Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat Page 18
The news of Donald Crowhurst’s deception, madness and suicide was the lead story in most British newspapers on the weekend of July 27. The surviving competitors all wrote their books. Knox-Johnston’s book, Moitessier’s and Tomalin and Hall’s story of Crowhurst are all still in print and selling well today, twenty-eight years after the end of the race.
Robin Knox-Johnston, the only finisher of the race, received both the Golden Globe and the £5,000 cash prize. He gave the money to the Crowhurst family.
I was unaware of all this at the time. I was no longer in England, where it is my habit to read the Sunday Times. I had returned to the United States. I was in college in Boston making my own chaotic voyages on LSD. I was protesting against Vietnam. I had tuned in, turned on and dropped out.
It was with one of my college tripping buddies that I planned to sell the Moroccan hashish Bill and I would sail across the Atlantic. When we sailed from Swansea (three years after the end of the Golden Globe Race) into our gale in the Bristol Channel, nothing in my life had prepared me for what was to come. In the middle of the first awful night, I sat huddled in the cockpit, on my watch, a small transistor radio held to my ear beneath my oilskin hood (before a wave doused me and put out the radio for good), listening to Beryl Reid, a British comedienne and actress, making a studio audience laugh. I wanted more than anything in the world to travel back through the ether to be among that audience blissfully unaware of the horror of being at sea on this night. Yet I couldn’t get off the boat that night or in the forseeable future because the weather made it unsafe for us to run for shore. I could not get off the boat at any price. That was the horror.
So I chose the only other way out: I got sicker. I escaped into a delirium of seasickness, leaving Bill to take care of everything. No wonder he finally called the lifeboat.
Jump a few years. I was writing advertising copy in London, had a little flat, had found what might in time have become a niche ashore. My one taste of sailing had terrified me, intrigued me, and left me with a funny, unidentifiable taste in my mouth. I went to the London Boat Show every January and read a few yachting magazines, but it went no further than that.
Then my parents, who had never sailed at all and must have got some notion about it from my misadventures, bought their Viva III and started preparing for their illfated third life. I went sailing with them on weekends and we learned the rudiments of sail-handling, anchoring and navigation together. I noticed, on these cruises off England’s south coast, even the rougher ones, that I did not get seasick.
One weekend morning, aboard Viva in the yachting port of Hamble, Hampshire, I woke up and saw Suhaili tied to the dock next to us. I recognized the boat immediately; I had found Knox-Johnston’s book somewhere and read it twice, mesmerized, and pored over every detail of the rough, inelegant Suhaili in the colour photographs. Robin Knox-Johnston was aboard, alone, puttering around on deck. He had stopped for the night, and before he took off again I said hello and talked to him for a while. Suhaili was unlike any yacht I had ever seen. She had a work-boat finish: all paint – not a scrap of varnish to waste your time on – corrosion-mottled steel and iron fittings, some stained with rust. Yet she was beautiful, the way a tugboat can be beautiful. At thirty-two feet, she was twelve feet shorter than her neighbour Viva, but she had an outsize massiveness about her that made her appear to be a chunk hacked off a wooden whaling ship. I watched Knox-Johnston take Suhaili away from the dock with no more fuss than tying a shoelace, and motor off down the Hamble. I remember what I felt, watching him go: a massive sense of disparity between us, which, if I had been able to put into words, would have been: ‘There goes a man.’ And I was filled with an awareness of all that I was not, and had once, out in the Bristol Channel, so conspicuously failed to be.
In time, I came across the Crowhurst book, and Moitessier’s. It became clear to me that alone at sea, in a dimension stripped of all possibility of pretence, the Golden Globe competitors had met their true selves – for better or worse – during the race. Moitessier had reached a spiritual plane that made the race seem pointless, made it impossible for him to turn left and sail to England for money or hollow acclaim. Crowhurst spent eight months inside a boat going nowhere, saturated with a deception that finally drove him to step off the deck into the water. And Knox-Johnston, despite damaging knockdowns from huge waves, and problems with his boat far worse than those which had demoralized and beaten other competitors, had learned that ‘I was thoroughly enjoying myself’.
I read all three books again and again, and the funny taste in my mouth about my own aborted voyage grew bitter and shameful. I had experienced the tiniest inkling of what they had endured and I had curled up in my bunk and mewled and puked like a baby until I was rescued. I became aware of a sense of inadequacy that nothing, it seemed to me, but to go to sea alone someday would dispel. A gauntlet dropped in front of me and wouldn’t go away. I wouldn’t have to sail through the Southern Ocean and around the Horn, nor even around the world. To singlehand across an ocean would redeem me, would ease the disgrace I felt from that first trip to sea …
This is too neat. I didn’t think it all through like this. I believe now, looking back, this is part of what drove me subconsciously, kept me fascinated; but at the time, I was simply reading and rereading these three wildly different tales of the same event, thinking about single-handing, and moving back towards boats after an initial episode that should have turned me off for ever.
Certainly I didn’t leave advertising to embark on a training scheme for eventual single-handed sailing. I was trying to write a novel, and I quit my copywriting job because I felt I didn’t have enough time for my own writing. But I was soon working on boats sailing around the Mediterranean, and not writing. Then J. and I got together, got married, and my thoughts of single-handing took a back seat to dreams of the two of us following after the Hiscocks, doing that sybaritic circumnavigation by way of the Caribbean, Panama, the Pacific islands, New Zealand and Australia, the Indian Ocean, South Africa and back up to the Caribbean. The Hiscock Highway, it has been dubbed. And after we had sailed together I couldn’t imagine sailing without her.
But I am here at last. Not just sailing across the ocean to get to the other side, to Maine to sell the boat, as I originally set out to do; nor alone for lack of crew. I am sailing to meet my true self, and hoping to find an improved version. I don’t want to see myself curling up again. I may have more than I bargained for, with the condition of my boat, but all I could have hoped for as a test. I must try to get Toad safely to land. I must be a man about it. I don’t have to commit suicide and go down with the ship if it really sinks; I can try to save myself if the struggle ahead fails despite all my efforts.
But I must struggle well. That, finally, is what I’m here to do.
18.00: Fixed the radio. It had to be the batteries. I tried one from another pack, substituting it one by one for the new ones – noise erupted. The sound is big, clear and glorious! A bad battery! Second biggest scare of the voyage so far. Listening rather smugly to VOA’s Jazz Hour now. Earlier, on the BBC, heard about the battle between the Royal Horticultural Society and a county cricket team over a British native orchid found growing on county cricket grounds. The horticulturists stopped play. Negotiations are scheduled. Without the radio I’d never have known.
Moving well. Pumping every hour, but life aboard is still good. This is still a wonderful trip. It’s actually getting better and better.
July 24
Twenty-second day out of Horta.
We have been tearing along all night with the main slightly reefed, and at 02.00 I go out on deck to roll the reef deeper. It is windier than an hour ago. Maybe because of the large dark rain cloud passing astern of us.
Below, I am unable to go back to sleep, feeling we are still over-canvased and hearing the sloshing in the bilges.
An hour later the cloud is gone and the wind is the same, about a steady twenty knots. I go forward and drop the genoa. I si
t astride the bowsprit in the dark, bunching up the genoa and tying it to the whisker stays. I grip the four-inch-wide teak spar with my thighs like a bronco rider. My feet on the bobstay dip in and out of the warmish water as the bow rises and falls. I’m still not wearing a harness, not yet, it’s not at all bad out. Just a lot different from what it has been for so long. And there is so much noise now: waves tumbling over themselves, and Toad’s insistent charging through them, and the steady cataract sound of the white water tumbling along both sides of the hull.
The boat is much happier under reefed main and stay-sail. Me too. I go below and fall asleep.
Still blowing this morning. Amazing difference from a few days ago. At noon we’ll clock a good run at last. America is a thousand miles away but seems infinitely closer today. I feel it now just over the horizon. I picture it, New England in August: clams, lobsters, station-wagons, sneakers and tattered sweatshirts; and toothsome American girls, strong, corn-fed, happy, impossibly normal. I imagine bringing Toad alongside some grey-bleached dock festooned with floats, stacked with lobster pots, and meeting one of these splendid, freckly girls. The ordinariness of it makes it seem so far beyond my reach. Is it real, or is it a J. Crew catalogue?
At 09.00 I notice a new sky. It is still blue and sunny, but high up there is now a lot of streaky cirrus.
If clouds appear as if scratched by a hen,
Get ready to reef your topsails then.
I get out Alan Watts’s book and find this sky in Photograph 2: ‘Sky which means deterioration. The warm front of a depression is probably on its way … the wind will increase … rain is likely later.’
The sea is up, too, after several days of this wind, confused and lumpy. A southerly swell now dominates over a steady procession of smaller waves from the north-west. Toad is being knocked about, slapped on the nose by the north-westerly lumps. But we are still making good progress, moving at five knots, heading north-westerly, straight for Maine.
However, Maine is still about 1,000 miles away. I have been thinking of making for Bermuda, now 400 miles due west. But with the wind up and from the south-west, I can’t push Toad any closer to Bermuda than we’re heading. When and if the wind shifts or drops, we will head that way.
A lot of water below, and more, always more, coming in. I pump now when I’m not doing anything else.
At local noon, 13.30, my sights show we have made 112 miles in the last twenty-four hours. The log mileage is 121, so there is some current with the north-westerly swell which has set us back ten or eleven miles.
At 15.00 and again at 16.00, I roll up more of the main onto the boom. Toad is equipped with a roller-reefing gear that pulls the mainsail down and rolls it around the boom. Operated by a ratchet and pawl, it does its job quickly and neatly. I can roll up half the mainsail in about a minute. The remainder sets well on the mast, maintaining a taut, efficient airfoil shape. I can roll it down to storm-sail size in two minutes. There is a photograph of this gear in Hiscock’s Cruising Under Sail. Turner’s roller-reefing gear, it’s called, manufactured in the thirties. It works much faster than the modern system, laughably known as ‘jiffy’ reefing, for its supposed speed of operation, which is what I found on all the new boats I’ve skippered or delivered.
Later in the afternoon I tune in to the short-wave weather forecast given by the US Coast Guard station November Mike November in Portsmouth, Virginia, to see if they mention this weather. Two gales are moving east off the eastern seaboard, but that’s way north, around 45° north.
And at 18.00 I roll up still more of the main. The wind – I finally admit it – is much, much stronger now. It’s blowing about thirty knots, a gale. We are being knocked and slammed about now. It is impossible to think of getting any closer to Bermuda at the moment. If I had thought of it days ago …
No matter how much I pump, water is now constantly sloshing over the floorboards. It has become wet and grimly depressing below. Gallons of water pouring without let-up into an old boat bouncing around in the middle of the ocean without a proper life raft undermines your confidence, I find. I’m used to seeing an ocean of water outside, but a lot of it inside the boat where by essential principle it’s supposed to be dry can get you down.
Just keep pumping. The Coast Guard forecast doesn’t mention any weather system around here, so maybe it’ll quieten down again soon. We’ll go to Bermuda or maybe still poop on to Maine. It’s hard to adjust to the fast-changing reality of life aboard: I keep thinking everything will be okay.
July 25
Haven’t slept much. That sloshing noise. I worry about drifting off and letting too much water come in. When I do doze I dream we’re sinking. Waking is hardly less nightmarish, with water above the floorboards.
The rain predicted by the Watts book comes in the night, with a low dark caving-in of cloud and those spatial hallucinations that make me feel we are turning and hobby-horsing through great amorphous rooms. The strangest sensation, not unpleasant, but so strong tonight, probably because this is the lumpiest sea and weather of this voyage so far, and because I’m tired and it’s easy, even a relief, to get carried away into it.
I have to watch myself. I know from all my book reading of sailors at sea and my own encounters with exhaustion that this is when you make mistakes. You let things go, let yourself and your boat down. I have to be vigilant. I have to eat to keep strong, and somehow I have to sleep. I have to sleep soon too, otherwise I risk getting so tired that when I wake up there will be too much water in the boat and I’ll have lost the battle. Later this morning I’ll nap.
We are converging with shipping lanes between northern Europe and ports in the Gulf of Mexico. We would never be seen by any lookout aboard a ship in such conditions. Nor would Toad be spotted on radar with all the wave clutter. And we’ve stopped moving now, so if I did see a ship looming up out of the murk, it would take long minutes to attempt evasive manoeuvres. I’m relying on the statistical unlikelihood of collision, as John Letcher did for a while. We are hove-to, staysail backed and the reefed main sheeted flat amidships, bobbing quite comfortably, pointing west, probably making a knot of leeway to the north-west, which is where we want to go. I want to see if heaving-to, reducing our motion, slows the water coming in. Can’t tell yet. It’s four o’clock in the morning.
Under way again at 08.00. Tried napping, and maybe dozed a little but not much. Just as much water coming in, so we might as well keep going and we’re making good time in the right direction. The wind is still a steady twenty-eight to thirty knots.
A lot of water, in fact, is coming in. More than yesterday. It is unhingeing to have this much water coming in and no visible hole in the boat. I pump all the time now when I’m not doing anything else vital. Sleep is vital, but I can’t seem to manage it. The floor is continually underwater now. I wade through the interior of the boat. Yet I seem to be able to keep it around that level.
Local noon is 13.35, and I’m lucky enough to get a sight of the sun for latitude. Earlier this morning I managed two quick snapshots of a hazy but sufficiently distinct orb through cloud. We’re at 35°18' north, 52°45' west. Eighty-three miles since noon yesterday, which is good for being hove-to and slowed down. This boat sails well.
Marking my pencilled X on the chart, I find we are again at one of those spots on the ocean where I’ve been before. Two years ago, on July 16, J. and I were just three miles away with the cats aboard Toad, bound for the Azores. A year ago, on June 28, we were five miles away on Sea Bear, a boat we delivered from Florida to England.
Sea Bear was a Moody 33, a modern plastic boat designed by Angus Primrose, the English yacht designer who had the great misfortune to go to sea in one of his own boats – something designers rarely do – a Moody 33 called Demon Demo. Primrose sailed it across the Atlantic in the OSTAR (the Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race), during which, in not particularly severe weather, Demon Demo was rolled upside down, losing its rig. Primrose was sailing the boat off the US east coast severa
l years later, supposedly alone, while Mrs Primrose remained in England, when again Demon Demo capsized during a gale. This was a bad Gulf Stream storm, a northerly gale blowing against the north-setting current creating dangerous seas. J. and I were coming down the Chesapeake from Annapolis in a new bareboat, to deliver offshore to the Virgin Islands, when this same storm brewed up. We were lucky enough to hear about its approach on the radio and sat it out in Little Creek Harbor at the mouth of the Chesapeake. Offshore, a number of boats got into trouble, and when Demon Demo capsized, Primrose, who was not in fact alone, but with a young lady, launched the life raft and got his passenger into it. She later said that before he had a chance to follow her, another wave broke over the boat and down it went, taking its creator.
Sea Bear was ugly and uncomfortable, though fast, and we were luckier than its designer with the weather. At one point we spent five days and nights flying a large spinnaker and travelling at its maximum hull speed of between six and seven knots through dense fog south of the Grand Banks, frightened to death of meeting a ship or an errant iceberg, but knowing there was not much difference between slow and fast in such a situation.
This afternoon we’re being knocked about too much, and tons of water are filling the boat, so I heave-to again, feeling, for the first time, a little desperate, unsure if I am able to handle what’s happening. I want to keep moving, get closer to Bermuda, but moving seems to make the leak worse – although, finally, it’s hard to tell. My attitude is changing fast. For a while, around teatime, that English ritual so suggestive of warmth and cosiness that I observe most days at sea, I lose my nerve and think of putting out a mayday call. It’s not warm and cosy at all aboard the boat now, but wet and loud and fucking terrifying.