Truly, the summer isles
Summer 2018 was my third visit to the Azores. This time I sailed my little yacht alone from the Algarve coast of Portugal and back. It was a joy to be on a long ocean passage in my own boat, even if the weather on the last four days of the outward trip was remarkably unpleasant. The northerly force 6 gusted 7, which turned into hours of a steady 7 gusting 8. My little boat rolled and slammed just too much for comfort in the waves and swell from the north. It wasn’t worrying but became annoying and tedious by day three and by day four I was searching the horizon for land. At that stage I wanted anything to give me a lee. I didn’t care if it was the Azores or Nova Scotia or a fleet of the biggest container ships ever built. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves in this story by putting all the fun first.
The ocean between Portugal and the Azores is fairly empty but not wholly so, and I had fitted AIS to help spot the “targets” (big ships to you and me). First out of the blocks were the big commercial ships going into and out of the Mediterranean and down from Europe to Madeira or further south, and I blessed the ability of AIS to see them and, better yet, help me avoid them. Not far west of Cape St Vincent are five shipping lanes. Or seven, if you count the way other traffic also passes just outside the lanes. My route clipped the top north east corner of the first lane and then took me clear of other lanes but not, of course, clear of the traffic entering and leaving the lanes. I monitored 36 “targets” on the screen, actually only saw four of them, took evasive action for two of them, and spoke to one to make sure he knew I was close. He passed five hundred yards away and I only saw him briefly as a murky image in the murk and that only because I was looking so intently at where I knew he would be. I saw lights on the murky image but they were not burning brightly.
The lanes were a wonderful first test of my AIS. Over the rest of the journey, there and back, I adapted to sailing with AIS. AIS changed my watch keeping routine out of all recognition. These were not changes made in a casual or ill-informed way. They were based on close observation of the AIS warnings on screen and my own look-out over the sea. I learnt to my surprise that there is always a ship out there – approximately 1.333recurring a day on average – and, to my even greater surprise, that there are gathering places in this wide, featureless ocean where, on that day and in those conditions and on that route, ships come to make their turn onto the next part of their passage. I might see five ships passing these sea junctions in the hour or three it took me to get out of range. I put myself on more active watch once I’d figured I was in one of these places but even so I might see only two ships by eye and five more on the screen.
Once out of the clutter of the shipping lanes I started my planned watch keeping routine. Sleep is the problem for a single hander and since I had crossed the lanes overnight I was already knackered. I began by setting an alarm every half hour but as I learnt how empty the ocean was turned this to every hour in the hope of getting better sleep. After a while, and still being very tired, I set the alarm for an hour and a half. After another while I discovered that I was naturally waking roughly every hour so I went with Mother Nature and slept as well as I could for most of that first day while taking a look around every hour. I was learning that my looking about was less useful than the AIS alarm. I had set the alarm to give twenty four minutes warning of targets passing within two miles of me and I gradually grew confident that this is exactly what was happening. I felt increasingly confident spending time resting or sleeping because when that alarm sounded I was up and barking like a Pavlovian dog.
I cannot praise AIS enough. Whether you are single handing or sailing with a surplus of crew, AIS is essential for boats mixing with big ships. It is what we Neo-Darwinian matelots might call the Expression of Intelligent Regulation because by being obliged to fit a cheap box of tricks every commercial vessel knows where every other commercial vessel is and can avoid the embarrassment of collisions; and us little yachts with our cut-price version can know this too. And if little yachts were to have fitted a transceiver instead of just a receiver they would all be seen as well.
Here I must make a confession. I fitted AIS as an experiment, albeit an experiment I was relying on to work well enough to put my life in its hands. I used the excuse of “an experiment” to be a cheapskate. I bought the cheapest AIS available, which happened to be made by QUARK Electronics and happened to be a receiver only. Nothing wrong with QUARK. It worked, a neat and tidy bit of kit. My error was in choosing a receiver only. AIS is a system. Every vessel out there on the ocean is a potential danger to every other vessel, so for the AIS system to deliver safety at sea every vessel should be transmitting, so that every receiving vessel knows it will get a full house. That includes us yachts as well. I will be living by my principles and upping my AIS to a transceiver for my next voyage. QUARK do just the thing I need.
AIS, of course, only shows vessels. It doesn’t show the other dangers floating around the ocean waiting to collide with us. I had seen plenty of these on previous ocean passages but I grew a little cavalier when I didn’t see any flotsam or jetsam going out to the Azores. This omission might well have been due to the unpleasant weather for the last 400 miles. The sea was too rough to see anything that wasn’t already riding the crest of the next wave to hit us. Anything further off wouldn’t be seen no matter how hard I was looking. The return trip was quite different. About half way back from the Azores I had a major panic about flotsam or jetsam. It was the big log awash that set my pulse racing.
The log went by only about fifty feet away. It was low in the water, the sea was washing over it, so it wasn’t what you might call visible. It was the stout branches I saw first, sticking up vertically in such a way to suggest that there was a lot more log below the water to support them. And when I looked long and hard through the bins I could see the waves washing over the torn trunk at each end. The log was quite a bit longer than Amelie. That dark trunk awash, so very hard to see, was probably very substantial. Fifty feet felt like a close miss. A slight wind shift or push off course by a wave half a mile earlier and we would have been going down a collision line instead of 50 feet clear. Sighting the log was worrying enough but made worse because the day before I had seen a five or six feet diameter wooden cable reel roll by, vertical, not lying down as I would have expected. Cable reels are big and heavy. This one was as high out the water as my deck. It rolled by close enough to see all the growth from weeks at sea without any need of the binoculars. That, too, is close. If I had hit it bows on I could have cracked the hull. And if that isn’t enough, the day before I had changed course to investigate a strange green patch of sea coming my way. I discovered a fishing net about fifty feet square, so coarse it could have been green plastic garden fencing. It swished around in the surface waves. If I had motored over such a stubbornly rugged net I would, at the very least, have snagged my propeller. My line cutter would have been useless. I figured I could have launched the dinghy and cut away most of the snagged net so that I wouldn’t be dragging it like a drogue back to Portugal for the month or two that would take me to sail; but as for net around my prop, I would not be able to cut that free at sea. I know from experience that cutting plastic that has welded itself to a prop is impossible at sea without an air bottle. To snag a net like that in any of the fifty or so hours I spent motoring through the calms meant one thing for certain: no more motoring.
I’m willing to bet that most of you have wound a rope or net around your prop; I’ll bet that even more of you know someone else who has; and I bet that all of you have read at least one magazine article in the last couple of years by someone writing about the line or net caught around their prop. It happens, but not usually 500 miles offshore where I was, just as a cable reel is more common on a building site rather than 450 miles offshore and logs awash are not overly common 400 miles offshore.
Since I still had a long way to go I decided to test this unwelcome crisis of confidence in what I was doing all alone out in the vast ocean. I tried a spot of Plato’s Socratic Dialogue to see whether I was really any more at risk than a fully crewed boat. According to the Collision Regulations (the bible for sailors) single handers break the cardinal rule of not being able to keep a constant look out and ought to be locked up for their own safety; and the RYA, as the fully helmeted and harnessed health and safety voice of yachting, would probably issue bulletins berating the stupidity of single handers if it weren’t so committed to keeping regulating authority at arm’s length. But deep ocean is not the busy waters of the coast or Channel. What are we keeping watch for and does a crew of several people do this any better than me on my own? And in case you think I’m alone in the madness of single handing 1,000 miles offshore I should say that on the day I arrived in Ponta Delgada on Sao Miguel I was the fourth single hander to arrive on that day alone.
The ColRegs are about hitting other vessels, so I decided to give that the Socratic treatment first and get it out of the way. Big ships are the real danger for us yachts out here, because of the consequences if we hit one, but they are big, well lit, transmitting on AIS and probably watching the world on their radar screens. A single hander will hear the AIS alarm when a ship is expected to come within two miles as certainly as a crew of ten will. So, thanks to AIS, big ships are no longer the vital reason for keeping a visual look out. What about other yachts? I saw three the whole trip: one at the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end. One was about a mile away; the others were right on the horizon. All were transmitting AIS. In a big ocean other yachts, even those without AIS, are probably not going to collide with me and if they do I would hope it to be a non-fatal glancing blow. I wasn’t going to not worry about that but it wasn’t going to reduce me to a panic. Nor did I think crewed yachts would see more yachts than I did. I would, though, worry less if I knew all yachts were transmitting on AIS; and that is why I will upgrade to a transceiver. If I give other yachts peace of mind maybe they will do the same for me.
Unlike the ColRegs (which I sometimes have my doubts about), my prime worry is hitting all that other stuff which isn’t a vessel. But everything else, from whales to logs awash and lost cargo containers, is random, unlit and invisible until it is passing your beam. It might be dead on your nose and coming your way but seeing it from the cockpit, even in good light, is a matter of heightened awareness and good luck. I can tell you this is the case because I spent an interesting hour or two testing my hypothesis by looking to see what I could see dead ahead of me. The mast is in the way. The life raft or dingy is in the way. The sprayhood is in the way. If the sun is shining in that direction, the light on the water is in the way. The first two boat lengths ahead of you are obscured by your own bow. And a look out looking over the sea to the horizon will not see what is in the next two boat lengths ahead either, so they won't see the log awash or the cable reel verticule. That is why you only ever see stuff on the beam or astern i.e. when it is passing and has already missed you.
Ah, but of course, it is night, isn’t it, when your single hander is most vulnerable because he/she is in their bunk sleeping and no one is up watching, unlike on a crewed boat where a person will always be in the cockpit. That person, though, may well be listening to music or playing a game on their phone or sitting with their back comfortably up against the bulkhead and their head under the sprayhood as they face aft and take a little snooze. Or they might have popped below for a Mars Bar or a cup of tea. None of that is keeping watch. And if they don’t have a moon ahead of them to help, it is too dark to see anything anyway.
So this exercise in sharp Socratic logic, taken with a stir of lazy indifference, when both were added to the need for sleep, won me the debate that day.
A friend arrived in Lagos, back from the Azores, the day after me, with his well-rested crew of four. I tried my theory on him. They kept a good look out. They always had a person in the cockpit. They had seen plenty. Whales, basking sharks, dolphin, flying fish and a shearwater. No flotsam or jetsam, though. Odd, that, given what I had seen!! And at night, I asked, what did you see? “Nothing,” he said. “You don’t see anything at night.” Exactly, as a Roman senator might have quipped in Latin.
This trip was a test of the boat offshore as well as me offshore. We had both been offshore before but not together. The boat was lively, as expected although she wasn’t the only boat giving her crew a hard time. I spoke on VHF to a fine big ketch headed from the Azores to Portugal who had been in the same bad weather for two days, just as I had by then. They said they were being thrown about and finding it impossible to do things down below. Amelie was quick in light airs, as expected. She was reassuringly buoyant, as hoped. She was badly galleyed, as I feared. But she was more competent as a sea boat than I had expected. She had tricks waiting for me to discover.
It wasn’t Amelie’s fault that I sailed only under reefed genoa for most of the stormy last four days before Sao Miguel. My first two reefs in the main were remarkably easy to set, all done from the cockpit, involving only a little running forward to the mast to clear annoyingly snagged lines, but nothing had been arranged for the third reef and in those final days I needed a third reef or no main at all. I settled on no main at all. I thought I could manage for a little while; that the storm would just be a 12 hour blow. It wasn’t so I assumed it would be over in 24 hours. But it wasn’t so I decided it would all be over at some time and I could live with that certainty. By the time I realised the wind was going to be with me all the way to Sao Miguel, and that it was now gusting gale force, the main was down and staying down and I was happy rolling more of the genoa away to keep the speed down to five knots. The boat sails perfectly steadily with just a tiny bit of genoa, better than any other boat I’ve had, and the big benefit of having it almost reefed away was that the rip in the genoa I’d mended on day three was protected.
On my way back, in easier weather, relying on the electric autohelm for self steering, I discovered a new trick. On the first night, to give the autohelm a rest, I hove to. When we used to heave to in long-keeled Petronella the boat would more or less stop and gently ride up and down in the water. Amelie didn’t do that. With a reefed main and a small amount of backed genoa Amelie slowed from about five knots to three and continued on her way but in a straight line even though the tiller was not tied in the least. This was a discovery almost as momentus as E=MC2. In those fairly benign conditions this trick was better than properly heaving to because we continued to make progress in the right direction, on my way to a record if I had but known it at the time.
I was pleased to arrive at Ponto Delgada but didn’t realise how tired I was or habituated to the motion. Once I saw land at dusk I stayed up till we arrived at about mid morning. I was surprised at how lively and awake I felt when I knew I should be exhausted. It made for a dramatic arrival, in a shameful sort of way. I had lost all sense of solid ground. After I tied up to the wall of the fuel dock I scrambled up the four feet to terra firma, stepped forward and completely lost control of my legs. I tried to put my foot on the ground ahead of me but the ground moved away and my foot tried to follow it and I only just avoided falling over. “Eleven days” I said in English to the man selling me the diesel, as the best explanation I could come up with at the time. He gave me one of those Portuguese looks which say “eleven beers, more like, mate”. Of course we all know now that it wasn’t eleven days, because it was ten, and that I was wrong and I regret saying that now but at the time I was more bothered about not falling over, and eleven was close enough.
On the return trip I was surprised at my sense of not being keen to arrive back in Portugal. Perhaps the easier weather and magnificent visibility meant I wanted to be at sea longer. Perhaps it was the wonderfully bright moon in a cloudless sky making nights unforgettable. Or more mundanely it was probably coming back into the reach of land and people after the infinity of the ocean. As I came up on the mainland of Portugal there were fishing boats and fishing pots and I was watching for the tuna nets and, in all, I felt disturbed. I lost the unhurried ways of the empty ocean. I felt the land was ready, at any moment, to come out and smite me. It was disorientating, just when I should have been expecting to feel safer from proximity to land. Sailing in deep ocean can be far less taxing than coastal sailing.
The Azores is a good ocean passage to make, even for those coming from the British Isles or north west Europe instead of Spain or Portugal. It gives you a better chance of beam winds than a return trip to Madeira or the Canaries. With a decent forecast you can get a day or two of good weather to get offshore and find your sea legs before anything nasty comes your way.* It is a longish trip but you might do it in a comfortable seven days or at a bit of a stretch in eleven. The uncertainty is that even the Azores High doesn’t make for predictably good weather. No one I met had experienced such bad weather on this route in previous years as my (and theirs) last four days. But even during those long days of stormy weather the ocean was a wonderful place to be. Huge vistas, amazing clouds, bright starry nights, a huge moon most of the time, and dolphin coming at any time of day or night. More than once I sailed through a hunt when the dolphin took no notice of me but went on doing head stands and back flips and nose dives and cannonball landings and moving through waves tops at incredible speeds. And on the way back to Europe, in the better weather, I had huge night seas when the moon stayed up in a cloudless sky. I saw the green flash at one sunset. Less possible, I saw the great city of Atlantis away on the eastern horizon at dawn, discovered by an intrepid sailor yet again. I waved but the Atlantians have the reputation of not being sociable. And when the day was clear, as it usually was, the sea stretched away to the far horizon all around me and was breathtaking.
On a passage to the Azores the cherry on the cake is the Azores themselves. Good marinas, welcoming officials, culture and entertainment ashore and magnificent volcanic scenery to explore.
If you have sailed to the Azores from Britain or northern Europe you have been granted the wonderful opportunity not to return there. You can make the much easier trip to Biscay or the Spanish Rias or the Algarve coast. These are all places with good winter facilities and flights to get you back home. Why not start a new sailing life.
*A note on weather forecasts.
I’m from a generation that started sailing before there were accurate, highly detailed weather forecasts on mobile phones, and it still surprises me how gullible some sailors are. A forecast is, after all, just a forecast. The US National Weather Service, the people who run the biggest weather models, give us the best rule of thumb. They assign probabilities of the forecast being right by twelve hour periods: 90% chance it will be right in the 12 hours after the forecast was issued; 75% chance for the next 12 to 24 hours; 66% chance for the next 24 to 36 hours; and after that you might as well be reading the tea leaves. Of course, sailors setting off on an eight to ten day passage invest a lot of passage planning hopes in any eight or ten day forecast they can get. Hope springs eternal. But just because we want one shouldn’t mean we believe it when we get one. Four hours out from Ponta Delgada, on my potentially ten day journey, still in the sweet zone of a 90% chance of the forecast being right, I discovered that the forecast was already wrong.
Summer 2018 was my third visit to the Azores. This time I sailed my little yacht alone from the Algarve coast of Portugal and back. It was a joy to be on a long ocean passage in my own boat, even if the weather on the last four days of the outward trip was remarkably unpleasant. The northerly force 6 gusted 7, which turned into hours of a steady 7 gusting 8. My little boat rolled and slammed just too much for comfort in the waves and swell from the north. It wasn’t worrying but became annoying and tedious by day three and by day four I was searching the horizon for land. At that stage I wanted anything to give me a lee. I didn’t care if it was the Azores or Nova Scotia or a fleet of the biggest container ships ever built. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves in this story by putting all the fun first.
The ocean between Portugal and the Azores is fairly empty but not wholly so, and I had fitted AIS to help spot the “targets” (big ships to you and me). First out of the blocks were the big commercial ships going into and out of the Mediterranean and down from Europe to Madeira or further south, and I blessed the ability of AIS to see them and, better yet, help me avoid them. Not far west of Cape St Vincent are five shipping lanes. Or seven, if you count the way other traffic also passes just outside the lanes. My route clipped the top north east corner of the first lane and then took me clear of other lanes but not, of course, clear of the traffic entering and leaving the lanes. I monitored 36 “targets” on the screen, actually only saw four of them, took evasive action for two of them, and spoke to one to make sure he knew I was close. He passed five hundred yards away and I only saw him briefly as a murky image in the murk and that only because I was looking so intently at where I knew he would be. I saw lights on the murky image but they were not burning brightly.
The lanes were a wonderful first test of my AIS. Over the rest of the journey, there and back, I adapted to sailing with AIS. AIS changed my watch keeping routine out of all recognition. These were not changes made in a casual or ill-informed way. They were based on close observation of the AIS warnings on screen and my own look-out over the sea. I learnt to my surprise that there is always a ship out there – approximately 1.333recurring a day on average – and, to my even greater surprise, that there are gathering places in this wide, featureless ocean where, on that day and in those conditions and on that route, ships come to make their turn onto the next part of their passage. I might see five ships passing these sea junctions in the hour or three it took me to get out of range. I put myself on more active watch once I’d figured I was in one of these places but even so I might see only two ships by eye and five more on the screen.
Once out of the clutter of the shipping lanes I started my planned watch keeping routine. Sleep is the problem for a single hander and since I had crossed the lanes overnight I was already knackered. I began by setting an alarm every half hour but as I learnt how empty the ocean was turned this to every hour in the hope of getting better sleep. After a while, and still being very tired, I set the alarm for an hour and a half. After another while I discovered that I was naturally waking roughly every hour so I went with Mother Nature and slept as well as I could for most of that first day while taking a look around every hour. I was learning that my looking about was less useful than the AIS alarm. I had set the alarm to give twenty four minutes warning of targets passing within two miles of me and I gradually grew confident that this is exactly what was happening. I felt increasingly confident spending time resting or sleeping because when that alarm sounded I was up and barking like a Pavlovian dog.
I cannot praise AIS enough. Whether you are single handing or sailing with a surplus of crew, AIS is essential for boats mixing with big ships. It is what we Neo-Darwinian matelots might call the Expression of Intelligent Regulation because by being obliged to fit a cheap box of tricks every commercial vessel knows where every other commercial vessel is and can avoid the embarrassment of collisions; and us little yachts with our cut-price version can know this too. And if little yachts were to have fitted a transceiver instead of just a receiver they would all be seen as well.
Here I must make a confession. I fitted AIS as an experiment, albeit an experiment I was relying on to work well enough to put my life in its hands. I used the excuse of “an experiment” to be a cheapskate. I bought the cheapest AIS available, which happened to be made by QUARK Electronics and happened to be a receiver only. Nothing wrong with QUARK. It worked, a neat and tidy bit of kit. My error was in choosing a receiver only. AIS is a system. Every vessel out there on the ocean is a potential danger to every other vessel, so for the AIS system to deliver safety at sea every vessel should be transmitting, so that every receiving vessel knows it will get a full house. That includes us yachts as well. I will be living by my principles and upping my AIS to a transceiver for my next voyage. QUARK do just the thing I need.
AIS, of course, only shows vessels. It doesn’t show the other dangers floating around the ocean waiting to collide with us. I had seen plenty of these on previous ocean passages but I grew a little cavalier when I didn’t see any flotsam or jetsam going out to the Azores. This omission might well have been due to the unpleasant weather for the last 400 miles. The sea was too rough to see anything that wasn’t already riding the crest of the next wave to hit us. Anything further off wouldn’t be seen no matter how hard I was looking. The return trip was quite different. About half way back from the Azores I had a major panic about flotsam or jetsam. It was the big log awash that set my pulse racing.
The log went by only about fifty feet away. It was low in the water, the sea was washing over it, so it wasn’t what you might call visible. It was the stout branches I saw first, sticking up vertically in such a way to suggest that there was a lot more log below the water to support them. And when I looked long and hard through the bins I could see the waves washing over the torn trunk at each end. The log was quite a bit longer than Amelie. That dark trunk awash, so very hard to see, was probably very substantial. Fifty feet felt like a close miss. A slight wind shift or push off course by a wave half a mile earlier and we would have been going down a collision line instead of 50 feet clear. Sighting the log was worrying enough but made worse because the day before I had seen a five or six feet diameter wooden cable reel roll by, vertical, not lying down as I would have expected. Cable reels are big and heavy. This one was as high out the water as my deck. It rolled by close enough to see all the growth from weeks at sea without any need of the binoculars. That, too, is close. If I had hit it bows on I could have cracked the hull. And if that isn’t enough, the day before I had changed course to investigate a strange green patch of sea coming my way. I discovered a fishing net about fifty feet square, so coarse it could have been green plastic garden fencing. It swished around in the surface waves. If I had motored over such a stubbornly rugged net I would, at the very least, have snagged my propeller. My line cutter would have been useless. I figured I could have launched the dinghy and cut away most of the snagged net so that I wouldn’t be dragging it like a drogue back to Portugal for the month or two that would take me to sail; but as for net around my prop, I would not be able to cut that free at sea. I know from experience that cutting plastic that has welded itself to a prop is impossible at sea without an air bottle. To snag a net like that in any of the fifty or so hours I spent motoring through the calms meant one thing for certain: no more motoring.
I’m willing to bet that most of you have wound a rope or net around your prop; I’ll bet that even more of you know someone else who has; and I bet that all of you have read at least one magazine article in the last couple of years by someone writing about the line or net caught around their prop. It happens, but not usually 500 miles offshore where I was, just as a cable reel is more common on a building site rather than 450 miles offshore and logs awash are not overly common 400 miles offshore.
Since I still had a long way to go I decided to test this unwelcome crisis of confidence in what I was doing all alone out in the vast ocean. I tried a spot of Plato’s Socratic Dialogue to see whether I was really any more at risk than a fully crewed boat. According to the Collision Regulations (the bible for sailors) single handers break the cardinal rule of not being able to keep a constant look out and ought to be locked up for their own safety; and the RYA, as the fully helmeted and harnessed health and safety voice of yachting, would probably issue bulletins berating the stupidity of single handers if it weren’t so committed to keeping regulating authority at arm’s length. But deep ocean is not the busy waters of the coast or Channel. What are we keeping watch for and does a crew of several people do this any better than me on my own? And in case you think I’m alone in the madness of single handing 1,000 miles offshore I should say that on the day I arrived in Ponta Delgada on Sao Miguel I was the fourth single hander to arrive on that day alone.
The ColRegs are about hitting other vessels, so I decided to give that the Socratic treatment first and get it out of the way. Big ships are the real danger for us yachts out here, because of the consequences if we hit one, but they are big, well lit, transmitting on AIS and probably watching the world on their radar screens. A single hander will hear the AIS alarm when a ship is expected to come within two miles as certainly as a crew of ten will. So, thanks to AIS, big ships are no longer the vital reason for keeping a visual look out. What about other yachts? I saw three the whole trip: one at the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end. One was about a mile away; the others were right on the horizon. All were transmitting AIS. In a big ocean other yachts, even those without AIS, are probably not going to collide with me and if they do I would hope it to be a non-fatal glancing blow. I wasn’t going to not worry about that but it wasn’t going to reduce me to a panic. Nor did I think crewed yachts would see more yachts than I did. I would, though, worry less if I knew all yachts were transmitting on AIS; and that is why I will upgrade to a transceiver. If I give other yachts peace of mind maybe they will do the same for me.
Unlike the ColRegs (which I sometimes have my doubts about), my prime worry is hitting all that other stuff which isn’t a vessel. But everything else, from whales to logs awash and lost cargo containers, is random, unlit and invisible until it is passing your beam. It might be dead on your nose and coming your way but seeing it from the cockpit, even in good light, is a matter of heightened awareness and good luck. I can tell you this is the case because I spent an interesting hour or two testing my hypothesis by looking to see what I could see dead ahead of me. The mast is in the way. The life raft or dingy is in the way. The sprayhood is in the way. If the sun is shining in that direction, the light on the water is in the way. The first two boat lengths ahead of you are obscured by your own bow. And a look out looking over the sea to the horizon will not see what is in the next two boat lengths ahead either, so they won't see the log awash or the cable reel verticule. That is why you only ever see stuff on the beam or astern i.e. when it is passing and has already missed you.
Ah, but of course, it is night, isn’t it, when your single hander is most vulnerable because he/she is in their bunk sleeping and no one is up watching, unlike on a crewed boat where a person will always be in the cockpit. That person, though, may well be listening to music or playing a game on their phone or sitting with their back comfortably up against the bulkhead and their head under the sprayhood as they face aft and take a little snooze. Or they might have popped below for a Mars Bar or a cup of tea. None of that is keeping watch. And if they don’t have a moon ahead of them to help, it is too dark to see anything anyway.
So this exercise in sharp Socratic logic, taken with a stir of lazy indifference, when both were added to the need for sleep, won me the debate that day.
A friend arrived in Lagos, back from the Azores, the day after me, with his well-rested crew of four. I tried my theory on him. They kept a good look out. They always had a person in the cockpit. They had seen plenty. Whales, basking sharks, dolphin, flying fish and a shearwater. No flotsam or jetsam, though. Odd, that, given what I had seen!! And at night, I asked, what did you see? “Nothing,” he said. “You don’t see anything at night.” Exactly, as a Roman senator might have quipped in Latin.
This trip was a test of the boat offshore as well as me offshore. We had both been offshore before but not together. The boat was lively, as expected although she wasn’t the only boat giving her crew a hard time. I spoke on VHF to a fine big ketch headed from the Azores to Portugal who had been in the same bad weather for two days, just as I had by then. They said they were being thrown about and finding it impossible to do things down below. Amelie was quick in light airs, as expected. She was reassuringly buoyant, as hoped. She was badly galleyed, as I feared. But she was more competent as a sea boat than I had expected. She had tricks waiting for me to discover.
It wasn’t Amelie’s fault that I sailed only under reefed genoa for most of the stormy last four days before Sao Miguel. My first two reefs in the main were remarkably easy to set, all done from the cockpit, involving only a little running forward to the mast to clear annoyingly snagged lines, but nothing had been arranged for the third reef and in those final days I needed a third reef or no main at all. I settled on no main at all. I thought I could manage for a little while; that the storm would just be a 12 hour blow. It wasn’t so I assumed it would be over in 24 hours. But it wasn’t so I decided it would all be over at some time and I could live with that certainty. By the time I realised the wind was going to be with me all the way to Sao Miguel, and that it was now gusting gale force, the main was down and staying down and I was happy rolling more of the genoa away to keep the speed down to five knots. The boat sails perfectly steadily with just a tiny bit of genoa, better than any other boat I’ve had, and the big benefit of having it almost reefed away was that the rip in the genoa I’d mended on day three was protected.
On my way back, in easier weather, relying on the electric autohelm for self steering, I discovered a new trick. On the first night, to give the autohelm a rest, I hove to. When we used to heave to in long-keeled Petronella the boat would more or less stop and gently ride up and down in the water. Amelie didn’t do that. With a reefed main and a small amount of backed genoa Amelie slowed from about five knots to three and continued on her way but in a straight line even though the tiller was not tied in the least. This was a discovery almost as momentus as E=MC2. In those fairly benign conditions this trick was better than properly heaving to because we continued to make progress in the right direction, on my way to a record if I had but known it at the time.
I was pleased to arrive at Ponto Delgada but didn’t realise how tired I was or habituated to the motion. Once I saw land at dusk I stayed up till we arrived at about mid morning. I was surprised at how lively and awake I felt when I knew I should be exhausted. It made for a dramatic arrival, in a shameful sort of way. I had lost all sense of solid ground. After I tied up to the wall of the fuel dock I scrambled up the four feet to terra firma, stepped forward and completely lost control of my legs. I tried to put my foot on the ground ahead of me but the ground moved away and my foot tried to follow it and I only just avoided falling over. “Eleven days” I said in English to the man selling me the diesel, as the best explanation I could come up with at the time. He gave me one of those Portuguese looks which say “eleven beers, more like, mate”. Of course we all know now that it wasn’t eleven days, because it was ten, and that I was wrong and I regret saying that now but at the time I was more bothered about not falling over, and eleven was close enough.
On the return trip I was surprised at my sense of not being keen to arrive back in Portugal. Perhaps the easier weather and magnificent visibility meant I wanted to be at sea longer. Perhaps it was the wonderfully bright moon in a cloudless sky making nights unforgettable. Or more mundanely it was probably coming back into the reach of land and people after the infinity of the ocean. As I came up on the mainland of Portugal there were fishing boats and fishing pots and I was watching for the tuna nets and, in all, I felt disturbed. I lost the unhurried ways of the empty ocean. I felt the land was ready, at any moment, to come out and smite me. It was disorientating, just when I should have been expecting to feel safer from proximity to land. Sailing in deep ocean can be far less taxing than coastal sailing.
The Azores is a good ocean passage to make, even for those coming from the British Isles or north west Europe instead of Spain or Portugal. It gives you a better chance of beam winds than a return trip to Madeira or the Canaries. With a decent forecast you can get a day or two of good weather to get offshore and find your sea legs before anything nasty comes your way.* It is a longish trip but you might do it in a comfortable seven days or at a bit of a stretch in eleven. The uncertainty is that even the Azores High doesn’t make for predictably good weather. No one I met had experienced such bad weather on this route in previous years as my (and theirs) last four days. But even during those long days of stormy weather the ocean was a wonderful place to be. Huge vistas, amazing clouds, bright starry nights, a huge moon most of the time, and dolphin coming at any time of day or night. More than once I sailed through a hunt when the dolphin took no notice of me but went on doing head stands and back flips and nose dives and cannonball landings and moving through waves tops at incredible speeds. And on the way back to Europe, in the better weather, I had huge night seas when the moon stayed up in a cloudless sky. I saw the green flash at one sunset. Less possible, I saw the great city of Atlantis away on the eastern horizon at dawn, discovered by an intrepid sailor yet again. I waved but the Atlantians have the reputation of not being sociable. And when the day was clear, as it usually was, the sea stretched away to the far horizon all around me and was breathtaking.
On a passage to the Azores the cherry on the cake is the Azores themselves. Good marinas, welcoming officials, culture and entertainment ashore and magnificent volcanic scenery to explore.
If you have sailed to the Azores from Britain or northern Europe you have been granted the wonderful opportunity not to return there. You can make the much easier trip to Biscay or the Spanish Rias or the Algarve coast. These are all places with good winter facilities and flights to get you back home. Why not start a new sailing life.
*A note on weather forecasts.
I’m from a generation that started sailing before there were accurate, highly detailed weather forecasts on mobile phones, and it still surprises me how gullible some sailors are. A forecast is, after all, just a forecast. The US National Weather Service, the people who run the biggest weather models, give us the best rule of thumb. They assign probabilities of the forecast being right by twelve hour periods: 90% chance it will be right in the 12 hours after the forecast was issued; 75% chance for the next 12 to 24 hours; 66% chance for the next 24 to 36 hours; and after that you might as well be reading the tea leaves. Of course, sailors setting off on an eight to ten day passage invest a lot of passage planning hopes in any eight or ten day forecast they can get. Hope springs eternal. But just because we want one shouldn’t mean we believe it when we get one. Four hours out from Ponta Delgada, on my potentially ten day journey, still in the sweet zone of a 90% chance of the forecast being right, I discovered that the forecast was already wrong.
