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They reached Dakar at the end of a rope after their engine had failed. A berth was offered them aft of an American destroyer. Michel said, "It's your country, Janis. Go talk to them." Whatever Janis did, it succeeded. "For the next week we had five sailors working on our engine. They filled our icebox with steak and ice cream. And all around us was this harbor of poverty. It was horrible, and it was heaven. I'll never forget it."
Nor the 30-day crossing to Rio -- "fantastic," Janis recalls, offering further a sort of book-jacket blurb that would surely kill sales: "Nothing hairy about it!" Michel and his sextant navigated a course straight as the kerf from a sawmill blade. One day he told his family they would be in Rio at 1 the next morning. At midnight, they could see land. With scant instruction -- he had had a couple of lessons in 1976 -- Michel was now a credible yachtsman, and a diesel mechanic and carpenter to boot, what with all the breakdowns that never cease on a boat -- any boat, ask anyone.
For her part, Janis had stood her watches and shouldered half the load. She had performed wizardry in the galley with 200 eggs -- souffles, quiche, omelettes, desserts. She knew they would run out of meat and would have to turn to eggs somewhere on the crossing, and the trick was to keep the eggs from rotting. First, she learned, turn the eggs once a week (it takes one week for the yolk to drop to the bottom, touching the shell and commencing to rot). Second, coat them with vaseline (to clog the porous shell and keep moisture and oxygen away from the yolk). For good measure, they had taken two live chickens. Michel promised them, "If you lay one egg, I will spare your life." The chickens contributed their lives to the larder.
The family hung around South America for two years, working here and there. Finally, in June 1985, they pitched up in Florida, at Port Canaveral, with a dead engine and a new way of looking at things. They had met a lot of people along the way, Janis says, "people who just wanted to travel. They didn't want to work anymore. We started to think, hey, that's not a bad idea. I mean, who wants to work anyway? After all, we were able to travel for nearly three years, until we got here."
"Here" is the middle of the Banana River, near the seaside town of Melbourne. "You could say we've sort of changed our optic. We don't want the house and the big stereo. Instead, we'll travel and work a little, travel and work a little. We also think about making a fortune so we can travel endlessly, but we haven't got very far with that."
Mullets jumped in the river as Janis talked one recent winter afternoon. Dolphins glided gracefully by. It is an economical life, she conceded, pointing to a 5-gal. canister on the deck. Normally the thing would hold weed killer, but on this boat, it holds fresh water. "That's the shower," Janis said. "Two people can bathe with it if you don't wash your hair." This was as far as she got on the subject of economy.