I've been having trouble posting to Usenet; I apologize if this is a
duplicate. So, some memories of sailing in the 60s.

Once upon a time...

I mostly grew up in New Orleans, although we spent a few years in
Seattle when I was young. All my sailing had been in the (semi)tropics
of New Orleans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Bahamas, and the Northern
Caribbean. So, the first thing I wanna talk about, before I get to the
crossing-the-Atlantic part, is arriving in England in the Fall. Now,
at this point in my life, looking back at this experience with
thirty-plus years of perspective and additional cold-weather
experience, I gotta say, in restrospect, since then I've had worse.
Lots worse. But at that time, Damn! It was nasty freezing cold! I
hated it.

No doubt my discomfort was exacerbated by a lifetime of stories by my
Irish granny who never missed an opportunity to launch into a Jeremiad
against the evil, hateful, etc. English who mercilessly slaughtered
our good, Catholic ancestors, etc. Anyway, it was a new, alien
environment and horriby cold (to me) and I wasn't enjoying it. My
emotional landscape at the time was confused, too. I had really wanted
to be a teacher; but survived my first actual teaching experience for
only a whisper of time before the administration and I agreed to part
ways. So, I was in career limbo. (Yeah. That means unemployed.) And
for those of you who are younger and don't remember the late 60s,
early 70s, there was a war on and a draft to go with it. None of this
all-volunteer stuff. I suspect I would have had a tough time getting a
passport if I hadn't already had one for a while.

To further set this narrative in its particular time, remember that
this was before GoreTex, before polypro, before capilene, before
hand-held calculators, even. I graduated college using a slide rule.
I've joked before that my slide rule and my sextant nowadays just sit
on my desk, keeping each other company; although I do still use my
circular slide rule (E6B) for flying. Anyway, I had a suitcase full of
shorts, T-shirts, and bathingsuits, in anticipation of getting to the
Caribbean; but those items were covered by wool clothing and
foul-weather gear. And was I ever glad to have that stuff. Generally,
I was pretty unhappy.

Then my friend, Peter, showed me his boat, our future home for The
Picaresque Atlantic Adventure.

One more bit of important background. We were young guys and all our
big boat (offshore) sailing had been done as crew on other peoples'
(nice) boats. Big boats. Comfortable boats. Big boats. Expensive
boats. Big boats.

Peter's boat looked like it might be a pregnant version of my Rhodes
19, which I had overnighted on in warm weather but which I didn't
think would make for an adequate ocean-crossing passagemaker. Seeing
this boat for the first time didn't make me jump up and yell,
"Yeee-haa!" It was more like, "Oh ****! What have I gotten myself
into?" But I trusted Peter; he was a steady sort of guy. Steadier than
I was, to tell the truth. And he was effusive in his enthusiasm and
seemed to have planned everything down to a pretty granular level of
detail. Plus he'd been figuring that he'd hafta do this trip solo and
he was a bit intimidated by that. Then I became available (unemployed)
and my joining him seemed fortuitous. So I decided to stick it out and
not catch a jet home.

Before long, we were loading provisions and shoving off for points
South, with points West to come soon after. We had no refrigeration
and a two-burner stove. Our larder ran heavily to canned goods. I've
always been a Coca-cola junkie; so my personal luxury cache consisted
of a coupla cases of Coke. I've never been a beer drinker; so Peter
loaded beer as his personal luxury item. Bye, England!

Cold and wet. Wet and cold. At this time of my life, all my sailing
had been in tropical or semi-tropical conditions. Sailing from England
was like being in the ninth circle of Dante's inferno. I kept
expecting to see a frozen Satan appear on the horizon. Pure misery
until we made sufficient Southing. Since then, I've had colder and
more miserable experiences; but at that time, that was an extreme
experience for me. I vaguely remember Brest, La Coruna (I think), and
Lisbon, followed by Cadiz, Gibraltar, and, finally, Tenerife (future
site of the world's worst aircraft disaster). Getting warmer as we
progressed South. That was nice.

Preparing for our Western departure we counted on the prevaling winds
at this time, the Northeast trades. We, of course, got the "freak"
occurrence of Westerly and Southwesterly winds, from light and flukey
to force 5. At least it was warm and pleasant, unlike our England
departure.

Some days we cooked along so fast it was exhilarating. Other days we
were becalmed and if it went on for too long we'd expend a little fuel
and motor along just to feel like we were accomplishing something. The
self-steering vane was worthless; so we hand-steered. (Well, except
that we had a line with a coupla turns aroudn the tiller which mostly
did the trick. It wasn't like "pure" hand-steering) Eventually, we got
mostly Northeast trades and made somewhat steady progress, although it
seemed desperately slow when measured on the chart.

Some random memories: ocean swells from some distant storm coming by
us on a very gentle day - those suckers were 300 yards between, tall
as a house and stretched for miles - you went from claustrophobic in
the monster troughs to seeing forever at the crests and back again a
couple-three times a minute; having to go to the top of the mast in
conditions like that to retrieve a spinnaker halyard lost one day when
we left the chute up too long in mounting weather and tore out the
top; "happy hour" every single night to marvel at the incredible
sunsets; nighttime tubes of phosphorescent light overtaking you on
night watch as porpoises played around us; losing generation capacity
to some corroded fitting, and having to conserve battery power for the
rest of the trip so we'd have running lights when we needed them
again.


"Good morning, Caribbean!" was the first thing we picked up on our
radio on the morning we made landfall. Yee-ha! We ended up bearing
down on the wrong end of the island, so my navigation wasn't what I
had thought (you get kinda lazy when "navigation" is something you do
once a day, if you even get around to it.) The rest of the day was
full of feverish navigation as we tried to dust off our skills and
figure out whether we were far enough offshore to miss the breakers we
could hear. We got a little tense with each other, then burst out
laughing, smoked up the last of the ganja so as to arrive with clear
consciences (and clear storage in case of a customs search), and
sailed the rest of the way in without incident, arriving just at
evening time.

After a few days of decompression, I decided that I really didn't
wanna spend any more time on that boat and grabbed a flight home. Got
work as a librarian for a few years before I moved to Seattle. That's
when I started to learn about sailing in the Northwest. But that's
another story...


Frank