Blue Water, Green Skipper: A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic

by Stuart Woods

  We settled into a routine aboard, a routine ruled by the constant strain of being hard on the wind. When a small yacht is beating to windward she will suffer more fore and aft motion and heel more sharply than on any other point of sailing. Harp’s motion was very kindly for a yacht of her size, but it is the heeling of the boat which is the most tiring feature of beating. When the boat is heeled at, say, a constant angle of twenty degrees from the vertical, life aboard becomes a continuous struggle with the law of gravity. One is always traveling either uphill or downhill and never on a level path. Ordinary tasks, like eating, become much more entertaining and exciting. I had equipped the galley with some very attractive American dinnerware, each plate of which had a rubber ring around the bottom which, the ad stated, kept the plate from sliding off the table even at a thirty-degree angle of heel. The ad was absolutely correct; the plates did adhere at that angle. But what the manufacturers had neglected to point out was that, while the plate would remain firmly in place at a thirty-degree angle of heel, the food slides off the plate into your lap. We learned to eat everything from bowls and to hold firmly on to them. They might not tip over or slide when heeled, but the suspense was unbearable.

  We ate well. In spite of the rigors of beating, I cooked a hot breakfast every morning until the bacon ran out, and we had a hot dinner every night and shared a bottle of wine. Bill, who had a firm rule of no alcohol when single-handing, relaxed this stance when sailing in company. I think it made us both better company. In the evenings we talked endlessly and listened to tapes from the Monty Python TV series. Bill had never heard of Monty Python, Irish television not having worked up enough courage to broadcast the series to the west of Ireland, and we were both often convulsed. We had a broad range of audio entertainment at our command—the Python tapes, music ranging from Vivaldi to Simon and Garfunkel and, of course, the BBC World Service on shortwave. We even got Radio 2 until we were about eight hundred miles out.

  We remained fairly busy, apart from sailing the boat. I practiced my celestial navigation, comparing my positions with Bill’s, and they began to come close. I read a lot, too, getting through Anita’s excellent biography of Francis Chichester and a couple of novels. Occasionally, a ship would turn up and we made efforts to communicate. Since the range of our little Seavoice VHF radio-telephone was only about forty miles, we could not communicate directly with land, so I had an idea for sending telegrams via other ships. Merchant shipping did not keep a watch on VHF, using it mostly for port operations, so I kept the signal flags KVHF ready for hoisting. K is the international signal for “I wish to communicate with you.” VHF, I figured, was self-explanatory.

  When we saw our first ship, we got the flags up in a hurry and switched on the radio. Nothing. I lit a white flare. Still nothing. We figured we had not seen him soon enough, and since he was abeam, overtaking us, by the time we got the flags up, he probably hadn’t noticed.

  Another day, a tiny fishing boat turned up from nowhere. He was apparently a tuna fisherman and the boat was so low in the water that it approached us unnoticed. It had not occurred to us that there would be fishing boats this far from land. He ran alongside us for a few minutes, and in spite of the flags and Bill’s efforts in French over the loud-hailer (the boat was from a southwest France port) we failed to make him understand that we wanted him to switch on his radio. With lots of friendly waving he disappeared over the horizon.

  Our second attempt at a merchant ship bore fruit. We saw it early and had the flags up in plenty of time. I was screeching out “K” on the hooter as the ship came up to us, and soon I had her radio operator on the VHF. She was an Italian grain carrier, the Mario Z, under charter to the Russians to ferry wheat from New Orleans to Leningrad, and she was on her way to the States in ballast. I chatted with the radio operator, a Spaniard, for some time, and he kindly agreed to send telegrams home for us. All merchant mariners, I believe, are bored out of their skulls and perfectly delighted to pass the time of day with a small yacht in the middle of nowhere. It breaks up their day.

  Talking with the ship had made our day, too, and there was better to come. For the first time since leaving England, we were freed. The wind backed and we were, at last, reaching. We had two lovely days of it, screaming along in bright sunshiny weather, clocking up our best runs of the passage. Our very best noon-to-noon run was 148 miles. It began to look as if we would make Horta in time for the competitors’ dinner on Saturday night, the sixteenth, and our spirits rose markedly. It had been depressing beating, beating, beating, sometimes laying our course, but even then hard on the wind. This was beautiful sailing, and we began to speculate about what Horta would be like. Bill had sailed past the Azores but had not stopped there, and I knew only what I had seen in a tourist brochure the race committee had sent.

  We raised another ship, a German this time, and sent a telegram to Horta giving an ETA of Saturday. Spirits were high.

  Then we were headed again. Worse, the wind dropped and we began to experience our first light weather, and from the worst possible place, on the nose. Very depressing. But I was learning an important lesson—that the sea doesn’t care when you arrive, or if you arrive at all. The sea is indifferent to the desires of those who sail upon her, and no amount of sulking or swearing will change that. One learns patience at sea, and always the hard way.

  Bill got hurt. He had opened a locker under a settee berth and, having forgotten that he had left the lid off, sat down, falling into the locker, the edges striking him around the kidneys. He was obviously in a lot of pain, and I was worried. There was nothing in our super-duper medical kit, at least, nothing I knew how to use, which would help a ruptured kidney. We were relieved when Bill didn’t pass any blood, and we thought that the worst it could be was a bruised kidney. The worst of the pain passed, and although Bill was very sore and uncomfortable, he insisted on doing all the work he usually did, which was plenty. The only concession he made to his injury was to wear a normal safety harness instead of the length of rope he usually wore around his waist.

  We plodded on, tacking back and forth to maintain our course, Bill in pain and I irritable, disappointed with our progress. We had hoped to make Horta in twelve days; now two weeks had passed. We worried that Gypsy Moth had already left Horta to return to England. We had hoped Bill would be able to return on her, saving the airfare.

  Finally, on Sunday morning, we awoke to find Graciosa, the first of the Azorean archipelago islands, on our route, sitting fat and green in our path. Even more remarkable, we had been freed again and were pointing at the port end of the island, right where we wanted to go, with the wind on our beam. We sailed on toward the island, and as we approached, a small motor launch appeared, towing two large rowboats full of men. Up a stubby mast on the launch, a man was clinging precariously, scanning the horizon. These were the Azorean whale hunters, going after the monster sea mammals as generations of Azoreans have, in an open boat, using a hand-thrown harpoon, their only concession to modernity the little launch which towed them out for their hunt. They gave us a cheerful wave and continued their search.

  Landfall! Graciosa was our first land for two weeks.

  Harp is dwarfed by Tahiti Bill in Horta Harbor.

  Then, of course, we were headed again and found ourselves pointing at the wrong end of the island, hard on the wind. Graciosa looked very inviting, with thick, green vegetation; tiny, white villages here and there; and beautiful beaches, with an occasional stretch of dramatic cliffs. We beat our way into the channel between Graciosa and St. Jorge, the neighboring island, and pressed on toward Horta in the shallower, rougher water and freshening winds. We beat all day and all night. I contrived not to wake Bill until he had got some sleep and then turned in at dawn. Sunrise was a relief, for we had been running without lights. About a week out, the Marinaspec masthead light had inexplicably stopped working, and two days before, our spare navigation lights had gone, too. We then ran with the deck lights on, which took a lot of battery charging but at
least made us visible. Finally, the deck lights went, too, and our last night out we were completely dark and worried about the possibility of colliding with an unlit fishing boat in the blackness.

  At half past seven Bill woke me. I looked across the water and saw the harbor wall of Horta. We put in a final tack and crossed the finishing line at 08.47, local time. We sailed into the harbor and were directed to a mooring. Somebody on shore set off some fireworks. As we furled the reefing genoa the Dynafurl broke again, but it didn’t seem to matter now. We were in Horta. It had taken us fifteen and a half days.

  Seventeen

  Horta, Sweet Horta

  What we saw amazed me. I had been expecting a brown, arid, rather deserted island. Faial was as lush and green as Ireland, and more mountainous. Horta wrapped around the little harbor and ran up the hillside, lots of trees and white buildings.

  Gypsy Moth V was moored nearby. Giles Chichester rowed over and invited us aboard for coffee. We began to pump up the dinghy. A motorboat came alongside and deposited a plump fellow in a bright green shirt aboard, waving customs forms. Funny sort of customs man, I thought. He extended a hand and said, in American-accented English, “Hi, I’m Augie.” And Augie he was. Born of an American mother and an Azorean father, August (pronounced “Ow-goost”) had spent some time in California before returning to live in Horta. Augie was a mine of information and good cheer. Did the laundry need doing? No problem. The electrics need fixing? Can do. I really began to relax. We signed the forms, surrendered our passports to Augie, and splashed over to Gypsy Moth. There Giles and his crew, Martin Wolford, brought us up to date. Runnin’ Scared had won the race. We were the last boat to finish, though not last on corrected time (we were also the smallest boat to finish), and three or four boats had retired. Everybody had taken longer than anticipated, so the dinner had been put back to Sunday night. We had missed it by twelve hours. But there was a beach party that night, and probably one every night from now on. The Club Naval, the local yachting, diving, swimming, and fishing organization, had apparently been given a grant from the government tourist office to entertain the race crews and their wives and girlfriends who had met them in Horta, and the club was having a wonderful time spending it. Nobody’s feet had touched ground since reaching Horta. Neither would ours.

  We staggered ashore under the weight of an incredible amount of laundry for two people, borrowed the staff shower at the Estalagem de Santa Cruz, a lovely modern hotel built inside the walls of an old fort next to the Club Naval, then, cleaner and more closely shaven than we would have dreamed possible, tucked into a lunch of fresh tuna (I had always thought they were born in cans) fried in batter, local grapes and cheese, and a cold bottle of the native white wine, Pico Branco (the local red wine is good, too, if you don’t mind your teeth turning blue), all of it a welcome change from the tinned food on the boat.

  Thus fortified, we began to lurch about Horta, exploring. We lurched because we had not yet got back our land legs, and the earth seemed to move in the same way the boat had. We found the Café Sport, which is the headquarters for visiting yachtsmen in Horta. The owner, Peter, receives and forwards mail, changes money, lends his telephone, and keeps social intercourse among visiting boats moving at a brisk pace. We renewed acquaintance with other crews over cold beer at the Club Naval and swapped stories about our experiences on the passage out. As it turned out, nearly all the other boats had sailed into a different weather system from the one we had encountered, and while we had had fresh headwinds for virtually the whole passage, they had had free but light winds and had suffered calms, so everyone had been slow arriving.

  I got a list of finishing times, did some calculating, and discovered to my astonishment that, allowing for the eleven hours required to put Shirley ashore, we had finished third on handicap, beating Gypsy Moth on corrected time. In fact, only Runnin’ Scared and Triple Arrow had beaten us on handicap. But, in spite of our appeal to the committee, we had been disqualified under the three-man, minimum-crew rule, as had been David Palmer, in FT, who had put a crew ashore on another island so that he could make a flight back to England. Our good position on corrected time raised my hopes for the handicap prize in the OSTAR, but much would depend on the kind of handicap I would be assigned for that race.

  In the afternoon I completely succumbed to the lure of being ashore again and moved into the Estalagem de Santa Cruz, reveling once more in clean sheets and hot showers. The boat was a bit of a mess, anyway, since she had begun taking water through the keelbolts again, and everything was very damp. All the rooms had balconies overlooking the harbor, and I could see Harp bobbing gently at her moorings, only a couple of hundred yards away. Bill moved into a hotel on top of the hill and got some much-needed rest.

  That evening Club Naval threw a beach party for us and, leaning into twenty-knot winds, we ate fish rubbed with garlic and cooked over a charcoal fire, washed down with Pico Branco. Lots of locals and nearly all of the crews came, and all had a marvelous time.

  For the next day or so I wandered around dazed, still unable to believe that I was actually in Horta. Giles Chichester threw a party on Gypsy Moth, and two other boats were tied alongside to handle the overflow. The conversation and the wine flowed like water, and before we knew it late evening had come and all of Horta’s restaurants were closed. Martin Wolford; John Perry, skipper of Peter, Peter, who floated about in a white suit, straw hat, and ten-day beard in the best beachcomber style and who claimed to be a solicitor in London; and a young lady who had flown out to meet a competitor who had subsequently retired from the race, all came to dinner on Golden Harp. We ate and drank well and when, in the wee small hours of the morning, the party began to break up and John and Martin offered to deliver the young lady ashore, I said I would do that myself, since I did not wish to disturb her while she was washing the dishes. I saw John and Martin on deck and to their respective dinghies and then settled down with a brandy while the young lady finished in the galley.

  When we came on deck for the trip ashore, Harp’s dinghy was gone, in spite of the perfectly good clove hitch I had tied in the painter. It was now two o’clock in the morning, and we were faced with the choice of shouting until we woke some wine-soaked sailor on another boat and asking him to get up, dress, and row us ashore in the pouring rain, which had just begun to fall, or staying on the boat. The only sensible thing to do, of course, was to stay on the boat. It was all perfectly innocent, really it was; she stayed in her bunk and I stayed in mine. It is a mark of what dirty minds people have, however, that we took a great deal of raucous abuse the following day.

  The dinghy was found, blown ashore at the other end of the harbor. I have never been entirely convinced that John Perry did not have a hand in the undoing of my perfectly good clove hitch. I do not think Martin would have stooped to such an action, but you can never tell about a London solicitor in a white suit and a straw hat.

  The days drifted lazily by, with the odd bit of work getting done on Harp whenever mañana arrived. We continued to be royally entertained by the Club Naval. There was a special dinner at the Café Capitolia for the last boats to finish—Harp on real time, Peter, Peter on corrected time. Augie and Luis, the commodore of the club, always seemed to be inventing a reason for another special dinner. One day I expressed an interest in seeing some of the island, and a taxi materialized in front of the Estalagem for a free tour. Another time, while I was working on the boat, a motorboat came alongside bearing a bottle of the local brandy—another prize for the last boat to finish. There seemed to be no end to it all. John Perry threw a party on Peter, Peter, a fifty-foot catamaran which could have served as a floating dance hall. Brian Cooke looked around and remarked that there was probably room for a branch office of the National Westminster Bank.

  The moonrises over the seven-thousand-foot volcano on Pico.

  Brian, who had suffered a bad fall from the top of the mast of Triple Arrow the season before, admitted that his broken back had not healed completely
, but said that he was looking forward to the OSTAR the following season, and to his winter project of attempting to beat Chichester’s speed record from West Africa to South America, on which he would qualify his new boat for the OSTAR. There was an impromptu dinner with Mike Best of Croda Way and David Palmer of FT and his lovely wife, Elizabeth. Mike and David were both, as I was, sailing back from the Azores single-handed to qualify, and we had an interesting chat about preparing for the race.

  Scrimshaw, etching on whale ivory, is the Azorean art form, and Orthon is its chief practitioner in Horta. Working in a small house crammed to the rafters with whales’ teeth and other bones and a great deal of ingenious machinery, most of which he made himself, Orthon, for a modest sum, will engrave the image of a yacht on a polished tooth and mount it. Each competitor was presented with a tooth engraved with the name of his yacht, and these handsome gifts no doubt grace bulkheads in widely scattered places today.

  As the week passed, yachts began to sail for England. First to go was Gypsy Moth, and she got a send-off of fireworks and hooters. Before leaving for home, Bill Howell laid me out in the cockpit of Tahiti Bill, injected me with a painkiller from my medical kit, and reglued a loose bridge which had been rattling around the back of my head since Portsmouth. Bill King found a berth with him for the sail back. The other boats followed one by one, until only Runnin’ Scared and Harp were left. I saw a lot of David and Ann Walsh, who were sailing Runnin’ Scared back, and they planned a trip to Ireland in the autumn, when we would cruise down the south coast. Most days we took Harp along the coast from Horta and anchored for a picnic and a swim. In the evenings, Ann formed the diverting habit of suddenly shedding her clothes and dashing into the pool at the hotel on the hill, while the ancient night watchman railed at us. I was sad when Runnin’ Scared sailed out of the harbor and left me to enjoy Horta on my own.