Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  July 16

  13.55: Noon pos: 31°34' N, 42°47' W. An astounding 69 miles noon to noon. How did we manage that becalmed most of the day yesterday? Must be some help from current there. And a great morale boost: I’m now on the western half of my N. Atlantic chart. Both Maine and today’s position are in view as it lies on the chart table.

  19.45: Becalmed. I feel I’ll never get away from here.

  23.00: A breeze again, same as this time last night. We’re moving and it’s wonderful.

  July 17

  In the late afternoon I pass another doughty voyager: a Physalia, or Portuguese man-of-war. It’s headed in the opposite direction, east, towards Europe. To Portugal? Its ‘sail’, a translucent half-round gas-filled chamber about six inches long and almost as high above the water – about the size and shape of a large clamshell – and the same lovely pale lavender colour as the old Union Castle liners, has enough parabolic curve to enable it to sail to windward. This is the sort of weather it likes best, a flat sea, the lightest of breezes, sailing at a gentle angle of heel. In stronger winds it gets blown flat, but this is an efficient form of reefing, as the wind spills off its sail and it effectively lies ahull until the blow is over, its underwater feeding streamers providing better drag for volume than the deepest keel of any yacht, and not too much hard-won sea room is lost.

  Farther on, I see another one. Then several more. A colony, or a family. Perhaps a race.

  There is much of the Portuguese man-of-war about Toad. A design evolved not for speed, but for a dogged ability to get there in the end, and, in the meantime, to be at home upon the ocean. Yet even after six years of living aboard, I have been astonished by Toad’s performance in the calm or nearly windless conditions of this last week. Every day the noon-to-noon run has exceeded all my expectations. In the lightest of airs, Toad has moved and kept moving longer, farther, faster than I thought was possible for its shape, which, underwater, where it counts, is scientifically crude.

  Part of the reason I’m so surprised is that I, like everyone else, am a victim of received opinion, of conventional thinking, of the wisdom of the books. Toad, according to the books, is all wrong. Its hull below the waterline is fat and bulbous, rather like the belly of an elephant between its legs. It lacks the finer-angled bow and stern of shapelier, more hydrodynamically thoughtful yachts, which shoulder the water aside in gradual increments and pull it back into the wake with a minimum of turbulent displacement. Toad is shaped more like a half-submerged gypsy caravan, full in the ends, so that it has to work harder pushing water aside.

  Toad’s keel, a long, untrimmed balk of lumber, lacks any hint of a foil shape – the sectional shape of an aeroplane’s wing: rounded at the front, reaching its greatest width about a third of the way back, then tapering to a fine point at its end. A boat’s keel should be so shaped for the same reason: to part the water with as little turbulence as possible, and draw it back together smoothly. Tank tests have provided the optimum shapes. Most modern yachts have fin keels: deep, narrow foil shapes, like wings pointing straight down into the deep.

  According to all the books, Toad should be barely able to move out of its own way. A monstrously inefficient design. A tub. In this it stands with some notable company: ‘Probably no vessel was less suited for long-distance cruising than Slocum’s Spray,’ writes sailor-designer Skip Dashew. The Spray was an engineless oyster dredger with a hull design about three hundred years old, rebuilt by Slocum and then sailed around the world by him alone between 1895 and 1898. Critics have for years insisted that Slocum’s claims for its exemplary behaviour at sea must have been exaggerated. However, a number of people have built Spray replicas and fervently defend Slocum and reiterate his claims. Dashew goes on: ‘I doubt if Robin Knox-Johnston would have sailed a Swahili [sic] if he could have afforded a more modern design.’* This is quite true: Knox-Johnston tried to get sponsorship to build a faster, more modern design in which to circumnavigate. He failed to get the money and went finally in Suhaili because it was his own boat, all he had. The clunkiest, oldest, most ‘inefficient’ design of the nine boats that set out to race around the world in 1968, it was also the only boat to finish.

  The question of ‘efficiency’ in yacht design rages on ad infinitum between sailors and yacht designers, and it’s endlessly silly. Efficiency has been confused with speed and performance. Modern yachts are without question faster than older boats, and able to point closer to the wind when tacking. But you wouldn’t want a racing car to go to Safe-way on Saturday mornings loaded with the kids and a dog. It wouldn’t be an efficient design. And you wouldn’t want a lightweight, pointy, rule-distorted weekend racer to load with provisions to sail around the world.

  So radically has yacht design changed in the last thirty years that many people today are surprised that older designs can even move through the water. The Westsail 32, a mass-produced fibreglass boat based on a very old design, is said to be an unhandy tub, a poor sailer, unable to tack without the engine going to push its nose through the eye of the wind. A yacht designer of some tiny note who had never sailed one repeated this nonsense to me once. It is fat and tubby, like Toad, roomy inside and sea-kindly in motion. It was drawn in 1924 by William Atkin for Motor Boat magazine, as a design that the magazine’s readers might have knocked together for them by local boat-builders for a modest sum. Atkin called his little boat Eric – after the Red – and based the design on a Norwegian lifeboat craft known as a redningskoite, which was in turn based on the ancient seaworthy double-enders used by Scandinavian fishermen venturing into the North Sea as far as the Lofoten Islands north of the Arctic Circle; and those boats were essentially short, fat versions of the Viking longships of a thousand years ago. In the seventies, Westsail’s designer Bill Crealock redrew Atkin’s Eric for fibreglass construction at the same moment that sailors everywhere suddenly tired of flimsy day-sailer designs strengthened for cruising; they wanted a massively strong, purpose-built boat, capable of going anywhere. The little Americanized redningskoite became the VW Bug of the yachting world. Westsail was for a time the success story of Southern California boatbuilders. By the late seventies, eight hundred had been built, and Time magazine had done a cover story on the popularity of small-boat cruising, featuring Westsail and its tubby prototype. But by the eighties, Westsail had gone bankrupt and its boat had fallen from grace. Such a fat long-keeler (as opposed to a modern design with a short, deep fin keel) surely could not sail well, people said, looking up from their yachting monthlies, and the mob turned again towards faster, lighter, newer boats.

  Robin Knox-Johnston’s supposed dog of a ‘Swahili’, Suhaili, is an Atkin Eric, a sister ship to the Westsail 32. Since returning to fame and glory in 1969 after his record circumnavigation, he has gone on to other sailing feats: he has raced across the Atlantic and around the world on trimarans and catamarans of record-breaking speed. He knows all about efficiency under sail. However, it was Suhaili he chose to sail to Greenland, above the Arctic Circle, on a recent climbing-sailing expedition with British mountaineer Chris Bonington and four other men. The choice of ship in which to sail to such a place is not made by nostalgia.

  I know, then, that such fat, tubby boats can in fact sail well, that they are good sea boats. But what amazes me now, in the ghosting conditions of this last week, is how well Toad has performed in such light conditions. Its momentum has kept it going through almost breathless air.

  I have always felt sensitive to the notion that Toad is a slow, unhandy tub. This is what people would think, looking at it and knowing what the books say – this is even what I thought. But what do they know of this boat in its element? Has it not, as my brother David shouted, been to more places than the snide landlord of Flushing has had hot dinners? Certainly it has travelled farther, with less fuss, than most of the plastic clone wonderboats that sit unused in all the marinas of the world.

  I have always seen Toad as the interim boat, the boat I would poke around in on both sides of the Atlanti
c before selling and getting ‘the right one’, that faster, bigger, sleeker thoroughbred that I would sail to Rarotonga, Whangaroa, and over horizons beyond. But now, deep into this fine voyage, that sense of another boat being better has dissolved. I think I have felt for some time, since Horta if not before, that I cannot sell Toad. I’ll get some job and buy J. out of her share. For as surely as the Portuguese man-of-war can sail across the Atlantic, Toad can take me around the world, and handsomely. It’s the best boat a boy ever had.

  It’s just got this leak. If I can get it to Maine, I’ll pull the sheathing off and recaulk the hull properly. It will be better than new. Then paint it a beautiful off-white, and go.

  July 20

  09.00: Becalmed.

  17.30: I’ve been hearing whatever it is again. Standing on the cabin roof beside the mast, the sea oily smooth over a vestigial swell, I can hear something. Actually, I’m not sure I hear it at all. I’ve become aware of it over the last few days during such absolute calms when the boat is quite still, when there’s no sound of water along the hull, no sound of waves. It’s a rumbling, possibly below the level of what I would call sound. I think it may be the heaving of the ocean upon the earth’s crust, this ocean that is pulled back and forth by the moon, and rises and falls by the pressure of the earth’s atmosphere upon it. An oceanic inhaling and exhaling. Or maybe thermocline layers of icy water moving across slopes or obstructions on the ocean floor 18,000 feet below me. Maybe it’s tinnitus, something in my inner ear – a version of ‘the sea’ one hears in sea shells cupped to the ear. But I can hear it.

  Tonight, at twilight, a breeze comes across the water, as it has the last few evenings, and I start fiddling with the sails to make the most of it. Toad begins to glide off from a standstill, and as always I feel a thrill at the sensation of being suddenly lifted and borne away under sail.

  I believe you can learn enough about sailing technique in one morning to set off on a voyage around the world that afternoon. I don’t mean seamanship – the experience-honed judgment needed to handle a boat in all situations, which is the greatest requirement of the sailor – I mean the simple basic principles of how to move a boat with sails for any given wind. These principles are as follows: if the wind is from ahead, you pull the sails in; if the wind is from the side, you let them out a bit; if it’s from behind, you let the sails way out. That’s it. That’ll get you out of the harbour; in fact, if you have an engine, you’ll probably motor out of the harbour and put your sails up later. That’s what most people do. The finer points of sail trim take years to learn, years of pulling the sails in and out until the wind is no longer invisible but is something you can see as clearly as smoke, with all its wraiths and streamers and eddies as its moves over the surface of the sea and slipstreams through your rigging and around your mast and across the parabolas of your sails. By then you know where the wind is with your eyes shut, you can feel it in your sleep in your bunk below, and a small change can wake you up. Trimming your sails then to make the most of the wind becomes an instinct. But in the beginning, pulling sails in when the wind is ahead, letting them out when the wind is behind, will take you far. Especially if you begin doing this on a boat with an engine which you can flip on when the wind grows light or fickle or when you want to sail through a tight spot. Early on, you may think you know how to sail. That’s what I thought before J. and I began sailing aboard Magdaleña.

  Our first voyage was back to Tortola, where we had been happy. We were cruising sailors now, aboard our own boat, and we wouldn’t have any problems with the immigration authorities. Since Magdaleña was so much smaller than Viva III, I had imagined it would be nimbler, more responsive than my parents’ boat. But it seemed less so; it moved sluggishly to windward – as it had on our first passage from the Lagoon – and it took us an entire afternoon (according to J’s second-year diary, which I am dipping into tonight) to tack the three miles across Pillsbury Sound from Red Hook to Caneel Bay on St John. Again, I worried that we’d bought a dog. If we had been aboard Viva I would certainly have turned on the engine and steamed straight across out of frustration, and it occurred to me that since I had always had that option, and too often used it, my sailing skills were probably still quite elementary.

  At anchor that evening, I opened Eric Hiscock’s Cruising Under Sail:

  The usual fault the beginner makes when sailing close-hauled is to sheet his sails in too flat and then to point up too close to the wind, so that although his yacht may head in the desired direction she does not move fast enough through the water. The average cruising yacht [that is, of the period in which Hiscock was writing] when treated in this manner will become lifeless and drift away to leeward; her sheets should be eased a little to get her moving … This is also known as sailing … ‘full-and-by’.

  That is, keeping the sails full and sailing by the wind, rather than by directional desire.

  We tried this ‘full-and-by’ business the next day and we did better. In time we also learned, per Hiscock, to sail the boat around from one tack to the other, rather than jamming the tiller hard over and trying to come about as fast as a modern boat. And we learned to ‘back’ a headsail: to let it fill with wind on the windward side of the new tack before releasing its sheet; this helped push the boat’s nose around. We learned to look at the ‘cat’s-paws’ and small wavelets made by the wind on the water to see where the true wind rather than the apparent wind (which is the wind plus the air coming from the bow made by the boat’s forward movement) was coming from. These simple lessons were the key to handling this fat little engineless boat, but they were not learned at once. Tacking into West End, Tortola, months later, we pinched too close to windward, failed to come about, and the bowsprit drove straight through a bush ashore, stopping a foot from an old man walking along the road beside the water. He said: ‘You got to turn de boat before you get dis close.’

  In Tortola, we saw Mike Underhill and his kids Sally and Ian and they came aboard and admired the boat. We hitched around the island as we’d done before and we loved it again, but now that we had our boat, the act of pulling up the anchor and going somewhere else was so exciting that we knew immediately we wouldn’t stay long. On the Fourth of July, four people asked us to sail them to Cruz Bay on St John for $5 apiece and we accepted happily. The idea was worth it. Sailing back downwind it took only two hours to get to Cruz Bay.

  This was the first time we had been to this small capital of St John, which had a few low red corrugated-iron-roofed buildings tucked between the palms in a lush cove with a boatyard and a ferry dock beside a white beach. We anchored and rowed our charter party ashore. Bands were playing, stalls were selling food and native knick-knacks, and I bought J. small black coral earrings with our charter fee. That night we lounged in our cockpit and watched the fireworks exploding over the harbour, and we wouldn’t have felt more privileged if we had been aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia.

  We liked St John. It was small and unspoiled, entirely without the commercial buzz of St Thomas, and being US territory, we could work there. We needed to stay put for a while; there was much to be done on the new boat before we cruised it any distance, and we had to make some money.

  I got a job at Caneel Bay, the dull and snooty Rockefeller-owned resort on the west coast of St John, around the corner from Cruz Bay. I worked as a labourer at Caneel’s own small boatyard in Cruz Bay which serviced its ferries that brought guests over from St Thomas. We anchored only a few hundred yards off the boatyard, and J. rowed me ashore every morning. She spent her days working on Magdaleña, painting and varnishing. She talked about looking for a job too, but while I was earning there was no urgent need. Most of what I made went to paint and varnish, thinner and glue, and each week we stuck a few more dollars in an envelope we kept stashed inside the saloon’s little solid-fuel stove.

  On weekends we sailed out of Cruz Bay and tacked to windward along St John’s north shore, learning more each time about our boat and how to sail it. We ancho
red in Maho Bay, a tiny palm-fringed beach that we usually had all to ourselves because the sailing guidebooks told cruisers to go to Francis Bay farther to the north, and obediently they did. We swam and hiked up through the rough bush in the hills to where we could see Magdaleña far below, and Tortola across Drake’s Channel, and in the distance Jost Van Dyke and the Atlantic Ocean. We speared fish and ate dinner in the cockpit, admired our boat and talked of where we would go in it someday, and we watched the sun go down over St Thomas – which looked pretty at a distance.

  We got a little tabby kitty we named Minou from the Humane Society on St Thomas, who tried immediately to escape and leaped overboard for the first and last time.

  Anchored in Cruz Bay, among the native fishing boats and a few plastic day-sailers, were four other small wooden boats with full-time live-aboards, all Americans in their late twenties, our age. We saw these people every day, rowing past one another’s boats to and from shore; we drank beer and wine on one boat or other, and talked about boats and sailing. Tom Averna, from Massachusetts, who had a dense black beard and looked like a Greek in an ancient mural, had the prettiest boat, Silver Seal, a twenty-four-foot English gaff cutter. Alan Johnson’s Driftwood was the roughest, a native craft he’d fixed up and painted fire-engine red; he was the best sailor among us and I got a few pointers from him. Stu, living aboard a homemade plywood boat, was a little older; he’d done time for some paper crime and was now on parole. Ed and Sue lived on a tiny wooden Folkboat, twenty-five feet long, and were unhappy. Ed was fat and sullen and treated pretty dark-haired Sue like a maid.

  We weren’t best friends, but we were all living the same life and shared the same dream – to take off, whether it was down-island or around the world – and we watched one another with interest to see how the other was going about it. We were poor, living hand-to-mouth, fixing up our boats, the two married couples trying to stay together, the two single guys trying to get laid. We were all, more or less, in the same boat.