Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat Page 20

  One day, back in London, after food-shopping by myself in Waitrose on the King’s Road, I went home and told J. I couldn’t live with her any more. I did this instinctually, appalled at myself, in the face of my love for her and my feeling that she was the best person I knew or might ever know and my vision of what we could have been together. None of that seemed to help. I was exhausted with trying to make her happy, sick of seeing myself at my worst through her eyes, and seeing her at her worst, frightened of the way we fought like two alpha wolves trapped in a cage, wounding each other and going for those same raw wounds the next time.

  She had expected it all along – almost from the day of our wedding, I realize now. It came as proof of the inerasable lesson she had learned as a nine-year-old girl on vacation with her parents when one day her mother vanished with the handsome tennis pro: the people you love will leave you.

  She didn’t fight me; she didn’t say, Let’s work this out. She took what I said as absolute as a papal decree and boarded a train to Nice to stay with her mother. She saw the Bergstroms again, and Leif asked her if she wanted to be part of a crew with him delivering a motor yacht to Florida. She went, about six weeks after we split, and they are still together.

  I have thought, since leaving her, that we might have been perfect together if we could have met for the first time as the people we were when we split up – or perhaps quite a bit later. People who had acquired some knowledge of marital relations and could use it to make one work. Or if we had stayed together and rebuilt our relationship as we had rebuilt Toad, cutting out the rot back to what was clean and sound and building on the good stuff. But I didn’t see how we could do that any more than meet each other again for the first time.

  I started running. I got up early every morning and ran through the dark around Bishop’s Park in Fulham, beside the Thames. I ran longer and longer distances. Across Putney bridge and down the towpath along the river to Hammersmith. Five miles, then ten miles. It seemed the only thing in the world I could do that did something in return for me. The longer I ran, the better I felt.

  I went on the dole (I gave my occupation as boat captain, and, there not being any such jobs at that time in Fulham, I was given £90 a week).

  I ran the London marathon in March.

  I spent most of my time in my little studio, writing, and reading boating books, magazines, and taking my sextant out of its varnished box and looking at it. I felt marooned. David and Martin were well embarked on their careers, but not in positions from which they could help me get in. I found my old portfolio of ads and thought of trying to get back into advertising. I wrote and drew new spec ads. I wrote one for Seiko watches, about how Peter Nichols used his to navigate across the Atlantic. But it was a bad time to try to get back in, I was told.

  I wondered what I was doing, and who I was, alone, in my thirties now, living at home with my mother, broke and on the dole. Such thoughts flew at me like van Gogh’s dark crows between two and four o’clock in the morning, and I had no answers.

  Increasingly I thought of Toad. Unsold, waiting. I thought of sailing it somewhere by myself. I felt capable of this now; I knew this would make me feel better about myself.

  Finally, it was all I could think of.

  July 26

  Spend most of the day in the cockpit. In my foul-weather gear, my harness on now because I’m getting some sleep, sitting upright over the pump, back against the cabin, nodding off between strokes. Rocked and bounced to sleep. Getting real sleep too, must be, because I’m dreaming vividly. Dreamed we were approaching the Azores. Woke up once and saw Maine ahead, for sure, all those granite shores and fir trees. Straight out of WoodenBoat magazine. Eggemoggin Reach, I guessed. Thought about getting up and going forward to unlash the anchor and then it wasn’t there and I realized we still had about eight hundred miles to go. A lot of dreams like that all day.

  Hove-to. No sailing. Boat full of water, although I can go below and wade around pretty easily.

  I put the battery (a Die Hard car battery, which powers my tape deck and VHF radio) into the cooler, which is floating where the engine would be. I have to keep it dry, keep the VHF working.

  No sun today, so no position. No one makes me tea either. Not that sort of day. Or else she’s on holiday.

  Odd, but there’s this white stuff in the water today, all around the boat, particularly as we roll in the swell. Little white bits, like chunks of barnacle you scrape off the hull when you haul out, only a little smaller. In the water around the boat. Waves cleaning the hull? The stuff sinks slowly. I watch it go down. Bits of something.

  I think it’s windier today, if anything. A real gale, over thirty knots. The seas are up from yesterday – but they would be, after days of this.

  Might try the radio later, put out a call, see if anyone’s there.

  An endless night, pumping when I’m not dozing. Pump-pump-pump. Back and forth, back and forth, a rhythm building, like prostration for prayer. It’s cloudy, but through the cloud comes the dim illumination from a new moon somewhere above, giving the night shape and texture: gloomy rooms with inchoate frescoed ceilings, dark, heaving walls.

  July 27

  At dawn I see a ship off to the north, four or five miles away. Very hazy, dawn light and misty air, but it stays there and keeps going like a real ship while I stand up and watch it.

  I go below and call it up on the VHF.

  ‘Hello ship at about 35°43' north, 53°03' west, this is the sailing yacht Toad several miles off your port beam. Do you read? Over.’

  An answer, from a Dutch ship. He claims it’s not him I see because he doesn’t see me anywhere off his port beam, or on radar. He tells me I’m probably seeing another ship. I don’t care. I have rehearsed what I want to say.

  ‘I am in a severely leaking condition. I am en route to Bermuda. I may have to abandon ship. Would you please radio the US Coast Guard station November Mike November and let them know my position and situation, and ask them to alert shipping in this area to keep a good lookout in case I have to abandon ship?’

  The Dutch ship will have a short-wave transmitter. My VHF will transmit no farther usually than you can see from its aerial at the top of the mast: maybe twenty miles, possibly farther at sea in good conditions.

  ‘You need to get off now?’

  I’m not prepared for this question.

  ‘Jacht, you want to abandon ship now?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m hoping to make it to Bermuda. But my boat is leaking, and I may have to abandon ship later.’

  ‘Ja, okay.’

  I wait a little while, then call back to see if he got through, but I get no answer. I call several more times without a response. I go back on deck and look to the north-west, but the ship is gone. It’s still blowing about thirty knots.

  Immediately, I start thinking I should have said, ‘Yes, I’m sinking. I have to get off now. Please save me.’

  What constitutes sinking? I wonder. Is Toad sinking? Even now, this is almost a new concept. It has a leak, but is it sinking? How bad is it? How accustomed to it have I become?

  What if I don’t see another ship?

  When do I let go?

  I pump for a long time, but there is still water over the floor below. I go down to find something to eat. No bread left. There is some muesli. I haven’t made a proper meal for several days. Spaghetti, when was that? I look in the lockers around the galley, not really seeing what I’m looking at. Didn’t I have some peanut butter?

  I drift, standing in the galley, holding on while the boat lurches back and forth, my mind blank.

  ‘Hello, Toad!’ An incredibly cheery voice on the radio, which I’ve left on. ‘Little boat Toad!’ An Indian accent. ‘Hello! Hello! Hello!’

  I pick up the mike. ‘Yes, hello. This is Toad.’

  ‘Toad, yes! Good morning! How are you?’

  How am I? ‘I am leaking, thank you. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, you are leaking!’ A definite chuckle
. ‘That is what we are hearing! But we are fine, thank you! Very good, very good!’

  The Indian accent, beloved of comics and mimics in England, is thick, and irrepressibly cheerful. It sounds like Peter Sellers, escaped from The Party and running amok on the high sea. If I were anywhere else – hearing this on the phone, say – I would know it was a joke.

  And even here I say, ‘Who is this?’

  ‘We are the ship Laxmi. We are calling to see if you need help. How are you, really?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘We are here!’

  We are here is not a position a professional seaman would be likely to give. The sense of joke compounds, turns surreal.

  ‘I mean what is your position, please?’

  ‘But we are right here, Toad! Look! Look out the door, please!’

  Still holding the mike, I step up on the galley counter and look out –

  A ship is right behind us, on top of us. I could whack a badminton birdie onto its deck. Big, black, rusty, a cargo ship of some sort. LAXMI written on its bow. The bridge towers overhead, and eight or ten grinning Indians are crowding the rail above my head, waving as if I were Prince Charles. I can hear them shouting: ‘Hello Toad!’ I wave back.

  ‘You see!’ says the laughing voice on the radio, ‘We are here!’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ I answer back into the mike.

  We all wave for a while.

  ‘Well, do you want to come with us?’

  That question again. Get off or wait? For what? It’s still blowing. I’m not doing well. I’m tired and dopey. And I don’t think the leak is going to slow down when the wind drops. I’ve reached a crossroads.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I ask.

  ‘We are going to Burma!’

  ‘Burma?’

  ‘Yes, Burma! You know, next door to India!’

  What a thought! What might be waiting for me in Burma? Perhaps I could turn into a Somerset Maugham character, become an old Burma ‘hand’. Manage a rubber plantation, wear baggy shorts and a pith helmet and start drinking a lot of gin. Trim my moustache to an RAF shape and marry the daughter of a missionary, Celia, with whom I would have brittle fights on the veranda after dinner. Go quietly mad. Or perhaps go native – ‘poor chap, bad business’ – and meet a Burmese woman and raise a bunch of beautiful Eurasian children. Or become a Buddhist monk. Or would I find my appointment in Samarra, the death I had unknowingly been headed towards all along? I think of these old clichés and realize I know nothing at all about the modern Burma. All the more reason to go.

  Here at the crossroads, Laxmi is unmistakably the less-travelled road, forking towards Burma. And, with some disappointment in myself, I fail to rise to the occasion.

  ‘No, thanks, Laxmi. I’m trying to get to the States. Or Bermuda.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ And now I’ll always wonder.

  I ask Laxmi to radio the Coast Guard at NMN in Portsmouth, Virginia, to tell them about me and my situation. They promise to do this and, with lots of waving and wide white smiles, they steam off to the south-east.

  Will this be the last ship I see? I’m sure not. It’s the second I’ve seen in an hour. We must be bang in the middle of the shipping lane.

  A little later Laxmi calls back. They’re in touch with the Coast Guard, who are asking for an ETA in Maine or Bermuda. Eight to ten days, or three or four for Bermuda, I tell my pal aboard Laxmi. In our last exchange, he gives me a position check, which puts me considerably farther to the north-east than where I think I am. One of us is about forty miles off.

  The sun appears at 10.30 and I get two LOP snapshots. I work them out and find that I am, in fact, where I thought I was. I believe in my navigation, and wonder whether Laxmi will make Burma after all.

  With the sun comes a sudden dramatic moderation of wind and weather. By noon it’s a nice day, blowing about twelve knots. The sea is still lumpy, but it’s time to crack on more sail, which will steady us and get us moving. I’m invigorated. I feel wide awake.

  I go up on deck and unroll all of the main. Then I go out on the bowsprit, sit down on it and start untying the genoa.

  My feet and legs and the bobstay chain are plunging in and out of the water as Toad rises and falls in the leftover swell. At the lower edge of my vision I suddenly register a large dark shape in the water immediately beneath my feet. I’m back on deck, well inboard, saying out loud, ‘Je-sus Christ!’ before I know it. It was huge, dark brown, and bobbing at my feet with a curious undulating motion, as if sniffing me.

  I lean over the edge of the deck and look down. My God, what is that? The weirdest creature I’ve ever seen, huge too: flat, ragged, torn, waving in the water –

  It’s the sheathing. Delaminated from the bow, hanging off the hull in a long wide flap of heavy cloth, brown with dried resorcinol glue, waving up and down in the water with the motion of the waves. I move out onto the bowsprit again to get a better look and see the same waving flap down the other side of the boat too. The Cascover has delaminated at its joint at the bow and peeled back down both sides of the boat, at least halfway back, as far as I can see. Great obscene flaps waving from amidships. How long has it been like this?

  I see those white bits in the water again, and now I know exactly what they are: old caulking, dried and brittle, washing out of the seams.

  Dizzy, with a cold feeling in my stomach, I rush below and look at the hull up forward. Plain as day, sea water is pouring in, welling arterially, through most seams, as far back as the saloon, and farther. White bits of old caulking have also been pushed in and are lying on the planking and down the sides of the frames. Everywhere. Haven’t I seen this until now? Known, without looking overboard, how bad it was? I don’t know. If I saw it, I pushed away its meaning.

  I don’t know if I’ve been holding my breath, but now I can’t breathe. I rush topside again.

  I sit in the cockpit. I’m feeling dizzy. Hard to breathe. I sit, holding on. Minutes pass.

  The boat, I realize – I knew it all along – is quite sound. All those sister frames, and the new laminated floor frames I put in just two years ago before we left Florida. The boat is as strong as ever. But the sheathing is off, the caulking gone or going from half the seams in the hull’s planking. The boat has turned into a colander.

  Nothing I can do about it … is there? A hole I could patch: I could saw up the plywood beneath the bunks and nail it over ten holes. But this… I think of Robin Knox-Johnston caulking Suhaili’s leaking seam underwater with a complicated patch. Eight feet of seam on both sides of the boat. What would he do here with the equivalent of forty fifteen-foot-long kerfs sawn through the hull? And certain to lengthen.

  Toad is gone. I know this absolutely as I sit here in the cockpit on what is now becoming rather a nice day. The sun is out, the sea is going down.

  Knowing this, I look at the boat around me. The teak vent boxes I built on the cabin roof. The stainless steel guard-rail stanchions I installed. The winches, the rigging. The new compass Martin and I hooked up. The slight imperfection beneath the paint on the cabin side that I know is my plug of a hole made by Henry’s useless depth gauge. I look up and down the boat and I cannot see an inch of it that I haven’t remade according to my idea of what would make Toad the best it could be. Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I can’t keep ahead of it, that I must get off, save my life, and let Toad sink.

  I have never thought of Toad as a ‘she’, the way many think of their boats. My brother David liked to call it ‘him’. To me Toad doesn’t have a gender, but it is certainly something far more than the sum of its wood and bits and pieces. With every screw and bolt and pass of a paintbrush that J. and I gave it, this boat made these its own, and added something of itself. It has absorbed more love into its fibres than any amount of paint or varnish, until this has become part of its matrix. What Toad is to me now is a thing that was made and lives from that love.

  And I beli
eve Toad loves me back.

  So as I sit in the cockpit and look at it with tears pouring down my face, I am careful to keep quiet. I don’t say anything. I’m not going to tell it what is going to happen now.

  I sheet the main amidships, heaving-to, and wait for local noon. I get a latitude sight. I work out our position with unusual care, thinking about our drift since the morning LOP sights. We’re at 36°08' north, 53°12' west. Three hundred miles north-east of Bermuda; eight hundred miles from Maine.

  At 14.00 I put out my first mayday call on the VHF. I say into the mike, according to international radio etiquette: ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the sailing yacht Toad at 36°08' north, 53°12' west, requesting assistance. Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the sailing yacht Toad at 36°08' north, 53°12' west, requesting assistance.’

  No reply. I repeat it a few more times, then stop. I haven’t been heard. Probably no ship within range. I’ll wait an hour and try again. I’ll do this every hour on the hour, but for no more than two or three minutes, to conserve battery power. I know this part of the ocean, I know this is a shipping lane. I’ve spoken with two ships already this morning. Another will come along. I cling positively to this thought so I don’t have to think about getting into the dinghy and sailing for Bermuda. I think instead of what to take when a ship comes along and takes me off. I start to pack.

  This is a good time to go through my wardrobe and get rid of a few things. At this singular moment in my life, an article comes to mind, written by Michael Korda some time ago in The New York Times Magazine. It was on the subject of a man’s irreducible minimum wardrobe. A man can make do, Korda wrote, with one suit and two shirts. He can wash the shirts in a basin at night, hanging them up to dry, and if the suit is made of a decent wool, he can hang it in the bathroom when he takes his shower, and the steam will remove any wrinkles. I wondered, when I read this, how Korda, scion of the family of cinema titans, who grew up surrounded by wealth and abundance, who has himself become a famous editor-in-chief of a publishing house and best-selling author, came by such knowledge, which would indicate both impoverishment and a great concern to maintain appearances, and why he would write about this during the prime of his own adult success. These tactics and concern might have come from his uncle, Alexander Korda, a penniless Hungarian refugee who made himself into a movie tycoon and married Merle Oberon. I suppose the fear of loss of newly gained wealth, and how to manage without it, and regain it, is carried subconsciously down through several generations. It might have been something Michael Korda learned at the knee of his illustrious uncle, essential information that any man must carry to make his way in the world, and that, I guessed, is why Korda was moved to write the article and pass it on.