Rough Crossing
The voyage of the Sipriz, March 15–April 20, 2009

1. START: March 15, 7 A.M.

2. HEART FAILURE? March 20, 8 A.M.

3. COAST GUARD HELICOPTER ENCOUNTER: March 21, 9:45 A.M.

4. COAST GUARD CUTTER ENCOUNTER: March 22, 7 P.M.

5. ZIGZAGGING STRUGGLE BACK TO THE ISLAND: March 23, approx. 9 A.M.

Immediately, the rudder on our brand-new boat jammed. Jean Oblit Laguerre, the wiry Haitian carpenter, his hands covered in scars, waded out from the beach where he'd built the Sipriz. He hacked at the rudder with a machete until it swung freely.

Oblit had an incentive to make it work, since he himself was coming on the trip. But even steering true, the Sipriz still suffered more shortages than a Cuban bakery. To start with, it had no keel—only a nominal keel board—and no ballast. This was so the boat could be beached easily, but in a storm it could flip like a leaf. The Sipriz had no lights, no radar, no depth finder, no electronics but the ones we fit in our pockets. Geert's tattered, ten-year-old chart book was "ready for retirement," he admitted, but no matter: The last reliable soundings for most of Haiti's coast had been made by the U.S. military in 1904. The Sipriz had no bunks, seats, or creature comforts. No cabin but the cockpit, open to the sea and sun. No head. No spare sails. The hull design was primitive and totally inadequate for an 800-mile journey. Ti bato, indeed.

For lunch, we ate an elaborate French-Creole meal, aristocrats before the guillotine. Laconic by nature, preoccupied by equipment and logistics, Geert skipped the soaring speeches and poured shots of Barbancourt rum to toast our luck.

"With God's help," said Gracien Alexandre, the Haitian first mate.

"With God and GPS," Geert countered.

Geert was a pretty unlikely captain for a Haitian ship: a 55-year-old Dutch-born novelist who lived in Washington, D.C., and sailed, like Mary and me, on the Chesapeake Bay. Ten years before, crossing the Gulf Stream, he'd tried to help rescue a sinking boat filled with Haitians. Forty drowned, an incident he recounted in The Smuggler of the Exumas, one of his ten novels. Geert had become obsessed with the Haitians' ingenuity and daring. His plan—to build a Haitian boat, the Haitian way, and sail it 800 miles on the route Haitians use to flee to America—looked like suicide to me, but he called it "a sporting challenge with a purpose."

Several purposes, really. Geert hoped the journey would humanize the faceless Haitian boat people, to make their plight plain—though he had limited expectations. ("This isn't Save the Whales for people," he told me one day before the trip.) He also wanted to write a novel about the journey. Mary, 50, a lifelong sailor whose children had left for college, wanted to get back to the sea. As for me, I'd seen too many refugees. At Cuba's easternmost tip, not far from here, I'd met a 15-year-old boy preparing to sail for America in a canoe. How could I say no to what a boy would do?

So that was the plan: America or bust. We would pick our way around the Haitian coast­line and then launch ourselves over the Windward Passage, an 80-mile crossing to Great Inagua, the southernmost island in the Bahamas. That was about 240 miles, at least a week in an open boat, combining intimate exposure to Haiti's perils with a deep-water crossing of a busy shipping lane. Mary and I planned to quit in the Bahamas; Geert and the Haitians would sail on, joined near the end by Geert's wife, Olga, and a videographer. The Bahamas would be the longest stretch of the trip, but the sailing would be easier, with beach landings, good wind direction, and several hundred miles sheltered from Atlantic rollers. After a month, Geert hoped to cross the Gulf Stream from Bimini to Palm Beach. A cargo ship could make the entire journey in four days.

We made a sailor's exit the next morning, up at 5 A.M. to stuff drybags by the flicker of an oil lamp. Then we waded to the boat in the shadowy half light. By seven we had slipped out of the harbor and put our backs to a sunrise obscured by thick clouds.

A strong easterly filled the sail, a Haitian rig like a gunter, the bamboo peak held up by a rope sling. The sail was painted brightly with the Sankofa, a mythological bird that carried news of the slaves back to Africa. Two hours later, racing westward, I threw up six or seven times. After that, only land made me feel sick.

Like hundreds of thousands of Haitians before us, we had slipped the shackles of this cursed land. We were outbound, with a strong following breeze, our optimism unbound by reality.