Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (11 page)

“I think you should come up,” Ros insisted after nearly half an hour had passed. The others had stopped asking about my progress; they too thought I should stop for a break. But it would be unthinkable to stop without finishing the job. There was my pride to consider, as well as the fact that we wouldn’t be going anywhere at all if the propeller was snarled up. There were just a few more fibers to go now. I sawed and hacked like a man possessed and at last the tangled skeins of rope came away in my hands. Propelled by an enormous sense of achievement I burst back to the surface, where five pairs of arms helped haul me back onboard and guide me down to the cabin.

I had just about managed to tug off my sodden layers of clothes and get into my arctic sleeping bag before the shivering started in earnest. I’d heard once of a man who shivered so much that he cracked a couple of ribs. Well, that’s how I was shivering now. My teeth were chattering, my very bones were chattering.

“You’ve got a touch of hypothermia,” said Ros, cracking open a small bag of heat-producing iron filings from the ship’s survival kit and passing it to me. I was unable to acknowledge the truth of what she was saying as my jaw was convulsed in violent spasms along with all the rest of my muscles. I cuddled the miracle bag that seemed somehow to be offering my body something of its lost heat.

Nor could I gesture, as I was stuffed tightly into my sleeping bag—silk filled with goose down, liner of cashmere
wool, good for forty degrees below zero. Yet even so I felt that I might never get warm again, as I lay there, my body racked with convulsions. Gradually, though, a little of the warmth of life began to creep back into my body, and I was able to take a couple of sips of soup and fall into a sound sleep.

I slept so deeply and so fast that not even the clattering of boots on the deck, nor the roaring of the engine, nor the rumbling of the ropes in the blocks … none of these sounds was able to rouse me to the fact that long before dawn we had put to sea. It was hours later when I slipped back into consciousness, and lay gloriously warm, listening to the sound of the water rushing along the wooden hull just inches away from my ear. When finally I emerged from my bag, the new day was well into the morning. I crept out onto the sloping deck and gazed across a blue and sunlit sea toward the white cliffs of Dover.

The wind was right and the tide was sweeping us fast along to where we would round the South Foreland and head north up through the Straits of Dover and into the English Channel. It was early in May and we were heading, by what seemed to me a somewhat circuitous route, for Vinland.

NIGHT BEGAN TO FALL
and the pale cliffs of the Kent coast were replaced by distant lines of light. With the deepening of the darkness the sea, too, vanished, and we seemed
to move through a fathomless blackness, with just the glimmer of foam in our wake to place us in the firmament. High in the shrouds the red light of the port lantern shone dimly on the mainsail. A few scattered stars peeped from behind the scudding clouds. A faint silver glow on the northeast horizon intensified until a bright shard of moon rose from the dark, shook herself, and began her climb into the night sky. The gale had abated and become a light wind blowing from the west, just what we wanted to drive
Hirta
, now under full press of sail, northward toward the North Sea and Scandinavia.

We all sat in the cockpit—a large sunken area on the open deck, like a big wooden bath with benches, that surrounded the wheel and compass. There was the friendly glow of a couple of cigarettes and the comforting scent of thin curls of smoke, as we talked quietly, almost with a certain reverence, so as not to dispel the enchantment of our first night at sea. Each of us cradled a mug of hot tea, for it can be murderous cold on the deck of a boat in the North Sea on an April night. Hannah was below, wrapped in peaceful sleep, rocked by the waves and cuddling her rag doll, Rowena.

Now the great pleasure of ocean voyaging, as opposed to day sailing, is that as the land drops away astern, all the woes and worries that afflicted you on dry land—all the things you ought to have done but have left undone, all the drab detritus and clutter of your daily existence—slough away like the old dry skin of a snake. You feel renewed and newly alive. There’s nothing you can do about any of that old stuff, so you forget it and just attend to the
business of navigation and survival … because getting things right on an ocean voyage in a small boat is simply a matter of life and death.

This phenomenon, which strips people down to their essence, happens every time you leave the land. But just as surely, when finally the lookout perched high up the mast shouts, “Land ahoy!,” you are overwhelmed with longing for the land, and mysteriously ready and eager again to immerse yourself in that cloying bog of cares.

Sensing all of this, we mused and chatted, sounding one another out, testing the parameters where you could and couldn’t go when it came to needling one another’s sensibilities. There was a tentative pleasure in getting to know one another, in the knowledge that we were soon to be hurled together and shaken up in conditions of the weirdest intimacy. Tom had warned me that to be confined together in the cabin of a small wooden boat, tossed among the terrors of the open sea, has the effect of a pressure cooker. Feelings that are best left simmering beneath the surface burst forth in extremis and have to be dealt with to make life even halfway tolerable. Tonight, though, we took a mild and friendly interest in one another, bandied compliments, trying to show ourselves in our most appealing light, without overstepping the mark. We each sipped whisky from a mug, the traditional treat at the start of the night—and the whisky in its wonderful way warmed our hearts and our spirits.

And then it was past midnight and a reverential silence fell for the Shipping Forecast. Like anybody else I had heard the shipping forecast before on the radio; a meaningless almost mystical incantation, the clear,
clipped tones of the BBC enunciating, “Dover, Thames, Humber, Dogger, German Bight … Fisher, Fair Isle, Cromarty, Viking, Faroes, Southeast Iceland …” and so on; comfortingly obscure names that had suddenly become both personal and pressing for us. Even its theme tune, “Sailing By,” which I had always thought rather vacuous, took on a different form, its rippling arpeggios charged with meaning and emotion.

From now on we would hear “Sailing By” each night as we plied our way north, until we’d sailed so far that not even the BBC could reach us.

“
IT’S TIME TO START
the watch system,” announced Tom. “We’ll do four-hour turns, two to a watch: John, you can have Mike, and Patrick can be with Chris. As skipper I don’t have a specific watch but you can call me any time, day or night.”

And so I found myself doing ten until two in the morning, just Patrick and me alone in the cockpit while a steady wind drove us northward through the night. Patrick spoke with the softest of Scottish accents. He was an experienced sailor and beneath his gentle well-mannered exterior he was really hard, tough as a nut, the result of years in the army. I was happy to take orders from Patrick as he knew what was going on, and I knew nothing.

“Take the wheel, Chris, and keep her on that heading, zero one five, while I go forward and give the sails a tweak.”

I took the wheel and peered myopically at the dimly illuminated compass in its binnacle just inside the cabin hatchway. At that distance of about two and a half yards I couldn’t quite make out the figures. This was a problem for me all the way to Vinland. What I would have to do was abandon the wheel for a moment and move forward to get a clear sight on the compass, then leap back for the wheel before the boat had moved too far off her course. Naturally by the time I got back to the wheel
Hirta
would have changed course by a few points, so I would have to dart forward again to the compass, nip back and give a tweak to the wheel, then forward again to see if I had got the adjustment right. It was far from satisfactory, but resulted in a certain sort of a zigzag progress in roughly the desired direction.

On a starry night the whole thing became easier because you could get your course more or less right, then find a star close to some fixed point on the masthead, and then keep the relation of the star constant to it. The problem, however, with this much more romantic method of navigation is that the stars are also sailing in a circular fashion across the bowl of the night, and if you fix on just one star, you end up going round in a great circle. So you must change your star every five or ten minutes to keep on track.

On that first watch, as Patrick beavered about on the foredeck in the dark, I listened to the creaking of the mast and boom, the whistling of the wind in the shrouds, and the rushing of the waves against the hull. And I thought how wonderful it was to be here out of sight of land, and heading for Vinland.

At ten to two I went below to make tea for the next watch and wake them up. It just remained to write down in the log what had or had not happened during the watch—changes of wind direction, course, anything of interest spotted—and then slip thankfully into my sleeping bag to sleep. And oh, how I slept … the rocking of a boat and the sound of water slipping along the planking are the most wonderful aids to tumbling deep into sleep and dreaming. Unfortunately, though, it never lasts.

At six, in the light of a gray dawn with the rain streaming from a sky the color of slate, the grinning face of Mike, the boat’s boy by virtue of his being the youngest member of the crew, appeared with a mug of tea. “It’s a horrible day,” he observed. “And it’s time you were up and in it. I’m going to bed.”

I rolled out of my bunk, and before it had time to get cool, Mike rolled into it. This peculiar form of intimacy is known as “hot-bunking.”

THOSE FIVE DAYS ON
the north sea, my first proper voyage, passed in something of a blur. Mostly there was little to see but rolling walls of water, sometimes gray, sometimes brown, and occasionally green, bearing down on us in endless procession. Sometimes they glinted or shone with pale sunlight, but more often they were opaque and brooding, and then all of a sudden the midday sun would break through the mists, and the sea would turn a deep pellucid blue, sparkling and glittering.

There was a curious soporific feel to the days, the long
hours passing without any particular interruption or event. The watch system was relaxed during the day, and we would take a trick at the helm whenever we felt the inclination, or busy ourselves with the constant tasks of whipping and splicing ropes. On land it would have been too tedious to bear, but here at sea I seemed to enter a completely different state of mind, the consequence of a hint of seasickness and not nearly enough sleep. I never got an uninterrupted night’s sleep; three or four hours was the longest the watches would allow you. We would doze during the day to make up for lost hours, but could never quite shake off a heavy-lidded torpor.

This had the effect of blunting the intellect a little and enhancing the feelings. I’m moved too easily anyway, but on the high seas I found myself constantly brought to the edge of tears by the simplest of things: a sudden burst of sunlight from behind a cloud, or a pleasing notion, or a particularly vivid thought of a loved one. And the simple act of standing at the wheel, watching the red sails billowing into the sky, and feeling the great black hull surging swiftly through the waves, filled me with ineffable delight. I suspected that the others were similarly affected, but these were private thoughts and we left them unsaid. Tom, as skipper, was constantly occupied with the maintenance of his beloved boat and by extension the safety and well-being of the crew. He would strip down the diesel engine and clean the injectors, cast an eye on the wear and tear of the running gear (the ropes and sails), which suffered from constant chafing, and stay aware of our course and position, as well as finding useful things for us to do.