Turtles in Our Wake

by Sandra Clayton

  Then we run a safety line along each of the side decks and across the foredeck. Should it be necessary for one of us to go forward in a rough sea, we can clip our safety harness onto this line to prevent us from being washed overboard.

  It is also essential that no loose items are left on deck as they will either cause damage or be lost overboard. This includes fenders and after we leave the fuel dock they will be stored in a locker.

  After five weeks of waiting, when we do finally get our autopilot back it is accompanied by another large bill. When queried, the answer that is ultimately issued through the agent in Liverpool is that it wasn’t the same bit at fault as last time so we must pay all over again, plus the courier’s costs.

  But at last we are ready to set off. The only thing left to do now is notify our insurance broker. Yacht insurance is provided area-by-area and it is quite normal for yachtsmen to wait until they are about to set off before notifying their insurer that they are moving into a new area because the moment you do the premium changes. And when crossing the Atlantic, it doubles.

  We had told our insurance broker from the outset that our intention ultimately was to cross the Atlantic, so it comes as a great shock when we contact him about our departure to be told our present insurance company will not cover us for that. He then contacts a number of other insurers trying to get cover for us.

  The next blow is that some of them demand a minimum crew of three for a crossing, while some want as many as four, and that anyone taken on as crew has to be as experienced as we are. This presents a number of problems. One is the prospect of having one or more total strangers sharing your confined living space for weeks. Another is the logistics of the situation. You have to carry up to twice the amount of provisions.

  We are also working on the see-how-we-go, so-far-so-good-principle. We have not committed ourselves to the Caribbean. If we arrive at Madeira and decide that this is as far as we want to go, we can always return to the Mediterranean, but run the risk of a really resentful crew member or two who have their hearts set on reaching the Virgin Islands.

  And therein lies another problem. Once he gets to the Caribbean, the skipper of a yacht is held responsible for his crew. A ticket home must be provided to ensure that a crew member leaves when his visa expires. And if that crew member should, for instance, smash up a bar whilst in his cups, or perpetrate some other crime, the victim will be looking to that individual’s skipper for compensation.

  The last and perhaps most significant deterrent is not just sharing your personal space with a total stranger and then being financially responsible for him, but the calibre of the individual involved. Horror stories abound. Of people who are lazy, alcoholic, drug abusers, who eat so much there isn’t enough food left to complete the voyage comfortably, who display psychotic tendencies once out at sea, who bore you to death by talking incessantly about themselves and the probably apocryphal but nonetheless terrifying story of a crew member whose last two skippers failed to make it to the other side alive.

  Our options are limited because of a general reluctance to insure multi-hull boats anyway. In their early days, after the Second World War, catamarans gained a reputation for fragility and instability and a tendency to pitch pole or somersault. Since then the designers, builders and those who sail them have learned the lessons of that early period. While this seems to have changed the perception of catamarans in the rest of the world, the British yachting fraternity’s mental image of them has not moved on. Inevitably this has spilled over into the insurance industry.

  Finally, with our English broker unable to help us David finds a German company which, it turns out, insures a lot of boats on Atlantic crossings. He contacts their British office and they tell him in a casual, almost laid-back manner, that of course they can provide cover with just the two of us as crew; solo, if that’s what he wants. So, now, we are ready to go.

  The Atlantic Ocean

  50

  Leaving Gibraltar

  Gaz of the multiple tattoos and Zapata moustache rows out in his dinghy and lifts our stern anchor for us. Then we ease our way out from among all the other stern lines and leave the pontoon. We tie up at the fuel dock where the water around us is littered with a sickly green film of diesel, assorted refuse and what looks horribly like sewage. The young attendant looks at it too and says sadly how dirty the harbour has become since a new breakwater was built on the Spanish side of the border.

  ‘Nowadays the rubbish that comes in doesn’t leave again,’ he says. ‘It stays until it rots onto the bottom. It used to be lush green weed down there. Now it’s all black and dead.’

  We fill our tank with diesel, and a can with 2-stroke for our dinghy’s outboard. Then we stow our fenders and set off on our longest-ever passage: approximately 570 miles out into the Atlantic to Porto Santo, the nearest of the islands of the Madeira archipelago. We shall need to sail wherever possible as we have a 100-mile shortfall on fuel. We leave Gibraltar with the wind in our favour and all sails up.

  Our departure time has been carefully chosen to get the best tidal conditions in the Strait of Gibraltar. The millions of gallons of water which rush into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic daily, and which had carried us in so effortlessly a year ago, are inevitably pushing against us now as we navigate our way out. However, the current is presently at its weakest. We gain even greater advantage by hugging the Spanish coast, which not only keeps us out of the current’s main thrust, but also away from the very busy shipping lanes.

  We follow the coastline until about 4pm, by which time we are past the shipping lanes, then turn south-west and head for a point ten miles from Cape Sparte on the Moroccan coast. Two hours later we are passing Morocco and heading out into the Atlantic. We see our first gannet in months. There is now very little wind, however. So although we keep the sails up, we have to put the starboard engine on to maintain our course.

  Throughout the evening we pass a number of fishing boats, and Channel 16 constantly crackles with the voices of fishermen, in heavily-accented English, calling to one another, making jokes, laughing. We are surprised that they should be speaking English among themselves.

  I take the first watch, at 8pm. Sometime after 10pm and a long way off the Moroccan coast some small, white, distant lights appear. They don’t move and at first I assume they are fishing boats. I watch for some time and, although I cannot say why, I feel very uneasy. I can’t make sense of them and though I hate to get David up before time, especially on my first watch of a long passage, I go below and wake him. He doesn’t understand the lights either. The one closest to us finally reveals itself to be a buoy with a white light on it, although no buoys are shown on our chart. David changes course so that we go well to port of the end one, which is on our starboard side.

  Our engine stops suddenly, and so do we. David’s immediate response, after turning off the ignition, is to hang over the stern with a torch to look for some tell-tale sign of whatever has fouled the propeller, usually discarded fishing net. We can see nothing. We go forward and hang over the bow rails, and then stare over the beams, shining a torch into the water. Eerily we appear to have stopped dead. You don’t just stop dead at sea, even when your engine fails, and especially when you still have sail up.

  It takes a little while in the darkness before we spot a small brown circular fishing float below the water, behind Voyager’s beam on her port side, and follow a line of them forward until they disappear out of sight under her bow. It takes a little longer still to fully realise what this means.

  What it means is that our boat has become trapped in an enormous net.

  While staring at strange lights in the distance we have been sailing into the unlit section of a drift net; possibly, we discover later, as much as 20 miles long and fifty feet deep. Voyager’s bows have hit the top edge of it. With it caught around the front of her keels she has driven it ahead of her until the trailing netting has reached her props and stopped the engine. We take down the sails to pr
event us being carried any further into it.

  51

  The Net

  It is a calm night and we are in no immediate danger, but we need to free ourselves as soon as possible. We cannot see how we can do this alone. Going over the side in the dark into a huge net is not an option. The answer seems to be help from other boats, specifically those whose net it is, and who must have had this happen before. We can see the lights of several fishing boats beyond our stern, so we turn on our deck and cockpit lights to illuminate our boat and David puts out a call on the VHF. He gives our boat’s name, position, says we are trapped in a net and asks for help. From that moment on, there will not be another sound from the VHF.

  I make some tea and we sit in the cockpit and wait. We are ablaze with white light and stare out from its blinding glare into the surrounding darkness. After a while the lights of a fishing boat come towards us. We stand up and wait, but after travelling some distance and getting quite close to us it turns and goes away again. This happens several times. David puts out another call on the VHF giving our name, our position and asking for help to leave the net. Again we wait. After all the chatter of the earlier part of the night the silence since our first call has been unnerving.

  There are things you know intuitively and things that common sense makes self-evident. But some things need to be experienced before they reach the fundamental depths of your understanding. This night is when I fully comprehend how completely alone and dependent on each other two people on a boat at sea really are.

  After a while I go below and make coffee. As we sit drinking it we reassess our situation. Two hours have passed since we hit the net. No help is coming and we must decide what to do next. We can go on waiting for the boats which will come, sooner or later, to haul up the net or we can try and cut ourselves free from within the boat. The night is still calm, but if the wind should rise and the sea get rough we shall become even more entangled. If we are to free ourselves, the longer we leave it the more difficult it is likely to become. Or should we wait?

  We begin to wonder about our treatment at the hands of the fishermen when they find us in their net. Fishermen are famously hostile to yachtsmen. The fate of one in Gibraltar comes to mind. His trimaran, with a gaping hole in one of its hulls, had been tied up near our berth and we had read a local newspaper article about it. A fisherman had deliberately driven his trawler at the yacht and having crippled it tried to claim salvage rights for rescuing it. The salvage aspect suddenly hits us. We had not considered the possibility of losing our boat.

  The silence begins to seem ominous. Perhaps we have been foolish to wait so long.

  And then with a shock I remember Annie from Humberside, in the launderette at Alicante marina last year, telling me about the night she and her husband got caught in a drift net. It was a Saturday night, she had said, and the fishermen were all drunk. They surrounded us and fired flares at us. They were still burning when they landed on our deck. It went on for hours.

  ‘What day is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Saturday.’

  We look at each other in the brief silence that follows. Then I go and get the boat hook and David fetches the Stanley knife.

  It takes both of us to drag up a section of the net until it is high enough for David to reach it with the knife. It takes all my strength to hold it aloft while he cuts through it. It is hard to haul up because the boat is so tightly bound up in it, but it is even harder to cut. The rope edge, to which the nylon net is attached, and on which the circular brown floats are strung, is extremely tough. It takes us quite a while because each time we think we are free we find we are caught somewhere else.

  It is some time after 1am before Voyager is finally free. What slight breeze still exists is now on the nose but for once we are grateful because it means we can put up the main and reverse away from the net under sail. We do not dare put on an engine. We know the starboard propeller at least is entangled in the remnants of the net and unusable. We do not know if the port prop is also fouled, but it most likely is. If we try to use it, it will simply entangle it even more before that engine seizes up too.

  We then turn off our deck and cockpit lights and sail away, very slowly. There is so little wind, in fact, that at times we only manage one knot. We travel south, a direction which we hope is putting us parallel with the net and wonder if we shall have to continue on this course until daylight. After a while, however, a freighter crosses our path. When we see that it meets with no opposition we assume it is beyond the end of the net and we follow its course. Then David sends me to bed.

  By dawn we have covered only twelve miles. Stress and tiredness do strange things to your mental faculties and we become somewhat paranoid when a fishing boat ahead appears to be waiting for us. A man on deck eyeballs us. We stare ahead. It is probable that he is simply bemused as to why we are travelling so slowly. After a while he moves away.

  His is the only vessel about, so once he is out of sight David puts on his wet suit, we heave-to and he goes under the boat to have a look. Strangely, the starboard propeller, which is the one we had been using and which we expected to be badly fouled, has very little around it. The port prop, on the other hand, is a mass of netting. I pass him a knife.

  It is a long job for we have no oxygen tank aboard so he has to keep coming up for air. Then half his oxygen and quite a lot of energy are taken up in getting back down and underneath the boat again. In between times, he has to hold on with one hand and cut with the other while holding his breath.

  It is also a dangerous job. We are fortunate that the sea is still calm with only a slight swell running. That swell is enough, however, to repeatedly lift Voyager and bring her banging down on David’s head. On one dive he is a long time below. He has become entangled in the net and is unable to get back to the surface.

  ‘I would like to be able to say,’ he admits later, ‘that I reacted with calm calculation. But my knife was slashing everywhere. My biggest surprise was that I still had all my fingers and toes when I surfaced.’

  They are badly cut, however. Not by his knife, but by the nylon netting. It has also sliced through the wet suit to his skin. Eventually, however, both props are free. We are able to put on an engine and continue at normal speed.

  It never fails to surprise me how unsuspected strength, sustained effort or the ability to overcome fear or fatigue materialise when a situation demands it. When the job is done, however, exhaustion kicks in. Once back on deck David is almost too tired to move. I peel him out of his wet suit, help him get dry and send him to bed. The rest of Sunday is uneventful.

  52

  Lost Appetites

  Monday is pretty uneventful, too. An enormous moon rises at 3.22am with the sun’s flush on it, turning it pearly pink. We are alone in a vast empty sea, yet the circular horizon makes it look quite small and the moon seems only a couple of miles away.

  At 9am we start getting big rollers from the north which last for some hours. David loses all interest in food while I manage two dry biscuits and a cup of coffee for breakfast. By midday, however, I am ravenous. More than anything else I crave a bacon sandwich. I make one while David is in bed.

  We are both tired and when not on watch we go and lie down. When you sleep in three-and-a-half hour shifts it takes a while to get in your eight hours. Even then, sleep which is disturbed every few hours is not as refreshing as a continuous night’s rest. We also lost sleep through the drift net and it is vital that we recover our energy as soon as possible. Should we have another emergency we will need to be as fresh as possible to cope with it.

  After eating my bacon sandwich I open all the hatches and wash the frying pan so as not to turn David green when he gets up. I follow the sandwich with a slice of date and walnut cake and feel confident that I have gained my sea legs. By evening, however, another bout of rollers puts paid to any plans for a chicken pasta dinner. We have half a bread roll each with honey on it, and a cup of tea. Not surprisingly, you often end a long passag
e thinner than when you set out.

  The sun sets without much fanfare, but when it gets dark the stars are incredible. There is also phosphorescence on the water. I look down from the helm and watch it roll off our bow-wave and tumble down the side of the boat. It is evanescent. At the very moment that the sparkling silver lights appear, so they disappear, vanishing before you can fully focus on them and all you can do is let your eyes go slack and simply absorb the radiance.

  The only vessels we see all day are two tankers. Inevitably the three of us are on a collision course, but courses get changed and we pass safely. We see no other craft beyond a light on the horizon just before midnight.

  53

  Sleep Deprivation

  On Tuesday I do the 3–6.30am watch again. The stars are very bright, but the sea is misty and the radar is on. The moon rises at 4.37 behind our stern, pearly pink again like yesterday. Sometime later a light appears on the horizon directly behind us and I assume it is another tanker, although it does not appear on the radar.

  As it gets larger, however, it gets higher like the masthead light of an approaching yacht. It has still not appeared on the radar, however, and I become anxious that if it is not appearing on our screen, we may not be visible on theirs. And although many leisure boats do not have radar, this one must, since judging from the speed by which it is gaining on us it is a large and very powerful yacht. It is exactly on our course so I switch on our cockpit lamp to make sure that we can be clearly seen.

  The glow behind us keeps rising until it is so high that it finally dawns on me what I have been watching all this time and I switch off our cockpit lamp. It is not the masthead light of a super yacht that we have behind us. It is the Morning Star. For the past half hour or so I have been signalling a warning of our presence to the planet Venus.