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

  Never mind, then, have a nice cup of tea.

  ‘’Ere, ’ave a nice cuppa tea, luv,’ I say aloud in my best East Ender charlady accent. ‘’At’s right, put the kettle on. Lovely! An’ a bit of that bread – why don’t you toast it, luv? You got this bleedin’ oven wiv a grill, use it! Go on! Give yourself a lit’le treat, then. All you bin froo. Yes, lovely! An’ a bit of that jam. A proper tea! ’At’s it!’

  Whoever she is, she’s wonderful. She makes me a lovely tea. And keeps cooing, ‘Love-lee!’ as she does it. I’ll hang on to her for a bit.

  I should sleep. I’m tired – you’re exhausted, you’ve got to sleep – but I’m afraid to let myself go all the way, because I don’t know at what point, if I stop to sleep, the water coming in will become too much ever to get ahead of again. If x amount is coming in now and I can keep ahead of it, can I pump out enough water after y minutes of sleep? I don’t know the answer, and I’m too terrified to get it wrong. And behind that is the fear that once asleep I simply won’t hear the alarm.

  This evening I do a marathon stint at the pump, getting glimpses of solid floorboard for a few minutes. Then I turn on the radio and hear McCoy Tyner on the Jazz Hour. I make spaghetti.

  I eat my bowl of spaghetti sitting on the saloon bunk with my feet up out of the water on a towel in front of me. Looking around the cabin, I’m intensely glad J. isn’t here tonight to see this water sloshing over the floor, to see Toad reduced to this. To fear for it now as I do. We had more good times than bad aboard this boat, I still think. Most of all when we pulled up the anchor and sailed somewhere. We worked in concert, and felt our boat respond. Once we had fixed it up, the vision we shared of a sailing life seemed, for a short while, to come true. Our three-month cruise from the Virgin Islands to Florida by way of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, was the nearest we came to reaching paradise together.

  It takes time to become part of a place, especially in a pit stop for transients, and after nearly three years of floating around St Thomas and St John, just as we were about to leave, we seemed finally to have arrived. People knew us and our rugged little boat. Ed Dwyer, who ran Water Island Charters and had given us so much work and become a friend, offered all the charters both of us might want and deliveries of new boats from the east coast down to the Virgins. Dieter, the German blacksmith, asked us to run his sixty-five-footer for its first charter season. We said no, thank you, pleased at the recognition, but we’d had it with the Virgins. It had been mostly heartbreak and effort. We were already gone.

  Two days before we sailed away, we got another kitty from the Humane Society, a black skinny thing with huge ears. Ed Dwyer said he looked like a bat. We called him Neptune. He was to be a friend for Minou, who pummelled him and ignored him before he finally fell in love. But it was me Neptune chose to favour. After two days of hiding aboard, he appeared on my chest one morning and began rubbing his nose against my whiskery chin, purring like an outboard. He became ‘my boy’ and I loved him more than Minou.

  We sailed first to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where we met an American sailor, Rick, and his Spanish girlfriend, Cruz, whom he had picked up in the Canary Islands while crossing the Atlantic. His boat was a nice, rather run-down old wooden double-ender; but what made it noticeable was the thing that looked like an umbrella without any fabric open and lashed to the top of the mast. It was a lightning protection device, he said. He had already been struck twice (‘¡Aïe!’ said Cruz, remembering) and designed his umbrella, after consulting numerous books, to ward off future attacks. Two years later when we were passing though Horta, in the Azores, Bob Silverman (whose house and lifestyle there I admired) gave us more news of Rick and his wonderful bad luck. Approaching Fayal the year before, Rick had taken a nap, the wind had changed, and his wind-vane-steered, umbrella-protected boat had piled into the foot of a cliff at the west end of the island. Rick and Cruz, wearing only shorts and T-shirts, jumped onto the rocks as the boat sank beneath them and spent the entire night scaling a steep cliff until they were crawling through the hydrangea bushes on level land at dawn. They were found bloody, shocked, insensible, and brought to the local hospital. When they recovered, they were given a ride on to England aboard another yacht. As that yacht entered the English Channel it was run down and sunk by a French trawler. Rick and Cruz were both injured, but made it ashore to England alive. I don’t know if they went sailing again, but I’d bet anything he did. He had too much bad luck going for him to leave it at that. People like that are persistent, and lucky too in a funny way, because they always survive, despite any amount of wreckage and dead or injured people they leave in their wake. Rick is still out there, sailing towards a fresh disaster, with a really unlucky, unsuspecting companion unaware of what’s about to happen.

  From Puerto Rico we sailed on through fabled waters. La Isla Española, Columbus named the large, lush, high island he found to the south of his first landfall, in honour of his Spanish patrons. Hispaniola it became, and still is, shared by the states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On the quiet Christmas night of 1492, the Santa Maria grounded on a coral reef off the north coast, near what is now Cap Haiten. It stuck fast and was abandoned, leaving its Spanish timbers to rot in the New World. On this bloody island sugar plantations worked by Carib and Arawak Indian slaves were the first planted endeavour of the colonial aspirations from across the Atlantic.

  We stopped at several ports in the Dominican Republic. Samaná, described in our guidebook as a picturesque village on the east coast, had recently been razed and rebuilt by the government in readiness for a hoped-for onslaught of tourism. It had rows of high-rise-looking concrete buildings in which the dispossessed people of Samaná now lived like glum squatters, empty concrete hotels, and wide concrete roads leading nowhere.

  It took us four days to sail the ninety-odd miles from Puerta Plata, on the Dominican Republic’s north coast, to Great Inagua, the southernmost island of the Bahamas. We got about halfway there and the wind died and we lay becalmed. We sat under the awning and ate the incredible-tasting avocados and pineapples we had bought in Puerta Plata. (‘How much are the avocados?’ ‘Sixty cents a dozen.’ ‘What?’ ‘Bueno, forty cents.’) We read. And we listened to the Voice Of America tracking Skylab as, unplanned, the space station fell out of its orbit and began hurtling earth-ward at so shallow an angle that NASA wasn’t really sure where it was going to crash onto the planet’s surface. Most of the earth’s surface, the VOA announcers pointed out reassuringly, was covered with water, so people on land shouldn’t worry. And much of the eighty-ton, eighty-two-foot-long Skylab would burn up in the long oblique plunge through the atmosphere, so what did reach that remote spot of water somewhere would simply be a few tons of white-hot flaming debris. The coverage, as the fiery descent began, made it all sound like a sporting event, the commentators excitedly reporting that now it was over the Bering Sea, dropping fast, then streaking south-east across the Canadian tundra, now over open ocean, hurtling down the Atlantic; it was anybody’s guess where it would land, NASA’s latest estimates were being revised; it’s got to be starting to burn up about now –

  I looked up, scanning the sky to the north for what would at first appear as fireworks but then very quickly grow infinitely bigger, imagining that we might actually be unluckier than Rick and Cruz and have a space station drop on us. It seemed worse not having an engine, not having the option of cranking it up and then, once the fiery comet of debris was sighted, being able to steam out of its way at five knots.

  However, it wasn’t even a close call. Skylab scattered itself over the eastern Indian Ocean and Western Australia, hopefully not disturbing even so much as a wallaby, or any Aussie yachties.

  The Bahamian islands stretching south and east from Nassau, the capital, on New Providence Island – the Exuma Cays, Cat Island, Long Island, San Salvador (generally agreed to be Columbus’s first landfall in the New World), Crooked and Acklins, Mayaguana and Great and Little Inagua – are known to th
e Bahamians as the Out Islands. Perhaps because they are really out there. They lie north of eastern Cuba. They offer no facilities to the visitor, and the world largely passes them by. To me they felt as remote from the rest of the world as any place I’ve ever been.

  We were sailing in the wake of one of my sailing heroes. In the sixties, Eric and Susan Hiscock sailed Wanderer III across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, the Bahamas and the US East Coast. Toad followed Wanderer’s path through the Out Islands and we stopped at many of the anchorages mentioned in Eric’s book Atlantic Cruise in Wanderer III: French Wells, Calabash Bay, Big Major’s Spot. In these places I took photographs of Toad, riding to anchor just where Wanderer had, copying Eric’s plates in the book as closely as I could. I even surreptitiously lured J. to spots on the sand where Susan had stood, where the composition was a perfect match, and then pressed the shutter. J. would admonish me, telling me to focus on our trip, not the Hiscocks’, but it gave me a little thrill.

  The Bahamas lie at the edge of the Great Bahama Bank, a plateau of sand almost five hundred miles long, which separates the islands from Cuba. The average depth is fifteen feet, and often in the atmosphere over the bank miles ahead, you can see ‘bank blink’, a pale green reflection of the shallow water below. On the other side of the islands, in places only several hundred yards from the bank, is the Atlantic ocean, with depths plunging quickly to fifteen thousand feet. In the cuts between the islands, where these waters meet, tidal currents are strong – far stronger than Toad’s sail-powered ability to breast them. We had to play the tides like sailors of old. Navigation was all ‘eyeball’: gauging depths and bottom type by the colour of the water and the state of the tide by a glance ashore as we shot through cuts and ran, tacked, jibed, and beat through an endless maze of tiny islands and labyrinthine coral reefs, around great mushroom-shaped coral heads that sprouted from the sandy bottom with only a dark patch to warn of their position. Our passage up through the Out Islands was our final exam in handling a small boat under sail. We had heard the scuttlebutt about the Bahamas: it was a tricky place and many boats were lost there. But we did fine.

  The Out Islands seemed deserted that summer. In our first month there, we saw only one other yacht, a singlehander on a tiny boat heading south. The Out Islands even had their own lonely sound, which we always heard when we stepped ashore from the dinghy: a soughing made by the trade wind through the casuarina pines that grew with the sea grape along the shore. It reminded us both of the wind in the pines in Mallorca when we were children.

  In three months we spent $100 on vegetables, limes and ice cream bought at tiny shack stores in Out Island villages, and on cold beer when we hove in sight of a bar. We carried no beer aboard because we had no refrigeration and didn’t like it warm. At the end of every day, anchored in quiet water watching the brief and always beautiful tropical twilight, we drank glasses filled with rum, crushed limes, water and a little sugar. During the day we drank gallons of water, of which we always had plenty because we caught it from passing squalls in our cockpit awning which emptied through a small tube straight into our tanks. We dived every day for grouper, crayfish, or conch, for us and ‘the boys’. I used a Hawaiian sling rather than a speargun: a slingshot made of surgical rubber bound to the side of a hollow wooden handle. The spear goes through the handle and is pulled back and released. You had to get close to your quarry, and then pull and fire. We saw shark and barracuda but we didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother us. We ate well on whatever I speared four or five nights a week with rice or vegetables, and spaghetti or rice on nights when we were glutted on fish or crayfish – the southern lobster. We found wild papaya and coconuts. We baked bread. We grew as brown and fit as savages from swimming and diving for our food and hauling up the anchor and raising sails and winching sheets and walking entirely around every island we anchored at.

  This was J. and I at our best, working our boat together, feeding ourselves, exploring each passing island and moving on. We felt we could have lived like this indefinitely, we dallied and zigzagged, but we were moving inexorably closer to the States and the end of our cruise.

  In the Berry Islands, north of Nassau, we sheltered in a landlocked bay as Hurricane David roared up through the Bahamas and passed sixty miles south of our hurricane ‘hole’. The roof of a solitary house ashore behind us blew off, but our anchors – three of them, triangulated for a hold against any change of wind direction – held firmly, and we weathered the blow looking out of our portholes at the spume-filled air, and listening to Florida radio stations a hundred miles away which tracked the storm. The local Bahamian station had switched, near the height of the storm, to a live, endless, imploring church service as a means of ultimate storm protection for its listeners. When the hurricane had passed, we found crayfish, disoriented by churned-up sand and strange currents, walking drunkenly along open sandy stretches of bottom, out of their usual holes in the coral, and we picked up eight of them in five minutes and ate them all the way to Fort Lauderdale.

  We spent six months in Fort Lauderdale, and another year anchored off Dinner Key south of Miami. A dispiriting time when we tried to make enough money to sail away, but there was never enough, or as much as we thought we would need. I hadn’t yet read Sterling Hayden’s autobiography Wanderer (Hayden was a sailing ship master before he became what he called a male starlet), in which he writes: ‘To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse.’ We did some delivery work: sailing new boats from Florida and Annapolis to the Virgins for charter companies, a ten- to twelve-day trip, usually an unpleasant beat to windward all the way, in crappy boats not designed or prepared to go to sea but for a doodle around the gentle Virgins. I bought a good sextant in a varnished wooden box from Sy Carkhuff, who had sailed around the world with it, and my sun and star sights improved on these offshore passages. I also worked as a boat carpenter around Dinner Key, and J. did some boat painting and varnishing.

  We plunged back into our old malaise. We fought more often and more unkindly. A constant dull unhappiness grew between us by the steady accretion of little episodes. The same way a coral reef is built.

  After eighteen months we decided to leave again. Rather the way we’d felt when we left the Virgins: it was time to flee. We knew we didn’t have enough money to get as far as New Zealand, a year’s voyage with no possibility of making money on the way, so we headed east across the Atlantic.

  This voyage was not the happy uninterrupted dream sequence of our Out Islands cruise. We sailed out of No Name Harbor on Key Biscayne, into the Gulf Stream a couple of miles offshore, where the wind died and we were swept away north in the five-knot current. That first evening we had a terrible fight, shouting at each other. I remember the shouting but not what it was about, but it’s never about what sets it off. The weather remained light all the way to Bermuda, and it took us fifteen days to get there.

  After two weeks in Bermuda, the bilges filled with water the day we left, frightening us, but we discovered it had been coming in through the unsecured forward hatch – and then it stopped. The Azores, three weeks out. A month on Fayal. Then a week to the European mainland, rounding Cape St Vincent on a sunny afternoon and Portugal looked so pretty, but we were screaming at each other. ‘I’m sick of you! I’m sick to death of you!’ I remember yelling at J., hoarsely, and her yelling it back.

  We almost put the boat ashore just north of Tarifa at the entrance to the Straits of Gibraltar. We had tacked in towards the land all night seeking a lee against the tremendous blast of a levante, an easterly gale blowing out of the straits. Tack after tack after tack, exhausting ourselves, we became drenched and cold inside our oilskins, and a dulling numbness came over us. In the misty dawn we saw ahead the lights of cars on the coast road shown on our chart, but we didn’t see that this was well inland from the beach. Before we were aware of it in our blunted state, we were in the waves off the beach. We
had expected the water to flatten out as we approached the shore, with the gale blowing off the land, but so great was the force of the wind that they were still high and breaking only yards from dry sand. We let the sheets fly, the sails flap, and I jumped straight into the water off the bow and stood hip-deep and pushed Toad’s bow off into deeper water. A day later we ghosted into Gibraltar, the northern Pillar of Hercules, and the remarkable juxtaposition of a hideous English suburban town on the shores of the Mediterranean.

  Our final break came not with a bang but a series of whimpers. We left Toad in Ibiza, one island short of our destination of Mallorca because we could bear to sail no farther together. I left almost immediately for London. J. followed two months later, after she had found a home for the cats with someone in Germany because there was no bringing them to England with a six-month-long quarantine. That must have destroyed her, giving them away; that and the abandonment of our home for a studio I was renting from my mother. We spent an unhappy winter and spring together in London. I was trying to write again, after years of thinking but doing nothing about it. J. hated sharing me again, particularly with the people we saw in London, whom she found to be superficial. She hated the way she felt about herself around me. That summer we got the job delivering Sea Bear from Florida to England. In the early fall we sailed Toad from Ibiza to England. Our final passage together. Martin came with us as far as Motril on the Spanish mainland, where we met Whit, who so disapproved of scrimshaw, and J. and I had one more fight. She left Martin and me in a bar there one night and when I got back to the boat I found a note from her: ‘I know when I’m like this I’m my own worst enemy, making you want to abandon me.’

  We spent two weeks at sea being quiet and careful with each other. We made love for the last time. We got pummelled by the equinoctial gales off the Western Approaches to the Channel. We left Toad at its winter berth off Flushing and listed it with a local yacht broker.