Great Seamanship: The Voyages of Pirate

A first ocean crossing on a classic Swan is a voyage to be savoured for Juan E Corradi. Tom Cunliffe introduces this extract from The Voyages of Pirate

Built in 1974 by Nautor in Finland, Pirate was designed by Sparkman & Stephens with oceans to cross in mind. She was not dreamed up by a commercial committee trying to maximise berths in a beamy hull. She proved to be a fast and safe cruising yacht, with good sail area and clean lines. The sailors who crewed and lived on the yacht over many years and many miles left more than a little of themselves behind. They gave the boat a soul.

The Voyages of Pirate – 55,000 Ocean Miles on a Classic Swan is a set of recollections about their adventures. Author Juan E Corradi is a New Yorker of Argentinian extraction, chairman emeritus of the Seamanship Committee of the New York Yacht Club and has been professor of political sociology at New York University.

Clearly a man to be taken seriously, he wears his laurels lightly. His thoroughly enjoyable account of extended voyaging on his 38ft Swan is modest and as non-hysterical as Erik Hiscock at his best. I love this chapter on his first Atlantic crossing on Pirate.

To quote the old Lancashire poem about Albert and the Lion, ‘there was no wrecks and nobody drownded,’ yet the spiritual wonder of the experience, missing from so many accounts, shines through in his masterful understatement.

Extract from The Voyages of Pirate

To cross an ocean on a small sailboat is part of a unique and ephemeral cult. It would be incomprehensible to the mariners of yesterday, who sailed for necessity, not sport, and it will be probably unknown to the humans that will follow us. Amateur ocean sailors may be a doomed but enchanted breed, as the ageing and shrinking membership of their organisations testify. I am proud to belong to them, and wish to leave this modest record of our damnable pleasure.

It started like this. On a bright day in late April of 1991, I composed a note to Pirate’s volunteer crew for our passage, containing a schedule for launching, sea trials, provisioning, routing, departure date, watches, and miscellaneous details. There were just four of us and a big ocean to cross: Simon Wynn from Australia, Hanno Schloendorff from Germany, my wife Christina Spellman from New York City, and myself, an Argentinian in America. The note comprised six categories, plus Number 7, reminding them to write a will.

At 0815 on 6 June we cast off after breakfast from Jamestown, Rhode Island. The barometer was high, the sky clear, and the wind blew in the morning at 8 knots from the north. Soon, Narragansett Bay faded in the haze. There I was, the least probable of seamen only a few years before, facing the great blue, minding the vessel with family and friends. Christina, Simon, and Hanno were confident enough, or crazy enough, to trust Pirate and me with their lives.

New adventure

It was a drastic way to leave the city and its chores for an adventure both simpler and more demanding, closer to nature, to life and death. The academic in me bemoaned the sorry state of my discipline, sociology, which I once joined in the hope of making the world a better place.

The thinker in me bemoaned the death of spirit at the university, transformed from a place of high learning and idle curiosity into an information vending machine with a stable of celebrities as part of the publicity brochure. But the sailor in me was not at all sorry for those disappointments, or for the killjoy life that had replaced them. Before me stood the prospect of raw survival at sea.

As we cleared Brenton Reef the afternoon breeze blew from the south-west at 16 knots, and fell to half that by nightfall. Calm rollers rocked the boat. The sunset was bright orange; a trawler passed astern. We set our wind vane, baptised ‘Alfredo’, and it performed flawlessly, as we moved at 5 knots.

Night fell gently upon us as Pirate braved the first majestic ocean swells. We practised star sights and started our watches after the first dinner under sail. The moon rose before midnight, and at 0300 we changed course further to the east. We’d entered another world, where an ever-present horizon had replaced the future.

Dawn greeted us with Homeric rosy fingers, cirrus clouds, and 7 knots of breeze on a very broad reach. It was time for the spinnaker. Shortly after noon we cleared Nantucket Light, and the ocean came alive: marauding sharks to port, three lazy pilot whales to starboard, and playful dolphins all around the boat.

We doused the spinnaker late in the afternoon, prepared for another night, took star sights at 2100, and encountered some haze, then fog, which made us nervous, given the proximity of the shipping lanes. Cold arrived too, and the cries of unseen birds sounded infernal at times. Alfredo continued to steer while one of us remained on watch.

The following day the sun burnt through the fog. As soon as the apparent wind crossed the threshold of 12 knots, Pirate lurched forward under full canvas, and reached a speed of 7 knots. She was telling us: ‘Give me wind and I shall give you miles.’ We sighted more whales at noon. We were now 200 miles from shore. We chatted over the radio with a Lyons Lines cargo vessel, and a little later with a container ship bound for the Azores, like us.

On the third day of the voyage we started monitoring the sea temperature, because it would tell us when we entered the Gulf Stream. Since we were approaching the current from the west, where its ‘wall’ is sharpest, a sudden jump in temperature would be a sure indicator that we were at the mercy of the Blue God.

From NOAA charts and their surface temperature analyses we had an approximate idea of the coordinates of the Gulf Stream, its eddies and meanders. We were about to enter the largest river on earth some 300 miles east of Rhode Island. In the wee hours of 9 June 9 the moon rose. The sea temperature jumped from 20°C to 26°. By 0430 it reached 30°.

We were fully inside the Gulf Stream. Our instruments (in those days Loran-C and an early GPS) put us at 38°46’N, 65°03’W. The tremendous force of the current was in our favour, supplementing the south-west breeze that blew at 14 knots. Together, wind and stream gave us a speed over the ground of just below 12 knots.

But the Blue God is finicky. It is a magnet for odd forms of marine life (Portuguese men-of-war, sargasso weed, lazy turtles, flapping sunfish, basking sharks, regular sharks, flying fish, phosphorescence), and for squalls.

The skies were first hazy, and then cloudy, with signs of the first squall approaching. Pirate kept cutting the waves at a steady clip on a pleasant beam reach. In the afternoon squalls and whales arrived, at the same time. We put a reef in the mainsail. A large thunderstorm loomed on the horizon, then dissipated.

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We continued under reefed main and No3 genoa, a combination that suits a Swan 38 well for breezes over 20 knots on her beam. The squalls left us by midnight. The new breeze was weak and on the nose, so we lost speed.

Things improved in the afternoon, but 10 June held a surprise. At 1630, while we ran under spinnaker, ominous black clouds appeared astern. Then, no more than three miles away, a bizarre spectacle unfolded before our eyes: six waterspouts marched, like booted legs of doom, towards us. Human reactions are often contradictory: while two of us thought only of dousing the kite quickly, the youngest member of the crew grabbed his camera as if afraid, not of the approaching twisters, but of missing the photo op!

Christina emerged from the galley just in time to see the twisters, but had to go back as the whistle of a pressure-cooker sounded its own alarm. Luckily, the spouts moved sideways and left us in peace, or rather, with just a vulgar thunderstorm.

The weather and the sea calmed down during the night; the pressure-cooker did not explode. The skies became clear, the night balmy. I held the wheel relaxed, enjoying the soft breeze, and then, exactly at midnight, came the last surprise: the pale green folds of a rare, immense sky curtain. Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, not common in those latitudes.

The new moon rose on 11 June at 0300, garnished by small clouds. At dawn we got a fix with the sextant, and checked our position with the Norwegian ship Pasquale. Thus started our sixth day at sea, which also brought a radio conversation with meteorologist Bob Rice, very keen on knowing more about our encounter with waterspouts. He advised us to come down one degree in latitude to avoid icebergs.

That was our last communication with him, because the SSB radio was disabled by a hidden leak behind it. From then on, any communication would be patched through VHF from passing ships.

On the eighth day at sea we felt cold again, which meant we’d moved north of the Stream. We changed our clocks as we passed through our first time zone. As per the advice received earlier, we came down to a more prudent latitude. Pirate’s speed steadied at 6½ knots over the water. On the ninth day we changed course due east. Dolphins came to play. We were resigned to radio silence: we were truly alone in the middle of nowhere.

Gale brewing

The night brought stronger winds. They built steadily to Force 7, and the waves reached 10ft. A gale was brewing, taking its time, as Atlantic gales do, to ripen and reach full strength. It never became severe, but it lasted 36 hours – standard for an Atlantic blow. We set a second forestay and hanked on a strong No4 jib. With such a small, heavy jib and two reefs in the mainsail, the cockpit was flooded twice, but drained itself in little time.

Pirate kept moving at 6½ knots, a confident boat eating the miles.

When the gale subsided we’d covered 1,300 miles. The wind backed, and the seas were finally calm. On the 11th day we set the spinnaker again, and sighted an inquisitive whale to port; clearly a humpback. We made noise by dipping a second spinnaker pole in the water and banging it with a mallet, to drive the beast away. We were not ready for Moby Dick.

The next morning the wind freshened a bit from the south-east, and Pirate accelerated again, as we breached the magic 12-knot barrier of apparent wind speed. Again dolphins surrounded the boat, determined to gambol and leap. When playing music below decks, the vibrations made them jump and snort as if dancing with the waves, and I’m convinced they prefer Mozart to jazz. We changed the ship’s clock again: 1,500 miles under the keel; another time zone.

Our 13th day at sea was uneventful. The wind abated and moved to the south-west, allowing us to sail on a broad reach, with staysail and genny first, and then under spinnaker. A hint of island life: a Bermuda Longtail hovered overhead. We were approaching the island of Flores which we located with the Radio Direction Finder. When the GPS came back to life it confirmed our celestial fix.

Our official 14th day at sea, 20 June, started with the excitement and apprehension of an imminent landfall. The skies were covered. The air was hazy. We sighted lights at 0200. An hour later we saw a commercial vessel far astern but then, as the fog lifted, in front of us, massive and grey, the isle of Faial and the volcano of Pico became visible.

We doused the sails and revved the engine, and something strange happened: after two weeks at sea, we were moved almost to tears at the sight of land. Landfall after a first ocean crossing is a strong, unforgettable experience. At 0625 we docked by the office of the Portuguese port authorities, and I set foot on land, holding boat documents under my arm. My sea legs made the land seem wobbly. My emotion made me feel I was walking on clouds.

We had done it – 13 days and 11 hours after leaving Brenton Reef we were in a land of rolling hills, small houses, well-tended gardens, new accents and different faces. Soon enough, we’d visit Peter Azevedo’s famed Café Sport, haven for mariners and the hub of gossip in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. We had averaged 138 miles a day, with our best daily run estimated at 160 miles.

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