Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  ‘Sea Change appeals to me on many levels – as travel, as a feat of navigation, as confession, and especially as a wonderfully observed ordeal.’

  Paul Theroux

  ‘It is Nichols’ humility in the face of his own failings and when confronted by the vastness of his solitude that makes Sea Change worthy of a place among the best survival stories.’

  Sunday Times

  ‘A thinking man’s book of the sea. A chilling catharsis, with salt-whipped sprays of wisdom that have you sharing the cockpit of Toad feeling every surge of the Atlantic storm … a lethal cocktail for a solo cruise. No helium-packed, jet-stream glide for Nichols.’

  Herald

  ‘An alarming account, told with remarkable calmness … that should sweep away even the most resolute landlubber.’

  Time

  ‘Delicately punctuated by recollections of his ex-wife, Nichols’ account of his madcap voyage is intimate and introspective’

  Observer

  ‘I greatly enjoyed Sea Change. It’s a real voyage of discovery, in which the vivid and exciting sea passage turns out to be a means of achieving knowledge of life on land. The voyage moves with extraordinary and satisfying speed, making the reader wish only that it had been longer, and Nichols makes so little of his own physical bravery and seamanship that these qualities shine all the more brightly for being modestly hidden under a bushel. I think Sea Change is a magnificent addition to the literature of small-boat adventuring.’

  Jonathan Raban

  ‘There are two schools of thought about lone yachtsmen: either they are heroic daredevils or they are reckless fools. I was strongly of the second opinion until I spotted Peter Nichols’ photo on his brilliant book. What a tormented-looking hunk! But more to the point, Nichols is a very good writer.’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Touching and amusing, I read it with great enjoyment.’

  Peter Mayle

  ‘Nichols is marvellous at describing the feelings of awe and loneliness that the sea inspires … In his understated telling of the story, he never seeks your sympathy. He just breaks your heart.’

  New York Times Book Review

  ‘I never thought I would get carried away by the ramblings of a lone yachtsman … but unlike some of his predecessors, Nichols can really write. He draws the reader in and makes us fret about his further prospects and agonise about whether he will make it.’

  Cambridge Evening News

  ‘Nichols is a real sailor whose affinity for his boat seems to have been absolute … What matters most to the reader is his love for the boat … As he sails Toad toward his destination, as he discovers the joys and fears of sailing alone, he conveys with real acuity what wooden boats and those who sail them are about.’

  The Washington Post

  ‘Sea Change is the story of a man who still craves adventure and acknowledges other ocean-going legends. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting book.’

  West Briton

  ‘Honest, poignant, full of humour, good sense and the sea.’

  Bath Chronicle

  ‘Humbling, thrilling reading … the author’s state of mind during his last days aboard … has the reader holding his breath. The ending makes the reader want to cry with the despairing author … His voyage ended in a nightmare, but the resulting book transcends the fiasco.’

  The Washington Times

  ‘Funny at times, but the humour lives in the drama, rises from the drama and never hides the richness, the poignant beauty of a man in the throes of growth.’

  New York Newsday

  SEA CHANGE

  Peter Nichols spent ten years at sea working as a professional yacht captain, living and cruising aboard his own small sailboat, Toad, before turning to writing full time. He is the author of Voyage for Madmen, which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2001 and Lodestar, a novel; both are published by Profile. He has taught creative writing in Georgetown University in Washington DC and now lives in Paris.

  SEA CHANGE

  ALONE ACROSS THE ATLANTIC IN A WOODEN BOAT

  PETER NICHOLS

  Published in Great Britain in 2000 by

  Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way

  London WC1X 9HD

  www.profilebooks.co.uk

  First published by Profile Books in 1999

  This edition reissued by Profile Books in 2002

  Copyright © Peter Nichols 1997, 1999

  Typeset in Goudy Old Style by MacGuru

  info@macguru.org.uk

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978 1 78283 547 9

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  England

  Falmouth to Fayal

  Horta

  Fayal to 36°08' north; 53°12' west

  A short weird cruise to Galveston

  Galveston. And beyond the infinite

  For my mother, Barbara Nichols

  and my brother and surest friend, David

  For Annie

  For Lizzie and Tony

  For Marion

  And for Poupette

  Acknowledgments

  My brother, David, was the first to read a small portion of this book. I came home to a message from him on my answering machine, from India, or Patagonia, where he was producing a movie: ‘It’s wonderful! I loved it! It’s the best thing I’ve ever read! Forget the movies!’ – I’d been writing screenplays – ‘This is what you should be doing! Get on with it, mate!’ So I did.

  I’m grateful for the encouragement of Suzanne Gluck. The strong enthusiasm of Sloan Harris, my agent, was worth more to me than he knows. His early and later comments helped shape the book.

  Bennett Scheuer, sailor, boatbuilder, reader of great books, helped in many ways. Peter Birch and Barry Longley praised and savaged, respectively, a first draft with effective results, and I still love Barry – he was right. Annie Nichols and Jeanne Davis read the first draft and gave me their constructive thoughts. Jeremy Scott and Peter Mayle read later drafts and gave me help I’m grateful for, each in his way. Jeremy continues to provide me with the sort of inspiration to write that no one else could possibly come up with.

  Martin Smith helped me prepare my boat and gave me courage at the beginning of my voyage in Toad. I’m grateful to Captain Frank Johnson and his crew of the Lykes Lines’ Almeria Lykes for their seamanship and assistance. My cousins Matthew deGarmo and Poppy deGarmo gave me two homes at the end of my voyage, and often since.

  John Standing and Annie Cleland both sent me beautiful letters, which contained handsome cheques, at the end of Toad’s voyage, and their thoughts and hard cash saw me through a difficult period.

  My editor at Viking, Carolyn Carlson, was the tireless and tenacious proponent of a better book than it seemed at times I knew how to write. She saw the forest while I was still lost in the trees, and she helped me chop my way out. I owe her a great debt.

  I’m very grateful to Andrew Franklin, Nicky White and Kate Griffin at Profile Books for their embrace, efforts and friendship.

  My mother managed to inveigle me to Spain, where she lives, and to keep me
there, well-fed from her garden, and undistracted, for much of the writing of this book. And we had the best of times.

  A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.

  Robert Louis Stevenson, The Cevennes Journal

  ENGLAND

  June 13

  The alarm clock wakes me at six a.m. I turn on the radio for the BBC shipping forecast. South-westerly gales for sea areas Plymouth and Sole. It was calm and clear six hours ago, when the 00.15 forecast made the same prediction. I went to sleep expecting to wake up in a choppy anchorage, hearing gale-force wind in the rigging.

  I stick my head through the hatch and look around. The water here in Mylor Creek, a fold in the green hills off the River Fal, in Cornwall, is calm, the sky pale blue and clear except for some high thin cloud. The shipping forecasts often seem full of dire exaggeration. If you wait for a good one you might never leave port. Maybe I should go.

  I put on the kettle and get out Alan Watts’s slim little book Instant Weather Forecasting. Each right-hand page is a colour photograph of the sky in some state of meteorological upheaval or transition, the left-hand page a description and table of possibilities. Right now the sky overhead looks very like Photograph 1: ‘Jet stream cirrus. Sky which means deterioration. A vigorous cyclonic situation exists upwind and gales may blow up within the next 8–15 hours.’ That more or less agrees with the BBC. The sky in Photograph 4 also looks quite like what’s overhead: ‘Altostratus ahead of a warm front or occlusion. Sky which means deterioration. If this sky follows that in (1) with cirrostratus (haloes) between, then expect major deterioration.’

  Right. I’m not leaving today. With such concurrence between Watts and the BBC, I’d be a fool to go to sea, only to realize later on, in the middle of major deterioration, that I could have been ashore at the pub around the hill in Flushing. Yet I still feel cowardly to sit ‘weather-bound’ in port on such a calm, sunny morning. But there is no wind at all right now and I can’t go anywhere in my engineless sailboat, Toad.

  I flick through Watts’s book while waiting for the water to boil. Photograph 5 shows low, dark, ragged lumps of cloud, predicting rain or snow within twenty minutes. Photograph 8’s thunderstorm cloud is obvious. Photograph 14’s ‘Quiet evening’ sky, a bucolic scene with a red sun going down behind farm buildings and a stream of smoke from a small bonfire, makes me wonder why I want to go to sea at all. For a moment I think about not going, but cruising around Britain instead. That was what Toad had been built for in 1939, just up the Devon coast, in Paignton. A day cruiser, a weekender, twenty-seven feet long, with a shallow four-foot draft, built to poke its nose up the Dart or the Fal, wind its way through England’s river country, with perhaps, for the truly adventurous, a voyage across the Channel to Brittany, or to Ireland, or up to Scotland and the Western Isles. It was not built to cross oceans, or to live in with a wife and two cats for six years. I have somehow left my wife, J., and the cats, Minou and Neptune, broken up our gypsy home, and am heading across the ocean again, this time alone.

  I hope to sell the boat in Maine, on the other side of the Atlantic, where there is a reverence for wooden boats. It has sat here in England for nine months, for sale, listed with a yacht broker, without a single inquiry. The price is not too steep; there is simply no interest. They all want fibreglass boats now. But Toad must be sold. It is all J. and I own between us, so it must go.

  I’m happy to delay my departure. I still have a few little jobs to do aboard the boat. But mostly I’m scared. I’ve been really scared, deep down, for a week. Not enough to paralyse me or change my mind, but enough to make sure I’m going to wait for a good forecast and unequivocally benign skies.

  My friend Martin has come down from London to stay with me until I leave, to help me prepare the boat and to keep me laughing. After breakfast, we try connecting the light to the new compass I’ve installed in Toad’s cockpit. As soon as I flick the switch we smell burning and the wires immediately melt. We read the wiring instructions now, for the first time. We have to go ashore to buy more wire.

  There’s wind on the water as we row towards the dock. A popple smacks the dinghy’s bow and sends flecks of spray onto my back. I feel better about staying put.

  After buying wire in Falmouth and realizing there isn’t a lot to do on the boat, Martin and I go sightseeing. We drive to the Lizard, the southernmost of Cornwall’s two lobster-claw points, and join a small group climbing through the lighthouse. I want a closer look at Lizard light, which I steered for coming in from the Atlantic aboard Toad, with J., through the long night of an autumn equinoctial gale nine months ago, and whose three-secondly flash will guide me back out to sea again, perhaps tomorrow. I am pulled to lighthouses as much as any postcard photographer because I’ve spent so many nights at sea looking for them, and seeing their flash at last has always meant joy and relief. Lighthouses sit on rocks or headlands you want to stay clear of, yet you make for them in thick weather in hopes of seeing them to know where you are. Manned lighthouses, a nearly vanished breed, offer the greatest comfort because you know there’s someone inside there, experiencing the same weather you are, and you look out at yourself through that person’s eyes and wish yourself well.

  Inside, Lizard light is full of brass and neatly painted wood and iron and gunmetal, a snug mix of a ship’s fo’c’sle and a boarding-school dormitory. The giant prismatic lens that revolves on a trough of mercury looks too big, too Jules Verne-ish for the twentieth century. The wind is definitely up now, buffeting the plate-glass windows. Looking out I see the seas building into long white-streaked rollers that come straight in from the south-west horizon and smash onto the base of Lizard Point directly below us. The sailor is always pleased to see such a sight – the more fearful the better – from ashore.

  We stop at a pub along Mount’s Bay, at Praa Sands, and lunch on Cornish pasties. I spent an Easter holiday here at Praa Sands when I was a kid. I shot at birds with my air rifle and saw an adder in the grass above the beach, and took a shy walk along a brambled lane with pretty red-haired Sally Summer, who died of a brain tumour twenty-seven years later, but I don’t recognize any of it today. That was Easter 1960, so no wonder. It could be worse. It could look like Cape Cod, where I spent my summers in the fifties, where it now looks like Los Angeles in places.

  We drive on, through piratically motifed Penzance, to Lamorna Cove, where naturalist-author Derek Tangye wrote about his life in a spare, isolated cottage on a cliff, in several books I’ve read over the winter. Clearly, he was writing when I was playing at Praa Sands, or before. Lamorna Cove is now a place of expensive-looking bungalows hidden behind thick hedges, rosebushes and Range Rovers.

  We head back in driving rain and stop in a warm quay-side shack in Marazion, where we drink cups of hot, strong brown tea from an urn and look out at St Michael’s Mount appearing and disappearing in the spume of waves breaking on the quay and clattering over the shack’s roof. The weather is thick now, appalling offshore. I feel intensely happy to be looking smugly out at it while driving between pubs and cafés.

  Back aboard Toad, we replace the wire and connect the compass light. We take turns going out into the cockpit to marvel at the illuminated compass, while the other flicks the switch on and off several times.

  ‘God, I wish the fuck I was coming with you,’ says Martin.

  At seven p.m., the sky – looking much like Photograph 6, ‘A front passes’ – brightens and the rain stops. June at 50 degrees north means it will stay light until almost eleven p.m. We row ashore again and take the footpath around a hill of pasture and rich dark cowpats to the pub in Flushing, a village across the Penryn River from Falmouth, where we play billiards and eat bacon, eggs and chips for dinner.

  Toad spent the winter on a mooring off Flushing, and on a nice day this spring when my brother, David, and I tried to sail it around the hill to Mylor, we strayed out of the unmarked channel and ran aground on a falling tide directly in front of this pub. We threw out the anchor and rowed ashore to
have ploughman’s lunches and a pint and wait for the tide to change. As we sat at the bar gazing out the window at a boat we both loved lying on its side in the mud at an awkward angle, the landlord made a humorous but slightly derisive remark about fair-weather sailors running aground. David, who had sailed aboard Toad in the Caribbean and in the Mediterranean, bristled. He asked the landlord if no one else ever went aground there. Not often, was the smirking reply. We drank up and went outside.

  ‘That little boat right there,’ David yelled outside the pub, ‘has been more places than that asshole has had hot dinners! I’d like to see him take that boat where it’s gone! Without a fucking engine!’ And we walked on along the footpath into Falmouth to find another pub, while David yelled, ‘Asshole! Jerk!’

  Martin has also spent happy weeks aboard Toad, in the Bahamas and the Mediterranean, and has heard all about this episode. As we play billiards in the Flushing pub (which is convenient to the boatyard in Mylor, and all that a salty shoreside pub should be), he looks across the room every now and then at the landlord and mutters, ‘Asshole.’

  At midnight, I am again lying in my bunk in the dark, listening to BBC Radio 4, waiting for the 00.15 forecast. You tune in to a different world when you listen to the shipping forecast: a grey, blue, green, clear and foggy, calm and storm-swept nation of twenty-eight contiguous sea areas surrounding the British Isles, reaching almost as far north as Iceland (‘South-east Iceland’) and down to northern Spain and Portugal (‘Finisterre’). Few people, planning voyages to the High Street shops, wanting only to know if they need to take along a mac or a brolly, will be bothered by the information that the wind in Viking, Forties, Dogger and German Bight will be blowing gale-force eight to storm-force nine, imminently. But to the poor buggers at sea in those areas, listening to the radio as if waiting to hear a judgment, this will be grim news. To them it means everything. It means danger offloading men and cargo on a stormswell beneath an oil rig; it means the possibility of steel hawsers and chains snapping and whiplashing through a trawler crew. In a yacht (where you find yourself by choice, either as crew or owner; and if you’re the owner, you’ve spent a lot of money to get there) it means long hours of questioning what it is exactly you’re getting out of this sport. For all who hear a gale forecast at sea, it means life reduced to a concentrated attempt to survive. They will envy the BBC announcer, sitting in a warm studio on top of a concrete foundation (I always imagine him wearing a Marks & Spencer cardigan, a cup of cocoa at hand), reading this forecast in his rich, plummy voice, after which he will drive home to Surbiton or Clapham or Barnes in a warm car and go to bed. They will long to be ashore, close to their families, at home in bed. Nothing on earth will get them there before the forecasted weather arrives. They can make no deal to avoid it. They will have to see it through. There is just one thing they can do that might make a difference: they can pray. No wonder mariners are God-fearing.