Стюарт Вудс - Blue Water, Green Skipper - A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic

On July 2 I heard that Colas had been docked ten percent of his elapsed time for having someone help him hoist his sails in St. John’s. (Later information: A member of the race committee had telephoned the St. John’s Coast Guard to learn the circumstances of Colas’s arrival and departure and had been told that on leaving, Colas had taken a party on board with him out of the harbor, thus breaking the most important rule of all, the one about sailing alone. Whether or not he had help with his sails made no difference, and he was lucky to get away with a ten percent penalty.)

My radar reflector chaffed through its shackle and slid down the backstay, thus reducing my visibility on radar. I plowed through my tinned American snack foods, continuing to gain weight and contemplating the disappearance of my navel.

From my log of July 3: Becalmed most of last night and until 11.00 hours this morning. When the wind returned it was, of course, nearly on the nose. I have been irritable all day. If I don’t improve my daily average it will take me another three weeks to reach Newport, and we’ve been at it for four weeks today. We seem to sail (hard on the wind) from one calm to another, like traffic roundabouts on the route, each jammed, with movement nonexistent. BBC says that David Palmer and Walter Green finished seventh and eighth (but who was fifth and sixth?). They were both very good performances, finishing ahead of a lot of the Pen Duick and Gypsy Moth classes. Good for them. I hope Mike McMullen was fifth or sixth. Why don’t they give us more news? The BBC hasn’t had one interview with anybody connected with the Race. Today I am (temporarily) weary of this enterprise, but now that the boat is moving again, in whatever direction, I feel better.

What I did not write in my log, for fear of giving the idea more credence in my own mind, was the thought that if Mike McMullen were not number five or six, he would not be in Newport when I arrived. I tried to think of all the hundreds of reasons why he might not be among the leaders — broken mast, leaky boat, illness — and still be safe, but the thought would not go away.

As July 4, 1976, the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of my country dawned, I was still thirteen hundred miles from Newport. Shattered was my hope of being in Newport for the celebration, and shattered it had been for two or three weeks, but that didn’t make it feel any better. Now I was worried about finishing the race before the fifty-day time limit expired. As we rode out a Force seven on the nose, I listened to reports of celebrations from all over the United States on the Voice of America. The Queen was in Newport, hosting a dinner for the president. Pity I couldn’t make it. Somebody, probably Protestant terrorists, had planted some bombs in Dublin. I was sad to think that the mindless war was beginning to be felt in the Republic. The Israelis freed the hostages at Entebbe, in Uganda, and I think that was the high point of my day. I stood up and cheered. I read Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and then, in a fever of patriotism, wrote a letter to Jimmy Carter, offering to work in his campaign. It would be some time before I could mail it. Thirteen hundred miles to go. Twelve days, with luck. Twice that, without it.

The next day the wind began to rise and back, putting us on course again but hard on the wind. It blew hard all that night, and I was routed out of bed early the next morning to reef right down to storm canvas. The squall hadn’t allowed any time for dressing, so I did the job naked. By the time I had finished the wind was blowing a steady Force ten, and the scene around me was very strange. Here we were in fifty to fifty-five knots of wind (I was certain about that, comparing it to the blow on the trip back from the Azores the year before), and the sun was shining brightly. It was very warm, and I sat naked in the cockpit for half an hour or so, watching the enormous seas and delighting in the sunshine. It was delightfully pleasant until the wind increased to the point where the spray hurt like hell, and I had to get below, my skin red as if from a needle shower.

As the storm continued, I began to worry that it might be a hurricane. The hurricane season runs from June to November, but most of them occur in September or October. I got out my Reed’s Nautical Almanac and began to read up on hurricane symptoms. They all fitted. I began to think about jibing, to sail away from the center of a possible tropical storm, which is the standard procedure, but I decided to wait for an hour or so to see what happened to the barometer. I crawled back into my bunk and tied myself in for the wait. A few minutes later I opened my eyes and looked straight up through the starboard window. I could see the cap shroud waving in the breeze. (The mast receives all its lateral support from two wires on each side of the mast. The cap shroud is the outer, longer one. If it goes on the windward side, the mast goes, too.) I ripped the back cushions off the bunk to get at the bosun’s bag and a spare clevis pin, found one, grabbed a harness, and got on deck, all, it seemed, in a matter of seconds. It was still blowing very hard, and now I had to brace my feet against the toe rail, hang on to the inner shroud, and try to catch the waving length of wire rope. Finally, I got it, and with trembling hands managed to get the clevis pin in place and secured. I was just breathing a huge sigh of relief when one of the spinnaker poles, which had been secured to the windward side of the deck, hit me in the back. It was another couple of minutes before I had wrestled that back into place and resecured it. Back inside the cabin, shaking like a leaf, I reflected on what might have happened had I jibed a few minutes earlier; the loose shroud would have then been on the windward side and the mast would have gone.

Less than an hour later we were becalmed again. I couldn’t believe it. Almost no wind and still a huge sea left from the storm. Very uncomfortable. But when the wind finally filled in again, it came from the east, which was nearly impossible according to the pilot chart. Not wanting to set a spinnaker in the confused seas, I boomed out the number-two genoa, hoisted the full main, and we flew before the wind, clocking up 140 miles during the next twenty-four hours, our best day’s run, and 120 miles the following day, before the wind veered and headed us again. It was now July 9 and there were less than a thousand miles to go.

With the boat hard on the wind again in a moderate breeze, I stretched out for an afternoon nap. I was nearly asleep when I heard a buzzing sound. The Zenith was tuned to the Voice of America and I thought the Soviets were jamming it again, as they sometimes did, but the buzzing grew quickly into a roar, much louder than any noise the radio could make. I charged into the cockpit, knowing that sound could be only one thing. As I came through the companionway, a single-engined airplane roared past our port side, only about fifty feet above the water. I dived back into the cabin for a camera and got back into the cockpit before he could turn for another pass. He turned and started to come straight in toward the boat as I began taking pictures. For a moment I had the feeling that I was about to be strafed, as in those old World War II movies. He flew past and began to turn again. He was Royal Navy, and I figured he must be from an aircraft carrier, because even though he was carrying a large fuel tank under his fuselage, the nearest land was Bermuda, about 450 miles away, and I didn’t think such a tiny aircraft would have that sort of range. He came back in again, low, along our port side, and I could see the lone pilot. I felt a curious kinship with him, both of us single-handed in the middle of nowhere. He turned and flew away to the east, and I knew he was from a carrier because there was no land in that direction. Next, I thought, we’ll have the carrier along, and I settled down in the cockpit to wait for her to appear.