2.
Nonstop
to Panama
I
struck the board and cry'd "No more; I will abroad."
What, shall I ever sigh and pine?
My life and lines are free; free as the road,
loose as the wind.
-
George Herbert
A few friends and relatives waved goodbye to Atom from the dinghy dock in downtown Ft. Lauderdale as I hoisted our two anchors, raised the mainsail and motorsailed between the concrete breakwaters through the river’s outlet to the ocean. The afternoon sea breeze carried me south 30 miles under full sail where I anchored off a sandy islet next to a marina in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. The next day at high tide, I brought Atom up to the beach and secured mooring lines to the palm trees. As the tide dropped, leaving Atom rolled onto her side like some wounded whale drawing a last breath, I began two days of scraping, sanding and painting the bottom, working in six hour shifts in rhythm with the tides. A rough beard of barnacles, shells, and grass can grow on a hull in a short time in warm waters. Most bottom paints lose much of their effectiveness within a few months and thereafter need scrubbing every couple of weeks. This is easily done in any warm-water anchorage by diving overboard with snorkel and fins and a stiff brush in hand. Even a slightly foul bottom makes a boat sluggish, particularly in light winds, so it’s essential to begin each passage with the cleanest hull possible.
Sitting in the cabin at night while the boat tilted and righted to the tides, I restudied the world Pilot Charts depicting prevailing winds, currents, and assorted meteorological and oceanographic information gathered from over a hundred years of ship reports on all oceans. As I pondered the course ahead, I determined to live these years as fully as possible, as if they were my last. Most yachties are basically tourists on boats and associate mainly with other yachties. That’s alright for them, not for me. I was ready to experience what I’d read of other cultures, which meant getting off the boat and living among the islanders whenever possible.
With a rising tide beckoning us on, I hoisted anchor on May 2nd 1984 for the long-awaited departure. Ahead lay a distance of 1,500 nautical miles to Panama, a passage requiring navigating through the numerous reefs and islands of the Bahamas and against the prevailing winds, before turning south to the Windward Passage from where I could put the wind more at my back.
Our voyage began with Atom eagerly pushing her way into the Straits of Florida with a fair south wind. Full sails, strong heart and open mind – I was on my way! Here and there, patches of cumulus cloud cast shifting shadows on the indigo sea of the Gulf Stream. The genoa, largest of my four headsails, set like a smooth curved sheet funneling the air aft into the slot between it and the full mainsail. Standing on the side deck between the sails I could feel the wind accelerate to give us more lift than either single sail could provide. As Miami’s jagged skyline dropped from view, within me rose an expectant feeling that grew to be a familiar state of calm heightened awareness.
Not long into the afternoon, the wind eased until finally I sat becalmed. Without the steadying effect of wind on sail, we rolled and pitched, more or less together, the boat and I, as the Gulf Stream carried us inexorably northward at a rate I guessed was about three miles to the hour. When some breeze did return it was light and from ahead which had me barely holding our position as we tacked against the wind and the flow of the silent stream. Meanwhile, the radar detector sounded its alarm several times each hour as another ship passed by. A good start had soon turned into a frustrating way to begin a long voyage. As they often do, things got worse before they got better.
By the next day I had coaxed Atom across the 50 mile wide straits and entered Bahamian waters at the Northwest Providence Channel. The first island I sighted was the barren, uninhabited rock with the grand name of Great Isaac Cay. A mile long and a couple stones throws across, the only “Great” thing about the island is the lighthouse on it that’s visible for 25 miles. For the next few days I threaded a course through low islands, some of which are palm covered and others barren limestone, plotting my position from one to another by compass bearings and dead reckoning; a rough guess of the effects of course, speed, and time. When near land I kept an attentive watch, and if tired, slept lightly between rings from a kitchen timer set to 15 minute intervals. During the nights I sat mostly in the cockpit, straining to see the land I knew to be out there somewhere, and listening for the alarming sound of surf boiling on a reef. Throughout these flat islands, unpredictable currents threatened to carry the unwary to destruction. The island of Great Stirrup Cay drifted by during the night as a dark shaded outline, its non-functioning lighthouse rendering it less than Great, at least for sailors passing at night.
Next on our course was the one to two-mile-wide by 65-mile long Eleuthera Island, and as its serpent-like shape fell astern, I had a few days of clear sailing in deep water. My old patched-up sails stretched taught as we pushed into the strong trade wind. Pressed over by the weight of the wind, Atom charged ahead, gathering speed as she climbed the face of a wave, then flung her bow into the air, only to protest with a bang and a shudder as we landed in the next trough. As the bow speared the next wave crest, water swept the deck from bow to stern. Leaks began to appear from the strain and movement in fittings mounted on the deck. Between the deck's layers of fiberglass was a waterlogged balsa wood-core that I had found too big of a job at the time to fix properly. Now this oversight caused old leaks to reappear and kept me bailing cupfuls of seawater out of the leeward lockers at all hours. Nearly everything inside became wet and then moldy during these few days pounding to windward. To keep even more water from getting below, the hatches remained dogged shut, causing the inside of the cabin to become miserably hot and stifling. To escape the heat, I stayed on deck getting salted and sunned like a piece of dried beef, returning to the cabin only after sunset. Lack of a cockpit hatch spry cover, aptly called a dodger, was to cause me much suffering from the sun and salt spray for many thousands of miles to come. A dodger over the companionway hatch and a bimini awning over the cockpit were two of many “non-essential” items struck from my fitting out list in favor of an immediate departure. I just had to tough it out until turning downwind brought relief.
It’s impossible to overstate the difficulties of taking a small, ill-equipped boat to weather against the trade winds. Racing boats are designed for good windward performance, if not comfort, but a small, heavily-loaded cruising boat that tries to slog long distances to windward will eventually shake itself or its crew to pieces. Because I had doubled up all the rigging on the mast and with my heavy load of supplies packed aboard, I noticed some lost sailing efficiency. At best, I could make 50 degrees off the wind. In stronger winds, about 70 degrees was all I could manage as course made good, taking into account the sideways slip of the boat through the water, which increased as the boat heeled. Over and over I reminded myself that once I cleared these islands, 90 percent of the remainder of the world voyage would be an easy downwind ride.
As I made some progress along the windward side of the Bahamas, I altered course more to the south. At sunset I passed the long and low Mayaguana Island and by morning approached Great Inagua, the last of the “Great” and good islands in the Bahamas. Sailing close along the leeward side of Great Inagua, the only visible activity was the mechanized conveyor loading of a Canadian freighter from a mountain of salt gathered from the island’s extensive salt drying ponds. I hove-to by back-winding the foresail, easing the mainsheet, and lashing the tiller to leeward, and drifted like this for a few hours behind the shelter of the island. There was reason to delay here, since I aimed for a daylight arrival at the Windward Passage, between Haiti and Cuba. A couple hours before sunset, I trimmed sails for a close-reach at 60 degrees off the wind and resumed my journey. It was a sleepless night of pounding into heavy seas that seemed to drop the boat on solid earth instead of soft water. Conscious of currents setting me towards Cuba, I pressed on at a good speed, knowing that the less time I spent in these waters the less effect the current would have. While the windvane held her on course, I wedged my body into the lee-cloths of the windward bunk and eased the long hours of the night reading by gimbaled kerosene lamp about the voyages of Columbus. It was an appropriate book for these waters as my little boat crossed the wakes of the three caravels, all of us setting out to discover a world new to us. About twice an hour, I set the book aside and climbed out of my bunk to check the horizon for ship traffic and to bail water out of the leeward bunks and lockers with cup, sponge and bucket.
At daylight the wind dropped and a few hours later the pumped up sea became calm. A line of position from a sextant sight of the sun showed I was in the center of the 40-mile-wide Windward Passage. At a speed through the water of barely one knot the motion was easy. There being no apparent danger, I went to sleep. I awakened not long after to the deep pulsing howl of a helicopter hovering close overhead as if attempting to perch on our masthead. A crewman leaned out the open door, took a photo of me fighting to lower sails in the rising tornado of his rotor wash, and then turned to skim along the water to the east towards Haiti. Two hours later, a US Coast Guard ship was beside me, launching a boat nearly the same size as Atom.
As the launch approached, the young officer in charge shouted across the water, “We are going to board you. Maintain your course and speed.” I hand-steered in the light wind as they came alongside and two armed uniformed teenagers clambered aboard. “Why didn’t you answer our call on the VHF?” the officer asked.
“I didn’t feel much like talking - since I was asleep,” I replied.
After a cursory look through some of my overstuffed lockers, I noticed my two guests losing their focus and swallowing deeply; sure signs of approaching seasickness. My familiar pleasure of torturing seasick guests got the better of me as I told them: “There’s more gear stowed under the forward berth you haven’t checked yet.” Then couldn’t resist adding, “Also, there’s a locker behind the toilet if you don’t mind the smell. “
Back on deck and apparently feeling better, they radioed their Captain who asked my destination and if I needed anything. Since they had intruded uninvited on my sea of solitude I thought they might as well do something useful and told them I could use some fresh water to top up my tank and a detailed weather forecast for the Caribbean Sea. They returned to their ship and sped back minutes later with several jugs of water, an armful of satellite weather charts, and a two-day old Miami newspaper, compliments of the captain. Now I wondered if I should have ordered lunch and a bag of ice as well.
“Can
you guys come back in a couple more days?” I asked one of the guardsmen.
Thinking I was serious, he patiently explained they were busy searching vessels
passing through the Windward Passage for drug smugglers and Haitian refugees
trying to make their way to Florida. Why they searched me, a southbound vessel
clearly not fitting either profile, they didn’t say. He went on to tell me
they had picked up 30 Haitians that morning apparently heading towards Florida
on a battered old fishing boat and were on their way to “repatriate” them to
the Haitian capital of Port Au Prince when they intercepted me. Since I
considered myself a man with an independent conscience unlegislated by either
the left or right of politics, I had mixed feelings about the rights of refugees
to travel at will between countries. Still, I was annoyed
that the US Coast Guard felt it had the right to patrol international waters and
other country's coasts, forcibly removing people from their boats because they might intend
land later in the US. Even back then a man needed to sail long
and far to get beyond the reach of the American government. I held back any open
criticism since I didn’t want my trip declared a “manifestly unsafe
voyage” and be hauled back to Miami in leg irons. Thank God there were no Cuban
gunboats around to “repatriate” me to Florida.
The plight of the Haitian boat people was and still is a sad story any way you look at it. Largely because of deforestation caused by poor conservation, the farmlands of Haiti are eroding into the sea leaving the land scared and bare. As families grow, their small plots of land can no longer support them. Birth control was unheard of, at least then, and without any type of government assistance, many were starving. Often a father decides to gamble everything by selling his barren land to pay a smuggler for passage for one of his sons to America. The young man joins a crowd of others who have paid some $2,000 each to board an open wooden boat for up to a 30-day ordeal on the sea. If he survives to reach Miami, and if he can find employment, he will send money back to his landless family who now live in a tin and cardboard shack in a shantytown. Most Haitians never make it that far. They get shipwrecked or duped by skippers who have been known to drop them in the Bahamas, telling them they are in Florida. Others have been thrown overboard to drown off the Florida coast because the nervous captain saw a Coast Guard boat approaching.
I was struck by the contrast of these desperate people to my own privileged cruise. The Haitians were pulled from their boat and dumped back ashore in the Hell of Haiti; I was given water and a newspaper and wished bon voyage. Where I could move freely about the world by flashing an American passport, the Haitians were usually picked up before they got far from Haiti’s shores. Forced to return home, some were jailed and tortured, others simply disappear. Around the time leading up to my voyage, there had been repeated popular uprisings in Haiti as the island teetered between brutal dictatorship or communist takeover as happened across the straits in Cuba.
As the Coast Guard ship steamed away on its unhappy mission, I turned to the west and spotted the rough outline of Cuba’s 12,000-foot high Sierra de Purial. I was now becalmed and drifting close to the 12 mile territorial limit where Cuban gunboats at the time were known to haul in foreign yachts for lengthy interrogations. Not far away on Cuba’s south coast is the US Naval station at Guantanamo Bay. This thorn in Castro’s paw was also off-limits to yachts. This was one of those times to put the engine into use. For three hours I motored south towards the open sea to put a few more miles between myself and the harsh realities of international politics.
Despite my eagerness to reach less troubled waters, for the next three days I averaged only some 50 miles a day. With a fair wind we could sail 100 or sometimes as much as 145 miles a day. The weather charts given me by the coast guard indicated a deep low-pressure area passing to our north. So at least I had an explanation for the slow going. Here, where trade winds are the rule, I had instead, calms, and vexing light shifting winds. A weather map may explain the weather. Unfortunately, it does nothing to change it.
The sun stood almost straight overhead at noon, sending down its Holy Hellfire of blazing yellow arrows reflecting in a metallic glare off the rolling sea. In the tropics, if you can’t find shade on a windless day, you will soon mark the sun as your constant enemy. I stared at a seemingly lifeless sea until it morphed into a slowly pulsing desert of sand dunes. Yet, even as I sat becalmed under this torpid sun on a molten sea, through meditation I momentarily escaped to the remembered perfume of a cool autumn day by my favorite brook in a northern Michigan pine forest. When I needed something more than illusion, I doused my naked body with buckets of tepid seawater.
At night I found relief from the heat by sleeping on deck where I could detect, and get up to act on, any faint aspirations from the sky. During the long hours sitting motionless at night, I watched the parade of stars rise and set and thought of the distances and oceans ahead. Would Atom be overcome by a storm and be driven ashore or broken up on a reef? Thankfully, those thoughts recurred less as the days unwound. Somewhere along the way, I lost the feeling of lurking danger and started sleeping soundly, even if for only a couple hours at a time. I was gradually learning to let all unproductive worrying slip away in my wake and live in the present moment. Until now, for the past week navigating through the Bahamas, I had not slept more than an hour at a time. Either it was a wind shift that required a sail adjustment, an intruding ship that triggered my radar alarm, or the need to stay alert for islands and reefs that demanded my attention. The beauty of calms at night was the glorious deep sleep they allowed.
Stepping on deck one morning, as casually as stepping onto the front porch at home to pick up the morning paper, a scan of the horizon caused me to catch my breath. Not far off the starboard bow sat a three-masted square-rigged sailing ship under clouds of limp canvas. It felt like I’d drifted into the pages of the Voyages of Columbus. I knew there were few large sailing ships still making ocean passages and certainly none lay becalmed without carrying on under auxiliary diesel power. The ship’s captain and I eyed each other through binoculars until a light wind filled in and they set to hauling their braces to get under way. I hoisted my bright orange and red spinnaker sail to take advantage of the new wind. The captain hailed me on the VHF and told me they were en route to Bermuda, their engine had broken down, and like myself had been drifting and making little progress for the past couple days. The ship close-reached ponderously to the north with barely enough way for steerage while Atom headed south under spinnaker, cleaving the calm waters at a speed that made the square-rigger look like it was sailing through molasses while dragging an anchor.
During the day the erratic trades slowly strengthened and with it the seas began to build. From every wave that slapped Atom’s side, a burst of fine spray flew up and the sun turned each into a brief rainbow. That night a small migratory bird perched on the pushpit stern railing and rested there through the night. As I got up each hour to check course or adjust sails, my guest flapped his wings once to acknowledge my presence and settled back down when I retreated to the cabin. Sometime before dawn I looked expecting to see him there and he was gone.
I had been in the habit of taking a noon sextant sight, which gave me my latitude, and another sight later in the afternoon to give me a line of position to cross with my latitude line for a position fix. This technique was simple, but prone to more or less error depending on the accuracy of my dead reckoning during the hours between the two sights. Now that the sun was passing directly overhead on its annual springtime journey north, taking a noon sight became awkward as the sun viewed through the sextant mirror appeared to jump around the horizon on all sides. From here on I seldom bothered with the noon latitude sight, preferring to take morning and afternoon sights and later to make morning or evening twilight star and planet sights.
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The island of Jamaica was not far away and made a tempting landfall, but as I was well-provisioned and enjoying being at sea now that I had a fair wind, I maintained a course for Panama. With the full force of the Northeast Trade Winds set in, we ran free on our 140 mile a day sleigh ride. In a rush we made up for all those motionless days. The waves rose to gently nudge Atom’s stern as they hissed by. For the next two days I didn’t touch a sail as we rode the waves under a singing wind.
In the mornings I made my inspections on deck to check if any lines had chafed or rigging worked itself loose and to throw over the side the bodies of flying fish that had hurled themselves aboard during the night. The remainder of the mornings I usually read from my library of over a hundred salt-stained books. In the afternoon I exercised. I knew from experience that if I relied only on the activities of handling the boat to keep me in shape, I would arrive at the next port with limbs as weak as a baby. Sailing alone is exhausting at times, but on the whole, it is a series of brief activities followed by long periods of rest. To build up stamina and general good health for my shore excursions and to combat the feeling of lassitude that easily creeps up on the lone sailor, I exercised vigorously, every day throughout the voyage, with few exceptions. I did sit-ups, push-ups, and deep knee bends, working my way up to sets lasting two hours. I also practiced a few yoga forms that can be managed on a less than stable platform. After the exercise, a saltwater bucket shower in the cockpit followed by a rinse with a cupful of precious freshwater in the solar shower bag, completed my day.
At night I studied the stars, memorizing the sky charts by pen-light and then locating them in the real world planetarium reeling overhead. No matter what I was doing, if there was steady wind, the Aries windvane self-steering took care of the hard work steering the boat around the clock. I had merely to get the boat settled on her course with sails balanced, then feather the windvane’s thin plywood vane into the wind and attach the steering lines. Atom then held a course less erratic over the long term than any helmsman is able to do. When the boat naturally tried to fall off course, the slight change in apparent wind direction tilted the horizontally pivoting wind blade, which caused the windvane’s small rudder to turn and kick up from the flow of water against its side, pulling one or other of the steering lines connected to the tiller. Back and forth it endlessly kept up its pendulous bowing from side to side. When the wind shifted it was up to me to make an adjustment and the windvane would again carry on. It was ingenious and simple and was responsible more than anything else for the initial opening of the floodgates of solo sailors on the world’s oceans in the 1970’s and 80’s. This was before an enormous flood of incompetent navigators was set loose on the seas by the availability of inexpensive GPS satellite receivers in the 1990’s.
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As I approached Panama, unsettled weather moved in. Complete overcast with frequent squalls and thunderstorms kept me jumping to the sails to reef or unreef the main or haul down and replace the jib with one larger or smaller. It was a routine that I became so practiced at over the years, I could literally do it blindfolded. For two days now I had been unable to confirm my position by celestial observation due to the clouded skies. At least I knew I was still on the canal approach as ships were passing by more frequently each day. Most shipping passed me unseen behind sheets of continuous rain. I knew of their close presence by the radar alarm’s insistent “Beep-Beep!”
Atom
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