Time, like the calendar, is a man-made construct. Created for convenience. Decided by committee. Even as late as the mid-19th century the English cities of London and Leeds – with only 195 miles between them – functioned six minutes apart. What ultimately unified the clocks of Great Britain was the expansion of the railways with its demand for reliable train timetables. By way of establishing order in the far larger land mass of North America, the USA drew three vertical lines down its map and divided the country into four separate time zones. This may appear somewhat arbitrary to those living in the Dakotas or Nebraska, where the eastern side of their state functions in Central Time while the western side operates an hour later, on Mountain Time.
When you live on land, Time in this abstract sense is not something most of us think about much, except perhaps to be aware occasionally of the small differences that occur daily in the sun’s rising and setting. This is most noticeable as spring or autumn get underway; the latter always prompting my Mother to observe, with a dying fall to her voice, that ‘The nights are beginning to draw in’. This small difference, totalling only a few minutes during the course of each week, does not become an issue in the northern hemisphere until late in the year when people start grumbling that it is beginning to get dark around four in the afternoon. It was to deal with this kind of inconvenience, among others, that Daylight Saving Time – another manmade innovation – was introduced.
The only other occasion when Time impinges on us is when travelling abroad, or interstate in countries the size of America or Australia. But if we travel by air this difference in time zones is speedily dealt with when a member of the cabin crew tells us by how much to alter our watches before we leave the plane. Sailing west, from the Cape Verde Islands to the Caribbean, we will pass through four time zones. At approximately 100 miles per day this means entering a new time zone every five days.
Initially, we stay with Cape Verde Islands’ time, but gradually the problem becomes apparent. In particular, I have been accustomed to going to bed just after sunset, at around 7.30 or 8pm, just as it is beginning to get dark. Although I currently set off for bed at the usual time, it is now still daylight. It is not only difficult to sleep with sunshine streaming in through the blinds, but I also miss watching the sun set before I go to bed. And of course it affects the other end of the day too, in as much as we are currently eating breakfast in the dark.
So we declare Central Voyager Time (CVT) which, in essence, means declaring dawn to be whatever time we want it to be so that our night watches fall at the right time and, especially, that David’s first one coincides with the relevant part of Herb’s nightly broadcast. However, to be able to tune into Herb, as well as BBC World Service News, we also need a fixed time so that we know when to access these transmissions. We choose Greenwich Mean Time and we keep two clocks: one on GMT to connect us with the outside world, and one on CVT which is basically whatever keeps us comfortable and functioning effectively on board.
Radicals during the French Revolution redesigned their calendar, among other things, with ten days to a week because it was tidier. While creating timeless literature, Shakespeare and Danté reinvented and transformed their respective languages to give us the modern forms of English and Italian used today. Strange to say, even all the way out here, just the two of us on a bit of fibreglass, it feels quite liberating to invent your own time.
The journey goes slowly. I think David is disappointed that he won’t get us to Trinidad for the New Year celebrations. The Millennium ones promise to be rather special. I don’t mind. I like it out here.
We have settled into an easy routine. We catch up on our sleep in the mornings and do our chores before and after lunch. And now that David’s course of antibiotics is complete we have introduced Happy Hour. At 5pm. Alcohol consumption is limited to one glass of red wine daily at this time. A glass before dinner is pleasurable, a small ritual to look forward to as evening approaches, but which is not going to threaten the boat’s safety. You cannot afford to become too relaxed or unobservant, especially as a rolling boat makes you quite tired anyway, constantly having to maintain your balance.
Dinner is at 6pm. I am in bed from 7 until 10. It is not always easy to fall asleep on this first rest. It is only after my second watch that I fall into my bunk and sleep like the dead. David is abed between 10.30pm and 1.30am. I get my head down again from 2 until 5am. I like the 5.30–8.30am watch best. I like the way the stars fade away in the pre-dawn light and dawn gives way to sunrise.
There are voices in the port cabin, and occasional music coming from the forepeak. Boats in a big sea develop innumerable vibrations which the brain converts into sounds familiar to it. For example, the one in the forepeak which is reminiscent of a mad timpanist is simply the effect certain sea conditions have on our port water tank, depending on how much water is in there. The voices are harder to identify. And nothing can explain the smells. Yesterday it was pipe tobacco smoke. Today it is orange blossom. We have neither on board.
22
Peculiar Weather
It is Sunday morning, the nineteenth day of December and the beginning of our seventh day at sea. The moon goes down at 4am but within an hour the planet Venus is bathing us in a glow even brighter than the departed moon; only more seductively. For while the moon sheds a cool, silver light, Venus showers you in gold. This is a novel way to spend December: out in the open air, in sunshine during the day and under a canopy of stars at night. It’s a bit bouncy, but a small price to pay for not spending the winter indoors under cold, grey skies and interminable rain.
I wash towels and night clothes before lunch and peg them out on the rails. And, as conditions are congenial at present, David runs the water maker to top up the tank since Herb is promising 22-knot winds which will make the process impossible. Then, with the chores done, we set up the tree.
Before we left England we bought a small artificial fir tree in the post-Christmas sales. It has been sitting in its box in the fore cabin ever since. We dig it out now, assemble it and begin straightening its wire branches. In the box is a piece of card headed Tree Fluffing Tips. Suitably fluffed, we prop it up beside the chart table, although we have to bend the top a bit to make it fit under the saloon ceiling.
There is squawking in the masthead again this afternoon from another inattentive shearwater. And there are more flying fish than ever. It has been a busy day and warm – 30°C. There are shooting stars again tonight. And a full moon, incredibly bright.
In his broadcast tonight Herb says that there is a huge high developing between Europe and North America and, as a result, he expects the stronger, more favourable winds he’s been predicting to develop above 15°North. He also says that there is a trough of low pressure developing below that latitude and that squalls are expected in the area. So we alter course to stay above 15°North although this will take us further away from our course to Trinidad. We just hope we’ll be able to head south-west once we get closer to the Caribbean. But some decent wind would be nice.
Instead, conditions over the next two days and nights prove to be simply more of the same, and increasingly frustrating. Typically, the wind will be weak all day and then suddenly, towards dusk, it will strengthen and we will pick up speed. Then in the early hours it lulls again before picking up with the approach of dawn. Essentially, for four hours around dawn, and four around dusk the wind increases before weakening again. It is particularly irritating because you just begin to feel you are making some headway only to watch it fall away again after four hours.
By Monday evening Herb is also giving very different forecasts for the boats in front and behind us, so there must be a weather front between them. Unfortunately we don’t know which side of it we are on. Our problem is this: Herb is advising Amber, the American boat ahead of us, not to go south for twenty-four hours but to take advantage of her present good conditions; while Van Dyke, the Dutch single-hander behind us, is told to head south to get out of a rough sea. David decides to
maintain our course, as things are not too bad – if only we had more wind. In the event we actually experience nothing like the forecasts given for either boat.
Tonight the moon is so bright that only the fixed stars of the higher magnitudes are visible and the whole sea, sky and Voyager are lit up as if by laser beam.
On Tuesday morning the sun is a glass globe filled with peach-gold liquid. As it rises from the horizon the colour drains to the bottom half, leaving pure gold at the top and glowing peach at the bottom. In only minutes it loses its crisp outline and sparkle, becoming fuzzy-edged, soft-focused and a typical yellow morning sun. I do some laundry and peg it along the rails. It rains.
Today is the third day of this tiresome weather pattern. As usual the wind falls away during the day but our frustration with the conditions is compounded when David tunes into our SSB radio during the evening. For the information we so gratefully glean from Herb’s broadcast has suddenly become very confusing and for once we wish we had a transmitter instead of just a receiver so that we could ask him for information specific to us. In the event David decides to alter course by 25° to the north for a time in the hope of finding some of the stronger winds Herb is warning people about.
Lack of wind is clearly not the problem being experienced by at least one of Herb’s yachts whose skipper, prior to tuning into tonight’s broadcast, had found it necessary to change course. Now, Herb is very skilled and works very hard and gratis for those people who have signed up for his services. So, if they ask for his expertise, and he is willing to spend part of each day working out the best course for them, and his evenings broadcasting his considered advice to them, it is only natural that he would expect them to follow it and be approximately where he expects them to be. If they aren’t his disappointment, though never spoken, is apparent in his tone. So when people deviate from the course he has given them they can be pretty apologetic; sheepish, even. In fact, sometimes they drop out altogether and are not heard over the nightly airwaves again. But tonight the recalcitrant yachtsman faces the music like a man and admits to having changed course contrary to the advice Herb had given him.
‘Oh?’ says Herb, with that inflection in his voice which can reduce middle-aged men to eight-year-old schoolboys. And then, after a pregnant pause, ‘Why?’
‘We… um… went looking for somewhere... a little… quieter,’ mumbles the skipper, downplaying a night of untenable violence. There is another uncomfortable silence which ultimately the yachtsman feels obliged to fill with further justification. ‘The rivets were dropping out of the mast.’
Our own sailing conditions tonight are not good. We have the same roly sea and lack of wind so that Voyager wallows and the genoa flaps, shedding what little wind is in it. There is a wonderful moon over the stern when I emerge on deck to begin my first watch, but by the time David is due to go below it has become obliterated by an approaching squall.
A quick dip into the radar tells us that it is around six miles long by four miles wide. He remains on watch with me. The rain is torrential. The only possible advantage of a squall might have been a decent bit of wind to drive us forward. But no. The wind whips from north to south while oscillating between 29 knots and two. The result is that one minute we’re hurtling along behind a billowing genoa and the next there’s zero on the wind gauge and we are hardly moving at all.
David is an hour late getting to bed.
After midnight the moon comes through again, and I have to put an engine on because, after all the fury of the squall, the wind is now too light and erratic to sail by.
Today is Wednesday 22nd December and our tenth day at sea. In the early hours I take advantage of all the rain to wipe down the cockpit. I have heard other yachtsmen complain about the amount of hair that gathers on a boat. You’d think it would blow away, but it doesn’t. It gathers in corners, silently accusing you of slovenly boat-keeping. At dawn a petrel keeps us company for a while, flying low along our starboard side, up from the bow close to our toe rails and then turning on the quarter to make another fly-past.
The day, when it comes, is overcast and oppressively airless. We sleep a lot, taking it in turns. In between I decorate the Christmas tree and air the laundry that got rained on yesterday. David, with a look of quiet determination, embarks on Tolstoy’s 900-page epic, War and Peace.
It is hot and stuffy in the saloon, so I open the small hatch beside me, a mere twelve inches by six and the only one on the boat currently not open. Immediately all the trimmings on board become horizontal. It is as if this one tiny aperture has sole access to all the wind on this stretch of the North Atlantic. It is very refreshing but, with our Christmas decorations in danger of reaching the Caribbean before we do, I have to close it again and continue to steam. The flying fish are particularly active today.
We also have a crew meeting. David has always anticipated that we would reef the sails at night but up until now the winds have been so light that it hasn’t been necessary. However, after last night’s activity, approaching squalls being so difficult to see, and so vicious when they arrive, we decide that in future we will put two reefs in the genoa at dusk each night. It will slow us down in the quiet spells but we need to preserve the safety of the boat. When dawn comes we can shake the reefs out as we shall be able to see any squalls coming.
Tonight, when David tunes into Herb he finds that his assumption about a front emerging somewhere between our three boats has been confirmed. It has swept Amber an additional 60 miles ahead of us, and put her in a completely different weather pattern from us. Fortunately Van Dyke, who had fallen behind, is catching up with us again so we still have a point of reference for Herb’s forecasts.
At 1.30 on Thursday morning, when David takes over the watch from me, all the little squalls that have been gathering around us for the past hour have finally joined up into a very large one heading directly for us. It has been fascinating to watch the process on radar, although there will be no possibility of using it to dodge the individual squalls as we did on our passage from Gibraltar to Porto Santo. This time they have homed in on us like a flock of predators upon a solitary prey.
It is always a little eerie, waiting for a squall to strike, especially in the dark. You make your preparations: you reef your sails, you batten down and you wait. There is often a period of quietness then, in which you wonder if perhaps you might be lucky and it will pass over you before it breaks, although it rarely does and not tonight. The wind roars up to Gale Force 8 and the rain arrives.
David ends up doing a seven-hour watch tonight, much of it out in driving rain, initially because the rain is so heavy that he cannot see enough from inside the boat to be safe. But then our autopilot begins to go awry. It does this three times during the night. Each time he steers manually until Voyager settles back on course and he can switch the autopilot on again. Then he stays at the helm to watch the compass and ensure we stay on course.
Conditions also prove too much for the radar. Its screen fills with clutter, its scanner bedazzled by too much rain and crashing waves for it to pick up anything remotely useful such as a dangerously-close vessel. As so often happens, just when you need it most, technology abandons you. And, ironically, this turns out to be the only occasion on the whole voyage when another boat is on the same course as us. It is also the only other yacht we shall see during this entire voyage. She is, we shall discover, a 36-foot catamaran called Summer Dream.
By lunchtime, and with the weather recovered, we spot her behind us for the first time. Around 3pm her skipper calls us on the VHF for a chat. His autopilot will not hold a course in this following sea of 12–15 foot waves, so he and his wife are having to steer by hand. They have two young children on board and are heading for Barbados.
Their autopilot would have been the brand we should have installed on Voyager in Gibraltar, at considerable expense, had we finally lost patience with the repair facilities of the manufacturer of our own automatic steering gear. The only thing that had stopped us
replacing ours with the brand on Summer Dream was that a friend back home had always been let down by it in a following sea.
We are grateful that we had persevered in getting our own repaired. Manual steering over these distances, with only two of you on board, is very tiring especially at night. It is not only the hours spent physically at the wheel but the concentration needed to maintain a course in a big sea and the strain on the eyes as you refocus endlessly between a dark sea and a lighted compass. To add to their woes, they are also having trouble keeping a charge in their batteries.
We have all been accustomed by equipment manufacturers – domestic and automotive as well as marine – to expect a life span of ten years. However, some time ago, when a yachting magazine published a survey of marinas in the UK, it concluded that the average yacht was used for only ten days a year. This meant that marine equipment, in a ten-year life span, was used on average for little more than three-and-a-half months. Yet take it in for repair aged 8 or 9 years-old and service agents will shake their heads and tell you it is cheaper to buy a new one. If electronics are involved they will claim the life cycle should really be only five years which equates to a working lifetime of only seven weeks.
Perhaps it is this limited usage by the average yacht owner that removes the pressure for equipment that is more robust. It is only when full-time cruisers buy it that it is given a thorough test.
A comparable situation was cars after the opening of Britain’s first motorway, the M1 between London and the Midlands, in 1959. In its early years the motorway’s hard shoulders were littered with broken-down cars, more than a few of them new ones and some very expensive ones, because cars were not then built to do long-distance, high-speed motoring. Reliability improved with increased demand. Unlike car-owners, though, long-distance yachtsmen are, and will remain, a small minority of marine equipment purchasers. The implications for their safety, not to mention their basic comfort, are considerable.
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 14