Chapter 13

In the morning (Tuesday, June 15th), after more than ten hours of sleep, I awoke to find Tinkerbelle again riding mountainous waves. But I wasn’t worried; I knew she’d stay upright. All day the wind blew hard, too hard to do any sailing; so I remained within the shelter of the cabin, going out on deck only occasionally to see if any ships were in sight.

It was a huge relief to be myself again, to realize that Robin really wasn’t in any difficulty, that all my fears about her had been part of a nightmarish hallucination. Robin wasn’t in trouble, there was no Ada’s Landing, no Place of the Sea Mountains, no MacGregor, no sinister choir, no Gunga Din, no staircase or hill in the ocean and no aquatic pranksters. O.K., granted. But what about those duckings? Were they hallucinatory, too? Had I or hadn’t I been washed overboard four times?

The clothing I’d worn the previous day was tucked away in a corner of the cabin and it was still sopping. It couldn’t possibly have got that wet unless I had actually been in the sea at least once. And if I’d been in the sea once, and knew it was for real, then the other times must have been real, too. Besides, the flashlight I’d had tied to a line in the cockpit was gone. The knot must have come loose, allowing it to slip away when it, too, had been washed overboard. Yes, I really had been knocked into the sea four times. No doubt about it. (Fortunately, I had a spare flashlight, as well as a marvelous signaling spotlight a friend had presented to me as a bon–voyage gift.)

Describing the previous day in the log, I understated the case somewhat when I wrote, “This was one of the most unusual days of my life. “Then, after telling about everything I’d “seen” and “done,” I summed it up with, “This was a weird experience. It must have been at least partly hallucination, but part of it must have been real because I know I was sailing around, was swept overboard four times, and used up a whole day. I must have just slipped a cog.

“I must say that I have had the most uncanny feeling of having someone with me most of the time. It’s not always the same person. Sometimes it’s Virginia, sometimes Doug, sometimes Robin and sometimes John (John Manry, my brother). I’ll have to get a psychologist to explain all this.”

Perhaps this feeling of having members of the family with me was a technique my mind had of coping with loneliness, for I did at times feel extremely lonely. However, I didn’t miss human companionship in a broad, generalized way, probably because I am inclined to be an introspective, self–contained sort of person, lacking strong inclinations toward gregariousness. I missed my family and close, personal friends intensely, but as for mankind in the abstract, no. I got along without human company (considered simply as human company) very well. And, after all, I knew from the very beginning that I wasn’t going to be alone for more than three months.

Besides feeling that I had members of my family with me, I sometimes heard voices in the wake. This was in the first part of the trip before any weeds or barnacles had attached themselves to the hull, and Tinkerbelle could sail quite fast, leaving a bubbling wake behind her. To me, sometimes, the bubbles sounded as if someone were talking down there under the water and once I imagined that someone under the boat was calling for help and I even went so far as to look down over the stern to see who it was. I didn’t see anyone.

To help face the loneliness I kept one of my watches set to Eastern standard time, the time of Willowick and Cleveland, so that I could visualize what might be happening at home. At 7 A.M. (E.S.T.) Doug would be getting out of bed, I knew, for he was the earliest riser in the family. As soon as he was dressed (if it happened to be Saturday), he would go out to the living room to watch the cartoons on television; otherwise he’d have a hasty breakfast and depart for school.

Robin, girl–like, spent the time between getting out of bed and leaving for school fixing her hair and making sure she was dressed to suit herself. And Virginia would have to keep urging her on so that she wouldn’t keep her friend, Jean Perkey, waiting. Then the two girls would go on to school together.

After the children had left, if I was at home, Virginia would spoil me outrageously by serving me coffee in bed and then she would sit beside me and we’d have the most wonderful conversations. How I missed those talks and cups of coffee. The talks I had now were rather one–sided and the instant coffee I made for myself wasn’t nearly as flavorful as the coffee Virginia brewed.

All day long I had only to look at the Eastern standard time to picture what was probably happening at home at that moment. It made the family seem much nearer than it might have seemed otherwise. I hoped that at the end of the month Virginia wouldn’t have trouble paying the bills, a chore that previously had been in my province.

Wednesday, June 16th, dawned with Tinkerbelle bobbing gently on a smoothed–out sea. I ate a hasty breakfast and we got going as quickly as possible. It turned out to be a fine, sunny day, the highlight of it being that, finally, after sixteen days at sea, we crossed the meridian of 60°W, completing the first step in the giant countdown to England.

It was a wonderful feeling to have passed this first oceanic milestone, but it required very little arithmetic to see that if we continued to move at the rate we’d established in the first two weeks we’d require about eighty–seven more days to reach England, making the duration of the voyage more than a hundred days. And I was provisioned for only ninety days. It looked as though I might have to go on reduced rations.

I wasn’t really worried, however, because I was consuming my provisions more slowly than I’d thought I would, and I was confident we’d move faster as I grew better acquainted with the ocean and with Tinkerbelle‘s performance in relation to it. During these first two weeks I had been sailing cautiously, feeling my way, getting my sea legs.

About noon the next day Tinkerbelle almost slammed into a shark that was lallygagging at the surface with its dorsal fin sticking out of the water; I think it must have been sleeping. It was eight or nine feet long, not very big as sharks go.

In midafternoon we had our first serious mishap: the rudder broke.

The fiberglass covering of the rudder had cracked near the stock where the tiller fitted onto it, and water had seeped through the crack to the quarter–inch plywood underneath, causing it to soften. Finally, the enormous strain set up by the opposing pressures of water on the rudder and my pull on the tiller caused the stock to snap. I thanked my lucky stars that I‘d brought along a spare. In less than five minutes it was in place and we were moving again.

We were becalmed for about four hours on June 18th and again for most of the morning of the next day. Shortly after noon, however, a breeze sprang up and, as it veered from the north all the way around to the south, it increased in force. Tinkerbelle soon was zipping along, headed due east.

“About midafternoon,” the log says, “we were racing along at a great rate on the starboard tack when a large tanker popped into view over my right shoulder, no more than 25 yards away. It had sneaked up on me without making a sound and gave me quite a start. I must make it a practice from now on to scan all around the horizon from time to time to prevent this sort of thing.”

The tanker was the S.S. Otto N. Miller of Monrovia. Crewmen at the rail waved and cheered as it sped past, and I waved back as well as I could while holding the tiller and mainsheet in my hands. The ship seemed to be going at terrific speed and the huge waves it sent out from its bow and stern gave us an exciting bouncing around. It didn’t even slow down as it passed and was soon out of sight.

Captain Orlando Rolla, skipper of the Miller told me later of his experiences that day. His ship had left St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, the previous day and was bound for Bandar Mashur, Iran, via the Suez Canal.

“In the afternoon of June 19,” he wrote, “Chief Officer Salvino Gallinaro was on watch. We had showers all around and our radar was working.

“Mr. Gallinaro advised me that a little object, not well defined, was showing on the radar screen. It was about 60° on our port bow and some three–quarters of a mile away. The horizon was clear of showers in that direction and, with binoculars, we saw a small red sail.

“We immediately headed the ship in that direction to investigate. We steered as close as possible so that no particulars about the sailboat would escape our attention. In fact, we passed so close I was able to see clearly the number marked on the bow of your boat and I saw you sitting at the tiller, looking as if you were sailing on a small lake rather than the Atlantic Ocean.

“I told the U.S. Coast Guard of our meeting, giving it the number and description of your boat, and advising it that no assistance was required.

“The night following our meeting we had a moderate sea and often our thoughts ran to you, alone in the open ocean.”

I’ll have to agree that Captain Rolla’s ship passed close to Tinkerbelle, so close the shock nearly made me jump out of my skin. But, as I noted in the log, it taught me an important lesson: keep scanning the whole horizon so that you’ll know when a ship is approaching. It was very kind of the captain to report me to the Coast Guard and to think of me that night. Conditions probably weren’t as bad as he imagined them, though.

“Toward dusk,” my log says, “the wind grew too strong for the genoa so I stopped to take it in and put out the sea anchor. Just then a cloudburst hit. It rained so hard I could hardly see 10 feet away. But I managed to get bounding Tinkerbelle bedded down without mishap.

“I stayed in the cockpit for a long time watching her take the huge waves. She did very well, but I’ll have to improve the jigger sail at her stern. [I had rigged this to help keep her pointed steadily into the waves.]

“I was fearful of getting into the cabin and going to sleep because of the brush with the Miller, but Tinkerbelle‘s anchor light seemed highly visible, so, finally, I did go inside where it was quiet and dry and got some sleep.”

At dusk the very next day (Sunday, June 20th) we met another ship, the S.S. Exilona, a 9,598–ton freighter commanded by Captain Helgi Loftsson. We had been through some squalls earlier in the day, but now the wind was light, although huge swells were running. Dark, threatening clouds partly covered the sky and caught orange–red rays from the setting sun. It was a scene El Greco might have painted if he had painted seascapes.

The Exilona, when I first saw her, was to the north of us, headed west, and I though she would go on by, but then she saw us and came lumbering over, rolling and pitching through the swells. As she drew near, Captain Loftsson stopped her engines, but even without her propellers turning she moved so fast, blown by the wind, that Tinkerbelle could barely keep pace with her. I shouted to men at the stern rail and they relayed what I said to Captin Loftsson on the bridge by telephone, and then, in turn, passed his questions and answers back to me.

I learned the ship was on its way from Beirut to Boston, and told the captain I was bound for England and needed no assistance. I added that I’d appreciate a position check and would like to give him some letters to be mailed when he reached port. He gave me the position figures promptly and they showed that my own were reasonably accurate, but transferring the letters wasn’t so easily done as I was afraid to get closer than about a hundred feet to the Exilona‘s stern because of the danger of having my craft slammed against her and smashed. A husky crewman tried twice to span the distance between us with a heaving line, but failed. It was hopeless.

The captain said he’d report me to the Coast Guard so that it could keep track of my progress, and I yelled back, “Thanks!” I found out later the message he sent was:

“Latitude 40.57 north; longitude 58.04 west. Passed sailboat OH–7013–AR, 14–foot [How he came so close to estimating Tinkerbelle‘s length I can’t imagine] lapstrake sailboat with red mainsail and white jib.

“One person aboard bound for Falmouth, England, from Falmouth, Massachusetts. Nineteen days at sea. Requested notify U.S. Coast Guard, Boston, that all is O.K. Required no assistance.”

After I thanked Captain Loftsson, we bade each other goodbye and I exchanged waves with the seamen at the Exilona‘s stern. Then we turned back to our original courses and went our separate ways as darkness closed in. A little while later a wonderful, steady breeze sprang up and Tinkerbelle, with a reef in her mains’l, gamboled over the waves as if she were a spirited fawn out for a romp in the woods. It was a glorious sailing and I wished that Virginia and the children could have enjoyed it with me. It was so pleasant, in fact, I took a stay–awake pill and went on all night.

Three more days of good sailing followed. On the third night, Wednesday, June 23rd, the ocean was as calm as a millpond. Hardly a ripple disturbed its glassy surface as Tinkerbelle ghosted along noiselessly on a shimmering cushion of phosphorescence. I lay on my back in the cockpit with my legs extending into the cabin, my head propped up on a cushion, the tiller in my right hand, steering by the stars that bejeweled the black velvet sky. What an enchanting out–of–this–world night that was, with sparkling diamonds in the water seemingly competing in brilliance with the diamonds in the heavens.

It was so calm I hove to for sleep without streaming the sea anchor, by simply hauling the jib to windward and tying the tiller to leeward. I slept like a baby and, in the morning, had the pleasure of beginning a new day without having to go through the arduous task of hauling the bucket.

We had been at sea more than three weeks now and I had a daily routine more or less established. I usually awoke at about 4 A.M., Tinkerbelle time, shortly before the sun popped up from below the eastern horizon, and I began the day in sheer luxury. I treated myself to a delightful experience that, at home, was reserved for mornings when I was indisposed or had done something extraordinary to merit extra–solicitous indulgence: I had breakfast in bed.

As a matter of fact, I also had dinner in bed, for Tinkerbelle‘s cabin was too small to permit my dining within it in any other way. Of course, my use of the word “bed” is a slight exaggeration. It wasn’t really a bed; it was a couple of bags full of clothing on which I sat and a rolled–up blanket to my right against which I leaned and rested my head.

Tinkerbelle‘s interior was too crowded with gear to allow me to stretch out at full length, so I had to experiment with other positions for sleeping. I tried out several, but the one that worked out best was this semi–sitting–up position in which I planted my stern on the bags of clothing and leaned to starboard against the blanket. Then, to have breakfast in bed, all I had to do was to straighten up and my food and canned–heat stove were within easy reach.

Breakfast usually consisted of hot cereal with raisins, canned fruit of some sort and coffee. Sometimes I had scrambled dehydrated eggs and dehydrated bacon or, about once a week, a dehydrated Spanish omelet. The first time I prepared an omelet, it wound up with a taste and texture resembling shoe leather, but, happily, I became more adept at omelet cookery later on.

After breakfast I washed my utensils in the ocean and brushed my teeth; and every other week I shaved my face, all except my mustache, which, by the third week, was beginning to look quite respectable. And once a week, if the weather was favorable, I took a sponge bath in the cockpit with sea water, afterward giving myself a rinse with fresh water. Water for shaving and bathing was warmed on the stove.

When breakfast and these chores were completed, I prepared to get under way. I took the anchor light out of the rigging. I removed the rudder from the daggerboard–keel slot where it had been stowed for the night and secured it in the cockpit, ready to be hung at the stern when I was ready. I also took down the improvised stern jigger sail, which helped to keep the boat headed squarely into the waves. Then I crawled to the foredeck and hauled in the sea anchor, stowing the line in the daggerboard–keel slot and lashing the bucket and float firmly in place aft of the mast. The next steps were to put the rudder on and, finally, to hoist the sails. We were then ready to go. In good weather the whole rigmarole took about twenty minutes, but if the sea was rough, forcing me to hold on tight to keep from being pitched overboard, it sometimes took twice that long.

When I got back to the tiller and we started moving, we kept it up until the sun (if not hidden by clouds) was at least ten degrees above the horizon. Then I hove to for the morning sun shot by backing the jib and lashing the tiller down.

Most navigators, I believe, take a series of sextant sights and strike an average, but since I had to stop the boat every time I used the sextant, I tried for the best possible single shot I was capable of and relied on that. For accuracy’s sake I always used the natural horizon, except once or twice at night when I used the bubble to get our latitude from Polaris. After I had gained some experience, I found that I could usually tell whether a given sextant sight was a good one.

When the sight had been worked out and the position line recorded on a plotting sheet, we resumed sailing and kept it up until just before noon. Then we stopped for the noon latitude sight, which usually took me twenty or thirty minutes, longer than was required for the morning or evening sights. By bringing forward the morning north–south position line, in accordance with the estimated distance and the course we had sailed, until it intersected the noon east–west position line, I got a fairly good idea of where we were at noon.

After the noon sight we again set sail and I ate a snack as we sloshed along. I’d have biscuits, or a meat bar, or a candy bar, or a concoction of dried fruit and nuts called pemmican. And I’d top it off with fruit juice or a carbonated drink. (Ben Carlin had written that he developed a craving for carbonated beverages while at sea so I brought along a good supply and was glad to have it.)

When the sun was far down in the western sky, but not yet closer than ten degrees to the horizon, we stopped for the evening sextant shot, which gave me another north–south position line on the plotting sheet. Then, by drawing a line from our noon position, according to the course we had traveled, to intersect the afternoon sun line, I established our position with sufficient accuracy for my needs. This type of position finding is called a running fix. It is not as precise as a regular fix in which position lines taken from two or more celestial bodies, in quick succession, establish the location of the vessel; but it nevertheless served us well, for we were not moving very fast, our average daily run being about forty miles.

Following the evening navigational exercise, I had dinner (in bed, usually; although I occasionally “lived it up” and ate outdoors, in the cockpit). The menus had a great variety of entrees: beef slices and potatoes, turkey loaf, shrimp, tuna and noodles, stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers, spaghetti and meat balls, corned–beef hash, chicken and noodles, ham loaf and others. Dessert was usually fruit or a candy bar, but once a week I treated myself to a tiny fruitcake. The beverage was coffee, most often, with an occasional switch to an orange drink or cocoa. Sometimes I added beef or chicken bouillon, and I always added a vitamin pill and an ascorbic acid, anti-scurvy tablet.

Dinner over, I washed the saucepan or frying pan and silverware in the ocean and got under way again. Usually I sailed until well after darkness had fallen, stopping for sleep between 9 P.M. and midnight, Tinkerbelle time; but once in a while, as I’ve already reported, I continued all night. The all–night sailing came, generally, when I was trying to get across shipping lanes quickly and safely, or was battling an adverse current.

The procedure for parking Tinkerbelle for the night was the same as the procedure for getting her under way in the morning, except that it was done more or less in reverse. I hove her to under sail, put out the sea anchor, lowered and secured the sails, unshipped the rudder and stowed it in the daggerboard–keel slot, raised the jigger sail at the stern and hung the anchor light in the rigging. If it was a pleasant night, I sometimes stayed in the cockpit for a few minutes, facing sternward with my back resting against the cabin, enjoying the sights and sounds of the nighttime ocean. At other times I played the harmonica or listened to the radio, most frequently to programs of the Voice of America, the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Then I descended into the cabin, closed the hatch after me (except for the crack I left open for ventilation), got into “bed,” pulled a blanket over me and went to sleep. I’ll have to confess that I didn’t observe such amenities as wearing pajamas and sleeping between sheets. I went primitive, to a certain extent, and slept in the clothes I’d been wearing all day–many times even when they were wet.

Usually I was so tired I had no trouble whatever getting to sleep; the sea rocked me as though I were in a cradle. (Luckily I have never been bothered by seasickness.) In rough weather, though, waves sometimes broke over the boat sending streams of water gushing through the ventilation crack left open in the hatch. This was annoying because it soaked the blanket, though it didn’t seem to reduce its warmth.

Tinkerbelle‘s cabin was a marvelous refuge, now that I had learned it wouldn’t, couldn’t become a trap. I wasn’t able to imagine how Dr. Alain Bombard, Dr. Hannes Lindemann, and George Harvo and Frank Samuelson had achieved their crossings in cabinless craft. They weren’t ever able to get out of the wind’s clutches, away from its buffeting and shrieking, as I was. How they stood the hardships of constant exposure to the elements is more than I can comprehend. In Tinkerbelle‘s cabin I was able to shut myself away from the occasionally harrowing difficulties of the sea world of waves and winds and enter a world of cozy comfort and order, where there was a place for everything and everything (I hoped) was in its place. The snugness and enveloping protection of the cabin touched latent atavistic inclinations with me that, no doubt, had been passed on from long–gone ancestors who lived in caves. The cab was a little world unto itself, safe and compact. There I could fall asleep to the music of the sea, the chuckling, giggling and laughing of wavelets strumming the laps in the boat’s clinker–built hull. There I could wait out storms with ease, passing the time with reading, eating, letter writing, napping, navigation figuring, radio listening and harmonica playing. There, too, I could raise my braying voice to top volume and burst into song without fear of annoying a soul, except maybe the birds or fish.

I love the smell of the cabin. It was an exotic compound of the odors of paint, calking material, a tarry aroma that came from I know not where, damp blankets and mold, the whole business being delicately seasoned with a faint scent from whatever type of food had been accidentally spilled into the bilge at the last meal.

June 25th (Friday) was a fine sailing day; so good, in fact, that I decided to keep going all night in an effort to catch up on our schedule.

Sometime after midnight an amazing thing happened; at least, it was amazing to me. I wrote about it in the log, thus:

“We were sailing along at a good clip with the usual phosphorescent phenomena [you see, by this time I was getting rather blasé] when all of a sudden a big patch of ocean the size of a baseball field lit up as though it were illuminated by underwater floodlights. And there was Tinkerbelle sailing on a sea of light. It was one of the most spectacular sights I’ve ever seen.”

This was a unique experience for me. I had never seen anything remotely like it before, although I had once read a little about similar occurrences. I certainly can’t explain it.

It was a beautiful sight, but it made me so nervous I failed to appreciate it properly at the time. The thought darted into my mind that maybe a whale was under the boat, stirring up the ocean’s luminescence, and that it might at any moment rise under the boat and smash it. I hung on, waiting for the fatal blow, but it never came; and in a minute or so I sailed out of the floodlit tract, awestruck and mystified.

Having sailed all night with the aid of pills, I should have suspected that something of a hallucinatory nature might occur the next day (Saturday, June 26th), but I didn’t. My guard was down and I drifted right into another fantastic experience.

This one began at about sunset. I believed I was sailing in an inlet, close to the shore, and that I heard two apish men on a small wharf talking in conspiratorial tones.

“One shot between the eyes is all it’ll take,” one of the men said.

“But how’ll I know it’s him?” the other asked.

“You can find his boat with no trouble ’cause he always puts out that there anchor light.”

Oh, oh! A couple of killers were obviously out to get me. I had to move far away from there, quickly. I sailed for my life, taking all sorts of devious routes in order to escape from the assassins. I even sailed into fog and stealthily circled back, hoping to lose them.

Sometime after darkness fell, I grew conscious of having Douglas and an elderly man on board Tinkerbelle with me. They were in the cabin, the man supposedly taking care of my son.

A little later we approached an island and, somehow, I knew that if we got onto the island we’d be caught and killed, so I steered Tinkerbelle away from it. But no matter what I did, she seemed determined to put us ashore and wreck herself in the process, for the coast was a mass of jagged rocks against which the waves hammered with sickening thunder. My boat simply went berserk. She became gallingly cantankerous, impossible to control. Nothing I did diverted her from drifting toward those terrible breakers. She would come about and then get into irons, come about and get into irons, over and over. She absolutely refused to obey me and to sail as she should. It was maddening, and I grew very angry. I shouted at Tinkerbelle and scolded her unmercifully. It was the first time I had said a harsh word to her. (I hope I’ll never do it again.)

I don’t know how it happened, but finally, by some means, I swerved Tinkerbelle away from her compulsive determination to kill us and herself. We broke away from the island’s threatening rocks and headed out to sea.

Then, gradually, the feeling crept over me that the man in the cabin with Douglas was not a friend at all. He was really one of the assassins bent on disposing of us both. As Doug’s father, it was up to me to save him from the clutches of the masquerading murderer.

The only tactical plan I could think of was to move slyly, silently to the cabin entrance holding the signaling spotlight at the ready, and then to turn it on in the killer’s eyes. The blinding light and the surprise of the attack might enable me to get his gun away and save Doug. I’d seen men do things like that in the movies, so maybe I could, too.

I moved forward to the cabin hatch like a panther about to spring. I picked up the spotlight without a sound and then, zip! I switched it on and thrust it inside.

No one was there.

Undoubtedly it seems peculiar, but the revelation that I was in the grip of another hallucination jarred me considerably. I realized, as I should have done long before, that I needed rest. So I put out the bucket drogue and prepared Tinkerbelle to look after herself while I was asleep. I was just about to secure the anchor light in the rigging when I recalled what one of the assassins had said, “You can find his boat without no trouble ’cause he always puts out that there anchor light.”

“O.K.,” I said to myself. “I’ll fool those lousy hoods.”

I outsmarted them with devilish cunning; I didn’t put out the anchor light.