little talk, something to eat, a cup of tea. The swells were mountainous out here, mid-passage. The whole extent of this sunlit sea was the deep, royal blue of the ocean.
On the wheel, time slid away. The sky was clear and endless, the rhythm of the boat lullingly repetitive, the sunshine bright in the eyes. Mid-afternoon, a little more than halfway across, a fulmar swung between the shrouds and the mainmast. An hour later, a swallow circled the boat, surveyed it, and without warning flew down through the companionway hatch, circling inside the cabin, cheeping, prospecting for a nest. On the way from Africa, it had found, miraculously, an almost empty, very suitable, if slightly small barn, 125 miles short of where it expected to find land. The swallow flew out again without touching timber, rope or canvas and away, its dipping, curving flight just held above the seas. Ten minutes later it returned, with another. The two of them flew down into the cabin again, not landing, cheeping in excited, quivering calls. They came out and back three more times. Surely a perfect site for a nest? Surely not: no mud or straw with which to build a home. They left again for the fourth and last time, as the Auk plunged on for Ireland.
If the wind had stayed good for us, we could have slid into a harbour that night as sleepily and dreamily as this day had passed. We were lulled. We could have sleepwalked home. Our exhaustion didn’t matter because the Auk would take us on. We were her passengers.
It didn’t happen like that. Late that afternoon, a weather front came through and winds veer on fronts. You could see it ranged above us, a curving wall of cloud, its leading edge quiffed up and back in wisps. The southwesterly wind that had been wafting us to Ireland shifted through thirty, forty, fifty, seventy degrees in the space of an hour. We were headed. Rain hammered down. Night was coming on again, the wind was now in the northwest, which was exactly where we wanted to go.
The bitter tide of exhaustion came flooding in. There was no way we could sail to Baltimore where we were due. The engine was the only option and the prospect of ten hours of that, at something like four or five knots, dead into a rising wind, felt like sacks of grain laid on our shoulders. The wind started to blow. For the first time now it was shrieking in the rigging. We had no instruments to measure it, but George reckoned thirty-five knots, gusting ten knots higher, Force 8 to 9. The beautiful day had given way to a raging night. We hauled the sails down and tied them as best as we could in the climbing wind. The whole of the foredeck was plunging into the breaking seas. Just visible from the cockpit, the white teeth of those breakers appeared grinning around us.
‘Go down,’ George said, a level of intensity in his voice I hadn’t heard before. Freezing rain was driving into our faces. Til get you in three hours’ time.’ Down below, the saloon was jumping, a savage version of itself, thrashing at the lamp that hangs from the deck-head, its chain not swinging but jerking like a hanged man, a maelstrom of no gravity followed by thumping smacking lurches into new seas. I crawled into my berth, jammed myself against its sides, my body held in place by my hands, the middle of my back and my knees, and hauled the sleeping bag up around my head. The engine groaned away beside me and I slept.
‘Can you do it?’ I woke to see George’s masked face slewing and sliding above me, only his exhausted eyes visible through the slit of his sodden balaclava. ‘I’m too cold to stay up there,’ he said. ‘I’m frozen and I don’t want to start making wrong decisions.’
In the churning, topsy-turvy world of the cabin, I got up, pushed seasickness away, swathed myself in the weather-armour, went on deck, got the heading for Baltimore from George, 340 magnetic now, took the torch from his hands, and he went below. I was no less exhausted than when I had gone to sleep. I had to shake my head every few seconds to keep myself awake. On and on the engine ground away beneath me. The boat was still smacking into the seas and the drench of the chilling rain was unbroken. It was just a question of staying awake and keeping us on course. No light worked in the compass. I could only find the heading with the torch. But I couldn’t keep that on all the time. An occasional flash on the binnacle and then the hope for a few minutes that I was steering in the right direction. The hours stretched out ahead. The eyelids drooped closed and jerked open, again and again and again. The wool of my balaclava was wet in my mouth. The boat was being hammered by the seas we were driving straight into, coming up white on the bow and then breaking over the bowsprit. For a while the stars appeared and I could hold a constellation at least half-fixed in the shrouds, a still point in a traumatic world. But the cloud and rain closed over again. I kept looking at my watch. Ten minutes had passed, sometimes twelve. How was I going to last three hours at this? My back had tensed into steel hawsers. As I turned my head, I felt the sinews in my neck clicking and rolling over each other’s armoured strands. ‘Dig deep,’ George had said to me as he went down.
It is a mysterious and powerful place to be, on deck alone, while the man you have been relying on sleeps beneath that deck. He has dug deep for you, has stood in his balaclava with the merest of eyeslits open to the world, shielded from it. He has stayed there for hour after hour in the dark while you have slept curled down in the bunk, protected from the rolling and breaking of the sea. How ancient a set of conditions is that? At this level, the sea is historyless: time has not passed here. His standing for me and now my standing for him is there in the Homeric poems and the sagas. It bears a cousin relationship to sharing a rope when climbing, but the tenderness of it and the demands of it are, if anything, stronger. I sleep while he suffers and I suffer while he sleeps. The only continuities are the sea, the boat, and the seemingly endless stretch of time, of an almost disconnected sense of timelessness, the repeating waves, the light head of exhaustion.
A strange and distant intimacy. The three hours came and went. I knew I must not wake him but wait until he was rested enough to get up himself. He had done the same for me, and everything here was reciprocity. It was a world governed by a mutuality of duty and care. I was cold but not impossibly cold. I was dog-tired but not beyond all consciousness. He had held the wheel for me often enough already; he had, in many ways, held me; now it was my turn.
We were in the darkest night I have known. I wonder if anyone who has not been to sea in these conditions, who has not felt himself exposed and exhausted as I was that second night, can know what it means to see the loom of a lighthouse on the shore for which you are making. It is no more than a blur at first, so faint that you cannot see it with your watching eye, but only if you look away and catch its flickering on a distant screen. Is that something? Is it? Yes, it must be. Fastnet! The Fastnet light! Again and again it smeared its paleness over the northern sky. Then another, over to the northeast, the Old Head of Kinsale. For hours they remained the two sentinels guiding me in. Lights! Land! Shore! Sleep! Home!
On the Auk drove, the Volvo engine beating steadily beneath me, George asleep, clearly very deeply exhausted. In the end, no more than his face appeared at the companionway steps. ‘Cup of tea?’ he said. The dark bulk of the land on either side was drawing us in on 340. The land now had shapes, a blacker outline against the black of the night. Ireland was a place, not a fantasy of arrival. Still an hour from the harbour entrance at Baltimore, I saw the light, marked on the chart, that I had been looking for over the previous hour. ‘I’ve got a flashing green,’ I shouted down to George. ‘Make for that,’ he said. The ocean slowly stilled. We reached the green, then the red beyond it, curving into the harbour calm, the lights of the village, the fishing boats against the quay, the ripple of harbour water against the Auk’s worn sides, the sea, as Auden once wrote, ‘as calm as a clock’. We dropped the anchor at four in the morning, forty-three hours out from England, and the Auk lay to her chain like a stabled mare while George and I drank whisky until the sky began to show the first streaks of a green Irish dawn.
We drank our Murphy’s and sank into the lush of southwest Ireland. The place oozed comfort, salmon on every plate, scallops for every dinner. We took the Auk in and out through
