Call of the Cape: Nearing the end of their voyage to Cape Town, Theo Dorgan and crew are still learning the ropes, and not just the ropes, of sailing
It feels as if we are travelling in a bubble of suspended time, on calm seas for the past three days; stars by night, blue cold sea by day. We got out of Tristan da Cunha just ahead of what we would now call "a bit of a blow", running north to be ready to make our westing when the winds came - and come they did. The constant wind this time didn't rise much above 50 knots and the gusts rarely above 60, but we did spend the next four days living at an angle of 40 degrees, perpetually jolting and banging across a beam sea, as damp inside as it was wet outside.
It isn't, believe me, that we have become blasé about heavy weather, it's just that all things truly are relative, and the weather in this ocean is on such a scale, and so changeable, that we have become habituated both to its power and its unexpectedness. "Expect the unexpected" is the true and only motto of the South Atlantic and the past five weeks have drummed the mantra deep into our consciousness.
We haven't been flying blind, of course. Our skipper, Steve Wilkins, knows this ocean as if it were his own backyard, which is what it has become over the past three years. Also, we have the latest in satellite technology aboard, and it would be hard to exaggerate the role this has played in our lives. We have literally been looking into the future, pulling down pictures out of the air of the weather before us, looking down on evolving weather systems from the eye of God, planning and plotting strategy in advance of real time.
Of course, we get the weather anyway, you can't dodge the impact forever, but we can duck between systems where it's possible, and when it's not we can prepare the boat and ourselves for what's coming. You'll get traditionalists who moan about this technology, just as I'm sure there were Genoese and Portuguese masters of the old school who decried the newfangled compass and stuck up for the trusty astrolabe.
If I was ever hesitant about such things, the sheer good fortune of being able to know what's up ahead has long since worked its magic on me, on all of us. We have become a small waterborne nation of true believers. Hence the relative sangfroid when we run into the by now familiar long deep swells, howling winds and seven-metre waves. We know what's on the other side and we know what we have to do to push through to there.We are adepts of the satellite imagery, 21st-century sailors.
Well, up to a point. The boat, after all, still has to float, and men and women have to be responsible for maintaining her integrity, for sailing her well and truly, for keeping her to her course. It comes down, as always, to the arts and skills of the human mind and body.
We have spent a great part of this journey broadening and deepening our knowledge of the art and science of sailing. Indeed, most of us have been to school, formal school, every day of the trip, following the Yachtmaster theory syllabus. We have been learning the ropes, and not just the ropes - signals, meteorology and weather, boat handling, sail trim, knots, flags, cooking and provisioning, crew management, navigation, mechanical maintenance and the devil knows what else.
On top of all this, we've been running the boat and, occasionally, sleeping. Clean laundry is perilously scarce now, fresh food almost gone, water tanks almost empty. We're ready to run in, and yet there's a counter-current too. We have been together, all 10 of us, for what seems a very long time now: our skipper, Steve, than whom perhaps no living person knows more about this ocean; Debs, our sunny New Zealander and her fellow watch captain, genial giant Kevin Cronin; Big Mike (59), the daddy of the boat, a laconic American who arrives on deck every morning to wonder if the Fuegan war canoes have caught up with us yet; Diane, with her furry microphones, making a radio documentary; the racing boys, Federico and Simon; Tony Macken, with his dreams of motorcycling across Africa crowding into his eyes; Justin "The Admiral" Slawson, beaming with pride at news from home of his boys' success in the local regatta. We have become, with all the ups and downs you might expect in the circumstances, a kind of family, a small tribe perhaps, and the time of dissolution is drawing near. We'll miss each other, to varying degrees, and maybe some of us will keep in touch - these things are out there in the void of the future.
We are closing on Cape Town now, and may well have landed there by the time these words find print. Soon there will be no night watches to try our endurance, no albatrosses or speckled petrels hanging in our wake. It will all be left behind us, as the Beagle Channel is behind us, the Falklands/Malvinas, Tristan da Cunha and all the rolling vastness of the empty sea. What will endure, what we will take away with us, will be different for each one of us. Here, closing on Cape Town, we have already begun to be prisoners of memory.
