Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  I drag it aft into the saloon. I’m sure most of its contents – biodegradable paper – can now be thrown overboard.

  J. has not been back aboard Toad since we split up. We were in London then. She had her foul-weather gear and boots and some clothes with her and she went straight to Nice to stay with her mother. She hasn’t taken anything off Toad, but we don’t own much that isn’t screwed into the boat.

  I open the bag.

  On the top, sitting on all the papers and the useless junk, are J.’s diaries covering the first five years of our marriage. Hardcover lined notebooks, the year stamped on the cover, a page per day. The pages are swollen with damp, but all the books are in readable condition. When we were together, her diaries were always been lying around, on a shelf in the saloon, and she wrote in them almost every day. But I’ve never opened them. Now I open the first book at April 23 and spores of memory rise off the page: the Mill-stream Hotel in Bosham, West Sussex … J’s bridal bouquet of freesias and lilies of the valley …

  I remember, of course. In the middle of the ceremony at the pretty Norman church, J. and I succumbed momentarily to a barely audible, nervous giggle, and the vicar stopped dead in the middle of reciting for me to repeat ‘… and thereto I plight thee my troth’ and stared at us with the expression of an irate schoolteacher. He stared at each of us in turn, from one to the other, until I thought he was going to close his Bible and tell us to leave. Twice I tried to jump-start him back into the ceremony by saying, ‘And thereto I plight thee my troth.’ Finally, after an embarrassing pause, he went on. It was a prophetic interruption.

  I flip the page and find a brown stem, brown leaves, and a crumbling brown flower pressed between April 25 and 26.

  I turn pages. We left England the day after our wedding and drove to Porto Ercole in Italy where we picked up my parents’ forty-four-foot ketch. They had bought the boat as their marriage was foundering, thinking they would sail away and things would get better. They named it Viva III, meaning that it was to be their third life together. The first had been in the States, when they had met in Greenwich Village after the war, had kids and moved out to suburban Connecticut. The second life had been in England, where they had moved with three young kids in 1959. Their Viva III lasted a year. At the time of our wedding, my father was living with his second wife in Orvieto, Italy; the boat was for sale, and J. and I were going to try to run it as a charter boat in the south of France until it sold. I had done a little crewing aboard other sailboats after the infamous dope run and had sailed often aboard my parents’ boat with them during the year they spent in the Mediterranean before breaking up, and I knew enough by then to look after the boat.

  Our honeymoon cruise from Porto Ercole to St Jean Cap Ferrat was J.’s first sail. She writes of her worries that she would be able to cope.

  May 7 begins with an entry saying that she has had nightmares about me. I don’t know what this means. I flick on.

  On May 11 we kissed in the cockpit and played with ropes and knots as we approached St Jean Cap Ferrat on the French coast after a lumpy day-and-night sail from Corsica. Then the engine died. Our VHF call to the Capitainerie at St Jean was answered by Sven Bergstrom, who came out in a motor boat with his wife, Ingrid, and son, Leif, who managed to start the engine.

  This was a fateful meeting. My parents had met Sven, his second wife, Ingrid, and his son, Leif, by his first wife, when they had passed through St Jean during their brief Viva III. The Bergstroms lived aboard their fifty-foot ketch Vagabond in St Jean, and they remembered Viva III. Leif, then in his early twenties, was shy and very quiet, and turned red whenever J. spoke to him. We saw the Bergstroms often during that summer and several times in the years that followed. When J. went to stay with her mother in Nice after we split up, she looked up the Bergstroms again. Leif, now a proficient engineer and yacht captain, was delivering a large motor yacht to the Caribbean, and J. went with him. They’re still together.

  I read on in her diary, riveted by the ordinary details of our days which rise off the pages like forgotten aromas. On May 12 the Volvo man promised to come and look at the engine the next day. That evening we ate moules and pizza at Joe’s Pizzeria in St Jean and saw the actor Oliver Reed, drunk, at the next table … Drinks with the Bergstroms aboard Vagabond … Local yacht broker Gérard Spriet came to appraise the boat, and felt it was worth $75,000, rather than the $100,000 my parents wanted … Martin wrote to tell us of a possible charter … Sunday lunch with my friends Peter and Jennie, who lived in St Jeannet … A drive (we had brought my old Morris up from Italy after the boat trip) to Sospel in the forested hills above Menton where we had a picnic …

  Like waking from a dream, I look up from J.’s diary and see blue sky and clouds arcing through the porthole across the saloon, hear the waves running past the outside of the hull. Normally I have a good memory, but this virtual time capsule takes me back into vivid and complete scenes where I can look around and see beyond what she has recorded, at what I’ve long forgotten. I remember only now the church in Sospel: we went inside after the picnic and saw photographs of dead parishioners on pale blue plaster walls, formal black and white portraits of dead woodsmen and farmers and their wives and children taken too soon.

  What I’ve forgotten, and remember more slowly, is that J. and I fought with each other from the very beginning. And I’ve forgotten, or little knew, the degree of her uncertainty about us and her strong ambivalence towards me. She writes, over and over, that she is unhappy … depressed … we have another fight … make up … fight again … we’re both unhappy … distant … another fight … depressed …

  Page after page of this – weeks of it – and it takes me by surprise. Maybe it was to be expected. Although we’d known each other for years, we had only lived together a short while before marrying. I had prised her away from José. We were adjusting to each other. But she was also excited by living on the boat, and the diary shows this too.

  Reading of good days or bad, it’s all painful stuff right now. I close the diary and put it away with the other four in a saloon cupboard.

  I go up on deck and am back into my own solitary voyage.

  Five days out. The barometer is beginning to drop as we move away from the high still centred west of Ireland. The BBC reports a low over Portugal. The counter-clockwise flow of wind at the top of the low, south-east of us, is combining with the clockwise flow at the bottom of the high, to the north-east. Both blow at us from the same direction, still from astern, but now the wind picks up. By dusk it’s blowing about force 5, the strongest wind we’ve felt so far. I reef the main and now go out onto the end of the bowsprit to remove the large lightweight genoa and put on the older, smaller, heavier one. As I’m doing this, the genoa’s sail bag blows overboard. I don’t stop and go back for it; it would take many minutes to disconnect the vane and get us sailing back on a reciprocal course. And then I know I wouldn’t find it. I just sit and watch the bag become smaller and disappear into the growing darkness astern.

  It’s no leap to imagine it’s me in the water being left behind as night comes on. I’m not wearing my harness, though I have one, made of nylon webbing, which would attach me to the boat by a short length of line and a snap shackle. It’s stashed below. J. and I wore our harnesses occasionally, mostly during bad weather, and as much as anything because the greatest fear each of us had was that one of us would wake up and find the other gone. I don’t worry about that now. I don’t have J. saying, ‘Have you got your harness on?’ If I do go overboard the wind vane will ensure that Toad will sail on without me.

  I don’t like harnesses. They can make you move around the boat in short, awkward stops and starts, clipping yourself on and off, undermining your natural balance. After a day or two at sea, the body unconsciously accommodates itself to the movement of a small boat. You find yourself moving fluidly up and down the deck. Interrupting this to clip on and off every few feet, and over-reliance on a harness, are, I believe, more likely than anyt
hing else to propel you overboard and kill you.

  This is my prejudice. It’s also a common rationalization among those sailors who choose not to wear harnesses all the time. Others hotly disagree. Many sailors believe you should wear a harness any time you leave the apparent safety of the cockpit.

  Harnesses have unquestionably saved people. And harnesses have failed. Of 235 crew who said they wore harnesses during the 1979 Fastnet Race, between England and Ireland, 26 (11 per cent!) reported harness failures – either buckles came undone, hooks straightened out, attachment points broke or safety lines chafed through. Six lives were lost directly as a result of these failures. Ten crew members reported that harness lines wrapping around obstructions prevented them from climbing back aboard unassisted.

  People have been tossed overboard during vulnerable moments between clip-on points. Our friend from St Jean, Ingrid Bergstrom, coming out of Vagabond’s companion-way, wearing a harness but not yet having reached a clip-on point, was tossed overboard at night in a gale in the Mediterranean, a certain death sentence. Her husband Sven rang a deck bell that summoned Leif to the cockpit. ‘Ingrid’s gone overboard,’ he said. ‘Hold this course.’ Sven went below to the chart table and, despite a mind reeling from shock, calculated what ground would be lost turning around, drift from wind and waves, the boat’s reciprocal course and likely speed and the speed and time elapsed since Ingrid had gone overboard, mixed all these together and plotted a new course back to that spot. He went back up to the cockpit and only then did he and Leif turn the boat around and go back along the course he had decided upon to look for her. They found her and got her aboard. A miracle.

  Reliance on safety harnesses – a modern device – has meant a widespread atrophy of that best of all devices to keep you aboard: a fully developed horror of falling overboard. Aboard commercial sailing ships in the past, sailors relied on this above all measures. When men had to turn out at a moment’s notice and run along the deck and scramble upward through the rigging, such tying-on would have been impossible, and laughable. Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail single-handed around the world, did not know how to swim and did not wear a harness. (To be fair, it must be admitted that he disappeared at sea on a subsequent voyage, along with his boat.) A determined refusal to go overboard, and a number of precautions – an overall design – taken to ensure that you stay aboard puts the wearing of a harness in its proper place: an additional measure, rather than a single, fallible device.

  I wear my harness mostly during bad weather, particularly if I’m going to leave the cockpit and go forward, or out on the bowsprit. Otherwise, more usually, I rely on my own inner gyroscope, on sail-handling tactics designed to avoid my exposure to risk, and on premeditated thought and visualization of how I am going to move about the boat. I rely, far more than on my harness, on the additional life-lines I’ve strung around the perimeter of the boat. Toad has the standard lifelines you see on most yachts, running between stanchions at heights of fifteen and thirty inches above the deck. These can help keep you from rolling off the deck, but if you’re standing up and collide forcibly with them they can buckle your legs and flip you into the sea as gracefully as a Flying Wallenda. To avoid this, before I left port I ran a three-eighths-of-an-inch nylon line (breaking strength three thousand seven hundred pounds with great elasticity) from bowsprit tip to stern, fixed at the rigging shrouds, down both sides of the boat at chest level. The effect is something like being in a boxing ring. It will be difficult to get through this cordon at fifteen, thirty and fifty inches above the deck. This upper line gives me a tremendous sense of security. I automatically run my hand along it as I move around the deck, in calm or wind. I lean against it when taking sextant sights. I believe this is far more effective than any harness, and when I wear my harness I clip its snap shackle to this line and thus continue to move freely up and down the deck.

  But most of all I rely on my fear of falling overboard. I have imagined being in the water and watching Toad sail away from me. That’s enough.

  Of course, it can still happen. I know that. But I believe it’s one of those things that’s more unlikely than being knocked down by a bus. And then it won’t matter if I’m wearing clean underwear or not.

  I watch the sail bag growing smaller astern, floating as long as I can see it.

  I go below and eat spaghetti and listen to a Joni Mitchell concert on the BBC’s short-wave World Service.

  Day after day the weather remains fair. The barometer rises again. Does this mean the high has shifted to the west and we are back in it? I don’t know. We’ve sailed beyond the range of the BBC’s FM shipping forecast; I have to figure it out for myself now. The high’s concentric isobars may have wobbled and elongated, like the stuff in those once tacky liquid lava lamps, and joined up with the great high usually hovering over the central Atlantic at this time of year. I don’t know, but I’m grateful the wind is still blowing out of the east, the north-east, sometimes the north, shifting back and forth and giving me something to do as I change sail arrangements – but still behind us or out on the starboard quarter, and pushing us gently, directly towards the Azores.

  Days run into one another, marked by small things. On the evening of June 20 we pass the 500-mile mark from Falmouth.

  June 21

  02.00: I come on deck and look around. No lights. We’re alone on the whole visible surface of the sea. I watch Toad surging on without any help from me, all sails trimmed and pulling, the wind vane steering an accurate course. Pointing straight at the Azores, 700 miles ahead, the boat seems to know where it’s going, and ploughs on with steady, dogged enthusiasm. It’s been doing this for five days now, all by itself. I can’t believe at this moment that this is no more than a man-made machine, an assembly of wood, screws, bolts, wire and cloth, without a sentient notion of what it’s up to. I can see it feeling the sea, meeting and shouldering its way through every wave with understanding and skill. And it will go on and on doing this, without any fuel, without any help from me, until I make it stop. To me this seems as miraculous as perpetual motion. I sit on the cabin roof as we move through the dark, and watch this for a while.

  Later in the night I wake and look out the hatch and find we’re sailing in company with another pod of pilot whales. They’re puffing along rhythmically about a hundred yards off our starboard side, very slowly overtaking. They’re not large, and in the dark it’s their slow, purposeful, unplayful cruising speed that distinguishes them most from the ever-exuberant dolphins. I look at the trim of the sails and tweak them to see if we can gain a half a knot or so and give the whales a race. But we’re doing our best, it seems, and the whales slowly pull ahead. I go back to sleep.

  08.00: Wind up. Still abeam (NW). Bombing along and making great progress. Finished last of Falmouth store-bought bread for breakfast. Will have to get baking.

  09.20: 2 LOPs (‘line of position’ sextant sights) snatched early as it’s becoming cloudy and overcast – might not find the sun later. Log 556. Have been having fun reading my New England Cruising guide looking for first landfall in Maine. Camden looks nice but crowded, and I might have to pay for a mooring – that’s out. Burnt Coat Harbor, Swans Is. looks good.

  13.15: Noon pos: 45°57' N, 18°20' W. 110 miles noon to noon. About 650 miles to Horta – almost halfway.

  19.00: Reading Henry Beston’s Outermost House. Wonderful winter storms on Cape Cod.

  Seventh day out, this is also J.’s birthday, our first apart in seven years. If I were ashore today I would … I don’t know … send her a telegram, maybe. Or just accept it. All day I’ve thought about her other birthdays, where we were and what we did. I am still getting used to the idea of sailing alone without her. She is a great reproachful silence aboard the boat at times. But the practice of sailing without her – the management of the boat on my own, getting enough sleep, being without her or any other soul to talk to, is so far working well. I have fantasized about sailing singlehanded for years, wondered what it would
be like, how I’d cope with being so alone, and I’m almost surprised to find that I seem to be enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I am lonely, but not with the crushing loneliness I have felt in large cities that can leave you feeling like some unfortunate biblical type ‘cast out’ from his own kind to wander the earth alone. Like, say, Wilfred in Mylor. This loneliness is often an exquisite state that takes time to recognize and savour, something I’m just beginning to get the hang of and enjoy. Something I know I wouldn’t feel with J. or anyone else aboard the boat with me.

  I have in fact come to the conclusion that sailing alone seems easier than with J. There is no tension, anxiety, or unhappiness aboard the boat any more. I don’t worry about her, about whether she’s fallen overboard, or if she’s as afraid as I am. Or if she’s happy, which was always my greatest worry. And, looking back, my greatest failure. Alone seems better, for the moment.

  Tonight I put aside The Outermost House and take up J.’s innermost scribbles and look back to see what happened on June 21 seven years ago, in the South of France.

  It was a Monday. I gave her Cousteau’s book about sharks, which always fascinated her. She has recorded the food we ate all day, from the honeyed grapefruit I baked in Viva’s oven for her breakfast to the ingredients of the picnic we packed and took to St Tropez – white wine, baguette, pâté, Camembert, melon – and dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Nice’s old port: pho noodle soup and some fish. She writes that she has pressed a rose from there into this diary … so that’s the brown thing many pages back that I thought might have come from her wedding bouquet. After dinner we drove on to St Jean, where we danced (though P. was stiff). A happy day. And she writes: ‘merci P…’ at the bottom of the page.