Alone on a Wide Wide Sea Page 16
1216hrs 5 April (GPS on the blink for some reason, so not sure of precise position)
Hello from the Atlantic. It’s me again. Dr Topolski’s sent me an email all about his EVA. He sounded so excited. Said Uri took lots of pics of him doing his slow-motion space dance. He’ll send them on down when he can. Here’s part of his email:
“I was six hours out there in space. I was busy, but I had plenty of time to look around me. That was when I guess I really understood for the first time the immensity of space, and the timelessness of it, the stillness of it. And our planet seemed to be suddenly so precious, so utterly beautiful. I thought of my family down in green Vermont, and of you out there on that blue, blue sea.”
I emailed him back asking him why he did it, why he’d become an astronaut in the first place. He said it was all Neil Armstrong’s fault, the first man on the moon. When he was little he’d sat there in front of his TV watching him step down on the moon’s surface. Said it was listening to him speak from the moon that did it for him. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He’d wanted to go into space ever since, and he was loving it, except he could do with a little more privacy he said.
We sent emails back and forth comparing notes really. I’m down here at sea level, (well ground level), only the sea keeps moving so it’s not level, and he’s up 350km above ground. They’re going at 5 miles a second up there in space. I’m doing 5 nautical miles an hour down here. I’ve got my laptop, my five GPSs (two of them are still on the blink) and some basic software. He’s got all the most amazing gizmos in the world, most of it operated from NASA. He’s floating around up there, I’m being bashed about down here. Don’t tell him this, but I’ve decided I’m definitely better off down here. Except for his space walk, he’s been shut in up in his space station for weeks. And at least I can breathe good clean sea air, and to be honest, I couldn’t live in such a confined space for so long – I’d go bananas. I mean you couldn’t even talk to yourself without being overheard could you? And he’s got another month cooped up up there. Think I’ll stick to sailing. But we’re both adventurers, he said, both explorers, and just about the luckiest people alive because we’re out there doing what we love best. “Isn’t that great?” he said. He’s right. It is great. I am lucky. He asked after Kitty, after my albatross, about the weather, about how I’m doing down here. He says it’s hard to imagine how life must be for me, but he wants to know all about it says he wants to see diagrams of my yacht, inside and out. So I’ll send them soon as I can. When he passed over I let off a flare again, but he couldn’t see it this time. He’s become a real friend to me, like no other. A friend I’ve never met.
Can now wiggle my little finger again Mum. So I’ve got all ten in use again now. Hands still sore, but otherwise I’m fit as a fiddle another Dad-ism. Why is a fiddle fit? Always wondered that.
There’s some flying fish around, the first I’ve seen. My albatross doesn’t seem at all interested in them. He’s sitting there now waiting for me to put my line over the side again. I’ll do it right now. Got to keep him happy, haven’t I?
1202hrs 11 April 28’ 54”S 44’ 53”W
Hi Mum, Grandpa. Haven’t heard from the ISS for a few days. Hope all’s well with Dr Topolski up there. More flying fish about. Getting closer to the Tropics all the time. Feel like I’m being boiled alive down here. A month or so ago I couldn’t feel my feet and fingers, now I’m sitting here pouring sweat. I want to open the hatch but I can’t because the spray comes in and soaks everything. So I wear very little, only way. Visibility is v. poor. Brazilian coast to port, but I’m keeping well away from it, much as I’d love to see it. Lots of fishing boats out there. Can’t sleep in this heat either – above 30. can’t wait to get further north into the cold again. When I’m hot I want to be cold. When I’m cold I want to be hot. What’s the matter with me? Still all of it will be worth it if we can find out where Kitty is. As I get closer – and I am getting closer now – I think about it more and more. I hope for it more and more. I keep looking at her key, Dad’s key, keep wondering what it’s for. GPS up and running again.
1520 14 April 25’ 85”S 41’ 31”W
The worst thing that could happen has happened, the saddest thing since Dad died. And it was me that did it. I should have known. I should have thought. My albatross is dead and I killed him. I didn’t mean to, but that doesn’t make me any less guilty, does it? I came up into the cockpit at dawn and looked around for my albatross as I always do. And he wasn’t there. My heart sank because I always knew that one morning, I’d find him gone. I saw there were a few flying fish lying in the scuppers. I think that’s what reminded me to check the fishing line. I could see at once the line was taut, so I thought I’d caught a fish. It wasn’t a fish I’d caught, it was my albatross. He was being dragged along astern of the boat, hooked and drowned. I pulled him in and sat with him sodden and limp on my lap, his great wings stilled for ever. Mum, he came with me all this way and I’ve killed him, I’ve killed my albatross. but I’ve done something a lot worse than that. It’s not just the albatross whose wings I’ve stilled. I feel deep in my heart that I’ve stilled Dad’s spirit too. A.
Alone on a Wide Wide Sea
It was only in the days and weeks following the killing of my albatross that I understood what Dad really meant in his story when he said that his “centre would not hold”. I know only from the emails I sent home each day after this that I sailed north for a month. I think I must have sailed on almost as if I was in a trance. It was like I was on automatic pilot. I sailed efficiently. To get as far north as I did, I must have done. I did everything that had to be done, but I did it with no excitement, no joy, felt no fear and no pain, not even any grief. I was numb. I just sailed the boat. I told them I wanted the Kitty Four website down for good. I recorded only my daily longitude and latitude position. I didn’t want to have any communications with anyone any more. I ignored all the pleading emails that came in and I didn’t answer the Satphone either. There was nothing more I wanted to say to anyone. I no longer cared about Kitty or the key. I no longer cared about anything. I even ignored all the messages of sympathy and encouragement that came in from Dr Topolski up in the ISS.
After ten days or so I did send one email that wasn’t just longitude and latitude. Looking back now I’m not sure quite why I did it, unless it was an attempt to explain my silence to everyone at home, and up there in space. Maybe I couldn’t find any words of my own, but I think it was more than that. By now I knew all of The Ancient Mariner so well. The words echoed in my head without my even wanting them to be there. Sometimes I’d just find myself sitting in the cockpit and the words and the lines would speak themselves out loud. And the more I recited it the more I lost myself in it, and came to believe that I was in some way the Ancient Mariner, that my journey, like his, was cursed because of what I’d done. Here’s some of what I emailed on 28th April:
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work ‘em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,
that made the breeze to blow!
…Water, water, every where
And all the boards did shrink;
Water water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
I know now of course how worried everyone must have been at home when they read this. I know now Grandpa wanted to call the whole thing off, to mobilise a major air—sea rescue at once to pick me up. But Mum had stood firm. And the only reason she had stood firm was that she could see my reports were still coming in each day. She could see on the chart that I was making good progress on my journey north. I know too that Dr Topolski was in close touch with them during my long silence, and encouraged Mum in her decision to give me time to work things out on my own.
I still don’t understand why I came out of the darkness of my despair when I did. We can’t ever
really know these things, I suppose. For Dad it was the moment when a nurse was kind to him in hospital in Hobart when he was at his lowest ebb, and helped him through. But even so he wouldn’t have come out of his black hole unless he had really wanted to. If there was such a moment of revelation for me, the moment I found I wanted to start living again, I know exactly when it was, the exact day, the exact place it happened.
I was in the cockpit of Kitty Four when I saw him. A turtle. A leatherback turtle. He surfaced right beside the boat, and just swam along with me. He looked at me quizzically like he was asking me what I was doing there. I told him I was going to England to find Kitty. I told him everything, and he stayed and listened. I wasn’t alone. I heard myself singing aloud in the wind. I hadn’t sung for weeks. I went through my whole repertoire from London Bridge to Here Comes the Sun to What a Wonderful World to I Will Always Love You, and I belted out the last one with tears pouring down my cheeks. When I’d finished, the turtle gave me one last look and left. I didn’t mind. I hadn’t cried ever since my albatross died. Something was gathering inside me, finding itself again, during these songs. It was my centre.
Maybe keeping myself as busy as I had been with the sailing was the best therapy I could have had to lift me out of the sadness I had been living through. Maybe also it was because I could see that the end of my journey was in sight now. I was only 2500 miles and twenty-three days out from Falmouth. But one thing I’m quite sure of. That day sitting there talking to the turtle, singing and crying in the cockpit of Kitty Four, I felt I was not alone any more. Mum was there with me, Grandpa, Dr Topolski, everyone at home, and Dad too. They were all there with me, willing me on. There was still grief in those tears I cried, but it was a sudden surge of joy that had released them.
I went down into the cabin then to email home at once, and I saw there was an email waiting for me from Dr Topolski. He was back on earth now. They’d brought him down a week before, in Kazakhstan, a bit of a bumpy landing, he said, and he was back home with his family now on leave for a while, and he’d been doing some investigations. He hadn’t forgotten about me. On the contrary, he’d been in touch with Mum and Grandpa a lot ever since he got down. He’d come up with something “pretty interesting” about Kitty, but, tantalisingly, he wouldn’t say what it was. He did tell me that his whole family knew about me, that they were all thinking of me every day, that they had a map of the Atlantic ocean pinned up on the kitchen wall and were charting my progress, moving the bright yellow pin that was me a little further north and little closer to England every morning. He knew that I’d been going through a hard time, he said, but he wanted me to know, “There’s a whole bunch of people here in Vermont and all over the world just rooting for you.” Every day after that I felt as if I was recharging myself somehow.
I was sailing into trade winds which didn’t make for comfortable sailing, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t only the winds that were blowing us along now anyway—and Kitty Four was flying—it was the emails that came in all the time from everyone at home, and from Dr Topolski too, everyone contributing to my new sense of wellbeing, of euphoria almost. I never saw my turtle again, but I’ve never forgotten him. I can still see his face gazing up at me, a kind face, old and wise. Sometimes I think that turtle saved my life.
With every day that brought me closer to England, I kept asking them about Kitty, but all I got back was that there was no real news. They had one or two hopeful “irons in the fire,” whatever that meant. It didn’t sound very hopeful. To be honest, I thought they were just stringing me along, trying to keep my spirits up, knowing perfectly well that the last thing I needed to hear was bad news about Kitty—that they couldn’t find any trace of her, or worse, that they had discovered she was dead. Often I’d sit there down in the cabin, Dad’s lucky key cupped in my hand, wondering what had been so important about this key. What did it mean? Why had Kitty given it to Dad that day all those years before when they were parted? What was so special about it? He had always called it his lucky key. I’d hold it and squeeze it tight, and every time I’d wish on it, just as Dad used to wish on it. I wished I’d find Kitty alive and well in England and that I’d find out at last what the key was for.
I’d be lying if I said that my new euphoria didn’t from time to time give way to times of sadness. There was still an ache inside me, left by the loss of my albatross, that would not go away. I thought of him so often. Every bird I saw reminded me of him, of the majesty of his flight, of his grace and his beauty. And sitting in my cockpit in a cold grey North Atlantic, I looked out and saw an albatross of a different kind, an albatross of the north, a gannet, diving down to fish, splicing the sea. He was magnificent, but not as magnificent as my albatross.
“London Bridge is Falling Down”
It was a good thing I was so buoyed up now and so determined, because in those last couple of thousand miles just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. First of all, the North Atlantic turned out to be every bit as vicious and hostile as the Southern Ocean. Kitty Four took a terrible battering. And it wasn’t just one storm, it was a whole succession of them. We’d sail out of one and straight into another. We got knocked down three times in three days, and the last time was very nearly the end of the story.
Not many single-handed sailors go over the side and live to tell the tale. I did. It was my own fault it happened. As Dad used to say, I was a silly chump. I was in the cockpit in a storm and I wasn’t harnessed in properly. Yes, I was tired. I hadn’t slept for a couple of days. But that’s no excuse. I was just a chump and very nearly a dead chump. I was caught completely unawares when the wave came. As the boat lurched violently I was catapulted overboard. Somehow I managed to grab a safety wire and just clung on to it. But Kitty Four was on her side and I was dunked in the ocean. I remember hearing the roar of the sea in my ears, and I knew that was always the last sound a drowning sailor ever hears. Then Kitty Four righted herself. She flipped up and I found myself flung back into the cockpit still in one piece, just. But I was nursing a broken arm—I knew it was broken at once because it was completely useless—and I was cursing myself loudly. You’re a lucky chump, a very lucky chump, I thought, when I’d stopped my cursing. My survival was down to Dad’s key, I had no doubt about it, it was entirely down to Dad’s lucky key.
I didn’t feel any pain in my arm at first. It was too cold after my dunking in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. But when I’d dried off and warmed up down below in the cabin, then it began to hurt like hell. I knew I’d need help, so I picked up the Satphone and rang home. Grandpa answered. I told him all I needed was a doctor to tell me what to do, and I’d manage. No arguments, Grandpa said, he was going to have me airlifted off. “You can’t sail a boat with a broken arm,” he said. I don’t think I’d ever shouted at Grandpa before (or since) but I did now. I told him that we were only fifty miles or so off the coast of England, off the Scilly Isles, which was less than a hundred miles from Falmouth; that Kitty Four and I were going to finish this thing together, and that I’d never speak to him again if he did it. Mum and Grandpa had a little talk about it—and five minutes later I had Dr Topolski on the phone. It turned out he was a doctor of medicine as well as a doctor of physics and engineering and just about everything else. He “examined” me by asking me dozens of questions. Then he talked me through how to make a splint, how to bandage it to my arm—not easy one-handed, but I did it.
Of course it wasn’t just me that was beaten up and hurting. It was Kitty Four too. Not the boat herself, she was fine. She’d just rocked and rolled, and bobbed up again, like she always did. She’d been built to be indestructible and unsinkable, and she was. It was all the bits and pieces that were beginning to fail as we neared the English Channel. Neither the generator nor the desalinator was reliable any more. The self-steering was in pieces. I’d tried mending it, but with one arm I couldn’t do it, so it meant I had to be up there in the cockpit almost all the time. In fact I’d have had to be there a
nyway, because there was a lot of shipping about now, more than I’d had on the whole trip, and for a little yacht, for any yacht, that’s dangerous. I could see them, but in seas like this I’d be lucky if they saw me before they ran me down.
I didn’t tell anyone how bad things were really getting. I knew how Grandpa would react, how upset Mum would be. Instead I wrote chirpy emails, sounded deliberately upbeat and jokey on the Satphone. I think maybe that having to sound chirpy was very good for me. The truth was that I was now really worried that I might not be able to make it. My arm pained me every time I moved. Every sail change I made was sheer agony. I came to a decision.
I emailed home saying I’d put into Scilly, and not go on to Falmouth. After all Scilly was England. It was as good a port as any to end the first half of my voyage. Mum phoned me back. She said she and Grandpa had thought about it and they were flying over to England as soon as possible, and they would let me know when they’d landed. I said I didn’t want any fuss, and that they weren’t to tell anyone what had happened. I was already dreading a welcoming flotilla coming out to meet me. Grandpa said that even with no website up there, there was huge interest in the papers everywhere.
“Just don’t tell them I’m coming into Scilly,” I told him. “Promise me, Grandpa.” He promised, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew the temptation of having “Stavros Boats” on the television news in big letters, and his little Allie, the apple of his Greek eye, standing on deck and waving, would be too much to resist. To be honest I expected the worst, but I’d come to terms with it. Maybe it would be quite fun anyway, and even if I didn’t like it, I could stand back and smile through gritted teeth—after all, I’d done that before in Hobart.