Sea Lord

vanished with the dawn, and I was going home.

But why, and to what, I did not know.

I should have sought shelter in Falmouth, or at any of the Cornish ports, but I had a sudden reluctance to exchange my damp clothes for a landfall. The wind, still in the south, was gusting towards gale force and flensing the wavetops into a stinging white mist that obscured the grey sea. The waves were thundering from the southwest, but being crossed by the new wind that filled their troughs with confusion. Sunflower did not mind. She was a tough beast and had taken far worse. She had a steel hull and, over the years, I’d doubled the strength of all her rigging. She’d ridden the edge of a typhoon once, and all that had been broken was some crockery in her galley. Now, in a filthy new day, she sailed up-channel. The daylight was grey, churned with spray, and cold. I was curbing Sunflower, not wanting a following sea to poop her, but, though she was pitching hard, she was in no danger. All that could have killed her now was a bigger ship or my own carelessness.

My first sight of home was a glimpse of the Eddystone lighthouse. It was then I turned for Salcombe. I suppose I’d always known I was going to Salcombe because Charlie lived there. Charlie and I had grown up together, chased our first girls together, got drunk together, were arrested together, then sailed the far seas together. Whatever else waited for me in England, Charlie was there, and his friendship alone made this voyage home worth its while; so, in the hard dawn wind, I turned for Charlie’s home port: Salcombe.

On a chart Salcombe seems like one of the most sheltered havens of England’s south coast, and so it is if you’re safe inside its steep-sided web of flooded river valleys. Many a yacht has waited out Channel storms in Salcombe, and the very harrowing of hell would find it hard to disturb the innermost lakes, but in an onshore wind against a falling tide the entrance to Salcombe is a death-trap. Salcombe means safety, but reaching that safety in a southern gale is suicidal folly. A bar lies athwart the harbour entrance like a hidden barricade. The wind-driven waves are toppled by the sudden ridge on the sea bottom to make a churning turmoil of breaking seas that crash white and are made even steeper and more dangerous when an ebbing tide tries to challenge them. Only a fool chooses Salcombe in a southern gale. Dartmouth, which can be entered in any weather, is just a short distance to the east, and Plymouth, even safer than Dartmouth, is not so far to the west. Torbay, the classic shelter in a southern or westerly gale, is an easy sail up-channel, but I chose Salcombe.

Perhaps, I thought, if I was not meant to be coming home, then the bar at the estuary’s mouth would tell me. I would tempt the devil and, if I lost, Sunflower and I would die on the bar, rolled and swamped and broken up within the very smell of home. That reasoning was the stupid bravado of tiredness, made worse by a lethal mix of self-pity and arrogance. The self-pity came from my reluctance to see my family again, the arrogance from a determination to show off my seamanship as I came home.

Sunflower’s boom was hard out on the port side as we ran towards Bolt Head. We were crossing the seas now, sliding diagonally over their eastwards flow. One moment we would be on the crest of a wave, triumphant and flying, then we would plunge deeper and deeper into the watery darkness and I would see the next wave threatening astern, its top sleeked and whipping with the wind’s force. The glassy dark heart of death would rear up Sunflower’s port quarter and, just as I thought she would never rise again, so we would be heaved up to the next crest from where I would stare ahead for a sight of land. The tiredness was gone, I did not even care that I was cold and wet. Now I was elated by the thrill of daring a sea to do its worst.

Yet the gale-driven sea was not our enemy. Our enemy was the steep rise of the bar, silent and hidden, beneath Salcombe’s entrance. Charlie and I had once watched a yacht crash down into a wave trough on Salcombe’s bar. The boat had come up again, but in the trough her keel had struck bottom and the compression of the blow had smashed every bulkhead inside her hull and fractured the skull of a man sitting at her chart table. Even a lifeboat had been lost on Salcombe’s bar, and lifeboats make Sunflower look fragile. Scores of widows cursed Salcombe’s bar, and now we were racing towards it, driven by a southern gale and madness.

There was a moment, early in the afternoon, when I knew I could turn east and still make Prawle Point to reach Dartmouth in safety. For a second I hesitated, tempted by sanity, then the greater temptation of tweaking the devil’s tail took over. I was a Rossendale, the last of the line, and I would come home with all the savage flair of that unpleasant family’s blood.

Bolt Head came up like a grey threat on the port bow. The land was blurred and soaking, the wind had a noise like an eldritch death shriek, and the sea was harrying me on to the lee shore. The waves were huge, steep and made tumultuous by the land’s proximity. At the top of each breaking crest I stared forward and I knew what I would see and, when I saw it, the fear came. I saw whiteness. It’s one thing to imagine a danger, but quite another to see its true malevolence, and to realise that the imagination does not have sufficient horror to match reality. The bar was frantic with shattering seas. I had a glimpse of breaking wavetops, spuming a mist of white, and beneath that mist the weight of water would be a churning maelstrom. Men ashore would have seen my sails by now. They would be knowledgeable men, and they would damn me for a fool and pray that my boat lived despite my foolishness. Doubtless the inshore lifeboat would already have been called, but only to pluck my corpse from the incoming waves.

I kept to the western side of the entrance. The water’s deeper there, though the Bass Rock is waiting just in case the bar fails to kill. I saw an explosion of white spew up as a wave broke into fragments on the Little Mew Stone, then Sunflower dipped her bows as a wave lifted her stern, but this time, instead of riding up over the wave’s crest, the great steel hull began to plane on the tons of rolling water. Now we were no different to the surfers of the Pacific. We were no longer a boat, but a scrap of material being carried aloft on a wave’s violence to where the bar made a white turmoil of the sea. We were also just where I wanted to be: hard under the western cliffs. I was braced in the cockpit with the tiller between my thighs and with both hands on the mainsheet for I knew what was about to happen.

Sunflower’s hard-reefed mainsail was still out to port. At any second the wind would bounce and curl off the cliffs and she would gybe. I should have furled the main and let the small jib and the big sea take us in, but to furl the main would have been to show cowardice. Let the bar do its worst. I’d chosen to play the sea’s game, and I wouldn’t give in.

The leech of the mainsail shivered. It wasn’t much, just a tiny flicker of the heavy grey material, but it was the sign I had been waiting for and, before the cliff-turned wind could dismast me, I hauled the sheet in with both hands. I braced the tiller hard, knowing how Sunflower would be knocked to port when the gybe came.

It came.

Unless you’re pointing dead into the wind and happy to go nowhere, the sails of a boat are always stretched either to port or starboard. There are two ways to bring them across from one side to the other. One, to tack, is to turn the boat into the wind, so that the wind slides decorously across the bows and the sails, like flags streaming from flagpoles, obediently change their direction. The other way, to gybe, is to turn the boat in front of the wind. Then it’s as if the wind has sneaked fast round the flagpole and the flag is crushed up against the pole before it smacks out in its new flight. Gybing is dangerous and violent. Instead of a flag I was letting a gale rip round behind a heavy sail that was lashed to a skull-crushing wooden boom. The weight of all that gear hammering across the wind’s eye could easily tear my shrouds free of their chain-plates and pluck the mast clean out at its root. Except that I had just enough of the mainsheet gathered in to act as a spring and, as the great sail and boom slammed across, I used the sheet to soak its force and tame its threat. I skinned my right palm bloody doing it, but it was a proper job. That’s what Charlie would have called it. ‘A proper job’ was Charlie’s biggest approbation. He offered it rarely, and only to practical achievements like a well-scarfed piece of wood or a neatly welded seam, or for a maniacal gybe off the bar at Salcombe.

Not that I had time to admire my own manoeuvre. We had survived the gybe, but as soon as the sail settled I felt Sunflower’s bows drop and I knew the bar was straight beneath the boat’s stem. I whooped a crazy challenge. I was staring down into the trough where mud and sand discoloured the water. Scummy strings of foam whipped across that dull patch. I was running into the killing trough and, for a few seconds, the howl of the wind was muted by the towering wave behind me. I could only hear the seething of the water. This sea had perhaps a hundred yards left in which to kill me, no more, but they were the worst hundred yards. If I broached now then nothing would save me because Sunflower would be turned over, her