A Thousand Miles from Anywhere

by Sandra Clayton

There is another dimension to our situation, something I have been trying very hard not to think about. It is that, several days ago, we entered a particularly notorious sea area. To be specific, we are currently in the Bermuda Triangle, a place made famous by stories of missing ships and lost aircraft. Looking around me I think I can guess what might have happened to some of them.

  But fear is like the athlete’s pain barrier: sooner or later you pass through it and simply keep going. You become practical. I am, I realise, keeping my balance on this turbulent sea by holding on to a winch. I look down at my hand and wonder if, with so much electricity about, ‘earthing’ myself to a great chunk of steel is really a good idea. I let go of the winch and brace myself against the coaming instead.

  Fibreglass is presumably a bad conductor of electrical current. As are the rubber soles of our deck shoes. Although for the moment I can’t quite see how these are going to be enough to prevent us from being fried. We could turn the boat around and try to outrun it, but given its speed over such immense distances – roughly fifteen or twenty miles in only minutes – outrunning it isn’t an option.

  All we can really do is turn everything electrical off as we approach the end of our blind alley and hope that when we get there it isn’t the solid wall of lightning that it currently appears to be. And not forgetting to keep as far away as possible from the mast, of course, because like the golfer’s tree it is the tallest part of the boat and likely to be the first thing to be struck, along with anyone standing close to it. And our mast is aluminium, a much better conductor than wood. But at least it isn’t raining.

  As time passes, and with nothing to do but stare ahead in a sort of mute dread, I find myself wondering if this is what it must have felt like for a young midshipman sailing slowly into his first sea battle, because you could almost mistake the smoking red, gold and silver explosions up ahead for cannon fire and burning ships.

  It is difficult to estimate distance at sea at the best of times and at night even more so. But the great, blazing archways off our starboard beam are getting close enough to be of serious concern. However, we have not got as far as anything remotely resembling a strategy by the time they, and the fireballs to our left, begin to show signs of losing some of their energy. They are not rolling down our sides with quite the same frequency or quite as much speed as before.

  And then the wind comes up very quickly from behind our stern. David unfurls the genoa and turns off the engine. The rise of the wind is followed almost immediately by torrential rain. By the time I return to the cockpit in my wet weather gear two things have happened: the lightning has vanished and the wind speed indicator is registering 39 knots. Either we are into a Force 8 gale or a very nasty squall.

  With the genoa well-reefed, we wait for it to pass over us. It takes maybe three-quarters of an hour but at least the sea is less bumpy, with the force of the rain flattening the ocean and such a strong wind coming from behind. Then the rain stops and the wind drops; from gale-force to a few knots right on the nose. So we furl the genoa, run an engine again and David goes to bed.

  We roll an awful lot. A whole new set of things rattle and creak: the wheelhouse roof, the boom, the crockery in the galley cupboards, the chart table and somewhere beyond the galley window somebody is playing a bugle, badly. I go around wedging things again and put up the stay sail, which helps a bit, until at 7.30 the sun finally struggles through the cloud, the world suddenly seems very bright and you realise with a shock that you are about to live through another day which, for a little while in the night, you hadn’t thought you were going to see.

  54

  Normal Service is Resumed

  Everything feels so much better now that all that electricity has expended itself. The atmosphere is lighter and fresher. I don’t feel tired and achy anymore and David says he feels livelier too. All that clinging dampness has gone from the boat as well. Everything is dry again and even our wet weather gear is airing nicely out in the cockpit.

  It is interesting how quickly you go back to normality once danger is over, to one of you resuming the watch and keeping everything going while the other gets some rest so as to be fit to take over at the proper time. There is no high-fiving and whooping like in the movies, just a peaceful tiredness and doing quietly whatever needs to be done. It is something David had noticed in War and Peace. Tolstoy describes soldiers after a battle sitting, smoking and talking quietly together.

  When he gets up David listens to the morning weather forecast and then goes off to consult the gauge on our fuel tank. We are now down to 140 litres of diesel and must continue under sail alone wherever possible. Because of the wind direction, however, we shall need to beat, so over the next few hours we tack three times to try and find the best course to make progress in the right direction.

  On one of them we end up in the same place we started. On another, Voyager takes so long to turn through the wind that the automatic steering (which we have forgotten to turn off) gives the most wonderful impersonation of an opera singer – one long drawn-out high note, then two enormous gulps of air and back into the melody again.

  When the wind veers to the north we start to make progress in the right direction but very slowly because of the confused sea, although we have no idea why the sea should be so turbulent. Later the wind veers even further, to the north-east, and we begin to pick up speed.

  Mid-afternoon two tropicbirds circle us, and a shearwater settles hopefully on the water as if ready for its tea. Then two barn swallows fly very close down our port side, try briefly to land on the foredeck rail, decide against it and fly on. Around 7.30 there is a big red sunset and shortly afterwards a southbound container ship. By 8pm we are off the San Salvador lighthouse. During the evening two brightly-lit cruise ships pass on our starboard side, probably heading for Miami.

  It is a week today since we set out from the BVI. As we change over the watch in the pre-dawn this morning David estimates that we should reach Fort Lauderdale on Monday afternoon, three days from now. We can hardly wait. There is too little wind again and the waves hitting our port beam are very noisy. Everything is noisy. Out of doors is no better than inside. The genoa flaps, the sheet runners rattle and the shackles clatter. Our torch batteries are dead again and the new ones we bought at Road Town, especially for this journey, turn out to be duds. Our rechargeable ones barely last the night.

  Dawn comes at 5.45 and sunrise at 6.25, a glorious crimson blaze that turns the sky red before transforming itself into pure gold – and visible from its first moment because for once we have a cloud-free horizon. At 7.50 I spot a cargo boat, probably out of Cuba via the San Salvador Channel. I nearly miss it, staring as I am through the binoculars at what turns out to be a plastic bottle.

  We are conserving fuel but our progress is slow, with a noon-to-noon run of only 70 miles. In terms of ennui we begin to empathise with the cast of The Iliad languishing in their interminable siege. Although we are seeing more traffic today. In the afternoon we spot a southbound freighter on our starboard side which is going so fast that twelve minutes later it is level with us, proving yet again the virtue of ten-minute checks.

  On Saturday morning the sun, like a celestial Salome, rises behind veils of cloud, only becoming fully visible three-quarters of an hour later. And a tropicbird pays us a visit. We get no weather forecast today as David Jones has taken the weekend off. I can’t say I blame him after yesterday morning when some ill-mannered oaf kept yelling, ‘Is Jones doing a weather forecast?’ over and over again just because the man was a few minutes late coming on air. Mr Jones very generously gives his time free of charge to provide an essential daily service for which most of us are extremely grateful.

  By 9am we are experiencing a number of problems. Firstly, while the autopilot (which contains its own compass) and the cockpit compass give the same reading, both of them disagree with the GPS. Secondly, we are being pushed against our will towards the Bahamian island of Eleuthera and its dangerous reefs. Thirdly, our
progress is still pitifully slow.

  We can keep ourselves off the reefs by altering course by 30°, which means we are crabbing at an odd angle to our destination but have no idea why we need to do this. There is nothing to explain it on the North Atlantic chart we are using so David gets out our Bahamian ones and finds a notation saying that, depending on the state of the tides, water rushes in or out of the Bahamian archipelago through the narrow gaps between the islands at a rate of up to 3 knots. We have obviously chosen a course too close to land and should have headed further out to sea. Our crab-like course across and partially against this current also explains, in part, our very slow progress.

  Instead, we had expected to have a current behind us pushing us up the coast. World Cruising Routes, the Atlantic Crossing Guide and Reeds Nautical Almanac all describe it as the Antilles Current and as going north (that is to say, in our favour). However, on a later re-reading of the Atlantic Crossing Guide, David finds a reference saying that the Antilles Current is ‘unpredictable’ – and it certainly is.

  David now turns his attention to the discrepancy between the GPS and the compasses. He gets out the handheld GPS to find out if that gives a reading consistent with our main GPS or with the automatic steering and manual compass. He puts the handheld GPS up on the coach house roof to give it a better chance of locking onto satellites quickly, but when it does finally produce a reading it insists we are in the Pacific. David looks tense and starts consulting manuals. He doesn’t like this sort of thing at all.

  And on top of everything else, we are still in the sea area popularly known as the Bermuda Triangle. Its three points touch the coasts of Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico with most of the incidents for which it is famous occurring along its southern boundary, where we currently are.

  55

  The Bermuda Triangle

  From 1950 onwards popular writers have been attributing shipping and aircraft losses in this area to a variety of exotic causes but the more memorable have involved UFOs, alien abduction, the lost city of Atlantis and a giant squid. And it was in 1952 that one of these writers first conceived the triangular boundary which subsequent authors have largely used. The name was invented by a man called Vincent Gaddis in an article entitled The Deadly Bermuda Triangle which he published in a fiction magazine in 1964 and expanded the following year into a book. The area itself is not recognised by cartographers and the name does not appear on official charts.

  At the heart of the triangle’s notoriety is the disappearance in December 1945 of Flight 19, five US Navy TBM Avenger bombers on a training mission. The Mariner aircraft sent to find them also disappeared along with its 13-man crew, although it is possible that it simply blew up, as Mariners had a tendency to do. There have been many books written about the triangle’s mysterious influence ever since, and in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind the missing Flight 19 aircrews are portrayed as returning alien abductees.

  No trace of these lost aircrews or their planes has ever been found, leaving writers free to offer any theory they choose as to their disappearance without fear of contradiction. Not so a considerable list of other aircraft and shipping claimed by triangle authors to have disappeared in mysterious circumstances. In fact, painstaking research of records and witnesses has established that some of the incidents ascribed to the area have been misrepresented, some occurred elsewhere, some never happened at all and some craft reported missing turned up later but unlike their disappearance their safe arrival was not reported.

  This is also an area of many natural hazards which those with an interest in the supernatural fail to mention. But most compelling of all is the undeniable fact that given the number of craft using this very busy seaway and airspace the number of losses is not disproportionate. Especially when you consider that a lot of the traffic consists of amateur crews aboard yachts and small private planes. Or put another way, people not unlike us. In fact, there is more than enough out here to account for the statistics without ever touching on the giant squid.

  Before the triangle authors bestowed its present name and boundaries on it, the seaway now known as the Bermuda Triangle was simply part of a much larger area of the western North Atlantic known popularly as the Devil’s Triangle and one of the few places on earth where a compass points to true north instead of magnetic north. Another lies off the coast of Japan and is known locally as the Devil’s Sea. Theorists say that the variation between true and magnetic north causes compasses to malfunction and navigators to go off course. Even Christopher Columbus noted in his log that he was having trouble with his compass in this area.

  I once read an article by an author on how she got into the appropriate mood to write her highly successful romantic novels. There was her room’s decor, in fondant pinks and greens, the satin cushions and the subtle lighting. And if memory serves, there may have been a mention of Turkish Delight. I can’t help wondering where those writing about alien abduction and giant squid in the Bermuda Triangle find their inspiration.

  At least writers within the romantic genre are likely to have experienced romantic love at first hand, and possibly unrequited love and the pain of separation or rejection, not to mention the salty passion of the sexual kind. But what about the triangle authors? What’s the nearest they get to the essence of the salty experience they write about? Because to get the measure of this place you really need to be here.

  For instance, I don’t even want to think about the voltages involved in last night’s pyrotechnics or what they could do to a vessel and its crew. And the Puerto Rico Trench we crossed the other day is not the only one of its kind around here, merely the deepest. There are many others, and their enormous depths mean that nothing sinking to the bottom of them will ever be found.

  Nor are electrical storms, trenches five miles deep and magnetic anomalies sending your compass haywire the only environmental forces at work. There are waterspouts, another name for tornadoes at sea whose funnel-shaped wind sucks a column of seawater upward into cumulonimbus cloud and which are quite capable of destroying ships or aircraft. We encountered two of them in the Mediterranean and never want to see another.

  There is also that giant circular surface current known as the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, and currents rushing between the Bahamian islands. Plus, there is a lot of seismic activity, recorded by scientists, resulting in undersea earthquakes and freak waves nearly a hundred feet high. In short, there is more than enough here to not only destroy vessels and aircraft but to swallow up or sweep away the evidence.

  For the 24 hours to noon today we achieve only 68.4 miles. At one stage a container ship passes at what seems unusual slowness until we discover that we are actually standing still. So we take in the sail and put on the port engine. Because we have two engines, David has always kept a record in the log of which one has been running and for how long so that engine use is divided equally between the two.

  While making a note about the port engine in the log down at the chart table he notices that the manual log, the one that measures our speed and is driven by that pesky little paddlewheel in the starboard hull, has jammed again. So we put on the starboard engine as well, to do a reverse thrust to clear it. Initially the starboard engine refuses to go into reverse. Then it keeps stalling and sending us in circles. It is possible that sargassum is caught underneath the boat and may be another clue to our slow speed. But doubtless this all keeps the crew of the container ship entertained. The starboard engine finally engages, however, the log clears and off we go again.

  At 6pm there is a flurry of container ships. Half an hour later a family of common dolphins appears, our first sighting of this species since Tenerife where they brought two calves to swim between our hulls. These are very fast but sadly they don’t stay long, although any visit from them, however short, is always welcome. At sea, captivating wildlife has a way of popping into view at unexpected moments. As earlier in the day, when dragging a backing genoa across to the opposite side of
the mast, with all the attendant flurry, rattle and crash, a large and luminous dragonfly appeared, hovered over the port winch, circled it a few times and then went on its way.

  With no weather forecast to get David up at his usual time tomorrow morning (Mr Jones being away) I am allowed to stay up (in my night attire and with teeth brushed) until 7.30 so I can watch the sun set. It is stunning. Huge and red. At first a solid, lazy red, then like a glass globe topped up with liquid gold, darkest red at the bottom and shading to golden red at the top. After I’ve gone to bed David records another electrical storm in the log, but this one is behind us, much further away and no threat to us.

  56

  Bird on a Wire

  I am out in the cockpit just after 2am on Sunday morning as we skirt the northern reefs of Eleuthera. Once we are clear of them, we shall enter the Northwest Providence Channel which will take us to the Straits of Florida and Fort Lauderdale.

  There is still an hour of my watch left but I go and wake David anyway. For some time we have had another electrical storm up ahead and on our starboard side. Huge silver blasts of heat lightning have been exploding in the sky ahead of us. To our right they are red and gold, like effusions from some monstrous furnaces whose doors are intermittently opened and closed.

  Unfortunately, that other form of lightning has just erupted, the sort with which we so recently became acquainted and hoped never to see again, and its great zigzagging arcs have begun leaping across the surface of the sea at enormous speed. David stays with me until we clear the reefs and then we alter course to port by 20° to take us across the Northeast Providence Channel and into the Northwest which fortunately also takes us away from the electrical storm, although it continues unabated until 4am.

  Around 6am the Norway (formerly the SS France and last seen anchored off Philipsburg, Sint Maarten) passes southbound down our starboard side and quite close but with very little wash.