Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (15 page)

On we ran toward the west across the mirrorlike surface of the ocean, surging over the great hills of the swell. We shivered and, for a little warmth, turned our faces away from the headwind, and slipped our gloved hands beneath our armpits; you never put your hands in your pockets on a boat, as you never know when you might need them in a hurry.

The gentlest of breezes was growing, fanning in dark patches across the smooth surface of the swell, but coming, predictably enough, from almost dead ahead. This made the headwind stronger, and consequently colder. Ros gathered up the now shivering Hannah and went below, followed by everyone else, leaving me alone at the wheel. They shut the companionway doors, to keep the
heat in, with just a little gap at the top through which I could almost see the compass. I was steering 285 degrees, west by northwest … supposedly.

Supper was served; a good idea to eat during a period of calm. I enjoyed the feeling of being alone on deck listening to the clatter of crockery and the pleasing sounds of people eating together, talking and laughing. Even nicer was to be at the helm alone at night, while all the others, except Patrick, who would be busy at his unfathomable tasks with the ropes and sails, lay deep in sleep. It gave me a wonderful feeling of responsibility, of steering my friends safely through the night.

Patrick relieved me when he had eaten his fill, and I went below into the warmth of the cabin. My face burned as I shed the heavy canvas coat—Swedish army surplus, which protected me through the foulest weather—and sat down to assuage my raging appetite. Constantly being cold makes you very hungry.

When I returned to the deck, tearing myself away from the warm fug of the cabin and the pleasures of after-dinner conversation, that gentlest of breezes had become an icy wind. “Here, take the wheel, will you, Chris,” said Patrick as I gloved up, thin woolen gloves inside heavy mittens. “I’m going forward to trim up the sails. I’ve had to bear away a little; see if you can make two seven five and keep the sails drawing.”

I settled happily to the wheel, standing astride in front of it and holding on to the spokes behind my back. It was a good feeling, bowing your knees with the bounding motion of the boat and heading into the gray twilight of an arctic night. There was, though, a solidly ominous bank
of clouds building darkly to the west, and by the time Patrick slid back into the cockpit twenty minutes later, the wind had freshened strongly, bringing with it a stinging sleet and a nasty steep chop to the waves. It looked like we were heading for a storm, and fast.

Hirta
heeled hard over as Patrick sheeted in the sails, and our pleasant afternoon of calm was quickly over. He leaned down and switched off the engine, and the sounds of the sea and the old boat reasserted themselves: the thump and hiss as the bow burst into each wave, the creaking and straining of the boom, the whistling of the fresh breeze among the shrouds, the sort of sounds that imprint themselves forever on your very soul. By eleven o’clock we were being battered by a ceaseless procession of fierce waves, and the wind that earlier had been whistling was nearer now to howling as
Hirta
shouldered her way through the unrelenting seas.

“This is more like it,” yelled Patrick, wiping the stinging spray from his eyes. “Now we’re making some real progress.”

I grinned at him in uncertain connivance as I cowered from the blast, teeth chattering, in the shelter of the cabin door. It looked to me as if
Hirta
was taking a bit of a beating, but I can’t deny that hammering, as we were, into the teeth of the rising storm was pretty exciting, and if Patrick reckoned it was all right, then it probably was.

Half an hour later, though, as the full gloomy twilight of the arctic night closed around us, things were starting to look threatening. The wind was now a full gale, howling in the rigging; we were constantly lashed by spray as
far back as the cockpit, and the lee or downwind rail was under green water most of the time.

Suddenly the cabin doors burst open and Tom’s head appeared. He looked around him incredulously. “What the fuck’s going on here, you pair of clowns? What in hell’s name are you trying to do … drown us all?” he yelled above the roar of water and wind.

“It’s OK,” shouted Patrick. “She’s taking it in her stride …”

“It’s bloody well not OK. We’re putting a couple of reefs in right away. Everybody on deck, now!” Tom shouted down below. “Safety lines, everybody, and Ros, can you take the wheel?” Ros had appeared in the cockpit and seemed to inhabit the space with a quiet authority I hadn’t noticed before. “Head her into wind; keep her as steady as you can,” Tom told her, before shouting, “Patrick: sheet in the staysail and jib tight as they’ll go. John: drop the mainsail, quick as you can now. Chris and Mike: furl the jib, right up, and don’t forget to hang on to the furling line. Then everybody get ready to gather the sail and tie it tight, double reefing.”

As
Hirta
came round head to wind, all hell broke loose. The foresails flogged with a noise like thunder until Patrick sheeted them hard in. When you’re straight into wind you catch the waves at an angle to the bow, so the boat yaws and rolls and pitches all at the same time. It’s impossible to get a footing because of the waves, tons of green water breaking over the deck. It’s hellish, and truly terrifying. You snap your safety line on to whatever solid thing you can, but more often than not it restricts
your freedom of movement, so you unclip it and take the risk. And it is a risk. If you went over the side, you’d be gone for good. There would be no chance at all of finding you, let alone picking you up in this sort of sea, and you’d be frozen stiff in a matter of minutes, anyway.

Tom was unruffled; he gave orders with absolute coolness as he hauled the boom in amidships and kept an eye on every one of us. Ros, too, seemed to keep resolutely calm as she battled skillfully with the bucking wheel. As the sodden mainsail crashed down onto the boom, we all leaped to gather it and tie down the first reef. Each of a dozen ropes had to be passed beneath the sail and tied.

With the crazed rolling of the boat, the icy cold in your fingers, the difficulty of getting a purchase with your feet, and the cold, cold terror gnawing at your very innards, this is not an easy task. When we finally got the first reef tied, John dropped the sail a bit farther and we set to tying in the second reef.

The whole job took about half an hour, then we hauled the now-much-reduced sail back up and tightened the outhauls. Tom cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled down the screaming wind: “OK, Ros, pay her off the wind now and see how she sails like that.” Ros spun the wheel until the sails bellied out with wind and
Hirta
drove her bow into the boiling waves once more.

“Patrick,” said Tom, as we tumbled back into the shelter and relative calm of the cockpit. “Please don’t ever do a thing like that again, not on my boat and not with a single member of my family and my crew onboard.”

“Come on, Tom, it wasn’t that bad, and we both know the old girl was up to it well enough.” Patrick was bristling,
but there was an element of sheepishness in his voice.

“This boat is a hundred years old, Patrick. She’s well built and she’s sound, but there’s a limit, and you took her all the way to that limit. I shouldn’t need to say this, but I’m the skipper and it’s my responsibility to get you all safely to landfall. I cannot have you driving the boat on as if this were some sort of bloody military maneuver.”

Tom was furious, but he just about managed to rein himself in. The restraint was more intimidating than any outburst would have been.

“You’re right, Tom,” said Patrick. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

AS IT WAS WELL
into the after-midnight watch, Patrick and I sloped off guiltily to our bunks for a couple of hours’ sleep. Sleep, or at least rest, is mandatory, as you need to be fit enough to take the next watch.

So I slumbered, listening fearfully to the storm that was still gathering strength. I was in my sleeping bag, wearing long johns and a T-shirt, with my moleskin trousers and heap of sodden jerseys at the foot of the bed and my oilskins hanging on a hook nearby. When the storm had started we’d each of us rigged up a lee cloth, a canvas strip tied to hooks above the berth, to stop ourselves from being hurled bodily from our beds.

As I lay there, thinking perhaps a little guiltily about Ana and her worries on my behalf that I’d so glibly dismissed, I became aware of John tumbling down the stairs
and disappearing into the saloon to wake the skipper. A minute later Tom joined him by the chart table and I listened to them conferring. “We can’t carry on like this,” asserted John. “The weather’s still getting fiercer. If we don’t put the third reef in a bit quick, we could lose the mast.”

I was already groping under my pillow for my glasses when Tom’s shaggy mane poked into my berth. “Get your butt up there on deck, Chris. Time for a third reef. Now!”

He went to wake Patrick while I rolled out of the berth, crawled into my oilskins, and staggered up the pitching companionway steps straight from the warmth of my rank berth into the awfulness of a full gale on an arctic night.

“Right,” said Tom. “You know what to do; do it. I’ll take the wheel.”

The third and last reef was a little easier than the others, as there was less sail to deal with and fewer ties, although this was offset by the fact that the ferocity of the wind and the water was even more intense. We began like sleepwalkers, moving slowly, sleepily, but once smacked in the chops with a bucketful of icy green water, one is very quickly back on the alert and moving fast.

Half an hour later Tom steered
Hirta
away from the wind to a point where she could just make headway through the now towering seas. “I reckon that’s a full storm; about force ten now,” he yelled above the thunderous howling of the elements. “Patrick and Chris, go and get some rest. Mike, go and make us some tea and we’ll see if we can’t make some sort of progress through this horror.”

Patrick and I crawled back below to our respective
berths and attempted to salvage what little remained of our hours of rest—hard to do when distracted by the thought of a wall of gray water bursting asunder the cabin doors and drowning us like rats in a rabbit hutch, but exhaustion must have settled the matter.

In no time at all, I was shaken rudely awake by Mike. It was four in the morning.

“Hey, there’s a storm out there and it’s your turn to get out and in it,” he said with a nauseating grin.

“Is it getting any better?” I asked.

“Nope,” he answered, straight-faced this time. “It’s a whole lot worse.”

Getting into sopping, wet, icy clothes at four o’clock on a morning when you’ve been up most of the night is nobody’s idea of fun. The violent motion of the boat made it an almost Herculean labor just to get a sock on. I asked myself if this really were the path to take in search of beauty … surely there must be less disagreeable ways.

I staggered out into a world of whirling grays. The sky was boiling down upon us in racing gray clouds; the sea was an unrelenting confusion of huge waves, each filling the air with its shattered crests of spray. John, drenched right through, gave me a wry grin from the wheel. ‘We don’t seem to be getting anywhere anyway, but see if you can’t make due west, two seven zero.’

I wedged myself in beside the wheel, pulled my hat down over my glasses, and appraised the situation. We were beating violently into a gray nothingness that whirled all about us.
Hirta
was sailing with just the staysail and a tiny patch of triple-reefed main. One minute the view was filled with nothing but a towering wall of gray water, and
then we plunged into the trough and up the other side, to see nothing but the whirling gray tumult of the sky. Down in the troughs of the waves we would lose the wind, and the boat would momentarily right herself before being hurled aloft by the next wave, where the sails would again be taken by the wind and she would heel hard over once more. The motion was truly awful. And there was nothing to give a moment’s comfort; not the sun nor the moon nor even the stars, nor the sight of a distant shore … just the crazed, if companionable, stares of the fulmars as they wheeled easily among the raging waves.

Things were getting so nasty that I decided to strap myself into the cockpit with the safety line. There was so much water breaking over the boat that I feared I might be swept away if a freak wave were to swamp us. It was a truly terrifying situation: we were three hundred miles from the nearest land, with no means of communication with any rescue services, and being tossed about like a feather in a whirlwind aboard a hundred-year-old sailing boat.

“This is nothing,” shouted Tom, who appeared beside me in the cockpit, and seemed to understand exactly what was going through my mind. “It’s nasty … very nasty … but this boat’s been around for the best part of a century; she’s been through a lot worse.”

“But what about you?” I hollered. “Have you been in worse storms than this?”

“Many a time … and in less seaworthy boats;
Hirta
will see us through. Don’t you worry about it.”