Chapter 9

When I awoke, the sun was shining brightly, dotting the undulating cobalt of the ocean to the east with diamond flashes of intense light, and Tinkerbelle was tugging good–naturedly at her bucket anchor, nosing into a docile, westerly breeze. Happiness, that morning, was a body replete with rest–a body gorged, crammed, satiated with sleep–and I was happy. It was great to be alive.

I cooked a breakfast of hot cereal and coffee, and, as I ate, ruminated on the events of the previous day. That seafaring hitchhiker, where had he come from and where had he gone? Was he part of a daydream? Or something else? Or was my mind coming unglued? It seemed possible that I had dreamed the encounter. In any case, it would do no good to worry overmuch about it. I knew that truck drivers who took pep pills to stay awake sometimes “saw” things, and even Slocum had been visited by an apparition–the pilot of Columbus’s Pinta, so he, the shade had said. Slocum had ascribed the visitation to cramps caused by eating Azores plums and white cheese. I hadn’t had any cramps, so I had to look elsewhere for cause. The hallucination, I theorized, must have been induced by lack of sleep and the pills.

Neither Tinkerbelle nor I had suffered a serious mishap, we were both in good shape, but the weirdness of the experience left me feeling uneasy–half fearful, half embarrassed. The whole affair seemed so unnatural, so preposterous. I was so sensitive about it that I refrained from mentioning it in my log. Not until much later, after I’d had other, similar experiences, did I write anything about the illusory events of that afternoon.

After breakfast I washed my saucepan, cup, fork and spoon in the sea and tidied up the cabin. Then I heated some water and shaved for the first time since leaving Falmouth; that is, I shaved all but my upper lip, for, in response to Virginia’s urgings, I had decided to grow a mustache. I hoped that by the time I reached England it would be a luxuriant, sea–dogish growth. I’d never had a satisfactory mustache, although once before I’d tried to raise one. The in-between days, when the bristles were ample enough to make your lip look dirty and yet too puny to keep your friends from inquiring (if only with their eyes) why you hadn’t shaved, were slightly discomfiting. But now I had a chance to escape all that; I would be out of sight for enough days. I could simply turn up on the other side of the ocean with a mature set of handle bars.

A gentle breeze of about ten miles an hour blew steadily from the west, so I rigged Tinkerbelle to steer herself. I had tested the self–steering arrangement on Lake Erie and it had worked well. It consisted of twin genoas winged out on either side of the forestay (the oars having been adapted to serve as whisker poles for that purpose), with sheets running back from the clew of each sail, through blocks on either side of the cockpit, to the tiller. The sails were adjusted to slant slightly forward from the forestay. Then, if Tinkerbelle veered a little to port, the portside genny caught more wind and the starboard–side genny spilled more, which, in turn, caused a pull on the port sheet and an easing up on the starboard sheet. That put the tiller over to port, making the boat return to her proper course before the wind. And, of course, it worked the same way, but in reverse, if she veered to starboard. As a matter of fact, by adjusting the sheets, the boat could be made to steer herself on a course that was a few degrees to port or starboard of the exactly–before–the–wind course. (However, I was never able to get the boat to steer herself on a reach or when the wind was forward of the beam.)

Tinkerbelle tobogganed along amiably, steering herself skillfully and, seemingly, without effort. She was a good girl. I delighted in her obedient behavior and in my freedom from the tiller. I could do anything I wished now without impeding our steady eastward progress. To be sailing without any effort whatever, without having to be concerned with steering, that was undiluted ecstasy!

But I couldn’t spend all day glorying in ecstatic idleness; there were other things to be done. I brought on deck clothes and blankets dampened by humid sea air and spread them in the sun to dry. Then I took a sextant shot at the sun in an effort to get a clue to our position, but something went wrong with the shot or the figuring, for I wound up with a sun line that was too fantastic to be believed. At noon I tried again, this time for a latitude shot, but again something went wrong. The latitude I got was 45° N, which couldn’t possibly have been right unless Tinkerbelle had flown three hundred miles or more during the night while I was asleep. She was a marvelous boat, no doubt about that, but a three-hundred-mile flight did seem a trifle beyond her capacities. Oh, well, tomorrow I’d try once more to pinpoint our position.

About five–thirty that evening a trawler hove into view and, seeing Tinkerbelle, churned over to within a few yards of us, its diesels clattering noisily. It was the Major J. Casey, American or Canadian, I couldn’t tell which. I cupped my hands and shouted to two fellows at the rail, asking if they’d give me my position, but I guess they couldn’t hear me above the strident din of their vessel. I needed a megaphone to focus and project my voice. Boris Petroff of the Plain Dealer‘s library staff had urged me to take one along despite the valuable space it would consume. “It’s a vital piece of equipment,” he had said, and now this inability to make myself heard tended to confirm his opinion. Wait till he found out about that. I’d never hear the end of it.

I could understand the men on the trawler, however.

“Where you bound?” one of them yelled.

“England,” I hollered back with all my lung power.

They didn’t even flick an eyelid, so I imagine they either didn’t hear me or thought I was having a little joke. Anyway, they swerved away right after that and sped off to the southeast. In a few minutes I was alone again. Not really alone, though; I had Tinkerbelle with me, and she was good company.

As darkness fell, the wind grew stronger and I had to discontinue the self–steering. (It turned out that I never used the twin genoas for self–steering again, as one of the pair was an old canvas sail that tore to shreds in a hard blow a few days later. The surviving genoa was a dacron sail I had made myself. I should have made two of them.) I returned to my post at the tiller and we went on under a single genny at four or five knots until nearly midnight. Then I “parked” Tinkerbelle to the sea–anchor setups to determine which worked best. One rig I tested had the regular Danforth anchor and the canvas bucket drogue linked in tandem at the end of the hundred–and–fifty–foot nylon anchor line. I studied the boat’s behavior for about an hour, eventually deciding this arrangement wasn’t a success, for instead of sloping off from the bow, the line hung straight down and didn’t keep the boat headed squarely into the waves. Several times she nearly turned broadside. When I started to pull the line up to test another setup, I found that either the Danforth was a lot heavier than I had thought or it had snagged a fish or some other heavy object. It was hard work getting it on board. I finally hauled it up, though, and when the bucket broke the surface I got a terrific shock; it was filled with sand! No wonder it had been heavy. There was only one possible explanation: we were in a shoal area where the sea was no more than a hundred and fifty feet deep and possibly a good deal shallower than that.

This threw my dead reckoning for a loop since, according to it, we were supposed to be in water that was more than a mile deep. How could I have gone so far wrong? I couldn’t answer that question, but in view of the circumstances it seemed reasonable to conclude that the time had come to obtain a better indication of where we were.

Just before the sun reached its zenith, I got out the sextant and, summoning forth my best efforts, took as accurate a noon latitude sight as I could, using the natural horizon rather than the bubble. When I worked out the sight, I got another shock; the figures said our latitude was 41° 2′ N, about sixty miles north of my dead–reckoning latitude. I got out the chart and deduced from this latitude figure and the shallowness of the water that we were probably at the southernmost edge of Cultivator Shoal, some ninety miles east of Nantucket. That made our longitude roughly 68° 32’W, not nearly so far eastward as I had imagined.

This blunt exposure of my shortcomings as a navigator left me shaken. Had I, in attempting an Atlantic crossing, bitten off more than I could chew? Was I likely to sail into, say, Brest, France, thinking it was Falmouth, England, or do something else equally ridiculous? I earnestly hoped not. But if the navigational clumsiness that had just been laid bare continued, it seemed possible that I would. Of course, there were important lessons to be learned from this chastening experience, the principal one being not to put much faith in dead reckoning (the boat’s speed over the bottom and the influence of currents were too difficult to assess), but that didn’t make me feel any better. Here I’d thought we were south of the shipping lanes and, actually, we were still thirty miles or so north of them.

I re–examined the chart, reread the Coast Pilot and sent my mind ranging back over the days since we had left Vineyard Sound, trying to find clues to how our actual course had varied from my dead reckoning. What about those bright lights I’d seen in the early morning darkness on the third day out? I had supposed they were on a buoy, but now I had doubts. Soon I found a paragraph in Coast Pilot that appeared to solve the mystery. It said, “A Texas tower of lights and a fog signal surmounted by radar and radio towers, is in 41° N and 69° 30′ W, near the southwest side of Fishing Rip. The entire structure is floodlighted at night.”

So that’s what had made that “buoy” seem so bright; it had been floodlighted.

Fishing Rip was a shallow area at the southern end of Nantucket Shoals, southeast of Nantucket, and the Texas tower on it was about twenty–five miles from the island. What Tinkerbelle and I had done, then, was to sail between the tower and the Nantucket Shoals Lightship, which was roughly twenty–seven miles due south of it. When the storm hit us, right after we passed the tower, we had drifted fifteen or twenty miles southeastward, and the next day, while I was in the grip of that hallucination, we had cruised around aimlessly, getting nowhere. Then, after those sublime hours of sleep, we had steered the 50° course that brought us to the southern tip of Cultivator Shoal, where the bucket startled me by scooping up sand from the bottom. Now I had an inkling of where we were.

Late in the day, after more sea anchor experiments, I tethered Tinkerbelle to what seemed to be the most efficient rig, the canvas bucket used by itself with a float and line attached to keep it from sinking more than fifteen feet below the surface, and took a short nap in the cockpit. Afterward, I fixed myself a tasty dinner of curried beef, potatoes and peas, lit the hand warmer John Place had given me, for it grew uncomfortably chilly when the sun dropped below the horizon, and set off on a southeastward course of 150°. I was determined to get to the south shipping lanes before heading directly eastward.

We sailed all night at a delightful wave–slapping pace and shortly after dawn arrived smack–dab in the middle of the lanes. There were seven or eight ships in sight, some headed east, others west; and as one left, another would appear to take its place. Two identical black–hulled trawlers came up over the sharp rim of the horizon and one of them picked up its skirts and hurried over to examine Tinkerbelle. As it drew near, I heard music blaring from a loudspeaker. So that’s what had passed by invisibly but far from soundlessly in the fog on the second day of our voyage-a trawler. When it got closer, I saw that it was Russian, as was its sister ship. And its music reverberated just as deafeningly as had that of the phantom ship in the fog. It was wonderful classical music, mind you; there was nothing wrong with it except that it was so loud it made the atmosphere quake.

Russians must be avid photographers because when the trawler drew to within fifty yards or so every member of the crew seemed to be on deck with a camera pointed at Tinkerbelle and me. Shutters clicked at a great rate. It reminded me of the time Virginia, Robin, Douglas and I had becalmed in the channel to Presque Isle Bay at Erie and tourists in passing excursion boats had snapped us. This time, however, I decided to join the fun: I got out my own cameras, a 35–mm. still camera and a 16–mm movie job, and clicked right back.

“Tovarish!” I yelled, using up with that one word fifty per cent of my linguistic resources in conversational Russian. And even that was a failure, apparently, for I got no response. The Soviet fishermen smiled in a friendly way, though, and when I waved they waved back. Then they raced away.

It was a perfect sun–drenched day, with a cloudless turquoise sky and a lustrous blue sea. The waves were just large enough to keep us moving along briskly. To all appearances we could have been on a pleasant Sunday afternoon sail on Lake Pymatuning; as a matter of fact, it was Sunday, June 6th. I told myself that if most of the days ahead were as pleasant as this, our trip would be a breeze, or, as the English say, a piece of cake.

About midday I hove Tinkerbelle to under sail and prepared a meal of dehydrated scrambled eggs and bacon, with coffee, and ate it out in the cockpit where I could watch the steady stream of ships going by to north and south. We seemed to be on the blue–water center strip of a multi–lane oceanic turnpike. Trawlers, freighters and liners passed in processions that were exciting to see.

After I’d finished off my meal with some canned pears, we got under way again, still headed southeastward, and in the early afternoon met another Russian trawler, this one white and much larger than the black trawlers I’d seen in the morning. It was slowly hauling what must have been a huge net through the water. No doubt the fishing was good, for the trawlers were on the edge of Georges Bank, a fishing ground that some authorities have rated next to the Grand Banks.

Tinkerbelle and I cut across the big ship’s bow, about two hundred yards ahead of it, and continued toward the southeast. By the middle of the afternoon every ship was out of sight; we were alone again. Moving so rapidly from an ocean teeming with ships to an ocean without any ships in sight made the aloneness claw into my mind, creating a keen awareness of my, I hoped, temporary separation from fellow humans. It was an intense feeling, but not an especially unpleasant one. Who has not yearned with all his heart to leave the “rat race” and getaway from it all for a while? I was a privileged character; I was actually doing what so many people longed to do. No more rat race for me for at least a couple of months.

During the afternoon I took another nap in the cockpit; then, when we started moving again, it was on a due–east course of 90°. That night I wrote in the log:

“I saw a school of about eight whales after I resumed sailing after my nap. They were too far away for pictures, though. I’ve also seen a lot of gulfweed. And quite a few birds, which always seem to be too far away to photograph.

“I still don’t know exactly where I am although I presume (from my dead reckoning) I’m near 40° N and 68° W. I’ll take some sextant sights tomorrow and try to pinpoint it.

“I haven’t seen a ship since leaving the lanes. The ocean is a vast empty expanse. I’m beginning to find out what real loneliness is.

“My nose is a bit sunburned and the backs of my hands are getting raw from being wet so much and chafing against my cuffs. But my biggest problem is my bumteratum, which is getting awfully sore from dampness and constant jostling. I’m sitting on the life preserver cushion now and that helps, but tomorrow I’ll have to render some first aid.

“Otherwise I’m in good shape. Have been eating and drinking less than I allowed for.

“But the cabin is a shambles. Everything is piled helter–skelter. The trouble is, when I want something it’s usually under an assortment of other things and I have to get everything else out of the way to get at it. And it goes on and on like that. When I’ve eaten some of the food and drunk some of the water there will be more room and, I hope, less mess.

“The barometer has been holding steady at 30.8. I hope that means several days of good weather.

“Everything on board is now damp as can be, even these pages.

“At dusk we got into a tide rip, probably a tributary of the Gulf Stream. Some dolphins, the first I’d seen, had been following us, but they left us at the tide rip, unfortunately.

“I hove to the sea anchor at 11 P.M. (Easter Standard Time) and got about six hours’ sleep.”

My log notations for the next day, June 7th, were:

“Had a nice big breakfast of hot cereal (cereal bars crumbled into water and heated) hot coffee, fruit, etc.

“Then got moving. It was a glorious day of sailing: blue sky, sunshine, wind and waves just right. Tinkerbelle just scooted along.

“Best of all, I finally got some good sun sights and established our position– 40° 4′ N and 67° 31′ W. This is not as far along as I had hoped to be at this time, but I had a couple of bad days there at the start and maybe I can make up for them now.

“I’m a little north of my planned route, too, but that may be an advantage.

“Sighted quite a few whales–all far off.

“Also sighted a ship to the north, which made me fearful that I was too near the shipping lanes, so I turned south for a couple of hours. Then hove to to sleep.”

I remembered that night well. I was worried because it was fogging up and I no longer had a radar reflector with which to warn ships away. That made it difficult to rest. I lay awake in the cabin for a long time, fretting, but in the end I dropped off to sleep. What helped was that I was warm. It was the first night I’d been warm since putting to sea, probably because we had moved out of the cold coastwise currents from the north into the warmth of the Gulf Stream.

That night I didn’t shiver and shake as I had on all the previous nights. I was cozy in the cabin. It was a welcome change and a very pleasant way to end my first week on the ocean.