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

  We were out of the Lagoon in six months. We sailed back to St John, where we could dive overboard into clear water and where we had no fears of being Lagooned for ever. Our boat looked, at last, to our eyes, beautiful. And we were looking much better to each other.

  We started cruising in our born-again Toad. Seeing our ‘new’ boat through the eyes of people close to us, and their appreciation of it, rekindled our desire to sail farther afield, and also gave us our happiest cruises in the Virgin Islands.

  David flew out from England to see us, fresh from his first experience as a producer (of a Lipton tea commercial for Arab-speaking television networks in the Middle East: scenes of chic, blue-jeaned Arab youths who were hip and had enough foresight to carry a Lipton tea bag around in their back pockets). He spent three weeks with us, and we all agreed afterwards that it was the best holiday any of us had ever had. We sailed Toad up the well-trod highway to Virgin Gorda, hitting all the piña colada joints I had taken charterers to on the way. We rented motorcycles on Tortola; we swam, snorkelled and spearfished. We sailed through crowded anchorages and current-ripped cuts as if we knew exactly what we were doing. Then we sailed across the Anegada Passage – a small overnight voyage, a taste of wider seafaring – to the French island of St Barts, where we stuffed ourselves with patisseries, baguettes, pâté. David fell in love with Toad, which now seemed an able, comfortable, trusty magic carpet. And J. and I now seemed able to sail it with skill, even some dash.

  When he left, we found we’d spent all our money. I went back to work, and J. now began to make use of her licence, skippering charter boats when large parties hired two or three boats at a time and we cruised in tandem up to Virgin Gorda and back. These skippering jobs were good for her self-confidence; she was happy, she looked beautiful, the charterers all thought she was incredible – and she was. I wondered at my luck in having such a woman, and grew full of hope again.

  We met Thom and Beth Wilson when they anchored their small, well-prepared fibreglass thirty-footer next to us for several days in Cruz Bay. A lean couple our age, they were making a year-long circuit of the Caribbean from Florida and back. We quickly became friends and had a Thanksgiving feast together aboard Toad.

  We spent two weeks sailing slowly up through the islands in company with them, eating supper together on one boat or another, spearfishing and taking long walks. They were, at that moment in time, what we hoped we could become: a tight unit on a tight boat, outward bound. For all four of us, our minds and attitudes clicked powerfully together. J. and I climbed up to the top of Mosquito Island when they sailed onward to the south, and miserably watched them disappear beyond Virgin Gorda.

  But Thom and Beth galvanized us. We were impressed by the planning and execution of their cruise, and by the performance of Toad alongside their boat – they beat us always in their modern design, but not badly; for all intents and purposes, we had kept up with them. We decided we would leave the Virgin Islands, where we had been for two and a half years, and sail away. Toad was ready. We were stale. It was time to go. We decided to sail as far as Florida. There we could work again, build up a good cruising kitty and sail on, either east across the Atlantic or west, through Panama, to the Pacific.

  We told our friends, and made our preparations. On one of my last charters, Sarah Comstock and I were sitting next to each other at the barbecue on Peter Island one Tuesday night, when she said to me: ‘I want you to know that I care about you.’

  She said it in a firm, quiet way that made me think she might even care about me as much as I cared about her. ‘I care about you too,’ I said. I saw Arawak a few more times, but we never had a chance to say anything more to each other.

  A few weeks later, J. and I sailed away for Florida.

  July 21

  We are becalmed. Then we ghost on zephyrs for a few hours until we lie rolling slightly and stop again. I feel the mind-boggling enormity of the ocean as I crawl across it at often less than a walking pace. I can see it on my fifty-three-inch-wide chart of the North Atlantic on which my daily X’s are half an inch apart. I feel smaller than a Physalia. As lonely as a satellite – an astronaut in outer space is in closer touch with the world than I am, with forty people in Houston monitoring every burp.

  The greatest reward of sailing alone (that I have discovered so far) is that no one comes between you and the indescribably beautiful world around you. You experience it directly without the muddying filter of someone else’s impression. At moments, standing on deck looking at the lonely sea and the sky, you find yourself moved to a mix of joy and sadness that breaks your heart. But it’s at just these moments that you also find yourself wanting to share it all with someone you love.

  18.30: I feel very far away from everything and everyone I love today.

  I wake in the middle of the night and it is as if the wind has been waiting for me to appear, groggy in the hatchway. We are still becalmed, but within seconds I feel it on my cheek, a breath from the south. By starlight I see it coming across the water on my left like the shadow of a cloud across a field, mottling the flat calm mirror on which we have been sitting, turning the surface dark and opaque.

  The breeze builds, then steadies into a light wind that I somehow believe in. This is the leading edge of something extending across a broad reach of ocean, I feel, with all the intuition I’ve acquired in place of a weatherfax machine. I believe – I fervently hope with the excitement of a pioneer in a prairie schooner passing over the continental divide and seeing the downslope – that we have at this instant sailed out of the windless mid-ocean high into the prevailing pattern of south-westerlies blowing alongside the American continent. This is our wind that will take us to the shore. It fills the main and genoa, which have been loose and flapping for days, weeks it seems. Now they are quiet, filled with wind like kites, pulling Toad through the air. After almost three weeks at sea, lurching, rolling and pitching, I feel no movement at all now – save for a slight, delicious acceleration – as the boat stiffens and we glide across the flat ocean surface. It is so thrilling I can’t go straight back to sleep. I stay up for the ride.

  Within an hour it is blowing twelve knots, a real breeze. The crests of waves are breaking into small phosphorescent whitecaps. This is perfect sailing. I’ve seen nothing like this since before the Azores. We are bombing along at five knots, pointing at Cape Cod, 1,300 miles away.

  Anxiety drains out of me. We’re on our way at last. I go below to sleep.

  July 22

  At 05.00, just before dawn, the alarm wakes me. Swinging my feet off the bunk, I touch water before floor.

  Real panic. Before I know it I’m up in the cockpit pumping for all I’m worth – so frenziedly that part of my mind is wondering about the age and strength left in the sun-faded rubber diaphragm C-clamped on the pump’s exterior. I have a spare, but it would rattle me further if this broke and I had to repair it right now. Pump-pump-pump-pump-pump-pump. After a while – I’ve forgotten to count or look at my watch – I look down the companionway: water’s no longer visible over the wet floorboards. I slow down a bit, catch my breath. Several deep breaths. What a way to wake up!

  I start thinking: I was in the lee bunk – the lower side of the boat now that it’s well heeled with wind in the sails for the first time in weeks. Water just under the floor when the boat is becalmed and upright would overflow on the lee side when moving and heeled. No need for panic. But water over the floorboards is above the threshold of my peace of mind.

  Five minutes later I know with certainty there’s a shit-load more water coming in now. Still no suck from the bilge and I’ve been at it for ten minutes at least. I stop and go below and pull up a floorboard. The bilge appears half full. Je-sus Christ.

  Up in the cockpit I pump like a mad metronome. Of course, I think, the bilge is V-shaped so what looks half full is really probably only a quarter full. I normally see half a glass of water as half full, but I have just become a fervent half-empty man.

  Anoth
er five minutes until I hear the sucking of air from bilge. I go below, up into the bow, and what I see is a waking nightmare that makes my gut feel suddenly full of ice: water is welling in, steadily, along half the seams in the hull below the waterline, on both sides. The inside of the planking up here looks as if a hose is being played across it. I pull sails, duffel bags, coils of rope wildly away from the hull to see how far aft this continues. Not far, thank God, not too far: it stops about six feet or so back from the stem. The planking is dry aft of this. The water’s getting under the sheathing, of course, and coming in through the seams, which haven’t been caulked for a decade at least. You can’t caulk them if you can’t get at them, but the water sure can. I stare for a few minutes, trying to think – of what I don’t know. Through the hatch light overhead I can see that it’s dawn.

  I go aft and start making coffee.

  Okay. I can still pump it out, I can keep it below the floorboards. But no question about it now: the faster I sail, the more water comes in. However, we’re doing about five knots now, we won’t go much faster than this, so maybe it’ll stabilize at this rate.

  Not a hope. The leak got progressively worse over the last two weeks while we were practically sitting still. It will get worse and worse, faster and faster, and I know why now: the water will work away at the old caulking and force its way aft. It’s a race against time.

  But aren’t we moving well!

  I think of the Al Italia joke a Pan Am flight attendant once told me: an announcement from the cockpit: ‘We gotta good news, anda bad news. The bad news is we’re lost. The good news is, we’re makinga great time.’

  Later in the morning, the liquid crystal digital display on my short-wave radio starts fragmenting: batteries are low. I change them, but when I turn the radio back on it is silent. A second moment of raw panic this morning. Absurdly, this seems far worse than the leak. The prospect of life without my radio makes me feel lonelier than Robinson Crusoe. The radio is my Man Friday, my contact with the rest of the species. Auntie BBC, jazz from the VOA in the evenings, this is the company that has kept me from feeling utterly alone.

  I pull the batteries – brand new Duracells – out of the radio and look at the contact points inside the battery compartment. Nice and shiny, no sign of corrosion. The batteries, fresh from their plastic packaging, look good too. I put them back, slowly, firmly, with the intense telepathic message: You will work now. I put the lid back on. Turn the radio on –

  Nothing.

  I unscrew the back of the radio and pull it off, revealing the inscrutable Japanese interior. I might as well be looking at an atomic bomb. I see no sign of corrosion, which I could expect after years on board. I pick the radio up and turn it upside down: nothing falls out, which is good, but then I realize that if it had I wouldn’t know where it came from to put it back. Miserably, I screw the back on.

  I feel a terrible cascading fear. I’m undermined, no doubt, by the other, realistically greater problem, but I am undone by the silence from my radio. I feel myself reverting to the baby state I escaped into on the dope boat: I want to blubber and appeal to someone, ‘Pleeeeaaase!’ More than a thousand miles to go, ten to fifteen days. Cut off from the world. Absolutely, completely, out-of-touch alone.

  Almost whimpering, I climb into the cockpit and start pumping. Pump-pump-pump. The voyage seems too grim now. Suddenly it’s no longer fun. I look around at the empty ocean and realize, with a sharpness I’ve never felt before, how alone I am. Just myself and a leaky boat in the middle of the ocean. Alone, alone, all, all alone.

  But isn’t this really what you’ve wanted all along? A real test? To see if you can take it? This is now, at last, a survival situation, mentally and physically. It’s perfect. It’s going to take everything you’ve got. Are you going to cave in now, as you did once before, on the Mary Nell, when someone else was looking after you, or are you going to rise to this? If you set out across an ocean in a boat like Toad, eager for a whiff of danger and sensation but unprepared to face just such a scenario, you’re just a fucking dilettante. This is real. Life or death. Are you up to it, or not?

  Why are you here?

  In 1966–7, sixty-five-year-old Englishman Francis Chi-chester sailed alone around the world. He stopped only once, in Australia, for seven weeks, to rest up for the long second leg by way of Cape Horn, and to give interviews, building public interest in his voyage, for he was a canny publicist. He was a tall, thin, geeky-looking old bloke, with Coke-bottle glasses and a cap bearing the Pure Wool trademark, the logo of his British Wool sponsors. The reason Chichester gave for making the voyage was to see if a modern yacht could beat the round-the-world sailing times of the old clipper ships plying between England and Australia along their now obsolete route. This route was south from England, down the Atlantic, then east through an ocean not found on any map but known to sailors as the Southern Ocean: the empty windswept stretches of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans at the bottom of the world, between latitudes 40 and 50 degrees south. A place also known as the ‘Roaring Forties’ and the ‘Furious Fifties’, where storm-force westerly winds drove great ships at their maximum speed. These winds develop huge seas that roll around the globe like an unceasing formation of tsunamis, unimpeded by land except in one place, Cape Horn, the southernmost rock of the Andes, the scorpion tail tip of South America. Once round the Horn – if they made it round – ships would turn north and head back up the Atlantic, to England.

  A small modern yacht against great old ships. An essentially pointless accomplishment (and, in fact, Chichester failed to smash any old clipper ship records), but it carried the specious ring of a worthy endeavour. The real reason Chichester went was that he was an adventurer: as a young man he had made a pioneering flight in a small aircraft from England to Australia; he had raced other singlehanded sailors across the Atlantic; and now, in his sixties, he was still unable to sit at home and be done with adventuring. As to where he went, his route, there was a much more compelling reason than beating clipper ship times (although this provided an interesting measure of his time): this east-about route around the world, by way of the Forties and the Horn, is the fastest, the most fearful, the most dangerous way to sail around the world. It is Everest for sailors. Chichester went that way because it was there.

  For England, sadly reduced in world stature since World War II, with no plucky British astronauts, a ‘brain drain’ of its premier scientists and thinkers decamping to America for more money, its only great twentieth-century heroes being Hillary (a New Zealander) of Everest, and Scott, the epic Antarctic bungler whose heroic posturing and ineptitude killed himself and his party, Chichester filled a famished void. No one had done what he had done. A quarter of a million people lined Plymouth Harbour the evening in May 1967 when he sailed home. Later he sailed on to Greenwich, stepped ashore and knelt before Queen Elizabeth who dubbed his shoulders with a sword and knighted him on the spot. Both events were nationally televised. I remember sitting in front of the telly in London, watching, sixteen years old and not quite sure what he’d done or what all the fuss was about.

  Among others watching was, no doubt, Robin Knox-Johnston, sixteen miles from where I was watching in London, if he was at his parents’ home in Downe, Kent, where he was living at the time:

  ‘I see that Tabarly is building a trimaran’, my father said one morning. ‘Would that be suitable for the Transatlantic race?’ …

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ I said. ‘Are there any other details?’

  ‘No, but I wonder if he is going to try and beat Chichester’s time, or perhaps even go round non-stop. That’s about all there’s left to do now, isn’t it?’

  He got up and left for the office, leaving me stirring a cup of coffee and thinking. ‘That’s about all there’s left to do now’ kept turning in my mind. Going non-stop around the world was all that was left to be done in the sailing marathons. Chichester had stopped in Australia … Who would try going round non-stop single-handed?
It would only be a matter of time …

  So begins Knox-Johnston’s book. This conversation took place in March 1967, two months before Chichester returned. Within a month, Knox-Johnston was talking with a yacht designer about having a boat designed specifically for a non-stop circumnavigation – a boat which ultimately he couldn’t afford, leaving Suhaili, which he already owned, as his only option.

  Chichester’s voyage provoked the same thought in others. By the end of 1967, at least six men were making plans for non-stop circumnavigations. The Sunday Times, which had partially sponsored Chichester and covered his story – hesitantly at first, then enthusiastically as Chichestermania rose to a frenzy – got wind of the non-stop gang, all of whom were contacting newspapers seeking sponsorship. The Sunday Times grabbed the initiative away from its Fleet Street competitors by formalizing these efforts with the announcement, in March 1968, of its Golden Globe Race. It would award a prize of a trophy, a ‘golden globe’, to the first singlehanded sailor to circumnavigate non-stop – from England, to England. For the sailor making the fastest voyage there would be a cash prize of £5,000. For these sailors, the sole purpose in going was to be first; the cash prize, unless the first man was also the fastest, would be a bitter consolation. What these sailors wanted most in all the world was that kitschy golden globe.

  The first to sail, on June 1, 1968, was John Ridgway, a twenty-nine-year-old captain in the SAS, Ridgway had already been to sea: in 1966 he had rowed across the Atlantic from Cape Cod to Ireland with a Scottish para-trooper, Chay Blyth. Two unquestionably tough men. Not to be left behind, Blyth set out after him on June 8. Both men were sailing stock thirty-foot-long fibreglass cruising boats, the sort in which a young family might poke about the Isle of Wight for the weekend, totally unsuitable for the Southern Ocean. As Ridgway left port, a twenty-five-ton vessel loaded with TV cameras collided with his little boat, smashing some woodwork, but he sailed on.