The Brendan Voyage (31 page)

I did not have to explain the risk to
Brendan
’s crew. They watched the pencil line on the chart, which showed our daily progress, inching nearer the Greenland coast. Each man kept his own counsel but it was clear that they appreciated the importance of every slight variation in the wind direction. The foul weather continued to afflict us all the next week, and began to take its toll. There can be few places where the daily fluctuations of weather have a greater and more immediate effect
than on the crew of an open boat in such waters. Whenever it rained—which was several times a day—we spent our time off-watch huddled in the shelter or under the tarpaulin, patiently trying to stem the trickles of water. When the air temperature hovered within a few degrees of freezing and the wind got up, the wind chill was harsh enough to restrict us to our damp sleeping bags as much as possible, despite the fact that the sleeping bags were still clammy. The trick, we found, was to keep rotating the bags so that the bottom side of the bag, which oozed a film of water, was periodically turned uppermost and had a chance to dry out. Grudgingly, we hoarded our last remaining dry clothes. The near-swamping had taught us to keep some dry clothes in reserve in case they were needed in a real emergency, and so we continued to wear our damp garments, even though it was a penance to pull on wet socks and trousers, push one’s feet into wet sea-boots, and squelch to the helm on a rainy cold night.

Yet under these conditions, we remained remarkably cheerful, provided only that
Brendan
was making progress in the right direction. Sails were carefully adjusted; arms plunged into the icy water to haul up the leeboards; the helm painstakingly set to just the right angle. It was when
Brendan
was stopped or being driven back by headwinds that life became wearisome. All of us knew that the only answer was to be stoically patient, to watch and wait and bide our time until the winds turned in our favor. There was nothing else we could do.

Each man reacted in his own way. As sailing master, George must have felt the most frustration. With the wind against him—or no wind at all—there was little he could do to help us reach North America. Yet he never lost his meticulous sense of care for
Brendan.
He checked and rechecked ropes for wear, readjusted lashings, stripped down and reassembled the steering frame when it became slack, moved the leather chafing pads to fresh positions. Inside the shelter, he was equally careful about details. With his army training he always left his sleeping bag neatly rolled, his gear carefully wrapped and stacked and out of harm’s way, and one could set a clock by his well-regulated watch-keeping routine.

Arthur was the complete reverse—a rumpled, chaotic, easygoing shambles. Arthur’s sleeping bag, if Arthur was not in it, was usually serving as a squashed-up cushion. His stock of sweaters and scarves ran loose and turned up in strange places, until we finally banished his
sodden naval trousers from the cabin, when they threatened to take over the entire living space. It was a standing joke that Arthur never remembered a hat. Invariably he lurched out of the shelter to begin his watch, and a minute later his head would pop back with a plaintive “I say, could you pass my cap, please. I’m not sure where it is, but it should be somewhere.”

Arthur always had the bad luck. If a sneak wave broke unexpectedly over the gunwale at mealtime, it was Arthur who was sitting in the wrong place so that he received the cold sea water down his neck or in his pannikin. When it began to rain heavily, it always seemed to be as Arthur was about to start his watch. “Arthur!” George would sing out cheerfully. “There’s a thunder cloud ahead. It must be time for you to take the helm!” With unwavering good nature, Arthur remained unruffled by his mishaps. Only his suit of green oilskins suffered. They seemed to wilt under Arthur’s tribulations, and adopt their own personality. The rest of our oilskins hung neatly over the steering frame ready for use; but Arthur’s green jacket and trousers were always to be seen, crumpled, battered, and inside out in a corner of the cockpit. “It hardly seems worth putting them on,” Arthur would say as he poured a cupful of sea water from his jacket hood and shrugged his way into the soggy garments. And likely as not, he would discover that the inside of his boots were full of water, too. And there was no mistaking which were Arthur’s sea-boots; his feet were so large that he was obliged to wear agricultural rubber boots, specially ordered from the makers, and their ribbed soles had treads like tractor tyres.

Trondur had spent so much time at sea in boats that he had developed his own brand of patience. “When do you think the wind will change?” I would ask him. Trondur would look at the sky, at the sea, and pause. “I say nothing,” he would announce calmly, “sometime north wind.” And when the weather was really atrocious, with driving rain, poor visibility, and an unpleasant lumpy sea that had
Brendan
staggering to the waves, he would say, “Is not so bad. It can be worse than this in winter,” and go about his work with such calm assurance that he raised all our morale. Trondur always found something to keep himself busy. If he was not fishing for fulmar, he was sketching shipboard scenes or working over his drawings, sometimes using the frayed end of a matchstick to spread the ink wash. The inside of his berth under the bow tarpaulin was a vertible artist’s atelier. He had rigged up a hammock of
fishnet which contained his paper and pens, his ink bottles and pencils, and the inevitable box of fish-hooks. Drawings and half-finished studies were hung up to dry, and one could sometimes see a needle and thread, scrapings of leather where he had commandeered a spare bit of oxhide and was stitching up some knick-knack, perhaps a little box for his ink bottles, or a leather pendant carved with a Celtic cross.

On the whole, there was little idle conversation among the crew. Like dry clothing, we tended to dole out our thoughts and our comments little by little, knowing that there was much empty time ahead. One side effect, George noticed, was how our conversation actually slowed down. George was using a tape recorder to make a sound track for a film about the voyage, and when he played back the day’s recording he found it was very frustrating. One person would ask a question. There would be a long pause; and then the reply would come back. Nor did George’s tapes reveal much of our thoughts. By and large, each member of
Brendan
’s crew kept his opinions to himself, and in an old-fashioned way concentrated on running the boat and minding his own affairs. By unspoken agreement it seemed the best way of enduring our ordeal.

Sailing aboard
Brendan,
we were finding, was becoming a very personal experience despite our shared adventure. Each man reacted in his own way to events, and his experiences did not necessarily mix with the ideas of his companions. Nowhere was this more true than on watch. Then the helmsman was often the only man to see the distant single spout of a whale, the sudden jump of a dolphin, or a changing pattern in the sky. Some incidents passed in a flash before there was time to rouse the other crew members—others happened so slowly and gently that they were only perceptible to a man obliged to wait by the helm for two hours at a stretch.

Watch-keeping in a gale was perhaps the most personal experience of all, because then the helmsman was acutely aware that the lives of the other three depended on his skill. Every big wave during his watch brought a challenge which only the helmsman could judge and meet. Each wave successfully surmounted, and rolling safely past under the hull, was not noticed by the rest of the crew. But to the helmsman it was a minor victory, only to be forgotten in the face of the next on-rushing wave behind it.

Some moments, by contrast, were seared in the memory of the man
concerned. One such incident occurred on May 23, when
Brendan
was yet again running north. It was the dusk watch, and although the wind was only about twenty-five knots, it was blowing counter to the East Greenland current and kicking up a short, breaking sea, with an occasional rogue wave which raked the boat. We were all very tired. The day-long moan of the wind and the roar of the combers sapped one’s concentration. Watch by watch we had been climbing into our immersion suits, strapping ourselves to the steering frame with our safety lines, and holding onto the tiller. George happened to be forward under the tarpaulin, pumping out the bilge; Arthur and Trondur were in the shelters in their sleeping bags; I was alone at the tiller, steering through yet another maelstrom of sea, cliff after cliff of water rising up behind the boat. Each wave demanded a heave on the tiller bar to bring
Brendan
to the correct angle to her adversary.

Almost casually I happened to glance over my shoulder, not toward the stern to where the waves were coming from, but to port and away from the wind. There, unannounced by the usual crashing white mane of foam, was a single maverick wave. It was not particularly high, a mere ten feet or so, but it was moving purposefully across the other waves, and now reared nearly vertical along
Brendan
’s length, while
Brendan
was already locked solid in the crest of a regular breaker. “Hang on,” I yelled at the top of my voice, and grabbed at the H-frame.

Brendan
began to tip away from the face of the new wave. She leaned over and over until, on the lee side, I found myself looking almost straight down at the water and still hanging on to the upright of the H-frame. “My God, she’s going to capsize!” I thought. “She can’t possibly hold this angle without tipping over. What’s going to happen to the men in the shelter and under the tarpaulin? Will they be able to get out?” It was a long, very unpleasant, moment. Then instead of capsizing,
Brendan
began to slide sideways down the face of the wave.

The next instant, the wave covered
Brendan.
It did not break in a spectacular roar of white water or tumble over her in impressive foam. It did not even jar the boat. It simply enfolded her in a great mass of solid water which poured steadily across
Brendan
like a deep steady river. Sea water swept across the tortoise and plucked at my chest. Looking forward,
Brendan
was totally submerged. Not two yards away, the cabin top was completely covered. The life raft, which was strapped on top of it and stood twenty-one inches higher, was under water. Only the masts
could be seen, projecting up from the water.
Brendan
seemed to have been absorbed into the body of the wave. In a curious distraction, I thought how her long, low profile and the two stubby masts looked exactly like a submarine with its periscopes hidden in the wave. And like a submarine emerging,
Brendan
struggled up from the sea. The air trapped under the tarpaulin and in the shelter simply pulled her up out of the wave. The water swirled off quietly, and
Brendan
sailed on as if nothing had happened. I was amazed. At the very least I expected the whole cabin to have been twisted and all the tarpaulins split. But when I clambered up on a thwart to survey the damage, everything was still intact.

The only casualty was my peace of mind. From my vantage point at the helm I knew exactly how close we had been to capsizing. And when my watch ended and I crawled into my sleeping bag, I found that I could not sleep although I was bone-weary. The rumble of every big wave sweeping down on the boat made me tense up to await a certain disaster. I did not get a moment’s rest, and when the watches changed again, I mentioned the rogue wave to Arthur. “Yes,” he said. “Everything inside the cabin went an underwater green.” And that was where, by tacit agreement, we left the subject; and did the same a couple of days later when George had a similar bad experience thinking that
Brendan
was about to roll over during his watch. Such episodes in our lives seemed best left without discussion.

Only seventy or eighty miles from the edge of the Greenland pack ice we were at last rewarded with a break in the weather. On the morning of May 25 a much-needed calm succeeded the high winds, and we could enjoy the revival of sea life around us. On the horizon great flocks of gulls were circling and diving. As they flew closer, we made out the bursts of white spray beneath the birds where a school of dolphin was hunting the same shoal of fish from below. Then a separate, excited group of dolphin approached. They were escorting one single, very large, very fat fin whale. As usual the whale changed course to visit us, and brought his dolphin escort with him. When he was close, the whale gave a deep puff, sank down, and swam under
Brendan
’s hull. But his dolphin escort stayed at the surface, leaping and jumping, twisting and turning all around us like gamboling dogs. Glancing astern of
Brendan
we could see the turbulence thrown up by the whale’s broad flukes, coming to the surface and flattening the small
waves, so that for a moment it looked exactly as if
Brendan
had her own propellers churning up a wake. Then the big whale surfaced, blew twice, and circled round us for one last look before he puffed off to the east, his spout visible for four or five miles.

It was, in fact, a typical “whale day.” George was leaning over the gunwale to scoop up a pot of salt water to boil the lunchtime potatoes when he glanced up and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “There are five big whales watching us, just astern.” “What sort are they?” I asked. “I’m not sure; they seem different,” George replied. Trondur stood up and looked over the stern. “These are sperm whale,” he said, and we watched as yet another of the whale species cruised quietly up to
Brendan
to take a look at her, their strange blunt heads shoving steadily through the water. One member of the pod swam to our bow to have a closer inspection and then all five moved majestically on their way, not bothering to dive but wallowing on the surface.

The calculated risk of running close to the ice edge paid off. On the afternoon of May 25, the wind began to blow steadily from the northeast, and
Brendan
started to move parallel to the ice edge, heading toward Cape Farewell. Prins Christianssund Radio broadcast a gale warning, which proved to be correct. All that night the wind stayed near gale force, and the night watch awoke to the chilling sound of hailstones crackling off the tarpaulins like the sound of crumpling cellophane. There was another gale warning the following morning, and the morning after that, too, and also on the third and fourth days. But now the wind always came out of the north or northeast, and
Brendan
fairly scampered along, helped by the East Greenland current which pushed her even faster, giving us an extra twenty or twenty-five miles a day. On May 26
Brendan
put up her best performance, 115 miles on the log in twenty-four hours. This equaled her best day’s run the previous season, and would have been a respectable achievement for a modern cruising yacht.