Whistling for the wind

WE ARE FAST APPROACHING the calm season around here, the dog days of summer when the wind disappears and the tidal streams snatch you and fling you in exactly the wrong direction. Some of us talented whistlers come into our own on these days. Whistling for the wind is something sailors have done since the very earliest days of sail.

According to The Encyclopedia of Nautical Knowledge (Cornell Maritime Press) the ritual was one of “plaintively entreating the winds for a breeze by whistling with the lips in a variety of soft continuous notes while facing the direction from which it was desired that the wind would increase or spring up. Earlier custom required that a group of men occupy a more prominent position, such as the poop, when thus engaged, especially during a lengthy spell of light airs and calms.”

Now that you know how to whistle for the wind correctly, there’s something else you should know. You should do it only in calms. If you whistle when you’re on watch, and the wind is already blowing, you invite bad weather.

Old-timers believed that you could whistle with impunity during your off-watch, but if you whistled during your working hours it showed that you didn’t have enough to do. The gods therefore found something for you to do. They sent stormy weather, which meant extra work for all hands.

The only crew member who could whistle while he worked was the bosun’s mate, the man who wielded the cat-o’-nine-tails when punishment was meted out. His whistling wouldn’t bring gales because the gods of the wind and sea ignored him, judging him to be an agent of the devil — which is exactly what the rest of the crew thought, too, of course.

Today’s Thought

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.
— Oscar Wilde.

Tailpiece

“Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”
(17) “Don’t be alarmed, sir — that sort isn’t poisonous.”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

The terror of calms

PEOPLE PREPARING for their first ocean voyages usually learn all they can about how to survive storms but very little about how to survive calms. That’s an oversight that could result in some nasty surprises. Calm seas can spawn stormy relationships among the crew. It’s extraordinary what harm a calm can do to morale.

I well remember one week-long calm we fell into while sailing across the South Atlantic in a 33-foot sloop. There were four of us on board, long-time friends, but after a couple of days of drifting among exasperating cat’s-paws coming from all directions, and lasting only a few minutes each, the tension built among us. We couldn’t turn on the engine because we were racing.

We snapped at each other. I nearly got into a fist-fight with my good friend Nick whom I caught “stealing” a spoonful of some powdered cool drink I’d brought along. MY cool drink, dammit. Not HIS cool drink. He claimed he didn’t know it was mine. Oh sure! Thought it was ship’s stores. Yeah, right!

Our mate, Eddie, a civil engineer, having calculated our rate of progress, announced that we would run out of food and water before we hit land, if we EVER hit land. He wanted to put out an immediate radio Mayday call to all shipping. He wanted to have a ship take our yacht on board. And he was prepared to pay all costs. He was deadly serious. He had never before in his life been in a situation where he had no control over his own progress.

We didn’t run out of food or water, of course. The wind did come back eventually, to our great relief. But I learned some lessons that stood us in good stead when I later went ocean voyaging with my wife and teenage son.

Most sailboats can’t carry enough fuel to get them through all the calms they may encounter on an ocean crossing, so there will probably be times when their crews will simply have to grind their teeth and practice serenity. One little trick that might help those who find themselves in a similar situation is to calculate a daily “bonus” of miles covered. I started with the premise that a cruising boat covers 100 miles a day. That was the figure I used to calculate the time it would take to cross the ocean, hence the amount of stores and water we would require.

Every day, after I had worked out the noon sextant sight, I would enter our 24-hour distance run in the ship’s log. Anything over 100 miles was noted separately as our “bonus” -- points available to be spent in calms when we did less than 100 miles.

Because the average cruiser covers between 120 and 140 miles a day, the bonus points add up quickly at first. But when the dreaded day comes that you do less than 100 miles, you simply draw miles from your bonus. For example, if you have 100 miles saved up, but you only manage to cover 50 miles from noon to noon that day, you’ve still got 50 miles left in your bonus — so you know that despite the calm you’re still half a day ahead of your planned arrival time.

You won’t believe what a boost this is to your morale until you try it for yourself. It’s a simple trick, perhaps a naive trick, but it certainly worked for us. Despite the calms, we always arrived a day or two earlier than expected. Very little makes the crew happier than that.

Today’s Thought
And there we sit in peaceful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.
—Aldous Leonard Huxley, Frascati’s.

Tailpiece
As I was laying on the green,
A small English book I seen.
Carlyle’s Essay on Burns was the name of the edition,
So I left it laying in exactly the same position.

A frightening calm

I’VE HEARD it said many times that the hardest part of an ocean crossing in a small sailboat is the calms. They’re hard on the boat’s gear, with all that jerking of spars, slatting of canvas, and constant chafe of lines. They’re hard on the crew, too. This is the time when minor irritations turn into full-blown confrontations, and even fisticuffs.

But I must admit that I love calms. I never find them boring. In fact, one particular calm gave me the biggest fright I've ever had at sea. I was one of four crewmembers aboard the Diana K, a 33-foot racing sloop taking part in the first Cape-to-Rio race from Cape Town, South Africa, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We ran slap-bang into a calm about 400 miles off the Brazilian coast.

Because there wasn't sufficient work to keep two people busy during the midnight-to-4 a.m. watch, I sent my watchmate down below to sleep. I sat in the cockpit marveling at the beauty of it all.

There was no moon, but each of a million stars was reflected brightly in the pitch-black ocean, and each tiny reflected dot was connected to its neighbor by a wobbly skein of light. The whole surface of the sea was gently heaving with this magnificent display when I got to wondering about how far down into the water the light of a star might penetrate.

I found the deck flashlight and shone it overboard, alongside the cockpit. Seen from almost end-on, the beam seemed to go down for ever, twisting and spiraling eerily, boring into the verdant depths.

Suddenly I burst out in a cold sweat. I realized I had just signaled our presence to every leviathan of the sea within miles. We all know the size of the creatures that inhabit the ocean deeps out there. Occasionally some octopus the size of a small elephant gets washed up on a lonely shore. Enormous whales return to the surface badly scarred after tumultuous fights with giant squids that inhabit the sea's secret depths.

And now I had flashed my light, the brightest light for hundreds of miles around, to show those squids where we were. And we weren't moving. We were a sitting duck. I literally shivered with fright.

More than anything, I wanted to start the engine and move away from that area. But that would have put us out of the race after nearly 30 days of hard sailing. And we had done well. We were in line for a couple of trophies. I thought of waking the skipper and confessing. I didn't know what to do.

I abandoned the tiller and crouched down in the cockpit. After five minutes of near-paralysis I crept down below to locate the fireman's ax we kept for emergencies and brought it back on deck. If any tentacles appeared over the gunwale I wanted to give a good account of myself.

It sounds silly and irrational now, I know, but at the time my fear was very real. Eventually, with a little puff of wind from here, and a little puff from there, we slowly started to move away, and I began to concentrate on my helmsmanship. I sailed like a demon. You’ve never seen such fantastic light-weather performance on any yacht in the middle of the night. It was a long time before I breathed freely again, but we did make a clean getaway.

I never told the others what I had done, and I'll never do it again. One fright like that is enough for a lifetime.

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Today’s Thought

Time flies like a speeding arrow. Fruit flies like a rotten banana.

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