El Norte

It seems that people go sailing for different reasons. For me it is poetry. I love the words given over centuries to the components of a sailing boat. The words are designed to get the meaning across in the purest, most succinct form. There is an element of the language almost stronger than the actual practise of sailing. A good sailor is one who knows the vocabulary as much one who can feel the wind accurately on the cheek and adjust sail appropriately. Certainly, I have been mistaken for a good sailor because I have taken such pleasure in the maritime lexicon. 

It was my father, the english teacher, who taught me first how to run a tide race when, as a nine year old, we kayaked out to the Beacon Rocks off North wales, where the tides run and rise waves at alarming speeds, to leave you perched, looking down into a watery abyss where seconds ago there had been a mountain of water rise up. ‘Keep paddling and don’t stop moving. Keep the bow into the current, or we’ll be lost’. We had some times, and as I look back I realise that although I had consumate and blind faith in his not inconsiderable strength, it was a team effort in that old fibreglass double canoe and, indeed, we could have been lost, although I didn’t know what that meant at the time.

This mistaken assumption that others would have come to the ocean for the same reasons. And what reasons are these? Idealism, of course, but why would they have come, have saved and spent and flown if they were not, too, striving for the same level of skill and commitment? And to discover they are not; that they will refuse to helm when the waves get high, despite the fact that there is no other way to survive than by co-operation, and yet still to refuse, and choose to die rather than co-operate. 

It finds me in a strange, lonely, and particular experience of being the ocean skipper. To have human beings somehow expect that if they don’t help everybody will survive anyway, as if in a video game, where one can insert a pound for three more lives. To know the risk and not be able to share it.

Now, we have been at sea for three days and three hundred miles, and our first sight of land is Satan Rock, in the biggest tide race in the Carribean. It is off Satan Rock that I reach a remarkable point of desperation. It seems impossible to hold a sixty degree course which will take is inside the Hawk channel. 

The dolphins in the darkness of that confused grey surging water off the Tortugas shallows seemed to wish us well on our passage, though, or perhaps they too knew what a bad situation I was in. The beautiful moonrise on that first night watch seemed, in it silver track, to cast a quicksilver nickel sparkle on the fact that we had left port on the 13^th. But why so superstitious? It is now clear that other boats made a great passage…

I have gathered all my years of accumulated sea skills, yet I still can’t keep the bow into the wind to move forward, and the boat keeps stalling and falling back to leeward. We have our tiniest reefed jib up, thankfully hank-on, giving us surprising drive when I can keep its edge in the teeth of the norther’s force. The engine spluttering and screeching after days of abuse, is failing me finally, with this evil rock to our lee, and my inexperienced crew switching off the fuel supply and clogging the filters with dirt from the breather hoses. I have been awake for thirty six hours, my last sleep: two hours.  After all these hours fighting at the wheel, I am exhausted, but now the only one who can keep the boat on the magic sixty degree course, but it is then that I realise, perhaps, why this has happened. We had put to sea on the thirteenth. 

It was clear that my boat, myself, and two crew were in some trouble two hundred miles offshore, as we listened to the increasingly rapid development of an unprecedentedly late weather system. It was of limited use to hear simply that ‘The North West Caribbean is, frankly, a mess’, but  the practical challenge came too, crackly, over the long-range HF radio. ‘It is critical that boats make the northerly latitude of  the Rebecca Shoal by thursday lunchtime to be safe. We had to go north, or get blown into the gulf stream with forty foot waves and certain disaster. And we had made it, only to find it wasn’t enough. We had done all we could, yet still the weather had turned on us. We had sailed right into the teeth of ‘El Norte’. There seemed to be a desperate situation from the start, but my decisions were astute, and as write in Key West, it is now clear that other boats made a great passage… So why was it so hard?

I’m not superstitious, but when it comes to the indeterminate mysteries and ungovernable powers of the sea and weather, I have accepted a different kind of awareness. I will not put to sea on a friday, and will not re-name a boat without astute and devoted attention to all the traditions and ceremonies required by sealore. It’s just not worth it. I have been flumoxed and confused by those huge forces too many times, and retain a healthy admiration for their ungovernable ability to confound prediction. But this time, I had overlooked one of my rules.

For three weeks there had been twenty good reasons not to leave. Long range weather forecasts, local surfers, fishermen, and the other cruisers all kept the mention of a ‘Norther’, or ‘El Norte’ constantly on their lips, even though it was improbably late in the season for anything like that. And I didn’t have the perfect crew for the job. A litre of Vodka had disappeared from the ships’ stores within twenty-four hours of them flying-in to Cancun, not to mention the complete technical disinterest. But I was between a rock and a hard place. 

An old maritime expression, that has, for now, slipped in and out of common parlance: the phenomenon of being ‘In Irons’. The dictionary definition is unknown to me, as I write this riding the GulfStream, offshore of West Palm Beach, but it runs something like ‘Being Caught between a Rock and a Hard Place; at sea, at risk of life and vessel, with nowhere to turn’.

A log entry from Isla Mujeres reads:

Whistling for Wind.

It is one of those windy rainy tropical days in the caribbean that reminds me of the Lynn Tait and the Commets ‘Storm Warning’. When people talk about the difficulties of running a boat, one of the most difficult situations of all is the limbo of waiting for wind.

Shore-bound, the ship’s company start to get unruly and frustrated. It has happened since time began, showing in literature like Coleridge’s ‘Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’, C.S. Forester’s ‘Hornblower’ series, and on. But it is still true today. We are all going nuts, wanting to get moving, and have stayed long enough now in Isla Mujeres, without the capacity to explore too far inland, should a passage towards the East and Florida seem suddenly feasible.

Discipline is difficult, and jobs are not getting done either as disconsolate men mope about. Out of all the difficult situations I get into, the last week rates high on the ‘Wlk the Tightrope’ list. Every day, for five days, I looked at the weather, and it seemed good for two of the three days needed for the crossing to the USA. But the third day predicted the wind suddenly turning on us, and with a crew unaccustomed to each-other or the boat, it boded disaster or at least a very unpleasant time indeed.

So here I still sit, trying to make life on the boat entertaining, trying to keep the boys off the bottle, and rested enough for their coming night watches. One thing is for sure: we are all itching to go, and will be ready now at the drop of a hat.

We were ‘in irons’ before we left. There was nothing positive about the slow and casual destruction of everything since then. I had worked to the point of personal physical destruction for over the last ten years. I took crew on anonymously, and watched their personal lineage of abuse and lack of respect get played-out on my lovingly restored boat.

I’m not superstitious, but when it comes to the indeterminate mysteries and ungovernable powers of the sea and weather, I have accepted a different kind of awareness. I will not put to sea on a friday, and will not re-name a boat without astute and devoted attention to all the traditions and ceremonies required by sealore. It’s just not worth it. I have been flumoxed and confused by those huge forces too many times, and retain a healthy admiration for their ungovernable ability to confound prediction. But this time, I had overlooked one of my rules.

I am aware that this is not necessarily the only version of what happened in the unseasonably late norther in the Gulf of Mexico, but it is the version I understand. 

As our beer-talk continued, it became clear that this lady was, it turned out, an emergency doctor for the US special forces, and had a story to tell that I didn’t want to hear. As a medical relief worker, she took me for a colleague, and she clearly had something to unload. She related a tale of a couple who set off, after consulting her, on a cruise. The wife was worried about her husband’s ageing heart, and has asked for a ‘medical’. 

She had looked him over, but didn’t know what to say. He was old and unhealthy, but she couldn’t stop them from sailing their dream into the ocean. He would probably be OK. That was enough for them. They had bought the dream. It was now or never. But it hadn’t been OK. A few days out, the husband went up the rigging because of a lost halyard. There is only one way to get the other end of a halyard if you let go and pull the other end, so he had got out the bosun’s chair , tied it to another line, and started to climb, with the wife was scarcely able to winch his overweight mass up. His own efforts had ended his life. He had had a heart attack, tangled in the lines above the spreaders, but worst of all had spun upside down in his harness, his body caught-up. The details needn’t be told, but the wife ended-up sailing the boat into port with upside-down blackened husband’s body dangling, leaking body fluid onto the stinking, blackening deck below, eyes and entrails pecked by gulls. She had jumped off the boat in a sate of extreme distraction, ‘never to be seen again’.

It was a bad omen for me to have heard the horrific tale, akin to the Ancient Mariner. Now, as we sailed northwards up the Yucatan Channel, I forced it out of my mind. I had an ocean passage to accomplish; three more days to Florida under sail, in the boat I had rebuilt myself, techniques learned from books, with unknown crew.

It all appears to me in ‘Episodes’ now. Would the boat make it? Was my restoration work good enough? The dolphins in the darkness of that confused grey surging water off the Tortugas shallows seemed to wish us well on our passage, or perhaps they too knew what a bad situation we were in and were worried for us. The swashbuckling feats of the Carribean’s pirates and wreckers may be from another time, but the seas, the weather, indeed the planet, is still out there. And so were we. But the beautiful moonrise on that first night watch seemed to cast a quicksilver nickel sparkle on the voyage; I distinctly remember flying fish in droves, scudding playfully across the teeming waters in the darkness as I helmed for my life, nobody else on board capable, it seemed, of keeping a course towards the shelter of Marquesas Key.

And now, suddenly, it is time. The time of my life. ‘Rupert, wake up. Billy’s struggling a bit; says we need to change course. The waves are too big’. I have slept for an hour. I grunt my way out of a miraculously deep sixty six minutes of sleep, and am pulling on my foul-weather trousers.  I am being thrown across the cabin by the seas. Don stands back, and when he can pass, goes back up the companionway.

Feeling how the twelve ton boat surfs down the fifteen foot faces of the waves, I am proud, but one thing she lacks is a second reef in the Mizzen, to reduce power and deal with this ‘out of nowhere’ short swell and that interminable wind. The wind! And the clogged filters deprive us of the critical speed we need to push against the worstening North Easterly wind, which now is gusting to thirty knots. Our course to save our boat and our lives: North East.

Billy now turns out not to be able to hold a helm in heavy weather. But now my engine is dying. Sixty degrees is untenable. We have tacked in close several times to try and push to the north, until I can clearly see the rock at the base of the tower in all the expanse of ocean, waves breaking. We have to get into the Hawk Channel. This is a desperate clawing moment of survival.

And we claw and claw our way. Around improbably crab pots (how did THEY get here?), and slowly along the channel, limping our way until finally we are beating, exhausted with crew unable to focus their eyes on the compass, and night is on us again, and my last trump card comes out, as we force our way towards a weak mobile phone signal and with the last technical trick I have, I can call for a tow for our battered boat, and the last ten miles into Key West are a wet rollercoaster ride as our disabled boat crashes through the swells on the end of a reassuringly thick towrope. And we are finally safe. From the sea, at least…