Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (17 page)

Mike is watching you from the cockpit with steadily increasing interest—he’s that bored.

Now for the moleskins. Mine, interestingly enough, belonged to the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes and have the name “Ran” written in Biro on the waistband. He wore these trousers on his Arctic and Antarctic adventure and sold them off at Camden Lock along with a whole rake of other stuff from the expedition. That’s where I got the fancy sleeping bag, too. But the moleskin trousers are by far my favorite possession—a reminder that we are all, in our own small way, fellow explorers.

They also have a very fine weatherproof zip, which, with frozen fingers, requires a lot of fumbling to get undone … but somehow eventually you do. That’s two layers; two more to go. Long johns, or the particular type that I was wearing, have a small aperture covered by a sort of pocket. You manage to insert a couple of questing fingers as you peer downward to see if you can see anything, which of course you can’t, because your glasses are soaked in salt spray and it’s almost dark and, besides, there’s not that much to see anyway; these things are best done by feel.

This, of course, is where your problems begin. You search in the gap between this opening and the top of your inside underpants with increasing but unavailing desperation. Can you locate the organ in question? Like hell you can! You’re being buffeted back and forth like a
shuttlecock, it’s freezing cold, and you’re scared half to death. A glance back at the cockpit confirms your suspicion that you’re still being watched by Mike. If anything he’s staring more intently.

Now here I should remind our readers that the male of the species is prone to a certain … shall we say reticence, and indeed shrinkage, in circumstances of extreme stress. An involuntary survival mechanism kicks in to protect that which we hold dear until a less inopportune moment should present itself. You look around, startled by a shout from the cockpit. It’s the unspeakable Mike.

“What’s the matter, then?” he shouts. “Can’t find your dick?” He then convulses with fatuous laughter at his own crass joke.

Your desperation increases, if that’s possible. There’s just got to be a penis in there somewhere, surely … it was there the last time you came on deck.

After long, long minutes of ineffectual fumbling, your search may be rewarded, but even then it’s no simple matter to coax the poor thing out through the long threatening sphincter of elastic and wool and buttons and zips. But then finally you get there, and you hang in the shrouds directing the long steaming arc into the frozen gray wastes of the North Atlantic … oh, the sweet and blessed relief. And now back to bed.

FOR THREE DAYS AND
three long nights we lay buffeted by the elements at some point between Iceland and Greenland. We kept up our routine of an hour on watch, then
back to the cabin, though to be honest it probably made no difference if anyone were at the wheel or not. Indeed, when any of us were woken for our watch—perhaps by John, his beard dripping icy water into the cup of tea that he’d brought—there would always be a few minutes, struggling with the pantomine of putting on foul weather clothes, while
Hirta
bucked and plunged, alone and unwatched, with us seven vulnerable souls shut below.

Still, we took our watches seriously. First I would go forward and, shackling myself to the forestay, scan what I could see of the horizon. Nothing, just gray heaving sea in all directions, populated sparsely by the odd baffled-looking fulmar. Next I would check that all the lashings and stays were tight, that everything was in place. And finally I would return to the cockpit, strap myself in, and busy myself with watching the waves as they burst over the bow and come sweeping knee-deep along the deck to pour out of the scuppers. It was raining hard, too, although even heavy rain didn’t make that much difference because we were already lashed by the salt spray that flew from the wave tops.

I would pull the peak of my woolen ferreting cap down over my glasses and hug myself against the cold. Wedged into the cockpit by the wheel at the back of the boat was one of the best places to be; the weight of the engine was at the back, so that’s the most stable part, and from a relatively still platform I could watch the bow with its long bowsprit rearing into the sky only to crash back among the waves, each time in a hissing cloud of spray that scattered instantly on the wind. You can scarcely imagine a thing so dramatic and beautiful.

We had almost got used to storm life onboard when, around about the middle of the morning on the fourth day, there came a lightening in the unrelenting grays of our world. A cloud like smoke whirled away for a moment, and behind it a brief glimpse of the palest disc and, looking down, a hint of a glitter and a shine in the joyless matte gray of the waves. Within an hour we were down to a fierce gale, but seemingly a wild thing of exuberance, crying exultantly farewell as it hurtled away to the east.

Four hours later and the sea itself was settling; the wind moderated and veered a little, so we shook out a reef and bounded again toward the west. There was a tangible sense of relief to be sailing again: everybody laughed easily and the old refrains and jokes were taken out again and dusted off. Patrick and Tom sat down and thrashed out their differences in the matter of boat handling and came to a perfectly sensible agreement. Meanwhile the rest of us had returned to the Jumblies:

AS OUR COURSE TOOK
us northwest toward the southern tip of Greenland, the ice cap, the greatest repository of frozen freshwater on the planet, the very air began to freeze. We had thought it was cold before, but this was different, and we felt it. And we already had all our cold-weather gear on, so there was nothing left to add.

Day after day we scudded on toward the west, sometimes chugging along with the engine, sometimes driven like a leaf before a gale, and at others, more rarely, gliding across the shining swell with the wind behind us. This was a lovely motion that tended, with its feeling of being lifted and gently hurled forward to where we wanted to go, to induce in us all a mild euphoria. Sometimes the clouds lifted a little and then there was an intense, crystalline brightness to the air and the sea. The sea would turn glassy all around, not a ship, not a boat; nobody else was crazy enough to be out and up at these sort of latitudes. All the more sensible sailors were cruising across the milder bluer seas of the world: the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, and it made us feel just the tiniest bit sanctimonious.

On one of those glassy days, I was leaning on the shrouds, staring idly around, when I noticed the slightest puckering of the surface away in the distance … then nothing. I must have imagined it … but then again, a little more and closer. Patrick noticed it too. Soon it was unmistakable. Dolphins. There were scores of them, and they came racing playfully from the distant horizon toward our boat, leaping like puppies and dancing and diving as they came. I had never seen dolphins before and I was unprepared, so far out in the loveless wastes of the northern ocean, for such a dazzling display of physical exuberance.

They gathered round the boat and rolled and dived beneath the hull; they weaved joyously among one another as they hurtled along riding the bow wave, now diving deep, now leaping full clear of the water. A little ahead and to one side a dolphin leaped right out of the water
and with muscular thrusts of its tail, performed two or three skips across the surface before falling with a great splosh back beneath the waves. They didn’t tire of their games; they played and played, on and on … and we too were almost leaping with excitement on the deck. Hannah squealed with utter delight; we were all swept up in the same astonished thrill. I climbed the mast and from high above the deck watched their glorious antics. The water was clear and I could see their great dark glistening bodies way below us, spiraling up and twisting over to show their pale undersides.

You couldn’t help but be foolish and imagine that those tiny eyes of theirs, deep in their protective hoods of blubber, were smiling and laughing at the sheer fun of it. I had seen a similar phenomenon with a flock of crag martins, forty or so of them horsing around in the sunshine and shade of the rocks by the shore in Greece. The only explanation I could possibly think of for this behavior was that it was a manifestation of sheer animal joy. Me, I found myself whooping with pleasure. All the cold and the boredom and the misery and the fear of the journey were amply repaid by such a sight.

The others were a little dewy-eyed about the dolphins, too, for although every long-distance sailor has often seen them, it’s a sight you don’t tire of. And from here on, as we crossed the Greenland Sea, there were dolphins with us almost all the time, and we felt comforted by the presence of such benignity. Until now we had had the birds: fulmars and skuas and cormorants and gannets; creatures that had both moved and fascinated us, and kept us company in times and places of loneliness and fear. For this I’d felt
a certain gratitude and respect. But the dolphins … well, the dolphins are mammals; they are “one of us.”

WE HAD BEEN HOPING
to make a landfall on the coast of Greenland, but the ice reports had not painted a rosy picture of the seaways up to those ports: there was pack ice and drifting ice, and the westerlies had blown all the ice from the west side of the Sea of Labrador over to the east, where it was blocking access to the coast. This, of course, was back in the 1980s; if you’d a mind to today, you could sail round the Greenland coast in your little Cornish Crabber. There’s almost no sea ice left anymore.

“Trouble is,” said Tom, “that you can be sailing in the evening through waters lightly packed with thin sheets of ice that just tickle the sides of the boat as she passes, and then you wake up in the morning and it’s turned to slabs of pack ice six feet thick. That’s the way it is up in these beastly latitudes. Give me the Torrible Zone any day … and the hills of the Chankly Bore.”

So we didn’t make Greenland—it was just too damn dangerous in a wooden boat—although that evening we passed close enough to the southern tip to be able to make out, in the faintest of pastel blues, Cape Farewell. We watched it wistfully for an hour or two as we passed and warmed our bellies with whisky.

The next day there was mist in the morning, and something new to talk about: John had spotted a growler.

“So tell me about your growler,” I suggested as I emerged on deck.

“You can see for yourself,” said John. “There it is, right behind us.”

I looked back to where he was pointing. There it was, a rather unexciting block of white ice bobbing about on the sea.

“It doesn’t look much to me,” I said, a little disparagingly.

“It may not look much to you, Chris,” said Tom. “But if we’d hit it at the speed we were going, it would have stoved in the front of the boat, and we wouldn’t have been here now, nicely up on the surface of the sea; we’d have been well on our way down below it. From now on, this being growler country—and maybe there’ll even be icebergs, too—we’re having a man on the bow on lookout day and night. So off you go and wipe the breakfast out of your beard and then get shackled on to the forestay; it’s your turn first.”