Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  My last vivid picture of Darwin on July 6, 1967, was my father and Patti standing very close together on the wharf; my father short, wearing glasses, wiry, rather tight-jawed; and beside him Patti—slim, the wind catching at her skirt and hair.

  We were bound together, the three of us, by bonds that none had the power to break. Both of them loved me, this I knew, but in such different ways: the one with a possessive love and believing he knew best just what was right for me and what was wrong; the other free and trusting. Patti was sure that there was order in the pattern of our lives—and that somewhere still beyond her vision we would find each other once again. I trusted Patti’s faith.

  My father and Patti were still on the wharf together when the morning mist and distance merged them with the light and shadows of the harbor. As I tried to recapture the memory of their faces and farewells, my love for them inexplicably merged too.

  Then loneliness again. The old enemy had slithered aboard while my back was turned and my defenses down.

  We are all made differently, of course. There are some of us whose peaks of happiness are higher and whose depression reaches deeper than the happiness and depression of others who cannot shout with joy or who never lose their cool. As for me, if I see grass greener than other people, if I hear sounds that they don’t hear, then the price I pay is in periods of frustration and loneliness. As I left Darwin, Dove sailing wing and wing, my morale touched bottom.

  Self-pity earns no credit, and I did not wallow in it too long because a gusty wind and whitecaps kept me busy with both sails and helm. My navigation had to be good if I was to find the tiny Cocos islands, 1,900 miles away.

  Soon the color of the sea began to change from the pea green of the shallows to a deep blue. The thermometer dropped too. Two sweaters and a windbreaker failed to protect me from a rash of goose pimples.

  Before I left the shallower water, the porpoises paid a call, grinning as they dived about the boat; and I had my own orchestra aboard—a family of crickets were cabin stowaways. Avanga pricked up his ears and tried to track them down.

  Trade winds gave me good progress, and I averaged about one hundred miles a day. The job at Darwin had given me fresh initiative and I worked at projects such as making a pair of leather sandals, tying patterned rope belts and taking pictures. I fixed a camera fore or aft, tied a string to it and tripped the shutter from the other end of the boat. After Patti’s cooking my meals were a bit of a bore, but I got a change of diet when flying fish and squid landed on the deck. Avanga always beat me to the catch, but there was usually enough for both of us.

  I had hoped to make the Cocos isles in two weeks. It was eighteen days before they broke the horizon—almost seventy years to the hour after Joshua Slocum had raised their palm-fringed shores. As it had Slocum, the sight “thrilled me as an electric shock.” Spray’s lone sailor had noted in his journal: “I was trembling under the strangest sensations…and to folks in a parlor on the shore this may seem weak indeed.”

  Six Australians were living on Direction Isle, one of the Cocos group, and they made up an air-sea rescue team, especially for the Qantas and South African Airways airliners which fly the long hop over the Indian Ocean. The Australians took me fishing and swapped my dead battery for a heavy-duty battery from their stores. They were nice guys.

  I had wanted to visit the island inhabited by the great-great-grandchildren of John Clunies Ross, the Scots sea captain who had settled the atoll in 1827. In 1814 Captain Ross arrived at the Cocos with his wife, children, mother-in-law and eight sailors to take possession, but found that a man called Alexander Hare had settled there with forty Malay women. Ross and his sailors decided to oust the settlers. Putting up little resistance, Hare retreated with his women to the smallest of the group, still called Prison Island. The channel between the islands was narrow and the lusty sailors wore long boots. The women deserted Hare and the sailors greeted them enthusiastically.

  Special permission was needed to visit the island, and as I had no permit I couldn’t pay my respects to the 450 offspring of John Clunies Ross and his sailors. Although the islanders are inbred, today’s community has found an idyllic life style. Civilized states might note that no one on the island remembers when the last crime was committed there, and that when a young couple are married they are given a house, a boat and a sewing machine by the community.

  On August 1 I left the Cocos minus my one passenger. After eating up the crickets, Avanga seemed to consider me his next victim. The cat, I had decided, was really crazy. My legs and arms were covered with his scratches. It was time to split, and when one of the Australians offered to tame him I handed over Avanga without a whimper. I suspect Avanga attempted a coup d’etat among the island’s feline community and I bet he got a dictator’s deserts. I was sad, though, to hear a report on the day I sailed that the body of a cat fitting Avanga’s description had been found floating in the surf.

  Eighteen hours out of the Cocos islands I was hit by squalls. I was exposing too much canvas for the wind. At two-thirty in the morning I was sleeping in the quarter bunk when I was awakened by a weird rumbling noise. At first I thought I had hit a floating log or had scraped the top of an uncharted reef. Bounding topside, I found there was nothing on the deck at all. The mast had gone and Dove had been swept almost as clean as a rowboat.

  Later I told my tape recorder: The mast has been knocked down into the sea. It didn’t break but bent over six feet off the deck and two feet below the old weld. Everything was in the water except the part of the mast which lay athwart the deck. I’d been wearing my lifeline harness while sleeping. When I came on deck I detached the harness because it was rigged to the boom, which was overboard. I struggled, getting myself all cut up, to clear the lines and get the mast and rigging back aboard and lashed down. Suddenly the boat lurched and for the first time in my life I fell overboard at sea—and without my lifeline.

  If Dove had been under way I would soon have been food for sharks, but within seconds—quite long enough—I was able to grab the rail and heave myself aboard. The water was fairly warm but rain and wind made me shiver. It took me two hours in the darkness to heave aboard the sodden sails and boom. I hacked free the twice-broken mast and let it sink to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

  I returned to the cabin and sat there shivering. Slowly I began to see that I was in real trouble. Up to then I hadn’t been too worried because I’d been far too busy. Now my muscles ached and I couldn’t go to sleep as I thought of the mess I was in. Dove just bobbed up and down on the choppy sea. It was then that I remembered how at Samoa I had forgotten the old sailor’s superstition that a coin must be placed under a mast when stepping it. A wise sailor doesn’t defy superstition.

  Dawn seemed to take an awfully long time to come, but when it did I felt better. At least I had a cooler head and I began to think seriously what to do next.

  Wind and current were behind me, so there was no hope of turning back to the Cocos isles. Mauritius lay 2,300 miles ahead—across an ocean in which many shipwrecked people had died of thirst and hunger. Dove carried provisions and fresh water for many months. My best chance, I decided, was a jury rig and the hope of good trade winds. Of course, if the winds failed I could drift in this ocean until they found my bones.

  Fixing up the jury rig by stepping the boom with two shrouds, one backstay and one forestay, was a tough job. Dove now looked like a cork boat that kids sail on a duck pond. But the wind filled the shortened mainsail and I took heart as I saw white water at the bow. Wretched weather continued but the twenty-five-knot wind kept on my tail. To increase speed and to balance the boat, I sewed a small square sail from a bed sheet and attached it to the forestay. The wind soon tore this to shreds so I fixed up a second foresail with my yellow awning, patching a tear with a hand towel and a shirt.

  Jury-rigged Dove would not now win a trophy for grace and glamour, but I was thrilled when my taffrail log recorded one hundred miles a day. Danger was ever present, and jibi
ng was a problem. Several times big seas threw half a ton of water into the cockpit. Pumping the bilge kept my circulation going on chilly nights.

  It wasn’t all fun and games. On August 7 I taped: A few minutes ago a huge wave broke over the side. I saw green water through the porthole for the second time at sea. My knees are still shaking. There’s a lot of water in the cabin.

  Then the next day I recorded: I was taking a noon sun sight when I heard a big bang. Another wave crashed aboard, soaking me and my sextant. This trip is getting to me. I felt like throwing the sextant right through the wind vane, but I thought I’d better not.

  After nineteen days at sea I knew I should be somewhere near the island of Rodriguez and was worried in case I might run into it at night. Fortunately there was a moon and I stood on the overturned dinghy strapped to the cabin roof and peered at the horizon. Then in the early morning I saw it and taped: There she is, a long, solid piece of land about twenty miles away, I guess.

  I was tempted to pull into Rodriguez harbor, but the thought of Patti waiting for me in Mauritius kept me going westward. Five days later I told the tape recorder: Wow! I’m right on course! I’ve waited so long to see Mauritius. Now I know my navigation isn’t too bad. What a marvelous sight to see the island lift up out of the water, so green and round. It’s taken me twenty-four days to get here—and that is the time I figured I’d take with a full rig.

  When I was tied up at Port Louis harbor a dozen deep-water vagabonds, including Shireen and Mother of Pearl from England, Edward Bear and Bona Dea from New Zealand, Corsair II from South Africa and Ohra from Australia, called in. Dove was tattered and battered—a proud little hobo among these sleek craft. But what a reunion party we had among old friends!

  Patti wasn’t there. From Melbourne she had tried in vain to find a boat bound for Mauritius. She had not had enough money for the air fare. Eventually she settled for an Italian ship returning disgruntled Australian immigrants to Europe via the Cape. Her letter said she would be waiting for me in Durban, South Africa.

  That was a big disappointment, but there was enough work to keep me busy. National Geographic didn’t want me to wait out the hurricane season and within two weeks they air-freighted a new aluminum mast in two parts.

  Mauritius is the setting of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s marvelous love story of Paul and Virginia, the children who grew up “knowing the hours of the day by the shadows of the trees, the seasons by the times which gave them flowers and fruits, and the years by the number of their harvests.”

  The story of Paul and Virginia reminded me of the time Patti and I had spent in the Yasawa islands, and I allowed myself to dream that one day we would again find the place and time “to learn the names of plants and birds and everything that had life in our valley…learn how to make everything necessary to the life of man,…and accomplish all these works with good temper which comes from health, open air and the absence of worry.”

  Sugar-rich Mauritius with its French atmosphere is utterly lovely with its blue lagoons and green hills. But it seemed to have lost the secret of the good life. While I was there the politicians were stumping on the eve of independence from Britain. Racial tension among the mixed population—whites, Indians, Creoles and Chinese—forewarned an uneasy future.

  This time I was very careful to put a new coin under the mast at the stepping party on Dove. The coin was a Mauritian fifty-cent piece. So many guests clambered aboard that water began to flood my self-bailing cockpit. I chased off the guests while I plugged the scuppers, and then we resumed the party.

  Waiting for the mast to arrive from America gave me the chance to backtrack with a new friend on an expedition to Rodriguez, a pearl of an island. Then on September 30 I sailed new-masted Dove to Réunion, eighty-five miles away.

  Each of these Indian Ocean islands seemed to me to be lovelier than the last. I scented the flowers of Réunion as soon as I sighted its peaks, which rake the skyline. Perfume is one of the main exports of this tiny French possession. Geraniums, ilangilang and vetiver provide the special oils. They say that when Frenchmen go to Réunion to die they find life so wonderful they live to a great age. I’m not surprised!

  On October 4, in company with the yachts Bona Dea and Ohra, I sailed southwest for Durban, 1,450 miles away. Knowing Patti would be there, I put out all my canvas. For three days the seas were calm, the airs were light. It was the calm before the storm. While I was asleep in the first light of October 8, the wind veered to the west and a different wave pattern on the hull awoke me. Just as well. My compass showed Dove had swung about and was going due east.

  This was a day of a strange uneasy feeling. I could not pin down the cause. The new mast looked sturdy enough and I was making good progress, even against a three-knot current. But there was something wrong. Slowly my mind began to focus on Patti. I felt somehow that she was in trouble. I was not to discover the cause of my worry for many days—some of the longest of my life.

  Extrasensory perception is not my bag. But perhaps when two people are very close they can transmit waves without material or scientific aid.

  On the day of my anxiety (I was to discover later) Patti was with friends in Durban awaiting my arrival. When the morning paper arrived her host pointed to a newspaper story. The paragraph was short. It stated simply that the yacht Dove had foundered off the island of Réunion and that nothing was known of her one-man crew.

  Patti’s first shock was awful. But, as she told me later, she never believed the report. She had gone at once to the newspaper. The editorial staff were sympathetic and helpful and tried to check the accuracy of the story. Cables to Réunion didn’t help. No one seemed to know anything.

  Patti went back to her friends, who tactfully left her alone with her thoughts. In spite of the evidence Patti again put her faith in that strange intuition which had saved her life in Mexico. Her eyes told her I was dead. Her heart told her I still lived.

  Her friends thought she was being brave. For nine days Patti lived through a hell of doubt but never lost her inner conviction that we would meet again.

  I was now alone at sea, separated by winds, currents and darkness from the yachts that had left with me from Réunion.

  The report of Dove’s foundering came close to the truth. On the seventh day at sea I passed within seventy-five miles of Malagasy (Madagascar). I was reading a book, The Ugly American, when I noticed out on the horizon a weird black squall and as a precaution I reefed the main and genoa. At the southern point of Malagasy I had expected rougher weather from seas sweeping down through the Mozambique Channel. These seas have sent many ships to the bottom.

  As a further precaution I put out warp, 150 feet of three-quarter-inch nylon looped in the water astern. The warp would help keep Dove’s stern to the seas. The wind increased, and even under a jib reefed to the size of a dish towel Dove moved over the bottom at three knots.

  Up to now in my voyage I had wrestled with the wind. Now I began to worry about the sea. I told the tape recorder: Seas are towering thirty to forty feet but the warp is helping me to keep on course. Dove’s not yawing very much. But there’s too much water coming aboard. When I get to South Africa I’ll have to board over the cockpit.

  That night the wind reached force nine. Huge swells kept on banging into the stern. I had experienced nothing like this before. The crests of the swells were curling into combers and often smashed into my back.

  As Dove climbed up and slid down their boiling sides she began to shudder and groan as if the hull were made of timber. I reefed the jib to the size of a handkerchief—just enough canvas to keep her on course. There was no chance to sleep.

  Next morning the storm was worse. Dove wallowed in mountainous seas. There was now a real danger of pitchpolling. I was unsafe on deck because a comber could throw me over the side and I was miserable below. But I went below and tried to read. That was when a huge sea crashed into Dove.

  A little later I taped: I really thought she was capsizing. Flying obje
cts hit me. Everything loose was hurled about the cabin. When she righted herself I found everything forward had been thrown aft and everything aft had been thrown forward. Something solid dented my barometer case mounted near the cabin roof. The sea broke into a porthole and green water poured into the cabin.

  If another big sea had hit Dove at that moment I think she would have foundered. I had to get that porthole fixed in a hurry. It was quite a job. With the boat pitching and rolling I had to undo screws, wedge the plexiglass back into its frame and then screw it in again. I don’t know how long the task took me—perhaps no more than ten minutes—but it seemed like an hour. All the time I was waiting for another big sea to smash into the boat.

  The biggest swells, fifty feet or more, came at Dove in a series of three or seven and they were followed by lesser swells of twenty feet. The sea behaved like a boxer between rounds, panting and resting, gathering strength for the next attack. The surface would sort of suck and swirl and then lash out again, with hissing whitecaps pouring water across the deck and cockpit.

  In the fading light of the second day of the storm the swells appeared to be living things, bullying, cruel, determined for the kill. Above the noise of the storm I could hear water sloshing about in the bilge beneath my feet. The cabin was soaked, the deck a mess. The cockpit was filled with water and my water bottles, which I had stored there, were in danger of being washed away. The spray dodger was badly ripped and the companionway doors had been cracked with the force of the combers.

  Dove seemed to weary as the storm progressed. She groaned and protested all the time. Every now and then I would stand up and grab the boom to search the horizon for some clearing of the weather.

  In a sea like this the real danger was not so much that the boat would be swamped, unless the portholes were forced again. Oceangoing yachts are built for heavy seas. They are buoyant enough to take several tons of water aboard. Dove was deep-keeled for her size and with everything battened down she could ride these waves as long as I had strength to keep her stern toward them. The real danger was that after sliding down a sea her bow would plow into the bottom of the trough. The boat would then pitchpoll, and corkscrew under the water.