Blue Water, Green Skipper: A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic Read online

  blue water, green skipper

  A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic

  STUART WOODS

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  NEW YORK

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  PUBLISHERS SINCE 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 1977 by Stuart Woods

  Afterword copyright © 2012 by Stuart Woods

  Previously published by W. W. Norton & Company

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woods, Stuart.

  Blue water, green skipper / Stuart Woods.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-59928-0

  1. Observer Single-handed TransAtlantic Race. 2. Single-handed sailing. I. Title.

  GV832.W66 2012 2012014594

  797.1‘4—dc23

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  This book is for

  MIKE AND LIZZIE MCMULLEN

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book One

  Some Sort of Beginning

  Learning a Bit

  Hooked

  Hooked Anew

  Book Two

  On the Brink

  Things Begin to Get Out of Hand

  Things Begin to Gel

  Waiting on Spring

  Organize, Organize, Organize

  My First Golden Cruise

  A Mist Opportunity

  Launching

  The Race Before the Race

  On to Portsmouth

  Book Three

  On Our Way

  Hard on the Wind

  Horta, Sweet Horta

  Alone from Horta to Crosshaven

  Back Home

  Reconnoiter

  A Last Irish Spring and Final Preparations

  Cork to Plymouth

  Book Four

  Countdown

  At Sea At Last

  Going West

  Drifting in the Gulf Stream

  The Final Dash

  Epilogue

  Afterword to the 2012 Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Interior Photo Credits

  book one

  One

  Some Sort of Beginning

  I stood in this place for the second time in forty minutes, a small, neat bay, surrounded by low hills, white cottages, a ruined mansion, and an unspecified number of dairy cattle, chewing their way through the morning. This choppy stretch of water was covered by a churning gray sky and contained half a dozen small plastic buoys and an old stone pier. Perhaps “stood” constitutes sloppy use of the language, for about forty knots of wind had me leaning at an unnatural angle to the perpendicular and the hairs on the leeward side of my body standing at an equally unnatural angle to my skin. I had not yet learned that a mild, sunny beginning to an Irish morning does not obviate the necessity for a sheepskin coat and gumboots at a slightly later hour, and I could not, for the life of me, see the Galway Bay Sailing Club.

  I drove back to the Thatched Pub in Oranmore and explained my problem to its keeper. As he had already done twice on that morning, he began patiently to direct me to Rinville Bay. I interrupted to explain that I was certain I had found the bay but could not find the clubhouse.

  “Ah,” said George the innkeeper, with the raised eyebrows of the enlightened, “there’s not a clubhouse, y’see; there’s just the club, like.”

  I gaped at him uncomprehendingly, unable to shake my preconception of the neat building, the flagpole, and the ruddy-faced chaps gathered in the net-draped bar. George leapt into the silence, which every Irishman abhors: “There’s just the club, and I’d say they’re not likely to be out just yet.” It was March, I had to give him that, but it was a Sunday too, and the paperback I had read had led me to believe that your enthusiastic yachtsman, if not actually on the water nowabouts, would at least be varnishing or splicing something in preparation for the event, and if not that, knocking a few back and talking about it at the very least.

  George fixed his gaze on the Guinness pump handle before him, trying hard to be helpful. “Pierce Purcell,” he said, looking relieved. “You’d want to speak to Pierce Purcell, he’s the secretary or one of the people, like, and you’d find him in the book.”

  The Irish Department of Posts and Telegraphs, because of the small size of the country, the low density of the population, and its own extreme reluctance to provide any of them with a telephone, has managed to gather all the nation’s telephone listings into just one directory, which is, in size, roughly equal to the combined bulk of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the I Ching, and The Joy of Sex. It proved to contain at least a page of closely spaced Purcells, far too many of them P.’s, P.J.’s and even Pierces, and none of them in Galway. George tried again.

  “Ferdia O’Riordan,” he said, this time with real conviction. The book offered us even more O’Riordans than Purcells, but no Ferdias in Galway. “The Bank of Ireland,” said George with finality. “That’s where he works, at the branch in Salthill.” But in Ireland only the pubs are open on a Sunday, so I thanked George and postponed my search for sailing yet another day.

  Sailing had been wafting around the hindmost part of my head since the summer of 1966, when friends had invited me to their summer home in Castine, Maine, and, back in my native USA, taken me sailing every day the wind blew. I had been enchanted with the notion that one could move across the face of the waters, fueled by nothing more than the wind, and I had resolved that if ever I were domiciled in any reasonable proximity to the sea I would learn to sail upon it. I thought, even, that since so much of the world was covered with water and since it lapped against so many interesting places, that I should like to sail right the way round, stopping everywhere.

  Eventually, I finished a ten-year hitch in New York advertising, did another three in London, and then, propelled by a lifelong desire to write A Novel, hied myself to the west of Ireland, to County Galway, to Lough Cutra Castle, near Gort, where I resided not in the castle but in the adjacent stableyard, in a flat. I spent two days a week in Dublin, writing television commercials and ads for an advertising agency, and the rest of the time in County Galway, writing my novel
or, at least, thinking about it.

  Lough Cutra was an ideal place—four hundred acres of grounds, twelve hundred acres of lake, and enough peace and quiet to make it very difficult to find an excuse not to write. To live this sort of existence you have to be either very lucky or very single. Looking back, I still find it difficult to believe I was able to get away with this for two years.

  Soon after my arrival in Ireland, in early 1973, I perceived that it was surrounded by water, and the sailing notion, so long displaced by an absorbing career and an athletic social life in New York and London, began to winnow its way into my frontal lobe. I bought a book which suggested that the way to go about learning to sail was to start with a small dinghy, then work up to larger things as desire and funds dictated. For several winter weeks I scoured the west, looking for a small boat to buy or someone who knew where to buy one or someone who knew someone who knew. Just when I was beginning to think that I was the only person in the counties Galway, Clare, and Mayo who realized that Ireland was an island, a friend in Galway, who believed that water should be fished in and not sailed upon, admitted that he had heard of the existence of a sailing club in or near Galway City.

  He was pretty cagey about it all, but still, I had managed to penetrate the alleged club’s apparent security arrangements to the point where I now had an actual name and an actual telephone number to call. Journeying to the public telephone in Mrs. Piggot’s Grocery Store in Gort, I gave the operator the number, inserted the required coinage into the instrument, and waited the customary seven minutes to be connected. To my surprise, there really was a Ferdia O’Riordan at the Bank of Ireland in Salthill, and he very generously invited me to join him for a sail the following Sunday, behaving as if the Galway Bay Sailing Club were common knowledge and had nothing whatever to hide.

  During the week which followed I reread my book on sailing and bought another, wishing to be as au fait as possible without actually having set foot in any sort of boat for seven years. The Sunday arrived and I again found myself at Rinville. Nothing had changed, except that the wind was blowing slightly less hard and the temperature had crept up a degree or two. The place was still deserted, and I sat in my battered Mini, chatting idly with Fred, a four-pound, five-week-old example of the golden Labrador breed, who graciously permitted me to share my flat with him. At last, a car materialized next to mine, towing a boat covered with canvas. From this car emerged Ferdia O’Riordan, his very pretty wife, and two irresistible little girls, with whom Fred evidenced an immediate empathy. Leaving the two children and the puppy rolling in the grass, we removed the canvas from the boat, revealing a gleaming example of the GP Fourteen class, erected the mast, bent on the sails, and trundled the lot at breakneck speed down the rocky shore. Ferdia and I stripped off our shoes and socks, rolled up our trouser legs, and waded into the icy water. In a trice, I was experiencing again that giddy sensation of motion over water which had so mesmerized me in Maine seven summers before.

  We thrashed about Rinville Bay, Ferdia issuing a steady stream of calm instructions, I trying to remember what I had read during the last week, while shifting my weight about in such a way as to keep us upright, and endeavoring to cope with sheets, cleats, and centerboard. “We’re nearly planing now,” Ferdia said at one point. I made a mental note to find out what “planing” meant. It had a familiar ring.

  Back on shore, while gathering my wits about me again, Ferdia, who turned out to be the club secretary, produced a membership form and relieved me of a check. We discussed what sort of boat I should buy and the consensus seemed to be a Mirror, a ten-foot ten-inch plywood dinghy whose design had been sponsored by the newspaper of the same name, which could be bought ready-built or in kit form, and which was the most popular boat in the club.

  Considering that in an entire year of woodworking classes in high school I had produced only one wobbly bookcase and half a lamp base, I thought the ready-built form of the boat appealed most, although I was assured that twelve Girl Scouts had once built one in eight hours. (Twelve Girl Scouts represent a multiplication of my woodworking talents by a factor of twenty-four.) Since demand for these little boats was high and supply slow, I would probably have to wait a bit for delivery, but the club, it was disclosed, owned two Mirrors for the use of members who did not themselves own boats, so I would be able to sail in the meantime. Also, the club was holding a boat show in a couple of weeks’ time, and there I would be able to peruse a number of other craft before purchasing.

  During the time remaining until the boat show I dropped by Rinville several times more, and on one occasion was invited out for a sail in a twenty-foot dayboat by a rumpled fellow of about my own age, who looked as I imagined a Galway fisherman looked and, to my American ear, sounded. It is a measure of my discernment in these matters at that stage of my Irish experience that he turned out to be the Minister for Local Government.

  The First Annual Galway Boat Show took place in the car park of the Salthill Hotel. On display were a dozen assorted dinghies and powerboats, some fishing and diving gear, and other water-oriented paraphernalia. Also on display was a gleaming new Mirror dinghy, which was being raffled as a fund-raising project for the club, and which I did not win. However, a large Dutchman and I unearthed one of the club Mirrors from Ferdia O’Riordan’s garage and, after an hour or so of puzzling over fittings, rigging, and sails, got it afloat.

  We pottered about between Black Rock Pier and the Margaretta Buoy in the middle of Galway Bay, tacking and jibing the little boat in a lovely breeze. My reading program was paying off handsomely, things making a great deal more sense than they had on my first outing with Ferdia. I had another short sail with another member, and then dropped him off at the pier.

  My recent reading had included Sir Francis Chichester’s book Gypsy Moth Circles the World and Joshua Slocum’s superb account of his three-year circumnavigation in the last century, the first by a man alone. No doubt these had served as some sort of inspiration, for I pushed off in the little dinghy and sailed her single-handed out to the buoy and back, ajangle at the newness of it all and terrified of capsizing the thing in sight of the crowd on the pier. This was a kind of high several notches above sailing with somebody else. Now, for better or for drowning, I had the thing all to myself, my first command, as it were, and I relished the experience. Tacking around the buoy went much as the book had said it should; the dinghy scooted across the water, seemingly in defiance of, rather than in harmony with, the laws of nature, and I returned to shore light-headed, as if having breathed an enriched atmosphere.

  I felt it was some sort of beginning, though of what I wasn’t certain, and to my distant fantasy of sailing around the world was added the even more fantastic notion of doing some part of it alone, and although the next time I sailed a boat alone the circumstances were much more exotic and the possible consequences far more serious, the special euphoria of that first, short, single-handed voyage remained unrivaled.

  Two

  Learning a Bit

  Carol, Fred, and I arrived at Rosturk Castle on a Friday evening in June, the club dinghy in tow behind the Mini. Carol, an old friend from both New York and London days, was passing through Ireland on her way back to live in the States, and we had been invited up to County Mayo for the Westport Show. The dinghy, much used and a bit battered, was for sailing in Westport Bay, for Rosturk Castle is situated on one of the most beautiful inlets of that very beautiful body of water.

  Sunday we went sailing, which was not as simple as it sounds. The inlet on which Rosturk stands habitually dries out twice a day, when the tide recedes, leaving a quarter-mile or so of lovely golden sand to replace the water, which ends up some distance from the castle. Since our time of rising and breakfasting coincided with low water, it was necessary for someone to come with us down the long strip of sand to the water’s edge in the Mini and, after the dinghy had been launched, return to the house with the car and Fred, who, in the two or three times I had sailed since my debut, had sho
wn himself to be not much in the way of a yachtsman. He either fell asleep with his head on the tiller or strolled about the decks until he fell into the water. He was, at least, good for man-overboard drills.

  We successfully launched the dinghy and sailed off into an already increasing breeze. Westport Bay is filled with islands, reputedly 365 of them, and it had been our intention to sail among them for a sufficient number of hours for the tide to allow us to sail right up to the doorstep of the castle. However, on the water everything looks a bit different; the wind blows a bit harder, the waves are a bit steeper, and, on top of everything else, it was starting to drizzle. I am not sure if I had confided the state of my experience to Carol, but she seemed willing to sail wherever I wished, so I probably hadn’t.

  We beat out from behind an island and the wind and waves both grew in strength—not to an alarming state, but sailing the boat required great concentration. There was little time for absorbing the beauties of Westport Bay. Carol, incredibly, managed to light a cigarette. We agreed that a shorter sail than originally conceived was in order. We sailed around the island and headed into the channel separating it from the shore where the castle stood. Then we were running, that is, the wind was directly behind us, and so were the waves. We began to surf in a small way, which was exciting, and then we “broached to,” which was a little too exciting. When a boat which is running broaches, it appears suddenly to change its mind about the direction in which it is sailing and to attempt to change its course, swinging abruptly around and abeam to the wind. This action, in proper concert with a passing wave, can cause the occupants of a dinghy to become swimmers. We were wearing buoyancy aids, but these did not make the prospect seem any more inviting. We broached twice before I learned to anticipate the movement and keep us on a straight course.

  We drove on up the inlet until the boat touched the sand, then we hopped out. We were still a quarter-mile from the castle. I sent Carol up for the car and trailer while I got the sails down and stood in the water, holding the dinghy. The tide was coming in quite fast now.