Blue Water, Green Skipper: A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic Page 10

  I was up at the crack of dawn to let the workmen on the boat and spent most of a frantic day shopping for gear I hadn’t been able to find in Ireland. Shirley turned up in the afternoon, and I gave her a list of things to do. The Bird was not far behind. I had not been able to find a decent place to stay in Gosport, and since I had to go to Lymington anyway to exchange a broken meter at Brookes & Gatehouse and collect the new Dynafurl from Jeremy Rogers, I booked us in at The Angel there. We made a mad dash for Lymington in her car in order to get there before closing time and just made it. Bill Green, Rogers’s man in charge of Dynafurls, broke the news that the replacement hadn’t arrived, then gave me tools and instructions on repairing the existing unit. I left instructions to send the replacement on to the Azores so that it would be there when we arrived.

  On top of this, The Bird was unhappy. She was unhappy about the sleeping arrangements, unhappy about being in Lymington, and only moderately appeased by a good dinner at Limpets. Next morning she was unhappy about waiting at the post office to see if the replacement Dynafurl would arrive at the last minute, and she pitched a fit when I kept her waiting at a chandlery while I bought other last-minute gear. The drive back to Gosport was completed in stony silence, and our farewell was very abbreviated. That night I noted in my diary, “… sometimes I am a very bad judge of women.”

  Angus Primrose joined us for lunch at the local pub (Bill and Tarka had returned from London) and gave us a soothing account of his part in the Azores and Back Race. The wind, said Angus, had never blown more than twenty-five knots and he had been supremely comfortable throughout. He made a suggestion or two about gear arrangements, and then we were hard at work again. At closing time Camper put Harp back into the water. She looked in very good shape, but we still had ahead of us the job of restowing all her gear and the food. That evening Bill, Shirley, and I took the hovercraft to the Isle of Wight for the pre-race party in Bembridge. There were twenty-four hours before the start of the race, and it was the first time the three of us had been together.

  Tarka and Anita met us at the party, and we relaxed for a bit and chatted with some of the other competitors. Mike Ellison, of the Amateur Yacht Research Society, was competing in a borrowed trimaran, and I met Bill Howell of Tahiti Bill, the Australian dentist, and Brian Cooke of Triple Arrow, the sailing bank manager. Both were OSTAR veterans, and I had been looking forward to talking with them about the race, but with time so short, that would have to wait until our arrival in Horta.

  Bill returned to Norris Castle with Anita and Tarka, and Shirley and I got the last ferry off the island. When we arrived at the marina we found Richard Clifford asleep on Harp’s deck and invited him in. Ominously, Shirley was complaining of not feeling well, but I was too tired to take much notice.

  Next morning, she was worse and running a temperature. We put her into a pilot berth and worked around her. Richard tackled a dozen jobs on deck while I emptied the boat of her stores and prepared to restow them. Shirley had pared down our Quinnsworth groceries to what we would need for the three of us, plus some for my trip back to Ireland. Bill and Anita arrived and Anita sat on the dock, resplendent in a large sun hat, and took notes for a stowage plan as I hustled grub onto the yacht. Bill pronounced himself uneasy about the whole thing. Richard kept looking at the shambles and shaking his head. “You’ll never make it,” he kept saying. Tension mounted. Then the committee types began coming round and muttering about Shirley’s illness. She was refusing to see a doctor, and they didn’t like it. I discussed it with Shirley and Bill and proposed a solution. Shirley had been looking forward to the race for weeks, and I was reluctant to disappoint her because of what might be only a twenty-four-hour bug.

  “Look,” I said to the committee, “we’ll take her down the Channel with us. She’ll probably get better. If she gets worse, there are a dozen places we can quickly put her ashore. If she’s not better by Plymouth we’ll put her ashore there.” The committee didn’t like it. I pointed out that we weren’t violating any race rules. The skipper of a yacht is responsible for deciding who races with him. Bill pointed out that he was the skipper and he had agreed to this plan. The committee said we’d be disqualified if we arrived in Horta without the minimum specified crew of three. They offered us another girl as crew. I pointed out that we would be disqualified if we changed crews within twenty-four hours of the start, and the start was five hours away. They said they’d overlook that. I asked why then wouldn’t they overlook the three-crew rule? Harp was built as a single-handed boat; two could handle her easily enough. The rule was obviously aimed at some of the bigger multihulls. They hemmed and hawed. I was beginning to get annoyed. We had much to do and little time to do it. They were wasting what we had left. I finally told them, as politely as I could, that we had made a decision which did not violate the rules and that that was it, so to please go away and let us get on with it. They finally did.

  Bill and Richard were still expressing doubts about our being ready for the start, and finally I exploded. “Look,” I said, “we have five hours to finish what has to be done. If we don’t make it, we won’t start, but let’s stop wasting time and get on with it. Don’t anybody say to me again we won’t make it, okay?” Everybody went back to work.

  The race was to start at seven o’clock in the evening. Incredibly, by five-thirty we were finished. Everything was stowed and Richard had accomplished a lot of absolutely essential work on deck. We had just time to dash for a shower. That finished, we pulled up at the fuel dock just in time to catch the attendant before he left for the day. We took on diesel, then left Richard on the fuel dock. We would not have made it on time without him. We motored out to the line with the main up and immediately found a fouled genoa halyard. I had to go up the mast to clear it but, fortunately, the sheltered waters were flat and motion at the top of the mast was minimal. I took a moment for a look at the view. There were fourteen yachts on the line, only two of them monohulls, Harp and Gypsy Moth V, being sailed by Giles Chichester, Sir Francis’s son. There were a number of large multihulls, in the fifty-foot range, and a number of smaller cruising types. It was a very pretty sight in the late-afternoon sun.

  We started badly. The seaward end of the starting line was to be an anchored trimaran, the committee boat. However, there was also another trimaran anchored nearby, a spectator boat, and we mistook that for the committee boat. We started third from last. But we had started.

  Harp’s main saloon from the hatchway, with galley to port and chart table to starboard. Sail stowage in forepeak.

  Main hatch viewed from the saloon.

  Harp’s gourmet galley. The central heating unit is visible to the lower left of the cooker.

  The well-equipped navigation area.

  book three

  Fifteen

  On Our Way

  As soon as we had altered course down the Solent we found the light wind behind us and got up the Betsy Ross floater. Harp began to move. With about five knots of wind showing on the B&G meter, her speed increased from two and a half knots under main and genoa to four knots under spinnaker. We began to overtake multihulls.

  Just before Cowes, as we passed Norris Castle, we heard explosions from shore. “They’re saluting us!” Bill shouted. Sure enough, Tarka and Anita were firing the castle’s cannon in our honor. As we approached Cowes, the little town’s lights began to come on in the dusk. We passed the Italian tall ship, Amerigo Vespucci, at anchor, and astern of her, the Royal Yacht. It was too late in the evening for an exchange of salutes, but as we passed, a small, dark-haired woman waved a handkerchief at us from the ship’s afterdeck. I think it was the tea lady!

  By the time we’d passed Cowes, we had overtaken four catamarans and trimarans, and, shortly afterward, we passed another. Mike Ellison’s voice came out of the darkness: “Your navigation lights are excellent!” He was referring to our very bright Marinaspec masthead light, and it was comforting to know we could be seen from a distance. We were facing heavy traffic in
the Channel and God-knew-what in the Atlantic, and I had no wish to experience being run down by shipping. We continued to pull away from Mike’s trimaran and, shortly, were hot on the heels of a big cat, both of us doing everything possible to put on speed so as to make the Needles light before the tide turned foul in the Solent and trapped us there in light winds. Then the wind began to freshen and the catamaran pulled slowly away from us, although we could see his lights until after midnight.

  We got the featherlight floater down in the freshening winds and continued under the genoa, both of us too exhausted to set the heavier all-round radial spinnaker. Each of us slept soundly when off watch that first night.

  We sailed most of the next day with the boomed-out, big genoa, still too tired to get a spinnaker up. The weather was sunny and warm, and we let Fred steer while we lay on the decks and rested. Shirley felt better for a time, then returned to her original condition. She refused all offers of aspirin to lower her temperature, and by late afternoon Bill was saying that we were fast approaching the point where we would have to decide whether to put her ashore in Plymouth. It was not much of a decision. Shirley was only a passenger in her condition, and her condition wasn’t improving. We altered course for Plymouth.

  Our vague plan had been to sail the boat somewhere pleasant after we’d dropped Shirley, if it came to that, somewhere that I could sail back from single-handed in order to qualify for the OSTAR. But now I was very dissatisfied with this notion. I put it to Bill that we go on to the Azores. After all, the boat had been repaired, we were thoroughly overprovisioned for the passage, the boat was easily managed by two, and our exhaustion was beginning slowly to slip away. Bill readily agreed, to my everlasting relief. I would have been very unhappy if, after all this preparation, we had been forced to change our plans. Now we began to plan how to lose as little time as possible in Plymouth. Our first plan had been to pick up a mooring in front of the Royal Western Yacht Club or to put into the Mayflower Marina and get a night’s rest before continuing. But since deciding to continue to Horta we were in more of a hurry. I got on the VHF and contacted Rame Head Coast Guard as we approached Plymouth. They said they would arrange for the pilot boat to take Shirley off at the breakwater and would ring Richard to collect her ashore. We pressed on.

  Near midnight, as we approached Plymouth breakwater, we were able to contact the Plymouth pilot boat directly on the radio-telephone, and they soon spotted us, sailing slowly under main only, with the deck lights on. They came skillfully alongside and took off Shirley, her suitcase, and an incredible number of plastic shopping bags. As we prepared to get under way again there was a shout from the pilot boat. Shirley had forgotten a shopping bag. We repeated the performance, tossed the last bag over, then were free. Bill took the first watch and set a course for the point where we had left our original course. Our plan was to return there before continuing to Horta, keeping a record of our lost time in order to appeal to the committee in Horta to subtract this from our elapsed time. We would also appeal not to be disqualified.

  When I came on watch Bill reported that we had been sailing through thunderstorms with gusts up to Force seven and that he had reefed everything and been up the mast twice to retrieve or sort out halyards. I had slept through everything. On my watch little happened except a fishing boat that wouldn’t go away, and I spent an hour making sure we didn’t hit him or foul his nets. Later in the day I telephoned a committee member and reported our loss of crew and lodged our request to remain in the race and be credited with the eleven hours it had cost us to put Shirley ashore and return to our original course. He said they would let us know in Horta. I then telephoned my mother in the United States and Ann, who had returned to London, to let them know of our progress before we were out of range of Land’s End radio. I don’t know what the Land’s End operators say when they ring a telephone number, but it never fails to astonish anybody who is getting a telephone call from sea. They can never quite believe that it is possible for a small boat out of sight of land to make a telephone call. It is great fun.

  It was now Tuesday afternoon, August 5 (we had started at seven p.m. on August 2), and the wind was freshening and heading us, an experience which was to be repeated ad nauseam for the rest of the passage. We reefed and began to beat. We did not know it at the time, but nearly two weeks later we would be still in identical conditions. At three a.m. the preceding morning I had been wakened by Bill. I was beginning to understand that not only was he a natural pessimist, but that he actually seemed to enjoy it when things went wrong. When anybody else would have been depressed and cursing his fate, Bill seemed stimulated.

  “What?” I mumbled, rolling over and trying not to let any heat escape from my sleeping bag.

  “Bad news,” Bill chirped. I was sure I could see his teeth in the darkness. I was sure he was grinning. The engine battery had shorted and was completely flat. I was sleeping on the hatch to the battery compartment. I struggled out of my sleeping bag and got at the battery. An untaped lead had rubbed against something. I taped it, switched the battery leads to start the engine, and began to disappear into the sleeping bag again.

  “I’ve been thinking it over,” Bill said. “I think we should turn back.” I woke up again.

  “What?”

  “I’m old and weak,” said Bill. “You’re young and strong, but inexperienced. We’ve had this battery trouble and the Dynafurl is going to break at any moment. It’s your decision, but I just want to put my view to you. If you decide you want to go on to Horta, we’ll do so.”

  I was silent for a moment. “Old and weak” was not a new theme. Bill King is a small but wiry man, and he is well muscled from manual labor on his farm. I suspected that he was stronger than I. In reflective moments he would bemoan his old age, referring to himself as “… nearly seventy.” He was not yet sixty-four. Once, over dinner, he’d remarked how well he was feeling, how youthful. I’d pounced: “But a couple of days ago you were practically on your deathbed.” “Ah, but now I’ve had half a bottle of wine,” he replied with a grin.

  I thought that now I detected a trial balloon of some sort, but I was too sleepy to give him the persuading he seemed to want. “I’ll sleep on it,” I said, “and we’ll talk about it in the morning, okay?” I knew that we would cover another fifteen or twenty miles while I slept. The next morning the sun was shining and Harp was going well to windward. Bill remarked what a seakindly boat she was. “She goes to windward so much more comfortably than Galway Blazer, with her big spoon bows for running in the Southern Ocean,” he said admiringly.

  “Listen, Bill,” I said, “everything’s going well now. The batteries are fully charged, and if the Dynafurl breaks again it’s simple to fix with our new tools. We’re both feeling better every day. I think we should go on.”

  Bill nodded. “Right. We’ll say no more about it.”

  We went on.

  Sixteen

  Hard on the Wind

  A week out. I was sitting in the cockpit in the late evening, enjoying the view. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, as beautiful at sea as the sky at night. There seem to be at least four times as many stars as on land, and the Milky Way is just that, a great white swath across a black universe. Then I heard a new noise.

  Sailing is not as quiet a pastime as many people seem to believe it to be. Every sailboat is accompanied by a constant little concerto of sounds—water sweeping past the hull, halyards flapping against the mast, the leach of a sail shaking in the wind. A new sound means that something, however small, has changed. The sound I heard now was coming not from the boat but from the water. I looked over the starboard rail and saw, lit by its phosphorescent progress through the sea, a torpedo coming straight for the boat.

  It is amazing how many thoughts and images can pass through the mind in a second or two. I saw the yacht erupt in the explosion, and myself flying through the air, then I thought, Nonsense, nobody would torpedo a small boat; anyway, I can see that the torpedo is a living thing
. It was a great white shark or killer whale. Bill King had been attacked by one in the Southern Ocean, now it was happening to us. I saw the boat, holed and sinking, while we scrambled into the vulnerable life raft and the creature circled the crippled yacht, waiting. Inches from the hull, the great white “shark” veered sharply away from the boat, as if he had ricocheted. I discovered that I had been holding my breath.

  The great white shark/torpedo was a dolphin, the first I had ever seen at night. Now I saw that there was a pair. They did their torpedo act again and again, driving at the yacht, then veering away at the last possible second. Since they provided their own lighting in the phosphorescence, I could clearly see their shapes and features, their smooth gray skins. I sat, transfixed, for nearly half an hour as they played their game, having the time of their lives, then they were gone.

  We had altered our watch-keeping system now, and we were both well rested. After passing over the continental shelf and leaving the trawler fleets behind, we were in much less danger of collision, being off the most heavily traveled shipping lanes. Now one of us would stay dressed all night, ready to go on deck if necessary but not keeping a constant lookout. One night, when I was on watch, I was dozing lightly in my berth, when I became aware that Bill had awakened and was going on deck. I returned to my doze, thinking he had gone up to pee, but suddenly the yacht tacked. A moment later Bill came below again. “I think I must have developed some sort of ESP in submarines during the war,” he said. “I just woke up and knew I had to go on deck. We were on a collision course with a very large ship.” I looked out of the hatch and saw the enormous thing about three hundred yards astern by then. I made a mental note always to sail with people who were former submariners, and I wondered if I would ever become that attuned to what was happening around the boat.