'Hearing the Irish sea area forecast brought me to tears'

Claire McCluskey and her partner Nick are sailing back from the Caribbean to Ireland. This is the final instalment of her Diary from the Sea.

To quote our very good friend and crew-member Brian, the best thing about sailing long passages is arriving at the end. We pondered the ill logic of this statement quite a bit while at sea, on the final leg of our journey from the Azores to Ireland. Why on earth would you engage in an activity, for fun, if the best part is to stop doing it?

To our dismay, the further we got into our trip, the more we were inclined to see the truth in Brian’s statement. The cold and the rolling sea-state were putting up a good fight with our morale. Around the half-way point, the winds began increasing and with that, the swell and the waves built higher and higher.

In one way, these conditions were beginning to prove testament to how far we had come as sailors, as I did not feel scared at the increasing scale and severity of the conditions. Thinking back to how inexperienced we were in the beginning, I have no doubt that I would once have felt entirely uncertain about our safety, abilities and perhaps even prospects for the future, in our current situation.

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These seas were big – bigger than anything we had weathered to date. And the winds were coming in loud and hard. Our weather reports were showing a low pressure passing to the north of us, shooting down winds of 35 knots and more in our direction. And, unlike the last gale we encountered on our way towards Faial, these winds were looking set to accompany us for much longer than 24 hours. We could expect the high winds to carry us the rest of the way – about three more days, until we reached home.

Mighty uncomfortable

It wasn’t all that bad. Well, it wasn’t scary, anyway… but it was mighty uncomfortable. The wind and waves this time were not running with us from behind, but coming in from the side. We were getting shoved impetuously around down below, which made simple tasks – such as getting dressed up for watch in your foul-weather gear – infuriatingly challenging. Steering was hard work; the muscles in my arms, back and chest ached constantly from grappling with the wheel. And whoever was on the helm would often receive a breaking wave of ice cold water to the face.

And the noise! The waves breaking on the side of the boat slammed in with a deafening boom that would startle us from our sleep. It was vaguely worrying at first, but the sturdiness of the boat was undeniably reassuring; she took it all in her stride. Unlike us poor sods – everything felt so hard; it was difficult to concentrate on anything at all. We fell into a bare routine of eat, snooze, sail. Repeat.

Finishing up on watch one morning, after a hefty dosing from a passing wave, I was tired, cold and feeling quite sorry for myself. I was, as the others also felt, Over It. Only a short while later, Matt made an interesting discovery; our steering had stopped working.

The absurdity of the situation somehow lifted our spirits and what ensued was a farcical romp of Carry-On style hilarity. Closer investigation revealed a very low level of hydraulic fluid in our steering system, but, unable to find a leak, we topped it up and hoped for the best. This worked for a while but, alas, by the next morning, the wheel was once again completely unresponsive.

The hilarious (as we saw it at the time – but perhaps we had begun to go mad by this point) thing was that the boat was so well balanced that we cannot be sure at what point our turning of the wheel failed to make an impact. The boat had been holding a true course all on her own and we suspect we had in fact been going sans steering, without realising it, for quite a while. We had about 100 nautical miles to go.

Stroke of genius

By some ingenious stroke of genius that Nick is often known to demonstrate, he figured out how to adjust our course by careful tweaking of the sails. If we felt we were straying a bit too far south, a tightening of our mizzen sail would nudge us up into the wind again. Similarly, hardening up on our staysail would pull us back down by a few degrees, and vice versa.

We continued in this way for a whole day, closing in on Ireland. With nobody on the helm anymore, we huddled together in the cockpit, our heads peering out over the sprayhood, scanning the horizon for sign of land.

After almost nine months, and a gruelling final leg at sea, the sound of the Irish coastguard’s sea area forecast, pealing through the dull morning, was so wonderful and welcome it actually brought me to tears.

We joyfully sighted land later that afternoon – our first glimpse was of the Fastnet lighthouse, a notorious sailing landmark – and then established radio contact with the coastguard to inform them of our situation. They were brilliant, requesting an update every four hours and dutifully keeping a watchful eye over us as we made our way in.

We had an emergency tiller on board (one never expects to use this sort of equipment) and once we were in the lee of the island, sheltered from the swell and waves, we disengaged the hydraulic system and rigged it up. Though it would have no doubt been impossible to use on the open sea, it now worked a treat, and with it we found we could manoeuvre our way along just fine.

The coastguard was kind enough to let us know that the lifeboat was on standby, just in case we needed assistance, but we managed by ourselves. We docked in Crosshaven at 9am on the morning of June 8th, greeted by the open arms, banners and balloons of our cheering and tearful families.

The best thing about long journeys really is the arrival home.