Seas break on Fastnet Rock at midday on Tuesday, August 14. The gala is slowly moderating, but the seas are still heavy. Later, the lighthouse keepers washed thick salt layers off the lantern. Irish Times
WATER DRIPPING FROM her frizzy hair, Sherry Jagerson came below at 10:40 to awaken the new watch. The blackness and the roar of waves and wind burst through the open hatch into the sanctuary of the dimly lit cabin. As my watchmates rolled out of their bunks, I poured water and handed them their coffee. “You’re already up?” John Ruch asked sleepily.
I drank my coffee carefully, put the mug in the sink, and went aft once again and pulled on my blue parka, insulated with foam to keep me afloat if I went overboard, and a brown wool hat. Leaning against a locker, I untangled the nylon straps of the safety harness and put it on. At the end of the six-foot-long tether was a heavy stainless-steel mountain climber’s hook, which I snapped into the buckle to keep the tether from tangling in my legs. Moving stiffly in the six layers of clothing and the harness, I walked forward, climbed up the companionway ladder, pulled back the heavy Plexiglas hatch cover, and stuck my head up into the gale.
Sliding out of the hatch on my belly, I grabbed the safety line rigged between the companionway and the cockpit with one hand and reached behind me with the other to pull the hatch cover securely shut. I duck-walked aft, looking downwind to keep spray off my face, and, when I reached the cockpit, found a spot of bench to sit on among the four dark figures that braced themselves against the wind and the mad jerking of the boat. I hooked my safety harness to the line and concentrated on the rows of white-capped waves that marched downwind from us. When my eyes were adjusted to the dark and my internal rhythms were more or less in synchrony with Toscana’s lurches, I turned and studied the glowing instrument dials: wind speed—thirty-five, forty, thirty-seven knots; relative wind angle—ninety, one hundred, ninety degrees; boat speed—(dropping as we went up a wave) 9.95, 9.82, 9.50, 9.3, (increasing down a wave) 9.46, 9.70, 10.01, 10.25.
I turned the other way and wiped the spray off my glasses with my fingers. At the helm was Dale Cheek, an Oklahoman and former skipper of a Greek charter yacht who had turned up at the dock in Cowes one day looking for a crew berth. Fortunately for us, we took him, and Eric asked him along for the Fastnet race. Dale was struggling with the wheel. The king spoke, marked with a bit of line, stands vertical when the rudder is centered. Now it was horizontal, so the rudder below us was pushing thousands of pounds of water to one side, risking damage (perhaps), slowing us down (probably), and hindering Dale from steering the course (certainly).
“Eric, we should shorten down,” I said.
“I agree,” he said. “This blow just came up. We put up the number 3 only an hour ago.”
“Another reef and the number-4 jib?” I asked.
“I think the forestaysail.”
“Will it be enough sail to get us around the Rock? We’ll have to tack, and the waves must be breaking there.”
“That’s five hours away,” Swenson said. “Look how fast this is building.”
We stared at the anemometer. The pointer now was between forty and forty-five knots. I looked around. Each of my watchmates was on deck, so we had nine pairs of hands. Eric took the helm.
“Okay,” I said loudly. “First let’s get the second reef in, next let’s set the staysail, then let’s douse the number 3.”
Nobody budged. A large wave broke on deck and spray flew over us and halfway up the mainsail. Blobs of phosphorus, nature’s light show, glowed for a few seconds on the sail and our foul-weather gear before sliding off and running out the cockpit drains.
I unhooked my harness, slid to leeward under the safety line, and grabbed an end of a spare jib sheet that lay on the leeward seat. I walked forward with the end along the starboard deck, leaning thirty degrees to port to stay upright and bracing myself against the boom with my left hand. Halfway forward, I leaned down and snapped the harness hook onto the jackwire that ran along the deck, glancing aft to see John Ruch and Doug Parfet, from Eric’s watch, dragging the forestaysail out of the main hatch and forward along the port deck. Down to leeward, up to my shins in water gushing up from the starboard rail, I passed the sheet through a block on the deck and tied the end to a rail near the mast.
We turned to the reef. I lowered the main halyard six feet, and Doug and John pulled the sail down against the force of the wind and secured a ring sewn in its luff under a stainless-steel hook on the boom. Then Doug helped me crank the halyard up taut on the winch. The three of us took turns at winching in the reefing line that ran from the leech into the boom and forward. It was arm-wearying work. With the reef tied in and her mainsail’s area decreased by about 15 percent, Toscana seemed to straighten up slightly.
Next, the change of headsails. Doug and John pulled the forestaysail out of its bag and, their wet hands slipping on the snaphooks, slowly hanked the sail onto the forestay and then hoisted the sail. Nick trimmed the sail in, on an after winch, cleated the sheet, and came forward to help us douse the number 3 hoisted on the headstay. Doug, John, Nick, and I sat down shoulder to shoulder on the foredeck, facing to leeward with our safety harnesses hooked onto the jackwires. We grabbed at the foot of the sail, but the wind stretched it like sheet metal and we could not grip the cloth.
“Eric,” I yelled aft, “bear off, bear off!”
A wave broke over the bow and our heads and shoved the four of us to leeward into the lifelines, our safety harness tethers stretched to their limits. With water trickling under our clothes and sea boots, we untangled ourselves from the lifelines and climbed back uphill. The boat leveled as Eric steered her off the wind. When we grabbed the jib again, its cloth softened as it was blanketed by the mainsail. Aft, Susan cast off the halyard. The wind and friction in the slot into which the luff was fed at first kept the sail from coming down. John and Doug slid forward and pulled together on the luff, and the sail gradually dropped in sixfoot folds into Nick’s lap and mine, and we smothered the heavy Dacron cloth with our bodies. Eric headed back up to the course to the Rock.
“Damn,” Doug shouted, “the sail’s stuck in the groove!” A few inches of the luff had jammed. If we were unable to free it, we would have to lash the sail on deck, where it would catch wind and water and eventually blow overboard, taking the lifelines and possibly even the stanchions with it.
“We’ll cut it away,” Doug said. I tossed him my knife and he slit the sail just above the jam-up and pulled the luff out of the slot. He opened the halyard shackle, shook the sail’s head out, and secured the shackle to the bow pulpit, the stainless-steel thigh-high cage that all this time had restrained him from being washed or heaved overboard as the bow lifted and plunged through a ten-foot arc.
While we held the jib on deck, Doug crawled aft and opened the forward hatch. We slowly stuffed the sail below, first with our arms and then with our legs. Waves broke on deck and water poured into the forward cabin down the creases and folds. When the sail was entirely below, John dropped through the hatch and, from inside, closed and locked the cover.
Susan, in the cockpit, yelled something.
“What?” I shouted back.
“How’s the trim on the staysail?” She was still racing.
“I can’t see. Where’s a light?” Somebody shined a large torch on the sail.
“On course, a little high, a little low, on course,” Eric chanted as the waves threw Toscana either side of our course.
“Ease it out a little,” I yelled aft. When the shape looked right at a moment when Eric said, “On course,” I shouted to Susan, “That’s fine. Hold that.”
We unhooked ourselves and walked aft, sliding our hands along the lifelines and crouching like boxers to absorb the motion of the deck, which tried to propel us into the nearest wave. We were soaked after our half hour’s work on the foredeck. Stumbling into the cockpit as a wave smashed the boat amidships, I slid under the safety line to the low side and around the steering wheel.
“Keep your harnesses hooked on, damnit!” Eric said in as near a roar as his gentle voice could command.
When I touched the wheel with my right hand, the palm of the wet leather glove slid across the elk hide cover that insulated the helmsman’s fingers from the cold stainless steel of the wheel’s outer rim. I squeezed the rim tighter and said, “I’ve got her, Eric.”
He sidestepped uphill to windward and I followed, grabbing the wheel with my left hand where he released it with his right. The wheel turned through twenty degrees as we rocked and pitched. When Eric released his grip entirely, I slid my left hand to where his had been, at the ten o’clock position. With my right hand at three o’clock, I could turn the wheel clockwise to keep the boat from rounding up when waves struck her admidships and she heeled. When the waves slid under her transom and we surfed off course, I pulled the wheel counterclockwise to bring her up. I had never worked harder at steering a boat. The instrument dials now read: wind speed—forty-five, forty-three, forty-six knots; relative wind angle—ninety, one hundred, eighty-five degrees; boat speed—8.61, 9.20, 8.83, 9.45 knots. We had traded some speed for improved control.
Eric’s watch went below. After half an hour, we were again overpowered: too great of an angle of heel, and excessive strain on the rudder.
“Get the navigator on deck to take the wheel,” I told Susan. “We have to tie the third reef in.”
She opened the hatch and stuck her head below. Almost before she had finished passing along the message, John Coote was on deck in his bright blue foul-weather gear.
“The zero-zero-fifteen shipping bulletin predicts force 9 to force 10 from the south-west, veering to north-west,” he said as he crawled into the cockpit. “It looks as though we have force 9 already.”
“What’s the barometer?” I asked.
“Down to 986 at Valentia, rapidly falling.” The barometer had dropped nineteen millibars, or half an inch, in only seven hours. The clouds had been right.
“Could you steer while we try to tie in the third reef?” I asked Coote.
“Gladly.”
“We’ll have to lower the main,” I told him.
“Good luck,” Coote said as he took the wheel.
Nick and John went forward to the base of the mast to lower the mainsail. We had only two reefing lines at the outer end of the boom. One, which was red, was holding down the second reef that we had just tied. The other, which was green, held down the first reef and was now redundant, since the second reef had superseded it (reefs in mainsails are like slats in venetian blinds; as each reef is tied in, several more feet of sail are removed from the flow of the wind). We had to pull the green reefing line out of the first reef and lead it through the third reef, but to get at the line, we would have to be able to get at the end of the boom, which was now ten feet to leeward, tripping through waves.
As Nick and John pulled the mainsail down, Susan and I trimmed the mainsheet until the boom was waving over our heads. Most of the sail flogged to leeward. I stood on the cabin top, hooked my harness into the safety line, and leaned over the boom to steady it. I pulled at the green line, but, wedged under the red line in the second reef, it would not budge.
“Ease the red line,” I yelled forward. Only twenty feet away, they did not hear a word I said. “Ease the red line!” I screamed. Nick looked at me, trying to read my lips. “Goddammit, the RED line, ease the RED LINE!”
Nick knelt down on deck and reached for a winch. The green line went slack.
“No, the red one, the OTHER one!”
He nodded and reached for another winch. The red line eased out.
“That’s enough!” I showed Nick the palm of my left hand and he cleated the line. I freed the green line and reached far over the boom for the third reef cringle, a heavy steel ring. The cringle flapped wildly and banged my fingers. I thought, even in twenty knots of wind this would be not easy. I finally grabbed the cringle with the middle finger of my left hand, held it long enough to pass the green line through it, and then pulled the line back to the boom and, using a bowline knot, secured the end through a metal plate.
“It’s made!” I shouted, and I crawled off the boom and into the cockpit. Coote, behind me, whistled a loud sigh of relief. Nick and John tied down the cringle in the luff and winched the mainsail up. The head seemed barely halfway up the mast. Susan eased the mainsheet, and the men forward pulled down the leech cringle with the green line, led around a winch.
I relieved Coote at the helm. “You know,” he said, “we were going along quite nicely with only the forestaysail up.” Nick and John came aft and, panting, threw themselves down on the windward cockpit seat.
Continuing to increase, the wind was now in the mid to high fifties. We were going no slower yet the steering was slightly easier even though the waves came in confusing patterns and at times tossed the boat around wildly. After a while I said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I think I should do most of the steering. Let’s keep two people on deck. The other two can go below to warm up.” I was chilled.
“Go ahead,” Nick said. “If you get tired, let me know.” Nobody went below.
As the wind built over the next two hours, the seas continued to grow larger. They broke with surprising frequency. For a while, I watched for the big ones over my left, windward, shoulder and tried to steer down their faces so they would not break over us. Toscana was not too large to be rolled over by a wave. A sixty-one-footer, Sorcery, was rolled in the North Pacific in 1976 and her mast, rigging, and lifelines were swept overboard as though a huge knife had sliced along her deck. In a confused sea like this one, churned up by a rapidly building and shifting wind blowing over relatively shallow water, there was always the chance of a giant wave rearing over and capsizing us.
But the night was too dark, the bad waves were too frequent, and I was too awed to continue the lookout. Their great size and speed distracted me from steering. Yet with my eyes straining ahead, I could still sense from the motion of the boat and increasing volume of the roar when the bad ones were coming, like moving walls, and would shout warnings to my watchmates who sat huddled in the cockpit. They could only pull their heads into their foul-weather jackets and parkas and hold on tight. One wave broke over us, knocking my glasses off until they dangled by the safety strap, collapsing my wool hat over my face, and filling the cockpit. Another big one slid out from under us and Toscana fell into the next trough with a crash that dislodged the lock on the forward hatch and opened the cover halfway, letting in a flood of water. John went below to close the cover and to pump.
For the first two hours, the only steady lights were those in the instrument dials, which I could barely make out through my soaked glasses, and the port running light on the bow, which turned the forward waves red. After a bad breaker smashed into the man-overboard light that hung on the lifelines behind my back, the light turned on as it flipped into the cockpit. Its flashing strobe had us helplessly blinded until John muffled it and turned it off.
For a frightening moment, we saw a green running light ahead, which indicated that we were on a collision course with a boat heading back from the Rock. The light disappeared for a couple of minutes and then showed up again down to leeward. A collision between two boats each going over nine knots would have been fatal to both. The sky briefly cleared at about 1:30, revealing a half-moon with its crescent, oddly, facing down. I thought, that’s the center of the depression.
Coote had told us to begin looking for Fastnet Rock light at 2:00 A.M., when we should have been within its eighteen-mile range, but it did not appear until almost an hour later. Instead of dead ahead, it was fifteen degrees on the port bow—we had been pushed to leeward farther than anticipated. As we trimmed the sails and headed up, the wind continued on the gradual veer that had started just after midnight. Instead of reaching at nine and a half knots in a south-westerly, we were now beating at six knots into a north-westerly, still not making the course to the Rock. Toscana’s bow started to pound into waves from the new direction. I thought, I’ve never seen worse, but God save the little boats. Toscana was stable enough to carry sail to keep her speed up in this sea and wind, but a thirty-five-footer could carry little or no sail area upwind in force 9 or more. With little speed, she could not be steered around the worst waves and could be badly battered.
Eric and his watch relieved us at 3:00 A.M. Cold and stiff, we went below. As I slowly peeled off the layers of sodden clothes, I heard the normally imperturbable Coote shout, “That’s Clear Island and it’s only a mile and a half to leeward. Tack! Tack nowl!” The bow swung through the eye of the wind with a roar of waves and wildly flogging sails. The staysail continued to flap after we were around. “The sheet’s untied,” I heard Sherry shout. Running feet pounded forward. I crawled into the sleeping bag. My shoulders ached and I shivered with cold. I pulled my knees up under my chin in the fetal position and instantly went to sleep.
Sometime later, I was awakened by a light shining through a porthole. Coote was shouting, “We’re clear now, Eric. You can bear off to course.”
I sat up and looked out the port. To leeward was Fastnet Rock, its baroque lighthouse almost hidden by spray. Between Toscana and it sailed a small cruising boat plugging along through the waves with only a storm jib up. I heard Eric, in the cockpit, say with amazement, “What could that little boat be doing out here on such a night?”