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December 4th, 2009 – At Sea, 03º 35′S, 038º 27′W
by Herb McCormick
Not so many years ago, a young man named Daniel Duane moved to the Northern California town of Santa Cruz, rented himself a room, got himself a surfboard, and started paddling out into the Pacific Ocean swell at every opportunity. In and of itself, this would hardly be worth noting – after all, California dudes were chasing tasty waves long before the Beach Boys sat down for their first crew cuts – were it not for the fact that once his Santa Cruz sabbatical was over, Duane collected his many thoughts and wrote a flat-out great book about it all called Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast.
Relatively speaking, not many people have ever even heard of Caught Inside, but in my humble opinion, it’s easily one of the best first-person accounts of the pursuit and passion of any sport – not just surfing – that’s ever been written. And the wonderful thing about the book is that you don’t even need to be a surfer to get it. As much as anything, Caught Inside is about the ocean, and its creatures, and the great outdoors. Yes, Daniel Duane is part philosopher, part naturalist, and part surfer, but his true talent is observing, and for one very insightful year, surfing was the prism through which he cast his very keen eye upon the world.
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| Mark studies a chart. |
“Caught inside” is, of course, a surfing term (though it comes to represent much more than that to Duane), and while it has a couple of different meanings, what it generally refers to is the unenviable position a surfer finds himself in when he’s the inside man in the line-up waiting on a wave. For a sailor, a similar predicament might be sailing up to the starting line on port tack at the start of a yacht race when everyone else is on starboard; in other words, you have no rights whatsoever, just the non-negotiable obligation of staying the hell out of everyone else’s way.
In any event, all this came to mind over the last 48 hours as I tried to think of a way to concisely describe Ocean Watch’s present predicament, and a precise way of explaining how it came to be. And while it’s not exactly relevant to Duane’s small masterpiece, the two words that kept coming back to me were: caught outside. In fact, if someone were to write the story of our trip down the coast of South America so far, it might be called Caught Outside: A Sailor’s Odyssey on the Brazilian Coast.
Let me, ahem, explain. And the best way to begin doing so might be with an anecdote. Over a week ago, Ocean Watch photographer David Thoreson sat down to write a letter to his sweetheart, Kirsty Moen. It was a straightforward account of the present circumstances of our voyage. Our sights were set on a small Brazilian port called Fortaleza, a few hundred miles down the coast. From our position at the time, and our average historical daily runs on the voyage from Seattle thus far, Fortaleza was three, maybe four days away. Easy, right?
Well, in practice, not so much. For this afternoon, after a spell at sea that ranks up there as the most frustrating ever for the collective crew of Ocean Watch, guess where we were? Twenty miles from Fortaleza. Oh, wait: that’s twenty miles north of Fortaleza. That’s right, we still weren’t there yet.
And why, pray tell, did this happen? We were caught outside.
In the next couple of days or so, our onboard scientist, Michael Reynolds, will delve into this waterborne mystery
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| Brazilian sailors. |
in greater detail. For it is a fascinating story. (Well, it would be if it happened to someone else.) There is, however, a scientific explanation, one that an oceanographer like Michael is especially qualified to tell. It has to do with currents and winds and will be of extreme interest to all voyagers, armchair and otherwise. I urge you to read it. But for now, for the sake of brevity, here’s what transpired.
We had two choices to get from Point A (the north coast of South America) to Point B (Rio de Janeiro, more or less midway down the continent). One was an inshore route, supposedly inside the northern flowing Brazilian current, and the other was an offshore option, theoretically sailing into a clockwise-spinning gyre of current that would sweep us clear of the Brazilian current, and such hazards as the mouth of the Amazon River, and down the coast in nifty fashion. We chose Door Number 2, the offshore route. And that’s how we got caught outside.
Cutting to the chase, we hit contrary current, on the nose, as we set forth from Cayenne, French Guiana, heading due east: heading outside. We kept going. We couldn’t find the favorable gyre, or a mysterious counter-current we’d also heard about. We still kept going. Ultimately, low on fuel, with headwinds that hampered our progress, we couldn’t keep going. We turned tail, ran for the fuel docks of Sao Luis, Brazil, and initiated a new plan, one we’re currently in the midst of.
Having “gassed up” in Sao Luis, we’re making tracks past Fortaleza, bound another couple hundred miles down the coast to a port called Natal. We’re now in harbor-hopping mode, and will be all the way to Rio. We’re still plowing into headwinds, but we’ve found some current relief, and we’re getting there, by jove, we’re getting there. The waning full moon has been lovely the last two nights. Fishing boats dot the horizon. It’s a tad toasty, but we’re getting used to it.
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| Fishing near Itaqui. |
This morning, running off the coast some 12-14 miles offshore, we had a good view of the shoreline, which was rather breathtaking. Even at that distance, the huge dunes were white, fluffy and brilliant. This stretch of the Brazilian coastline purportedly boasts the country’s best beaches, and from our vantage point on Ocean Watch, removed though it was, that certainly appeared to be the case. They continued on, pure and pristine, for miles and miles and miles.
My watchmate Dave Logan and I surveyed the scene in wistful silence. Somewhere in there, for certain, there was a jutting cape and a sweet point break and a bevy of salty souls paddling out, intent on the incoming rollers. And no doubt, somewhere in there, someone working those sets was going to find himself watching his buddies as they crested a wave; too slow on the uptake; caught inside.
Meanwhile, Logan and I sang our same old, sad Brazilian song. It had a very familiar refrain. For once again, we were stuck on the outskirts, caught outside. All we could do, alas, was gaze in.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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