Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  They particularly liked to watch us eat their prized home-made sausages. They all made them, they all wanted us to eat the stuff by the yard. Not being great meat eaters, we did our diplomatic best, but sometimes this was difficult. This choriço seemed full of nothing but dense yellow fat, coagulated blood and gristle. On one occasion, when we were being picnicked beside the road by a middle-aged couple whose car trunk just happened to be full of food in baskets, and my cheeks were bulging like Dizzy Gillespie’s with a ghastly unswallowable accumulation of animal byproducts, a car came along the road and as our hosts turned to look at it, I spewed my mouthful into a hydrangea bush. My host saw this, or the tail end of it, and I began to cough convulsively as a cover-up. It had been an accident, of course, something caught in my throat. The sweet man pounded my back to stop my coughing, and immediately cut another huge chunk of choriço and with tender solicitude actually opened my mouth like a dentist and popped it in. For him, I chewed it up and swallowed it with convincing relish, and washed it down with good bread and wine.

  The heart of the visiting sailing community in Horta is the Café Sport on the stone-cobbled Rua Tenente leading up from the harbour. Founded by Henrique Azevedo, who befriended the first few yachts that turned up in the forties and fifties, organizing their needs, their laundry, their provisioning, and this tradition is carried on by his son Peter and grandson José. The Café Sport is the place to go when you first arrive, to have a beer or a glass of wine and see who else is there, to pick up your mail, which the café will hold, and while pawing through the mail pile, to see who else is on the way. It’s a club, your club, where even you are welcome. It doesn’t matter if you come off a little boat like Toad or an absentee-CEO’s superyacht carrying Toad’s weight in electronics and a platoon of blond, liveried crew members. All who fetch up at Fayal have sailed across at least a thousand miles of ocean, and it’s the little boats that have slogged harder with fewer resources to get there. I have felt more at home aboard Toad in Horta than in most places.

  The Azores are lovely islands to approach from the sea. Joshua Slocum’s landfall here in 1895, on his way around the world single-handed aboard his famous Spray, was typical of most sailors’ first sight of the islands at the end of a passage:

  Early on the morning of July 20 I saw Pico looming above the clouds on the starboard bow. Lower lands burst forth as the sun burned away the morning fog, and island after island came into view. As I approached nearer, cultivated fields appeared … Only those who have seen the Azores from the deck of a vessel realize the beauty of the mid-ocean picture.

  Pico’s cone, O Pico, is an unmissable beacon in the ocean, seven thousand six hundred feet above sea level and shaped like Mount Fuji. It rises directly and steeply, almost as far from the ocean floor to the surface as it continues above: in the two-mile channel between Pico and São Jorge, there are depths of over five thousand feet.

  The islands are volcanic, with small craters, or caldeiras (also the Portuguese word for a ship’s boiler), poking up all over the landscape. The coasts are edged in black rock and sand. The soil is rich, the climate mild, and the slopes between the high caldeiras and the sea are chequered with the small green fields of farms. Fayal is called the Blue Island for the thick blue hydrangeas that border all its fields and lanes like a lattice over the landscape, and this blue and green weave dotted with whitewashed houses and villages is thrilling to see as you approach it after days or weeks on a blue-upon-blue ocean. The effect was no less exciting for our two cats, Minou and Neptune, as we approached from the west on our first visit, three long weeks out of Bermuda. They crouched on deck astounded, goggle-eyed at the materializing land, noses quivering as we came under the island’s lee, as if they had forgotten entirely about the pungent non-watery world and were seeing it and smelling it for the first time.

  J. and I spent many days walking and hitching all over Fayal. We bought eggs and fruit and vegetables from farmers and their wives. We went inside the lighthouse high over the sea on Punta da Ribeirinha. We climbed to the island’s summit and looked down into the swampy caldeira. We looked over at Pico just four miles across the water, and we looked far out to sea at where we had come from and turned and looked in the direction we hoped to go.

  At that time the islanders were still whaling in small, open, oar-powered whaleboats, putting out from the beach when the cry ‘Baleia! Baleia!’ went up from lookout stations ashore, rowing for long hours after spouting, breaching whales. They rowed right up to the whales’ backs and threw hand-held harpoons into them exactly as the whalers of New Bedford and Nantucket had done a hundred and fifty years before. On our bucolic walks high on Fayal we saw the whales and the boats putting out from shore and followed the long, slow chase.

  One night just before we sailed away, J. and I rowed back to Toad a little drunk and very happy and I got out our rocket distress flares and began firing them off over the anchorage. Other boats followed and the sky over the harbour suddenly filled with a dazzling display of shell bursts and red and white parachute flares. We sailed away and a week later we were screaming foully at each other in the lee of Cape St Vincent.

  I remember all this in the cloudy dawn of June 27, twelve days, 1,123 miles out of Falmouth, as I sit in the cockpit with a cup of coffee, staring ahead over a smooth grey sea.

  06.30: LANDFALL. I can see Graciosa plainly on the horizon, about 30 miles away.

  07.25: I think I can see Pico – the tip – bearing 210 Magnetic, above all the clouds, far ahead. Definitely Pico’s cone. A magnificent landmark.

  10.00: Light rain, buggering us about with usual wind shifts. We’ve been about 7 degrees W of our daily DR since we left England, so I’m concluding the compass has a westerly deviation of 7 deg.

  11.00: Glad I saw Graciosa and Pico earlier – now hidden by clouds and showers – or I’d be wondering about our landfall.

  12.00: Graciosa now about 10 miles SE, faint under rain cloud, though we are in sunshine. Can’t see Pico or Fayal.

  14.00: Punta de Barca, Graciosa, is due E True, about 8 miles. Little patchwork farms high above the sheer drop at the coast. Lonely, impregnable looking island.

  15.00: Can now see Ponta dos Rosais, NW tip of São Jorge, fine on port bow; and a smudge of Fayal off to the SW.

  15.30: Fayal, Pico, São Jorge all well in view now – should be eyeball navigation from here on in. Fishermen in an open boat half a mile abeam, waving.

  16.00: Dolphins playing around the boat. Impossible not to believe they are welcoming me.

  18.30: Sunny now, clouds all gone away, water blue and flattened right out in here among the islands. Wonderful to come back to such a place, remembering it so well as I see it. Have identified lighthouse on Punta da Ribeirinha which J. and I visited, and Punta da Espalamaca, Guia, and the whole lay of the land above and around Horta. A little bittersweet. Wind right down, ghosting along.

  20.00: Bearings on Pico, Guia, and Ribeirinha light place us 8 miles out of Horta. Looks more like 2 in clear early evening. Frustrating.

  21.00: 4 miles to Horta. Getting darker. I hope to get in while there’s some light and pick up a mooring instead of anchoring, but wind is getting lighter and lighter. An hour maybe.

  23.00: We’re here. In. Probably rounded the breakwater at about

  22.30. The place is packed with yachts and couldn’t find a mooring in the dark, so dropped the hook farther out where it’s a little lumpy from my blessed E’ly which has carried Toad and me here from Mylor. Amazing to be here. Lots of thoughts and feelings. Glad to be in. Pleased to have done it on my own, but sad J. isn’t here with me. Good time – for old Toad – 121⁄2 days. Vane has worked incredibly, I haven’t steered once from Mylor until Horta breakwater. Arrived about this time of night 2 years ago, and hear the same sound from ashore, the sound that struck us so after coming from America and made us realize we had reached Europe: the whine of small motorbikes zooming along the edge of the harbour and down the shore road. Drinking a cup of te
a and contemplating 8 hours’ sleep without waking 16 times.

  * I would not today lie ahull, even with old and tired sails. I no longer believe this is a seamanlike tactic for heavy weather. Instead, I would ‘heave-to’, that is, put up some scrap of reefed mainsail, however small, and possibly also the smallest headsail ‘backed’, or sheeted to windward, and tie the tiller ‘down’ to leeward. Never mind that this sounds rather technical; it’s simple to do. So arranged, a boat will point its bow slightly up to windward and bob quite comfortably, making perhaps a knot of drift at right angles to the wind. In this position the boat does not present its whole broadside, its most vulnerable aspect, to the oncoming waves, as it will do when ahull, but points obliquely into them with its bow, parting them and riding over them. Heavy Weather Sailing by the late English author and sailor Adlard Coles, the definitive book on heavy-weather tactics at sea, is filled with anecdotes of disasters resulting from boats lying ahull, but nowhere contains any record of a yacht incurring damage while hove-to. If my small scrap of sail ripped while hove-to, I guess I’d have to lower it, sew it up as best I could, and raise it again. I’d do that standing on deck, tied to something, rather than lie ahull.

  I’ve reached this conclusion mostly from further reading. I’ve never experienced ‘survival’ weather conditions at sea. The finest essay I’ve read on storm tactics for small boat sailors is the appendix of Miles Smeeton’s Because the Horn Is There. Smeeton and his wife, Beryl, were twice dismasted aboard their yacht Tzu Hang west of Cape Horn, the first time ‘pitchpoled’ (the boat somersaulted) while running downwind before a great gale, the second time rolled over while lying ahull. Years later they successfully rounded the Horn in Tzu Hang. Smeeton wrote that he would never again lie ahull, and his thoughts on tactics, confirmed by his own wide reading of other sailing narratives, are to be respected.

  * What happened with the dope deal? Our investor, in too deep to abandon ship, paid to have it repaired, and Bill and I went on to Morocco, where we navigated by pulling in at ports and shouting, ‘Où sommes-nous?’. We bought the hash and stashed it aboard, inside the emptied water tanks. But we were no longer enjoying each other’s company and we both thought one of us might push the other overboard in mid-Atlantic. I got off. Bill and two other crew members sailed across the Atlantic, taking longer than Columbus, and with more uncertainty of position. At the end of a lengthy cruise they reached Florida, the dope was sold, and after the investor recouped his long-ballooning investment, he and Bill split $4,000 profit.

  HORTA

  June 26

  In the morning I row ashore and sign in with the maritime police at the Capitania, giving the name and displacement of my ship, the number of my crew and the port of my destination. I receive a Livrete de Transito de Embaracoes Estrangeiras. I have my bath. I surrender my sail bag full of laundry to a stout woman who plants herself in front of me on the quay and simply takes it with a shy smile. I carry the twelve-volt battery that powers my stereo and VHF radio to a garage to be charged, and then I go up the Rua Tenente to the Café Sport. There’s a letter from my mother congratulating me and telling me to call her. I use the phone at the Estalgem Santa Cruz, Raymond Burr’s place.

  ‘Are you lonely by yourself, baby?’ my mother asks.

  I try to tell her about the enjoyable loneliness I was starting to feel out at sea. Something like that elusive ‘oneness’ that spiritual types are always banging on about. Like feeling as small as a plankton but part of an infinitely larger design. But I stop myself before I begin to sound sincerely enlightened and ask her how she’s doing.

  My mother is a painter and lives in a studio in London. This winter a man she was in love with, a sculptor, died of cancer. She hasn’t talked about it much. With this event, I think she has begun to see herself as getting old. I bought her Gail Sheehy’s book Passages a few months ago, which may not have been a tactful idea. She made a face and rolled her eyes when I gave it to her, and I don’t think she’s looked at it.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Busy.’ Busy is good.

  After hanging up, I look around the hotel for a girl I saw working here two years ago. Out at sea, remembering Horta, I suddenly remembered her. I never spoke to her, except to ask to use the phone. Two years later I still remember her face, and those eyes. During the last year in London, newly single, I have found myself as awkward as a spotty adolescent in my few attempts to approach women. Nevertheless, I’m emboldened by my new image of myself as a man who has sailed alone across a thousand miles of ocean, and now I plan to come in, talk to this girl on some pretext, tell her I remember her, and, if I see any flicker of response, ask her out to dinner.

  She’s not here, though. I don’t see Raymond Burr in a kaftan either.

  I go for a walk, the thing I am dying to do when I come ashore after a passage at sea. I walk along the shore road out of town, past the beach and up the hill to Punta da Espalamaca, the prominent headland I steered for coming in. From here you can see all of Horta and the harbour and south-eastern Fayal stretching away below you, and you can look across the four-mile channel of current-ripped water at Pico soaring to its Fujiyama cone, as J. and I did many times walking up this road and down the other side to the fishing and whaling villages of Praia and Pedro Miguel.

  Suddenly, without warning, I am stabbed by a devastating loneliness. It comes in under my ribcage and moves upward and crushes my heart. It comes like a fit, squeezing me breathless, wringing me out, then eases, draining me away with it, leaving me undone, elaborate fortifications smashed. Oh boy. Is this what single-handing is all about? I felt nothing remotely approaching this out at sea. While I was sailing towards a destination, I felt for some reason that I’d be less lonely once I arrived.

  I turn around and head back down the hill towards Horta. I start thinking about when I will leave.

  The next day I run into Bob Silverman at the Café Sport. Bob, an American, and his wife sailed here, liked it, and now live all year round on Fayal, in a small farmhouse not far from Punta Espalamaca. I met him two years ago and bought his small Cruising Guide to the Azores which he wrote and published himself. It’s an endearing little book, printed by the local newspaper, O Telegrafo, soft-covered, held together with two staples, illustrated with maps that I guess are drawn by Bob, or perhaps by a local child, and what appear to be antique daguerreotypes of Azorean ports and views, in which, however, can also be seen modern fibreglass yachts. Two years ago it was the only yacht-oriented guide to the Azores, full of good local knowledge not found in official pilot books, and with five hundred yachts a year calling at the islands, it was a hot item at the Café Sport. Bob also does sail repair work at home and is caretaker for the few but increasing number of boats left in Horta over the winter.

  We have a drink with people off two other boats, and Bob invites us all up to his house for drinks tomorrow, Sunday.

  On the way back down to the harbour I buy Saturday’s copy of O Telegrafo and find Toad listed as one of the recently arrived Iates de Recreio. ‘335 – TOAD, americano. Desloca 5 tons. e e tripulado pelo navegador solitario Peter Nichols. Procede de Falmouth em 13 dias e vai para Camden (Estados Unidos).’

  Another single-hander has also made Saturday’s paper. On the same page runs the headline: ‘NAVEGADOR SOLITARIO ENCONTRADO MORTO A BORDO DO SEU IATE.’ The story is short. A merchant ship spotted a twenty-seven-foot-long yacht drifting 160 miles south-west of Fayal. The Portuguese naval corvette Jacinto Candido picked up the yacht, Mariner, and towed it to Fayal. The iatista solitario, Mark Spring, an Englishman, was found in the cabin, emaciated and dead.

  Mariner, a small boat about the same size as Toad, is now bobbing at a mooring a hundred yards in front of me as I read this. It looks as if it has just floated in out of the Twilight Zone. The sails are tattered, lines hang off the deck and dangle in the water; it has a look of decay and abandonment I’ve never seen on another floating boat. The story running around the anchorage is that the boat was becalmed (I
don’t know if it had an engine, or insufficient fuel) until the iatista solitario ran out of food and starved to death. A horrifying story, but it seems unlikely to me. Calms don’t last that long, except in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In seven years of engineless cruising, three days is the longest calm I’ve known. Mariner is a lighter, newer boat than Toad, and probably a better sailor; making port should not have been a problem. The more likely explanation for such an awful end – worse, I think, than falling overboard – is that some accident or sickness incapacitated him, or killed him.

  Sailors in mid-ocean are clearly vulnerable to physical problems. Assembling proper medical supplies, including antibiotics, syringes and a good medical book, is part of conscientious preparation for heading offshore. Toothache is probably the severest problem most sailors will encounter, but of course there is worse. In March 1960, Eric and Susan Hiscock were in one of the remoter stretches of the Pacific, between the Galapagos and the Gambier Islands in southern Polynesia, far from any shipping lanes, when Eric developed a pain in his stomach:

  It was during the early part of the trip that a nagging pain in the appropriate part of my abdomen, between navel and hip bone, suggested to me that I was developing appendicitis. Miserably I realized that there was nothing to be done, for it would have been a long, slow and rough business sailing back to the Galapagos, and there was no doctor on those islands. There was no point in telling Susan about my symptoms, but after a day or two I could no longer keep the horrid secret to myself.