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

15 On our way

As soon as we had altered course down the Solent we found the light wind behind us and got up the Betsy Ross floater. Harp began to move. With about five knots of wind showing on the B&G meter, her speed increased from two and a half knots under main and genoa to four knots under spinnaker. We began to overtake multihulls.

Just before Cowes, as we passed Norris Castle, we heard explosions from shore. “They’re saluting us!” Bill shouted. Sure enough, Tarka and Anita were firing the castle’s cannon in our honor. As we approached Cowes, the little town’s lights began to come on in the dusk. We passed the Italian tall ship, Amerigo Vespucci, at anchor, and astern of her, the Royal Yacht. It was too late in the evening for an exchange of salutes, but as we passed, a small, dark-haired woman waved a handkerchief at us from the ship’s afterdeck. I think it was the tea lady!

By the time we’d passed Cowes, we had overtaken four catamarans and trimarans, and, shortly afterward, we passed another. Mike Ellison’s voice came out of the darkness: “Your navigation lights are excellent!” He was referring to our very bright Marinaspec masthead light, and it was comforting to know we could be seen from a distance. We were facing heavy traffic in the Channel and God-knew-what in the Atlantic, and I had no wish to experience being run down by shipping. We continued to pull away from Mike’s trimaran and, shortly, were hot on the heels of a big cat, both of us doing everything possible to put on speed so as to make the Needles light before the tide turned foul in the Solent and trapped us there in light winds. Then the wind began to freshen and the catamaran pulled slowly away from us, although we could see his lights until after midnight.

We got the featherlight floater down in the freshening winds and continued under the genoa, both of us too exhausted to set the heavier all-round radial spinnaker. Each of us slept soundly when off watch that first night.

We sailed most of the next day with the boomed-out, big genoa, still too tired to get a spinnaker up. The weather was sunny and warm, and we let Fred steer while we lay on the decks and rested. Shirley felt better for a time, then returned to her original condition. She refused all offers of aspirin to lower her temperature, and by late afternoon Bill was saying that we were fast approaching the point where we would have to decide whether to put her ashore in Plymouth. It was not much of a decision. Shirley was only a passenger in her condition, and her condition wasn’t improving. We altered course for Plymouth.

Our vague plan had been to sail the boat somewhere pleasant after we’d dropped Shirley, if it came to that, somewhere that I could sail back from single-handed in order to qualify for the OSTAR. But now I was very dissatisfied with this notion. I put it to Bill that we go on to the Azores. After all, the boat had been repaired, we were thoroughly overprovisioned for the passage, the boat was easily managed by two, and our exhaustion was beginning slowly to slip away. Bill readily agreed, to my everlasting relief. I would have been very unhappy if, after all this preparation, we had been forced to change our plans. Now we began to plan how to lose as little time as possible in Plymouth. Our first plan had been to pick up a mooring in front of the Royal Western Yacht Club or to put into the Mayflower Marina and get a night’s rest before continuing. But since deciding to continue to Horta we were in more of a hurry. I got on the VHF and contacted Rame Head Coast Guard as we approached Plymouth. They said they would arrange for the pilot boat to take Shirley off at the breakwater and would ring Richard to collect her ashore. We pressed on.

Near midnight, as we approached Plymouth breakwater, we were able to contact the Plymouth pilot boat directly on the radio-telephone, and they soon spotted us, sailing slowly under main only, with the deck lights on. They came skillfully alongside and took off Shirley, her suitcase, and an incredible number of plastic shopping bags. As we prepared to get under way again there was a shout from the pilot boat. Shirley had forgotten a shopping bag. We repeated the performance, tossed the last bag over, then were free. Bill took the first watch and set a course for the point where we had left our original course. Our plan was to return there before continuing to Horta, keeping a record of our lost time in order to appeal to the committee in Horta to subtract this from our elapsed time. We would also appeal not to be disqualified.

When I came on watch Bill reported that we had been sailing through thunderstorms with gusts up to Force seven and that he had reefed everything and been up the mast twice to retrieve or sort out halyards. I had slept through everything. On my watch little happened except a fishing boat that wouldn’t go away, and I spent an hour making sure we didn’t hit him or foul his nets. Later in the day I telephoned a committee member and reported our loss of crew and lodged our request to remain in the race and be credited with the eleven hours it had cost us to put Shirley ashore and return to our original course. He said they would let us know in Horta. I then telephoned my mother in the United States and Ann, who had returned to London, to let them know of our progress before we were out of range of Land’s End radio. I don’t know what the Land’s End operators say when they ring a telephone number, but it never fails to astonish anybody who is getting a telephone call from sea. They can never quite believe that it is possible for a small boat out of sight of land to make a telephone call. It is great fun.

It was now Tuesday afternoon, August 5 (we had started at seven p.m. on August 2), and the wind was freshening and heading us, an experience which was to be repeated ad nauseam for the rest of the passage. We reefed and began to beat. We did not know it at the time, but nearly two weeks later we would be still in identical conditions. At three a.m. the preceding morning I had been wakened by Bill. I was beginning to understand that not only was he a natural pessimist, but that he actually seemed to enjoy it when things went wrong. When anybody else would have been depressed and cursing his fate, Bill seemed stimulated.

“What?” I mumbled, rolling over and trying not to let any heat escape from my sleeping bag.

“Bad news,” Bill chirped. I was sure I could see his teeth in the darkness. I was sure he was grinning. The engine battery had shorted and was completely flat. I was sleeping on the hatch to the battery compartment. I struggled out of my sleeping bag and got at the battery. An untaped lead had rubbed against something. I taped it, switched the battery leads to start the engine, and began to disappear into the sleeping bag again.

“I’ve been thinking it over,” Bill said. “I think we should turn back.” I woke up again.

“What?”

“I’m old and weak,” said Bill. “You’re young and strong, but inexperienced. We’ve had this battery trouble and the Dynafurl is going to break at any moment. It’s your decision, but I just want to put my view to you. If you decide you want to go on to Horta, we’ll do so.”

I was silent for a moment. “Old and weak” was not a new theme. Bill King is a small but wiry man, and he is well muscled from manual labor on his farm. I suspected that he was stronger than I. In reflective moments he would bemoan his old age, referring to himself as “... nearly seventy.” He was not yet sixty-four. Once, over dinner, he’d remarked how well he was feeling, how youthful. I’d pounced: “But a couple of days ago you were practically on your deathbed.” “Ah, but now I’ve had half a bottle of wine,” he replied with a grin.

I thought that now I detected a trial balloon of some sort, but I was too sleepy to give him the persuading he seemed to want. “I’ll sleep on it,” I said, “and we’ll talk about it in the morning, okay?” I knew that we would cover another fifteen or twenty miles while I slept. The next morning the sun was shining and Harp was going well to windward. Bill remarked what a seakindly boat she was. “She goes to windward so much more comfortably than Galway Blazer, with her big spoon bows for running in the Southern Ocean,” he said admiringly.

“Listen, Bill,” I said, “everything’s going well now. The batteries are fully charged, and if the Dynafurl breaks again it’s simple to fix with our new tools. We’re both feeling better every day. I think we should go on.”

Bill nodded. “Right. We’ll say no more about it.”

We went on.

16 Hard on the wind

A week out. I was sitting in the cockpit in the late evening, enjoying the view. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, as beautiful at sea as the sky at night. There seem to be at least four times as many stars as on land, and the Milky Way is just that, a great white swath across a black universe. Then I heard a new noise.

Sailing is not as quiet a pastime as many people seem to believe it to be. Every sailboat is accompanied by a constant little concerto of sounds — water sweeping past the hull, halyards flapping against the mast, the leach of a sail shaking in the wind. A new sound means that something, however small, has changed. The sound I heard now was coming not from the boat but from the water. I looked over the starboard rail and saw, lit by its phosphorescent progress through the sea, a torpedo coming straight for the boat.

It is amazing how many thoughts and images can pass through the mind in a second or two. I saw the yacht erupt in the explosion, and myself flying through the air, then I thought, Nonsense, nobody would torpedo a small boat; anyway, I can see that the torpedo is a living thing. It was a great white shark or killer whale. Bill King had been attacked by one in the Southern Ocean, now it was happening to us. I saw the boat, holed and sinking, while we scrambled into the vulnerable life raft and the creature circled the crippled yacht, waiting. Inches from the hull, the great white “shark” veered sharply away from the boat, as if he had ricocheted. I discovered that I had been holding my breath.

The great white shark/torpedo was a dolphin, the first I had ever seen at night. Now I saw that there was a pair. They did their torpedo act again and again, driving at the yacht, then veering away at the last possible second. Since they provided their own lighting in the phosphorescence, I could clearly see their shapes and features, their smooth gray skins. I sat, transfixed, for nearly half an hour as they played their game, having the time of their lives, then they were gone.

We had altered our watch-keeping system now, and we were both well rested. After passing over the continental shelf and leaving the trawler fleets behind, we were in much less danger of collision, being off the most heavily traveled shipping lanes. Now one of us would stay dressed all night, ready to go on deck if necessary but not keeping a constant lookout. One night, when I was on watch, I was dozing lightly in my berth, when I became aware that Bill had awakened and was going on deck. I returned to my doze, thinking he had gone up to pee, but suddenly the yacht tacked. A moment later Bill came below again. “I think I must have developed some sort of ESP in submarines during the war,” he said. “I just woke up and knew I had to go on deck. We were on a collision course with a very large ship.” I looked out of the hatch and saw the enormous thing about three hundred yards astern by then. I made a mental note always to sail with people who were former submariners, and I wondered if I would ever become that attuned to what was happening around the boat.

We settled into a routine aboard, a routine ruled by the constant strain of being hard on the wind. When a small yacht is beating to windward she will suffer more fore and aft motion and heel more sharply than on any other point of sailing. Harp’s motion was very kindly for a yacht of her size, but it is the heeling of the boat which is the most tiring feature of beating. When the boat is heeled at, say, a constant angle of twenty degrees from the vertical, life aboard becomes a continuous struggle with the law of gravity. One is always traveling either uphill or downhill and never on a level path. Ordinary tasks, like eating, become much more entertaining and exciting. I had equipped the galley with some very attractive American dinnerware, each plate of which had a rubber ring around the bottom which, the ad stated, kept the plate from sliding off the table even at a thirty-degree angle of heel. The ad was absolutely correct; the plates did adhere at that angle. But what the manufacturers had neglected to point out was that, while the plate would remain firmly in place at a thirty-degree angle of heel, the food slides off the plate into your lap. We learned to eat everything from bowls and to hold firmly on to them. They might not tip over or slide when heeled, but the suspense was unbearable.

We ate well. In spite of the rigors of beating, I cooked a hot breakfast every morning until the bacon ran out, and we had a hot dinner every night and shared a bottle of wine. Bill, who had a firm rule of no alcohol when single-handing, relaxed this stance when sailing in company. I think it made us both better company. In the evenings we talked endlessly and listened to tapes from the Monty Python TV series. Bill had never heard of Monty Python, Irish television not having worked up enough courage to broadcast the series to the west of Ireland, and we were both often convulsed. We had a broad range of audio entertainment at our command — the Python tapes, music ranging from Vivaldi to Simon and Garfunkel and, of course, the BBC World Service on shortwave. We even got Radio 2 until we were about eight hundred miles out.

We remained fairly busy, apart from sailing the boat. I practiced my celestial navigation, comparing my positions with Bill’s, and they began to come close. I read a lot, too, getting through Anita’s excellent biography of Francis Chichester and a couple of novels. Occasionally, a ship would turn up and we made efforts to communicate. Since the range of our little Seavoice VHF radio-telephone was only about forty miles, we could not communicate directly with land, so I had an idea for sending telegrams via other ships. Merchant shipping did not keep a watch on VHF, using it mostly for port operations, so I kept the signal flags KVHF ready for hoisting. K is the international signal for “I wish to communicate with you.” VHF, I figured, was self-explanatory.

When we saw our first ship, we got the flags up in a hurry and switched on the radio. Nothing. I lit a white flare. Still nothing. We figured we had not seen him soon enough, and since he was abeam, overtaking us, by the time we got the flags up, he probably hadn’t noticed.

Another day, a tiny fishing boat turned up from nowhere. He was apparently a tuna fisherman and the boat was so low in the water that it approached us unnoticed. It had not occurred to us that there would be fishing boats this far from land. He ran alongside us for a few minutes, and in spite of the flags and Bill’s efforts in French over the loud-hailer (the boat was from a southwest France port) we failed to make him understand that we wanted him to switch on his radio. With lots of friendly waving he disappeared over the horizon.

Our second attempt at a merchant ship bore fruit. We saw it early and had the flags up in plenty of time. I was screeching out “K” on the hooter as the ship came up to us, and soon I had her radio operator on the VHF. She was an Italian grain carrier, the Mario Z, under charter to the Russians to ferry wheat from New Orleans to Leningrad, and she was on her way to the States in ballast. I chatted with the radio operator, a Spaniard, for some time, and he kindly agreed to send telegrams home for us. All merchant mariners, I believe, are bored out of their skulls and perfectly delighted to pass the time of day with a small yacht in the middle of nowhere. It breaks up their day.

Talking with the ship had made our day, too, and there was better to come. For the first time since leaving England, we were freed. The wind backed and we were, at last, reaching. We had two lovely days of it, screaming along in bright sunshiny weather, clocking up our best runs of the passage. Our very best noon-to-noon run was 148 miles. It began to look as if we would make Horta in time for the competitors’ dinner on Saturday night, the sixteenth, and our spirits rose markedly. It had been depressing beating, beating, beating, sometimes laying our course, but even then hard on the wind. This was beautiful sailing, and we began to speculate about what Horta would be like. Bill had sailed past the Azores but had not stopped there, and I knew only what I had seen in a tourist brochure the race committee had sent.

We raised another ship, a German this time, and sent a telegram to Horta giving an ETA of Saturday. Spirits were high.

Then we were headed again. Worse, the wind dropped and we began to experience our first light weather, and from the worst possible place, on the nose. Very depressing. But I was learning an important lesson — that the sea doesn’t care when you arrive, or if you arrive at all. The sea is indifferent to the desires of those who sail upon her, and no amount of sulking or swearing will change that. One learns patience at sea, and always the hard way.

Bill got hurt. He had opened a locker under a settee berth and, having forgotten that he had left the lid off, sat down, falling into the locker, the edges striking him around the kidneys. He was obviously in a lot of pain, and I was worried. There was nothing in our super-duper medical kit, at least, nothing I knew how to use, which would help a ruptured kidney. We were relieved when Bill didn’t pass any blood, and we thought that the worst it could be was a bruised kidney. The worst of the pain passed, and although Bill was very sore and uncomfortable, he insisted on doing all the work he usually did, which was plenty. The only concession he made to his injury was to wear a normal safety harness instead of the length of rope he usually wore around his waist.

We plodded on, tacking back and forth to maintain our course, Bill in pain and I irritable, disappointed with our progress. We had hoped to make Horta in twelve days; now two weeks had passed. We worried that Gypsy Moth had already left Horta to return to England. We had hoped Bill would be able to return on her, saving the airfare.

Finally, on Sunday morning, we awoke to find Graciosa, the first of the Azorean archipelago islands, on our route, sitting fat and green in our path. Even more remarkable, we had been freed again and were pointing at the port end of the island, right where we wanted to go, with the wind on our beam. We sailed on toward the island, and as we approached, a small motor launch appeared, towing two large rowboats full of men. Up a stubby mast on the launch, a man was clinging precariously, scanning the horizon. These were the Azorean whale hunters, going after the monster sea mammals as generations of Azoreans have, in an open boat, using a hand-thrown harpoon, their only concession to modernity the little launch which towed them out for their hunt. They gave us a cheerful wave and continued their search.

Then, of course, we were headed again and found ourselves pointing at the wrong end of the island, hard on the wind. Graciosa looked very inviting, with thick, green vegetation; tiny, white villages here and there; and beautiful beaches, with an occasional stretch of dramatic cliffs. We beat our way into the channel between Graciosa and St. Jorge, the neighboring island, and pressed on toward Horta in the shallower, rougher water and freshening winds. We beat all day and all night. I contrived not to wake Bill until he had got some sleep and then turned in at dawn. Sunrise was a relief, for we had been running without lights. About a week out, the Marinaspec masthead light had inexplicably stopped working, and two days before, our spare navigation lights had gone, too. We then ran with the deck lights on, which took a lot of battery charging but at least made us visible. Finally, the deck lights went, too, and our last night out we were completely dark and worried about the possibility of colliding with an unlit fishing boat in the blackness.

At half past seven Bill woke me. I looked across the water and saw the harbor wall of Horta. We put in a final tack and crossed the finishing line at 08.47, local time. We sailed into the harbor and were directed to a mooring. Somebody on shore set off some fireworks. As we furled the reefing genoa the Dynafurl broke again, but it didn’t seem to matter now. We were in Horta. It had taken us fifteen and a half days.

17 Horta, sweet Horta

What we saw amazed me. I had been expecting a brown, arid, rather deserted island. Faial was as lush and green as Ireland, and more mountainous. Horta wrapped around the little harbor and ran up the hillside, lots of trees and white buildings.

Gypsy Moth V was moored nearby. Giles Chichester rowed over and invited us aboard for coffee. We began to pump up the dinghy. A motorboat came alongside and deposited a plump fellow in a bright green shirt aboard, waving customs forms. Funny sort of customs man, I thought. He extended a hand and said, in American-accented English, “Hi, I’m Augie.” And Augie he was. Born of an American mother and an Azorean father, August (pronounced “Ow-goost”) had spent some time in California before returning to live in Horta. Augie was a mine of information and good cheer. Did the laundry need doing? No problem. The electrics need fixing? Can do. I really began to relax. We signed the forms, surrendered our passports to Augie, and splashed over to Gypsy Moth. There Giles and his crew, Martin Wolford, brought us up to date. Runnin’ Scared had won the race. We were the last boat to finish, though not last on corrected time (we were also the smallest boat to finish), and three or four boats had retired. Everybody had taken longer than anticipated, so the dinner had been put back to Sunday night. We had missed it by twelve hours. But there was a beach party that night, and probably one every night from now on. The Club Naval, the local yachting, diving, swimming, and fishing organization, had apparently been given a grant from the government tourist office to entertain the race crews and their wives and girlfriends who had met them in Horta, and the club was having a wonderful time spending it. Nobody’s feet had touched ground since reaching Horta. Neither would ours.

We staggered ashore under the weight of an incredible amount of laundry for two people, borrowed the staff shower at the Estalagem de Santa Cruz, a lovely modern hotel built inside the walls of an old fort next to the Club Naval, then, cleaner and more closely shaven than we would have dreamed possible, tucked into a lunch of fresh tuna (I had always thought they were born in cans) fried in batter, local grapes and cheese, and a cold bottle of the native white wine, Pico Branco (the local red wine is good, too, if you don’t mind your teeth turning blue), all of it a welcome change from the tinned food on the boat.

Thus fortified, we began to lurch about Horta, exploring. We lurched because we had not yet got back our land legs, and the earth seemed to move in the same way the boat had. We found the Café Sport, which is the headquarters for visiting yachtsmen in Horta. The owner, Peter, receives and forwards mail, changes money, lends his telephone, and keeps social intercourse among visiting boats moving at a brisk pace. We renewed acquaintance with other crews over cold beer at the Club Naval and swapped stories about our experiences on the passage out. As it turned out, nearly all the other boats had sailed into a different weather system from the one we had encountered, and while we had had fresh headwinds for virtually the whole passage, they had had free but light winds and had suffered calms, so everyone had been slow arriving.

I got a list of finishing times, did some calculating, and discovered to my astonishment that, allowing for the eleven hours required to put Shirley ashore, we had finished third on handicap, beating Gypsy Moth on corrected time. In fact, only Runnin’ Scared and Triple Arrow had beaten us on handicap. But, in spite of our appeal to the committee, we had been disqualified under the three-man, minimum-crew rule, as had been David Palmer, in FT, who had put a crew ashore on another island so that he could make a flight back to England. Our good position on corrected time raised my hopes for the handicap prize in the OSTAR, but much would depend on the kind of handicap I would be assigned for that race.

In the afternoon I completely succumbed to the lure of being ashore again and moved into the Estalagem de Santa Cruz, reveling once more in clean sheets and hot showers. The boat was a bit of a mess, anyway, since she had begun taking water through the keelbolts again, and everything was very damp. All the rooms had balconies overlooking the harbor, and I could see Harp bobbing gently at her moorings, only a couple of hundred yards away. Bill moved into a hotel on top of the hill and got some much-needed rest.

That evening Club Naval threw a beach party for us and, leaning into twenty-knot winds, we ate fish rubbed with garlic and cooked over a charcoal fire, washed down with Pico Branco. Lots of locals and nearly all of the crews came, and all had a marvelous time.

For the next day or so I wandered around dazed, still unable to believe that I was actually in Horta. Giles Chichester threw a party on Gypsy Moth, and two other boats were tied alongside to handle the overflow. The conversation and the wine flowed like water, and before we knew it late evening had come and all of Horta’s restaurants were closed. Martin Wolford; John Perry, skipper of Peter, Peter, who floated about in a white suit, straw hat, and ten-day beard in the best beachcomber style and who claimed to be a solicitor in London; and a young lady who had flown out to meet a competitor who had subsequently retired from the race, all came to dinner on Golden Harp. We ate and drank well and when, in the wee small hours of the morning, the party began to break up and John and Martin offered to deliver the young lady ashore, I said I would do that myself, since I did not wish to disturb her while she was washing the dishes. I saw John and Martin on deck and to their respective dinghies and then settled down with a brandy while the young lady finished in the galley.

When we came on deck for the trip ashore, Harp’s dinghy was gone, in spite of the perfectly good clove hitch I had tied in the painter. It was now two o’clock in the morning, and we were faced with the choice of shouting until we woke some wine-soaked sailor on another boat and asking him to get up, dress, and row us ashore in the pouring rain, which had just begun to fall, or staying on the boat. The only sensible thing to do, of course, was to stay on the boat. It was all perfectly innocent, really it was; she stayed in her bunk and I stayed in mine. It is a mark of what dirty minds people have, however, that we took a great deal of raucous abuse the following day.

The dinghy was found, blown ashore at the other end of the harbor. I have never been entirely convinced that John Perry did not have a hand in the undoing of my perfectly good clove hitch. I do not think Martin would have stooped to such an action, but you can never tell about a London solicitor in a white suit and a straw hat.

The days drifted lazily by, with the odd bit of work getting done on Harp whenever mañana arrived. We continued to be royally entertained by the Club Naval. There was a special dinner at the Café Capitolia for the last boats to finish — Harp on real time, Peter, Peter on corrected time. Augie and Luis, the commodore of the club, always seemed to be inventing a reason for another special dinner. One day I expressed an interest in seeing some of the island, and a taxi materialized in front of the Estalagem for a free tour. Another time, while I was working on the boat, a motorboat came alongside bearing a bottle of the local brandy — another prize for the last boat to finish. There seemed to be no end to it all. John Perry threw a party on Peter, Peter, a fifty-foot catamaran which could have served as a floating dance hall. Brian Cooke looked around and remarked that there was probably room for a branch office of the National Westminster Bank.

Brian, who had suffered a bad fall from the top of the mast of Triple Arrow the season before, admitted that his broken back had not healed completely, but said that he was looking forward to the OSTAR the following season, and to his winter project of attempting to beat Chichester’s speed record from West Africa to South America, on which he would qualify his new boat for the OSTAR. There was an impromptu dinner with Mike Best of Croda Way and David Palmer of FT and his lovely wife, Elizabeth. Mike and David were both, as I was, sailing back from the Azores single-handed to qualify, and we had an interesting chat about preparing for the race.

Scrimshaw, etching on whale ivory, is the Azorean art form, and Orthon is its chief practitioner in Horta. Working in a small house crammed to the rafters with whales’ teeth and other bones and a great deal of ingenious machinery, most of which he made himself, Orthon, for a modest sum, will engrave the image of a yacht on a polished tooth and mount it. Each competitor was presented with a tooth engraved with the name of his yacht, and these handsome gifts no doubt grace bulkheads in widely scattered places today.

As the week passed, yachts began to sail for England. First to go was Gypsy Moth, and she got a send-off of fireworks and hooters. Before leaving for home, Bill Howell laid me out in the cockpit of Tahiti Bill, injected me with a painkiller from my medical kit, and reglued a loose bridge which had been rattling around the back of my head since Portsmouth. Bill King found a berth with him for the sail back. The other boats followed one by one, until only Runnin’ Scared and Harp were left. I saw a lot of David and Ann Walsh, who were sailing Runnin’ Scared back, and they planned a trip to Ireland in the autumn, when we would cruise down the south coast. Most days we took Harp along the coast from Horta and anchored for a picnic and a swim. In the evenings, Ann formed the diverting habit of suddenly shedding her clothes and dashing into the pool at the hotel on the hill, while the ancient night watchman railed at us. I was sad when Runnin’ Scared sailed out of the harbor and left me to enjoy Horta on my own.

But other boats were arriving all the time, Horta being a prime stopover for yachts on transatlantic passages: Charisma and Tenacious, both members of the American Admiral’s Cup team in the recent Cowes Week, came and went; two Canadians sailed in aboard a homemade catamaran; an American couple arrived on a lovely little cutter which sported a square rigged sail; a couple who had briefly been neighbors at Coolmore while building a boat at Crosshaven came in on their way to Brazil; and we all watched with bated breath as the pilot boat took a giant, seventy-five-foot ketch in tow just before she drifted onto some rocks, her engine seized and her sails blown out in a gale. She was Polaris, a handsome if weathered old boat, built in Germany in 1914, sailed by a very mixed crew which included an English bank manager turned fisherman turned boat bum, a couple of pretty girls, and a mad Irish skipper. They were great fun for the rest of my stay and, at last report, Shay, the skipper, and Tim, the fisherman/bank manager, were still in Horta, running a discotheque.

An American ex-marine and now merchant marine radio operator named Bob Lengyl turned up in Prodigal, a tiny sloop, and nearly worried himself to death when I told him that the race committee was closing the entry list for the OSTAR. He had been preparing for the race for two or three years but had neglected to reserve a place. He got an application in the mail, pronto.

One of the most interesting people to sail into Horta was Laurie, a wiry Aussie with an impenetrable accent and a wide gap between his teeth. He had a story to tell about that. Leaving Virginia Beach, in the United States, for Horta, he had been caught in a hurricane, then come down with an abscessed tooth. Unable to stand the pain, he had sloshed down some whisky, then taken a drill and a self-tapping screw to the roots of the tooth, when it had broken off in attempts to pull it with vice-grip pliers. While he was lying semiconscious in his bunk recovering from that, a supertanker nearly ran him down, scraping his little boat along the entire length of the huge ship’s hull and pulling out his mast and most of his stanchions. He had restepped the mast and repaired his rigging at sea, then sailed on to Horta.

Laurie and Len, one of the Canadians, gave me a great deal of help with getting Harp ready to sail again, especially with the electrical system, which was performing very poorly. Len had a complete electrical tool kit aboard his boat and worked wonders with a soldering iron.

The people at the Estalagem were interesting, too. A writer and photographer from National Geographic turned up, doing a story about the Azores, especially about the whale hunting. Then Perry Mason turned up at the bar one afternoon. Or was it Ironside? Raymond Burr, the actor, for reasons I never quite got straight, owned the lease of the government-built Estalagem. It was very peculiar, at breakfast or dinner, to look up and see Perry Mason/Ironside across the dining room. He gave a reception one evening and is a charming man.

My stay in Horta was stretching pleasantly on, my chief excuse being the nonarrival of the new Dynafurl. There had been some confusion about when and where it was to be sent, and an exchange of telegrams was required before I was notified that it was on its way. Augie and Luis took over from there. They somehow arranged for the pilot of the flight from Lisbon to the Azores to collect the package in Lisbon, then pass it on to the pilot of the interisland flight, thus saving several days in shipment. Augie then walked me through most of the Azorean Civil Service in order to save me paying exorbitant duty on the gear, which was being almost immediately re-exported anyway.

A northeasterly gale held up work on the boat for another two days, giving me a breather to enjoy the stories of the anti-communist demonstrations in Ponta Delgado and Horta. At that time Portugal, which owns the Azores, was going through a political upheaval and it looked as though there might be a communist takeover of the country. The Azoreans, who are pro-American, pro-English, and anticommunist, did not like the sound of this at all, and a considerable number of them were talking of declaring independence if the communists succeeded in Lisbon. There were very few communists in Horta, but that was apparently too many. There were large demonstrations in the middle of the night, which I slept through. On one occasion the plan had been to burn the local communist headquarters, but it seemed that a rather nice person lived next door and no one wanted to risk the fire spreading there, so a discussion was held and it was decided to remove the communists’ books and papers and burn them outside. The communists retaliated by sabotaging the record player at the local discotheque. On another island a large crowd escorted two communist leaders down to the sea and tossed them in. When they realized that one of the two could not swim they immediately rescued him. The Azoreans are like that.

September had arrived, and I was beginning to worry about getting home before the equinoctial gales started. I had never heard of the equinoctial gales until Bill had casually mentioned their occurrence on the passage out. As I made my final preparations, stocking up on Pico Branco and fresh food from the lovely local market, I checked with the meteorological office at the American air base on another island. There was still a stiff northeasterly wind blowing, and I did not relish the thought of beating back to the British Isles after beating all the way out. The duty officer said I could expect the northeasterly to continue for a day or two, then moderate and swing around to the south or southwest. That wind should hold for a few days, then veer to the northwest. He advised me to sail due north until the wind veered so that I would be in a position to take advantage of the northwesterly. He also said that I probably wouldn’t experience winds of more than twenty-five knots on the passage home. As it turned out, he was right about everything except that.

On my last night in Horta there was a dinner party aboard Polaris, and then I performed the ritual every yachtsman follows before leaving Horta. I painted a golden harp on the harbor wall next to all the other yachts’ names and symbols, hundreds of them, including Chichester’s, that have accumulated there over the years. The next morning, September 4, I collected fresh bread and, particularly, banana bread from the Estalagem, gathered my gear together, and, with Len, rowed out to Harp. Len helped me deflate and stow the dinghy, had a last look at the electronics, and got a lift ashore. I started the engine, slipped the mooring, and motored past Polaris for a last shouted goodbye. I truly hated to go.

I motored through the harbor entrance, nearly in tears, passing the Pico ferry; everybody aboard waved goodbye. I unreefed the genoa, switched off the engine, and started to beat toward Pico in the fresh northeasterly. The seven-thousand-foot volcano was distinctly outlined against the bright blue sky, not wearing its usual crown of clouds. It suddenly occurred to me that I had never, not once, sailed Golden Harp single-handed.

I began to consider wintering in Horta.

18 Alone from Horta to Crosshaven

I began to tune the rigging — adjusting the shrouds until the mast was standing straight on both tacks, something somebody had told me how to do in Horta. It worked, and by the time I had finished, my initial nervousness at sailing the boat alone was gone. I began really to enjoy myself; it was a wonderful feeling of self-sufficiency.

Pico began to recede into the distance as we (I always thought of Harp and me as “we”) approached Graciosa. As night fell, I navigated from bearings on the many lights dotted about the island. We pointed toward the western end of Graciosa, taking a different route from the passage out, and I rested fitfully, coming up often to check my bearings. I would not really feel comfortable until we had cleared Graciosa and were in the open sea with no rocks to pile up on.

Our first full day out was sunny and clear, lovely sailing, but with the wind still on the nose and dropping. Late in the afternoon I sighted a ship and got my KVHF flags up in a hurry, something I was getting good at. She was the Polish merchant ship General Madalinski, and I got the usual warm reception from the radio operator, who agreed to send telegrams to the States and Ireland for me. The captain gave me a position which closely corresponded with my own navigation, a great relief, since that day I had done my very first noon position on my own. I spent the time reading and listening to the American Forces radio station at Lajes Field in the Azores, which was much like listening to a small-town American radio station. The news was particularly nice to hear, since I hadn’t read a newspaper or listened to the radio for more than two weeks.

I got my first good night’s sleep and awoke to find us nearly becalmed. I set the drifter and had to work all day at keeping the boat moving in the light airs. At my next noon sight we had covered only thirty-five miles, a discouraging figure, but shortly after lunch the wind swung around behind us and I was able to set the Betsy Ross floater spinnaker. The boat’s speed increased immediately from two to three and a half knots, more when the wind puffed a bit. Fred steered perfectly, the sun shone, and I had the best sailing I had ever experienced, lying naked on the deck with a glass of wine and soaking up the sun while Harp took care of herself. This was a totally sybaritic experience and was the time when I most wished I had someone to share the trip with. Randiness began to set in.

In the afternoon I contacted a Russian merchant ship, the Alexander something-or-other, and got the first cool reception in my experience with other ships at sea. They gave me a position and weather report but they didn’t seem too happy about it and, since I had sent telegrams the day before, I didn’t press them to pass on messages. They divulged that they were en route from Leningrad to Cuba and then signed off.

I went to sleep with the floater still up and woke at midnight to find that the wind had risen and the spinnaker had torn along the starboard leech. When I went to get the sail down, the deck lights shorted again and I had to do it in the dark. I was very sad about the spinnaker, since it had become my favorite sail. It was like seeing a good friend with a broken leg, and I folded it into its bag to await the ministrations of John McWilliam in Crosshaven.

Now I had day after day of free sailing. On the eighth I was making six to seven knots in ten to twelve knots of following wind when a very embarrassing thing happened — or, at least, it would have been embarrassing if there had been anybody there to see it. I got a bad spinnaker wrap; my Irish tricolor all-rounder wrapped around the forestay in the middle, while remaining full of wind at the top and bottom, giving the effect of an overengineered brassiere sticking out in front of the boat. I tried everything I could think of to free the sail, but it refused to unwrap and it began to look as if I would have to climb the mast to unwrap it from the top. It was mid-afternoon and I decided that since we were still making a good speed I would leave things as they were until it began to get dark. If the spinnaker hadn’t unwrapped itself by then, and I fervently hoped it would, then I would go up the mast and free it. In the meantime, a beer seemed a good idea. After all, I was in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and there was nobody there to witness my humiliation. Why not relax?

Five minutes later a Dutch naval vessel, HMS Zuiderkruis, turned up and, after making radio contact, the operator’s first words were, “Can we assist you in clearing your spinnaker?” I said I could handle it, and after getting a position and a weather report and ascertaining that they had picked me up on radar at a distance of five miles, I went on deck, shamed into climbing the mast. I waved goodbye to the ship and started up. After ten minutes of swearing and struggling with the bloody thing, it finally came unwrapped, and as the big sail filled I was startled to hear a loud cheer. I swung around to look behind me and found the ship stopped, her entire crew hanging over the rail, applauding. She gave a loud hoot on her horn and was on her way again. So much for privacy in single-handed sailing.

In the middle of that night I got a fine scare. I was sleeping like a stone when there came a loud thumping on deck. Pirates? I charged up the companionway ladder to find nothing. Then, as I was about to chalk the sound up to a nightmare and go below, the thumping started again. A small, needle-nosed fish had jumped into the cockpit and was thrashing about the floor. I caught him and returned him to the sea. I don’t know if I really rescued him, for at that moment a pair of dolphins appeared and started into the phosphorescent torpedo act again, and he could have made a midnight snack for one of them. I watched, still fascinated, until they departed, then crawled back into my bunk.

I settled into a deep contentment. I was comfortable, well fed, and doing what I had been planning for months. The nearest problem was eight hundred or so miles away, and I was enjoying my solitude and self-sufficiency. The only fly in the soup was that Harp had never stopped taking water, and as time wore on she took more and more. There was so much that it was impossible to isolate and tell where it was coming from.

The electric bilge pump had packed up again and, since the intake for the main pump was too large to collect water in the shallow bilges unless the boat had three or four inches of water inside her, the only way to bail was with a sponge and a bucket, and it wasn’t much fun. By now I was taking out about twelve gallons of water four times a day, and anything that touched the floor got soaked immediately.

I continued north, and the barometer began to drop. When it went down six millibars in four hours I knew I was in for a blow, and I reefed before dark even though the wind had not yet risen; I had no wish to have to reef in the middle of the night with the deck lights not working. By morning we were in our first full gale ever. Fortunately, the wind was still behind us and we were able to maintain our course while running before it with a double-reefed main and the genoa reefed to storm jib size. We were making excellent time.

I settled into a heavy weather routine. This consisted mostly of staying in my bunk, sleeping or reading, apart from a periodic look around the horizon for shipping and a check of the sails and decks to make sure nothing was chafing or coming adrift. And bailing. As the weather deteriorated, the leaking got worse. I began to become accustomed to living in my seaboots, with two inches of water slopping about the cabin. There were two exterior forces as well which made things less comfortable. One was the mini-broaches. When a boat “broaches to” when running before the wind, she suddenly veers and tries to point into the wind, ending up beam-on to the seas and the wind. This can be very dangerous, and Harp never quite performed the maneuver. What she did do was begin to broach, then correct. Fred, like any self-steering gear, could not anticipate the action of a following wave the way a helmsman can. He could not correct the boat’s direction to allow for a wave which was about to change it. Rather, he would have to wait until he felt the yacht beginning to change direction, then correct. This resulted in a sort of “mini-broach,” in which the yacht would start to veer abeam to the wind, then resume her proper course. The effect on the occupant of the boat and the contents was much like that on the occupants of a car which, traveling at, say, forty miles an hour, suddenly and sharply swerves to avoid another car backing out of a driveway, then continues down the street. If I were standing, cooking, for instance, when the mini-broach occurred to port, I would be tossed across the cabin to land on (or under) the chart table. This is not as much fun as it sounds.

The gale moderated after half a day, but we were left with a large, old sea running. Still, we had about twenty-four hours of relative quiet, with winds of no more than about twenty-five knots, and this seemed something of a rest. The most tiring part was the constant bailing.

Then the barometer, after rising a bit, began to fall again. In the first gale it had bottomed at about 1,014 millibars. It was there again when I went to bed on the night after the gale. During the night I dreamed, first, that I was being tossed around in a rubber dinghy. I think this came from being bounced in my bunk between the foam-rubber cushions of the settee back on one side and the lee cloth on the other. Toward morning I began to dream that I was lying on a beach with the sea lapping against the sand a few inches away. When I woke there was, instead, about four inches of water lapping around the inside of the cabin. Thinking for a couple of minutes that the boat was sinking, I began bailing. There is a saying that there is no more effective bilge pump than a frightened man with a bucket. This, I can say from personal experience, is true. Finally, when I had scooped up as much water as possible with the bucket and had to resort once again to the sponge, I realized that the boat was not sinking, that she had merely begun to take more water. During the next three days she took more than three hundred gallons.

When I had recovered enough from my fright to look around me, I found that the barometer had plunged to 1,008 during the night and that there was forty knots of wind blowing outside. While bailing, I had hardly noticed the motion of the boat. Now I did. I could hardly fail to notice it because suddenly the boat committed one of her finest mini-broaches; I was lifted off my feet, flung across the cabin from the chart table, and deposited squarely on top of the cooker. By the time I had disentangled myself from the stainless-steel fiddles on top there was the distinct smell of gas in the cabin. I quickly got into the cockpit locker and turned off the gas supply at the bottle. From that time, when I wanted to cook, I had to go into the cockpit, turn on the bottle, then dash into the cabin and light the cooker before enough gas collected to cause an explosion. Once the flame was burning it seemed to consume any excess gas from leaks, but I used the cooker as little as possible from then on. What really cut back my use of the cooker was the fire.

I had gone through my cockpit/cabin drill, but the disposable cigarette lighter was damp and slow to light. When I finally got a spark and a flame the whole cooker, both burners and the grill, burst into massive flame. My reaction still astonishes me. There was a fire blanket near my right hand and a fire extinguisher at my left knee; either would have quickly extinguished the fire. But instead of using one of these, I simply blew. The fire went out like the last candle on a birthday cake. I was very, very careful with the cooker after that.

Now, with so much wind blowing, the sea around me became an even more fascinating place. It wasn’t very cold and rain was spasmodic, so I would sit in the watch seat in the companionway and watch the gale. Fortunately, the wind had risen slowly and without changing direction radically, so the seas, though large, were regular and from the same direction. Using the mast as a guide, I reckoned the waves were a bit over twenty feet in height, and I watched, transfixed, as Harp rose to meet each one. Just when it seemed that a giant sea would overtake us and fall on top of the boat, the yacht would rise to meet it, and the wave would pass harmlessly under us. As the wind rose even more there seemed to be waves breaking everywhere, but never one immediately behind us. When that happens, when a yacht is “pooped,” an incredible weight of water falls onto the boat, serious damage can be done and gear washed away. If the main hatch has been left open the cabin can fill with water and the boat founder.

Harp surfed down the big waves, often exceeding her theoretical hull speed of about eight knots. I have one vivid memory of sitting in the watch seat, watching the instrument dials; the yacht suddenly accelerated to nine knots, surfing down a wave, and the wind-speed indicator was registering a steady forty-five knots with the wind dead astern. This meant a true wind speed of fifty-five knots, or more than sixty miles an hour. The noise and spray were incredible, but knowing that I had a good boat under me, it was not frightening but exhilarating.

Now my spare navigation lights failed. On reaching Horta I had found that the masthead light had simply disappeared, blown away on the passage out. Now, with the spares gone, too, I was reduced to one small, battery-operated white light, which I taped to a stanchion so that it could be seen all round. In a lull, when I started to unreef the genoa a bit, the Dynafurl parted again, the top half of the top swivel staying up the mast with the halyard and the bottom half sliding down the Twinstay with the sail. As long as the wind was behind us this did not pose much of a problem, since we could still sail very fast under the double-reefed main only, so I lashed the sail to the deck along with the number-one genoa and sailed on. I would have to climb the mast and retrieve the top half of the swivel before I could set a headsail again. Quite apart from the weakness in the Dynafurl, which would have to be redesigned, this meant that there was a gap in my sail plan. The smallest sail I had aboard was the number-two reefing genoa, which meant that if the Dynafurl failed in heavy weather I needed a smaller sail to set until I could repair it. I would have a lot of rethinking to do when I reached Ireland, but then, that was what the qualifying cruise was for — to expose weaknesses in the boat and her systems. On that basis my cruise from the Azores was already an outstanding success.

The storm continued for nearly three days, with the wind only occasionally dropping to gale force. My reaction to being tossed about was, surprisingly, not fear but anger. I found it difficult to sleep, because when the boat mini-broached and woke me up my anger at being awakened made it difficult for me to go back to sleep. This cut into my reserves of strength, and the constant bailing kept me tired, but I became really exhausted only once.

At dusk on the thirteenth, I went into the cockpit to change the battery for the navigation light and discovered to my horror that both the number-one and — two genoas were dragging in the water, attached to the boat by only a shackle at their tacks. If I lost those sails, or even if they were badly torn, I would have no headsail to set and would be at the mercy of the wind, unable to sail in any direction but downwind. I was afraid to stop the boat and let her lie ahull, abeam to the seas, so I left her on her course, got into a safety harness, clipped onto a jackstay, and crawled forward to the foredeck, where I could reach the overboard sails.

With the additional drag from the two big sails, the boat had slowed to about four knots and was heeled more sharply. Large amounts of seawater were washing over me, and when I began to try to pull the sails aboard I discovered that they seemed hopelessly entangled in the lines, now broken, which had been laced through the guardrails to keep the sails on deck. Also the drag on the sails was incredible. It was like trying to haul in nets full of fish, single-handed.

As if all that wasn’t enough, I began to hallucinate. I had read about the hallucinations of single-handed sailors. Joshua Slocum believed he had been assisted by a Portuguese seaman from another era, who appeared when he needed help. Others have written of shouts from on deck when something had gone wrong. Still others have seen and talked with friends or relatives. My hallucination was somewhat more mundane. The telephone rang.

Of course, there was no telephone on Golden Harp, but that did not stop it from ringing. What’s more, it was a French telephone, like the instrument in a cheap Paris hotel room. It rang and rang. It was a bit like being in the bath, hearing the phone ring and being unable to answer it. My thought process went: Dammit, there’s the phone, must answer it; no, can’t answer it, got to get these sails aboard again; wait a minute, stupid, there is no telephone... There’s the phone, must answer it... It went on and on as I struggled with the sails, the same thought pattern turning over and over in my head; I could no more stop it than I could stop the phone from ringing.

It took me more than an hour to haul the sails aboard again and secure them, the whole of the time being drenched, often with my feet dragging in the water as I tried to find a position where I could get a better grip and more purchase on the dragging canvas. Twice I almost lost a seaboot, rescuing it just as it was being washed from my foot. Finally, I had both sails aboard on the foredeck, lying spread-eagle on top of them to keep them from going again. Foot by foot I slid their bulk back toward the cockpit, taking infinite pains to see that no part of them slipped overboard again, because now they were attached to nothing except me. I made the cockpit, pushed the sails in ahead of me, then collapsed on top of them. At last, I thought, I can answer the telephone. It stopped ringing, just as it always does when you’ve struggled out of the bath and, clutching a towel about you, raced through the house, leaving a trail of wet footprints. Later, when I told a friend about this, she said, “Suppose it hadn’t stopped ringing.” That is a terrifying thought.

I lay in the cockpit for half an hour, not even budging when another squall hit. After all, Harp was steering herself, and I couldn’t get any wetter. I think that if anything else had gone wrong at that moment I would have been unable to do anything about it. It is that degree of helpless exhaustion which is so dangerous to the single-hander. Sometimes, if you can’t cope you can’t live. It’s as simple as that.

Soon after this delightful evening the storm began to abate and the wind veer. By morning the wind was ahead of the beam, still blowing about thirty knots. We were close reaching under double-reefed main only and our speed was down to two knots. Without a headsail we were going to make little progress, and if the wind continued to veer we would end up pointing at France instead of Ireland. There was nothing to do but go up the mast, retrieve the halyard, fix the Dynafurl, and get a headsail up. I made my first attempt almost immediately; I got about two steps up the mast, a forty-knot squall hit, and I was quickly down and into the cabin again, very chastened.

Next day, Sunday, I tried again. The wind had dropped further, but there was still a big sea running and, the wind having veered, it was now coming from two directions. I got as far as the crosstrees this time before I chickened out and retreated to wait for the seas to go down. Finally, late Monday afternoon, I made one last assault on the mast. I ran the boat off to steady her as much as possible, got into a harness, and started laboriously up the stick, clipping one of the two stainless-steel carbine hooks onto a higher step before unclipping the lower one. That way if I slipped I would always be hooked onto something, although I didn’t relish the thought of swinging around like a pendulum from a rope clipped to a mast step. I stopped at the crosstrees to rest my hands, which were already very tired from gripping the steps so tightly, then continued. Step, hook to next step, unhook from lower step, step again. It went that way for all of the mast’s thirty-eight-foot height, until finally I was clinging desperately to the top, both arms wrapped in a bear hug around the mast. It was necessary to hold on very tightly still, for the boat was rolling in the confused seas, and the mast was cutting an arc of fifteen to twenty feet at the top. Had I lost my grip there would have been a kind of slingshot effect, and I would have been catapulted off the mast into the sea. I stuck an arm through a mast step so that I would have a free hand, praying that the boat would not do a snap roll and break it at the shoulder, and started to haul down on the halyard.

The whole of the time I was at the top of the mast I thought about two things to the exclusion of everything else. The first was Brian Cooke falling onto the decks of Triple Arrow and breaking his back; the second was a teenager jumping from the yardarm of a tall training ship that summer, striking the water and dying instantly from the impact. That was all I could think about.

When I had finally inched my way back down the mast I sat on the deck for fifteen minutes until I could make a fist again, then repaired the Dynafurl and hoisted a foresail. I was nearly as tired as I had been after rescuing the sails. And while I had been doing that, other things had been going wrong. I discovered that when falling off a wave, Harp had jammed the log impeller up into the hull, freezing the mileage recorder. This was easily put right, but I had no idea when it had happened, and not knowing what distance I had covered screwed up my dead reckoning mightily. I hadn’t had a firm position fix for several days, because there had been so little sun, and with my dead reckoning out, I was very unsure of my position and still not close enough to land to use radio direction finding.

Then the engine refused to switch off. I had been charging batteries, and the lever which controlled the accelerator had jammed, corroded by seawater that had reached the engine through the cockpit floor, which was almost impossible to seal properly because of the way it was constructed. No amount of easing oil or blows with spanners and winch handles would free the lever, so now the only way to stop the engine was to turn off the fuel cocks and let it run out of fuel. Then, before starting again, the fuel system had to be bled to get out the air bubbles in the fuel lines.

Next, my last disposable lighter refused to work, and, having no matches on board, I had no way to light the cooker. This meant no hot food, no hot coffee, no hot anything, and I was not looking forward to eating cold tinned food.

Finally, the main alternator failed, but at least I was able to plug in the spare. It would charge only one battery at a time, though, so I had to switch leads to charge both batteries, and I could not run the engine and use the other electrics at the same time. Bloody nuisance it turned out to be, too.

By Tuesday I was over the continental shelf and had a rough RDF position, but I was anxious to contact a ship for a tighter fix. Once, when I had been lying on the foredeck repairing the wiring to the forward navigation light, I saw first one, then four ships, but the engine was running at the time to charge batteries and I couldn’t use the VHF. In the early hours of Tuesday morning I spotted a brightly lit fishing boat nearby and began signaling KVHF. He apparently didn’t read Morse, so he came over for a closer look. He was soon well within shouting distance, but my electric loud-hailer chose this moment to malfunction, so I was reduced to shouting “VHF — Radio” as he circled and came up about fifteen yards off my starboard quarter, running alongside and slightly behind us. It was a huge steel trawler, a hundred feet or so in length, and she was wearing a German or Dutch name that I could never quite read. I shouted repeatedly, but there was lots of shrugging and shaking of heads by everybody on deck.

Suddenly, the helmsman put his helm over all the way to port — I could see him in the wheelhouse spinning the wheel — and started across my stern without reducing speed in the least. I froze in the cockpit as the enormous trawler came toward us — I was actually looking up at her bows — and waited for the crash. The thought raced through my mind that if I went below to get a life jacket I would be trapped there when the collision occurred, and that there was no time to launch the life raft. So I stood, clutching a winch and bracing myself for the blow. He missed Harp’s stern by less than ten feet, and took more than ten years off my life. I turned the signaling torch on myself and waved him away. I resolved never again to ask a fisherman for help or advice unless I was really in a bad way.

I got little sleep that night, keeping a watch for shipping, then at dawn I saw a strange shape sticking up over the horizon. My binoculars had fogged up from being wet, so I couldn’t identify it, but I thought it must be an uncharted oil rig, and since it seemed to be receding I went below to make a cup of coffee. I had begun hearing jets passing overhead now and figured I must be on the London — Cork air route. A few minutes later I heard a helicopter, a very loud helicopter, and went on deck to find a U.S. Navy chopper hovering about a hundred feet directly above the boat. I looked astern and there was the largest warship in the world, the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier more than a thousand feet long and with a crew of five thousand. I knew about her from an interview I had heard on the BBC with one of her officers. She had been on a courtesy visit to England and she was now apparently trying to find out what the hell a small yacht was doing sailing about with no one at the helm. I waved at the chopper crew and they went away, apparently satisfied that there was someone on board. Again, the engine was running and I couldn’t call her up on VHF.

Tuesday passed quietly with light weather and occasional rain, but toward evening the wind freshened and I was running at a good clip, on course for Crosshaven, I hoped. I was still a bit shaky on my position, getting good bearings from Old Head of Kinsale and Galley Head, but unreliable ones from Round Island, in the Scillies. I began to plan a landfall about eight-thirty the following morning at Roberts Head, just outside Cork Harbor.

I stayed up all night, waiting for Old Head light to appear, hoping it would be in the right place. To make matters worse, my log had begun to overread, destroying my dead reckoning. It began to drizzle heavily and I worried about visibility as I approached the Irish coast. About four a.m. I sighted the loom of Old Head light. I got a quick bearing on it and settled down for the light itself to appear. Roche’s Point light at the entrance to Cork Harbor would appear, eventually, too.

Then the visibility closed in completely. The drizzle obliterated everything, and although I kept a vigil I was never able to raise either light. Dawn came in the most peculiar way. It was not possible even to tell where the sun was rising. Everything just changed from black to ever lightening shades of gray until it was full daylight. All I could see was fog. There was not even a bird about to give me some idea of how far I could see. The terrible thing about fog is that it makes it impossible to judge distance.

I sat in the watch seat with the depth sounder in my hands, watching the water get shallower and shallower. I expected an eight-thirty landfall and the soundings seemed to confirm this. I felt pretty sure that I would sight land somewhere between Kinsale and Cork, a distance of about fourteen miles, but then I could also make my landfall east of Cork. I could only point the boat at where I thought Roberts Head might be and hope for the best.

The sounder read forty fathoms, then twenty, then fifteen, then twelve. Eight-thirty came and went. Still no land. Still no visibility. Then I heard a noise like the engines of a ship. Oh, God, I thought, as if making a landfall in no visibility weren’t enough, I’ve got to dodge a ship or fishing boat. I doubled my efforts to see through the fog. All I could see was a white line on the water just ahead of us. A streak of detergent foam washed out of some river, I thought. Then, less than two hundred yards dead ahead, a large, green cliff appeared out of the fog. The noise had been the sea pounding against it. The white line had been the surf. I had found Ireland; now I had to find Crosshaven.

I jibed very quickly indeed and sailed east along the coast, keeping it barely in sight. Since I wasn’t certain where I was, I didn’t want to run onto rocks on one part of the coast, thinking I was on another part. The visibility cleared slightly and I saw a buoy, Daunt Rock buoy. After a week without a firm fix and in two hundred yards of visibility, I had found Roberts Head on the nose, and twelve minutes late. I was giddy with excitement.

I contacted Cork Harbor radio and asked them to have customs meet me at the Royal Cork and to ring Nick at the cottage and ask him to help me get into Drake’s Pool and pick up Harp’s mooring. I sailed along into the entrance to Cork Harbor, still in poor visibility, and picked up Ringabella Bay and Ringabella House on its shore. The hammerheaded water tower on the hill appeared. It was not until I was abeam of Roche’s Point that the fog lifted enough for me to see the lighthouse.

As I began to tidy up the yacht and get ready to take the sails down I looked up to see a Mirror dinghy sailing past me out of the harbor. Her skipper was single-handed. I thought, where the hell is he going, single-handed, on a day like this? And then, I wonder if he knows what he may be getting himself into?

I motored up the river into Crosshaven and picked up a mooring in front of the Royal Cork Yacht Club. The place was deserted, apart from a steward and the customs men, who were there to meet me. As the customs men were going ashore, Nick appeared, roaring down the river in his rubber dinghy, standing up and waving both hands. He came aboard and we motored up to Drake’s Pool and picked up Harp’s mooring. Fred greeted us in a frenzy as we stepped ashore in front of the cottage, and I wondered, How many people can sail thirteen hundred miles and never touch land until their front doorstep? I turned and looked at the yacht swinging peacefully at her moorings.

Golden Harp was home.

19 Back home

Everything seemed very peculiar at home in Ireland. I had the usual problem of stopping the earth from swaying, of course, and the rooms of Drake’s Pool Cottage seemed vast after the confines of Harp’s cabin, which had seemed so roomy at sea. I staggered about the cottage, babbling incessantly to Nick and Heather. I could not stop talking. We had dinner at a local restaurant. The thing I had missed second most on the passage was food cooked by somebody else, served on a white tablecloth, with cloth napkins. I talked all through dinner and straight through till bedtime. By the time I crawled between my first clean sheets and soft bed in thirteen days I was hoarse from talking.

The autumn was a busy time, and the boat was my first priority. The broken log was returned to Brookes & Gatehouse for servicing; Hydromarine sent a man down to recondition the engine; Lucas replaced both alternators and the splitting diode, all of which had been corroded into uselessness by seawater entering the engine bay through the cockpit floor; Derek Holland, a neighbor at Coolmore and a former ship’s engineer, rewired the whole boat; Nick fitted my ingenious little heater; and the cooker, which hadn’t liked it when I had been thrown on top of it, was replaced. I raced the boat in a Sunday event in the harbor, crewed by a tribe of local Lydens, and she took twenty gallons of water in three hours, so Harold Cudmore and I packed the keelbolts with lifecaulk and hemp and retightened them, and this greatly reduced the water she was taking, though it did not cure the condition.

John McWilliam and I flew to the Southampton Boat Show and I got a lot done there: Marinaspec kindly replaced the blown-away masthead light, explaining that there had been a faulty weld on a few lamps and they had not been able to track me down; I met Jim Nolan of Barlow Winches, who agreed to loan me a pair of big self-tailing winches and a larger halyard winch; and I had a talk with Camper & Nicholsons about bringing Harp to England for repairs. On the flight back we had to divert to Shannon, as Cork Airport was closing, and the following morning we had a beautiful, low-level flight over the green Irish countryside, stopping at two small airfields along the way, one of them the front lawn of Kilbritain Castle, near Kinsale.

Before leaving Horta I had asked Luis, commodore of the Club Naval, to write to the Royal Western, confirming that I had left Horta alone; on arriving in Crosshaven, Harry Deane, secretary of the Royal Cork, had also written to them, confirming my single-handed arrival. I had then, as the rules required, submitted a list of my noon positions between Horta and Crosshaven, and on September 29 I received a letter from Lloyd Foster saying that I had been accepted for the race pending only the final inspection of Golden Harp in Plymouth the week before the race. This was a monumental landmark for me. I felt that I had now accomplished a great part of what I had set out to do: I had learned to sail, got experience on a wide range of boats, completed one navigation course and half of another, making up in practical experience what I had lost in classroom instruction; I had planned and had the yacht built, equipped her, sailed her fourteen hundred miles with Bill King and thirteen hundred single-handed; I had experienced an enormous variety of conditions, and both the boat and I had stood up to them. All that was left to do before the race was to overhaul the boat completely and make the refinements I had already worked out in my head.

The autumn slipped by in the most pleasant sort of way. David and Ann Walsh from Runnin’ Scared came over for a weekend sail to Kinsale, followed closely by Ann, who came for several days.

Harold Cudmore, Ann, and I sailed down the south coast of Ireland, stopping for the night and a good dinner in Kinsale, then proceeding to the lovely little village of Castletownsend, where we were joined by Philip McCauliffe for a short passage on to Baltimore. We ate well, slept well, and spent many pleasant hours in the West Cork pubs. After a day in Baltimore the weather went to hell and showed no signs of clearing up, so we got a lift back to Cork and left Harp on a mooring there for collection later.

While awaiting Harp’s return, Ron Holland, John McWilliam, and I appeared on the Irish version of the TV quiz show To Tell the Truth, in Dublin. We all claimed to be me, and a panel had to figure out who was lying. We must have been pretty good liars, because only one of the four panelists guessed correctly. Highlight of the program came when a panelist asked Ron what a centerboard was. “Something that keeps a boat from sailing sideways,” Ron answered. The panelist turned to McWilliam. “And what do you have if you don’t have a centerboard?” she asked, pouncing on him for an answer. “A boat that sails sideways,” replied John. We had a great time.

I had hoped that the television appearance might help pave the way toward finding a sponsor for the race, something that had eluded me so far. (There had been a regretful letter from Quinnsworth on my return from Horta, saying that they had decided they could not participate.) But the recession of 1974–75 had hit Irish businesses hard and advertising budgets, never very big in Ireland, were at an all-time low.

Ron, his design business expanding rapidly, bought a farmhouse across the river from the Royal Cork, made plans to renovate a pigsty and turn it into a design office, and hired an assistant. O.H. Rogers, a young man from Florida, had been Ron’s first client when he struck out on his own, the resulting boat being called Cherry Bomb. Now, after campaigning for a couple of seasons, O.H. was apprenticing himself to Ron, and he would turn out to be a big help to me in preparing Harp for the race.

On November 20, O.H. and I motored Harp up the harbor and delivered her into the hands of Southcoast Boatyard for her “immediate” repairs. On December 1 I left for my home in Georgia, to spend the Christmas holidays there. I stopped by the yard to see how work was progressing. I had a talk with them about it, and they promised to be well along with her when I returned in January.

I spent five weeks in the United States, working on the early chapters of this book, visiting friends at home in Manchester and in Atlanta, looking into the family business, a clothing business rapidly becoming a department store which needed further expanding, and just relaxing. Only one event occurred that might have had a bearing on my entry in the OSTAR.

My last week at home I did something to my back which made it very sore — a muscle strain, I figured. Then, on the day of my departure for Ireland, then London and the boat show, I was bending over the sink shaving when something down low snapped, and I was suddenly in excruciating pain. I tried to delay my departure for a day, but the only flight I could get was the one I was already booked on, so, walking in a rather peculiar way, I arrived at Atlanta Airport, struggled up to the Delta Airlines ticket counter, and said in a strangled voice, “Do you think you could get me a wheelchair, please?” The startled girl behind the counter picked up a telephone, spoke a few words, and within seconds a man with a wheelchair materialized at my elbow. My ticket was processed instantly, the gross overweight of my luggage was overlooked, and it was shipped straight through to Shannon Airport against all regulations, since I was stopping in New York.

Moments later, I was being wheeled at a rapid clip down the two and a half miles of corridor to my departure gate (it is always two and a half miles to my departure gate), sailing through the security search with hardly a pause, the wind made by our swift pace cooling our passage every step of the way. It occurred to me that I had inadvertently discovered a wonderful new way to travel in airports. I recommend it.

I was put on the plane before the other passengers, made comfortable, given a quick glass of water with which to down the large painkilling pill I was waving about, and given the first drink when the bar opened. At Kennedy Airport, New York, I was met by another wheelchair, my New York — routed luggage appeared in record time, and I was deposited in a taxi without my feet ever touching the ground. I believe I was passed from person to person so quickly because each of them was afraid I would die while in his hands.

After a two-day visit with my old friend Carol Nelson (remember our experience with the Mini and the incoming tide?), this entire performance was repeated in the Aer Lingus terminal at Kennedy, at Shannon Airport in Ireland, and, eventually, at Heathrow in London. This, I thought, is the only way to go.

I hobbled through the London Boat Show, stoned out of my mind on painkillers (all the back doctors in London had flu or were out to lunch, or something — it was a week before I could persuade one to see me), tying up loose ends as best I could. I ordered an excellent new suit of oilskins from Morgan of Cowes, the yachting tailors, and four Javlin Warm Suits, in case I decided to take the northern route in the OSTAR. I also bought an excellent signaling torch, and Camper measured the standard Golden Shamrock at the show in order to make a much-needed sprayhood for Harp. I also had a long lunch with Tim Stearn of Stearn Sailing Systems to talk over modifications to the Dynafurl, and he promised to supply me with a newly designed unit which would solve all my problems.

When I finally got to see a back specialist, he ushered me into a large gilt office; poked here and lifted there, ignoring my screams; then laid me on an altar-like slab in the middle of the room, stuck a needle into my backbone, and lubricated my spine as if it were the crankshaft of a Fiat 128. This hurt only slightly more than my original back problem. I left his office, poorer by £25, clutching an orthopedic back cushion and a prescription for more painkillers.

Fortunately, my back did not hurt when I lay down, which meant I could sleep well, or when I was sitting, which meant I could eat well.

Ann and I toured our favorite restaurants, and I enjoyed the occasional dinner with other old friends. Angela Green of The Observer, whom I had met at the start of the Azores and Back Race in Falmouth the summer before, joined me for lunch one day and brought me up to date on the Race. At the close of entries on December 31, 1975, there had been 197 entries received, and all hell was breaking loose in the yachting press. Disaster at the start was being predicted from all sides, and there was a lot of bitching about the acceptance of Alain Colas’s huge 236-foot yacht, Club Méditerranée.

I, for one, was delighted to have the big boat in the race, since it stimulated so much discussion, although I was not going to be sailing across her bows at the start, screaming, “Starboard.”

20 Reconnoitre

In early March I made a reconnaissance trip to Plymouth and managed to combine business with pleasure. I had never been to Plymouth and I was anxious to have an advance look at the facilities well ahead of the race. Ann joined me for the trip. First, we visited the Royal Western Yacht Club of England, which would be organizing and running the race, and as we walked down the steps to the waterside setting of this famous club, we were greeted with a bit of drama.

A bright red trimaran was in a lot of trouble. He had apparently tried to sail away from a club mooring, had got into irons and drifted dangerously close to the rocky shoreline and to the sea wall in front of the club. He had flung out an anchor, which was holding his bows off, then somebody from the club had thrown him a stern line. That somebody turned out to be Lloyd Foster, secretary of the Royal Western and every OSTAR aspirant’s main contact with the race committee. Lloyd turned out to be a calm, boyish-looking fellow, in spite of long naval service going back to navigator’s duties on a World War II destroyer. He settled Ann in the drawing room with a magazine and sat me down in his office. I had a dozen questions and he had all the answers: yes, there was a good yard where I could make advance arrangements for any last-minute repairs to Harp; yes, there would be a shipping company at Millbay Docks to collect any extra gear from competitors and send it ahead to Newport; no, we could not use our engines at the start, no matter how many boats entered; yes, there would be plenty of space for 197 boats in Millbay Docks, etc., etc., etc.

We chatted for an hour or so, and I was relieved to discover that the committee was unperturbed by all the criticism being leveled at the race. The controversy centered on the number of boats and the fact that a single-hander cannot keep a lookout at all times, which, according to the Race’s detractors, made single-handing unseamanlike. What the detractors preferred to overlook was the fact that the start would be postponed if there were fog or extreme weather, and that every entrant knew that he would have to stay awake for the first two days of the race until he was across the continental shelf and out of the fishing fleets.

The editorials and letters to the editors seemed to imply that the full burden of avoiding collisions rested on the single-hander, and that merchant ships and fishermen were never at fault in these circumstances. On the passage from Horta to Crosshaven I had once, on a bright sunny day, come on deck to find a large merchant vessel dead ahead of me on a reciprocal course. I had borne away to avoid a collision, and as the big ship sailed past me I never saw a soul on her decks or bridge. This is not an unusual situation at sea, and I believe that if the standard of watch maintained on most yachts, even single-handers, were maintained by merchant seamen and fishermen, there would be few, if any, collisions at sea.

Lloyd seemed to feel that no matter what the committee decided, they would be criticized, so they would simply press on, organizing the race the way they felt it should be done.

We left the Royal Western and had a look at the place where all the OSTAR yachts would congregate in late May. Millbay Docks is a large, concrete tidal basin with locks which open an hour before every high tide and close an hour afterward. It is surrounded by businesses and warehouses, most of which have something to do with shipping or ships and, apart from its size, is not a very impressive place. It is doubtful if the place has ever been drained and cleaned, and there is a story that once, when someone fell into the water, he was, after having his stomach pumped out, detained for forty-eight hours in a hospital for observation. I do not doubt it.

We drove over to the Mayflower Marina and were given a tour of the facilities there, and I booked Harp in for the week prior to the deadline for being in Millbay Docks. Finally, we visited Alec Blagdon’s boatyard, and I made arrangements for a haulout in case it was necessary before the race. Alec Blagdon is a kindly man with a West Country accent, and we shared mutual friends in Cork. I felt he would be very helpful if I should need it.

I had hoped to take Ann sailing, but on our return to Cork found that the yard still had not finished with Harp. A couple of young American students turned up, sent along by Bill King, and I put them to work rubbing and antifouling the yacht’s hull. Eventually, we got her in the water. At last she seemed right. I was certain that a lot of detail would still need work, but she was basically watertight and sound. Her keel had been removed, a reinforced glass-fiber “shoe” inserted between the keel and the hull, and the keelbolts glassed in. This stopped the movement of the keel which had loosened the bolts and allowed water to come into the boat. The Brookes & Gatehouse log hull fitting had been replaced, the first one having been incorrectly installed; lockers had had floors glassed into them to keep bilge water from entering; the port pilot berth had been enclosed to make a clothing locker — now the heater radiator would warm two dry lockers as well as the boat; a beam had been glassed under the deck to reinforce the inner forestay deck fitting; a padeye had been fitted to the foredeck and bolted to a bulkhead — I could now set a small storm jib flying without taking down the headsail, just roller-reefing it; the interior of the cabin had been relined with foam-backed vinyl; the windows had been removed, resealed, and bolted on; a new Sestrel Porthole compass had been fitted, which could be read both from the cockpit and from the cabin; all the deck blocks had been removed, resealed, and refitted; the decks had been given a new and better nonslip finish; and a dozen other small refinements had been made.

She was mine again. Mine. I had six weeks to get her ready for a May 15th departure for Plymouth. Harry McMahon and I would take a leisurely week to sail her there, the last unhurried time I would have aboard her. I looked forward to it eagerly.

21 A last Irish Spring and final preparations

That there was much more work to be done on the boat became clear the first time I sailed her. Some friends and I set off for a weekend cruise to Kinsale, and as we were sailing out of Cork Harbor one of the girls asked for a sponge and bucket to do some bailing. Thinking that a little water had been left in the bilges I handed down the bucket, but a couple of minutes later, as Harp heeled in a gust, there came a shout from below that water was pouring into the boat. I jumped down the companionway ladder to find a heavy stream of water entering the cabin from the engine bay. I got the ladder and engine bulkhead off and found a bare-ended hose pouring water into the boat at the rate of about twenty gallons a minute. Fortunately, a wine cork was the perfect size to plug the hose, and with a jubilee clip tightened around the whole thing, it seemed watertight. But we canceled the cruise to Kinsale and settled for a sail around Cork Harbor, uncertain what other defects we might find.

Harold Cudmore and I planned to sail up to Galway, to arrive in time for the West of Ireland Boat and Leisure Show, now a fixture of the Galway Bay Sailing Club. O.H. and I sailed the boat as far as Kinsale, from where Harold and I would depart for the long cruise down the southwest coast, then around the corner and up the west coast to Galway, but we began to get bad weather forecasts for the west coast and I decided to drive. We left the boat on a mooring at Kinsale, for collection later. A couple of days afterward I was awakened at eight in the morning by the ringing of the telephone. (After six months of clawing my way through the Irish Civil Service, I had finally got a phone by appealing to a politician friend, who wrote one letter and did the trick.) A voice asked if I was the owner of Golden Harp. I was. She had broken her mooring and was aground on the opposite bank of the river.

I dressed and made the fourteen miles to Kinsale in record time, my heart in my mouth and pictures running through my mind of Harp lying on her topsides, her mast tangled in some tree. I arrived to find that Courtney Good, a Kinsale businessman and owner of another Shamrock, had pulled her off with the club crashboat, and we got her onto another mooring quickly, completely undamaged. It had been the scare of my life, for if she had been damaged badly I would have had one hell of a time getting her right again in time for the race. I sailed her back alone in a Force seven, but it being an offshore breeze the sea was flat. It was only the second time I had sailed her single-handed, and it was very exhilarating.

I drove up to Galway for the boat show, which was bigger and better than ever, and for a last goodbye to the people who had given me my first opportunity to sail, both in dinghies and cruising boats. At the dinner, I was allowed to say a few words, and I presented a cup to the club to be given each year for the best cruise by a member. I was very sad to think that I might not see Galway or any of my friends there for a very long time.

Some time in April I read that there was a second Irish entry in the OSTAR, Patrick O’Donovan, and that he had just sailed into Kinsale at the completion of his qualifying cruise in a thirty-one-foot trimaran. The next day I was invited to dinner at the O’Donovans’ Cork home, where Patrick and I got acquainted and compared notes on our preparations. He mentioned a new marine radar detector which would sound an alarm in the presence of radar signals from another ship, and this sounded a good idea, since the OSTAR rules prohibited radar on the yachts participating. I ordered one immediately.

Patrick had had his problems with getting a boat ready and would have more. He had planned to sail Lillian, a fifty-five-foot proa, in the race, and had actually qualified in her, but on a return trip from Ireland to England with Lillian’s owner, the proa had capsized in a Force ten and Patrick and the owner had spent eighteen hours in the life raft, tied between the proa’s floats, until they were picked up by a fishing vessel. When they returned to look for Lillian she could not be found, and they learned subsequently that she had been taken as salvage by a Russian ship, sawn into manageable pieces, and left on a quayside in Cairo, of all places. All Patrick had got back was his passport, forwarded by the British consulate there. Now he had bought my friend David Walsh’s trimaran, Silmaril, and qualified her. The following morning he stopped by Drake’s Pool for a look at Harp and more conversation. Patrick, who was only twenty-three, would be one of the youngest competitors in the race. Born in Cork, he was now living in England and was preparing his boat there.

Ron and Laurel Holland moved into their new home, Strand Farmhouse, in Currabinny, across the river from Crosshaven, and for the first time Ron had a proper design office. From his drawing board he had a view of the Royal Cork and the members’ yachts moored in the river; he could see all who came and went. Shortly before I left for Plymouth, he and Laurel cruised down to Kinsale with me, the first time they had sailed together in two years, kept apart on the water by Ron’s increasingly busy schedule and Laurel’s pregnancy. Kelly, the Holland daughter, was a big tot by now, and Laurel was pregnant again.

Now I applied to the Irish Yachting Association to be examined for the Yachtmaster’s Certificate, the culmination of a program I had been working on for more than a year. To my astonishment and consternation, I was told that I did not have enough experience to sit for the examination. The Yachtmaster’s program called for forty-eight hours of classroom instruction (I had had sixty-four); six days of practical instruction (I had had ten); and five hundred miles of offshore cruising (I had submitted a logbook documenting more than four thousand miles offshore, thirteen hundred of it single-handed). I was incensed to be told that I did not have enough experience even to take the examination. If I took it and failed, fine, but I did not feel I should be denied the examination after so much work. Apparently, the difficulty had stemmed from a report about my training cruise aboard Creidne, when Captain Eric Healy, the skipper, had suggested I needed more experience of handling the boat under power, and that I had been impatient with the crew when skippering. I agreed that these had been justifiable, constructive criticisms at the time, but since then I had sailed more than three thousand miles and amassed a great deal more experience, and I did not feel that comments made a year before still were applicable. At the suggestion of a friend, I wrote to the president of the IYA, explaining my position and requesting an examination before I left for Plymouth. I waited nervously for a reply.

My back problem had begun to abate now, after more than three months of pain whenever I stood up or walked for more than two or three minutes at a time. The lower back pain had extended to the sciatic nerve, which runs from the hip down to the foot, then given way to severe muscle cramps which continued for some weeks. I had been to two more back specialists; one had given me muscle relaxant injections which helped somewhat; the other had told me just to wait and it would go away, and he prescribed a very embarrassing, steel-braced corset to be taken on the transatlantic crossing in case the fractured disc slipped out of place again. Having always been extremely healthy and unaccustomed to severe pain, I lived in terror of the thing recurring in mid-Atlantic. My last treatment came from a quack, an Irish farmer who seemed to be able to “divine” and treat the source of pain, much in the way that some people are able to divine water. His treatment had the most immediate and dramatic effect of all, although it did not cure the problem entirely, and I was unable to see him again, as he lived some distance from Cork. So I tucked my corset into a locker on the boat and hoped for the best. I was also very careful about lifting things and favored the injury whenever I could.

At the Easter bank holiday weekend I planned a return to the Scillies with some friends, having been very impressed with the islands when we stopped there during the Irish Mist delivery trip the spring before. We spent a delightful, sunny weekend, listening to the local male choir in the pub and seeing Harold Wilson, recently retired as prime minister, strolling on the beach with the giant Labrador which had once nearly drowned him when the dog had capsized the dinghy from which Mr. Wilson was fishing.

Our passage back was pleasant and fast, taking only twenty-seven hours in a good breeze. We had been supremely comfortable on the boat, what with the central heating and the stereo, and after much work the bugs were finally being ironed out. Harp was beginning to be something like ready for the transatlantic. No serious water was coming into the boat, although there were one or two minor leaks I hadn’t yet located; the new Dynafurl supplied by Tim Stearn was working well in its newly engineered form; and with the addition of the new storm jib, which could also be used as a reaching staysail, the sail plan now seemed ideal.

Back in Cork my sextant, which had been left with Henry Browne & Son for reconditioning and correction, arrived, not having withstood very well the tender mercies of the British and Irish postal systems, and I packed it back to London with Harold Cudmore, who was setting off for America and Spain on the international yacht racing circuit.

Word came that I would be examined for the Yachtmaster’s Certificate after all, and a Mr. O’Gallagher met me at a Cork hotel, examined me closely for more than an hour, and pronounced me passed, to my intense relief. I believe I was the first person to be certified under the program.

I made a final dash to London, where I conferred with my publishers and took care of last-minute details. Ann and I continued our restaurant research, and I had another lunch with Angela Green of The Observer, when I learned that Chay Blyth, who had damaged his huge trimaran, Great Britain III, in a collision with a ship, would not be participating in the race. All doubts about the entry of Alain Colas had been resolved, though, and he would be sailing his 236-foot Club Méditerranée. Colas had nearly severed his right foot when it was caught in an anchor chain the year before, but he had made a remarkable recovery and, wearing a special boot, had made his qualifying cruise in the Mediterranean with a crew of forty. He would do another 1,500-mile single-handed qualifying cruise prior to the race.

Henry Browne & Son, when they saw the state of my old sextant, promptly gave me a new one without charge. That is the sort of customer relations that maintains an outstanding reputation, as was also my experience with the Omega Watch Company. I had purchased an expensive Omega wristwatch which had performed erratically; when I got no satisfaction by reporting this to the American importers, I wrote directly to the company in Switzerland, and within a very short time, the Irish distributors had replaced the old watch with a brand-new Omega Seamaster electric wrist chronometer, which performed beautifully. In general, I found that most of the suppliers I dealt with took great pride in their products and were always ready to make adjustments when warranted. Only two or three times in the eighteen months that I dealt with manufacturers was I disappointed by a supplier’s attitude. During the whole of the project I was badly let down by only one equipment manufacturer.

My final task in London was to buy provisions for the race, and for this I went to Harrods, that superb department store in Knightsbridge. On the Azores trip I had become bored very quickly with my diet, and I was determined to take more time and plan my menus more carefully for the much longer transatlantic passage. I chose Harrods because their magnificent food halls are stocked with a huge variety of main courses in tins. Any supermarket has a lot of canned food, but the choice of main dishes is poor. Harrods has everything, from the simple to the exotic, and I filled four or five large shopping carts with stews, chicken, sauces, cheese, meats, and, best of all, American snack foods I had grown up with, packed in tins to preserve their freshness. It was expensive, but I would eat very well indeed.

Back in Cork I had less than a week to dismantle my life in Ireland and prepare for a new one at sea. Those last days were wildly busy, every moment taken up with packing, paying bills, making arrangements to have mail forwarded and goods shipped to the States. I was very sad at the thought of leaving Drake’s Pool Cottage, and even sadder to leave Fred, but he had, fortunately, practically adopted the McCarthy family, who lived near the main gate of Coolmore, staying there whenever I left Cork for a few days. They loved him and he loved them. It is not every dog who has the opportunity to choose his own family.

Harry was arriving on Friday and we were sailing for Plymouth on Saturday. On Thursday night Ron and Laurel Holland arranged a farewell dinner at their new home in Currabinny; John and Diana McWilliam were there; Nick, Theo, and Heather came; so did Derek and Carol Holland and O.H. Rogers — all of whom had done so much work on the boat that I could never thank them sufficiently. Friends Donna O’Sullivan and Carey O’Mahoney came, too, and we had a good dinner and a fine evening, even if it was tinged with sadness for me.

On Friday the removals people came and took away the personal belongings I would be sending to the States, and in the afternoon Harry McMahon arrived. We worked the rest of the day getting gear sorted, had a farewell drink at the Royal Cork Yacht Club and a steak at the Overdraft, and got a good night’s sleep. Next morning I took Fred’s bed, bowl, and rubber mouse to the McCarthys’ and made my farewells there.

We loaded all the gear onto the boat and began stowing everything, tied up next to Nick’s boat in Drake’s Pool. Fred had been behaving oddly for the last twenty-four hours; I think he knew something unusual was up. The day before he had turned up in Carrigaline, apparently looking for me, something he would not ordinarily do. Now, after my choked-up goodbye, he sat on the stone slip in Drake’s Pool and solemnly watched us working on the boat. I had explained to him long before that he would never be allowed on Harp until he had learned to use a marine toilet, and after a few instances when he swam in circles around the boat, demanding loudly to be hauled aboard, he had given up, and whenever I rowed out to the boat he habitually departed in a huff for the McCarthys’. He sat there the whole morning, watching. Finally, we had the last bit of gear stowed, we had made our last goodbyes to Nick, and we were ready to leave Drake’s Pool for the last time.

We started the engine, cast off Nick’s lines, and, as we motored around the first bend and out of Drake’s Pool, the last thing I saw was Fred, sitting in front of the cottage, watching.

22 Cork to Plymouth

An hour later we were in a full gale. The southwesterly six-to-seven wind that had been forecast had become southerly and Force eight. Harry, who does not have the world’s best sea legs the first day of a cruise, was very ill, and in his bunk. I reefed us down to storm canvas, set Fred (the Hasler Windvane Steering), and relaxed as best I could in the seas. The gale continued all that day and all night, and morning brought little relief and bad visibility. Our first intended stop had been the Scilly Isles, but I had borne away onto a close reach to ease our motion and keep up our speed, and we made our landfall at Land’s End early the following evening. Faced with a hard slog to the Scillies, I decided to turn left and reach to St. Ives, on the north coast of Cornwall, instead. It turned out to be a delightful alternative.

Not having a large-scale chart of that part of the coast, I telephoned the St. Ives harbormaster on the VHF and got excellent approach instructions, and we were anchored in the lovely bay by midnight, ready for a much-needed night’s rest. There was no customs officer in St. Ives, but we went ashore anyway the next day, saw the town, had dinner, and returned to the quay to find two police detectives waiting for us at the dinghy. Our identification and explanations were accepted, but it was clear that, the political situation being what it was, the constabulary was taking a close interest in any visiting yacht flying an Irish ensign.

After another night in St. Ives, we beat our way around Land’s End in a Force seven wind, Harry now fully recovered, and made our way in moderating weather to St. Mawes, my favorite Cornish village, just across from Falmouth. I had radioed ahead to arrange for the customs launch to meet us there, and on arriving we did a little square dance with them in St. Mawes Harbor as they came alongside us, bending a stanchion or two and the top shaft of the self-steering, but finally we were safely moored.

Two days later we sailed to the entrance of the Helford River, and as we started to motor up that beautiful Cornish estuary, the engine, though it continued to run smoothly, ceased to drive the boat and we had to be towed to a mooring.

The following morning Harry went over the side in a wet suit to see if the propeller turned when I put the engine in gear. It did not, but we didn’t know if the propeller was freewheeling on the shaft, or if the hydraulic drive wasn’t turning the shaft. The best solution, after several calls to Hydromarine in Galway, seemed to be to continue to Plymouth without the engine and there look for repairs, so we slipped our mooring and sailed to Fowey, enjoying a light-weather spinnaker run along the way. We were able to sail up the river into Fowey and anchor without incident, had dinner ashore and a drink at the Royal Fowey Yacht Club and another on a Royal Navy training yacht anchored alongside us, then sailed for Plymouth the next morning.

It was a beat in fresh winds all the way, but finally we were sailing past Plymouth Breakwater, past the Royal Western, around Drake’s Island and up to the Mayflower Marina, where we were towed to a berth. After a year and a half of preparation and dreaming, Golden Harp and I were finally in Plymouth together. I could hardly believe it.

It was now Monday, May 24, and there were only twelve working days left before the start on Saturday, June 5. I had carefully planned to be in Plymouth that far ahead to have time to handle any unexpected problems, and a good thing it was, too. My biggest problem was the engine. Actually, the engine in its broken state performed the only function it had to for the race, charging the batteries, but I did not like the idea of having a major piece of equipment not in working order, even if it had to be sealed during the race so that it could not be used as a propellant. Besides, it was still on warranty, and that would have elapsed by the time I arrived in Newport. The plan was for O.H. Rogers, who was driving my car to Plymouth, to bring with him a new tank, which comprised the major part of the hydraulic drive unit. I had described all the symptoms to the Hydromarine people in Galway, and they were sure that it was either the propeller or the tank. I had performed all the tests instructed by both Hydromarine and their agents in Southampton, and they felt it could only be one of the two problems. O.H. should have arrived on the Tuesday, and I had the engineer coming from Southampton on that day, but then O.H. phoned from somewhere in Somerset to say that my car had blown a cylinder head gasket and he would be delayed a day, so the whole operation was put back.

Finally, O.H. arrived with the new tank and the spare propeller pins, and all was ready. The engineer arrived from Southampton, walked under the boat, which we had dried out on the scrubbing pad at the marina, turned the propeller first one way and then the other, and said, “It’s not the tank and it’s not the propeller; it’s the driven pump, which sits behind the tank, and I don’t have one with me. Didn’t anybody tell you to try turning the propeller both ways? It should only turn one way.” Nobody had mentioned this simple test. The engineer promised to see that the proper parts were sent and instructed a local mechanic on how to perform the relatively simple installation.

O.H. and I pressed on with small jobs, assisted by Peter Adams, a local friend of a friend who was very helpful in getting me around the strange city of Plymouth, and in transporting my Harrods stores and Averys wine from the Royal Western office in Millbay Docks to the marina for stowage aboard Harp. The arrival of these stores had caused much amusement at the Royal Western. Harrods had packed everything so carefully that the apparent volume of my food was twice its real volume. There were two huge crates and three cases of wine from Averys. Nobody could believe the shipment was for thirty-foot Golden Harp and not for 236-foot Club Méditerranée.

The slaving aboard the boat was relieved by an increasingly active social life as more and more competitors arrived. The bar at the Royal Western was getting more crowded by the day, and nobody talked about anything except the race — especially what equipment different boats were carrying and, most of all, the riddle of which route to take.

There are two main routes taken by most competitors and several variations. The most-sailed route, and the one which had always been sailed by the winning yacht, is the great circle route. Its principal attraction is that it is the shortest, about two thousand eight hundred miles. But it has great disadvantages, too: the weather can be very rough at times, there is the likelihood of icebergs and fog along the way, and, worst of all, a skipper taking this route must expect headwinds nearly all the way, and he must tack back and forth in order to get west, since a sailboat cannot sail straight into the wind. This circumstance can add several hundred miles to the distance actually sailed.

The second important route is the southern, or Azores, route. This involves setting a southwesterly course to and past the Azores, down to about latitude thirty-seven degrees north, then turning west and sailing to about longitude sixty-five degrees west, before turning northwest for Newport. On the face of it this route sounds silly, since it is about three thousand five hundred miles long, but it does have its advantages. In a year of typical weather, a skipper will have a lot of reaching winds and not nearly so much beating to windward as on the great circle route, and thus should be able to sail much faster. Nobody taking this route had ever won the race, but in each race somebody always came close, and often it turned out that boats taking the Azores route sailed fewer miles than boats which had had to tack back and forth on the great circle route. Another major attraction for the Azores route is kinder weather and lots of sunshine, and, of course, the Azores themselves are on the route in case a boat suffers damage or her skipper is injured. The big disadvantage of the route is the big Azores High, which, in addition to providing sunshine, can also provide extended periods of calm, and sailboats do not sail in calm weather: they sit on the sea, occasionally being pushed in the wrong direction by ocean currents.

There are variations, as I have mentioned: there is a high, northern route, where some hope to pick up following winds, but the risk of ice is much higher; and there is the very southerly trade winds route, which offers almost certain free sailing, but which is so long that it has rarely been taken in the race. The big joker in the pack is the Gulf Stream, a strong ocean current which originates in the Gulf of Mexico, runs around the tip of Florida, up the east coast of the United States, turns northeast and continues across the Atlantic toward the British Isles. Anyone trying to sail a route between the great circle and the Azores routes will have to contend with this major, adverse current, and most prefer to avoid it, those on the great circle route remaining north of the stream, and those on the Azores route remaining south of it, until crossing the current almost at right angles when turning northwest for Newport. The excellent chart from the official race program is reproduced here and illustrates all the various routes.

Many people had already made the decision to plunge straight across via the great circle, no matter what; others would not consider any route but the Azores. I was undecided, preferring to wait for the weather briefing the day before the race before making a decision, but I was biased toward the Azores route. Harp went well in light moderate airs, and I felt my level of experience was probably better suited to going south.

I had had some advice from the Irish Weather Service, who had kindly sent me some charts and diagrams and reported on some studies of westerly winds in the North Atlantic, but the sum total of all these was that nobody could predict anything about the weather we would encounter with any degree of probability, let alone certainty. So I would wait for the final briefing, in the meantime soliciting as many opinions as possible — and there were almost as many opinions about the route as there were competitors. There was a great deal of caginess in any discussion of route, nobody being willing to commit himself on the subject. If somebody did commit himself he was probably lying and would be taking another route on the day. This caginess always made me laugh, since the whole question was so riddled with uncertainty and the weather on any route so unpredictable that it seemed to make little difference what anybody thought before the Race.

On Tuesday night, Richard Clifford invited me aboard Shamaal II, on which he lived, for drinks. It was a big party for a small boat, comprising Richard; myself; Robert Hughes, the Gibb self-steering expert; two other Royal Marine officers; the Bulgarian entry, Georgi Georgiev; and two people who were to have a large effect on my life, Mike and Lizzie McMullen. Mike was sailing Three Cheers, a fast trimaran designed by the very successful Dick Newick. His practice crew, David Hopkins, was also there.

Mike McMullen had sailed Binkie, a thirty-two-foot monohull, in the last OSTAR and had finished well up. While in Newport he had been invited for a sail on Three Cheers by Tom Follett, who had sailed her in the race. Mike had been instantly attracted to the boat, although he had never sailed a multihull, and bought Three Cheers and immediately began to sail her in preparation for the next OSTAR. Lizzie had enthusiastically joined in the project and they had spent a great deal of time together on the boat during the ensuing four years. The previous summer they had made an extended cruise to the Hebrides and made a film about it which was soon to be shown by the BBC. Mike was a tough, former Royal Marines commando officer and a superb yachtsman, and his ability, in combination with such a fast and proven boat as Three Cheers, had made him one of the favorites to win the race outright, in spite of the fact that Three Cheers, at forty-six feet overall, was much smaller than the other favorites.

I was attracted to Mike and Lizzie McMullen as I have rarely been attracted to any couple, their collective charm, enthusiasm, and total commitment to the race captivating me completely. Mike held forth on his opinions about the OSTAR and Lizzie goaded him from the sidelines; we talked and talked and laughed constantly. Lizzie was a very beautiful girl, and I complimented her on her nose. (There are leg men, etc., etc. I have always been a nose man.) She liked that, and it became our private joke.

We eventually continued the party in the bar of the Royal Western, and by the end of the evening I counted them as close friends, difficult as that may be to explain. For ten days I would see them constantly, then I would not see them again.

Angela Green of The Observer arrived to set up the press office, and we began to see a great deal of each other, often meeting Mike and Lizzie in the club for drinks and another discussion of the race.

Harry had flown back to Ireland the day after our arrival, and now O.H. had to leave, too, so I was on my own. I greatly envied those entrants who seemed to have whole staffs of people to fetch and carry and bolt things onto their boats. Even some of the smaller boats had vans full of gear and teams of friends, relatives, or professionals working on their problems. Ann was coming down the Thursday before the race, but until then I would have to get help where I could find it. Robert Hughes, in addition to servicing Fred, was most helpful with stowing my food, and Ian Radford, who was in the marina aboard his entry, Jabuliswe, and who was much readier than I, was very helpful. The marina staff did what they could, and Alec Blagdon loaned tools from his boatyard, even though I did not have to take Harp there for anticipated repairs. But by the end of the week, although a great deal had been accomplished, my list of things to do did not seem any shorter, and Harp would have to be moved into Millbay Docks on Monday night, along with all the other entries, to undergo her three inspections — one for water and stores, one for safety equipment, and one for structural soundness and suitability of gear. She would also have to be inspected by the handicap committee, and the gear lever of her engine would be sealed, so that the engine could be driven only in neutral, for battery charging.

In addition to the list of things I had planned to do in Plymouth, new problems kept cropping up: first, the hydraulic drive problem, then the engine’s electrical system. An electrical engineer came aboard and immediately found the problem which had caused my batteries to discharge: one of the battery wires had been led across part of the engine’s exhaust system which, when it got hot, had burned through the insulation of the wire, causing a short circuit.

On Saturday night Angela and I invited Mike and Lizzie McMullen to come aboard Harp for drinks. They were tied up until later in the evening, so Angela and I had dinner at Bella Napoli, which was becoming a sort of culinary headquarters for everybody, and went back to the boat to wait for them. They were late, and as we were sitting below having a drink, we heard a commotion from across the marina. I stuck my head through the hatch and looked around. Two pontoons away a large group of dark figures was gathered around another boat, some of them pounding on the coach roof, others pumping up and down on the bowsprit, pitching the boat fore and aft. I heard someone shout above the din, “Aha! We know what you’re at!” I went back below, laughing, and told Angela that some poor bastard across the way was having either his sleep or his amorous activities disturbed by his friends.

A few moments later I heard hushed puzzled voices on the pontoon next to Harp and stuck my head out again to see what was up. Mike and Lizzie and half a dozen other people were standing there, trying to figure out where Golden Harp was. Forgetting that Harp was an Irish entry, they had asked at the marina office for the American boat and had been directed to Catapha, whose skipper, David White, had been rudely awakened by a great deal of noise and commotion. “What really worried me,” Mike said, as they all tumbled below and found seats, “was how big that guy was.” Andrew and Roslyn Spedding, close friends of the McMullens’, had come along, together with David Hopkins and Paul Weychan, designer and builder of Quest, a fast-looking trimaran which would be sailed by John deTrafford. There were a couple of other people jammed into Harp as well, but in the ensuing joking and laughing I forgot their names. Andrew Spedding had sailed in the last OSTAR, and was one of the scrutineers who would be inspecting Harp in Millbay Docks. I tried to keep his glass full.

At one point in the evening I remember Mike remarking, “There’s a lot of luck involved in this race.” It was a comment I had not heard anyone else make, and I would have occasion to recall it later.