A Thousand Miles from Anywhere

by Sandra Clayton

  It is not a nice day, gloomy and overcast and for a while it rains.

  Heavy cloud produces an incredibly dark night. So dark that you step through the companionway doors and you can’t even see the cockpit you are standing in. Four or five squalls pass through during the night. It is too dark to see them but we can follow their progress and measure their size on radar. One of them is six miles wide. I watch it coming towards us on the screen, but only the wind and rain at its outer edge actually hits us as its great bulk passes behind our stern. All we see during the night are two lights, one astern of us and one off our starboard beam, probably yachts but both on a more westerly course than we are.

  David has toothache.

  During Wednesday morning the sky begins to clear and the day becomes bright and pleasant. The wind is light and from the north to begin with and we motor sail with just one engine on. Unfortunately the wind slowly backs until by midday it is coming from the south-west, the direction in which we are travelling.

  Wind on the nose slows our progress considerably as the sea starts to build. By evening it is most uncomfortable. Voyager bangs and crashes and we feel jarred and jolted all over. When it is like this, just moving about takes all your energy and all your muscles ache. To add to the discomfort, two squalls pass through.

  We have a number of options. One of them is to continue on this course but that will require us to tack continuously. Catamarans do not sail well into the wind, however, and we could beat and tack about throughout tonight and all day tomorrow, constantly shifting sails, but at the end of it still be only a few miles closer to our destination.

  It would be better to make one very long tack, either well out into the Atlantic or towards the African coast, but both have disadvantages. If we choose the former, and then the Trade Winds kick in before we are ready, we would have difficulty tacking back towards our destination. As for the latter, we do not feel comfortable about getting closer to an area of the African coast where there have been recent reports of pirate activity.

  In the last few years there has been a lot of media coverage about pirate attacks on merchant vessels and yachts off the east coast of Africa, especially Somalia. Apart from the sailing press, there has been little written about piracy on the western side of the continent. Here the target is yachts which, being slow-moving and with a minimal crew, are particularly vulnerable as the pirate boats are fast and powerful.

  By far the best option would be to forget about the Cape Verde Islands altogether and head out into the Atlantic because the present direction of the wind would allow us to lay a course straight for the Caribbean Sea. The problem is, we have arranged for David’s brother Tony to send our post to Mindelo and among all the other things it contains is our Christmas mail from family and friends. We don’t want to abandon it. We also want to make our first visit to an African island.

  We decide to continue on our present course, with one engine on, and hope for a wind change before fuel becomes a problem.

  The only thing we see in 24 hours is a distant light, off our port side during the night. For a long time it seems to be shadowing Voyager before finally speeding up and overtaking her. It is only much later that David admits how uneasy this particular vessel made him feel.

  Once off-shore our VHF radio, with its range of between sixteen and twenty miles depending on atmospherics, is our only two-way contact with the outside world. Although we can listen to BBC World Service on short-wave radio, and to weather forecasts on SSB (single-sideband modulation) which is the marine equivalent of ham radio. Unfortunately both require the use of headphones because reception is so poor out here.

  BBC World Service provides a full range of programmes but our listening is restricted to a half hour broadcast each morning made up of twenty minutes of world events followed by ten minutes of UK news. This is because thirty minutes is as much as you can take before you get a headache from the interference. Something like a play or a closely-argued debate is out of the question. One item that never fails to get through the static, though, is Aston Villa’s latest result which, on the team’s present form, inevitably casts a pall over David’s day. In my innocence I had assumed that missing out on the English Premier League would be one of the bonuses of being cut off from the world.

  Given our difficulty with the French weather forecasts, David trawls the wavelengths again in the hope of finding an English-language one and is delighted when he finds himself at last tuned into Herb. He has tried before without success but happily our receiver is finally within range.

  Herb Hillgenberg, known to trans-Atlantic yachtsmen simply as Herb, broadcasts personalised weather information from his home in Ontario, Canada via SSB radio to any yachtsman who requests it and who has an SSB transmitter/receiver on board. Every evening he calls up individual yachts all over the North Atlantic with a detailed forecast for the course each one is following and as many as 50 yachts will have someone beside their radios waiting to talk to him. In addition to those with transmitter/receivers, there will be many more yachtsmen like us who have only an SSB receiver but who will also be listening in to get forecasts.

  He begins with yachts in the north-west Atlantic, off the coast of Canada, and works down to the South Caribbean. He then moves to the English Channel, down to The Canaries and across to the Caribbean again. All this takes three or four hours but by around 8pm he will have reached our own area and David can tune in for the twenty minutes or so that it takes to get the information he needs, and which is as much as his ears and brain can cope with.

  Herb gives his extraordinary expertise at weather forecasting and ship routing without charge and calls it a hobby although he is so good that a number of professional maritime bodies use his services. He is there every day except Christmas Day and probably spends as long in preparing ahead of each broadcast as he does in transmitting. When he calls up a yacht he will already have a good idea of the area it will be in from the previous day’s transmission and will have already identified the best possible course for that particular yacht for the next 24 hours based on the latest conditions available to him.

  As we have only an SSB receiver, we cannot communicate with Herb directly or receive a personalised forecast. Instead David listens out for the names of yachts in front and behind us and takes down their forecasts. He then has a pretty good idea of what weather we can expect in the next 24 hours.

  16

  A Lack of Stimuli

  There is a squall just after midnight with the wind fluctuating from 25 knots to 12; not gradually, but wham, straight up to 25 and then dropping like a stone. There are two more in the next three hours. In between times, there is a bright quarter moon. The only other activity is a flickering red light which our radar shows as five miles away.

  Today is Thursday and our fourth day at sea. The wind continues from the south-west but lighter than yesterday so that apart from the squalls we don’t get thrown about as much. We continue motor-sailing on one engine although now on reduced revs to conserve fuel and progress is slow.

  Sunrise is at 7.45.

  During the morning David tops up the oil in both engines.

  The day’s third exciting event is a piece of polystyrene floating past. Unfortunately I am asleep when this occurs but, on learning about it later, demand a full description plus the reason why I wasn’t told immediately. It was about eight inches by three, David informs me, off-white with dirty grey marks; and as I was sleeping soundly at the time he thought it was a shame to wake me. I am nevertheless quite resentful at having missed it. There is a distinct absence of visual stimuli at present.

  We are not seeing as much of each other as usual either. We are both desperately tired and all we really want to do is sleep, so we have extended our dedicated watches and whoever is off watch goes back to bed until lunchtime. We have found in the past that after the first couple of days of a long passage our brains and bodies have adjusted to the broken sleep and we assume a natural rhythm. The present trying c
onditions, however, have left us exhausted.

  One of the last things we purchased before setting out from England was a battery-operated kitchen alarm. It is small enough to slip into any pocket and during night passages we set it to go off at intervals of ten minutes. Having long ago timed the passage of super tankers from horizon to horizon, we settled on ten minutes as the optimum time between checks to avoid a collision.

  At present I am so tired that for the last half of my final watches our little kitchen alarm goes off and not simply alerts me that it is time to make a check, but actually wakes me. I then go outside, make my 360° inspection of the horizon, re-set the alarm, sit down and remember nothing more until it wakes me again ten minutes later. My head is like lead and my whole body aches. David’s toothache is proving persistent and analgesics give little relief.

  Wind direction is about as uncongenial as it can be. North-west through north to east would put the wind aft of our beam and be ideal. Instead it remains persistently south-west and on the nose. So we motor all day on low revs while we wait for the wind to change.

  Tonight is very dark, the blackest of black, and we creep through the blackness as if we are the only creatures left alive on a dead planet. Midnight to midnight we cover only 33 miles.

  Early Friday morning, while David is sleeping, a green plastic detergent bottle with a blue cap floats past. I don’t wake him. After all, I wasn’t given the opportunity to view that piece of polystyrene yesterday. But sometime later, when we are both awake and on deck, a flash of colour draws us to the rails. Below the surface of the water, for as far as the eye can see, there are skeins of what appear to be tiny electric-blue eggs. The colour is riveting. In amongst them tiny jellyfish, looking newly-hatched, maintain a precarious balance using their little frills against the roll and rush of the water.

  The wind is still coming from the south-west, but getting weaker all the time. At 9am we decide our fuel supply is such that we need to do something drastic. Feeling we are now far enough away from the threat of pirates to tack in towards Africa we change course to get some drive from our sails. We turn the engine off, resolving to use one of them only twice a day, for the hour or so it takes to recharge Voyager’s batteries.

  This new tactic pays off and engineless we manage to maintain our speed although not strictly on course. We stay on this tack for six hours and manage to cover 19 miles but by the end of it we are only four miles closer to our destination. David is not encouraged.

  At least we have recovered our energy and our days now settle into a comfortable pattern. While I am asleep, after my last watch of the night, David listens to the BBC’s half-hour news broadcast on World Service. When I get up, around 9am, we have breakfast together and he gives me the radio news highlights. We do chores during the morning, then prepare and eat lunch. Afterwards, if there are no further jobs to do apart from the washing up, we are at leisure and as long as the weather is amenable we spend the afternoons out in the cockpit, propped up on cushions reading, writing or sharing a crossword puzzle. We have our evening meal while watching the sun go down, at around 6.30, then I go to bed at 7pm leaving David to do the first watch of the night, which he combines with tuning in to the SSB radio at 8pm for Herb’s weather forecast.

  This morning I see a Leach’s petrel close up for the first time, with the distinctive white V pattern down its black back and wings. It touches its feet to the water, dips its head to scoop up something and becomes airborne again immediately. At around eight inches long, and with a 19-inch wingspan, it seems a very small bird to live on the wing out here. Yet amazingly it has an even smaller cousin, the tiny storm petrel, with which we are destined to have a closer acquaintance in the not too distant future.

  We are also visited by a solitary shearwater. It is a superb flier although, like the petrels, it is virtually helpless on land. Like them it also goes ashore only to breed, in burrows or among rocks, and even then under the cover of darkness which is why they are rarely seen except from seagoing vessels. Much larger and heavier than the petrels, and with a four-foot wingspan, the shearwater is using the air currents to fly just above the waves in long, graceful glides with stiffly outstretched wings. Petrels and shearwaters are the only birds we have seen since leaving Tenerife.

  Around midday David notes the chart reference 23°26N. We have crossed the Tropic of Cancer and entered the tropics.

  During the afternoon the wind drops to a barely discernible breeze and occasionally dies away altogether. By sunset we have stopped sailing and simply drift. In theory we are back to our original course but that means nothing under these conditions. The sails merely flap with the slight rocking of the boat. We are becalmed.

  It is something not generally known to most modern sailors. Before the arrival of steam and diesel, however, anyone who went to sea could expect to be becalmed at some time. Its effect was indelibly imprinted on my child’s mind thanks to the school board’s enduring love affair with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

  By killing the albatross, the poem’s narrator had doomed his ship and fellow crew members, and even all these years later I still recall his evocation of the becalmed vessel:

  Day after day, day after day,

  We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

  As idle as a painted ship

  Upon a painted ocean.

  Like the ancient mariner we have no idea when the wind is likely to return and a sort of listlessness sets in. Instead of reading or doing a few chores David and I merely slump in the cockpit and stare out onto a flat sea.

  ‘We shall go quite mad, you know,’ I tell him.

  ‘It’s only been a couple of hours,’ he says.

  My second watch of the night is very, very dark. Pitch black dark. As I turn my back on the tiny circle of light shed by the saloon’s chart-table lamp and step out into the cockpit it is like falling into The Void. It is at such times that you ask yourself if being adrift on a 40 x 16-foot piece of fibreglass in thousands of square miles of sea is really a sensible thing to be doing. Tonight is the nearest I have ever come to sensory deprivation. There is nothing here except my consciousness. When I look down I can’t even see myself. Then, in the preternatural silence, a few feet from our stern, a whale sends an explosion of air hurtling through its blowhole and I become momentarily unhinged.

  A little while later the wind gets up. Perversely, despite our current desire to increase our speed, I should have preferred it to stay calm; because in the all-pervading darkness, and twitchy from the proximity of unseen whales, the imagination takes over. The wind begins to whip up the sea and the resulting roll of the boat brings up the horseshoe lifebuoy on the port side deck, right in front of my eyes and outlined by the eerie glimmer of phosphorous which has suddenly appeared around our topsides. For a few moments the looming black shape ceases to be a lifebuoy and becomes a ghoul from a horror movie. The worst thing now is to start thinking about alien abduction. At times like this I tend to bolt indoors for a bit.

  When David takes over the watch again we are becalmed for the next four hours. During this period he becomes transfixed by the GPS. Its screen currently bears a dotted line representing our progress. The only time it shows us travelling towards our destination is when the engine is on. The rest of the time we seem to be drifting backwards, sideways, every which way except where we should be going.

  Although he complains hardly at all, and performs all his tasks as usual, David’s toothache is giving me cause for concern. The pain has extended to the whole of the right side of his jaw and down into his neck. Apart from offering painkillers, and neck exercises to relax the muscles and help him sleep, there is little I can do.

  Saturday’s dawn is silver and a dozen shades of grey, from silvery white in the east where the sun is loitering, to the colour navies paint their battleships. There is every kind of cloud imaginable, too: flat, billowing, wispy mares’ tails, shimmering mackerel and fluffy cumulus, but all of them in shades of grey.
Grey everywhere, but sparkling in the east and incredibly beautiful. A Seascape in Grey and Silver. Whistler might have painted it.

  Around 11am the wind fades altogether and in the next five hours the only time we make any progress – 2.8 miles – is when we run an engine to re-charge the batteries.

  We are visited by a petrel and a shearwater again.

  Finally in the late afternoon a light wind emerges from the west and albeit slowly we begin to make a little progress which is even in the right direction. From sunset yesterday to sunset today we get only 23 miles closer to our destination. The black line on the GPS, recording our drift and our battery charging looks like a bootlace tied into a ragged bow.

  Sunset is at 6.30. The cloud cover is lighter than last night. The fixed stars are bright enough to be visible and there are some shooting stars. The bobbing masthead light of a yacht appears behind us and slowly, over a period of hours, overtakes us. Two commercial vessels pass on our starboard side heading north-west.

  When David wakes me in the small hours, for my second watch of the night, he says that as he left the cockpit he could hear a whale breathing. This is troubling for three reasons. If you can hear a whale breathing it is a) on the surface; b) very close; and c) probably asleep. Being mammals, whales have to rise to the surface regularly for air. The explosive sound that comes from their blow holes is them clearing foul air from their lungs after all the oxygen has been used up. They are then ready to take in a supply of fresh air. As there has been no whoosh of stale air being expelled, and the foul smell that comes with it, the chances are that the whale we can hear is lying on the surface with its blowhole out of the water. This enables it to have a good long snooze without the inconvenience of periodically rising to the surface, emptying and refilling its lungs, and then sinking again.