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

by Stuart Woods

  Seconds before the gun I saw Mike Kane get Spirit into irons nearly on top of the starting line. He just stood in the cockpit shaking both fists in the air until the big tri decided which tack she wanted. Fortunately for Mike, Colas was late, and Spirit recovered in time to nip Club Med at the line. Then Spirit was gone, reveling in the light conditions, while Club Med moved sluggishly toward the Channel. It was clear that if it were going to be a light-weather race Mike would probably win it hands down.

  Mike McMullen sailed past in Three Cheers, and I shouted to him, “Win it, Mike!”

  “I’ll bloody well try!” he shouted back. He was smiling.

  As soon as the Gypsy Moth bunch were away I put Ann and Suzy off onto a spectator boat, switched off the engine, and began to sail slowly around under main only, the reefing genoa furled, and the drifter lashed on deck in case the wind dropped. I have never experienced anything quite like the atmosphere among the competitors at the starting line. Here, in an intensely competitive situation, everybody was wishing everybody else luck! Each time two boats passed there were shouts, jokes, and absurd insults exchanged. I saw and exchanged greetings with Nigel Lang, Ian Radford, Max Bourgeois, Peter Crowther, Angus Primrose, Andrew Bray, Richard Konklowski, Richard Clifford, Ziggy Puchalski, Mike Flanagan, Simon Hunter, and two dozen or so others whom I had never met but were wishing me luck, anyway.

  I saw Angela, aboard one of the Observer press boats, and waved goodbye. We were planning to meet in Newport, where she would be running another press office at the other end. I saw the boat carrying Ann and Suzy a couple of times more, and then I heard the ten-minute gun. I had chosen the starboard end of the line, because starting on the starboard tack would give me right of way over boats on the port tack. I ignored all other tactical considerations in favor of playing it as safely as possible. With nearly ninety boats on the line it would be all too easy to collide with somebody and be out of the race with damage before it even started. In spite of my decision to play it safe, though, I felt all my dinghy racing instincts coming back as the minutes ticked away; I stopped thinking about safety and started thinking how to be on the line when the gun went. Suddenly, nothing else mattered.

  I made a couple of passes at the line under main only, then settled into an oval pattern near the starboard end, jibing around in circles and watching my stopwatch. At about a minute and a half to go, I found myself being crowded by the Linski boats, all five of them, which seemed determined to start as a fleet. At forty-five seconds I let go the tiller and hauled on the leeward sheet, breaking out the reefing genoa, and started for the line. I crossed exactly thirty seconds late. Lousy for a dinghy start, but pretty good under these conditions. Much better yachtsmen than I started way behind me.

  Nineteen months, almost to the day, after my first offshore passage in a yacht, I was starting across the Atlantic, single-handed. I felt as if I would explode. I felt terrific.

  Spirit of America nips Club Méditerranée at the line as ITT Oceanic prepares to tack.

  ITT Oceanic and Club Med jockey for position at the start, as much as one can jockey for position in boats of this size.

  Twenty-four

  At Sea At Last

  As I crossed the line I overtook and sailed between Richard Konklowski in Nike and Michael Richey in Jester, with only a few feet to spare on either side. After that I was in the clear and had only to worry about yachts approaching on the port tack. I was making about three knots in the light breeze, very good considering Harp was wearing the number-two genoa instead of the number-one. I had set the smaller sail at the start because it would be more manageable in tight quarters.

  I sailed perhaps three miles into the Channel in order to lay Penlee Point with plenty of room to spare, noticing that I seemed to be sailing as fast as Clare Francis in Robertson’s Golly, which was carrying a bigger sail. Just before I tacked, Walter Green in the Dick Newick tri, Friends, sailed across my bows, moving very fast. Conditions were ideal for the trimarans, and shortly after I tacked, David Palmer in FT overtook me to leeward, having apparently got a very bad start. Just after we crossed the line, Peter Adams and his family motored alongside in their small yacht and we made our goodbyes. Now another familiar yacht, Ruinette, from Cork, called me on the VHF and wished me luck. It was my last such contact that day, and I felt I was really on my way.

  Up to windward Yves Anrys in Pawn and Lars Wallgren in Swedelady were giving me a boat-for-boat race. Yves, with his big genoa set, began to pull away from us, and Swedelady began to change up to a bigger sail. I hung on to the number-two, hoping the wind would freshen, and Yves pulled away from me. Then Ian Radford in Jabuliswe appeared astern and began, very slowly, to overtake me. She was a smaller boat than Harp, and I knew if I didn’t get more wind soon I would have to make the sail change. Because of the furling gear, this was a more difficult change than with conventional gear, and I dreaded losing the time without a foresail during the change. In higher winds when a smaller sail was needed I would have the advantage, but at the moment, in about a Force three, I did not. Ian was right forward in the pulpit of his boat and stayed there for a long time, apparently making some repair.

  Then the wind dropped a bit, and I had no choice but to make the sail change. Once Big Jenny, as I called the number-one, was up, our boat speed increased and we were making a good four knots. Then the wind freshened again and we did even better. About five in the afternoon, off Fowey, we overtook Angus Primrose in Demon Demo, a bigger boat, and I knew we were doing well. Ron had said that Harp would do better than the Moody 33 on any point of sailing except reaching, and it appeared he was right. Shortly after that, David Pyle in Westward, one of Angus’s Moody 30s, just nipped me, but when I tacked again I saw that I was pointing much higher than he, and later I was sure that we had overtaken him.

  Darkness fell and there were lights everywhere. There was one yacht in particular that seemed to be keeping pace with us and I thought it must be Ian, in his smaller but much lighter boat. Nobody could sleep that night while we were still in danger of colliding with one another or with shipping in the Channel.

  I drank coffee to keep awake, although I had some Dexadrene should I need it, and dined on ham sandwiches and chili con carne that Ann had made in Plymouth. In fact, with a dozen sandwiches and a large pot of the chili, I ate little else for the first three days, except cereal for breakfast. I saw very little shipping, but there were yachts all around us.

  At midnight I called Lizard Coast Guard to check the visibility there and was told it was eight hundred yards. By two a.m. it was down to two hundred, but it must have lifted, because I saw the Lizard light briefly at three a.m., then it disappeared. When dawn came, I could see only two yachts as we approached the Lizard, and they soon disappeared after tacking. I did not know it then, but they were the last I would see. The Lizard was really socked in, although visibility on the water seemed about a mile. I came close enough to the headland to hear the fog signal, but I never saw the land at all. It would be some time before I saw any land again.

  I tacked away from the Lizard, got the yacht on course, and began making telephone calls on the VHF. It was my last chance to say goodbye to people before I was out of range of Land’s End radio. It was still very early morning in the Channel, but in the States it was five hours later. I heard a British warship on the VHF to somebody, reporting that some of the larger yachts had been reported at the Scillies, and I chatted with Andrew Bray on Gillygaloo. We arranged a calling schedule for noon GMT, but I slept through two of the appointments, and we did not make contact again. I talked with Chica Boba, an Italian yacht, which was apparently behind me. Andrew had been ahead. Late in the afternoon I spotted a Scottish yacht, Sundancer, not a competitor, called him up, and was told that he had seen FT near Bishop Rock, which indicated to me that David Palmer was disregarding his earlier, hotly declared intention to go south.

  A large group of dolphins came and played with us for half an hour or so, then darkness fell again a
nd I faced my second night without sleep. At midnight I heard a very clear VHF transmission from a ship called Arctic Seal, who was talking with the Coast Guard. When his transmission was finished I called him up and had a long, friendly conversation with the officer on watch, Jerry Miller of Port Arthur, Texas. I could see the brightly lit ship several miles off my port beam and he reported that he could see me on radar at a distance of eight miles, and could see my masthead light as well. This was most comforting. He also gave me a very precise position from his satellite navigational system, which amused me, since Alain Colas had not been permitted to carry that equipment on Club Med and had shown a good deal of annoyance toward the perfidious British because of it. I had been able to see Club Med for a large part of the first afternoon, and I knew she could not be liking these conditions. I said goodbye to Arctic Seal and set a course for the southwest, having made my decision to take the Azores route.

  I caught a cold. Coming down the Channel, my throat had become sore and now the whole thing blossomed. This, combined with some queasiness from the rough seas we had begun to experience, made my first week out very uncomfortable. I had little energy and what I had went quickly when I had to deal with some problem, like when the Big Jenny wrapped herself around the forestay. It was worse than the spinnaker wrap had been on the Azores trip, and took a lot longer to get undone.

  I was still in radio contact with Land’s End and St. Mary’s Coast Guard at the freakish distance of 110 miles out, although I could read them better than they me. I tried to relay a message from Lizard Coast Guard to FT about this time, but couldn’t raise him. This reinforced my belief that he had gone farther north than I.

  My radar detector seemed to work, waking me in the middle of the night once, when a big merchant ship went by. Trouble was, it detected other things, too, like my electric razor, and often came on when the boat was being tossed about. Still, it seemed better than not having the thing at all.

  I learned the hard way that no sail could be lashed on deck on the leeward side in any kind of a sea, or even on the windward side when things were rough, without its going overboard. This happened twice, but since the sails were shackled onto the deck at the tack, they were recoverable. It was not nearly so tough to get them back on board in a Force seven as it had been in the Force ten coming back from Horta, but it wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun, either, and with the cold sapping my strength, it was exhausting.

  We were constantly in fresh winds, usually Force five to seven, and sometimes sailing free, so our daily averages were usually a hundred miles or better at this point in the Race, and I felt good about the possibility of achieving my twenty-nine-day goal.

  My only brush with the opposite sex at sea, a few dolphins apart, came when I raised the German merchant ship St. Clemens on the VHF and found, to my delight, that she had a female radio operator, one Heidi Riedel. Heidi and I chatted for ten to fifteen minutes, both regretting that we could not get together for a drink. She was from Hamburg and promised to take a message to an old friend there for me. It was the last leisurely radio conversation I would have with anybody, because soon after that when I switched on the ignition to charge the batteries, the engine would not start. The trouble was clearly electrical, and among all the things I did not do well, electrics ranked high. I removed the switch panel, checked all the wiring, and sprayed everything with some stuff which was supposed to dispel moisture and improve electrical connections, but nothing. I checked all the connections on the starter motor and sprayed those. Still nothing. I tried jumping the electrics with a screwdriver blade but succeeded only in making a lot of sparks and frightening myself. Finally, all my electrical ideas exhausted, I tried starting the engine with the hand crank. The manual said this was easy to do, even in cold weather. Ho, ho. I cranked the bloody thing until I couldn’t stand up anymore, a marline spike stuck under an alternator belt to control the decompression lever. I’d get it spinning well enough, but as soon as I released the decompression lever the engine would stop turning. I thought perhaps a stronger man might turn it further, but I doubted it.

  This was a depressing situation, because it meant that when the charge remaining in the batteries was exhausted there would be no electrical power left on the yacht. This would mean no VHF, no cabin lights, no instruments, no stereo tape, and, worst of all, no navigation lights. I would still have radio reception for weather reports, radio direction finding and entertainment on the battery-operated Brookes & Gatehouse and Zenith radios, and depth sounding on the battery-operated Seafarer but no log for speed and mileage recording, no wind direction or wind speed, and no off-course computing from the Hadrian.

  I had gone to such pains to ensure that I had the best possible battery charging system, extra-large batteries, two alternators, etc., and now here I was without electrical power because I could not start the engine, a possibility that had never occurred to me. A thousand pounds’ worth of electrical and electronic equipment was now useless. I went over the whole system again, afraid that I would arrive in Newport, somebody would point at a loose wire and say, “That’s your problem.” There was nothing loose, and apart from that I didn’t know where to begin. I stopped using everything electrical except the log.

  There had been a shortage of sun for the last few days, and I had been proceeding without sun sights to fix my position. Now, as the remaining charge in my batteries faded away, I knew I would soon be without the log, valuable for keeping a good dead reckoning position. Finally, the log ground out its last hundredth of a mile and stopped. I was left with only those navigational aids which mariners had used for centuries: the compass and the sextant.

  I had been at sea for eight days when I got the first bad news. Dominique Berthier, one of the two French girls competing, had lost her yacht, 5100, but had been rescued by a French trawler. I wondered how she could have been near a trawler after eight days at sea, far from the continental shelf. (Later information: Mlle. Berthier had collided with an unknown cargo carrier and received damage to the yacht’s hull. The boat started to take a lot of water and she decided to return to Brest. Nearing France, just off Seil Island, the hull began to break up and she abandoned the yacht for the life raft, watching the boat sink twenty minutes later. Shortly after that she was taken aboard by the trawler and was in Dovarnenez by midnight.)

  I had finally found the radio frequency for the special weather forecast being broadcast for us by the BBC World Service and what I was hearing sounded very bad for the yachts on the more northern routes. Confirming this, I heard the wife of Guy Hornett, who was sailing Old Moore’s Almanac, on the Jimmy Young show on Radio 2; she said Guy had run into two successive Force nine severe gales. Later in the day the BBC reported that Pierre Fehlmann on Gauloise had begun taking water and had retired, and that Yvon Fauconnier on ITT Oceanic (formerly Vendredi Treize) had broken an arm and that some of his sails were in the water. Jock Brazier, in Flying Angel, was also reported to have retired with self-steering problems, and H. G. Mitchell in Tuloa was said to have retired. That made five that I knew about. What else was happening up there? (Later information: Pierre Fehlmann lost Gauloise, and was taken off by another ship under very trying circumstances; Fauconnier and ITT Oceanic were taken in tow by a Russian tug; Guy Hornett and Harry Mitchell finished the race.)

  For three days I was in very thick fog with light headwinds, a very bad combination. I could see nothing, and nothing could see me, but at least there was the consolation that merchant ships would be using their radar, and I had a large radar reflector mounted fifteen feet up on the backstay. In fact, it might be easier to detect my presence that way than by eye, especially at night. My daily average began to drop as I tacked through the soup in the light winds. I did some figuring that at my present rate it would take me forty-three days to finish. That was a horrible thought, but I felt it couldn’t go on forever like that, and that we would get reaching winds after the Azores and the turn west. After freshening and freeing us for a few hours, the wind went li
ght again and back on the nose. To make matters worse, there was a very large swell running, the product, I suppose, of the rougher weather farther north. This made it very difficult to take advantage of what little wind there was. I had set the drifter, the superlight nylon genoa, but the violent motion of the boat shook the light breeze from the sails and the boom swung back and forth and had to be tied. It is one thing to sit on a flat sea with no wind. It is quite another to roll about with no wind. Cooking became messy; messier, even, than in rough weather, when there is a kind of rhythm to the seas. I spilled a glass of red wine all over the tennis whites I was wearing and into my bunk. I got even more bruised than I did in heavy weather, especially around the knees and thighs, from bumping into things.

  During the days, I read as much as I could, finishing Alistair Cooke’s America and starting a biography of Thomas Jefferson. In between, I finished Rosie Swale’s Children of Cape Horn. Rosie had swept through Plymouth, relieving me of £5 for her club of supporters building the Swale’s new catamaran and leaving me with copies of her two books. I ate well. A lunch might include pâté de canard, Parmesan cheese (with the mold sliced off), Bath Oliver biscuits, and half a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet. I gained weight. I began to cultivate a mustache.

  From the radio news I learned that Kriter III, formerly British Oxygen, was reported to be breaking up and Club Méditerranée had been hove-to for three days, repairing sails. There had been a rumor in Plymouth that Colas could not hoist the sails alone, which meant that if he reefed in heavy weather he would not be able to get them up again. I found it difficult to believe that Colas would put himself in that situation, but the word was that there were no winches available big enough for one man to hoist such a huge sail. Somebody else, I didn’t get the name, had been picked up in a life raft.