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

by Stuart Woods

  “Water, water everywhere …” Becalmed in mid-Atlantic.

  Then came the really stunning news: there were only ninety-nine competitors left in the race. Thirty-one had retired or been lost. I had, up until this time, heard about only six or seven boats. Thirty-one gone, and it was June 18—thirteen days after the start of the race! A report came that the Soviet tug Bestroshryy, which had taken ITT in tow, had also taken Yves Terlain off Kriter. He had been able to hold the huge cat together just long enough for help to arrive. Tabarly was reported 850 miles from Newport and it was said that he might be there as early as the twenty-first, which seemed utterly impossible to me.

  My first two weeks I had covered 1,066 miles over the ground, probably sailing fifteen or twenty percent more than that because of headwinds. Poor progress. I missed the electricity, especially the instruments, and it annoyed me that when it got dark I simply had to go to bed. I tried reading with a flashlight, but it was very uncomfortable. I was in my sleeping bag by ten and always it took me at least two hours to get to sleep, not being accustomed to early bedtimes. I listened to Willis Conover’s jazz program on the Voice of America, and to the American Forces Radio and Television Service, in addition to the BBC. We were too far out for Radio 2 now, but I was picking up the American station in the Azores again, and getting the first hard news about the coming Democratic Convention in New York. After reading about him for months in the International Herald Tribune, I heard Jimmy Carter’s voice for the first time. He sounded very familiar, like half the people I’d grown up around in Georgia.

  I became very subject to reminiscence, something that had happened to me on the return trip from the Azores, too. I found myself easily moved by memories and by things I read or heard on the radio which brought back memories. The Northern Service of the Canadian Broadcasting Company was replaying a series of old radio programs, Inner Sanctum, The Green Hornet, and, best of all, Jack Benny. The CBC and VOA also played a lot of music from other eras, and one evening I suddenly found myself in tears, listening to Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell, I think, singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It’s not a very sentimental song, but I suddenly remembered that when I was about six years old I had known all the lyrics to the male part of that song, and a little girl across the street had known the girl’s part. I remembered sitting under a tree in my grandparents’ front yard on a hot summer day, singing that duet, while we waited for the local fire department to come and rescue a cat which had been chased up the tree we were sitting under by a local dog. What moved me was the memory that I had had a childhood in which firemen came to rescue cats from trees.

  On Sunday, June 20, I scored what for me was a navigational triumph. I took my first moon sight, plotted it across a sunsight, and had an instant position without having to wait for a noon sight. It doesn’t sound like much of an event, but after a while alone at sea, small successes become wildly elating, just as small problems become hugely depressing. While I was doing the plotting I looked up from the chart table and saw through the windows on the port side the bows of a huge ship. I ran up on deck, waving and pointing at the signal flags I kept flying, which meant “Report me to Lloyds.” People on deck waved back and, as I watched, the ship made a ninety-degree course change to port and sailed away. Apparently, she had come up on my starboard side, gone astern of me, and then run on a parallel course on my port side to see if there was anybody aboard. I had been too absorbed in plotting my position to hear her engines, close as we were. I wondered what the outcome would have been if the encounter had occurred at night.

  Harp drifts through the light airs in mid-Atlantic. The very light drifter genoa kept her moving.

  The calms and light winds persisted, but very gradually the sea became flatter, until it was not unpleasant to be sailing slowly. My log for Monday, June 21, read, in part: Sitting in the watch seat writing this—a lovely evening. I’m wearing only tennis shorts, and the air feels good on my skin. There is what looks like squally showers up to windward; if it will bring a good sailing breeze that’s O.K. with me. I have been sitting on the “back porch”—the self-steering platform—trailing my feet in the cool water. It is very blue and extraordinarily clear. A fish about eighteen inches long appears to have fallen in love with the rudder—he has been swimming alongside, almost touching it, for hours. We were almost completely becalmed from nine a.m. to four p.m… . Spotted a mooring buoy ahead and after what seemed like a very long time, crept abeam of it. It had the number nine on top and the name (I think) Nancy Egary. The owner can find his mooring at 40°27’N, 27°22’W. Heard on BBC that Tabarly is within a day’s sail of Newport. If it’s true he will beat the record by three days. Seems impossible … The Azores are being even more elusive than on the trip with Bill. Graciosa is still sixty miles away and Flores is a hundred miles further than that …

  I was wearing tennis shorts and not running around naked because I had been doing just that, and parts of me which were unaccustomed to the hot sun were complaining. I could sit comfortably only in certain unusual positions. The Azores were, indeed, taking their time about turning up. On the race the year before, Bill and I had taken 15½ days and we had considered that two or three days too long. That night, however, I picked up the loom of a light on Faial and as I was about to go below to plot the bearing, I looked astern and saw two enormous red lights from a position where there could be no land. It was obviously not a ship, and just when I was beginning to reassess my opinions about UFOs, I realized that it was the moon rising, only a sliver of it, but huge and red and broken up by black clouds stretching across it. It was a few minutes before my pulse returned to normal.

  Next morning, I could see things growing in my drinking water. This was alarming. I remembered an account by a competitor in the last race describing a similar experience with his water; he had had to put into the Azores to clean his tanks and change the water. If I wanted an excuse to visit Faial again, here it was. I decided to wait another day before making a decision about it. When I checked it again, I found that the contamination was only in the starboard tank and not the port, and I remembered that Yves Anrys had given me two water-purification tablets before the start of the race. I had put them on the chart table and forgotten what they were. Now they were wedged under the barometer and crumbling, but I swept up the pieces, divided them equally between the two tanks, and poured a pint of water in after each of them to make sure they did not lodge in the filler pipes. I reasoned that the contamination was probably harmless bacteria, and anyway, the pills were at work now, so I would drink the starboard tank first, before anything new started growing in it.

  A day later, the water situation was still on my mind when I rose to find Faial, green and lovely, off my port bow, with a cloud-enshrouded Pico behind. The height of the islands, Faial at 3,500 feet and Pico at 7,000 feet, must make them among the best landfalls in the world, when they are not obscured by cloud. I thought of Horta and the people and places I knew there—Augie and Luis, the Club Naval, Peter and his Café Sport, the Estalagem and the village market—and I resolved to come back when I could combine the excitement of seeing the Azores with the satisfaction of visiting them.

  The BBC was now reporting that the race winner was five hundred miles from Newport, but they had stopped mentioning Tabarly specifically. I wondered how Mike McMullen was doing, hoped he was up front, unnoticed and winning. I had thought about Lizzie and Mike often, and I wanted him to be not just the first multihull but the first boat across the line. I knew that no one else could be as highly motivated.

  My first flying fish. Not exactly a trade winds breakfast.

  The water was choppy in the archipelago waters. Faial remained in view for nearly a day and a half in the clear weather, and as I was coming on deck for my noon sight on the twenty-fourth, glancing to see if the island was still there, I saw instead a ship coming up fast astern of us. She was Olwen, Royal Navy, I think, since her officers were in whites, but there were women aboard, too, and I wonder
ed how the Royal Navy had managed that. She passed me, then circled and came close abeam my starboard side, and I shouted through my Tannoy loud-hailer, “Please report me to Lloyds.”

  “I have already done so,” replied an officer from the bridge.

  I asked for my position, but he was unable to get the information before his part of the ship passed me, and suddenly Harp was very close to her, close enough for a rating further aft to ask after my welfare only barely raising his voice. I dropped everything and threw in a very fast tack, and the big ship slid by only a few yards away. That rattled me a bit, and it must have got to her captain, too, for this time he did not circle but hove to and waited for me to come to him. I was not about to go anywhere near the ship, stopped or not, without an engine. He waited for a few minutes, probably trying to get me on the VHF, because an antenna was visible at my masthead, then sailed on. At least my position would be reported, I thought.

  That night I heard on the BBC that Clare Francis was a thousand miles from Newport, apparently on the great circle route. I got out the dividers and measured my distance from the finish. I had made my first turn on my course at about 37°30’N, 35°W, and I still had just over two thousand miles to go. Maybe they were having heavy weather up there, but at least they were having wind, too, while I sat becalmed or in light headwinds day after day. But now I was at my southerly turning point, the place where the reaching winds were supposed to be. If they came, and if they were fresh, my daily runs would improve dramatically. And anyway, didn’t they have calms on the great circle route? Maybe there was a chance of making a good showing, yet.

  Twenty-five

  Going West

  I don’t suppose I had really expected fresh reaching winds to materialize the moment I reached a point on the chart, but I was bloody disappointed when they didn’t. Still, at the end of three weeks I had covered 1,645 miles over the ground, and my daily average was improving steadily.

  Life went on in a regular sort of way, my daily routine continuing. I saw my first sea turtle; he measured about three feet across his shell and was covered in barnacles. We sailed slowly past him in light winds, so slowly that I was able to go below, get a camera, and take a couple of shots of him.

  Then my eggs went bad. An egg company had given us thirty each, and Yves Anrys had given me his, but for some reason my taste for them had disappeared and I had eaten only two since Plymouth. I had a good time with them now, though. I sat in the cockpit and dropped them overboard one by one, watching as they sank but remained in sight for an amazingly long time in the clear water.

  I had passed my halfway point and had begun to get out my large-scale charts of the east coast of the United States and mark them up for future use.

  On July 28 the BBC reported that the French Navy had started a search for Eric Tabarly. This seemed ridiculous to me, since he had been out for only twenty-two days, and there were any number of good reasons why he might not have appeared in Newport yet. What seemed more a cause for concern was that sixty-seven of the yachts in the race had not been sighted or heard from either during the past week or since the start. I was glad I was not one of them. It suddenly occurred to me that although I had been seen and my family and friends had news of me, I had none of them and would have none until reaching Newport.

  Anything might have happened—someone might be dead or ill—and I would have no way of knowing. It was a facet of single-handing that had never crossed my mind and I found it mildly discomforting. Colas was reported two hundred miles from Newport after putting into St. John’s, Newfoundland, for repairs. This was perfectly proper, since the rules stipulated that a yacht could stop anywhere for as long as her skipper wished, as long as he was not towed for more than two miles into and out of port and observed all the other rules.

  The following day, the twenty-ninth, I heard that Tabarly had won, crossing the line at nine in the morning, Newport time. Colas was thought to be close behind. I was sorry that Mike McMullen hadn’t won, or Mike Kane, but there was still the multihull prize, which I had begun to think of as the “Tin Lizzie.” Then, the next day, came the amazing news that Michael Birch, in one of the little Newick trimarans, The Third Turtle, had finished third, followed closely by Kazimierz Jaworski in his thirty-eight-foot monohull, Spaniel. They were both remarkable performances, Spaniel’s being perhaps the most remarkable, since she was a monohull. David Palmer, who had expected to win the Jester class in FT, had dismissed the Newick trio as contenders, saying that a boat completed this season could not win for lack of time to prepare. It was a classic case of a competitor believing that everyone else would experience the same teething problems he had; of not recognizing that there will always be someone, in a race of this size, whose boat is better designed, better prepared, and better sailed than yours. Considering all the variables, it was not a race to be cocky about. Here we had the boat that everyone had predicted would win in a walk coming second, beaten by a boat designed to be sailed by fifteen men, then two yachts from the smallest class finishing third and fourth, ahead of much larger, faster boats which should have beaten them. It was that kind of race.

  From my log of July 1: I have just dined on sweet and sour ham, with peanuts and raisins, and the Bâtard-Montrachet ’70 and am a little bit drunk; Willis Conover is playing very good jazz on the Voice of America and Mike Flanagan is dead. BBC said at midday, as I was eating a ham sandwich, that Galloping Gael has been found by a merchant ship, drifting, with no one aboard. Mike is apparently the victim of what I have always thought is the single most dangerous risk of this Race—falling overboard and watching your boat sail away. It is said that drowning is a pleasant death, but it cannot be pleasant to tread water and contemplate it until it happens. When I heard about this my first action was to put down my sandwich, go and sit on the back porch (first clipping my harness to the pulpit) and rig a tripping line to the self-steering. It is now being towed behind with a number of knots and two loops tied into it. It may not be much, but it is all I can do. I didn’t know Mike Flanagan well, but he seemed a nice enough fellow and was, I am told, supremely confident of his chances of winning the “Jester Trophy.” Now, barring a true miracle, he is gone, a victim of what? The Race? His own self-confidence (vanity)? Or an unavoidable accident? (There are unavoidable accidents.) Now, in the last month, two attractive young people I knew are dead. Why do I feel responsible, or at least guilty? They are not dead because they both knew me, although I may have been their only connection. I have believed from the beginning that someone would die in this Race. Now, someone has. God, let that be an end to it.

  On July 2 I heard that Colas had been docked ten percent of his elapsed time for having someone help him hoist his sails in St. John’s. (Later information: A member of the race committee had telephoned the St. John’s Coast Guard to learn the circumstances of Colas’s arrival and departure and had been told that on leaving, Colas had taken a party on board with him out of the harbor, thus breaking the most important rule of all, the one about sailing alone. Whether or not he had help with his sails made no difference, and he was lucky to get away with a ten percent penalty.)

  My radar reflector chaffed through its shackle and slid down the backstay, thus reducing my visibility on radar. I plowed through my tinned American snack foods, continuing to gain weight and contemplating the disappearance of my navel.

  From my log of July 3: Becalmed most of last night and until 11.00 hours this morning. When the wind returned it was, of course, nearly on the nose. I have been irritable all day. If I don’t improve my daily average it will take me another three weeks to reach Newport, and we’ve been at it for four weeks today. We seem to sail (hard on the wind) from one calm to another, like traffic roundabouts on the route, each jammed, with movement nonexistent. BBC says that David Palmer and Walter Green finished seventh and eighth (but who was fifth and sixth?). They were both very good performances, finishing ahead of a lot of the Pen Duick and Gypsy Moth classes. Good for them. I hope Mike McMullen was
fifth or sixth. Why don’t they give us more news? The BBC hasn’t had one interview with anybody connected with the Race. Today I am (temporarily) weary of this enterprise, but now that the boat is moving again, in whatever direction, I feel better.

  What I did not write in my log, for fear of giving the idea more credence in my own mind, was the thought that if Mike McMullen were not number five or six, he would not be in Newport when I arrived. I tried to think of all the hundreds of reasons why he might not be among the leaders—broken mast, leaky boat, illness—and still be safe, but the thought would not go away.

  As July 4, 1976, the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of my country dawned, I was still thirteen hundred miles from Newport. Shattered was my hope of being in Newport for the celebration, and shattered it had been for two or three weeks, but that didn’t make it feel any better. Now I was worried about finishing the race before the fifty-day time limit expired. As we rode out a Force seven on the nose, I listened to reports of celebrations from all over the United States on the Voice of America. The Queen was in Newport, hosting a dinner for the president. Pity I couldn’t make it. Somebody, probably Protestant terrorists, had planted some bombs in Dublin. I was sad to think that the mindless war was beginning to be felt in the Republic. The Israelis freed the hostages at Entebbe, in Uganda, and I think that was the high point of my day. I stood up and cheered. I read Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and then, in a fever of patriotism, wrote a letter to Jimmy Carter, offering to work in his campaign. It would be some time before I could mail it. Thirteen hundred miles to go. Twelve days, with luck. Twice that, without it.

  The next day the wind began to rise and back, putting us on course again but hard on the wind. It blew hard all that night, and I was routed out of bed early the next morning to reef right down to storm canvas. The squall hadn’t allowed any time for dressing, so I did the job naked. By the time I had finished the wind was blowing a steady Force ten, and the scene around me was very strange. Here we were in fifty to fifty-five knots of wind (I was certain about that, comparing it to the blow on the trip back from the Azores the year before), and the sun was shining brightly. It was very warm, and I sat naked in the cockpit for half an hour or so, watching the enormous seas and delighting in the sunshine. It was delightfully pleasant until the wind increased to the point where the spray hurt like hell, and I had to get below, my skin red as if from a needle shower.