I finished RETURN TO THE SEA. Although it relates the last 20,000 miles of my fourth circumnavigation, from Boston to Sydney, Australia, between June 2001 and February 2003, there is more land in it than in my other books.
I completed my first circumnavigation in 201 sailing days and less than a calendar year. I completed my fifth in 193 sailing days and 18 months. But that fourth circumnavigation took twelve years, two boats and two wives. As I note in the book, actually it could more accurately be described as a two and a half year circumnavigation with a nine year interruption.
Here are some of the passages from RETURN TO THE SEA:
The Breath
Many of us live with tension so constant that it becomes transparent until a change in intensity brings it back to mind.
Decades ago in San Diego when I had what is called a real job, I found that sometimes when I went daysailing out beyond Point Loma and got into the open ocean, I would unconsciously take a deep breath and suddenly become aware that the constant tension had vanished.
On the afternoon of Thursday, June 7, at approximately 40º N 48º W, (with Carol on our passage from Boston to The Azores) while sitting on the deck as THE HAWKE OF TUONELA close reached east at her customary seven knots, I took such a breath. It had been years, So long that I had forgotten. The breath cannot be willed; it simply comes. But it felt so good I took another.
In sailing the world I have been most impressed by three achievements: the single generation in which tiny Portugal exploded over the globe and justifiably claimed to be “first in all oceans”; the earlier expansion of Islam in a few centuries from the Arabian Peninsula to islands just off Australia in one direction and the west coast of Africa in the other; and the British Empire. All were creations of people with relatively small populations who took incredible risks because they believed in themselves and their myths. It did not matter that the myths were not real, only that they were believed in. As a child I made up my own myth about myself and then I lived it. Myths may be all we have.
Of King Sebastian, 1554-1578, who led a Portuguese army into disaster, the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa wrote:
What’s a man who isn’t mad
But some ruddy beast,
A corpse postponed that breeds?
Let me express a personal preference: even ignoring the cost, I would rather be at anchor or on a mooring than in a marina.
At anchor a boat is alive, she swings with the wind, has better ventilation, more privacy, and better views from the cockpit. In addition, I just like having a moat between me and the world.
During it we passed unseen Cape Brojodor, the merest excuse of a cape, completely unnoticeable on a modern chart of the African coast, but in its time more feared than Cape Horn is today. Brojodor stopped the Portuguese for generations. Seamen refused to go beyond it, into what they called “a green sea of darkness” from which no ship could return. Foul currents, storms, sea monsters, an ocean that steamed and boiled. If they had read their Herodotus, they would have known that the Phoenicians had successfully come up from the south on their clockwise circumnavigation of Africa almost two thousand years earlier. But then Herodotus was not much known in fifteenth century Europe, and probably few of them could read at all. Finally in 1434 one captain, Gil Eames, did venture beyond Brojodor, returned to tell the tale, and became a national hero.
November 11 (2001), our eight day out of Gibraltar, saw us 70 miles west of Cape Brojodor and about the same south of the Canary Island of Fuerteventura. Our weather was clearing, but the BBC reported that overnight the now distant center of the storm had caused flooding, destruction and death in Algiers.
I was pleased to be at sea with Carol on my sixtieth birthday. I remembered being in New Zealand on my way back to Cape Horn on my fiftieth, but couldn't recall any other of my new decade birthdays. My fifties had been a trial, if largely of my own making, with a growing acceptance that parts of my life were not going to be as I had once hoped. That I was at sea that day, heading out, was proof that I had endured if not prevailed, and that I had lasted much longer than anyone, including me, had ever expected. I was where I wanted to be.
When we visited the port captain’s office (in Dakar) to clear for departure (for Brazil) the official solemnly examined the papers I had completed on arrival, asked a few questions in French about our next port, stamped the papers and handed them to me. In my broken French I asked if he spoke English, he shook his head no, so I continued in French to say, “We like Senegal.” He broke into a big smile and said, in English, “You come back.”
In the year that it had taken THE HAWKE OF TUONELA to carve a big Z across the North and South Atlantic Oceans from Boston to Cape Town, she had covered 12,000 miles and been underway for 130 days, of which 97 were on ocean passages, I have read that cruisers only sail one day in ten, so perhaps I am not a cruiser. Over the years I have found that, as I did in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, I sail one day in three.
(In Cape Town) I continued to ride my bicycle or walk (from the Royal Cape Yacht Club the mile and a half) to the Victoria and Albert shopping complex at the other end of the harbor every other day.
One day something reminded me of a poem I had written in Tahiti thirty years earlier, during one of the times I was waiting for Suzanne. It was about a solitary old man I often saw riding a blue bicycle along the Papeete waterfront. I realized that I had become my poem. Just as I became a different poem, ‘Gray Days’, when I sank RESURGAM. I was about the same age the old man was then, and I was riding a blue bicycle. Different waterfront.
I heard the wave coming, hissing like a snake, but then I had heard many waves coming. Seven or eight every minute. Even when I did not hear them approach, they sometimes suddenly exploded against the hull like artillery shells. Several had picked us up and thrown us far over. Countless had filled the cockpit and poured through the edges of the companionway. The sodden chart of the Southern Ocean between Africa and Australia had long been removed from the chart table. Twice I had been completely soaked in the cabin and now wore foulweather gear inside even with the companionway closed.
THE HAWKE OF TUONELA and I were 2,200 miles and five storms out of Cape Town at 41º S, 59º E. That Carol had returned to her architectural career before this passage was additional, though redundant, proof of her superior intelligence.
The instrument system had recorded maximum gusts in the storms of 57, 60, 44, 51, and 61 knots of apparent wind coming from astern, so the true wind was six or seven knots greater. This wave spared me the annoyance of reading such numbers again. (By knocking THE HAWKE OF TUONELA down so that her masthead was below the water which tore the wind instruments and masthead light off, as later knockdowns did on GANNET.)
I was sitting on the starboard settee berth, facing aft, trying to concentrate on David McCullough’s fine biography of John Adams. THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was making six to seven knots under bare poles—and it can probably be stated categorically that if you can do seven knots under bare poles, you should be under bare poles.
When an hour later after restoring the cabin to some semblance of order after the knockdown I opened the companionway and stuck my head above deck:
Partially blocked in the troughs, on the crests of the waves the wind staggered me.
I glanced about the ocean. It was a scene of undeniable grandeur. A half dozen albatrosses with 8-foot wingspans and more than a dozen smaller shearwaters glided and dipped over the peaks and troughs of twenty to thirty foot high and a thousand yard long waves that gleamed in bright sunshine.
One of the things I have sought at sea is purity, and here it was: unblemished beauty and power, perhaps too much power. A shadow loomed over me. I held tight to the grab rail near the main traveler. A week earlier a wave had bent a similar 1-inch tube on which a solar panel was mounted. The wave broke, slamming into my back. When it passed I turned. Of course another wave was coming, but I had time to get below.
In my mind I can still see the grandeur of that stormy ocean.
That storm was the sixth of the passage. Tired of being beaten up I moved a bit north out of the Forties. But I had two more storms, one at least as strong as the one that knocked us down, which made eight storms of gale force and four of hurricane force in a 5,000 mile and a little more than five week passage.
As I entered Sydney Harbor in February 2003 closing my fourth circle:
I cut the engine to just above idle and briefly ducked into the cabin to turn on the CD player.
We passed through Sydney Heads to the somber and serene notes of Jean Sibelius’, ‘The Swan of Tuonela’, which partially gave THE HAWKE OF TUONELA her name.
I patted the deck and said, ‘“Hawkey, they’re playing our song.”
