Blue Water

Red Sails, No Sunset

I ALE TRAIL                                               

Perched on a stool in a Bristol pub, with a dreary English winter drizzle slurring the windows, a pint of ale in my hand and a coal fire crackling at my back, it seemed like a brilliant idea; inspired, even.

‘Let’s sail to the Arctic next spring,’ I suggested to Sarah.

She gave me a long, cool look through squinted eyes while she tried to calculate just how many pints had poured past my tonsils. ‘Okay, if you really want to,’ she replied warily, ‘but why the Arctic?’

Even in the cold, grey, sober dawn of the next day it didn’t seem like too silly an idea, so we began to plan the voyage.

Why the Arctic? Ever since I was a boy, reading about the exploits of Shackleton, Amundsen and Scott, I had harboured an ambition to sail to the ice. Any ice.

From my native New Zealand, Antarctica is a long, landless sail southwards, across the world’s roughest water and the hostile conditions of the Southern Ocean. In Antarctica, we would face the globe’s least hospitable weather patterns and have to deal with icebergs and largely uncharted waters. In the Arctic, on the other hand, a small boat can make good most of the distance to the ice pack in the relatively sheltered waters of the Norwegian coastline. The Arctic has been traversed for centuries by explorers, whalers, sealers and research vessels, who have pretty thoroughly documented the navigable areas. Weather reports and even satellite photographs of the extent of the ice pack are readily available through the Norsk Polarinstitutt, Norway’s polar research organization. If we sailed from Bristol, we would already be halfway to the Arctic. In fact, for much of that snow-and sleet-spattered winter, we felt as if we were already there.

We settled on Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago north of Norway, as our objective, and began the extensive research and planning that precede any successful yacht cruise. According to the Admiralty’s Arctic Pilot book, Svalbard is the name given 900 years ago to land discovered by the Northmen (Vikings to you and me) about four days’ sail from Norway. ‘From time to time there has been some controversy as to its exact location’, the Arctic Pilot added. It sounded like our ideal cruising ground.

During the summer of 1986 we had sailed from the United States, via Newfoundland and Iceland, in Elkouba, our 11.6-metre steel cutter. We had no qualms about tackling more high-latitude work in her. Charts were a bit of a problem; especially the reams of detailed cartography needed to navigate the convoluted coastline of northern Norway. Buying a collection like that would put severe strain on a budget that already bulged like Rudolf Nureyev’s leotard during a pas de deux.

I had read magazine articles by a yachtsman from Bermuda, Warren Brown, who had sailed his 19-metre aluminium sloop, War Baby, along the route we were looking at. After a barrage of letters and a few phone calls, we managed to meet him and his wife, Anne, at their London flat. Warren ferreted out all the charts we needed from various wardrobes and cupboards around the flat and, even more generously, added guide books, bird spotters’ manuals and a Norwegian/English dictionary to our growing pile of printed matter. He also imparted an invaluable oral encyclopaedia of hard-won knowledge and advice from his own trip in War Baby. It was a very magnanimous gesture towards a couple of fresh-faced would-be Arctic adventurers whom he’d never met before, and our first taste of the camaraderie that exists among those who sail to the less-frequented parts of the planet.

For me, to be bound for the ice under sail was the realization of a long-held dream. I had always dreamed of a life afloat, forever en route to another exotic port of call, another adventure.

That was a pretty hard fantasy to maintain while I received secondary education at an institution called Stratford Agricultural High School, where most of the conversation was about automobiles, grass growth and the fat content of one’s milk. But a like-minded mate and I soon began to work on our dream ship. Pretty much as I would end up doing again later on in life, we built the dream boat on a very limited budget using whatever came to hand — in this case, discarded sheets of corrugated roofing iron, with the end of an apple case we stole from behind the greengrocer’s shop as a transom. On race day, when almost the entire population of the town — park warden included — was at the race track, we towed the boat behind our bicycles to the park and launched it on the largest body of water for miles around: the duck pond.

We didn’t waste time on a bottle of champagne; we didn’t even know that this was the traditional means of ensuring a long and propitious voyaging life for a new vessel. Voyaging in the duck pond was a big enough misdemeanour in its own right, without compounding the crime by scattering broken glass about the place.

Furtively, we launched the boat and paddled out from shore, out of our depth. Our combined paddle-power sent the boat bounding across the pond, cleaving a path through the limpid brown water and scattering a gaggle of displaced ducks. We were afloat — masters of our own destiny — and for the first time I felt the buoyant jubilation of a sailor. I had turned my back on the shore and my bows towards a new adventure.

Perhaps jubilation was the problem, because it turned out to be anything but buoyant. Or, perhaps, it was just inexperience. Anyway, several metres into the voyage, our craft took a sickening list to starboard, water rushed in, and her tenuous hold on positive buoyancy was overwhelmed. She sank, like a sheet of corrugated roofing iron, beneath the murky water and the lily pads to the duck pond’s version of Davy Jones’s locker. Dave and I floundered ignominiously back to dry land, and I learnt the perils of joint command as we loudly blamed each other for the demise of our ship.

This tragedy notwithstanding, I had been bitten — I had tasted the glorious sensation of being afloat, in my own vessel, master of my destiny. She was a long way from a Cape Horn clipper ship, but she was the boat that set me sailing.

That night my mother lectured me at great length on the variety of maladies one is likely to contract from wearing wet clothes. But she did not realize that she was dealing with a changed man. A few wet clothes? So what? They were nothing to a sailing man. I’d devoured the few sailing-ship books stocked by the local library and read all about seamen clambering onto yardarms to furl topsails off Cape Horn with body and soul lashings and tattered oilskins to keep Patagonia’s foul sleet and ice at bay. Tepid pond water and oxygen weed were nothing to me.

That year my grandfather arrived from the South Island for Christmas, and I quizzed him eagerly about what it was like to sail on a ship between the two islands. ‘Bugger that for a joke,’ he replied, ‘I was crook as a dog.’ He took an aeroplane home.

From school I drifted in to a cadet reporter’s job with the local evening newspaper, the Taranaki Herald, under the meticulous editorship of Mr George Koea. Newspapers like that do not exist any more. The Herald had a dedicated staff of old-time journalists who, with the odd exception, were concerned with the absolute accuracy and the social implications of everything they wrote.

It was great training in the manual skills of newspaper work: plotting weather maps, compiling shipping columns and reporting on flower shows. But, more importantly, it was good schooling in the importance of being accurate and honest in all I produced. For the first two years I was totally absorbed, but then I began spending time down at the docks talking to fishermen and yachties. The rot was setting in.

Eventually the rot took over. I did a few, nauseous, trips on commercial fishing boats, and realized that no matter how much my back and my hands hurt, regardless of how wet and cold I was, I would still much rather be there, at sea, than anywhere else I had been. I did one wet and windy yacht delivery trip from New Plymouth down the west coast of the North Island to Wellington, and became obsessed by sailing. Not the yacht-club-and-pink-gin school of sailing, but the hands-on sailing of the old school. I worked on garbage scows and charter boats, I fished and sailed, learning how to hand and steer and knot and splice, and everything I could of the sailoring trade. I loved, and I still love, all boats indiscriminately, from the finest purpose-built racing yacht to the blunt-bowed garbage scow. They all hold a potential for romance and adventure that no sedentary, shore-bound edifice can aspire to.

A few months before my 21st birthday, I was shipwrecked in the Galapagos Islands while crewing a 58-foot schooner on a delivery trip from Sydney to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. The ship, Sereno, was lost, along with one of my shipmates, but the disaster did not dampen my enthusiasm at all. I just couldn’t say no to a boat trip, and still can’t.

Things went on in this way for several years. I spent time commercial fishing, working on charter boats and delivering yachts, interspersed with bouts of journalism during my ‘straight’ periods, until 1979 when I returned to New Zealand from the Sydney–Hobart yacht race. A few months later I left again, on Ocean Mermaid, a 75-foot ketch, for a wet and windy delivery trip from New Zealand around Cape Horn to Antigua in the Caribbean. Ocean Mermaid was owned by a young English aristocrat, on whom his people had bestowed the title ‘Right Honourable’. He was about the least honourable ship-mate I have ever been to sea with.

We arrived in Antigua just before the hurly-burly of the island’s annual regatta, or race week, began. The local boats were honing up their tactics, and after each Wednesday-night race session a huge tub of rum and fruit drink was mixed up at Nelson’s Dockyard. Rum was cheaper than fruit juice, so the spirits outnumbered the syrup many parts to one and produced a punch with real clout. Sailors who were accustomed to climbing masts at sea clambered up the dockyard flagpole or swung from the rafters in Nelson’s venerable spar loft.

Amidst this joyous revelry I met my future wife, Sarah; but a few weeks after Antigua Race Week, she left for Scotland in Exactment, a 47-foot ketch, and I took Omuramba, a Swan 43-foot sloop, to New York via Bermuda. With a couple of expatriate Kiwis who had represented Canada in the world Laser champs as crew, we’d sailed the boat hard during race week and picked up a bit of brasswork but, after a lifetime racing out of Cape Town and as a South African Admiral’s Cup team boat, she was starting to show her age. Omuramba’s owner, an expatriate South African film director, virtually handed me a blank cheque. ‘Fix it,’ he said, and I spent the cold winter months at Essex Boatworks in Connecticut, USA, supervising Omuramba’s total refit. Sarah flew across from England and we settled into a life of comfortable domesticity, working at the boat yard by day and living by night in a loft apartment over a barn where almost-retired boatbuilder and engineer Pete Gref pottered away at various projects.

‘Well,’ Pete would say to me, ‘When are you going to make an honest woman out of her, lad?’ Eventually, with a lot of cajoling from Pete, the question popped itself and Sarah and I decided to get married.

Our first step was to visit the local priest, the Reverend Joshua Crowell. He welcomed us into his study, closed the door, and fixed us both with an intense stare. ‘What you must decide,’ he said from under lowered brows, ‘is that you both really are 100 per cent sure that you are suited for each other and that you can live together for the rest of your lives.’

‘Well … uh … we have actually been … sort of sailing together for the last three years, and…’ I stammered nervously, not sure how he’d take the news that we’d been living together outside lawful matrimony for some time already. Like most people in the small Connecticut river town, the Reverend Crowell is a sailor himself, and his stern face softened into a broad grin. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can probably tell me all about compatibility, then.’

At the time, Sarah and I were working as skipper and mate on a 56-foot ketch taking charters around New England and the offshore islands. We arranged the wedding between charter trips, and I stayed up until 2 a.m. hand-writing the invitations. We arrived at the dock after one long charter, had a day to clean the ship, and were wed the following day on the boat’s foredeck, cheered on by an international crowd of boating friends gathered on the deck — in various states of attire from jandals and shorts to pin-striped suits. The Reverend Crowell looked the part in blazer and straw boater, the international signal flags whipped and snapped in the breeze overhead, and right at the crucial moment I slipped the ring onto the finger on Sarah’s right hand. Pete, who had given Sarah away, whispered, ‘Wrong hand, dummy’ in my ear and nudged me with his elbow. Wrong hand, perhaps, but the right woman — we were all set for a lifetime of ocean voyaging. All we needed was the boat.

Next autumn Sarah and I set out to sail to Florida in Annie, the 28-foot wooden yacht we had acquired while working in the boat yard at Essex. She sprang a bad leak in a gale on Long Island Sound and we left her in a friend’s boat yard at Oyster Bay, New York. A few days later we took a bus to Fort Lauderdale, and began sleeping under a tarpaulin in the back of a friend’s pick-up truck while we trudged around the marinas and yacht brokers looking for work.

A law had been recently passed making employers who hired illegal aliens, or foreign citizens without work permits, liable for substantial fines. I quite liked the idea of being dubbed an ‘illegal alien’ — a working extra-terrestrial being outside the law — but the job market suddenly slammed shut as tightly as a giant clam under threat. We sailors had no work permits and no prospects of getting any, and jobs for us were scarce. Sarah and I began to see the same old faces every morning at the marina offices and at night in the bars where we lived off the free snacks they gave out at Happy Hour. I finally got a job rigging French-built production yachts for an importer at the Miami Boat Show. Then Sarah met an old Caribbean shipmate, and we moved aboard his yacht at River Bend Marina while he moved in with his yacht-broker girlfriend. Things were looking up.

Sarah and I had spent years discussing the ‘right’ boat for us. We kept notes of positive aspects of yachts we had raced and delivered, and, likewise, their drawbacks. Our boat was to be our life — more than just a home or a conveyance to lug us safely across oceans. Our yacht must look good, must perform well, and must be safe and sea-kindly. We wanted a boat strong enough to take us into the stormy weather and icy seas of the high latitudes, large enough to house us and an occasional guest or two in comfort, yet small enough that either one of us could single-handedly change or reef sails.

We would probably want to raise a family in her, so she would have to be capable of coping with that. She would have to be responsive enough to satisfy the boy-racer in me, yet sea-kindly enough to make long, comfortable ocean passages. Ideally she would have that mysterious and highly individual symmetry of line and form that suggest beauty and seaworthiness to the experienced eye. And she had to be cheap.

A tall order? One would have thought so.

As I walked back into the boat yard one evening after a day rigging boats in Miami, I saw Elkouba. Her faded black paint-work was streaked with red rust stains, and gaping cankers of corrosion showed through her decks. She was propped up in the ‘long stay’ back-blocks of the yard. I walked admiringly around her. Her shape suggested moderate speed and responsiveness combined with seaworthiness, and she was obviously built from steel for strength. The fin keel had a stylish rake to it and her broad beam implied that there’d be ample space below decks. The cutter rig would be easily handled by either of us. I inspected the hull closely, but in my mind I was already holding the freshly varnished tiller while the boat broad-reached across a choppy sea, tossing sparkling spray aside like handful of diamonds, sails bellying to the wind.

She was the boat.

Elkouba was in such a sad state of neglect and disrepair that she might even just fit our meagre budget. Looking back over my shoulder at the boat — just sitting there, waiting — I jogged off through the boat yard to find Sarah.

I pulled up, breathless, at our temporary boat home.

‘Ha—have you seen that black boat in the corner of the yard?’ I panted.

Sarah looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘I reckoned that she was the boat so I spoke to the owner when they hauled her out this afternoon. We have the first option to buy her,’ she said, smugly.

We went straight back and clambered all over Elkouba, tapping her hull to determine the extent of the corrosion, crawling through the bilges, and calling excitedly to each other as we discovered more about her construction and equipment. It looked as if she fitted just about all our criteria.

The tatty black yacht had spent several years hosting hordes of cockroaches up a canal in the back-blocks of Miami. The teak decks had curled up like the toes of a sultan’s slippers and water had penetrated through to rust the steel decks. The sheer-line, that flowing curve of a boat’s hull from the bow to the stern, was non-existent, but she did have a collection of top-quality Goïot hatches and deck gear and her construction showed quality and titanic strength.

Elkouba was built in Toulon, France, between 1975 and 1979 to a design by Jean Marie Finot. Her builder, Guy Simon, was an Algerian. We were told that he had named the boat after his home town. A detailed search of the atlas failed to find any such location, however, and we assumed that perhaps Elkouba was a little wadi somewhere in the Sahara Desert. Other translations of the name we have heard over the years are that Elkouba is a kind of North African sea bird, or a mythical resting-place for warriors, a sort of Algerian Valhalla. We have never really confirmed any of these explanations, however, and to us Elkouba meant a 38-foot, cutter-rigged steel yacht, our carriage to some of the world’s most exciting and inaccessible places. Our home. Our life. And the realization of most of our dreams.

II WORKING OUR PASSAGE                     

Elkouba’s current owner had received her as repayment for money he had lent the previous owner, and he was keen to sell. ‘For $12,000 US she is yours,’ he said. Sarah and I raked money from across the Atlantic and within a week she was ours. Now we really were broke. We had no work and no prospect of getting any, a broken-down wooden boat in New York and a rusty steel one in Florida. We wondered what we had inflicted on ourselves until a job offer arrived from Connecticut. We hitch-hiked up the eastern seaboard to Connecticut and signed on with Madrine to earn funds for Elkouba’s re-build.

We worked our way back to a state approaching financial solvency, then delivered a yacht from Newport, Rhode Island, back to Fort Lauderdale. It was a rough trip, bucking the north-flowing Gulf Stream in late fall (autumn) with the first of the winter weather systems barrelling down from the Arctic, and we went via Bermuda. The boat was notable for having belonged to one of the people who had helped develop satellite navigation and had space for a huge, packing-carton-sized receiver which had been mounted near the chart table from when she had been used as a test bed for the system.

From Fort Lauderdale we motored Elkouba up the intra-coastal waterway (ICW), a system of canals that runs along the United States’ eastern seaboard, to Fernandina Beach, just south of the Florida/Georgia state line. Much of the waterway, including the delightfully named Dismal Swamp Canal, was surveyed by George Washington’s surveyors in the 1700s for the efficient transfer of US Army men and munitions down the eastern seaboard in those pre-freeway days without facing what can be a fearsome sea passage.

We left Elkouba, along with a comprehensive list of the work she needed, at a Fernandina Beach boat yard friends had recommended. She stayed there for two years while we worked to finance her refit, but we became dissatisfied with the quantity and quality of the work that was supposed to be being carried out on her, and with the yard’s haphazard workmanship and accounting methods, so we moved in and completed Elkouba ourselves. The sultry heat of northern Florida took its toll and we stupidly worked without good protective gear. Sand-blasting Elkouba’s interior in shorts and T-shirt, the sweat streamed from my pores and I finished each day looking like a sand sculpture at a beach carnival. Just shaking my head would set off a miniature sand storm of grains being flung from my hair. We lathered her bilges with epoxy paint with only the weak breeze stirred up by a household fan to disperse the toxic fumes.

But, in the cool of the evening, we’d walk down through the wetlands to a small jetty where a local bar served very cold beer, and chat with the good ol’ boys as the sun slowly became eclipsed by the continental USA.

Eventually Elkouba was returned to the element she’d been designed for: seawater. Her new, red paint gleamed and reflected ripples from the muddy creek. We fired up the three-cylinder Volvo motor and powered south down the waterway to St Augustine, landing-place of the Conquistadors and oldest city in the United States.

It took a couple of months there to complete the refit. We spent long days and nights painting, fastening, gluing and screwing joinery and fittings into the boat. Finally, Elkouba was as ready as funds and time permitted. We motored out through the ornately balustraded Bridge of Lions, negotiated St Augustine Inlet’s shallow channel to the open Atlantic, and swung her bows north towards New England and the world. At last we were really afloat, in our own boat, capable of going almost anywhere there was water, and whenever we felt like it (taking into account the constraints imposed by cyclone/hurricane seasons and pack ice).

As we wafted along in light airs south of Cape Hatteras, a menacing grey mini-warship roared towards us from the smudge of land on the horizon and settled down to an idle about 50 metres astern of Elkouba. Sarah and I had been relaxing in the cockpit in what had been a balmy but overcast day, but the grey shadow lurking in our wake took the warmth out of the day.

‘Warship south of Cape Hatteras … this is the yacht Elkouba,’ I called on the VHF radio — but no reply, just the rumble of idling diesels as the ship rose and fell with the oily swell.

We made a show of normality until, about 45 minutes later, the ship nosed closer. ‘Sailboat … this is United States Coastguard cutter Cape Hatteras,’ a voice barked by loudhailer crackled at us. ‘What is the name and nationality of your vessel … number of people on board and their nationalities, your departure port and your destination?’

I relayed the information back by VHF, including passport numbers; and, seemingly mollified, the coastguard cutter burbled back to take up station behind us again.

In retrospect, our situation didn’t look good in a United States recently recovering from Cold War paranoia: two foreigners in a red yacht in US territorial waters — we just had to be communists … or something.

Eventually the cutter cruised back towards us again and the loudhailer said that a boarding party would be sent across to search our vessel. A big inflatable was launched from the back of the cutter and headed towards us with two people sitting astride a central console behind the driver, all three swaying comically in unison as the boat surged over the swell.

The inflatable squelched alongside Elkouba and two people, in light summer uniforms and black combat boots, clambered aboard and turned to grab the submachine-guns proffered to them by the remaining coastguardsmen in the inflatable.

‘Captain,’ the male half of the boarding party, whose name tag proclaimed him to be ‘USCG Harvey’, addressed me, swinging to cover me with his machine-gun, and rattled off a staccato speech about how he was empowered to search our vessel for anything which constituted a breach of US navigation or civil law. We sat in the cockpit, the female half of the boarding party keeping cover on us with her gun, before I followed Harvey below to begin the search.

We delved into all Elkouba’s lockers and compartments, under and behind bunks and seats, and deep into the bilges. We’d provisioned the boat for a trip across the North Atlantic and almost every centimetre of space was taken up with plastic containers of basic foodstuffs. We’d lift a locker lid and the coastguard searcher would spot containers full of white powder. His eyes would light up and his hand compulsively tighten on the butt of his machine-gun. ‘What’s that?’ he snap. I’d take the lid off and sniff — ‘Sugar…’, and hold it up for him to see. Maybe a pound of sugar might look like a $1m street-value stash of A-class cocaine to a nervous coastguardsman searching a blood-red boat full of foreigners.

Meanwhile I felt Elkouba coming to life; wind filled the sails and bent the boat to leeward, and she began to soar over the swells instead of wallowing. There was also the hoarse sound of someone forcibly ejecting their breakfast out in the cockpit.

When we’d finished below, we went on deck and found Elkouba sailing briskly with Sarah at the helm and the coastguard woman, submachine-gun across her lap and vaguely pointing at Sarah, splashily retching into a bucket.

By now it was early evening and, with the wind, the temperature had dropped a degree or two. I asked the pair if they’d like a cup of coffee. ‘No sir,’ Harvey replied. They’d obviously said nothing about this in training school — being stuck on a moving sailboat, miles offshore, surrounded by potential drug-smuggling communists while his sole back-up was throwing up in a bucket. His eyes flicked nervously back to the grey cutter which rumbled along behind us.

Sarah and I had a coffee, then our dinner — which Harvey eyed longingly but stoically refused a serving of. His partner, meanwhile, was hunched over the bucket and had begun to shiver uncontrollably. I asked if she’d like to borrow a jacket or sweater and she raised an ashen face. ‘No sir,’ she croaked. Eventually I grabbed a blanket from below and draped it round her shoulders — she was too weak to resist.

Harvey had been below a few times to communicate with his colleagues on the cutter by VHF and, just after dusk, came on deck to say that the cutter would come alongside and take them off.

The wind was about 16 knots and Elkouba was in her element under full sail when the cutter gingerly nosed up to our port quarter. Blinded by the headlights set into her bow, I concentrated on keeping Elkouba steady and was only dimly aware of the grey shape looming over my shoulder. Her skipper brought the boat to within a few inches of Elkouba with consummate skill, hands reached down from her foredeck, grabbed the female boarder and bundled her onto the cutter. The second part of the operation wasn’t as smooth. Harvey gave a yelp as his foot was caught between the cutter and Elkouba. As he was unceremoniously dragged over the cutter’s bow, I saw blood splashing from his combat boot in the headlight beam.

The cutter coxswain called back by VHF and offered his apologies for detaining us so long. Being Sunday, he said, they’d had trouble contacting people to verify our details or make a decision about what to do with us. The crunch, cushioned by Harvey’s foot, had left a sizeable dent on our hull-to-deck join and the coxswain advised us to stop at a USCG base and fill out a damage reparation form.

We did this in Newport, Rhode Island; but several months later when we’d arrived in Bristol, England with our cruising kitty almost entirely drained, I contacted the New Zealand embassy in Washington, told them the story and said that I hadn’t heard back from the coastguard. Within days, a letter had arrived from US Coastguard headquarters. I borrowed letterhead paper from the boat yard where I was working, compiled a generous quote for repairs (which I’d already completed myself), and a few weeks later a generous US Government cheque arrived by mail. The US Coastguard had become a major sponsor for the trip northwards.

Meanwhile, I had an engagement to sail the Newport to Bermuda race in the maxi racer Condor, and it took Elkouba eight days to cover the 1200 nautical miles from St Augustine to Newport. For eight days of tedious light winds Sarah and I steered four hours on, four hours off. Then, after a short, sharp gale, we arrived in Newport to find the port totally fogged in and Elkouba one of the few vessels moving.

Radar is almost a necessity in these heavily travelled, tidal and frequently fogbound waters. We’d already spent a fair bit of time there and delved deep into the cruising kitty to fit a new 24-mile Furuno model, but I received a salutary