama canal. Danielle will get on deck at 2200 for the first night watch.
From all I can remember, I was always fascinated by the seven seas and its critters. I mean completely fascinated. I was born in Chicoutimi, a small landlocked Canadian town, in 1968. Nothing in the cultural background of my environment had anything to do with the sea, sharks, whales, clams, scuba diving or sailing. Not one member of both extended families of my parents (and that is a lot of people) had either did some diving, sailing or sit on a fighting chair battling a marlin. At best, there was a canoe on a lake somewhere when I was kid and that is a very vague memory sprinkled with fresh water without any hint of salt in it.
I have a very clear recollection where my fascination with the oceans started though. It started in April 1975. I was seven years old, and my father was 10 years in his job climbing the corporate ladder and settling his young family in the soft cushion of Montreal middle class suburbia. And with that, came our first family trip out of the snow to sunny Miami for Easter that year. We were staying at the 1801 on Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, a little condo block situated right on the beach. It was my first experience of salt spray, sun-block-optional-1975-crackling-red-skin, bathers well saturated with sand, with its occasional man-o-war or jelly fish sting. But it also came with its witnessing of a massive leatherback turtle laying eggs one morning surrounded by us and a few early onlookers, lizard races on the beach with my little brother Paul and a small shark caught by a local on a surf casting rod. A stark contrast with my black fly infested spruce backyard of the previous summer.
Like all good and well-behaved Miami snowbirds, my mom brought my brother and I to everything Florida for the 2 following weeks. Disney World, Cypress Garden, Parrot Jungle, the Everglades alligators, and the Miami Seaquarium were all part of the well-designed circuit. I vaguely remember Mickey Mouse, but I clearly remember that day at the Seaquarium. I also remember my mom and aunt Christiane giving up to my prayers and going there again the following day. I remember, the shark feeding session, the very strange looking manatees, the pen of “Flipper” the dolphin and the house set where they were shooting the TV show. The marker of the day was the show of 2 orcas named Hugo and Lolita in what I thought was a massive saltwater enclosure surrounded by a massive stadium with millions of spectators cheering the orcas. Perspective as we grow older changes and 25 years later, while on a golf trip in Miami, I was driving to go play at the Key Biscayne Golf Course and passed right in front of the Seaquarium. I was shocked by the run-downed sadness of the minuscule arena where poor Lolita was still performing a tacky show in a pool no longer than twice her own length. A reality check on our poor record as custodians of the wild.
The following summer would catalyze my fascination for the sea while still being hundreds of miles away from it. We lived a twenty-minute drive from the Island of Sainte-Helene on the South Shore of Montreal where there was an amusement park and the site for the 1967 World Fair. And Sainte-Helene Island is also the site where the Montreal Aquarium was located. I now had a reason to go there. I needed to compare. Would I see dolphins and orcas? Would there be some shark feeding to entertain me? Do we have manatees in Canada?
My mom came with me the first day but she would wisen up quickly and dump me there in the morning with my cousins Fabien, Sophie or Sylvain so they could keep an eye on me while enjoying the free ride to the aquarium. She could then go on to the task of being a mother as my 5-year-old brother was still a handful. There are no orcas at the Montreal Aquarium nor manatees. But there used to be dolphin shows in a massive salt pool in a massive arena (with a giant spiraling roof to protect them from the snow!). A few years later, my eyes would open a bit more to the reality of life to discover a much humbler setting for the dolphins. And few more years later, my heart would sink more when 2 of the Montreal dolphins would die of hunger because of a worker strike at the city, another monument to the ineptitude of humans in the management of animals in captivity.
The one thing that did change my life forever that summer was a small backroom theater in the aquarium where a series of documentaries were run non-stop in a loop that would brand my brain with a forever love of the sea. I would sit there day in, day out, listening to the 37 episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. That series of documentaries were the windows in the life of Commandant Jacque-Yves Cousteau, ex French marine officer, and explorer. The different episodes showed us the life at sea of the Cousteau family onboard their ship Calypso exploring the depths of the oceans. Jacque-Yves with is to 2 sons Phillipe and Jean-Michel, accompanied by their friend Falco would become my family that summer. I would quickly become fluent in decompression sickness, submarine navigation, wreck treasures, scuba diving, spear fishing in the bountiful sea and ocean roaming. Later in my life, my path would cross the one of Jean-Michel Cousteau on 2 different occasions.
Suzanne, my mom, always conscious of feeding my passions with books, had already filled my bookshelves with encyclopedia and history books on aviation. At the age of six, I had promised her I would become a pilot. It turns out that my brother became the pilot while I ended up farming the sea. She would have to change the reading subject and in her magnificent generosity to feed my brain, she bought me The Cousteau Encyclopedia in 20 volumes. That series of books were sold on a catalogue mailing system and were delivered at the painful snail pace of 1 volume per month. I was eight years old. 20 months of waiting in front of me. Almost a quarter of my life. An infinite excruciating sadistic eternity.
Those books grew with me. At 8, I was looking at the images and figures while reading the captions. I started attacking the body text at 10 years old. By 12, the encyclopedia had no more secrets. My father was still climbing the corporate ladder at a good clip and with more discretionary income, he bought a nice chalet in the Eastern Townships near the magnificent lake of Memphremagog, a one-hour drive dues East of Montreal. That chalet would be our home every day of the summer vacations and every weekend of the year. Between alpine ski on Mount Orford in the winter and fishing and tennis in the summer, we lived the protected life of a lucky family. My brother and I had a lot of friends that all seemed to be in the same situation, kids of working parents in Montreal looking for a soft escape on the weekends. Suzanne stayed with us all summer while my father was dutifully and responsibly working in Montreal. He would still come down every weekend so the small chalet would fill up invariably for meals with family and friends. Us kids, we would just bolt out and disappear for the next adventure in a tree house, hit some tennis balls or fishing on the nearby pond.
In the summer of 81, one of our neighbors came to see my father to tell him that he was registering is 2 kids Martin and Sebastien to a hot new sport and that my brother and I should join the craze. Papa said yes and 2 days later we were on the lake getting wet every 30 seconds while learning windsurfing. No more tennis, no more fishing: we were now windsurfers. We were a group of 8 or 9 kids going to the lake every day and learning that wind is a fickle thing with its own temperament and attitude. We all became good quickly because we were putting the hours in. Small breeze or gusty days, we were on the water. We quickly surpassed our teachers and after a few weeks, we were the leaders learning freestyle tricks while keeping an eye on magazines following Californian and Hawaiian champions. Mom, who was a nurse, would throw fits at us because we forgot to eat breakfast so we could be there early in the morning. We would be in the cold water with blue lips and a constant shiver, still, we would skip lunch if the wind was right. She would get so angry yelling at us about cramps and caloric deficit. It was not our fault; we had the wind bug. It is an untreatable condition.
I just could not get enough of it. So was my friend Stephane who was the best of us at it. He was completely absorbed by the equipment trimming and using the perfect sail for the given wind condition. He was super technical and loved to practice and repeat every move again and again. I was more the feel type. Whatever the equipment I had, I had to run it to the maximum speed possible until the board was balanced right. I was moving my hands closer together and bending the board on the outside rail on upwind tack until I could feel the drag losing its grip. I would move back on the board and keep it as flat as I could on the downwind legs while angling the sail so all the wind power would go through the mast on the board, not through my arms and in my legs. At one point in the process, you start forgetting the board and the sail so you can start concentrating on the only obsession of every sailor; finding the wind.
Wind is a tricky thing. It almost act as a living thing. It dances to different beats. It is never constant. It comes and goes and never moves in a straight line. It snakes. It swells. It dies. It gets angry. It always wins. The best you can do is to anticipate its next move. You need all your senses to detect its nuances. You can hear it, smell it and see it. And the skin on your cheeks will trigger all sorts of alarms. There is a vocabulary to it that you have to learn: Beaufort scale, gusts, pressure, downdraft, squally blast, breeze, light puff, calm , variable, flat calm, dead calm, right pressure, left pressure, blast, roar, screech, storm wind, mistral, katabatic, trades, gale, current, stream, zephyr, berg, monsoon, bora, maramu, tornado and the hurricane freight trains that kills with no impunity. Sometimes it is very predictable and then, it can be completely random. The only way to learn is to pay attention and put in the hours on the water.
There is a lot of telltale signs if you look carefully. The way the trees move or bird glides, the way the wave pattern changes, or the color of the water darkens will tell you a lot.
If you are going along on a starboard tack and If you start feeling cold air on your right cheek, there is a storm cloud building up behind you from where the wind is coming. Chances are that the cloud is not in your field of vision. You are feeling the cold high-altitude air dropping to the ground from the outskirt of the cloud. Get ready for the dance. The wind will pick up quickly and if the cloud is big and dark, the windspeed will increase very fast. Then you will feel on the same cheek the wind getting warmer. That is the sign that you are getting closer to the center of the cloud as it passes above you. The wind will drop as it is now being sucked back up in the cloud by the void created from the previous downdraft. The wind speed will pick up again, but this time it will be from another direction depending on where you are in relation to the cloud as you are being hit by the downdraft from the other side of the cloud. Your other cheek will now feel the cold air as the cloud moves away.
If you intend to spend time sailing, that is a critical skill to own. If you want to race, you will win with that skill. And if you spend time on big oceans just cruising around, that skill will save you time and misery. It could even save your life. It did save mine.
Syjoli III logbook
March 16th, 2006, 10 AM, NE 30knots, Sunny
Panama Bay, Panama
I could not sleep. Danielle did. She had to wake me up a few times to help her with cargo traffic just to make sure. Her night vision is not as good as mine. I am still nauseated and will be for another day or so until I get my sea legs back. Already 110 nautical miles on the counter, we are moving good. Sluggish but good… hard to explain. Syjoli does not feel right, she is still too heavy. That Katabatic wind from the Andes is really pushing us out of the bay. I hate that 4 hours watch system; it really breaks me. Danielle is cranky also.
The summer of 1984 would bring another defining moment in my young life. That summer was a new beginning for our family. The previous year, my dear mother Suzanne had died in the spring after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. 1983 was just a blur of sadness for us all. She was the strong anchor that we always leaned on. She was nice. Everybody loved her. And then she was gone. I have a very patchy memory of that summer at our chalet in Magog. Aunt Therese was staying with us. Paul and I were still spending countless hours on the water to bury our sorrow while my father was doing the same at work back in Montreal. He would call us on the weekdays and dutifully comeback on the weekends. It would take a year for us to move on and find our smiles again. In the following winter, my father met Helene.
She would become his wife and is still by his side today.
Helene would be instrumental in my development as a teenager and my early adult life. Helene is the opposite of my father. While my father is a model of respectability, conservatism, responsibility, and stability. Helene is the cool supercharged feminist and super autonomous at managing her own consultancy cabinet. Helene just wants to have fun. Food, wine, tennis, ski, golf, theater, and trips around the world is her normal routine. Helene was probably absent the day that God was distributing the “fear” gene. Helene had another special skill, she was an accomplished sailor, and that gave her Mega-Brownie-Points in my eyes.
1984 was a year of big change for all of us. Helene had no kids and was coming in a household of 2 teenagers in full testosterone mode. My father still saddened by his loss saw only memories in both the house in Montreal and the chalet in Magog. So, he changed both that year by reducing size in Montreal and seriously upgrading in Magog to a beautiful 3 story house by the lake. My younger brother was starting to hold his own on the sailboard while I was discovering girls, beers and windsurfing trips with my friend Stephane. Stephane and I did our first competition on the American side of Memphremagog lake in Newport, Vermont. Stephane finished 1st, I took second place. We had a serious advantage on everyone. We were both built on a chicken frames and light as a feather. We could glide in any condition. I was carrying 2 boards. I had a Mistral Maui for light wind work and a Windsurfer Rocket 83 when things were getting rough. Stephane had four boards and 6 sails. Between the 2 of us, we had all declinations of sails from 4m2 to 7.2m2. It was difficult to move all that stuff around. Stephane’s father stepped up to the plate and bought a 6-board trailer with a lock box. Stephane’s older sister, Chantale, who had nothing to do better that summer, voted herself as our personal chauffeur and DJ (we had 1 cassette tape on a loop with some ACDC, Van Halen, Journey and Toto… actually, there was a second cassette with Chantale’s selection that we made disappear). Her father had bought her a big graduation gift that year, a Pontiac Grand Prix. We were all good to go. And we went. We did 7 windsurfing competitions that summer between Kinston on the great lakes in Ontario and Baie St-Paul on the St Laurence River in the northeast of Quebec. We had a blast. I remember every day of that summer.
At the beginning of that summer, my father, maybe because he wanted to impress Helene, managed to get an invite to go on a daytrip on a sailboat. I was also invited. Not doing so would have probably created a family crisis. The date was June 24th, 1984, and the venue was Quebec City. It was Quebec’s National Day and a special one at that as Quebec was also celebrating the 450th anniversary of the 1st French explorer to Canada in 1534. And for the occasion, all the tall ships of the world were converging on the city that day. My father’s business contact had a magnificent C&C 36 sloop parked at the Quebec Yacht Club. The day was sunny, warm with a very light breeze. There were 6 adults, me, and a deckhand on board. We got out of the Yacht Club, turned to port toward Quebec’s harbor and lifted the sails. I knew sailboats, but the small kind only: 420s and Lasers. This was a different breed: 12 tons, a fifty-foot mast and a helm wheel 6 feet across. The adults started drinking wine and chit chat about business.
Louis, the hired deckhand, ran the sails and somehow, I ended up behind the wheel.
There is a heaven.
I got the hang of it right away. It felt easier than a Laser dinghy and much easier than a 420. Both these dinghies are unforgiving machines, and you pay the price right away with a wet bum and a capsized boat. It is not the case with a 36-foot sloop. There is a 5-ton lead keel under you that keeps you straight up and so much inertia that you have all the time in the world to correct your navigation mistakes. That boat was tracking like a freight train. At the same time, you can feel everything from the helm. You can feel
the balance of sails through the helm. You can also feel the turbulence of underwater drag if the boat is not tuned right. It was the same feeling I get from my backfoot on a windsurf. You just know if you’re moving along but you can also feel if you could smooth those turbulences and go a tad faster. Sloops of that size have something else; a built-in comfy house with cabins, kitchen, salon and toilet. A seed was planted that day.
Syjoli III logbook , March 17th, 2006, 10 AM, NE 25knots, Sunny
Panama Bay, Panama
I do not know which idiot think that this British Navy 4-hour watch system is a great thing, but it is not working for me or Danielle. By the time you are sound asleep, you must wake up. Stupid. Everything feels like a burden. Danielle is crankier also. Maybe we will get used to it. No more land in sight. Yesterday we could still see the mountain caps of Colombia above the clouds. Not today. No more cargo ships either. We are on our own.
I moved to my 1st apartment in 1987 in Quebec City to study Biology at Laval University. I had a monthly allowance of 500$ a month from my father to deal with rent, food and tuition. I was working as a bar tender on the weekends during the semesters to have real pocket money. The job was 2 nights, was cool and had not impact on school obligations. My father had landed me a super summer job as a biology field technician sampling fish over a wide area in the north of the province on a Hydro dam project. We were monitoring the mercury content in fishes and the impacts on the native population around the project area. It was a privilege to work there. I really had a hands-on experience on what a biologist job was before even studying in Biology. I always hated school. Not that I was not good at it. I just hated it probably because of the burden of fitting it that regimented box. I was never good at following orders anyway. If I was to enroll in the army, I would probably end up in the brig on the first day.
Studying in Quebec was great, and I had 2 passionate teachers who transmitted their love for their field of work. One was Dr Immelman in Zoology of Invertebrates and Dr Dodson in Zoology of vertebrates and Ichtyology. For the first time, I liked school. But I also quickly came to realization that I would not survive well out of that love. In 1989, jobs were sparse for everyone and inexistant for biologists. Unless you went through a master’s degree followed by a 4-year Doctorate, where you could do some teaching and some subsidized research, life as a biologist was very grim. Reluctantly, after learning about metabolism, organic chemistry, chordates anatomy and biochemistry, I switched faculty to Business school to increase my prospects and chances to be able to pay my bills one day.
Throughout all those years at Uni, I never stopped bar tending, it kept me grounded and well cashed up.
I had zero student debt and could travel with friends on our next mountain bike adventure on Cadillac
Mountain in Maine or a diving trip to Les Escoumins in the Gulf of St Laurence in the warm and comfortable 4degC salt water (with a dry suit please). Windsurfing was not in the cards anymore, but my student apartment was not too far from the St Laurence River, and I would always look at those sailboats on a Sunday exiting the Quebec Yacht Club jetty from the corner of my eye thinking that one day…
In the summer of 1989, after reneging on biology, I landed another cool summer job. I was a sailing instructor at the Club Med in Eleuthera in the Bahamas for a couple months. It felt like a cool thing to do. There was not much money in it, and it did not bother me because I knew I was coming back to bar tending when Uni class would start again. The lack of money at Club Med was heavily compensated by fun, sun, salt, sailing, rhum and more girls. My job as a sailing instructor was minimal. The dive center and sailing center of the Eleuthera Club Med was on the other side of the island in Governor’s Harbor. Guests at the resort needed to take a shuttle to come sailing so that would seriously cut down on the number of people I would see in a day. I was lucky if I had 1 lesson a day to 1 guest. The rest of my time was spent between diving, spear fishing and hours of sailing on the mighty Laser 1. I just love that boat with its barebone sailing and constant tweaking, a perfect sailing machine.
I did the same thing in the summer of 1990, but this time I was sent to Punta Cana in Dominican
Republic. That Club had a more organized sailing center. I was working for the head of water sports Fabio, a massive scruffy Italian with a thundering voice. It was a more military approach to work, and I had a lot of students. Fabio did run the mill with a strong hand, but he was a great teacher of life and a super navigator. He really polished my skills as a sailor and as an instructor. He brought that European flair to the equation and his worldly experience of working with people from all over.
I did crash a boat that summer… and it was 100% my fault. I was busy giving instructions to a student on the laser and I was not looking in front. I t-boned another laser to a completely hull loss. There was a 2foot-wide hole on the hull. I felt like shit. The General Manager really had a go at me, but Fabio stood in front of him and took the blame. But man did I pay after that. The general manager wanted the boat scrapped so he could stay angry at me. Fabio wanted to repair the boat to ease the tension. The manager agreed but it would be put on the work line only if the boat was to his standard of performance and “Club Med” aesthetics. So, Fabio took on him to have me repair the boat and teach me all the necessary skills to achieve the mission. And this would have to be done outside the normal work hours. That meant no more diving, spear fishing, rhum or girls. So, for the next 2 weeks, I sweated in long sleeve shirt and pants (you quickly learn about the itchy characteristic of fiberglass) while sanding, prepping, gluing, fiber glassing, molding, and painting a dead vessel. Fabio knew what he was doing, and he did the final coat of paint himself to make sure we passed muster. The General Manager never inspected the job as he was already managing one of the thousand other crisis a 600-guests resort generates every day. The boat looked great and was back on a work line… and from Fabio, I learned a few leadership skills that would come handy later.
Syjoli III logbook , March 18th, 2006, 10 AM, NE 15knots, Sunny
The wind is slowly abating as we move away from the coast and getting closer to the equator. The wind generator is still pushing nice electrons in the batteries, and we have not used the diesel engine yet to recharge the banks. That might change over the next few days. That shitty British Navy watch system does not work at all for us. I am very tired already and we are just starting the trip. We will try something different tonight and extend the sleep time to 6 hours watch. I will sleep first from 1800. Danielle will go to her bunk at 0000.
I met Danielle on a Wednesday evening in March 1991. I always worked as a bar tender at the pub on Friday and Saturday nights from 10pm to 3am. I had seen her from afar on a few occasions, but our eyes had never crossed. I was probably busy anyway as we were always super packed on the weekends. On rare occasions, I was called to fill in on weekdays when someone was sick, but I had pleaded with the boss not to call on me too often as I was still under the Temple of Knowledge training, cramming my head with bond pricing technique, operational research, marketing, or macroeconomics theory.
It was a snowy evening. She opened the door of the pub in all her splendor to stop for a beer on her way back from work to her apartment. She never made it there. She still describes that night as:
“The night a caveman grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to his lair.”
One week later she moved in with me and one month later, we started our first company.
Syjoli III logbook , March 19th, 2006, 10 AM, NE 3 knots, Sunny
As expected, we are running out of wind. I will wait to tomorrow before running the engine to recharge the battery. The batteries are sitting at 13.1V. Plenty. That new 6-hour-Syjoli-watch system seems to work. I feel better. Danielle thinks we should increase it to 8 hours. I wonder what Lord Nelson would think of this. Would it be “proper”?
Danielle is an illustrator and graphic designer of great talent. She was working as a freelance designer for all the top advertisement agency in Quebec City when I met her. She wanted to have her own shop and I was looking for any excuse to get out of my misery on the school bench. In May 1991, we founded Tandem Conception Inc and quickly established ourselves in the market. We had embraced before anybody else the new ways of electronic desktop publishing and reaped the benefits quickly. We were driving ourselves in the settled and comfortable life of posh suburbia near the Plaines d’Abraham in Quebec City.
We led very active lives with golf memberships at 2 different clubs and multiple dive trips in the Caribbean. We mostly went to Cuba. Cuba has probably the best diving in the Caribbean. Cubans are cool, musical and they just want to have fun. It is a beautiful country. Coming back to the city after a dive trip was always a bit depressing. We just could not get enough of the sun, the sea, the dives, … the vibe. We both felt the same way. Our shop was doing fine, we had a very nice house in a nice neighborhood, a nice car and nice wine on the table. Still, we were not happy in that setup anymore. I was now 30 years old. Personally, I was telling myself: “Is that it?” I do not know if you are supposed to be depressed at 30. But I was. And it made no sense. If you would have asked me then on what would make me happy, I would have been at a lost on the answer. I knew that I was not allowed to complain, I had everything. I did confide in Danielle. She understood, she felt a bit the same in her own way. We agreed on many things. We agreed that we both did not want kids. We agreed that our job was not as exciting as it used to be. We agreed on the fact that a big sabbatical would be nice. I mention a boat. She said yes.
We bought Syjoli III, a beautiful and very capable 16-ton cutter-rig blue water boat, in the spring of 2000. On July 4th, 2004, after selling all our assets, we set sail for the North Atlantic.
Syjoli III logbook , March 20th, 2006, 10 AM, flat calm, Sunny
Shit. The engine does not start. I cannot recharge the batteries. I am a bit panicking right now. The batteries are at 12.6 Volt. I probably have 2 more days of charge in them and we have at least 6 or 7 days of flat calm in front of us. All that food in the fridge and the freezer will spoil. And how will we enter the lagoon pass in the Gambier Island in a month’s time without an engine and no electricity to run the GPS and the Radar?