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

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  However, by late afternoon, somewhere in Louisiana, I am getting the mother of all backaches. Living in the never-still Toad, even aboard the gentle Almeria Lykes, I have experienced nothing like this fiendish bus seat since perhaps the last time I visited a dentist. I get out whenever we stop, and bend and stretch, but it doesn’t seem to help. I’m getting a terrible headache too. Noise is bothering me: the grinding of the bus, the raucous twangy braying of people in bus stations. It may be English they’re speaking, but it’s as arcane as the dockers’ babble that came up over the Caronia’s side in Southampton in 1959. Despite my earlier hopeful embrace of America, it’s beginning to look like a nightmare out there. I feel myself withdrawing into a familiar solipsism.

  For supper I eat an apple pie, apparently made in New Jersey, which I buy wrapped in cellophane from a snack machine in Mississippi.

  As the bus hums through the dark, I look out the window at the flat landscape and think of the sea. And then of Toad, and the whole thought of it comes over me in a rush. I think again of all J. and I did to that boat, how we rebuilt it, renamed it and gave it its last incarnation, where it took us, and finally where it took me.

  Now for the first time I begin to think about what Toad has done for me, and suddenly it becomes clear. Toad showed me that I could use scavenged inner-tube rubber to replace the diaphragm on a galley pump. That I could be a carpenter if I needed to be, or a navigator; that I could sleep for no longer than thirty minutes at a time for weeks on end. That after disgracing myself years ago in a Bristol Channel gale, I could go back to sea alone and acquit myself well. For most of the last forty days, Toad and I flew across the sea together as sleekly and happily as partners in a fairy tale: a boy riding on a magic dolphin. Through my shame and grief I find I’m proud of our fine voyage. The ending was simply how it finished, not the voyage itself.

  What I will do now is find my way back to sea.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

  ‘Little Gidding’ from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. © 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company and Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Around the World in Wanderer III, Atlantic Cruise in Wanderer III, Beyond the West Horizon, and Wandering Under Sail by Eric C. Hiscock (1986, 1987). By permission of Sheridan House and A & C Black (Publishers) Ltd.

  Cruising Under Sail by Eric C. Hiscock (1972). By permission of International Marine/McGraw-Hill and A&C Black (Publishers) Ltd.

  Voyaging Under Sail by Eric C. Hiscock. By permission of A & C Black (Publishers) Ltd.

  A World of My Own by Robin Knox-Johnston. © 1969 by Robin Knox-Johnston. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and Curtis Brown.

  Self-Steering for Sailing Craft by John S. Letcher, Jr. (1974). By permission of International Marine/McGraw-Hill.

  The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier (1995). By permission of Sheridan House.

  To the Great Southern Sea by William Albert Robinson. Reprinted by permission.

  Because the Horn Is There by Miles Smeeton (1985). © Miles Smeeton. By permission of Sheridan House, Westwood Creative Artists Ltd and the Estate of Miles Smeeton.

  Mischief in Patagonia by H. W. Tilman. Collected in H. W. Tilman: The Eight Sailing Mountain-Exploration Books. © Pam Davis. By permission of Baton Wicks Publications/The Mountaineers.

  The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall (1970, 1995). By permission of International Marine/McGraw-Hill and Hodder Headline plc.

  Instant Weather Forecasting by Alan Watts (1968, 1996). By permission of Sheridan House and A & C Black (Publishers) Ltd.