Oceans crowded with rowboats

MOST OF US don’t give much thought to what’s going on in the middle of the oceans, but I was surprised to learn how many hardy souls are rowing boats out there, unassisted by sails or motors.  And not only rowing, but racing each other across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

In his recent book, Little Ship of Fools (Greystone Books), Canadian author Charles Wilkins describes his role in an attempt to beat the record Atlantic crossing for rowing boats. His boat,  Big Blue was a 40-foot catamaran with a crew of 16. Eight people rowed at a time, all the way from Africa to the West Indies.

But the first people to row the Atlantic in 1896 were two Norwegian-born fishermen named George Harbo and Frank Samuelsen, who crossed from New York to England in 55 days in an 18-foot open dory named Fox.

Since then, hardy extremists have made a kind of game of racing one another, or the clock, across the oceans of the world. Not all of them survive. In 1966 two young Brits named David Johnstone and John Hoare left Virginia in a craft called Puffin, rowed for 105 days in the direction of home, and simply disappeared off the face of the earth.

Two weeks later, a second British team consisting of John Ridgway and Chay Blyth set out from Cape Cod and arrived in Ireland safely to become the first of the “new age” rowers to cross the Atlantic.

In 1972, yet another pair of Brits, John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook, aboard Britannia II, become the first to cross the Pacific from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia. They took 361 days. Cook was the first woman to row across any ocean, incidentally,  and saved Fairfax’s life after he was bitten by a shark. She has an extraordinary story to tell, as you’ll discover if you Google her name.

Meanwhile, in his book Wilkins says 30 rowing crews attempted ocean crossings between 1966 and 1982, attempts now referred to as “historic” ocean rows. Only 15 completed the whole crossing. Three were lost entirely.

From 1997 onward the number of successful Atlantic crossings rose to something over 400, largely as the result of the introduction of a transatlantic rowing race, the Atlantic Challenge. In October of 1997, 30 boats, each with one pair of rowers, left the Canary Islands. Twenty-four of them reached Barbados. In 2003 the race become the Woodvale Atlantic Rowing Race, as many as 40 boats setting out every second year from Tenerife in the Canaries.

The sport is now regulated and archived by an English organization called the Ocean Rowing Society, which stipulates among other things that boats must be self-sustaining, must touch neither land nor vessels en route, and must run entirely without motors or sails.

All I can say is that if you thought crossing an ocean in a small sailboat was the height of madness, you need to reconsider that opinion. The prize must surely go to these crazy rowers.

Today’s Thought

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

— H. L. Mencken

Tailpiece

An Italian lady always had trouble with English verbs.

“I can’ta weara my wool skirt any more,” she said. “I have send it to the cleaners and they shrinked ... shrank ... shrunk ... Oh!” she broke off in desperation, “I putted on weight.”

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

Is it love or endurance?

DO YOU TRULY LOVE your boat, or do you take it for granted?  I ask because Barbara Marrett says she never felt much affection for the boat she owned with her husband, John Neal, until they sold it.

Marrett makes this confession in Mahina Tiare: Pacific Passages, a book about the American couple’s extensive South-Sea wanderings in a 31-foot Hallberg-Rassey sloop. They eventually sold Mahina Tiare and parted with her in Brisbane, Australia.  By then, Marrett had sailed many thousands of deep-sea miles in her.

“Mostly I’ve just gotten impatient with her inconveniences,” Marrett says, “her small, tightly-packed spaces. I’ve cursed her many times but never spoken affectionately to her.

“And now that she is almost gone, I look lovingly at her sleek lines, at the wood I worked so hard to keep varnished. I pat her cushions and rub my hand over the soft curved teak handrails. I notice the subtle details which make her special, a cut above every other boat.

“Mahina Tiare is where John and I had our first date, our honeymoon. Even I, who didn’t care for boats, was impressed with her when I first stepped aboard on a cold December night. She felt warm and safe, like I felt in John’s arms that first night when he hugged me.

“She’s taken us to magical places and I never thanked her. Hurricanes, white squalls, we’ve tied up in impossible harbors, impossible anchorages like Easter Island and Pitcairn, but she has never lost an anchor, blown out a sail. I ran her into Greenhithe Bridge in New Zealand, broke her forestay, but she heeled over sideways and managed to slip us through without losing her mast.

“John always treated her gently and lovingly, but I just took her for granted. John earned her, but I married her along with John, competing for affection until slowly I spent as much time on her as John did. She has become home and I have learned the patience to live aboard her. She represents the happiest years of my life and with her passing, that chapter closes.”

Competing for affection, the lady said. Ah yes, there lies the rub for many cruising couples. If I had to guess, I’d say that men love their boats, and women do their best to endure them for the sake of the marriage. I know that’s not always true but I suspect it happens often enough to make long-term cruising an endurance test for many reluctant women.

Today’s Thought

An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have: The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.

— Maurice Chevalier

Tailpiece

“What happened to your ear?”

“Well, I was ironing my shirt when the phone rang and I accidentally put the iron to my ear.”

“Bummer. And what happened to the other ear?”

“Well, I had to call 911, didn’t I?”

 

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

How to prove you're a skipper

A FRIEND who has been sailing for years tried to charter a yacht recently. He found that the charter company’s requirements were quite strict. They wanted written proof that he could handle a yacht and navigate. And, of course, he didn’t have any written proof.

There was a cabinet full of silver mugs at home, the result of winning a lot of sailboat races over the years, but that didn’t help, of course. In the end he printed a list of his sailing experiences and had it signed and sworn by a notary public. That did the trick.

I had a similar experience when a yachting magazine sent me to Grenada to do a story about chartering in the Caribbean. The charter company asked me to list my sailing accomplishments before they would hand over their nice yacht. I must confess that my experience seemed quite meager on paper until I remembered that at one time in my life (albeit for a very brief period) I was a professional seaman — that is, they actually paid me money. 

It happened when I was young and adventurous. I was looking for a cheap way to get to Britain. I found a Union-Castle liner called the Warwick Castle that was heading that way and hopped aboard. I washed dishes and changed bedclothes all the way to London.

When I say I washed dishes that’s not quite correct. I learned from my fellow crewmembers that the correct thing to do, after fetching meals for the little messroom I served, was to throw the dirty dishes out of the galley porthole. I then picked up fresh clean dishes from the Tourist Class galley dishwashing machines.

I didn’t reveal to the charter company the exact nature of my professional seagoing experience, lest it should confuse them. I didn’t actually mention that I was a member for just three weeks of the British National Union of Seamen (Catering Branch), because that’s like telling a prospective employer that you’ve got a B.A. Calcutta (failed). It doesn’t divulge the full extent of your skill and experience.

No, I merely told the charter company that I had served time at sea as a professional. They were won over immediately. It seemed that not many of their prospective customers could produce such desirable credentials. So they cheerfully handed over their nice yacht, and June and I disappeared northward into the warm blue Caribbean Sea with happy grins on our faces.

Today’s Thought

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.

— Vernon Law, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher

Tailpiece

A pessimist is a person who builds a castle in the air and then locks himself in the dungeon.

An optimist, on the other hand, is a person who fixes your eyes.

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

Time-change confusion

ISN’T IT TIME we stopped messing with the time?  Every time we are forced to comply with daylight savings time by putting the clocks an hour ahead, my inner clock goes woozy. I wake up at all hours of the night to check the clocks. Then I worry that I didn’t change the clocks before I went to bed, so is it 4 a.m. or 5 a.m.? Did I change just some of the clocks?  If so, which ones?

It’s even worse in the morning. Did I spring forward or fall back? Did I get it right this time? Am I the only one who has sprung back and fallen forward?

Why, oh why, do we have to go through this silly business twice a year? And how do you avoid changing the batteries in the smoke alarms twice a year, instead of just once, because you can never remember which time change concides with the battery time change?

The cats in the kitchen and the birds clustered around the feeder get really suspicious when their food comes an hour early. But it’s worse later in the year, when the clocks go back. You can’t explain to them that their supper is going to be an hour late because the government insists upon daylight savings time coming to an end. They just think the government hates them, and they hate you even more for kow-towing to the government.

Usually I forget to change the time on my wrist watch. I don’t like to mess with it because it’s also an old-fashioned self-winding chronometer. Three times it has guided small yachts across oceans with the help of a sextant, but now it’s a poor little orphan. No sailor needs a mechanical chronometer any more. Everywhere we look there are chronometers. Time is all over the place, accurate to the second. Quartz movements are on cell phones, computers, TV sets, radios, stoves, microwave ovens, car dashboards, GPS receivers, and lord knows where all else. They’re even in cheap clocks and watches. They’re all darned chronometers now.

Yet despite this plethora of fine, accurate time, easily accessible to everyone for next to nothing, we have to keep messing with the clocks. All except Arizona, that is, where they have more sense and stick to Mountain Standard Time all year round. It must be nice to live in Arizona and only change the smoke-alarm batteries once a year.

I just don’t understand this strange compulsion to keep putting clocks back and forward. I mean, if you want to start work or school earlier, why not just go ahead? Start work earlier. See if I care.  Why drag the whole country into it? It makes too many of us severely crotchety. 

Today’s Thought

Last week we passed a birth-control bill. Now we are trying to pass a law to put the people to bed an hour earlier.

— Frank L. Gill, State Senator, Colorado

Tailpiece

 “Let’s stop here. This looks like an ideal place for a picnic.”

“It must be. Fifty million mosquitoes can’t be wrong.”

(Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday — a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Singlehanders, and enough sleep

IF YOU OWN a reasonably small sailboat it’s probable that you’ll find yourself singlehanding sooner or later. You know what it’s like with crews. They’re never around when you need them.

It’s also possible that you’ll do some passagemaking, and if your next port is more than 24 hours away, you’re going to run into what I reckon is the singlehander’s biggest problem — how to get enough sleep.

Actually, a singlehander who sleeps for any time at all is breaking the international rules because he or she can’t maintain the required continuous lookout duties. In fact, though, nobody ever seems to prosecute singlehanders, probably because they come off worse in any encounter with a ship.

From what I can gather from published interviews with solo sailors, most of them think the best thing to do at night is nap for 20 minutes at a time. Then they get up, have a look around the horizon, check the course and the sails, and go below to set the galley timer alarm for another 20-minute nap. This apparently goes on all night from dusk to dawn. In theory, if they get 10 minutes of actual sleep in each 20-minute period, they’ll get 30 minutes of sleep in every hour, or six hours during the night.

Then, during the day, they can take a longer nap, justifying it on the grounds that a collision is less likely during the day because a sailboat is then easier to see and avoid.

Why 20-minute naps? Well, there seems to be a theory that 20 minutes is how long it takes a ship to move from just below your visible horizon to the spot where you will be in 20 minutes’ time.

Now, the deepest part of sleep, the part we need most, apparently, if we are to avoid fatigue and hallucinations, is called REM sleep, named after random eye movement. It’s not normally the first part of our sleep patterns, but it seems that many singlehanders have managed to train themselves to fall into REM almost immediately they lie down, and they get 10 minutes or more of REM in every 20-minute sleep period.

It usually takes about a week to get into the routine of instant REM, though, so if you’re planning a solo voyage you’d do well to practice in advance.

Not everybody follows this 20-minute nap routine, of course. Many optimists just sleep the night through as if they were safely in port, getting up only to shorten sail or answer the summons of an off-course alarm. On the whole, I can’t help thinking they’re probably just as safe as the 20-minute nappers. It seems to me that a sleeping singlehander is more likely to run into another sleeping singlehander than to collide with a ship manned by a regular crew and maintaining a proper lookout. And if two singlehanders do run into each other, nobody’s likely to prosecute them for breaking the rules. They’ll just say it serves them right.

Today’s Thought

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

— John Steinbeck

Tailpiece

I don’t know how much truth there is in the medical theory that everybody is slightly taller in the morning than they were in the evening, but I can tell you this: all my life I have noticed a pronounced tendency to become short between paychecks.

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

A rumor about dismasting

EVERY NOW AND THEN I hear the rumor that sailing under a jib only will cause dismasting. It’s one of those rumors that surfaces for a while, dies a natural death because of its inherent stupidity, and then miraculously is reborn, to start the cycle again.

I have no idea why sailing under a jib only should cause dismasting. I have sailed many hundreds of deepsea miles under jib only, and in stormy weather, too. I have wondered if maybe a fractional rig was more vulnerable than a masthead rig, because of the stress at the top of the mast caused by a lower forestay and a higher backstay, but I imagine that any naval architect would know how to compensate for that.

A Cal 20 of mine was fractionally rigged, and she would sail just fine under working jib only, and even go to weather in strong winds. So did my old Mirror dinghy, for that matter. I have vivid memories of planing under a jib little bigger than a pocket handkerchief after a sudden windstorm hit, and I dropped the mainsail completely. She, too, would go to windward under jib only, but carrying a whole lot of lee helm, of course. And despite the many miles I’ve done under jib only, I’ve never lost a mast. Touch wood.

There is, in fact, a long tradition of yachts tackling the trade winds with twin jibs and no mainsail. I mean, one of the lovely things about the lone jib, or twin jibs,  on a deepsea keeler is that the center of effort is so far forward that a windvane, which normally struggles dead downwind, is able to guide you to leeward with ease. You can huddle down below, nice and warm and dry, with your hands wrapped around a mug of coffee and rum, while your boat goes downwind like she’s on rails.

The only problem with this rig is that if your course is deeper than a reach, your boat will roll from gunwale to gunwale. But all dead-downwind work is pretty rolly, anyway, unless you know how to fly twin jibs or a twistle yard in a deep V forward, so they act like a cone and resist a lot of the sideways movement.

So don’t be put off. Fly that darn jib on its own if you like, and to heck with the rumor mongers.

Today’s Thought

Rumor travels faster but it don’t stay put as long as truth.

— Will Rogers, The Illiterate Digest                                                      

Tailpiece

Our local school officials recently gave eighth-graders a test to see what they were best suited for.

They discovered that the eighth-graders were best suited for the seventh grade.

No highways, no byways at sea

I WAS SURPRISED to find that Robert Macfarlane had included two chapters on the sea in his popular book The Old Ways (Penguin Books). The ways he’s talking about are the ones on land, the ancient paths, lanes, byways, and roads that restless humans have traveled since before the beginning of recorded history.

“We think of paths as existing only on land, but the sea has its paths too,” Macfarlane declares. He goes on to talk about a network of “sea roads” and the astonishing fact that they carried maritime traffic “dating back at least to the Mesolithic [era], and intense activity for the three millennia before Rome built its roads.”

Well, Macfarlane is a landscape mystic, of course, and not unacquainted with hyperbole. There have never been roads for sailing ships. One of the glories of the open sea is that you are mostly free to go where you want. You find your own way. There are no marked highways that you must stick to. And that’s lucky for us, because a sailboat could rarely follow a road at sea even if there were one.

There are a few straits and channels that funnel ships into narrow waters, it’s true, but even they must be wide enough to tack in, otherwise no sailing ship would dare use them.  Motor ships are better at following shipping “lanes,” of course, but there were no motor ships around in the Mesolithic era, or when Roman slaves were building roads for Caesar’s legions.

What sailing ships follow are “routes,” not “roads.” In fact, roads, as the word is known to sailors, are open anchorages, commonly used in Europe and other parts of the world while waiting for the wind or tidal stream to change direction. Routes, on the other hand, are general directions for making passages between ports, and were originally dictated by the strength and direction of the prevailing ocean winds.

It would seem that some time after Romans were building roads on land, sailors at sea discovered the system of rotating weather systems that allowed ships to cross the Atlantic from east to west by first going far south, and then to return to Europe by first sailing north. Then they found they could take advantage of the Roaring Forties to circle the Southern Hemisphere, and so forth; but I expect the Arabs or the Phoenicians had discovered the handy monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean, which enabled them to trade with East Africa, long before that.

Ships leave no tracks in the ocean. There are no cairns or milestones, or signposts to designate roads. A swirl of wake and a temporary patch of foam, and soon no evidence exists that a ship has passed by here.  Each ship makes its own road in the sea, and immediately the sea erases all signs of its passage.

Anyone who has a boat and access to a branch of the sea anywhere has access to all seas everywhere. That’s the magic of owning boat. You are within reach of all other boats all over the world. And you don’t need a road to get there.

Today’s Thought

I like a road that leads away to prospects bright and fair,

A road that is an ordered road, like a nun’s evening prayer;

But best of all I love a road that leads to God knows where.

— Charles Hanson Towne, The Best Road of All

Tailpiece

Last week a local Small Claims Court judge told a nervous woman witness to make herself at ease, and talk to him as if she were talking to her husband or friends.

The case is still proceeding.