Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat Read online

  The Germans walk out of the water shivering and laughing, and thanking me for such a great adventure. Their suspicions of the perilous nature of small-boat sailing are confirmed. There are some jokes about how I’ve made it this far from England. They decide to go back to their hotel and change. We say goodnight.

  I think it’s time to head for Maine.

  * The woman was Julia Hazel, and later I recognized her and her boat when she started writing articles for Cruising World magazine. Julia went on around the other half of the world and completed her circumnavigation by herself.

  FAYAL TO 36°08' NORTH; 53°12' WEST

  July 8

  10.35: Well. What a night. Long story short – I realized at 02.00 when I had to pump out for about 2 minutes, after things had long since calmed down, that we were taking on far too much water. I think I’ve located the main source: the planking up forward. I watched it flexing on each wave, and saw water coming in both sides of the stem. I spent the entire night, from 02.00 until 10.00 this morning, sawing up some spare plywood and fitting additional floor timbers. They’re pretty flimsy, but hopefully now the boat won’t actually break up, or if it does, it won’t go real fast. I must now, however, be seriously prepared to abandon Toad –

  As I write this the pen stops moving. I get up and make another cup of coffee and what I’ve just written reverberates around my mind like a sound in a canyon: loud then faint then loud again. Coffee ready, I take my mug back to the saloon table and start writing in the log again.

  I won’t, unless it actually sinks. I don’t mind pumping a lot, I just hope it doesn’t get a lot worse, as it began to do yesterday after a not at all severe day of beating to windward. (We’re beating now, but more gently.) I thought about going back to the Azores, but what could I do to the boat there? I have no money to fix it properly. I probably couldn’t get any work in Fayal. Going back to Europe isn’t really any different than continuing on to the States, where at least I can get work, and anyway I don’t want to go back to Europe. So, I’ll pump and head for Bermuda. If we’re still in reasonable shape by the time we near Bermuda, I’ll head for Maine. Sail it straight in to some yard in Camden, haul it out and live aboard, find work, get money, make repairs. Launch. Sail around the world. Sounds good. Maybe it’s mad to carry on. I hope not.

  13.15: Noon pos: 32­52' N, 32­08' W. A measly 49 miles made good to the SW from yesterday’s position. 446 since leaving Horta 6 days ago. Over 2000 to go.

  After writing up the log I have lunch. Azorean cabbage, my bread, a tin of smoked oysters. It’s the first time I’ve relaxed since last night. The sun is out. It’s pleasant. Get a grip.

  Most traditionally built wooden boats take on water, particularly when driven hard. Their hulls flex, and water finds its way in. They leak when they’re first launched after they are built. They leak after a winter ashore, during which their planks and timbers dry out and shrink and require a period of immersion for the wood to swell up and become watertight again. They leak when putting to sea after a long period of idleness. They leak sitting still.

  Toad has always leaked. When we beat across the Anegada Passage from the Virgins to St Barts, and across the Florida Straits to the Bahamas after months in the anchorage off Dinner Key, and when we thrashed through one long and desperate night against a levante gale blowing out of the Straits of Gibraltar as we tried to get into the Mediterranean, water had sloshed in the bilge and required long minutes of pumping to get rid of. But when the hard chance was past, and the stress on the hull gone, the water has always stopped coming in.

  Not so now. We’ve been beating, but not hard, into a west-south-westerly wind and some short but steep waves for the last 2 days, July 6 and 7. This morning the wind veered to the northwest and dropped and Toad is once again plodding along in the gentlest of conditions, and water is still coming in.

  I know Toad, and all its timbers and its every component, as I have known nothing else, and I know something is changed and wrong. I can’t actually believe the trouble is some weakness in the hull, and my night-long work banging in extra floor timbers was, now that I think about it, an unthinking reaction to seeing water coming in up forward. It hasn’t stopped the leaking. It has only reassured me that the bow isn’t going to crumble inward.

  In the last five years I have built over eighty doubler, or ‘sister’ frames into the hull – laminating thin strips of douglas fir and epoxy glue alongside the older, original frames on the inside of the planking until the desired thickness was reached, then fastening them in place through the outside of the hull planking with hundreds of bronze screws – effectively doubling the skeletal strength of the hull. Until today I’ve believed that Toad was at least as strong as when it was built, in 1939. There is no rot in the boat. When J. and I ‘wooded’ the hull between deck and waterline, sanding down through decades of paint to the bare planking before repainting, the larch looked and smelled like new wood, and in places still dribbled resinous sap. My night of panicked carpentry over, I still have to believe that Toad is fundamentally sound. It’s got to be something else.

  In England, ten years ago, Toad’s previous owner, a Dutchman called Henry, sheathed the hull from the water-line down with a nylon cloth sold under the brand name Cascover. He did this as a precaution against the teredo, or shipworm, an almost invisible organism that lives in sea water and likes to bore into the planks of wooden boats, whereupon it grows into a worm with sharp woodcutting teeth at one end. In the tropics, where Henry was taking the boat, the teredo can grow as long as six feet. It then eats its way through the boat’s planking. Reading descriptions of the teredo, I’ve always imagined a fifties horror movie scene of the luckless yachtsman being taken unawares by a giant python-sized, incisor-gnashing worm bursting through the planking one night as he sits drinking his cocoa and listening to the BBC. In fact, the worm stays within the wood and doesn’t grow larger than spaghetti. But the damage it can do to a boat is scary enough, turning whole planks into papier mâché. Good bottom paint, thickly applied, will keep worms out, but paint can be scraped off during accidental groundings, or the impecunious yachtsman may let it go too long between repainting. Hull sheathing of some form is better. For hundreds of years, wooden ships, and many yachts, were sheathed with thin copper sheets, which not only prevented worm attacks, but kept the bottom clean by leaching cuprous oxide, which is toxic to marine flora which will adhere to anything in the water and grow into slimy weed. Fibreglass is a modern alternative, but the glass and polyester resin matrix doesn’t stick well to the flexing hulls of traditionally built boats. It is better stuck onto stiff plywood or modern cold-moulded boats, and then with the more expensive but stronger and more waterproof epoxy resin.

  Cascover was developed as a deck covering. I don’t know if the manufacturers recommended it for hull sheathing below the waterline, where it would be constantly submerged, but Henry put it on, glued to the wood with resorcinol glue. It has lasted ten years, but I’ve never liked the idea of it. Resorcinol glue can become brittle with age, unlike epoxy, which is somewhat elastic. Before leaving Mylor, I noticed that some of the sheathing below the waterline was delaminating, coming away from the hull. I believed this was the source of some of the water that periodically leaked into Toad’s bilge, and I glued it back onto the hull with epoxy resin. But I’m unhappy about the rest of it. I’ve decided to take the sheathing entirely off the hull when I get to Maine, and try something else, either just good antifouling paint or cold-moulding the hull with thin laminations of wood veneer and epoxy. But it has worked for ten years, I reasoned back in Mylor, it will surely last another two or three months until I get to Maine.

  Maybe. If that’s the problem. I have to find out.

  We’re moving along at between two and three knots. I get out my mask and snorkel and go forward and sit on the bowsprit. I look around for sharks and don’t see any. As if I’d see any. I put on the mask and snorkel, tie a line around my waist and climb down onto the bobstay, the
chain that runs from the tip of the bowsprit to an eyebolt in the stem just above the waterline. It’s the best place to sit when the dolphins are zeroing in on our bow wave, zigzagging back and forth in front of the boat. I look around once more, then drop into the water, keeping a good hold on the chain. I look back down along the stem and along the hull on each side. My repair to the sheathing looks fine. The rest of the sheathing looks good, no signs of any delamination.

  Then, just for a moment, I look down into the ocean. It looks like blue fog, with refracted bolts of light stabbing down into its depths. Toad hovers, levitated somehow, in a pocket of water that is oddly clear and uncoloured by the surrounding blue. I look around horizontally and see nothing but blue. I feel an incredible, visceral, unreasoning fear of the depths below me, the limitless water around me, of what might suddenly materialize streaking towards me out of the diaphanous blue. I remember how Robin Knox-Johnston spent hours in the water repairing a leaky seam in his wooden boat Suhaili, and I force myself to hang onto the bobstay for a moment longer. And then I can’t, not for another nanosecond, and I’m clawing up the bobstay over the bowsprit onto the deck, where I stand dripping and gasping.

  Back inside the boat, water is still, and now, quite mysteriously, trickling in, pooling in the bilge, rising. I pump it out again.

  I spend the afternoon preparing a ditch bag of essentials I will grab if Toad goes down fast and I have to take to the dinghy in a hurry: fishing gear, some food (including my Neal’s Yard peanut butter, which I’ve barely touched since leaving England but for some reason now strikes me as essential survival food), water, passport, sextant, watch, almanac and tables, sunblock, hat, Swiss army knife, rocket flares, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, which, like my peanut butter, I’ve been having some trouble getting into. Perhaps, facing imminent death in a tiny dinghy bobbing on the ocean’s surface, both book and peanut butter will at last prove to be richly sustaining.

  I don’t have a proper inflatable life raft aboard Toad. I couldn’t afford one, and since I’ve read many accounts of life rafts failing to inflate when launched, or falling apart soon afterwards, I don’t feel too badly about this. Stowed underneath Toad’s cockpit is our old, patched inflatable dinghy, but I don’t plan on launching that and sitting in it until I die. My plan, if I really have to abandon ship, is to get into my eight-foot sailing dinghy, with its positive flotation, and step its mast, raise its sail and go. I don’t expect to encounter really bad weather. I can bail out the waves that slop in. I can heave-to and sleep. I will read about dissolute Romans when becalmed. Most importantly, I can move towards a destination, without waiting for someone to spot me in the middle of the ocean (something ships have proven notoriously unable to do when passing life rafts full of frenziedly waving castaways). I’ll head either for Bermuda or the Azores, depending on which is closer. I know the ability to carry on will help me psychologically. The weather – which at no time has been bad, although we’ve just had several days of grey skies, lumpy seas and wind from ahead – turns pleasant again.

  This evening we move along over a flat sea at about three knots, straight towards the setting sun. Life aboard Toad is as nice as it has ever been. I listen to Meredith D’Ambrosio’s piano on the Voice of America’s Jazz Hour, hosted by the smoky-voiced Willis Conover. A great dinner comes out of the pressure cooker: a many-bean mix with tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs and various Azorean vegetables. I drink Azorean wine. I watch the sun go down on the flat horizon ahead and see the green flash. All the time I wonder if I’ll have to abandon Toad.

  July 9

  Two minutes’ pumping every two hours clears the bilge. Water seems to be coming in at a steady rate; fine if that rate holds. The weather today is still gentle and nothing seems amiss aboard Toad. But since considering the possibility of the boat sinking, I have wondered how I would confront J. with this loss and what she would think. Will it appear to be my fault? Will she be disgusted with me? Will she hate me? Will that make it really the end? Even though I’m sailing Toad to the States to sell it, it is more than just property to both of us. More like a child that we are putting up for adoption, and we are going through the motions despite deeply ambivalent feelings. After all we went through together aboard this boat, it still seems unthinkable to get rid of it, just as it still seems so odd to me at moments throughout every day that J. is not aboard. While Toad is afloat, I have always thought we might get back together.

  This thought always brings up the questions I continue to ask myself about what went wrong with us. And these questions pull me iresistibly to her diaries – now that I’ve opened the bag and found them – to pore through them in a queasy reverie of nostalgia and pain.

  In the late fall, after almost six months in the South of France, Viva III was sold. J. had grown happier, particularly through September and October when the mobs had left the coast and we had been there so long and knew it so well that we felt like residents. She had come to think of Viva as her home, and it wrenched her to leave.

  Grimly, we emptied out the boat and drove back to England. Somewhere in farm country in northern France – she writes and I remember now, though I had forgotten – we picked up a load of delicious white beets spilled beside the road and ate them for days afterwards.

  J. grew very depressed in London. Sharing me again with her brother and my family after six months alone together on the boat, seeing me able and eager to amuse myself with others, made her feel rejected. Nothing I could say or do made any difference – except not seeing David or Martin or my mother. She would have been happier, I felt, if we were marooned on a desert island together. This scared me. Entry after entry in her diary records that she is unhappy, depressed, that we fight. The more depressed she became, the easier I found it to be elsewhere.

  I remember this; it is the degree I had forgotten. But it’s all here in the unrelenting ledger of her unhappiness, in a tight imploding hand. I flick quickly past many pages detailing her disappointment with me – written almost as appeals. Or were they written for me to read? If I had been the diarist, she would certainly have ferreted out and read everything I wrote. These diaries lay around for years, but I never opened them until now. Was I meant to?

  At Christmas we went to the Virgin Islands with Martin, his girlfriend and J.’s and Martin’s father and stepmother. It was no longer my turf, as J. saw London, and she was happier. It was beautiful and there were boats everywhere. We decided we wanted to live on a boat again, so we planned that Christmas to move to the Virgins as soon as we could and somehow find a boat. She was thrilled to leave London, and it was clear to me that things were not going well for us there. Somewhere new might help us.

  We spent spring in Washington DC, living at her father’s house in Georgetown, making money for our move. I drove a Red Top cab, nights mostly, out of Arlington, and J. worked in a Georgetown boutique.

  Suddenly her diary presents me with a record of events I had no idea of. José, her old Bolivian boyfriend, was evidently in Washington also, and they began to see each other. At a bar called Charing Cross, at other unnamed places, and, at least once, they drove out to Great Falls and picnicked. She continued to see him over a period of many weeks, after work, while I drove my cab over in Virginia, across the Potomac. She writes that these meetings are fun, relaxed, that he is his old, warm self, that she feels good with him. She also writes that she and I and bring out the worst in each other, that we depress each other, that she wonders what we’re doing together.

  I’m a little stunned, after all this time, to read this now. I remember now her telling me often that she was going out after work with Cindy, the girl she worked with in the boutique. Cindy and J. did become friends, and they did go out together, but obviously a little less than I knew.

  I wonder what she and José did together – the diary is uncharacteristically vague. I wonder if she thought of leaving me and going off with him. Did she want to, and he didn’t? How close was it for her? W
hy did she stay with me?

  Because she did. Our plans went ahead. In March we flew to St Thomas and ferried on to Tortola, in the British Virgins. After a few days in a guest house in Road Town, hitch-hiking around the island to look at apartments and little houses, we rented an apartment on Frenchman’s Cay in West End. This was a sleepy place then. There was one bar, Poor Richard’s, run by Rick, a hospitable but enigmatic American who was circumspect with details of his past, and his present existence when not behind his bar. There were no charter boats there, only local fishing boats and a few small wooden yachts anchored out in the blue ten-fathom deep of the bay.

  Suddenly we were happy. J.’s diary changes immediately, in tone and to look at: the pages are no longer empty save for a tortured comment or a complaint about P. They are filled, in a larger, more confident hand, with accounts of our life together. We walked and hitch-hiked all over the island, exploring, swimming, looking at boats. We met English ex-pats living on Tortola who gave us rides and sometimes knew of boats for sale.