Under Weigh
Doug Sherr
©
Copyright 2025 by Doug Sherr
2021 Winners Circle Contest
Winner
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Photo by Markos
Mant on Unsplash
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The
Hawk swirled snow and debris down the alley knocking
over a
garbage can as I shoved the mattress into my station wagon. The Hawk
is Chicago’s brutal winter wind that carries enough humidity to
cut though the best winter clothes causing your bones to ache. I
threw in my bags carrying clothes, foul weather gear, zero temp-rated
sleeping bag and the plastic box holding my sextant. I had an
internal chuckle thinking that I was the only person in greater
Chicago carrying a sextant that night. The engine was running so I
had a warm car to drive away. My destination was Ft. Lauderdale
because that’s where all the sailboats were waiting to voyage
south to warm water, palm trees and piña coladas.
Nine
months before, I was about to go to work in my windowless office and
laboratory when the thought burst into my mind that I was leading the
wrong life. I called my boss and quit. He said that was fine because
I was a terrible engineer; I should be an artist or poet or
something. While I had no literary or artistic drives and no clue
what something could be, I sure as
hell knew what it
wouldn’t be. My new life would have movement, new sights,
sounds, and a measure of the unknown.
A
few weeks after I quit, I joined the crew of a Great Lakes bulk cargo
ship transporting iron ore and learned how the professionals ran
ships. Soon, I realized that I wanted the boats to be smaller and the
adventures greater. I got off the ship when the Great Lakes season
ended with the beginning of winter, but I knew I wanted to continue
my life on the water. I had taken sailing and navigation lessons,
sailing regularly on Lake Michigan in races across the lake even
learning how to fix a position using celestial navigation. I did
suffer some comments about the silliness of using a sextant on Lake
Michigan, but I soon was able to determine our position within a
couple of miles, which is the best to be expected when trying to find
the horizon through the optics of a sextant from a small boat
bouncing across the water.
As
I eased away from The Hawk wind of Chicago,
a little thrill of the
unknown eased in as the miles ticked by. After two days of sleeping
in the car and waking up to truck stop coffee, I made Lauderdale
mid-day and after asking some questions about where the sailors hung
out, found the Southport Raw Bar, which had great seafood and a small
bar that looked out on a waterway. After my first beer, a young man
sat down next to me and the conversation started.
He
was a Canadian with limited voyaging experience who was the new
captain of a 57-foot sailboat bound for the West Indies. He was
worried about navigation—he had only sailed the waters around
Vancouver Island seldom beyond sight of land. This was before the GPS
satellite navigation system so navigating an ocean required
dead-reckoning and celestial skills. I mentioned that I knew a bit
about navigation and even had my own sextant—he hired me and
bought me a beer. The next day, I showed up at the boatyard and was
invited aboard a weird looking sailboat. It was named Plato;
personally, I’m more of an Epicurean. The builder was a French
firm that was noted for its powerboats—this was its first
attempt at a sailing vessel. The boat resembled something that might
act as a dinghy for the Starship Enterprise with a mast stuck in it.
The
owner was a middle-aged businessman from Ohio who had sailed only on
Lake Erie. A somewhat younger and bigger friend of his was the other
crew. I really don’t remember their names so I’ll call
the owner Richard, his friend, Albert, and Captain Brian. The owner
had the boat trucked from Ohio, which was probably cheaper than
sailing to Chicago, navigating down the Illinois and Mississippi
Rivers, across the Gulf of Mexico, around the Keys, and up to
Lauderdale. Richard suggested that I do an in-depth tour of the boat
to figure out how it all worked. He gave me the port stateroom that
had two bunks and an en-suite head with a shower—quite nice.
The
engine/machinery space was well laid out as would be expected from a
powerboat builder. The rigging of sails and the lines that control
them were well thought out: the builder clearly hired sailing
professionals to design and install the rig.
Plato’s interior
accommodations were designed by someone who had never bothered to go
to sea or just hated sailors. A boat at sea rolls side-to-side,
pitches up and down, and yaws back and forth as the boat pivots on
its center. Any and all of these motions will turn a person into a
pinball. To stay safe, the interior should not have large open spaces
and contain numerous handholds and grab rails. Plato’s main
salon was an open space without any grab rails. The chart table was
forward to port. Checking a chart or making a logbook entry would
require a launch and dance across the open space to make a desperate
grab for the table before slamming into the sharp corners beautifully
fitted into all the interior joinery. Sharp corners are even more
dangerous than they sound. Next to the chart table were two steps
down to the galley—also nothing to hang on to. The owners cabin
was in the bow, which has the maximum motion in a seaway. The bed was
a large oval affair that had no partitions, like lee-cloth
separators, to keep sleepers from launching across the cabin. This
should be an exciting trip.
Richard
the owner, did most of the organizing while Captain Brian acted more
like regular crew than the boss. At sea, there can only be one boss.
Albert took charge of provisioning and Brian tended to the machinery.
We made a list of bits and pieces we needed and I went to the local
marine supply store (a chandlery in seaman’s terms). As I was
rolling my cart filled with goodies to the checkout I turned a corner
and ran into my friend Henry. We had known each other in another life
and didn’t know that we were sailors. We immediately went to a
bar and filled in a few years of stories. When we got around to
today, I asked Henry if he would like to sail down island. He smiled
and off we went to Plato.
I
introduced Henry as an old friend, a good guy, and a fine sailor. We
had never sailed together, but he was such a competent guy that if he
said he was a decent sailor then he was pretty good. The crew met him
with the usual balance of enthusiasm and skepticism and welcomed him
to join the voyage. He left to grab his gear and was back in an hour,
immediately joining in the preparations. He took the other bunk in
the port cabin and we settled into ship-board life. In three days,
the boat was ready for the passage. I had grabbed a cruising guide of
The Bahamas at the chandlery, which is a detailed book on the
intricacies of sailing in waters that can go from great expanses of
ankle deep to an abyss in a few feet. Color pictures tried to show
how to “read” the water depth by changes in color.
While
I understood the basics of navigation, the Great Lakes are mostly
tide and current free. I had no experience with either. To get to The
Bahamas we first had to cross the Florida Strait, which carries the
northward flowing Gulf Stream. A written description of the Stream is
inadequate to understand its magnitude: it carries one hundred times
the volume of all the world’s rivers combined—every
second (roughly 7.9 billion gallons per second). The guide said not
to cross the Gulf Stream if the wind was from the north, which would
push against that flow of water turning the Stream into a washing
machine. The weather forecast said there was a low-pressure system
building in the Atlantic that would send wind roaring south down the
Florida Strait. I suggested that we wait out the weather, but Richard
said he was behind schedule and we had to leave immediately.
Our
goal was to cross the Stream and quickly transit the Northwest and
Northeast Providence Channels through The Bahamas and into the open
Atlantic. I said that since the transit across the Stream would take
about ten hours, we should leave at sundown because we didn’t
want to arrive at night in an area of unreliable navigation aids with
thousands of square-miles of ankle-deep water. Richard agreed and
Brian thought it was a wonderful idea. We all got some rest and went
ashore for a last supper—an unfortunate Biblical reference.
With all its good information, the cruising guide said nothing about
eating a large, deep-dish anchovy pizza before crossing the Stream in
heavy weather.
We
left the boatyard at sundown clearing the harbor in the dark. The
wind was blowing in the mid-to-high teens pushing the waves to about
four feet and we learned the awful truth about Plato—it
had a terrible motion through the water. Boats can be seaworthy
meaning they are designed and built to safely travel the ocean. Good
boats are also sea-kindly meaning their motion through the water is
smooth and orderly, but seaworthy boats can be un-sea-kindly. Wedged
into the helmsman’s seat and hanging onto the wheel was
probably the most comfortable place on the boat. I experimented a
little with course changes and adjusting the sail trim, but nothing
worked: the motion remained miserable.
We
reached the Stream a little over four miles off-shore. It was
startling. The sea was chaotic. While the motion had been bad in
fairly orderly seas, now we were leaping and diving on waves that
felt like they were square. Occasionally, we fell off a wave slamming
into the trough between waves. Richard stuck his head out of the main
companionway hatch and looked at me as if it was my fault. Over the
sounds of wind and wave, I yelled that we could turn around and wait
a day or two for the weather to moderate. He yelled back, “I’m
not giving up!” There are a few times in life when you know
you’ve put yourself in a lousy situation that you can’t
change. The best you can do is accept it gracefully and ride it out.
All I had to do was stay strong for 1500 nautical miles and I could
have a piña colada in the tropics.
Then
the folly of a deep-dish anchovy pizza became real. I had been
seasick once on a race from Michigan to Chicago, but those conditions
were a play storm relative to what we were in. However you might wish
you could curl up and die, you still have to do your job. Every few
minutes I’d lock the wheel and crawl to the leeward, down-wind
side leaving a trail of partially digested pizza remnants. I wondered
what the fish thought of my spicy chum. After a time that seemed like
days, Albert came to relieve me. Crawling into my buck that night was
one of the best things I’d ever done.
Henry
shook me awake a few hours after dawn and said Great Isaac light was
visible to starboard—we’d made our first navigation mark.
Now that we were out of the Stream, the chaos of the night had
settled into a livable, if not comfortable, motion. The cruising
guide said that currents in The Bahamas were notorious and
unpredictable. We had to make about 140 miles to reach
Hole-in-the-Wall at the southern tip of South Abaco Island, which was
our exit into the Atlantic. As we sailed east, I wondered how we
would know if the major, but variable north-setting current
experienced in the Providence Channels would affect our course to the
Hole. Basically, we needed to know if we were being pushed north.
There
is a trick in celestial navigation, which allows for a quick
non-mathematical solution that gives an accurate position, north or
south (latitude), which works at noon using the sun and at twilight
using Polaris. I took a noon sight and we were three and a half miles
north of our charted position. We maintained our course. A twilight
sight showed that we’d been off-set not quite seventeen miles!
The current was averaging slightly over three knots. Henry analyzed
my work and agreed. I corrected our course south to guarantee that we
would be well clear of the Hole.
Our
routine had set in with watch changes, meals, maintenance, and rest
whenever possible. At dinner, I tried to emphasize the effect of the
current and said that we would sight the lighthouse at Great Stirrup
Cay about 0300 hours at ten to fifteen degrees off the starboard bow.
Part of my nav kit included a stopwatch. I said that the
characteristic of the light would be two white flashes every twenty
seconds and to time it with the stopwatch to be sure—no
guessing. This is part of the mystique that I had read navigators use
regularly—make a prediction—if it comes true you’re
a pro. This keeps you sharp because you don’t want to miss your
nav mark and look like an idiot. I crawled into my bunk with a
certain confidence and had a good sleep until a shock woke me. The
boat bumped again. We were aground against something hard, but it
wasn’t the grinding of rock or coral.
On
deck, I could see off to port a faint loom of light. Forward to
starboard was the closer loom of a flashing light. We continued to
bump. I had no idea where we were, but we were in trouble. I grabbed
the powerful spotlight that was stored in the cockpit and went to the
bow. We were completely surrounded by coral heads that grew right to
the water’s surface. Any of them could have punched a big hole
in our fiberglass hull. The heads were everywhere; it seemed
impossible that we could have sailed into this position without
striking one. Brian came up to the bow and stared at the water as I
swung the light all around the boat.
He
asked, “How could we have got in here without hitting
something?”
“Grace
of god,” was the best I could come up with.
There
was some quiet cursing from the cockpit, but it was eerily quiet as
we continued to bump gently against the hard sand bottom. I asked
Brian if he could slowly turn the boat 180 degrees. He said he could
and we talked over a routine to get us out to safe water. The wind
was just gentle puffs because we were in the lee of a land mass and
the water was still as a bathtub. Brian did a good job of easing us
around and I called out “Dead slow ahead.” For the next
few minutes it was steering instructions: “neutral, stop, come
right ten degrees, left five degrees, dead slow astern, neutral.”
It went on and on, but it was probably no more than ten minutes. We
cleared into deeper water free of coral heads. I was exhausted. I
said we had to anchor and in the morning we would figure out where we
were and continue on.
Henry
didn’t shake me awake until 0900. Coffee was on and it was a
bright, blue-sky day. A visual survey and sun sight verified that
we’d sailed into the bight of Abaco Sound. The light loom to
the north was Moors Island and the one to starboard was
Hole-in-the-Wall light. We were only twenty-four miles north of where
we should be. It turned out that Albert didn’t like my course
selection and followed a plot as if there were no current. The crew
also wasn’t sure if they actually sighted Great Stirrup light.
It took some effort to not say any unkind things that I wouldn’t
regret.
The
knot meter said that water was flowing by us at three and a half
knots; we were straining against the anchor rode. Excellent proof of
the current, but Richard said he wanted to go swimming. I asked if he
had been a competitive swimmer in high school or college. He huffed
slightly and said he did laps every week. It doesn’t flow three
and a half knots in pools. I suggested to Captain Brain that he
should quickly launch the dinghy. Richard jumped in and quickly
disappeared aft. I grabbed the binoculars and kept Richard’s
head in sight. It took about ten minutes to get the dinghy in the
water and the outboard motor fitted. If there had been any waves, I
couldn’t have kept Richard in sight. Brian took a handheld
radio and I used the cockpit-mounted radio to direct him to Richard.
It took about fifteen minutes to retrieve him.
He climbed aboard and
said, “That was exciting.”
Death by drowning does sound
exciting.
At
that moment, a voice came from the radio asking if we had any
cigarettes. About a mile distant was a forty-foot powerboat coming at
high speed. I called back that we didn’t smoke. The reply was
they were going to come by for a visit. I replied that we didn’t
need company. They insisted. Richard said we couldn’t say no
because it would be impolite. I took the AR-15 stored in Albert’s
cabin and grabbed a bag from the galley filled with beer cans we
hadn’t crushed. The boat was about a hundreds yards from us. I
called on the radio that the owner said to come by—we were
about to have a party and we’d planned some fun with firearms.
I threw the cans in the water and unloaded half a clip. I actually
hit a couple of cans. The boat made a high-speed turn away and didn’t
respond to my radio call to have a safe voyage. Richard asked what
those guys had wanted. I said anything they could take.
This
voyage had become way too exciting. Actually it was crazy. I had no
reference, but I couldn’t believe that this was anywhere
typical of voyaging with amateurs. I said that I no longer wanted to
be the navigator and that the island of Spanish Wells was a day’s
sail away where I would like to be set ashore. Everybody just stared
at me. Richard finally said some stuff that approached an apology and
asked me to stay on. He said they would follow my instructions. Henry
said I should stay.
We
weighed anchor and cleared into the Atlantic well after dark. The
plan was to sail due east 500 miles to longitude 065 degrees to gain
favorable winds and then turn south on a straight shot to St. Thomas,
USVI. We settled into our off-shore routine and the crew conjured up
some decent meals. Since I dislike cooking on boats I took over the
dishwashing and clean up chores. I got in celestial sights whenever
the clouds cleared and was feeling more comfortable with the
navigation. If it weren’t for filling in the hourly log with
navigation information the days could easily blend together: stand
watch, navigate, eat, check the boat for
potential
problems, sleep, repeat.
The
wind began to build and Plato responded
with its
uncomfortable motion, but we were making good progress. One
afternoon, I was on watch and looked forward through the boat. The
door to the owner’s cabin was open and I could see him on that
oval bunk. He was asleep, but in the rough motion he was actually
levitating a few inches off the mattress. I can’t imagine how
he could actually sleep. He could have used another bunk mid-ships
where the motion wasn’t so brutal, but he was the owner, that
was the owner’s cabin, and damn the torpedoes. Stubbornness
seems to me to be self-punishment.
Finally,
we were one day out from St. Thomas. I had the first night watch as
the crew prepped a final dinner at sea. To celebrate, Albert grilled
up steaks and baked some potatoes. The wind moderated a bit. The
heavy cloud cover of the last day began to break up bringing flashes
of moonlight that looked as if the waves were coated with diamonds.
Whatever weirdness, frustration, and anxiety had built up on the
voyage flushed away and I laughed. Albert called up and said he would
steer while I came below to eat. I said I was having too much fun and
to just hand me a plate. It was too rough to manage a knife, fork,
and steer the boat so I grabbed the steak by hand and ripped off a
piece with my teeth. The juice ran down my chin. To this day, I
remember the taste. I used the potato to clean up some facial grease
and gnawed away. I felt like a Viking on the last night at sea after
a successful raiding voyage. I was where I belonged.
We
cleared into Charlotte Amalie harbor on St. Thomas mid-day and slid
into the quiet of a slip near the saloon at the end of the dock.
Henry and I jumped in the water for a swim not realizing that the
harbor was famous for its pollution. Fortunately, neither of us got
some incurable infection—probably because we immediately went
to the saloon and had several piña coladas. We booked a flight
Stateside and I stayed on Henry’s 36-foot sailboat a few days.
Then he said he had trouble with the prior owner so a plan evolved
that I would sail around The Bahamas, beyond the reach of the prior
owner’s lawyers, until Henry’s negotiations were
successful, but that’s another story.
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