We ate well. In spite of the rigors of beating, I cooked a hot breakfast every morning until the bacon ran out, and we had a hot dinner every night and shared a bottle of wine. Bill, who had a firm rule of no alcohol when single-handing, relaxed this stance when sailing in company. I think it made us both better company. In the evenings we talked endlessly and listened to tapes from the Monty Python TV series. Bill had never heard of Monty Python, Irish television not having worked up enough courage to broadcast the series to the west of Ireland, and we were both often convulsed. We had a broad range of audio entertainment at our command — the Python tapes, music ranging from Vivaldi to Simon and Garfunkel and, of course, the BBC World Service on shortwave. We even got Radio 2 until we were about eight hundred miles out.
We remained fairly busy, apart from sailing the boat. I practiced my celestial navigation, comparing my positions with Bill’s, and they began to come close. I read a lot, too, getting through Anita’s excellent biography of Francis Chichester and a couple of novels. Occasionally, a ship would turn up and we made efforts to communicate. Since the range of our little Seavoice VHF radio-telephone was only about forty miles, we could not communicate directly with land, so I had an idea for sending telegrams via other ships. Merchant shipping did not keep a watch on VHF, using it mostly for port operations, so I kept the signal flags KVHF ready for hoisting. K is the international signal for “I wish to communicate with you.” VHF, I figured, was self-explanatory.
When we saw our first ship, we got the flags up in a hurry and switched on the radio. Nothing. I lit a white flare. Still nothing. We figured we had not seen him soon enough, and since he was abeam, overtaking us, by the time we got the flags up, he probably hadn’t noticed.
Another day, a tiny fishing boat turned up from nowhere. He was apparently a tuna fisherman and the boat was so low in the water that it approached us unnoticed. It had not occurred to us that there would be fishing boats this far from land. He ran alongside us for a few minutes, and in spite of the flags and Bill’s efforts in French over the loud-hailer (the boat was from a southwest France port) we failed to make him understand that we wanted him to switch on his radio. With lots of friendly waving he disappeared over the horizon.
Our second attempt at a merchant ship bore fruit. We saw it early and had the flags up in plenty of time. I was screeching out “K” on the hooter as the ship came up to us, and soon I had her radio operator on the VHF. She was an Italian grain carrier, the Mario Z, under charter to the Russians to ferry wheat from New Orleans to Leningrad, and she was on her way to the States in ballast. I chatted with the radio operator, a Spaniard, for some time, and he kindly agreed to send telegrams home for us. All merchant mariners, I believe, are bored out of their skulls and perfectly delighted to pass the time of day with a small yacht in the middle of nowhere. It breaks up their day.
Talking with the ship had made our day, too, and there was better to come. For the first time since leaving England, we were freed. The wind backed and we were, at last, reaching. We had two lovely days of it, screaming along in bright sunshiny weather, clocking up our best runs of the passage. Our very best noon-to-noon run was 148 miles. It began to look as if we would make Horta in time for the competitors’ dinner on Saturday night, the sixteenth, and our spirits rose markedly. It had been depressing beating, beating, beating, sometimes laying our course, but even then hard on the wind. This was beautiful sailing, and we began to speculate about what Horta would be like. Bill had sailed past the Azores but had not stopped there, and I knew only what I had seen in a tourist brochure the race committee had sent.
We raised another ship, a German this time, and sent a telegram to Horta giving an ETA of Saturday. Spirits were high.
Then we were headed again. Worse, the wind dropped and we began to experience our first light weather, and from the worst possible place, on the nose. Very depressing. But I was learning an important lesson — that the sea doesn’t care when you arrive, or if you arrive at all. The sea is indifferent to the desires of those who sail upon her, and no amount of sulking or swearing will change that. One learns patience at sea, and always the hard way.
Bill got hurt. He had opened a locker under a settee berth and, having forgotten that he had left the lid off, sat down, falling into the locker, the edges striking him around the kidneys. He was obviously in a lot of pain, and I was worried. There was nothing in our super-duper medical kit, at least, nothing I knew how to use, which would help a ruptured kidney. We were relieved when Bill didn’t pass any blood, and we thought that the worst it could be was a bruised kidney. The worst of the pain passed, and although Bill was very sore and uncomfortable, he insisted on doing all the work he usually did, which was plenty. The only concession he made to his injury was to wear a normal safety harness instead of the length of rope he usually wore around his waist.
We plodded on, tacking back and forth to maintain our course, Bill in pain and I irritable, disappointed with our progress. We had hoped to make Horta in twelve days; now two weeks had passed. We worried that Gypsy Moth had already left Horta to return to England. We had hoped Bill would be able to return on her, saving the airfare.
Finally, on Sunday morning, we awoke to find Graciosa, the first of the Azorean archipelago islands, on our route, sitting fat and green in our path. Even more remarkable, we had been freed again and were pointing at the port end of the island, right where we wanted to go, with the wind on our beam. We sailed on toward the island, and as we approached, a small motor launch appeared, towing two large rowboats full of men. Up a stubby mast on the launch, a man was clinging precariously, scanning the horizon. These were the Azorean whale hunters, going after the monster sea mammals as generations of Azoreans have, in an open boat, using a hand-thrown harpoon, their only concession to modernity the little launch which towed them out for their hunt. They gave us a cheerful wave and continued their search.
Then, of course, we were headed again and found ourselves pointing at the wrong end of the island, hard on the wind. Graciosa looked very inviting, with thick, green vegetation; tiny, white villages here and there; and beautiful beaches, with an occasional stretch of dramatic cliffs. We beat our way into the channel between Graciosa and St. Jorge, the neighboring island, and pressed on toward Horta in the shallower, rougher water and freshening winds. We beat all day and all night. I contrived not to wake Bill until he had got some sleep and then turned in at dawn. Sunrise was a relief, for we had been running without lights. About a week out, the Marinaspec masthead light had inexplicably stopped working, and two days before, our spare navigation lights had gone, too. We then ran with the deck lights on, which took a lot of battery charging but at least made us visible. Finally, the deck lights went, too, and our last night out we were completely dark and worried about the possibility of colliding with an unlit fishing boat in the blackness.
At half past seven Bill woke me. I looked across the water and saw the harbor wall of Horta. We put in a final tack and crossed the finishing line at 08.47, local time. We sailed into the harbor and were directed to a mooring. Somebody on shore set off some fireworks. As we furled the reefing genoa the Dynafurl broke again, but it didn’t seem to matter now. We were in Horta. It had taken us fifteen and a half days.
17
Horta, sweet Horta
What we saw amazed me. I had been expecting a brown, arid, rather deserted island. Faial was as lush and green as Ireland, and more mountainous. Horta wrapped around the little harbor and ran up the hillside, lots of trees and white buildings.