Climbing on the Carousel 2008 Home Port I dropped my mooring and backed away--or I thought I did. Later I came to believe I was only carried by the ebbing tide. I felt some sadness as I shifted into forward and turned north. BOSTON is written on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s stern, but Opua, New Zealand, is her true home port, and I love it there. I glanced back at the mooring until I couldn’t see it any longer. Then at the marina and familiar buildings ashore, and at New Zealand’s green hills: emerald, olive, forest, sea, lime, and more shades for which I don’t have names. I hoped I wasn’t seeing them for the last time. Three miles north off Paihia, a brief shower created a rainbow. As it faded, I cut the engine and set the sails and turned my mind toward the ocean ahead. The seas were confused off Cape Wiwiki, the northern entrance to the Bay of Islands, which caused the anchor to roll at the bow, which caused me to realize that I had forgotten to remove the anchor from the bow, a task that would have been considerably easier on the mooring than in these rebounding waves. I decided to wait until we were past the cape and into deeper water before going forward, but went into the cabin to get a wrench to loosen the anchor shackle and needle nose pliers to remove the seizing wire with which I had secured the shackle pin. As I climbed down the companionway ladder I felt and heard the vibrations of a freewheeling propeller. To prevent this, I always shift into reverse to close the blades of my folding prop after I turn off the engine while underway. I felt certain that I had done so, but went back on deck and did it again without any effect. I removed the companionway ladder and the engine cover and crawled onto the port quarter berth with a flashlight. THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was sailing at seven knots and the shaft was spinning merrily and loudly, rising to mad crescendos as we rolled down short, steep waves. Back on deck I furled the jib and lowered the main and started the engine. I shifted into forward and we seemed to power forward. I shifted into reverse and nothing happened. I cut the engine. Shifted into reverse again and could still feel the prop freewheeling. Back to the quarter berth where I finally saw that the cover of the transmission shift cable had spit and the core of the cable was bulging out one side. I used a wrench to shift the engine into reverse manually, which brought blessed silence. I briefly considered turning around and going back, but I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t need reverse again until we reached Cairns, and with luck not even then. Weather Windows Too much is made of “weather windows,” particularly in places like New Zealand where you can wait a very long time for a weather map that doesn’t include a low. I don’t recall the expression being used when I started sailing forty years ago. Perhaps it is a corruption of the space program’s “launch window.” Once I move away from land I don’t receive external forecasts. I predict the weather by wind and sea state and clouds and a barometer. To read of the giant race boats’ ability to choose their weather is a revelation; but those of us who can’t sail at 20 knots are pretty much stuck with what comes to us. What I don’t want on departure are headwinds, which are inefficient and make the transition from harbor to sea more difficult. I’d also like an absence of rain, but that isn’t essential. And depending on the situation, gale force winds from astern are not a detriment. My last crossing of the Tasman from Sydney was a fast ride on the north side of a deep low. The forecast when I left New Zealand was for winds from the southwest and southeast for several days, which was perfect. Our course was north seventy miles to North Cape, then northwest to Cairns, Australia. That first afternoon I watched promontories I knew well slip past. I went to sleep early, but was awake at midnight, when the GPS put us 20 miles due east of North Cape. From here on we would do what sailors have always done and adapt to whatever weather came our way. Which Ulysses? Homer leaves Ulysses upon his return to Ithaca, where perhaps we are to imagine him, after ten years of war and ten years wandering the Mediterranean, a man at least in his late forties, basking in the love of his pure wife, Penelope, and pride in his son, Telemachus, respected, prosperous, living through his final Golden Years. Other poets, England’s Tennyson and Greece’s Kazantzakis among them, have thought differently. Their Ulysses is not content to grow old at home, and as an old man sets out again. I thought of that as THE HAWKE OF TUONELA sped north through the first sunset. I missed what I had left behind. I missed my wife, Carol. But there is such joy in sailing away and not turning back. Tilt I don’t know how many miles I have put on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA. At least forty or fifty thousand. But for the past two years I had sailed her as most boats are sailed: part time and along the coast. When we lived aboard in New England, we seldom sailed further south than Martha’s Vineyard and never further north than Maine. Decades earlier in San Diego my normal range was Catalina to Ensenada. And so while THE HAWKE OF TUONELA is prepared for and has been knocked down masthead in the water at sea, it had not happened recently. When the wind weakened and backed southeast instead of veering the predicted southwest, the green sloop was thrown casually around by leftover 8’ waves. I put a preventer on the boom, but after an hour the crash of collapsing sails became too much and I lowered the mainsail, continuing under jib alone. During the night we sailed drunkenly at between three and eight knots. Although the seas flattened some, I had to put up the lee cloth to keep from being rolled from my berth, and I got up frequently to stuff pieces of paper towel in the cutlery rack and rearrange clinking objects on shelves in the galley and the head. And I was struck once again but how much your use your body, always under tension from the constant motion, moving from handhold to handhold, while heeled 20º. Split For three days THE HAWKE OF TUONELA made her way north and northwest before winds that remained generally south and seas that rose to 6’ and fell to 2’. On the third night the wind went light and I knew the right sail was the new gennaker I had brought back with me from the U.S.; but despite moonlight through the clouds, I decided to wait until dawn to set it. At first light I carried the sail and the gennaker furling gear to the foredeck, hooked the tack drum to the chain stopper and the head swivel to the halyard, ran the sheets aft, and raised the sail, which I had set once briefly in New Zealand and so was furled. It was an easy five minute set, with the boat losing little speed during the transition from jib to gennaker. Securing the halyard, which runs to a winch on deck just forward of the cockpit, I moved aft, released the line to the furling drum and pulled on the port sheet, and out billowed a lovely white cloud. Our boat speed jumped .7 knot and our motion smoothed. Perfect, I thought, reserving final judgement only until I get caught with the sail up in a sudden increase and have to furl it in 20+ knots. I stayed on deck for a while to be sure the Monitor could hold our course. In eight knots of wind, it did, and I went below for breakfast. From inside the cabin I sail a boat by sound and feel: changes in the sound of waves and the hull moving through the water; changes in angle of heel and speed. Still I went to the companionway at intervals to look around; and an hour later I was just in time to watch in disbelief as the new sail split wide open, all the way from leech to luff. The furling line lay at hand one step away, but before I could reel in the sail, the leech tape split, too. The two halves of the gennaker wrapped obediently around the luff line. I lowered it to deck and stuffed it in its bag. All my standing rigging and the leather chaffing gear on the spreader tips had just been replaced, and the sail is made of 1½ spinnaker nylon, so a small tear shouldn’t have spread all the way across. I wasn’t sure what had happened, or where I would be long enough to get it repaired. It was great while it lasted. ---------- Unfortunately the excitement wasn’t over for the day. Early that afternoon I decided to get up from where I was reading on the port settee berth and check the self-steering vane. No specific reason. When I moved aft on deck I found that one of its four major support arms had come loose. I furled the jib and tied the tiller amidships. The loose arm was the lower starboard one. The two lower arms are attached to the main frame of the Monitor by bolts that screw upwards. The heads of these bolts have holes drilled in them so a wire can be used to prevent them from turning. While in the boat yard a year ago, I removed the Monitor from the stern to work on it. Apparently I neglected to rewire those bolts. Hanging over the stern, I was able to realign the bolt, which had not yet fallen in the sea. I checked the one on the port arm and found it loose, too. I tightened both and ran seizing wire through them. Then I checked all the other bolts, though those are the only two that screw in upwards against gravity. THE HAWKE OF TUONELA continued to sail while I worked. I skinned both arms. Blood on the stern deck. Film at 11:00. Reverse After a day and night of rain and wind gusting 25 to 30 knots from the south, which sped THE HAWKE OF TUONELA north under a deeply furled jib, we were becalmed. I decided that this was a good time to see what would happen with the engine. It started. I shifted into forward with a wrench and saw the shaft begin to turn. but on deck when I increased the throttle, there was no forward motion. I went through this process several times, up and down the companionway ladder from engine to cockpit. It made no sense, unless the prop was fouled or had fallen off. I wrote in the log: I am thinking of turning around and heading back to New Zealand. That was the last such entry. I made some coffee and went for a swim. First I had to dig out my mask and the boarding ladder, which necessitated removing almost everything stowed on and beside the starboard quarter berth: buckets, split gennaker, dinghy, dock lines, life raft. I fit the boarding ladder into its bracket on the side of the hull, secured it with a line as well, and dropped the end of a jib sheet over the side. The sails were down. No wind. A two foot swell. And the instrument system said the clear water was 71ºF. I climbed down the ladder and stepped into the ocean. It felt good. THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was moving slowly forward. I drifted to the jib sheet, grabbed hold of it, steadied myself, took a breath and dove. The prop was there and not fouled. I opened and closed both blades. Surfaced. Dove again and turned the prop and shaft. They moved as they are supposed to. As I climbed back up the boarding ladder. I didn’t understand, but I was happier. A few hours later, THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was powering at 5.7 knots over still smooth seas and I did understand: the frayed cable had enough resistance to shift the engine out of gear by the time I got on deck. I removed the cable coupling from the transmission, shifted manually into forward, and found success. I dislike clutter and don’t carry an excessive number of spare parts on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, but I did have a spare engine control cable. When uncoiled it was several feet longer than needed, but it would work. Two days after my swim, I fit the spare cable. This took four hours, mostly lying face down on the port quarter berth and reaching down with my left arm, around other parts of the engine and its cooling system, while THE HAWKE OF TUONELA rolled along. Among other things I had to drill a hole in a bracket for a new bolt to replace the rusted one whose head broke off when I tried to remove it. My battery hand drill is too big for the space, so I used a Dremel tool, but its biggest drill was smaller than the bolt. I managed to enlarge the hole, then dropped the bolt. It fell only a few inches and had to be in the engine compartment, but I could not find it and eventually used a different one. In the end, I again had an engine I could shift into gear from the cockpit, and the left side of my body was covered with bruises. Bent Trades The start of our second week at sea found us at 27º South. On the pilot charts for April and May almost all the winds above 28º have east in them, but our wind persisted from the southwest. After sunset one night the wind abruptly doubled form 13 knots to 26, and it was quicker to furl the jib than lower the main, as I usually do to reduce sail on a reach. The mainsail on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA is only 232 square feet. I vanged it down, and the green sloop sped along. I woke several times during the night. We felt motionless. Thinking that I needed to set the jib, I checked the instruments and saw that we were making 7 knots under the main alone over a smooth sea. I verified this with the GPS and went back to sleep. At dawn the wind was down to 20 knots and I did set part of the jib. Our boat speed was always at least seven knots, often over 8, and I saw 9 briefly. I must confess to leaving the chartplotter on all morning so I could keep track of our SOG. I wanted a decent day’s run. At noon we had one: 164 miles, more than a third of it under mainsail alone. I didn’t expect that wind to last, although I wouldn’t have objected if it did. We were beam reaching to the northwest. But the wind was from the southwest, and the trades in the Southern Hemisphere are from the southeast. The sky began to fill with evenly spaced low white puffs of clouds: a trade wind sky; but no trade winds. The world seemed to be opening up, though it was probably only my mind. We had not had bad sailing from New Zealand, with only one day of rain and no serious headwinds, but only now did I feel at home again on the sea. The cares of land had fallen away, and only waves and sky and wind and the green sloop remained. I sat on deck one afternoon, watching the waves and wondered how many I had seen over the years: tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? millions? The Carousel There are terms that are patronizing and dismissive. “Milk Run” to describe a westward circumnavigation mostly before trade winds is one of them. I believe it is used by overstuffed men sitting in overstuffed armchairs, who have probably never crossed an ocean much less circumnavigated,. I, who have circumnavigated four times, twice west in the trades, twice east in the Southern Ocean and Cape Horn, never have used it and never will. East and Cape Horn are unquestionably harder, but both directions are honorable and testing and real, as so much of modern ubran life is not, particularly on boats with crews of one or two who have to do it all, day and night, for 25,000 miles or more. Nine days out of New Zealand I checked my journal and found that I had been on deck between midnight and 0200 seven of the nine nights. Like MacBeth, sailing doth murder sleep. There is no “milk run.” However there are in both hemispheres carousels of wind. In the Northern Hemisphere it turns clockwise and in the Southern counterclockwise. Get on the sides close to the Equator and the wind will be--or should be--behind you most of the way around the world. I was there; but the wind wasn’t. For three days THE HAWKE OF TUONELA sailed beneath that trade wind sky, and the wind remained stubbornly southwest. Each day we moved north more than two degrees of latitude. On the pilot charts, the percentages of east wind approached 100%. Has global warming comes to this? I wondered. Finally, as we neared the offshore reefs: Saumarez, Wreck, Kenn, Frederick, Marion, Flinders, and my favorite, Heralds Surprise, that give the Coral Sea its name, the wind began to back. When it moved east of south, I knew we had climbed onto the carousel. One afternoon, although we were sailing well under jib alone, I set the old spinnaker on the gennaker furling system. Although it has less area than the jib, being cut fuller and of lighter cloth, it is a better off wind sail, and we gained .5 of a knot, and as always the ride smoothed out. I sat on deck until sunset, riding up and down on the carousel’s wooden horse--though that may have been the of THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, listening to music as you always do on a carousel, watching the waves and the sail, feeling the green sloop in perfect balance, and thought: What a good thing this is to do. (To clear with officials at Cairns, Australia, you must enter Marlin Marina, where I was assigned a downwind slip. Although they had men on the dock to help with lines, with 20-25 knots of wind behind me, I was very glad to be able to shift into reverse.)

Climbing on the Carousel

2008

Home Port

I dropped my mooring and backed away--or I thought I did. Later I came to believe I was only carried by the ebbing tide.

I felt some sadness as I shifted into forward and turned north. BOSTON is written on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s stern, but Opua, New Zealand, is her true home port, and I love it there. I glanced back at the mooring until I couldn’t see it any longer. Then at the marina and familiar buildings ashore, and at New Zealand’s green hills: emerald, olive, forest, sea, lime, and more shades for which I don’t have names. I hoped I wasn’t seeing them for the last time.

Three miles north off Paihia, a brief shower created a rainbow. As it faded, I cut the engine and set the sails and turned my mind toward the ocean ahead.

The seas were confused off Cape Wiwiki, the northern entrance to the Bay of Islands, which caused the anchor to roll at the bow, which caused me to realize that I had forgotten to remove the anchor from the bow, a task that would have been considerably easier on the mooring than in these rebounding waves.

I decided to wait until we were past the cape and into deeper water before going forward, but went into the cabin to get a wrench to loosen the anchor shackle and needle nose pliers to remove the seizing wire with which I had secured the shackle pin.

As I climbed down the companionway ladder I felt and heard the vibrations of a freewheeling propeller. To prevent this, I always shift into reverse to close the blades of my folding prop after I turn off the engine while underway. I felt certain that I had done so, but went back on deck and did it again without any effect.

I removed the companionway ladder and the engine cover and crawled onto the port quarter berth with a flashlight. THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was sailing at seven knots and the shaft was spinning merrily and loudly, rising to mad crescendos as we rolled down short, steep waves.

Back on deck I furled the jib and lowered the main and started the engine. I shifted into forward and we seemed to power forward. I shifted into reverse and nothing happened. I cut the engine. Shifted into reverse again and could still feel the prop freewheeling.

Back to the quarter berth where I finally saw that the cover of the transmission shift cable had spit and the core of the cable was bulging out one side. I used a wrench to shift the engine into reverse manually, which brought blessed silence.

I briefly considered turning around and going back, but I didn’t want to. I wouldn’t need reverse again until we reached Cairns, and with luck not even then.

Weather Windows

Too much is made of “weather windows,” particularly in places like New Zealand where you can wait a very long time for a weather map that doesn’t include a low.

I don’t recall the expression being used when I started sailing forty years ago. Perhaps it is a corruption of the space program’s “launch window.”

Once I move away from land I don’t receive external forecasts. I predict the weather by wind and sea state and clouds and a barometer. To read of the giant race boats’ ability to choose their weather is a revelation; but those of us who can’t sail at 20 knots are pretty much stuck with what comes to us.

What I don’t want on departure are headwinds, which are inefficient and make the transition from harbor to sea more difficult. I’d also like an absence of rain, but that isn’t essential. And depending on the situation, gale force winds from astern are not a detriment. My last crossing of the Tasman from Sydney was a fast ride on the north side of a deep low.

The forecast when I left New Zealand was for winds from the southwest and southeast for several days, which was perfect. Our course was north seventy miles to North Cape, then northwest to Cairns, Australia.

That first afternoon I watched promontories I knew well slip past. I went to sleep early, but was awake at midnight, when the GPS put us 20 miles due east of North Cape.

From here on we would do what sailors have always done and adapt to whatever weather came our way.

Which Ulysses?

Homer leaves Ulysses upon his return to Ithaca, where perhaps we are to imagine him, after ten years of war and ten years wandering the Mediterranean, a man at least in his late forties, basking in the love of his pure wife, Penelope, and pride in his son, Telemachus, respected, prosperous, living through his final Golden Years.

Other poets, England’s Tennyson and Greece’s Kazantzakis among them, have thought differently. Their Ulysses is not content to grow old at home, and as an old man sets out again.

I thought of that as THE HAWKE OF TUONELA sped north through the first sunset. I missed what I had left behind. I missed my wife, Carol. But there is such joy in sailing away and not turning back.

Tilt

I don’t know how many miles I have put on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA. At least forty or fifty thousand. But for the past two years I had sailed her as most boats are sailed: part time and along the coast.

When we lived aboard in New England, we seldom sailed further south than Martha’s Vineyard and never further north than Maine. Decades earlier in San Diego my normal range was Catalina to Ensenada. And so while THE HAWKE OF TUONELA is prepared for and has been knocked down masthead in the water at sea, it had not happened recently.

When the wind weakened and backed southeast instead of veering the predicted southwest, the green sloop was thrown casually around by leftover 8’ waves. I put a preventer on the boom, but after an hour the crash of collapsing sails became too much and I lowered the mainsail, continuing under jib alone.

During the night we sailed drunkenly at between three and eight knots. Although the seas flattened some, I had to put up the lee cloth to keep from being rolled from my berth, and I got up frequently to stuff pieces of paper towel in the cutlery rack and rearrange clinking objects on shelves in the galley and the head.

And I was struck once again but how much your use your body, always under tension from the constant motion, moving from handhold to handhold, while heeled 20º.

Split

For three days THE HAWKE OF TUONELA made her way north and northwest before winds that remained generally south and seas that rose to 6’ and fell to 2’.

On the third night the wind went light and I knew the right sail was the new gennaker I had brought back with me from the U.S.; but despite moonlight through the clouds, I decided to wait until dawn to set it.

At first light I carried the sail and the gennaker furling gear to the foredeck, hooked the tack drum to the chain stopper and the head swivel to the halyard, ran the sheets aft, and raised the sail, which I had set once briefly in New Zealand and so was furled. It was an easy five minute set, with the boat losing little speed during the transition from jib to gennaker.

Securing the halyard, which runs to a winch on deck just forward of the cockpit, I moved aft, released the line to the furling drum and pulled on the port sheet, and out billowed a lovely white cloud. Our boat speed jumped .7 knot and our motion smoothed. Perfect, I thought, reserving final judgement only until I get caught with the sail up in a sudden increase and have to furl it in 20+ knots.

I stayed on deck for a while to be sure the Monitor could hold our course. In eight knots of wind, it did, and I went below for breakfast.

From inside the cabin I sail a boat by sound and feel: changes in the sound of waves and the hull moving through the water; changes in angle of heel and speed. Still I went to the companionway at intervals to look around; and an hour later I was just in time to watch in disbelief as the new sail split wide open, all the way from leech to luff. The furling line lay at hand one step away, but before I could reel in the sail, the leech tape split, too. The two halves of the gennaker wrapped obediently around the luff line. I lowered it to deck and stuffed it in its bag.

All my standing rigging and the leather chaffing gear on the spreader tips had just been replaced, and the sail is made of 1½ spinnaker nylon, so a small tear shouldn’t have spread all the way across. I wasn’t sure what had happened, or where I would be long enough to get it repaired.

It was great while it lasted.

----------

Unfortunately the excitement wasn’t over for the day.

Early that afternoon I decided to get up from where I was reading on the port settee berth and check the self-steering vane. No specific reason. When I moved aft on deck I found that one of its four major support arms had come loose. I furled the jib and tied the tiller amidships.

The loose arm was the lower starboard one. The two lower arms are attached to the main frame of the Monitor by bolts that screw upwards. The heads of these bolts have holes drilled in them so a wire can be used to prevent them from turning. While in the boat yard a year ago, I removed the Monitor from the stern to work on it. Apparently I neglected to rewire those bolts.

Hanging over the stern, I was able to realign the bolt, which had not yet fallen in the sea. I checked the one on the port arm and found it loose, too. I tightened both and ran seizing wire through them. Then I checked all the other bolts, though those are the only two that screw in upwards against gravity.

THE HAWKE OF TUONELA continued to sail while I worked. I skinned both arms. Blood on the stern deck. Film at 11:00.

Reverse

After a day and night of rain and wind gusting 25 to 30 knots from the south, which sped THE HAWKE OF TUONELA north under a deeply furled jib, we were becalmed.

I decided that this was a good time to see what would happen with the engine. It started. I shifted into forward with a wrench and saw the shaft begin to turn. but on deck when I increased the throttle, there was no forward motion. I went through this process several times, up and down the companionway ladder from engine to cockpit. It made no sense, unless the prop was fouled or had fallen off.

I wrote in the log: I am thinking of turning around and heading back to New Zealand.

That was the last such entry.

I made some coffee and went for a swim.

First I had to dig out my mask and the boarding ladder, which necessitated removing almost everything stowed on and beside the starboard quarter berth: buckets, split gennaker, dinghy, dock lines, life raft.

I fit the boarding ladder into its bracket on the side of the hull, secured it with a line as well, and dropped the end of a jib sheet over the side. The sails were down. No wind. A two foot swell. And the instrument system said the clear water was 71ºF.

I climbed down the ladder and stepped into the ocean. It felt good. THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was moving slowly forward. I drifted to the jib sheet, grabbed hold of it, steadied myself, took a breath and dove. The prop was there and not fouled. I opened and closed both blades. Surfaced. Dove again and turned the prop and shaft. They moved as they are supposed to.

As I climbed back up the boarding ladder. I didn’t understand, but I was happier.

A few hours later, THE HAWKE OF TUONELA was powering at 5.7 knots over still smooth seas and I did understand: the frayed cable had enough resistance to shift the engine out of gear by the time I got on deck. I removed the cable coupling from the transmission, shifted manually into forward, and found success.

I dislike clutter and don’t carry an excessive number of spare parts on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, but I did have a spare engine control cable. When uncoiled it was several feet longer than needed, but it would work. Two days after my swim, I fit the spare cable.

This took four hours, mostly lying face down on the port quarter berth and reaching down with my left arm, around other parts of the engine and its cooling system, while THE HAWKE OF TUONELA rolled along. Among other things I had to drill a hole in a bracket for a new bolt to replace the rusted one whose head broke off when I tried to remove it. My battery hand drill is too big for the space, so I used a Dremel tool, but its biggest drill was smaller than the bolt. I managed to enlarge the hole, then dropped the bolt. It fell only a few inches and had to be in the engine compartment, but I could not find it and eventually used a different one.

In the end, I again had an engine I could shift into gear from the cockpit, and the left side of my body was covered with bruises.

Bent Trades

The start of our second week at sea found us at 27º South. On the pilot charts for April and May almost all the winds above 28º have east in them, but our wind persisted from the southwest.

After sunset one night the wind abruptly doubled form 13 knots to 26, and it was quicker to furl the jib than lower the main, as I usually do to reduce sail on a reach. The mainsail on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA is only 232 square feet. I vanged it down, and the green sloop sped along.

I woke several times during the night. We felt motionless. Thinking that I needed to set the jib, I checked the instruments and saw that we were making 7 knots under the main alone over a smooth sea. I verified this with the GPS and went back to sleep.

At dawn the wind was down to 20 knots and I did set part of the jib. Our boat speed was always at least seven knots, often over 8, and I saw 9 briefly.

I must confess to leaving the chartplotter on all morning so I could keep track of our SOG. I wanted a decent day’s run. At noon we had one: 164 miles, more than a third of it under mainsail alone.

I didn’t expect that wind to last, although I wouldn’t have objected if it did. We were beam reaching to the northwest. But the wind was from the southwest, and the trades in the Southern Hemisphere are from the southeast.

The sky began to fill with evenly spaced low white puffs of clouds: a trade wind sky; but no trade winds.

The world seemed to be opening up, though it was probably only my mind. We had not had bad sailing from New Zealand, with only one day of rain and no serious headwinds, but only now did I feel at home again on the sea. The cares of land had fallen away, and only waves and sky and wind and the green sloop remained.

I sat on deck one afternoon, watching the waves and wondered how many I had seen over the years: tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? millions?

The Carousel

There are terms that are patronizing and dismissive. “Milk Run” to describe a westward circumnavigation mostly before trade winds is one of them. I believe it is used by overstuffed men sitting in overstuffed armchairs, who have probably never crossed an ocean much less circumnavigated,. I, who have circumnavigated four times, twice west in the trades, twice east in the Southern Ocean and Cape Horn, never have used it and never will. East and Cape Horn are unquestionably harder, but both directions are honorable and testing and real, as so much of modern ubran life is not, particularly on boats with crews of one or two who have to do it all, day and night, for 25,000 miles or more. Nine days out of New Zealand I checked my journal and found that I had been on deck between midnight and 0200 seven of the nine nights. Like MacBeth, sailing doth murder sleep. There is no “milk run.”

However there are in both hemispheres carousels of wind. In the Northern Hemisphere it turns clockwise and in the Southern counterclockwise. Get on the sides close to the Equator and the wind will be--or should be--behind you most of the way around the world.

I was there; but the wind wasn’t. For three days THE HAWKE OF TUONELA sailed beneath that trade wind sky, and the wind remained stubbornly southwest.

Each day we moved north more than two degrees of latitude. On the pilot charts, the percentages of east wind approached 100%.

Has global warming comes to this? I wondered.

Finally, as we neared the offshore reefs: Saumarez, Wreck, Kenn, Frederick, Marion, Flinders, and my favorite, Heralds Surprise, that give the Coral Sea its name, the wind began to back. When it moved east of south, I knew we had climbed onto the carousel.

One afternoon, although we were sailing well under jib alone, I set the old spinnaker on the gennaker furling system. Although it has less area than the jib, being cut fuller and of lighter cloth, it is a better off wind sail, and we gained .5 of a knot, and as always the ride smoothed out.

I sat on deck until sunset, riding up and down on the carousel’s wooden horse--though that may have been the of THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, listening to music as you always do on a carousel, watching the waves and the sail, feeling the green sloop in perfect balance, and thought: What a good thing this is to do.

(To clear with officials at Cairns, Australia, you must enter Marlin Marina, where I was assigned a downwind slip. Although they had men on the dock to help with lines, with 20-25 knots of wind behind me, I was very glad to be able to shift into reverse.)