Riding Out the Gale – The Return of Mary Rose

Great, steep seas of liquid sapphire rolled toward us in everlasting succession, lifting Mary Rose up, up, balancing her on their peaks, and then passing under, letting her down gently, and rolling away to leeward. Fast and busy; that was my impression of them, as though they were creatures intently focused on some urgent business somewhere far to the southward, with no time to pause or pay heed to us. Some broke briefly in curling splendor, and on such occasions, if they broke against the hull, we were showered in the cockpit with warm, sweet-salty, clean water, as thoroughly as if one had thrown buckets of seawater directly at us from only a few feet away. It was tepid and pleasant, under a brilliant sunny sky dappled with jolly white cotton-balls of cumulus clouds, and it reminded me of a day at the beach, running in the surf, but without the bright-yellow oilskin weather-repellent gear and safety harness in which I was, at the moment, attired. The ever-present roar of the wind and sea in motion filled our ears; we had to shout to be heard.

“This must be the Gulf Stream” I commented to Captain Tom. “It feels so much like it; and the color of the water…” But we feared the Stream, which was supposedly flowing in a northeasterly direction, and in opposition to the 30 knots of northwest wind that were now roiling it, stacking up the seas dangerously. Opposing northerlies make the Stream formidable; seas can become mountainous, steep, and short, and when they begin to break, a small vessel such as a cruising yacht can find itself in grave peril.

We were clawing our way northwestward from Bermuda to Newport, Rhode Island, and the wind had been in our teeth all the way, with a big nor’easter brewing south of Nantucket. We had been battling this storm for a few days now, four of us in the 80-ft. antique wooden Herreshoff staysail schooner Mary Rose, on her return trip to New England for the summer, having wintered over in Tortola, BVI.

To get home, or to get anywhere back along the coast of the United States, we had to cross the northward-flowing Gulf Stream. The stream turns northeastward beginning around the latitude of Maryland, and heads off toward the British Isles. So it loomed, in my imagination, like an Atlantic Wall, blocking our way home with peril; the seas were already high; how much of a tougher time did we have in store for us ahead? There was no turning back; Bermuda was three hundred miles and more behind us. So we had decided to go westward toward the coast of Virginia, Maryland, or Delaware, since going in our chosen direction toward home was utterly impossible, and would be thus for several days yet. What little information we could obtain suggested that the storm would remain stationary for some time still, with winds out of the north, frustrating our passage home. So we sailed due west, sometimes a little more northerly when the wind shifted north or northeasterly, keeping the towering seas on the starboard bow, motor-sailing to windward under Mary Rose’s two staysails only.

Captain Tom was at the helm, having taken over the watch at noon; I had been steering all morning since six, with my watch-mate, Andy. I stayed in the cockpit with Tom for awhile; I was not in a mood for sleep.

“Seas must be eighteen feet,” I commented to Capt. Tom.

“At the very least,” he replied, and muttered a curse under his breath. “We must be in the stream. I can’t imagine that it can get any worse than this!”

Sparkling, glistening, sun-drenched, blue and more blue; a terrifying beauty. It was a scene that was awe-inspiring and lovely while at the same time dangerous and without mercy. But, as the fisherman Santiago observes in The Old Man and the Sea, also without malice, after all.

I had remained in the cockpit with Captain Tom even though my watch was over, and I ought to be napping or trying to manage a bite to eat, perhaps an orange or a slice of nut-grain bread with peanut butter, but I had the nagging suspicion that we were indeed in the Gulf Stream. I remained on deck also because I was in a state of semi-rapture, I suppose; I could not stop watching the magnificence of the sea, in what Slocum once called “its grandest mood.” But finally I went below with the intention of confirming or invalidating my suspicion that we had indeed entered the Gulf Stream, which can be anywhere from ten to twenty miles across.

I had brought my notebook computer along, loaded with a chart-plotter software program and a GPS antenna device that plugged into the computer. Once it picked up the satellite signal, and I zoomed the chart in, the program indicated that our position was right smack-dab in the middle of the Stream, positioned on the ‘estimated axis’ of the Gulf Stream. I breathed a sigh of relief, and passed the word around. “Well that’s good news,” Captain Tom said.  “We’re doing all right, right now. If we can get through this, we’ll probably be fine the rest of the way.” Indeed; after a short nap, I awoke again at watch-time, at nearly six in the evening, and emerged on deck to an entirely different scene; the water was dark green and there was a distinct chill in the air. It was the North Atlantic that I was used to, a half hour before sunset. “We’re out of the Gulf Stream,” Captain Tom announced. From this point, I thought, there is nothing in our way; let it blow. We’re getting used to it, and the boat can take it.

Now, it stands to reason that a man who has stepped inadvertently into a bucket of fish-offal will henceforth be more mindful of where he puts his feet when walking down a dock, with the intention of avoiding the repetition of such a mishap. But can you fathom a man deliberately stepping back into that same bucket the next time he walks the dock? And do so with enthusiasm, and deliberately so, at that? This is what the person who does not love the sea cannot understand about the sailor. To him or her, the bucket of offal and going to sea are one and the same. But why would an intelligent fellow who has experienced a rough ocean passage readily sign up to endure the same ordeal again only a few months later? Because he or she is a sailor, of course, and will not only repeat the experience of being tossed about in a small boat in the middle of the vast ocean once, or twice, but moreover will repeat the same again and again and again. I thought about this as I lay in my berth in the darkness, trying to hang on, trying to grab a moment of sleep as the Mary Rose slammed about noisily in stormy seas, and occasional droplets of cold water, seeping through the deck, dripped onto my face or into my eyes, or wetted my pillow and blanket. Here I am again, I thought; I shook my head in bewilderment, and quite nearly laughed at myself; incredibly, I realized, I was in exactly the same pickle-barrel as I had been this past November, only now in even worse circumstances. And I had told myself, at the end of my November passage on Mary Rose to Tortola, that I would be most reluctant to ever again embark upon such an uncomfortable misadventure! Now why in the hell, I queried my conscience, had I signed up for this trip, and with an eagerness that bordered upon frenzy? It seemed to be the very stuff of madness. As the wind topped and exceeded fifty knots during the night, I thought, well, you fool, you’ve done it now, you came back for more, and got a full ration of what you had before plus some. Now you’ve no choice but to ride it out, and make the best of it. But as every silver lining has a cloud, so the obverse is true; at least my stomach was the least of my worries. I might find myself adrift in a raft, but my own hold would be well-stowed; after the second day out from Bermuda, I’d acquired my sea-legs, and no amount of motion of the boat, no matter how violent, had upset it since.

The Mary Rose had sailed to Tortola, BVI, by way of Bermuda, in late November. I had been aboard for that stormy trip south. She had spent the winter cruising the Caribbean, topping it off by sailing in Antigua’s Classic Yacht Regatta and taking home an award. But when it came time for the springtime trip back north to Newport and Bristol, I had not been called; I was disappointed, but I understood; a one-way air ticket to Tortola from New England is an expensive proposition and the Captain was on a tight budget. A young fellow from Maine, seeking passage north, signed on. I knew when they left, and I followed them with my chart-plotter in dead reckoning mode. It turns out that they arrived in Bermuda only three hours earlier than my ETA for them!

But in Bermuda, the sailor from Maine left. He’d had a rough time of it with seasickness, and was not willing to continue on. Airplane turbulence was as much now as he had stomach for. On a Sunday morning, two days after they had arrived, I received a call on my cell phone. It was Captain Tom. “So, Mike, are you busy?” He laughed. I was on a plane the next morning, on a remarkably short – 90 minute – flight out of Boston.  Once the young man from Maine had left, there were only three remaining to take the boat home, across 630 miles of open North Atlantic. Captain Tom, his lady Bonnie, and crewman Andy. Andy was the only sailor familiar with the boat other than Tom and capable of working the foredeck. So there were not enough sailors aboard, and thus I was summoned to rejoin the crew, and no one, I felt, could be more delighted than I at the prospect of sailing on Mary Rose once more!

There were many boats in Bermuda, and five times as many sailors, seemingly bottled up, itching to be on their way, but a continuous pattern of bad weather had kept them in port. Two boats left the day I arrived, and returned the next day, battered and beat up. Some said it would be more than a week before anyone could safely leave. But our captain had his doubts; the forecast days ahead was nothing if not vague; but it suggested that the low that had driven those boats back in was passing well off to the east. Yet oddly this had been an off year; a succession of lows had moved like a parade across the U.S. from the Pacific, developing into gale centers in the North Atlantic. The jet stream was off, some said. But after mulling it over, our captain decided that the outlook was favorable enough to go, and it looked that way to me, too.

The night before we left, we attended a lively party at the home of a local sailmaker. Many cruisers were there, and it was a wonderful evening of wine, hors d’oeuvres, and camaraderie among sailors, long-distance passagemakers, and cruising lifestyle people. If you are one of them, or even doing such a thing as making a deepwater passage in a sailboat for the first time, you will find only friends in that gathering; and even if you are acquainted with no one, you will still find a willing ear, a friendly voice, and an outstretched hand of welcome. And although we sailed out of sunny St. George’s the next afternoon to friendly cheers and waving hands, I heard much later on that there were not a few among them who felt that we were earnestly out of our minds to be leaving when we did.

The morning that we crossed the Gulf Stream, I went topside with my cup of tea in hand, to begin my watch with Andy, just before six o’clock, to find the wind light and the seas moderate. The sun was up but it was behind a low layer of dark clouds. The air was warm and moist; in the distance, beneath the dark clouds, cone-shaped funnel clouds were trying to form in a couple of different places. “Waterspouts!” I exclaimed, and cursed; another hazard to look out for. The sea was purple beneath the clouds, and the thought passed through my mind that perhaps we were in a warm eddy of the Stream, or approaching the Stream itself. Little did I know that we would be in it by mid-day, with winds piping up to thirty knots plus and seas building to blue hills.

We had seen so many Portuguese Man-o’-War jellyfish that I could only imagine that millions upon millions dotted the seas beyond the scope of our vision. Indeed, they were everywhere, deadly iridescent blue bubbles that looked at first like partially-inflated plastic sandwich bags floating on the surface. We had seen dolphins, flying-fish, and a couple of large, slow, green creatures beneath the surface that might have been sea turtles or ocean sunfish. A grey-skinned whale surface briefly near the boat once, and another did, unseen, but we smelled his dank, fishy, malodorous breath when we passed over the spot where he had just been before sounding. Occasionally, a white-tailed tropicbird circled for a little while overhead.

The sea is a painter’s canvas, and light is the artist. It is not dull, nor empty, nor simply water and sky, but an ever-changing tapestry, always different, always refreshing itself. Clouds change the way light paints the sea and sky; they change color and texture, sometimes dramatically and sometimes with great subtlety. But it is no still-life; always in motion, it is a performing art.

But the interpretation of the masterpiece is done by the mind and the imagination. Where there is nothing familiar, the mind struggles to add it. Sometimes I have felt as though land was near, or that a reflection of light from an instrument was, in the corner of my eye, a marshy shore off the coast of Virginia. But most remarkably, one night as we sailed through a strange moonless night with clouds stacked at different levels of the sky and occasional heat lightning, I could have sworn that we were sailing through a dark forest of impossibly tall pines, or redwoods, on either side, rather than hundreds of miles from the nearest coast. And two nights later, in the midst of the gale, spray blew across the Mary Roses’s foredeck, illuminated by the surreal green glow of the starboard sidelight. It was a plunging, lashing, spray-whipped vision of water traveling horizontally athwartships as Mary Rose beat strongly and doggedly to windward, powerfully, unstoppably. I watched this unlivable no-man’s land of the foredeck through the clear panel of the savagely shaking pram-hood dodger. Ship against the sea, challenging, persevering, taking a beating in the process.

We could not get home along our chosen course. Thus, in a few days we sailed exhaustedly into Cape May, NJ to dry out the boat and take on fuel and to rest. Two days later, in much better conditions, we steamed northeast on a beeline for Block Island and arrived in cold, gray, windy Bristol Harbor after nearly 19 hours of motorsailing. It felt good to stand on the pier in my own town again, next to all things familiar, home, family, and little dog. And, once again, I stood in awe of the antique wooden vessel that had carried us home, kept us alive, and had survived a rough sea and a nasty gale. I had to go home, but I could not but pause for a few moments to look back at her, suddenly and oddly emotional, with feelings of deep affection. And I then understood what it has meant, for centuries, for a sailor to be attached to a ship. You cannot explain it, but you know it when you experience it.

The nor’easter we sailed into didn’t have a name, but it had an eye, and back home, our families watched in horror as the thing developed and unfolded on the evening news reports on television. We saw winds in excess of 50 knots, days with the winds between 35 and 40 knots, unrelenting, unrelenting. Two vessels sank; one a hundred miles south of Nantucket, another one somewhere out off New York, their crews rescued by the Coast Guard. At the time of this writing, it is now midsummer and Mary Rose rides contentedly on her mooring in Bristol Harbor, enjoying the kind attention of Andy’s skilled varnish brush and patient care. Where she will cruise to next, one can only guess!