Chapter 10

In the morning of the eighth day, as I lay asleep, a sound insinuated itself into my unconscious mind and tugged me toward wakefulness. It had the tone and timbre of a chorus of shouts–men’s shouts. But that was absurd. Men’s choruses simply didn’t go about the Atlantic shouting. I must have dreamed it. I squirmed into a new position under my blanket and began to drift back into sleep. Then suddenly I was exploded into wide–eyed consciousness by:

“Ahyouuuuuuuuuuga! Ahyouuuuuuuuuuuga!”

That was no dream! Such a dreadful, ear–busting noise could mean only one thing: my time on earth was up. And when I identified the accompanying roar as that of diesels I was sure of it. Without a doubt a big ship was bearing down on Tinkerbelle and noticing her at the last minute, too late to swerve aside, it had sounded its klaxon in a desperate bid to save the life of whoever was aboard her. Any second now there would be a grinding crash as the ship plowed us under. My one chance of survival was to abandon Tinkerbelle at once and swim for it. If I moved fast enough, I might get out of the ship’s path in time.

When I realized what I had to do and that my life depended on it, I sprang into action. I must have been hitting Mach 3 as I threw open the cabin hatch and flew out on deck ready to dive overboard.

Fortunately I was moving just slowly enough to have half a second to notice that, really, there was no ship headed toward us, and pull myself to a halt before plunging over the side. We were not about to be run down, but what I saw nearly made my eyes pop out of their sockets. Lying alongside Tinkerbelle, so close I could almost have jumped aboard her, was an enormous submarine. And on its bridge, staring at me, were three or four men, no doubt the chorus I’d heard.

I felt foolish. To be scared out of my wits was bad enough, but to be scared thus in front of an audience was too embarrassing to bear. I tried to salvage my pride by deftly changing my expression of panic into an expression of nonchalant greeting, which, I hoped, would convey the impression that, far from being hurried by fright, I was accustomed to shooting out of the cabin like that every morning, and equally used to meeting submarines on the high seas. It’s a shame my performance wasn’t caught on film, for it may have been worthy of an Academy Award. Or it may have served a useful purpose, later, as a medical-school exhibit on the muscular contortions a human face can achieve. Despite my histrionics, however, I had a suspicion the men on the sub weren’t the least bit deceived, and I learned afterward the suspicion was well founded; they knew I was in a blue funk.

What should I say? What should I do? I was racking my brain for answers to those questions, and trying to decide what the sub might want or do, when one of the men on the bridge (I heard subsequently it was the captain) called out, “Do you need any help?”

So that was it. They thought I was in some sort of trouble, I felt a great load slide off my shoulders, for I had begun to have wild notions such as maybe war had been declared since I’d left shore, or maybe the Coast Guard had sent the sub out to stop me from making what it considered a foolhardy voyage. Actually, it had only stumbled onto me, thought I was in distress and wanted to help. That was all.

I appreciated the offer of assistance immensely, but in my startled condition I could think of nothing I needed. So I shouted back, “No, thanks!”

Whereupon we lapsed into numbed silence, for the men on the submarine undoubtedly were as astonished by the sight of Tinkerbelle and me as I was at seeing them. We couldn’t think of anything to say. We just stood there looking blankly, unbelievingly, at one another as we slowly drifted farther and farther apart. Soon we were so far apart we couldn’t have made ourselves heard, even if we’d wanted to, over the shuddering clangor of the sub’s engines. (I had no idea submarines, even non–nuclear subs like this one, made so much noise while running on the surface.) As the sub’s stern passed by, I saw markings which told me it was an American craft, the Tench, named after a Eurasian fish noted for its ability to survive out of water. Finally its propellers began turning and in a very short time it slid out of sight over the horizon.

When I had recovered my composure, I berated myself for two serious omissions: one of courtesy, the other of seamanship. I felt I should have invited the sub’s skipper over for a gam and a cup of coffee, and I should have asked him for a position report against which to check the accuracy of my navigation. I managed to get along without the position report, but my failure in courtesy was not so easily overlooked. After my voyage was completed, I wrote a letter of apology to the Tench‘s skipper, Lieutenant Commander James A. Bacon, and he replied, kindly, with his impression of our meeting.

“At 0800 on 7 June,” he wrote, “Tench departed New London for sea. On arriving at Nantucket Lightship in the early evening of the 7th fog and numerous fishing vessels impeded our progress. As a result I spent the night in the conn or on the bridge.

“First light found Tench some 150 miles east south east of the lightship with the fog clearing. As the sun rose we broke out of the fog and the lookouts [one of them was a Yeoman Robert R. Rentschler, a fellow Cleveland suburbanite] spotted a very small mast on the horizon some distance to the south of our track.

“At first I thought the mast belonged to one of the trawlers we had been playing tag with all night, but as we approached it became apparent that it belonged to a small sailboat. At this point I altered course to pass close aboard in order to hail the boat.

“When the small size of the boat became obvious, I thought it probably had been blown out to sea and no one would be aboard. Until this time no one had been seen in the boat and now I decided to stop alongside and examine it in detail. As we approached within a few hundred yards, it could be seen that the boat was riding to a sea anchor and was provided with oars and other gear lying in the after section– the forward area being decked over and having a small cabin.

“I stopped Tench with Tinkerbelle about 10 yards abeam of the bridge, and we continued our examination. Although no on had been sighted on board, it now was apparent that someone could very well be in the cabin. Mustering all the lung power of the bridge watch and using a megaphone, we hailed the Tinkerbelle but to no avail. It became obvious after a few minutes that if there was in fact someone on board another means would have to be found to rouse them.

“The solution to the problem was readily available. I reached over and gave a long blast on the ship’s whistle, and there you were, leaping out of a small cabin as if you thought you were about to be run down by the Queen Mary or some equally large ship. I must now admit that I found your reaction somewhat amusing.

“We exchanged greetings as you have already stated. After you gave a negative response to my offer of assistance, I was at a loss for words. Since I had been delayed during the night and there was a good chance I was going to be late arriving at my assigned station. I proceeded on at best speed. I came to the conclusion that you were where you wanted to be and little could be gained by Tench remaining in your vicinity. I entered your position (39° 46′ N, 66° 27′ W) and the name of your boat in the ship’s log in case the Coast Guard should start looking for you.

“I thought at the time that you most probably were a sailing enthusiast on vacation and sailing to Halifax from Boston or some place in the Cape area. I am sincerely glad that I did not know what your true destination was. I am sure that if I had known what you were attempting, I would have had a guilty conscience on leaving you there.”

I, too, am glad Lieutenant Commander Bacon was spared the pain of a guilty conscience. There really was no reason for him to have had one, even if he had known where I was bound, because, as he said in his letter, I was where I “wanted to be”; no one had dropped me off there against my will. And, since I was there of my own choice, I had won the right to experience whatever that entailed, good or bad. So far it had been mostly very good and I was optimistic about the future.

I have just one bone to pick with Captain Bacon: he called that noise he made with his submarine a “whistle.” How euphemistic can you get? I’ve called it a klaxon sound, but even that falls pitifully short of being an adequate description. There simply is no word for the sound the Tench produced, a sound that seemed to be a nerve–jangling synthesis of the wailing of banshees, the booming of thunder and the screeching of all the demons of hell.

Tinkerbelle spent the hours of darkness after our meeting with the Tench riding big waves to her sea anchor while I tried as best I could to rest in her cockpit. It was a chilly, wet, miserable, dragged–out night. I was still too afraid of a capsize to seek shelter in the cabin when the waves were ominously large, so I had to bear the discomforts of the cockpit. It wasn’t easy to sleep in that exposed, perpetually joggling place.

The next morning (Wednesday, June 9th) the wind continued to blow at twenty–five or thirty knots and my bleary eyes got their first good look at the waves that, until then, had been partly hidden by the mantle of night. Some of them must have been seventeen–or eighteen–footers, the biggest waves we’d yet encountered. I watched them in awe and was mightily pleased and relieved to see how gracefully Tinkerbelle climbed to the summit of each one in turn, glissaded into the valley beyond and then climbed the next peak, on and on. My little craft performed her nautical functions with all the agility and stamina of a ballet dancer. I was delighted with her and praised her to the skies.

The threatening waves were not to be trifled with; I was sure of that. It was better to be wary of them than wrecked by them. It was equally true, though, that every minute we stayed tied to the sea anchor meant another minute added to the duration of our voyage, and a lot of those extra minutes could add up to one or more of several different crises that ought to be avoided, if possible. Consequently, I was eager to be moving.

Still, the waves held me transfixed with fright. I tried to envision what it would be like to brave them under sail and the only pictures that came into my mind were of disasters. Did Si Lawlor in his little Sea Serpent and William Andrews in his collapsible Sapolio sail through waves like these? That they might have done so seemed unbelievable, utterly fantastic. Yet Lawlor got across the ocean in only forty–five days, an astounding accomplishment for a boat only fifteen feet long. Andrews, in a boat half a foot shorter and with a greater distance to go, took eighty–four days, but he couldn’t have achieved even that mark if he had spent much time hitched to a sea anchor.

I wrestled with fear through the whole morning as I studied the waves. Finally, in the early afternoon, the conviction grew that we should get under way. “After all,” I wrote in the log, “The whitecaps are small even though the waves are big.” So, marshaling all my courage, I decided to put up one of the small jibs and proceed tentatively under it alone. If conditions proved to be too hazardous, I’d get the sail down again immediately and go back to the sea anchor.

I steeled my nerves and we started moving eastward once more. I was sure that, even under just the one small jib, we would take off like a jet–driven aquaplane. But I was wrong. We barely crawled. I had to hoist the mains’l, too, to get Tinkerbelle to move at a satisfactory pace. (However, I’m happy to be able to add that as the voyage progressed my ability to size up sailing conditions improved.)

I tried to get some pictures of Mother Carey’s chickens (storm petrels) the next afternoon, June 10th, but they moved so fast it was extremely difficult. They were fascinating to watch, though, because of their odd habit of walking on the water. I’d never seen these birds before, although I had crossed the Atlantic several times previously on ocean liners.

The book Virginia had given me said they were Wilson’s storm petrels, migrants from the Antarctic and the commonest members of the storm petrel family. Mother Carey, it said, was a corruption of Mater Cara, an appellation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and storm petrel was derived from Saint Peter, who also walked on the water, according to the Bible, until his lack of faith brought on a ducking. The Maoris of New Zealand had a poetic term for the birds, “takahi kare moana,” which meant “dancing on the waters.” I thought that was a particularly apt description.

Wilson’s bird was a little smaller than a robin, brownish–gray and black, with a white spot at the base of its tail. Sometimes it seemed to hop along on the water, sometimes it used its feet like skis and sometimes it simply walked. Two or three times I was amused by a bird that just stood on the water flapping its wings, as though it were trying to pull its feet out of hardening cement.

Not once did I see Wilson’s storm petrels in the water, floating and resting like little water birds. They were always flying, beating their wings without letup, moving erratically like butterflies and usually very close to the water’s surface. They must be tireless creatures, or else embarrassed to have anyone see them inactive. The bird book said they occasionally alighted on the water, but I never saw one do so, although I watched them intermittently all the way across the ocean.

One other variety of bird accompanied me almost all the way to England, the greater shearwater, a brown–and–white bird about twenty inches long, with a wingspread of more than two feet. I also saw, occasionally, pretty black-and-white terns and of course, gulls.

The greater shearwater was a lovely bird to watch in flight, it rode the wind so elegantly. It, unlike the storm petrel, was frequently to be seen bobbing on the water, resting or feeding. However, it never accepted the tidbits I offered.

One day I came upon an oceanic melodrama, a tragedy of the sea in which the innocent victims were little fishes, probably herring, and the villains were giant tuna and ravenous shearwaters. The poor herring found themselves in a terrible fix: if they stayed in the water the tuna got them, and if they jumped out of the water in their frantic efforts to escape the tuna followed right on their tails; besides which, in the air or near the surface, the shearwaters got them. They were trapped between two devils and the deep blue sea: doomed, no matter what they did.

I watched this battle for survival with something approaching horror–stricken fascination. The greedy tuna and shearwaters gorged themselves on the hapless herring. But as Tinkerbelle and I drew within twenty yards or so all the shearwaters in the area, alarmed at the sight of us, took to their wings. All except one, that is. This particular bird cut loose with a great squawking and flapping of wings, but, try as it would, it couldn’t get airborne. At first I thought the squawks and the inability to fly meant it had been injured- by a tuna, perhaps- and was in distress, so I headed toward it with the intention of seeing if I could render first aid. However, in a very short time it became clear that the bird was simply cussing itself out in bird language for having eaten so piggishly that it was now too heavy to take off. And, believe me, that bird knew how to cuss. I am no prig and yet I was shocked! And so were the tuna, for, as the air turned blue, they left.

As we bore down on the bird, its cursing and wingbeats became more frenzied. Finally, goaded by fear into making one last, do–or–die, super bird effort, it flogged itself into the air like an overloaded cargo plane and lumbered away. I don’t know bird language, so I can’t say for sure what it said as it fought for altitude, but the tone and inflection sounded like “Gee–hookers! That was a close one!”

Shortly after sunset I noticed the barometer was down a tenth of an inch. That wasn’t much of a drop, but sure enough it began to blow hard and I had to stream the sea anchor again.

“Wow! What a night!” I wrote in the log the next morning (June 11th), “I hope I don’t have to go through any more like that, but I probably will. It was cold, too, as the wind had shifted from west to north.”

The wind relaxed a little at about 12:30 P.M., however, and then the sun came out for the first time in three days and we had a gloriously sunny, warm afternoon of sailing. I hove to contentedly in the moonlight at about ten that night and, just before going below to sleep, saw a big liner rumble westward a few miles north of us, its portholes agleam and its decks bathed in soft light.

The next morning, I awoke at about sunrise after a full seven hours of warm, relaxed sleep, and lay there in the cabin luxuriating in the pleasure of being rocked gently by the waves. Sounds of water had enchanted and soothed me all my life: the roar of a fast–flowing stream in a valley of the Himalayas; the patter of monsoon rain on the tin roof of our home in Landour; the crash and hiss of breakers hitting the beach at Ventnor, New Jersey, where our family had thrice vacationed; the slap and gurgle of Lake Erie fresh-water waves around the breakwall at Wildwood Park harbor and now the happy laughter of Atlantic saltwater billows as they toyed playfully with Tinkerbelle.

It was Saturday, June 12th, and one of those “God’s–in–His–heaven–all’s–right–with–the–world” mornings that come along every once in a while to give you a taste of how wonderful life can be. And then, just as I was beginning to slip into utter harmony with the delights of the environment, I became conscious of a subtle something. I heard nothing whatever that could be termed alien or out of place and yet, gradually, imperceptibly, I was infused with an eerie feeling that Tinkerbelle and I were not alone, that we had company. It was an uncanny sensation, as if I were on the receiving end of a telepathic message.

I opened the hatch and went topside. Good Lord! There was another vessel!

This was much larger than the Tench. It towered above us, its tremendous bow jutting higher than Tinkerbelle‘s masthead. It was a Canadian naval vessel and to me, then only twenty–five yards away, it seemed large enough to be a battleship. However, I found out later it was a destroyer escort, H.M.C.S. Columbia, a beautiful light–gray ship with a well–cared–for look about it.

At the Columbia‘s rail, when I emerged from the cabin, was an officer in a smart white uniform. He had an electronic megaphone in his hands and, when he saw me, he used it to project his voice across the water between us.

“Good morning,” he said cheerily.

His friendly tone and casual manner seemed to imply that the sole mission assigned to the Columbia by Royal Canadian Navy Headquarters was to conduct a genteel wake–up service for singlehanded Atlantic yachtsmen.

“Hi!” I yelled back, attempting to sound just as casual and cheery as the naval person at the rail above me.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Everything’s AOK here!” I shouted.

Then I remembered what I had neglected to ask the captain of the Tench and added, “But I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a line on my position.”

“Will do.”

As we waited for the Columbia‘s navigator to work out the position, the officer asked me where I had come from and where I was bound and what my craft’s name was. I yelled back the replies and asked him if he would report Tinkerbelle and me to the Coast Guard in Boston and he said he would. Then the position report came. We were at 40° 17’N and 63° 7’W. That was great news! It showed that my navigation was reasonably accurate, for the position I had calculated was less than six miles from that given by the Columbia‘s navigator.

It was a tremendous relief to find out that my sun shots and calculations hadn’t gone haywire; that, apparently, I had got the hang of it and could now rely on my sextant and arithmetic to take Tinkerbelle and me where we wanted to go. I grew confident that we actually would land at Falmouth, England, and not unexpectedly at some other port.

“Smooth sailing to you,” called the Columbia‘s blithe officer. And I yelled back, “Thanks! Same to you!”

Then the big ship quietly pulled away stern first, turned northward and moved off with an air of majesty, its red–and–white ensign fluttering in the breeze. For the first time since we’d met, I looked about the ocean. There were three other warships in sight and off to the west airplanes were streaking through the sky. I must be mixed up in some naval maneuvers I said to myself. It turned out I was right, but at that moment I didn’t know how right.

Later I learned that Columbia, commanded by Commander P. R. Hinton, was participating in Exercise Polestar as a member of the NATO Matchmaker Squadron, which was composed of four ships, one each from Great Britain, Holland, the United States and Canada. The three other ships I’d seen undoubtedly were those of Britain, Holland and the United States.

“On the morning of 12 June at 0615,” Commander A. C. McMillin of the Royal Canadian Navy wrote to me, “Columbia was patrolling her station when ordered to investigate a small radar contact. This contact turned out to be the Tinkerbelle, and at first sight it appeared to be derelict, as there was no sign of life. As Columbia came alongside Tinkerbelle you appeared and spoke to Sub–Lt. E. J. Kelley, who was the officer–of–the–watch at the time.”

I learned, too that Exercise Polestar was an antisubmarine exercise in which units of the United States and Canadian Navies and the NATO squadron were divided into teams and pitted against one another. In fact, the Tench was a participant, but on the side opposite the Columbia, as the “enemy.”

Meeting both “friend” and “foe” in a naval exercise was a thrilling experience, one I shall remember always. But I feel mortified about the way Tinkerbelle and I blundered like bumpkins into those war games and diverted two vessels, for some minutes, from their important assigned duties. Here and now I want to thank the officers and men of the Tench and Columbia for their solicitous concern for our safety and, humbly, beg the Navies of Great Britain, Holland, the United States and Canada to pardon our intrusion.

The next night, following our encounter with H.M.C.S. Columbia, we had another beautiful, easygoing sail in the moonlight until about 11:45 P.M., when I turned in.

On Sunday, June 13th, I awoke to find a stiff breeze blowing so I kept Tinkerbelle tethered to the bucket drogue and utilized the time that gave me away from the tiller to rearrange the stowage of my supplies. I was getting more and more fed up with having to root through nearly everything I had to find what I wanted. I also took the opportunity to write some letters, to Virginia and others, which I hoped a passing ship might eventually pick up and mail for me when it reached port. We were hove to for seven or eight hours, altogether, not counting the night hours when I was sleeping. It was quite a pleasant time, on the whole, for the waves were not quite big enough to scare me out of the comfort of the cabin, but I was impatient and fretful because we weren’t moving eastward. In fact, we were falling behind on the schedule I’d set and if we didn’t get cracking soon it would take more than three months to reach England instead of the two months I had estimated.

Fortunately, the wind abated a little at about one in the afternoon. I hauled in the sea anchor, put a tuck in the mains’l and the Tinkerbelle spread her red–and–white wings. We took off at top speed.