The Last Degree

2005

    Glass.

     Perfectly smooth except for occasional slight undulations that briefly distort the reflection of THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s green hull like a fun-house mirror, alternately making her fat and thin.  Polished silver water in all directions as far as my eye can see.  A fine anchorage, except that it is two miles deep and three hundred miles offshore, and I have been stuck in it now for six days.

    I had left Savusavu, Fiji, in mid-September, after only a week back on the boat. 

    I like Savusavu; but I have discovered in the past few years that I like the tropics a bit less than I used to, and I have never enjoyed being alone there.  Carol, my wife, had planned to join me in Fiji, but a career and city change intervened.  I am happier alone in New Zealand, so instead of getting a cruising permit, I cleared for Opua where I have a mooring in the Bay of Islands, and sailed.

    It was a passage south.  Eighteen degrees of latitude—from 17°S to 35°S—and only five of longitude, 179°E to 174°E, which decrease in length as we move away from the Equator.

    I did not expect it to be pleasant.

    While sailing north from Opua to Tonga in May, I had strong winds behind me most of the way, and I often thought then that I was glad I wasn’t going in the other direction.

    Now the first three or four hundred miles figured to be close-hauled on port tack against southeast trade winds, which though generally moderate, often blow steadily at 20+ knots.

    This would be followed by the convergence zone, which is a roll of the dice.

    And New Zealand’s weather is characterized by a quick succession of highs and lows chasing one another across the Southern Ocean and the Tasman Sea. 

    I first sailed to New Zealand in 1976, and I have seldom done so without experiencing a gale.  A gale isn’t the end of the world.  Or not usually.  Wind direction is important.  In 2003 I had a quick passage across the Tasman from Sydney on the edge of a gale, and I had ridden a gale blowing from astern a good part of the way to Tonga in May.

    But you can’t always pick the direction, and a gale from ahead is not much fun.  For me, as for many of those migrating across the Pacific for the first-time, the passage to New Zealand was just something that had to be done.

    In the event, none of it was as I expected.

    While I don’t believe in weather forecasts beyond 72 hours and am skeptical of those beyond 48, I had checked the weather charts before I left and found only light and variable winds expected in Fijian waters.

    This is what we had the first afternoon, as I cleared the reef off Vanua Levu and started south, sailing some, powering some, and eating dinner on deck as we ghosted past Koro Island.

    With several reefs and islands to avoid I didn’t get to sleep until midnight, when we were clear of all but Kandavu, which was far enough ahead not to be a problem until well after dawn.

    At 0400 I was awakened as the boat heeled 30° and sudden rain pounded the deck.  Not bothering with foul weather gear in the tropics, I went on deck and partially furled the jib. 

    By the light of the almost full moon, only partially obscured by clouds, the sky ahead seemed to be clearing.   Fifteen minutes or a half hour, I thought, and this will be over.

    But dawn found the wind still blowing at 25-30 knots directly on the nose, forcing THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s bow toward the island of Ngau, which I had thought safely behind us.  I went on deck again in the rain—this time in foul weather gear—and tacked to port.  Our bow was now pointing toward Kandavu.

    By noon the rain had stopped, but the wind hadn’t.  Kandavu and its off lying reefs stretch 40 miles.  I could no longer pass them to the east, so I eased sheets for several hours of pleasant reaching in their lee until I could pass to the west.

    We were off the west end of Kandavu at midnight, and with some reluctance, expecting to get hammered as we moved from the shadow of the island, I reduced the jib, put a reef in the main, and hardened up until the bow was pointing south.

    But we were lucky.  The wind had backed to the east and I was able to ease sheets.  191°True, the course to the entrance to the Bay of Islands, was a beam reach.

    The next morning I wrote in the log:  ‘This may be perfect sailing.  7 knots in the right direction.  The final test will be whether I can sit on deck this afternoon without getting wet.’  I also noted that when pumping the bilge I found the corpse of a dead wasp.  I doubt that wasps think of such things, but it seemed a lonely and bewildering death.   I had no idea how he got there.

    That afternoon I sat on deck, listening to music on the cockpit speakers without a wave breaking over me, so the sailing was certified perfect.  And that was all the trade winds we saw. 

    The wind continued to back.  Midnight found me on deck, as so often it does, this time lowering the main which was blanketing the jib.

    A few hours later I was on deck again, jibing the jib as the wind continued to the northwest.

    There are a couple of places in the world that I have bypassed and later wished I hadn’t.  Cocos Keeling off Australia is one; and the Minerva Reefs south of Tonga and Fiji are another.

    Before I left Savusavu, I emailed Carol that I might stop at Minerva on the way south, but that was not likely because they lay a hundred miles east and therefore to windward of my course.  Now with this northwest shift, Minerva was dead downwind.  Still I did not divert.  After all these years I should know that once I go to sea, I tend to stay there; and the wind was fair for New Zealand as well.  Besides I didn’t think it would last.

    Three days later the wind was still blowing between west and north and we were more than halfway to the Bay of Islands.  600 miles down; 550 to go.  Before departure I had expected a nine day passage, plus or minus two.   Strong headwinds could still slow me, but I began to think in terms of minus.  Then we stopped.

    I had just finished my dinner of freeze dry chicken curry at sunset, when the wind died, but the sea did not immediately turn to glass.  The leftover waves from the northwest exploded against a long swell from the south.  Gravity overcame the Monitor, so I hooked up the tillerpilot, which kept us pointed more or less in the right direction until a chorus of alarms began to beep through the night.  One was the tillerpilot telling me it was off course.  Another I finally identified as the Micronet instrument system informing me that the internal battery of one of its transmitters was low.  All this with the boat being thrown in sundry directions.  I believe it is called Bedlam.

    The only way to regain control was to turn on the engine.

My first circumnavigation and most of my second were made in engineless boats.   While I have developed a certain respect for THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s little two cylinder Yanmar diesel, I don’t power much.  One tank of fuel—18 gallons—usually lasts me a year.  I don’t know how far I can power.  I have never tried.  And I haven’t been alongside a fuel dock in three years.  From time to time I row over with a jerry can.  I had done so in Savusavu, and when I sailed the tank was perhaps ¾ full.  I had already powered several hours the first day out.  I guessed that I still had thirteen or fourteen gallons of fuel.  At a little over a quart an hour at 5.5 knots in smooth water—which this certainly wasn’t—the math said I could power between two and three hundred miles.  This last seemed optimistic as well as depressing.  All I wanted to do now was power enough to keep from being thrown around the cabin by leftover waves until the wind returned.

Those waves were not big, only 5’ and 6’, but when they met the swell they became vertical, dropping THE HAWKE OF TUONELA and burying her bow like a half tide rock.

I kept reducing rpms until I found a reasonably effective way forward at 4 knots.  And then I put my iPod earplugs in to block the drone of the diesel and tried to sleep.

Awakening every hour or so, I felt the seas diminish during the night, until by dawn they were smooth; but there was no wind.

THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s fuel tank is located under the port quarter berth and is in cross section triangular to follow the lines of the hull.

I folded back the cushion, removed the cover and tried to assess how much remaining fuel we had with the dipstick; but with the tank much smaller at the bottom than the top, this provides only a rough estimate.  There seemed to be somewhat more than half a tank. 

I put everything back in place and went on deck to look for wind.

There was none.  But we couldn’t power forever.  I turned off the engine.  And we sat.

The day’s runs tell only part of the story:  46, 48, 35, 92, 54, 56.  And I powered for part of three of those days.  Except for the one day of 92 miles, which came in a brief interlude between high pressure systems, they were not day’s runs at all, but day’s crawls.  We moved down the chart like a slow stain.

For several days I was patient.  I had food and water aboard for months.  I read.  I listened to music.  I wrote in a journal I keep under the title, ‘self-portrait in the present sea,’ (sic) which I certainly was.  I told myself that I had no schedule, that I was doing pretty much what I would have been in harbor and was as comfortable.

Sometimes I left the sails up.  Often it was so still that they didn’t slat and I hoped they would catch the least breath of wind.  Sometimes they did slat and I furled the jib and lowered the main.  One night I left the main up and woke to find THE HAWKE OF TUONELA ghosting back north.  By the time I got us turned around and checked the chartplotter, our day’s run since noon, which when I had gone to sleep at 2200 was a magnificent 13 miles had been reduced to 10.

In 74° F temperature and cloudless sky, the ocean looked inviting, but with water temperature only 58°F I did not go for a swim.

There are few joys greater for a sailor than feeling his boat sailing again after being becalmed.  I was teased by that joy many times, finally too many.

One night I felt us actually heel a few degrees.  I heard water ripple against the hull.

I went on deck and felt a slight breeze, only 3 or 4 knots, blowing it is true directly from where we wanted to go, but wind, any wind, was better than none.  I checked our course and found us sailing due west.  I tacked.  I had to go forward to pull the clew of the jib past the babystay.  When I got back to the cockpit I found that as we settled onto the opposite tack, our bow was pointing due east. 

I told the universe what I thought of it. 

The universe accepted my observations stoically.

The slight wind died soon, as all the other winds had died, so it did not matter where the bow was pointing anyway.

Crossing the equator and the doldrums eleven times had never slowed me like this.  I searched my memory and could recall only one other calm this prolonged, and it was in the Red Sea in my open boat in 1982.

We were close enough to New Zealand to hear their weather forecasts on AM radio at night, and, eventually, during the day.  15 knot westerlies were blowing in the Bay of Islands and the usual gale in Wellington.  But whatever was happening south of us, stayed south of us.  The big high north of the country was supposed to move away.  But it didn’t move away from THE HAWKE OF TUONELA.

    I went on deck the morning of September 26, our twelfth day out of Savusavu.  I had had a good night’s sleep; but then why wouldn’t I?  The boat couldn’t have been steadier in a boatyard.

    I looked around.  Motion, even the thought of motion, had vanished.  The sea was glass, shimmering in the early sunlight until it merged impeccably with a cloudless sky.  This is really quite lovely, I told myself.  And I am sick of it.

    I went below and measured the remaining fuel once again.   Six or seven gallons.

    I turned on the chartplotter.  250 miles to go to the entrance of the Bay of Islands, and 11 beyond that to the Quarantine Dock in Opua.

    I turned on the radio.  The big high north of the country was supposed to move away.  This seemed familiar.  West wind of 15 knots was supposed to become northwest at 20 knots tomorrow.  So did this.

    I went back on deck and turned on the diesel for what I knew would be my last day of powering until land was in sight.

    Occasionally cat’s-paws touched the water; occasionally a cloud appeared to the southwest.  Occasionally I had hope. 

At 1730 I turned off the engine.  We still had 200 miles to go.  I tried to sail.  We couldn’t.  I left the main up and the tillerpilot on.  Everything was quiet.  I did not regret not having more fuel.  Jerry cans tied to lifelines are dangerous in heavy weather and aesthetically unacceptable.  I regretted not having wind.

I awoke at 2300 to find us moving.  Forgetting for the moment that the tillerpilot was steering rather than the Monitor and so we couldn’t have reversed course, I checked the compass mounted on the main bulkhead to be certain we weren’t heading back to Fiji again, before I went on deck and felt the sweetness of a light breeze from the west against my skin.  2 knots with only the main became a lavish 3 knots when I unfurled the jib.

I had been disappointed too often to believe in this wind until the next morning when the barometer finally began to drop; a delightful grey haze to the west instead of that incessant, depressing blue; and our speed leapt from 3 knots to 4.

Our day’s run to noon was 74 miles; The Bay of Islands lay 155 miles ahead.

Steady progress found this followed by a 118 mile day, usually a poor run for THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, but in context dazzling.

We crossed 34°S that morning.  17° down; 1° to go.

During the past few years, I had been considering paying the duty and importing THE HAWKE OF TUONELA into New Zealand, so that I would not have to sail away each year.  The reasons for this were numerous.  As I have mentioned I have come to enjoy the tropics less and New Zealand more.  I love the Bay of Islands:  the view from my mooring of light and shadow changing on surrounding hills and water; watching boats maneuver for the start of the Opua Cruising Club’s Wednesday night race; the three mile walk up and down steep hills and valleys into Pahia; anchoring off Russell and rowing ashore for lunch; and all the coves and bays and anchorages.  And, though I have said that I have it all:  Carol and the freedom to sail my boat.  I seldom have it all at the same time and have felt increasingly fragmented.  Keeping the boat in New Zealand will still leave me divided, but into only two parts, not three or four or five as I have been.

I left on my first attempt at Cape Horn in November 1974.  This was September 2005.  During those 31 years I had circumnavigated four times:  twice via Cape Horn; and I had spent seven or eight years at sea, most of them alone.

I looked around at the ocean and wondered if this was my last degree.  We were finally sailing well, making seven knots broad reaching.  I turned and faced aft.  All those years.  All those miles.  All those storms.  All those adventures.  All those joys.  Three or four boat lengths astern our wake was erased by the waves.

Bits of New Zealand appeared in early afternoon off to the west and ahead to the south. 

New Zealand is green and brown, grey and blue.  Green of fields and forests and ferns and water.  Brown of exposed rock, earth, dunes and beaches.  Sky about equally grey and blue.  But mostly, almost overwhelmingly green

    We were off Cape Wiwiki, the northern entrance to the Bay of Islands at sunset, and in an appropriate end to this atypical passage I made an unaccustomed entry into port after dark, lowering the sails as the wind died and using the last of my fuel to power to Opua, where I tied to the Quarantine Dock at 2030.  A month ahead of the migrating fleet, THE HAWKE OF TUONELA had the long dock to herself.

    I went below and poured myself a glass of Laphroaig and took it back on deck, where I sat in the stillness. 

    The water between us and the shore was black from the night and gold from the reflections of shore lights.  And it was glass.