Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  What I don’t know about celestial navigation comprises the main text of most primers on the subject. I learned the essentials from an article in a yachting magazine, which I read hundreds of miles offshore, sitting in Toad’s cockpit wondering anxiously where I was. Such a situation has much to recommend it over learning at home or in a classroom. The article’s author, Stafford Campbell, suggested that since you didn’t need to understand the theory of the internal combustion engine to drive a car, he would describe the basic steps of the practice and worry about the theory later. That was exactly what I wanted to read. I later augmented this article with a small book called Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen by Mary Blewitt, which offered a simple pre-Copernican look at this seaman’s science (in this book, the heavenly bodies still revolve around the earth). This got me shooting sun and star sights in very little time, and successfully sailing across unmarked stretches of sea, and once I was able to do that, I forgot all about theory. I navigate by rote, looking up numbers in the almanac and sight reduction tables, adding and subtracting them as necessary. This part of it is far simpler than working out the sticker price of a new car. The real skill in celestial navigation has to do with the accuracy with which you can use a sextant on the deck of a small boat tossing about on the sea.

  The sextant is a beautifully designed, essentially simple and old-fashioned device – virtually unchanged since Cook’s time – enabling the user to see the sun, moon or a star through a monocular and filtered shades and pull the image down onto the horizon by means of a hinged mirror, and then measure the angle between the user, the horizon and the celestial body. Taking a sight on a sunny day in smooth conditions is very different from trying it in murky weather in rough seas. Accuracy in such conditions, and the ability to take a quick ‘snapshot’ of the sun when it appears momentarily through the clouds, as the boat simultaneously rises high enough on a swell to glimpse the true horizon, requires practice and confidence. It has been said that a navigator’s second thousand sights will show noticeable improvement over the first thousand.

  A bit of theory can, of course, help you out. It can teach you tricks and save you time. In the Virgin Islands I met Ed Boden, who had sailed around the world in an engineless wooden boat a few feet smaller than Toad. Before circumnavigating, Ed had been a rocket engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California. He had been on the team that sent the Mercury rockets into space, paving the way for the Apollo programme and the moon landings. Ed had been looking at the heavens long before he became a navigator and he knew the theoretical side of it pretty well. He showed me how, with a bit of extrapolation from the nautical almanac, to estimate to within a minute or so when the sun will reach its zenith in the sky at local noon. This allows you to pre-set the sextant and go out on deck and take your sight in a few minutes, rather than spending twenty minutes or more squinting skyward through the eyepiece, observing the sun’s rise to the point where it stops and begins to descend, and getting a crick in your face that makes you look like Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo for half an hour afterwards. Ed also knew more dirty limericks than any man alive. Every time I saw him – a grinning, limerick-spewing savant – he told me at least four. But this is the only one I remember:

  There was a young man from Valparaiso

  Who said, ‘About sex there’s one thing I do know.

  Young boys are fine, fat women divine,

  But the Llama, ah! Numero uno.’

  I believe my celestially derived positions are usually accurate to within two to three miles. If the weather is rough and the results more uncertain, greater allowance is given. This is accurate enough for a slow-moving boat.

  The X I mark on my chart today at local noon is at latitude 49°19' north, longitude 8°40' west; about 150 miles from Falmouth, and just over 1,100 to Fayal in the Azores.

  June 19

  00.45. The alarm goes off and I’m on deck looking around without waking all the way up. This is my state between bouts of sleep: a kind of functional somnambulism during which I am keyed to wake all the way up and take action if necessary. Right now, still foggy with sleep, I nevertheless see, standing out clearly against the moonlit water, the sharp point of a cotter pin on a turnbuckle at the base of the shrouds along the edge of the deck: it’s sticking out and might catch and fray the genoa sheet, which runs close to the turnbuckle. It’s not catching now, but it could happen. I haven’t noticed this possibility until this sleepy moment in the middle of the night. I get out pliers and some electrical tape and go around the boat flattening and taping all the cotter pins, something I meant to do before leaving Falmouth. Never mind, I’ll do it now. At the same time, I check the tension in the rigging, removing pins, tightening the turnbuckles, putting the pins back in and taping over them. I look around the horizon again and go below, set the alarm and fall fast asleep. I’m not sure I’ve even been awake.

  I give more thought to the dreams my alarm pulls me out of every twenty or thirty minutes. I seem to dream all night in vivid colour. I’m pulled out of them, I go up and look around, pull sheets or cotter pins, go immediately back to sleep and slip into a new, brilliant dream.

  I’ve been dreaming of my father, who died a year ago, a day before his sixty-first birthday. He got prostate cancer and paid too little attention to it. It metastasized and spread to his spine and grew around it with a strong squeezing grip, removing feeling below his waist and the use of his legs. He had always been an unusually healthy man. His idea of a snack was a piece of celery. He was a great swimmer, with the tall, lean body of an athlete. Things got sticky between us when he and my mother broke up. I found myself championing what I thought was her fair position when they split up their property, and he and I grew estranged for a while. Later we pretended to forget all about it, but I felt an unease between us until he died. I tried to speak about it though he said it didn’t matter, yet I knew it did, and he died with this unresolved between us. I’ve waited for grief, but it hasn’t come yet. It’s biding its time. My last impression of him was of a man grown suddenly old, emaciated, feeble and paralysed. In my dreams he’s whole and laughing and younger, his eternal best self, his long arms spread open for me.

  At noon today we are at 47°33' north, 13°36' west. Give or take a few minutes. Marking my X at these coordinates on the chart, a chart marked with the positions from previous trips, I see that this is about five miles from another X, Toad’s noon position on September 19, nine months ago, when J. and I brought the boat up from Ibiza in the Mediterranean to Falmouth. We left Spain late and got clobbered by two fast-moving equinoctial gales as we neared England.

  I have with me the logbook from that trip and I open it now to see what was going on with us that day:

  01.00: Ship just passed ‘9 cables’ astern – called him up to ask if he’d seen us on radar; he had and we’d made a good picture. He’s bound for US and Mexico – it will take him 9 days!

  03.00: Becalmed. Thunder and lightning out.

  14.45: Under way at last with light NW’ly. BBC reports low to the S of us, and another NW of us, and gale warnings, but we’re headed in the right direction. Large NW’ly swell, grey sky.

  On the left-hand page of the logbook, I have written down the salient details of the BBC forecast:

  Sole: variable, force 3, becoming SW’ly 5–7, veering NW’ly, gale force 8.

  I flick the page to September 20. We sailed fast all day, and the gale caught up with us around seven that evening.

  September 20: 20.30: Wind up considerably, seas quite large; reefed main till it’s about the size of staysail. Barometer dropping.

  At 22.00, the log records the wind at force 8 to 9 (thirty-four to forty-seven knots). Worrying about our old sails blowing out, we dropped them all and Toad lay ‘ahull’ – that is, no sail up, beam on to the waves, drifting downwind, creating a noticeable slick on the water’s surface to wind-ward, which, in theory, is supposed to interrupt the advancing waves, causing them to break or topple before they reach
and smash into the boat. This seemed to be working, and J. noted that we were lying ‘comfortably’.*

  The next day, September 21, the BBC reported that this blow was the remainder of tropical storm Debbie.

  Two days later, September 23, 88 miles from Falmouth, the forecast was for south-westerly winds force 7 to 8 and ‘severe gale 9’. That night the air was cold and the sky was unusually clear. I took compass bearings on Bishop’s Rock light, south of the Scillies, and on Lizard light: 45 miles from the Lizard, well beyond the 29-mile range of its light, its loom was clearly visible above the horizon, pinpointing its position. The wind rose all night, to gale force and beyond, and shifted not to the northwest as expected, but stopped in the south, on our beam, threatening to make it impossible for us to hold our course to pass south of the Lizard and to blow us instead up into the Irish Sea. Reading the log now, I remember that night well, sitting in the cockpit steering, pinching up to windward – to the south – as much as possible, my streaming eyes fixed on Lizard light flashing ahead, willing it to stay on the bow and even begin slipping to port, which, finally, in the wee hours it did. We blew into Falmouth in wild rain squalls just after noon the next day. We sailed past the town up the Flushing River and anchored in flat water surrounded by green hills.

  That was J.’s and my last trip together. I remember it all clearly as I read the logbook and sail on alone in the gentlest of conditions towards the Azores. As always, we derived great comfort from each other in bad weather, but the rest of the passage had been flat. We no longer shared the trip as we used to, talking endlessly as we prepared meals and navigated and tucked each other in and kissed each other at the beginning and end of every watch, planning future voyages, and the ‘next boat’, the dream boat we would build together and sail around the world. That was something we had talked about for years, and had stopped talking about. We were often silent, keeping our thoughts to ourselves, moving about the tiny boat on our own errands, trying not to make trouble. Trying not to have the sort of fight we’d had as we sailed past Cape St Vincent and into the lee of the European continent at the end of our transatlantic passage the year before, when we should have been hugging each other and toasting our achievement, but instead had been screaming how fucking sick to death we were of each other. That had been a milestone. We stayed together another year, living in London, wondering what had happened and what we were doing. Then we brought Toad up to Falmouth, went back to London and one day split up.

  I have all our old logbooks aboard. I start going through some of the others, reading back to find when it had been good. But it all looks good in the logbooks: references to wind and sea, food we like, ships, visiting dolphins, two birds flying together, a fish caught, a turtle overtaking us, the cat’s insatiable appetite for flying fish, a birthday breakfast for J. as we approach Bermuda slowly but in perfect weather. We didn’t record the fights or the ugly things we said to each other.

  The old logbooks are full of references to our attempts to get the wind vane to steer the boat. The vane gear is an inelegantly home-made affair of plywood, stainless steel tube and strapping, nuts, bolts and string. It came with the boat and was bent up and torn off when another boat collided with us in St Thomas. I then rebuilt it. It worked adequately about half the time. But when winds were light or from astern (when the apparent wind is reduced by the speed of the boat moving away from it), the gear would not overpower the boat’s natural and proper tendency to head up to windward unless we deeply reefed the mainsail, reducing our speed – not what you want to do in light and favourable winds. At other times, in conditions that had suited the gear one day, it would turn ornery and refuse to steer the next, and then J. and I would have to steer.

  As I skipped the theory part of celestial navigation, I have similarly bothered little over the years with the aeroand hydrodynamic business of how a sailboat works. I have read that the wind doesn’t, in fact, push a sailboat, but creates a vacuum on the leeward, or backside, of a sail, and the boat is apparently sucked along by this vacuum. Sitting on a boat that’s being blown about by the wind – feeling myself blown about too, feeling the wind push me rather than any vacuum hauling at me – I find I don’t respond well to the idea that what I appear to be seeing and feeling isn’t really happening. I can grasp the theory, I’ve seen all the diagrams, and I’ve heard people expounding on the principle. It doesn’t appeal to me. And I’ve found I can do perfectly well without it. I prefer to base my actions on my own crude, empirical experience. I’ve spent seven years sailing the engineless Toad across about 15,000 miles of water by fiddling with its sails, feeling the wind on my face or the back of my neck, looking at the water around us, and watching it flow along Toad’s hull and tumble into the wake astern, and this has taught me what I know. (I’ve also sailed about 10,000 miles in other, newer boats, delivering them between ports for paying customers, and this has provided a welcome chance to observe the behaviour of different types of boats in all sorts of weather. This experience I brought to my efforts at handling Toad.)

  Sailing thus, while also trying to get the vane gear to work, I’ve learned what I know about sail trim and the balance of a sailboat, and over time this has meant more hours when I could get the whole contraption, boat and wind vane gear together, to hold a steady course.

  But I wanted more from the vane: I wanted a wind vane that steered all courses in all conditions. You can buy them in yacht chandlers and they have always cost more than I could afford. Their smug owners rave about them in ports and anchorages where cruisers get together. So I bought John Letcher’s book this winter and made some alterations to the gear while Toad was hauled out in Mylor and I was being harangued by Wilfred. The difference is tremendous. The gear suddenly has a sensitivity and power I had not even hoped for. Undistractable, sensitive to every puff and zephyr, the plywood vane constantly turns itself slightly to one side or the other as the boat yaws, like someone hard of hearing angling his head from one side to another. It now steers better than I can. I removed the tiller from the rudderhead as Toad sailed past Martin on Pendennis Point and have not touched it since. All this time the wind has been light and from behind us and the gear has steered the boat.

  This has affected my life aboard Toad more than anything else. I now have all the time I want to read, prepare my meals, navigate, sit on the bowsprit when the dolphins come and watch them, in pairs, criss-crossing in the water immediately below me, or sit and do nothing. I watch the sea and sky for longer periods now without glancing at the compass. I see their constant change. See a cloud for a second and it’s a static photograph. Lie on the foredeck and watch it for fifteen minutes and it evolves into a wraithlike organism. Trade wind clouds are marvellous to look at: small, dense and regular as sheep, an infinite flock low overhead ambling towards the western horizon. All day, by degrees more perceptible the longer you watch, the light and the sea change. From looking through the sextant you know already the incredible speed at which the day’s seemingly steady features are evolving: the sun shoots up to its zenith so fast that to hold it down on the horizon you must constantly adjust the instrument.

  Cloud, light and darkness create spatial sensations of ‘places’: I sail through to new places, as if moving from room to room. At night this impression intensifies, all scale is lost, the rooms grow as tall as the clouds that form their walls and ceilings, and I am the tiniest toddler on a wet rocking horse moving through a giant moonshot house of elastic shapes and perspectives. Makes me think of acid hallucinations in the sixties. I wonder now if I’m hallucinating or seeing what’s really there.

  June 20

  This morning, sorting through bags of old clothes up forward, I come across the yellow sail bag.

  It has been here, stashed in its corner of the forepeak, for years. Yellow dacron, cinched at the top with a draw-string, a blue base, and the word MAINSAIL stencilled onto it. Not a bag for one of Toad’s sails, it belonged to a charter company in St Thomas and was being thrown out when J. a
nd I, wharf-rat scroungers, spotted it and took it home. We’ve used it as a laundry bag, a carry-all duffle for our clothes and gear when we took off delivering other people’s boats, but it has found its most lasting use as a place to store old papers, letters, junk we no longer use but perhaps don’t want to throw out. It’s our cardboard box in the basement.