An Irresponsible Adult

Chapter Seven

It is Tuesday morning, just before noon. I am back at the nav station, writing another entry for the Soundings blog. It has been beautiful out since sunrise. I have been steering a course dictated by some coordinates I received yesterday from weather router Herb Hilgenberg. Actually, he gave the waypoints for crossing the Gulf Stream to Monica, whom I had called on the satellite phone after I picked up part of a garbled radio conversation between Herb and Peter McCrea, who is about 120 miles ahead on his sailboat Panacea. The few words I heard from that conversation had me sufficiently worried that, even if it means I will eventually be disqualified for breaking the rule against getting unfair outside help, I thought it a matter of prudent seamanship to understand the rest of the conversation.
Herb is a volunteer weather router. You don’t have to pay for his service. All you need is a single sideband receiver to hear his forecast. With a transmitter, you can check in directly with Herb, give him your coordinates and get his customized forecast for your precise location. I have a receiver on Robin, and I’ve been struggling to get good reception. The $100 antenna I purchased on the Internet so far has not been able to bring Herb’s voice consistently into Robin’s cabin.
Yesterday afternoon, I heard Peter give Panacea’s location to Herb. I heard just a few of Herb’s words. It sounded as though he said “front forming near Florida.” Then Peter, who is sailing this race for the eighth time and who is my age, replied: “Then I’ll try to get to Bermuda by Thursday,” or words to that effect. It sounded as though he was responding to a warning, but I clearly did not know what Herb was predicting.
I had a means at my disposal of finding out, and to fail to seek the details would certainly be an unwise decision should an ocean storm be heading my way. So after deliberation, I turned on the satellite telephone and called Monica, who was at work in Philadelphia. I gave her Herb’s telephone number and asked her to call him. Ask him what he told Panacea, I said. Later, we talked again. Herb had given her coordinates for the best place to cross the Gulf Stream. There was no mention of impending foul weather. And so, after shortening sail and then lying ahull for a while in the roughest seas I had yet encountered, I began at dawn sailing toward Herb’s coordinates. My course was 20 degrees to the west of the rhumb line.
Now I am blogging about the last few hours.

I’m surprised that I’m spending so much time in Robin’s cabin. That was not my plan. I thought I would ride the whole way in the cockpit in order to keep my watch. But last night, the weather drove me inside and I’ve stayed put.
Right now, as Robin rolls side to side in a 6 to 8 foot following sea, there are ovals of sunlight coming through the ports and racing up and down the starboard side of the cabin. The sea is a deep, inky blue. I’m keeping an eye on the wave action. The waves are rollers and the ride is pleasant. But the wind is blowing 15 to 20 and I don’t know if that will rise enough to cause these waves to begin breaking. If it did, I’d want to get the “washboards” in the companionway in case Robin’s cockpit gets pooped.
I’m in the port settee, which for now is the low side of the boat. The laptop is on my thighs. In a minute, I’ll stow it and go check the instruments.
The GPS, which gives the coordinates, boat speed over the bottom and course, is mounted inside the boat near the companionway and nav station. The radar display is above the nav sation, and I check it about every half hour at night and in fog. It gives a reading out to 24 miles. No need for that right now, although a bank of clouds ahead – maybe the Gulf Stream – may change that.
Instruments [have been] checked and, a mile astern, Curlew was crossing my path. I talked with Brian Guck. Comparing notes, I realized I must have written Herb’s coordinates incorrectly. I’ve already crossed the Gulf Stream. It is a beautiful morning and I’m steering toward [Bermuda].


It would be understatement to say that I am confused. Brian’s course seems to be nearly 90 degrees east of mine, and he says he is sailing straight for Bermuda. How, I wonder, can I be so far off the path? Since I never plotted my own crossing of the Gulf Stream, I have no context for Herb’s waypoints. I am paying for allowing myself to leave Newport unprepared. I turn the satellite phone back on and this time, I call Herb directly. He is astonished. Yes, he tells me, I have already crossed the Gulf Stream and should forget about the waypoints he gave Monica. He gives me new coordinates for entering the favorable flow of an eddy south of the Gulf Stream but to my west. I write the information down and adjust my course accordingly.
I have the sense that I am flying blind. I knew where Bermuda is. I could point Robin in that direction and sail along with Curlew. Instead, I have chosen to let others guide me. Again comes that familiar sense, the one that accompanied me back in Newport Harbor just before the race began. The sun is shining and the wind is blowing, moving Robin along at about four knots, so there is no dread. But there is the feeling of inevitability, of resignation. With very little surgery, I can slice away at these emotions and locate the source. I have already written about it in a blog entry that ran on June 2, while Bill Haldeman and I were sailing somewhere off Long Island, heading for Newport.

It dawns on me that coming to the starting line of the Bermuda One-Two as the means of taking one’s first significant solo offshore sail shares many of the pitfalls involved with the first time one climbs to the top of a ski jump holding a pair of skis. In both cases, the outcome is seriously in question.
There is another way to sail to Bermuda. Go down to the dock, get on your boat and go. If you don’t tell anyone, no one will know. You may not make it. You may turn back or run into problems that thwart your attempt. But it will be a private affair, between you, your boat and the ocean.
There is almost no such option the first time a person decides to try ski-jumping. By the nature of the discipline, there will always be others to witness that first flight. To be sure, the first jump will be on a modest hill, not one of those ski-flying hills you see in the Olympics. But just as on the larger ski jumps, the smaller ones are kept in shape by teams of jumpers who use their skis to groom the landing. A solitary jumper in most cases doesn’t wait for a good snowfall and then give it a shot. He or she joins with others, first to groom and then to use the hill.
Once the grooming is done, the eager jumpers line up to climb to the top of the jump tower. (In the Olympics and other international events, there are elevators.) Every one of these athletes in line for the climb has at some point taken his or her first jump. When they did, they put their skis on their shoulder like all the veterans and began the climb.
In some cases, the steps leading up to the top of the jump are scary enough to turn back those who should not be there. The beginner who mounts the first step of these stairs suddenly finds himself not only following the skier ahead but being followed by an eager hoard. Typically, there is no “down” side to these stairs. Your only option is to climb.
At the top of one of these small jumps, there is room for only one jumper at a time on the level spot from which a jump commences. So the novice places his skis there, steps into the bindings and looks ahead. Confronting him are two ski tracks in the steep, packed snow on the in-run of the jump. He shuffles forward, and the front of his skis, from his boots forward, are jutting out in the air over the ruts.
Below him the ruts end at the takeoff, which seems to be a very long way down. Farther down is the crest of the jumping hill, which the jumper must clear. Everything beyond the crest is a great unknown from up at the top.
Having reached this precipice, the novice has no choice but to shove off, begin what seems like a headlong freefall and hope for the best.
Facing the starting line of the Bermuda One-Two feels only slightly different. There is an exit ramp. But like the ski jump, there really is no way to practice for this moment of truth. Once the starting line is crossed, all 18 of we novices will be going headlong into our own unknown.
In fact, for me, there never has been an exit ramp off the starting line of the Bermuda One-Two – not since my editor, Bill Sisson, asked me to write a blog about my planning for and entry into the race. The conversation went something like this:

Bill: So, Doug, are you really going to do it? Race to Bermuda?

Me: I’d like to, Bill.

Bill: We were thinking what if you wrote a blog for the web page.

Me: [Perhaps some hesitation marks my response, because no more than two months before, I had sent Bill a business proposal outlining how he and I could create our own blog, write about boating matters, share the space and any advertising revenues we could generate with Soundings and, with success, become wealthy capitalists. He rejected the idea because the company was already thinking about its own blogs. Now, he’s offering me the chance to do the same job in addition to my work as a Soundings reporter but with no extra income, let alone profit sharing.]
Gee, Bill, that sounds like a great idea.

Bill: Okay, we’ll need the first one by Friday.

And with those words, I was locked in as a racer. I could not fail to get to the starting line without some degree of public humiliation or the sense that I had failed my employer. I could not fail to cross the starting line as long as most of the other sailors did, again due to the humiliation factor. Indeed, in the first two days of the race, when I began asking myself why I was out here, I recognized that even if I wanted to, there was no turning back.
And now, I’m more than half way to St. George’s. At noon, I am 342 miles from Newport, with a mere 293 miles of blue water between me and Bermuda.