Cruising Tales: The 600 Mile Voyage to Nowhere
Why do most of us go to sea? For adventure - gosh, where did that reef come from! For the challenge of crossing oceans - yeah, we were doing at least 26 knots in that storm! For the sheer pleasure of being at sea - the seasickness, the dinners that end up on the cabin sole, getting lost! Also as a means of making a living by taking people sailing on passages.
There are two ways to charter your boat on ocean voyages; 1) take crew that pay but also work or 2) take paying guests who do not work. The big advantage with working crew is that you don’t need any other professionals than yourself. The definition of a professional is loose, that is, someone who knows that the bow is the pointy end and the stern, the square end!
The disadvantage of having crew or guests along is that because they arrive on a specific day, you have to be ready to go and keep to your proposed schedule or nearly so. Another down side is that you may not always be able to start within the best weather window.
Still, having to leave on a certain day means that you can’t procrastinate. Of course you want the boat to be perfect and ready for anything but it ain’t never gonna happen. Besides, you need to sail before you run out of money.
Mike’s brother, Nick, and our sailing friend, Warren Giss, were deadheading with us on Avenir, our twin-diesel ketch, from Newport, R. I. to Bermuda. We had recently finished a charter for the America’s Cup Races in September 1967. At Bermuda we would pick up some of our Fort Worth sailing buddies as paying crew for the trip to St Thomas. The weather looked good and it was a straight six-hundred mile shot to Bermuda except for some allowance for the thrust eastward by the Gulf Stream.
Autumn may bring all sorts of weather and sure enough, we encountered a gale and big seas about three hundred miles out. We shortened down to a jib and reefed the mizzen but the wind was head on and shoving us north and eastward, essentially backwards. We needed to go southwest.
Things had immediately started to go wrong. The generator stopped working so all the food in the frig had to be thrown overboard. When a large pod of pilot whales surrounded us, we stopped the engines. Afterwards the port engine wouldn’t start. Then the other developed a water pump leak. The seas got bigger.
One rough night I fixed stew, thinking it would be easier to eat. Watching that stew slop around didn’t help queasy stomachs. When Warren lit a cigarette, the smoke made us all charge out of the main salon for the deck. From then on there was a new rule: no smoking below!
The washing-machine waves made steering difficult. On one very dark, wet night a freighter came too close for comfort and our helmsman got confused and headed up toward it, stalling the boat. Mike rushed up to the deck and yelled, "Fall off! " Fall off!"
The freighter slithered by, flashing morse code and in the commotion Warren ran up on deck dressed only in his skivies. He started to fling himself over the rail. Fortunately, I grabbed him by his, er...pants and cried, "Not yet, Warren! Not yet!"
In the morning, we realized that we were losing a lot of ground and that we might not make Bermuda at all. The batteries were going down and we were still engineless. Better to retreat while still ahead and alert our friends to meet us in Newport instead.
Luckily, we got the message to them and turned around, arriving in Newport at two in the morning. Ghosting quietly under sail we came alongside the dock near the brigantine Black Pearl and the restaurant named after it.
We learned one important lesson on this sea trip: Always arrive in port before the bars close!
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