Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  At midday the next day, Billy Walker motored out in a launch to where we were anchored, threw us a line and towed us out through the shoaling channels of the lagoon to deep water. We had cold beer and sandwiches in a cooler to share with him, but we forgot all about them in the fuss and excitement, until we had cast off his line and he was zooming back towards the mangroves and we were bobbing off the south coast of St Thomas. On our own.

  The main was already up, fluttering in the breeze, and we raised the jib and staysail, pulled in all sheets and began tacking east. We beat towards Dog Cut, a narrow current-ripped gap between small rocky islets at the south-east tip of St Thomas, through which we would have to sail to reach Red Hook, where we planned to spend the night. Without an engine, relying solely on our ability to work the wind and currents, I was suddenly nervous. I bolted my beer. The sandwich turned to dry mush in my mouth and I threw it overboard. I was grimly silent, concentrating on tacking the boat, and becoming disturbed by its evident sluggishness. It seemed reluctant to come about on each tack. We had bought an unhandy tub, I started thinking, almost panicking. A slow, fucking tub, and without an engine! We were probably going to smash into the rocks right here in Dog Cut before we’d gone a mile.

  But then I looked at J. She was standing up on the wind-ward side of the cockpit, face into the wind, her blonde hair blowing out behind her, and she had begun to shriek. At the top of her voice she was yelling how great, how unbelievable, how beautiful it all was, and I thought she was wonderful. This was how she was heralding the start of our new life on our boat, screaming out her love of it for all she was worth. I was ashamed of my fear. She filled me with faith and I threw my crappy mood overboard and we shot through Dog Cut.

  I close the diary, which is red, its pages rippled and fattened with mildew, and this thing like a sneeze rises up and comes out of me and I find I am crying.

  I go up into the cockpit and take a look around. No ships, empty ocean. Not much wind, but short lumpy seas from the north-west which slow Toad down.

  I start pumping the bilge again.

  July 10

  Day 8 – End of 1st week out of Fayal – 00.00: Lovely night, stars, warm. We’re becalmed. Sails slatting as boat rolls slightly on imperceptible swell. Tried to go to sleep reading The Devil Drives, life of Burton, the Victorian explorer, but riveting stuff and keeps me awake. Will try to sleep now.

  01.00: Leak steady so far, pumping 2-3 minutes every 2 hours. That’s better than getting worse, but it’s not getting better, and conditions are light. Unnerving.

  13.20: Noon pos: 31°30' N, 34°08' W. 58 miles noon to noon. With the wind from calm to force 2 since yesterday noon, that’s not a bad mileage. Old Toad is moving very well in these light airs. About 500 miles from Horta in exactly one week – not as bad as it’s seemed sometimes, and the fact that we’re farther S than I had wanted to be may stand us in good stead later, near and beyond Bermuda, when we’ll probably be forced N by SW’lies. Also, farther south may mean a gentler ride with more chance of E’lies. Present course of about 300° takes us more or less straight towards Bermuda – 1540 miles away.

  Marking the noon position – a small pencilled X – on my sailing chart of the North Atlantic, I see we are now well out onto the broad belly of the ocean, the great midriff emptiness between the continental outposts of Bermuda and the Azores. 2400 fathoms (14,400 feet) down to the ocean floor. Having been pushed mostly south this last week, we’re not as far east as I’d hoped to be, but in another week we should be halfway between North Africa and the east coast of the United States. On the chart, our route from one side of the Atlantic to the other looks all wrong: a long, pronounced droop from northern Europe down here to the subtropical middle of the ocean, seemingly Caribbean-bound, then back up to the north-east United States. Certainly not the flight path of an intrepid crow, but it is the best one for Toad.

  Planning my route across the ocean in London earlier this spring, I spread pilot charts of the North Atlantic for the months of June and July on the floor and bent over them for hours. My optimistic plan was to try to stick close to the rhumb-line – the straight-line – route from Falmouth to Fayal, to get clear of the European continent with its commercial and fishing traffic; to keep, if possible, from being blown south into the Bay of Biscay, with its notoriously rough waters, where I could expect to find myself port-hopping along the north coast of Spain against predominant westerlies. A dreary prospect, particularly as I’ve always thought Spain’s much-ballyhooed tapas and paella are overrated dishes, usually as grease-laden and rancid as Azorean choriço. The June pilot chart showed mostly westerly and north-westerly winds along this route – on or just off the nose – and I had expected to be beating to wind-ward for most of that first leg of the trip. But I was lucky. I could not have realistically hoped for the glorious easterly wind that blew gently behind us and carried us the entire 1,195 miles.

  Then, planning the route from the Azores to Maine, I bent over the pilot chart for July. These pilot charts – quite different from basic sailing charts, which show only lines of longitude and latitude, water depths and obstructions, such as rocks, shoals, or land – are the primary tool used by a navigator planning a sailing route across an ocean. Published by the Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, DC, they show, for each month of the year, the average strength and direction of winds, currents, the percentages of calms and gales, for every 5 degrees of latitude by 5 degrees of longitude square of the ocean. They show where you might hit icebergs, the paths of tropical and extratropical cyclones, atmospheric pressure, air temperature, sea surface temperature, magnetic variation, and the routes across the ocean taken by full- and low-powered ships. On the backs of the charts, for no other reason than to fill up that large blank space, are great freebies: illustrated articles on such subjects as: ‘Dangerous Sea Life’ or ‘Satellite Navigation’. You can curl up in your bunk and spend all day looking at a pilot chart.

  These charts were the brainchild of Matthew Fontaine Maury, a nineteenth-century lieutenant in the US Navy, who began collecting weather observations recorded in log-books by captains aboard other ships. Maury began this task at a time when a tremendous amount of information about remote parts of the world’s oceans was becoming available for the first time. This was the heyday of the Yankee whalers, and their equally adventuresome brethren, the sealers, who were after pelts for American, European and Chinese markets. Commerce-driven, these mariners were true explorers, pushing their slow, tubby ships beyond the limits of known frontiers as they thinned the world’s oceans of its seemingly limitless resources and sailed ever farther hunting for more. It was a Nantucket sealing ship, the Topaz, that was the first vessel to reach Pitcairn’s Island nineteen years after the Bounty got there in 1789, and found the last living mutineer, Alexander Smith. An American whaler, the Manhattan, of Sag Harbor, cruised the Japan ‘grounds’ and anchored off what is now Tokyo eight years before US Commodore Perry historically ‘opened up’ Japan in 1853. And it was whalers following bowhead whales into high arctic latitudes that brought back volumes of grim descriptions of the conditions there.

  Millions of observations later, Maury’s charts give the sailor a full statistical picture of conditions most likely to be encountered in every part of every ocean, in every month of the year. But weather out at sea is no more predictable than ashore, and on any given day – as for the entire twelve days of my passage from Falmouth to Horta – the pilot charts can be wrong.

  The navigator, heading out onto the featureless deep, places a religious faith in his books, charts, sextant, timepiece and leadline. These tools acquire talismanic importance. When they fail or mislead him he is unreasonably upset.

  In 1968, racing west-about around the world, singlehanded, non-stop, Englishman Robin Knox-Johnston was confronted with days and weeks of steady easterlies down in the Southern Ocean, in the latitudes of the ‘Roaring Forties’, where, according to the pilot charts and centuries of sailors’ lore, strong westerlies a
re supposed to prevail. At the time, his most serious competitor, Frenchman Bernard Moitessier, who had left Europe weeks after Knox-Johnston, was 4,000 miles astern. It wasn’t far enough, given Moitessier’s larger boat, greater speed, and the certainty that, of course, the Frenchman would be getting what the pilot charts predicted. The contrary weather, against all his expectations, drove Knox-Johnston to his greatest heights of frustration and brought out his best English schoolboy xenophobia:

  December 9th, 1968 … Of all the lousy things to happen; easterlies in an area which is renowned for westerlies … If the Frogs are meant to win – OK, but there is no need to torture me as well as allowing me to lose, and the Chinese could hardly have thought up a slower, more destructive method of torturing a person than this …

  December 10th, 1968. No change still. I cannot make it out at all … Perhaps if I decided to turn round and head back to New Zealand I’d get westerlies! …

  December 29th, 1968 … I just give up! Someone is going to have to rewrite the books! …

  December 30th, 1968 … Tacking north and south and making no progress at all, whilst somewhere to the west and probably not far away now, I’ll bet the Frenchman is having beautiful westerlies.

  Planning Toad’s route back in England, I decided to try to follow, more or less, the dotted line on my June and July pilot charts marking the route of low-powered vessels westbound from northern Europe to New York. This is an old steamer route, probably little used nowadays, with ships heading more directly for their destinations, but it takes advantage of winds and currents, and Toad certainly qualifies as a low-powered vessel. This line heads south-west from the English Channel, through the Azores, to a dot on the chart at 33°00' north, 38°33' west – about 1,300 miles due west of Morocco. Along this course, beyond the Azores, the pilot chart shows winds coming mostly from the north-east and east, and ocean currents of about half a knot pushing me in the right direction. This dot is almost 600 miles from Fayal. From there, the line heads due west 1,200 miles to another dot just north of Bermuda, at 33°00' north, 65°00' west. Between these dots, the wind is supposed to shift gradually from easterly to south-westerly, with the current still in my favour. (This line also passes north of the location of an iceberg sighted in July 1916, the chart notes, 500 miles south of the mean maximum southerly limit for icebergs in July. I could pause at this detail and wonder what sort of year it’s been for ice up north, but I let it go. I can’t believe I could pump this much to keep Toad afloat and then run into an iceberg here at the edge of the tropics.) At this point – the Bermuda dot, I call it – I will turn half-right and head for Maine, 800 miles distant, with an increased likelihood of south-westerlies, which will then be on or just abaft our beam, fair sailing. Inevitably, I will be blown off this line, one side or the other, but it offers what is statistically the most advantageous course to follow, and I will try to keep to it.

  The blue ‘wind roses’ – circles with feathered arrows indicating wind directions and strengths, centred on each 5-degree square on a pilot chart – also indicate that this course promises light winds, an average of force 3 (seven to ten knots), and calms about 6 per cent of the time. These are the ‘Horse Latitudes’, a place of notoriously light winds between the trade winds to the south and the stronger westerlies to the north, an area of ocean where progress can seem painfully slow. In the age of sail, merchant ships often took months to get through the Horse Latitudes, by which time the seamen had worked off what they called the ‘dead horse’, the advance wages they had received when signing on. A slow passage here was to a seaman’s benefit, as he was paid by the day, and a slow start meant a longer passage; thus to ‘flog a dead horse’ was vainly to expect an energetic effort from seamen as they worked off their advance.

  Light winds will mean a slow trip, but a gentle one, and especially now with Toad’s leak this is what I want. A slow poke across the Atlantic, no challenges, no rough stuff. I have plenty of food, books, batteries for the radio and I’m already home, so speed doesn’t particularly concern me.

  Tonight, at sunset, listening to jazz on VOA, I make a pie: dried apricots and apple rings from Neal’s Yard, raisins, a bit of trail mix, my bread dough without yeast. It’s delicious and I’m amazed it turns out so well, like a real pie. That I can do this with my funky ingredients. I have it with a little tinned cream poured over the top. A Sunday treat. After that I pump out the water seeping into the bilge. Pumping has become a part of my routine, and sometimes, like tonight, listening to jazz and thinking about my pie and what else I might bake, I can do it without growing appalled at how long it takes until I hear the loud suck of air beneath the floorboards.

  July 12

  After several days of very light north-easterlies, this morning the wind veers into the north-west and confuses me. I believe we are on the south-eastern edge of the Azores High, a great isobaric mesa that stretches at this time of year between the Azores and Bermuda. With winds blowing clockwise around any high-pressure system, north-easterlies would place us at the south-east – or at the four or five o’clock position – of this clockwise system.

  So why north-westerlies – which would indicate a one or two o’clock position – now? Why doesn’t it work the way it’s supposed to, according to the basic principles of weather systems, according to Maury’s charts, according to the time-honoured lore handed down by all those salty seafarers who have gone this way before? Why are there always so many exceptions to the supposed rules that the rules themselves, as Knox-Johnston complained, seem in need of revision? I can only presume it’s just a small anomalous wobble in the high.

  Sometimes I think I would like to have a weather-fax machine. In that next boat. Ships have them, and the big yachts with bucks. You get a faxed printout from any number of sophisticated weather stations ashore every time you press a button. A weather map of your area, dense with isobars and wind roses, explanations and forecasts written in stone. So you don’t do what I do: sit in the cockpit, look up into the sky and wonder what the fuck is going on.

  But if I had a weather-fax machine, I’d have to throw away my weather rhymes:

  When the wind shifts against the sun

  Trust it not, for back it will run.

  This morning the wind veered: it moved from north-east to north-west, or in the direction of the sun’s passage. But had it backed, moved contrary to the sun – say, from northwest to north-east, or south-west to south or south-east – then I might have thought of this rhyme, not trusted this wind shift, and waited for it to shift back again. As it is, the wind might sit in the north-west indefinitely now, forcing us to beat.

  On the other hand, it did happen quite quickly:

  Long foretold, long last

  Short warning, soon past.

  Sailors found these rhymes accurate, put their faith in them and passed them on. Some, apparently so unerringly useful, have been purloined by landlubbers ashore:

  Red sky at night is a sailor’s [or shepherd’s] delight;

  Red sky in the morning, the sailor takes warning.

  Many times a day – each time I make an entry on the left-hand page of my daily log – I look at the barometer. Its reading will considerably affect my own inner barometer:

  At sea with low and falling glass,

  Soundly sleeps the careless ass.

  But when the glass is high and rising

  Soundly sleeps the careful wise one.

  But it must already be high and rising, because there’s a rhyme that warns me to look out for a sudden rise after a low:

  Quick rise after low

  Foretells a stronger blow.

  There are many such rhymes, about the appearance of the sky, when and how the wind blows, handed down from sailor to sailor as long as old salts have broken in new ones:

  Mackerel sky and mares’ tails

  Make lofty ships carry low sails.

  If rain before wind, tops’l sheets and halyards mind.

  If wind before rain, soon you may
make sail again.

  When clouds appear like rocks and towers,

  The earth’s refreshed by frequent showers.

  When the sea-hog jumps,

  Look out for your pumps.

  This last refers to the debatable lore that porpoises leaping close inshore may augur stormy weather. True or not, I like it, and if I see dolphins or porpoises leaping close to shore, this old saw comes to mind.

  More than their possible usefulness, what I like about these rhymes is the company they bring me. They give me a kinship with sailors of the past, common seamen, as frightened as I by the prospect of hard weather, who looked skyward and mumbled to themselves:

  If clouds appear as if scratched by a hen,

  Get ready to reef your topsails then.

  And then looked aft, anxiously, to the officers strutting on the poop deck, awaiting the order to run up the shrouds and get those bloody topsails in. They were superstitious men, largely ignorant of the science and theories that lay behind the phenomena they observed at sea. For them the natural world was riven with magic and mystery, examples of which might appear at any moment, between a wave, inside a cloud. They saw, as I have seen, the sun flash green on sinking into the ocean, the heavens hung with glowing curtains, and pellets of fire in the water around a ship’s hull. Books have explained these strange sights to me, stripped them of their wonder with cold science, but the sailors of old remained ignorant and felt their magic.

  If I had a weather-fax machine, the mystery and surprise of what will happen next upon the ocean and in the sky will be removed, and too much else will be taken away with the not knowing.