Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  The Bay of Biscay is part of sailing folklore. For Northern sailors like us, taking the Atlantic route, it is an obstacle to be overcome before achieving the sunnier climes of southern Europe. It is notorious for bad conditions and as a graveyard for ships. Even at temperate times of the year, when the sea areas adjacent to Biscay are expecting moderate winds, the shipping forecast for the Bay will often be for gales.

  World Cruising Routes, a publication which informs yachtsmen planning voyages when they can hope to encounter the best conditions, explains its inherent violence as follows: Because of the abrupt change from deep to shallow waters in the Bay of Biscay, seas can become extremely rough even in a moderate storm. The situation is sometimes exacerbated by a high swell generated by a hurricane blowing thousands of miles away. … Towards the end of summer the frequency of gales increases and some attention should be paid to the forecasts from the middle of August to the end of September when some of the most violent storms have been recorded. Today is August 18 and there are hurricanes on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Our objective is the North West Spanish town of La Coruña and the crossing will take around 55 hours. It comes as a surprise, when making your first crossing of a large expanse of water, how little you need to do. Inevitably, the focus of the day becomes mealtimes and our evening meal at sea becomes supper rather than dinner.

  Tonight we have tortellini with a tomato and basil sauce. Pasta is quick to prepare, requires a minimum of pans on a moving boat, and is hot, tasty and filling. A deep soup bowl and a spoon are also easier to handle, while perched on the helmsman’s chair or the cockpit coaming, than a plate and a knife and fork.

  Hot enjoyable food, eaten together, is not only companionable and comforting as night falls, but for the person taking the first watch it provides necessary warmth and energy as the temperature drops. For the off-duty crew member, with only a few hours in which to get some rest before taking over the watch, it can be sleep-inducing when combined with a warm, comfortable bunk.

  As well as bodily comfort, solitary night watches require something to occupy the mind which will not distract from the act of observing. This is particularly crucial as you approach the end of your last watch of the night, when all your mind can think about is its crying need to go to sleep. In an attempt to reduce this tiredness we have decided to experiment with a four-hour watch this time as on our previous night-passage we found that three hours’ sleep did not refresh us enough for the next watch. I stand the first one, from 8pm until midnight, as I prefer the natural transition from daylight to dark rather than go to bed in the light and get up into blackness. I also like to see the sun set.

  We are under sail only, so it is wonderfully quiet, and for once there are no worries about collecting fishing buoys around our propellers. After all, who in their right mind would drop lobster pots all the way out here? At around 8.30 half a red-gold sun breaks through the cloud just before it sinks into the sea, leaving little white puff-clouds on a strip of pink horizon back-lit in gold.

  As daylight begins to disappear I switch on our navigation lights. The night’s traffic consists of two black-backed gulls, three yachts, a fishing boat and a couple of lights too far away to identify or matter. The sky clears a little later on, enough at least for stars to become visible in the west.

  Some time before midnight the wind drops away and it becomes necessary to switch on some power. There is no quiet way to start an engine under a bed and it is something David has never experienced before. I have, a long time ago, but unfortunately I have forgotten what it is like to be deep in the arms of Morpheus when a 27 horsepower diesel engine clatters into life directly underneath your mattress. After the silence of sail, that initial cacophony is transformed by the sleep-befuddled brain into your worst nightmare: a collision at sea at night. David materializes on deck in seconds, his eyes wildly searching for the source of the calamity.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumble guiltily. ‘I should have come and woken you first.’

  The cold air hits him and, fully conscious now, he totters back to bed.

  I don’t wake him at midnight to take over the watch, but leave it closer to the 00.48 shipping forecast which we will need to take together. Out here the radio is inaudible with the autopilot on, so while I listen to the forecast David steers with one hand and aims a torch at the manual compass with the other. He’s spent ages trying to get the console lights to work but without success.

  It is necessary to start listening to the radio a few minutes before the forecast is due. The reception is so poor that it takes a while to attune your hearing to it, even with one ear pressed against the speaker. I am also confused on this particular night by a strong Spanish accent and demands for a kidnap ransom. Unsure what station I am tuned into, I am just about to start trawling through the wavelengths when it becomes clear that it is after all the BBC, and what I am hearing is the end of an item on bandit activity in South America. It is followed by another announcing that President Clinton is taking a holiday with his family after admitting sexual relations with Ms Lewinsky and that Mrs Clinton has already forgiven him. The forecast is for a moderate breeze from the northwest, which would have been a broad reach and a super sailing wind had it materialized, but it doesn’t. The wind comes from the north and is very weak.

  I am in bed by 1am and on watch again at five. At six I have plump, sweet greengages for breakfast. I have to get David up around eight to help me get in the mainsail. The wind has shifted towards the northeast causing the main to shadow the genoa and leave it flapping uselessly. Since the latter is our most powerful sail, we take in the main and motor-sail with just the genoa. David returns to bed.

  A short time later, glancing across our starboard quarter, I am startled to see what looks like a large cliff with a lighthouse on it doing 22 knots across the horizon and then realise that I have just seen my first super tanker. I watch a yacht beating northwards and envy its full main and genoa. A small, scruffy white aeroplane begins flying around us, very low and very close.

  It is quite eerie to sit in your cockpit in a grey empty sea on a grey murky morning and look up into an aeroplane’s windows, every one of which contains an impassive face staring back down at you. The minutes pass. The faces continue to circle Voyager and stare. It’s odd, the thoughts that flit through your mind. Alien abduction. Drug smugglers. The riders in the chariot.

  I can see no markings on the ‘plane but finally assume they must be French customs officers. They monitor craft in French waters and if they form any suspicions about you will summon up their coastguard to search your boat. A friend had his boat searched three times on a four-day passage down the French coast. I am curious as to what it is that makes them decide in the end whether to have you intercepted or fly away and leave you alone.

  Ultimately I become irritated by their staring faces. I feel like shouting up at them, ‘Just give me a call on the VHF and I’ll tell you anything you want to know!’ But that really would get us stopped and searched so I just continue to stare back at them.

  Maybe one of them checks out our yacht’s registration details and finds nothing suspicious. Or maybe they decide the grumpy-looking middle-aged woman glaring up at them doesn’t really fit the profile of an international drug-runner. For whatever reason, after another circuit of our boat, they fly away.

  I am supposed to wake David at 9am, but he seemed very tired when he went off watch. His sleep keeps getting broken, usually by me. I decide to leave him where he is for a while and organize some Spanish ready for our next landfall.

  My ancient teach-yourself-Spanish book, that I haven’t looked at in decades, provides examples such as ‘Milk is cheap’ and ‘Old Martin did not see us, because he was blind.’ Guaranteed to impress even the most hardened immigration official I should think. The tense of the second sentence begins to fascinate me. Was blind. Shouldn’t that be is blind? Has Old Martin been blind, but by some miracle can now see? I seem to be losing my way. A basic vocabulary
and politeness is the best thing to aim for. I’ve left it a bit late for grammar.

  I begin practicing numbers: uno, dos, er … Three is invariably the number where I revert to the previous language. Fortunately I still have another couple of days. Looking away from the page to try and memorize the numbers my gaze becomes riveted by the instrument panel. It may simply have been a shoal of fish passing under the boat that has caused the depth gauge to show such a dramatic drop. But when you are 70 miles offshore and it suddenly registers only a metre of clear water under you, the blood runs cold.

  I have a French peach for tenses; when you breakfast at six, elevenses get earlier. The peach is red on the outside and almost white inside, sweet and very juicy. While mopping up afterwards I spot what look like two yachts on the horizon, but after I clean my glasses they are no longer there. The sun comes out at last and I can remove some clothing.

  By 11.45 we are dodging fishing buoys. Seventy miles from shore, in two and three-quarter miles of water, and somebody plants pots! Hardly worth the diesel and all that string I should have thought. At its maximum, Biscay is three and a quarter miles deep. We lunch on Breton pâté, and the last two crème caramels from Tréboul’s patisserie which tremble when you lift them.

  There are no birds out here.

  I do the 8pm to midnight shift again, using the genoa, stay sail and port engine. It is one of those wonderful, warm, dry, starry nights when you feel it is a gift to be alive and just exactly where you are at this moment. There are only three other boats during the whole watch and I don’t have to get David up once. When it is quiet like this, apart from a search of the horizon every ten minutes, the night is yours to write, read, daydream – or fiddle with things. Accordingly we now have lights for the instruments and the manual compass. It will no longer be necessary to read them at night using a torch. When David gets up I demonstrate.

  ‘Brilliant!’ he says. ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘Easy,’ I say, ‘I just got a screwdriver and … ’ I finish the sentence with a shrug.

  He looks so impressed I’m almost tempted to leave it there.

  ‘Actually,’ I say, bending double under the wheel and pointing upward, ‘There’s this switch…’

  Today is Thursday and our third day at sea. At 05.35 I listen to the shipping forecast while David steers. I sometimes wonder why we go to so much trouble to get a forecast because it so often fails to reflect what really happens. The expected NW backing W3 or 4 increasing to 5 in the north fails to arrive and although we still have the genoa up, the breeze is so light that we turn on both engines. Then David goes to bed.

  In the eastern sky the moon is a thin crescent of russet-tinted silver, although the reflection from the rising sun completes the circle by creating a wafer-thin silver rim all around it. More surprising still, the angle of the sun’s rays reveal the dark three-quarters of the planet, its craters and even its roundness. I have never seen the moon as a sphere before, only as a flat disc.

  The sun is hidden by cloud, but it is soon hot enough to get out the shorts. The surface of the sea becomes flat and shiny. It undulates very gently somewhere deep below the surface but there isn’t a breaking wave as far as the eye can see. Finally even the light breeze falls away to nothing. This fearsome stretch of water, this bogeyman of mariners famous for its murderous rages and mountainous waves is currently undergoing a period of calm.

  With the wind gone the genoa droops. By the time I’ve pulled it in, and remembered to re-set the alarm clock for the next shipping forecast, I discover that I have forgotten to do the 6am log.

  We keep an hourly log, recording weather conditions and all our instrument readings. It has two purposes. Firstly, it makes you look at your situation on an hourly basis, because it is easy to drift off mentally on a long passage and not notice things like a sharp drop in the barometer. Its other purpose is that should you lose all or any part of your instrumentation you would at least know where you were within the last hour and be able to navigate your way by dead reckoning.

  Nothing stirs for a long time. Around 8am I lean over the side to observe a piece of flotsam that we pass. Around nine, with the help of radar, I finally work out that what looks like two ships towing a road bridge directly at us is actually a tanker travelling at a slight angle down our starboard side. At eleven David withdraws his head from the locker in the port cabin where the fuel gauge resides, goes up on deck and turns off one of the engines.

  We have done a stupid thing. Before leaving Douarnenez we should have topped up our fuel tank. But it was so terribly crowded with the regatta, and hot, and everybody knows that in Biscay there is more wind than you know what to do with. The last thing you expect is light airs followed by a dead calm. This is no excuse. When going offshore you fill up with everything – fuel, water and food – because you never know what will happen at sea, as has just been proved. The result is that we are now running very low on diesel.

  Fortunately we are not short of food. We lunch on pâté, Port-Salut cheese and French bread, followed by almond cake and fresh peaches. We have the bread with the crusts cut off, not out of delicacy but because, like our voyage, the loaf with the fleur-de-lys motif is also in its third day and its crust resembles concrete. After all, the popular image of French people trekking through the streets several times a day clutching the staff of life has less to do with cultural traits than the minimal keeping quality of the nation’s bread.

  After lunch I write a letter to a friend, have a nap and when I wake David points to a patch of the horizon ahead of us that is a bit darker than the rest. The coast of Spain is visible. By 4.30 we can smell it: wild herbs, scrub, earth and tree bark, all baked by a hot sun.

  By now we have the genoa and the main out again to take advantage of the little wind that has returned, but it keeps fluctuating. Throughout the afternoon one or other of us keeps trudging down into the port cabin to stare at the fuel gauge and David picks out several places on the chart, before La Coruña, that we could go into and probably get fuel. But as the day progresses, and having calculated miles-per-gallon to a nicety, he decides to head for La Coruña after all.

  At 9pm I put out the fenders as we head for La Coruña’s harbour wall. A long, long line of fishing boats passes down our port side, heading out to sea. Doubtless we will become re-acquainted with them when they all hurtle back during the early hours of the morning in the race to be first onto the fish dock.

  The setting sun, on our starboard side, is the most magnificent I have ever seen. Great coils of cloud blaze scarlet against a gold and azure sky. In front of it, bathed in the same scarlet light as the clouds, stands the stately Tower of Hercules, begun by the Romans and the oldest working lighthouse in the world. It looks stunning in this incredible red light but it never occurs to me to photograph it. My mind is too full – of tying on fenders and mooring lines, of running out of fuel at the last minute and there not being enough wind to get us under sail into water shallow enough for us to anchor in – to think of cameras.

  It is dark by the time we enter the harbour. There is a big Ferris wheel lit up on a distant quay but the marina itself is indistinct. The approach to it appears to have some sort of barrier, or boom, across it that is not shown in the cruising guide. There are also lots of buoys and odd clutter in the water and it seems prudent to anchor in the main harbour, with several other boats, and enter the marina in daylight.

  We turn off the engines at 9.20pm: 58 hours, or three days and two nights, after leaving France’s Rade de Guet and having covered 370 nautical miles; the longest single passage we have ever done with just the two of us. We are very glad to be here, especially as the weather could break at any time. As if to prove how contrary this sea area is, while the latest forecast for Biscay is still gentle breezes, its surrounding areas – Sole, Plymouth and Finisterre – are expecting Gale Force 8. For us though, the worst is done now. There’s just Cape Finisterre to go. But when David calls his brother, to say that we have crossed B
iscay safely, he learns that their mother has died suddenly. Tomorrow we will make arrangements to fly back to England.

  NORTH-WEST SPAIN

  16

  La Coruña

  Our two objectives on Friday morning are to find somewhere safe to leave the boat, and to book a flight home. We pull up our anchor and motor into the marina. A strong wind that we could have done with over the last couple of days has now got up and keeps blowing us off the reception pontoon. A silent Swede emerges from his boat and helps us tie up.

  We have forgotten to put our timepieces forward an hour from French to Spanish time and have arrived at the marina at noon, instead of eleven as we thought, and the office is closed for lunch. A Belgian, cruising single-handed, comes to talk to us. Old hands tell you to beware the solitary sailor. They go for long stretches without speaking and, like the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s poem, once they buttonhole a listener they can sometimes find it impossible to stop. We have an hour he’s welcome to, before the marina re-opens.

  When it does, the young woman in the office says we are too big for this marina, but we can go to their other one on the other side of the little fort that juts out into the harbour. She says a boat is just leaving round there and we can berth against the wall, which will save us the trouble of a lazy line. We have never used a lazy line and from their reputation among British yachtsmen we are in no hurry to.

  Before we dare go anywhere, however, we have to refuel. After hovering for ages, waiting for another boat to come out of the tiny fuel dock, it takes all David’s concentration to squeeze Voyager into it. As we approach, a young Spaniard on a shiny new jet ski roars up from behind and streaks in ahead of us. It is a very short dock with boats moored all around it and, given the fact that our current fuel supply may quit at any moment, once committed David has no option but to keep going. I am at the bow with a shore line, ready to tie up fast to the high stone quay and look down anxiously at the queue-jumper directly below me. His eyes widen in his upturned face as Voyager’s bows slowly cast their shadow over him, like Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons just before a piece of mountain falls on him. The young man on the jet ski revs his engine and leaves.