Well, tomorrow would be another day, as the saying goes. Certainly there were no indications of any change in weather. The barometer hadn’t budged in days—hadn’t tipped us off, as a matter of fact; to what we were in. Presumably we were still in the same Azores High, but in a part of it that was windy. I missed, also, our daily swims, though the rain and the waves kept us well laundered, besides which there is a splendid shower by the master stateroom. The sights have been irregular, and this afternoon we spotted a Portuguese warship and spoke it (v.t.). The reply: “We ahrr Portugal. You ahrr what?” I suppose if we had said we were Mozambique they’d have declined cooperation, but we gave our flag, and asked if they had a position, and after a few minutes’ silence they gave us one. Either we were six miles south of where I had us, or they were six miles north of where they placed themselves. I had had a noon sight, and was not lightly going to give ground on the subject, though those northerly winds were probably giving us considerable set and leeway, and I cranked our course north by three degrees. I’m not worried about where we are. As a matter of fact, I thought, turning off the reading light, I wasn’t really worried about anything. The Sealestial was built without any notion of being overwhelmed by such seas as come at you with winds of forty miles per hour, and was proving it very nicely.
The next day was just as bad, but it was on the evening of it that Allen made his remarkable prediction. It is hard to describe the joy that comes to a sailor when after a particularly long blast, the weather clears. I swear, it’s like V-J Day. You just want to go out and be happy. There were still swells at 6 P.M., but the wind was down to seven knots. For the first time since leaving the Azores, we ate in the cockpit. The moon was perfect, the stars were out. The music was on. Everyone had a snort, and wine besides. Tom was fully recovered, and once again was finding everything funny, including imitations of him during the preceding three days (Reggie’s was superior. To do it right, you must lie flat on your back, and look straight up, and put your hand over your eyes. The tone of voice must be funereal. “I’ll have one saltine. No! Make that half a saltine. Thank you”). And the whole of the next day was more of the same, with just enough wind to sail by.
I began to make calculations. As I’ve suggested, I don’t like to end a big trip at anticlimactic hours. At the rate we were going, we’d pull into Marbella at about two in the afternoon, and that is no damn good for celebrating. Rather like being married at six in the morning. So, said I studying the charts, I have a proposal. Let’s go into Gibraltar, get off the boat, have lunch there, look around for an hour or two, then reboard and sail up the thirty miles to Marbella. My proposal was greeted with cheers from all sides, and I knew how Magellan must have felt when he said, “What do you say we pop around the world?” That night was especially animated, we played poker followed by a little wild Red Dog, and when the chips were counted, the whole exercise resulted in an entirely tolerable redistribution of wealth, a modest amount of it in my direction.
You must not ever count on uneventful endings to ocean passages. For every day I have finished a race or cruise in calm circumstances, I can think of two that have been turbulent.
The next morning the breeze was on the nose, and before I came on deck, Tony had hardened up the sails; and now, the wind having veered directly east, we had given way, heading about 110 degrees. We had run into what they call in those parts a “levanter,” namely a tough wind that comes out of the Mediterranean from the east, and has a swooshing funnel effect in the Strait of Gibraltar, which after all is only nine miles wide at its closest point.
I took the helm, and hung on to it for six hours, enjoying it all, though it was fierce and salty. By now we could see the southern coast of Spain—and the northwestern tip of Africa. The navigation from this point would be visual. Consulting the Coast Pilot, I learned that after high water in Gibraltar, the current flows east to west beginning four hours after high tide in Gibraltar, until the next high tide. So, all we needed to do was find out what time was high tide in Gibraltar.
There ensued a search through every paper and document on board the Sealestial. We came up with stuff that would have permitted us to navigate up the Amazon, around Patagonia, into uncharted ports in Micronesia; but no tide tables for the Mediterranean.
So I asked Allen to try Radio Gibraltar, which he did. This is Whiskey Oscar George 9842 Whiskey Oscar George 9842 calling Radio Gibraltar, calling Radio Gibraltar. Nothing. By now we were coasting along the shore of Africa, with a good view of the wind-harried dunes, including a relatively new-looking tanker that had missed the turn by a mere quarter mile and was now abandoned, on its side on the rocks. There is a spectacular lighthouse there, at a point east of which the Barbary pirates took sanctuary for so many years. Now we were abeam of Tangier, and I suggested we try Tangier Radio, with which, however, we had no better results than with Gibraltar. Okay, I said, let’s try the handheld radio with which we had successfully communicated with several vessels during our passage. There were great tankers and freighters of every nationality and size steaming east and west across the Strait. All we desired was the simplest datum—namely, What time was high water in Gibraltar?
We tried it in English, in French, and in Spanish: just the bare question. There was a sullen muteness in all that traffic: hard, really, to understand, because ships at sea tend to be civil to one another. I tacked about again, to starboard, pointing now to the Spanish coast about ten miles west of Gibraltar, and thought: what the hell, we’ll stay on this course. If the tide is favorable, it will waft us into Gibraltar. If it isn’t it will blow us west with the wind, and worse fates are imaginable than spending a night in a southern Spanish bay, reculer pour mieux sauter and all that sort of thing.
The triple-reefed main was augmented by a storm jib, because we had blown out the staysail and topsail, so we added engine power and moved tight into the wind at a full nine knots.
Within one hour, we knew we had gambled—and won.
Two hours later, without tacking again, we were suddenly surrounded by hills—we were in the Bay of Gibraltar, and the time was four in the afternoon. Too late for our lunch plans, but not too late, I thought, for a little tour d’horizon, and so, with the binoculars, I got the lay of the land and brought the Sealestial through a crack in the breakwater, only to run into a frenzied harbor pilot on an armed launch, directing us away from the southern end we thought to tour. “Probably Limey off-limits naval forces,” Allen commented. I was glad to experience the sinews of Western military strength: but thirty seconds later we heard the crack of a gun. It was not a fusillade, let alone the beginning of the third world war. It was a blank cartridge signaling the start of a children’s dinghy race. We had been escorted out of an area in the bay reserved for ten-year-old kids on the days they race. Oh well.
So we took in other parts of Gibraltar, passing the fancy hotels serenely, looking up at the mountain where all the monkeys are cosseted, passing a dozen freighters tied up, loading and unloading. The girls were handing around some wine, and I took some and said, “Well, gentlemen, shall we proceed to Spain?” The consensus was affirmative, and so we moseyed out of Gibraltar and, to our surprise, found that the levanter had entirely dissipated, leaving us waters so placid, one would not have thought they had experienced wind in a week. We rounded, and I set the pilot on automatic, with a heading for Puerto Banús, whose light we would in any event pick up within a couple of hours. I don’t remember ever seeing such pinks and blues as we saw that night, quietly proceeding at a mere thirteen hundred rpm so that there would be no noise to contend with. Every few moments, as the sun went down and the moon blared up, the color combinations changed, and we saw deep mauves, every color every painter ever used, when painting in a tranquil frame of mind; such a frame of mind as our own. Dinner was served slowly and consumed slowly, and there was barely time for coffee, brandy, and cigars before we saw the light and closed down on our destination.
I had seen it before, and remembered sending Dan
ny in a dinghy to delineate absolutely the angular little channel by which you enter the huge facility at Marbella. I remembered it, and we crawled in, and instantly spotted two flashlights signaling us in a direction where, through the glasses, I could make out an unoccupied section of a dock, about the length of the Sealestial, and so I gave my last command: “Fenders, port side.” I approached, did a figure eight to test the current, and we slid in. Betsy and a friend had just then (at midnight) arrived, expecting an all-night vigil. Betsy and Christopher had eloped only last November.
There was great commotion at the Immigration dock during which we all endeavored to place telephone calls to America, on the understanding that doing so would not interfere with our consumption of champagne, which Van had sent ahead in copious supply and Betsy had taken care to keep chilled. I don’t know why, but suddenly I felt an impulse to pull out. I did so without ceremony, walking, champagne glass in hand, back along the lifeless dock, toward the boat. I stepped gingerly over the lifeline, grasping the shroud with my left hand: the other hand was not available, as there was still the champagne glass. The boat, moth-balled in moonlight, was dead. Everyone was ashore, telephoning, reveling, roistering. There was no breeze, no sound. I walked aft to the stern cockpit and maneuvered down the stillness of the companionway to the master cabin, flicked on the reading light, dropped my pants, shoes, and socks with a single downward motion, and slid between the sheets. For the first time in seven days, no need to fasten the canvas leeboards that had kept me, during those screeching moments of heel, from being tossed onto the floorboards. I picked up my journal and began to write. The dozen words I managed I cannot, at this moment, decipher. They are illegible. But I know what they say. Know what they express. Gratitude.
Notes
Chapter 3
1 We had informally designated our transatlantic crossing in 1975 as the “BO”— i.e., the Big One.
Chapter 5
1 Until reading Tony’s journal I don’t remember having come across “fiddle.” Webster: “Naut. A frame or railing on a ship’s table to keep dishes, etc. from sliding off in rough weather—vt-dled,-dling.” I’d have used the word “lip,” but find no authority for it in the dictionary.
2 This gallant navigational gallimaufry I discuss later, in a commentary on navigation at sea.
Chapter 6
1 Beard-McKie: “Latitude and Longitude: A series of imaginary lines on the earth’s surface drawn at intervals parallel to the Equator (latitude) or the poles (longitude) as an aid to navigation. Since they are invisible, many mariners find them of limited usefulness.”
Chapter 13
1 (Beard-McKie-“Binoculars: Entertaining shipboard kaleidoscope which when held up to the light reveals interesting patterns and designs caused by salt spray, thumbprints, and scratches. Uncapped, its lenses may also be employed to collect mall amounts of salt from seawater through evaporation.”)
Atlantic High Page 23
