Three Ways to Capsize a Boat Page 11

  Things were getting so nasty that I decided to strap myself into the cockpit with the safety line. There was so much water breaking over the boat that I feared I might be swept away if a freak wave were to swamp us. It was a truly terrifying situation: we were three hundred miles from the nearest land, with no means of communication with any rescue services, and being tossed about like a feather in a whirlwind aboard a hundred-year-old sailing boat.

  “This is nothing,” shouted Tom, who appeared beside me in the cockpit, and seemed to understand exactly what was going through my mind. “It’s nasty … very nasty … but this boat’s been around for the best part of a century; she’s been through a lot worse.”

  “But what about you?” I hollered. “Have you been in worse storms than this?”

  “Many a time … and in less seaworthy boats; Hirta will see us through. Don’t you worry about it.”

  Tom’s voice was reassuring, but his face was set grim as he assessed the constantly changing situation and made the necessary decisions. For myself, I just wanted to avert my eyes from the awfulness of the tormented sea and sky around us. But I was on the helm and couldn’t avoid looking at the sea. It had a hypnotic effect. The monstrousness of it made it seem unreal, although it was the realest, coldest, wettest, most immediate and overpowering force I had ever faced.

  And then I saw something I don’t ever want to see again as long as I live: a colossal wall of dull gray water was bearing down on us. It obscured the very sky; it stood half as high as the mast. There was no way we could avoid being swamped. My legs went weak and I whimpered inwardly. “Oh shit!” I cried (disappointing as last utterances go, I know, but there it is) and steeled myself for the crashing impact of a million merciless tons of seawater. At the same time I hauled on the wheel to steer into the wave. The bow rose, and Hirta seemed to look up like a tiny David confronting Goliath … and then … the monster just vanished. It rolled away beneath us. I looked behind as we surfed down the far side of it, and there it was, roaring away to the east. I almost wept with relief, and my heart welled with affection for the simple contrivance of hewn and shaped tree trunks that bore us safely across the fathomless abyss. Hirta had taken the wave in her stride. Our skipper was right.

  He looked far from complacent, though, sitting solid and square in the corner of the cockpit, staring gravely at the storm. I watched him with one eye as I responded with the wheel to the dip and tug and roll of the boat each time she plunged into the trough of a wave or crashed over the crest. It was no longer a matter of steering a compass course; you just steered over each wave as it bore down upon the boat.

  “What are you thinking, Tom?” I asked, when I couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

  He bit his lip for a moment longer, then said, “What I’m thinking is … we’re not getting anywhere. There’s too much wind, too heavy a sea, and it’s all against us. It’s taking hell out of the boat, taking hell out of all of us.”

  He stopped to think a bit more, still chewing his lip.

  “We have two options: we can turn and run before the storm, head back for Iceland …”

  “Or … ?” I asked.

  “Or … or we heave to, batten down the hatches, and just ride the storm out. It’s a couple of crap options, but there you go. We’ll put it to the vote.”

  IN THE EVENT, NOBODY wanted to run back to Iceland, abandoning all the westerly progress we had already made. Nobody much fancied heaving to, either, but it seemed the better option, so that’s what we did.

  Looking back on it, it seems almost beyond belief that we would just have stopped right out there in the middle of the North Atlantic, stopped dead, rocking about day after day in our infinitesimal speck of a boat. There we were, suspended in tumult somewhere between the moon and the core of the earth, seven minuscule humans, tossed like a walnut in a millrace, waiting, just waiting, for the anger of the storm to pass.

  To prepare for heaving to, we lashed the wheel to starboard and pulled the two sails in so they were angled to channel the winds safely, like sheep through a pen. The result was that the wind steadied the boat while driving us very slowly sideways back where we had come from.

  One man would be on watch at all times, tied into the cockpit. One-hour watches; after that you’d be frozen half to death, to say nothing of being frightened out of your wits. Down below we did what we could to adopt some semblance of normal human existence; not all that easy when you’ve six people tumbling around in the confines of a tiny wooden cabin. I wondered at the infinite capacity of human beings to adapt.

  Ros, strapped tightly into the galley, cooked meals, wonderful meals of mutton and bacon and beans. The cooker, like all the oil lamps in the cabin, was on gimbals—an ingenious system of pivots that meant that it stayed horizontal no matter what the angle of the boat; otherwise the pans would have been constantly slopping their hot contents all over the cook. The cabin table was fitted with a fiddle, a raised wooden surround, which, with the aid of some miraculously sticky place mats, prevented the plates flying off the table into the laps of first the diners on one side, then on the other.

  We adopted strategies for dealing with everything: you timed your lunge from galley to table with your plate of stew, to the pitching of the boat. The pitching was more or less predictable, so in one lunge you could get to the bulkhead at the end of the chart table. There you wedged yourself in tight, holding the stew aloft, while the boat toppled crazily over the other way; then, as she started to come over again, you made the final dive and at the bottom of the roll slumped neatly down onto the seat and waited for the next roll to slap your stew down on the nonslip mat. Thus seven people fed three times a day.

  When we weren’t eating, we would read … some would have their heads deep in the Vinland sagas, or some earnest nautical tome. I myself found it impossible to concentrate on anything more complex than Edward Lear and so, at Hannah’s insistence, reverted to reciting “The Jumblies.” Oddly enough, I derived the greatest comfort from joining her in declaiming:

  And when the Sieve turned round and round

  And every one cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”

  They called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,

  But we don’t care a button! We don’t care a fig!

  In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”

  We may have been in the middle of a nightmare, but that didn’t mean we were without pleasures; after all, you can only be catatonic with fright for a certain limited period. When the source of the fear is with you night and day, roaring and whirling just an oaken hull away from you and your dinner, your fear—and I make no bones about admitting that I was absolutely terrified—soon takes second place to other, gentler things: conversation, laughter, reading, hope, the minutiae of daily existence. Also there was the inspiring example of little Hannah, who seemed hardly perturbed at all. She had adapted immediately, in the way that children will, to her new environment. Ros and Tom would read to her and play, just as if they were at home in their cozy cottage in the New Forest, and she was happy.

  There was an odd sort of coziness about the situation, too. The saloon was lit by oil lamps, which cast the most romantic glow, and a comforting warmth came from the little potbellied stove in the corner. Everywhere you looked there was some big lug of a man sprawled out like a dog, reading a book or dozing, rocking involuntarily with the motion of the boat. And there was a heavy and complex odor about the place, composed of diesel, meat stew, the fishy smell of the sea, outbreaks of flatulence, and the putrid miasma of unwashed bodies and wet wool. This was far from pleasant, but you can get to like anything with familiarity. As I said, it was oddly cozy.

  BY COMMON CONSENT, EVEN when things were as bad as they were now, we the men would go on deck to take a leak. The heads could become unpleasantly congested with the daily traffic of five men, so they were reserved for what you might call sit-down occasions, and for the more refined use of Hannah and Ros.

  Now, as you may imagine, it was far from plea
sant going up onto the storm-lashed deck to relieve yourself, so you would try and hold things in until it was your watch, when you had to go on deck anyway. This was not always possible, though. You might, for instance, be in your berth, thinking ruefully of your loved ones and the home you suspected you might not get to see again, and little by little that familiar old insistent urge would steal over you. It might be one o’clock in the morning, and you’re not on watch till four. You wonder if perhaps you could hold it back … for three hours? No, impossible. You lie back and try to forget it…. Maybe it’ll go away. You try to think of something different, but to no avail.

  And so, wearily, you set the long tedious process in motion: first you unzip your sleeping bag, whereupon most of that lovely warmth you have worked so hard to create vanishes. Then you wriggle out of its clinging silken folds and the tangle of the woolen inner. Next you reach up in the dark to untie the lee cloth, grateful that you were sensible enough to tie it properly with a couple of bows, because little by little the urge is getting stronger upon you now. With the lee cloth down, you have a little more freedom of movement, so you reach down and, with an unimaginable contortion, take hold of your sopping-wet moleskin trousers and fight your way into them, still supine and in the dark. By the time you fasten the zip you are exhausted, so you lie back for a moment and groan quietly to yourself.

  Now it’s time to roll out of the berth and wedge yourself into the dark passage, while you scrabble about for the three or four layers of upper woolens that are essential if you’re not going to freeze up solid the moment you emerge from the cabin. This takes a long time, because the sweaters are partly inside out and partly the right way around, and they’re wet and moldering, and also because while this is going on you are being hurled back and forth like a fish in a washing machine.

  Now to select your boots from the heap haphazardly tumbled by the companionway steps. You squeeze your feet into them, only to find that you have left a pair of thick sopping-wet socks scrunched up in the bottom. By this time you are so desperate for relief that you can’t think straight, so you put on somebody else’s boots … but you’re not there yet. No, not by a long chalk.

  Oilskins are next, and getting into oilskin trousers with your boots already on is hard enough in bright daylight on dry land. You wonder if maybe you ought to take the boots off and put the trousers on without the boots, but then you remember that the trousers must be outside the boots or else your boots will be full of seawater within five seconds of going outside.

  Braces over the shoulders, and on with the oilskin jacket; button it up and zip it to keep the wind and waves out. Spectacles next, a quick swipe to clean them, woolen hat, and finally wet wool gloves and you’re ready, and not before time, as your bladder’s on the point of exploding. You grasp the companionway rail and climb the first step … Oh-oh … what about your safety line? Back down into the cabin, untangle it from all the others on the same hook, slip it over your shoulders, clip it together at the front, and scuttle back down the passage and up the ladder.

  You burst through the doors. The icy blast almost knocks the breath from your body. There’s Mike lashed into the cockpit, salt spray streaming down his glasses, his mouth open like a dying cod. He wants to talk because he’s been sitting there like that for the last hour with nothing but the wind and the waves for company.

  You ignore him and with an oath and a grunt … because things are getting beyond a joke now … you scramble out of the cockpit and head as best you can for the lee shrouds.

  Bugger the safety line; you’ve got to get there fast now. You slip as a wave bursts over the bow, bark your shin on the cabin skylight, and roll down into the scuppers beneath the rail. That’s OK, it’s more or less where you need to be, anyway. Grabbing the shroud, you haul yourself to your feet and snap the safety line onto it.

  Now I know that there will be those who may find this indelicate, but I feel constrained to relate here a particular difficulty that flings itself in the path of this most natural bodily function. The sensitive reader might prefer to skip a page or two and join us later on the trip, as these are details that I feel must be chronicled.

  So there you are, shackled safely to the lee shrouds, up to your knees in raging green water. The lee side, you see, being downwind, is more often than not completely under water. (One of the first lessons you learn when you start sailing is—for reasons that are pretty obvious—not to pee off the windward side of a boat.)

  Now at this point there’s a terrible danger that you might momentarily lose the urge and decide that you don’t actually want to take a leak after all and that you might as well just return to your cabin. But it’s a delusion and you delay at your peril. Luckily you are wise to this; it has happened too many times before. You remove your gloves; you cannot under any circumstances take a piss with gloves on. This is easy enough, although, despite the fact that you have shackled the safety line to the shroud, you still have to hold on with one hand or else you’d be in and out of the water like a yoyo. Next, fumble for the buttons and the zip on the oilskin bottoms … not easy with your one free hand, but after a little inept fiddling about you manage to get it open.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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