Rescue at Sea (5th in a Series)

Part 5. “For me, when everything goes wrong – that’s when adventure starts.”* It was a little past noon on the fourth day when the steering went. We were 142 nautical miles from shore, with only a distant line of squalls to get past, after which we expected clear sailing until we reached Newport the following afternoon. We had navigated through the Gulf Stream’s heavy weather and come out into this morning’s clear, sunny skies and the quietest seas we’d experienced so far. Near the end of my watch (no, I wasn’t allowed up there by myself), a pod of young dolphins swam exuberantly around the boat.

I had just gone below to get some sleep, leaving the others on deck to discuss lunch, when without warning, the wheel, which was on autopilot, holding steadily to our north-by-northwest course, began rotating wildly. All efforts to steer manually failed, and we found ourselves adrift on an empty sea – 140 miles from the closest dry land and several thousand feet above the ocean’s floor. We hadn’t seen another boat in 72 hours.

Restive proved her mettle by neatly heaving to into the wind, while the collective brainpower tried to figure out what to do. Clearly, the problem was the rudder, and so Dave descended into the bowels of the boat to have a look.

“I’ve found the problem,” he called up from below, and as he scrambled back on deck, the once-distant squalls were closing in, the waves had swelled to over eight feet, and the wind was now blowing 20-30 knots.

“We have,” Dave said, “a major structural failure.”

*Yvon Chouinard

Rescue at Sea (4th in a Series)

Part 4. Cast and Crew We were five aboard Restive, four old friends, the fifth picked up from an Internet site, a seafarers’ match.com where captains look for crew and sailors look for boats.

• George: the captain. A veteran sailor with years at the helm and many Bermuda races in his topsiders. Had lovingly overseen every aspect of Restive’s design, construction and launching in 2006. Calm, focused, confident, a skipper’s traits, and ones that had enabled him to build the boat in the first place. Born: 1945. Friends since 1955.
• David: a Marine combat engineer in Vietnam who spent his subsequent career with a large construction company. A keen mechanical aptitude and a fascination with deciphering how things work. An unruffled sailor, he innately grasped Restive’s nuts and bolts. An indifferent swimmer. Born: 1945. Friends since 1958.
• Fred: a man of remarkable physical strength and unflagging good humor (except when reading my blog). A tough and fearless seaman – also the cook, although rough seas limited his culinary creativity. Born: 1945. Friends since 1963.
• Dave: an MIT-trained engineer. Built his first boat from a kit at the age of nine and has been sailing ever since. A genius at determining what was wrong and fixing it. A generation younger. Friends since the night before we sailed.
• Your scribe: a rookie. Born: 1945.
• Restive: A wooden 48-foot sloop, both seaworthy and beautiful. Built more perhaps for seafaring than comfort. But, hey, we were ancient mariners.

As we set off, we little knew how critical these attributes would soon prove – especially the personal ones.

Rescue at Sea (3rd in a Series)

Part 3. Evening Star We sailed out into the Atlantic under sunny skies, watching the water change from the aquamarine of Bermuda’s coastline to a deep, rich blue. A strong wind blew out of the southwest (as several of you pointed out), and in the first two days we covered 352.5 of our 635-nautical-mile trip, a record 48-hour distance for Restive.

Ocean sailing consists of long periods of boredom, accompanied by discomfort and interspersed with moments of terror, all taking place in a tiny capsule bobbing on an endless sea. There are those who love it – the hoisting and lowering of sails to adjust to changing winds, charting a course in an ocean without markers, scanning the skies for approaching storms and, my favorite, hanging out with friends, swapping stories.

For me, night was a special time – the sky filled with millions of distant lights as we sailed beneath the Big Dipper, the North Star directly above our mast. It was around the time of the Jupiter-Venus conjunction, when the tiny evening star seems to pull the fiery torch of Jupiter across the night sky.

After the first night we never saw another boat. There was nothing in any direction but water, all the way to the horizon. I thought of the prayer that reminds us that “a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.”

It’s amazing to be at once so cut off from the world and so connected to the universe, “alone,” as the ancient mariner said “on a wide, wide sea.”

Rescue at Sea (2nd in a series)

Part 2. At Sea We were five aboard Restive as, with the captain recovered, we headed out of Hamilton Harbor and onto the open sea, destined for Newport, R.I. 635 nautical miles to the northwest, with nothing between us but salt water. We had clear skies and a strong southwest wind, which, if it did not change, meant we could sail straight to Newport without turning – or, as we salts like to say, on a single port tack. It also meant high seas, which made stomachs dyspeptic and turned the simplest tasks into physical challenges. For example, you didn’t walk to the toilet (“head”), you grabbed onto whatever was handy and hauled yourself painfully forward. Once safely there, you faced a whole new set of challenges.

A few days earlier, with a different crew (we were the B team), Restive had completed the Marion-to-Bermuda race. It had been quite a trip. Early on, the thing that furls the jib had broken during a storm, which forced the crew to spend several perilous hours wrestling the huge sail onto the deck. Then the toilet broke.

But Restive sailed on undaunted, navigating only by the stars, a class she had won twice before. This time, however, for some yet-unexplained reason she veered to the northeast and missed Bermuda entirely. This is not an insignificant miscalculation, as the island is a lonely collection of rocks in an otherwise empty ocean – Cape Hatteras, the nearest dry land, is 580 nautical miles away.

Glad I wasn’t on that trip.

Rescue at Sea (1st in a Series)

Part 1. Setting Off. Like Ishmael, “I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world,” and so for some unfathomable reason I accepted the invitation of an old friend to sail on the return leg of this year’s Marion (Mass.)-Bermuda race. I had never been on a small boat miles from any land before, and I looked forward to the opportunity to get away, to learn whatever I might and to have, perhaps, a bit of an adventure.

It was hot and humid the morning of Sunday, June 28^th when five of us set sail on Restive, a lovely 49’ wooden sloop, a rarity in an age of fiberglass. With a forecast of clear skies and a favorable southwest wind, we were bound for Newport, R.I. 635 nautical miles away. (A nautical mile, I learned, is not a precise distance as humans measure, but a fraction of Earth’s circumference, which is divided into 360 degrees. Each degree is further divided into 60 minutes, and a nautical mile is equal to one minute of the Earth’s arc – approximately 1.1508 miles.)

We had just pulled away from the dock when I inexplicably tripped over the cockpit rail and found myself fully airborne and heading straight for the back of our unsuspecting captain, who was intently maneuvering us into Hamilton Harbor. It was a clean hit, and the full force of my body drove the startled skipper into the wheel and firmly wedged his Adam’s apple against one of its spokes, rendering him momentarily unable either to steer or to breathe.

We were off.