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

by Stuart Woods

  Force ten in the Atlantic. The waves never look as large in the photographs.

  Now, with so much wind blowing, the sea around me became an even more fascinating place. It wasn’t very cold and rain was spasmodic, so I would sit in the watch seat in the companionway and watch the gale. Fortunately, the wind had risen slowly and without changing direction radically, so the seas, though large, were regular and from the same direction. Using the mast as a guide, I reckoned the waves were a bit over twenty feet in height, and I watched, transfixed, as Harp rose to meet each one. Just when it seemed that a giant sea would overtake us and fall on top of the boat, the yacht would rise to meet it, and the wave would pass harmlessly under us. As the wind rose even more there seemed to be waves breaking everywhere, but never one immediately behind us. When that happens, when a yacht is “pooped,” an incredible weight of water falls onto the boat, serious damage can be done and gear washed away. If the main hatch has been left open the cabin can fill with water and the boat founder.

  Harp surfed down the big waves, often exceeding her theoretical hull speed of about eight knots. I have one vivid memory of sitting in the watch seat, watching the instrument dials; the yacht suddenly accelerated to nine knots, surfing down a wave, and the wind-speed indicator was registering a steady forty-five knots with the wind dead astern. This meant a true wind speed of fifty-five knots, or more than sixty miles an hour. The noise and spray were incredible, but knowing that I had a good boat under me, it was not frightening but exhilarating.

  Now my spare navigation lights failed. On reaching Horta I had found that the masthead light had simply disappeared, blown away on the passage out. Now, with the spares gone, too, I was reduced to one small, battery-operated white light, which I taped to a stanchion so that it could be seen all round. In a lull, when I started to unreef the genoa a bit, the Dynafurl parted again, the top half of the top swivel staying up the mast with the halyard and the bottom half sliding down the Twinstay with the sail. As long as the wind was behind us this did not pose much of a problem, since we could still sail very fast under the double-reefed main only, so I lashed the sail to the deck along with the number-one genoa and sailed on. I would have to climb the mast and retrieve the top half of the swivel before I could set a headsail again. Quite apart from the weakness in the Dynafurl, which would have to be redesigned, this meant that there was a gap in my sail plan. The smallest sail I had aboard was the number-two reefing genoa, which meant that if the Dynafurl failed in heavy weather I needed a smaller sail to set until I could repair it. I would have a lot of rethinking to do when I reached Ireland, but then, that was what the qualifying cruise was for—to expose weaknesses in the boat and her systems. On that basis my cruise from the Azores was already an outstanding success.

  The storm continued for nearly three days, with the wind only occasionally dropping to gale force. My reaction to being tossed about was, surprisingly, not fear but anger. I found it difficult to sleep, because when the boat mini-broached and woke me up my anger at being awakened made it difficult for me to go back to sleep. This cut into my reserves of strength, and the constant bailing kept me tired, but I became really exhausted only once.

  At dusk on the thirteenth, I went into the cockpit to change the battery for the navigation light and discovered to my horror that both the number-one and -two genoas were dragging in the water, attached to the boat by only a shackle at their tacks. If I lost those sails, or even if they were badly torn, I would have no headsail to set and would be at the mercy of the wind, unable to sail in any direction but downwind. I was afraid to stop the boat and let her lie ahull, abeam to the seas, so I left her on her course, got into a safety harness, clipped onto a jackstay, and crawled forward to the foredeck, where I could reach the overboard sails.

  With the additional drag from the two big sails, the boat had slowed to about four knots and was heeled more sharply. Large amounts of seawater were washing over me, and when I began to try to pull the sails aboard I discovered that they seemed hopelessly entangled in the lines, now broken, which had been laced through the guardrails to keep the sails on deck. Also the drag on the sails was incredible. It was like trying to haul in nets full of fish, single-handed.

  As if all that wasn’t enough, I began to hallucinate. I had read about the hallucinations of single-handed sailors. Joshua Slocum believed he had been assisted by a Portuguese seaman from another era, who appeared when he needed help. Others have written of shouts from on deck when something had gone wrong. Still others have seen and talked with friends or relatives. My hallucination was somewhat more mundane. The telephone rang.

  Of course, there was no telephone on Golden Harp, but that did not stop it from ringing. What’s more, it was a French telephone, like the instrument in a cheap Paris hotel room. It rang and rang. It was a bit like being in the bath, hearing the phone ring and being unable to answer it. My thought process went: Dammit, there’s the phone, must answer it; no, can’t answer it, got to get these sails aboard again; wait a minute, stupid, there is no telephone … There’s the phone, must answer it … It went on and on as I struggled with the sails, the same thought pattern turning over and over in my head; I could no more stop it than I could stop the phone from ringing.

  It took me more than an hour to haul the sails aboard again and secure them, the whole of the time being drenched, often with my feet dragging in the water as I tried to find a position where I could get a better grip and more purchase on the dragging canvas. Twice I almost lost a seaboot, rescuing it just as it was being washed from my foot. Finally, I had both sails aboard on the foredeck, lying spread-eagle on top of them to keep them from going again. Foot by foot I slid their bulk back toward the cockpit, taking infinite pains to see that no part of them slipped overboard again, because now they were attached to nothing except me. I made the cockpit, pushed the sails in ahead of me, then collapsed on top of them. At last, I thought, I can answer the telephone. It stopped ringing, just as it always does when you’ve struggled out of the bath and, clutching a towel about you, raced through the house, leaving a trail of wet footprints. Later, when I told a friend about this, she said, “Suppose it hadn’t stopped ringing.” That is a terrifying thought.

  I lay in the cockpit for half an hour, not even budging when another squall hit. After all, Harp was steering herself, and I couldn’t get any wetter. I think that if anything else had gone wrong at that moment I would have been unable to do anything about it. It is that degree of helpless exhaustion which is so dangerous to the single-hander. Sometimes, if you can’t cope you can’t live. It’s as simple as that.

  Soon after this delightful evening the storm began to abate and the wind veer. By morning the wind was ahead of the beam, still blowing about thirty knots. We were close reaching under double-reefed main only and our speed was down to two knots. Without a headsail we were going to make little progress, and if the wind continued to veer we would end up pointing at France instead of Ireland. There was nothing to do but go up the mast, retrieve the halyard, fix the Dynafurl, and get a headsail up. I made my first attempt almost immediately; I got about two steps up the mast, a forty-knot squall hit, and I was quickly down and into the cabin again, very chastened.

  Next day, Sunday, I tried again. The wind had dropped further, but there was still a big sea running and, the wind having veered, it was now coming from two directions. I got as far as the crosstrees this time before I chickened out and retreated to wait for the seas to go down. Finally, late Monday afternoon, I made one last assault on the mast. I ran the boat off to steady her as much as possible, got into a harness, and started laboriously up the stick, clipping one of the two stainless-steel carbine hooks onto a higher step before unclipping the lower one. That way if I slipped I would always be hooked onto something, although I didn’t relish the thought of swinging around like a pendulum from a rope clipped to a mast step. I stopped at the crosstrees to rest my hands, which were already very tired from gripping the steps so tightly, then
continued. Step, hook to next step, unhook from lower step, step again. It went that way for all of the mast’s thirty-eight-foot height, until finally I was clinging desperately to the top, both arms wrapped in a bear hug around the mast. It was necessary to hold on very tightly still, for the boat was rolling in the confused seas, and the mast was cutting an arc of fifteen to twenty feet at the top. Had I lost my grip there would have been a kind of slingshot effect, and I would have been catapulted off the mast into the sea. I stuck an arm through a mast step so that I would have a free hand, praying that the boat would not do a snap roll and break it at the shoulder, and started to haul down on the halyard.

  The whole of the time I was at the top of the mast I thought about two things to the exclusion of everything else. The first was Brian Cooke falling onto the decks of Triple Arrow and breaking his back; the second was a teenager jumping from the yardarm of a tall training ship that summer, striking the water and dying instantly from the impact. That was all I could think about.

  When I had finally inched my way back down the mast I sat on the deck for fifteen minutes until I could make a fist again, then repaired the Dynafurl and hoisted a foresail. I was nearly as tired as I had been after rescuing the sails. And while I had been doing that, other things had been going wrong. I discovered that when falling off a wave, Harp had jammed the log impeller up into the hull, freezing the mileage recorder. This was easily put right, but I had no idea when it had happened, and not knowing what distance I had covered screwed up my dead reckoning mightily. I hadn’t had a firm position fix for several days, because there had been so little sun, and with my dead reckoning out, I was very unsure of my position and still not close enough to land to use radio direction finding.

  Then the engine refused to switch off. I had been charging batteries, and the lever which controlled the accelerator had jammed, corroded by seawater that had reached the engine through the cockpit floor, which was almost impossible to seal properly because of the way it was constructed. No amount of easing oil or blows with spanners and winch handles would free the lever, so now the only way to stop the engine was to turn off the fuel cocks and let it run out of fuel. Then, before starting again, the fuel system had to be bled to get out the air bubbles in the fuel lines.

  Next, my last disposable lighter refused to work, and, having no matches on board, I had no way to light the cooker. This meant no hot food, no hot coffee, no hot anything, and I was not looking forward to eating cold tinned food.

  Finally, the main alternator failed, but at least I was able to plug in the spare. It would charge only one battery at a time, though, so I had to switch leads to charge both batteries, and I could not run the engine and use the other electrics at the same time. Bloody nuisance it turned out to be, too.

  By Tuesday I was over the continental shelf and had a rough RDF position, but I was anxious to contact a ship for a tighter fix. Once, when I had been lying on the foredeck repairing the wiring to the forward navigation light, I saw first one, then four ships, but the engine was running at the time to charge batteries and I couldn’t use the VHF. In the early hours of Tuesday morning I spotted a brightly lit fishing boat nearby and began signaling KVHF. He apparently didn’t read Morse, so he came over for a closer look. He was soon well within shouting distance, but my electric loud-hailer chose this moment to malfunction, so I was reduced to shouting “VHF—Radio” as he circled and came up about fifteen yards off my starboard quarter, running alongside and slightly behind us. It was a huge steel trawler, a hundred feet or so in length, and she was wearing a German or Dutch name that I could never quite read. I shouted repeatedly, but there was lots of shrugging and shaking of heads by everybody on deck.

  Suddenly, the helmsman put his helm over all the way to port—I could see him in the wheelhouse spinning the wheel—and started across my stern without reducing speed in the least. I froze in the cockpit as the enormous trawler came toward us—I was actually looking up at her bows—and waited for the crash. The thought raced through my mind that if I went below to get a life jacket I would be trapped there when the collision occurred, and that there was no time to launch the life raft. So I stood, clutching a winch and bracing myself for the blow. He missed Harp’s stern by less than ten feet, and took more than ten years off my life. I turned the signaling torch on myself and waved him away. I resolved never again to ask a fisherman for help or advice unless I was really in a bad way.

  I got little sleep that night, keeping a watch for shipping, then at dawn I saw a strange shape sticking up over the horizon. My binoculars had fogged up from being wet, so I couldn’t identify it, but I thought it must be an uncharted oil rig, and since it seemed to be receding I went below to make a cup of coffee. I had begun hearing jets passing overhead now and figured I must be on the London–Cork air route. A few minutes later I heard a helicopter, a very loud helicopter, and went on deck to find a U.S. Navy chopper hovering about a hundred feet directly above the boat. I looked astern and there was the largest warship in the world, the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier more than a thousand feet long and with a crew of five thousand. I knew about her from an interview I had heard on the BBC with one of her officers. She had been on a courtesy visit to England and she was now apparently trying to find out what the hell a small yacht was doing sailing about with no one at the helm. I waved at the chopper crew and they went away, apparently satisfied that there was someone on board. Again, the engine was running and I couldn’t call her up on VHF.

  Tuesday passed quietly with light weather and occasional rain, but toward evening the wind freshened and I was running at a good clip, on course for Crosshaven, I hoped. I was still a bit shaky on my position, getting good bearings from Old Head of Kinsale and Galley Head, but unreliable ones from Round Island, in the Scillies. I began to plan a landfall about eight-thirty the following morning at Roberts Head, just outside Cork Harbor.

  I stayed up all night, waiting for Old Head light to appear, hoping it would be in the right place. To make matters worse, my log had begun to overread, destroying my dead reckoning. It began to drizzle heavily and I worried about visibility as I approached the Irish coast. About four a.m. I sighted the loom of Old Head light. I got a quick bearing on it and settled down for the light itself to appear. Roche’s Point light at the entrance to Cork Harbor would appear, eventually, too.

  Then the visibility closed in completely. The drizzle obliterated everything, and although I kept a vigil I was never able to raise either light. Dawn came in the most peculiar way. It was not possible even to tell where the sun was rising. Everything just changed from black to ever lightening shades of gray until it was full daylight. All I could see was fog. There was not even a bird about to give me some idea of how far I could see. The terrible thing about fog is that it makes it impossible to judge distance.

  I sat in the watch seat with the depth sounder in my hands, watching the water get shallower and shallower. I expected an eight-thirty landfall and the soundings seemed to confirm this. I felt pretty sure that I would sight land somewhere between Kinsale and Cork, a distance of about fourteen miles, but then I could also make my landfall east of Cork. I could only point the boat at where I thought Roberts Head might be and hope for the best.

  The sounder read forty fathoms, then twenty, then fifteen, then twelve. Eight-thirty came and went. Still no land. Still no visibility. Then I heard a noise like the engines of a ship. Oh, God, I thought, as if making a landfall in no visibility weren’t enough, I’ve got to dodge a ship or fishing boat. I doubled my efforts to see through the fog. All I could see was a white line on the water just ahead of us. A streak of detergent foam washed out of some river, I thought. Then, less than two hundred yards dead ahead, a large, green cliff appeared out of the fog. The noise had been the sea pounding against it. The white line had been the surf. I had found Ireland; now I had to find Crosshaven.

  I jibed very quickly indeed and sailed east along the coast, keeping it barely in sight. Since I
wasn’t certain where I was, I didn’t want to run onto rocks on one part of the coast, thinking I was on another part. The visibility cleared slightly and I saw a buoy, Daunt Rock buoy. After a week without a firm fix and in two hundred yards of visibility, I had found Roberts Head on the nose, and twelve minutes late. I was giddy with excitement.

  I contacted Cork Harbor radio and asked them to have customs meet me at the Royal Cork and to ring Nick at the cottage and ask him to help me get into Drake’s Pool and pick up Harp’s mooring. I sailed along into the entrance to Cork Harbor, still in poor visibility, and picked up Ringabella Bay and Ringabella House on its shore. The hammerheaded water tower on the hill appeared. It was not until I was abeam of Roche’s Point that the fog lifted enough for me to see the lighthouse.

  As I began to tidy up the yacht and get ready to take the sails down I looked up to see a Mirror dinghy sailing past me out of the harbor. Her skipper was single-handed. I thought, where the hell is he going, single-handed, on a day like this? And then, I wonder if he knows what he may be getting himself into?

  I motored up the river into Crosshaven and picked up a mooring in front of the Royal Cork Yacht Club. The place was deserted, apart from a steward and the customs men, who were there to meet me. As the customs men were going ashore, Nick appeared, roaring down the river in his rubber dinghy, standing up and waving both hands. He came aboard and we motored up to Drake’s Pool and picked up Harp’s mooring. Fred greeted us in a frenzy as we stepped ashore in front of the cottage, and I wondered, How many people can sail thirteen hundred miles and never touch land until their front doorstep? I turned and looked at the yacht swinging peacefully at her moorings.

  Golden Harp was home.

  Fog begins to lift at the entrance to Cork Harbor.