Once Upon the Gulf of Maine
by David J. Forsyth

It was mid-June in 2005 when my relationship with the sea was forever altered by a single day and night of raging wind and monstrous seas. The ignorance and anxiety of a novice sailor were swept away in those few hours and replaced with the unshakable confidence of a seasoned mariner.

It wasn’t the first time I’d sailed through squalls and angry seas, but that experience was exceptional and memorable. That night, I acquired confidence in my own capabilities and learned to trust my vessel.

David J Forsyth
www.davidjforsyth.com

Alice Rose was cruising west-south-west in the Gulf of Maine, a few nautical miles northeast of George’s Bank. Her wind-vane steering clung tenaciously to a course of 257˚ true, and a light breeze caressed her starboard quarter. She’d been enveloped in dense fog since the morning of the previous day, and we’d donned our survival suits to insulate us from the cold and damp. Anxiously, we searched the enveloping white shroud for discernible shapes. Had we been blind, we would have seen as much. We listened intently for the faint sounds of engines, fog-horns and bells, but we heard only the gentle scurries of unseen wave crests.

Alice Rose’s radar swept the surrounding sea stoically, searching for indications of other vessels, buoys and debris. I’d read accounts of collisions with partially submerged shipping containers, too low in the water to appear on radar, and the previous summer, I’d come upon the wall of a clapboard house drifting seventy-five miles off the coast. Of course, the odds were against such an encounter, but the possibility existed nonetheless.

It was mid-morning when a blip appeared briefly in the upper right quadrant of our circular radar screen. It faded quickly in the wake of the sweeping arm. I stared intently at the display until the image refreshed again and again, then heard the first, distant low moan of a fog horn. The eerie sound seemed to come from everywhere.

Marine law requires a single blast at two minute intervals while sailing in fog, so for two minutes, I listened to be sure the sound wasn’t a trick of my imagination.

Retrieving our hand-held fog horn from a cockpit locker, I raised it above my head, checked my watch, and depressed the trigger for one second. Its high-pitched squeal sounded more like the cry of an injured gull than it should have.

The anxiety incumbent with sailing amidst dense fog, particularly for a skipper with limited experience, is difficult for a landlubber to comprehend. Imagine crossing a road, even a rural road, while blindfolded. It takes a leap of faith to sail into the white unknown, and the nearby presence of a giant steel hull adds yet another level of apprehension.

Four years earlier on a sunny Florida morning, while crewing aboard a thirty-six-foot Gozzard on the New River, the skipper misjudged the strength of the current as we entered a slip under power. At little more than three knots, we struck an immovable concrete piling and stopped abruptly. Even at that speed, the collision was so violent that one crew member was thrown forward and suffered a severe laceration above his eyebrow. I couldn’t imagine what a collision with a 160,000 ton ship cruising at 18 knots might be like.

Imperceptibly but relentlessly, the blip crept out of the radar screen’s perimeter toward its centre at the speed of a wall-clock’s minute-hand. Its heading remained constant with each sweep of the radar’s needle. While it appeared to be steaming directly toward Alice Rose, I knew the ship’s sophisticated radar would have detected us long before we’d seen her. I was sure her crew had already adjusted her course if needed, and my responsibility was to maintain our heading to avoid inadvertently re-entering their path. Seconds ticked by as I waited for some indication the ship would pass us port-to-port, the conventional sea-going protocol, but it remained in the right hemisphere of the radar screen. I had neither training nor experience interpreting radar images, but at the time it seemed to indicate a starboard to starboard encounter.

The throaty bark of the ship’s horn grew louder. I listened anxiously for the five short blasts that would signal imminent danger of collision.

My confidence resembled Swiss cheese. What if the ship’s crew hadn’t yet seen our certain-to-be insignificant radar blip? What if they maintained their course, while I too held my heading – until she ran us down? I thought of the Stockholm and Andrea Doria and recalled the Empress of Ireland and the Storstad. Both of those collisions occurred in fog and involved sudden substantial course changes. I remained glued to the little radar screen as it swept the surrounding sea at two and a half second intervals.

My resolve reached its limit, or as some would say, I lost my nerve. I altered our course one degree to port. It was a ridiculous compromise between taking evasive action and doing nothing. I hoped it would turn a collision into a near-miss. If we passed starboard to starboard, as I anticipated, my trivial course alteration would increase the vessels’ separation by a few yards.

Subsequent sweeps showed no indication that our relative positions had changed. I felt impotent and wished I’d acquired a better understanding of my JRC 1000 radar system. Was I properly interpreting the creeping blip’s progress? I was certain I’d read the user manual but recalled little beyond the function of the buttons on the control panel. I began thinking about changing course another degree – perhaps several – as the unseen hull approached within two or three hundred yards.

The tension built to a crescendo, then exploded in a millisecond with a mighty fog-horn blast off our port bow. The unseen behemoth was passing port-to-port after all. Though it had been a very trivial adjustment, I had actually turned toward her. The realisation came as a shock. Nevertheless, it meant the danger was in our past. I could relax.

The soft churning sound of her engines suggested an intervening distance of a hundred yards or less, but sound carries well in fog, so it might have been double that or more.

When I looked back at the radar screen, I saw a second, mosquito-sized blip on the far-side of the ship’s course. Amid the excitement of our blind encounter with the steel giant, the other vessel had escaped my notice. Finally, we realised we were just one of two small boats converging on the ship’s predestined route.

'Too Cold for Mermaids'

David J Forsyth is the author of 'Too Cold for Mermaids', an account of his sailing adventures in the Great Lakes and on the North Atlantic.

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By early afternoon, the breeze stiffened, and the fog began slipping over the surface of the gently rolling gulf. The wind puffed and gusted, periodically splattering the deck with a flurry of raindrops and spray. Within an hour or two, the opaque fog transformed into a translucent wall of rain, and the swells edged higher.

As our little Bermuda-rigged sloop crept quietly and incrementally toward the eastern seaboard of the US, the west-bound swells grew in both height and separation. With each overtaking surge, Alice Rose’s stern lifted gently before she slid down the face of the swell. Then the wave crest slipped beneath her hull and raced on ahead. Finally, she dropped into the trough between the swells where she paused to await the next swell. In this manner, she waltzed gracefully toward Boston.

For a while, we remained in the cockpit, huddled beneath the dodger, watching the digital knot meter react to the rising wind. We had no doubt a stormfront had overtaken us, but at the time I didn’t appreciate the severity of the depression. Our wind-vane steering system had by then earned our trust, so by mid afternoon we went below to get out of the swirling rain. We closed the companionway entrance with a one-piece washboard made of clear, half-inch polycarbonate.

Alice Rose pitched and heeled gently as each passing swell slid beneath her hull. She was coming to life as if picking up the scent of Boston Harbour still a couple of days away.

We should have prepared a hearty meal while the weather was stable enough to cook, but being inexperienced, we didn’t. Instead we made sandwiches and coffee.

Up on deck, the wind continued to flex its muscles. Alice Rose’s hull heeled further to port with each gust. Our once white environment turned grey and was edging toward black.

Our dinghy and several jerry cans were tied down on deck, and I wondered if they were secure enough to endure the blow, so I clipped my tether to the starboard jack line and crouched my way forward in wind-driven rain to check their bindings. With everything secure, I returned to the relative comfort and quiet of the cabin.

We should have reefed, but we didn’t. It was my responsibility; my decision; my mistake. Hour after hour, I kept assuring myself that the wind had peaked. It blew twenty knots; then twenty-five as it veered slightly southward. When it reached thirty knots, I was a little concerned, first for the potential that something might break, then for the safety of my sloop and crew. When the wind reached thirty-five knots and the waves grew to just under three metres, Alice Rose‘s motion became more violent. Boiling water and cooking was by then unsafe, even with pot clamps on our gimbled galley stove. We had to brace ourselves repeatedly to avoid being thrown off balance and began accumulating bruises. A fall to leeward might have broken an arm or resulted in a concussion.

My anxiety increased. I’d sailed in thirty-five knot winds a number of times, but only once as the vessel’s skipper, and that was a mere brief squall. I was feeling the weight of responsibility for the safety of Alice Rose and my crewman, Mark.

The eerie whines and screams of the wind in the shrouds competed with the thump of waves slamming against the hull. We looked up through the companionway washboard at a towering wave crest in awe. The windspeed was moving through thirty-five knots and the seas appeared to be coming out of the southeast.

An angry wave crest fell into the cockpit and flooded the port deck, submerging our tightly dogged ports. I’d purchased replacement seals but hadn’t yet found the time to install them. The wave’s weight forced a half-gallon of seawater through the ports’ old neoprene seals, saturating my berth, but thanks to my survival suit it made little difference to my comfort.

Finally, faced with the fact that I’d failed to reef while it was still safe to do so, I announced the need to go on deck. It was by then shortly after 10 p.m. and we were in the midst of the gale.

I carefully studied the radar screen, switched on the spreader lights, and lifted the washboard out of its track. One after the other, Mark and I crawled through a portal into a world of deafening confusion. I clipped onto the leeward jackline and immediately noted the mainsail had ripped along a seam near the leech – not far above the foot. The torn Dacron was flapping frantically like an injured bird.

“We have to get her down quickly,” I yelled.

The glare of the spreader lights created a tangle of dancing, disorienting shadows reminiscent of a strobe-lit discotheque. The screeching wind was frightening and unlike anything I had ever experienced, and the lashing rain was horizontal. The deck writhed and bucked beneath our feet as if trying to fling us into the surrounding darkness.

I braced myself and hauled in the mainsheet, drawing the boom aft. Then I yelled to Mark, who was by then creeping forward on deck, “Pull down on the luff when I release the halyard.”

Mark furrowed his brow and turned his ear toward me. The words had been torn away by the wind as they left my mouth. I shouted the instruction several times before he nodded in acknowledgement. He crept forward along the deck, mounted the coach roof, and embraced the mast, where he awaited the halyard’s release.

I didn’t dare come about in a following gale, so I opened the rope clutch, but the wind pressure jammed the slides against the sail track, resisting Mark’s efforts to haul the sail down. I clambered up onto the coach-roof and helped him pull the sail down.

During Alice Rose’s refit, I’d equipped her with lazy jacks which had been a mere convenience up until then. They proved invaluable that night, when all Hell was breaking loose around us. Together, we bundled the flapping sail along the boom and secured it at more or less appropriate intervals.

In those moments the rest of the world ceased to concern me. Nothing existed beyond the glare of the spreader lights; nothing but empty, black infinity. I, my shipmate, and Alice Rose were alone in the universe. It was an unprecedented profound moment in my life.

I briefly considered replacing the working jib with the storm jib, but the risk of going onto the foredeck would have been irresponsible. If one of us went overboard, even with a tether attached, there was a substantial risk of injury to both the man-overboard and his rescuer.

By the time we’d accomplished our primary goal, the forty-knot gale was clawing at my survival suit and blinding me with salt spray. High on adrenaline, my crewman and I retreated to the cabin to wait out the tempest.

Hours passed as we listened intently to the storm for signs of abatement. My confidence in Alice Rose grew with each hour. By mid-morning, it became apparent that the wind was easing, and our ordeal was coming to an end. The existence of the outside world re-emerged, and I thought of my wife and son awaiting our arrival in Boston. The damage to our mainsail was going to delay our arrival, and they would begin worrying when we failed to arrive as scheduled. I decided to contact the US Coastguard, and ask them to advise my son that we would likely be twenty-four hours late. Otherwise, we would risk being reported overdue.

At 11:30 a.m., I began calling the coast guard on the only radio we had aboard, a marine VHF. “United States Coast Guard Radio, United States Coast Guard Radio, United States Coast Guard Radio. This is Alice Rose, Alice Rose, Alice Rose, Charlie-Foxtrot-Foxtrot-Nine-One-Three-Seven. Over.”

There was no response.

We were beyond the range of coastal stations, and there were apparently no Coast Guard patrols in our area. I waited thirty minutes and tried again. Still no response. For the first time in my life, I felt truly alone and entirely dependent on my own resources.

After numerous calls over the next few hours, we finally made contact at 5 p.m. The radio operator remained patient throughout our weak and broken transmissions. The identification of our vessel, our position, our condition, number of souls aboard, etc. took considerable time, as I carefully articulated numeric details and phonetic spellings over and over again. The wind had by then dropped substantially, and our position and course became a matter of record. I no longer felt alone – others were aware of our existence, and though we’d never met, they cared about our well-being.

Alice Rose and I began the long, serpentine entry into Boston Harbour at 3 a.m. on June 16, 2005. Though I still had lots to learn about cruising, I no longer saw myself as a novice sailor and stepped ashore with newfound confidence.