Our brief bout of windward work had exposed another of Ocean Mermaid’s shortcomings. Right amidships she had a huge saloon. The muted lighting reflecting off the gleaming teak-and-holly cabin sole must have looked wonderful in Antigua or a Mediterranean port with the anchor down and stern lines securely tied to the dock. But this vast, varnished area had very few handholds and, with just a few drops of water leaked onto it, the saloon became a 7-square-metre varnished teak-and-holly skating rink. Most of us went for a slithering skate across the saloon at some stage, and we damaged some of the exquisite joinery on the way through. I could see, by the thoughtful look on Quentin’s face, that it was something they hadn’t thought about when the boat was a-building.
Ocean Mermaid’s 71-foot sister ships were built with a big transom stern which gives buoyancy aft. The extra footage added to our stern finished in a very shapely little transom that must have inspired more than a few admiring gasps in the Mediterranean, but just didn’t provide the lift needed to crest the big southern greybeards. Valves to isolate the main engine and generator exhausts protruded through the original transom into the poky lazarette and, to allow access to them, we’d lashed half a dozen or so fenders to the stainless-steel pushpit railing. The first Southern Ocean storm dumped a mass of water over the stern, encountered the resistance of the fenders, and reduced the stout 30-millimetre railing to stainless-steel spaghetti on deck.
October, or even November, is a little early for any yacht looking for a comfortable traverse of the great ocean. A series of storm fronts came through, with the saving grace that they were always from the west. We came to recognize the symptoms: the building swell, leaden sky and a barometer that fell so fast you could almost follow its descent with the naked eye. Several times the Brookes & Gatehouse anemometer readout was pegged at its 75-knot maximum, and the real wind must have reached 100 knots. It was impossible to face upwind — the wind blew your eyes and nose closed, your mouth open. Salt spray and water blasted your face. We steered Ocean Mermaid by instinct, under bare masts and keeping her stern to the great waves that towered from the sea behind us.
At night, watchkeepers soon became accustomed to the momentary lull in the wind as it was blanketed by a wave roiling up astern, followed by the gradual, inexorable rise of the stern to meet it and a brief, exhilarating surf, surrounded by crashing white water, as Ocean Mermaid ran with it. At about 2 a.m. one day, as I hunched at the helm, what felt like just another wave came up astern. The boat rose to meet it — and rose … and rose. I was jerked instantly into full adrenaline-pumping awareness. That wave must have been 20 to 30 metres high. Ocean Mermaid took off the crest of it like a 50-tonne surfboard. I desperately pumped the wheel, just hoping that I was doing the right thing — one small miscalculation would put us beam on, then rolled, bowled and buggered. Ocean Mermaid raced through a canyon of water, metres high, on either side. She was going so fast that the hydraulic brake, which prevented the prop shaft from spinning while we sailed, burned out and left the propeller shaft free to spin at high speed. Ocean Mermaid, hull and rig, vibrated like an electric guitar during a power surge and off-watch crew started clamouring at the hatch to know what was happening.
Within seconds — that all seemed like long minutes — the monster wave had swept past and continued its inexorable charge towards Cape Horn. I felt washed out and desperately needed a pee. People patted me on the back and said ‘well done’ or ‘thanks’ as I stumbled forward to the head in a daze.
For days we ran on dead-reckoning because it was too cloudy for sun sights. Occasional glimpses of a fuzzy orb in the sky would bring Quentin or Graham on deck, sextant in hand, and a position line on the chart a few minutes later, sometimes with a question mark alongside it.
The HF radio sometimes picked up the race radio schedule for boats competing in the Whitbread Round the World race which had left Cape Town for Auckland at the same time we’d departed New Zealand. It was comforting to hear that they were getting hammered too — but sobering to think that the weather which was hammering them would soon catch up with us.
I often talked with Quentin as we kept watch. His family home was called Farleigh House, set in 3500 acres of family land in the south of England, and he complained about the cost of maintaining the art treasures that were kept there: climate and humidity control, full-time curators and security. Being a natural democrat and having a New Zealander’s innate egalitarianism, I suggested that he hang the paintings on the walls and get people to pay to come and see them. He looked at me as though I’d gone crazy. ‘You can’t do that,’ he blustered. ‘Most of them don’t know what they’re looking at. You have to be trained from birth to appreciate those sorts of things — you can’t let every Tom, Dick or Harry look at them.’ He was 28 years old, and I was a year or two younger. I still don’t understand how anyone could think like that.
On another occasion, a Sunday morning, we were discussing what we did at home on Sunday morning. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I take breakfast in bed with the Sunday papers. I always have bacon and eggs — if they bring me anything else, I send it straight back.’ It made my traditional plate of Weetbix seem a bit bland, somehow.
Closer to Cape Horn, Ocean Mermaid took a heavy roll to leeward and the boom, which we had fastened to the toe rail with the vang, broke in mid-section. As the yacht rolled back to windward, the big aluminium section flailed across the deck like a demented giant’s cudgel and all hands turned to, dropped the mainsail, removed the boom and lashed it on deck, then reefed the main and rigged a bridle so that we could still use it, loose-footed. It was several hours of hard work in rough, cold conditions, and afterwards we gathered in the saloon for a debrief. Quentin poured himself a whisky from his personal stock and stood drinking while we talked. ‘We peasants obviously aren’t qualified to appreciate whisky, either,’ I thought to myself. ‘You must have to be born to it to appreciate that, too.’
We had our revenge, though. The owner’s cabin (he preferred ‘stateroom’) aft was awash. It had been watertight during the hosing-down the fire brigade had given it in Auckland, but a few weeks of being racked by the Southern Ocean had opened up cracks and fissures all over the place. By luck, I’d chosen the professional skipper’s cabin, which was the driest one on board. We slept in warm, dry bunks while Quentin huddled behind a sheet of plastic he’d taped over his bunk and listened to water sloshing round the cabin sole.
Ocean Mermaid’s small aft cockpit, which I’m sure had hosted many intimate soirées in the Med, spent much of the time brimming with cold southern sea water. The same water found its way beneath her teak decks and found places to exit, normally over a bunk or the chart table, many metres from the source leak.
Despite the difficult navigational conditions for much of the trip, however, Cape Horn appeared at the appointed time and place and we passed a few miles off it in just about the best weather we’d encountered the whole passage. The sea floor goes from 4400 metres deep, just a few miles west of the cape, to about 130 metres on the Cape Horn plateau. The big seas sweeping round the Southern Ocean hit the steeply sloping bottom, and the lower portion of each wave slows down while the top half continues on at speed until it crashes, tumbling into the shallow water. This phenomenon has helped cause many of the 560 shipwrecks attributed to the area.
With Patagonia astern, and a vivid red-orange sunset which explained why Spanish explorers called it Tierra del Fuego (‘Land of Fire’), we pointed Ocean Mermaid towards the Falkland Islands, the last little bastion of Britishness left in the South Atlantic.
Port Stanley was a fairyland. The rust-orange wreck of the iron barque Lady Elizabeth, with masts still standing, lay stranded on a beach to port as we entered, and other square-rigged ships, battered by Cape Horn and written off by insurance underwriters when steamers began carrying the bulk of the world trade, had been beached and used as warehouses. Rows of snug little houses overlooked the waterfront with a backdrop of tawny peat hillsides. Murray and I fell in love with a
stout wee wooden ship lying derelict nearby, which had been built to trade with Argentina, and talked about buying her to go cruising in.
The governor, Rex Hunt, lived in a mansion west of Port Stanley proper and was chauffeur-driven about the place in an immaculate maroon London taxi with a huge gold crest on the door. Having a fair dinkum aristocrat in town really sent Port Stanley all aflutter. Compliant mechanics from the RAF base at the head of the harbour took our main boom, and the generator which had swallowed salt water, away for repairs. Governor Hunt held a reception at Government House for the honourable Quentin and crew, and I scoured the meagre menswear department at the Falkland Islands Company store and bought the only pair of trousers on the islands that fitted me, so as not to let the side down. They’re a rather fetching pair of brown woollen flares which I’ve kept to this day.
At the reception I began talking to the governor, a reserved and thoughtful man with the interests and future of the island folk very much at heart. ‘The Argies [Argentinians] are going to invade us,’ he said worriedly. ‘I’ve been warning the Home Office for years,’ he added. ‘But they keep on ignoring me. People aren’t painting their houses — or doing repairs — because they know there’ll be Argies living in them before too long.’
A lovely, classic Scandinavian double-ended wooden fishing boat, crewed by a crowd of young Danes, was the only other boat in port and we spent some very amiable time with them, splitting and salting herrings round the pot-belly stove in the boat’s big saloon. They’d borrowed a Land Rover and filled the back to overflowing from a bay or two down from the township. They shook their heads in disbelief: ‘All these fish in the water here and the people aren’t catching them — nobody here even has a boat.’ It was true — Port Stanley’s inhabitants had turned their backs on the sea. Each family was allocated a patch of peat as fuel to heat their homes, and most of their leisure time seemed to be taken up by cutting and drying peat. Perhaps the sea was often so rough and inhospitable that it acted as a deterrent.
Having conquered Cape Horn, Quentin decided to fly home and spend time with his family. Ocean Mermaid’s Southern Ocean wounds were gradually repaired and we headed for Mar del Plata, Argentina with one extra crewman — an Argentinian obstetrician called Juan who’d been visiting friends in Port Stanley. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘the junta [Argentina’s military leaders] will invade Islas Malvinas — things are bad with the economy, they need something to take people’s minds off it.’
We shoehorned Ocean Mermaid into Mar del Plata’s small marina just before Christmas and met with a decidedly frosty reception from the customs, police and military, who clumped on board in their combat boots to inspect us. There was nothing frosty about the rest of the Argentinians, though. We were invited to one asado (barbecue) after another. It’s worth travelling to Argentina for the beef alone — it’s like beef nowhere else in the world. The asados could have up to 100 people present, with one or two sides of beef rotating slowly over a bed of red-hot coals. When a guest felt peckish, they’d stop the electric motor that turned the beef and carve off whatever cut they wanted; very rare, rare, medium or well done.
The Mar del Plata Yacht Club invited us to their Christmas Eve party, where a classically stunning Argentine señorita quickened our Kiwi heartbeats by picking up a guitar and launching into a rendition of ‘Pokarekare ana’. It turned out she had worked with a Kiwi in Panama who had taught her New Zealand’s unofficial national anthem.
Mar del Plata was the first place we’d been warm for a while and I, for one, fell in love with the ambience of South America. We went sailing with a judge who invited us to spend a weekend at his apartment in Buenos Aires. The first night there, dining with the family on the 10th floor, we found ourselves suddenly in mid-electrical-storm with forked lightning fizzing and crackling outside the windows. It must have been fairly commonplace, because the family kept eating right through while Amy and I marvelled at the light show crackling outside the thin glass windows.
After a month or so, Ocean Mermaid headed north for the municipal marina at Rio de Janeiro. I befriended a local and we spent a wonderful night dancing with the local samba team at a favela (slum) called the ‘Hill of the Singing Rooster’. Every district has a samba team, and Rio’s famous carnival is held so that they can strut their stuff. The music is earthy and primal with undercurrents of voodoo and witchcraft.
We’d heard about a colourful Madeiran sailor who’d had some trouble with officialdom in a small port about a day’s bus ride south of Rio, and needed crew pronto to depart the place. Amy and I rattled forth in a local bus to his aid. The ‘trouble’ involved a local lawman’s barely legal daughter, so we hurriedly slipped the lines and headed north. We spent an idyllic couple of days working his heavy steel cutter through the small islands off the coast in very light winds, and he showed us the sack of diamonds his brother had smuggled out of a South African mine so they could sail to Finland and buy one of the quality Swan yachts built by the Nautor boat yard there.
Ocean Mermaid’s next stop was at Salvador da Bahia on the north Brazilian coast. We anchored the yacht behind an old stone fort, rowed ashore and walked through a navy base, through the guarded gateway and onto the street. A rowdy group of us were reeling back to the boat one night when the guard at the base gate called something in Portuguese. ‘Yeah, she’ll be right, mate,’ we chorused back. He let a volley of submachine-gun shots off into the limpid night air, the most effective means of sobering a rowdy group of sailors up that I’ve ever come across.
Monkey vendors stood on street corners of the old port town, with hands full of string tethers to the young simians that climbed all over them. We took a Swiss girl and her monkey aboard for the trip to Antigua, and learned quickly that monkeys do not house — or boat — train.
The trip from Salvador to Antigua was my first experience of trade winds, which for a southern sailor are the closest thing to heaven on earth. Warm, moist wind that rarely exceeds 20 knots, from the same direction day in and day out, seemed almost too good to be true. We passed about 860 miles east of the Amazon River mouth, but the sea was still a muddy brown and the temperature differential spawned patches of mini storms with their own crackling lightning and torrential rain. We slalomed around them in the big ketch, charging through the black night with forked lightning fizzing into the sea all around us.
At one stage, about 50 miles offshore, I saw something a bit darker on the water ahead of the boat and altered course to pass close by. As we got closer, I picked out the barely visible silhouette of a human, and closer still the startled look on his face as we forged past. Fishermen, on rafts of balsa logs lashed together called jangadas, travel far offshore for their catch. They drop the mast on deck and wrap themselves in the sail to sleep. Ocean Mermaid, her great white hull charging through the dark night, must have given this somnolent fisherman a rude awakening.
Ocean Mermaid tracked past the islands of the south Caribbean and through the narrow cleft-rock entrance to English Harbour, Antigua. Her 75-foot overall length had made her a big boat in Auckland, but here she was merely average. I wandered around with my mouth agape; I’d never seen so much varnish. Classic vessels that I’d only ever read about in boating magazines, like the graceful American Herreshoff-designed Ticonderoga, Belle Adventure by William Fife of Scotland and many others, roosted gracefully with their sterns to Nelson’s Dockyard while gangs of people swarmed over their decks and up their rigs, polishing and varnishing.
We tuned into the BBC World Service and heard that war had broken out in the Falklands. Governor Hunt’s predictions had come true, and Margaret Thatcher’s government was overreacting with a brutish display of military might. The war lasted four months and 907 people were killed. Fairytale Port Stanley would never be the same again.
I soon found a job as skipper in a film director’s Swan 43 which was gearing up to compete in Antigua Race Week, and we moved our gear off Ocean Mermaid. She’d been home, haven, tutor and mistress to us
for many wild miles of the world’s roughest ocean; now she was back in her tropical element.
In and Around the Americas
GALAPAGOS GROUNDING
Big green seas burst over the schooner’s bluff bows, and tumbled aft to congregate in a flurry of foam at the stern. On the afterdeck, skipper Kirby Ingelse braced himself against the teak deckhouse and squinted through a sextant at the afternoon sun. ‘About 60 miles south west of the Galapagos,’ he explained afterwards. ‘We’ll pass within eyesight in the morning and get some compass bearings to confirm our navigation.’ The 54-tonne schooner plunged onwards through the heavy swell, inching eastwards across the chart for Panama and the canal, towards our Caribbean destination.
At 10 p.m. I took the big teak wheel for my two-hour ‘trick’ peering at the dim light illuminating the compass card in the dark wheelhouse as Sereno pressed on under her full rig of gaff mainsail, Bermudan foresail, fore staysail, staysail and jib.
Blue Water Page 26