Three Ways to Capsize a Boat

by Chris Stewart

  “Take the wheel, Chris, and keep her on that heading, zero one five, while I go forward and give the sails a tweak.”

  I took the wheel and peered myopically at the dimly illuminated compass in its binnacle just inside the cabin hatchway. At that distance of about two and a half yards I couldn’t quite make out the figures. This was a problem for me all the way to Vinland. What I would have to do was abandon the wheel for a moment and move forward to get a clear sight on the compass, then leap back for the wheel before the boat had moved too far off her course. Naturally by the time I got back to the wheel Hirta would have changed course by a few points, so I would have to dart forward again to the compass, nip back and give a tweak to the wheel, then forward again to see if I had got the adjustment right. It was far from satisfactory, but resulted in a certain sort of a zigzag progress in roughly the desired direction.

  On a starry night the whole thing became easier because you could get your course more or less right, then find a star close to some fixed point on the masthead, and then keep the relation of the star constant to it. The problem, however, with this much more romantic method of navigation is that the stars are also sailing in a circular fashion across the bowl of the night, and if you fix on just one star, you end up going round in a great circle. So you must change your star every five or ten minutes to keep on track.

  On that first watch, as Patrick beavered about on the foredeck in the dark, I listened to the creaking of the mast and boom, the whistling of the wind in the shrouds, and the rushing of the waves against the hull. And I thought how wonderful it was to be here out of sight of land, and heading for Vinland.

  At ten to two I went below to make tea for the next watch and wake them up. It just remained to write down in the log what had or had not happened during the watch—changes of wind direction, course, anything of interest spotted—and then slip thankfully into my sleeping bag to sleep. And oh, how I slept … the rocking of a boat and the sound of water slipping along the planking are the most wonderful aids to tumbling deep into sleep and dreaming. Unfortunately, though, it never lasts.

  At six, in the light of a gray dawn with the rain streaming from a sky the color of slate, the grinning face of Mike, the boat’s boy by virtue of his being the youngest member of the crew, appeared with a mug of tea. “It’s a horrible day,” he observed. “And it’s time you were up and in it. I’m going to bed.”

  I rolled out of my bunk, and before it had time to get cool, Mike rolled into it. This peculiar form of intimacy is known as “hot-bunking.”

  THOSE FIVE DAYS ON the north sea, my first proper voyage, passed in something of a blur. Mostly there was little to see but rolling walls of water, sometimes gray, sometimes brown, and occasionally green, bearing down on us in endless procession. Sometimes they glinted or shone with pale sunlight, but more often they were opaque and brooding, and then all of a sudden the midday sun would break through the mists, and the sea would turn a deep pellucid blue, sparkling and glittering.

  There was a curious soporific feel to the days, the long hours passing without any particular interruption or event. The watch system was relaxed during the day, and we would take a trick at the helm whenever we felt the inclination, or busy ourselves with the constant tasks of whipping and splicing ropes. On land it would have been too tedious to bear, but here at sea I seemed to enter a completely different state of mind, the consequence of a hint of seasickness and not nearly enough sleep. I never got an uninterrupted night’s sleep; three or four hours was the longest the watches would allow you. We would doze during the day to make up for lost hours, but could never quite shake off a heavy-lidded torpor.

  This had the effect of blunting the intellect a little and enhancing the feelings. I’m moved too easily anyway, but on the high seas I found myself constantly brought to the edge of tears by the simplest of things: a sudden burst of sunlight from behind a cloud, or a pleasing notion, or a particularly vivid thought of a loved one. And the simple act of standing at the wheel, watching the red sails billowing into the sky, and feeling the great black hull surging swiftly through the waves, filled me with ineffable delight. I suspected that the others were similarly affected, but these were private thoughts and we left them unsaid. Tom, as skipper, was constantly occupied with the maintenance of his beloved boat and by extension the safety and well-being of the crew. He would strip down the diesel engine and clean the injectors, cast an eye on the wear and tear of the running gear (the ropes and sails), which suffered from constant chafing, and stay aware of our course and position, as well as finding useful things for us to do.

  Ros looked after the galley, keeping us well fed and happy. Curry, which she did well, has an almost supernatural effect on a wet, cold crew on a nasty night at sea. And for much of the day she would be teaching and reading to Hannah. The rest of us would take it in turns at the helm, trim the sails, and do whatever tasks Tom had allotted to us. And on the odd occasions when the sun deigned to appear, everyone would rush onto the deck and try to fix our position with a sextant.

  Mike, John, and Patrick were making use of the trip to brush up on their navigation techniques, taking advantage of Tom’s considerable skill. This was long before the days of GPS, and an ability to use the sextant was essential for ocean navigation, quite apart from the fact that mastery of this traditional instrument was an art in itself. Navigators have relied upon this beautiful device of gleaming brass for hundreds of years, and just to slip one out of its case and hold it to your eye casts you into the unbroken spell of time that links you to Columbus, Magellan, or Henry the Navigator.

  The ideal time to take a sun sight on a sextant is at noon, although of course this is not always possible, as the sun is not necessarily shining at noon, especially in the dismal latitudes toward which we were heading. In theory, though, you can take a sight at other times of the day as long as the sun is visible above the horizon and you have an accurate watch. But if it isn’t noon, it complicates the calculations no end.

  On our boat, if the sun were visible just before noon, the navigators would gather on deck and prepare their instruments. Then, as the moment of the zenith approached, they would adjust the ingenious little smoked mirrors to catch the exact moment the sun ceased its climb and started to drop. That was exact celestial noon, and the figures so accurately etched into the brass arms and arcs of the sextant could now be read off and entered into the calculations. This was also an opportunity to check the accuracy of the chronometers, that is, our watches.

  Next everyone would tumble down the ladder to the chart table, where there would be a frenzy of calculations and poring over navigation tables. Then there would be such sucking of pencils, and muttering and leafing through pages gray with tan and cosine and sine, and date coefficients and declination and other unfathomable logarithms, until the final calculation was made and an estimate of our position arrived at.

  Although I dearly wanted to be involved, there were only three sextants onboard and it became obvious that if I were to muscle in on the master classes, it would all become a bit of a scrum. For the first couple of days, I graciously bowed out. But on the third day the desire to navigate got too much for me; I cracked, and, seizing a moment in the afternoon when everyone else had returned to their bunks or allotted tasks, I crept up on deck with Tom’s sextant and took my own sight. It wasn’t a particularly opportune moment to take a reading, but it would have to do. Unhurriedly and with all the figures at my disposal, I busied myself down at the chart table all on my own with the complex calculations.

  My deliberations moved inexorably toward their conclusion, until at last, panting mentally from the excess of mathematical gymnastics, I had the numbers. Excitedly, I drew in my lines across the chart, trying vainly to ignore the little copses of half-rubbed-out pencil marks that indicated everybody else’s approximation of our whereabouts. These were quite closely grouped.

  However, as my pencil slid along the ruler toward the spot where it would intersect with my f
irst plotted line, the truth began to dawn on me that things were not as they seemed. I removed the ruler and stared, brow furrowed, at the crossed pencil lines. Either everybody else was wildly out—which seemed to me the more likely option—or else I myself had slipped up badly. For my estimate of our position, far from being about fifty nautical miles southwest of the northern tip of Denmark, as the other navigators tended to agree, had us high and dry on the top of a prominent hill just to the south of Scunthorpe.

  Hurriedly I rubbed out the lines. It seemed best to keep this disappointing discovery to myself. In fact, I resolved to leave the sextant work in the future to the eager navigators, for it was hard to imagine a useful result coming from my own offbeat deliberations. So far out to sea, though, you never know exactly where you are, anyway. And it doesn’t really matter that much. It’s only when you draw close to land that you need an exact position, in order not to pile your boat onto the bricks, as Tom would have it.

  Although I never quite got the hang of sextant maths, Tom did show me how you can get a rough idea of where you are by “dead reckoning.” This is a matter of plotting your course onto the chart. You have to make allowances for tides and currents, magnetic variations, leeway (which is the way that the wind blows you a little sideways off your intended track), and your speed, which you ascertain by streaming a device known as a log—a primitive instrument with a propeller on it that you throw into the sea way behind the wash of the boat. You plot all this information, along with changes of course, wind speed, and direction in the logbook, and on the basis of it you have some idea of where you are … although—unless you’re very slick—not much.

  DURING ALL OF THOSE five long days sailing northward to Norway, we saw no sign of land, and, apart from the odd distant ship, there was not much to see on the sea, either, except a few birds.

  I bemoaned this to Tom one day, or at least mused aloud about the monotony of the sea compared with the variety of the land with its ever-changing views of rocks, flowers, and trees. But he wouldn’t have any of it. “Birds,” he declared, “are the flowers of the sea. They’re the living element of the seascape; they give it color and personality and endless variety. There’s not an oceangoing sailor who doesn’t care about birds. Even if you didn’t give a fig for birds before you went to sea, you soon come to love them. They’re your constant companions and you get to know everything there is to know about them.”

  And sure enough, the longer we were at sea, the more I came to see the truth of this. The presence of birds was enough to dispel our loneliness and fill us with fascination. Tom and Ros, Patrick and John knew all there was to know about them and could recognize different species when they were no more than distant specks far away among the waves. We all had our favorites. Mine was the fulmar, a fat little gray-and-white gull with an amiable disposition and a quizzical look—a companionable sort of bird that you felt might be sticking close to the boat for the company rather than just the search for food. There were plenty of fulmars wheeling around among the waves as we sailed up the North Sea, though as we journeyed north I transferred my allegiance to the gannet, which started to make its appearance in ever greater numbers.

  Gannets are bigger than fulmars and more slender and graceful. They dive spectacularly from a great height; they fold up as they hit the water and down as far as two hundred feet they can give a fish a run for its money. To my mind that should class them as amphibians, although this is not generally conceded. But to see a flock of gannets fishing, plummeting from sixty feet up in the air, racing among the schools of fish and then launching themselves from the waves again for another high dive, is one of the unforgettable sights of the sea. And then there’s the strangeness of the gannet’s cry, for it sounds just like a raven, a sound you associate more with the loneliness of heather-clad moorland than with the rolling wastes of the ocean. “Gark … gark,” they cry.

  Gannets fly vast distances but go home to their nests most nights for a kip. Fulmars, on the other hand, are a tougher lot. They are pelagic, which means they live almost entirely at sea. They will go for months, even years, without touching land; indeed the only time they do touch land is when they lay their eggs and rear their young. In the case of the fulmar, she doesn’t lay her first eggs until she’s eight years old, so once a chick leaves the nest it spends the next eight years of life at sea. It’s hard to imagine this companionable creature spending so many years with nowhere to perch for comfort and warmth other than the waves of a high sea.

  “If we were off in the southern oceans,” Tom told me one morning, “you’d see albatross, and just the sight of an albatross will wrench your heartstrings. They’re big and graceful and they range over all the oceans of the world, and they live in terrible loneliness as if there really were a curse upon them, just like in the poem.” Sadly, albatross rarely come north of the line, so we didn’t get to spot one, and I fear that a certain restlessness has now descended on my soul—in that special place where we keep our thwarted ambitions.

  Along with the bird-watching and sextant studies, Tom and most of the crew had a passion for the Vinland sagas, the ancient Icelandic tales of Leif Eriksson’s discovery of Vinland. Indeed, Tom’s expedition had been premised in part on a desire to follow the journey of Leif Eriksson, who in about AD 1000 set out from Iceland for Greenland, but was blown by storms way to the southwest. As a consequence, Leif was the first European to discover the Americas, which he called Vinland. The saga about his voyage recounts at great length the dastardly exploits of—and I am not making these names up—the unappetizing Ragnar Hairybreeches, the loathsome Erik Bloodaxe, and our hero Leif’s mother-in-law, the redoubtable lady Thorbjorg Ship-Bosom.

  For myself, I was never entirely taken with the Viking saga and its rawboned fare. Instead, I buried my head in a volume of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse, which I found in the ship’s library. I began with “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” which I learned by heart during a day’s watch, to entertain Hannah. But it was “The Jumblies” that captured the imagination of everyone onboard, with its chorus:

  Far and few, far and few,

  Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

  Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

  And they went to sea in a Sieve.

  Being a vintage wooden boat, Hirta had a tendency to leak in a heavy sea, so the appositeness of this was lost on nobody. Indeed, it wasn’t long before most of the crew could reel off quotes for appropriate occasions as well as chant the chorus. And so the time fairly zipped by—and in five days we had reached Norwegian waters.

  This was, according to Tom, “good passage-making.” We had averaged roughly five knots, which is about the speed you back your car into the garage, or toil uphill on a bicycle slowly. Now you might well consider this and conclude that such a journey is a waste of time, and on the surface of things you might be right. It’s an expensive form of travel, too; during five days at sea we had probably consumed enough whisky, Mars bars, tea, canned food, and diesel to buy each of us a flight. And most of the time we were rather wet and cold … and during the first twenty-four hours almost everyone was stricken by seasickness.

  It is undoubtedly a madness. And yet I remember reading in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars of how the author once told a Bedouin camel driver that in his flying machine he could do in two hours the journey that would take a camel caravan ten days. The Bedouin pensively scratched his aquiline nose, and then looked deep into the aviator’s eyes. “Why,” he asked quietly, “would a person want to do that?”

  I’m with the Bedouin every time here. I’d plump any day for exploring the beauty that the world has to offer. I know people who have never slept a night beneath the stars. In fact, there are probably people who have never climbed a hill, nor swum in a river or a lake. It’s time they did.

  AT LAST WE SAW to the north a thin gray line a little more distinct than the horizon. As the hours passed and the breeze drove us on, the line became clear
er and finally resolved itself into the jagged cliffs and forested islands of western Norway. We had only been five days at sea, but even so there was a tremendous desire to set foot on dry land. There are those who would have it that sailing is like banging your head against a wall: it’s only good when you stop. And it’s hard to deny that one of the greater pleasures is pulling in to a quiet bay or a harbor at the end of an ocean passage. To walk in the woods, to climb a hill or go to a bar or a bakery.

  As we slipped behind the outer islands and entered the more sheltered archipelago, the sea became calmer, and Hirta churned along unimpeded by the waves of the open sea. We lay around on the deck oohing and aahing at the beauty of the place … the little green valleys, the cliffs and waterfalls and huge ranges of snowy mountains all reflected in the deep, still waters. But the serenity of the scene was, apparently, quite deceptive. According to Tom there were winds that could all of a sudden rush down the mountains and knock a boat like ours clean over. Katabatic winds, he called them, that could spring at you from the still and silent landscape like a wild beast breaking cover. And they could rush the other way, too (these were called anabatic winds), knocking boats like ninepins as they raced from the water straight up the mountainside.

  We mulled this over silently. Fortunately neither wind made a showing that day, and we moved on uneventfully through the baffling maze of islands and fjords that hide the entrance to the port city of Bergen. And there we did what sailors do, which is go to a bar and drink beer, our faces full of wind and our bodies swaying with the memory of waves. Norway was ruinously expensive back then, and the beer was well beyond our modest means, but we had to have it and, believe me, it had never tasted so good. We felt special, in the way that you do when you come in off the sea, or down off a mountain, or out of the wild … we existed on a slightly different plane from those around us.