Racing the Savage Atlantic

a veteran salt named Charlie Barr drove a three-masted steel schooner from America to England in 12 days, four hours and one minute, thereby setting a record for a transatlantic fleet race. Charlie's feat still stood 92 years later when 15 yachts equipped with space-age navigation, communications and weather gizmos and manned by the hired guns of ocean racing's professional elite set out on the same course to set a new record.

I sailed on the Adela, a steel schooner flying the American flag and, at 170 feet overall length, the second biggest boat in the fleet. Our chief rival and the odds-on favorite to win was Adix, the British-registered 212-foot schooner. Adix led from the start. We watched her magnificent profile grow smaller as she pulled ahead, the pale sun gleaming on a full spread of canvas. Good sports that Adela's sailors are, and at other times the best of mates with the Adix bunch, we could only hope that in the fullness of time the Adix crew would manage to screw up, break something important and leave the honors to us.

•

Some people say old-time ocean racing sailors were tougher than their modern counterparts. Maybe. What is certain is that crews faced worse conditions in Charlie Barr's day. They handled heavier and less reliable gear, took bigger risks and suffered more because of inferior heavy-weather clothing, lousy food, cramped accommodations and substandard medical aid.

The strain showed. Six years after his great triumph, tough little Charlie Barr pegged out from a heart attack at 47, a victim of years of accumulated stress.

Poor Charlie. Too bad he didn't live to see the miracles of the modern age of ocean racing. In his time there were no fiberglass hulls or titanium blocks, no strain gauges, synthetic lines, carbon fiber masts, Kevlar sailcloth, global positioning satellites or liquid crystal display instruments. Poor Charlie navigated with a sextant and a chronometer. He didn't have shore bases recording each boat's progress from onboard electronic transponders. No cute stewardesses running up and down the decks with hot drinks and high-energy snacks.

Nor were there TV news helicopters chasing him across the starting line or New York City fireboats gushing farewell fountains against a backdrop of glamorous skyscrapers. Except for the two-year-old boat Charlie commanded, the fleet he raced in consisted mostly of wooden veterans---11 American, British and German gaffers, schooners and square-riggers, one of them a full rigged ship.

The fleet left the Jersey shore in a cloud of sail, cheered on by spectator boats crowded with flag-waving passengers bellowing national anthems, and disappeared into a clammy mist. The winner would be rewarded with a gold cup donated by His Imperial Highness Kaiser Wilhelm II. This impressive trophy, later melted down to raise money for liberty bonds during World War I, turned out to be thinly plated cheap metal.

•

Charlie Barr was a professional captain aboard the American schooner Atlantic and the most successful racing sailor of his day. A Scotsman by birth and an American by choice, he was famous for his waxed mustache and for winning the America's Cup three times. He had no patience for slackers. It is part of his legend that during the 1905 race Atlantic's owner crawled up on deck in a howling gale and said that since death looked imminent it might be a good idea if Captain Barr dropped a few sails. "Up yours, sir," Charlie replied---or words to that effect. "You hired me to win this race, and that by God is what I intend to do," adding that if Sir didn't like the weather he should stay below.

I wasn't thinking about our seafaring predecessors or their lack of technological enlightenment when a tug came to pull Adela away from the dock on May 17---the same date Charlie's fleet started their race. I was thinking about omens. During the previous week we'd been tied up at Pier 60 on the Hudson River, which is where the Titanic was bound on her one and only voyage.

On the way to the start as we dodged through spectator boats and commercial shipping, I mentioned this to the helmsman, Shag Morton, one of several Australians among the half-dozen flinty-eyed professionals taken on as Adela's racing crew and a veteran of so many Atlantic crossings he's lost count.

I asked him if he thought the Titanic connection was an omen.

"Fuck the Titanic," he said.

"Do you think we'll beat Charlie Barr's record?"

"Fuck Charlie Barr."

"What about Adix?"

"Fuck Adix. And fuck you, too. I'm driving this bugger through traffic, not playing 20 questions."

He then turned the wheel over to the owner's 30-something son, Adam, who had the privilege of driving us across the starting line. The rest of the crew tried not to watch. Crossing the line is a crucial moment; a good start lifts morale, a bad one saps it, and for all his skills in the money market our starting helmsman was at best a novice on the high seas.

Shag stood next to the wheel, the tension almost palpable as we drew closer to the line and watched Adix take the lead.

"Go below that ship," Shag shouted. We were heading for the midsection of a tanker.

"Why?" Adam asked.

"Because you'll hit the bastard---Jesus Christ! Go round that one's bows."

"Why?"

"Same bloody reason." Before we crossed the line Adela's captain, Steve Carson, got on the deck hailer to call the crew aft. All 28 of us---25 men, three women, eight nationalities--- stood together for the first and probably the last time for the next 3000-some miles. We had been divided into two watches, so the members of each watch would rarely see the others before reaching England---except in a crisis, and that was unlikely to be as relaxed as this gathering was.

"Pay attention," Carson said, "especially you people who haven't done much sailing. At all times follow the sailor's rule: one hand for the ship, one hand for yourself. Don't be ashamed to wear safety harnesses. Clip 'em on when it blows. I don't want any of you bastards falling overboard and spoiling the race for the rest of us. It takes a long time to turn the boat round and pick people up out of the water. It's cold in the North Atlantic. Chances are you'll freeze to death before we get there---if we find you."

Thus encouraged, we turned off the engine, trimmed all sail and crossed the line in the spreading wake of the mighty Adix. Our poor start, Charlie Barr's record and his ghost be damned---we would by God show him and the world what the modern age of ocean racing was all about.

•

Think of a big sailing boat under way as a gigantic bow and arrow held at full stretch. The hull is the bow, the mast is the arrow and the rigging is the bowstring. What the mast wants to do when the boat is driven hard is punch a hole through the bottom of the hull. Failing that, its tendency is to fall down under the strain, which is what happens when the crafty balance of tension and flexibility that's built into the mast design suddenly gives way to any number of factors, including bad luck, weather and poor judgment.

On a boat racing across the Atlantic Ocean flat-out 24 hours a day, your world is a long steel tube that surges forward and upward, hangs over a hole in the sea, then crashes to the bottom of the hole with the force of a truck ramming the side of a mountain. You lie in the bunk, waiting for the next crunch to bring down the rig.

An old sailor sleeps through it, knowing that he can't do anything about it anyway and for some perverse reason actually enjoys the experience; for newcomers it's not so easy to rest in these conditions. This is when the unwary or the exhausted might find themselves stepping into a slack coil of line on deck just as the other end is about to be whipped at great speed through a series of metal blocks and around inch-thick steel rods in order to meet the demand of a fast-filling sail that's big enough to cover a couple of tennis courts. The result of this can be what some refer to as checking into the hurt locker.

•

We lost sight of Adix on the third day out. She took a southerly and parallel course to ours while we ran north and [continued on page 195] Racing the Savage Atlantic [continued from page 116] east in a strong following wind, surfing down the face of high quartering seas and pulled along by Big Red. This was our biggest spinnaker, a blimp of a sail not much smaller than Belgium, someone said, though it was in fact about a quarter of an acre. Big Red cost $37,000 and came fresh from the sailmaker's loft the day before we left New York. This monster was our secret weapon, the heaviest cannon in Adela's arsenal. If we could keep Big Red full of wind we'd have the race and Charlie Barr's record in the bag.

Adix was gone from view but far from forgotten. What did they have that we didn't know about? And why did they leave the dock late one night when we were still in New York and return just before daybreak? Nobody goes sailing for fun after dark when they could be out drinking, as normal sailors do when they're about to race across an ocean.

We suspected that Adix went out that night to test new and even bigger sails than ours, and though we plied her crew with enough liquor to loosen the tightest lips, it was a mystery that remained unsolved. Perhaps she would suddenly reappear in our wake, storming along under a monstrous sail that blotted out the sky and made Big Red look like a postage stamp. But if this did come to pass, we could only hope it would be in darkness so we'd be spared the shame of having to watch. Failing that, surely it was not too much to ask that when she overtook us our rival's sails would burst into flames and all three of her masts fall down.

Again I sought an opinion from Shag.

"Never mind them bastards," he said. "What we ought to do is go south. We should have gone south two days ago. That's where the wind is."

Go south? More wind? We already had more wind than we knew what to do with. That's why we'd reduced sail, putting two reefs each in the mainsail and the foresail. Why go south when we were charging downhill at 14-plus knots? Multiply speed by 24 and you've got 336 miles a day---at that rate we could cut two days off Charlie Barr's record!

Shag's fellow hired guns, including two other round-the-world veterans, disagreed about the southern option. By the time we'd been at sea a few days there was so much disagreement on this and other tactical theories that for a while it looked as though the debate would end with a punch-up in the scuppers---or so it was said by those who were there; I was up forward in the net under the bowsprit, looking up into the billowing heart of Big Red. Dolphins were showing off on either side of the bow, sun on the water, the steady rumble and hiss of scattering foam.

That night the ship's horn jerked the off-watch out of our bunks soon after we had gone below. One long, strident blast penetrating into the bowels of the boat, followed by a voice shouting down the hatch, "Everybody on deck now!"

Swines! It was the other watch taking their revenge. Yesterday, just as they went below, we got them up to help raise Big Red. But we didn't use the horn. They used the horn! This was going too far under the accepted rules of interwatch needling. The horn ploy could only mean that Captain Carson, the archneedler, was at the wheel, gloating inwardly while pretending to be sorry for waking us.

Cursing him, cursing the other watch and the boat, we stumbled about in the main saloon looking for thermal gear, flashlights, harnesses, socks, hats, gloves, boots and oilskins. To prevent confusion these had all been numbered before the race, but now it seemed the thieving bastards on watch had willy-nilly helped themselves to whatever came to hand first and left the rest of the stuff in a sodden, jumbled heap.

The horn again. More angry yelling down the hatch.

We had no idea what was happening up there. Fire? Imminent collision? Man overboard? Who could tell? Feet thundering overhead, more shouting, deck canting one way, then the other, both masts vibrating, the hollow twang of rigging under strain.

As we scrambled into our gear someone called out---for about the tenth time since the race began---"Taxi!" We cursed him too and arrived on deck just in time to see the shredded remains of Big Red disappearing in a silky fluttering rustle under the light of a blazing full moon.

"Thank you for joining us, gentlemen," Carson said, grinning broadly, as he often does when he wants to hit someone. "Maybe next time you could make it on deck within the hour, if you would be so kind."

How the other watch managed to lose our biggest sail, what happened and who was responsible, nobody would or could say. It was dark, we changed course, perhaps someone failed to take up enough slack in a line or took too much, perhaps someone gave an order that was misunderstood. Operator error. Not that it mattered now. Big Red was a goner after only 12 hours of service or, to put it another way, at t cost of around $3000 an hour.

All that work for nothing.

•

Eventually we would blow out seven sails, including both spinnakers, which had to be cut away and abandoned. The other five we managed to save and repair. For 22 hours we dropped the heaviest sail on the boat---the mainsail, which provides the driving power---to replace a torn panel. This work had to be done on deck by hand because the main weighed half a ton and was too thick to be carried below. So much for the electric sewing machine installed in the sail repair room in the saloon. Sailmaker Graham Knight sat on the deckhouse roof and stitched until he couldn't see straight while the rest of us kept an eye on the fogbound horizon, expecting Adix with each passing minute.

While Graham sewed we were lucky with the wind, which stayed behind and gave us days of fast, effortless sailing. With all sails up again we made 299 miles in one day and celebrated with a beer apiece, convinced that we'd won the trophy for the best day's run---and would have won if Adix hadn't clocked up an extra fraction on the same day.

Two days later the wind turned hard against us in the form of square-shaped onrushing seas, spray-flecked gray boomers exploding over the bow while Adela lunged into the troughs with all the grace of a drunkard falling down the stairs. From then on we slept with faces jammed against the bulkhead or pressed against leeboards, the lashed-up canvas cloths that keep you in the bunk when the boat's heeling on her ear; and with each lift of the bow we braced ourselves for the crash at the bottom of the next canyon and wondered whether this time we would fall on a whale, a submerged container or some other unseen boat sinker. Those of us who bunked forward had the full benefit of this experience while our pampered shipmates, the hotshots and the owner's party, slept aft in the splendor of guest cabins.

Adam, the owner's son, came aboard with a retinue of can-do young executives in the New York real estate and money markets who arrived at the dock in their three-piece suits shouting, "Ahoy, mates!" to Adela's stone-faced regulars. At the last minute one Wall Street recruit showed up with Miss Fabulous on his arm and explained that he couldn't make it---he was in the middle of a deal. Sorry. That left us a man short and with no chance of finding a replacement before the race. Thus at first we were not disposed to think too highly of these new arrivals.

Some of them had never before sailed offshore and during the first week spent their hours on watch bundled up and greenish. This was understandable, we'd all been there once, though it was a little unusual to find them huddled in the deckhouse, wearing every lifesaving device available while they conferred on the downstream dollar possibilities of this or that particular deal and the projected earnings and losses of another.

Carson rousted them out of their shelter one morning while they were peering out of the deckhouse, admiring a dolphin racing alongside the boat. "Get your asses on deck!" he shouted. "This ain't a sight-seeing trip---we're racing!"

•

At least once daily Adela's owner called from New York on the $12-a-minute satcom line to discuss tactics with Captain Carson. Some days he called more than once. Did we realize that Adix was making better time than we were? Did we have any plans to increase our speed? Were we aware that another boat, a big, fast, modern ketch owned by a Saudi tycoon, was creeping out of the pack and closing in on us?

There were urgent consultations between Carson and the afterguard of experts. What to do about Adix before she did it to us? Everyone had ideas. We sent a man up the foremast to look, but he could barely make out the horizon through the driving rain. We could have called them on the satcom line, pretending we were from the media and asking them for their position, course and speed. Carson ruled that out as non-kosher. A third option was to radio Adix and identify ourselves, offer to give them our position in exchange for theirs and then plead radio interference and hang up when it was our turn to deliver. To this, Carson shouted, "Maybe you'd like to call in an air strike and sink "em!" To that someone murmured, "Can that be arranged?"

Damage had already taken its toll in the fleet. In the rising seas the venerable schooner Aello lost a topmast and had a 30-foot crack down her mainmast. Just as Aello's skipper was about to send five men out onto the bowsprit to lower sail, the bowsprit snapped off and was carried away. Aello was out of the race. Globana, a 118-foot ketch with a crew from the U.S. Naval Academy, ran into a fishing net and limped off to the Azores with a tangle of rope and wire around the keel. She was out, too. And another vintage schooner, Mariette, dropped out when the owner fired his race tactician and replaced him with a man who navigated the boat into a windless void. This, combined with the fact that the boat ran out of food, so incensed Mariette's owner that we later heard he punched the cook on the nose and sulked in his cabin until the boat reached England under engine power.

All told, six of 15 boats retired. Two of the dropouts, Sapphire and the schooner America, had been chartered by the upper crust of England's yachting fraternity, the Royal Yacht Squadron. In New York before the start, the senior RYS member aboard Sapphire threw a wobbly because the captain of America failed to dip his ensign in salute. Now both RYS boats were quitting in midrace, not because of damage but because their distinguished charterers had suddenly remembered they had important business ashore, and would have to proceed under sail and engine. In defense of these fine gentlemen, it must be said that members of the RYS wear spiffy little hats and awfully tight reefer jackets as part of the squadron uniform; however, nobody would mistake them for sailors.

The calls from Adela's owner increased. One day he called with orders to tack. This was a novel and in my experience unprecedented command, for it is generally recognized that a decision to change the boat's direction is best left to the people actually on the boat rather than to someone a couple thousand miles away. But tack we did and after an hour or so of sailing toward a point way south on the Moroccan coast we tacked back in the general direction of Europe. Someone asked Captain Carson if we could hook the owner's telephonic voice into the deck hailers next time he called so that he could shout, "Ready about!" and other useful commands at the opportune moment. Carson, who was now smoking half a carton or more daily, was in no mood to reply.

We had by then been going to weather---pounding into the wind---for several days. This is called beating. Adela lay on her ear, smashing through the seas with one side of the deck awash, the other lashed by frigid spray. To get anywhere you staggered, crawled, jumped and slithered, holding on to whatever you could grab before launching yourself forward. The beating came into it when you crash-landed on a steel winch or head-butted some other fixed object, like a mast.

•

We were no longer worried about the whereabouts of the rest of the fleet; we had enough to do maintaining maximum possible speed through the rising seas, pushing the boat to the limit, raising and dropping sails to squeeze what we could out of the wind.

The warmth of the Gulf Stream, fanning out to the north and east almost to the edge of the icy Labrador Current, was far astern. No more shorts and T-shirts. Now it was---in the obscure parlance of sailors and contrary to the theme of the movie of that name---the full monty: seaboots, gloves, hats and oilskins, all except for Shag Morton, who drew the line at boots and stood every watch in big, bare, calloused feet.

Halfway through the second week we ran out of cocoa, marmalade, jam, candy and cookies. Tempers in the crew mess shortened as this horrible news sunk in. People wanted to know who ate the last Milky Way. The guilty---I and seven others---said nothing. Our position was this: They finished off the cookies.

In the early days we feasted on ribs and steaks, chicken and beef pies, spicy pizzas, tuna melts and other treats. Now there were sarcastic gripes from the nonsailors about the frequency of beans and porridge in the ship's diet. Adela's cook, a strapping young lady called Carey Gordon-Jones, runs a sailor's bar and restaurant in Antigua and for several months in the Australian tropics cooked for a shipload of psycho biker-shrimpers strung out on speed. Ignorant of the golden rule that applies to cooks at sea--- never, ever piss off the cook---perhaps the nonsailors on Adela saw Carey as a domestic servant and failed to notice the glint in her eye when they chanted, "Oh boy, beans again, just what we wanted." Someone less tolerant would have dropped something nasty into the saucepan. Carey went on deck and smoked a couple of cigarettes until her temper cooled.

•

Having stripped the boat of surplus weight before the race, we had only one video on board, an action movie starring Steven Seagal. In one scene a busty half-naked girl springs out of a cake. Man of Steel meets Woman of Silicone---we never tired of watching the cake scene.

Further entertainment was provided by Adam, who, as a Yale Law School graduate, had an endless stock of probing questions:

"Why is it windy?"

"Why are the sails making that awful noise?"

"Why is it raining?"

"Why are we going up and down like this?"

And, most difficult of all, "Why are we here and not somewhere else?"

Who could say? But it was clear that after days of pounding against the wind, fatigue and frustration had set in. A 20-minute sail change now took an hour or more. We still couldn't make the course we wanted: We could sail above it and below it, but not on it. Adix was reported to be drawing ever closer, parallel with us though still slightly behind, and the phone rang day and night with calls from the owner. Adam dropped a few hints that if we didn't win, Captain Carson might have to look for another job. Carson took that in his stride and changed the subject. "You could be right," he said, "but think of the money you're saving your clients by not being there to advise them."

Belowdecks, the electrics went on the fritz: lights shorting out, alarms sounding to report leaks fore and aft, generators overheating---all false alarms, as it turned out, though our one and only electric kettle sprang a leak and gave violent shocks to anyone careless enough to make contact. Engineer James Harrison dealt with each problem as it arose and waited moodily for the next crisis.

For 750 nautical miles we stayed on the same tack, four days of hard beating through rain and low gray scudding clouds. Around the clock the bowsprit crew raised and dropped headsails while the rest of us crowded forward to drag the sails over the rail and onto the deck as they came down. The bowsprit crew spent much of their time underwater with the boat heaving and plunging under them. Once they took a 30-foot drop that tossed 12 men skyward until they were jerked back by their harnesses and half-drowned on the way down. They escaped with a few chipped teeth, sore ribs, a black eye and bruises.

And then, toward the end of the second week, the wind eased and the sun came out. We shook out the reefs in the mainsail and the foresail, hoisted our last remaining headsails and took off like the proverbial bat. The next day the wind came back in strength, forcing us again to reduce sail. But the sun stayed and the drying decks steamed in its warmth.

Thirteen days after racing across the line at Sandy Hook we saw contrails heading east. Overnight traffic from the U.S. and Canada. Later in the morning two Royal Navy helicopters clattered over the horizon and stationed themselves on each side for an hour or so as we plunged onward past the Isles of Scilly toward the English coast.

With 50 miles left to the finish someone asked Carson if it was time to put the champagne on ice. Adela's captain, who cannot tolerate the color green, whistling or the word rabbit---all considered bad luck by mariners---shook his head. The Saudi yacht was still gaining, had even drawn ahead of Adix---or had she? Nobody knew for certain.

What mattered was that anything could go wrong in the last stretch, with the boat and crew pushed way beyond tolerance. Both masts could go over the side, the stitched panel in the repaired mainsail could give way under the strain, some fool might bounce over the side, forcing us to turn around and pick him up. Carson himself, now reaching the last of his Marlboro Lights, might go crazy from nicotine starvation and set a course for the Pacific.

We sailed on, counting down the miles until we saw the long range of sunlit cliffs that mark the southwesterly tip of England. There was a puff of smoke and the faint thud of a cannon as we passed Lizard Point and crossed the finish line. We answered with two rounds from Adela's cannon and for the first time in two weeks felt the strain and stress fall away. Out came the champagne. People embraced, shook hands, cheered and laughed---some wandered off, not trusting themselves to speak in case emotion overwhelmed the elation.

At the dock we found wives, girlfriends, families, TV news crews. And Adela's owner, who couldn't stop grinning and shaking hands with everyone he saw. If it bothered him that he'd laid out maybe a quarter of a million dollars to win first prize---a Rolex and a couple of bronze and glass trophies---he showed no sign of it.

No, we didn't smash the record that Charlie Barr set in 1905. His time beat ours by a day and 17 hours, and as much as we might wish otherwise, I can't help feeling glad that Charlie's record is still standing. (Many boats have turned in faster transatlantic times than Charlie Barr's, but not while racing in a fleet of full displacement yachts; later record breakers had the luxury of waiting for just the right weather---a strong westerly front---while our fleet had to leave on the appointed date, wind or no wind.)

For all the good they did us we could have pulled the plugs on Adela's computers and the rest of the electronic arsenal. In racing a boat across an ocean, it always comes down to the basics: You can do only what the wind and sea will let you do. We won the old-fashioned way, Charlie's way, through dogged hard work and refusing to quit and because in the end the crew---all of the crew, including the first-timers---gave everything they had and kept pushing it. There's something to be said for that. Shag Morton said it afterward in the pub: "Fuck losing."