A Thousand Miles from Anywhere

by Sandra Clayton

  Fast on the heels of what appears to be a satisfactory resolution to the disasters that have faced Nirvana and Wanderer, however, comes a new cause for worry. A lone sailor on Sea Shanty has a broken finger and a badly injured leg.

  An overcast morning turns into a lovely, bright blue, shiny day. A happy day. We have baths in the cockpit in the sunshine during the afternoon and corned beef with sweet potato for dinner followed by chocolate pudding. Cholesterol? Forget about it!

  It is Tuesday 28th December and our sixteenth day at sea. Last night and first thing this morning the sea was very violent. Weary of it endlessly shaking the wind out of our sail we are travelling northeast at present to try and keep some in and, if possible, maybe find a little more. At the same time you feel guilty about wanting more wind, because the last thing Jupiter and the boat it is towing need is overly strong winds.

  As well as news of specific yachts within its purview the Big Fish Net provides an overview of current weather conditions. All northern Europe, it seems, is enduring extensive wind and rain damage. On the Atlantic coast of north-west Spain there are wind speeds of 80–100 knots. A boat entering Barbados this morning experienced rain so heavy that the crew couldn’t see their bow.

  One of the few things missed during this voyage has been a newspaper and when I take over my second watch I find that David has produced one for me. In biro. It contains the latest news from World Service, plus some of his own like the British government banning Happy Hour on board yachts and cutting the crew’s sleeping time – which in my sleep-befuddled state I don’t twig immediately – and a crossword.

  Due south, just before dawn, there is the most heavenly smell of a full English breakfast. After our own cholesterol-free muesli, we have a strategy meeting. Why did we settle on Trinidad?

  One: as the island at the southernmost end of the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles, Trinidad had seemed the natural starting point from which to explore the island chain. There was also Trinidad’s New Year celebrations, but we are going to miss those anyway.

  Two: we had arranged to meet Ian there. It had been Ian, a Royal Yachting Association instructor and professional delivery skipper, who had given us our first, compelling taste of catamaran sailing. He had also helped us, as sailing novices, to get Voyager home to England from southern Spain where we had bought her. In the process he had become a friend.

  He is currently skippering Spirit of Diana, one of four identical yachts in a round-the-world Millennium Yacht Race. One of her layovers is Trinidad during Christmas and New Year. Unfortunately, conditions are against us. And not only are we becoming increasingly tired struggling with them, but we are not going to reach Trinidad in time to meet up with Ian before Spirit of Diana has to leave.

  We had found the passage to the Cape Verde Islands, during which similarly adverse conditions had prevailed, equally tiring and had we not had several compelling reasons to go there we should have changed course for the Caribbean instead. So the sensible option now is to forget Trinidad and head further north, where the weather is driving us anyway and where, according to Herb’s current forecast, we can expect better sailing conditions.

  It has another advantage, too. We do not have unlimited time to meander up through the islands. There is the not insignificant consideration of the hurricane season during which a force of nature regularly and spectacularly trashes whichever islands and boats are in its path and for which our insurance company – should we be imprudent enough to remain within range – does not cover us.

  The new course will mean a shorter, more leisurely trip with more time to enjoy the individual islands along the way. Accordingly, we decide to give up the battle to get to Trinidad and at 9am we change course for the Lesser Antilles and Antigua.

  Lesser Antilles is the name given to three groups of islands lying in an arc between Venezuela and north-east of Puerto Rico. The two main groups are the Windward Islands, from Grenada in the south up to Dominica and so called because they were more windward to European sailing ships than the Leeward Islands to the north. The Leeward Islands consist of Dominica up to the Virgin Islands (Dominica being unable to make up its mind to which of the two groups it belongs). The third group lies off the coast of Venezuela. Trinidad does not consider itself part of the Lesser Antilles at all.

  Just out of interest, and because wherever there is a lesser there will be a greater, the Greater Antilles stretch from Puerto Rico to Cuba. Those far larger islands consist of rock and are part of the North American continent, whereas the Lesser Antilles, to which we are heading, consists mostly of volcanic or coral islands.

  On the Big Fish Net this morning, along with updates from those yachts already familiar to us, the bad news is from the skipper of a new one called Lightship who reports that his main sail was badly damaged in a squall last night when the wind reached 40 knots. The good news is that the replacement tow should reach Wanderer by tomorrow morning to relieve Jupiter. Jupiter’s skipper, Don, comes on air briefly. He sounds tired.

  At noon we put our Central Voyager Time clock back an hour since, with sunrise currently at 9am, I am going to bed in bright sunshine again. Herb’s forecast for tonight and tomorrow is easterly 20–25 knots. This is what we have been hoping for all along, but it has taken until our sixteenth day at sea for it to arrive. The sea itself is bouncy and horrible but by midnight the 25-knot winds materialise, along with another necklace of black squall clouds. We put an extra reef into the genoa. We will now have these winds all the way to Antigua, sometimes even a little stronger, but excellent sailing conditions.

  24

  One of the Locals Stops By

  At around 1am this morning I walk out into the cockpit and am startled by the moon behind cloud off our starboard quarter. It is startling because it doesn’t look like the moon at all, just an unexpected light that is very eerie. Sometime after 2am I get David out of bed to another sort of light directly in front of us, quite large and suddenly there. We conclude it is a large commercial ship of some sort, because it suddenly moves away to port and disappears very fast and I’ve got him up for nothing.

  After he’s gone back to bed I get to thinking. I know that yachtsmen sometimes sail at night without navigation lights to save their batteries; only switching them on when they spot someone else’s light to prevent a collision. And I wonder if large ships ever do this, too. If so, it’s rather frightening especially if, as the third officer on a tanker once lead us to believe, the lookout on the bridge is rarely looking out.

  After breakfast the Big Fish Net reports that Nirvana had been going along very nicely but that her main sail was damaged in a squall last night. Also that Jupiter and Wanderer had their tow broken at 3am this morning and had heaved-to until dawn when they reconnected. The replacement tow boat is currently around three hours away. This must come as a great relief for the couple on Jupiter which, according to our calculation, has been towing for four days now.

  Meanwhile, on our own stretch of the Atlantic it is a lovely sunny day. With our chores all done we spend the afternoon sunning ourselves in the cockpit until around 3pm when we get a visitor. Quite suddenly the saying up close and personal takes on a special meaning. This gets very close and the intention may even be amorous.

  Our first inkling is a sudden flash of white, close to our starboard side. When we stand up and lean over the coaming to investigate we find ourselves staring at the white underside of a whale. After hovering a moment or two, the whale proceeds to carry out a minute inspection of us, circling Voyager very slowly on its back or its side, just below the surface of the water, so that from on deck it appears as either shimmering silver or silver-and-black.

  It shows no fear, swims as little as a foot from our hull, and pops its head up beside us regularly to roll an interested eye over us. When we, and the boat, have been thoroughly observed it swims away like a torpedo to reappear, only moments later, as a large, dark head in the middle of the enormous wave rolling down behind us.

  Since
leaving the Canaries we have become reconciled to a big sea, with waves between 15 and 20 feet high. But even by recent standards it is huge today, with monumental rollers sweeping down onto our starboard quarter. Despite conventional wisdom about big, non-breaking waves on one of its quarters being ideal for a catamaran, these are so big that when you first stand in the cockpit and look up at one curving voluptuously down towards you, you are convinced that, despite being gorgeous, sooner or later one of them must inevitably sink you. However, far from overwhelming Voyager, each wave simply raises her up and propels her forward with gratifying speed.

  The present conditions are not only the result of our change of course but of the Trade Winds, which have finally lived up to their much-vaunted promise and actually arrived. Combined with the sunshine, this is the best sailing day of the passage so far. It would therefore be one of life’s great ironies – after all the squalls, high winds, and big seas pummelling our beam – if Voyager were to be sunk by a relatively small inquisitive whale.

  While being thoroughly inspected by our visitor, we take the opportunity of doing a little research ourselves. According to our book on marine mammals, a fully grown adult male Minke reaches 36 feet from head to tail and weighs in at ten tons. Measured against our 40-foot hull this one is about 25 feet long, so not yet fully grown. He is dark grey, with a small dorsal fin and the large distinctive Minke head containing the baleen plates through which the species filters its food.

  We watch the large dark head rushing down the wave towards us with trepidation, wondering if this exuberant adolescent is capable of controlling his momentum in such a force, or whether he will be smashed against our stern and destroy our steering gear, or worse. We need not have worried. Our young visitor turns out to be perfectly under control as he executes the first of his many extraordinary sequences.

  First of all he bodysurfs down the wave behind us straight to our starboard quarter. Once there he rolls onto his back, presents his silvery white underside and outstretched flippers and proceeds to shimmy gently just below the water. He hovers like this for a minute or two, only inches from our starboard hull, then limbos underneath the boat where he registers 21 metres on our echo sounder.

  While we are still squinting into the sunshine, trying to see where he comes up, he is already back behind us, surfing down another massive roller to our starboard quarter. Watching him do this, again and again, we feel we finally understand the saying having a whale of a time. He surfs, shimmers, shimmies and limbos, each time recording a smaller and smaller depth on the echo-sounder as he passes beneath us.

  This increasing proximity to our boat’s underside does begin to cause a little anxiety, though, because our book on marine mammals also tells us that a solitary, immature male Minke in these waters at this time of year is likely to be in search of a mate. And an offshore yachtsman once told us that a whale did in fact seem intent on mating with his boat and was only driven away by pumping out a whole bottle of pungent toilet cleaner through the boat’s foul-water outlet. By the time our visitor passes beneath us at around 1.5 metres we have become concerned.

  Perhaps it is at this distance that he discovers his mistake, or simply loses interest in this buxom but unresponsive creature he has been courting. Or maybe he is far too savvy to make such a mistake. Perhaps he has simply tired of the plastic toy he found floating in his bath. Or, like many a young male, perhaps he has been practicing his seduction technique on Voyager, or simply honing his athletic skills. For whatever reason, after making one last pass underneath us, at a little less than a metre, he disappears.

  25

  A New Millennium

  Our fresh food is all but gone. Just two apples left in the fruit bowl and enough potatoes under the sink for one more meal. After this it is pasta or rice. The dried fruit from Tenerife is heavenly, the best we’ve ever tasted, but the nuts when we open the tin are stale. The marzipan cake, on the other hand, really is out of this world.

  Aston Villa 1 – Spurs 1.

  Herb forecasts solid Trade Winds out of the east for the next four days, mostly in the 21 to 25-knot range with a chance of rain and squalls tonight for up to five or six hours. Before my watch at 10.30pm we put a third reef in. As per Herb’s forecast, the night degenerates into an endless chain of squalls passing remorselessly over us bearing an awful, howling wind.

  Yachtsmen are not the only people enduring this bad weather, of course. People on land are suffering far worse. At least on a boat torrential rain runs down your coach house roof onto your decks and safely out through your toe rails into the sea. World Service tonight reports that in Venezuela, 500 miles to the south of us, flooding may have cost the lives of anywhere between 20 and 50,000 people as hundreds of landslides up in the mountains, triggered by the exceptionally heavy rainfall, bury coastal towns and villages under mud and boulders or sweep inhabitants into the sea.

  Today is our eighteenth day at sea. The formerly exhilarating rollers on our starboard quarter have transformed themselves into a heavy swell on our starboard beam instead. It is making Voyager roll uncomfortably and the waves hitting the underside of her bridge deck are producing a loud and constant banging.

  Unable to sleep David gets up at 1am, half an hour before I am due to wake him. He startles me, appearing at the companionway doors when I think I am alone on deck in the darkness. Within minutes yet another squall unleashes its violence over us and we retire behind closed doors to escape the torrential rain. Heaven help Wanderer and her tow if they are experiencing conditions like this.

  I imagine most of us could identify within ourselves a particular stress factor which is far more likely to destroy our resolve or our performance than more obvious causes. In 1984, George Orwell’s 1949 novel set in a totalitarian future, the State breaks its non-conformists by finding and exploiting the one fear an individual cannot withstand. For Winston Smith, the book’s main character, it is rats and on being faced with one, in a quite literal sense, he capitulates.

  While for many it may be a physical threat that incapacitates, for others it is stress on the emotions, the nerves or the senses that does it. With me, it is sustained noise. I can cope with only so much before it begins to exert a malign effect. It probably has something to do with overly sensitive hearing and at 4.30 this morning I emerge from sleep into noise levels that have increased enormously.

  Within a short time of taking over the watch it begins to prove too much for me: the howling of the wind, the endless single-note whine from the forestay, the erratic banging under the bridge deck, the rattling shackles, the slam of canvas and all the other extraneous rattles, thumps and bangs caused by the wind, not to mention the violent roll of the boat which keeps you physically off-balance all the time. Even so, the effect on me is quite irrational.

  I have stood my watch under worse conditions than these, including squalls whose vicious gale-force winds have been enough to wreck a sail in minutes or bring down a mast. The wind at present is only 31 knots and with three reefs in the genoa we are under no threat. Even so I am consumed with fear for the safety of the boat; that I will fail to keep her safe. I have a duty of care, to the boat and to David asleep in the starboard cabin, but my brain is so addled by the cacophony assaulting it that I can’t even begin to identify the threat, let alone deal with it. Soon this fear becomes overwhelming and even concern for the boat and David is subsumed into a mindless, all-encompassing need for escape. To cover my ears; to bury my head under something, anything as long as it will reduce this intolerable noise. In short, I get the screaming meemies and flee to the skipper, who immediately takes over while I bury myself briefly under the duvet.

  I have not experienced anything like this before, or since. And it is only long afterwards that I remember this night when an article about the First World War makes me wonder if hypersensitive hearing could actually mean the difference between withstanding days, or even weeks, of heavy bombardment and being shot for cowardice or desertion.

  I am bac
k on duty at 5am. Half an hour later there is a strange phenomenon. The wind and the noise levels have been dropping steadily and I am sitting up at the helm. With the instruments in front of me I notice that despite 16 knots on the wind gauge, our speed over the ground is zero, and staring around me we do indeed appear to have stopped moving. The only time this has happened before was when Voyager became trapped in an enormous drift net off Morocco.

  Unwilling to get David out of bed again unless I really have to, I sit and wait to see what happens. Initially Voyager simply wallows. Then, after a while, the log shows 0.7 knots, then 1.0, until finally it settles at 2.3. One of the engines is on tick-over at present, charging up the batteries so I put the engine into gear until we gain enough momentum to stop the boat wallowing and the sail flogging. Gradually our speed returns to normal and I take the engine out of gear again. It is very odd. We discuss it later, but David can only suggest that we became caught up in a something soft below the surface such as a clump of weed which slowly broke up, freeing us.

  Around 7am I watch the sky turning from grey to blue. The stars begin to melt, all except the brightest ones until only Venus is left. She is very large and bright and accompanied by a half-moon.

  A couple of hours later the Big Fish Net reports that yesterday afternoon, as expected, the relief boat took over Wanderer’s tow from Jupiter. A couple of hours later the tow rope broke; they reconnected and hoved to until this morning. Wanderer’s skipper is on SSB radio for the first time, emotional with gratitude. Asked if his wife has received her ice cream yet he says it is too valuable to risk a transfer in the present rough conditions. They will try later.

  Nirvana’s skipper also expresses his thanks for all the support he and his wife have received and is pleased to report that they have managed to repair their mainsail.

  Above us, somewhere around 11am, another squall peaks at 34 knots. Herb warns we can expect more of the same until Sunday, today being Thursday. It is a hot, sunny day with a large swell and a rolling boat. The interior gets very stuffy so we open all the hatches. One particularly high wave catches the boat on the bottom of her roll and seawater soaks the starboard bed again. We dry it out in the cockpit. Again.