Blue Water, Green Skipper: A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic Page 6
Later, we would add two other sails to the wardrobe: one, a duplicate number-two genoa, so that twin headsails could be set when running in fresher winds, and so that I would have a spare for my principal working sail. Twin headsails are easier to control than a spinnaker and have self-steering properties, too, which would be a help in strong winds. The other addition would be a drifter, or very light large genoa, made of nylon. This would help considerably when beating or reaching in very light winds. Much later, the need for a storm jib would present itself, but I’ll get to that later.
With the sails ordered and a delivery date promised to coincide with the boat’s launching, I set about selecting other gear. I chose the well-known Hasler Windvane self-steering system. I must admit I chose it with a minimum of research. Mike Ellison, of the Amateur Yacht Research Society, which had done much research, recommended it, and so did Ron Holland. The difficult decision to make was whether to order the small or medium size of the unit. My boat fell in a gray area where the small unit might be big enough and might not. But the larger unit was twice as heavy and twice as expensive, so I took the chance and went for the smaller one. I would not know until the boat was launched whether I had made the right decision, and I was plagued by doubt.
I chose the Avon four-man life raft and the Avon Redcrest inflatable dinghy as my tender. Both were well proven, and I had been impressed by Avon quality at the London Boat Show. Life raft stowage was going to be a problem, because even a four-man raft is rather bulky, and no place had been designed into the Shamrock for it, a mistake, I felt, and one which I communicated to Ron on more than one occasion. I chose Brookes & Gatehouse electronic instruments, simply because, from everything I could gather from every source I could find, they were considered to be the finest in the world. I ordered their Hornet unit, which combines, in one control box, wind speed, wind direction, magnified wind direction (a fine display for beating to windward), water speed, and distance covered. To this I added the Hound water speed amplifier, which gives a finer display of small changes in speed and is invaluable for fine sail trimming.
I also, after much soul searching, ordered the B&G Horatio unit, which offers several functions. Once a course is set into an electronic compass on the deckhead, steering can be done by keeping a needle on a dial straight up, instead of steering a compass course, which demands more concentration and is more tiring. The unit also has an off-course alarm, which can be set for either twenty or forty degrees, important when the boat is under self-steering and will change direction automatically if the wind direction changes. Finally, there is a constant digital readout of the number of miles sailed to either port or starboard of a set course. This would be valuable when setting a course when about to go to sleep. On awaking, I would know how far off course I might have sailed. Horatio was an expensive piece of equipment, costing as much as the complete Hound, but I felt I might genuinely need it.
I also chose the B&G Homer/Heron radio receiver and radio direction finding compass, and the shortwave converter for the radio, which would enable me to pick up radio time signals at sea.
To the Brookes & Gatehouse equipment I added the ubiquitous Seafarer depth sounder (at the suggestion of B&G, because I wanted to economize) and the Seavoice VHF, already mentioned, made by the same company. (I later exchanged the self-contained model for the ordinary model, because I was having difficulty finding room for the extra bulk of the first unit.)
Finally, I added, as a backup radio receiver, the American Zenith Trans-Oceanic Portable, probably the best of its kind, and a Philips car stereo radio/tape player, purely for entertainment. At home I am never without music playing, and I would have missed this terribly at sea.
That was a lot of electronic and electrical gear, but it all got used. I have always had a thing about being well equipped, and the boat would be evidence to this part of my character. In defense, I must say that I felt my lack of experience made electronic help all the more important. A lifelong sailor might guess at the wind speed or direction accurately, but I could not. I felt I needed all the help I could get. This feeling, it turned out, was entirely correct.
I had to choose an engine as well. The choice was between the Yanmar 12 and the Farymann 12 diesels, the Farymann having hydraulic drive. The Yanmar has a good reputation, and I was offered a nice discount on it, but I chose the Farymann because of its compact size and the versatility of installation of the Hydromarine Hydraulic Drive. This equipment is manufactured in Ireland, and Hydromarine offered me, at no extra cost, a heavy-duty unit more suitable for running for long periods without a load, as when charging batteries. They were later to give unstintingly of technical help and advice.
On March 27, Laurel Carlin Holland gave birth to a daughter, Kelly, much to the astonishment of everyone, since triplets, at a minimum, had been expected. Ron was completely bemused by the idea of being a father, and we had a celebratory dinner at Ballymaloe.
My social situation took a turn for the better when a letter came from Ann O’Donahue, a London friend, in response to an invitation issued in January. She would be arriving in early April for a visit. I was looking forward to that. The only people I knew in Cork were my designer, sailmaker, and boatbuilder, none of them very pretty.
Ann arrived on Monday afternoon and we renewed our acquaintance over dinner at Arbutus Lodge, Cork’s best restaurant and, many think, Ireland’s. Having Ann about the place made an enormous difference. We had the Hollands and Barry and Mary Burke over for dinner and, confirming conversations we had been having, Barry promised to mold my boat next, making it number seven instead of ten. She would be launched, said Barry, around June 1. This was an enormous relief to me. The red boat was only now being completed, and I had been increasingly worried about having the boat ready for the Azores race. Now I would have a month more to sail her than planned!
The red boat was finally launched on April 11. In the water she was very pretty, and we arranged to go sailing on her with Ron and John McWilliam on Sunday.
We were joined by Harold Cudmore, a dinghy sailor, now becoming a helmsman in offshore racing, and a nonstop talker about sailing, Cork, and anything Irish. The boat was a delight to sail. I was astonished at how quickly she tacked. We sailed about Cork Harbor, while Ron ceaselessly tuned the rigging and McWilliam admired his sails. Ron never seems to stop moving on a boat. He is everywhere, dressed in a pair of white painter’s overalls, or something equally awful, completely indifferent to what the fashionable yachtsman is supposed to be wearing, and always with tools in his hands. Sometimes he will deign to wear a battered pair of seaboots. Ron seems vaguely uncomfortable in anything new, or even pressed.
McWilliam, on the other hand, is extremely neat, though not given to fashion, as such. He always seems ironed and starched, even on a boat. I think his wife presses him before he leaves the house.
Cudmore, a rangy fellow with a lot of thick, red hair and a native capacity for Guinness, enjoys giving instructions in a manner which manages to be, at once, quick and easy. Both Ron and Harold are good teachers on a boat, each having a large fund of knowledge on every detail of the sailing of a yacht, and a willingness to share it. McWilliam, on the other hand, although possessed of at least as much information, seems to assume that anyone who is over the age of seven has a native understanding of everything that makes a yacht work, and an equal knowledge of things mechanical. Once, when I interrupted him, puzzled by a discourse on load factors or something, he said to me, “You know, it’s good training for me to talk to you about things like this; your mind is so … so …” “Unsullied by knowledge?” I volunteered. He grinned. “That’s it.”
Everything about this first sail in a Shamrock was an eye-opener for me. First of all, it was, at this point in my experience, the largest boat I had ever sailed on; second, it was my introduction to what my own boat would be like, and I was both a little awed by the height of the mast and the sail area, and relieved, in that the yacht didn’t seem unmanageable. Ann, who says o
f her ability on a boat, “I do what I’m told,” was enjoying herself, too. At least nobody was yelling at her. She tells of a sail down the Channel once with a male companion who became Captain Bligh on a boat. She abandoned ship in Weymouth and took a train back to London.
Sailing back to moorings in front of the yacht club, Cudmore gave me a real workout. Harold would rather sail anytime than use an engine (I saw him sail up to a mooring under spinnaker once, in a riverful of moored yachts), and he decided we would short tack up the river, against the tide. Ron and McWilliam quickly found something to do on the foredeck, and I had to man both winches, with Ann tailing the sheets. I was wiped out by the time we reached the mooring, and after three months on my exercise program. It occurred to me that had I tried that in January I would have collapsed after the first four or five tacks.
Back at the Royal Cork, we ran into Hugh Coveney in the bar and got into a discussion of boats’ names. Hugh’s Golden Apple name came from Yeats … “The golden apples of the sun and the silver apples of the moon …” The “Golden” handle had continued with Golden Shamrock, and I thought I’d like to keep it going, combined with something Irish but a bit more elegant than Shamrock. The harp is the Irish national symbol, and that of the Royal Cork Yacht Club as well. Golden Harp seemed a good possibility. Hugh liked that, and I think from that time on, though I thought about other names, the yacht, in my own mind, became Golden Harp.
Ann flew back to London that afternoon, and I was alone again. Still, my boat was about to begin building, and I was about to make my first passage of the season and my first to England. Golden Apple had been sold, and Hugh Coveney had invited me to sail on the delivery trip.
Ten
My First Golden Cruise
The next two weeks were mostly occupied with final meetings about the molding of the boat. I think we had at least three final meetings. I was beginning to have doubts about some of the modifications planned for the boat. First, I abandoned the idea of replacing the whole cockpit and decided just to make the existing one deeper. Then I was talked out of that, because of doubts about the cockpit draining properly when heeled. Finally, George talked me out of raising the decks with the teak sandwich idea. He was concerned about the possibility of leaks around the hull/deck join. I gave in on the custom interior, too. I would accept the Swede’s standard interior and simply add extra stowage space.
A letter came from Mike Ellison of the Amateur Yacht Research Society, who was helping to organize the Azores race. When Harry McMahon and Ewan Southby-Tailyour had not been able to get enough free time to do the race, I had told Mike I’d consider taking a girl crew, which the committee had suggested entrants do. Now Mike had two candidates for me, and the following day I received a letter from one of them, Shirley Clifford. She sounded fine, but she was married to Richard Clifford, a Royal Marine officer who had done the last OSTAR, and I wrote her a frank letter explaining that I had not expected inquiries from a married lady, and that I didn’t want any angry Marines buzzing about. I didn’t, either.
Golden Apple departed about one o’clock on a Friday afternoon, Hugh Coveney having come down to provision and fuel us. The rest of the crew were Ian Hannay, skipper, an English airline pilot and, as it turned out, a former British Olympic helmsman in the Dragon class; Richard Edwards, an English medical student; and Killian Bush, George’s son. Killian worked at the yard and had crewed on Apple the year before. I’d had some sort of mild bug since the day before and was feeling rotten, so as soon as we set sail at Roche’s Point, at the mouth of Cork Harbor, I turned in until time for my watch. It annoyed me to feel poorly at the beginning of a trip to which I had so looked forward; it was my first sail out of sight of land.
I was awakened later by the sound of the engine starting. It was a sound I would grow to hate during the next three days. The wind had been light when we set sail, and now it had dropped to nothing. Motoring on a Ron Holland one-off racing yacht is not like motoring on anything else. Instead of the purr of an engine, muffled by soundproofing, we had a deafening chug, muffled only by a panel of sailcloth between the quarter berth and the engine. Soundproofing is too heavy to be used on a superfast Holland design. We motored on through the late afternoon and into the evening, picking up, at some point, an exhausted pigeon who perched on a spreader, hunkered his head down, and fell into an apparently dreamless sleep, stirring himself from time to time to shit on the deck below.
Dawn came slowly, and we found ourselves motoring onward in a haze that made it impossible to judge distance. The sun shone weakly through it. The effect was one of being anchored in one place with the engine running, there was so little sensation of movement in the haze. By late afternoon things had cleared enough to sight Land’s End, my first landfall in a yacht, and that was exciting. That lower-left-hand corner of England was abeam by 20.00 hours, and I turned in after my three-hour watch, looking forward to nine uninterrupted hours of sleep. Motoring was curiously tiring, and I still felt rotten. I was awakened by Hannay at 03.00 after only six hours of sleep and told that I was on watch. (Often on a yacht when racing, or when cruising in heavy weather, the skipper and/or the navigator does not take a watch, but saves himself and is awakened if there are problems.)
It was now clear and very cold (it was only April, remember) with a huge full moon lighting everything through the haze. As I took the helm, Richard gave me the course and said he hadn’t sighted the Lizard light and thought we had probably passed it in the fog, earlier. I settled down in my long underwear, jeans, two sweaters, offshore jacket, lined mittens, and my balaclava. The balaclava was the best idea I’d ever had, I thought, keeping me nice and warm inside my jacket’s hood.
Half an hour later I sighted two flashing lights slightly off the starboard bow. This was very peculiar, according to the ship’s light patterns I had studied in the yachtmaster’s course. A larger ship will have two mast lights, one high, aft, and one lower, forward. But they do not flash. The only thing that flashes is a lighthouse or a buoy, and besides, I couldn’t see the red and green port and starboard lights which a ship should be wearing. I switched on my pocket torch (always necessary on a night watch, I had discovered) and had a look at the chart. We were past the Lizard, we thought, and the lights were too high to be buoys. I turned to port to avoid the thing, which seemed to be moving.
The two lights continued to flash, and the whole thing made no sense, so I decided to call the skipper. I didn’t feel too bad about waking him up, anyway. I shouted “Ian!” half a dozen times, but got no reply. Finally, I lashed the helm, stuck my head down the companionway, and yelled, “SKIPPER!” This message did not reach Ian, but Richard stumbled, shivering, out of his sleeping bag. We regarded the flashing lights together, through the haze. Finally, Richard dug out Reed’s Nautical Almanac, consulted it briefly, and timed the lights.
“Well,” he said, finally, “one of ’em is the Lizard,” and went back to bed. I corrected my course quickly, having been steering toward a large and very solid part of Cornwall for the past five minutes. Sure enough, as we drew abeam of the thing, the lighthouse became visible. The second flashing light appeared to be caused by the light striking another, smaller tower of some sort behind the lighthouse. Later, what seemed to be Falmouth appeared and receded.
That afternoon came the highlight of this exciting voyage on the world’s fastest one-tonner. We put into Salcombe for more fuel. We had no dinghy and only one jerry can and the petrol stations were all closed, but the kindly harbormaster quickly arranged for us to buy ten gallons from the local ferry operator, and we were on our way again faster than if we had had a dinghy and more than one jerry can and if the stations had been open. Moreover, after crossing the bar at the mouth of the harbor, we found that rare thing, a breeze, and got a couple of hours of sailing in before it died and we had to go back to the engine.
I was on at midnight, then again at nine on Monday morning (the skipper was saving himself again). It was quite foggy, and we were approaching
the Needles, the group of rocks at the western end of the Isle of Wight. Ian fiddled with the Radio Direction Finder, did some calculating, and said, “You’ll be hearing the Needles fog signal soon.” Soon, indeed, the mournful sound came out of the fog, and shortly afterward, the proper buoy appeared on the nose. I was impressed.
We were in the Lymington Yacht Marina by eleven, cleaned out the boat, cleared customs, rang Avis for a car, and by one I was in bed at the Angel Hotel, dead asleep. It had been the most boring and most exhausting three days I have ever spent on a boat, before or since. So much for exciting delivery trips in fast sailing boats.
The following evening I met for the first time, in person, both Ewan Southby-Tailyour and Shirley Clifford. Ewan (it is pronounced Uwan, I discovered, and Southby, as South) looked more distinguished than his years would suggest, and Shirley looked just like her photograph. Everybody was a bit restrained when we first met at my hotel, two-thirds of the group being British, but after our arrival at a Poole restaurant and the subsequent wine consumed, relaxation prevailed, and I may even have been forward with the lovely proprietress. The evening ended, I think, with an aura of goodwill, in the officer’s mess of the Poole Royal Marine base at three a.m. Shirley reassured me that it would be okay with her husband for her to sail with two strange men to a remote island in the North Atlantic. She was a victim, she said, of the “marry your crew and give her hell” syndrome and could not occupy the same floating object as her husband.
Next day, I visited some chandleries and called in at M. S. Gibb in Warsash and Kemp’s in Titchfield. Gibb makes the Hasler Windvane self-steering system, and I met Robert Hughes, their marketing manager and resident self-steering expert, who kindly showed me where and how the things were built. I left almost understanding how the gear worked.
At Kemp’s I went over the mast order, and Peter Cartwright and his people made a suggestion or two which seemed useful. Earlier in the day, James Kirkman, sales manager at Brookes & Gatehouse, had spent some time explaining the workings of the instruments I had bought, so my time on the south coast was well spent.