What I Learned at Sea

I have no satisfactory explanation for this, but for almost ten years, I was employed by Playboy magazine in a position that many people described (somewhat carelessly, I often thought) as the greatest job in the world. For an aspiring young writer who'd spent years day-dreaming about exotic lands, it probably seemed as close to perfection as any job could be. The work consisted of foreign travel, with an open expense account and a walletful of company credit cards, and taking notes. It was the kind of job that allowed me to go where I wanted when I wanted, and I did. Someone had to do it, and for reasons best known to those who made the choice, I was chosen.

Perhaps nobody at the Chicago head office fully understood why this privilege had come my way. Certainly, none of us ever knew exactly what the job was, for the issue was confused by the fact that my title on the masthead changed every year or so. It was assumed that I was a kind of travel editor, and for a time I think I was, though at least one editor remained convinced that I was employed by a foreign intelligence service.

There was only one formal definition of my function in the Playboy empire, and that came on the first assignment, a tour of hotels, restaurants and places of amusement in nine European countries, the first of which was Portugal. In Lisbon, I checked into a suite at the Ritz, took a bath in a room that appeared to have been carved from a quarry of pink marble and went out into the city to begin eating and drinking my way into the resort suburbs of Estoril and Cascais. Within a week, I'd collected so many receipts that I had to buy a new bag to hold them and had to invent a new category--nightlife research--for the company expense-account forms. Alarmed by the extravagant costs of the expedition, I phoned Chicago from Lisbon to suggest that we drop the remaining eight countries from the itinerary. Over the crackle of the transatlantic line, I heard the Managing Editor's kindly, confident chuckle: "Don't you worry about that, my boy. You just stay on the road and spend the money. That's your job."

I followed those orders faithfully. Other men might have behaved otherwise in the circumstances, but to me it was work that called for systematic and fairly relentless self-gratification, and through the full, rich years from 1966 to 1975, I applied myself to the task with energy and dedication on a global scale.

Throughout most of that time, I lived in England and went to the office only for the occasional meeting and to collect money for the next journey. When a Senior Editor asked me why, as a staff member of a company based in Chicago, I lived in another country, I could only say that it was more convenient.

It is difficult to convey the enormous sense of well-being that comes to those who travel the world on other people's money; and in my case, perhaps it was inevitable that the money would sometimes be used to gratify powerful cravings. For several weeks of a three-month canoe and river-boat journey across the Amazon Basin in the rainy season, my guide was a man who claimed a deep and almost mystical intimacy with Amazon geography, which he first demonstrated when we became hopelessly lost within a mile of his native village. It took us more than a week to get out and another two weeks before we reached the city of Manaus.

Throughout that period, my guide had only one subject on his mind, and he talked about it with an enthusiasm that never waned during those endless days of rain and epic discomfort: He had a passion for the German city of Frankfurt; it was his lifelong ambition to go there.

This soon became a difficult and intensely boring subject to sustain, since neither of us had been to Frankfurt or knew anything about the place, but my guide adopted the playful attitude that because I had traveled widely, I must also have been to Frankfurt and would one day break down and tell him everything I knew if he kept on about it long enough.

In Manaus, in exchange for his services on the river and in part payment for the occasion when he had led me to a swimming hole infested with piranhas, I helped my guide obtain a passport and gave him a one-way ticket from the jungle to his city of dreams. He went, but he never wrote.

•

As the years rolled splendidly by, there were warning tremors offstage, the rumbling sound of things breaking up in the background. Marriage. Family. Home. In Hong Kong in 1972 I met an American woman who came back to my hotel room and waited until we were in bed before reminding me that we'd been there once before, in Morocco in 1969. She verified this with a summary of incidents from our first encounter: swimming at night in the surf at Agadir, the broken shower in her room, the workmen and their drills outside her window at daybreak. I remembered that, I remembered a woman, but I didn't remember her. I said:

"You've changed your hair; that's what fooled me."

"No, it's the same."

"And you're still singing with that band?"

"No, I'm still a lawyer."

Another wobble came a year later in a movie theater in Tokyo, when I sat in the darkness, sober and wide-awake, timing myself for more than a minute while I tried to remember the answers to these questions: What country am I in? Why am I here?

To coincide with my 39th birthday, in April 1975, and with the intention of writing about charter yachting in the West Indies, I arranged for the magazine to charter a 72-foot schooner and a 60-foot ketch for a two-week cruise in the eastern Caribbean. My fellow passengers were a photographer, his assistants, a stylist, a hairdresser and five models.

"What we're looking for," the photographer said as we set off from Martinique, "are pictures of mature young adults doing mature-young-adult things with each other."

In the Caribbean, I made myself obnoxious among my colleagues by brooding loudly and often about a theme that had developed into a monotonous diatribe--filled with whining and self-pity, no doubt--the gist being that while I'd been everywhere and done practically everything I wanted, I couldn't actually do anything that was of any real value to anyone, and it seemed to me that I didn't know anything of lasting value to myself.

As we sailed from island to island, I couldn't help comparing my way of life with that of the crews of our two chartered yachts and with that of the other sailors we met during the charter. There was a humor and a practical wisdom about them that struck a chord; I admired them for what they could do, for their skills, their knowledge of tools and materials; I envied them for the simplicity of their existence, which seemed to me to combine the greatest freedom with the greatest responsibility. Unlike many of the people I knew, they didn't spend their time in neurotic contemplation of men, women, issues and events that were far removed from them and over which they had no control and that rarely mattered anyway. They were unconcerned about the latest fads or obsessions, the newest celebrities, current movies, books or diets or cults. More important, there was a refreshing and unself-conscious sense of friendship among them, a mutual dependency and trust that took no account of nationality, age or sex. It occurred to me that for the first time in my life, I was among a group of people who did what they did for the love of it, and that what they did was worth doing.

From this it was a short step to the conclusion that I wanted to know what they knew, to be like them, to be one of them; and at dinner on the boat one night, after yet another day of watching naked young models diving from the boat and running along the beach, I said so. One of the models said, "Do you know that nine out of ten people think you're an asshole?"

"That's all right," said Mike Perkins, our skipper. "Nine out of ten assholes think he's OK."

•

I didn't write the story about the charter-yacht business. In Antigua, where our charter ended, there was an old wooden ketch called Fortuna that was leaving the next week for the south of France. I got a place on the boat as a deckhand and flew back to Chicago to hand in the world's greatest job and the company credit cards; there was a brief interview with Arthur Kretchmer, the Editorial Director.

"You must be out of your fucking mind," he said.

I didn't think so. All I knew was that I wanted to pump out the contents of my mind and fill it up with everything it knew nothing about--the sea, boats, weather, navigation, engines, electronics. I wanted to learn how to use tools and to make broken things work again. I wanted to learn enough so that I could take a boat anywhere a boat could go; I wanted to be an ocean sailor.

The drawback to this new passion was a lifelong aversion to the sea; in my experience, the ocean had been mostly a cold and miserable setting for unpleasant memories. Some years before the Playboy charter, I had joined my then--father-in-law, the major, and three of his friends when they sailed his boat from England to Portugal. This was probably nothing more than an attempt to smarm myself into the good books of the old man, a stiff and bristly ex--British-army officer whose sailing philosophy derived from the belief that a clean ship is a happy ship. Ours was neither; for the week or so that the nightmare lasted, I threw up on him, his friends, their bunks, in the galley, over the engine and everywhere on the boat except over the side. When we flew back to London, he sat at the opposite end of the plane from me. We've never spoken since. His daughter, my wife, later sealed the disgrace by drumming me out of the family regiment.

But as I flew from Chicago to Antigua to join the crew of Fortuna, I don't remember being worried by those memories. A new life was starting. I would sail to the (continued on page 134)At Sea(continued from page 124) Mediterranean, learn what I could on Fortuna and then buy a boat of my own in Europe. It would have to be small, because I didn't have the money for anything large, and it would probably be old and made of wood. I'd learn to navigate and sail back to the West Indies before winter.

On the plane, I carried a box of 48 sea books and a short length of line with which I practiced tying knots. By the time we landed, I could almost do the bowline.

In Antigua, I found that Fortuna's mast had snapped off during my absence and the owner had put the boat up for sale. The Atlantic crossing was off. There would be no dolphins, no dicing with death, no spray in the rigging or rousing chanteys with the lads in the fo'c'sle. Instead, I was 39, unemployed and stuck in the West Indies with 48 sea books and Arthur Kretchmer's parting words echoing in my ears.

I bought a sailor's knife--a knife in a holster, with a pair of pliers in a pouch and an instrument called a marlinespike in another pouch. This accessory had a commanding, nautical appearance, and I wore it daily as I made my way around the dockyard at English Harbour, looking for a place on a boat bound for Europe. I didn't know what a marlinespike did or why pliers would be more useful to a sailor than, say, a hammer, but I felt that by wearing them on my belt, I'd stand a better chance of being taken on, that a captain would say, "You're just the man we're looking for; you've got your own knife and pliers."

Unfortunately, with the hurricane season about to start, most boats had already left the Caribbean, and the few that were still in port were fully crewed or were staying in the islands. There was only one exception, and that was a large schooner that I will call Diamond (for reasons that will soon become obvious, many names in this journal have been changed).

Diamond was going to Gibraltar as soon as she could be made ready. I knew the boat--she had been tied up stern to at the dock when I arrived in Antigua--and she was so beautiful that I hadn't dared ask the skipper if he needed crew. She had elegance and power in every detail: two towering masts, a broad sweep of scrubbed teak deck, highly polished varnish on the deckhouse and hatches and an open cockpit with a large spoked wheel. A classic yacht.

But her captain was not a deeply beloved man; taken as a whole, the summary of dockyard intelligence on Diamond's skipper described a man who combined the social graces of Himmler and Torquemada. The kindest thing said of him was that he was a maniac. Sailors I met around the dockyard talked about the boat in terms of rape, overwork, bad food, random violence, imprisonment and mental cruelty of various kinds. "Captain Demento, psycho of the seven seas," was how one ex--crew member described him. I decided that such talk could only be gossip and rumor and wasted no further time in presenting myself at Diamond's gangway, wearing my knife and pliers. The skipper was a small, stocky man with a lopsided grin and bright-blue, lively eyes; he was polite, affable and to the point.

"What can you do?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"When do you want to move aboard?"

•

We stayed in Antigua for more than a month, working every day of the week from first light to late at night. Much of the work required moving heavy things from one inaccessible place to another. It took six of us to carry the mainsail ashore to be sewed. Tons of lead had to be removed, collected and taken off the stern gangway in a wheelbarrow. We sanded, scraped, varnished, painted, scrubbed, built a new freezer, installed wiring, fitted new rigging, mended sails and awnings. Tools lost their mystery, while fingers and other parts of the body lost their feeling. On Diamond, I began to understand why sailors described themselves as boat niggers.

We took turns being janitor of the day, a form of penal servitude under Bertha, the 18-year-old cook, a large, fierce girl from Los Angeles. One of her recurring specialties was half-frozen chicken on a bed of charred vegetables, spattered with sauce clots and liberally dusted with gravy powder. Some of us called it chicken outrage, though not when Bertha was around; levity wasn't her strongest point.

The first mate was called Two-Six; he was Bertha's boyfriend, a Nebraskan who had once made a living by grappling with powerful animals on the rodeo circuit. Two-six was the timing phrase he used when we pulled on lines against a load. The other deckhand was Zack, a tall and Biblical New Yorker who performed ritual calisthenics on deck in homage to a religion that combined cosmic overdrive and gravity fields. There was very little communication among any of us except when work was concerned. The crew ate up forward; the captain and his wife dined alone in the main saloon.

Our captain had a skin disease on both arms that made him scratch with two hands at once, which sometimes gave the impression that he was plucking an invisible stringed instrument. As he scratched, showers of dust and flakes dropped to the deck; when he was angry, his fingers picked at double speed and his quick blue eyes jiggled in their sockets like steel balls in a child's puzzle.

About an hour before we were due to pick up the anchor and sail, Zack decided to quit. It was a question of bad karma in the force field and planetary death pragmatics, he explained. Two-Six took him ashore in the dinghy and returned half an hour later with a young French couple and their duffel bags.

"Isn't that nice?" the captain said as we watched the girl, a fresh-faced, pretty blonde in a bikini and sarong, lift her leg over the rail.

•

It took us 31 days to reach Gibraltar. I was seasick once, the first day, and for the last time since. Between watches, we kept on working, scraping, sanding and varnishing; the captain sat in the cockpit, watching us with his bright eyes, scratching energetically at his arms. Except for the first few days, when we ran into one violent squall after another, the Atlantic proved to be an anticlimax; it just lay there and heaved gently, one long, hot and windless day after another.

But two weeks after we had left Antigua, the French couple were prisoners in the fo'c'sle, forbidden to go on deck except for an hour in the morning and restricted to bread and water. The captain said it was because they had complained about the food. Another version of the truth was revealed in a trial--if it can be called that--held in the main saloon. The captain sat at a large gimbaled table while the rest of us--the accused, Two-Six and myself--stood around the table, bracing ourselves against the occasional swell. The French couple spoke no English; I'd been called in as interpreter. For the sound track, we had Wagner at high volume on the saloon stereo.

"Tell these slimy frogs I've had it up to here with their fucking whining about the food," the captain said, using the conversational tone a man might take when asking his gardener to trim the lawn. "Tell them all frogs are slimy; tell them I shit on their flag."

I explained that the captain understood they were unhappy about Bertha's cooking. The girl burst into tears and said that wasn't the problem; everyone complained about the pig swill that Bertha called food; the problem was that she had refused to sleep with the captain and his wife. Cet homme dégoÛtant, she said, had come on deck at night while she was at the wheel and had chased her from one end of the boat to the other, naked and waving (continued on page 150)At Sea(continued from page 134) his thing at her.

"Bullshit," the captain responded; they were slimy frogs, whiny, wimpy frogs who deserved everything they had coming to them. They could stay in the fo'c'sle and eat bread and water, and if they tried to come on deck without permission, Two-Six would kick them back down the hatch.

I passed along the gist of this to the Frenchman, a slight, popeyed young man with a wisp of a mustache, who wisely took no part in the proceedings except to put his arm around his girl's shoulders and give her an occasional cautionary squeeze.

The captain brought this melodrama to an end with a brief tirade against France (Napoleon was a jerk and a faggot, De Gaulle was a transvestite with smelly armpits, etc.); then he told the mate to escort the prisoners forward and lock them up. I was left alone with him. His hands scratched furiously at both arms so that a little sunlit shower of skin dust floated above the table, and his eyes rested on mine for a moment before jittering off on their hoppy little dance.

"You wanna sleep with my wife? Eh? Keep her happy when I'm on watch?"

•

My trial took place a few days later, after the French couple had been released. They showed a remarkable change of attitude toward the captain and his wife, as if they had all become better friends. Unfortunately, I'd been given a few pages of bad script in the show in which I'd refused the captain's offer of his wife, had argued with him about the punishment of the French couple and had taken the dramatic step of living on bread and water until he set them free.

At my trial (the main saloon and Wagner again), the captain talked about England, my place of birth, and its well-known and degenerate hopelessness in all fields of human activity. For an hour, he talked about British traffic lights and road signs. He didn't like them. He didn't like British astronomers, jockeys or musicians, and the subject of cloud formations over the British Isles brought him to his feet in trembling rage. He hated British clouds.

I was an ingrate and a scheming troublemaker. Who did I think I was, waking up our French friend the previous night just because he was a little late relieving me on watch? (Our French friend had, in fact, been more than half an hour late, and I'd waked him twice.) As punishment, I was to stay below for three days and take my orders from Bertha, the teenaged tyrant.

"But I'm 39 years old," I said.

"Tough titty," the captain said. "You just fuck off--and don't let's hear any more of the old crapola about your fucking furlongs and your imperial gallons. Teach you bastards."

The rest of the passage passed without incident. A week or so later we were all friends, after a fashion, and as we sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar, the captain served cakes and champagne in the cockpit.

Diamond was going on to the Riviera coasts and Sardinia, but not with me, though I was almost tempted to stay, having grown unaccountably fond of Bertha and Two-Six. But it was already July; I wanted to be back in the West Indies by winter, which meant finding a boat and learning everything I needed to know to make the crossing. On Diamond, I'd learned very little apart from routine deckwork and steering a course; and because the weather had been so bland most of the time, I'd had no rough-passage experience. Celestial navigation, engines and electronics were as much of a mystery when I left the boat in Gibraltar as they had been when I joined in Antigua.

In England six weeks later, I got a letter from Two-Six. He and Bertha had quit the boat. Our old captain had been arrested in Sardinia and jailed on a charge of murdering the occupants of a fishing boat run down by Diamond the previous year in the Strait of Messina.

•

It took me two months to find a boat I could afford. She was a 35-foot wooden sloop, built in 1947, with a 20-horsepower diesel and bunks for five; her name was Khariessa, and she lay at a mooring on the west coast of Scotland. The day after I signed the check, I drove a motorcycle into an oncoming car that was being driven on the wrong side of the road by an American tourist. Although the police measured a 40-foot flight path from the point of impact to the gutter where I landed, there were no serious injuries; but the bandages around my arms, legs and face and the stiffness from numerous cuts and bruises made it almost impossible for me to work on the boat, and I couldn't pay anyone else to do the work. All of this was depressing beyond belief, as the boat had been hauled out of the water for survey in a local shipyard and the diligent surveyor had torn out much of the interior to examine the frames and planks. The debris lay scattered around the rocky, slimy floor of a large shed. I had neither the strength nor the competence to put it back together.

To reach the West Indies by winter, I had to get out of Scotland immediately and down the Irish Sea to Falmouth, on the west coast of England, where I'd planned to look for crew for the crossing; and if I were to avoid the North Atlantic winter storms, I would need to leave Falmouth by early October at the latest. It was impossible. I still knew nothing about celestial navigation--I hadn't even been out in the boat yet; in fact, I knew nothing except that I had dreamed myself into a deep and troubling hole, one that I would have given much to escape.

To make matters worse, the surveyor had dashed any hopes of an honorable retreat by turning in a report of nearly 30 pages, favorable in all respects. "She's strong; she'll go anywhere," he said. This had been great news when I first heard it, but after the accident--as I pondered my situation during those weeks in that dismal shed, while it rained without ceasing and the days grew shorter, darker and colder--it acquired a hollow tone.

On Diamond, I'd made baggywrinkle, which is strands of old rope that you weave into fluffy, sausage-shaped objects and wrap around wire rigging to prevent the sails from chafing against the metal. In the shed, with the rain beating against the corrugated-iron roof, I made enough baggywrinkle for a tea clipper. The stuff was soft and soothing to the touch and reminded me of small, furry, friendly animals.

The yard workers used to watch me. One of them said, "So you're crossing the Atlantic, laddie. Is that this year or next?"

•

Crawford McInnes, Khariessa's former owner, began visiting the yard. He'd owned the boat 12 years and had kept her in immaculate condition; I'd been to his house several times for advice on various bits of equipment. Only Crawford, his family, possibly a few of his friends and the entire labor force at the shipyard realized that I was an incompetent pretender.

"Aye, what a passage to make," Crawford said one day when he found me hobbling around in the shed, picking things up and wandering around with them before putting them down somewhere else. "All the way from Scotland to the Caribbean with Khariessa. But do you no' think it's getting a wee bit late?"

With Crawford's help and the help of an electrician who was so drunk that he was immune to the pain of constant electric shock, the boat went back into the water at the end of September. The two McInnes children joined us for a trial sail, my first, and we cast off the lines on a day when there was a good stiff breeze on Holy Loch and the local yacht club was holding a dinghy race.

I was at the wheel when we headed out across the loch toward the nuclear-submarine base. We put up the sails and I pushed the engine throttle to full ahead so that Khariessa went ramming through the water, through the dinghy fleet, 12 tons of wood surging along in one big lump at full (continued on page 174)At Sea(continued from page 150) speed, with a frozen dummy at the helm. My fingers gripped the wheel as if they'd been welded to it; I couldn't think, I could only stare rigidly ahead at an onrushing submarine that was, in fact, a mile away, anchored. Racing dinghies capsized; I didn't see them, but I heard angry shouts on the wind. The two McInnes children clung to the steeply slanting roof of the cabin; one of them shouted, "You never did it like this, Daddy!"

Crawford discreetly prized my fingers from the wheel and took over. He pulled back the throttle and turned the boat into the wind, bringing her to a stop. Then he told me to try again but to take my time and to maintain contact between the hands and the brain, which I did, successfully. "You have to lose control sometimes before you can learn how to get it back," Crawford said.

Over the next couple of weeks, he led me through everything on the boat. Much of this wisdom went straight into the mental void; there wasn't the time for a prolonged or detailed education, but he showed me how to raise and drop the anchor, stop and start the engine and move the boat around under sail and power, and that would have to do. For the passage from Scotland to Falmouth, I would have to get someone with oceangoing experience, a professional who would teach me how to use a sextant.

The man I found was recommended as a widely experienced seaman and a qualified navigator. "The name's Pete, but my friends call me Rhino, because I'm always charging into things," was the way he introduced himself. He was a chunky Irishman with no teeth and a face like a clenched fist, hard and knotted, and he said at our first meeting that he was in a good mood because General Franco ("my idol") had just ordered the execution of eight Basque terrorists.

The other crew members, Barry and Richard--who lived in my home county of Suffolk and had never been to sea--were already on the boat the day Rhino joined. He came out to the mooring in a dinghy rowed by one of the shipyard men, and he was dressed in a naval uniform of his own design, with an officer's peaked hat and brass-buttoned jacket. Rhino flung his bag over the rail and climbed aboard just as a small launch passed with a couple of people I knew aboard. They waved pleasantly, and my hired professional shouted, "What are you staring at, you slack-jawed bunch of cunts? Get away from here with that poxy boat before we get the flares out." Then he unzipped his trousers, pissed liberally over the side and gave me a terrible wink, saying, "How do you like it so far?"

•

Within 24 hours of leaving Holy Loch and motoring down the Clyde and out into the Irish Sea, I'd learned everything I needed to learn about sailing in heavy weather. I learned that the most important thing to know about heavy weather is to try not to be there when it's happening.

We had motored into Loch Ryan, a dead-end finger of the Irish Sea that pokes into the Scottish coast in a southeasterly direction, and had tied up the boat for a few minutes while we went into a pub near the dock at the head of the loch. The weather changed the moment we stepped back aboard, and within seconds the quiet evening breeze had turned into a screaming gale that blew directly from the northwest, our only way out, and straight along the unprotected shores of Loch Ryan. If you filled a shallow basin with water and then agitated it violently with your hand, the surface of the water would look very much like Loch Ryan looked that night, and if you placed a small toy boat in the basin, it would behave in much the same way Khariessa did.

There was no possibility of escaping from the loch, nor could we stay at the pub dock, because the wind was blowing us against it and we would have been smashed if we'd stayed.

We spent the night in the deepest water we could find, holding the bow into the wind with the engine and praying that the fuel would outlast the storm. Rhino and I stayed in the cockpit and took turns driving. I don't know what happened to Barry except that he was somewhere below, and Richard wedged himself into a space between the table and the saloon bunk, unable to move. Rhino greeted each vicious smash of sea with his three favorite phrases, "And now for something completely different," "How do you like it so far?" and "It's no good, Captain, I can't 'old 'er."

It cleared before daybreak and we tied up at the town dock and slept. There was a note from Barry when I woke. He had called home and had been told that his son had an infected toe; he was sorry, but he had to leave. He left his love on the note and a jar of organic spices in the galley.

But there was no damage to the boat, and that was reassuring. We spent a couple of days cleaning up in Loch Ryan and then put back to sea. The clutch shaft snapped a day later, and we drifted for two days in a dead calm, moving steadily toward the Irish coast with the tide. A fishing boat eventually towed us into Dun Laoghaire on Dublin Bay, and Rhino jumped ashore before we tied up. I found him in a pub three days later; he was in one of his difficult phases. When asked if and when he was coming back to the boat, he said, "How would you like it, you needle-nosed weasel, if I tore off one of your arms and beat you to death with it?"

He came back the next day, sober and contrite, and he brought a new crew member, a man called Danny, a grinning, shambling Irishman with a cleft palate who snarfled and hing-honged incomprehensibly but who seemed to have a rapport with Rhino that I thought might make our shipmate an easier man to live with. By way of an apology, Rhino said, "It's the pills I have to take for the pains I get in my head. They make me go mad when I do the drinking, and if I don't do the drinking, I go crazy. You understand, don't you?"

In Falmouth, which we reached without unpleasantness, a new and alarming problem developed: I'd paid Rhino--paid him more than we'd originally agreed--but he refused to leave the boat. At first, he said it was because he wanted to help me get Khariessa ready for the crossing; then, when it became clear that he had no such intention, he said he was staying because he wanted to, whether I liked it or not. For about a week, there were just the two of us aboard. At night, I lay in my bunk and cowered like a terrified rabbit while Rhino rampaged around the saloon and the fo'c'sle, kicking the bulkheads, smashing empty bottles and shouting curses. I thought about getting the police but realized that this would only delay my departure even further, and it was already late October. I considered clubbing him with an oar, throwing him into a dinghy with his bag and taking him ashore, but the thought of what could happen if I killed him by accident or if he woke before I got him ashore was even more terrifying than his awful presence.

Finally, I told him I'd decided not to take the boat anywhere, that there had been a death in my family, that I was locking up and leaving. It wasn't hard to fake the sorrow, but it didn't fool Rhino for a minute; he derided the entire story as a pack of lies. But it worked; he packed and left. My last sight of him was on the wind-lashed rainy streets of Falmouth, striding along the middle of the road in his naval uniform and bare feet.

Rhino dropped out of my life without teaching me the first thing about celestial navigation. He said I didn't deserve to learn it and he had no intention of teaching me. But I couldn't hold that against him. During our stormy passage down the Irish Sea, he'd taught me something more valuable: He'd handled the boat beautifully under power and sail, his seamanship was superb and he made you do things his way, fast and properly. He'd kept us alive. Watching him provided many clues to the central question about handling a boat and sailing: "How do you do it?"

•

Khariessa left Falmouth on November 19, 1975. Aboard were Brian, whom I'd met in a Falmouth pub and who'd done some day sailing, and Mike Stratton, a professional yacht-delivery skipper and licensed navigator. Stratton would go with the boat to the Canary Islands and teach me how to use the sextant; Brian would go all the way to the West Indies.

The dreaded winter storms in the North Atlantic failed to materialize; in fact, the winds were so light that we motored most of the way from England to Portugal, across the Bay of Biscay and down to Lisbon, where we stopped to refuel before carrying on to the Canary Islands. Stratton patiently led me through the intricate mysteries of celestial navigation, which proved to be neither intricate nor mysterious. The sextant measures an angle between the object--sun, moon, star or planet--and the horizon; the observer writes down the angle and the exact time of the observation; then, after consulting a couple of reference tables, does some simple addition and subtraction to determine the boat's position, which he marks on the chart. On the way to the Canaries, I did it dozens of times and felt fully confident when Stratton left us and flew back to England.

We picked up three more crew: Les, a Canadian who had been swimming around in the harbor looking for a ride, and Sue and Elaine, who were camping on Gran Canaria. None of them had ever sailed before, which was probably just as well, because the day after we raised the anchor and left the Canaries for Barbados, our next port, some 2700 miles to the southwest, my first sextant sight showed that we were in the Moroccan desert, in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. The next day's sight was slightly better: It placed us south of Marrakesh. I thought it only fair to tell the crew that something seemed to have gone wrong, but none of them seemed worried. "Perhaps it's unusually high tides," said Sue. If I'd felt more confident about being able to find the Canaries, I would have turned back and taken a quick refresher course in navigation.

On the third day, the sextant calculations miraculously sorted themselves out and showed that we were roughly where we should have been, about 400 miles southwest of Gran Canaria. Reassured by this, I drew a straight line on the chart from that point to Barbados and instructed everyone to enter in the log every two hours the course sailed and the distance traveled. Perhaps I thought that at the end of a given time, Barbados would suddenly jump out in front of us and we'd have to slow down to avoid hitting it.

We rode the northeast trades for two weeks on long, high ridges of sea that marched across the ocean like ranks of pyramids, building and falling and building again, sweeping everything before them to the west and carrying us with them on the long run downhill.

The steering gave way at the start of the third week. It happened after we'd changed course to investigate red distress flares; we found nothing after a search of several hours, and when we turned to resume our course, the rudder wouldn't respond. Khariessa had a hydraulic steering system, which meant that liquid was stored in a reservoir and was pumped under pressure through pipes and into a cylindrical ram connected to the rudder; Crawford McInnes had explained it in Scotland, but the wisdom had failed to take. I no longer remembered how the system worked or what the word hydraulic meant. But I knew we had a length of steel pipe that could be used as an emergency tiller, so we bolted that onto the rudder while we got the hammers out and tried to beat some sense into the broken steering. A few days later, we'd fixed it by taking the system apart and finding out how it worked.

We were now lost. There hadn't been time to take sights for many days, and even if there had been, the weather was unsuitable: too much cloud and only a rare glimpse of the sun or the moon. A more experienced navigator would have been able to use the stars; I tried a couple of times, but the damned things wouldn't cooperate, producing results that staggered across the chart. I blamed my sextant, which was a cheap plastic instrument that looked like a gift in a box of corn flakes, but then I discovered a new branch of the science of navigating, and our problems were over.

It was called creative navigation, and it was based on the theory that when you're lost, you put a mark on the chart at the place you think you ought to be and may be, if you're lucky. This assumed position can be used as the basis for the next position, and so on. After you've done that for several days, you forget that you invented the original position, and the conviction gradually grows that you were right in the first place. We swept onward to the west, happy in our ignorance.

I was knocked overboard by the boom one night when Elaine was steering and everyone else was below, asleep. Elaine turned around to speak, and in that split second of inattention, she forgot where the wind was coming from, the sail filled from the other side and the boom, with me leaning in it, banged across on the opposite tack. We jibed several times in quick succession, with Elaine screaming while I shot across the boat, clinging to the boom, a human yo-yo waiting for the string to break. I was shaken off on the last pass and went overboard backward, headfirst, catching one leg on the upper lifeline that ran around the deck, so that my head smashed against the hull. I had only one hand free; the other held the radio direction finder, which I'd been using in a vain attempt to pick up a land station. I was probably in the water no more than ten minutes, wondering whether the lifeline or the leg would break first or whether the boat, which seemed to be out of control and either pulled away from me or pushed me under, would perhaps roll over and remove all further worries. Then I saw Brian's hairy, grinning face peering down over the side, and he and Les lifted me back aboard. "Looks like you lost your water skis," Brian said.

On our 31st night out of the Canaries, Sue called me up on deck to look at some lights. They didn't move; they weren't on ships. Everyone came on deck and looked through the binoculars. Then we all jumped up and down, broke out the bottle of beer we'd been saving for the occasion and hugged one another with tears running down our faces.

To have found the little island of Barbados after our difficulties was a miracle, a triumph. When I checked the chart and discovered that what we were looking at wasn't Barbados, I thought it best to keep this from the crew and hope that it might turn into Barbados in the morning.

The land, or what we could see of it in the darkness, was irritatingly mountainous. Barbados is flat. There were yellow moving lights on shore. Cars. French cars have yellow headlights. We were looking at a French island, one with a big rock next to it, a rock that, for a while, looked very much like the rock we'd sailed 5000 miles to hit. It was the rock at the north end of Martinique.

Most of the crew left after a week or so; Les had to go back to work in Canada, Brian to his wife in Cornwall, and the girls took jobs on a charter boat. The five of us have never met since. A waitress, a bank teller, a factory worker, a builder and a writer--five ninnies on the ocean, strangers for a lifetime and bound forever by the split second we shared when we found the land.

•

By the middle of April, I'd sailed down to Trinidad for Carnival and was back in Bequia, the old whaling station in the Grenadines, to get ready for the last leg of the journey. I was in a hurry to get north to New York, where the Tall Ships Race fleet would collect for the '76 Bicentennial. New York City had been my home town for ten years, and I had no intention of missing that party. Nick, an English lad, went with me when I left Bequia. He was eager to get to New York to meet his brother, who was sailing in one of the tall-ship entries.

We sailed directly from Bequia to St. Lucia, arriving on a fine, warm morning that we celebrated with a Martinique ponche, white rum with a couple of limes squeezed into it. An hour later, we were in jail, in a cell that measured eight feet by five and was already occupied by five West Indians. From the cell window we could see Khariessa's mast, a couple of hundred yards along the dock.

"What exactly did you say to the guy at customs?" asked Nick.

A number of things. When a boat clears customs, the skipper usually goes ashore with a crew list, passports and ship's papers. In St. Lucia that day, there was a cruise ship tied up at the main port of Castries, and when I went ashore to clear, the customs officer was giving his full, flattering attention to an officer from the ship. They finished their business and I handed the customs man my papers. He looked at the crew list and tossed it across the desk onto the floor at my feet. "That piece of paper too small, man. Get a bigger piece; don't bother me with that kind of thing."

Something snapped. Words were exchanged; there was a laying on of hands; the customs officer was on the floor. Two others came in the side door and grabbed me by the neck. There was a quick flurry, a few slippery punches, and then I was on the floor under a customs man and a policeman.

They frog-marched me along the dock to where Nick lay on the cabin roof, enjoying the morning sun. Several other men had joined our group. They jumped aboard and began to tear Khariessa's interior apart. In a jacket pocket, they found a marijuana seed. In a small tobacco tin, they found three fragments of stalk and nine seeds.

"You're drug smugglers," a police officer said. "You're both under arrest."

From the jail I got a message to the British consulate to ask if they could either get us out or into a bigger cell. The reply came in the form of a badly smudged Xeroxed list of local lawyers. It was confiscated by the police, who told us that we were allowed no paper in the cell, no books, no cigarettes, no writing materials, nothing except our pants.

Three times a day, we each received a small loaf of bread and shared a tin mug, taking water from a bottle whose contents a policeman poured between the bars of the cell door. Apart from the door and a small window, there was nothing in the cell except bare boards on the floor and four walls, all of which had been clotted with smears and dollops of shit all the way to the ceiling. We slept as we could, fitting together and around like loose cutlery dropped into a drawer.

I asked an officer if we could be given something to clean off the walls and scrub the floors. It was the thought of exercise, as much as hygiene, that prompted this. The only lavatory, at the end of the passage outside, had overflowed, creating a pool of wet stench that ebbed and flowed across the floor outside our cell. Rats rarely came into the cell, because there was no way out apart from the door, but they ran up and down through the night, splashing around in the sewage. The guards gave us brooms and buckets. The other inmates refused to have anything to do with the business and asked to be taken out until we'd finished.

That night, it was my turn to sleep with my feet resting on the horizontal bar of the cell door. Someone grabbed my bare toes and rubbed my instep against the steel bars. It was a police sergeant. "You like that, you honkie?" and he gave them another scraping. The word honkie gave him much satisfaction; he repeated it several times, while I lay back on my elbows, waiting for him to get bored and let go. "That boat of yours, honkie, that's my boat," the sergeant said.

In the morning, I got permission to speak with a police superintendent. I told him that if we weren't allowed out to pump Khariessa's bilges, she would sink at the dock. She was old, she was made of wood, she leaked. If she sank, the port might be inconvenienced, and none of us wanted that.

From then on, Nick and I took turns as pumper of the day, escorted to the boat by a policeman and a customs officer. The customs man cut the seal that he'd locked the main hatch with the previous day, then joined the policeman on the dock while the pumper, left alone on the boat, stuffed himself with fruit, smoked cigarettes, read a book and stowed a few treats in the rolled-up cuffs of his jeans to take back to the cell. Occasionally, he would shout, "Jesus wept, look at the water!" or "We got here just in time today!"

The policeman stayed on the dock, because it was his job to tell the pumper when the water stopped coming out of the hole at the back of the boat. The hole was the exhaust from Khariessa's engine.

A marine diesel, unless it's air-cooled, is cooled by water that's sucked through an inlet in the hull, pumped around the engine and squirted out through the exhaust. Our engine was water-cooled. The pumper's first job was to run the engine; we had already told the police that the engine was essential to operate the pump. There was no leak in Khariessa--she was as tight as the proverbial drum--but as soon as the engine was turned on, the water started squirting out of the hole at the back; and for as long as the engine continued to run, the water squirted with it.

"You gotta lotta water today, man," the policeman would say; and half an hour later, "Water still coming out. You gotta big leak in that boat."

I celebrated my 40th birthday in jail the day before we were refused bail at a hearing before a judge. The police told the judge that we were notorious smugglers, dangerous men and vagrant sailors, and it would be only a matter of time before their inquiries to Interpol, Scotland Yard and the FBI started to produce results.

After a week, we were handcuffed and loaded onto a truck to be taken for trial. In court, all charges against Nick, whatever they were--they were never specified--were dropped. I had hired a local lawyer for our defense. He knew exactly how much money I had left, including a loan from a friend in the States, because he'd handled that transaction. It came to $1150 in local currency.

In court, the tobacco tin with the three stalks and the nine seeds had sprouted into a fair-sized bush in a cardboard box.

"You could go to prison for four months," the judge said and called my lawyer to the bench for a brief consultation. "You could go to prison, but we shall be lenient. We fine you $1150. Next!"

We sailed out of Castries the next day, penniless and close to ecstasy, singing the song we'd made up in the cell:

"Oh, Castries, what you done to me

Threw me in your jail under lock and key

Took all the money, tried to break us, too

That's Castries, St. Loo."

That was the refrain; the eight verses were even worse.

•

We stayed another six weeks in the Caribbean, living on fish and the occasional food handout from charter-boat crews we'd met down island. Further support came from one of my more villainous cousins, who showed up unexpectedly in Guadeloupe, where he'd been paid off as a deckhand on a yacht chartered by an elderly Swiss for a parrot-smuggling run from South America to the West Indies. From Guadeloupe, the birds--all 29 of them--were supposed to be flown to Europe; they had been sedated for that purpose, but they escaped on the dock and attracted considerable attention. The smuggler's claim that the birds were, in fact, not parrots but a common breed of South American duck was ignored by the customs officers, and everyone on the boat except for the skipper and the old Swiss--who were sent back to sea with their raucous cargo--had been obliged to leave in haste. Probably only a sailor will fully appreciate what it must have been like on the passage from Colombia to Guadeloupe, beating into the northeast trades for three weeks on a 35-foot ketch full of unsedated parrots. I would like to be able to report that my cousin listened when I said that parrot smuggling was an unworthy crime, but the fact is that the money he'd earned helped keep us in food, as he pointed out whenever the subject came up.

We spent most of the remaining time in the islands anchored in the mangroves in English Harbour, Antigua, where we arrived just before Race Week. This is the biggest annual sailing party in the West Indies, and hundreds of boats of all flags and sizes meet there in the last weeks of April, before the hurricane season starts. For destitute yachtsmen, Antigua is the logical place to be at that time of year, because that's when boats clean out their stores and pass the windfalls to those in greater need.

We painted the boat, sawed off the deckhouse, mended sails and took a few days off to go racing as crew on larger boats. Two friends flew in, one from London, another from Utah, and between them provided enough cash to cover fuel costs, dock dues and other expenses on the journey north. If I had found one, I'd have bought a New York--harbor chart, but none was available. All we had was the North Atlantic chart, and on that, Manhattan is a microdot and Long Island about half an inch long. I could only hope that creative navigation would get us through. And to those who recoil with contempt at such unseamanlike methods, I'll quote the sailor's oldest proverb: You do what you've got to do with the things that you've got.

The exploits and misadventures of Khariessa's crew had attracted an unexpected notoriety over the previous few months, and while this had ceased to be a novelty by the time we left Antigua, the send-off we got when we sailed out of English Harbour made even the worst moments seem worth while. We had a new crew member on board--Yochi, an Israeli trumpeter--and while we tacked out through the Race Week fleet, Yochi sat on the stern rail playing Summertime, every last beautiful note echoing across the water. It was one of those quiet West Indian evenings, just before sunset, with the lightest of breezes barely filling the sails, and as we glided across the anchorage, people began to line the rails of the assembled boats. Someone blew an air horn, whistles and sirens sounded, a cannon fired and the flares arced into the darkening sky over the high ground around Freeman's. Bay. We could still hear the noise reverberating in the hills when we sailed out through the entrance and picked up the first gust from the northeast trades.

A week later, we were off Bermuda, sailing among the tall ships that had gathered for the last leg of the Bicentennial race. Here again, creative navigation saved the day: We found Bermuda by pointing a transistor radio in the direction of the strongest signal from Bermuda radio stations and steering an appropriate course. The horizon was a mass of square-rigged sails--brigantines, barkentines, big schooners and sailing craft of all types and origins, all tacking for position at the starting line. One of the ships, the 3500-ton Khruzhenstern, a Russian, thundered past us in 25 knots of wind, leaving Khariessa's 12 tons wallowing in a wake that might have been left by a destroyer. We passed her under engine two days later, totally becalmed, with a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter hovering just off her stern, while a row of nonchalant Russian cadets pissed over the side and threw us cigarettes and fresh fruit.

The tall ships were making for Newport, but I wanted to get to Manhattan early, so that I could sneak into a berth before they left Newport for New York. As we sailed from Bermuda toward America, however, the summer haze thickened, and our lack of a radio made it impossible for us to ask passing ships to verify our position. We crept slowly westward, all ears strained for the horrible sound of engines, surf or traffic, but the visibility grew steadily worse and my imagination conjured up one catastrophe after another as we groped through the mist. Somewhere out there, I thought, was the ship I'd been dreading, the 200,000-ton tanker surging my way at 15 knots--one of those fully automated beasts you read about, with a crew stupefied by drugs and a stateless skipper whose only credentials were the Panamanian master's papers he'd bought in a Tangier disco. I thought about the story of the ship that had entered Yokohama with a tangle of yacht rigging and shreds of sails hanging from one of the bow anchors. An accompanying tug radioed the ship to ask about the accident. "What accident?" the ship replied.

For a few years in the late Sixties, my ex-wife and I had owned a house in Ocean Bay Park on Fire Island, the barrier island that runs along the Atlantic coast of Long Island for some 30 miles. Our place was about 100 yards inland from a small and prominent house that had been built by a friend, Harold Krieger. I hadn't seen Harold or the house in six years, and as we felt our way through the mist, it is certain that of the numerous things on my mind, neither Harold nor his house was among them. One morning, however, the mist evaporated--not all of it, just a large ragged patch, and in it, perfectly framed, was the unmistakable outline of Harold Krieger's house, revealed for less than a minute before the fog swallowed it up again.

I swung the wheel hard over and turned the boat around. In another ten minutes, we would have been running up the beach. We heard the engine of a small boat and sounded the air horn. The other vessel answered, and then we saw it, a small yacht chugging along in the opposite direction. I shouted across the gap between us to ask if they had a spare chart of the New York entrance. The other boat passed us and came back around our stern, and from out of the mist sailed a rolled-up chart that landed in the cockpit. New York, New York.

We yelled a chorus of thanks and I heard a man shout back, "You're welcome!" He sounded uncannily like Mel Brooks.

We tied up at a Hudson River pier in Greenwich Village on July 1, 1976. On that date the previous year, I had been sitting on Diamond's bowsprit, watching the sun-speckled mass of Gibraltar take shape in the Mediterranean haze. In just over a year, I'd covered 10,000 miles of ocean, crossed the Atlantic twice, sailed from Scotland down the west coast of Europe, over to the Caribbean and north to a Manhattan pier only a few blocks from my old apartment. Nobody knew better than I the debts I owed to blind luck and good friends.

•

Almost nine years and another 60,000 miles of ocean have slipped by since we tied up at that New York pier. Khariessa was sold at the end of 1976; that winter, I delivered a new boat from Florida down to St. Vincent and worked in the islands as a charter skipper for the first and last time. Janitors in shorts, we called ourselves in the fleet where I worked, and janitors who could never escape from the clamorous demands of their tenants.

The money from Khariessa went into a partnership in another old wooden boat, a 50-foot teak ketch that was lying in Majorca. Four of us sailed her from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and spent an icebound winter in Annapolis, supporting ourselves with the occasional delivery down to the islands. After the ketch was sold, I rebuilt and refitted boats in Europe, made deliveries, went ocean racing for a few seasons, sailed a Hobie Cat from Florida to the Bahamas and back and worked as chief engineer on a 200-ton vessel. In short, the past nine years have been full of boats.

In 1975, I wanted to learn how to sail a boat anywhere a boat could go, and if I haven't accomplished that large and pretentious objective, I've been lucky enough to get my boats to their destinations without loss or injury. I used to think that anyone who sailed an ocean a few times would know everything there was to know about the sea, sailing, weather and boats, but these are inexhaustible subjects, with layer upon layer of knowledge and experience. You could devote a lifetime to the sea and barely scratch the surface of the first layer. Perhaps that's why you never meet an ocean sailor who says he knows it all; only a liar would claim he did, and only a fool would believe him.

On Diamond, where I learned that the land has no monopoly on loonies and tyrants, I found that my illusions about the sailing life were nothing more than that, and that the only way to be rid of them was to accept and deal with the realities. My old shipmate Rhino, the swine, showed me that a man can be a bully and half-crazy, yet still command respect for his competence. He gave me priceless insights into the business of seamanship and the art of keeping a boat going in heavy weather, when the temptation to let go and wait for nature to take its course is sometimes stronger than the will to survive. From Rhino and from many others later on, I learned that all storms pass. All storms.

As a rule, sailors--those who make a living at sea--aren't boastful about their work or achievements, and this is probably because the sailing world is so unlike that of any other society or community. It has no cliques or special-interest groups, no minorities or outcasts. There are no leaders or followers, no fans or celebrities, no government, no police, press or church, and the only two authorities--wind and sea--are impartial. To my mind, at least, that's an ideal definition of democracy.

If you learn anything at sea, you learn about the things that count and the things that don't, and if that statement sounds too dreamy to be true for these cynical times, it must be seen in the context of taking a boat on a long ocean passage. There, everybody aboard shares a common purpose--to get to the destination quickly and safely, each crew member making the fullest possible contribution to that objective. Sailors rarely talk about humor, endurance, dedication or commitment, but these are the human qualities most essential on an ocean-going boat.

Finally, of all the rewards to be gained by sailing, there is the euphoria of that unique and perfect experience, an ocean passage under sail. On a cloudless night in the Atlantic, with the rest of the crew asleep, you have another half hour at the wheel before the next watch comes on deck. A dim light in the compass and a black sky brilliant with stars and planets. A gleam of the rising moon along the rail and the steady whoosh and hiss of breaking foam as you ride the westbound seas, with the trades filling the sails and the creak and stretch of lines and rigging when they take the load. A mug of coffee, a cigarette, Bob Marley honking away on the deck speakers. A falling star and the first pale crack of dawn over your shoulder.

The other night, you saw an ocean liner slide across the horizon in a streaming blaze of lights, and as these dwindled and vanished, you thought about the ship's passengers, dressing in their cabins, dancing, laughing at a mirrored bar; you heard music from a band on the afterdeck, a faint throb of bass and a rising note on a trumpet. You won't forget that moment, that sound, and the conflicting impressions it left of happiness and loneliness, of being remote from the world and part of it, of longing and belonging.

After you came off watch, you put on the headphones and listened to the short wave before turning in. Someone was in trouble off the Cuban coast, a leaking boat with broken pumps and water up to the saloon floor; three adults on board, one with a fractured arm. A man's voice, calm and deliberate, spoke to the Coast Guard station: Yes, Coast Guard, this is a mayday, you could say that. Roger your mayday, sir; state your vessel's present longitude and latitude. Then the transmission faded and you spun the dial through a babble of static and propaganda, chanting Arabs and a BBC lady disc jockey playing Stan Getz for a Mr. Bungi in Nigeria.

On the U.S. Armed Forces Network, a dark and menacing piano theme, stark and urgent, like the music from Mission Impossible, with a tough male voice-over: "Espionage is a jigsaw puzzle--don't let them have your piece of the puzzle. There is somebody out there and he doesn't like us, not one little bit."

And there was Radio Moscow, a smooth American accent, as usual, explaining that if a Korean airliner had been shot down over Soviet territory by Soviet fighters, the culprits could be found in Washington.

Ho hum, and a pox on all politics.

You turn off the radio and climb into the bunk, falling asleep to the sound of the boat working and the seas bubbling and sliding along the hull. In a few hours, you'll make the bread and take the first sights of the day while the dough rises. You should be seeing land in a couple of weeks, provided the wind stays where it is. There'll be old friends there, people you haven't seen in months or years. Maybe some mail. If you've got the time, you may cruise down to Trinidad for Carnival or drop the hook for a week on one of those perfect crystal bays in the Grenadines.

Escapism? Probably, but so what? If it is an escape, it's the kind everyone could use a bit more of. Maybe you would, too. There's only one way to find out.

"Tools lost their mystery, while fingers and other parts of the body lost their feeling."

"One of them said, 'So you're crossing the Atlantic, laddie. Is that this year or next?' "