WELLFLEET — There is an expression in French for when all of the elements are against you, said Marie-Anne O’Reilly: “Contre vents et marées. Against wind and tide.” O’Reilly, her husband, Daniel Picker, and their two children, Ulysse and Achille O’Reilly-Picker, were beating their 42-foot C&C Landfall sailboat, Vallée du Vent, toward Provincetown in exactly those conditions. Their engine had been faulty since they’d left their home in Québec City on July 7, and now it was not functioning at all.
The family had set off with the goal of sailing from Canada to the Azores. The whole journey — they call it “a dream” — would take a year.
But by 3 p.m. on Sept. 26, it was clear to Picker and O’Reilly that they’d never make it without replacing the engine completely.
“We were going like this,” said O’Reilly: she zig-zagged her hand in the air, miming their fight against the currents around the tip of the Cape. Exhausted from two sleepless nights of rough sailing from Nova Scotia, at 8 p.m. they finally called the Coast Guard, who arrived in 30 minutes and towed them, for free, to the Provincetown Marina.
“We don’t save lives to make money,” O’Reilly said the Coast Guard captain told her.
They anchored in Provincetown for a week — but staying there proved too expensive, says Picker: “$280 per night.” On the Provincetown Marina’s website, the cost of transient dockage for a 42-foot boat is even higher than Picker reported: $315 per night, plus fees.
Picker would need time to rent a truck and go to Virginia to pick up a new engine.
They looked to Wellfleet, where the mooring fee was significantly lower: $87 per night.
On Oct. 4, a towing service towed the O’Reilly-Pickers into Wellfleet Harbor.
In Wellfleet, said O’Reilly, “every time we had a problem, someone offered their help and said, ‘We have a solution.’ ”
Wellfleet’s interim Harbormaster Stuart Smith towed them back and forth from their spot to the fuel dock. “It’s the worst thing in the world,” said Smith, “to be out in the middle of nowhere, and you’re having engine problems, and there’s no one around to help.”
Recently hired Assistant Harbormaster Jeff Kemprecos, whose grandfather served at the Pamet lifesaving station, said he took on the role of tour guide, showing the family around town. He speaks a little French, and his wife is fluent. He took them to PB Boulangerie. “I said to the kids, ‘This is our Eiffel Tower!’ ” said Kemprecos.
The family has walked on the beach and played on the playground. “We discovered the public library,” said O’Reilly, “which is really, really nice.” They explored the art galleries next, she said. “The kids love to draw.”
Each morning for about two hours, she taught the children: at the moment it was math and French. O’Reilly’s sister is a teacher and provided schooling materials for the year. But the curriculum is flexible. “Last week, we started a project on fish,” said O’Reilly. From the dock in Wellfleet there are plenty of fish to observe; birds and seals, too.
Just the other day, she said, they saw an ocean sunfish: another mariner in need of rescue. “A kayaker brought it up — it was stuck at low tide,” she said. “They’re waiting to have a boat so they can bring it back to the ocean.”
Kemprecos, whose family has lived on the Cape for generations, said the sheltering of the family from Canada is part of a Wellfleet tradition. “We’ve had shipwrecks and guys clawing up the beach,” he said. “But it probably happens all the time that somebody’s traversing Cape Cod Bay or the ocean and their engine blows, or they spring a leak.”
Wellfleet does have a storied history of assisting helpless mariners, albeit most stories are more dramatic than that of the O’Reilly-Pickers. According to the National Park Service, in the early 1800s an average of two shipwrecks occurred every month in the winter. The Cape has been the site of more than 3,000 shipwrecks in 300 years of recorded history.
In 1872, the U.S. Life Saving Service was created by the federal government, and nine staffed stations were built on Cape Cod, from Race Point to Monomoy Point.
Rescues by the Lifesavers of Cape Cod are the ones Wellfleet is known for, said David Wright, curator at the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum. They involved surfboats launched on stormy seas and sailors pulled in from wrecked ships on rope lines.
By the beginning of the 20th century, shipwrecks happened less often — ships were sturdier and the Cape Cod Canal provided safer passage up the East Coast. In 1915, the Life Saving Service was incorporated into the newly formed U.S. Coast Guard.
Wright said it’s hard to know how many sailors have pulled into the harbor — or been pulled — with mechanical issues like that of the O’Reilly-Pickers, “any port in a storm” style. Kemprecos said that in every port on the Outer Cape, “We’ve all been involved in helping people arrange for repairs and getting them fixed up.”
With Vallée du Vent securely anchored in Wellfleet Harbor and calm water all around, Picker got to work extracting the old engine — a crane lifted it from the boat — and installing the new one.
In the cabin, the dining table was flipped up to reveal the engine underneath. Green and shiny in the noon light streaming through the slim windows, “it’s so clean we can eat on it,” said Picker. “That’ll last maybe three days.”
At the helm, the wheel was detached and off to one side. Tools littered the floor. “I do mechanics, electronics, programming,” said Picker. He learned the trades from his father. “We had a small sailboat when I was young. I learned to make a sail at the age of six.”
He expected the family would have to stay in Wellfleet until Oct. 23. The rest is a relief, said O’Reilly, “but we prefer to be sailing.” Picker gave her a reassuring smile. “That day is approaching,” he said.
The two met more than a decade ago as chaperones on a school trip to the Îles de la Madeleine with their older children, who were in the same class at school. “We met on a boat,” said O’Reilly with a laugh. They began dating in 2014.
The living space on the Vallée du Vent — meaning “Valley of the Wind,” in honor of Hayao Myazaki’s film Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind — is small but bright. The kids have their own bunk room in the fore: the two small beds were strewn with paper airplanes and other toys. Sometimes they put up blankets and make the space into a fort.
O’Reilly and Picker have a bed tucked behind what they call “the captain’s desk.” The kitchen is tiny but big enough to cook a meal. O’Reilly was making “a local dish”: canned clam chowder. “It’s from Maine,” said Picker.
When they’re sailing, they spend most of their time on the deck and at the wheel. The kids aren’t yet big enough to steer. But Achille likes to help his father lift the anchor, and Ulysse can throw lines to his mother when they dock.
Before they left Québec City, they sold their house and paid off the mortgage on their boat. This year on the sea won’t just be an adventure — “It’s a test of a way of life,” said Picker. There is no guarantee, both O’Reilly and Picker agreed, that they’ll return anytime soon to a life on land.
Out at sea, with no land in sight, “you sort of blend with nature,” said O’Reilly. “It’s not that you are the master. It’s something you are working with. It gives you a sense of empowerment, but at the same time, vulnerability.”
“One day you wake up,” said Picker, “and forget where you are. You open the door — ‘Oh, here we are.’ We’re always at home.”
The family left Wellfleet Harbor for the sea on the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 29.
