Blue Water, Green Skipper: A Memoir of Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic

23 Countdown

MONDAY. I spent the morning doing small jobs on the boat. The marina mechanic, Ted, came and changed the engine’s water pump, which had been leaking, and installed a new Jabsco electric bilge pump.

Ian Radford volunteered to come with me on the tow to Millbay Docks and help me berth Harp there, which might be tricky with no engine and so many boats about. Ian is a young physician who had been practicing in Zululand and who had done a stint performing heart surgery with Christiaan Barnard in South Africa. He had accepted a new job in Miami, Florida, and was emigrating the hard way, via the OSTAR. A cheerful soul, Ian was always ready to lend a hand with no more recompense than a cold beer or two... or three.

As we were waiting for the towing vessel to come for us, Lizzie trotted up, a bottle of whisky in each hand, and invited us to come for a look at Three Cheers. The lovely, primrose-yellow trimaran was tied up at an outer pontoon of the marina, where she had just been blessed by the family vicar. The bottles of booze were gifts from friends who had turned up for the ceremony. Nigel Lang of Galadriel, one of the little Contessa 26s in the race, joined us, and we spent a pleasant half hour aboard as Mike, with obvious pleasure and pride, gave us a Cook’s tour of the boat. I had only been on one or two tris, and I was fascinated as Mike explained the modifications he had made which would make her an even faster boat than when Tom Follett had sailed her. I lifted an upside-down bucket in the cabin and found a small ham-type shortwave radio transmitter. He was keeping the bucket over it, Mike explained, because he had not had time to get a license for it, and anyway, he would only use it in emergencies. Nigel remarked on the absence of stanchions and guardrails on the boat, but Mike pooh-poohed the idea, saying he thought they were unnecessary.

We finished our tour and Ian and I invited Lizzie to stop by Harp for a glass of sherry on her way home, since she was passing the boat, anyway. Lizzie, who had been fascinated with all the little comforts on Harp compared to the austerity of the lightweight Three Cheers, rolled her eyes and said she’d just love to come and see my central heating and listen to my stereo again. I said she could snuggle up to my central heating anytime, and as we left Mike shouted after us, “You watch that fellow. I don’t trust anybody who has central heating and stereo on his boat!” We left Three Cheers, Lizzie giggling, and strolled along to Harp. We had sat and chatted for only a minute when the towing vessel turned up, and we had to cast off. As Lizzie jumped ashore we agreed that Angela and I would try and meet them at the club later that evening for dinner. “Don’t forget to bring your nose!” I shouted after her as she ran toward the car park, still clutching the whisky.

She laughed and waved the bottle. I was looking forward to spending another evening with the McMullens.

John, the marina’s bosun, towed us slowly around to Millbay, and as the gates were not yet open, we had an opportunity to circle and get a close look at Club Méditerranée. From the water she seemed even more massive, with her four tall masts, enormous deckhouse, and huge windcharger propeller aft. Alongside her, Golden Harp looked about the same size as the little Avon dinghy we were towing looked alongside Harp. As we waited for the car ferry from France to dock and the Millbay gates to open, other yachts began to congregate in the area, and by the time the gates opened a dozen or more boats of all sizes were there, this being the final deadline for entering the docks without incurring a time penalty.

Inside, Captain Terence Shaw, former secretary of the Royal Western, who was in charge of docking arrangements, directed us to a berth alongside Pawn of Nieuwpoort, being sailed by the Belgian entrant, Yves Anrys, and Achille, whose skipper was the young Frenchman, Max Bourgeois. Terence Shaw, white-bearded and very salty-looking, did not need a megaphone to issue his instructions, and skippers disregarded them at their peril. Soon, Nigel Lang, in Galadriel, and young Simon Hunter, in Kylie, another Contessa 26, were tied up outside us, making a raft of five boats, with Achille closest to the concrete dockside.

Behind us were the two Chinese lugsail schooners, Ron Glas (which is Gaelic for “gray seal”), sailed by Jock McCleod, a Scot, and Bill King’s old boat, Galway Blazer II, now owned by Peter Crowther, who is just a bit mad. Also there was Angus Primrose in a Moody 33 of his own design, Demon Demo, soon joined by Chris Smith in the tiny Tumult, only twenty-two feet long.

Millbay Docks was now home to nearly every boat that would start, and the whole place took on a festive air that completely changed the ordinarily drab appearance of the place. Angela and her Observer press office were there; Camper & Nicholsons and M. S. Gibb were sharing a portabuilding, and Brookes & Gatehouse were located in a trailer nearby. All the famous boats from past races were there: Jester, the Chinese lugsail folkboat which had been sailed in every OSTAR, first by Blondie Hasler and later by Michael Richey; Tahiti Bill, Bill Howell’s cat; Vendredi Treize, the 128-foot giant of the last Race, now called ITT Oceanic; Cap 33, formerly a French trimaran, now sailed by an American from Boston, Tom Grossman. Manureva, in which Alain Colas had won the last Race, was to have been sailed by his brother, but had lost a float and would not compete.

Among the new boats were Kriter III, a seventy-foot catamaran built as British Oxygen, winner of the Round Britain Race when sailed by Robin Knox-Johnston (beating Mike McMullen in the much smaller Three Cheers by less than an hour); Pen Duick VI, Eric Tabarly’s boat, built to be sailed in the Round-the-World Race by a crew of fifteen, now being sailed by Tabarly alone; Galloping Gael, a boat designed to the maximum limit of the Jester class and sailed by an Irish/Canadian/American, Mike Flanagan; FT, also designed to the maximum of the smallest class and sailed by David Palmer, who seemed certain he would take the class prize; Spaniel, a hitherto unknown Polish entry, with a bucket seat and automotive steering wheel in her tiny deckhouse; five identical boats designed by Marc Linski, a Frenchman; and four identical thirty-two-foot trimarans designed by Dick Newick especially for the race, one of them sailed by a close friend of Ron Holland’s, Walter Green, an American.

With the withdrawal of Great Britain III and Manureva, only seven boats were entered in the largest group, the Pen Duick class. One of the most interesting was a sixty-two-foot trimaran with a truly vast sail area, Spirit of America, sailed by Mike Kane, who claimed his boat to be the fastest multihull in the world. The medium-sized Gypsy Moth class had considerably more entrants, but by far the largest was the Jester class, with about ninety boats, most of them privately owned, nonsponsored boats like Harp.

Living conditions not being in the category of wonderful in Millbay Docks, I moved into a hotel until the start. On Monday night Angela and I went to a party given by Tom Grossman of Cap 33 and met a number of other entrants. Although we knew each other by sight, this was my first meeting with Mike Kane. He was reputed to be a bit cocky about his boat and his chances, and with a few drinks under his belt he was in rare form, talking about the incredible speeds the Lock Crowther — designed tri could reach and how well proven she was. We lingered a bit too long among the congenial company at Tom’s party and missed Mike and Lizzie at the Club.

TUESDAY. The hydraulic engineer rang and said that Hydromarine would reluctantly supply the needed replacement unit, but that they were insisting he come back and install it. I cringed at the cost, but I agreed. I spent the morning rounding up bits and pieces of gear, including two white fishing floats which would have to be painted black to conform to a last-minute rule that each yacht carry two black balls hoisted when the boat was under self-steering with no one on deck, a concession to the criticism from Yachting World. I was doing this job when the first of the scrutineers, Walter Venning, arrived aboard Harp. “Come aboard,” I said. “I was just painting my balls black.” Then from behind him appeared his girlfriend, Sally, the other scrutineer. I think I blushed.

They asked to see all the required safety equipment, checking each item off on a list, then chatted for a minute. Walter turned out to be a cousin of Bill King’s, whom Bill had told me about. He is a tomato grower, and once, when Bill was about to make a transatlantic crossing in his first boat, Galway Blazer I, Walter gave him a basket of tomatoes which had been carefully selected so that one of them would ripen each day. It had worked perfectly, Bill said, the last tomato ripening on his last day out.

Yves Anrys and I had a chance to talk a lot as we were each doing jobs on our boats. Yves had been a reserve Olympic helmsman in the single-handed Finn dinghy class and was sailing a half-tonner similar to Harp but very stripped-out inside and much, much lighter. He is a merchant seaman and was planning to race his boat in the World Half-Ton Cup Championships later in the year.

WEDNESDAY. I was a blur of motion all the morning, running errands, seeing to last-minute fittings, and filling small gaps in my list of necessary gear. There seemed to be no end to it, and I was beginning to have a feeling of running out of time. While in this somewhat harassed state I got a telephone message from the Royal Western office in Millbay Docks that the McWilliams and the Hollands were arriving at four in the afternoon and please to meet them.

We arrived back at Millbay Docks and were standing outside the Observer press office, chatting with some people, when Angela called me aside. “Have you heard about Lizzie McMullen?” she asked. Oh, God, I thought, there’s been a car crash and Lizzie’s in the hospital with a broken leg or something.

“No,” I said.

“There’s been a terrible accident. Mike and Lizzie were working on the boat at Mashford’s yard this morning when an electric drill fell overboard into the water. Mike shouted for her not to touch it, but she did. They gave her heart massage and artificial respiration for half an hour until an ambulance could get out to Cremyl, but it didn’t help. She was dead on arrival at the hospital.”

I froze inside; I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. Lizzie McMullen, beautiful, bright, delightful Lizzie, could not be dead; it was simply not possible. I asked Angela if she were absolutely sure, if there were any possibility of a mistake. Angela was sure. Lizzie, who thirty-six hours before had been joking about my central heating, laughing, and sipping sherry on Golden Harp, was gone. Irrecoverable. Out of anyone’s reach. Out of my life. Out of Mike’s. Dear God, I thought, if I feel this way, as if somebody had struck me with a blunt instrument, how must Mike feel?

“How is Mike?” I asked Angela.

“I don’t know. I’m sure friends are with him. I’ve sent a telegram.” I wanted to send a telegram, too. I sat in Angela’s office and thought for a time. There were less than seventy-two hours left before the start of the race. This would have been the most crushing possible blow at any time, but to happen now, after four years of work and preparation together. It suddenly seemed unthinkable that Mike should not sail the race. I found a pencil and wrote, “I only knew her for a week, and I loved her, too. There is no answer to the senseless. Please sail the race and win it.” I signed the telegram, gave it to Angela to send, then went out and sat in the car, numb. A man wandered over and began talking to me through the open sunroof about an ice cream seller who had been ejected from the docks because he didn’t have the proper permit. I chatted absently with him without knowing what I was saying. Angela came out and we talked for a moment, then I left. I felt I had to keep doing things, that I couldn’t stop — not just because I had so much to get done but because if I stopped I would think about Lizzie and, worse, about Mike. So I kept moving, kept ticking items off my list, but it seemed that every two or three minutes I would stop and realize all over again that Lizzie was dead, and it was just like being told for the first time.

I spent most of the afternoon with the Hollands and McWilliams, but in a kind of daze. When they left for the airport early that evening, I went to the club. I found Lloyd Foster and asked if he knew Mike’s plans about the race. “I think it will certainly be impossible for Mike to compete now,” he said. “Of course, there’s the funeral, but there’ll have to be an inquest as well. There are just too many formalities to complete before Saturday.” I suggested that the competitors might send some flowers, and Lloyd agreed to receive contributions. Later, that didn’t seem enough, seemed too transient, and some of us thought perhaps the committee might accept a new trophy for multihulls to be presented in memory of Lizzie. This seemed much more satisfactory, more permanent, and Lloyd said he would bring it before the committee for consideration.

I don’t think anyone who knew Lizzie McMullen, however slightly, went to bed with dry eyes that night, and I was more deeply affected than at any time since my grandfather had died. It had been a bad day.

THURSDAY. Everything began to gather momentum. There were three events scheduled for competitors: a lord mayor’s reception at midday, a competitors’ briefing in the early afternoon, and a dinner that evening. In between, I was at a dead run. The hydraulics engineer from Southampton turned up bright and early with the new pump. I spent the rest of the morning running errands and arrived at the lord mayor’s event after the speeches. Lloyd Foster called me over to confer with Henry Williams and Colonel Jack Oddling-Smee of the committee, who agreed to accept the proposed Lizzie trophy. Liz Balcon of The Observer voiced the newspaper’s approval, and both the club and The Observer agreed to contribute a substantial amount of money to be combined with the competitors’ contributions to purchase a piece of silver. Lloyd asked me to announce the trophy at the competitors’ briefing in the afternoon and said he would accept the contributions.

I found Richard Clifford chatting with a very attractive girl and the three of us adjourned to a local restaurant for an hour to rest from the rush of the day. Richard told me that Mike had decided to continue in the race and would be at the briefing. I felt vastly relieved and very happy about that. Yves Anrys had said to me the previous afternoon, “The man’s wife is dead, that’s one problem. If he doesn’t do the race he will have two problems.” I thought that described the situation very succinctly, and I was glad that Mike would not have to suffer the additional agony of missing the race. I hoped, too, that competing might have a therapeutic effect.

As we gathered at the Royal Western for a group photograph and the briefing, I found Mike, looking shattered but holding up well, told him what we wanted to do, and asked if he minded if it were announced at the briefing. He agreed readily. When we sat down for the photograph on the club’s front terrace, there seemed to be a thousand photographers, and I think most of us were a little taken aback at all the attention, not being used to that sort of thing. I was sitting somewhere near Clare Francis and the crush around us was incredible as all the photographers, as one man, rushed forward for close-ups of the prettiest skipper in the race. A lot of attention was focused on Mike, too, but this was more discreet, thankfully. We filed into the main lounge of the club and were briefed on the starting and finishing procedures; the Pen Duick class would start at twelve noon, the Gypsy Moth class at twelve-thirty, and the Jester class at one o’clock. The finishing line would be a line between the Brenton Reef lighthouse and a nearby buoy, and we were given a chart of the Newport area. A representative of the Ida Lewis Yacht Club of Newport, who was handling the arrangements at the other end, said that an effort would be made to meet as many competitors as possible. Other details were discussed, then I made the announcement about the new prize, to be called The Lizzie McMullen Perpetual Trophy, for the first multihull to finish. It would be a presentation of the competitors in the 1976 race and would be presented in perpetuity. There were a few more announcements, and we broke up to return to our boats.

Ann arrived during the afternoon, and I left her to rest at the hotel while I got back to the boat. Arriving there, I found that the replacement hydraulic unit had blown immediately upon installation, and the engineer was trying to cannibalize the old unit to repair the new one. I got the electrical engineer started on replacing the battery and rewiring the engine bay, working around the other engineer as best he could. This was a time when I had planned to be lounging in the cockpit with a glass of wine, watching everybody else panic. Instead, Yves Anrys was lounging in his cockpit, watching me panic. The handicap committee came by and had a look at Harp. I sat them down and explained as thoroughly as I could that Harp was not in her present condition a competitive half-tonner, that she was much, much too heavy for that and had larger rigging, steps on the mast and lots of other windage-making gear, such as the Dynafurl reefing. They nodded sympathetically and agreed that she would not rate as a standard half-tonner, and I felt I had made my point successfully.

I raced back to the hotel to change for the banquet, and we made it on time. The atmosphere was relaxed, and although a lot of people looked tired, as I’m sure I did, everybody looked happy. Ann got her bottom pinched by somebody who turned out to be Jerry Cartwright, an American yacht designer from Newport and a friend of Ron’s. I asked her if she wanted me to hit him, but she seemed flattered.

We sat with Yves Anrys, Max Bourgeois, and Ian Radford, with Bill Howell at the next table, so we were among friends. Jack Oddling-Smee made a gracious and amusing speech, the new editor of The Observer, the incredibly young-looking Donald Trelford, made another, and Val Howells responded on behalf of the competitors. Val had been a competitor in the first race, in 1960, and now he and his son Philip had built identical boats for the Jester class for this race. The party broke up and everybody went to get some sleep before the last full day we would have before the start.

FRIDAY. We were up at the crack of dawn and back on the boat. The two engineers were working away at it, and I sent Ann off in the car for some last-minute shopping while I worked on the boat. With the two engineers still working it was a mess, and with only a day to go.

Lizzie McMullen was buried in the family plot at the little church in the Cornish village of St. Mellion, a few miles from Plymouth. Mike Kane and I drove up, and Richard Clifford and Clare Francis were there, too. Mike McMullen bore himself in a manner which put us all to shame. “He’s taking it better than I am,” Mike Kane said.

Mike invited us back to the house after the funeral, and was everywhere, putting everybody at ease. He showed us around the place, a pair of workmen’s cottages he and Lizzie had been converting into a single house, doing all the work themselves. Only one room was completely finished, and it was heartbreaking to see, on a beautiful Cornish hillside with a view nearly to Plymouth, still another project that they had begun but would not finish together. I told Mike how glad I was that he would be sailing the race. He said, “Your telegram just about did it, you know.” I said I thought Lizzie would have been pleased, too, and Lizzie’s father, who was standing with us, agreed.

On the drive back to Plymouth, Mike Kane and I got to know each other better, and I began to appreciate the pressures he was under, over and above anything I was experiencing. He was being sponsored by the American Tobacco Company, and a crew had been sent to make a film about his project. A camera and sound crew were following him around everywhere he went; they had been in California taking shots of his home and family before he left for England, and there were the usual PR men skating him around the TV and press people, too. He was longing to be out at sea, I think, leaving it all behind.

Ann and I worked the rest of the day stowing gear and tidying up last-minute details. By early evening Harp was nearly ready. During the afternoon I met Mike Flanagan of Galloping Gael; he came aboard, introduced himself, and asked to borrow my dinghy to do some work on the topsides of his boat. I had heard that Mike was very confident of his chances in the Jester class and wasn’t shy about it. We chatted for a couple of minutes, and he seemed a nice enough guy.

Mike Kane came to the dockside, camera crew in tow, and we had a shouted exchange of good-natured abuse for the benefit of the television audience. Robert Hughes arrived and replaced the steering vane shaft which had been bent in the altercation with the customs launch in St. Mawes. Everything was finally aboard and fitted; only some stowage remained, and we left that for the following morning.

Ann and I had hoped to have a farewell dinner at the superb Horn of Plenty in Gulworthy, but we finished on the boat too late and decided on dinner at Bella Napoli after a drink at the Royal Western. There we bumped into Jerry Cartwright, the well-known yacht designer and bottom pincher, and a very attractive English girl, Suzy Wassman, who had lived for a time in Newport. They joined us for dinner. Jerry had done the last OSTAR but hadn’t been able to complete a boat in time for this one, and we talked all through dinner about the race, the routes, and problems I might encounter. I had missed most of the weather briefing that afternoon, turning up at the wrong place, but everybody I talked to still seemed to think it was a toss-up between routes. Only a smaller-than-usual amount of ice on the great circle made that route seem a possible favorite. I was still leaning toward the Azores route, having heard nothing new against it, but still had not made a final decision. I would not really have to do that until leaving the Channel.

I was also bitching a lot about the handicap I had been assigned that afternoon. Nobody knew what handicapping system the committee was using, but whatever it was, I didn’t like it. Harp had been given a handicap of nineteen days and some hours; Pawn of Nieuwpoort, Yves Anrys’s boat, identical in size to Harp but stripped out inside and much lighter, had been assigned a handicap of twenty-two days and some hours. I was giving Yves three days! Clare Francis, in her thirty-eight-foot Robertson’s Golly, was giving me only half a day! When Yves and I sat down and went through the list, we discovered still more strangeness. Harp, designed as a half-tonner, was actually giving time to a one-tonner! I had written out an immediate protest to the committee, citing half a dozen apparent anomalies, and they had told me I would get a decision in Newport. I was very concerned about this, because the handicap prize was the only one Harp had any real chance of winning, being eight feet overall and three and a half feet on the waterline shorter than the class maximum.

In spite of all the shoptalk, the pleasant dinner eased the tension a bit and, since Jerry would be on the press boat at the start, we invited Suzy to join Ann and me on Harp for the time before the start. That way she could get inside the restricted zone, where spectator craft were not allowed.

Tomorrow was the day, but I was too tired at bedtime to reflect much about it.

SATURDAY AND THE START. We were up at six; collected my fresh meat, a week’s supply, from the hotel freezer, where it had not frozen; stopped by the fish market for a large bag of ice, which smelled like fish; and got down to the boat. I dropped Ann, the meat, and the fishy ice there and drove to the marina, where Mike Kane had promised me some last-minute weather poop. Mike was late and I had too much to do to wait, so I went back to Millbay Docks, giving Richard Konklowski, the Czech entry, a lift. I hadn’t had an opportunity to talk with Richard before, but he was an interesting fellow, sailing his little home-built twenty-four-footer, Nike, in the race for the second time. Since the Czechs have no boat-building industry and import restrictions abound, Richard had had to build his boat from whatever materials he could find, making many fittings himself, even the sails.

Since repairs on Harp’s engine had been completed so late, there had been no opportunity for the committee to seal the gear lever, and I was given an acceptance certificate and told they would trust me. (As it turned out, they didn’t have to.) This meant that, unlike the other competitors, we had a useable engine for the period before the start and did not have to be towed. So, with Ann and Suzy aboard, we were among the first out of the docks, collecting a round of applause from the crowd gathered at the gates. (Angela told me later that all the competitors got a round of applause. I had thought it was just for me.)

We motored out to the starting area, stowing gear all the while, and started to look at boats. I don’t think anybody got a better look at things than we, with our engine. We motored back and forth through the fleet, dodging hundreds of spectators that could simply not be kept out of the restricted area, in spite of the best efforts of the Royal Marines, buzzing about in inflatable assault craft, yelling at people. There was every possible kind of spectator boat inside the restricted area, most of them small yachts under power, but I even saw two kids in a Mirror dinghy thrashing about among the competitors.

In spite of what sounds like chaotic conditions, everything was quite orderly, the spectators were well behaved, apart from their trespassing, and I did not see a single incident of any kind. Fortunately, it was a light day. In heavy weather things would have been a bit hairier, but then, in heavy weather, there would not have been so many spectators.

Club Méditerranée sailed slowly around at the starboard end of the line, her decks crawling with people (spectators did not have to be off the boats until the ten-minute gun), and Spirit of America stayed nearby. I knew Mike Kane wanted badly to start before Colas, and there he was, waiting.

The ten-minute gun went for the big class, and the huge boats started jockeying for position. ITT Oceanic, sailed by Yvon Fauconnier, was down at the starboard end of the line with Club Med and Spirit, and the other large boats were more scattered. Poor Tom Grossman, on Cap 33, had been bumped up from the Gypsy Moth to the Pen Duick class when it was found that his boat exceeded the length for the medium class. He had simply taken the word of the previous owner on her measurements, and now he was in with the big boys, the smallest boat in the class.

Seconds before the gun I saw Mike Kane get Spirit into irons nearly on top of the starting line. He just stood in the cockpit shaking both fists in the air until the big tri decided which tack she wanted. Fortunately for Mike, Colas was late, and Spirit recovered in time to nip Club Med at the line. Then Spirit was gone, reveling in the light conditions, while Club Med moved sluggishly toward the Channel. It was clear that if it were going to be a light-weather race Mike would probably win it hands down.

Mike McMullen sailed past in Three Cheers, and I shouted to him, “Win it, Mike!”

“I’ll bloody well try!” he shouted back. He was smiling.

As soon as the Gypsy Moth bunch were away I put Ann and Suzy off onto a spectator boat, switched off the engine, and began to sail slowly around under main only, the reefing genoa furled, and the drifter lashed on deck in case the wind dropped. I have never experienced anything quite like the atmosphere among the competitors at the starting line. Here, in an intensely competitive situation, everybody was wishing everybody else luck! Each time two boats passed there were shouts, jokes, and absurd insults exchanged. I saw and exchanged greetings with Nigel Lang, Ian Radford, Max Bourgeois, Peter Crowther, Angus Primrose, Andrew Bray, Richard Konklowski, Richard Clifford, Ziggy Puchalski, Mike Flanagan, Simon Hunter, and two dozen or so others whom I had never met but were wishing me luck, anyway.

I saw Angela, aboard one of the Observer press boats, and waved goodbye. We were planning to meet in Newport, where she would be running another press office at the other end. I saw the boat carrying Ann and Suzy a couple of times more, and then I heard the ten-minute gun. I had chosen the starboard end of the line, because starting on the starboard tack would give me right of way over boats on the port tack. I ignored all other tactical considerations in favor of playing it as safely as possible. With nearly ninety boats on the line it would be all too easy to collide with somebody and be out of the race with damage before it even started. In spite of my decision to play it safe, though, I felt all my dinghy racing instincts coming back as the minutes ticked away; I stopped thinking about safety and started thinking how to be on the line when the gun went. Suddenly, nothing else mattered.

I made a couple of passes at the line under main only, then settled into an oval pattern near the starboard end, jibing around in circles and watching my stopwatch. At about a minute and a half to go, I found myself being crowded by the Linski boats, all five of them, which seemed determined to start as a fleet. At forty-five seconds I let go the tiller and hauled on the leeward sheet, breaking out the reefing genoa, and started for the line. I crossed exactly thirty seconds late. Lousy for a dinghy start, but pretty good under these conditions. Much better yachtsmen than I started way behind me.

Nineteen months, almost to the day, after my first offshore passage in a yacht, I was starting across the Atlantic, single-handed. I felt as if I would explode. I felt terrific.

24 At sea at last

As I crossed the line I overtook and sailed between Richard Konklowski in Nike and Michael Richey in Jester, with only a few feet to spare on either side. After that I was in the clear and had only to worry about yachts approaching on the port tack. I was making about three knots in the light breeze, very good considering Harp was wearing the number-two genoa instead of the number-one. I had set the smaller sail at the start because it would be more manageable in tight quarters.

I sailed perhaps three miles into the Channel in order to lay Penlee Point with plenty of room to spare, noticing that I seemed to be sailing as fast as Clare Francis in Robertson’s Golly, which was carrying a bigger sail. Just before I tacked, Walter Green in the Dick Newick tri, Friends, sailed across my bows, moving very fast. Conditions were ideal for the trimarans, and shortly after I tacked, David Palmer in FT overtook me to leeward, having apparently got a very bad start. Just after we crossed the line, Peter Adams and his family motored alongside in their small yacht and we made our goodbyes. Now another familiar yacht, Ruinette, from Cork, called me on the VHF and wished me luck. It was my last such contact that day, and I felt I was really on my way.

Up to windward Yves Anrys in Pawn and Lars Wallgren in Swedelady were giving me a boat-for-boat race. Yves, with his big genoa set, began to pull away from us, and Swedelady began to change up to a bigger sail. I hung on to the number-two, hoping the wind would freshen, and Yves pulled away from me. Then Ian Radford in Jabuliswe appeared astern and began, very slowly, to overtake me. She was a smaller boat than Harp, and I knew if I didn’t get more wind soon I would have to make the sail change. Because of the furling gear, this was a more difficult change than with conventional gear, and I dreaded losing the time without a foresail during the change. In higher winds when a smaller sail was needed I would have the advantage, but at the moment, in about a Force three, I did not. Ian was right forward in the pulpit of his boat and stayed there for a long time, apparently making some repair.

Then the wind dropped a bit, and I had no choice but to make the sail change. Once Big Jenny, as I called the number-one, was up, our boat speed increased and we were making a good four knots. Then the wind freshened again and we did even better. About five in the afternoon, off Fowey, we overtook Angus Primrose in Demon Demo, a bigger boat, and I knew we were doing well. Ron had said that Harp would do better than the Moody 33 on any point of sailing except reaching, and it appeared he was right. Shortly after that, David Pyle in Westward, one of Angus’s Moody 30s, just nipped me, but when I tacked again I saw that I was pointing much higher than he, and later I was sure that we had overtaken him.

Darkness fell and there were lights everywhere. There was one yacht in particular that seemed to be keeping pace with us and I thought it must be Ian, in his smaller but much lighter boat. Nobody could sleep that night while we were still in danger of colliding with one another or with shipping in the Channel.

I drank coffee to keep awake, although I had some Dexadrene should I need it, and dined on ham sandwiches and chili con carne that Ann had made in Plymouth. In fact, with a dozen sandwiches and a large pot of the chili, I ate little else for the first three days, except cereal for breakfast. I saw very little shipping, but there were yachts all around us.

At midnight I called Lizard Coast Guard to check the visibility there and was told it was eight hundred yards. By two a.m. it was down to two hundred, but it must have lifted, because I saw the Lizard light briefly at three a.m., then it disappeared. When dawn came, I could see only two yachts as we approached the Lizard, and they soon disappeared after tacking. I did not know it then, but they were the last I would see. The Lizard was really socked in, although visibility on the water seemed about a mile. I came close enough to the headland to hear the fog signal, but I never saw the land at all. It would be some time before I saw any land again.

I tacked away from the Lizard, got the yacht on course, and began making telephone calls on the VHF. It was my last chance to say goodbye to people before I was out of range of Land’s End radio. It was still very early morning in the Channel, but in the States it was five hours later. I heard a British warship on the VHF to somebody, reporting that some of the larger yachts had been reported at the Scillies, and I chatted with Andrew Bray on Gillygaloo. We arranged a calling schedule for noon GMT, but I slept through two of the appointments, and we did not make contact again. I talked with Chica Boba, an Italian yacht, which was apparently behind me. Andrew had been ahead. Late in the afternoon I spotted a Scottish yacht, Sundancer, not a competitor, called him up, and was told that he had seen FT near Bishop Rock, which indicated to me that David Palmer was disregarding his earlier, hotly declared intention to go south.

A large group of dolphins came and played with us for half an hour or so, then darkness fell again and I faced my second night without sleep. At midnight I heard a very clear VHF transmission from a ship called Arctic Seal, who was talking with the Coast Guard. When his transmission was finished I called him up and had a long, friendly conversation with the officer on watch, Jerry Miller of Port Arthur, Texas. I could see the brightly lit ship several miles off my port beam and he reported that he could see me on radar at a distance of eight miles, and could see my masthead light as well. This was most comforting. He also gave me a very precise position from his satellite navigational system, which amused me, since Alain Colas had not been permitted to carry that equipment on Club Med and had shown a good deal of annoyance toward the perfidious British because of it. I had been able to see Club Med for a large part of the first afternoon, and I knew she could not be liking these conditions. I said goodbye to Arctic Seal and set a course for the southwest, having made my decision to take the Azores route.

I caught a cold. Coming down the Channel, my throat had become sore and now the whole thing blossomed. This, combined with some queasiness from the rough seas we had begun to experience, made my first week out very uncomfortable. I had little energy and what I had went quickly when I had to deal with some problem, like when the Big Jenny wrapped herself around the forestay. It was worse than the spinnaker wrap had been on the Azores trip, and took a lot longer to get undone.

I was still in radio contact with Land’s End and St. Mary’s Coast Guard at the freakish distance of 110 miles out, although I could read them better than they me. I tried to relay a message from Lizard Coast Guard to FT about this time, but couldn’t raise him. This reinforced my belief that he had gone farther north than I.

My radar detector seemed to work, waking me in the middle of the night once, when a big merchant ship went by. Trouble was, it detected other things, too, like my electric razor, and often came on when the boat was being tossed about. Still, it seemed better than not having the thing at all.

I learned the hard way that no sail could be lashed on deck on the leeward side in any kind of a sea, or even on the windward side when things were rough, without its going overboard. This happened twice, but since the sails were shackled onto the deck at the tack, they were recoverable. It was not nearly so tough to get them back on board in a Force seven as it had been in the Force ten coming back from Horta, but it wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun, either, and with the cold sapping my strength, it was exhausting.

We were constantly in fresh winds, usually Force five to seven, and sometimes sailing free, so our daily averages were usually a hundred miles or better at this point in the Race, and I felt good about the possibility of achieving my twenty-nine-day goal.

My only brush with the opposite sex at sea, a few dolphins apart, came when I raised the German merchant ship St. Clemens on the VHF and found, to my delight, that she had a female radio operator, one Heidi Riedel. Heidi and I chatted for ten to fifteen minutes, both regretting that we could not get together for a drink. She was from Hamburg and promised to take a message to an old friend there for me. It was the last leisurely radio conversation I would have with anybody, because soon after that when I switched on the ignition to charge the batteries, the engine would not start. The trouble was clearly electrical, and among all the things I did not do well, electrics ranked high. I removed the switch panel, checked all the wiring, and sprayed everything with some stuff which was supposed to dispel moisture and improve electrical connections, but nothing. I checked all the connections on the starter motor and sprayed those. Still nothing. I tried jumping the electrics with a screwdriver blade but succeeded only in making a lot of sparks and frightening myself. Finally, all my electrical ideas exhausted, I tried starting the engine with the hand crank. The manual said this was easy to do, even in cold weather. Ho, ho. I cranked the bloody thing until I couldn’t stand up anymore, a marline spike stuck under an alternator belt to control the decompression lever. I’d get it spinning well enough, but as soon as I released the decompression lever the engine would stop turning. I thought perhaps a stronger man might turn it further, but I doubted it.

This was a depressing situation, because it meant that when the charge remaining in the batteries was exhausted there would be no electrical power left on the yacht. This would mean no VHF, no cabin lights, no instruments, no stereo tape, and, worst of all, no navigation lights. I would still have radio reception for weather reports, radio direction finding and entertainment on the battery-operated Brookes & Gatehouse and Zenith radios, and depth sounding on the battery-operated Seafarer but no log for speed and mileage recording, no wind direction or wind speed, and no off-course computing from the Hadrian.

I had gone to such pains to ensure that I had the best possible battery charging system, extra-large batteries, two alternators, etc., and now here I was without electrical power because I could not start the engine, a possibility that had never occurred to me. A thousand pounds’ worth of electrical and electronic equipment was now useless. I went over the whole system again, afraid that I would arrive in Newport, somebody would point at a loose wire and say, “That’s your problem.” There was nothing loose, and apart from that I didn’t know where to begin. I stopped using everything electrical except the log.

There had been a shortage of sun for the last few days, and I had been proceeding without sun sights to fix my position. Now, as the remaining charge in my batteries faded away, I knew I would soon be without the log, valuable for keeping a good dead reckoning position. Finally, the log ground out its last hundredth of a mile and stopped. I was left with only those navigational aids which mariners had used for centuries: the compass and the sextant.

I had been at sea for eight days when I got the first bad news. Dominique Berthier, one of the two French girls competing, had lost her yacht, 5100, but had been rescued by a French trawler. I wondered how she could have been near a trawler after eight days at sea, far from the continental shelf. (Later information: Mlle. Berthier had collided with an unknown cargo carrier and received damage to the yacht’s hull. The boat started to take a lot of water and she decided to return to Brest. Nearing France, just off Seil Island, the hull began to break up and she abandoned the yacht for the life raft, watching the boat sink twenty minutes later. Shortly after that she was taken aboard by the trawler and was in Dovarnenez by midnight.)

I had finally found the radio frequency for the special weather forecast being broadcast for us by the BBC World Service and what I was hearing sounded very bad for the yachts on the more northern routes. Confirming this, I heard the wife of Guy Hornett, who was sailing Old Moore’s Almanac, on the Jimmy Young show on Radio 2; she said Guy had run into two successive Force nine severe gales. Later in the day the BBC reported that Pierre Fehlmann on Gauloise had begun taking water and had retired, and that Yvon Fauconnier on ITT Oceanic (formerly Vendredi Treize) had broken an arm and that some of his sails were in the water. Jock Brazier, in Flying Angel, was also reported to have retired with self-steering problems, and H. G. Mitchell in Tuloa was said to have retired. That made five that I knew about. What else was happening up there? (Later information: Pierre Fehlmann lost Gauloise, and was taken off by another ship under very trying circumstances; Fauconnier and ITT Oceanic were taken in tow by a Russian tug; Guy Hornett and Harry Mitchell finished the race.)

For three days I was in very thick fog with light headwinds, a very bad combination. I could see nothing, and nothing could see me, but at least there was the consolation that merchant ships would be using their radar, and I had a large radar reflector mounted fifteen feet up on the backstay. In fact, it might be easier to detect my presence that way than by eye, especially at night. My daily average began to drop as I tacked through the soup in the light winds. I did some figuring that at my present rate it would take me forty-three days to finish. That was a horrible thought, but I felt it couldn’t go on forever like that, and that we would get reaching winds after the Azores and the turn west. After freshening and freeing us for a few hours, the wind went light again and back on the nose. To make matters worse, there was a very large swell running, the product, I suppose, of the rougher weather farther north. This made it very difficult to take advantage of what little wind there was. I had set the drifter, the superlight nylon genoa, but the violent motion of the boat shook the light breeze from the sails and the boom swung back and forth and had to be tied. It is one thing to sit on a flat sea with no wind. It is quite another to roll about with no wind. Cooking became messy; messier, even, than in rough weather, when there is a kind of rhythm to the seas. I spilled a glass of red wine all over the tennis whites I was wearing and into my bunk. I got even more bruised than I did in heavy weather, especially around the knees and thighs, from bumping into things.

During the days, I read as much as I could, finishing Alistair Cooke’s America and starting a biography of Thomas Jefferson. In between, I finished Rosie Swale’s Children of Cape Horn. Rosie had swept through Plymouth, relieving me of £5 for her club of supporters building the Swale’s new catamaran and leaving me with copies of her two books. I ate well. A lunch might include pâté de canard, Parmesan cheese (with the mold sliced off), Bath Oliver biscuits, and half a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet. I gained weight. I began to cultivate a mustache.

From the radio news I learned that Kriter III, formerly British Oxygen, was reported to be breaking up and Club Méditerranée had been hove-to for three days, repairing sails. There had been a rumor in Plymouth that Colas could not hoist the sails alone, which meant that if he reefed in heavy weather he would not be able to get them up again. I found it difficult to believe that Colas would put himself in that situation, but the word was that there were no winches available big enough for one man to hoist such a huge sail. Somebody else, I didn’t get the name, had been picked up in a life raft.

Then came the really stunning news: there were only ninety-nine competitors left in the race. Thirty-one had retired or been lost. I had, up until this time, heard about only six or seven boats. Thirty-one gone, and it was June 18 — thirteen days after the start of the race! A report came that the Soviet tug Bestroshryy, which had taken ITT in tow, had also taken Yves Terlain off Kriter. He had been able to hold the huge cat together just long enough for help to arrive. Tabarly was reported 850 miles from Newport and it was said that he might be there as early as the twenty-first, which seemed utterly impossible to me.

My first two weeks I had covered 1,066 miles over the ground, probably sailing fifteen or twenty percent more than that because of headwinds. Poor progress. I missed the electricity, especially the instruments, and it annoyed me that when it got dark I simply had to go to bed. I tried reading with a flashlight, but it was very uncomfortable. I was in my sleeping bag by ten and always it took me at least two hours to get to sleep, not being accustomed to early bedtimes. I listened to Willis Conover’s jazz program on the Voice of America, and to the American Forces Radio and Television Service, in addition to the BBC. We were too far out for Radio 2 now, but I was picking up the American station in the Azores again, and getting the first hard news about the coming Democratic Convention in New York. After reading about him for months in the International Herald Tribune, I heard Jimmy Carter’s voice for the first time. He sounded very familiar, like half the people I’d grown up around in Georgia.

I became very subject to reminiscence, something that had happened to me on the return trip from the Azores, too. I found myself easily moved by memories and by things I read or heard on the radio which brought back memories. The Northern Service of the Canadian Broadcasting Company was replaying a series of old radio programs, Inner Sanctum, The Green Hornet, and, best of all, Jack Benny. The CBC and VOA also played a lot of music from other eras, and one evening I suddenly found myself in tears, listening to Bob Hope and Marilyn Maxwell, I think, singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” It’s not a very sentimental song, but I suddenly remembered that when I was about six years old I had known all the lyrics to the male part of that song, and a little girl across the street had known the girl’s part. I remembered sitting under a tree in my grandparents’ front yard on a hot summer day, singing that duet, while we waited for the local fire department to come and rescue a cat which had been chased up the tree we were sitting under by a local dog. What moved me was the memory that I had had a childhood in which firemen came to rescue cats from trees.

On Sunday, June 20, I scored what for me was a navigational triumph. I took my first moon sight, plotted it across a sunsight, and had an instant position without having to wait for a noon sight. It doesn’t sound like much of an event, but after a while alone at sea, small successes become wildly elating, just as small problems become hugely depressing. While I was doing the plotting I looked up from the chart table and saw through the windows on the port side the bows of a huge ship. I ran up on deck, waving and pointing at the signal flags I kept flying, which meant “Report me to Lloyds.” People on deck waved back and, as I watched, the ship made a ninety-degree course change to port and sailed away. Apparently, she had come up on my starboard side, gone astern of me, and then run on a parallel course on my port side to see if there was anybody aboard. I had been too absorbed in plotting my position to hear her engines, close as we were. I wondered what the outcome would have been if the encounter had occurred at night.

The calms and light winds persisted, but very gradually the sea became flatter, until it was not unpleasant to be sailing slowly. My log for Monday, June 21, read, in part: Sitting in the watch seat writing this — a lovely evening. I’m wearing only tennis shorts, and the air feels good on my skin. There is what looks like squally showers up to windward; if it will bring a good sailing breeze that’s O.K. with me. I have been sitting on the “back porch” — the self-steering platform — trailing my feet in the cool water. It is very blue and extraordinarily clear. A fish about eighteen inches long appears to have fallen in love with the rudder — he has been swimming alongside, almost touching it, for hours. We were almost completely becalmed from nine a.m. to four p.m.... Spotted a mooring buoy ahead and after what seemed like a very long time, crept abeam of it. It had the number nine on top and the name (I think) Nancy Egary. The owner can find his mooring at 40°27′N, 27°22′W. Heard on BBC that Tabarly is within a day’s sail of Newport. If it’s true he will beat the record by three days. Seems impossible... The Azores are being even more elusive than on the trip with Bill. Graciosa is still sixty miles away and Flores is a hundred miles further than that...

I was wearing tennis shorts and not running around naked because I had been doing just that, and parts of me which were unaccustomed to the hot sun were complaining. I could sit comfortably only in certain unusual positions. The Azores were, indeed, taking their time about turning up. On the race the year before, Bill and I had taken 15½ days and we had considered that two or three days too long. That night, however, I picked up the loom of a light on Faial and as I was about to go below to plot the bearing, I looked astern and saw two enormous red lights from a position where there could be no land. It was obviously not a ship, and just when I was beginning to reassess my opinions about UFOs, I realized that it was the moon rising, only a sliver of it, but huge and red and broken up by black clouds stretching across it. It was a few minutes before my pulse returned to normal.

Next morning, I could see things growing in my drinking water. This was alarming. I remembered an account by a competitor in the last race describing a similar experience with his water; he had had to put into the Azores to clean his tanks and change the water. If I wanted an excuse to visit Faial again, here it was. I decided to wait another day before making a decision about it. When I checked it again, I found that the contamination was only in the starboard tank and not the port, and I remembered that Yves Anrys had given me two water-purification tablets before the start of the race. I had put them on the chart table and forgotten what they were. Now they were wedged under the barometer and crumbling, but I swept up the pieces, divided them equally between the two tanks, and poured a pint of water in after each of them to make sure they did not lodge in the filler pipes. I reasoned that the contamination was probably harmless bacteria, and anyway, the pills were at work now, so I would drink the starboard tank first, before anything new started growing in it.

A day later, the water situation was still on my mind when I rose to find Faial, green and lovely, off my port bow, with a cloud-enshrouded Pico behind. The height of the islands, Faial at 3,500 feet and Pico at 7,000 feet, must make them among the best landfalls in the world, when they are not obscured by cloud. I thought of Horta and the people and places I knew there — Augie and Luis, the Club Naval, Peter and his Café Sport, the Estalagem and the village market — and I resolved to come back when I could combine the excitement of seeing the Azores with the satisfaction of visiting them.

The BBC was now reporting that the race winner was five hundred miles from Newport, but they had stopped mentioning Tabarly specifically. I wondered how Mike McMullen was doing, hoped he was up front, unnoticed and winning. I had thought about Lizzie and Mike often, and I wanted him to be not just the first multihull but the first boat across the line. I knew that no one else could be as highly motivated.

The water was choppy in the archipelago waters. Faial remained in view for nearly a day and a half in the clear weather, and as I was coming on deck for my noon sight on the twenty-fourth, glancing to see if the island was still there, I saw instead a ship coming up fast astern of us. She was Olwen, Royal Navy, I think, since her officers were in whites, but there were women aboard, too, and I wondered how the Royal Navy had managed that. She passed me, then circled and came close abeam my starboard side, and I shouted through my Tannoy loud-hailer, “Please report me to Lloyds.”

“I have already done so,” replied an officer from the bridge.

I asked for my position, but he was unable to get the information before his part of the ship passed me, and suddenly Harp was very close to her, close enough for a rating further aft to ask after my welfare only barely raising his voice. I dropped everything and threw in a very fast tack, and the big ship slid by only a few yards away. That rattled me a bit, and it must have got to her captain, too, for this time he did not circle but hove to and waited for me to come to him. I was not about to go anywhere near the ship, stopped or not, without an engine. He waited for a few minutes, probably trying to get me on the VHF, because an antenna was visible at my masthead, then sailed on. At least my position would be reported, I thought.

That night I heard on the BBC that Clare Francis was a thousand miles from Newport, apparently on the great circle route. I got out the dividers and measured my distance from the finish. I had made my first turn on my course at about 37°30′N, 35°W, and I still had just over two thousand miles to go. Maybe they were having heavy weather up there, but at least they were having wind, too, while I sat becalmed or in light headwinds day after day. But now I was at my southerly turning point, the place where the reaching winds were supposed to be. If they came, and if they were fresh, my daily runs would improve dramatically. And anyway, didn’t they have calms on the great circle route? Maybe there was a chance of making a good showing, yet.

25 Going West

I don’t suppose I had really expected fresh reaching winds to materialize the moment I reached a point on the chart, but I was bloody disappointed when they didn’t. Still, at the end of three weeks I had covered 1,645 miles over the ground, and my daily average was improving steadily.

Life went on in a regular sort of way, my daily routine continuing. I saw my first sea turtle; he measured about three feet across his shell and was covered in barnacles. We sailed slowly past him in light winds, so slowly that I was able to go below, get a camera, and take a couple of shots of him.

Then my eggs went bad. An egg company had given us thirty each, and Yves Anrys had given me his, but for some reason my taste for them had disappeared and I had eaten only two since Plymouth. I had a good time with them now, though. I sat in the cockpit and dropped them overboard one by one, watching as they sank but remained in sight for an amazingly long time in the clear water.

I had passed my halfway point and had begun to get out my large-scale charts of the east coast of the United States and mark them up for future use.

On July 28 the BBC reported that the French Navy had started a search for Eric Tabarly. This seemed ridiculous to me, since he had been out for only twenty-two days, and there were any number of good reasons why he might not have appeared in Newport yet. What seemed more a cause for concern was that sixty-seven of the yachts in the race had not been sighted or heard from either during the past week or since the start. I was glad I was not one of them. It suddenly occurred to me that although I had been seen and my family and friends had news of me, I had none of them and would have none until reaching Newport.

Anything might have happened — someone might be dead or ill — and I would have no way of knowing. It was a facet of single-handing that had never crossed my mind and I found it mildly discomforting. Colas was reported two hundred miles from Newport after putting into St. John’s, Newfoundland, for repairs. This was perfectly proper, since the rules stipulated that a yacht could stop anywhere for as long as her skipper wished, as long as he was not towed for more than two miles into and out of port and observed all the other rules.

The following day, the twenty-ninth, I heard that Tabarly had won, crossing the line at nine in the morning, Newport time. Colas was thought to be close behind. I was sorry that Mike McMullen hadn’t won, or Mike Kane, but there was still the multihull prize, which I had begun to think of as the “Tin Lizzie.” Then, the next day, came the amazing news that Michael Birch, in one of the little Newick trimarans, The Third Turtle, had finished third, followed closely by Kazimierz Jaworski in his thirty-eight-foot monohull, Spaniel. They were both remarkable performances, Spaniel’s being perhaps the most remarkable, since she was a monohull. David Palmer, who had expected to win the Jester class in FT, had dismissed the Newick trio as contenders, saying that a boat completed this season could not win for lack of time to prepare. It was a classic case of a competitor believing that everyone else would experience the same teething problems he had; of not recognizing that there will always be someone, in a race of this size, whose boat is better designed, better prepared, and better sailed than yours. Considering all the variables, it was not a race to be cocky about. Here we had the boat that everyone had predicted would win in a walk coming second, beaten by a boat designed to be sailed by fifteen men, then two yachts from the smallest class finishing third and fourth, ahead of much larger, faster boats which should have beaten them. It was that kind of race.

From my log of July 1: I have just dined on sweet and sour ham, with peanuts and raisins, and the Bâtard-Montrachet ’70 and am a little bit drunk; Willis Conover is playing very good jazz on the Voice of America and Mike Flanagan is dead. BBC said at midday, as I was eating a ham sandwich, that Galloping Gael has been found by a merchant ship, drifting, with no one aboard. Mike is apparently the victim of what I have always thought is the single most dangerous risk of this Race — falling overboard and watching your boat sail away. It is said that drowning is a pleasant death, but it cannot be pleasant to tread water and contemplate it until it happens. When I heard about this my first action was to put down my sandwich, go and sit on the back porch (first clipping my harness to the pulpit) and rig a tripping line to the self-steering. It is now being towed behind with a number of knots and two loops tied into it. It may not be much, but it is all I can do. I didn’t know Mike Flanagan well, but he seemed a nice enough fellow and was, I am told, supremely confident of his chances of winning the “Jester Trophy.” Now, barring a true miracle, he is gone, a victim of what? The Race? His own self-confidence (vanity)? Or an unavoidable accident? (There are unavoidable accidents.) Now, in the last month, two attractive young people I knew are dead. Why do I feel responsible, or at least guilty? They are not dead because they both knew me, although I may have been their only connection. I have believed from the beginning that someone would die in this Race. Now, someone has. God, let that be an end to it.

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.

Fifteen minutes later, there was another, different sort of noise, and I opened my eyes to see a helicopter coming straight at us from the north. It occurred to me that although the first pilot had found me and I had waved, I had given him no indication of whether I needed help, so as the chopper passed I gave him a thumbs-up sign. Two crewmen, sitting in an open doorway aft, waved back, and they were off, back to the east again. I waited for a while longer in the cockpit, but the carrier never appeared. I knew, though, that I had been reported, for the first time in three weeks, and I was wildly elated.

I now found myself low on water. The fouled starboard tank was empty and the port tank was less than half full. There was only one bottle of beer left, too, but plenty of wine and food. I had begun to lose weight, now, the snack foods having run out, and I was in good health and excellent spirits. I expected to be in the Gulf Stream soon, and I began to read up on what Adlard Coles and Erroll Bruce had to say about sailing in that great ocean current. None of it was good. The current normally runs at one-half to one and one-half knots, according to the pilot chart, but what I was reading indicated that in places it could run three to five knots and even reverse its normal southwest to northeast direction. The very warm water temperatures caused very changeable weather conditions, too, and nobody seemed able to predict anything about the Gulf Stream.

On the eleventh, as I was cooking, I looked out and saw through the port window what looked like a big squall. There had been dark clouds down there all day, but we had been making good progress under shortened sail. I started on deck to have a better look, but stopped with one foot in the cockpit as a thunderstorm, complete with thunder and lightning, struck us. I have never seen anything like it. Visibility came to an end. The self-steering, about eight feet away, disappeared in a wall of gray water. The sea around the boat turned white, churned into foam by the force of the rain. I pulled my foot back inside the hatch and stood on the ladder and watched. I suppose it lasted for about two minutes, and then I was able to get into the cockpit and reef farther. I felt lucky that nothing had broken, and I figured it would all blow over as quickly as it had come. It did, but it came again and then again. I have never experienced anything as sudden and as violent as these thunderstorms which raked across us for two and a half days. On land there are trees and buildings to break the force of such storms, but not at sea. Even more frightening than the sixty-knot gusts of wind was the lightning. For the whole of the two and a half days I had the feeling of living under a huge, electrically lit sign which, because of some wiring fault, was flashing on and off erratically. It was all the more frightening because Harp’s mast, thirty-eight feet above the water, was the only tall object in hundreds of square miles, and it was made of aluminum, a wonderful conductor of electricity.

Occasionally there was a lull, when the wind would drop to Force six or seven for a few minutes. During one of these, Fred tacked the boat and put us aback. He had done this several times, when the combination of a gust and a wave would push the boat up into the wind a bit, and I was extremely annoyed with him. I had always talked to him, as if he were a dog or cat, and now I found myself screaming at him as I struggled to get the boat back on the right tack in the big seas, “You sonofabitch! You do that again and I... I won’t oil you any more!”

About seven-thirty in the evening of the thirteenth the wind had dropped enough to unreef, and for the first time in what seemed like years, the horizon to windward was not filled with dark thunderheads. I released the reefing line to the Dynafurl and started to crank in on the sheet to shake out the reefing genoa, pleased because we were only about four hundred miles out of Newport now, and I was hoping to cross the line on Friday, the sixteenth. That would give me a reasonably creditable passage of forty days — more than I had wanted to take, but not bad. Something stuck. The sail would not come unreefed. Swearing under my breath, I hauled the sheet in as tight as it would go, made it fast, got into a harness, and crawled onto the foredeck, where I began turning the swiveled forestay by hand. Suddenly, the forestay wasn’t there anymore. There was a metallic thunking noise and the whole stay, sail and all, flew out of my hands, the aluminum reel at the bottom nearly hitting me in the face. I had been squatting, turning the stay, and now I was dumped back onto my bum, watching the forestay, which supported the mast from forward, waving the number-two genoa in the breeze from the top of the mast like a giant flag. First the stay, now the stick, I thought.

I sat on the foredeck and waited for the mast to go.

26 Drifting in the Gulf Stream

Incredibly, the mast did not break. The wind was down to about Force three, the main was double-reefed, and the inner forestay held everything together long enough for me to charge aft and release the main sheet and start getting halyards forward. Fortunately, Harp was equipped with two genoa halyards and two spinnaker halyards, and I got three of this lot forward to the toe rail and winched them tight. The mast would not fall now, but there was the immediate problem of recovering the flailing forestay and sail before the fitting at the top of the mast broke under the strain and sent everything overboard.

After twenty minutes of fruitless effort, trying to haul everything down onto the deck by hand, I discovered the easy way: I put the windward sheet onto one of the big Barlow self-tailing winches and cranked away until the stay was back on deck and under control. Perhaps “under control” is an overstatement, for the aluminum-rod forestay was writhing all over the place like a giant serpent. Finally, I got it shackled to the toe rail and lashed it so that it could not thrash about and chafe things. Next, I got the sail off, with some difficulty, and stowed. This gave me another genoa halyard to play with, and now the wisdom of having the little storm jib made came home to me. I set this flying on the halyard, tacked to the pad eye, which had been fitted about two feet abaft the forestay tack, and once again we had a headsail and could go to windward. We couldn’t point very high, but we could go to windward, and that’s where Newport was.

Trouble was, now that the wind had dropped and we had been reduced to a double-reefed main and a storm jib, we could move at only about two knots. I was afraid to hoist the whole main for fear of putting too much strain on the halyards and toe rail forward. Making two knots, there was no chance of reaching Newport by the weekend, and this was very depressing. Still, things could have been a great deal worse; we could have lost the mast and really have been in trouble. Our reduced speed called for a reassessment of the food and water situation, too. Food was getting short and water even shorter, so I had to be very careful to see that nothing else happened to delay us, or I would have to go on a very serious diet. I had already started brushing my teeth in salt water, and now I watched every drop. I tried collecting more water in the thundershowers by hanging a bucket from the end of the boom; this worked for a while, then the bucket blew away. But at least we had a main and a headsail and, above all, a mast.

Twenty-four hours later, however, we didn’t have a headsail anymore. The halyard on which it was flying parted at the mast sheave, probably because, in an effort to get the luff of the sail tight, I had winched it up too much and it was carrying too much of the weight of the mast. I was afraid to set the sail on another halyard — I was running out of them — and we made little progress during the night under the reefed main only.

I decided to have a go at getting my VHF transmitter working with spare batteries from my signaling lamp. They were six volts each; six plus six equaled twelve, I reasoned, and the VHF worked on a twelve-volt current. I wired the two batteries together, hooked them to the radio, and it worked! At least, I was getting crackling noises. I didn’t want to try transmitting until I could see a ship, since the batteries were small and surely wouldn’t last long.

By morning it was clear that under the present sail plan we could sail either to Newfoundland or to Bermuda but not to Newport, unless we got a radical wind shift, and I wasn’t going to count on that. The only alternative seemed to be to repair the forestay in some way so that we could set a headsail, a job which seemed clearly impossible. It was bad enough that when the stay was unshackled from the toe rail it would start thrashing about again; but the main problem would be getting the stay to stretch enough to reach the forestay tack. I had found the cause of the failure: a deck eye which fitted into the bottom of the forestay had come unscrewed. First, I removed the deck eye from the forestay tack and tried to screw it back into the bottom of the stay. The threads were stripped. It would go part of the way in, then freewheel when turned. I spent two hours, lying on my side on the foredeck, draped over a spinnaker pole, trying to get the thing screwed back in. Finally, using a large screwdriver for leverage, I managed by putting pressure on it and turning at the same time, to get it most of the way in. But I had no way of knowing if the threads would hold and keep the same thing from happening again.

Now I had to try to stretch the forestay far enough to reach its deck fitting. The logical thing to do, of course, was to ease off the backstay, then crank down on the halyards forward, bending the mast until it reached. But I knew that would not get it close enough. O.H. and I, when Harp had been relaunched at the beginning of the season, had had one hell of a time getting the backstay to reach under similar circumstances, and that was with two of us pulling on it and no sea tossing us about. I would have to find another way.

My eye fell on the reefing line, which had broken when the stay went. This was a length of flexible wire rope with a rope tail spliced to one end for ease of handling. I took the block normally used for the spinnaker foreguy and shackled it to the forestay tack fitting, then ran the reefing line up through it and tied it around the wire drum at the bottom of the forestay. I took the rope tail back to a winch and cranked it as tight as I could, then went back to inspect the angle at which the line was drawing the forestay toward its fitting. It looked right, but there was still a twelve-inch gap between the end of the stay and the deck fitting. I went back to the cockpit and cranked each halyard down as tight as I could, then cranked on the reefing line again. It was working. I loosened the backstay even more and cranked down on all the winches again. The gap was now only about two inches. Was it possible this was going to work?

I cranked still further and the reefing line parted. It wasn’t going to work. I was going to have to sail to Newfoundland and try to keep from starving to death while I was doing it. I ran the line through the block again and retied it, then went back and started easing off the backstay even more, frightened stiff that I would turn the wheel one thread too many and the backstay would go. I eased it about two inches beyond where I thought it would be safe, then, one by one, cranked down on the halyards again, then the reefing line. I went forward to inspect the gap. The deck eye was one-fourth inch from the position where the clevis pin would slip in to secure it. Summoning up all the strength I had, I squeezed the eye into the gap. The clevis pin went in. With trembling hands I secured it with a split pin, and we had a forestay again.

I couldn’t believe it. I had done something that two men shouldn’t have been able to do in a seaway. Could Robin Knox-Johnston have done this? (Of course he could, and in half the time.) The job had taken me from ten that morning until early evening, and I was too exhausted to hoist a foresail, so we slogged on overnight under main only. The next day was the sixth, the day I had planned to arrive in Newport, and we had drifted thirty-five miles to the northeast, pushed by the Gulf Stream. When the forestay broke we had been about four hundred miles from Newport, on about the latitude of Cape May. Now we were farther north, and I was worried about being headed again, as we would not be able to point high to windward with the present state of the rigging.

On Friday morning I thought I would try to pick up Nantucket Lightship, as we were getting close to being within radio direction finding range. I couldn’t hear Nantucket Lightship, but I was picking up another signal loud and clear. I checked the chart in Reed’s, showing all the New England radio beacons, and none of them matched the Morse code I was hearing. I began running through the lists of other east coast beacons, and in a moment my finger froze. I was hearing a radio beacon on the coast of North Carolina, and it had an effective range of a hundred miles. Had I, through some navigational blunder, approached the coast in the wrong place? Was I really off North Carolina? I began twirling dials furiously, weak with apprehension. I found another beacon and hurriedly looked it up. Cape Cod Light. I nearly fainted. Apparently, some freak atmospheric condition had allowed me to pick up the North Carolina beacon so clearly. For confirmation, I switched on the Zenith and started looking for commercial stations. The thunderstorms had caused so much interference that I had been unable to pick up anything except shortwave for several days. I found a station in Lynn, Massachusetts. I felt better.

Now my biggest concern was being becalmed. After the violence of the thunderstorms, we were down to about a Force two and it was coming from, of all places, the east. I got up a spinnaker, hoisting the heavier all-rounder, because if the wind rose I didn’t want to do another spinnaker change. We ran for most of the day in a light breeze, then, about sunset, the wind began to rise and go around. Soon we were close reaching at about seven knots and I was steering, because Fred couldn’t handle the helm under those conditions. I took the spinnaker down at dark and got up the number-two genoa, hoping that the dodgy forestay fitting and the two halyards still taken forward to the toe rail would keep the mast up. We managed an eighty-mile run that day, and I was pleased and relieved. That night, after dark, I thought I could detect a change of color in the water. The edge of the Gulf Stream is easier to find in the north than in the south. The water temperature and the color change very quickly at the edge. Next morning, the color was a dirty brown instead of the deep blue to which I had become accustomed.

We had the mast, we had a foresail, and we were out of the Gulf Stream. Newport lay ahead. We were finally in the home stretch.

27 The final dash

Sunday morning, the eighteenth, I picked up a Newport commercial radio station. I could not have been more excited if I had been contacted by a flying saucer. I could hear people talking, and they were in Newport, Rhode Island. What’s more, they were reporting race news. Five or six boats had finished during the last twenty-four hours, including Ziggy Puchalski and Richard Konklowski; another twenty-five boats still had not finished, so at least I wouldn’t be last.

I had a good lunch and stretched out on a settee berth for a nap. A few minutes later, as I was sleeping soundly, I was lifted right off the berth by the sound of a ship’s foghorn at what seemed a distance of about eighteen inches. I landed in the cockpit, ready to dive overboard and swim for it. There, about fifty yards off the port quarter, was a large merchant ship, Alchemist. I jumped below to get the loud-hailer, not wanting to use the tiny radio batteries unless absolutely necessary. I started to shout that I wanted to send a telegram, but she was already overtaking us. Someone on the bridge made a hand signal to indicate that they would circle. I tried to wave them off, remembering my close call with Olwen some weeks before, but they circled and came up again. I shouted out a telegram to Angela in Newport, giving an ETA of Tuesday, and asked for a position. But we were being overtaken again, and the big ship circled a second time. This time, the radio operator was standing on the foredeck, and as I shouted out my message, he sprinted toward the stern of his ship, writing furiously. Someone on the bridge had an old-fashioned hand megaphone and shouted a position to me. It struck me as funny that I, on my tiny boat, should have an excellent loud-hailer, while they, on their huge ship, should have a megaphone.

They sailed on, promising to dispatch my telegram immediately. My spirits soared now. My position had been reported, my navigation had proved to be perfect, and in two days I would be in Newport. I anticipated arriving between noon and three with the light winds we were experiencing. Then, only a few minutes after the disappearance of Alchemist, I looked off the port quarter and saw a yacht, the first I had seen since the English Channel. She was in the far distance, and even with the binoculars I could not recognize her, but I felt sure she was a competitor. She was there for the rest of the day, slowly overtaking us, and during the night she disappeared.

While I was watching her I saw something else in the water, a float of some kind, with a pole and a radar reflector. Then another, and another. This meant I would have to keep a lookout for fishing boats that night and the next, but also that they were using radar to find their floats, so would be likely to spot me, even though my reflector had slipped down to about six feet above the deck.

Darkness fell and I kept a close watch, sometimes lying down for ten minutes at a time to rest but not falling asleep. About two-thirty in the morning, as I was resting, I was suddenly overcome by a violent chill. Shaking uncontrollably, I got up to light the cabin heater but thought I would first have a look around. I stuck my head up through the hatch to find a large fishing boat two hundred yards dead ahead, bearing down on us at about ten knots. I grabbed a torch and signaled him, and he changed course to pass about twenty-five yards on our starboard side. The chill vanished. Had I developed another level of perception, like Bill King? Maybe.

Monday, July 19, our last day out. The wind backed and freshened, and we were tearing along at six knots under our reefing genoa and double-reefed main. My ETA began to change, and, for once, to earlier. We saw no shipping of any sort that day until sunset, when the first fishing boat appeared. At midnight, a huge, brightly lit ship, looking like an aircraft carrier, appeared on the horizon and tore across our wake several miles astern at very high speed.

We had now picked up Gay Head Light on Martha’s Vineyard to starboard, and Buzzard’s Bay Light was ahead, off the starboard bow. I kept a running check on our position with bearings from the two lights, combined with a check of our depth. At midnight I estimated we were fifteen miles from Brenton Reef Light and the finishing line, but I would not yet see it, even though it should have been visible at that distance. I hoped that one of the infamous local fogs was not enshrouding Newport — that was all I needed. I was taking great care to see that nothing went wrong this close to the finish. I kept thinking about Bill Howell in the last race, about to finish in fifth place, then colliding with a fishing boat. I didn’t want that sort of problem now. My ETA was now three a.m. I had not wanted to arrive at night in a strange port and I hoped I would be met at the finishing line, as had been mentioned at the pre-race briefing.

At twenty minutes past midnight I saw Brenton Reef Light flashing in the distance. I abandoned my compass course and began steering for the light, the first time in forty-five days I had had a mark to steer for. It was very satisfying. At 01.45, Judith Point Light appeared, and from bearings on the two lights I estimated my distance at seven miles. An hour later, I was almost on top of Brenton Reef Light and looking hard for the flashing red light on the buoy that marked the other end of the finishing line. I could see the lights of Newport arrayed behind the light.

I brought some flares, the signaling torch, and the loud-hailer into the cockpit. I didn’t want to waste a minute being found when I was across. The red buoy appeared where it was supposed to be.

On July 20, 1976, at 03.15 local time, 07.15 GMT, Golden Harp crossed the finishing line. The second we cleared the line I stood up on the afterdeck and struck a white flare. The yacht lit up as if a dozen klieg lights had been thrown on it. I had never seen such an intense, white light. The flare burned for about a minute, then sputtered out, leaving me with no night vision whatsoever. Gradually, my eyes became accustomed to the darkness again, and there was no boat of any kind to be seen. The wind was dropping very quickly, and Harp was slowing, now running dead before it at about two knots. I waited a few minutes and struck another flare. Again, the intense light, followed by equally intense darkness. Still no other boat.

Following the chart as best I could, we started up the narrow entrance to Naragansett Bay toward Newport. The lights of the town and of the large suspension bridge farther up the river made it very difficult to pick out buoys and lights ashore. The wind continued to drop and soon we were barely stemming the tide. We drew abeam of where Castle Hill Coast Guard station was marked on the chart. I could see a large building on a hill, with several exterior lights. I signaled the station, but there seemed to be no one on watch. (The building was a hotel. The Coast Guard station was behind the hill.) I tried the VHF but got no reply either from the Coast Guard or from Goat Island Marina, where a twenty-four-hour watch was being kept at a reception center being run by American Tobacco. Nothing. Maybe the small batteries were enough for receiving but not for transmitting. I struck another flare abeam of the Coast Guard station. Still no notice was taken of me.

I sat in the river for the rest of the night, fuming at being ignored. Forty-five days at sea and no bands, no fireworks, no dancing girls, not even a rowboat. The river was absolutely devoid of traffic of any kind.

These people did not seem to understand my heroic achievement. Did they think I did this every day? Shit.

Dawn came as slowly as possible. I made a cup of coffee and tried to stay awake until somebody else was up. I wondered what time the local water-skiers got started; there didn’t seem to be anybody else stirring. There was still not enough wind to make any headway against the tide.

At six o’clock I heard an engine. Reception committee? Fishing boat. He was on his way out for his day’s work, passing a hundred yards to starboard. I hailed him and asked if he would call Goat Island Marina on his radio and ask them to come and get me. He said he would, and I settled down with my coffee again. A couple of minutes later, he had turned and was coming alongside.

“Nobody’s up,” he said. “Throw me a line, I’ll take you in.” The only other person aboard his boat was a girl.

“I envy you your crew,” I said. “I haven’t seen one of those for six weeks.” She laughed and made my line fast.

As we moved up the river a huge, red sun rose behind the spires of Newport. I stood on the deck and looked at the houses and green shore. It seemed unreal, a New England Disneyland, constructed of papier-mâché. We approached the marina’s fuel dock. A lone figure stood on the pier, holding a towel. I shouted at him to take a line. He did. He was waiting for someone to come and unlock the showers. I called the reception center. No answer; it had closed the day before. Customs wasn’t up yet. No need to wake Angela at this hour. I lurched back to the yacht on my new land legs and pottered around the decks, sorting ropes, then went below for another cup of coffee. I was too excited to sleep. A voice from above. I stuck my head up. A smiling face greeted me.

“I’m Pete Dunning; I run the marina; I think you’re the sixty-third boat in. Congratulations.”

“Where’s Mike McMullen?”

“He hasn’t been reported since the start of the race.”

I knew it. I think I had known it all along.