We have changed our watch times so that David’s final one coincides with our current weather forecaster. After reaching the BVI our SSB radio had trouble picking up Herb’s broadcasts and we began using a local forecaster who has been very good. His name is David Jones and he broadcasts from Tortola every morning. Accordingly, I am now in bed from 6.30 to 9.30pm. It’s a bit like being a small child again, going to bed in daylight on long summer evenings.
An hour into my first watch a tawny moon rises east-south-east. Initially it makes me jump. I think it’s a cruise ship coming up fast again, it’s so big so suddenly and sort of squarish, but that’s because of the way it is tangled in low cloud. But quite suddenly it is round and solid and glowing like a moon should be and the boat and the whole night take on a different atmosphere; light and bright and even a flapping genoa and a faffing wind don’t seem so trying any more. The wind, as always, is either a famine or a feast. After nights of anchor watches in up to 40 knots we now have barely enough to fill a sail.
With the morning light the horizon becomes visible. We have Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to our left, while stretching away on our right is the Sargasso Sea. This is a sea without shores, a region of the North Atlantic surrounded by ocean currents. Four of them to be precise and between them they create something called a gyre, a giant circling oceanic surface current. This one is called the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre although ‘Sargasso Sea’, the name given to it by those 15th century Portuguese explorers, has a much nicer ring to it. It is 2,000 miles long and 700 wide, deep blue and so clear that visibility can be as deep as 61 metres.
Sometime after 5am a freighter passes astern of us. Like yesterday’s solitary yacht, it is the only vessel we shall see all day. In fact, considering that this area is famous for its exceptionally busy shipping lanes it is surprising how few vessels come within sight.
According to BBC World Service this morning, the start of the British Grand Prix has been delayed for an hour because of fog.
According to the calendar, today is not only Easter Sunday but the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death and St George’s Day as well. In truth, nobody knows the date of Will’s birth, only his baptism – 26th April 1564. Doubtless some antique PR person thought it would give added lustre to have the birth and death of England’s national poet and playwright and the country’s patron saint’s day all occur together. By such strokes of the pen is history made.
But it makes me wonder how many of us actually celebrate the feast day of our patron saint. Apart from waving his flag about at sports events or demonstrations, do many of my countrymen ever give a thought to St George? I know I don’t. And I don’t think I ever knew that 23rd April was even his day before. So I look him up: 23rd April is the ‘traditionally accepted’ date of his death in AD303, although record keeping must have been even more hit and miss in the 4th century than in Shakespeare’s time. And depending on whether it is the ancient Julian calendar that was being quoted, or the present-day Gregorian one, 23rd April would be have been 6th May anyway.
As more time passes, the less ‘history’ and ‘culture’ and the petty one-upmanship of ‘nationality’ have any relevance. Surely it’s the fundamental truths of a Shakespeare play or the world’s great religions that matter. Not the myths and manipulations of human gullibility. I mean, why is England represented by someone who ‘according to tradition’ (which means there is no evidence) was a Roman soldier in the Guard of the Emperor Diocletian and who may have died in 303 (possibly as young as 22) and who was canonised two hundred years later for acts ‘known only to God’?
I think the biggest stumbling block for me has always been the dragon. I mean, is there something peculiarly English about having a patron saint whose origins and relevance are so obscure and whose only ‘known’ act is so improbable that most of us ignore him? A long sea passage provides an environment for this kind of thinking.
David decides that it would be useful to have the main out again but, despite trying several more times, we are still unable to thread the outhaul past the obstructions inside the boom. So he decides to jury rig a system instead. He rummages in his toolbox, finds some old pulleys and shackles and is quite pleased when he has the sail working. Sadly the wind changes direction shortly afterwards so we have to take it in again and resume sailing on the genoa alone.
We see some flying fish and a shearwater and around 2pm we get a glimpse of a tiny black bird with a forked tail to starboard. An hour later I look up from the galley sink and see it perched on the rail outside the window. It has the grumpy little chestnut face of a barn swallow and a toe missing from its left foot. It appears anxious, making a couple of brief flights in different directions but returning each time to the same spot on the rail.
I put out a piece of pear for it, on the principle that it will at least provide moisture if the bird is dehydrated after a long flight. It stretches its wings a lot and does a fair bit of feather plumping, but mainly it just stands staring towards land. It seems very young, an impression created by the little bits of white fluff poking through the black feathers on its back. Happily, it becomes more relaxed as time passes and at 4.30 takes off in the direction of the Dominican Republic less than two miles away.
It is very dark when I begin the 9.30pm watch. The moon is not due for another two hours and there is a lot of phosphorous on the sea. Its eerie sparkle in the otherwise total blackness is vaguely unnerving tonight. At least we are under sail and despite a noisy sea it is nice to have the genoa up and no engine and be just sailing. And we shall purely sail for the next four days, only needing to run an engine to charge up the batteries.
Yesterday I noticed vaguely from the chart that our course was taking us across the Puerto Rico Trench. Tonight I read that this trench, which forms the boundary between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean is the result of moving tectonic plates. It has a maximum depth of over five miles and is the deepest part of the Atlantic. It may be irrational but I’m rather glad I wasn’t aware of that yesterday when we were sailing over the top of it.
52
Deteriorating Conditions
Easter Monday. We finish Framley Parsonage and begin Homer’s Iliad. Not too different really. Autocratic power thwarted by the power of love. One set in a 19th century English village, the other at the siege of Troy some time before the 8th century BC. Although there is a nice contrast in that when Trollope’s impoverished young heroine is separated from the love of her life by his snobbish mother she takes it like a man. The warrior Achilles, on the other hand, deprived of the ornament of his life by King Agamemnon, bursts into tears. In 1966 I read Homer’s Odyssey to David as we drove across hundreds of miles of Australian outback in a Triumph Herald convertible without a radio. I thought it time I read him the prequel.
There are lots of flying fish about today and it is much cooler now that we are 300 miles further north. The nights are heavy with dew, however, and the atmosphere during the day is clammy. The wheelhouse roof lining is slimy with salt. Voyager’s interior feels damp. And for the first time ever during a passage there is condensation on the inside of the windows. Even my hair feels as if it’s going mouldy.
The only traffic we have seen all day is a cargo ship at midday and a small boat at 9pm. Once past midnight we are bathed in moonlight.
Today is Tuesday and our fifth day at sea. At 4.20am a white light appears in the south-east off our starboard quarter travelling only slightly faster than we are. After roughly an hour I can identify three vertical white lights signifying that this vessel and whatever it is towing have a combined length of more than 200 metres. Although I can see nothing behind the boat and no other light.
With the arrival of dawn, I can just make out that the vessel is a tug and that behind it is a grey unlit mass the size of a small island. Half an hour later, both are overtaking us, the one a vast distance behind the other.
While I am still gazing after it David enters the cockpit ready to take over
the watch and I tell him we’ve just been overtaken by an island being towed by a tug. He takes a look and says maybe a rich American wanted an island of his own but doesn’t like travelling. And, since the Bahamian government has hundreds of them cluttering up the place, it has decided to sell him a small one and this is it being relocated closer to the man’s home. When I look at him sideways he shrugs and wanders off to put the kettle on for breakfast. I suppose it’s his equivalent of my ruminations on St George. It’s the isolation that does it.
In reality, we have just had our first glimpse of cargo shipment American-style. It is the result of one of those government initiatives intended to support an industry but which backfires to the detriment of those it was intended to protect.
The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 is a US federal statute regulating maritime commerce. Section 27 of it, also known as the Jones Act, deals with coastal shipping and requires all cargo transported in US waters and between US ports to be carried on US-built and US-flagged ships owned and crewed by US citizens.
The object was to protect the jobs and safety of US workers and merchant seamen but resulted in US cargo ships becoming ruinously expensive. Tugs and barges were not included in the Jones Act, allowing shipping companies to avoid the cost of cargo ships and at the same time use smaller crews.
Over time we shall discover that they can also be something of a hazard. To begin with, they use an incredibly long towline between the tug and the barge making the distance between the two enormous. The other problem is that the barge is poorly lit. Although my first sighting tonight involved a barge with no light on it at all, the most we will ever see is a very small one on the stern which is barely detectable from any other angle than directly behind the barge, and making it invisible in poor conditions. And we will subsequently hear of a yacht which unwittingly sailed between a tug and its tow in the dark with fatal consequences.
The sea’s motion has been very uncomfortable for several days now, with waves coming from two directions. I feel particularly queasy on the 9.30pm to 1am watch. This is the second time in a few days and most unusual for me. In fact, I so rarely get seasick now that I’ve forgotten to have my favourite home remedy on board this trip – ginger. Ginger biscuits, ginger cake, anything with real ginger in it. It works better than any patent remedy for me.
A tropicbird flies very close during my final watch on Wednesday morning. I only know it is a tropicbird because afterwards I go and look it up as I have never seen one before. It is that blistering white peculiar to seabirds, with black markings on its wings and extremely long tail feathers so that in flight they look like streamers trailing out behind.
Four hours later David has two of them begging off the back of the boat and squawking loudly but nothing we have to offer satisfies them and after half an hour they fly away in disgust. I am sleeping at the time. I feel very tired and ache all over. Whether it is the damp, the sudden drop in temperature, the uneasy motion of the boat, the broken sleep, or even the approach of the thunder and lightning promised in today’s forecast, I cannot say.
While I am horizontal David collects some sargassum for me to look at when I get up. It is from that genus of seaweed after which the Sargasso Sea is named, since it is home to large amounts of it. Most familiar is the species that forms into vast free-floating weed beds, hated by coastal humans – especially in the Florida Keys – but providing an environment for some marine life not found anywhere else.
In the afternoon at about 3pm we leave the tropics behind when we re-cross the official northern boundary of the Tropic of Cancer.
The sun sets at 7pm. The wind is gentle and from the south but nevertheless we make reasonable progress. There is a clear sky with just the odd bit of cloud about and after a while a few stars become visible. Two hours later the forecast lightning arrives on our starboard horizon, out in the Sargasso Sea. Not the threatened thunder, just two kinds of lightning: heat and forked.
Meanwhile, Voyager rolls and shudders most uncomfortably in a very confused sea that is making everything on board rattle, bang and clatter; even things which have never clattered or banged before, like the door to the heads or the saloon table. I go around tying things open, or shut, and wedging things with towels, anything to reduce the awful racket we have on board.
Such innocuous words really, the forecast lightning arrives, and indeed it does begin pretty quietly. Yet it is the prelude to a night that will remain with me forever. For now, however, we drift on, unaware that we are being carried slowly but remorselessly into a blazing nightmare.
53
A Night to Remember
The wind increases a little during the night and the sky becomes increasingly cloudy so that when the moon rises at 2.20 on Thursday morning it is mostly obscured. By 4am, as well as lightning to starboard, it is also ahead of us and on our port side. David becomes convinced that a rainstorm is imminent so he battens down and lays out our wet weather gear in the saloon ready for us to put on quickly when the need arises.
The night becomes pitch black from heavy cloud cover and for about half an hour a bird flies round and round Voyager, close and screeching, although it is too dark even at such close range to see what kind it is. Whether wanting to land and afraid to we don’t know but it sounds frantic. We stay as still as possible and hope that it will find a suitable place for itself on board.
At around 4.30 the wind dies away. We take in the genoa and turn on an engine. While we have no desire to rush towards the electrical storm up ahead, just wallowing in this confused sea is untenable and a little forward motion eases it.
At the same time David turns off all the non-essential electrics, because if they are switched on when a boat is struck by lightning they will burn out. If they are switched off, they stand a chance of surviving. He also puts our handheld GPS and VHF in a metal box in the oven. It is the same scientific principle as the Faraday Cage, a metal shield named after its inventor and designed to protect electrical equipment from lightning strikes. It will mean that if our main GPS, which is wired into the boat, burns out during a strike, and if we are still in a condition to continue afterwards, we shall have some form of navigation. This will be essential given the treacherous nature of these waters because what the lightning fails to destroy, the reefs and shoals off the Bahamas undoubtedly will.
During this time the lightning flashes have been getting stronger, brighter and more frequent, lighting up the sea intermittently like heavy-duty spotlights being randomly switched on and off. Then suddenly, a few miles directly ahead of us, the horizon erupts in the most stupendous explosions of gold and silver interspersed with bursts of red. There is a long line of them stretching for miles, like some monumental firework display featuring what I can only call fireballs.
For a time these massive fireballs, though expanding outwards and upwards as they erupt, nevertheless remain where they explode. After a while, however, more of these fireballs begin to erupt at right angles to the left-hand end of the original line and roll across the surface of the sea as if fired from some monstrous cannon. Within moments they are travelling continuously down our port side, perhaps a couple of miles away, and at tremendous speed, blazing and fuming, before disappearing over the horizon behind us.
Worse still is what now begins to happen at the right-hand end of the original line of explosions as another line forms at right-angles, although this time it is not fireballs. What now comes hurtling down Voyager’s starboard side are great arcs of zigzag lightning, a mile or two away and maybe two hundred feet high. I never knew lightning like this existed. My whole experience has been limited to heat lightning flashing in the sky and forked lightning snaking down from the clouds. These new varieties appear unconnected with the sky altogether. On the contrary, they seem wedded to the sea and their path is horizontal.
Like the fireballs rolling past on our left, this new line appears to take its energy from the blazing horizon in front of us. It rises up into a great jagged arc of red and gold bef
ore hitting the sea and immediately arcing upwards again. And again and again and again as it too careers past us towards the horizon behind us and out of sight. The speed of it is stupefying. So is the fact that we are now enclosed on three sides by what is effectively a huge blind alley of electricity. And as if this weren’t enough, as we stand in our cockpit staring out at it all, it gradually begins to dawn on us that this blind alley we are in is slowly getting narrower and its blind end closer.
The more it closes in on us, the more horrifying it becomes because I’ve known from an early age what happens when lightning strikes you. As a child I walked my dog through the local park and across the municipal golf course but was repeatedly reminded never to shelter under trees during a thunderstorm after a golfer ignored all the warnings.
The extra height offered by something like a tree provides a quicker route to the ground and the lightning bolt travels down the tree’s sap, exploding the bark as it goes. But lightning can jump and human tissue offers an even faster route so that anyone under the tree – especially if he happens to be clutching conductive material such as a steel golf club – is in mortal danger.
Cloud-to-ground lightning bolts contain an extraordinary power. The man, found later lying under a tree, looked as if he was asleep and apparently unmarked. But internally the damage was catastrophic, as the lightning burned its way straight down through his body, out through the steel studs of his golfing shoes and into the wet grass; water, like steel, being another highly conductive material. And that was just your everyday forked lightning. What these fireballs, or these great jagged, red and gold arcs can do, is unimaginable.
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 31