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

  I say a heartfelt goodbye to him. He seems a little amazed that I’m really going. He asks me to send him a postcard from the Azores.

  Martin and I hug and I step aboard. I raise the mainsail and jib, leaving their sheets slack, the sails flapping. Martin casts off the two shore lines and throws them aboard, while I stand on the foredeck and back the jib, holding its clew out to port. The wind fills the sail and pushes Toad’s bow off the dock. We drift slowly away from the shore. It’s exactly noon.

  ‘You better get going,’ I say to Martin, who is still almost arm’s length away and now shooting pictures like a paparazzo. ‘I’m going as the crow flies, but you’ve got to get through Falmouth at lunchtime. And I’m not waiting.’

  He heads for the car. I steer the boat for Carrick Roads, the Fal’s wide channel that lies beyond the hill Martin and I walked around to reach the pub in Flushing.

  Farther out in the creek, I jibe Toad, bringing the wind onto our starboard quarter. I slip the quarter-inch stainless steel bolt that hangs on the end of a piece of string into the holes on my home-made self-steering gear, connecting the wind vane to the trim-tab on the rudder, and the boat begins, magically, to steer itself. I go forward and stand on the foredeck and look around like a sightseer as Toad takes us down the river towards the sea.

  At 12.30, we’re approaching Pendennis Point. I can see Martin waving and taking pictures. I go aft and alter the vane setting and head us close in. As we pass him, he starts shouting. ‘Wait! God-dammit!’ He’s frantically going through a bag. ‘I’ve got to put another roll in!’ He’s shot too many pictures too fast and now that we’re approaching perfect range, he’s out of film.

  ‘You idiot!’ I shout back. ‘No way!’ I have a good wind, not strong, but it’s behind me, well slanted to get me clear of land, and I’m not going to waste a second of it. I have the tide too, and I quickly leave Martin behind, on his knees on the rocks, trying to load his camera, his shouts – ‘God-dammit it! Fuck iiiiiiit!’ – fading fast. I wave. He remains there for as long as I can see him, until he becomes an indistinguishable dot against the town of Falmouth. And I know just how he feels as he watches me and Toad for as long as he can as we shrink into a bobbing dot with a stick on it heading out to sea.

  We pass Black Rock in the middle of the harbour entrance and I think of sailor-mountaineer H. W. ‘Bill’ Tilman, who, sailing from Falmouth on July 6, 1955, bound for the Straits of Magellan aboard his pilot cutter Mischief was becalmed right here:

  We passed Black Rock, and the sentiments appropriate to watching from the deck of a small ship, outward bound on a long voyage, the receding shores of one’s native land, had barely found expression when the shores ceased to recede. The wind which had hitherto been light now failed altogether and for two hours we drifted off the headland of St Anthony viewing its not remarkable features from many different angles.

  I have Tilman’s wonderful, dry book, Mischief in Patagonia, aboard, along with my Hiscocks and many other narratives of cruises in small boats. These books are, for me, the finest of company. When your course converges with a cruise covered by one of these books, its author seems to come along with you. And you join that group of sailors that has gone before you.

  I don’t have to look at St Anthony’s not remarkable head from many angles as Tilman did. It’s at the far side of Falmouth Bay and quickly behind me as I head now for the lightbuoy off a group of rocks called The Manacles 6 miles ahead, and beyond that, Lizard Point and its light, 15 miles distant.

  I stream the Walker log – my nautical odometer: a small torpedo-shaped propeller on a line attached to a dial on the boat’s transom – change the jib to a genoa, and make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’ve made the mistake of getting my peanut butter where I got all my beans for the trip, at Neal’s Yard, the stylish and irreproachably holistic health food shop in London. Like all health-food-shop peanut butter, it has the consistency of mortar almost gone-off, with separated oil requiring long minutes of stiff, spoon-bending mixing before it’s spreadable. As I sit in the cockpit eating my sandwich in nice weather, watching the English coast float smoothly by, I realize my fear and apprehension have subsided to a small, manageable little pulse somewhere deep down, and my only regret is that I haven’t bought Sunpat.

  At four p.m., Lizard light, where Martin and I were tourists two days ago, is well in view, two and a half miles north-north-west. I look at it through my binoculars. I wouldn’t have gone there, or had tea in the shack on the rainy quay at Marazion, or played billiards in the pub, without Martin. I’d have stayed in Mylor, frightened and lonely, working on the boat until it was time to go, and then gone, with only Wilfred to see me off. I miss Martin now.

  The long sweep of Mount’s Bay, with Praa Sands and Lamorna Cove, slides into view as we pass the Lizard; Land’s End is visible at the far end.

  The late afternoon forecast is for light and variable winds in sea areas Plymouth and Sole. The tide turns against us in the early evening and we move slowly away from the land through the long northern twilight.

  21.30. Slipping along nicely, doing about 31⁄2 knots. Wolf Rock, Lizard and Land’s End lights all in view and flashing, though it’s still not dark.

  22.00. Wind has veered north-easterly, very good for us. Staysail down, main and genoa poled out wing-and-wing.

  23.30. Almost becalmed. Stars out now. Lovely night, and I’m grateful that it’s an easy and peaceful one.

  June 16

  My sailor’s day begins at midnight. I turn a page in my log-book and write, on the right-hand page: ‘June 16. Day 2.’ On this page I write my comments, which, depending on conditions and my state of mind, can be straightforward comments on what’s going on, long chatty riffs, or short, nearly illegible, salt-stained scrawls giving basic navigational information. I divide the left-hand page into six columns, headed Time, Course, Wind, Force, Log, Barometer. Now at midnight I fill them in: 00.00, 270, NE, 1–2, 35, 1041.

  The 00.15 forecast states that a high-pressure area has become stationary to the west of Ireland. Winds in areas Plymouth and Sole are predicted to be northerly, becoming variable, force 3–4 or less. The wind is revolving around the high in a clockwise direction, interrupting the pattern of prevailing westerlies that would have had me beating to windward in lumpy seas, making slow progress. I’m sneaking away to the south-west on the high’s eastern edge, and the light northerlies will gradually become easterly the farther west I move, as long as the high remains where it is. I hope it does.

  I begin to feel sleepy. At 01.30 I set my alarm clock for 01.45 and lie down on a saloon bunk. Ten minutes later I’m still awake and too anxious to wait for the alarm. I get up and climb halfway out of the hatch and look around. The vane is holding Toad on course. The lighthouses are flashing. There are no ship lights, at this moment, although we’re just outside the traffic separation zone for all shipping coming in and out of the English Channel. There may still be all sorts of boats – fishing vessels, yachts, submarines – anywhere in the waters around me (my chart for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly notes: ‘Submarines exercise frequently, both surfaced and dived, in the area covered by this chart. A good lookout is to be kept for them when passing through these waters’) – but I see no lights.

  I go below, set the alarm for fifteen minutes hence, and lie down once more. Again, though beginning to relax, I remain awake, finally unable to wait for the alarm before getting up to look around.

  The third time it all catches up with me: days of anxiety, final departure, the late hour. For the first time, I manage to fall fast asleep while alone at sea.

  Rule 5 of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, known as COLREGS, requires that ‘every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper lookout by sight and hearing as well as by all available means appropriate in the prevailing circumstances and conditions so as to make a full appraisal of the situation and of the risk of collision.’

  Clearly, someone sailing
alone can’t do this. After more than a day or two at sea, the single-hander will grow tired and go to sleep, and the boat, hopefully maintaining its course by means of some self-steering arrangement, will continue on, illegally and blindly. Despite the wide publicity given to many single-handed voyages and high-profile single-handed races, no authority has yet come down the dock to ticket or arrest a single-hander for non-compliance with COLREGS Rule 5. But the inability to keep watch at all times is a life-threatening risk the single-hander has to come to terms with.

  All sorts of junk and debris litter the oceans of the world, waterlogged, mostly submerged and usually impossible to see until it’s too late to alter course: heavy logs, oil drums, and, probably most catastrophic of all if a yacht should hit one, containers that have fallen off container ships. You hear rumours about containers and read such rumours in the yachting press. A container would be a floating reef, lethal enough to wreck almost any yacht. Tightly shut and packed with sofas, antiques, mail, food, bicycles and computers, a container could remain afloat for days, even weeks. A number of yachts in recent years have been holed and sunk after colliding with ‘an unknown object’. A container, maybe. Then there are whales, asleep or otherwise. A few yachts have been sunk by whales, and these incidents are well-recorded by the survivors, who typically have spent weeks in rubber rafts and later appear in yachting magazines endorsing pocket-sized reverse-osmosis water-makers. And, rarely, there are yachts that leave port and are never heard from again, their crews lost at sea for unknown reasons. But the number of sinkings, from whales or unknown objects, is still small compared with the thousands of successful voyagers crossing oceans, sailing all over the world, alone or with a mate. And if you do collide with some such object, you’re as likely as not to hit it at a glancing angle, making a thud loud enough to give you a heart attack, and sail on with little or no damage, not even knowing what it was.

  I believe the greatest risk facing the single-hander while asleep below is being run down by a ship.

  Until the last thirty years or so, most ships kept to well-defined shipping lanes, routes across oceans that offered the most favourable combination of weather, ocean conditions and distance. The British Admiralty publication Ocean Passages of the World, a pilot book detailing these preferred routes for high- and low-powered vessels, as well as for sailing vessels, still comes with a chart showing these shipping lanes. Early single-handers – and the sleepy shorthanded crews of other small sailboats – could avoid these highways in the sea, or, if they had to cross or approach shipping lanes, knew what to expect and could remain awake or catnap for a few days. Afterwards, out of harm’s way, they could, and usually did, turn in for hours at a time.

  Then ships began to stray out of their lanes. They became more powerful, able to head more directly for their destinations against prevailing winds and currents. They began to get daily meteorological faxes and radio reports from shore stations giving them optimum courses around local weather systems. Soon they were all over the oceans, and the single-hander could run into and be run down by a ship anywhere.

  At one time, the single-hander under sail could hope that the approaching ship would see him and alter course – as it is legally obliged to do: a vessel under sail has right of way over an engine-driven ship. In Eric Hiscock’s early books, recounting voyages made in the thirties, forties and fifties, he and Susan would hang a kerosene lamp in the cockpit and go below for a good night’s sleep, trusting that any oncoming vessel would have a man in the bow peering out into the dark ahead, who would see their little light and send a message back to the bridge and the ship would turn away. That halcyon world – when ships were not only well manned but also beautiful, and old orange peel was the only pollution you might see floating in the ocean – is, of course, gone. Now, there is probably no one looking out from the bow. As ships have grown larger and their systems more sophisticated, manpower aboard has been cut back. A supertanker may have less than twenty men aboard, and at any given time a third of that complement will be off duty, asleep or watching Rambo videos in the saloon. A few shipping lines still maintain a good lookout, posting a man on the bow in radio contact with the bridge. Other ships, particularly those registered under the less demanding requirements of flags of convenience, are not so scrupulous. Lookout may be by radar alone, and if the radar doesn’t pick you up, you’re invisible. Yachts, particularly wooden yachts, do not make good radar pictures. They’re small, their radar echoes may be lost in ‘sea clutter’ – you may look like just another wave on the radar screen. And the radar, as I’ve often found when calling a ship by VHF radio to ask what sort of radar picture my boat made, may be turned off.

  The bridge of a large tanker may be a quarter of a mile astern of its bow and a hundred and fifty feet above the water – something like the view from the upper floors of a condo on Miami Beach looking out at the Florida Straits. The crew on the bridge can see the big stuff, other ships, from up there, but little sailboats can go unnoticed. At night, a sailboat’s navigation lights, close down to the water, will almost certainly not be seen farther than half a mile away, even if anyone’s looking – scant minutes to collision. Then, if seen, the manoeuvrability of a large ship is poor and slow.

  Undoubtedly, it’s up to the dinky sailboat to stay clear of the ship. You have to see it, first, then you have to watch it to determine its course, and finally you may have to alter your course to avoid it, speeding out of its path at four knots per hour. If you don’t have an engine, you’d better hope the wind is blowing.

  Then there is this: the curve of the earth, you quickly realize when you go to sea, is quite pronounced. The horizon seen from the deck of a small yacht circles you at a distance of about three miles. Beyond three miles, a ship will be ‘hull-down’ below the horizon, only its superstructure visible. Eight miles away, the whole ship will be below the horizon. Conditions of haze, cloud, rain, fog, or a large swell on a sunny day can reduce this to yards. A ship moving at eighteen knots (the speed at which the average container ship might travel – many travel faster), unseen when you come on deck and make your periodic scan of sea around you and then go below again, can steam up over the horizon and run you down in twenty minutes or less.

  This last winter I bought and read John S. Letcher, Jr.’s book Self Steering for Sailing Craft, and made some improvements to Toad’s home-made wind vane. Letcher, who has a Ph.D. in aeronautics and applied mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, and has sailed more than 25,000 miles in his own small, homemade engineless sailboats in both the Atlantic and Pacific, also wrote about the risk of collision in his book:

  For a quantitative estimate of the risks from merchant shipping on a particular passage, find out approximately how many ships will cross your projected track during the expected duration of the passage. These statistics are available from port authorities, and are compiled in the US Bureau of the Census publication FT975, ‘Vessel Entrances and Clearances’, and in Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, Statistical Tables.

  First, consider just one of these ships. It will have to pass (on centre) within about 50 feet on either side of you to make contact; so there is a section of your track only 100 feet long that is endangered by this ship. If the ship crosses at a random line, the probability that you are in the section is just 100 feet divided by length of passage. This risk is multiplied by the total number of ships crossing, to give the probability of a collision if neither party ever looks out.

  Example: On a passage from Hawaii to Alaska (2,500 miles) I expected to take 30 days and I obtained an estimate of five ships per day, on the average, arriving or departing west coast ports for the Orient. This makes 150 ships crossing my track. The probability of collision is

  (150 × 100ft) ÷ (2500mi × 6080ft/mi) = 1 ÷ 1012

  This can be reduced, of course, by several measures on both vessels’ parts. But even so it says I could sail blind back and forth continuously across these waters and expect to be run down only once in a tho
usand voyages – over 80 years of continuous sailing.

  These calculations initially assuaged any fear Letcher had of collision, enabling him to spend whole nights in his bunk: ‘I used to delight in waking up … listen a moment to the familiar symphony of sounds from spars, rigging, sails, and the water rushing past, and then drift back to sleep.’

  Then, returning to California from Alaska in 1965:

  That night I saw the lights of many ships, one or two per hour, passing a little way inshore. We were running under twins, but by midnight the wind had almost died and progress – and maneuverability – had become very poor. One northbound ship appeared for a long while as if it were going to pass a little outside us, but rather close. I assumed they were seeing my lights, and was a little annoyed that they would pass so close. As their lights drew closer, and the muffled whine of turbines and the rush of the bow wave came across the water to me, I turned on my searchlight and aimed it at the ship. This was just to let them know I was annoyed. Imagine my horror when the ship turned and came directly toward me! White over white, red beside green, the group of lights approached with an awful noise, growing by the second, and there was not the slightest chance of getting out of its path. As the pale bow loomed out of the darkness I dived through the companionway and instantly there was a terrible jolt and a rending crash. In a few seconds of shuddering vibration the ship’s side rushed past … They never knew we were there … It turned out there was no contact between our hulls … their bow wave washed Island Girl’s hull aside, but her rig rolled into the side of the ship. The mast was broken in three places, the forestay, headstay, and bowsprit were all broken, and the upward pull of the forestay lifted the deck and clamps so the sheer strakes were split almost back to the chain plates. I got away with my life and felt very lucky.

  In 1969, Letcher, this time with his wife Pati aboard, was again returning to California from Alaska. They were north of San Francisco, well clear of shipping lanes: