Harmattan
I think I’m getting a sore throat,” said Dorothy, “I better get some rest.”She disappeared down the companionway and I took over. Funny . . . my throat was raspy too, and my eyes weren’t working right, either --- our running lights cast exaggerated sworls of red and green. We’d had a battery of inoculations before we left Tenerife --- yellow fever, typhoid, hepatitis --- and we were taking anti-malaria pills religiously.
A bit melodramatic perhaps. . . . Still, the word “ harmattan” conjured up an exotic threat, implied hostile coasts and ancient voyages into the unknown. Six hundred years before Christ the seamen of Carthage had sailed down these desolate shores to engage the Africans in “silent trade” for the gold of Guinea. Two thousand years later, the Portuguese pushed their caravels over the same seas, fearing the worst, and gratefully discovering Cape Verde, behind which lay rivers and wealth. Columbus, Hawkins, Drake and many other (in)famous mariners had sailed past this same desert and breathed the harmattan’s dust.
Dawn was dismal, bereft of sunshine.It didn’t first grow brighter in the east; instead the whole bowl of the sky absorbed and spread a drab, coarse light, gloomy as an eclipse--dirty daybreak in the bowels of a harmattan. We could actually see clouds of blowing dirt--- fine reddish silt that 20 knots of wind whirled and billowed like hard-pressed smoke from a prairie fire. It was incongruous to be thirty miles offshore on the untrammeled brine, yet feel like we were bound in traffic behind a column of trucks on a dry dirt road.Out here we couldn’t hang a right or hold our breath ‘til it passed. . . . This was omnipresent and inescapable.
I’d never seen the boat so filthy, not even after seven months wintering beneath a busy bridge in Seville. Dirt lay thick on the decks. The masts and cabin sides looked like the rear window of a car after fifty miles of bad road, waiting for some wag to write “wash me” with his finger. The halyards were grimed deep into the fiber of the rope, the portholes were obscured, but the sails were worst. From weathered white, they’d turned tan bark overnight, so streaked with mud where spray had landed they looked like they’d been dragged through a buffalo wallow.
Down below, the dust had settled over the interior like a plague of locusts. . . . books, cameras, dishes, cabinets, clothes . . .when someone sat down it smeared into the upholstery. We could feel it in the folds of our neck, clogging our nostrils, stopping up our pores, drying our eyes. And our lungs--- I wondered what combinations of desiccated camel dung and dormant fungal spores waiting for rain lay baking on the surface of the Mauritanian badlands.A skim of dust floated on my coffee but I gulped it down anyway. Half an acre of the Sahel’s precious topsoil fertilizing my decks . . . while farmers starved, whose land it had been . . . life’s a bitch.
Around 9:30 when the sun should have been high in the sky, it occurred to me that, with no visible sun, there could be no sun sights. So how were we to make our landfall?Up ‘til now, I had given it little thought.It was only a 16-hour run from Cape Verde to the mouth of the Gambia River. I’d assumed we’d close with the coast late in the morning and run it down, relying on DR and visual confirmation.The thick haze now made that plan dangerous.
According to the Pilot, this coast was none too easy to read in the best of weather, consisting of a long low line of undifferentiated mangroves occasionally broken by nondescript hills.As much as five miles offshore lay a string of shallow banks so steep-to that soundings would give no warning of their approach. One minute a vessel would be in four fathoms, the next hard aground.The Pilot also warned of tidal streams up to two knots setting on and off shore in the vicinity of the river mouths that clustered around the Gambia’s entrance.With no tide tables we were obliged by prudence to set a course that allowed for the full on-shore set---and that introduced a wide area of uncertainty into our DR.
We needed an accurate fix from which to set a course for the buoy that marked the entrance channel through the shoals into Banjul--- Gambia’s port and capitol.With a shaky DR, no sun sight , no Loran---these waters weren’t covered anyway---and no sat-nav (this was pre-GPS), we appeared to be stuck, doomed to flounder around ‘til the weather cleared.That might be a week--and that meant mutiny. A week of slopping scupper to scupper in the swell? While New Year’s celebrations ashore unfolded without the input of our youthful crew? I felt sudden companionship with the astrolabe navigators of the caravels, creeping along an unknown shrouded coast, while the crew clamored for home.
Finally by 11 am the sun rose high enough to clear the worst of the haze and shine weakly through a gauzy patch of blue. For a moment our problems seemed solved.Out came the trusted old sextant and my son Raffy and I took turns shooting the sun and writing down each other’s numbers. We came quickly acropper of the next obstacle though . . . we could make out the sun alright, the bottom arc of its lower limb was clear enough, but where exactly was the line of the horizon?The grey sea stretched away and melded seamlessly with the grey sky. As the haze coalesced and dispersed with the gusts of wind there sometimes appeared to be a sort of horizon, briefly, but at best it was blurred.
“What about a noon sight?” asked Raff. I was skeptical. Noon sights are the easy way for beginners to start celestial navigation without all the bother of exact time and the calculations that go with it. Raff had been taking them all the way from Gibraltar.
“I doubt it,” I replied. “We need one sight before noon and another one some time after, to be able to cross their LOPs for a proper fix. What’s the good of one line?”
“Well, better one line than none,” he said.
Actually, as I thought about it he was probably right. A noon sight isn’t tied to a split second on a chronometer.Instead, you follow the sun in the sextant as it climbs to its zenith---noon. When it starts to drop you know it’s after noon and you stop tracking and just read off the last, highest, value on the sextant’s arc. Subtract that value from 90 degrees (allowing for declination) and you have your latitude. Simple and elegant. . . and taking the sight over a period of five or ten minutes meant we stood a much better chance of sorting out the true horizon than we would with any timed sight at a given instant.
As I plotted the noon sight on the chart, it struck me that our longitude was right below us, on the sea floor. The coast off Gambia runs almost due north and south, and the continental shelf falls off quite evenly.By taking soundings and locating them at our latitude on the chart we should have a fix, right? Maybe. At any rate it was worth a try.
We got bottom in ten fathoms---25 miles offshore if our navigation was to be trusted-- and we set a course for the buoy. With four young men aboard it was easy to get regular soundings from the leadline up forward, and as we compared the depths with our course over the bottom it tallied nicely.So far so good.
The buoy we were seeking marked a long bank with less than five feet of water over it--- the “Stop-In-Time-Bank”---a name with a message. As we approached the invisible coast, the wind died away and the sea became glassy with a low swell. We motored through opaque muddy green water which would never show a warning color change if the bottom came up suddenly.We looked for signs of breakers but the swell might not break in a few feet of water so we looked for it to steepen or curl---any change in the low undulation.We kept the lead going at frequent internals now that we were in four fathoms--- the least depth on the chart before the bank. I strained my eyes into the haze. Stories came to mind of boats searching for a landfall in the rugged Cape Verde Islands during harmattan weather and finding themselves amidst breakers before they ever saw land.
Something floating in the water attracted the lookout’s attention---just leaves on a branch that must have been washed out on the ebb tide of the river. Soundings kept coming back four fathoms.The bank had to be close...was I seeing breakers off the port bow? . . .definitely seeing something. . Stop!. . .something white. . .vague. . .a trawler, emerging from the haze like a ghost coming through a wall.
We got close enough to read the name and we called him up to ask which way to the buoy.Try as we might, we couldn’t get an answer.He spoke an impenetrable version of English. Frustrated, we looked around and saw bearing down on us a cargo ship right on our course, heading in towards what could only be Banjul. We fell in behind it and ran the engine at top speed, trying to keep up with it before it merged back into the haze. Just before it faded and vanished, it made a turn . . . and we saw the buoy.
From there on into Banjul was a piece of cake.Little did we know that the most hair raising incident of the voyage – of our lives --
awaited our arrival.
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