Chapter 1: Just another long night.
We are doing short passages of one or two nights as we hop
slowly down the Brazilian coast headed towards Rio. Our jury-rigged auto-pilot
system means than we don’t have to hand steer all the time but it is not
working perfectly either. My four shifts per day on this current leg are 3-6
and 9-12.
MY SHIFT (9 – midnight) The wind was all over the place
sometimes breezing 10 knots (almost enough wind) and sometimes blowing 28 knots
(almost too much). The auto pilot tended to work pretty well in the light winds
but just couldn’t hold up in the heavier ones and, to both of our great
frustrations, HS could not manage to explain to me how to correct it when it
was not working. Sometimes, if it is beeping, which means you are more than 15
degrees off course and it doesn’t think it can fix the problem by itself, you
just have to wait patiently through the annoying sound because, in fact, it can
indeed fix itself but is too impatient itself to realize this. Sometimes you
have to adjust the magnetic course setting on the tiller auto-pilot. Sometimes,
instead, you have to decouple the lines that are wound around the wheel,
readjust them, and then recouple them. HS explained to me, several times, when
to do what, but for some reason my mind just couldn’t untangle the subtleties
involved, and, consequently, as the wind was often blowing too hard for the
auto-pilot to hold course, he spent most of my shift setting and re-setting the
auto-pilot for me.
HIS SHIFT (midnight – 3 am) I had lain down for a nap at midnight but
shortly thereafter heard something snap loudly, almost like a bang. I then
heard HS swear. I stuck my head up and sure enough a line on the auto pilot had
broken. I took over hand-steering and HS repaired the broken line, quite a
tricky job as it was back behind the boat down near the water line, and, of
course, it was dark, and the boat was moving all over the place. This process
took about two hours. Now, admittedly, he was the one fussing with tools and
extra bits and whatever, but I was working hard too. Hand-steering, especially
in 28 knots, which is what we seemed to have most of the time, is, excuse my
language, a bitch. I lay down for twenty minutes at the end of his shift before
mine began but didn’t even doze off. Mostly I just hoped that the wind would
miraculously go down.
MY SHIFT (3 am – 6 am) The wind did not go down before my
shift started. Not only that, but, apparently, just before 3 am is when the
fishing boats head out. At 3 am when I reported for duty, the wind was still
blowing a fair shake and there were at least 10 fishing boats all around us
heading out to sea and there were, also, of course, why not, at least 2 large
ships leaving a nearby port and heading towards us, and, on top of all that, we
were heading into a lightning storm. I was not happy with this whole situation,
at all, but HS was knackered and so I (somewhat reluctantly) let him go off to
bed and took over. No sooner had he gone down the stairs than the frickin’
auto-pilot started to beep. I tried this, I tried that, I fussed and worried
and babied it, but it just wouldn’t do its job on its own and I knew that, in
28 knots of wind, if I gave up and turned it off completely and hand-steered
that I would not possibly have enough concentration left over to keep track of
where all the fishing boats and ships were. I didn’t want to wake HS up. I knew
he’d barely had any sleep. But in the end I couldn’t deal with the situation, so,
very embarrassed and therefore a tad whiny, I went and woke him up and told him
that I just couldn’t do it. I don’t think I had ever before gotten him up just
simply because I couldn’t cope. He got up and came up. He was not happy but
what choice did he have? And, although I hadn’t realized it, there was in fact
a real problem with the auto-pilot, a block, which is a pulley, had broken and
the wire was stuck in it. Hmph. I went back to hand-steering (uurgh) and HS
tried to fix the block. Unfortunately it was un-fixable so he had to replace it,
a procedure which, in the dark and blowing wind and rolly seas, took about 2
hours.
By then we were both pretty much exhausted. I went down into
the nav room to check our course on the computer and accidently checked the
wrong ‘x’ turning the whole program off. (In my defense I have to say that the
mouse that goes with the computer is broken and the touch screen feature is not
well calibrated so you have to touch a very different place that where you
actually want to be which is maddening at the best of times and a nightmare in
the early morning when you have been up most of the night dealing with too much
wind!) However, nonetheless, when this happens it takes about 15 minutes of
work to re-load the nav programs. HS swore at me and I burst into tears.
I could vaguely remember, less than a day before, writing a
journal entry about how much I loved the lifestyle, but right then I couldn’t
remember why that might possibly be, and I even, very briefly, considered
jumping overboard and swimming the 10 miles or so to shore.
HIS SHIFT (6 am – 9 am) By 6 am HS had the auto-pilot working
again and the computer stuff re-loaded and running, it was getting light out,
all the other boats had dispersed out to sea, and the wind was slowly dying down.
I knew HS was more tired than I was and that he would work more than his fair
share of hours the next day as we got into port so I offered to do his shift
for him. Normally he is very strict about us following our own shifts. Even if
he has spent most of his shift helping me with stuff he still comes up to take
over at the allotted time and tells me to go and take a break. This morning,
however, he took me up on my offer and went to lie down below.
I was left alone on deck with a somewhat drab grey morning
emerging all around me. It took me several minutes to notice that there were
mountains rising out of the mist off to starboard, several minutes longer to
properly appreciate their beauty, and several minutes even more than that to
recalibrate my emotions and rediscover a sense of calm. I did, however, do it,
and, despite the ghastliness of the past night, started to look forward to the
rest of the day.
Chapter 2: Anchoring woes
IN PORT: As we dropped sail and started to motor into the bay
where the marina in Vittoria is the wind picked up again and was suddenly
howling away. Not a good sign. The old boat, with its full keel and all, does
not turn well in the best of times, and going into a marina under heavy wind is
a nightmare at best. Then the marina was full. Then we anchored just offshore
but our anchor kept dragging. Then we tried to set a stern anchor too but got
the line fouled around the prop. (HS swam under the boat to untangle it.) Then
we left the stern anchor behind with a float to mark its position so we could
pick it up later and went to anchor somewhere else. Then we put the dingy in
the water so we could go and retrieve the stern anchor but the tender line
broke and the dingy sailed off by itself. (I swam after the dingy and rowed it
back.) The wind, of course, continued to
howl through all of this. Hmmm. I can’t remember when, exactly, the first four
letter word was uttered but by the end we had been through a whole slew of
them.
Chapter 3: Doing the detail dance
BACK AT SEA: We decided we didn’t much like Vittoria and so we
cast off again the next morning. As we set out I asked HS what shifts we’d do
for this leg of the trip. Our conversation went sort of like this:
Me: What shifts would you like to do this leg?
HS: Whatever you want.
Me: No, you’re the boss. You get paid the big bucks. I’ll work
whatever you tell me.
HS: No no. You get to choose.
Me: Then, I’d like to do 6 hour shifts and work 2 to 8. (This
means I work 2 am to 8 am and again 2 pm to 8 pm. I like these shifts, which we
have done before, because I get to see both the sunrise and the sunset.)
HS: No no. I don’t like 8 - 2. If we have to do 6 hour shifts
then we do 6 – 12 and 12 – 6.
Me: OK. How about we keep the same three hour shifts as last
leg then.
HS: No no. I don’t like three hour shifts they’re too short.
Me: What do you want to do then? I’ll work whatever you like.
HS: No, no. You get to choose.
Me: OK. Let’s go back to six hour shifts then and I’ll take 6
– 12.
At this point there was a long pause. I could tell HS wanted
to object. He had assumed that I would take the 12 – 6 shifts so I could see
the sunrise but midnight – 6 am is such a nasty shift that no one really wants
it. Back at the beginning of our voyage when I was trying to be totally
amenable I would have taken 12 – 6 without a question, and back before I had
said I was ready to leave the boat and he’d asked me to stay he would have just
given me 12 – 6, but now there has been a subtle alteration in the power
balance, and, given the conversation we’d just had in which he had kept
insisting I got to choose, I could tell he was struggling over whether to take
the 12 – 6 shifts or tell me to take them. In the end he didn’t say anything,
so I get 6 – 12 and 6 - 12, but I have to admit I do feel a bit guilty about it
all.
No, it is not all roses. (But I am still thrilled to be here!)
