Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  The day of leaving port is always the longest part of a journey. Landmarks along the coast ridicule a small sailboat’s progress. On the first day out you think about the miles ahead and the loneliness.

  Toward noon the wind picked up, not from the northeast as promised on the radio but from the southwest. It was coming from the direction I wanted to go.

  I taped: I never want to beat. If the wind is forward of the beam and fifteen knots or more, I say forget it. No use fighting this weather. I turned Dove about and headed back to Durban, making the twenty-five-mile return trip in a very fast three hours.

  Of course Patti was gone. The sun-washed, sparkling Durban that had welcomed me in October was now drab, cold, unfriendly. It was like returning to a house that had once been a well-loved home, but finding it empty, shuttered, smelling of mice and mildew. How weird, I thought, that one small girl could change the character and climate of a city.

  Late that afternoon I walked the beach and found the spot on the sand where we had had our “wedding.” The sand that had been warm and silken on that day was gray now, chilly to the touch.

  In the night the wind freshened to a gale, howling through the harbor and thrashing rigging against Dove’s mast—a miserable noise that lasted thirty-six hours. When I sailed again I had little better luck. The sea lanes were crowded with shipping forced around the Cape by the closure of the Suez Canal and I was obliged to stay awake at night to avoid collision. It was pretty hairy sailing. I hate taking pills, even aspirin, but I knew that to sleep for ten minutes could spell disaster, so I swallowed two Benzedrines and peered into the darkness, shifting the tiller whenever I saw or imagined a gray shape ahead.

  The wind rose to thirty knots and again came right out of the southwest. Scudding heavy clouds were a few hundred feet above the mast. On my second day at sea I reefed the sails and slept for perhaps three hours. When I awoke the land was out of sight. A current had taken me far out. I told the tape: Now I’m completely lost. I should be somewhere off the Wild Coast…but for all I know I might be off the South Pole.

  At Durban they had told me weird tales of ships vanishing without trace on this stretch of ocean between Durban and East London. The best-known story was the one about the Waratah, sailing for Australia in the last century with a large number of women aboard. She just vanished. One theory was that the ship had been wrecked on the Wild Coast, where the men had been murdered and the women seized—accounting for the light skins of the Pondo Africans in this area.

  On the fifth day out, without hope of finding my position from sun or stars, I was lucky to pick up a strong land beacon on my radio. By turning my radio to the strongest point of the signal I homed in on the coast and sailed past East London’s harbor wall on March 14.

  No sign of Patti. Her route would have taken her through the Transkei, the biggest of the native territories. With racial tension high, a white girl alone on a motorcycle could well have been attacked. I trudged to a police station, where a heavy-jowled sergeant at the desk grunted negatives to my inquiries about road accidents. Miserably I returned to Dove.

  That night I had a horrible and vivid dream. I saw Patti crumpled up in a ditch, beside her the twisted frame of Elsa. So clear was the dream that I saw her blood-wettened hair across her face, her fingers stiff and curled, the ring clearly on her finger. I awakened shivering, cursing the sense of duty which had compelled me to sail on alone.

  Of course it was only a dream. When the sun was up I walked down the seafront esplanade and we saw each other when five hundred yards were still between us. Both of us began to run. The shipping people had told her that the storm would delay me two more days.

  It took ten days before I could summon courage to sail again. It wasn’t that I feared the sea but the moment of our parting. I told Patti, “If I were stronger I wouldn’t need you the way I do.”

  She never tried to hold me back. She never clung to my body or my spirit. She was there when I needed her, but ready to free me the moment I was ready to sail on. This time, though, before riding out of town Patti waited on the harbor wall to be sure that Dove was heading westward along the coast. Dove had barely hit the swells outside East London’s harbor when the wind veered to the southwest. I turned back into port once again and Patti helped me tie up Dove for another night. Next day the northeaster held and Dove took only thirty-six hours for the short leg to Port Elizabeth.

  Simply knowing that Patti would be ahead of me and waiting at quayside, wharf or on the cliffs along the coast kept me sailing through some of the most discouraging weather I had struck. Home now was where Patti was, and Patti was always a port ahead.

  Twice I tried to leave Port Elizabeth and twice I failed as the wind swung the compass around to my bow. The third time out, I still had to beat against a southwest wind. I began to think this was an omen, a sort of warning to stop my global voyage. Suddenly the idea struck me that one sure way to end the voyage was to wreck the boat deliberately.

  It would be simple enough to blow up the life raft, scuttle Dove and then paddle to the shore. My mind had already half written the letters I would send home—the story of how Dove must have hit some rock or hidden wreck and foundered, and how happily I had been close enough to shore to save my life. Never again would I have to face the cruel gray sea alone.

  In a frenzy of energy I collected my passport, documents, logbook and money and packed them into the raft.

  In now confessing this planned deception I would like to be able to claim that a sense of honor eventually prevailed and dissuaded me at the last moment from completing the sabotage. But that would be substituting one lie for another. It was not honor that intervened, but a sudden change of wind. I was within seconds of wrecking Dove and abandoning her to the ocean bottom when the wind backed to the north and then to the northeast—a freak and sudden change I’d never experienced on this coast before. The sails filled at once and white water spewed from Dove’s southwest-bound bow.

  I have not before told anyone about this sabotage plan which failed. It is hard enough to confess it now. I do so only because I now believe that nature’s intervention was designed, related in a way (that some will understand and others cynically reject) to the sudden calming of the sea that saved my life in the great storm off Malagasy.

  So through a freak wind (or special blessing) I made the journey to Plettenbergbaai and because there were no docking facilities I anchored Dove two hundred yards off the boiling surf. I searched the beach through my binoculars and in a moment focused on a young girl standing quite alone, a girl in blue jeans, her hands shielding her eyes against the glare, her wheaten hair streaming in the wind.

  From the beach Patti watched me launch Dove’s small dinghy and paddle shoreward. She saw the swell gather up and arc behind me and then catch the dinghy in its crest. The dinghy somersaulted and as I was hurled into the surf Patti ran to the water’s edge and helped pull me up the beach—a soaked and shivering and very lucky sailor. We salvaged the dinghy too.

  “And now,” I said as I gasped for air, “what about some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

  Patti had found a small room overlooking the bay of this small and beautiful resort. She undressed me and dried me down, but I have no memory of going to bed. I slept for eighteen hours straight and was awakened by a furious pounding on the bedroom door.

  Some Cape Colored fishermen had come to tell me that Dove was dragging and would soon be on the rocks. On arriving at Plet (as the locals call it) I had expected the onshore gale and had put out enough chain and line to give two anchors four hundred feet of scope. But against a raging sea this anchorage was not enough.

  Still buttoning my pants, I reached the beach. Dove was clearly in the gravest peril. The fishermen gathered around and gave me advice. Even their sturdy powered boats could not cope with the thundering breakers.

  The boat I had planned to wreck three days earlier was now about to destroy itself unless I could do something about it in a hurry.
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br />   The one hope was to swim through the angry surf. The sea felt cold enough for ice floes and it took me fifteen minutes and all my strength to reach Dove’s rolling gunwale. For a while I simply clung to the side, unable to muster the extra energy to heave myself aboard. Realizing that I would soon simply freeze to death, I found a reserve of strength to scramble to the deck.

  One of the two anchor lines had parted, which was why Dove was dragging. The other three-quarter-inch nylon was stretching like a rubber band. If this snapped, as it could do at any moment, the whiplash would make fishbait of my entrails. I went below and got out my big anchor and gave it all the chain I had. The wind was howling like a hundred jackals. A diver in a wetsuit swam out to help. Between us we were able to set Dove’s heaviest ground tackle.

  There wasn’t anything else to do. Dove would have to battle out the storm alone. I gave her little hope, and I filled a plastic bag with all my important papers and my money (about one hundred dollars), tied a life preserver around my chest and dived overboard. Without the life preserver I wouldn’t have made the shore.

  Once again Patti dried me off, and she massaged my back, which I’d strained when carrying the heavy anchor across a heaving deck. This time I could not sleep, because I worried about Dove fighting for her life.

  The storm lasted two full days and nights, but the anchors held. When I swam out to Dove again I was really proud of her. The boat had a courage of her own and, wounded though she was (the anchor’s rope had ripped away five feet of toe rail), she had come through without my help. The decks were again leaking where they joined the hull. The cabin was a mess. My little radio looked as if it had been a monkey’s toy.

  While the wind remained in the wrong quarter there was a chance to see this stretch of coast and make friends with the Colored fishermen. On Saturday night they drank themselves under the table, but on Sunday, dressed in starched shirts, their women in flowered hats, they took us to their little whitewashed church. I was surprised to find that all races worshiped here together. They seemed to forget for an hour or so each week the apartheid which causes so much bitterness.

  We found kindness everywhere. A group of white women had organized a nonprofit store where the poorest Coloreds could buy staple foods for prices well within their budgets. But the poorest Afrikaners were too proud to buy there. Some politicians had told them they should not mix with those who had darker skins. It was crazy to see how racial issues had been used by the politicians. It seemed to us that unless all South Africans, black, white and brown, began to see each other as fellowmen with common needs, there’d be real danger of bloodshed in their lovely land.

  The bell of the little whitewashed church was calling the faithful to the Easter Sunday service on the day I sailed again—this time only forty miles to Knysna. The entrance to Knysna harbor is one of the loveliest in the world and, with its narrow, rocky gateway and huge swells, one of the most dangerous. Patti had arrived ahead of me on Elsa. Next day we hitched a ride to Cape Town to see if there was any mail. There was, and among the letters was one from my parents saying they had had second thoughts about my marrying Patti.

  It didn’t matter now because except for “that little piece of paper” we had been man and wife for several months.

  Leaving Knysna on April 25 remains one of the special memories of my voyage. Patti had climbed high up on the cliffs overlooking the narrow harbor entrance. She waved down to me four hundred feet below. She had become a good photographer and from her high position took one of the best pictures of Dove, showing the tiny craft against a great rampart of rocks and heading for the open sea.

  It always hurt so much to leave Patti behind. We weren’t like an American suburban couple kissing on the doorstep before the husband joins the snake of traffic to his downtown office and the wife returns to her kitchen to wash up the breakfast things. With us there was always the chance of not seeing each other again. I don’t want to overplay the danger, but sailing along the South African coast against the prevailing wind and in a season when storms blow up in minutes wasn’t, as they put it in South Africa, “everyone’s cup of tea.” The headlands here and hidden rocks have wrecked a fleet of ships, ranging from great ocean liners to boats as small as Dove. Few coastlines in the world have more stories of disaster—and of heroism too. I had just been reading the account of the sinking of the Birkenhead, one of the most stirring of all the tales of the sea.

  In 1852, not far from where Dove was now sailing, the Birkenhead, an iron paddle steamer of about two thousand tons, had struck the pinnacle of rock called Danger Point. The rock ripped her hull and in twenty minutes she broke in two and sank. Of the 638 aboard, mostly young British soldiers going to the Kaffir Wars, only 184 were saved. The Birkenhead disaster is remembered because every woman and child was saved. The men stood on the deck in line, knowing that most of them were going to drown, while the women and children filled the boats. Copies of Thomas Hemy’s famous Birkenhead picture of a boy drummer beating a final salute to his comrades was hung in the nurseries of Victorian England and children were told that this was the discipline and courage which had created the British Empire.

  Each time I went to sea now it was not for myself I feared. I worried what Patti would do if Dove simply failed to turn up at the next port. Dove wasn’t really seaworthy any longer, and a storm could quickly find her weakness—especially at the places where the deck had separated from the hull. A big wave could crush the deck like cardboard. If this were to happen she would sink in seconds.

  My plan on sailing out from Knysna was to slip around the southernmost point of Africa, Cape Agulhas (many people wrongly think that the Cape of Good Hope is the southernmost point). Once around Agulhas, the return to California would be, as I told my tape, “all downhill.”

  Patti rode the motorcycle to Gordon’s Bay. I told her to watch out for me in three days. My first few miles in Dove proved easy sailing. The wind was on the port quarter. But the second day out the wind came around to the southwest again. By tacking I managed to make eighty-three miles in three days.

  I told the tape recorder: Oh, man! This is absolutely stupid! I’ve made thirteen miles in the last thirteen hours!

  I pulled into Stilbaai, which is sheltered from the west, to take some sleep. Next morning I tried once again to beat into the wind. That night I could see the lights of Cape Agulhas, still forty-four miles away, bouncing off the bottoms of low clouds, then at dawn the radio crackled a gale warning.

  This was what I most feared. I scooted into Struisbaai, just short of Cape Agulhas, and dropped anchor in the nick of time. An absolute fury of a wind roared and wailed about my head for a full week, and although bare-poled Dove was protected by the land, she pitched and rolled, and even at anchor was taking quite a beating. Now I was short of food and the huge breakers hitting the coast made it impossible to get ashore in my six-foot dinghy. Actually there was a real danger of the anchor line parting and of Dove being blown out to sea.

  Into the tape recorder I protested: Wouldn’t be surprised if the whole stupid boat doesn’t simply fall apart any minute…. Just lost my coffee pot over the side and I am trying to make some more by boiling percolator coffee in a pan. It tastes like sand. At least it’s warm…. My good food is all gone and I’ll have to eat from the rusty cans left over from the Solomons…. Oh, man, what a bore this is! Patti must be really worried…. Just had some awful soup and will probably get ptomaine or something. I’m just existing….

  A fishing boat riding out the storm with Dove came up alongside and the skipper generously threw me a fish. The change of diet helped boost my morale. To pass the time I began to make a pair of leather sandals for Patti.

  On the eleventh day after leaving Knysna a red-painted aircraft dipped overhead, and toward evening of that day the sound of voices brought me up on deck. Another fishing boat was alongside. Shouting into the wind, the skipper asked, “Where’s your wife?”

  I’d run out of both humor and old grocerie
s. “What business is it of yours? She’s in Gordon’s Bay,” I yelled.

  The skipper grinned as Patti appeared on the fishing boat’s deck. “Oh, no I’m not,” she laughed.

  When Patti had arrived in Gordon’s Bay she’d guessed I’d been delayed by bad weather, but when ten days had passed without any word of me she was really troubled. She had thought of riding back down the coast to look for a sail or wreckage and was about to set off when the associate editor of National Geographic, Gilbert Grosvenor, turned up at Gordon’s Bay. He had come from Washington to help me revise my first story for the magazine.

  Gil had heard that we were married. When he was looking for me someone had casually spoken of Mrs. Graham. This surprised him. Patti did not want to create another scene like the one in Darwin so she thought it was best to tell him the full story. Patti thought Gil looked like the kind of person who would understand and besides she was so concerned about my safety that she felt he might be helpful in finding out where I was.

  Gil did understand our situation very well and was quite satisfied when Patti told him that I planned to continue my voyage single-handed. In fact he suggested that the National Geographic articles would gain by the inclusion of a piece about my falling in love with a California girl. But he was worried as well that I had apparently vanished in the week-long storm and he immediately arranged for a search plane to scour the coastline. This was the red-colored aircraft I’d seen. The pilot had spotted me and reported back to Patti and Gil that I was holed out in Struisbaai. Gil then rented a car and brought Patti down the coast for our unexpected and marvelous reunion.

  Pretty soon after Patti had turned up on the fishing boat the storm died down and we all went ashore. We stayed in a small hotel and for the next five days Gil and I revised the manuscript.

  Then I returned to Dove and, running before a fresh easterly, sailed around Africa’s southernmost tip and anchored within the breakwater of Gordon’s Bay.