Great Seamanship: A leisurely Pacific crossing

Tom Cunliffe introduces this extract from Christian Williams' Philosophy Of Sailing, a retrospective of his leisurely Pacific crossing giving another perspective on ocean sailing

Christian Williams, now 81, is alive, well and going strong in California. To get a handle on this remarkable man, watch A Gale of Fire Turns our World to Ash on his YouTube channel, ChristianWilliamsYachting.

His home of 30-odd years is totally destroyed in the well-documented Pacific Palisades firestorm. The measured, seaman’s response to what for many would be a catastrophe gives us an insight into the author of Philosophy of Sailing, Offshore in Search of the Universe.

Williams was editor of The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal and went on, among many other things, to become a successful TV producer.

We join him on passage from Los Angeles towards Hawaii, sailing the same route as the Transpac race. where he begins to ponder on the real differences between cruising and racing. And he should know. In the book, he’s taking life as it comes on his Ericsson 38 which he loves, but in 1979 he was with Ted Turner on Tenacious, winning the most dramatic Fastnet race of them all.

Extract from the Philosophy Of Sailing

We are cruising, not racing. We move across the ocean purposefully, seamanlike, in accordance with the gift of the day.

And this day is good: a following breeze, moderate seas and distinctly balmy air. We’re making 6½ knots at the moment, which seems pleasingly fast. I set the table for breakfast with a knife, fork, spoon and napkin, and carried eggs and bacon there in a tray. Here to serve, and notice the Tabasco I have put out, should we choose a burst of red pepper to wake up the day.

You’d think that a sailboat, by design and nature intended to cooperate with the wind, would foster respect and contemplation. And it does. But add one other sailboat and things change. A leisurely course across a bay is a sojourn until altered by another boat approaching from astern.

If the other boat is closing, conversation turns to sail trim and more attention to the helm. It doesn’t matter that the boats may be quite different in size or design or number of crew. If one boat is faster, it can inject into the air of even a pleasant picnic sail the scent of sulphur.

Comparison is all the more unnatural because one boat may be a happy tub, her sails old and bottom foul, while the approaching yacht gains with a $20,000 composite mainsail. Competition between sailboats has been with us since before fishing schooners raced to be first home with codfish, and can be seen, and heard, in any Optimist fleet of nine-year-olds.

We have the advantage this morning of an empty horizon. A shearwater roams the wave tops. The feeling of the boat is intimate and easy.

It hasn’t always been, for me. My sailing life has been informed, or moulded, or warped, by comparisons. My first race was at 10 years old as crew to my father. He had built a Penguin, an 11ft 6in sailing dinghy designed for wintertime racing.

The idea was to hone skills with short races, as many as five in a day. We were in Red Bank, New Jersey, and as we launched our boat among the 20 or so others the race committee declared us under the minimum weight. It was humiliating to watch my father add 20lb of rocks in a bucket to make up for my skinny insufficiency, but that wasn’t what I was worried about. It was my father’s first race, too, and he had just learned to sail.

By the first mark we were last. By the last mark of the last race we were last. It was 50°F with little wind, and I remember tending the mainsheet in a heavy wool coat and galoshes as we fell further behind on every leg.

“That was great!” he said on the way home. “Thanks for coming along!”

Racing is a great teacher, and 20 years of it taught me as much about myself as about sailboats and how to make them go fast. The great attribute of one-design racing is that all the boats are the same. The winner is the best skipper, that day, and the only variable is you.

I often raced a Laser. I kept notebooks of tactical plans, sail trim settings and my own workout routines. Racing a Laser is a test of stomach muscles as much as skill. I learned to feel every element of the character of an unsinkable 14ft long hunk of glassfibre with a bendy aluminium mast. In a spring regatta when it blew 30 knots I capsized five times and finished the race disgusted, my wetsuit torn in half. One year, I managed to win the President’s Cup on the Potomac River by covering a 20-year-old college kid all weekend. We must’ve tacked a hundred times, which is 500 sit-ups, and at every tack he smiled and hiked out flat as a board.

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At the trophy presentation I could hardly walk. I was 40, and I knew the next time we met he would win, and he knew it too, and the next time we met, he did.

Competition makes sailors better. At high levels it is violent and pitiless, even on the most pleasant day. In Annapolis, my partner Larry Brodie and I campaigned a Soling. Our fleet included Stuart Walker, an Olympic medallist and author of sailboat racing books, and Sam Merrick, chairman of the US Olympic Sailing Committee. We raced all year, scraping snow off the boats in winter. Rivalries were intense, and winning – which Larry and I did infrequently – came hard. The prize was a chance to represent the country in the Olympics of 1980.

The Olympics were called off that year over tension with the Soviet Union, but I’d seen the soul of racing. Gary Jobson, preparing for the 1981 America’s Cup as Ted Turner’s tactician, used our Soling to tune up in match races against Merrick, who had been his mentor. Larry and I were the crew, and figured to have a swell chance to see young lion Gary in action against baleful Sam, who we both admired and feared.

The first time Jobson and Merrick crossed tacks neither of them would yield and the two boats struck at full speed, with broken parts flying off and both men standing up and yelling at each other at the top of their lungs.
So that’s how it is, racing with the masters.

1900: a sail in sight

There’s a blip on the ship alarm seven miles away, the first other sailboat of the voyage. She’s a little larger than we are, and the AIS lists her name as Onde Amo. I can just see her sail on the southern horizon. She is competing in one of the most famous ocean races of all, the TransPac. I shall hoist my cocktail pennant in her honour, the traditional recognition of a cruiser to a racer going by.

The 49th TransPac, like its predecessors, started a few miles from where we did off Los Angeles, with a finish line at Diamond Head on our destination island of O’ahu. We share the same course. For racers, it’s usually a spinnaker run all the way, and the likelihood of a wind from astern for 2,500 miles changed yacht design.

To win, boats had to be able to surf the offshore waves. That meant long, light hulls with a flat run aft that could plane like speedboats. By the 1990s such downhill ‘sleds’ could make the finish line in a week. This year, Mighty Merloe, a 60ft trimaran with a 100ft mast and crew of eight, is already there: she made it in four days and seven hours, a new course record.

We don’t carry a spinnaker, and Thelonious II doesn’t plane down the face of waves. The naval architect Bruce King designed her to succeed on all points of sail, not specialise in one. But the difference between us and Onde Amo is more than hull design or number of crew. It is the difference between the game and the grandstand.

TransPac entries conform to stringent rules of safety and performance, long lists of required gear and crew qualifications, and undergo a personal inspection of the yacht to include an actual man overboard recovery demonstration. Any boat that qualifies for a trophy is inspected again. The Transpac is not a spectator sport, being for the most part out of sight of land. Nobody in one ever forgets it.

Does it make you feel slow, jogging along as we are?

No, just different. Nobody inspected us. Nobody asked for credentials or an entry form. The Coast Guard doesn’t even know we left, and there was no requirement to tell them. There’s a single-handed Transpac race, too, from San Francisco to Kaua’i, with many mandated requirements and a daily report of everybody’s position. I asked a recent winner, Steve Hodges, why he would want to sail such a crowded ocean. This was after a beer or two. “Why would anybody want to be the only boat out there?” he asked in return.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s to sail without concentration and a finish line. Racing has both, all the time.

I do know what it’s like just now on board Onde Amo, gaining on us to the south. They have a crew of seven and seven different spinnakers. They stand watches of three hours. They use routing software to wring the best out of every slant of wind. They travel light for speed, change sails at every excuse, and at all times the skipper knows the position of every boat around him, which if you want to win means a continuous edge of doubt, hope and determination that can blot out the sun and the sky.

I don’t know if Onde Amo can see us as clearly as we see her. We would appear on her AIS as unimportant: a cruising boat, an exception on this temporary race course of the sea and therefore no cause for fear or satisfaction.
I can hear in my imagination the muffled click of their blocks, the low tones of the crew conferring, and the snoring of some off-watch fellow in his unchanged clothes. I wish them luck and victory.

Don’t be disappointed that we’re not them. Seven guys on a little boat means your bunk is shared hot and smells like somebody else. I am freshly shaved, newly washed, and about to make us another pineapple cocktail.

Here’s their log entry for today:

“Yesterday afternoon around 1700, it got very interesting! First, we broke the afterguy that holds the spinnaker pole back, so the spinnaker was flying free. We got the chute down, ran a replacement afterguy and got the chute back up, only to see that it had a small tear in it. We swapped to a different spinnaker, repaired the original one and swapped back to the A2.

All in all, it took less than an hour. Then we noticed that the next-to-top batten in the mainsail had broken. So, we sent Mike C aloft in about 20 knots of wind to put a patch on the main. He did a great job and I am happy to report that, although the main has a bit of a funny shape at the top, no other damage to the sail.

We are seeing in the daily report that Rio 100 hit something and damaged one of their rudders, that Cabernet Sky blew up their A2 spinnaker and don’t have a replacement, and that Tropic Thunder damaged their A2 spinnaker and are only using it during the daylight hours.

“We are still making steady if small gains on Creative, but Dark Star is proving to be the competition for the rest of us in the class. In the daily report they noted they are doing 13 knots most of the night and hit 20 at one point. We are doing 8-9 knots and hit 12-13 occasionally. Oh well, everyone is pitching in on the daily boat chores and driving the boat as hard as we can.”

Our oceans are different, but I’ve been on theirs. Our goal is to stop the world, theirs to make it spin faster. I was good at speeding up. This challenge is different.

Later in the crossing, we find Christian in a different mood. 0355

I noticed weeds in the water this morning, and wondered why. There shouldn’t be seaweed out here, and it wasn’t. It was some kind of stringy jellyfish in sizes and shapes I’d not seen before.

Now, where the windvane oar cuts the water at our stern, the ocean leaves a trail of phosphorescence that stretches in the wake for hundreds of yards. The bow wears a necklace of green jewels, streaming on either side.

If jellyfish are beautiful, so are we all.

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