It was now Tuesday afternoon, August 5 (we had started at seven p.m. on August 2), and the wind was freshening and heading us, an experience which was to be repeated ad nauseam for the rest of the passage. We reefed and began to beat. We did not know it at the time, but nearly two weeks later we would be still in identical conditions. At three a.m. the preceding morning I had been wakened by Bill. I was beginning to understand that not only was he a natural pessimist, but that he actually seemed to enjoy it when things went wrong. When anybody else would have been depressed and cursing his fate, Bill seemed stimulated.
“What?” I mumbled, rolling over and trying not to let any heat escape from my sleeping bag.
“Bad news,” Bill chirped. I was sure I could see his teeth in the darkness. I was sure he was grinning. The engine battery had shorted and was completely flat. I was sleeping on the hatch to the battery compartment. I struggled out of my sleeping bag and got at the battery. An untaped lead had rubbed against something. I taped it, switched the battery leads to start the engine, and began to disappear into the sleeping bag again.
“I’ve been thinking it over,” Bill said. “I think we should turn back.” I woke up again.
“What?”
“I’m old and weak,” said Bill. “You’re young and strong, but inexperienced. We’ve had this battery trouble and the Dynafurl is going to break at any moment. It’s your decision, but I just want to put my view to you. If you decide you want to go on to Horta, we’ll do so.”
I was silent for a moment. “Old and weak” was not a new theme. Bill King is a small but wiry man, and he is well muscled from manual labor on his farm. I suspected that he was stronger than I. In reflective moments he would bemoan his old age, referring to himself as “... nearly seventy.” He was not yet sixty-four. Once, over dinner, he’d remarked how well he was feeling, how youthful. I’d pounced: “But a couple of days ago you were practically on your deathbed.” “Ah, but now I’ve had half a bottle of wine,” he replied with a grin.
I thought that now I detected a trial balloon of some sort, but I was too sleepy to give him the persuading he seemed to want. “I’ll sleep on it,” I said, “and we’ll talk about it in the morning, okay?” I knew that we would cover another fifteen or twenty miles while I slept. The next morning the sun was shining and Harp was going well to windward. Bill remarked what a seakindly boat she was. “She goes to windward so much more comfortably than Galway Blazer, with her big spoon bows for running in the Southern Ocean,” he said admiringly.
“Listen, Bill,” I said, “everything’s going well now. The batteries are fully charged, and if the Dynafurl breaks again it’s simple to fix with our new tools. We’re both feeling better every day. I think we should go on.”
Bill nodded. “Right. We’ll say no more about it.”
We went on.
16
Hard on the wind
A week out. I was sitting in the cockpit in the late evening, enjoying the view. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, as beautiful at sea as the sky at night. There seem to be at least four times as many stars as on land, and the Milky Way is just that, a great white swath across a black universe. Then I heard a new noise.
Sailing is not as quiet a pastime as many people seem to believe it to be. Every sailboat is accompanied by a constant little concerto of sounds — water sweeping past the hull, halyards flapping against the mast, the leach of a sail shaking in the wind. A new sound means that something, however small, has changed. The sound I heard now was coming not from the boat but from the water. I looked over the starboard rail and saw, lit by its phosphorescent progress through the sea, a torpedo coming straight for the boat.
It is amazing how many thoughts and images can pass through the mind in a second or two. I saw the yacht erupt in the explosion, and myself flying through the air, then I thought, Nonsense, nobody would torpedo a small boat; anyway, I can see that the torpedo is a living thing. It was a great white shark or killer whale. Bill King had been attacked by one in the Southern Ocean, now it was happening to us. I saw the boat, holed and sinking, while we scrambled into the vulnerable life raft and the creature circled the crippled yacht, waiting. Inches from the hull, the great white “shark” veered sharply away from the boat, as if he had ricocheted. I discovered that I had been holding my breath.
The great white shark/torpedo was a dolphin, the first I had ever seen at night. Now I saw that there was a pair. They did their torpedo act again and again, driving at the yacht, then veering away at the last possible second. Since they provided their own lighting in the phosphorescence, I could clearly see their shapes and features, their smooth gray skins. I sat, transfixed, for nearly half an hour as they played their game, having the time of their lives, then they were gone.
We had altered our watch-keeping system now, and we were both well rested. After passing over the continental shelf and leaving the trawler fleets behind, we were in much less danger of collision, being off the most heavily traveled shipping lanes. Now one of us would stay dressed all night, ready to go on deck if necessary but not keeping a constant lookout. One night, when I was on watch, I was dozing lightly in my berth, when I became aware that Bill had awakened and was going on deck. I returned to my doze, thinking he had gone up to pee, but suddenly the yacht tacked. A moment later Bill came below again. “I think I must have developed some sort of ESP in submarines during the war,” he said. “I just woke up and knew I had to go on deck. We were on a collision course with a very large ship.” I looked out of the hatch and saw the enormous thing about three hundred yards astern by then. I made a mental note always to sail with people who were former submariners, and I wondered if I would ever become that attuned to what was happening around the boat.
We settled into a routine aboard, a routine ruled by the constant strain of being hard on the wind. When a small yacht is beating to windward she will suffer more fore and aft motion and heel more sharply than on any other point of sailing. Harp’s motion was very kindly for a yacht of her size, but it is the heeling of the boat which is the most tiring feature of beating. When the boat is heeled at, say, a constant angle of twenty degrees from the vertical, life aboard becomes a continuous struggle with the law of gravity. One is always traveling either uphill or downhill and never on a level path. Ordinary tasks, like eating, become much more entertaining and exciting. I had equipped the galley with some very attractive American dinnerware, each plate of which had a rubber ring around the bottom which, the ad stated, kept the plate from sliding off the table even at a thirty-degree angle of heel. The ad was absolutely correct; the plates did adhere at that angle. But what the manufacturers had neglected to point out was that, while the plate would remain firmly in place at a thirty-degree angle of heel, the food slides off the plate into your lap. We learned to eat everything from bowls and to hold firmly on to them. They might not tip over or slide when heeled, but the suspense was unbearable.