Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat Page 4

  Pati awoke to the sound of an engine approaching. On looking out she saw … a fishing boat about to cut us in two! Her desperate yell brought me out of my bunk, sleeping bag and all, and when I saw this boat through the portlight I yelled too. Pati was trying to unlash the helm and start the main-sheet, but before she could do either, the fishing boat struck us a cruel blow on the lee quarter … if he had hit us dead center I don’t think we’d be alive. We raised Cain, blowing the horn and yelling until the boat was a mile away, but he kept straight on, evidently on autopilot, and we never saw anyone on board.

  Sailing alone or with his wife, Letcher thereafter kept a regular lookout.

  To try to avoid this sort of thing, the single-hander only sleeps for short periods. You have to wake yourself up and climb out of your bunk and look around every fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes – there’s no rule, it varies from single-hander to single-hander. I’ve met people who sleep for an hour or more between lookouts. You sleep as long as you dare, according to your temperament. You guess, viscerally, at the sort of odds Letcher so carefully calculated. You rationalize that it would be unlikely and unlucky indeed for a ship, unseen when you last looked out, to come along and meet you in one tiny spot on all the open ocean around you in the period before you next stick your head up through the hatch and look around. But after you’ve altered course a few times to try to get away from a ship that seems to be coming too close, you begin to see how amazingly unlucky you can be.

  At night, when J. and I sailed together, one of us had always been ‘on watch’. On Toad, with the wind vane doing most of the steering, this usually meant relaxing below, reading, writing, cooking, listening to the radio, and sticking our heads out of the companionway hatch every fifteen minutes for a careful look around. The other would be asleep. Depending on conditions and how we felt, our watches usually lasted about four hours. Then we’d wake the other up. Getting enough sleep had rarely been a problem.

  Now that I’m alone, I’ve decided that while I’m at sea between England and the US coast, I’m not going to let myself sleep longer than thirty minutes at a stretch. Here, close to land or shipping, I’ll make that fifteen minutes. I’ve never slept like this before, but I’ve read about other single-handers doing it, so I will do it.

  For this trip, I have bought a new alarm clock. I’ve taken some care choosing it. It’s a Casio, powered by two AA batteries. It is white, small, easily stashed on the bookshelves above the saloon bunks, but it has large, easy-to-read numerals on its digital face. It is easy to set, with relatively large hour and minute buttons that can be pressed with sore, numb, or stupid fingers. It has a piercing alarm, which escalates to a more frantic tone if not turned off quickly.

  It wakes me promptly at 02.15. I realize I’ve fallen asleep and rush up the companionway and look around. There are lights, but well to the south: a ship heading east into the Channel, well inside the traffic separation zones. (Such zones, in the English Channel and in other waters worldwide where there is heavy convergence of shipping into relatively tight areas, are, unlike shipping lanes out at sea, rigidly adhered to; at the other end of the Channel, where barely ten miles of water separates Dover from Calais, traffic is controlled as it is in airports, by controllers glued to radar screens.) There’s nothing else in the waters around me now – that I can see. Bishop Rock light at the southern end of the Scilly Isles, flashing twice every fifteen seconds, is visible, ahead and just to starboard, exactly where it should be. I go below, set the alarm, and am soon asleep again.

  I continue sleeping through the night, fifteen minutes at a time, waking, looking out, and going easily back to sleep within two or three minutes. By 08.00 I no longer feel sleepy. I make toast and coffee and have breakfast sitting in the cockpit looking at the Scilly Isles, small, round, green and inviting, six miles to the north.

  I have travelled to the Scillies by yacht once before. In my early twenties I concocted, with a friend, Bill, a plan to buy a sailboat, cruise down to Morocco, fill it with hashish, and sail it across the Atlantic to the States. Bill had done some sailing; he even thought he knew how to navigate. I had crossed the Atlantic at the age of nine aboard the Cunard liner Caronia and been aboard a few cross-Channel ferries. We convinced a friend of my mother’s to finance us in return for a third share; bought a wooden schooner, the Mary Nell, in Swansea, Wales; filled it with some groceries and took off.

  We sailed out into the Bristol Channel in March. That was when I heard my first BBC shipping forecast: it wasn’t good. We were overtaken by a ‘vigorous low’. The sea became alpine, the air turned arctic. We were blown off our intended course. Bill discovered that out of sight of land he had difficulty determining our position. I developed what a yachtsman’s medical book we had aboard described as ‘the third and final stage of seasickness, preceding death’. After losing everything in my stomach, I still could not stop retching. I couldn’t eat or drink. I couldn’t move. All I could do, and did often, was yell and scream at Bill to get us ashore. After three days and three nights of this, Bill put out a radio call asking for help. An hour later, out of the grey, foam-streaked mists, hove a Russian factory trawler, top-heavy with radio antennae. Unasked, without preamble, the Russians shot rocket-propelled grapnels on the end of long lines into the Mary Nell’s rigging, where the grapnels successfully entangled themselves. The Russians winched us into the side of their ship, against which the seas threw our boat, smashing both masts, which fell in a tangle of wood and rigging wire onto the deck, as if cannon-shot.

  The noise of this, and the sight of the black wall through the porthole above my bunk, brought me out of my vomit-flecked coma with a surge of relief. I thought Bill had got us ashore, alongside some building, and I came up through the hatch ready to leap onto it. What I saw, however, was a group of Russian seamen looking down at us from what seemed a great height. Bill was screaming at them – he was calling them ‘Russian bastards’ – and cutting away the rocket lines with a knife. Every three or four seconds the swell raised us fifteen feet and smashed our hull and the stumps of our masts against the black and rusty side of the trawler. I was confused and terribly disappointed, and I went below again.

  Sometime that night we were towed into Hugh Town, on the island of St Mary’s, in the Scillies – I had no idea at the time where that was – by the St Mary’s lifeboat. I was lifted out of our wrecked schooner and taken ashore to the hospital.

  During the next few days, Bill and I were a little tense with each other and spent long hours apart. Between cleaning up the boat and filing a report with Lloyd’s of being attacked by Russians on the high seas, I wandered over the little island of St Mary’s, which was green and English-looking until you reached its Caribbean white beaches and clear blue water. I gradually became amazed that I had come there, like Gulliver, out of a storm, to a place I’d never heard of, a place so completely unanticipated, a place no one else ever went to (in March, anyway) except people on small boats (and also, apparently, former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, by helicopter, for his holidays). The local Scillonians treated us well, not at all like tourists. They opened themselves up to us, invited us into their homes and lives.

  The schooner’s cabin, once we had cleaned it up, felt like home in this strange port. It was full of our stuff, our own clothes and books and dinner plates and coffee mugs and pillows. It was a good place to get back to after tramping around the island, or talking with the locals at the pub about those bastard Russians.

  Despite the ordeal, the seasickness, I began dimly to sense that on a sailboat you could slip through some membrane at the limit of ordinary travel into a world you could never know by any other means. It was the way you got there, the difficult, even scary passage, so profoundly unlike a brief hop on a passenger aircraft, or even a ferry boat, that made the destination stand out in vivid relief, as if seen through the clarifier of ion-charged air after a storm. And it was the way the local people saw you, as someone who had travelled there by your own effort,
perhaps at some peril, by a means that arouses a sense of romance and adventure in anyone but the dullest stick-in-the-mud. They appreciated it and they took you in.

  ‘We from the little ships, making our brief visits, see and hear things which are not always vouchsafed to the ordinary traveller,’ wrote the author of a book I found in a local store in St Mary’s. I had not yet heard of Eric Hiscock. The book, Around the World in Wanderer III, was his account of the first circumnavigation he and Susan made in their wooden thirty-foot sailboat, in 1952–5. People like to point to books and say, This one changed my life. This was one that changed mine. It wasn’t Eric’s descriptions of palm-fringed lagoons that excited me, but the vision of refuge that life aboard their little boat offered:

  For four days we lay weather-bound there [at anchor off a nameless islet inside Australia’s Great Barrier Reef]. We took the opportunity to catch up with our letter-writing, but the tapping of the typewriter did not drown the doleful whine of the gale. To port of us lay the low green line of the island and to starboard, three miles away and only occasionally visible through the mist, stood the barren, uninhabited coast.

  Wherever this was, I discovered it was somewhere I wanted to be, inside the same small wooden boat, with gimballed kerosene lamps throwing a cosy glow onto the woodwork, waiting for the weather to subside before sailing off towards somewhere else. For years I remembered this passage from this book. I read other books, and learned that going to sea in a small yacht needn’t be the uncontrollable nightmare Bill and I had experienced. I read that Eric and Susan got seasick too, but that in time it afflicted them less. Years later J. and I bought Toad, a boat very similar to Wanderer III. I became less and less afflicted by seasickness. J. read Hiscock and got the same bug that had bitten me, and we set about slowly and painfully trying to get to that place we both thought we wanted to go.

  In another book, Wandering Under Sail, Hiscock had written: ‘Each time I go to Scilly I wonder more and more why I ever bother to go anywhere else, and if ever I own a yacht large enough to carry a good sailing dinghy on deck, I do not think I shall.’ He wrote this in 1936 or 1937, and though he later had a succession of larger yachts, he never went back to the Scillies. I’m not pulling in there now either, remembering my catastrophic awakening as a sailor and knowing what a wonderful place it is, for the same reason: Eric was looking farther afield and was impatient to be gone.*

  By noon, the Scilly Isles have disappeared astern. We move on slowly, the wind light and easterly, behind us.

  At 14.00, I am below reading when a screaming roar louder than anything I’ve ever heard brings me up on deck faster than the speed of thought. A jet streaks past overhead at what seems like mast-height. I think I can actually feel air rushing into the hole created by its passage, but it may also be the combination stroke/heart attack I’m experiencing. The jet suddenly rotates 90 degrees onto the edge of a wing and banks away until it is invisible. When I can think, a minute or so later, I realize my first thought was that I was about to be run down.

  Later, a container ship, American Legend, overtakes us. I call it on the radio, saying that I am the small yacht about three or four miles off its starboard side, and ask what sort of a radar picture I make. Bob Damrell is the officer on watch who replies. He says Toad makes a reasonable but not great radar picture at 3.8 miles. He asks my destination. When I say Camden, Maine, Bob tells me he’s from Boothbay. We talk about sailboats for a few minutes. He has delivered yachts to the Virgin Islands and has some land on St John. I tell him I bought Toad in St Thomas seven years ago and spent most of my three years in the Virgins anchored off St John. We talk about who we know there, and find we have mutual friends. Bob says he’ll be around Boothbay in September, and I tell him to keep an eye out for Toad. He wishes me luck. I take it as a good omen.

  June 18

  This morning, as I loll in the cockpit with a cup of coffee like a vacationer, I see a pod of pilot whales two hundred yards off the port side. Small dark whales, but at least twice the size of most dolphins. They’re following the same course I am and overtake me at a slow, steady speed. They breach regularly to breathe, which they do with a gentle exhalation and inhalation I cannot hear across this short distance.

  At 08.30 I notice fishing boats scattered in a rough line across the horizon ahead. An hour later, nearing that line, sailing slowly between two rustbucket trawlers, the regular patterns across the water grow subtly disturbed. It isn’t fish – my first thought, with the whales and boats about – it’s some movement of the water within the water around it. I walk to the bow and look at the water as we move slowly across it. The sea here is still virtually flat, but snaking across the surface is a line of pattern disruption looking something like a tide rip. It’s not nearly as pronounced as the small waves that are passing unnoticeably beneath us, but as Toad moves across this irregular pattern, the rhythm of our progress – something my body has by now grown used to – alters slightly. We don’t slow down, but I feel a change.

  I go below and look at the soundings on the chart beneath our position. We are crossing over the edge of the continental shelf. We’re soaring, slowly, over an undersea cliff edge. Two hundred metres below Toad, the bottom has begun an abrupt plunge into abyssal depths. The cold bottom water will be sliding over the edge and falling too, like a slow-motion waterfall. In the 150 or so miles I’ve travelled since leaving Falmouth, the continental shelf has dropped all of 100 metres. In the next 15 miles it will fall more than 2,000 metres. This afternoon, if we continue our gentle three- to four-knot poke to the southwest, Toad will be sailing over the ocean floor in water over 4,000 metres – 13,000 feet – deep.

  Normally I don’t think about what lies beneath a boat when I’m at sea. I’m concerned with the surface of the ocean, the sea state, and the weather. If I think about the subsurface waters around me, I think of the immediate shallows and of the things I may see or encounter: sharks, whales, dolphins, edible fish, floating obstructions. The greater depth, extending down to the blackness of the ocean floor many vertical miles below Toad, is too abstract. Bobbing along on top of the ocean, you can’t see more than a few fathoms down into the murk around you, even if you bother to look. More likely, you’re fiddling with your wind vane, trying to remember to put on sunblock, looking out for ships, navigating, reading about the Maine coast or the Beagle’s passage through Tierra del Fuego. Sailing across the ocean surface, I think no more about the boundless deep than I ponder outer space stretching away directly overhead when I get into the car and drive to the movies. Then I’m only vaguely aware of blue or cloudy sky and I’m looking for a parking space. If I were sailing over a transparent ocean, looking down at the plains and ridges and canyons below (the view would be much like that from a jet flying over the American Southwest) I might give it more thought. I might be petrified.

  But I do have the The Times Atlas and Encyclopaedia of the Sea aboard, and now, as we sail off the continental shelf, I open it up. I find a colour plate of the continental slope falling away into the bathyal zone, on its way to the abyssal zone. I look at the pictures of the ocean floors and the jagged sea ridge that rises up and has the Azores – where I’m headed – like a snowcap at its top. The cross-section of the ocean water goes from palest milk at the top to deepest indigo at the bottom. A bit of artistic licence there, because at the bottom of the ocean it’s pitch-black.

  I’m curious about the fish here. I want to find out why these fishing boats are stationed very precisely here at the edge of the continental shelf. The atlas doesn’t answer this simply, but I deduce from several sections that this edge of the shelf is a convergent region where fish and organisms from the epipelagic zone (surface to about 200 metres down) mingle with fish and organisms migrating upward for food from the mesopelagic zone (200 metres down to 1,000 metres). The edge of the shelf is an interconvergent smorgasbord where everyone comes to eat everyone else. The trawlers and the whales have come to this same place for the same reason.

&
nbsp; I like having this book aboard. It turns the awful and inscrutable sea all around you into a delicate and beautifully intricate organism. It helps you see, if you are inclined to see such a thing, divine creation.

  Such an understanding of the sea removes the nonsensical fancy that it can contain malevolence. In the worst of weathers, I’ve never felt the remotest ill will from the sea, or the least recognition. The ocean, like water in a glass, is absolutely impersonal. It makes no distinction between you and your little dreamboat, filled with your photo albums and all your hopes, and the windblown larva of a mayfly, or a barnacle, or a Styrofoam coffee cup. You’re just there. The sea is doing its thing. You deal with it as well as you can, with your weather forecasts, your alarm clock, your sextant and chronometer and the rest of your bag of tricks.

  Since losing sight of land when the Scillies fell below the horizon behind us, I have navigated by dead reckoning. I’ve estimated our position by a combination of recorded course, speed and time elapsed. This agrees with all the activity here at the edge of the continental shelf, and for the moment I know roughly where we are. But it’s time to begin celestial navigation, as I will see no more land and have no other checks of our position until I sight the Azores.

  Using the sun, the stars, a sextant, a nautical almanac, sight reduction tables (Publication No. 249 for Air Navigation, published by the US Defense Mapping Agency) and a quartz watch, I can pinpoint my position on the face of any ocean. This seems as wonderful to me as it must have to Captain James Cook (probably more, because I understand the problem less than he), who would probably have given his mother to the Sandwich Islanders who killed him in return for my £12 Casio quartz watch. Until the advent of an accurate timepiece, navigators were unable to determine longitude and were at best inspired guessers, often lost. Disasters at sea directly attributable to errors in navigation led the British government in 1714 to offer £20,000 – a fortune large enough to enjoy and pass on to heirs – to anyone who could produce a ‘generally practicable and useful method’ of fixing longitudes at sea. This required the production of a ‘watch-machine’ that would tell time at a uniform rate under conditions of cold and heat, aboard a ship tossed about by storm and wave, so that once set at a point of departure it would continue to show the correct time for that place. The difference between the time at that place and any other place would allow a deduction of longitude. This production of a chronometer was the life’s work of a carpenter named John Harrison, a mechanical genius so inarticulate and self-deprecating that the government gave him only half the award money in 1765 because he couldn’t explain the workings of his clocks satisfactorily or promote them with bravura. And he only got this much on condition that he hand over the four models he had built, which showed the evolution of his methods. The first clock was the size of a Wurlitzer jukebox, and with its exotic spheres, whirligigs and multiple dials looked more a time-travelling machine. The last and smallest, an outsize pocket watch as large as an Indian River grapefruit, was duplicated by a craftsman named Larcum Kendall and the method became known and replicable. Harrison got the rest of his money in 1773, after the king took an interest in the matter. Harrison’s and Kendall’s clocks, and their descendants, are displayed in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I’ve often gone to see them and am always moved by the difficulties early navigators faced, and overcame, enabling me, a poor mathematician, to poke my way across the oceans with such accuracy.