Torries

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F

or the fi rst time in years, I could

hear water chuckling against the

hull, just a few inches from my ear.

Two days before, my plane had circled

snow-covered roofs in Brooklyn, New

York. Now I was on a friend’s boat in

Kota Kinabalu, in northern Borneo, and

soon the tropic heat would chase me out

of my bunk. I lay motionless and thought

about what my friend had said the pre-

vious night, after spending a week in the

boatyard where Oddly Enough, the beloved

Peterson 44 my husband and I spent

10 years crisscrossing the South Pacifi c

aboard, was hauled out.

“I couldn’t bear to go near her. She

looked so derelict,” he had said.

I traced the bright outline of sun coming

through a port and wondered what to do.

My husband, Tom, and I had returned

to Borneo to make Oddly Enough salable,

something we should have done sooner

rather than leaving her on the hard for

three years of burning sun and tropic rains.

If her condition was truly as bad as my

friend said, maybe the only thing to do was

tow her into Kudat Bay, open the through-

hulls and let her sink. In northern Borneo,

there aren’t many options when you hit

the end of the line. We could sail her to

Langkawi, but she needed work to get

there, and then what? We’d still be on the

other side of the world, trying to sell her.

Oddly’s boatyard was three hours north

of Kota Kinabalu. Tom and I rented a car,

took our time on the awful parts of the

road, and still arrived with plenty of day-

light. I couldn’t bring myself to go directly

to the yard where Oddly Enough sat on

the hard. Jet lag and shell shock from our

friend’s description, along with the dismis-

sive pessimism of a local man we talked to

about selling the boat, were freaking me

out. So Tom and I checked into a much

nicer hotel in downtown Kudat than we

would have a couple of years ago, and the

next morning we drove our small, rickety

rented car over the ruts into Penuwasa

Shipyard. It was winter and the rainy

season, and in the morning gloom, Oddly

Enough loomed very tall, surrounded by

squat wooden fi shing vessels in various

stages of repair. We pulled around the bow

of a boat and bounced to a halt.

My stomach started to unknot. Oddly

Enough didn’t look so bad. Her full covers

were intact, unlike the shredded tarps

on a nearby yacht. We’d alerted our local

caretaker that we were coming, and he

had a ladder against the hull waiting

for us. With shaking hands, I undid the

companion way lock and pushed back the

No one tells you how to stop cruising, though. Or how to reconcile the new life with the old.

BY ANN HOFFNER

Point of View

Swan SONG

TOM BAILEY

january/february 2017

cruisingworld.com

Oddly Enough’s cleaned-out and

spruced-up interior (top left) was a

huge improvement. The author (top

right) did the refi t in a hot, dusty Bor-

neo boatyard. Oddly Enough (above)

looked tired after years on the hard.

CRW0217_POV_Swan song.indd 42 11/21/16 2:41 PM