COME SAIL AWAY Bangor resident tells of fulfilling his childhood dream of sailing east, across the Atlantic

loading...

Editor’s Note: Geoff Gratwick, a Bangor rheumatologist and city councilor, signed on with three other men for the first leg of a trans-Atlantic sail to Bangor in Northern Ireland, sailing 2,400 miles from Bangor to the Azores. This is his account of the 19-day-journey.

I have always dreamed of sailing out to sea, past the horizon, across the Atlantic. My dreams took shape during the long summer afternoons of my childhood spent messing around with boats at our summer cottage on the southern tip of Vinalhaven. I lived in a world of toy sailboats and played with them endlessly in tidal pools and around our dock.

As I grew up, larger boats took me on voyages of exploration to the unknown backsides of farther islands. But there was always the lure of more distant lands. From the deck of our house, I could look southeast down Hurricane Sound to a narrow sliver of the horizon and the lighthouse on Matinicus Rock, flashing at the edge of solitude. Beyond Matinicus Rock was nothingness, and way beyond that in my childish arithmetic were the Azores and then Portugal, foreign and mysterious places.

For several years now, my friend Dan Cassidy had been organizing a six-month sabbatical from his work. He planned to sail across the Atlantic to Bangor, Northern Ireland, our sister city and a small port near Belfast. From there he would sail on to Scotland, the Mediterranean and back following the southerly trade winds off Africa to the Caribbean and home. This is the classic route of the clipper ships, taking advantage of favorable winds over and back, a voyage of more than 8,000 miles.

He asked me to join him on the first leg – some 2,400 miles – to the Azores. How can you refuse a dream? The Azores are the first landfall on the way to Europe, a group of small volcanic islands spread out over 300 miles of ocean and 800 miles off the coast of Portugal. They were home to many of the sailors and harpooners of the old whaling fleets.

My synapses had signed on before the words were out of his mouth. My wife, Lucy, had misgivings but knew from the faraway look in my eye that I needed to live my dreams; without them there is little to life. She focused on knitting me a wonderful pair of Irish wool mittens to keep me warm during the early May weather.

Bound for Bangor, Ireland

We decided to set sail from our home port in Bangor in early May. The city has put a great deal of energy and money over the last 20 years into the docking and waterfront facilities, but they are not yet known as a departure point for ocean voyages. We felt that needed to change.

It was different in the past. Before the Civil War, Bangor was one of the busiest ports in America with up to 20 schooners, coasters and barks arriving and departing on a single tide. It was said you could walk from Bangor to Brewer on the decks of the moored vessels. At that time, a departure such as ours would have been routine, barely mentioned in the shipping section of the Whig and Courier. But our trip, for our time, was decidedly unusual.

Bangor’s chief engineer Jim Ring allowed as how he couldn’t remember the last time a vessel had set sail for the Atlantic, let alone Bangor, Ireland, from our docks. He suspected that the ghosts of the many ancient mariners prowling the waterfront on late foggy nights would applaud and sign on if only they could.

Dan had purchased a fine old 38-foot Alden Challenger yawl six years ago. The Fleana was built in 1962 and the hull was among the first built with fiberglass. It is still strong and sound. The superstructure and all the fittings were traditional, made of wood, and full of warmth and character. Dan has 20 years of sailing experience in coastal waters, but has supplemented it with courses on weather, navigation, electronics, single sideband and ham radio and seamanship.

Since he conceived of this trip a year ago, he has made lists, and then lists of lists. His boat had been updated with new sails, standing rigging, everything that the prudent mariner could ask for. Safety equipment, spares of spares, supplies to last for six months. He even had e-mail, with access through his ham radio by volunteer land-based radio operators; it is very slow at 2 kilobytes per minute (1/180 the speed of a dial-up connection) but still a remarkable tool to have in midocean. Dan is also possessed of an unflappable temperament and magnificent sense of adventure.

Bangor was a great base for our myriad last-minute preparations. Then it was a 6 a.m. breakfast at Bagel Central, a benediction from the Rev. Bob Carlson on the dock, and hugs from family and friends wishing us a safe and speedy voyage. City Councilors Gerry Palmer and Frank Farrington were on hand and entrusted Dan with a key to be presented to our sister city across the Atlantic for this historic occasion.

We left the dock in Bangor with a falling tide and gentle winds, motored down the Penobscot River, and then sailed out to sea, out beyond Vinalhaven, past Matinicus Rock buried in the fog, out still farther along the paths of my childhood dreams. With hindsight, our departure was perhaps too early in the season – sailing directions note general good weather in May but occasional “May gales” – but our preparations were complete, we knew that others had traveled this route before us, and we were confident modern-day sailors.

Dan’s son Dave Cassidy, who had just graduated from college with an engineering degree and was eager for a break before grad school, joined Dan and me. Seth Richardson, a longtime family friend and a University of Maine student planning a boat-building career, was the fourth crew member. Our fifth mate was Monte, a self-steering wind vane. Without complaint he allowed himself to be permanently bolted to the stern and although he was frequently in need of coaxing and cajoling he was a true stalwart and kept us on course in fair weather and foul.

At the wind’s mercy

We had sailed 120 miles offshore when we ran into a gale on Georges Bank. We already had been beating into heavy seas for two days and had become rudely reacquainted with rough weather and the abject misery of seasickness.

On the banks, there was neither pattern nor letup to the turbulence. The outgoing tide crossed with a Northeast wind, and the upsurge from the continental shelf produced myriad confused waves, each bent on unpredictable mayhem. While basically sound, the Challenger was an old and small boat. Still, we struggled and pushed on.

There was one particularly vicious wave. The boat fell hard onto the starboard bow, shattering ribs and inner support structures. Each successive wave brought 2 inches of flexion in the bow panels and an unquiet chorus of splintering and grinding of the wooden supports for the bow bunks. We began to see wood shards. There were no major leaks, but wisdom dictated repairs. We turned with despair and ran back before the Northeaster to harbor. In those three days, I lost 10 pounds; I was unsure whether I had lost my dream as well.

We returned to John M. Williams boatyard on Mount Desert Island where, remarkably, our damaged bow structures were removed and replaced in four days, stronger than ever. We departed for the second time with much less fanfare and a certain grim determination on a southwest wind at 15 knots and clear skies, a near-perfect day. We pounded through the residua of the gale in the shallows off Mount Desert – it was messy all over again – but then the seas lengthened out. Our fine lady put her shoulder into the long swells, heeled over gently and started out across the Atlantic. We were finally underway.

Weather assumed extraordinary importance. Although we had a small auxiliary diesel engine, we were almost entirely dependent on the wind – which way it blew, how much and how long. We could hear NOAA predictions close to shore.

A private service called Buoy-Weather provided computer-generated predictions offshore, but we were most closely tied to Herb. Herb, an institution among offshore Atlantic sailors, is a retired sailor living in Montreal who advises sailors daily at 4-6 p.m. by ham radio, giving them his best 24-48-72-hour advice for their local conditions.

Herb’s two hours were sacrosanct. Dan glued himself to the static of his shortwave radio; in the vastness of the uncaring ocean Herb was one person who knew where we were and made it his business to help us on our way. If he said a front was passing through and we should change course to be in its favorable quadrant, we invariably did so. One learned to disregard Herb at one’s peril. But in spite of his best predictions, the weather was unpredictable and idiosyncratic. We traveled only slowly, could divert only 60 miles with a day’s notice and thus basically had to cope with whatever lay in our path.

The second day out, a front passed through around midnight. The wind had been from the southwest, on and off through the day, and we had made good time. In the late evening, the wind slowly died and we were left in oily, calm, slatting seas that pushed us around randomly.

Forty miles ahead on the horizon, we were treated to a spectacular display of three separate thunderstorms competing for attention. We couldn’t hear the thunder – it was too far away – but enormous flashes of lightning lit up the underside of the cumulus clouds. We decided to keep on our course, hoping the storms would pass on across our bow. And so they did. We came slowly closer and the thunderheads dissipated, disappearing to whatever place storms at sea end their days.

The passage of the front, however, left its mark, and the next day we had another gale, this time from the west with 35-knot winds. The seas built all morning, sweeping alongside with long swells and deep troughs. Sometimes they would tip their hats and with a little pfft of spray pass on. Other times, they roared past with an angry hiss or a loud clap. The seas grew. As they seethed and reared to 30- and 40 feet behind the boat – the height of my old barn at home – it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t crash into the cockpit and overwhelm us.

But our boat rose gently with each and then slid down its back to rise for the next. The wind whined its complaint in the rigging. As the day waned, we rushed blindly on in the darkness with cresting seas appearing dimly beside us and a clear sky overhead.

Barn swallow’s pit stop

The sea has many destinations, different for each of us. Dan’s destination was Bangor, Ireland, but for me the destination was the voyage itself. As we entered the Gulf Stream, the sea turned an azure blue and the water temperature rose from the 45 degrees of Penobscot Bay to 70 degrees with all its attendant changes.

We were escorted by a variety of pelagic birds including shearwaters, kittiwakes and boobies; the kittiwakes flitted around like bats and chirped anxiously at us at night. We saw several turtles lolling along a million miles from no place and numerous man-of-war jellyfish. Flying fish landed on the deck at night.

At least once each day a school of 20 to 30 dolphins cavorted in a synchronized ballet alongside or in the bow wave. Once they appeared at night in swirling vortices of phosphorescence, tunneling past us at three times our speed to roll to the surface in the midst of a splash of brilliance for their whuffing breath, then returning to their sparkling underwater tunnels. The dolphins disappeared as rapidly as they came.

A barn swallow landed on the cabin one afternoon, appearing from nowhere. Exhausted, it rested on the cabin top for 15 minutes, uninterested in the crumbs and water we offered. Then it perked up and began to explore the deck, landing on the shrouds, cockpit and finally entering the cabin. It immediately marked the port bunk with its droppings (I remembered why I had worked so hard to keep swallows out of my barn in Bangor) and flitted around, finding Seth’s curly hair particularly enticing.

Our Peterson’s bird guide told us that barn swallows winter in Central America and Argentina. European and American varieties are apparently very similar, but there was no mention of trans-Atlantic migrations. There was no way of telling whether our Flossy (the name we gave her) had been blown offshore from Nova Scotia 300 miles to the northwest or whether she was on some other long voyage of her own design. The dilemma: Should we capture her and keep her with us, a deus ex machina, a fortuitous and beneficent entity, and release her in the Azores? Or should we recognize that we were to be only a transitory resting place and let her set off when she was ready and felt the urge to resume her travels?

We decided to keep her with us. It seemed heartless to let her go so far from land, to have her fall exhausted and unnoticed into a grave in some unmarked spot at sea. Seth made her a nice house out of an old provision carton with water, some of our grain, and an apple core. We sent out a simultaneous urgent e-mail to our ornithologist network seeking advice.

As we settled down for the night we heard an occasional chirping from the bow; we were quite sure she felt at home and that we had interfered appropriately in the order of the natural world. In the morning, however, Flossy was dead. One ornithologist answered later that morning, advising us to keep her with us as far as the Azores; the second felt we should let nature take her course. We had a brief burial, not knowing whether we had been spectators at or agents of her end.

Close quarters

At sea, the nature of time changed. We lived in an eight-hour day in which three boat days equaled one terrestrial day. During each of our days, we were on watch for two hours and then off for six, time to attend to the boat, eat, but mainly to sleep. Nothing interfered with sleep; a trans-Atlantic sail would cure the most chronic insomniac. It didn’t matter whether we were in the midst of chaos with the diesel pounding three feet from our heads – we slept. Other times sleep was truly blessed. There is nothing like tucking into a lee bunk on a beam reach for soothing motion, the perfect adult crib.

We became used to new rhythms and new perspectives. The main cabin measured 8 by 6 feet, and the only other habitable space on board, the cockpit, was smaller still, so that we couldn’t get away from each other; similar quarters at a prison would be judged inhumane. But we managed to preserve a certain amount of independence by respecting boundaries and idiosyncrasies.

Brushing teeth, changing socks, reading and keeping various notebooks all followed individual patterns. We took time to keep the boat shipshape, do “Move and Improve” exercises and talk. I changed my underwear once every four days, whether I needed to or not. It somehow didn’t seem to matter after a while that the floor sponge also served as the dish sponge.

We kept warm and mostly dry, but the salty, sticky dampness was all-pervasive. Mostly we were happy and content, helped in part by our cuisine. Dan created a delicious pasta alla carbonara in the middle of a storm, Dave served up original and mysterious melts for lunch, and even my instant oatmeal tasted pretty good some mornings.

The ocean is remarkably large. Day after day, the horizon stretched 360 degrees around us, marked by sunrises and sunsets, varying cloud and weather patterns, but always the same distant unending horizon. There is an infinite vastness to the sea, and the only sign of our progress was the slow march of our noon positions across our chart.

This was the world of Vasco da Gama, the explorers, whaling ships and steamships, a world of which the rest of the world has largely lost sight. How Columbus made it across an ocean that was flat without falling off the edge, without a GPS, without e-mail, and without Herb totally astonished me. As for unshaven Vikings in open boats in northern latitudes – our forebears were tough. We passed five or six ships off the coast of the United States and perhaps one a day at sea, but otherwise the horizon, which bounded us mile after slow mile, was the same as that which has bounded sailors down through time.

Azores in sight

Ten days out we received reports of a major low moving across our path to the Azores. For the next three days, there was no mention of it. Then Herb began to talk of a gale again, advising boats approaching the Azores to divert if possible.

We were on the wrong (or storm) side of the low and listened to each afternoon’s broadcast with increasing concern. Two days later he predicted easier 15- to 20-knot head winds, but that the center of the storm below us would either “intensify or dissipate.” What was one to do? Dan was a cautious captain. We diverted more, nearly 200 miles. We were hit by the flank of the gale for the better part of a dismal day. But then we escaped to its north side and for the next two days watched thunderheads sweep across the sky 80 miles to our south.

Our weather was beautiful with near-perfect sailing, the equal of an August day on Penobscot Bay with a snapping northwest wind. Herb had served us well. We were three days behind schedule, my reservations to fly home from the Azores and my regular life were in tatters, but I had learned yet again the virtue and necessity of accepting with grace those things I cannot change.

The green and jagged volcanic peaks of the Azores appeared 18 days out. We anchored behind the breakwater at Horta, joining a fleet of boats like ours that had come from all the shores touched by the Atlantic.

My dream had been realized; tired, exhilarated, sobered and energized I had to fly home and continue on with the rest of my life. I had sailed over the horizon and found it much vaster, grander, than I had ever imagined. I had seen the sea close-up and appreciated as never before the tiny niche that we humans have inhabited on our planet since the beginning of time. The prospect of flying back over the Atlantic in six hours was totally disorienting. This conquest of time and space underscored for me both humankind’s accomplishments and its hubris. I worried that this hubris – the banishing of the human scale and perspective that I had so painstakingly learned – may well prove to be our undoing.

Dan, Dave and Seth planned to dry out for several days, restock, and then start out on the next 1,000-mile leg of their trip to the other Bangor. There they would present a key from our Bangor and return with a talisman, a symbol of the connection between our two cities.

Geoff Gratwick can be reached at ggratwick@aol.com.