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Trans-Atlantic with Jonah
Transatlantic with Jonah
by Ron Schaper, Florida Station
It wouldn’t be fair to blame the hurricane on him. After all, we’d set out from Fort Lauderdale on Sept. 1, 1971, the heart of hurricane season. And the fact that the driveshaft coupling on Eshowe broke shortly after we left and prevented us from using the engine wasn’t his fault either. But when you add up the series of adventures, scrapes, and mishaps that turned a sail from Florida to Spain’s Balearic Islands into a 66-day odyssey — well, there had to be some reason for it, right? Superstitious sailors have long pointed the finger at the Jonah figures among them. As the Old Testament tells us, God ordered Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and preach against its wickedness. Instead, Jonah set sail for Tarshish. When a huge storm hit, the sailors blamed Jonah because he’d disobeyed the Lord, and when they threw him overboard, the storm ceased. Ever since, sailors thought to bring bad luck, foul weather, and all types of nautical misfortunes have been branded Jonahs. Should such a sailor be found to have gone missing from morning chores, the crew might justify their role in his disappearance with “he got the Jonah’s lift on the middle watch.” They’d seen to it that he didn’t continue to bring bad luck. Now we on Eshowe wouldn’t have gone so far as to give a Jonah’s lift to our shipmate — but there’s no denying we were tempted. Who was this Jonah? He was the little brother of a smoking-hot blonde I was trying to get closer to. She lived on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, and when I told her of my upcoming delivery to Europe, she asked if her brother could go along “for the experience.” It was my hope that by taking him under my wing, she would be ever so grateful. Eshowe, a steel 46-foot ketch, surely would’ve benefited from some motoring or even motor-sailing ability, but the driveshaft coupling could not be fixed at sea. We plodded on, through the Sargasso Sea, which was like sailing through a meadow. We caught so many fish that our freezer was full. Small, white puffy clouds streamed toward us, the barometer fell, and the breeze built. We had no forecast of Hurricane Ginger, the famous wanderer. In 1971, boats did not have single-sideband radios and high-seas weather reports. We shortened sail until we were running under bare poles and streamed long anchor warps in a loop over the stern to slow us as we roared down the faces of huge waves. This drogue helped keep us from broaching and perhaps kept many breakers from crashing over us from astern. It was too dangerous to remain on deck, so we were mostly secured below, wedged into our bunks, with lee cloths, pillows, and blankets. But there are times when you just have to go to the head, as our Jonah did. He opened the locker above the toilet. A glass bottle of Listerine fell out and broke in the open toilet. Genius Jonah figured the best way to fix this was to pump it out. Alas, broken glass does not through a head pump. Rebuilding a head is always a treat. Doing so during a hurricane brings new challenges. When the storm abated, we found ourselves in thick fog with little or no wind, somewhere off Nova Scotia. I discovered that nights spent rolling in the swell, sails dripping with water, straining to hear ships and knowing that if we heard one, we couldn’t maneuver out of the way, were more frightening than the hurricane’s shrieking winds. Land birds often arrive on boats offshore. Mid-Atlantic, a little chickadee-sized bird came aboard for a rest. He worked himself below and found that the best perch was on the fiddle of the gimbaled stove,
where he drank some water, ate some crumbs, and slept the night away. In the morning, when it is not uncommon to find these guys feet up on the cabin sole, our little sojourner looked fit and rested as he flitted up to join us in the cockpit. Four of us were watching as he took flight, flying low to the water to avoid the buffeting winds. As we speculated as to where he might find landfall, an enormous fish leaped from the ocean and swallowed him down in one fluid motion. We were dumbfounded. “Did you see that!?” we bellowed in disbelief. We all felt we had just witnessed the death of a shipmate. Do you remember the story of Jonah? Could there be a clearer allegory?
While this delivery occurred early in my sailing career, I’d been studying navigation and was getting pretty good at celestial navigation, practicing aboard Eshowe with two others who were experienced with taking sights. So I was somewhat surprised the morning I relieved Jonah from his early watch and saw the sun rising behind us. Generally, when sailing from North America to Europe, one expects to see the sun rising ahead of the boat, in the east. The sun was in the right spot. We weren’t. Eshowe was fitted with a grid-type compass. The course was set on the rotating ring, which displayed parallel lines; to steer the set course, one
simply kept the line on the compass card in line with and parallel to the grid. A simple glance at the compass, even from a distance, showed if you were on course. Unless, that is, if you were 180 degrees off course!
With a freezer full of fish, Martin, the boat’s owner, decided to add a little variety to the day’s mahi-mahi by making fish and chips. Even with a gimbaled stove, a pot of hot cooking oil is a bad idea at sea. All was well until Martin opened the oven door, which jammed the gimbal and spilled boiling hot oil on his arm, wrist, and hand. After his shrieks of agony subsided, we wrapped his arm in ice packs and plied him with various painkillers. Several days later, when we arrived in the Azores — 31 days out from Fort Lauderdale — Martin was treated at the hospital, free from infection.
An interesting thing happened upon arrival in Sao Miguel. After a month at sea, I was anxious to get some exercise and hike into town. Sailing uses mostly upper-body muscles, and your legs don’t get much of a workout. A few hundred yards up the pier, my legs were already complaining. It didn’t take long to hitch a ride in a truck heading my way. As I struggled to communicate with my friendly driver, I was glad I had taken time to study a Portuguese-English phrasebook at sea. We stumbled along in broken Portuguese for about 10 minutes — until I discovered he was from Texas and had just arrived in a 150-foot tug from Louisiana! In good-ol’-boy Southern English, he invited our entire crew aboard for a steak dinner and strawberry shortcake. Then, as they burn several hundreds of gallons of diesel an hour, they seemed happy to give us 150 gallons of fuel.
Thanks to the efforts of a young engineer on a Dutch ship, we were able to repair our broken driveshaft coupling. This repair held until we were two days out of the Azores.
As we approached the Straits of Gibraltar, the levanter was blowing. The unrelenting easterly winds directly out of the Mediterranean increased the prevailing head current, making it impossible for us to make headway. After tacking back and forth between Gib and Morocco with no easterly progress, we decided to put into Cadiz, Spain, to wait out the weather. We gingerly sailed up to a commercial fishing dock, where we soon discovered another byproduct of our Jonah’s presence: Cadiz was in the throes of a cholera epidemic. At least the local fishing-boat mechanic helped us finally fix the shaft coupling.
With a large cask of local vino stowed below and a dry-cured pig rump — with hoof and fur intact — hanging from the mizzenmast, it was smooth sailing at last. With calm seas, we could do a bit of cleaning about the boat. Jonah removed all the well-used food-encrusted burners and grates from the stove and proceeded to give them a real scrubbing in a bucket of soapy water in the cockpit. The water immediately turned black with stove filth, so out with the old and in with the new, right? Does the old expression “throw the baby out with the bathwater” have relevance here? I’m afraid it does. Jonah dumped the dirty water, along with all of the stove parts, over the side.
Under the burners of a propane stove, there is a tiny orifice where the gas comes out; the burner then evenly distributes the ignited gas. No longer for us. Now we had been left with only that tiny hole. With a great deal of care, a match could be held near the hole when the valve was cracked open on low. Up would shoot an 18-inch-high blowtorchlike flame, as the cook placed a pot over it to squash it down. That was how we did our cooking for the remainder of our hexed voyage. Thank you, Jonah.
Our 66-day voyage from Florida landed us on Mallorca in November. I wended my way through Barcelona, Paris, and London before heading back to New York and then Florida to join my next boat and new adventures. Oh, the hot blonde in Fort Lauderdale? She moved out of state with no forwarding address. Jonah, indeed.
The South African flagged ‘Eshowe’ means “the sound of the wind through the trees.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Growing up in a commercial fishing family and spending summers on a small island, Ron could not help but be a sailor. Years of running and delivering, cruising and racing sailing yachts have provided plenty of experiences to share. Captain Ron holds a 100-ton USCG license and sails his Sabre 402 out of Hillsboro Inlet, Florida. A version of this article appeared in Cruising World July 2010.
