Chapter Two: In Which We Set Up Our Boat While in Self-Isolation

We awoke on Wednesday at 5 a.m. as a potent combination of jet-lag, nerves, and excitement flooded our bodies. I tried to go back to sleep, but I knew a lost cause when I saw one. 

“Excellent. Two hours of sleep it is.” I thought.

We disentangled ourselves from our pile of makeshift bedding and began to assess our situation in the light of day. The sun in Crete is piercingly clear and bright. Only the first hour of sunrise and final hour of sunset offer a softer, more gentle light. But even in the forgiving rosy hues of the early morning, there was no getting around it. Our boat looked like it had been ransacked by lunatics.

• 

• 

• 

In addition to our overflowing bags, all the bilge covers (the boat world’s terminology for floorboards) were pulled up and all the cabinets and built-in storage lockers were hanging open, making Gradisca essentially a giant booby-trapped maze. (If you’re wondering why all the cabinets and floorboards were open, Ángel had come to visit the boat earlier in the year and had found a leak that had let water into the master berth and, after removing 100 liters of water from the boat and fixing the leak, he had left all the bilge covers, lockers, and cabinets open to dry out the boat. Thus, this is the state in which we found her.)

Our first order of business was to assess whether his fix for the leak had worked (it had) and whether the boat was dry (it was). Hooray! Our first piece of good news. 

The second order of business was to figure out how we could self-isolate for a week aboard a boat that currently had:

No working toilet or shower.

No running water, either hot or cold.

No food other than trail mix.

No pots or pans except for one small paella pan. (Can a Spaniard really move aboard a boat without a paella pan? No, the answer is no).

No electricity.

No refrigeration. 

No gas line, meaning no stove or oven.

Two quick, easy wins on Wednesday morning were to get the water and electricity hooked up. So with these in place, we decided food was the next highest priority and, dutifully masked and armed with a shopping list of items that required no cooking, we headed to the grocery store to do one mega-shopping trip for our week of quarantine. The Greek government requires all new arrivals to self-isolate for one week, even if they test negative for coronavirus on entrance. This grocery store trip is all we were allowed for our first seven days. 

On the way to the grocery store, we had our second piece of good news. We ran into the Australian couple who had sold us our boat, and they informed us that, while the main shower / toilet facilities were prohibited to those in self-isolation, there was a separate toilet facility built specially for recently-arrived pariahs such as ourselves. After the indignity of the prior night, we were elated. Never have public toilets brought me so much joy. (In fact,now that I think about it, these toilets are likely responsible for the continued happy state of our marriage. I’m not sure how well I would have handled a full week of creeping into the shrubbery to relieve myself, particularly without a shovel….) 

But I digress. The salient point is that things were looking up. We had electricity, we had water, we had toilets, and now at the grocery store, we had abundant, delicious food. We revelled in the fresh Greek produce, the salty feta and thick yogurt, the Cretan honey, the olives, and the tins of Aegean sardines. We loaded ourselves down with as much as we could carry and headed back to our boat, ready to spend a week quarantining in this Grecian paradise and even more ready to tick items off our list and keep “moving balls forward.” We were hopeful, sure that we’d soon have everything in order. 

Then we ate lunch. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever sat down to eat a large lunch on a hot day in southern Europe while jet-lagged, but if you have, you know it can only lead to one thing: complete, all-encompassing, soul-sucking fatigue. At this point, we were like sharks: if we stopped moving, we died. 

My approach was to keep moving, to just power through and unpack the bags. Ángel succumbed to the call of sleep and lay sweating and semi-hallucinating in the sweltering master berth (we had not yet learned which hatches to leave open for maximum airflow). He eventually awoke, deeply disoriented and dehydrated and I manically displayed my handiwork to him, crowing in a slightly unhinged tone that all our things had a “home” (thank you, Marie Kondo, for this concept). Just as Ángel began to blearily take in what I was saying, I began to melt down, utterly spent and with a body clock gone haywire. 

In this way, we progressed fitfully through our first few days, taking it in turns to fall apart. At any given time, one of us would be buoyed with optimism, intent on conquering tasks and propping up the struggling partner, who more often than not would be staring slack-jawed into space, despondent and defeated by faulty pump wiring, an inverted joker valve, or a malfunctioning water tank gauge. All of our struggles were compounded by our enforced week of quarantine: what could usually be solved by a simple trip to the hardware store or the marine chandlery now involved inventive workarounds and an ever-growing list of tasks that had to be delayed until we could leave our boat for more supplies. 

For most of Thursday, Ángel took on the more optimistic role as I grew progressively crankier and more obsessed with our unfulfilled quest for the holy grail, for that most soothing and most important morning ritual, for that source of pep that allows one to face the day. In other words, the quest for a cup of coffee. 

Several issues stood in the way: we had no matches or lighter; we could not figure out why our propane line wasn’t working; and we had no pot in which to boil water. 

We cleared the first of these hurdles when our kindly Swiss neighbors sympathetically gave us boxes of matches, which charmingly displayed an image of the Alps.

The second issue was solved on Friday, when I awoke at 3:30 in the morning to find Ángel frantically pulling open the galley cabinets and then triumphantly announcing that he had dreamed that there was a second safety switch for the propane line (which in fact, there is, hidden in one of the galley cupboards) and that he had found it and now finally, FINALLY we could light our stove. (That this behavior seemed to me not only normal, but in fact, commendable, sheds a great deal of light on our mental state at this point.)

And finally, as necessity is the mother of invention, we boiled the water to make coffee in our trusty paella pan. 

Thus, Friday morning brought us both coffee and a rosier outlook on life. We had conquered several of the boat’s most important systems, and though others would continue to elude us, we made slightly more sane progress as the week went on. It became more of a “two steps forward, one step back” instead of a “no steps forward, one step sideways and one step that can’t be taken because your screwdriver is the wrong size.” By the end of the week, our jet-lag had abated and our boat was almost fully functional, without us entirely realizing how we’d gotten there. 

And as with many trying experiences, the challenges are already fading from my mind, leaving only the happy “firsts” standing out in stark clarity.  I can clearly remember the absolute joy of dangling my feet for the first time off the back of the boat and letting the turquoise Mediterranean waters eddy coolly around my calves. I remember our first sunset dinner in the cockpit of our boat, when we were finally able to eat stove-cooked food with a glass of refrigerator-chilled wine. And I’ll never forget the moment when both of us, arms deep in plumbing, suddenly looked up in wonder at the same time as church bells pealed out on our first Sunday morning. 

In many ways, we suffered in that first week. But we were also encountering moments of joy more pure and more powerful than I had felt in years. 

• 

• 

It’s hard to convey the overwhelming sense of accomplishment that I felt at the end of the week when I looked around at the boat and realized that, more or less, everything was actually working. (This will come as a shock to no one, but Ángel and I aren’t really the handy, DIY types. Before moving onto the boat, the closest thing to a home improvement project that I’d undertaken was to make a hummingbird feeder out of a peanut butter jar. For me, this was all new territory.)

But more than that, I knew how hard we had worked to come here. I knew how hard it was to be inundated with things not working, to be tired, jet-lagged, caffeine-deprived, and somehow supposed to handle this all in self-isolation. It was a lot. But we made it through, propping each other up as best we could, and always reminding ourselves that no matter how challenging, we were living out the life of which we had dreamed for so many years.

On the last night of our self-isolation, we rhapsodized about what we would do on our first day of freedom: go for a run, go out to eat, go to the beach, go shopping for the myriad items we’d identified in our week of confinement. We went to bed, with visions not of sugar plums, but of fried sardines, of clear blue waves cresting onto golden sand, and of gleaming hardware store aisles, and we fell asleep impatient for morning when we could celebrate our first week’s accomplishments and get to know our new home.