In the end, we jury-rigged it. I went up and tied a spare line around the mast above the upper spreader. We led the line to the deck, through a block and back to a winch. If the tang broke completely, the installed line would take over and support the mast. We put two reefs in the mainsail to reduce the stress on the mast above the upper spreaders. We did all we could, but the breakage was a nuisance and a worry. Not only had we been delayed by our repair work, but with less sail area, we’d be sailing with reduced speed for the remainder of our crossing.
We were in our usual mindsets. I was optimistic that we’d supported the mast well and that the rig would be okay. Nik fretted. With so many Atlantic miles ahead of us, he wanted the confidence of sailing with a perfectly robust rig. I believed that we’d manage whatever came our way, but Nik felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. If the rig failed in some way, he knew it would be his greater strength and mechanical know-how that I relied upon to fix it.
Despite my outward optimism, inwardly I admitted that the breakages were getting me down. The challenges of cruising were beginning to overshadow the joy. We were both looking forward to getting to Trinidad, docking the boat, and walking away for a while. We were beginning to feel we needed some downtime from cruising.
But getting to the Caribbean required several more passages. So, after ten days at St. Helena, we set out on the 700 NM journey to Ascension Island.
As it turned out, the rig was the least of our worries.
CHAPTER 27
Ascension
(March – April 2014)
The ocean was a vast expanse of whitecaps in the relentless trade winds. Sitting in the cockpit, looking astern, all we could see was the next wave coming. Standing at the wheel, looking forward, all we could see was the backside of the wave that just went past. We called them HOS’s – horizon obliterating swells. They crowded in on the Ghost, their crests peaking in a translucent glacier blue, collapsing into a frothing white whoosh behind us.
Despite the big motion, we got into our offshore routine quite quickly, settling into life with attachments. At sea, it seemed, I always had something on my head. On the morning shift, it was sunglasses. Off watch for the afternoon, I’d have ear plugs jammed in and an eye patch keeping daylight out while I napped. Back on watch at four p.m. the sunglasses were switched out for a headlamp at sunset, then at eight p.m. it was back to ear plugs, but no eye patch was required to sleep in the dark. At midnight, the ear plugs were out and the headlamp was back on. Back to bed at four a.m. and the headlamp came off, the ear plugs went in, and the eye patch was back in position in preparation for sunrise. It was an endless change of headgear.
The water temperature was 20°C, fifteen degrees higher than it had been in Cape Town. We were back in the tropics. We were noticing the warmth and humidity in the air too. The fridge iced up, the fans were on, and scantily clad sailing was back. Life was hot and uncomfortable, but we were chugging along making good mileage toward Ascension.
Then, our trusty third helmsman, “Otto,” gave up the Ghost, literally and figuratively. Three hundred nautical miles from our destination our electronic autopilot stopped working and we didn’t have a backup. Our mechanical autopilot, Digger, had not been working properly for a long time and we’d been lazy about repairing it, relying on Otto instead. With no backup system, there was only one solution – hand-steering.
It is physically demanding and mentally tiring to have to hand-steer at any time, but worst of all to have to do it all the time, particularly with a short-handed crew. We shortened shifts to three hours. At first, I was optimistic – we can do this! But two hours into my first shift and thoroughly exhausted, I started counting. Over 300 NM, with two reefs in the mainsail, about seventy hours, divide by two, thirty-five hours … a dozen shifts each – it seemed an impossible task. Keep going, Jenny! I heard radio Roy’s voice in my head. One more hour. I told myself, This won’t last. Contemplating manageable time frames and concentrating on encouraging mantras was the only way I was going to get through it.
Conditions required two hands on the wheel. Arm, shoulder, and back muscles were constantly engaged. There was no reading, no curling up behind the dodger out of the wind, no grabbing a snack or making a warm beverage. On shift, you couldn’t leave the wheel for a moment, not even for a bathroom break. Off shift, rest took precedence over everything else. Meals were simplified – grilled cheese sandwiches, scrambled eggs, and canned beef curry were our saviours.
We’d heard horror stories from other sailors about “that time the autopilot failed,” but we’d never experienced the situation ourselves. It was a marathon of physical effort resulting in a fatigue so complete, I felt exhaustion at a level I’d never experienced before. After hand-steering for three nights and two days I had new respect for anyone who has hand-steered for longer. We were spent, but we knew we were lucky. It was only 300 NM – it could have been worse.
While St. Helena felt remote, Jamestown had been a civilized village and a quaint mid-ocean settlement. By comparison, Ascension was a wild windswept place, the rugged back of beyond. The unearthly landscape of barren lava flows and volcanic cinder cones looked like a scene from a sci-fi movie. Even so, we were happy to see it. Like Rodrigues was in the Indian Ocean, Ascension was our little slice of oh-thank-goodness in the Atlantic.
As at St. Helena, there was no natural harbour at Ascension. The broad swell of the South Atlantic bent around the island, creating notable motion even on the lee shore. The swell in the anchorage, the waves surging upon the beach, and the strong winds that wrapped around the island added to the uncivilized setting. We arrived mid-morning on a Friday and set our anchor on the second try.
“Hey, check these fish out,” Nik said to me as he returned from lowering the anchor at the bow.
“I know, they’re everywhere!” I said.
The small black fish were about eight to twelve inches long and they stood out starkly in the aqua-green water. There were hundreds of them swimming about. Like seagulls at a seaside picnic, it seemed they’d come to see if anything good was on offer. I tossed a crust of bread in and we watched in astonishment at the instantaneous mob feeding. The surface became a thrashing swirl of black bodies as dozens of the fish hungrily swarmed the tiny crust. In seconds, there was nothing left but a frenzied school of bread-predators searching for a second morsel of food.
“God help you if you fell in,” Nik said.
“No kidding,” I answered. “Death by piranha. I wonder what they are.”
We wasted no time launching the dinghy and going to shore, to check in with the officials and get Internet access.
In the port captain’s office on the long cement pier I made small talk while we got the paperwork done.
“We noticed many small black fish in the harbour as we came in,” I said. “There must be hundreds of them.”
“Thousands,” Kitty George, the port captain, replied.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right, thousands,” I agreed. “What are they?”
“We call them blackfish,” she said with a completely straight face.
“Of course,” I said, trying to remain serious, but wanting to giggle. “That makes sense.”
We purchased WiFi access from a humourless woman at The Obsidian, the island’s only hotel. We wrote an e-mail to a marine electronics dealer in the U.K. and ordered a brand-new autopilot, hoping we might be able to get it on the next flight.
Pleased with our efficiency, we went looking for something to eat. The hotel wouldn’t feed us because they needed several hours’ notice to prepare a meal. The saturnine proprietress sent us to a snack bar called The Saints.
“Do you have a lunch menu?” Nik asked over the counter.
“Today is chicken nuggets and french fries but we’re out of chicken nuggets,” came the reply.
“Okay, thanks. Maybe we’ll come back tomorrow,” Nik said.
“Tomorrow is tuna sandwiches and french fries,” the cook announced.
We learned that the next nearest place to get a meal was either the British RAF base, an eight-kilometre uphill walk, or the U.S. Air Force base, also a long walk from the wharf. Ascension wasn’t much of a tourist destination. It reminded us of a remote mining camp – not so much a place to live as a place to work. The population of eight hundred worked for the British government or the U.S. military. As a result, for people passing through, there was limited entertainment.
Sick of our own cooking and desperate for a meal, we bought two frozen pizzas at a little grocery shop, went back to the boat, ate pizza, drank beer, then slept for eleven hours straight.
We’d allotted five days for a stop at Ascension. We were keen to get our repairs done. The new autopilot would be shipped to the military airport in Bristol, England, spend two days clearing security, and then it would arrive on the semi-weekly flight. We anticipated a week-long wait – not bad, not too far off schedule.
But everything took longer than planned. It took five days just to finalize the order and another five days for the parcel to arrive in Bristol. There, it was placed on the manifest for a flight departing in six days’ time.
We made daily trips to shore, walking up the long cement wharf to the small cluster of buildings that were Georgetown, spending a small fortune (5 GBP per hour) at The Oblivion, to use their weak and intermittent WiFi to check progress.
The delay caused a series of inconveniences. We’d had to apply for permission to visit Ascension before we left St. Helena, and we’d already overstayed our permit. Two extensions to our Permit to Stay were required while we waited. We worried about our propane. We were more than halfway through our forty-pound supply and there was no LPG (liquid petroleum gas) for a thousand miles in any direction. Our credit card expired at the end of May. We’d expected to be in Trinidad by then to receive it, but the way things were looking, that wouldn’t be the case. We could feel our plans for an Ontario summer slipping away.
Worst of all, our delay wreaked havoc with our social life. Moonfleet had stayed on at Ascension hoping we could sail on together to Brazil. But when our delay became ever longer, we encouraged them to leave without us.
“We’ll see you in South America!” I shouted to Diane as we passed Moonfleet in our dinghy.
Diane and Alan were preparing to weigh anchor for departure.
“But we’ve been together for nearly two years!” she shouted back. “I hate to go without you!” She looked truly upset at our parting.
“Don’t worry, Diane!” Nik called back. “We’ll be right behind you. We’ll catch up to you somewhere, I know we will!”
Alan, the consummate captain, swung Moonfleet out of the anchorage as we went ashore to check e-mail.
Our optimism vanished at The Oblivion when we received the news that our shipment would be delayed another full week.
As we had on the Indian Ocean, we’d continued to operate a radio net on the Atlantic. It started with just the two of us, Moonfleet and Green Ghost, but by the time we reached Ascension we had a dozen boats on the roll call.
“Good morning, everyone. This is Green Ghost, Green Ghost, Charlie-Foxtrot-Golf Seven-Two-Three-Seven with the Atlantic Crossers’ Net. Is there any emergency traffic? Any emergency traffic come back now.” Pause. “Nothing heard. Let’s start the roll call. Eliana, Eliana, this is Green Ghost, Green Ghost, how copy?”
The comeback was barely discernible. We could tell it was Dave on Eliana responding to our call, but attempting conversation was fruitless – his voice was too faint to decipher. With our stationary existence, we were getting farther and farther away from our comrades travelling west.
Being left behind was hard on our hearts. Upon our arrival at Ascension almost every boat on the roster was behind us on passage. Over the course of our stay, every boat passed Ascension, some even arriving in Brazil while we sat stationary. By our last few days on the island, the fleet was so far west of us that we were having tremendous difficulty transmitting and receiving. It only made sense to transfer net control to the boats in the middle of the pack.
It was depressing that we had to give up the very net we’d started. It wasn’t a control thing. It was, after all, much easier to be the guy who called in than to be the guy who ran it. It was about the people. Time and time again on our journey we’d found that it wasn’t just about where you were. It was about the people you were with – and we were no longer with our people.
But we were slowly becoming Ascension Islanders.
When a poster at The Saints snack bar touted free dance lessons, we dinghied ashore in the dark. An Ascension Airline hostess had a thirty-six-hour turnaround and while she was there she gave salsa lessons. There were three of us in the class – us and a German guy on his way home from a conservation contract in the Falklands.
We squeezed the salsa lesson into our busy schedule of checking out the museum (open on Monday evenings and Saturday mornings only), seeing the fort, lunching at the Saints Club (too many french fries, too many times) and going to the beach with a conservation officer after dark to watch green turtles lay their eggs at the second largest nesting site in the world (the largest being in Costa Rica).
Each night in the anchorage, under starry skies we would hear the sharp exhalations of female turtles making the last few hundred metres of their long journey. They swam all the way from Brazil just to lay their eggs on the beach at Ascension.
Twice we shared a rental car with other cruisers and tried to make a day of it. Even though we drove every paved road on the island at the posted speed limit of thirty kilometres per hour and stopped once for coffee and another time for snacks, we’d done it all by two p.m. At about ten kilometres by thirteen kilometres, Ascension isn’t that big.
We watched the people, the vessels, and the turtles come and go. And we waited.
We’d been fortunate to have relatively good conditions, making our trips into the wharf reasonably easy for most of our stay, but the good conditions didn’t last. At times, a dangerous swell was present in the bay. The locals called them “rollers” and the port captain had warned us that when the rollers came in, the wharf was untenable, and we should not attempt to go ashore.
The difficulty in landing was one of the reasons many cruising yachts didn’t bother to stop at Ascension. Even on a gentle day, the broad Atlantic swell kept the water level in constant motion at the wharf’s side. You had to have your wits about you when you approached the cement structure in a small boat. Picking that sweet spot, that safe moment to step out of the dinghy between crest and trough, was not for the faint of heart.
While on Ascension we’d had the experience of coming into a dry wharf, the lower landing baking-hot in the sun, only to step out of the dinghy and get soaked to the knees without warning. Bare feet and shorts were a must.
We learned not to put items down on the landing. The safe thing to do was to unload one person (me) and then have the dinghy operator (Nik) hand over one item at a time. I would take each one, and scramble up five or six cement stairs before setting the item down safely high and dry on the wharf. It was a tricky process, transferring our backpacks, our computers, our cameras and shoes.
Even the emptied dinghy was in peril. We couldn’t leave it tied up adjacent to the wharf. It would’ve been damaged by abrasion from the up and down of the swell. A stern anchor had to be used to hold the dingy off the rough cement.
One day we were on shore for some mid-morning distractions when we saw a catamaran arrive in the anchorage. Later, we met the crew in the grocery store. The four sailors were from Brazil. They had stopped only to get water, refuel, resupply, and send e-mail. They carefully spent every last coin of their British currency at the shop, while their captain went off in search of Internet access.
A little later, when Nik and I wandered back down the wharf to head home we saw the Brazilians already there. From a distance, we could
see them walking down the cement staircase, all four of them, carrying all their goods to the dinghy landing.
“Uh-oh,” Nik said, and we quickened our pace.
As we reached the end of the pier we saw the four sailors crowded onto the small landing with their jerry cans of fresh water and fuel, and their bags of groceries as well. The captain was struggling to pull their dinghy alongside. The wharf was wet, which should have been a clue, but they were distracted with the task at hand and they were not paying attention to the sea.
“Um, you might want to …,” Nik began to warn them.
At that moment, a rogue swell rolled in, noiselessly rising up, engulfing the small wharf, and soaking the Brazilians thigh high. Then, the water receded, floating all their jerry cans and gathering up all their groceries in one wet sweep. Every single item was sucked into the sea.
There was chaos on the landing. Two Brazilians managed to jump in their dinghy. They struggled to get their outboard started. The jerry cans floated, partially submerged in the ocean. The grocery items spilled from their bags, canned items sinking, buoyant items bobbing in the swell. A pale head of cabbage bounced on the surface just briefly then disappeared in a dark swarm, a mob feeding frenzy of blackfish.
“I’m going in!” Nik shouted.
Not having access to our own dinghy with the Brazilians blocking the landing, Nik set down the bags he was carrying, threw down his backpack, tore off his T-shirt, kicked off his shoes, and dived in. He swam straight for the cabbage now twenty metres away. If there was one thing we knew, salad mattered. In a few powerful strokes Nik pounced on the produce. He grabbed the cabbage with one hand, tearing it away from the scavengers, triumphantly holding it high in the air. But he was too late. In those few seconds, the cabbage had been reduced to the size of a golf ball.
Nik looked at it, shook his head in disbelief, tossed what was left of it back to the blackfish, and swam for our dinghy. The would-be coleslaw was history – it was time to save the other items. In our own dinghy, Nik assisted the Brazilians in recovering their grocery bags and their jerry cans from the water.
Green Ghost, Blue Ocean Page 24