‘Firebird’ braving the seas.

In the late 1970s, my good friend Itz (short for Yitzhak), a successful Tel Aviv architect, suggested that we take a course, of all things, in sailing. Itz and his wife lived along the seafront near the Hilton Hotel. He had observed a young fellow on the beach putting together a wooden shack in the sand and starting to market a course in sailing, with the implausible vision of establishing a full-fledged marina right there. It was not like Itz at all to be taken in by such a grandiose proposition, and, as for me, writing my doctorate at the time and attending an orchestra-conducting class at the Music Academy, I wasn’t keen to take on new projects just then. 

Nevertheless, two weeks later, Itz and I found ourselves in a fascinating year-long course leading to a skipper’s license for small craft. Diverse subjects were taught: sailing theory and practice, maritime map reading, radio communications, meteorology, diesel engines, First Aid, knots, and, of course navigation, coastal and celestial. Meanwhile, miraculously, at the Hilton Beach the construction of a marina had actually begun.

I did have a brush with sailing in my student days in Los Angeles. A kindly doctor acquaintance who owned a sailboat, and whose wife suffered from seasickness, often invited me as deck-hand and 'nanny' to his two children on weekend excursions to picturesque Catalina Island, a half-day sail off the California coastline. It was there that the sailing bug trapped me and lay dormant, waiting to come alive.

In those days there was no international convention governing the requirements for skippers of small crafts. In Israel, partly surrounded by unfriendly countries, the requirements are quite rigorous, among other reasons, to prevent small boats from mistakenly entering inhospitable territorial waters.

After passing the government exams and obtaining the long-awaited skipper’s license, I committed myself to a splendid acquisition, a 9.3-meter Yachting France fiberglass sloop, to be picked up in Hyeres, near Toulon. I went to the Port Authority in Haifa to register the boat. The registrar’s name happened to be Klemperer, and I asked jokingly if the famous conductor Otto Klemperer was a relative. “Yes,” Klemperer the registrar said, “my first cousin.” Looking at my documents, he suddenly smiled, “Was my predecessor in this job, the maritime lawyer Julius Sebba, by any chance, your relative?” “Yes,” I answered proudly, “not first cousin, but family.” “And what is to be the name of your boat?”

“Does a boat need to have a name?”

 “Yes, every boat has to have a name,” he said, and waited for an answer. I had come to Haifa by train, and held in my hand a pocket edition of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite which we were studying in class at the time. Almost without thinking, I said “Firebird.”  Klemperer entered the name in his forms. “Just a minute,” objected Klemperer’s middle-aged secretary, “I think we already have a Firebird.” Klemperer doubted this, but the exacting lady brought out a heavy leather-bound book, the genuine boat register, and went through the entries several times. No boat by that name was to be found. “I am sure there is a Firebird,” she insisted. I thought I might come to the lady’s rescue. “Perhaps you are thinking of Stravinsky’s Firebird,” I suggested, waving my pocket score in her direction.  “Oh, Stravinsky, yes, of course,” she said, much relieved. “Tell me, where does he keep it, in the Kishon River or in Jaffa?”

Sailing is one of mankind’s oldest and most elemental advances, not unlike making a fire or inventing the wheel. Though constantly refined through the ages, sailing is essentially not much different today than it was five or 10 thousand years ago. The wind is there, and it carries the boat, without having to invest extra energy and deplete a vanishing resource. There is no sound, except the sliding of the hull through the water. No smell of gasoline or diesel, no vibration. Once the coastline disappears below the horizon, the hassle of civilization becomes but a vague reminiscence, and one becomes inescapably aware of being alone in the universe. In a way, one might as well be on the other side of the moon.

The maiden voyage of Firebird turned into one of the most enjoyable odysseys of my life. The new boat itself was perfection. The cabin was deep enough for a person to stand up comfortably, yet without the superstructure protruding too much above the deck to slow down the boat’s progress. There were six bunks, all fitted out pleasingly with small reading lights – two in the bow, two along the central folding table, and a double bunk in the so-called captain’s cabin, which featured its own door, and in which I installed an extra compass near my head to make sure even in my sleep that the boat was sailing on course. There was also a galley with a small refrigerator, a navigation corner -- which I furnished with a set of relevant British Admiralty maritime maps -- a shower/toilet all in white, and plenty of storage space for gear and water.

From the little French port of Hyeres, the Firebird, manned by a crew of four, sailed through the Ligurian Sea to Ajaccio, Corsica, and on through the Strait of Bonifacio (between Corsica and Sardinia) via the Tirrhenian Sea to the western coast of Italy. A short stop at the island of Capri to resupply and switch to the second crew, and on south, through the Strait of Messina (between the Italian mainland and Sicily), Reggio di Calabria, across the Golfo di Taranto and the last bit of Italy, Santa Maria di Leuca. Crossing the Adriatic Sea through the Strait of Otranto, we sailed to the island of Corfu, Greece, and a meeting with the third crew, then on to Cephalonia, in the Ionian Islands, the Corinthian Sea, and through the man-made Corinthian Canal into the Gulf of Saronikos, the island of Hydra, the Cyclades and the island of Mykonos, where we met the fourth and last crew. From there we sailed east to the Dodecanese Islands, via charming little Symi, which became one of my favorites, then to Rhodos, and from there non-stop, via Paphos in Cyprus and home to the Tel Aviv Marina.

The four crews were made up of friends who flew out to meet me on pre-arranged dates for two weeks each. The law does not require a crew member to have special qualifications, so anyone can come aboard and join a crew. However, teammates are expected to take turns, day or night, either at the tiller, keeping the boat on course, or as lookout at the bow, to elude collision. As skipper, I never left the boat unless it was securely moored, and never slept out, finding the captain’s cabin the most luxurious accommodation imaginable.

Ever since that voyage, I have asked my guests to bring one outfit in white, for formal occasions such as reporting to the border police or customs officials when entering or leaving a country. In spite of limited space, the library shelf above the navigation table contained one item not connected to sailing: the four-voice chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach. These came in handy when waiting out a storm in a secluded haven, and in truth I favored, where possible, teammates who could read solfege . At the end of each trip abroad, there would be a joyous captain’s dinner, when all leftover food was brought out and a fancy menu in French was composed and read aloud.

There are two things a sailboat cannot do. One, much like a bicycle, it cannot be controlled at very low speeds. For this reason, sailboats are equipped with an auxiliary motor, usually a diesel engine, for navigating within a marina or a harbor, and also for stabilizing the boat at sea in very bad weather. Two, a sailboat cannot sail into the wind, and if this is one’s course the boat must zig-zag left and right to overcome the dead angle around the wind’s direction. Generally, a boat under sail will be tilted left or right, so bunks, shelves, and surfaces have rims or frames around them. Especially when tacking, anything left loose or untied instantly flies off the deck, never to be seen again.  

Unlike ships, characteristically equipped with powerful high-voltage radio transmitters, small boats communicate by radio on a so-called Channel 16 wavelength. This compact, low-voltage device has of necessity a limited range. A sailboat on its way from Israel to Cyprus -- the nearest approachable destination -- inevitably passes a zone of radio silence when it is too far out for Haifa Radio to reach, and not yet close enough to Akrotiri, the Cypriot contact located high in the Trodos mountains. In case of an emergency no one in the world would hear you or be able to offer advice or assistance. I habitually forewarned my teammates to be doubly cautious on this stretch until radio contact was re-established. In the days before mobile phones and GPS devices became household articles, this expanse was a yachtsman’s unavoidable peril, yet at the same time an extraordinary thrill.

The heart of navigation is establishing where on the endless waters you actually are. When land is visible, the solution is fairly simple. By measuring the compass bearing to two recognizable points on your map, you draw two corresponding lines from those points back out to sea, and where these two lines cross - known as a “fix” -- is where you are.

With no land in sight, you are dependent on celestial bodies to guide you: the sun during the day and the stars at night. The trouble is, the sun and especially the planets behave t irregularly, posing a serious brainteaser to the baffled human observer. All through antiquity it was assumed, and later bitterly defended by the Church, that the center of the universe, around which all heavenly bodies circled, was the earth. In 1543, a Polish monk, Nicolaus Copernicus, suggested that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe, and that the earth was itself a planet that circled the sun. The Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, developer of the telescope, came to the same conclusion, and paid a high price for upholding this view, as dramatized by Bertolt Brecht in his famous play Galileo.

In 1609, the German mathematician Johannes Kepler, in one of humanity’s most striking deductions, formulated several rules which laid the foundation for modern science and astronomy. Kepler’s First Law states that the orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the two foci. His Second Law, even more spectacular, says that a line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. I found these insights, which we learnt in the skipper’s course, deeply compelling, and wonder to this day which is the greater marvel – the universe being constructed in such an orderly fashion, or the human mind being capable of uncovering and comprehending this.

Once the position of a major heavenly body can be accurately predicted, it can be used as a reference point to determine the observer’s location. All a navigator needs on board is a chronometer (showing Greenwich Mean Time), a sextant (a hand-held instrument measuring the vertical angle between the sun or a star and the horizon), and a current Almanac (published annually) listing the coordinates of the major bodies throughout the year.

“Sailing keeps the doctors away,” a Turkish yachtsman once told me. Indeed, sailing is a healthy sport, and a few weeks on a boat can do wonders for one’s constitution. A 10-liter jerrycan filled with water or fuel begins to feel lighter by the day. Sometimes there is a need to dive underwater to inspect the hull from the outside, or to pull yourself up in a trapeze to the top of the wildly swinging mast to replace a defunct light bulb, obligatory for sailing at night.

During my sailing days I met several families, some with children, who had given up living on land altogether. It is amazing how small a living space and how few earthly goods one really needs. I have a tremendous respect for those who have actually braved the oceans for weeks without seeing land, crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific, and for whom the Mediterranean Sea is merely a gentle lake for wintering.

On Saturdays, the Tel Aviv Marina is a bustling meeting place. Visiting neighboring boats is a popular social activity, and there is always work to be done on one’s own boat. One day a persuasive salesman came round with a small portable water purifier, an invaluable device no yachtsman could disregard. To demonstrate, he invited a group of us to urinate into the device’s container. We all consented and contributed our share. A few minutes’ connection to the boat’s battery and – voila! - the liquid was purified. He filled a glass with it, now admittedly colorless, and to our incredulity drank the contents with an expression of great pleasure. The sell, however, was evidently too hard - no one bought the contraption from him.

During thunderstorms in the winter months, especially at night, the marina quickly springs to life. Yachtsmen forever worry that their (or their neighbors’) boats will tear loose from their moorings and cause havoc. It is wise, therefore, to stick around and see that no harm befalls your boat. During a storm, a boat is safest out in the open sea, where there is, hopefully, nothing to collide with. But fog and spray, strapping winds and high waves can still put a boat to the test. I was always astonished how fast the boat moved in a strong wind, even with the mainsail trimmed down to the size of a mere handkerchief.

Greece, with its 4,000 islands, is one of the world's favorite destinations for recreational sailing. The dramatic island formations, the picturesque waterfront bays, the narrow alleys, the little perennially whitewashed stone houses with wooden shutters and balustrades painted mostly in blue, are a photographer’s paradise. Indeed, the photos I snapped on these islands over the years are among the best I ever took. Luckily, only the major islands are overrun by tourists. For the independent yachtsman there are enough isolated islets left to visit and to savor the true local atmosphere. If there is a general store, yoghurt is still sold in home-made earthenware, and if there is a post office and mail for you marked Poste Restante, the postmaster himself will bring the mail to your boat, and have time for an Arak or a Greek coffee in your cabin. One cannot escape the tantalizing speculation as to what precisely it was that caused the very foundations of Western culture, art, science, architecture and philosophy to be born, of all places, on these islands.

Sailing can be full of surprises. Way out at sea, one encounters lone seagulls, overly brave or perhaps lost, and occasionally playful dolphins swimming alongside the boat for many nautical miles. Once we passed a huge sea turtle enjoying itself, unperturbed by our intrusion. Approaching Larnaca one evening after several days at sea, we were overwhelmed by the smell of tasty kebab wafting across the water, although we were still hours away from land. At the island of Castelorizo near the Turkish coast, after a long night’s journey, we saw the most majestic sunrise, in full color and as if in slow motion.

When another sailboat approaches at sea, people happily wave at each other, as though the brotherhood of men has become a reality. One eagerly appraises passing boats - their size and especially their speed - and wonders from where these travelers came. Once we got the answer, when someone with a very British accent hollered across the waters, “Ahoy there.”

Out at sea, suddenly a navy vessel appears alongside us, and we are ordered by megaphone to open Channel 16. It is the Israel Navy, and the conversation switches from English to Hebrew. A quick check to ascertain who we are, and all is found to be in order. The navy vessel wishes us well, accelerates hard so our boat shakes and shudders, and flies away.

Thinking back, those years presented a perfect way of life – summers on the boat, winters at the university; a balanced regimen of body and mind. My doctorate was approved, and I was given the opportunity to teach my findings. My conducting studies also began to bear fruit, and I became too busy to pursue all three activities. Although I hate to admit it, the sun actually became a bit too strong for me. My good friend Pinni, a well-known sculptor and art professor who had sailed with me often, obtained his skipper’s license and bought my boat.

For a year or two I didn’t run into Pinni. When we met again, I was sorry to learn that he had separated from his wife, left her their apartment, and gone to live on the boat. Somewhat apologetically, he added that he had also changed the boat’s name. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “Every time the navy caught me at sea, the story repeated itself. ’Who do say you are? Feierberg? Sorry, there is no such name on the register.’ I finally decided to simplify the procedure.”