Sea Change by Peter Nichols

Author:Peter Nichols
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2018-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

July 10

Day 8 – End of 1st week out of Fayal – 00.00: Lovely night, stars, warm. We’re becalmed. Sails slatting as boat rolls slightly on imperceptible swell. Tried to go to sleep reading The Devil Drives, life of Burton, the Victorian explorer, but riveting stuff and keeps me awake. Will try to sleep now.

01.00: Leak steady so far, pumping 2-3 minutes every 2 hours. That’s better than getting worse, but it’s not getting better, and conditions are light. Unnerving.

13.20: Noon pos: 31°30' N, 34°08' W. 58 miles noon to noon. With the wind from calm to force 2 since yesterday noon, that’s not a bad mileage. Old Toad is moving very well in these light airs. About 500 miles from Horta in exactly one week – not as bad as it’s seemed sometimes, and the fact that we’re farther S than I had wanted to be may stand us in good stead later, near and beyond Bermuda, when we’ll probably be forced N by SW’lies. Also, farther south may mean a gentler ride with more chance of E’lies. Present course of about 300° takes us more or less straight towards Bermuda – 1540 miles away.

Marking the noon position – a small pencilled X – on my sailing chart of the North Atlantic, I see we are now well out onto the broad belly of the ocean, the great midriff emptiness between the continental outposts of Bermuda and the Azores. 2400 fathoms (14,400 feet) down to the ocean floor. Having been pushed mostly south this last week, we’re not as far east as I’d hoped to be, but in another week we should be halfway between North Africa and the east coast of the United States. On the chart, our route from one side of the Atlantic to the other looks all wrong: a long, pronounced droop from northern Europe down here to the subtropical middle of the ocean, seemingly Caribbean-bound, then back up to the north-east United States. Certainly not the flight path of an intrepid crow, but it is the best one for Toad.

Planning my route across the ocean in London earlier this spring, I spread pilot charts of the North Atlantic for the months of June and July on the floor and bent over them for hours. My optimistic plan was to try to stick close to the rhumb-line – the straight-line – route from Falmouth to Fayal, to get clear of the European continent with its commercial and fishing traffic; to keep, if possible, from being blown south into the Bay of Biscay, with its notoriously rough waters, where I could expect to find myself port-hopping along the north coast of Spain against predominant westerlies. A dreary prospect, particularly as I’ve always thought Spain’s much-ballyhooed tapas and paella are overrated dishes, usually as grease-laden and rancid as Azorean choriço. The June pilot chart showed mostly westerly and north-westerly winds along this route – on or just off the nose – and I had expected to be beating to wind-ward for most of that first leg of the trip.

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