Preparing for an Atlantic crossing may be inherently more arduous than the crossing itself
Issue 23 : Mar/Apr 2002
A couple of years ago I crossed that last threshold of sailing consciousness and announced I was preparing for a transatlantic voyage. With limited funds, a full-time job and family, and a good old boat that may last have seen blue water two decades ago, I figured it would take me two or three years for the outfitting. The New England sailing season is short, and there are 200 miles between home and our mooring in Downeast Maine.
Two or three years seemed not too bad, however. There was lots of gear to buy, and half the fun would be researching what I needed and which brands to buy. I started making lists immediately. I also began rereading the classic sailing narratives of circumnavigators and ocean-crossers, taking notes on what gear was most essential for them. I paged through old copies of Sail, Cruising World, Good Old Boat, and Practical Sailor. The lists grew longer. Soon I had to make a master list just to keep track of all the other lists.
After a few months the lists were edging out of control. I was still discovering questions, more and more things to attend to, and I hadn’t even begun researching the right answers. The spring when I was scheduled to start implementing the first year’s boat improvements rapidly approached, and I hadn’t even finalized my lists, much less developed a priority plan.
One day, staring at the computer screen and the piles of printouts and clipped articles drowning my desk, I realized I’d become Sisyphus. You may remember Sisyphus — that guy the Greek gods condemned to push a rock up the mountain forever. When he reached the top, he watched the boulder roll back down the mountain, and then he followed it down to begin pushing it up again. For all eternity. I couldn’t remember exactly what he had done to make the gods angry enough to punish him this way. Probably he’d dared to announce he was outfitting his boat to sail across the Aegean.
Still, it was fun for a while. Stacks of sailing magazines were a lot lighter to push around than boulders. Sisyphus also probably didn’t have all those pretty color photos of boats to look at.
Worse than the rock of lists, however, was an insidious sailor’s schizophrenia that split my brain. While the articles and ads in Sail exhorted the virtues of 12 brands of self-steering windvanes costing thousands of dollars, and Practical Sailor ran endless tests comparing them, Joshua Slocum and Harry Pidgeon told me about their cruises alone around the world using their own steering systems of sheets tied to the tiller. While I studied the Web sites and brochures of products to protect me from being run over by a tanker while I slept — radar and radar reflectors and radar detectors and sonar detectors and alarm clocks that woke you to check the horizon every 10 minutes — I was also reading how John Guzzwell and Vito Dumas solo circumnavigated and slept without a worry in the world as their ships simply sailed on. And just when I thought I’d at least completed that particular list of gear, I realized I needed electricity to power my radar and radar detector and sonar alarms and so started a new list of equipment to research: wind generators, water-towed generators, solar panels, auxiliary generators.
My right brain reread Robert Manry crossing the Atlantic alone in 13 1⁄2-foot Tinkerbelle with no more power than flashlight batteries, and Howard Blackburn doing the same alone almost before batteries were invented. Meanwhile, my left brain calculated the amp-hours required to run everything from navigation software on a marinized notebook computer to the latest expensive LED tricolor running lights.
One night my right brain shoved 20 pages of lists through a paper shredder.
In the morning my left brain found those lists on my hard drive and emailed them to my entire address book so that copies would be available no matter what my right brain did.
“Seamanship!” shouted my right brain. “Fail-safe gear and redundant systems!” shouted back my left.
On the next weekend cruise my right brain searched the boat’s lockers and made lists of gear to take off the boat. The next day my left brain installed padlocks everywhere and hid the keys.
My right brain recalled Slocum’s half-dinghy strapped on the foredeck and told my wife that she could have a week in Paris spending the savings I’d earmarked for a life raft. My left brain got up in the middle of the night and ordered so much survival gear — EPIRB, backup GPS, strobe lights, personal watermakers, parachute flares and smoke canisters, signal mirrors, night-vision binoculars, survival suit, spear gun, emergency dental kit, and so on — that even the 6-man life raft it also ordered couldn’t have held it all.
My right brain was a rock happily rolling down a mountain. My left brain laboriously pushed it back up.
My right brain canceled the Internet orders and went sailing. On foggy days it went to bookstores and found still more narratives of the great days of sail before electricity was invented and when survival gear consisted of a fishhook and line.
My left brain threatened not to even get on the !%$%# boat again until I’d followed the latest advice of Practical Sailor and installed redundant system backups for the backup systems of all primary systems.
The sailing season was slipping by without major boat improvements. I started worrying that if I ever did get started on a transatlantic, my right brain might simply push my left brain overboard, and I wasn’t sure where I, myself, would end up if that happened.
Approaching age 50, I now became concerned that I had only two or three decades left to resolve these issues before I was too old to sail across the Atlantic.
One night, taking time off from the West Marine and BoatU.S. catalogs, I was reading a computer magazine and got to thinking about virtual reality software. Breakthroughs were predicted imminently, using direct neurological connections, that promised simulated experiences indistinguishable from reality. A computer flight simulator, in other words, so real you would black out from too many Gs or too little oxygen. Long before I entered a nursing home I’d be able to put on a sensorineural helmet and sail around Cape Horn without leaving my bed. Indeed, if someone slipped the helmet on me when I wasn’t looking, I’d not even know that in fact I wasn’t rounding the Horn or crossing the Atlantic.
That thought haunted me for some time. Could I still take my own boat on my simulated cruise, or would I be forced onto some carbon-fiber hull with unstayed mast and Kevlar sails? If money for virtual gear were no object, how many GPS units would I take aboard? Might I even have a weatherfax — something that had not made any of my lists so far? Would there be any reason not to have all the very best and most expensive gear on my virtual yacht?
Was that what they meant by armchair sailors? Were all those high-tech gear reviews in magazines written for people who actually sailed only in their imagination?
My left brain bristled, but even it couldn’t escape obvious conclusions. Crossing the Atlantic encased in a self-contained rescue pod tracked constantly by satellite to ensure rescue and a warm bed within 17 minutes of the onset of any emergency wouldn’t be much of an adventure. It’s enough to give you pause.
When I’m 90 and off my boat at last, all I can hope is that some old sailor-programmer of virtual reality software sends me to sea with no engine, no high-tech gear, in fact no electronics at all . . . and no left brain.
But meanwhile, I’m still planning my transatlantic crossing. Having gone through all this, I now feel, has provided some benefit. My lists are shorter and more realistic, and I cross off more items than I add. As the boulder tumbles down the mountain, it gets worn and is smaller and easier each time to push back up. That’s sort of like having an old sailboat, I think. The modern gods may have thought they were punishing us when they chained us to our old boats, but some of us wouldn’t have it any other way. After all, there is no such thing as virtual freedom when sailing.
Tom sails Allegro, a 1971 Albin Vega, in Downeast Maine, and really is outfitting for an eventual transatlantic passage.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
