Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (16 page)

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:

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 pleasant 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.