Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  There is no bad weather forecast tonight. No mention of the gales that have blown earlier today. The wind in sea areas Plymouth and Sole – where I am and where I’m going – is forecast to veer to the west and north-west and drop from Beaufort force 6 to 4 (twenty-two to twenty-seven knots to eleven to sixteen knots).

  This is unsettling news. It means I might have to go tomorrow.

  June 14

  Six hours later, the forecast is the same, better even: the wind is predicted to drop to force 3 or 4, or seven to sixteen knots. The sky outside is clear.

  I call John, on Corrinna, anchored off Penryn, on Toad’s VHF radio. He’s watching the weather also, waiting to head out for Portugal and the Med. He says it’s a good forecast for him, heading south-west for Brittany; it puts the north-westerly wind on his beam, a nice reach. He’ll be off, he says, as soon as he tops up his fuel tanks. I tell him I’ll probably go too, and we say goodbye and wish each other good trips. It’s all right for him. Corrinna is a 50-foot-long ferro-cement ketch, with a fifty-horse diesel in her. John could push her through the Antarctic Ice Pack if he wanted to.

  I decide to go – there’s no good reason to stay.

  Martin and I clean up the boat, and he packs his bag. I go forward once more and work my way aft through the boat, checking that all is stowed properly.

  In the forepeak is my double bunk, which I won’t use once at sea, covered now with bags of clothes, spare line, spare lots of things. Up here, in a tiny cubicle, is also the head, where my foul-weather gear hangs on hooks, and a string bag holds a three-month stash of toilet paper and paper towels.

  Coming aft I enter the saloon: a bunk down each side, lockers filled with food forming backrests, and above the lockers, shelves crammed with books held against the hull with wooden fiddles and shock cord. Beneath the bunks on both sides are fibreglass water tanks I built, holding together almost ninety gallons. Coming down through the middle of the boat, from deck to keel, up between the two forward bulkheads, is an octagonal piece of Scottish pine, eight inches in diameter. This supports the mast, which is actually stepped on the deck above, in a tabernacle – a hinge that enables it to be lowered without lifting it out of the boat. Aft of this mast support, running three feet down through the middle of the saloon, is a gimballed teak drop-leaf table, on which I can leave a cup of coffee or plate of food in all but the worst weather. A kerosene Aladdin lamp is held by a small braided line over the forward end of the table. This is the main light aboard the boat, the light I read by. On the forward bulkheads (the partitions between the saloon and forward cabin) are screwed Toad’s brass clock and barometer, on which hang a shell necklace and a whalebone marlinspike on a piece of leather; a magazine rack full of National Geographic, The New Yorker and Wood-enBoat magazines; a large framed Paul Davis print of two fish on a beach with storm clouds gathering out at sea. Stuck into the frame are photographs of J. and one of my dead father playing his clarinet, his eyes closed, eyebrows raised, his face contorted like Eric Clapton’s. On the aft saloon bulkhead, to starboard, is a solid-fuel heating stove, inside which I keep my money and my passport; to port is an elegant teak cabinet holding glasses, mugs and spare wicks for the Aladdin lamp.

  Aft of the saloon is the galley, to starboard, with a gim-balled three-burner propane stove with grill and oven, a long counter spanning the full eight-foot width of the boat, with a sink sunk into it, and more books filling a recess behind the counter. In racks on the galley bulkhead are plates and cutlery. Huge lockers beneath the counter are filled with pots and pans and baking dishes. A small, gim-balled brass kerosene lamp is fixed to the galley bulkhead over the stove.

  To port, opposite, is the chart table. More books, mostly pilot and navigational volumes, sit at its edge held against the hull with shock cord. Beneath the chart table are my charts, about a hundred, collected over the years, mildewed, discoloured and stained, a big part of what I think of as my personal wealth. Beneath the chart space are lockers for my sextant and any other gear that has to do with the management of the boat. On the bulkhead over the chart table is a teak box holding binoculars, flashlight, hand-bearing compass. A kerosene hurricane lamp (which tends to blow out in winds stronger than twenty-five knots) hangs from a hook over the chart table and it bumps into my head all the time.

  Toad does not have an engine. It did once, and its former owner threw it overboard when it conked out. J. and I never had enough money to put another one in, and without question I would love to have an engine. But in the space aft of the galley and chart table, where the engine and all its nasty tanks and business would have been, is an enormous clean, well-painted storage space, holding jugs of kerosene for my lighting, spare lumber for emergency shipbuilding, tools, more food, spare anchors, chain, rope, paint, varnish, boxes of screws, bolts, shackles, spare parts for the galley water pump, the bilge pump, the head, spares for everything I can think of.

  Everything looks tidy and secure below. I climb up into the cockpit.

  On deck, Toad is clean and spare and rigged for sea. The only thing not bolted down as part of the rigging and running rigging is the fibreglass dinghy, turned upside down and lashed to ringbolts that go down through the cabin roof and its oak beams, and the dinghy’s mast and oars, which are tied to the handrails along the cabin roof.

  All looks shipshape aboard Toad.

  We raise the anchor and tack up to the fuel dock. We fill the water tanks and hose off the boat. We have a ploughman’s lunch in the cockpit: bread, Cheddar cheese and Branston Pickle from one of two jars that I hope will last me the trip. I watch Martin and hope he doesn’t use too much, but I won’t say anything. In fact, he says he doesn’t want to use any of my stores, and I say, ‘Don’t be silly, go ahead, it’s just pickle.’

  The wind doesn’t drop, though. Throughout the afternoon it remains strong, at least twenty to twenty-five knots. Heading west-south-west, it will be forward of Toad’s beam, an uncomfortable point of sail for my somewhat tubby boat, an ‘inefficient’ design according to modern trends. It could force me down towards Brittany, and the rocks and tide rips around Ile de Ouessant, where, without an engine, calm conditions could be even worse than strong winds. It isn’t what I want to start with. I want, unreasonably, completely favourable conditions. But the sky is blue; I know the wind will go down later in the evening. I should go.

  I open my logbook (loose pages in a ring binder) and write:

  Log of Yacht TOAD, from Mylor, Cornwall, England to – hopefully – Camden, Maine, via Horta, Fayal, Azores.

  I turn the page and write:

  At anchor, Mylor. Decided to go. But now – 17.30 – am very chicken. Wind still quite strong. Am feeling all the usual pre-departure feelings – fear, loneliness and a great desire to buy a farm – if I could afford one – but very much more so now without J.

  Normal feelings, healthy even. To be unafraid when setting out to sea is unintelligent. The dangers are clear and to be aware of them is to be prepared for them. Eric Hiscock, the English yachtsman and writer of sailing books, whose complete oeuvre I have read and reread many times and carry aboard Toad, wrote:

  Although the commencement of a long voyage in a small sailing vessel is not yet an everyday happening [it is now – Hiscock was writing in 1967], it is not uncommon, and I sometimes wonder if the people concerned suffer from similar feelings to mine on such occasions: tense apprehension because of the knowledge that we will be dependent entirely on our own skill and resources, and a sad empty feeling at leaving behind the people and the things we love. I had hoped, as the years went by and I gained experience and a little more confidence in myself, that such feelings might become less strong; but I found on this departure in late June … that I was just as apprehensive and just as sad as ever I had been before.

  And Eric had Susan Hiscock with him, the woman who never let a day go by in forty years of circumnavigating, whatever the weather, when she didn’t give Eric a hot meal, whistling as she prepared it. (However, Eric al
ways did the dishes.) Susan also navigated, and handled their boat as well as Eric. Although he wrote the books, she matched him in every sailorly endeavour, and he handsomely acknowledged her contribution at the very beginning of Around the World in Wanderer III, the book covering their first circumnavigation, when he wrote that she was the true heroine of the story.

  Another sailor-author, Miles Smeeton, who sailed around the world with his extraordinarily adventure-driven wife, Beryl, wrote this about people going to sea alone:

  When they are tired there is no one to take their watch, when they are anxious there is no one to relieve them of their anxiety, when they think they are sick there is no one to laugh them out of it, when they are fearful there is no one to lend them courage, when they are undetermined there is no one to harden their resolve, and when they are cold there is no one to hand them a warm drink.

  I’m going alone now. I’ve done almost all my sailing, so far, with J., who whistled too, which was always nice to hear when I was below on a dark night and she was on watch in the cockpit, and she handed me warm drinks, and gave me courage. To think of going to sea without her seems impossible. And disloyal.

  We bought Toad for $6,000 in the Virgin Islands a year after we were married. We remained in the Virgins for almost three years, living aboard the boat while we slowly rebuilt it. I worked as a charter boat skipper, taking pale yuppies out on other boats, ‘bareboats’, for a week at a time. Often, space permitting, I took J. with me. From St Thomas, the base for the charter companies I worked for, we zigzagged up through the islands – Jost Van Dyke, Tortola, Peter Island, Virgin Gorda – and back, stopping at every beautiful beach and cove in between. Dinner was speared fish or crayfish, or the ‘gourmet’ meals packed into the boat’s icebox, or the cheeseburger in paradise ashore. ‘You’re paid to do this!’ my charterers never failed to tell me. They marvelled at the life J. and I were leading on our ‘cute little boat’ and bemoaned going back to their jobs and mortgages.

  We lived very simply, more simply than I think they understood or would care to try themselves, despite the way they’d rave on about envying our lifestyle. Living at anchor, we had no bills. We had no electricity. No refrigerator or TV. At night we read by the light of kerosene lamps and listened to the radio. Our dinghy was our car. Ashore we walked or took buses. We lived hand to mouth, but our only expenses were our food and the boat. I took skippering jobs as we needed the money. The rest of the time we sailed Toad or worked on turning it into as livable and good a boat as we could make it. We made plans to sail around the world. In the meantime we sailed around the Virgin Islands, and once to St Barts when David visited us. Finally we did sail away, to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, up through the Bahamas to Florida, where we stayed for eighteen months. Then across the Atlantic by way of Bermuda and the Azores to the Mediterranean, and then to England, where all our plans foundered and we broke up.

  It seems a wonderful life when I look back on it like this, as if through a photo album, seeing the pictures. I remember the unpleasant episodes too, but now, set against the bigger picture of our life aboard Toad, they seem inconsequential. I keep thinking there must surely have been much more wrong with us than I can remember. Deeply and seriously wrong, to have thrown all that away. And now, for the first time, I’m going somewhere aboard Toad without her. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it.

  ‘Fuck it. Go tomorrow,’ says Martin, with great pith. He has been quiet and businesslike all day as we’ve prepared the boat. We’ve been best friends since we were both twelve, despite rather than because he is also J.’s brother. We met in Mallorca, where my parents owned a house and we spent our summers, and where Martin and J.’s French mother lived after she had left them and their father and run off with a Mallorquín tennis pro while they were holidaying at the Hotel Formentor one summer. She stayed in Mallorca when their father took them back to the States. Martin and J. spent most summers with her after that.

  J. was ten when I first saw her on a dusty unpaved street in Cala Ratjada, a skinny American kid with white-blonde hair walking with a dark little Mallorquín girl, both yakking away in Spanish. When I got to know her after running around with Martin all summer, I found her alternately taciturn and wildly mischievous, disconcertingly sharp and acerbic. She was not intimidated by two older, boorish twelve-year-olds. If we messed with her she could make us – or me, anyway – feel very small. She was a pain and I was fascinated by her. As we grew into our teens, seeing each other only in the summers, we kept a wary eye on each other. She hung out with French and Spanish boys, while I hung out with their sisters. There was something between us that we wouldn’t touch, like a secret we both knew was there without knowing what it was. Then we didn’t see each other for years. We met again in our early twenties. Martin had married and we all got together and went skiing for a few days in Switzerland. I was stupidly amazed to find J. had become a woman, lithe, beautiful, with wonderful tawny thick blonde hair. And deflatingly bright, more disconcerting, more unpredictable. We were still wary of each other, careful of how we proceeded, as if touching something awfully big, so we still didn’t touch it. A few more years went by. I heard through Martin that she had met a Bolivian and gone to Bolivia. Then, at the end of one summer, I found myself in Mallorca again after eight weeks working as crew on an eighty-foot yacht sailing around the Mediterranean, and J. was there too, looking sensational and exotic in Levi’s and Cochabamba casual wear, visiting her mother. Her boyfriend, José, had gone back to Bolivia temporarily, although they were still in touch and planning to see each other again. I was twenty-six and J. was twenty-four, and I finally realized I was in love with her. I asked her to marry me. I wooed her, persuaded her that we had always been meant for each other, that there was no one else for either of us. I appealed to that part of her that was also in me that thought our history pointed this way, that this was unavoidably true. I was relentless, I was so sure, I was convincing. A few months later we were married in England.

  Martin has watched us grow up, circle each other like two cats, get married, and sail off together. He’s sailed with us, and he’s seen us break up. His emotions at now seeing me sail off alone are probably as full and complex as mine.

  ‘Go tomorrow,’ he says again. ‘The weather’ll be better. I want to play some more billiards. And we’ve still got to check out that point.’

  ‘Okay.’

  We have dinner at the pub in Flushing again and play more billiards. Afterwards, at ten o’clock, when it’s just beginning to get dark, we drive to Pendennis Point, the promontory at the entrance to Falmouth harbour. Martin is going to drive here when I leave and take pictures of Toad as I sail past. We find a good spot for him, low down on the rocks near the water. I will steer for this spot tomorrow, and he will be waiting, camera ready.

  FALMOUTH TO FAYAL

  June 15

  From my log:

  06.25 forecast: Plymouth: north-westerly winds 5–6, decreasing 3–4; Sole: variable winds, 3 or less. Decided (again) to leave. Looks real good: wind north-west (but may just be funnelling effect down Mylor Creek). Sunny day. Barometer very high. I’m feeling much better. Called Ma and said goodbye. Now 11.25, about to leave.

  Toad is again alongside the dock, facing the wind.

  Standing on the dock with Martin, watching me prepare to take off, is Wilfred, another yachtie who lives on a small boat anchored in Mylor Creek. Wilfred is of indeterminate middle age and looks like a schoolteacher who has been living in a car for some time. His unvarying costume, week after week, is a threadbare houndstooth jacket, dark grey polyester trousers that are shiny and oily brown with wear and grime, and black shoes rotting from repeated immersion in the water in the bottom of his dinghy as he rows ashore. Underneath the jacket the same grey wool turtleneck sweater. He wears black National Health glasses which he has broken and is continually and unsuccessfully trying to jury-rig with epoxy, seizing wire, small screws and Swan Vesta matchstick splints. His only nautical
concession is a blue wool watchcap I’ve never seen him take off. While Toad was hauled out on the hard in Mylor’s boatyard for three weeks, Wilfred came and stood beside me every day and relentlessly told me the details of his grim personal life while I rebuilt the wind vane, slapped on bottom paint and generally made ready for sea. He and his wife fell out. He’s been living aboard his boat for six months. He’s fixing it up to sail to the Caribbean. I’ve seen his boat, a small, sad bilge keeler, in much the same shape as his glasses.

  We’ve had a few pints together at the pub around the hill. Wilfred feels he and I have much in common, with our little boats, our estranged wives, our dreams of leaving. He gives me the willies: he is what I hope I don’t turn into. I feel he is not a long way from the homeless man whose major preoccupation is fixing up his shopping cart. But I’ve detected no desperation in Wilfred. He seems perfectly happy.