Moments of Pure Terror

I’d pitched this whole sailing gig to myself as an opportunity to emerge bolder, braver and more courageous but in fact the opposite has happened.  I can spend many hours pre-passage lying saucer eyed in the dark all but overwhelmed by visions of krakens and white squalls.  My heartrate can go from resting to infinity as I slam the helm over to avoid a last minute bommie. Anchoring was initially the activity that brought Miles and I closest to divorce and even though we’re much better at it now, the thought that we’ll drag and founder still niggles at me in even the most bottlenecked of anchorages.  I’m a great big scaredy cat.

But there have been a couple of moments of terror in the last few months that (as Miles has encouragingly pointed out) would have had most people shitting their britches. Here they are.

Ray and Navman

The previous owner of Pandion was heavily into redundancy, which is why we have two autopilots, two complete sets of sails and two depth sounders.

I call the sounders Ray (short for Raymarine) and Navman (short for Navman) and they can rarely reach a consensus about how much water we’re in.

Ray goes to sleep in anything over about 150 metres.  He says, ‘-.-‘ which roughly translates as, ‘okay lady, we are in seriously deep water here, wake me up when something happens.’  Navman just stolidly reports 57 metres, no matter what the actual depth is.  ‘Fear not,’ he says, ‘you’re in at least 57 metres.’

 

Ray only really comes alive in 57 metres or less. And I trust Ray at these depths.  When Ray says you have 20 centimetres under the keel, listen up folks, that’s all you’ve got.  Oh, but don’t forget to account for the offset that Milo can’t remember how to program into the plotter, so when Ray says you have 5.5 metres under your keel, you really have 4.5 metres.  So if a day comes that Ray really does say 20 centimetres it’ll be because we’re 80 centimetres out of the water.  And that will be bad.

 

This is what passages look like

Right, so we’re out in the deep blue, halfway between Vanuatu and Australia.  The chart plotter is uniformly white without even a single contour line to break up the whiteness.  The paper chart (yes, we do carry those, like quaint old fuddy-duddies), says we’re somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2.5 kilometres above the sea floor.  Naturally Ray is asleep, giving his standard ‘-.- talk to the hand, dollface,’ and Navman is saying we’re in 57 metres. 

 

When we’re in water this deep and I’m by myself on watch, sometimes I like to go and get one of the kids’ shells from their collection and drop it over the side (please don’t tell them). I like to sail on and imagine it sinking slowly down to the ocean floor long after we’ve gone and landing with a tiny puff of silt in some lightless trench. I like to imagine a deep sea research vessel scooping up a sample of sea floor to analyse and delivering a shallow reef shell to some bewildered researcher.  But I digress.

Earlier today, on hearing that we’d be passing within cooee of some 44 metre deep banks at sunset, Miles begged me to pass right over them in the hopes of a fishy encounter, but there were no fish, the sounders didn’t budge and according to my chart reading we are now well and truly past them.

 

It’s pitch black, 9pm, Miles is asleep, and I’m just running my eyes over the instruments in a not very attentive way when I see Ray wake up. ‘19 metres,’ he says chirpily. At that depth, Ray doesn’t lie.  Now, 19 metres might seem like a whole lot of water to have under your keel, and if you’re looking for an anchorage it’s way too much.  But in the middle of a piece of ocean that’s supposed to be several kilometres deep, it’s alarming.  Especially when Ray starts a death dive: 14.1, 9.8, 7.1, 5.5, 4.9, 4.1. I race down to the nav station to consult Navman who says … 57 metres.

At this point I throw open the aft companionway and yell at Miles loud enough to wake the dead. I’m not sure what I expect him to do.  We’re under full sail, moving at a steady 6.5 knots.  If there is something looming up in front of us, I can’t see it.  If I veer off in one direction or another, I might inadvertently veer right up its backside.  True to form, Milo’s on deck in seconds. Ray’s telling us there’s 3.9 metres under the keel, which really means 2.9.

I manage to squeeze an entire nervous breakdown into the next 60 seconds.  I brace myself for the hull-rending grind of us becoming shipwrecked some 500 miles away from land.  Miles opens the tablet which has another chart plotter on it with more accurate depths and I stop looking obsessively at Ray and go below to plot our position on the paper chart, still cringing against a crunch.

‘What’s it saying now?’ I call up to Miles.

‘5.3,’ he says, ‘but that can’t be right. We’re in seriously deep water.’

I intersect our lat and long and confirm that we’re in seriously deep water.

I can’t believe it, Ray lied.  I feel betrayed.  Navman lied too but he always lies; I expect better from Ray.

It’s five hours later and I’m back on watch.

Ray’s asleep -.-.  Navman’s telling me we’re in 87 metres, which makes an interesting change, and the paper chart’s telling me we’re in approximately 2151 metres.

All’s well.

******

2. The Thing of Which I’m Proudest

Our cockpit roof is just under 6 feet high and Miles is just over 6 feet high so for him to helm comfortably he either needs to sit in the chair or stand with his feet far enough apart to reduce his height.  Almost from the beginning of our trip I took over the helming and almost straight away I loved it.  I love the adrenalin rush you get from parking a big unresponsive beast in a tiny marina berth, narrowly avoiding million dollar boats all around.  I love knowing just how much to gun it in reverse to slow her down and how much turning circle she needs if something goes wrong.

We arrived at the outer anchorage at Petersen’s Bay two hours short of high tide and went over in the dinghy to inspect the notorious passage into the inner anchorage.  The Vanuatu cruising guide has a number of way points with which to navigate the pass but we weren’t sure how much we should rely on them. 

‘Don’t trust the way points,’ someone had told us not long ago.  ‘They’re completely wrong.’

Two boats in the previous week had gone aground on their way through the pass, and both of them were catamarans which traditionally have shallower draughts than monos like us.  Another boat told us that they’d had 0.0 under their keel when they came through and they draw 20 centimetres less than we do.

 

It was overcast and late in the day, two conditions that should be avoided when picking your way around coral bommies.  We also weren’t sure of the tides because the three models we had access to showed three different heights for high tide and three different times, as much as 60 centimetres and 2 hours difference.  Why were we so keen to get into the inner anchorage? Because a cyclone had blown up in the Solomon Islands and we were expecting three days in a row of heavy rain and thirty-plus knot winds.  The inner anchorage at Petersen’s Bay is protected from all swell and any winds.  It’s like heaven.  It has two blue pools you can dinghy to and a bar with cold beer.  We were very motivated to get in there.

We took soundings in the dinghy for half an hour and confirmed that we might have as little as 20 centimetres under us at the shallowest point.  The pass is complicated.  You go through two markers like goal posts, keeping to port, then cross an expanse of pure white sand before arriving at a field of lowish coral, then you line up a buoy that marks a boat-killing bommie and then veer hard to starboard over some more coral pavement.  We knew we wouldn’t be able to see much because of the low light, so we made a list of instructions: through the goal posts, straight ahead, when the hut on the hill lines up with the coconut tree on the ridge, veer right to line up the buoy, pass the buoy to port and then veer to the right again to line up the exit way point.

We ran through it five times to cement it in our brains, programmed our own way points into the tablet and then went back to Pandion to wait for our best guess at high tide.

I lay curled up in the aft cabin paralysed with fear.  As places to go aground, it wasn’t bad.  Petersen’s Bay is reasonably close to Luganville and the pass itself is well protected from swell by a couple of islands.  I just wasn’t sure I could do it.  There was an occasion, early on when we were making our first crossing of the Wide Bay Bar, when I let go of the helm and left it to Miles and went below to hug a pillow.  My modus operandi in crises is to freeze like a rabbit in the headlights.  There’s a reason why Miles is in charge of crises and cocktails. 

 

Miles came down to see how I was going.  ‘I’m so scared.’ I said between chattering teeth.  ‘I’ve never been this scared of helming before.’

‘Just imagine it going well,’ he said.  He looked calm but maybe he was faking calmness in order to keep me calm.  He does that.

‘Are you scared?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ I demanded.  ‘Aren’t you afraid I’ll freeze? Or crash?  Both of those things could happen.’

He shrugged.  ‘I know you can do it.’

I was profoundly touched by his trust.  I’m not sure if the boot had been on the other foot that I’d have been capable of such trust.  There are times I definitely don’t trust Miles to helm and I wrest the steering wheel out of his hands. (Anyone who’s seen Miles drive a car will understand this. It’s not that he’s reckless, he’s just often in such Deep Thought that he hums past turn offs that we were supposed to take, or drives down one way streets the wrong way.)

The kids were not unaware of the tension. 

‘You can do it, Mum,’ Reminy kept saying, but later on she let me read her diary which reads: I’m terrified. It. Is. So. Shallow. (emphasis hers)

When the time came we gave the kids specific instructions to keep them busy: during the pass nobody is to talk to Mummy except for Daddy; Budi, read the numbers on that depth sounder but don’t call them out, just remember the shallowest number; Reminy stand amidships to relay messages from Daddy on the bows to Mummy at the helm; Sylvie, go below.

We lifted the anchor and headed for the goal posts.  The sun had just gone down but it was still reasonably light.  I cleared the posts, covered the sandy straight and turned Pandion to line up the buoy.

Which wasn’t there.

Unbeknownst to me, at this point Miles had a private wig out of his own.  The buoy had vanished under water, its tether being shorter than the tide.

But I was halfway through now and there was no room to turn back.  I ignored the real world and went to the cartoon world of the tablet, where I kept the little black ship that was us moving over each of our four waypoints.

As we passed the Death Bommie Miles saw the buoy suspended some 30 cm under water by our port side but by then I’d already turned out into deeper water.

“You did it!” screamed the kids, and all the good endorphins that follow imminent danger flowed through my body in a trembling moment of pure joy.  Budi reported a minimum depth beneath us of a wholesome 40 centimetres.

We dropped the anchor in 10 metres in good solid mud and slept like babies even though the wind picked up and howled through the rigging all night long.

I would have to traverse the pass three more times over the coming weeks, but that first time was the best.

My Main Man at the Petersen Bay blue hole