The Azores: or A Love Affair Part I
9:23 am | 1 Comment » |
The scent of land, so strange and overwhelming you swear you can smell the differences between the dark green of spring grass, the electric violet of hydrangeas, colors with associated odors drifting far out to sea in a cloud, almost tangible but vanishing before the eyes come into focus. After two weeks at sea, there up ahead in the woolly blanket of pre-dawn lies the thinly spread collection of volcanic bubbles known as the Azores Archipelago. Similar in geology and geography to other mid-ocean volcanic islands, such as Hawaii (though not as lush or mountainous), the Azores are geologic whipper-snappers at about 4 million years young. Like the Hawaiian Islands, the Azores were created by a geologic hotspot – a week point in the earth’s crust that allows magma to bubble up and up and up through successive underwater eruptions until the peaks of the giant volcanoes break through the waves. Formed at the western fringes of the Eurasian and African plates, the islands have been on a slow, steady eastward march since their inception, thanks to the industrious Mid-Atlantic ridge which creates about half a centimeter of new ocean floor every year. In about 10 million years, if everything goes according to plan, Lisbon will be at the epicenter of a cataclysmic homecoming as the Azores finally return to join the motherland. Insider tip: those of you looking for long term real estate investments should avoid the Portuguese coast.
Seabirds were probably the first colonists, though several civilizations, including the Phoenicians in the 6th century B.C, the Vikings, the Chinese, and at least one Genoese chart from 1351, have alluded to the existence of a group of island off the coast of Portugal long before Prince Henry the Navigator sent Gonçalvo Velho Cabral on a search for them in 1431. The Portuguese quickly set up colonies. Being a small country, landlocked as they were by Spain, meant they had to turn their imperial aspirations towards the west and try to make the best of it. Fields were cleared on the fertile volcanic slopes (there were no native human inhabitants to subdue when the Portuguese arrived, making the colonization a bit more palatable to modern sensibilities with the benefit of hindsight.) The islands were in possession of some wonderful natural harbors, and as gradually over the next 70 years all 9 islands were discovered, the Portuguese, as well as the rest of western Europe, began to see the immense strategic advantage of having a port of call between Europe and what many – including Columbus -thought was India just over the western horizon. When on his return trip from the newly discovered “West Indies” in 1493 Columbus stopped briefly at the island of Santa Maria for provisions, the fate of the Azores as an envious piece of real estate in the mad rush of westward expansion was sealed. Spain, after invading Portugal in 1580, took over most of the islands and began to use them as stopping points for the return trips of their gold-laden galleons from the Americas. Pirates from all over the globe soon followed, and the eternal battles of predator and prey ensued, with all the role swapping that accompanied shifts in the balance of power.
Throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, whaling became more and more a staple of the Azorean economy, usually in the form of American whale boats dropping anchor in the islands in search of hardy crew. In Moby Dick, Melville wrote of the islanders “…It is not known why, but the best whalers come from among these islands.” Indeed, up until only 25 years ago sperm whales were still hunted by hand-flung harpoons in small open rowboats. Many of these old whaling boats are still visible with their brightly painted hulls and sleek sturdy design.
Back in the present, we are on approach to the island of Faial, illuminated now in a single shaft of sunlight which falls like a spotlight on the squat whitewashed houses and low rectangular field walls of black rock from the belly of the planet. Green pasture and grapevines hug the shoulders of the island, giving way only to the short sea cliffs below and the near vertical ascent of the terrain above. Of the 9 islands in the group, only Pico (“peak” in Portuguese) retains it’s majestic conical top, the rest having blown theirs in massive eruptions of volcanic ecstasy to create large craters called calderas. Often one finds lakes in the middle of these anti-peaks, similar to that of Crater Lake in Oregon. On our way east towards Europe in two days, we will sail along the southern shore of Pico and witness a meteorological phenomenon known as a lenticular cloud capping the very top of the mountain, but for now we round Faial’s southeastern corner and find the town of Horta resplendent in the morning sun, the harbor, and more importantly, it’s hot showers and cold beer welcoming us with open arms. Blue water sailing for 1600 nautical miles with hardly a boat in sight allows one to forget just how nerve-wracking a harbor landing can be, especially for a new crew on a new boat. But this morning the conditions are great, very little wind and Roger expertly brings us alongside another fellow world cruiser, a soft-spoken chap from Texas (yes, there are a few). We toss him our lines, wait for Elemiah to settle, and shut the engine off. Smiles all around: we’re two-thirds of the way to Europe!
The wharf in Horta is a lively affair of cruising boats from all over the world, many making a stop here on their way from the Caribbean, America, and Canada to a summer season in northern Europe or the Med. At this time of year, not many are heading the other way, as hurricane season is only a few months away, though October and November will see the flows reversed. The Azores remain as strategic as ever, though now not necessarily for commerce. The concrete and rock walkways and retaining walls of the harbor are plastered with thousands of paintings left by the crews of yachts passing through from one point to the next, each one leaving their ship’s name, a design, the names of the crew and the year they were in Horta. It’s difficult to find a blank spot on which to place our own design, and unfortunately, between repairs, supply runs, rain showers and general excitement of landfall, we are unable to leave Elemiah’s mark before we cast off.
The meager 48 hours we spend on Faial will enough to entice me to want to stay and explore the Azores for the rest of my life, a feeling that is mutual, I’m sure, among many of the British and Spanish and sundry other ex-pats who have done just that. For someone in love with the sea yet firmly rooted in agrarian and agricultural tradition, the combination of abundant green, endless blue, agreeable weather, and damn good wine is a recipe for heaven. In my travels I have been at times haunted by certain places, as if they are a part of my genetic memory passed on to me through ancestral lines, or perhaps vestigial recollections from what some might call past lives. It’s the uncanny notion that perhaps I have been here before, that something of this place resides in me and I can feel it undeniably in my bones about the Azores. Maybe we all have a spot or two on this planet that calls out to us, sure as a scream, for whatever reason. The somewhat unsettling notion of stumbling upon a place that has the uncanny feelings of home, even when we are far away from home is, I think, one of the ancient driving factors for us to even venture out of our door in the first place. To take that first step outside our normal realm of comfortable routines and experiences into a world that is indeed much larger than any of us can truly comprehend. When we can accept the fact that this rock here is very much different from that rock over there, or that light filtered through morning fog in the Azores actually possesses a slightly different quality than that of the light poking through the thick Lunenburg fog 1600 miles west, then we begin to understand how a life dictated by our senses, our spirit, and our heart can strip away stereotypes and preconceptions and leave us open and raw, the best way to receive any new experience.
I suppose there are also those of us who simply cannot abide punching timeclocks and will always yearn for the eternal consolation of vast open spaces: the reminder not that all will be well or go according to plan, but that things, the truly important ones, will endure. How many lives found their end under the waves, and yet we continue to venture out, adding our bit to a tradition that had it’s origins, like all traditions, in the necessity of the times.
The morning of July 5th we cast off from Horta and point our bow slightly south of east, toward Portugal, skirting Pico to the south with a blazingly brilliant sun painting the remote villages in glaring contrast to the deep emerald green of the land. By nightfall the lights of the island of Sao Miguel will be suffusing the night sky well to our stern with a soft orange hue. For five consecutive days we will hear the drone of the diesel, victims of the windless Azores high as we eventually drop all sails and relegate the hope of having wind to sometime in the future. When at last we shut the engine off it is not because of wind, but because we have run out of all but our emergency fuel and will need to save that in order to motor into harbor in Lagos. For a day and a half we languor in the glassy east Atlantic, mizzen and stay sail up to catch any momentary breath of wind that might propel us in any direction resembling east. 2 knots is something to celebrate, and the ship’s log from this time is littered with terse entries such as “engine on…” “no wind” “very low fuel” and “nothing noteworthy”. We angle southeast to keep a good angle on what little wind we have, hoisting the Angel whenever possible, and exalting the 4 knot milestone. When finally, a week out of Horta, we are gifted with a force 3 from the west norwest, I have a faint understanding of the relief the old timers must have felt upon making it through the doldrums, where some go crazy with the heat and the incessant flapping of the sails as the old ships lolled back and forth on the glossy swells.
The wind continues to hold, and on the 12th we are passing the forlorn lighthouse at Cabo de Sao Vicente, Portugal’s southwestern elbow, in a 25 knot northerly. Heeled over and bound for Lagos.
Fair winds
Curtis
1 Comment »
September 10, 2008
In the Gulf Stream
9:01 am | 3 Comments » |
380 mile west of Horta, our destination in the Azores, and the clouds hang close overhead, crowding out all notions of stars and sky. I sit cross-legged at the helm, staring at the hot pink heading line lilting side to side across the radar screen, pondering our differences from trained monkeys as I tilt the wheel first left then right as we motor through the night into an unforseen headwind. Sensing a lack of brain activity I switch off the display and am relieved to see a milky glow infusing the clouds on the eastern horizon – dawn is not far off. Motoring, I’ve decided, can be a mind-numbing experience, requiring little vigilance of wind and water. Sometimes even night watches are something to be endured, when the universe above and the equally alien worlds below are shrouded and do not give up their secrets easily and it merely feels like 2 hours of one’s life. When I was younger and my questions were more honest I used to wonder if we age hourly or even by the minute. Could we watch the imperceptible march of time across one’s face as surely as we see it in the intervening years when life hands us smiles and frowns to furrow our brows? It seems existence is fabricated from the most refined calculus and when we look back on our circuitous routes they seem like swells across the sea: continuous and linked. The jolting experiences and sudden twists as we experience them are smoothed out by time and distance and we are left to carry the testaments of our lives as lines on our faces. I hope one day to be a wrinkled old man with my pants held by red suspenders just below my nipples. Such is the diversity of aspiration.
And now dawn has crept silently upon my musings and melted itself through the thick cloud cover, dripping into the world as slowly as summertime. The sea is flat, a bit rolly, and the mizzen flaps back and forth with the pitch of the boat, straining against the sheet like a chained madman. The rhythms of boat life have settled in comfortably over the past week or so: eat when hungry, sleep when tired (or whenever you can around watch schedules), take in the sun and the complete and utter joy of being alive on the ocean. A cruising boat develops a life and schedule all it’s own when on long passages, and I always revel in the small routines that evolve. From morning tea at high noon because you pulled the 4 to 6 am watch, to the daily ritual of watching the setting sun being dowsed by the western horizon, these become the signposts by which you measure the day. The only place where clock time intrudes is when writing in the ship’s log, and even then it feels like an intruder into an unhurried world. Food, and the eating of it, always looms at the fore of any cruising boat’s social calendar. Meals are planned days in advance, with all the time in the world to detail cooking times and techniques, spices, accompaniments, and presentation. Before leaving Nova Scotia, Hannah and I bought a bag of potting soil, some seeds and a six pack of basil plants to create a little herb garden in a large rubbermaid box. It lives under the dodger on the starboard side of the companionway, and it’s splashes of green and purple add a refreshing visual break when one has grown weary of blues and greys. Though the lavender tranplant and the mint seedlings seem to be struggling, the basil has taken surprisingly well, and there are lots of little shoots of thyme poking their new heads from the soil. We’ve already nipped a few basil tips for a delicious caprese salad.
The acrobatics necessary for cooking on a pitching and rolling sailing ship will one day, I am convinced, evolve into an elegant and very competitive sport complete with titles of “national hero” and “world champion” for those skilled enough to master such a sublime art. Sharp knives, fast moving bottles of olive oil, rolling onions and oranges, not to mention bubbling cauldrons of soup and pasta sauce swinging wildly on the gimbled stove are all daily hazards with the real ability of causing pain at the least, or creating an emergency situation several days from land in a worst case scenario. The contortions of the body necessary to lodge one securely enough in the galley to enable both hands to be free for actual cooking sometimes resemble some twisted individual’s idea of torture through yoga; right leg out at 35-40° (if on port tack), left leg wedged against the stove, butt pressed firmly into the railing in front of the sink, elbows at the ready for emergency stabilization, and you’d better be prepared for a gust of wind from any direction which could send all your carefully placed ingredients clattering to the floor or across the counter in a mad rush of gravity. And it’s when the oven has been on for an hour making a lovely sauna out of the cabin, the galley a national disaster area of dirty dishes and vegetable bits, and the boiling water for pasta is sloshing out of it’s pot that the phrase “pleasure craft my ass” comes to mind. When on a boat it is very important to cook with wine. You may even want to consider putting some in the food.
***
We’ve been in the gulf stream for days now, heading roughly due east towards the Azores with a southwest wind at 10 to 15 knots and quartering seas. In sail speak that translates into one of the more sublime aspects of sailing: hoisting the billowy gennaker and leaving the reins to our beloved Angel as she pulls us forward over the waves. (The Angel Elemiah is the angel of inward journeys as well as marine travels. Her likeness was copied from the church in Engleberg, Switzerland where Rosemary and Ian have their flat) Most sails on a modern yacht work on the airfoil principal: pressure differences between faster moving wind on the outside of the sail and the slower moving air on the inside creates the force to propel a boat even if the wind is close to the nose. A gennaker or spinnaker is usually a brightly colored and lightweight sail hoisted at the bow, using the brute force of a following wind as the engine. Without fail, the moment when the gennaker is released from it’s snuffer (sort of a sausage casing) and it snaps forward and billows out full of wind, I usually get a little tingling sensation up my spine. For 5 days the Angel has been our primary sail, though we have had to adjust course south first and then back north in order to keep a proper wind angle, since gennakers are asymmetrical and cannot function when the wind is at 180° on the stern.
Now, only 2 days from the Azores and we have entered a semi-permanent bubble of light winds called, appropriately, the Azores high, which covers a large chunk of the central north Atlantic in summertime. Sails up for a few hours, then sails down, turn engine on. Motor and repeat. We see our first sailing vessel since leaving Canada, and a couple of freighters bound either for the Azores or Europe. Settlement is nearing, we are almost 2/3 of the way across the Atlantic, and the prospect of a proper shower and a few cold beers has me feeling a tad giddy as I lie down in our bunk. In the morning we will probably see the first land in two weeks looming ahead.
Fair winds
curtis
3 Comments »
September 3, 2008
It’s all gotta start sometime…
3:06 pm | 3 Comments » |
There is little this morning that separates it from the preceding night. The dense, shroud-like fog that has played an extended game of cat and mouse with Lunenburg harbor over the previous couple of days has finally been caught, gnawed upon, and digested, leaving a thick gelatinous goop only slightly thinner than water. The visual world is compressed, thoughts kept tight behind sleepy eyes. It’s about 5:30 in the morning of the longest day of the year, and on the good ship Elemiah there is a nervous energy that not even the fog can obscure. On the wharf is a smattering of hardcore friends and family who’ve made the early morning trip down to the water front to send us off with friendly farewells. The mood is both somber and expectant as the bell buoy out at Battery Point tolls it’s hidden position. The Atlantic beckons. Quick mugs of tea, last hugs and the groggy rumble of the diesel as lines are cast and we swing away from the Foundry wharf. Lunenburg slips by to port, still slumbering in it’s thick blanket of summer fog. Steve, an American yachtsman we befriended at The Knot who has had his North Atlantic circuit waylaid in Nova Scotia by transmission problems, shatters the silence with a hand-held fog horn from near the Bluenose berth as we pass by. We yell and wave back, and I wonder briefly if we’ll see him again. The family of cruisers is surprisingly small and tight-knit; the sea encourages close friendship.
Out beyond the notion of land now, and there is little in the way of distinction between heaven above and ocean below, only a denser collection of grey. The first real fringes of excitement are building slowly as we hoist sails and head sou’ sou’east, close hauled in a 10 knot sou’wester. The radar is on, the engine is off, and Elemiah is sailing with the wind. All five of us are out in the cockpit, absorbing our brand new world, as well as keeping an eye out for other large occupants which might creep up on us out of the mist. We know our foul weather gear will gradually be shed as we approach the Gulf Stream and angle eastward toward the Azores, but for now we stand wrapped in thermals, boots, gloves and hats. On watches we curl ourselves around steaming mugs of tea, like snakes around sun-warmed rocks, and trim sails as the weather dictates. It seems Elemiah balances beautifully with only the mizzen, staysail, and jib, and can make an honest 7 knots in a 15 knot beam wind. The main adds a bit too much pressure to the rudder, making steering more like a day at the gym. The hydraulic steering system still has a few bugs to work out once we reach the Azores, so for now we mostly leave the main furled.
***
I awake with the warmth of the late afternoon sun on my eyelids. Napping on the aft deck I open my eyes, sticky with sleep, and hear nothing but the bubbling of water against the hull as we glide silently onward. Was I out for days or mere minutes? The sun came out, the fog loosened it’s grip. That was yesterday I believe. Time is quick to abandon it’s rigidity in the face of long lazy swells glistening under the arc of the sun. My forearms and inner thighs ache and I remember now having gone aloft earlier today to retrieve the mainsail topping lift after a shackle pin came unscrewed and it traveled to the top of the main mast. Hugging the mast with my four limbs as the boat heaved back and forth, it’s motion accentuated the higher up I went, I saw the crisp junction of the horizon describing a perfect circle, of which we are forever the center, eternally traveling a radius line. What of that horizon, which at this lazy hour, when the heat of the day is stored in the very air and everything drifts, holds my gaze with a force more ancient than possibly anyone can imagine? It seems so close, just over a few swells, down into the troughs and then…you might just drop over the edge in a cataclysm of sea and sky to fall for an eternity, bearing witness to the whithering of galaxies, the bright violent death of stars as they give up their bodies for others to use. Is it such a break in logic to assume the face of God exists out over the horizon, etched in sand somewhere on a distant shore by a child with liquid eyes and a stick of driftwood? The search for heaven on earth kept our predecessors quite busy for several hundred years.
I stand and stretch, gaze over the dodger, my skin taking in the wind info subconsciously; it’s freshened a bit, moved a bit more southerly. Dusk burnishes the belly of a cluster of storm clouds away to the south and they make periodic visits over the next several hours. Late at night a squall passes, the wind gusts to around 30 knots and we roll up the jib as Elemiah slips gracefully through the quartering seas on just her mizzen and staysail. I smile into the bullets of rain, happy as a clam and wondering if they might pressure wash my teeth clean as well. It’s 2 am and we are sailing across an ocean.
fair winds
Curtis
3 Comments »
August 27, 2008
Farewell Maggie B
12:41 pm | 9 Comments » |
To begin my first travel blog with a little background as to how a person from that great sea-faring state of Missouri ended up working on world cruising sailboats seems like a logical first step. That it should also be a eulogy of sorts to the ship that I first cut my teeth on adds a touch of irony to the situation, though I suppose tragedy is never far removed from the ironic.
On the 10th of November, 2007 I hopped a plane in San Francisco which would take me first to Dallas, and then onward to Santiago de Chile and finally to the southern Chilean city of Puerto Montt, where I was to meet the Schooner Maggie B and her Captain and crew.
I had been pursuing a spot on board for over a year, exchanging hopeful emails with Capt. Blair at various stages of the circumnavigation he was conducting with his brand new “fusion schooner” that he’d had built at Covey Island. The names of the places that he replied to me from sent chills down the spine of a grown-up boy who’d spent endless hours as a child hunched over National Geographic magazines, old maps and globes, reciting place names in mantra-like fashion and stringing together the erratic and amorphous borders of far flung empires in my mind. Capetown, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Rangiroa, Bora Bora. These all elicited a wide-eyed fascination with the possibility of not only witnessing such disparate locations, but also gaining the deep experience of place that only moving slowly through an area can provide.
Sure, we have the ability to get anywhere in the world from anywhere else in under 24 hours, a level of mobility that casts the phrase “it’s a small world after all” in the spotlight of understatement, but how much do we know about the places between A and Z. Our pointilistic desires have severed our ancient ties with what real travel is all about, that being the journey itself and the changes brought on in ourselves by everything we witness. Don Quioxte’s pilgrimage wouldn’t have been very interesting if the only thing he encountered in his wanderings were airport bars and inside of taxis, and just think if good ole Henry David Thoreau had been ruminating only on his destination. We would be all the poorer without his fields and forests of ramblings from which one can mine many precious jewels.
The fact that I had never set foot on a sailboat, let alone had any experience in the high latitudes and legendary storms of the great Southern Ocean didn’t strike me as particularly odd, though in retrospect, and having since met many other sailors with decades of blue water experience who admitted to me their dream of one day ’rounding the Horn, I began to view my first month aboard the Maggie B as something precious and rare in the sailing world.
Maggie B carried us through the achingly beautiful and equally treacherous fjords of Chilean Patagonia, rolled back up from an 80 knot knockdown from the infamous straightline winds known as “williwaws” that keep the mountainsides swept clean of all but the most determined vegetation, kept us somewhat warm and reasonably dry in the precocious weather that could switch from sun to rain to snow and back to sun in the course of an hour.
From her deck we were witnesses to the deep groaning of living glaciers as they enacted the natural drama of shedding their icebergs into the milky sea, fog shrouded mountain peaks top heavy with snow, narrows cut by ancient ice between hulking rocks that required us to hold our breath as we squeezed through, and the effortless wheeling of albatrosses that look like knives flying.
A mere 3 weeks after first setting eyes on her long low sleek hull that rose elegantly from the water line as if she’d sprouted right out of the ocean, we were passing Isla de Hornos at 55 degrees 56 minutes south latitude in an unbelievable window of calm that couldn’t even puff out our sails. As we motored away to the northeast, leaving Cape Horn to stick out forlornly amidst the ragged clouds and oil-dark seas of the Drake Passage, it definitely looked like the end of the world. A piece of earth forever at odds with its environment.
I would stay on board the Maggie B for another 5 months, seeing the skyline of Buenos Aires rising out of the sea under a half moon, swimming in the phosphorescent waters of southern Brazil, languidly watching the lights and stunning landscape of Rio de Janeiro drift by, and hopping on the express train known as the northeast tradewinds as we scooted into the northern hemisphere with Maggie’s 10 knot hum singing us to sleep under a sky on fire with the light of 10 billion suns.
Coming into Lunenburg harbor on May 10th to the cheers of the crew on the Picton Castle and the exploding cannon shot of Walter Flowers was the clinching point for me in acknowledging that I was indeed hooked on sailing. The alchemical process of the subtle union between man and boat that all sailors are privy to was slowly cooking over the course of my 6 month initiation, and rounding the lighthouse at Battery Point for the first time and seeing the city of Lunenburg spread out before me, the houses with their expectant bumps casting a hopeful gaze towards the sea, I shed my first tears for the Maggie B in that she was returning home and I was fortunate to be at her bow.
Hannah Joudrey (a Nova Scotia native from New Germany) and I were due to ship out in a scant 4 weeks time on board another Covey Island boat, the ketch Elemiah, for an Atlantic crossing and a season bouncing along the Mediterranean coast to Croatia. We both knew we would sail on Maggie B at some point down the road.
But, as I mentioned previously, this is in part a tribute to the passing of a friend, protector, and singularly elegant individual. When the Maggie B was destroyed by the fire at Covey Island on August 10th, the world lost a little bit of grace and beauty, and all those who sailed on her lost a home, a haven, and a bit of their past. That which memory alone can sustain will gradually fade over time to sepia-stained images and vague recollections. But it is the sea itself that will keep the Maggie B alive in my heart.
Fair winds
Curtis Weinrich
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