Run Before the Wind (37 page)

of what it was. Probably I had just seen her somewhere in Plymouth.

"We'd better get a move on," Annie said and began collecting glasses and tidying the cockpit. We checked the boat's lines to see that they would allow for the rise and fall of the tide, then stepped ashore. Watching Mark make the maneuver, I was amazed at how agile he was with the crutch and brace. It was as if he'd been using them since childhood. We walked slowly toward the ferry dock, chatting among ourselves. The Fortescues' car waited on the other side for us.

We bought our tickets, went aboard, and sat down. Then Mark stood up again.

"I don't want to leave her," he said.

"What?" Roz puzzled.

"We've had so many problems along the way, I just don't want to leave her alone tonight. I don't want anything else to go wrong."

"Neither do I," I said and stood up, too.

"Annie," Mark said, "why don't you go on back with Andrew and Roz? Willie and I will sleep aboard tonight and see you in the morning."

"All right," Annie replied, "if you're really worried about the boat."

"I know there's no real reason to worry," Mark said, "But I would."

"I've got a better idea," Annie came back.

"Why don't we all stay aboard tonight? Roz and I can cook--we've certainly enough food aboard--and God knows there's plenty of room, too."

Andrew and Roz looked at each other.

"Okay?" Andrew asked her.

"Okay," Roz replied.

We left the ferry as the helmsman revved his engine for the departure. I felt immediately better, just as Mark obviously did. We hadn't come all this way to have something happen to the boat at the last minute, just because we weren't around. Later, I would wonder if maybe we hadn't felt something else besides concern for the boat.

Annie and Roz whipped up a spaghetti dinner; that and much wine were consumed with gusto. We got to bed early. Mark and Annie, aft in the owner's cabin; Andrew and Roz forward in the larger of the two guest cabins, and I in the smaller one. We fell asleep to the sound of the river lapping against Wave's hull.

We were up early and had a hot breakfast. Remembering my seasickness after Cowes aboard Toscana, I took it easy.

Mark looked at me across the saloon table.

"Nervous?" he asked.

I nodded.

"Lots of butterflies."

"Me, too. It's always this way; a combination of fear and excitement, I guess."

"Fear? You? But you've done a lot of this sort of thing."

"Sure, but the fear is always there. Will I ram somebody at the starting line? Will I be run down by a merchant ship? Will I come back from this one? Once you're out there it goes away--at least, most of it does. But fear's a good thing. Sharpens the senses, makes you more aware."

If that were the case I would be very sharp this morning. Andrew and Roz prepared to leave.

"Why don't you come out with us?" Mark asked them.

"We'll have a couple of hours of thrashing about, getting used to her before the gun. You can grab a ride back with one of the spectator boats."

"Fantastic," Andrew said.

"We'd love to have a sail."

And so we all remained aboard for a while longer. At half past nine we cast off from the quay at Spedding's boatyard and stowed our fenders and mooring warps. We wouldn't be needing them for another ten days or so. We motored down the river and, out in the harbor, just in front of the Royal Western Yacht Club, the sponsoring organization, we set sail, to waves and cheers from the crowd on the terrace. For an hour and a half, we sailed about the harbor, while Mark got the reel of his new boat. He planted himself in the cockpit, the braced leg jammed into a corner, and tacked the boat again and again, without help from us, then practiced reefing the roller head sails

"She's a dream," he grinned.

"I'll get some practice reefing the main a bit later."

"No rush," I said.

"There'll be three of us aboard, remember?"

I knew he wouldn't be happy until he felt he could do everything aboard.

At quarter to noon, the fifteen minute gun went off on the Royal Navy ship that served as committee boat.

"All ashore that's going ashore," Andrew called below to Roz. He whistled and waved at one of the Royal Marine runabouts that had been keeping the spectator fleet away from the starting line. They came alongside.

"Will you take us off, sergeant? We'll need a lift to the Cremyi ferry port on the Plymouth side after the start."

"Right, sir!" the man called back and held his big rubber assault boat steady against the rail while Andrew and Roz climbed aboard.

"Good luck!" they both cried as the runabout moved away.

"See you in a few weeks!"

We waved them off and turned to our work. The twenty-odd entrants in the race, of which Wave was the biggest, reached up and down the starting line, trying for position, while a hundred or more spectator craft ran about, jockeying for a better view. The ten-minute gun went, then the five-minute. With Mark braced at the helm, me grinding the self-tailing winches and Annie keeping time with a stopwatch, we positioned ourselves at the starboard end of the line.

"Thirty seconds!" Annie called out.

We put in our final tack and started for the line, which was very close, now.

"Fifteen seconds!"

We picked up speed.

"Five, four, three, two, one ..." The starting cannon aboard the nearby ship went, loud in our ears. Perhaps half a second later Wave's bows sliced across the starting line.

"Beautiful!" I screamed.

"Bloody good luck!" Mark screamed back.

Since we had never practiced, it must have been, but that didn't make it feel any less good. We tore out into the English Channel, neck and neck with a large trimaran. The big multi hulls four or five of them in the race, were going to be our competition. In the right conditions, they could beat us. A mile or so out, Andrew and Roz appeared briefly in the Royal Marine boat, waved, then turned back for Plymouth.

Mark kept us on the starboard tack, making for the Eddystone Light, some ten miles offshore, which was the first mark of the race. The next mark was the finish line, off Horta, on the island of Faial, in the Azores, some twelve hundred miles down the North Atlantic Ocean. We made the Eddystone in a bit more than an hour,

having averaged nearly nine knots in the fresh breeze. As we tacked around the tall lighthouse, a faint boom hit our ears.

"I hope the Royal Navy's not having gunnery practice out here today," Mark laughed, looking around for the source of the noise.

Then he pointed in the direction of Plymouth. A column of black smoke was rising from the town.

"Jesus," I said.

"What's that?"

"Looks like it could be one of those oil tanks down by the river."

Then one of my jib sheets came adrift, leaving the sail napping, and we forgot about everything else while we re trimmed for the next long tack down the English Channel.

WE WERE NOT OUT of the English Channel yet when I discovered that Mark and I had entirely different views of what we were doing. I had been looking forward to a cruise to the Azores; Mark had been looking forward to a race.

We were hard on the wind down the Channel, and Mark liked it that way.

"This is what we need if we're going to beat the multi hulls he said, grinning.

"They don't like sailing close to the wind in a chop. First of all, they aren't all that close-winded, and second, while we go through the waves, they go over them, up and down, up and down. I promise you, there are blokes on trimarans all around us puking their guts out right now."

I had avoided that fate by eating and drinking carefully the evening before and at breakfast, but there was no getting away from Mark's racing frame of mind. All the way down the Channel, we were tuning everything, making minute adjustments in sail trim, increasing or decreasing tension in the rigging to make sure the mast was standing up absolutely straight on both tacks, watching wind and water speed instruments to be sure she was sailing equally fast on either tack. Mark wanted a position fix every hour, so we were constantly taking bearings on landmarks when close to shore, and on the RDF equipment when we weren't. Annie kept us in food and drink and spelled us at the helm when we were both working.

Mark wouldn't allow the use of the self-steering.

"We've got to make every tenth of a knot we can while conditions favor us," he said.

"If the wind frees, the bigger multi hulls will be past us like a shot. The self-steering steers a nice, average course, but it won't take us as consistently close to the wind as a good helmsman."

By the following evening, we were off the continental shelf, out of the green water near land and into water that was a blue I had never seen, a color that comes to the sea only when the bottom drops away to a depth that might as well be bottomless, and the water reflects a blue sky. With our escape from the heavily trafficked shipping lanes of the Channel, the need for a constant lookout decreased, and we were finally able to begin to catch up on the sleep we had lost nearer land. I was becoming a better helmsman out of sheer practice, but I was also discovering that the self-steering gear had a big advantage--it never got tired. We settled into a routine of using it on night watches and steering for long periods during the day. Even then, we would occasionally latch it in so that we could all sit down and enjoy a meal together.

I don't think I had ever eaten better. Annie had splurged on the best of everything, the tender est cuts of meat, the most expensive cheeses, and first-rate wines. We wanted for nothing.

The headwinds held, too. The prevailing wind for that part of the ocean was southwesterly, and we were sailing southwest. Mark exulted in it; Annie and I grew tired of living at fifteen degrees of heel. I wondered how she managed to keep up her standard of cooking while leaning against a safety strap on one tack, or pushing herself off the cooker on the other.

We had at least some sun on most days, but the occasional squall called for shortening sail. I practiced taking sun sights with the sextant, and Mark taught me the drill for reducing a sight to a position line, using the nautical almanac and the marine sight reduction tables.

Mark was having difficulty standing steadily on deck in order to reef the mainsail, something he would have to do alone on his singlehanded passage back. Finally, three or four days out, he asked Annie to toss a-package to him from the chart table, then he sat down, struggled out of his baggy shorts, and started to unbuckle the waist strap that held the leg brace in place.

Annie was horrified.

"Mark, you know you can't do that," she cried.

"It's too early to go putting all your weight on the knee."

"Look, Mark, I know it's tough, but it'll get better. You've still got a couple of weeks before starting back."

Mark held up a hand to quiet us and began unwrapping the package.

"I got a fellow in the brace shop to make this up for me.

Designed it myself." He pulled out an odd-looking thing made of leather and steel and padding.

"And did the doctor approve your design?" Annie asked.

"I forgot to show it to him," Mark said, buckling the thing on.

He tried standing, played with the straps and buckles for a minute or two, then stood and put his weight on the weak leg.

"Not bad," he grinned.

"Not bad at all. Maybe I should have shown it to the doctor; he might have liked it."

He showed us how it worked. Instead of running the length of the leg, like the brace, it ran from the lower thigh to the upper calf, with a hinge at the knee. He could lock it in a straight position, or at a ninety-degree angle for kneeling, or at two stops in between. He showed us how quickly he could change the angles.

The front side was thickly padded with foam rubber and covered in leather, so that kneeling on deck wouldn't damage the knee. I was impressed. I looked at Annie; so was she.

"So? What do you think?" Mark asked.

"Well, maybe if you're really careful," Annie said, hesitantly.

"Looks good to me. Mark, but for God's sake, move slowly, will you?"

"What you're both forgetting," he said, "is that I am the last person who wants to injure this knee again."

After that, nothing more was said about it. Mark got about the decks much faster and, it seemed to me, more safely. Annie and I relaxed.

Annie came on at four in the morning to relieve me; I got her a cushion, and sat her down next to me; I wasn't ready to turn in yet. We were less than a day from our landfall, the weather had warmed a lot, and the sky was cloudless and moonless. I had never seen so many stars. She took my hand and held it in both of hers.

"How are you, Willie?"

"Very well, thank you." I was, too. I was tanned and healthy and relaxed, and, most of all, I had begun to put some emotional distance between myself and Connie. That hadn't come easily.