As I throw a mooring rope around a bollard a large piece of concrete falls from the quay and crashes into the water. Fortunately it misses our hull on the way down. Once tied up we mount another search for the black and yellow distribution point but still can’t find it. Ten thirty arrives. Sometime after eleven David sets off for the Shell office.
While he is gone a very thin man arrives and slides his hand out of the pocket of his ill-fitting trousers. He opens his palm and offers for sale three minute tomatoes. He is replaced by another man bearing the kind of brush which in a more genteel age would have been used to sweep crumbs off a tablecloth. He seems to be offering to clean our boat. Like his predecessor, he is very thin and has that kind of heartbreaking smile which despite stretching from ear-to-ear nevertheless has little hope in it.
A thin, exhausted-looking dog comes and curls up on the dock opposite Voyager. I throw it some food scraps which it ignores. When a man wearing a hard hat arrives and opens a lock-up the dog uncurls and wanders over to him. The man fills his hat with water from a nearby tap, the dog drinks it gratefully and then curls up again.
David returns. There is a delay. When the official finally arrives he says we are in the wrong place and must move to the black and yellow distribution point. We look at him expectantly. He frowns at us, then walks a couple of metres further down the quay and points at his feet. We move Voyager back a couple of metres. Then another man, in overalls, arrives and the elusive distribution point turns out to be a very small metal plate flush with the dock and covered with concrete dust like the rest of the quay. But when the man in overalls brushes away the dust, and we stare at it really hard, it might once have had black and yellow paint on it. He lifts the metal plate, pulls out a hose, and we fill our diesel tank.
We cast off at 1.30pm local time and embark on our longest-ever voyage.
THE ATLANTIC
20
A Vast Empty Sea
There is hazy sun and a very light wind. Since the wind also keeps changing direction we have the engines on for a couple of hours to make sure we are well clear of the islands before nightfall.
Early evening David tunes into Herb. From the yachts reporting to him, David estimates that one called Amber is about a day ahead of us and will be an ideal boat for him to listen out for nightly, since its weather should be similar to ours. Initially this does not appear to be very helpful since Amber is enjoying a 10–15 knot following wind while we have 5 knots on the nose. But within a couple of hours our own fluctuating wind also makes its final shift of the day – to the east, like Amber’s. David hopes, within the next couple of broadcasts, to identify several other boats, especially one behind us, thereby enabling him to establish a comprehensive picture of prevailing weather patterns.
We sail throughout the night except for the couple of hours between 9 and 11pm when the wind becomes too light. The sky is mostly clear with just a few clouds and shooting stars every few minutes.
Yet when I take over the watch at 5am we are becalmed in a darkness so intense that it seems to have a presence all its own. It feels as if it is pressing in against the boat and that only an act of will on my part is going keep it at bay for the next three hours. As I take a reluctant step further out into the cockpit an even closer threat makes itself apparent when something scrabbles in the corner beside my left foot.
I have always hated the dark and for a few seconds, standing here in this overwhelming pitch blackness, I experience what I can only describe as primeval fear; a moment of morbid dread of some unimaginable horror about to reach out and touch me. Then common sense reasserts itself and another sort of horror takes its place. A rat! From those rotting hulks in Mindelo Harbour, perhaps. Or the fuel dock. As well as strong swimmers, rats are adept at climbing anchor chains and mooring ropes.
David has not yet gone to bed and my shriek of revulsion brings him running with the torch. In its small circle of light, a storm petrel ducks its head, fluffs its wings and huddles closer into the corner in a doomed attempt to make its blackness invisible against what is now, thanks to the torchlight, a startlingly white background.
Smaller than a blackbird, but with a slightly larger wingspan, like the Leach’s petrel and shearwater that visited us on the passage to Mindelo, storm petrels are only seen ashore when breeding or driven there by particularly bad weather, hence the name. This one probably collided with our rigging while napping on the wing and then landed in confusion. Its round head and a distinct lack of sleekness about the feathers make it look particularly vulnerable. Weighing only an ounce, the storm petrel seems an impossibly small bird to withstand the Atlantic’s ferocious autumn gales. Yet surprisingly its lifespan can be as much as 20 years compared to a garden blackbird’s five.
It doesn’t seem to be injured – its legs and wings all appear to work – and we see no point in terrifying it further by trying to inspect it more closely. So David switches off the torch, turns on an engine to get Voyager moving again, and goes off to bed. I withdraw into the saloon, leaving the little bird to recover from its shock. To help this recovery along, when I go out into the cockpit every ten minutes to make my inspection of the horizon for other vessels, rather than walk close to where it is huddled against the cockpit sole I climb up onto the seating instead. And in the process of minimising the bird’s fear of me, I quite forget my own dread of the surrounding darkness.
The petrel, too, begins to recover its equilibrium, and at one stage even hops to the companionway doors with a view to an exploratory mission into the saloon. There it eyes me speculatively as I sit in the tiny glow of the chart table lamp. I don’t want to seem inhospitable but I have to shoo it away. A black bird wandering about in a black interior is a recipe for disaster in terms of the little bird’s safety. Not to mention its potential effect on our pale blue upholstery. I don’t know what part of a seabird’s diet it is that produces that particular brown stain but, whatever it is, it never washes out.
So the bird returns to its corner and remains there, quiet but alert. After a further half an hour it begins to make its way to the stern, in small stages, pausing between times to gaze about as if absorbing the features of this totally alien world into which it has fallen. Although it probably has more to do with the fact that it is unused to walking and can only manage a few steps at a time. After a good rest, however, and with its fear overcome, it is ready to return from whence it came. It flutters and flaps up onto the afterdeck and then it hops down the two steps onto our stern, around the corner of the port cabin and out of sight.
It is such a very black night that I do not see it take off. But when David comes on watch I clip on a safety line and go to the stern to see if it is still on board. Happily there is no sign of it. It is back on the wing where it belongs, out in a vast empty sea.
That brief image of a tiny dark figure in a circle of light evokes another, because night watches encourage the mind and the memory to roam. The last time I visited the National Portrait Gallery in London one of its rooms contained an oil painting of a man called Max Wall. He was a comedian from the English music hall tradition who successfully made the transition into the new mass medium of television, which was where as a child I first saw him in the 1950s. He also became a serious actor but continued to perform his popular one-man comedy shows wearing his distinctive black costume of jacket, tights and heavy workman’s boots.
Towards the end of his life in 1990 an artist did a series of oil paintings of him. The one in the National Portrait Gallery was small and monochrome and in sharp contrast with the much larger canvases, often in sumptuous colour, that surrounded it. Its background was black: the darkened auditorium. In the foreground was a white circle: the spotlight. And in the centre of this white circle, looking very tiny, was Max in his trademark stage costume of black jacket, tights and boots. So simple. Yet it captured so eloquently the solitariness of a solo entertainer, on a brightly-lit stage, performing to an invisible audience.
I hadn’t thought of this
picture in years until we left land behind us for the first time. For no matter how large the ocean, what you can actually see of it is unexpectedly small. This is because standing in your cockpit, at sea level, on a clear day, the horizon is only about four miles away. In poor visibility, of course, it is even less. What is even more unexpected is that the horizon itself is round, because there is no coastline to give it a straight edge. So there is your boat, in the middle of a perfect but surprisingly small circle – as small and solitary as Max Wall in his spotlight – with an enormous, unseen auditorium beyond.
Being able to see only a short distance out here is probably a blessing, because if you could look out over vast distances, and all you could see was a boundless expanse of water in every direction, I think it would be a fairly simple matter to go stark, staring mad.
Only occasionally does this huge, unseen auditorium make itself felt. Usually it is a clear, moonless night that does it; when the Planets and the Fixed Stars pulsate, the Milky Way winks two hundred billion stars at you and your mind turns to troubling thoughts about Infinity. Another, more prosaic, reminder occurs tonight when I do the log.
Mindful of our feathered guest I have nevertheless gathered all the data from the cockpit instruments located just above its small round head, plus the GPS above the chart table, and entered them into the logbook as usual, and am now about to mark our position on the chart. I do this by taking the latitude and longitude provided by the GPS, locating the point where they meet each other and marking it in pencil with a small cross. I then draw a line between my latest cross and the previous one so that we end up with a continuous line from our departure point to our present location. By this simple method you can see at a glance your boat’s current position and whether or not you are deviating from your course.
Charts come in all sizes. This one is very large, much larger than our chart table, and is folded into four. The land on it is coloured beige and the water is white. What is showing on the quarter of the chart that is currently uppermost is the north-west coast of Africa and the Cape Verde Islands. This fills much of the available space in beige with just a little bit of white – representing the Atlantic Ocean – to the left of São Vicente, the island we left yesterday afternoon.
Naturally, when your pencil line reaches the fold, you have to turn over the chart. When I turn this one over I simply sit and stare at it. At all the white space. At the two thousand miles of nothing but water ahead of us. And suddenly the chart does what the small round horizon cannot do. It makes me comprehend in no uncertain terms what a tiny speck on an immense sea we really are. It is more than my mind can cope with at present, sitting alone in the darkness with only a pinprick of light from the chart table lamp, and I turn the chart back over to the way it was.
When David comes back up a couple of hours later, to take over the watch, I tell him that I will of course continue to record the data from the instruments and GPS every hour during my watches but should be grateful if he would take over the daily responsibility for pencilling in our position as I’d rather not look at the chart for the time being.
When the wind returns it is light and variable, shifting about until finally settling at east-nor’east. This is a good direction for us but from time to time it gets so weak we still need an engine on.
Today is Tuesday and our second day at sea. We are experiencing much larger waves than one would expect from the present wind strength, but according to Herb there are gales six or seven hundred miles to the north.
Unfortunately the light wind and this big rolling sea is not a good combination. The roll of the boat keeps making the genoa flap, and whatever small amount of wind it takes in is rapidly spilled out again. The result is that in twenty-four hours we have covered only 84 miles. At this rate, far from enjoying its combined New Year/Millennium celebrations our estimated time of arrival at Trinidad is currently 6th January.
Around midday, there is a huge bulk carrier to the south-west of us, probably headed for Brazil. This is the only vessel we have seen in the twenty-four hours we have been at sea.
In the afternoon there is a lull in the sea swell so we take the opportunity of starting up the water maker for the first time in earnest. It is not something you can do in a rough sea as the roll gives the unit an inconsistent pressure which prevents it from removing all the salt. After running it for a little while the water it produces tastes very good and we deem it fit to go into the tanks.
It has been 26°C and sunny here during the day and the sky tonight is full of shooting stars. Usually, at the start of night passages, it is the second watch that I have difficulty completing. Tonight I crave my bed by the end of the first one.
21
Life at Sea
Over the next few days the wind settles into a steady direction but the rolling sea continues to spill it from the sails keeping conditions bumpy and slow; although we do gradually pick up half a knot of current which helps increase our speed a little. Meanwhile, our days are enlivened by flying fish and our night watches by shooting stars. There is also an indignant squawking overhead at 3am one morning as an inattentive shearwater collides with our rigging, its white underside turned green by our masthead light. It soon recovers its equilibrium and flies on.
Aston Villa loses to West Ham in the quarter finals of the League Cup. Southgate missed a penalty.
One night there is a half moon so bright you feel you could read by it, but it is soon consumed by cloud. A ship passes from north to south on the horizon ahead of us; only the second boat seen so far. For a couple of days we get runs of over 100 miles a day despite the continuing big sea but by Friday, our fifth day out, the wind has begun to shift again and get weaker.
Herb says that these big rollers which are making life so uncomfortable out here are being generated by the gales currently hovering off the Canary Islands, a thousand miles away, and due to hit those islands this weekend. They will be the second series of gales to hit the Canaries since we left them, but so serious this time that Herb is suggesting that any yachtsmen wanting to set off from there should not even think about leaving until Monday.
No responsible sailor throws refuse overboard, even all the way out here. But since we no longer have the dinghy on the davits to use as a skip, we are storing our gash bags in the chain locker. Given the present confused and lumpy sea, carrying them forward requires David to clip on his safety harness. It would be particularly ironic if Voyager’s refuse was dutifully stowed for proper disposal upon arrival, but in so doing her skipper got tossed overboard.
During refuse duty one morning he finds a tiny flying fish on the foredeck, only one and a half inches (4cm) from nose to tail tip. It could never have flown so high on its own miniscule wings and must have been carried up on deck by one of the large waves constantly pounding us. A huge one over the starboard quarter today drenches the galley and the starboard bed. We mop up the galley and dry the bedding out on deck in the sunshine.
There is a dazzling half moon tonight but it is very dark in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes the totality of the darkness, after all that moonlight, simply astounds you.
David gets the world headlines and UK news on BBC World Service through headphones at the chart table each morning and then gives me the highlights over coffee and biscuits out in the cockpit. He does it because I have ears like Radar, the character in the American TV series M*A*S*H, who could hear the helicopters bringing in the wounded long before anybody else. Similarly, I hear sounds well before David does. The downside is that headphones concentrate so much static, crossed channels, people who go down into the basements beside BBC recording studios and chop up tea chests and other extraneous noises that my ears, or my brain, have difficulty separating them.
The temperature is around 26°C so it is shorts and T-shirts until nightfall and sometimes beyond.
We are using the water maker to keep our tanks filled and also the seawater pump on the galley sink. The latter is not something you would ev
er want to use close to shore because of pollution, but out here the water is probably as clean as it gets and ideal for rinsing crockery and pans before washing them in fresh soapy water, as well as flushing the sinks to keep them fragrant.
A cargo ship crosses the horizon from south-west to north-east at around 6pm. Another passes from west to east at around 10pm – only four vessels sighted in six days. And I put some laundry in to soak before going to bed. This has not been an eventful passage so far.
Inevitably people are going to ask what on earth you do on a long voyage like this. The answer is you eat, you sleep and you keep yourselves and your boat clean. Without electrical appliances, and on a rolling sea, housework and laundry take longer and require more physical effort. For instance, where you once walked briefly behind a vacuum cleaner, now you wield a dustpan and brush, on your knees, while intermittently head-butting the furniture. This in turn creates a quantity of dust everywhere which also needs removing from a living space inhabited by someone with a serious dust allergy.
As for laundry, apart from overnight soaking before rubbing through with hard laundry soap, hand washing also requires quite a lot of rinsing and wringing. Here also, the fresh water provided by the water maker is a boon because, as well as being resistant to soap, salt water rapidly destroys all forms of elasticity so that pretty soon your underclothes and swimwear droop most unbecomingly.
In between times you stand your watches, keep a regular eye on the weather, the horizon, the chart, the boat and all its equipment. You play backgammon, Scrabble and chess or share a crossword puzzle. And you sink joyfully into new books, revisit old favourites and lift the covers of those worthy tomes you’ve always intended to read, or previously failed to finish. For David: War and Peace and Moby Dick. For me: Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazov. For entertainment during our watches we have a Walkman and a selection of audio books, radio plays, classic BBC radio comedy, homemade compilations of our favourite old records and our collection of music tapes. You also have time. Which can become a subject of fascination in itself.
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 13
