Terror aboard the Green Ghost
Memoir tells at-times harrowing tale of couple that sailed around the world
If you're going to travel 40,000 nautical miles in a 42-foot sailboat, odds are there are going to be both good and bad times.
Now if you're going to do that in the company of only one other person, the bad times can quickly become really, really ocean-sized bad times.
For Jennifer M. Smith, the author of the memoir Green Ghost, Blue Ocean, the bad time that jumps first to her mind is the time she thought her husband, Alex Nikolajevich, had gone overboard during his night shift as the pair sailed near the northern Minerva Reef, some 800 nautical miles from New Zealand.
“I never want to have that feeling again,” Smith said recently from land in Burlington, Ont.
In the book, Smith says a common refrain among sailors is that “offshore sailing is 98 per cent boredom and two per cent sheer terror.” It was those “pretty hairy” times that led Smith to ask herself: “What am I doing here?'”
Lucky that the “pretty hairy times” always abated and the couple was able to push through severe seasickness, sleepless nights, ferocious weather, and you name it, to log some big adventures.
“No divorce. Nobody died. So that's good,” Smith said when asked about surviving a trip that began in 2000 in Vancouver and ended in 2017 with Nikolajevich hugging a dock boy in Kingston. Ont., and telling him: “It's been 17 years since I've stepped off this boat onto Canadian soil. Looks like you're the welcoming committee!”
It should be noted that those 17 years weren't uninterrupted ocean-faring ones. In November 2003 they left the Green Ghost in Queensland, Australia and went to Toronto to work and buoy their
bank accounts. They returned to Australia in 2008 and Nikolajevich continued to work as they brought the Green Ghost back to a seafaring standard.
They set off on what Smith calls their “second instalment of retirement,” in 2010.
Smith explains that during a long odyssey like this you're only at sea about 15 per cent of the journey (about 240 days for this couple), “because the whole fun of it is being somewhere lovely,” she says.
But when you're out in the ocean it's a full-time job that really doesn't afford one any time to get mad and stay mad.
“One thing I would say is you hardly see each other because you are on opposite shifts,” Smith said. “I think you actually have a deeper appreciation when you're at sea counting on each other.”
You also learn quickly what is important to your sailing partner. In this case for Nikolajevich it was finding surfing spots and for Smith keeping a meticulous record of their food stores.
While living in Vancouver (they moved here in 1989), the Ontario natives realized that their corporate careers as a technical sales representative (Nikolajevich) and an accountant (Smith) weren't filling their tanks. They wanted more out of life than a big mortgage, nice car and “more money to buy more things.”
So in 1996 they bought a boat. They sailed around the Gulf Islands, then sold their car and headed out to sea and a very bumpy start.
“Avoiding the bad weather would be nice, but that's not how offshore sailing goes,” said Smith, who was 38 when the trip began. “You're always going to hit something. You think this is always what you wanted, but suddenly there is a realization of, `Oh-oh, I hope it really is (what I wanted) because now we've done it. We're actually in it.' So I think you can't be too hard on yourself when you first set out. Give yourself a break.”
The journey, in a nutshell, was a straight shot down the West Coast
of B.C., stopping in San Diego and San Francisco before moving into Mexico, where they hung around for a few months before ringing in the new year and then heading off across the Pacific Ocean to French Polynesia, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and many beautiful spots that dot that part of the world.
When the couple set off on their adventure Smith didn't have her sights set on writing this book. She had been a journal keeper in the past and had turned to the act of writing to help her navigate tough questions and situations in her life.
“I was trying to process whether we had done the right thing and I wanted to tell my family the story of what had just transpired the first week,” Smith said. “I wrote quite a long email home and detailed the first week at sea. My mom wrote back in an email in a sort of joking fashion: `Well, honey, I have Chapter 1 of your book, when is Chapter 2 coming?'”
Smith from then on put chapter and numbers in her subject lines of her long emails. Family and friends started sharing the emails and by the time they got to New Zealand, they had 100 people on their email list wanting more chapters.
After being on dry land for 18 months, Smith decided she would
write a book. She pitched the story to a publisher and entered the manuscript in a non-fiction contest held by Pottersfield Press in Halifax. She won the contest and in turn was published.
“I had a non-traditional experience there. I didn't knock on 100 doors. I knocked on two doors and the second door said, `Yeah, we'll publish your book,'” Smith said.
Now as we sail into the darker days of fall and winter, days made even darker by the COVID-19 pandemic, good escapist reads are kind of no-brainers.
“I have had a lot of comments back from a lot of readers. A lot of people have said that they felt like they had been around the world with you,” said Smith, who with Nikolajevich, spent last summer touring the now-38-year-old Green Ghost around the Great Lakes.
If Smith and Nikolajevich's adventures on the Green Ghost inspire others to do something similar, Smith has a few simple seaworthy suggestions.
“My first bit of advice is sail locally and know your boat,” Smith said. “Once you've done that, and you're on the West Coast, the Pacific is fantastic. If that's on your doorstep, go for it.”