The
Ocean Gypsy sailed under clear blue skies paralleling the Mexican coast,
headed for Belize. Linda had gotten off the boat
several days earlier to fly ahead to meet Richard in Placencia. As the
32-foot catamaran sailed past Banco Chinchorro, some of the crew trolled
for bonito and mackerel. “It was one of the most perfect sailing days of
the whole trip,” Richard recalls.
Besides Richard,
the crew consisted of Kitty Fox and Ran Villanueva from Placencia, and
Robert Gates, Erik Klockars, Michael Marsden, and Duff Chambers -- friends
of Richard’s from Connecticut; and Cinnamon and Maya, resident boat kittys.
As the Ocean
Gypsy neared Xcalak, Mexico, six miles north of the Belizean border, the
skies grew dark and the winds escalated from 20 to 40 knots. “Something
didn’t feel right,” Marsden says. “We’d been through squalls, but this
was different.” They decided to find anchorage in Xcalak, but 30-foot
waves obscured the cut in the reef which they would have to cross to make
it to shore. Fifty yards wide, the cut is hard to navigate under the best
of circumstances. When the crew was unable to raise anyone on the VHF radio,
they turned the boat back out to sea and headed for the Turneffe Islands
off the coast of Belize. What the crew didn’t know was that the tropical
storm they’d heard about the day before had changed course while they were
out of VHF range. It was now 600 miles wide and a class five hurricane,
called Mitch -- spiraling directly toward the Mexican coast.
Tim Haas
was packing up to evacuate Xcalak when he looked out at the Caribbean Sea
and spotted the mast of the Ocean Gypsy. The 46-year
old owner of the only telephone and fax in town once flew fishermen and
divers to the Yucatan Peninsula. Eight years ago he’d decided to stay in
Xcalak, a primitive village of 300 with no electrical power.
Over a VHF
radio, he called out to the Ocean Gypsy. “What in the hell are you doing
out there? Don’t you know you’re sailing straight into a Class Five hurricane?”
Tim told the
crew that the storm was due to make landfall at Xcalak by noon the next
day.
They had one
choice -- they must cross through the fifty foot cut in the reef to make
it to shore if they were to escape the storm. The crew donned life jackets
and prepared to make the run. With Tim shouting out coordinates over the
radio, Richard lined up the lighthouses. On the pier, Tim readied himself,
“How many souls on board?” he asked. “How many women and children?”
Tim recalls
“I knew that a boat making it through that cut in those conditions would
be nothing short of a miracle.” Just a few hours earlier the 282-foot Windjammer
Fantome had gone down off the coast of Honduras with 31 aboard.
Richard Sugarman
punched the V-6 175-horsepower engine during a split-second lull between
waves and the Gypsy roared into the cut, riding down a 40-foot breaking
wave.
The catamaran
angled into the passageway, pitched sideways, and threw one pontoon completely
into the air. On shore, the half-dozen villagers watching turned and ran
to the village church to pray. The port captain grew so frightened he turned
his back and walked away. “We knew we were going over,” Marsden says. “But,
somehow...by divine intervention, we came back.” Inside the reef, ecstatic
that they’d made it, the crew cheered.
“Everyone on
board?” shouted Sugarman. Michael Marsden, eyeballed the aft cockpit and
screamed, “Gates is gone!”
Erik Klockars,
marine mechanic, recalls, “ I saw him in between the waves at that moment
being sucked out to sea. It was all white water, and he was popping up
between the waves flailing his arms as if to say, ‘I’m here. I’m here.
Then he disappeared.”
They tossed
an anchor overboard to search for Gates, but the iron cleats broke off
like twigs. Tim Haas watched in horror from the shore and shouted, “Turn
back! There is nothing you can do for the man! Let him come to you! You’ll
all die if you go after him.”
Richard reluctantly
steered the boat toward the pier. He beseeched the armed Navy “Marinos,”
who had stood silently by watching the drama, to mount a search for Robert
Gates. Instead, the marinos boarded the Ocean Gypsy and spent an hour and
a half searching for drugs. It was dark by the time they finished, making
a search for Robert that evening impossible. The crew spent
the night
in an abandoned hotel crying and praying for their friend and wondering
if they would live through the night. The next morning as the storm grew
near, the marinos allowed the crew to evacuate inland.
Meanwhile the
storm whipped along the Caribbean coast taking out every pier, beach, and
dock from Isla Mujeres, Mexico, to Honduras and Nicaragua.
In Placencia,
Belize, Linda was also evacuated and spent four days and three nights living
in a van in the Mayan Mountains where she helped a woman suffering a miscarriage.
She had no way of knowing what had happened to the boat and crew until
Richard reached her by phone two days after the accident.
The crew returned
to Xcalak to find the Ocean Gypsy 250 yards from the concrete pier where
they’d left her tied and anchored. She was full of mud and water, and sunk
in 2 1/2 feet of water with a gaping hole in her starboard stern and a
port bow that was split in two.
The insurance
company flew out a representative who declared the boat a “constructive
total loss.” However, Richard believed that the Ocean Gypsy could be refloated
and repaired and set about making plans from a one-room cabana at
the Costa de Cocos Resort in Xcalak. Linda returned to Connecticut to work
until they could resume the trip.
Richard wrote
family and friends from Xcalak one month after the hurricane, “Robert was
my best friend. I’ll always wonder what I could have done differently that
terrible day.” (Gates’ body was found several days after the accident on
the coast of Belize.)
“What now?”,
Richard added, “After what we’ve been through, will we still want
to run a sail charter business 2500 miles from home?
When you do everything you can to breathe life into a dream, and it becomes
your worst nightmare, all bets are off for what happens next.”
I met Richard
two months after the hurricane at the Costa de Cocos where I was escaping
my own storm -- a nasty divorce. The large, ruddy-faced man with a gray
braid snaking down his back rowed me out to see the sad, partially sunk
Ocean Gypsy, which he referred to fondly as “she.” The Sugarmans wowed
me. They were going for it. No matter what. Class five hurricanes not excepted.
And I was worried about a few sharks at home...
A few days
later, Richard wrote to loved ones in his first Christmas card from Central
America, “Remember, life is precious but it can vanish in the wink of an
eye. Hold on for all you’re worth. And whenever you can, hold on to each
other.”
Over a period
of six months in the tiny village of Xcalak, with no power and no machinery,
Richard, Marcos, Filipe, Silva, and Dave used manpower and creative inspiration
to accomplish the near-impossible. They hauled three tons of mud and water
out of the boat bucket by bucket, pulled the five-ton catamaran through
a foot of water and mud up onto the beach, repaired her bulkhead, replaced
her electrical system, gave her a new coat of fiberglass, and more. And
they did it with homemade levers and pulleys and palm tree fulcrums, shovel-dug
trenches in the mud in which they laid giant metal pipes. Across this,
trees cut from the jungle were placed, all of it under a boat the size
of a school bus which was tugged 100 feet through the one foot of water
up onto the beach inch by inch by several men on the end of a rope. Just
your run-of-the-mill pyramid-building engineering feat.
Four months
later,the canary yellow catamaran was back in the water, ready to continue
to Belize. But first Richard flew to America to
hold two memorial services. One for his mother who passed away two weeks
after they sailed away from New England, and the other for Robert Gates,
his best friend who had perished in the storm.
“Eight
bells. As one watch ends, another begins,” wrote 51-year old
Richard Sugarman as he and wife, Linda, sailed out of Niantic, Connecticut,
for Placencia, Belize. The 2500-mile journey
symbolized for the couple the end of 20 years of dreaming and the beginning
of a two-year trial run in the charter sailboat business. What they didn’t
know was that the biggest storm to hit the Caribbean in 500 years would
rearrange their plans -- it would kill one of their dearest friends, nearly
destroy their catamaran, and cause months-long delays and financial depletion.
No one said moving to a third world country would be easy... The dream
was spawned when Linda and Richard and five-year old daughter Casey sailed
to Mexico where they camped for three months before returning to New England.
The dream was shelved while they focused on raising their daughter and
building careers -- Linda’s in physical therapy and Richard (ironically)
in the field of trauma counseling. Thirteen years later, Casey returned
from a Boston University field trip to Belize. “Mom, Dad. You’ve got to
quit your jobs and move to Belize!”
