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September 3rd, 2009 – At Sea, Davis Strait, 68 05N, 62 22W
by Mark Schrader and Herb McCormick
(Sept. 3): The other day in this space, our onboard scientist for this leg of our travels, Harry Stern, chimed in with a discourse on Arctic mirages. Yesterday on Ocean Watch, powering into a choppy southerly swell, we experienced a different sort of optical illusion, one I’ve especially noticed in the North Atlantic over the years. I think it must have something to do with the head seas you often encounter in those waters, but the basic sensation is that you’re sailing uphill…quite literally, surmounting a physical rise that is very unsettling. The earth is still flat, right?
Hopefully not to confuse the issue, but today, as Ocean Watch continues southward – and at a great clip at the moment – we’re very much sailing downhill, which is actually a term sailors use to describe a course running before the wind – in other words, with the wind blowing from astern. This isn’t so much a visual description as a metaphorical one. With the breeze behind you, life is sweet. Mate, it’s all downhill.
That is: except when it isn’t. Allow me to explain.
With the wind blowing a solid 20-knots from the northeast, and Ocean Watch trucking along on a powerful broad reach at speeds up to 8-knots, the miles are ticking away. But it’s a very strange ride. The northeast wind is starting to set up a nice following sea directly on the port quarter…the aft section of the left-hand side of the boat. This is good. However, there’s also a bit of a leftover southerly chop from yesterday’s travails, which is not so hot. And finally, every so often, a completely random but powerful wave comes roaring out of the east, a most unwelcome interloper.
When all these disparate, dynamic forces of liquid velocity converge as one – and when Ocean Watch is at the center of said convergence – the corkscrew motion is quite spectacular. Furthermore, if this happens at the exact moment the genoa, or forward sail, is blanketed behind the mainsail – thus collapsing in shape, and subtracting the force and drive that helps the yacht punch through the waves – it’s enough to quite literally toss you off your feet, to enforce a jig or shuffle or two-step before you, like the boat, can regain your center of balance and control.
As I’ve been jotting these notes, my watchmate, Dave Logan, asked, “Did you get in there that right now we’re 44 tons of surfing fury?” My friend, I just did.
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| The world has become elemental, reduced to a finely honed set of parameters – the wind; the waves; the clouds; the currents. It doesn’t get much better. |
In any event, if any of the above sounds like a complaint, it’s not meant to be. It’s sailing. We’re sailors. For the first time in quite a while, we’re in the open ocean, running before the wind with the sails perfectly set and drawing. The world has become elemental, on multiple levels, reduced to a finely honed set of parameters – the wind; the waves; the clouds; the currents; the gorgeous fulmars that have Logan transfixed. These graceful sea birds are flying machines dancing atop the wavelets, just like us. It doesn’t get much better.
Well, almost.
There is a fly in the ointment, and it has left skipper Mark Schrader annoyed and powerless. But we’ll let him explain all that and more in this latest installment from his personal log:
“Very nice sailing conditions this morning. With full jib and neatly reefed main we’re broad reaching and making about 7 knots right on course down the Davis Strait toward the Labrador Sea and St. John’s, now 1325 nautical miles from our current position. The weather forecast for this area suggests we’ll have these favorable conditions through Saturday morning, when the wind will once again turn and blow hard from the south for a couple of days. We’ll enjoy this while we have it.
“Our watch started at 0600 this morning. Herb and Dave unfurled the jib about midway through their watch when the wind backed and increased just enough, shut down the Lugger diesel, trimmed a bit and relaxed to the sounds of sailing. David Thoreson made coffee, Harry went right to work in the upper cockpit looking for icebergs and I sat down in the main saloon, smiling with hot coffee in hand, and just enjoyed watching our routines unfold. We pretty much know each other’s moves and moods by now. Important things get done without much fuss. Interesting news from the ‘outside’ carried by email is shared. Discussion of humorous events usually takes precedent over more pithy and sobering political happenings. Sometimes annoyances are aired, all in the name of peace and harmony – or something like that.
“There are two freezers and one refrigerator on board Ocean Watch. The refrigerator and small freezer are in the
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| Ocean Watch is making about 7 knots right on course down the Davis Strait toward the Labrador Sea and St. John’s. |
galley, handy for our daily use. The second freezer in the workshop space is large and deep – huge for a boat of this size. On tiptoes while bending over and reaching as far as I can while moving frozen fish, meat, vegetables, bacon, cheese, tortillas and then more of each, I’m just able to touch the bottom. I’ve recently discovered butter isn’t there, nor is it in the galley freezer, nor in the refrigerator. We’re out of butter. For a few of us on board, this is very close to a crisis. Pancakes, popcorn, toast and countless other butter-dependent treats might as well be thrown off the boat.
“I know. Without butter we’ll be healthier. Good friend and neighbor Mac Sheridan is a butter and bacon man. We’ve eaten together enough over the years for me to say so with some confidence. He puts butter on his pancakes just like the rest of us. My construction partner, Neil Harrigan and I built the Sheridan house a few years ago – a large timber-framed interesting Northwest kind of house.
“The project took about a year. Mac and his wonderful wife, Paula, helped with the construction. Dave Logan built a beautiful set of cabinets – lots of them – and furniture for the house. We became friends, ate construction-site meals together and remained friends when it was all done. When Mac isn’t doing farm things or borrowing my tractor he’s working in an operating room fixing hearts, literally saving people’s lives. Paula has taken a hiatus from doing the same thing – two physicians/heart specialists as friends and neighbors. It’s a good thing, because I really like butter.
Believe me, I do know how trivial this is, but since I started down the path of this story I’ve got to finish it. And, I’m pretty sure I know what you’re thinking. If running out of butter is a crisis on the good ship Ocean Watch then absolutely everything else on board must be working very well. And it is. Perhaps the captain should relax and read a book.
“I’ve spent days, weeks, hurtling by myself through ice-infested Southern Ocean waters – twice – without benefit of radar, a heater, an enclosed cockpit, refrigeration, watermaker and almost any other convenience you could name, but never have I run out of butter.
“David Thoreson and I grew up in the Midwest, he in Iowa, me in Nebraska. We share more than that – we share the views that without a little extra butter most foods are close to inedible. We’re not talking butter substitutes here, none of that movie theater popcorn coating stuff that comes out of a spigot – we’re talking real butter. He has vowed to take a second look into the bottomless freezer in the workshop – diving for butter. There isn’t any but he has to check one more time.
“So that’s what I was smiling about this morning while sitting on the settee, enjoying the motion and sounds of sailing while drinking a cup of excellently brewed coffee and waking up to a day on the water with good friends around me and a good ship under me. And just so you know, on that one to ten level-of-annoyance scale, the butter thing hovers just above zero.
“Thanks for the concern, Mac. We still have bacon.” A postscript: At the change of watch I met David Thoreson in the companionway, he going on watch, me coming off. He saw I was smiling at Mark’s story, a hard copy in hand, which he’d written on his previous watch, “Pretty funny, huh?” said David.
I laughed and said, “Yeah.”
Then his gaze turned steely. “But you do know I’m going in that freezer,” he said, serious as can be.
As I made my way forward to my bunk a few minutes later, I glanced back and saw his legs dangling out of the freezer…his upper body had vanished in the cold throes of the bin. The boy was going deep.
It was one of the saddest sights you’ll ever see, another ageless tale: a man in search of something he’d never find.
- Mark Schrader and Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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