OVER AND OVER AND OVER
A Window Slams Shut.
Our 1934 56-foot Wooden Motorsailer Steadfast casts a big shadow. She’s tall as sailing yachts go; the top of the pilothouse is nearly twelve feet above the surface of the water. On April 26th and 27th waves loomed above that level, over and over and over, opposing gravity, it seemed, passing us by when it looked like they would completely flood our entire domain. Salt spray coated every surface, inside and out, the floors were sending salt water down the scuppers at every tilt and the automated bilge pumps were kicking on and off with frightening regularity.
I imagined that I could reach out and touch the crests, far above my head. Our bow would then climb and broach those waves, at an angle that seemed impossible, and a full 2/3rds of our vessel, as near as we could determine, both above and below the waterline, cleared the surface of the mighty North Atlantic, only to plunge back down, over and over and over. When the bow hit, that green water should have passed us by, but the east wind was so powerful that the wave was redirected with a crack that was unmistakable, to pummel the entire length of the vessel. Those strikes make you duck even when there is a window between you and Mother Nature. You duck. My eyes were as wide as they have ever been as I timed my steps from solid handhold to solid handhold just to stay upright.
We had pulled up our anchor Thursday afternoon. On Friday morning, I emerged from the aft cabin for my watch at the helm and gazed surprisingly at the electronics. Our course clearly read 55 degrees, northeast. When I tucked myself in after my 4 to 8am shift, we had been headed north from Ft. Pierce to Fernandina, on the Florida/Georgia line, 256 miles on a course of 0 degrees. North. I’m sure I raised my eyebrows. To our east lay the powerful Gulf Stream and the indomitable North Atlantic. In the back of my mind lay the forecast we had received. A deceivingly calm ocean surrounded us, and our big Detroit Diesel chugged along accordingly, our sails “strapped in” and simply minimizing the roll rather than actually assisting in the propulsion.
The question was a statement. “We’re not going to Fernandina.” “Nope,” came the reply. As always, we had studied a plethora of forecasts, searching for a weather window, which is what we who travel upon the oceans call the opportunity to travel safely. It’s interesting that we use the term window, as if we could peer through and know what was on the other side. With this kind of window you can’t do that; you have no idea what Mother Nature can and will conjure up on the other side of your weather window. There is not a lot of clarity, that’s for certain. Like the windows in an old house, (don’t picture those new fancy crank-out kind) or the round bronze ports here on our old-fashioned boat, those windows can slam shut, with authority, startling you into rethinking whether that window should have ever been open, or not.
We had explored all the possibilities, over and over, to get us to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in one long passage. A fellow liveaboard calls it “analysis paralysis” when you look and look and download the Predictwind Sailing Planning and Weather Routing programs over and over and over but still cannot find the perfect timing, the perfect circumstances that you seek. Those amazing AI programs utilize billions of calculations; (at least that’s what they tell us) as we tensely wait for their directives. Seconds later the recommendations pop up on the screen and we decide whether our weather window is clear enough and big enough to pull up the anchor and try to get where we are trying to go.
Thursday morning the winds had looked fine, good even, for a big sail in our big sturdy boat. But the waves. The wave height predictions were warning us off, three to six feet with seven-footers for a small percentage of the time, putting a haze on our window. We chose not to see it.
“Weather forecasters are not usually right,” I reminded him, “When you get out here, it is what it is.” He tossed my words back to me later that evening when the winds and waves built, notably quickly, notably larger than forecast, from the flat calm of the day. “There’s no point in being apprehensive now. It is what it is,” he told me. My apprehension overruled his advice. We were nearly one hundred and eighty miles offshore. There was no turning back and we made the choice not to simply turn west toward a closer safe harbor on the coast. I nodded at him, seeking the horizon line to watch as the sun set, calming both my nerves and my quivering stomach.
We could clearly see the front line looming as we sailed forward and it also closed the gap, silently threatening and dynamic, the thunderheads moving far faster than we were, changing shape, direction and color as the lighting flashed within them. Day turned to night as the wind and waves continued to build and the rain began. At night you cannot see the window you are sailing into, cannot see the swells that encroach on all sides, but you can feel the floor drop beneath your feet and you can perceive how steep the climb is up the front side of the next wave. When I shone my flashlight at the mainsail through the skylight above the helm, the salt water sloshed back and forth, making that window, too, impossible to see through.
I had never felt anything quite like what we were experiencing and was disconcerted enough to not even take any photographs. This is unheard of; my brain always, relentlessly, tries to capture and share our experiences as we SPAR WITH MOTHER NATURE. Was it pure, unadulterated fear? Or in the back of my storyteller’s brain did I know that there was no way I could capture the immensity of the situation with photography. “Our lifeboat is flat,” Steve said to me, indicating the partially deflated rubber raft hanging off our transom. Those words may describe how we were feeling more than any other. Never, ever, before had we discussed the potential need for a lifeboat. Our window had indeed slammed shut.
For thirty hours we were caught in the maelstrom. The largest of the waves we experienced doubled the forecasted height. Over and over and over. If you were looking from afar, our eighty-thousand pound boat would apparently disappear in the troughs. It felt like that, too, getting sucked into the depths and then thrust up to see what was around. The only vessel we encountered, at dawn on Saturday, was a Carnival Cruise Ship named PRIDE, which, out of all of the thousands and thousands of square miles of ocean, crossed our course close enough that the proximity alarm went off on our tracking system. I was at the helm again and absolutely convinced that they swung close enough just to see what kind of carnival we were experiencing on that roiled up ocean.
It’s cut off in the photo, but we still had 220 nautical miles to go, or around 34 hours. I wedged myself onto the helm seat, wiped the salt spray from my glasses and watched the pampered, dry, comfortable folks on the cruise ship pass by and disappear over the horizon. As I sipped my flat ginger ale, unable to eat, I could picture the immense displays of food ready to be devoured by those aboard her, and had no interest.
Seventy-six hours after we pulled up our anchor in Fort Pierce’s matchless sunshine, we dropped it again in the familiar, reassuring harbor of Beaufort, North Carolina, a bit worse for the wear and with a story to tell. The life-long Sailor was already considering what sail configuration would have worked better under those circumstances. I was already considering how best to avoid ever having to experience those circumstances again. That, of course, is not within my control.
Could we have done something differently? Yes. We could have pointed the bow west and sought shelter; that would also have been a rough sail. Should we have done something differently? No. Like the waves that crash upon the beach, over and over, we are SPARRING WITH MOTHER NATURE, over and over. I still wouldn’t trade this life for any other….but was I ready for a hot shower!!
For more tales of night passages:
April and I will make this trip in two weeks, leaving from the St. Lucie Inlet. If all goes well and the weather window holds, we'll pass Beaufort and sail up to Block Island. Beaufort is a favorite bailout spot when the tide isn't ebbing in that river!