LANDFALL

A cruising sailor prepares for the worst and hopes for the best. This is often our mindset before we set off for a voyage, although there are obviously conflicts in the head when we have prepared something that does not appear perfect (so we hope for the best! We are often asked what it is like to make landfall after voyaging on the ocean for days or weeks. Firstly one has to examine what the feelings and emotions are like prior to the voyage. Apprehension is one feeling, as if an important examination was impending. All the preparation (no longer entirely mental!) that has to go into ensuring the boat is seaworthy, and ‘home’ for weeks, means long ‘to do’ lists, and hurrying against deadlines. Then, of course, the chandlery doesn’t have the part you require, and so it has to be ordered in, or you take the bus, or cadge a lift, to another town for further search! The smooth flow chart is disrupted, but you can still make the departure date if you juggle this activity with that one. (maybe!). Of course in tightening the odd bolt, the odd bolt shears under the torque! Many happy hours later, after drilling, and tapping, and muttering, the disrepair is repaired. Another extension to the flow chart. One saying which we learnt in the United States is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!” What a marvellous way to prepare for a voyage. Full of hope. We heard of a transatlantic sailor with three other crew who hoped that the amount of food they had (enough for two weeks) would last the three weeks it took them to sail the ocean. The last mars bar changed hands at £35.00 the day before they made landfall. The time before leaving is full of turmoil and stress and is not unlike the usual everyday business that is experienced in running a go ahead Civil Engineering Consultancy. In other words Will leaps from the frying pan to the fire! However everything will be alright when we leave and it will calm down. It has to. There will be no one else to rely on 1000 miles from land. We heard of one member of a two man team who suffered so much from the pre depart stress that he literally ran away, leaving his friend very much in the lurch. Needless to say the boat didn’t depart. It is easy to crack under the strain, especially when one is stressed out already and when the whole idea is to leave the stresses behind! People used to urban life, with known stresses, can push such stresses a long way before exceptional strain or breaking point occurs. Not so if there has been no experience of that which is to come. It is a leap into the unknown. Cold sweats break out and the nightmares of waiting for exam results recur as in younger days.

And you have to go! You have said you will go, and you cannot allow fear to hold you back. Why should it? Life is not a dress rehearsal. Go for it. Do we have to?! If we stay longer it will cost more in the marina or at the mooring. Our friends will never believe us again. Confucius said ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with but one step.’ He was right. We can’t walk on water but the theory is the same. We do go. Friends and Relations wave us goodbye and hoot horns. We are off, like a bubble being pushed from the blowing ring, with a bit of help from all our friends. How delightful to be soaring away from the society we lived in, and into the blue yonder. We are on our own for four, fourteen, twenty days. No real hope of help unless the very worst happens, and even then nothing will be certain. Certainly no reliance can be placed on help. Just ourselves. Thunder, lightning, storms, tsunamis, rocks, pirates. All could be ahead of us. Possibly none of these things, and only downwind sailing under puffy clouds and under mostly blue skies with 15 to 20 knots of breeze. The one thing that is certain is we will have to keep awake to ensure we see other ships or bad weather approaching. There were four of us as crew across the Atlantic and we started carrying out watches of four hours on and four hours off, having a companion to talk to. We varied it later on by sliding watches having four hours on standby, four hours on watch, and eight hours off. You could sleep on standby if you wished although you had to be ready for a jump on deck and to work for a living if required. This only occurred once, when all of us were on deck in the middle of the night struggling with the two large genoas of the papillon (butterfly) rig, because a cotter pin had escaped its housing, and the bottom of the forestay, and thus the genoas, were banging around inside the pulpit. It took two of us two hours to take off the genoas and set the main and staysail in a relatively smooth sea. Everything on a boat seems to take twice as long as you think it is going to, and is at least twice as difficult. When there are two of us on passage we stand three hour watches, which seems to give enough sleep to be able to maintain the watch of the next three hours. We always seem to have enough sleep, even if it is just a catnap in between cooking or mending something.

There is no doubt that the general pace of life slows down at sea and that some of the cares and woes of modern life on land are left behind. For one thing there is not a lot one can do to help others from the middle of the ocean except perhaps to talk to land through the satellite phone we have for emergencies, or to say Happy Christmas or Happy Birthday. We do not use the satellite phone usually, since calls cost a pound a minute, but it is good for peace of mind once a day to hear that there is no hurricane or tropical storm forecast. This was particularly true during our three and a half day passage from Antigua to Curacao, during the beginning of the hurricane season in the first week of July, when we spoke to our friend Mogens, in Antigua, for the first two days, and were informed that we would experience no winds over 20 knots and no seas over 6 feet. At least that is what the weather forecast said. They were not quite right since on the front of a tropical wave , which only overtook us after the first two days, having started with us, there is rain, thunder, lightning and squalls of up to 30 knots of wind. Of course this is not too bad if you are going downwind, which we were, and if you have a self draining cockpit to help the unbelievably dense rain run straight into the sea, which we have. Despite the routine of watches, life at sea in a sailing boat is not necessarily all calm and peaceful sailing, and the anticipation of the unknown is always there gnawing away at the pit of the stomach. Coming from higher up in the northern hemisphere we know that the weather can change drastically every half an hour or less. This is not necessarily the case in the trade wind belt where the wind, at least, is remarkably constant between 10 and 25 knots from the east, or thereabouts! This does give some relaxation and sometimes we can pick up a book if we are used to the rolling motion. Admiral Nelson was sea sick for the first four days every time he went to sea. Mind you he spent long periods at sea, up to two years on one occasion, without setting foot on land.

So having left the hurly burly of life on shore, worried ourselves, not quite sick, as to whether we are going to sink or be run over or blown over, or run aground, and yet still survived, we have nearly reached our destination. What is the feeling like? Firstly there is a known entity coming our way. Land. That is a knobbly bit sticking up out of our friend the sea, who has actually looked after us for the past few days or weeks. Assuming we miss the knobbly bit, and this is where the chart plotter and pilot book come in, we will have to find a sheltered place to anchor. Those are the first thoughts. The second thoughts are that just maybe (although unlikely in some places) if we now have a problem we can call for help instead of being totally self reliant. This is not necessarily a good thing since we probably know more about our craft and the way she handles in most conditions than anybody else; nevertheless there is a comfort there that has crept in to reduce the acidity in the stomach. Then there comes the curiosity. What does the land look like? What are the people like? Are they friendly to yachting tourists? Are we going to pay the skin colour tax by being the unknowing underdog? Will the customs and immigration be friendly or will they take themselves far too seriously as a very few have on our travels? After all, this discovery is why we set sail in the first place.

The land looms closer. Sometimes the visibility is such that the landfall cannot be seen until about three miles off the coast, and then we wonder whether the land shown on the chart plotter is just a myth or whether we really are going to land there. Indeed, is the chart plotter(which usually shows exactly where we are in relation to the land) functioning at all, or is the blob close by the boat on the screen a hallucination? They say hallucinations can happen at sea but we have never seen one. Perhaps because all our alcohol is stored away! In the last Century, and before, it was apparently hard to find Barbados, since there is a magnetic anomaly and strange currents that surround it, and also a haze that usually makes it difficult to see from far off. They kept a pig on board the local sailing traders, which they threw over the side when they thought they were near the island. They followed the direction it swam in. We were never informed whether the pig was picked up again or whether it had to make its own way to land. When we first sighted Barbados from the Atlantic crossing we could see the loom of the lights from over 20 miles away at night, it was exceptional visibility. We felt quite elated and relieved by the sight and felt that all the rolling, and being tossed up and down by the sea, for 22 days, had actually delivered a result! We were going to land in another culture.

The problem with pictures of a crossing or lengthy voyage is that on a good day there are puffy white clouds in a blue sky over a blue sea, with the odd dolphin and petrel, and on a bad day of rain you can’t see anything. There is no doubt that coastal weather and scenery is more photogenic with its crepuscular rays and mountains. Except of course for the shapes in the trade wind cumulus clouds. Sometimes a dragon, sometimes a castle, sometimes little miss Muffet. Of course there is also sometimes the great dark and foreboding thundercloud that creeps up from behind. So the pictures are limited for this posting.. We hope you enjoyed making landfall with us though.

Love Atlantia