Chapter 1

Even with shortened canvas Tinkerbelle rushed headlong through the darkness at about seven knots, her top speed. Her spray soaked sails strained against their fastenings as the relentless wind probed for some point of weakness that could be forced to give way. Every now and then a foaming wave cap slammed into her starboard side, sending up a geyser of spume and sloshing rivers of salt water back along her deck, half filling her self–bailing cockpit. Under each blow of the waves she lurched like a wounded doe, dipping to leeward with a tense, stomach–churning heave. She told me through her tiller, by the way she wanted to point closer to the wind, that she was unhappy. But I forced her to go on, full tilt.

What time was it? How many more grueling hours to dawn?

I wrapped the mainsheet once around the tiller and held both in my left hand. Then, struggling to keep Tinkerbelle on course with this hand, I shined a flashlight into the cabin with my right hand and peered through the tiny porthole in the drop panel of the battened–down hatch. I’d hung a wristwatch inside where it was relatively dry. From the Greenwich mean time indicated by the watch, I calculated it was roughly 2 A.M. at our meridian of longitude; 2 A.M. Tinkerbelle time. Oh, God. Another two and a half hours to sunrise! I’d be frozen stiff by then. Not to mention blown silly or drowned.

My teeth chattered even though I had on four layers of clothing. I wore padded thermal long johns next to my skin, regular cotton underwear over these, then a woolen shirt and woolen trousers and, on top of everything, a yellow rubberized anti–exposure suit. And still I shivered.

My socks, canvas shoes, feet and the lower halves of my trousers and legs were soaked despite the waterproof outer suit. Rivulets from my sodden hair trickled across my face and down my neck, stabbing icily at my back, making me wince. My hands were puckered and swollen from prolonged saturation. They hurt, especially the tips of the fingers and thumbs, which made untying knots and adjusting the sheets painful tasks. Salt-water sores on my buttocks turned the necessity of sitting into pure misery.

The cabin barometer was an enigma. I wasn’t sure what its strange behavior presaged. During the day it had fallen gradually. Then, between sunset and about 11 P.M., it had held steady. But since eleven it had zipped upward again at an alarming rate. I suspected it meant we’d soon encounter even stronger winds than those we were already battling.

The wind, whistling out of the south at twenty–five knots, the most that Tinkerbelle could stand up to under reefed main, built up menacing seas that threatened to bowl her over on her beam ends. She had to be swerved around periodically to meet the biggest of the cross–waves almost head–on or she’d have got into serious trouble.

Yet we kept moving, despite our vulnerability, because I wanted to make up for the seven or eight hours we’d spent hove to in a hard blow during the day. It would take forever to reach England if we had to spend that many hours out of every twenty–four lying to a sea anchor. We were already several days behind schedule. So on we raced, taxing our endurance to the limit, reeling off a fraction less than two nautical miles every fifteen minutes.

Except for glimpses at ocean, sails and sky, I kept my eyes fastened on the orange glow of the compass, shifting the tiller to right and left as required to keep the index line opposite the mark for 105°, our eastward course, printed on the swaying card. We bucketed along, our position at that hour being approximately 40° 43′ N and 60° 50′ W, which meant we were some two hundred and ninety nautical miles south of Canada’s Cape Breton Island and four hundred and eighty miles east of Long Island.

It was Monday, June 14th, and we were fourteen days out from Falmouth, Massachusetts, on the first leg of a transatlantic voyage I had dreamed of most of my life and carefully planned for more than a year.

“England, here we come!” I yelled at the stars.