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

  Our orders are taken by Frankie, a woman in her early thirties who is about five foot two and weighs about eighteen stone. She is very respectful of Captain Johnson and Dan, who grunt their orders in her approximate direction as if she were a drive-thru intercom outside a Burger King. She’s extremely solicitous of my welfare. I think she believes I’ve been languishing in a life raft for weeks. I do appear to have lost weight: my Levi’s, which I haven’t worn since leaving Horta, now fit like someone else’s. Frankie presses dessert on me at every meal, and I have acquiesced so far. I love ice cream, anyway, and it seems to make her day. But after two days of steak, meat loaf, pie and ice cream, I am bunged up and in as much distress as Robin Knox-Johnston when he thought he was dying of too many steak and kidney puddings. So today I’m back on salad, a baked potato and no dessert. Frankie is unhappy and won’t be consoled.

  Captain Johnson and I have had some good sailorly gams over our food. He pooh-poohs the idea of any Bermuda Triangle, but he feels that more shipping grief seems to occur in the five-degree square north-west of Bermuda (outside the putative triangle) than in any other watery place he knows. And he knows why, nothing supernatural to it: the north-east-flowing Gulf Stream widens out there across a considerable area of sea, and over this moves a continual series of weather depressions coming off the US east coast. The strongest winds of these systems blow from the north-west through north-east, against the current in the Stream, creating abnormally steep seas. Add to this a heavy concentration of traffic, of both commercial shipping and pleasure boating, and you have the makings of a statistically accident-prone area.

  He tells me that during the winter in this area, rolling container ships routinely ‘throw’ containers. Care can be taken to avoid this, he says, by judicial heavy-weather management – going off route to align a ship more perpendicularly to the seas, as yachts must do at times (much as Bernard Moitessier recommended) – but not all masters will bother to do this, worrying more about schedules than the loss of odd bits of insured cargo. As a small-boat sailor, I’m horrified to hear him tell me that this ‘routinely’ happens. This is every sailor’s nightmare, hitting a water-logged container.

  He has also paid me the high compliment of telling me plainly that he respects my endeavour of sailing about on a small boat with only a sextant, tables and chronometer to guide me. None of his officers, he says, would be able to do as much. They take sextant sights daily from the bridge, but only because they must aboard his ship; and because they have the electronic magic boxes aboard, their sights tend to be untrustworthy. The ability to navigate by sextant and one’s instincts, and to manage a boat according to the dictates of sea and sky, he feels, is passing, and I agree with him. He is a real seaman, and I believe he knows what I’ve been up to, as few others will, and I value his appreciation.

  The others aboard, Dan included, believe you have to be nuts to go to sea in a small boat. It’s bad enough on the Almeria Lykes, they like to say, but on something the size of a container or less, well, you have to be crazy. I don’t get very far pointing out that it’s really quite safe. They don’t believe me.

  Ever since I’ve been aboard, I’ve been bothered by a sense that I gave up too easily. That I could have done something. I’ve even thought I might have given up because I wanted the boat to sink, to sever my last link with J. I’ve thought about this and decided to discount it.

  I don’t know what else I could have done. At the end, even hove-to, I was unable to sleep and keep ahead of the water coming in; moving at all, more water came in. The sheathing was half off and continuing to delaminate. The hull was becoming as porous as a loosely woven basket. But I keep feeling that someone else might have been able to figure out a solution. I think of Knox-Johnston and his seam repair. Or of Marcel Bardiaux, the Frenchman who circumnavigated in the early fifties – whose book, signed by him for me when I met him in the Azores two years ago, I left aboard Toad. (Then almost eighty, he had teeth and a boat made of stainless steel and was wooing an Azorean dentist.) Years before, he had hit a reef in the South Pacific which holed his wooden boat, Les Quatre Vents, sinking it – almost. While building it, Bardiaux had filled every spare cubic spot inside his boat with sealed empty cans of air, enough to provide the boat with flotation. He sailed it, virtually sunk, with only the rig and sails sticking up out of the water, for four days until he reached a port where he hauled out and repaired the hole. Moitessier recommended sawdust immersed in the water close to a leaking seam, which pressure would then carry into the seam, plugging it. I would have needed a barge filled with the waste of a lumberyard. I didn’t have a hundred empty sealed tin cans. Perhaps I could have made Bermuda, but only if I’d seen what was coming, how quickly the situation would deteriorate, and headed for there much earlier. It was too late by the time the wind rose, directly from Bermuda, and tore the sheathing off. But still I wonder. And I feel a deep shame. I have an inkling now of why captains might once have gone down with their ships.

  I wonder what I am to tell J. about how I lost our boat. And what she will think.

  I’ve been running each day since I’ve been aboard. This ship actually has a running track: a path painted in non-skid paint around the floor of an empty cargo space in the hull beneath the bridge. Dan says a former chief mate, a runner, painted it during a long voyage. I find I have my running shoes with me, the Nikes I wore for the London marathon back in March, though I have no memory of packing them. I run around and around this dark space inside the ship.

  I remembered yesterday that I forgot to pack my father’s World War II dog tag, inscribed with his name, serial number and his thumbprint, which I had been using as a key ring. There were two; David has the other one. I left it in the box above the chart table, with my only key, the one to Toad’s companionway hatch padlock.

  My stateroom is absurdly comfortable. I take several showers a day in my bathroom. Somebody comes in and cleans when I’m out. There is a telephone beside my bed. Dan told me it’s connected to the galley and all I have to do is pick it up to get anything I want delivered to my cabin. I haven’t ordered anything yet. I don’t want anybody coming into this room while I’m in it. I like being alone in here.

  The sense of being in a dream has not worn off at all. I see the ship through a membrane that blocks my feelings. It’s like watching a TV documentary: interesting, but remote. At odd moments, talking about the sea with Captain Johnson, who is a warm, kindly man, some quivery emotions have bubbled up inside me forcing me to bend over my plate or give in to Frankie and eat some ice cream.

  It is only during the night, when I wake – and I wake frequently – that I feel I wake from this dream. Then I look around this stateroom and know I’m in the wrong place, and remember with a great lurch what has happened. I used to come up into the cockpit at night and marvel at Toad ploughing on with no help from me, but I know that it really did need me and I have abandoned it. Days ago now. Far behind. Left it to save my sorry ass. Toad is gone.

  July 31

  I am back in familiar waters: the Bahamas. This morning we passed through ‘Hole in the Wall’, the twenty-odd-mile deep-water gap between the southern tip of Great Abaco Island and the cluster of islands – Royal Island, Russel Island, Spanish Wells – at the north end of Eleuthera. Then we turned right, west, into Northwest Providence Channel, which separates the Berry Islands, where J. and I rode out Hurricane David, and the Abacos. We’re now steaming towards Florida.

  J. and I sailed this way, through the Northwest Providence Channel, heading east, on all our yacht deliveries from Florida to the Virgins. We always stopped to refuel and sometimes spend the night at Spanish Wells, an island populated by about a thousand white Bahamians named Pinder, descendants of an English loyalist family of that name that fled the American Colonies during the Revolution. When we first arrived at Spanish Wells, we were cleared by Mr Pinder the immigration officer, and I asked him if his bar, Pinder’s Bar, beside the dock, had plenty of cold beer.

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sp; ‘Dunno,’ said Mr Pinder. ‘Never been in there. Don’t drink.’

  ‘Isn’t that your bar?’

  ‘Nope. Dunno the man. No relation to me.’

  And we found this was the way in Spanish Wells. A thousand blond, pointy-faced Pinders who claimed coincidence rather than relation for the similarity of everyone else’s name and physical features.

  Another delivery boat was docked beside us, and we ate dinner that night with its crew, at Pinder’s Restaurant, up the street from Pinder’s Bar. One of these guys, full of beer and crayfish, asked us what we planned to do after dinner. We were going to bed, but we asked him what he was going to do.

  ‘I’m gonna go swing me a Pinder.’

  I’m not sure what he meant, but I could tell he was looking forward to it.

  Once we came through on a Sunday and saw all the Pinders on their way to church. They had brought out family members who normally remained home and indoors during the rest of the week, the Pinders in whom it looked to me as if the genetic soup had become too thin. It reminded me of the John Wyndham book, The Chrysalids, set in a Bible-thumping post-nuclear world of genetic mutation, where all the two-headed and extra-legged farmyard animals that differed from the proscribed norm were ceremonially slaughtered, and the human equivalents were cast out and sent to a place called the Badlands, from where they made raids on the self-righteous ‘normal’ folk.

  I watch from the bridge as we pass Great Isaac Light at the top of the Great Bahama Bank and turn south into the Florida Straits. At 17.00 we are south of Miami, close inshore, only a mile off Fowey Rocks light at the entrance to Biscayne Bay, out of which J. and I sailed in Toad bound east across the Atlantic two years ago. I can see people on the beach on Key Biscayne.

  I wish Captain Johnson could let me off here. My friend Bennett lives in Coconut Grove, five miles due west. Thom and Beth are up in Fort Lauderdale. But the Almeria Lykes is on a schedule as tight as an aeroplane’s. After he stopped to pick me up, Captain Johnson had to radio Galveston to put their booking at the container dock back by three hours.

  In these waters we are surrounded by sailboats. And the view from up here is what I imagine it must be like in a zeppelin, vibrating along at about eighteen knots, a hundred and fifty feet or so above the water. I look down on these dinky little boats from the bridge and compare my visual sightings with how they show up on the radar. Radar is clearly better. It is hard to see some of them by eye way down there on the water in the afternoon light. It would be easy to mow them down without knowing it. What a nuisance they are.

  The crew are being very careful, though. There is constant radio communication between the bridge and the lookout stationed right in the bow.

  Through the twilight we cruise down the Florida Keys, which look beautiful off to starboard with the red sunset behind them. I wonder why J. and I never sailed down here from Miami. We never seemed to have the time.

  August 1

  All day we cross the Gulf of Mexico. The sky is dull, white and hot. The sea is flat, a little chop but no swell, which looks odd after so long on the open heaving ocean, and I sense the encircling continent out of sight over the horizon but getting nearer. My short pleasure cruise is almost over. The sense of dream is fading and I’m coming out of the merciful anaesthesia that has dulled my thoughts for the last five days. I’m starting to think about what’s next, and getting scared.

  In the late afternoon the sky clears and turns a pretty blue and we raise the Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island on the Texas coast. Barrier islands with houses on them. We steam alongside them for a while, then enter a pass to Galveston Bay.

  A pilot comes aboard. On the bridge Captain Johnson stands back while this man, small, neatly trimmed moustache, hair and moustache dyed black, now gives orders to the helmsman. He navigates our floating mall down a narrow waterway. Beach houses pass by very close on our starboard side. Feeling like an alien coming to earth, I look down at passing tableaux of normal earthlings barbecuing and jumping about in their little backyards.

  It’s almost dark when we reach the container dock, but lights are blazing, illuminating a vast dockyard, cranes on railways, a fleet of waiting trucks. Captain Johnson takes control again here and stands on the bridge wing giving directions into his hand-held VHF. The ship comes alongside with the precision and speed of a space station docking.

  Unloading begins immediately. The cranes lift containers off the ship and lower them onto the trucks. The noise of a hundred diesels grinding through their gears reverberates up the side of the ship’s hull.

  An immigration officer comes aboard. He’s unconcerned by my unorthodox entry into the USA. He stamps passports quickly and is gone. Two Coast Guard officers also come aboard, take down the name of my sunken yacht and go away. There are no searching questions. I might have murdered someone and left a body aboard Toad for all anybody knows or seems to care.

  I thank Captain Johnson for his hospitality. He wishes me well, kindly – just like the Duke would, with a nod and a crinkly smile; I even hear ‘Waal, take care of yourself, Pilgrim,’ although I’m not sure he actually says this. He gives me a solid handshake, and at the last minute I’m overcome with a gulp of emotion and can’t say much. He’s become my dad in a funny way in the last few days; an older man who has understood my small effort and said, ‘Well done.’ But he has already disappeared with agents and paperwork.

  I can’t find Dan. Frankie gives me the name of a hotel and helps me carry my bags down a gangplank onto the dock – solid unyielding concrete with gravity I’ve not felt for almost a month – where a number of taxis wait to carry the crew off to Galveston’s fleshpots. I thank her. I get into the cab and am driven away. I look at the ship out the back window until it is lost from view.

  Through the streets. Red and green traffic lights. Seven-Elevens. Liquor stores. Vagrants on street corners. The cab reeks of smoke and sweat and moves at what appears breakneck speed.

  Some stars shine in the evening sky, but, disoriented, I don’t recognize them.

  GALVESTON. AND BEYOND THE INFINITE

  August 2

  I watch the Today show and find it difficult to shower and dress. It’s hard to pull away and do anything else while it’s on. I find myself spending long minutes standing in the middle of the room gaping at the TV. Finally I manage to turn it off, and I call my cousin Poppy in Connecticut.

  ‘You what?’ she says. ‘You’re where?’

  I can stay with her as long as I like, for ever, she says. And her brother Matt, who is also a best friend, lives in Manhattan. So I will head there. Maybe I’ll go to Maine later, but I saw myself there on a boat. Without a boat Maine will be a room ashore like any other place. Beyond Poppy’s, I have no idea yet what I’ll do. Get some work, somewhere. See what things look like when I’ve come down, returned to earth, which I don’t feel I’ve done yet.

  ‘So, wait, what was your trip like?’ Poppy asks.

  ‘Well … I’ll tell you when I get there.’

  The hotel accepts my Barclaycard. I take a taxi to the bus station. My Barclaycard also buys me a bus ticket to New York City. That’s more than £100 now. I’m in debt already, the proper way to begin life in America.

  I think: How will I ever tell Poppy and Matt what my trip was like? How do I explain it?

  I change buses in Houston. I find I can just carry everything at once as I move through the bus station. I don’t want to leave half my bags in one place and relay them to another. I’m worried about theft.

  All I need is a shopping trolley. That would hold everything nicely, and I’d fit the homeless paradigm to a T. I am now worse off than Wilfred in Mylor, my former benchmark of how far I feared I might fall. I can be reduced no further unless I begin to lose body parts. Reminds me of the joke about the guy who’s just a head and torso in a hospital bed, and is upset because he’s about to lose a tooth.

  I’ve read enough to know I could look upon my new situation as a spiritual opportunity: as di
vested of material burden as a Brahman mendicant, I am now free. I could wander off to a mountaintop, or to a New Age Disneyland like Sedona, Arizona, and travel inward, a journey farther and more difficult than going to Burma. This unencumbered state often seems appealing to the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation, but standing in a Trailways bus station with my poor bundles, it makes me want a car, and money for gas, and, somewhere down the lonesome road, a Whopper. I’m not ready to pass over the razor’s edge and commence the greatest journey.

  The bus out of Houston takes me east along Interstate 10. One part of America looks so like another. I’ve never been here before, but it all looks familiar.

  I keep coming back to America, and I wonder why. Perhaps because I was removed at an early age. I was resentful of this later on, in my Dickensian boarding school, where I was beaten with a bamboo cane, where there were no girls, and where I listened to the Beach Boys and heard what I was missing in the good ole USA. I came back for college, but didn’t find it. Then later, again and again, but I always fled back to England, defeated, hating America because it wasn’t what I thought it should be.

  Now here it is rolling by so familiarly out of the window, and here I am again, with just my sextant, my scrimshaw and my Hiscocks. And my blazer, which I forgot to hang up in the shower this morning. This isn’t how I wanted to tackle America again. Life on a boat, the separateness, has been my protection. But perhaps it has isolated me too – made me the thing I feared being: a satellite as unattached as Klaus in Horta. Maybe it will now be a good thing that I won’t be able to sail away as soon as the urge takes me.

  I look out of the window and I’m full of hope. I hope to find work I like. I hope to meet a woman I like who likes me. I hope to write something good. I hope somehow to get another boat.

  I think of lines by T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding, in a book that sank with Toad: