My friend Maile and I both married men who love the sea. They do not love the sea more than they love us, but then again they’d rather not be asked to choose. Maile and I prefer hotels. I have a terrible fondness for shade and beds that don’t move. When I go for a walk, I usually want to go farther than ten feet. Maile just gets seasick.
And so the husbands conspired to design a sailing trip that would prove to us that a good time can be had by all on the water. It is a plot worthy of Doris Day and Rock Hudson: Two sailing husbands cook up a plan to turn their land-loving wives into a couple of old salts. It has romantic comedy written all over it.
The four of us met up in the British Virgin Islands in the season of calm seas and endless sunshine. Our boat was called the Aurora, a 67-foot sloop the husbands had decided on after months of poring over choices on the Internet. (Ah, the Internet. It fans the hearts of sailors the way the sea itself once did.) We dragged our duffel bags full of swimwear and sunscreen and paperback novels down to the dock, where we met Rich and Sam Malone, the husband-and-wife captain-and-cook team. They radiated warmth and welcome despite the fact that we were two hours late and had already eaten lunch. “Eaten?” Sam said.
“Did you make lunch? ” Maile asked.
“I’m so sorry, ” I said brightly. “Whatever it was, just give it to us for dinner. ”
Let’s stop the movie here. Imagine you are living in an apartment that is 67 feet long and, at its most ambitious point, 17 feet wide. Four people you’ve never laid eyes on show up with a not insignificant amount of luggage to stay with you for seven days and seven nights, and none of you will leave the apartment for the entire week. To get off on the right foot, you cook a beautiful meal for your mystery guests, and they, in turn, blow it off (albeit unwittingly). Instead of drowning the ungrateful wretches like a sackful of blind kittens, you simply smile. There were smiles all around. We settled in while Rich started the engine and cast off. My husband (a doctor) doled out Maile’s first dose of his special seasickness cocktail before a wave had a chance to break across the bow.
After our first day’s sail, there was a mooring near something that could be called either an enormous rock or a tiny island. We took a swim and then mastered the vacuum toilets and a shower that begged you to take the quickest rinse of your life. We reappeared on deck in dry shirts and began to play the first round of getting-to-know-you with our hosts. Sam is a pretty Scottish blonde; Rich a handsomely sunbaked Englishman. After eight years of sailing together, they had recently married. It had been a surprise proposal. We, the guests, in turn threw down our own stories about when and why we had made the leap to marriage. Sam kept up her part of the conversation from the galley, where she was working away. There’s an unwritten rule on these charters: no grazing from the cupboards; no poking around in the icebox. Sam would have ultimate authority in her four feet of workspace, just as Rich would have authority as captain of the boat. We could all agree that was fair.
Dinner first night should have been our tip-off to what was coming, but I think we all suspected that Sam was simply playing her best hand. Up the five steep galley stairs came the little coconut crab cake appetizers, crunchy and featherlight, followed by an orzo and lobster salad that I mistook for dinner. Imagine my surprise when dinner showed up, a gratin of some mysterious island tuber with grilled asparagus and a little piece of chutney-glazed snapper. We had requested a menu heavily weighted toward fish and we got what we asked for. Actually, we got more than we asked for. We got a passion-fruit crème brûlée with boat-made biscotti, too. The husbands now remembered that the website for this particular boat had blood-sworn testimonials about the brilliance of the food. It was true. It was also a little weird to think that one of the best meals I’d ever eaten had been made on a swinging propane stove the size of an overnight bag.
Moreover, it had been made not by a professional chef but by a sometime Christmas-tree designer. Except that when Sam got the job designing Christmas trees for large British corporations, she didn’t know how to do that either. “It sounded like fun,” she said. “I was sure I could figure it out.” Living on a sailboat with Rich sounded like fun, too, and so she figured out how to cook. She told me this after breakfast, which had consisted of little sailboats assembled out of fresh fruit and pumpkin-cranberry muffins baked at the crack of dawn. I hung over a bookcase to both stay out of the galley and still talk to her. She was kneading a deep yellow piecrust on a counter that was a single piece of tile. We were sailing again, but the precipitous rocking had no effect on Sam’s ability to press the dough into six individual tart tins. I counted four tiny cabinets. Who has individual tart tins on a boat? “Sam Malone,” she said, still reveling in the pleasure of her new name.
After a few hours of sailing, we dropped anchor in a beautiful cove that bore a suspicious resemblance to the beautiful cove we had recently left. The four guests jumped overboard and swam away. When we got back, we could smell our boat. It smelled like caramelized onions and lavender. I could swear that the masts of the few other boats nearby leaned toward the Aurora. “Lunch!” we cried and paddled harder. For each of us there was a beautiful tomato tart with a melting coin of goat cheese, its heat balanced on a crisp salad. Rich and Sam ate the same tarts we did, but they ate them down below. Whether that had to do with the size of the table or the propriety of service or their desire to have a quiet moment of their own, I do not know.
When I’m eating in a restaurant, I know that there is someone back in the kitchen cooking my food, but I don’t see them do it. And anyway, they aren’t making the food for me. They’re cooking the next order on the line. Even when the kitchen wall comes down and the chef becomes the evening’s entertainment, I don’t look over the hot stove and think, “Hey, that’s my dinner. He’s doing this for me.” But on a boat, the world is reduced to a postage stamp. Sam began work on dinner the minute lunch was over, and I knew exactly who she was cooking for. Plates were set down and whisked away by two people I was quickly coming to think of as friends. I understood that we were paying for our vacation, but the inequity of labor began to eat at me. Maile and I begged to chop peppers and wash pots, and were kindly and consistently denied. The Perrier flowed like, well, water. Would we like some nuts? More tapenade? Could they get us some more ice? I made our bed each morning and cleaned up the cabin, but after a swim I noticed that the sheets were tucked in tighter and that the pillows were no longer askew.
“Sam,” I pleaded, “you cannot clean my room.” While the three husbands sailed, Sam and Maile and I told each other about our previous boyfriends and our issues bra shopping. We managed to do yoga in a space too small to play a game of Twister. This was not a Four Seasons, this was intimacy on fast-forward. This was a boat, where after you swim and sleep and read you are still left with 12 to 14 hours of straight-up conversation a day. We sailed to another island, and then we sailed to the other side of it. We swam down to see the tiny yellow fish and the larger ones with blue stripes. One of the husbands saw a giant spiny lobster, and far out in the water I spotted a small shark lying still on the sandy bottom. I swam slowly, avoiding splashes, until I found Maile, and we went back to tell Sam our adventures.
One morning a tall, blond surfer pulled his loaded dinghy up beside us and sold Sam fresh arugula and mangoes while the rest of us bought T-shirts. Later that day, the arugula and mangoes made a bed for smoked-salmon cakes filled with smoked-marlin mousse. It was a better meal than anything I have ever made in my life, and she was serving it for lunch on a Thursday after swimming.
The six of us talked books. We played Scrabble. (Never play Scrabble with people who live on a boat. They have a lot of time to read the dictionary.) Sam made Rich show the DVD he made for her last birthday, pictures of the two of them sailing in Alaska, Australia, the Grenadines. It ended with his marriage proposal up on the screen in big, block print. We sat on the couches and cheered.
The trip was a success. Maile never did get sick, and I worked through my claustrophobia by taking long swims. In fact, the only thing about sailing I couldn’t get over was watching Sam work so hard. I also couldn’t stand to see Rich washing all those dishes, filling all our cups while we stretched across the deck like a bunch of sunning lizards. Surely one of those British Virgin Islands had a decent restaurant. On our last night, I offered to take everyone out to dinner.
The restaurant was, of course, a sad way to end the greatest culinary week of my life, eating lukewarm soup that wore the satiny skin of a bisque kept waiting. But it was worth it to see Sam in her staggeringly high heels and ruffled halter top. It was worth it to see someone serving her for a change. I can only imagine the brilliant final meal she would have made for us had we stayed on the boat. I like to think our sacrifice was a small gesture toward equality and friendship
To book a boat with captain and cook, contact Antigua Yacht Charters (268-463-7101; caribbeansail.com; weeklong sails (for two) in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean from $5,900)