Out There No More

Well, it's over. We have been back in Newport for a few days now, the boat is empty and floating nice and high and we have just moved into our gigantic house. Matt and Dani are once again among the missing, having slipped seamlessly back into the inner city youth gangs from which we rescued them so many months ago. Karen is nesting and I have been wandering the streets in a daze wondering what the hell I am supposed to do next.

The first day back on land passed in a blur. Kenny and Brad Read and my parents met us on the water 5 miles outside Newport. We were expecting to slip quietly into the harbor, finish up some math testing (honest) and then go out for a celebratory dinner. But when we heard Kenny on the radio at about 2 hours away, we all got excited and nervous. Everyone changed clothes, out of 3-day-old T-shirts into 2-day-old T-shirts, and we did our best to clean the boat up in a hurry. By the time we hooked up with them our 25-knot southwesterly had abruptly petered out to nothing and instead of surfing gloriously into the Bay we took the sails down and powered in. Brad passed us over some welcome home provisions: a 12-pack of my dad's home-brewed beer, a bottle of champagne, pretzel rods, a liter of Coca-Cola, a melted pint of ice cream and a day-old Providence Journal. In exchange we handed them a bag full of attack cats and kitty litter. We saw some more friends at the Sail Newport dock while waiting to clear customs, then went over to the Camrose Cottage for a cookout and before we knew what had happened we were sleeping in beds.

Everyone wants to know how great that first shower felt and how we like sleeping in a bed that doesn't rock. Those things are of course very nice, but so far I am just sleepwalking through the obvious comforts of land. The day after we arrived I spent puttering around the harbor and that night went back out and slept on board Calvin. It was brutally cold with just me and the cats but the familiar rocking and occasional snap of the bow against the anchor line felt like home.

Life on land is always more complicated than on the boat. Even while we were in the Caribbean, the few times we tied up to a dock we recognized that our time had to be scheduled about store hours, marina rules and the press of social arrangements. Nothing out of hand, but the worst forms of stress are related to scheduled time. There is stress on passage, mostly due to the fact that weather passes and changes over time and, no matter how far ahead of it we are, we are always in a race with the next front. But I much prefer the passage stress. It is a cleaner, simpler level of stress, more real, more dangerous, and in some respects, less self-inflicted. While we were out there on the last passage, there were many moments when we could not wait to get off the boat. Moments of utter discomfort or mild fear, but also plenty of magic.

This one was a passage on any number of levels; from the monotonously splendid weather of the Caribbean winter to the frontal rhythms of New England spring. From the deep blue water south of the Gulf Stream to the steel gray North Atlantic, and from the isolation of our little adventure back into the clutches of work, school and social circles.

We sat in Bermuda for a week watching small low pressure systems spin off the East Coast every 2 days. By the end of the week the Bermuda high was reestablishing and a deep depression was forming up just west of the Hudson Bay. The big picture was set to promote a gradually building SW breeze, blowing straight up the coast, as the low pushed closer to the Bermuda high, compressing the parallel isobars. It looked like we had 5 days before the Hudson Bay low would reach the coast. Steve Dashew knocked on the hull of our boat early Saturday morning, waving a plastic baggy full of weather faxes. "Get up. It's time to go."

The Bermuda-Newport crossing should take Calvin 3.5 days in ideal conditions, while Beowulf could do it in just over 2 days. Since the weather is moving from west to east, while we are sailing from southeast to northwest, we would be converging with the small lows that are only 2-3 days apart. It was a certainty that we would sail through at least one low along the way, while Beowulf, at nearly twice our speed, might make it all the way in one window. They were going to wait for the next front to pass. We took off Saturday in mid-afternoon, leaving with a light NE breeze and a forecast for a clockwise shift to the SW and at least 2 days of clear weather. But sometimes the forecasts are not exactly right. We sailed out under the mess of clouds that we have learned to identify as a "trof" for the first several hours as we skirted the invisible reefs of Bermuda. Karen served up a full course dinner and we settled back into our watch system. The breeze never quite shifted to the SW and we had moderate tight reaching conditions for the first 350 miles to the Gulf Stream. Then things started to get more interesting.

When we left we were planning to average 8.5 knots in the SW breeze over the course of the second day. At that speed we would have reached our waypoint for the south wall of the Gulf Stream in the morning, and we would have made it across the 60 miles of the actual stream ahead of the frontal passage of the first low. But because the breeze never shifted aft, and never built, our speed had averaged closer to 7 knots and we were a half day behind. We could see from the fax charts that at least the warm front would pass while we were in the stream but by that time we were beginning to worry about beating the really scary looking Hudson Bay low into Newport. We later found out that the weather routers had their customers stop at the south wall that night and wait to cross the stream after the front. But we pushed right through, not knowing any better.

Just as we entered the stream, late Monday afternoon, I was off watch and had a dream about a small island in the Caribbean. In the dream I was looking down on the island from above. It was shaped like a fried egg but with a dark green interior, surrounded by a light tan sand beach, then the rim of turquoise reef water and the very blue Caribbean. It was a composite of the dozens of islands we had visited. A Brown Boobie hung in the sky, looking at me sideways. I could see the trailing edge of his wings spread wide, with individual feathers barely overlapping each other. His thick, muscled talons hung down ending in relaxed claws. He just stayed there in the wind and the dream lingered pleasantly until I woke up to Matt calling me because he saw a squall approaching. On my way up I looked at the GPS and saw that we were in the stream. We had just passed our waypoint and the boat was now traveling 20 degrees to the right of the direction we were pointing. Everyone was still in bathing suits and barefoot, but not for long.

Matt was steering the boat, surfing down 8-foot waves and pointing right at Newport. The approaching squall didn't look too bad to me but I put in the first reef. Matt was skeptical of adult judgment since an earlier encounter with a squall where, against his continued protestations, we kept up the full main and reaching spinnaker and ended up doing a mid-ocean wind check. He gave me a stern look and said, "Put in another one." So I winched in number 2 and just about as I was cleaning up the lines we got another 5 knots of cold breeze along with a burst of thunder and lightning. We bore off 20 degrees onto a very broad reach, threw the lightning wire in the water, rolled away the jib and put the boat on autopilot since no one is too psyched about holding onto the 5-foot aluminum steering wheel in a lightning storm. Within seconds we were surfing at 12 knots with just the double reefed mainsail and then in another instant Calvin was on her side, boom in the water, rudder out of the water, skidding sideways with the whole boat shuddering. The waves were blown flat, sheets of white spume were blowing over the mainsail, something in the boat went BANG, lightning and thunder happened simultaneously and more or less continuously and Matt, now down below and crunched into the corner of a settee berth, let out a most impressive, subhuman scream--thereafter referred to as the "Gulf Scream." Karen and I, still very close after all the trials of the last 9 months, found ourselves squashed together, laying against the leeward side of the companionway. I looked down below and everything seemed pretty much normal, aside from the extra 40 degrees of heel angle. Both kids were braced with all fours and looking mildly pissed off, but otherwise OK. So I turned my attention to the rig. The mainsail battens were pretty well wrapped around the spreaders and the ends of them were flogging and slapping the water, adding to the clouds of foam flying by. Every flog would flow like a violent wave from the mainsail into the rig, down the shrouds and spar to the hull and finally off the boat with a wag of the keel. After some quick thought I determined that no good could come of this, so Karen and I each took a winch and we ground the mainsail down to the 3rd reef.

Just as George Harrison assured us years ago, all things must pass, and when this first Gulf Stream squall roared off for Greenland, Calvin popped back up into a crisp 20 knot Southerly. We rode that timidly into the nightfall with more fun to come. We spent the bulk of that night imbedded in the true frontal passage. The weather was never again as violent as the first squall but it was a very dark night, about 25 knots of breeze, with hours of electrical storms all around us. We could not see the waves except in the lightning flashes, but we could hear them and had fair warning of the really big ones from the change in noise and the occasional glimpse of white foam on the wave tops. Twice we were knocked down by big waves hitting us from abeam but both times our little cork of a boat went over far enough to let the keel skid and the wave rolled on by. We did our best to keep the waves on the stern quarter while trying to steer as directly as the waves would allow towards the north wall. For lack of better conversation we would occasionally ask each other, "Why are we doing this again?".

The fronts associated with the low that passed over us that night were not radiating out of the center toward the SE and SW as they normally appear. Rather, the frontal lines were stretched out more due east and due west, aligned with the isobar curvature between the two dominant systems of the Bermuda high and the Hudson Bay low that we were all still racing into Newport. Accordingly, we got to experience the frontal weather for most of its length towards the center of the depression and we only had very brief periods of clear sky. When dawn broke we were beyond the north wall of the fast-moving part of the stream and into the 100-mile-wide area of eddies and meanders. In the daylight we were greeted by the ugliest seascape that we witnessed during the entire trip. A gray sky with brown bottomed clouds met slate gray water that was piled up in 10-15' high, steep spires with white foam crests, coming and going from every direction for as far as you could see. We couldn't sail more than 6 knots or the boat would launch off the crests and drop hard into every trough. We determined that this was, without a doubt, where sailors get sent to hell.

Later that day the wind died down to less than 10 knots from the southeast and the seas slowly began to settle down. We refilled the fuel tank from our Jerry cans and tried to start the engine, only to have it fail for the first time in 5,000 miles. One last little test. We hove-to, changed the filters, and when all the normal steps for clearing the air from the fuel lines failed, we resorted to West Indian methods. Dani, now dressed in 5 layers of pajamas and a wool hat, curled up on top or the fuel tank with her thumb over the air vent outlet. I lay on the floor and blew into the fuel return lines to pressurize the tank. Matt sat Indian-style on the fuel delivery side of the engine, eventually covered in diesel, watching for the fuel to burst through at each junction before he capped the line with his thumb and reattached it. The kittens walked through the little puddles of spilled fuel, sniffing at the oily wrenches and leaving diesel paw prints throughout the boat. And then it occurred to me that this is the type of family bonding experience that we were after, and I had to laugh.

That last night at sea I came on watch at midnight and found Matt and Dani, bundled up from head to toe, tethered to the big padeye in the companionway and dancing in the cockpit to keep warm. The breeze was still out of the SE and the kids were sailing straight at Newport on starboard gybe. But there was a building swell from the west and they said that we had a few brief lifts in the last half hour so I had the two of them help me gybe the boat before they went below. By the time Karen came up four hours later the Southwesterly that we had been looking for over the last four days had filled in and built to 25 knots and we were surfing in rows of steep, well formed waves. It was raining and the fog had closed in to less than 100 feet. Lobster boats were talking to each other on the VHF and the air had the clean, cold taste of RI Sound. I knew that the next several hours would be full with the excitement of a landfall and our much anticipated return home, but at that moment, I was happy to be on the ocean, and realized I was not quite ready to give up the helm.

I want to go back. But sooner or later the nice people at VISA will stop paying for our fun so we will have to wait awhile. This will be "Calvin-Out" until the kids finish their educations.

(To read about the Bermuda-Newport passage from the perspective of the Dashews aboard Beowulf, start with Beowulf Report #46.)