Breaking the waves…Vol. I!
Not wishing to disappoint my legion of readers(!), keenly awaiting the next brutish misuse of our fine mother tongue (I can’t say short, Dad, since none of them have been), I have sought to surpass previous marathon reads with a 2 part saga!!!
I have been breaking waves in lots of ways over the last fortnight; including literally, on a 35 foot boat sailing from Goa to Mumbai. Two weeks ago, our family friend David called me up to say he would be returning from Goa and would I like to sail the boat back with him and a friend called Sam, up the Arabian Sea to Mumbai. Never one to pass up once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, the offer no sooner made and I was on the next train down to Goa. With the inimitable struthious DaSilva approach (David is a past master of displacement activity!), organisation and provisoning of the boat was left to an eleventh hour and 59th minute flurry of list making and stocking activity. Contrary to expectations, this process was bizarrely efficient, and the 11am departure was only delayed by 41/2 hours!
Picture a beautiful turquoise sea lapping at the bow, the warm sun drying the salt spray on your face, and drifting into port lounging over the poop deck with a grilled steak sarnie in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other as the sun dips below the horizon ..... BZZZZZZWWIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPPP! Sorry, that was my effort at trying to make the noise you get in films when the record gets yanked off the player! Er no, not quite that sort of a sailing trip! Bear in mind that the captain of this trip is the sort of loon who says he loves rough weather and will put out to sea on the Indian ocean in monsoon season with an 8 foot dinghy on 20 foot waves!
No, each of us having various commitments to be back in time for, this was a trip where we would be sailing all day and all night keeping shift watches for a theoretical 2 days and 2 nights. In fact it turned, for various reasons into 3 days and 3 nights, departing Friday afternoon, and by a miraculous bit of favourable weather on the last day, arriving in Bombay on Monday evening. Faced with an unseasonably choppy sea for the time of year, one of the things which surprised me was the speed with which I adapted and lost the initial feeling of sea sickness. I had come armed with a blister pack of fairly powerful anti-emetic, to take the edge of things, but in the end needed only about 12 hours worth to get me through the first night. Sea legs were not quite so forthcoming. After the last 4 years study, I might now understand the physiology and nervous processes involved in acquiring this gubernatorial necessity, but this doesn’t help much with actually managing to walk on the boat! Those who know my legendary balance, grace and poise can picture my elephantine pirouettes back and forth across the deck tightening various lines, or the graceful lunges as I try to duck out of the way of one of the Tindalls. In case you are wondering what on earth a Tindall is, it appears to be the name given to a couple of deck hands who live on the boat and look after it, helping rig sails and carrying out David’s instructions as to sail trim. Oddly, they don’t actually know how to sail. However, they are substantially more nimble and agile than me!!! Though that may be damning them by faint praise! But it does mean they are the people to have around if rigging needs to be altered or sails adjusted and the only other competent sailor is helming!
In all seriousness, we had a good deal of short chop with the boat slapping into waves and pitching about quite bit, together with some reasonable winds that meant the boat was well heeled over for long periods. Pitching and heaving around, these two tindalls, Mahadev and Tulsi, were scampering around like they were on a perfectly level surface in a dead calm! Most impressive of all I think was their ability to rustle up their evening meal of rice and daal complete with finely chopped onions, garlic, ginger chillies etc. with a pressure cooker and a camping gas burner clamped between their feet while wedged between 2 bunks in the cabin! Actually, on reflection, I think the thing that impressed me most about them was their cheerful and uncomplaining willingness to sort things out with the sails, or keep lookout on night shifts for trawling nets (they snag the keel with fairly disasterous consequences) irrespective of weather or tiredness.
Actually that was one of the most interesting and toughest parts of the trip – sleep deprivation. Those avid Top Gear fans among you might remember Ellen Macarthur talking about it in a Clarkson interview. Not that this was anything like the ludicrous conditions she was facing, but if you are not used to it, it is very difficult to sleep deeply or well on a relatively cramped boat, and as it is, you are rotating on 2 hour night watches. In reality I probably managed to snatch 20 minutes of fitful sleep at a time totalling maximum 4 hours over 2 nights and 2 days. By the end of the second day, with the third night of sleeplessness ahead of us I started to understand why they use this as a form of torture!
I have to say though, this feeling was more than compensated for by some of the natural wonder of the trip. There is something quite amazing about the endless hypnotic blue grey vastness of sea, in all directions, as far as your eye can see. The monotony is punctuated by the occasional flying fish and not much else. It gives you a tremendous sense of perspective . Even more so the amazing night skies – I think this was one of the highlights for me. The endless sea of stars, from the bright familiar constellations which are all we see at home, to the myriad faintly iridescent swirls that make up galaxies billions of light years across and billions of light years away.
‘Hands that flung stars into space….’
The other really beautiful thing about the night sky is the way the light changes as the night progresses, just as it does in the day. Stars wax and wane to varying degrees and the moon rises and sets just like the sun, sometimes with some spectacular colour displays of its own – I have never seen a fiery blood red moon before. Unfortunately I couldn’t capture it on film! But I will try and post some of the other magical aspect of night sailing – the twilight and the sunrise. The photos don’t really capture the amazing glows across the water at first light – our eyes are so much better at perceiving the wonderful spectrum of colours it makes. Plus my photographic skills were not up to the job of compensating for a heaving ship on a long exposure.
One of the other factors that gives you a sense of perspective is the real power of the seas, even with relatively mild chop (only 6-8 foot swell at worst). A sea perfectly capable of stopping our boat dead in the water with each slap of the waves as we beat upwind was mild in terms of what size the Arabian sea can muster when the conditions are right. It is the unpredictable nature of sea that makes you realise that you are tremendously vulnerable and fragile bobbing along – something I don’t often find myself thinking about day to day.
The trip did have its hairier moments – a disturbing number of which involved the autohelm which we christened Abraham! Abraham is vital to sailing with a less experienced crew like we were, as it allows the only fully competent helmsman (David) to get some much needed rest while someone else keeps watch and adjusts course according to the wind. The basic job of helming and holding that course is done by Abraham. One such hairy moment was towards the end of the first night, when we had set our course fairly constantly and there were light winds and a calm sea, so that David and Sam drifted off into sleep. I was lying on the deck wrapped in a blanket drifting in and out. Around 7 hours later, I got up to check our course and bearings, which seemed to be OK. As I emerged from the cabin, I noticed that Abraham was in fact not plugged in! He had merely been holding the tiller at whatever course he was steering when the plug came out several hours before, and by the grace of God the wind had not changed and the boat had sailed herself pretty much in the right direction.
By the second night the winds and waves had really picked up, and I found myself awoken from a seated doze as the boat suddenly pitched violently under a wave, throwing me forward. As I came to, I realised I had crashed into Abraham's digital box of a brain and sheered it from its mounting – essentially decapitating him! Surfacing from my daze, I saw the box was nestled neatly in the crooks of my elbows where I had braced my fall against the leeward seat! Thankfully, the tiller arm carried on its electrical whirring happily as Abraham corrected course! A sigh of relief breathed!!
At the end of that second day and into the third night, just when I thought I couldn’t possibly continue without some sleep, David announced he was feeling really quite unwell and needed to lie down. Sam, age 63 with high blood pressure and a heart condition had already conked out for the night exhausted by a combination of sunstroke and dehydration from not drinking sufficiently. And David himself had had a mini-stroke last year. I suddenly realised no-one except the now-feeling-unwell skipper actually knew how to sail this boat as we chuntered along 8 miles off shore! Er….right then!
Amazing what reserves you find available when you suddenly need them – a serious answer to prayer. I spent the rest of the night navigating and trimming sails and autohelm to keep us on course while David got some much needed sleep. GPS makes the business of discerning the difference between your heading (compass bearing) and your actual course (track over the ground also influenced by waves, current and leeward drift) significantly easier than it would be by dead reckoning the old fashioned way. When you think about the tremendous storms on big oceans and the tiny little boats and comparatively primitive charts and navigation tools that 15th and 16th century mariners had, it leaves you in awe of their global voyages.
The best bit of sailing was saved for the final day. We had expected to be another 48 hours from where we were at dawn of that day, but a sudden flattening of the seas and a significant increase in the wind saw us flying up the Maharashtra coast. Often times, the winds were enough that under full sail we were finding it hard to hold the tiller to course! What an awesome exhilarating feeling, foaming water rushing past the rails as you cut cleanly along at nigh on the maximum speed she will do (around 6 or 7 knots): the boat heeled over at well past 45 degrees, Genny (the big foresail across the front of the yacht) dipping in the water; feet dangling over the windward rail, surf cracking over the bow and spraying into the cockpit covering us in a fine dusting of salt as the sun quickly evapourated it. We managed to make almost double the progress we had expected and finally made port in Mumbai harbour on Monday evening.
Grimy and knackered and desperate for a decent hot meal and a shower, I was just grateful to have finally arrived. But with some time to reflect, suddenly I understand what attracts people who sail competitively to this sport. The combination of exhilaration and exhaustion and satisfaction is a lot like what you feel when you flog up a mountain in less pleasant conditions to get that view from the top and that amazing “Done it” feeling. As David put it, lots of sailing is really grim and uncomfortable, and the best bit of most trips is as you are putting into port with the feeling of having survived; but then it somehow takes on a different colour in the memory with the benefit and separation of time, and you look back and think: that was totally brilliant and I really enjoyed it! Massochistic tendencies? Or self delusion? Answers on a postcard…l.
I have been breaking waves in lots of ways over the last fortnight; including literally, on a 35 foot boat sailing from Goa to Mumbai. Two weeks ago, our family friend David called me up to say he would be returning from Goa and would I like to sail the boat back with him and a friend called Sam, up the Arabian Sea to Mumbai. Never one to pass up once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, the offer no sooner made and I was on the next train down to Goa. With the inimitable struthious DaSilva approach (David is a past master of displacement activity!), organisation and provisoning of the boat was left to an eleventh hour and 59th minute flurry of list making and stocking activity. Contrary to expectations, this process was bizarrely efficient, and the 11am departure was only delayed by 41/2 hours!
Picture a beautiful turquoise sea lapping at the bow, the warm sun drying the salt spray on your face, and drifting into port lounging over the poop deck with a grilled steak sarnie in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other as the sun dips below the horizon ..... BZZZZZZWWIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIPPP! Sorry, that was my effort at trying to make the noise you get in films when the record gets yanked off the player! Er no, not quite that sort of a sailing trip! Bear in mind that the captain of this trip is the sort of loon who says he loves rough weather and will put out to sea on the Indian ocean in monsoon season with an 8 foot dinghy on 20 foot waves!
No, each of us having various commitments to be back in time for, this was a trip where we would be sailing all day and all night keeping shift watches for a theoretical 2 days and 2 nights. In fact it turned, for various reasons into 3 days and 3 nights, departing Friday afternoon, and by a miraculous bit of favourable weather on the last day, arriving in Bombay on Monday evening. Faced with an unseasonably choppy sea for the time of year, one of the things which surprised me was the speed with which I adapted and lost the initial feeling of sea sickness. I had come armed with a blister pack of fairly powerful anti-emetic, to take the edge of things, but in the end needed only about 12 hours worth to get me through the first night. Sea legs were not quite so forthcoming. After the last 4 years study, I might now understand the physiology and nervous processes involved in acquiring this gubernatorial necessity, but this doesn’t help much with actually managing to walk on the boat! Those who know my legendary balance, grace and poise can picture my elephantine pirouettes back and forth across the deck tightening various lines, or the graceful lunges as I try to duck out of the way of one of the Tindalls. In case you are wondering what on earth a Tindall is, it appears to be the name given to a couple of deck hands who live on the boat and look after it, helping rig sails and carrying out David’s instructions as to sail trim. Oddly, they don’t actually know how to sail. However, they are substantially more nimble and agile than me!!! Though that may be damning them by faint praise! But it does mean they are the people to have around if rigging needs to be altered or sails adjusted and the only other competent sailor is helming!
In all seriousness, we had a good deal of short chop with the boat slapping into waves and pitching about quite bit, together with some reasonable winds that meant the boat was well heeled over for long periods. Pitching and heaving around, these two tindalls, Mahadev and Tulsi, were scampering around like they were on a perfectly level surface in a dead calm! Most impressive of all I think was their ability to rustle up their evening meal of rice and daal complete with finely chopped onions, garlic, ginger chillies etc. with a pressure cooker and a camping gas burner clamped between their feet while wedged between 2 bunks in the cabin! Actually, on reflection, I think the thing that impressed me most about them was their cheerful and uncomplaining willingness to sort things out with the sails, or keep lookout on night shifts for trawling nets (they snag the keel with fairly disasterous consequences) irrespective of weather or tiredness.
Actually that was one of the most interesting and toughest parts of the trip – sleep deprivation. Those avid Top Gear fans among you might remember Ellen Macarthur talking about it in a Clarkson interview. Not that this was anything like the ludicrous conditions she was facing, but if you are not used to it, it is very difficult to sleep deeply or well on a relatively cramped boat, and as it is, you are rotating on 2 hour night watches. In reality I probably managed to snatch 20 minutes of fitful sleep at a time totalling maximum 4 hours over 2 nights and 2 days. By the end of the second day, with the third night of sleeplessness ahead of us I started to understand why they use this as a form of torture!
I have to say though, this feeling was more than compensated for by some of the natural wonder of the trip. There is something quite amazing about the endless hypnotic blue grey vastness of sea, in all directions, as far as your eye can see. The monotony is punctuated by the occasional flying fish and not much else. It gives you a tremendous sense of perspective . Even more so the amazing night skies – I think this was one of the highlights for me. The endless sea of stars, from the bright familiar constellations which are all we see at home, to the myriad faintly iridescent swirls that make up galaxies billions of light years across and billions of light years away.
‘Hands that flung stars into space….’
The other really beautiful thing about the night sky is the way the light changes as the night progresses, just as it does in the day. Stars wax and wane to varying degrees and the moon rises and sets just like the sun, sometimes with some spectacular colour displays of its own – I have never seen a fiery blood red moon before. Unfortunately I couldn’t capture it on film! But I will try and post some of the other magical aspect of night sailing – the twilight and the sunrise. The photos don’t really capture the amazing glows across the water at first light – our eyes are so much better at perceiving the wonderful spectrum of colours it makes. Plus my photographic skills were not up to the job of compensating for a heaving ship on a long exposure.
One of the other factors that gives you a sense of perspective is the real power of the seas, even with relatively mild chop (only 6-8 foot swell at worst). A sea perfectly capable of stopping our boat dead in the water with each slap of the waves as we beat upwind was mild in terms of what size the Arabian sea can muster when the conditions are right. It is the unpredictable nature of sea that makes you realise that you are tremendously vulnerable and fragile bobbing along – something I don’t often find myself thinking about day to day.
The trip did have its hairier moments – a disturbing number of which involved the autohelm which we christened Abraham! Abraham is vital to sailing with a less experienced crew like we were, as it allows the only fully competent helmsman (David) to get some much needed rest while someone else keeps watch and adjusts course according to the wind. The basic job of helming and holding that course is done by Abraham. One such hairy moment was towards the end of the first night, when we had set our course fairly constantly and there were light winds and a calm sea, so that David and Sam drifted off into sleep. I was lying on the deck wrapped in a blanket drifting in and out. Around 7 hours later, I got up to check our course and bearings, which seemed to be OK. As I emerged from the cabin, I noticed that Abraham was in fact not plugged in! He had merely been holding the tiller at whatever course he was steering when the plug came out several hours before, and by the grace of God the wind had not changed and the boat had sailed herself pretty much in the right direction.
By the second night the winds and waves had really picked up, and I found myself awoken from a seated doze as the boat suddenly pitched violently under a wave, throwing me forward. As I came to, I realised I had crashed into Abraham's digital box of a brain and sheered it from its mounting – essentially decapitating him! Surfacing from my daze, I saw the box was nestled neatly in the crooks of my elbows where I had braced my fall against the leeward seat! Thankfully, the tiller arm carried on its electrical whirring happily as Abraham corrected course! A sigh of relief breathed!!
At the end of that second day and into the third night, just when I thought I couldn’t possibly continue without some sleep, David announced he was feeling really quite unwell and needed to lie down. Sam, age 63 with high blood pressure and a heart condition had already conked out for the night exhausted by a combination of sunstroke and dehydration from not drinking sufficiently. And David himself had had a mini-stroke last year. I suddenly realised no-one except the now-feeling-unwell skipper actually knew how to sail this boat as we chuntered along 8 miles off shore! Er….right then!
Amazing what reserves you find available when you suddenly need them – a serious answer to prayer. I spent the rest of the night navigating and trimming sails and autohelm to keep us on course while David got some much needed sleep. GPS makes the business of discerning the difference between your heading (compass bearing) and your actual course (track over the ground also influenced by waves, current and leeward drift) significantly easier than it would be by dead reckoning the old fashioned way. When you think about the tremendous storms on big oceans and the tiny little boats and comparatively primitive charts and navigation tools that 15th and 16th century mariners had, it leaves you in awe of their global voyages.
The best bit of sailing was saved for the final day. We had expected to be another 48 hours from where we were at dawn of that day, but a sudden flattening of the seas and a significant increase in the wind saw us flying up the Maharashtra coast. Often times, the winds were enough that under full sail we were finding it hard to hold the tiller to course! What an awesome exhilarating feeling, foaming water rushing past the rails as you cut cleanly along at nigh on the maximum speed she will do (around 6 or 7 knots): the boat heeled over at well past 45 degrees, Genny (the big foresail across the front of the yacht) dipping in the water; feet dangling over the windward rail, surf cracking over the bow and spraying into the cockpit covering us in a fine dusting of salt as the sun quickly evapourated it. We managed to make almost double the progress we had expected and finally made port in Mumbai harbour on Monday evening.
Grimy and knackered and desperate for a decent hot meal and a shower, I was just grateful to have finally arrived. But with some time to reflect, suddenly I understand what attracts people who sail competitively to this sport. The combination of exhilaration and exhaustion and satisfaction is a lot like what you feel when you flog up a mountain in less pleasant conditions to get that view from the top and that amazing “Done it” feeling. As David put it, lots of sailing is really grim and uncomfortable, and the best bit of most trips is as you are putting into port with the feeling of having survived; but then it somehow takes on a different colour in the memory with the benefit and separation of time, and you look back and think: that was totally brilliant and I really enjoyed it! Massochistic tendencies? Or self delusion? Answers on a postcard…l.
posted by Duncan at 8:30 am
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