Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat Page 21

  Anyway, I think of it now as I go through my own clothes. I don’t have a suit, but I do have a blazer, wool, and I stuff it into a sail bag. I’ll pull it out when I have my next shower. I have a number of shirts, out of which I select two Brooks Brothers button-downs, and several T-shirts. A pair of venerable jeans. Underwear, socks, a hankie Martin gave me. I hope this will do. I have no idea what this next boatless phase in my life will bring, or what I will have to become in it, or how often I will have to shower with my blazer.

  I look around at my books. About a hundred of them stuffed into the shelves above the saloon berths, over the chart table, in the back of the galley. Years of selecting and collecting. Mostly they are books about boats and the sea. How to design them, build them, sail them. By the designers, builders and sailors I most respect. Like William Albert Robinson, whose seventy-foot brigantine Varua is my favourite boat in all the world. Robinson circumnavigated in a small ketch called Svaap in the twenties, and then designed Varua, his ‘ultimate’ ship, with Starling Burgess, and in it he experienced the ‘ultimate’ storm: ‘Again and again that night, I asked myself why I was there – and had no better answer than that perhaps this was the very thing that had drawn me into this voyage: an unexpressed urge to experience a real Cape Horn gale.’ Robinson built Varua in his own shipyard in Gloucester, Massachusetts, starting construction in 1939 – the same year Toad was built – and then sailed it to Tahiti, where he lived for the rest of his life. He wrote about this ship and his life sailing it around the Pacific, and through the Roaring Forties to Chile, in two of my favourite books, Return to the Sea, and To the Great Southern Sea. But if I take them, what do I leave behind? Skiff and Schooners; Boats, Oars and Rowing; and Spray? All by R. D. ‘Pete’ Culler, who learned marlinspike seamanship from a man ‘who had learned his seamanship under men who had sailed with Nelson’. Bill Tilman’s Mischief in Patagonia? My Knox-Johnston, Moitessier, Crowhurst books? Sailing Alone Around the World by Slocum? Chapelle’s Boat-building, and Yacht Designing and Planning? … My Hiscocks, for fuck’s sake? It doesn’t matter that I’ve read them all; they are my library, I refer to them constantly, for reassurance more than anything, to know that this world I’ve read about and want to be a part of exists, and I feel a chill intimation of a coming loneliness at the thought of leaving them all behind.

  I take the Hiscocks, all nine of them; Eric’s complete oeuvre, hardbacked, blue cloth, Oxford University Press. They are salt-stained, half ruined, broken-spined, dust jackets long disintegrated, the foundation of my library – and of who I am, for they describe all I want to do and the world in which I want to do it – and upon them I will build once more from scratch. The rest I hope I can find again.

  At 15.00 I make another mayday call. No response – until, minutes after I’ve stopped and gone back to my packing for a new life, a clear static-free voice fills the cabin:

  ‘Ship calling mayday, this is the Almeria Lykes. Almeria Lykes responding to mayday, come back.’

  For all my desperate confidence of being picked up, relief floods me. I think: Wow, that was fast.

  ‘Yes, Almeria Lykes, this is the sailing yacht Toad. I’m at 36°08' north, 53°12' west, and I am sinking. Over.’

  The voice on the radio, a voice of calm, of authority, tells me that he is about twenty miles from my position. (He talks in a seigneurial first-person singular: not we, not the ship, but ‘I am about twenty miles …’) He is a container ship, on his way from Rotterdam to Galveston, Texas. He asks me how sure I am of the position I have given. Pretty sure, I reply, within a couple of miles – sure that if they come to that position I will see them. The voice responds that he is on his way. He will be there in an hour. He will remain standing by on the air.

  I hang up the mike and look around Toad’s saloon. After six years, an hour more. After an immeasurable moment I resume packing. I can, of course, take more than these clothes, the Hiscocks, and the grab bag I had ready to take in the dinghy (in fact, I will leave my Neal’s Yard peanut butter and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall behind), but already I can see myself afoot in America. I have about $60 and an English Barclaycard Visa with a £100 limit. I will be starting my new life in a Texas bus station. I will have to hump everything, God knows how far, or for how long. I must travel light. I must be ruthless.

  I am a sailor. This is how I hope to make my living. So I put my varnished sextant box into the cockpit. Into the sail bag, on top of my irreducible wardrobe, I cram all my charts, my Filofax with my Coast Guard hundred-ton licence and my passport, oilskin jacket and pants and seaboots. In go the Hiscocks, camera, exposed film, envelopes of loose photographs, and my logbook of this voyage, the last entry reading:

  15.00: Mayday call replied to by Almeria Lykes, a container ship bound for Galveston. Gave him my position and he said he’d be here in an hour.

  My Seiko is on my wrist, and around my neck is my Azorean scrimshaw of Toad.

  For J., I throw in her five hardback diaries.

  On top of them I place the folder containing the novel I’ve been trying to write. I suspect it’s not what I want it to be. I yearn to write something great and wonderful – much better than this novel – but I don’t know yet what that might be.

  I take my Olivetti up into the cockpit, put it next to the sextant box, look up and see the ship on the horizon. Black and square. It looks like a building. I go below and call him on the radio, tell him I see him, give him his bearing from me – let him work out the reciprocal, I’m too busy.

  I go back up into the cockpit and start pumping, partly because I can’t stand the sight of so much water below, also because I don’t want Toad to sink before the ship gets here. I don’t know how long it will take the ship to manoeuvre alongside, or how all that will work.

  The ship is now about three or four miles away. He calls over the radio to tell me he’s spotted me, made visual contact.

  I watch it get bigger and bigger, its shape and details growing more definite. It’s ugly, slab-sided, tier upon tier of containers – red, grey, blue, rust – stacked high above the black hull along its entire length. Almost no superstructure visible except the bridge at the very front, right up in the bow where it doesn’t belong according to all the laws of ship aesthetics as I know them. The closer it gets, growing huger and uglier, the less it looks like a ship. Finally, it has the size and appearance of a mall nearing the end of construction: rectangular, black and nine hundred feet long, I will learn later this afternoon. Mr East would hate it, feel it was an abomination. I don’t know how to feel. It looks like Armageddon and it’s coming to save me.

  The ship – ALMERIA LYKES I see on its bow, and LYKES LINES in enormous white three-storey letters along the black hull – approaches from windward, leaving us becalmed in a short chop. His voice comes up out of the cabin, from my radio, to tell me that he’s going to stop, drift down to me, throw me a line to fasten at Toad’s bow. He will then move ahead at his slowest speed, several knots, and we will be pulled in alongside the hull. He will drop a rope ladder, which I am to climb up.

  Soon the ship is all I see. It drifts towards us, sideways, blotting out half the visible world. The black hull stretches from horizon to horizon along Toad’s starboard side and goes all the way up to the sky.

  My hackles rise – no metaphor: the back of my scalp is contracting tightly. This is against all my small-boat sailor’s instincts. I should clap on sail and get away from this monster that can mean only one thing to Toad: damage. The last time I was on a small boat this close to a larger one was with Bill on Mary Nell as the Russian lassoed us and pulled us in and Mary Nell’s masts both snapped like dry twigs.

  Toad is half-turned towards this black wall, now about fifteen feet away. Instinctively, with no thought at all, I dance across the cabin top, over the foredeck, out onto the bowsprit. I stand on the very tip, holding onto the forestay. The black steel plate – pitted, dull and uneven up close – is closing fast. Toad’s angle is all wrong.

 
I look up for a moment: high above me, peering over the top of the hull, I see a man with long blond hair and a moustache. He’s waving. Waving me back.

  The ship is a foot away. I stick out my foot now, bracing the other on the bowsprit, to push it off, or push us off. Suddenly this is a collision, that’s all I know.

  And we collide: the tip of Toad’s bowsprit, four inches from my foot, meets the black wall. There’s a crack – I’m flying through the air, still holding onto the forestay – and then I land back on the cabin top by the mast. The bowsprit is broken, snapped immediately on contact. The forestay, attached to the end of the bowsprit, under tension from the mast and rig, has whipped backwards carrying me with it like Tarzan on a jungle creeper. I land at the mast (which remains upright, held by the inner forestay, which was not set up when the mast fell backward in St Thomas harbour five years ago). I look at the jagged broken stump of sprit in the bow, and the other piece lying by my foot, and think about how to fix it … and then I pull myself away from this thought and push myself towards what must be done.

  A shout from above: I look up again and the blond man swings a coil of line right above me, which as I watch turns into a helix as it falls through space and drops onto Toad’s foredeck. I fasten the end to the oversize bronze cleat on the foredeck that I took off the Chris Craft lying on the hard in the Lagoon one night years ago.

  The small chop, the collision, perhaps even my attempt to push us off have caused us to drift away from the ship’s hull. But now the ship begins to move slowly ahead. Tension straightens the line at Toad’s bow, and we are pulled forward and in against the black hull. Toad’s three-quarter-inch larch planking smacks and bumps against the black steel and I just try not to think about it.

  A bright orange rope ladder drops down over the side of the ship astern of us. Someone starts letting out the line holding Toad alongside and we are eased back along the hull until we are bobbing and thumping against the ladder. Small thin lines are dropped down into the cockpit where my bags are packed and ready.

  The blond man is now about thirty feet directly above me. I can hear him clearly. He tells me to tie my bags to the small lines. I do this and crewmen haul them up over the side. They are careful with the sextant, keeping it from banging into the steel on the way up. Four items altogether: a sail bag, the sextant, the typewriter and a Bellingham overnight bag.

  ‘Is that it?’ the blond man asks me when they’re up and out of sight.

  ‘Yes, I’ll be right up.’ And I go below.

  I look around. Apart from the water now at my knees, all looks normal aboard Toad. Very neat, just as I like it aboard a small boat crammed with years of collected belongings. The kettle on the stove. It’s past teatime.

  There remains an hour or two of daylight. I know what I must do. I take the bread knife, bend and crawl into the space behind the galley, where the engine would have been, and cut the one-and-a-half-inch-diameter plastic hose between the cockpit drain and its gate valve through the hull. Water begins to gush in, spouting. Toad must sink before dark. So no other yacht will smash into it, water-logged but still floating, and sink with it. Full of love and memories, Toad is now an obstruction to safe navigation.

  I climb back up into the cockpit, grab the orange polypropylene and start up the rope ladder. An unreal, dislocating sense of what I am doing, deserting and abandoning the thing I love – a suddenly familiar and reverberating sensation – weighing me down. About a thirty-foot climb.

  I’m standing on the ship’s high deck. The blond man – he’s about six foot four, looks like a Viking, or like a young Hulk Hogan – grabs my hand and shakes it, grinning.

  ‘Hey, I’m Dan. How you doing?’

  The other crewmen around me are also grinning. They introduce themselves. They are all American. This is an exciting episode in the middle of a monotonous trip for them. They’re all thrilled.

  I’m not sure what I say, but farther along the deck I see someone casting off the line to Toad’s bow. He drops it into the sea.

  Dan speaks into a portable VHF he’s holding in his hand. A moment later the ship shudders. It begins a long arcing turn around Toad, which I find I can’t take my eyes off.

  I’m walking along the deck behind Dan, who’s talking to me, though I have no idea what he’s saying. This is just like a dream: I observe, but I am completely detached, dis-embodied from the scene. We go forward, up steps, into the superstructure below the bridge. Inside we continue up steel stairs.

  I’m shown into a stateroom, so vast as to confirm that this is a dream. A double bed, a bathroom en suite. It looks like a motel room, but bigger than most. Windows look out at the sea – I crane my head but I can’t see Toad. Dan tells me to make myself comfortable, have a shower, and come up and meet the captain, who’s on the bridge, one deck up, whenever I’m ready. The other guys bring in my four items of luggage, all I own in the world. Then they all leave.

  Again, I look out the window but I can’t see it. Toad is behind us somewhere, to port. I leave my stateroom and run – so, so dreamlike with the uphill roll of the ship against me, holding me back – down a long hallway to a door. Through it, I’m outside, on a wing far above the ocean.

  Toad is astern, a quarter of a mile away, maybe, looking not quite itself with its stump bowsprit, and conspicuously low in the water. But it still looks good, the paint and varnish glinting in the low sunlight.

  Its bow is pointing straight at Maine.

  * Knox-Johnston’s boat was called Suhaili, and it was built for him in India, but Dashew, who spent some time in South Africa, has trolled his memory or sources too casually.

  A SHORT WEIRD CRUISE TO GALVESTON

  July 30

  Captain Frank Johnson is a dead ringer for John Wayne in his later years. Taller than Chief Mate Dan, he must be sixfive. His feet appear to be eighteen inches long. He has that barrel-shaped girth the Duke acquired, yet he carries it well. He is not fat. He is every inch a captain. He wears well-pressed khaki trousers and shirt. Today, as we chatted on the bridge, he stood by the plate-glass windows forward of the helmsman, ceaselessly scanning the sea as we talked, his eyes creased in a permanent squint from years of keeping such a lookout. Only at mealtimes do his eyes open any wider and I can see then they are pale blue, like a baby’s. His face is deeply red from hundreds of tiny burst veins, nearly the colour of a boiled lobster, the complexion of a nineteenth-century whaling captain who has spent a lifetime on a wind- and salt-swept poop rounding the Horn, but since most of Captain Johnson’s years at sea would have been spent inside, latterly on the well-sealed, air-conditioned bridge, this might simply be a rather befitting rosacea. He is a Texan, he speaks well, simply, quietly, and with the timbre of authority I heard so clearly on the radio from over the horizon, for it was he who was the voice of his ship.

  Captain Johnson has kindly given me the run of his ship. He has extended to me the courtesy he would show the visiting captain of any other ship, the courtesy he would hope to be shown himself. He doesn’t treat me like an irresponsible hippie boat bum he had to fish out of the drink, but has accorded me the respect of one captain for another, and I’m grateful for this. I am allowed on the bridge at any time. I can peer into the radar screens (there are three or four of them), lean over the chart to see our latest position, or watch the seaman at the wheel, which he turns half an inch at a time. Pretty boring after a while. No sails to change, no anxiety.

  I accompany Dan, the Chief Mate, on his daily rounds up and down the deck and through the capacious hold of this massive ship as he checks the rigging holding the containers down. Inside the ship are whole rafts of containers that are floated into an area of the hold that is partially flooded and then pumped out. This area is open to the stern and you can look out at the Niagara Falls of the wake stretching aft to the horizon. He’s taken me into the engine room. It is loud and looks like the inside of the nuclear power station in The China Syndrome. He’s shown me the crew’s quarters, and their saloon,
a sort of bland lobby next to the dining room where they can watch videos or find trashy paperbacks.

  Dan tells me the crew were impressed by the accuracy of the position I gave them once they learned I had no electronic devices aboard but found my way about by sextant. I was, apparently, right where I had said I was.

  My stateroom below the bridge, next to the captain’s cabin, is usually reserved for the Lykes Line owners or family members, if they have a hankering for a voyage. There are no other guest facilities aboard the Almeria Lykes.

  I eat at the captain’s table, with Captain Johnson and Chief Mate Dan. Just the three of us. Dan eats quickly, without much talk, and usually excuses himself after eight or ten minutes. The food is well prepared and plentiful, the menu (freshly typed for each meal) unrelievedly American. Steak is available for breakfast, lunch and supper. Captain Johnson unfailingly eats one of these, about the size and shape of a saddle, rare, every evening. The alternatives are meat loaf; hamburgers; hot dogs; chicken, fried or char-grilled; and liver. These come with potatoes, baked, roasted or french fried; a vegetable, salad, with a choice of bottled dressings. There is always pie and ice cream for dessert.