One trouble with the weather, as Mark Twain said, is that it is always doing something. Another trouble is that it is often doing something it shouldn’t at a particular time of the year. On our raft we have witnessed this aberration only too well.
What everyone knows about trade winds is that, within this region and since the early days of Atlantic sailing, they have blown ships from east to west with surprising ease. Well, the weather has been obeying its second rule – that it breaks its own traditions. Some three weeks ago it suddenly produced an atypical depression. Then, after we had surfaced from its effects, it produced another and sent us even farther off course.
We needed four days after the first digression to reach the place we had already been. After the second, we needed seven to be where we had been a week earlier.
These happenings were most depressing. Of course, rafts are unlike ships or yachts, with their greater control over direction, but it was sad to be waking up each day farther east than west and farther north than south.
However, there were compensations. With no wind and the sea mill-pond flat it was time to get out the dinghy, swim to it and have a look at ourselves from elsewhere. There was a cord between raft and dinghy because the thought of separation was horrific. The raft could no more go backwards to meet the dinghy than the dinghy, with its two little oars, could be paddled forwards to meet the raft.
The sea’s flatness was astonishing. How could the Atlantic, with all its immense turbulence and storms, its highs and lows of pressure, and with its great swells travelling for hundreds of miles, become almost totally becalmed? Even birds were missing. Shearwaters, so adept at using waves to increase their speed, could not show off their expertise without a wave in sight. Presumably they just sit on the water and wait for better times.
Shortly before this flatness we saw sargasso weed floating by. Like the fucus, which grows on British shores, this Atlantic vegetation contained buoyancy bubbles. It also carried minute crustaceans, no doubt grateful for a foothold of any kind on this huge sea. We also counted several roseate terns flying south – but why south, we wondered, when there is no land that way?
When our swimmers explored beneath our raft they found, to our dismay, that a length of heavy timber had snapped.
It formed part of one support for the rear and starboard guara – one of the dagger boards which, when lowered, helps us to keep our course. So how to mend it? We agreed on a form of splint to reinforce the damaged portion. On deck we had an aluminium pole and, after cutting it to an appropriate length, lowered it to the swimmers.
Soon the break was mended as well as it could be – and the two menders both downed an extra tot that evening as reward. But we fear that another depression may be growing within, or between, the great bulk of the anti-cyclone that should be dominating our patch of sea at this time of year. To forestall the negative effects, we are trying to go farther south. We are also hoping that the weather will remember what it should be doing and not play tricks.
Our hoped for destination is Eleuthera in the Bahamas. This island lies 76 degrees west of Greenwich and we are now at 46 degrees. In other words, even if it is plain sailing from now on – which is highly improbable – we still have a very long way to go. There is food enough and water enough, but the weather we cannot control.
“It’s always doing something,” as the great man said. “It’s always doing something contrary and wrong,” as we have started to say.