I would have to be more careful. The inner tube rubber had not given enough velocity; next time I would try jabbing with the spear as I held it in my hand. I could see the school coming back; I swam toward them. The pilot fish were close on my heels. I singled out the leader of the dolphins, waited until the latest possible instant, and then thrust the spear hard into its back. It gouged a hole in its back but failed to penetrate far enough to fix him to the spear. I followed him deeper but I couldn’t get closer for another try.
I hated to injure the dolphin and not finish the job. The school swam away, with its leader spewing white clouds of excrement into the water.
By now, the sun was going down and I was starting to get chilly. I headed back to the boat where Kathleen asked how the spearing had gone. She looked disappointed, but said nothing. I took off my wet suit and dried myself off with the towel Kathleen handed me.
We leaned against each other by the deck cabin, watching the sun meet the ocean on the western horizon. The seas rolled gently around us and were smooth and shiny as glass. The surface showed not the slightest indication of air movement. The sky and water were blue, and then the sky turned yellow and both melted into soft pinks, blues, and grays. As the seas flattened out, the colors spread from the sky to the water and finally over to us until we felt as though we were part of the sunset. The feeling was so peaceful and the sight so idyllic, I felt we could stay there forever.
I saw that the pompano dolphins had come back. It was getting dark, but they were just below the surface of the water, their blue-silver bodies glinting in the last light of the evening sky. Curt leaned over the gunwale, spear in hand, waiting for them to come closer.
I went into the cabin to get the fishing book so we could identify exactly what kind of creature we were trying to catch and maybe glean a hint or two on the best technique for spearing them. The book indicated they might be yellow jack instead of dolphin and light tackle could be used.
Curt took the fishing pole, which we had attached to the bow cabin roof to troll, and put a flasher on the end of the line. He cast it out and started reeling it in. Bam! He had one on the very first cast, twisting and fighting. In a moment, he had it on board, covered with the dip net. It wasn’t the same kind of fish as the one he had injured earlier. We compared it to the pictures in the book. “It must be a pompano dolphin.”
I lost no time getting the stove out and heating olive oil and rosemary in the frying pan. Curt handed in the cleaned fillets to cook. This time we saved the guts for bait for the next day.
In the yellow glow of candlelight, we ate our fillets of pompano and sipped at the Spanish sherry given to us by the port director in Radazul, Hierro. It was by far the best meal we had had yet.
The next morning, I woke up at 0730, feeling relaxed. It was perfectly calm, and the boat wasn’t moving at all. I rolled over and looked at Curt. When he opened his eyes, I asked him how he had slept.
“Very well, thank you.” I smiled back and pointed out the port window on his side. The sea was like glass. We decided to take a holiday—each of us doing what we wanted. Curt wanted to develop film, while I planned to fish and sketch in my logbook.
Leaving Curt to catch up on his sleep, I went out on deck. It was lovely to be alone on a calm sea. I was determined to catch more fish, so I assembled my fishing equipment and settled down on the starboard side. I baited my hand line and tossed it overboard. At first, the only fish I saw were pilot fish. They swam up and looked closely at the baited hook. They weren’t interested, though. Their mouths looked too small for the hook anyway. I was just as glad because, according to an old fishermen’s superstition, it was bad luck to catch the pilot fish—however tasty they might be!
As I sat on my favorite seat, I felt overwhelmed by the beauty of the sea that day. There wasn’t a wave, not even a ripple. And the silence was the most complete I had ever experienced. When I sat perfectly still and held my breath, there wasn’t a single sound.
I sat on deck until about 0930, enjoying the morning, trying to catch a fish. The silver fish returned, but not even they seemed interested in the baited hook I dangled in front of them. Eventually, I heard a stirring in the forward cabin. Curt leaned out of the hatch and asked if I wanted pancakes for breakfast.
“Sure, that sounds great.” I sat fishing for a few more minutes and then put my line away when Curt handed out perfectly cooked pancakes with Vermont maple syrup. Pancake breakfasts were a Saville family Sunday tradition, and he was very good at making them.
After we had eaten our fill of pancakes, Curt called out from the interior of the cabin, where he had remained. Did I want to work with him to develop a roll of black-and-white film?
No, no, I didn’t. I just wanted to change places with him and go in the cabin. I wanted my time alone there. Curt could work on his own developing the rolls of black-and-white film we had been taking photos with all along. We switched places, and I handed out the bag of photo developer chemicals from the forward hatch.
I settled myself down in the cabin, stretching out with the luxury of two pillows. I told Curt he should pretend he was doing a photography program on television and describe his actions as he went along. He agreed, and I “watched” the show audibly from my vantage point, propped up on the two pillows and folded-up sleeping bag.
In all, the operation took an hour, using three quarts of fresh water. The Perma-Wash film rinse was a great help because it reduced the amount of water needed after the film was fixed. He was pleased, and I was impressed when the film turned out so well.
As Curt was putting away the last of the chemicals, later in the morning, we heard a noise near the boat: swoosh! In the silence that surrounded Excalibur, the sound was startling.
“Whales! There’s a pod of them off the bow!”
I dove out of my nest with the camera in hand. Off the port bow were two huge whales, the sunlight glinting off their black skins, expelling air from their blowholes.
The whales, probably the baleen North Atlantic right, took a few more breaths and left us, diving deep beneath the surface. We never saw them again, but later in the day I heard them. By then, a very light breeze had come out of the west, just enough to put little ripples on the glass-like surface of the sea.
We were curious to see if our position had changed in the last twenty-four hours in the calm conditions. We had rowed for a little while the previous afternoon, and the light breeze out of the west was probably pushing us back some. But the two forces had practically evened each other out. We were still in just about the same place, as was shown by the noon sight: 22 degrees 20 minutes north and 28 degrees 42 minutes west.
By the time night had descended over the sea, the wind was coming out of the northwest at about Force 1. We wondered if we were in for a weather change. But there was nothing we could do about it, so we didn’t worry.
As usual when the dinner was done and the dishes stored in the red nylon bag on deck, we were both tired. I read aloud from a Travis McGee thriller, The Empty Copper Sea, which seemed appropriate, until we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer.
At about 0230, I woke up. The antenna wire was moving back and forth in the air vent by my head. I was afraid the abrasion might damage it, so I stuffed a towel in the slot to stop it from moving. This cut off the air by my head, so I went out on deck to breathe some fresh air and see why the antenna was moving around.
Out on deck, leaning against the bow cabin, I could feel a light breeze on my left cheek, coming out of the north-northeast. I looked around at the incredibly clear night. The Milky Way was spread across the sky in a great encompassing arc.
CHAPTER 18
Seed of a Hurricane
May
WE FELT REFRESHED AFTER OUR holiday in the calm. We’d needed it, for we’d worked steadily, without a break, for the two weeks since leaving Hierro. But we could congratulate ourselves on having covered nearly seven hundred miles of the row across the Atlantic during that period.
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nbsp; Curt’s log: May 7
The oars seemed to be less heavy as I rowed alone in the early morning seas. I thought of the rowing schedule we had settled into: it was really working out well. I would row alone for about two hours in the morning, finding it a pleasant way to wake up. After breakfast, Kathleen would row alone for another two hours. In the afternoon, she would row another hour or so. The sun would still be high in the sky, but she wasn’t as bothered by its heat as I was. Later in the day, I would get in a couple of hours and then, before shooting the stars in the twilight, we would row together. This way, the boat was moving under oar power up to eight hours a day. And we had plenty of time to be alone in the cabin and on deck.
The waves had not yet built up after the calm. The wind was blowing out of the east at Force 2, taking the edge off the morning heat as the sun climbed higher in the cloudless sky. We had originally planned to do much of the rowing at night to avoid the tropical heat. But this had not yet been necessary. In our preparation, we had overlooked the wind chill effect. How ironic that we had forgotten about that! All winter long, in Tony’s old barn in Touisset, the freezing temperatures of the wind had plagued us as we worked on the boat. It never occurred to us that the wind chill effect could be a benefit in the tropics.
I saw something off the starboard that at first looked like a bird. On closer inspection, I saw it was a silver-blue flying fish in the low morning sun. It flew at least fifty feet through the air before plunging back into the water. A moment later, another one took flight.
The wings of the flying fish drew my attention. They seemed to be moving in a blur, like hummingbird wings. Were they actually moving very fast or did it look that way because of the way the sunlight was hitting them? I could not tell, but I had always thought that flying fish shot out of the water and glided with their fins extended.
The sun was climbing higher in the sky every day as we rowed south and the month passed by. As I recorded the noonday figures that Curt read from the sextant on the deck, I noticed the sun’s altitude was 84 degree 30 minutes above the horizon. When he finished, he came back in the cabin to work the sights out.
By June 21, the sun would be at 90 degrees, or directly above the Tropic of Cancer. But as we traveled south, the sun would appear to be more than 90 degrees, taken from the south horizon. It was necessary for us to get an accurate sighting of the sun from the north and south horizon around that time, something Curt was still working out in his mind. He seemed exasperated by my questions about it, so I dropped the subject. I picked up my logbook and wrote in it for a few minutes.
“We’re at 22 degrees 9 minutes north and 29 degrees 6 minutes west. We’re getting even closer to the Norfolk-to-Dakar shipping lane. The middle of it’s about fifty miles away. I don’t know how close the ships stay to the lane—we might see a ship any time in the next couple of days.”
That was an exciting prospect. According to John Fairfax, who had rowed across the Atlantic in the mid-1960s, he had met quite a few ships and been given all sorts of goodies. I got out the VHF radio to give a call, on the off chance that a ship was in the vicinity. Curt followed me out on deck.
We scanned the horizon but didn’t see anything. I wasn’t discouraged, though, because the handheld radio had a range of about forty miles. This meant we could talk to a ship even though we couldn’t see it. Holding the radio up to my mouth, I pushed the talk button. “CQ, CQ, this is Excalibur, the transatlantic rowboat, seventeen days out from Hierro. Do you copy me? Over.”
Silence.
I tried again. “Calling any ship in the Norfolk-to-Dakar shipping lane. Please come in. Do you copy, over?”
Silence.
“Let me try,” Curt said, taking the unit. “Esta es el barco de ramo Excalibur de los Estados Unidos llamando barcos en esta region. A ver si nos copia. Cambio.”
Silence.
There weren’t even any Spanish-speaking boats out there. We looked at each other in disappointment. I took the radio, crawled into the cabin, and put it away. Curt sat on the rope bag on deck and looked out at the sea. He felt as unhappy as I did.
The unsuccessful attempt to talk to a ship, filled with other people, left me feeling lonely. I reached over and switched on the ham radio. I wanted, needed, to hear other people. Tuning the 15-meter band, I could hear two hams conversing in Morse code. As I listened, I could tell that one ham was in Palm Bay, Florida, and the other in Alaska. I was impressed that the Drake TR-7 could pick up signals that far away. I thought of contacting them, but we needed to conserve electric power, so I listened a while and then turned it off.
Curt’s log: May 7
I thought about the course. The autopilot was still set at 255 degrees true. Nevertheless, we were getting farther south than I wanted. Should I change the course to compensate? No, I thought it was better to leave it alone for a few days. I noticed the little Xs on the chart showing our position for the past two weeks formed a slightly zigzag line. Maybe that was because I realized that altering the course too frequently had been a flaw in my racing strategy at regattas. It was better to make a decision on a course and follow through with it. The straighter the course, the more efficient.
But what if we went too far south? What would that do for us later in the voyage? Would the more southeasterly winds on the western side of the Atlantic compensate for this and push us back north in the later part of the voyage?
I went out of the cabin and we began the afternoon’s rowing session. Both of us kept looking over our shoulders at the sun until the last point of light disappeared below the horizon. Then we watched for Jupiter, which was the first object to appear in the night sky except for the moon that hung where the sun had been. When Jupiter appeared, it was time for the evening sights. Curt wanted to double-check his navigation with additional stars and planets that evening, so when Jupiter became visible, we quickly took in the oars and tied them down for the night. We had grown so accustomed to this task that we could practically tie the oars with one hand and steady ourselves with the other.
That evening Curt was able to shoot Jupiter, Sirius, Capella, Arcturus, and Polaris. Polaris, the North Star, was particularly useful because it could give us a double-check of our latitude position. Since it is only a third-magnitude star, it was sometimes hard to focus in the telescope of the sextant. Polaris was now getting so close to the horizon, due to our southerly travel, that the earth’s atmosphere was making it more difficult to see clearly. Its altitude for this position from where we were was 21 degrees 40 minutes. After Curt had applied corrections to the sights he had taken and plotted them on the North Atlantic chart, we found that we were 22 degrees 3 minutes north and 29 degrees 31 minutes west. From the pre-marked lines on the chart that showed the boundaries of the shipping lanes, we were indeed getting closer to the Norfolk-to-Dakar lane.
During the night, we took turns getting up every half hour to look out for ship lights. But each time the sky was dark and the sea empty.
One morning when I was taking my stint at the oars after Curt had already put in his two hours, I saw a pilot fish following my oars as I rowed along, playing around the tips of the blades as I pulled them out of the water at the end of the stroke. I was delighted that the pilot fish had stayed with us after the calm.
One of the purple-and-striped fish stood out from all the rest. It was about four inches long and seemed to have a sleeker body than the others. Or was it my imagination? I thought he was more playful than the rest, staying closer to my oar blades than his buddies. When I would take the blade out of the water, he would swim quickly forward to see what had happened to it. When the blade went back in the water at the bow end of the boat, he swam back to look. I decided to give him a name. Alpha: the first name that came to mind.
Alpha reminded me of Excalibur’s sleek hull. Ed Montesi had done a great job creating lines that made her such an easy boat to row. Even in the light winds blowing out of the northeast, the boat was smoothly cutting through the water.
&nb
sp; We had told Ed that we preferred a low profile for the ocean-rowing boat. This, we felt, would give us greater maneuverability in windy conditions at sea. Ironically, we paid for this choice in the lower headroom and more cramped conditions in the forward cabin that were our tiny living quarters. Moreover, higher cabin structures could have probably enabled us to drift farther in strong following winds. But it had been a trade-off against the need for more control over the boat.
Throughout the day, the conditions remained stable. The wind was light and blowing from an advantageous direction. We finished the day feeling good about the progress the boat had made. After a dinner of curried rice and soy protein, I suggested we turn on the radio to see if there was any interesting news on the UK maritime net.
An amateur radio ham in the Caribbean came on and told everyone on the net that the first hurricane of the season had just formed near the West Indies. We looked at each other in shock. It was only early May. Normally, the hurricane season didn’t start until June or July. “HI, HI, and the baby is born!” “HI, HI” was ham jargon for laughter. They were referring to Hurricane Arlene. We didn’t think it was funny at all.
Curt reached up and turned off the radio. For several moments, we sat looking at each other in silence. We were stunned. Everything was going so well. The weather report, however, brought home the reality of our situation.
“This makes you think of where we are and what exactly we’re trying to do,” Curt commented, adding, “and how many miles we have yet to cover.” He opened the navigation hatch and pulled out the chart, dividers, and a pencil. He began taking measurements and writing figures in the margins.
I asked him what he was doing, and he replied, “Trying to figure out how long it will take to reach the nearest island in the West Indies. I think it’s Antigua.”
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