The Wind Has Weight: Neither Wind Nor Fate Bears Malice

PROLOGUE

The wind has weight and many moods. Both on land and over the oceans, all living things dance and sing to its tune. Each spring it flirts with the emerging leaves. Each autumn, like an act of infidelity, it then strips them petulantly from the branches. Its vocal range is operatic: the whisper of a catspaw, a howl, a roar, screaming, soughing, and whistling. Sometimes it feels like a lover’s caress, an affectionate stroke to your cheek, then in a fit of pique, bows you down until you surrender.

Invisible. Unpredictable. Irascible. And every sailor learns to both love and fear it.

The history of the world owes as much to ships and sailors as to armies, rulers, architects, and Saints. Centuries before the birth of Christ, single-mast rowing boats carrying one square sail set out in search of ‘Terra Incognito’ only to discover a world beyond their imagining. Carried along by the whims of current, wind, and tempest, their discoveries were no less momentous for being a matter of chance.

Other than to maritime historians, the names of these bravest of our forebears are largely forgotten: Coleus of Samos, Pytheas the Carthaginian, Ottar the Viking. As early as the 7th century BC through to the 9th century AD, they traversed the Mediterranean, sighted the Atlantic Ocean from Gibraltar, circumnavigated the British Isles, and travelled much of the East Coast of Africa.

Accounts of their exploits, written by contemporary chroniclers or preserved in ship’s logs, gather dust in archives. Their names are rarely spoken. Although celebrated and honoured in their day, very few are immortalised by statues, monuments, or tombs. But while the hazards of ocean sailing are ever present, these long-ago sailors faced much greater perils than those we fear today. The Earth is flat… the abyss awaits. Sea monsters will swallow the ship. Flesh will rot from your bones, Poseidon will exact revenge for intruding into his domain. Superstition lurked in every mind.

Captains could order a noose to hang you from the yardarm, flog a man until his blood ran onto the deck. ‘Dereliction of duty’ would remain a flogging offence until well into the 20th century and very few sailors survived the Draconian punishment of being ‘flogged around the fleet’ while those who did, having suffered up to 300 lashes, were maimed for life. So great was the fear that even cruel discipline could not preserve every man from despair, mutiny, or madness. And as if the fear were not enough, they journeyed as if groping in the dark, without compass, charts, or adequate provisions.

As with all great endeavours, each first momentous step becomes a ladder for others to climb…rung by rung. Across continents, to the top of the highest mountain, the depths of the ocean, to the moon and back. Until eventually any man or woman can choose to reach out into the world. See it, feel it, measure it, and marvel.

INTRODUCTION

Sailing away. That most ancient and persistent of all fireside daydreams. Cast off, lift anchor, loose the bonds, let go, break free. Whether sitting quietly in a darkened room lit only by a candle, watching a sailboat leaving harbour, strolling alone above cliffs overlooking the sea: the thought will eventually come to mind.

Usually it’s a blue dream: azure sky, turquoise shallows, midnight blue in the dark, menacing deeps. The scene is cast in brilliant sunshine light. You are at the helm, calm eyes fixed on the horizon.

Now and again it will be an alarming dream. Huge chunks of ocean, sliced off at the wave tops by the wind, are smashing into your face. You are looking for canyons between a moving range of mountains, the slopes of which are that mythological ogre green and in the midst of an alarming noise comes the dread…should you choose the wrong route neither you nor your vessel will ever be seen again. There is no blue at all in a maritime nightmare. The sky itself is green.

I met Ken in 1979 when we were both approaching middle age. Thirty-five years have since passed as have the three uncommon adventures we shared. ‘I’m building a boat,’ he told me. Would that be a model, a canoe, a small river cruiser with a two-berth cuddy? I wondered. But this was no shed hobby nor the romantic appeal of twilight on the river Thames, it was to be a forty-two-foot, steel, sea-going yacht. With sails! For an HGV agency driver, living in caravan, paying his rent by working as a part time caretaker for a cricket club, it sounded rather unrealistic. With only 300 pounds in the bank? Utterly preposterous!

It was only when he took me to the boatyard where the keel of his boat lay waiting that I realised he was simply making a statement and not in the throes of a mid-life crisis.

Build a sailing yacht? From scratch? What a dreamer…but such a dream to have. Which was, I think, why I so dearly wanted to believe him.

And so the dream took hold, energised us, brought us close, tested us in all the ways and shaped the next twenty-two years of our lives together. Finally, in the years that followed, it prepared us for the shocking event that ended our adventures so abruptly.

As our boat rose from the ground, our relationship evolved with it. One may talk of the bond between man and wife, comrades at arms, blood-sharing brotherhoods, but just as intense and mutually dependent, is the bond between shipmates.

But beware! Romancing a boat builder is akin to taking up with a mountaineer. You can expect that at some point he will persuade you to share his passion, get to ‘know him better.’ Yet even when you have hiked up to cloud level with him, the wretch will tell you that it was ‘a modest hill’…not even the courtesy of calling it a mountain! With boat builders, expect to add welding, carpentry, and painting to your other womanly skills.

Improbable as it seemed at the beginning, we earned what we came to call ‘Our passport to play with dolphins.’ It would take seven long years for us to build the yacht we named ‘Imago’. We lived in a caravan, wore out several pairs of boiler suits, pared our needs to subsistence levels, and worked as hard as any labourers.

I often wonder if either of us ever ‘grew up’ or ever really wanted to. Perhaps we were prey to ‘leftover adolescence,’ a condition remarkable for its lapses in common sense. We could almost hear it as background music to our labours: that universal parental frustration: ‘fools! They just won’t take no for an answer. Why don’t they build a narrow boat or a pair of kayaks? The idiots have never been sailing… not even in a dinghy!’

But to sail around the world! Could we realise that most singular of dreams, one that is unquestionably in the premier league of adventures. More importantly to us, could we construct a way of living that didn’t depend on money, envy, or wishful thinking? Integrity to the DIY principle meant everything to us. Saving to buy a boat, being given one, winning the pools would have changed nothing. Our goal was to make what we wanted and be what we wanted.

As we enter our seventies, memories of our journey begin to fade and blur, as they do in lives that are nearly lived. For Ken, there is tragedy in his forgetting. Hopefully, this reminder of those fifteen years we spent sailing around the world will re-connect a few more neurons in his injured mind and that I too, before my wits wither along with the rest of me, will finally believe that however foolish, we were also brave. As Baudelaire says in his poem The Voyage… ‘not knowing why’ we did just say, ‘let’s go!’

CHAPTER 1

AND HERE ENDED THE FIRST LESSON

The first time we went to sea was in 1987, having excitedly marked way points for crossing the English Channel to our first ever foreign ports of call, either in France or Portugal. But we were severely punished for our inexperience and rightly so, barely surviving the ordeal of criss-crossing that seaway for nine dreadful days in huge wallowing seas and gale-force winds. Had we previously done any serious sailing, we would have known that big swells presage rough weather or its aftermath, though we would contradict anyone refusing to admit to just a twinge of dread at watching a huge freighter disappear into a trough or wondering how a small boat could climb a slope so close to the perpendicular without tumbling backwards.

It took weeks to recover from that ordeal: swaying rooms, hypothermia, hallucinations, dehydration, nightmares. I cannot think how we ever found the resolve to try again.

All we needed now was a hurricane to complete the meteorological repertoire! Some spiteful entity decided that was a really good idea and would finally see off this unlikely pair.

Imago was tied up to mooring buoys at the back of Poole Harbour. Winds had been fresh to strong for most of the previous day. In the early evening Ken returned from his temporary driving job, but when he looked across from the pontoon to our position out on the moorings, he realised that it was too risky for me to row over in the dinghy – not that I was disposed to even try, so he spent the rest of that violent night in the sleeper cab of the truck he was driving – leaving me alone on the boat.

The worst of the hurricane hit the SW of England just after midnight. It began with what was now a familiar sound: rumbling low pitched moans as the wind collected its forces, holding back like an aircraft preparing for take-off, before hurtling across the landscape. As the first impact slammed into the rigging, Imago shuddered from stem to rudder… so began yet another long night. Between shouting out words of encouragement to our noble craft and threats of unspeakable retaliation against any mooring rope that failed, I dragged on my wet gear. Curtains of rain soon obliterated the boatyard and the town lights. The air itself dense with noise and the sounds of destruction. We might just as well have been out in a raging sea as here in one of the largest and safest harbours in the world.

I spent most of that night squatting in the scuppers, hugging a 45lb anchor between my knees. Proper conduct I felt, since deputy skippers are supposed to ‘do something.’ But in reality, it had no more significance than as a ‘girly gesture’ of defiance. I can barely lift the damn thing clear of the deck, let alone heave it over the side! Perhaps I was relying on a boost of adrenaline that would instantly transform me into ‘Desperate Delia.’

At the height of the storm, a boat moored alongside us lost her bow line, swinging her around, adding greatly to the strain on our own ropes. Several craft had broken away altogether, drifting in all directions around the bay. As the wind veered and the tide turned, a large catamaran locked together with a fishing boat tried to climb aboard Imago. Between this formidable pair of pirates, our dinghy was being tossed higher than the guard rails. Those few yachtsmen who were aboard their craft that night emerged briefly between squalls, feverishly working winches, tightening rigging screws. Later accounts described chaotic scenes in the outer harbour where over seventy boats had broken free. Several had been tossed over the harbour walls onto the roadway.

We escaped very lightly indeed, just a few more scrapes and dents to add to our battle scars and two broken oars from frantic efforts to repel those unwelcome boarders, unlike some unfortunate folk whose boats were smashed beyond repair against the harbour walls.

A bigger drama was played out at sea. A forty-foot catamaran had left Poole Harbour the day before, bound for the Canaries. Sophisticated as she was in terms of equipment, her roller reefing system jammed, threatening the boat with capsize and surely the loss of several lives amid the sixty-foot waves. A naval ship was brought in to block the worst of the seas and to pour oil, enabling the lifeboat to rescue the five crew, including a woman. The skipper stayed aboard to ride it out with his courageous escorts. We met up with some of the survivors a few days later. One image still haunted them all; the sight of the lifeboat balanced atop a fifty-foot wave crest, threatening to topple over then smash down on them in the trough below.

At the height of the storm, the needle of their wind speed indicator had trembled for more room. It was calibrated to the limit of the Beaufort scale force 12…a wild night indeed!

Shaken but undeterred, we spent the rest of that winter constructing a doghouse and reorganising the running gear. Imago had proved herself to be stalwart vessel. Now it was up to us to ensure her a better history… though not before another sharp lesson or two!

During our stay at Cobb’s Quay in Poole, I worked as dish washer/ standby waitress at the Yacht Club which is where we met ‘Dink’ and her husband John. Dink (even today I do not know what her given name was) had worked in the catering industry for all of her life, mostly as a silver service waitress. Her tales about severe black uniforms, starched apron and cuffs, the loutish behaviour of pernickety guests, dictatorial chefs, over-inflated head waiters, were historical gems. We often sat together at the end of the day rehearsing for the wonderful hours of ‘cockpit talk’ we would later enjoy in harbours and anchorages all over the world.

There are ‘universal mothers.’ Dink was one of them. Her apron would have dried many a tear, wrapped many a graze. ‘They don’t use the crusts from the loaves, Dink. I can make bread and butter pudding, will you save them for us?’ I think she guessed the reason why.

‘Bread and butter pudding,’ I said to Ken as I spread jam on them for breakfast! ‘You’ll do it, you know,’ she said. It sounded like a mother’s blessing.

The year passed quickly. We were ready to try again. This time the do-or-die. Even a hurricane could not erode our determination to continue on the path we had set our minds to those nine years before.

CHAPTER 2

‘They listened and look sideways up

Fear at their hearts, as at a cup,

Their lifeblood seemed to sip.’

(The rime of the ancient mariner-Samuel Coleridge)

If we were ever going to experience the fears and joys of a long ocean passage we must first escape the consistently spiteful clutches of the English Channel: an unpredictable waterway with an ‘attitude’ that seemed determined to crush our spirits.

We left Poole Harbour at 6.30am on the 21st of August 1988. Folded into a mug in the galley cupboard was £300, our budget for a year. Our destination was the Canary Islands, with contingency plans to stop over in Portugal or the Cape Verde Islands if the weather proved unkind.

In a blustering wind, we headed west towards Plymouth, making excellent progress in a force 6. Imago registered 6.7knts, lunging through the seas, throwing rainbows from every wave – a wonderful feeling. By 7pm the following day, we sighted the Great Mewstone Rock that stands guardian in the bay. But the run in swept us too close to shore, forcing us to tack out to sea again. With an offshore wind slowing us down, we were committed to a harbour approach in darkness and in a heavy swell. We knew that, as novices, it was ill-advised, but the weather was again deteriorating quickly. We are not the first cruising sailors to be seduced by the proximity of land, its promise of sleep, respite, the thrill of safe arrival. Perhaps the nightmare of the previous year still lurked in our minds. The green pilot light marking the portside entrance was clearly visible. But where was the red light? There comes a dread feeling in my stomach that something is terribly wrong. The blackness ahead looks too dense, too solid.

Ken was at the bow. I called out to him but the wind was now soughing, carrying away both words and breath. But I can see he is struggling to drop the foresails. There is an unexpected sound of breaking surf. At last, both sails spill onto the deck and our speed is checked. As Ken gathered the sails into his arms, he looked down over the bowsprit…what he saw made him throw the sails onto the foredeck before staggering in a blind rush to the cockpit where he desperately turned the wheel hard to port. Amidst huge rocks and agitated water, the bowsprit is poised over the concrete slabs of Plymouth breakwater!

A cold logic invades our minds. All is lost. We are shipwrecked. In a few seconds from now, a decade of toil and self-denial will be undone as Imago embeds herself into those fearsome fangs of rock. For a frozen moment, we wait for the scrunch of steel against concrete.

What happened next was something we shall never forget (in the way that you don’t forget seeing a UFO or a cow in a tree). It was as if Imago herself, despairing of our incompetence, decided to act on her own. Rising high on the next swell, she turned in her own length, lurching away as the mainsail caught the wind. As she did so, the skeg rolled over the rocks. We felt the grating vibration of it through the hull. But she was off! Crawling away from doom at a painfully slow 0.5knts. Surely in all our journeying we would never come closer to disaster than this (though a night on the Barrier reef would come a very close second).

But it was not over yet. Although both harbour lights were now clearly visible, wind and tide were in control, forcing us perilously close to the cliffs that skirt the entrance, eventually trapping us in bay just fifty metres from them. Ken dropped anchor when it became clear to us that engine power was not enough to get us away. It was a dire predicament, the anchor chain hummed with each rise and fall of the swell. Chain links snatched hard against the bow roller. We set to, tying three more warps to the chain shackle, but at any moment they threatened to part. In a last exhausting effort to avert disaster, we deployed a secondary kedge anchor, but that was instantly torn away and lost.

Whichever beckoned first, breakwater or cliffs, we knew we faced disaster. It was time to call the marina for advice or assistance. We heard the conversation that followed… ‘a very long time since we have seen a yacht in so perilous a position as this… it’s force 6 out there and they are dangerously close to the cliffs… we’ll send out the marina launch and bring them in.’

While waiting for the launch, we inflated the dinghy before standing on opposite sides, ready to fling it over the rails and jump. By now our mouths were so dry that our tongues stuck to our palates and stayed there.

Once safely tied up in the marina, we sat together at the saloon table for a long time. Silent. Brooding. Ken was deeply dejected. Neither of us could summon up any thoughts about the future, but nor could we postpone a decision for very long before berthing fees swallowed up the money we had saved for the journey. This was a summit meeting, the agenda having as much to do with our future together as whether to continue sailing, especially if I was of a mind to call it a day. Even building Imago from scratch, employing all the skills he possessed, was not enough to preserve Ken from a feeling of failure. His boyish enthusiasm would evaporate, the dream that fired his restless spirit would be hard to re-ignite. It was this bounding puppy of a man I wanted to be with, not a wounded bear.

My own thinking was finished then, but it had to be a skipper’s call. So, deploying the subtlety, intuition, and all round brilliance of most women, I tested him out.

‘The only thing we did wrong out there, skipper, was to attempt an unfamiliar harbour approach in darkness.’

‘Spot on, girl!’ Ken reached across the saloon table to take both my hands in his. ‘Sorry love, we won’t do that again.’

With the word ‘again’ safely out, the meeting was adjourned. We went to bed.

Do-or-die then. We hope to be preserved. The sea is implacable. It would take us or spare us.

***

Even the noise of the engine couldn’t muffle the sound of that thud. I hear it now, fourteen years later. Still feel the cold the helplessness. I thought he had tripped over the ropes that were hastily retrieved as we left the lock on the Canal-du-Midi, in France. I called out to him from my position at the wheel (some silly bit of banter which now makes me close my eyes in regret). I cannot leave the helm, a queue of boats are on the move, taking order to fill the lock we have just left. No answer, so a quick peep around the wheelhouse. Ken is sprawled in the side-decking, lying awkwardly as if he hadn’t tried to check his fall. Unmoving. I want to be sick.

Manoeuvre Imago towards the towpath, click the engine lever into neutral, grab hold of two pegs and the hammer. Secure the bow first, then let the current swing her to the bankside before securing her at the stern, switch off engine: familiar mooring routines conducted at treble speed. Ken is making snuffling sounds, his breathing is laboured, he’s not conscious. I call out to the last of the boats entering the lock. ‘Medical emergency!’ In English, with what I hoped was a French accent. The skipper replies in perfect, barely accented English.

‘I’ll tell the lock keeper.’

‘I’m from Paris,’ he adds, ‘my English is OK.’ I think he saved Ken’s life. An ambulance arrived within ten minutes. Ken was treated where he lay for nearly half an hour. One of the paramedics came below to ask for a glass of water – I’m faint with relief, he’s awake! ‘For his dentures,’ he says and I’m rigid again and my heart is pounding.

I have to set up the gang plank so that Ken can be transferred to the towpath on an inflatable stretcher, thence to the ambulance where he is treated for a further hour. I sit on the bankside, waiting. It’s 80F, but I’m cold.

The attending paramedic finally emerged from the back of the ambulance. ‘He did not hurt himself falling Madame, he has had a stroke, there is bleeding from his ears and his left eye.’

On the way to the hospital, sirens blaring, they tell me I have been calm and composed. ‘It is ‘elpful to be so like zis,’ they say, so I suppose that numb was preferred over hysterical.

CHAPTER 3

ESCAPE FROM THE CHANNEL

Remnants of that hooligan wind swept the SW coast. Rigging clattered and whistled on all the small boats in the harbour, like a garden full of wind chimes. At night, warm and safe in our bunk, we imagined the bleak anxiety of those who were out in it, as we had been.

The cost of a visitor’s berth in the marina, together with their charge for towing us in, seriously depleted our precious resources, yet as each day passed, our resolve hardened. This time, we would leap off, jump in feet first, casting off our doubts along with the mooring ropes. After all, we mused, our small ship was now a sound, proven, vessel, whereas other quirky Brits had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in rowing boats, even rafts, while purists, faithful to the art form of sailing, even scorned an engine.

Whether it was a symbolic farewell to British shores, or simply to lighten our mood, we decided to have a land based ‘play day’ in Weymouth, accepting the offer of a lift with a lovely young family who were holidaying from the Midlands. They had chosen Plymouth because their children wanted to see ‘lots of boats.’

We sat on the beach among hundreds of people who seemed intent on sacrificing most of their clothes to the Sun God. A people watchers Paradise: posers, promenade walkers, sun shades, those entwined, a few alone but looking. Parents vainly trying to re-capture their own sea-side memories while their children imprinted their first: burying themselves in the sand, making sand castles, running the particles through their fingers. At the margin of the sea they generally played alone, squealing with exhilarating fear as they hopped away from a rogue wavelet. One curly-headed mite of a girl was seriously contemplating her first sea shell and accidently spilled a drink over her mother’s freshly basted legs. The resulting mayhem and tears ended the tiny girl’s moment of awe… science and wonderment snuffed out with a single slap. Adolescents marched up to their parents, demanding money before disappearing to buy plastic earrings at inflated prices or to feed the mouths of machines that simulated motorbikes crashing at 200 miles per hour. The beach hummed with irritations, drowning out the music of surf and seagulls.

During our travels, we would witness shocking examples of cruelty towards both children and animals, but the expression on that pretty young face stayed with us. Our own childlike remnants of wow and wonder about our world had also received a slap or two in recent weeks. The analogy was painful.

Away then. Conditions are rough. Four hours at the helm is too long so we reduce it to two. Even so, sleep is shallow and fitful. Numbingly cold. There are no stars, just inky blackness. Our navigation lights reflect back from a light mist. We sail towards a grey wall but never reach it, though I cannot stop myself peering steadfastly into the gloom as if the grey wall might suddenly become solid. But with the passing of every hour, we are closer to rounding Ushant into the Atlantic Ocean. We feel a mixture of rueful satisfaction about escaping the channel and anxiety as to what might lie ahead for the next 350 nautical miles.

During the third night the sea is calm. Our course is parallel to the Bay of Biscay. An infamous stretch of water with a fearsome reputation, but we were to experience it at its most benign and were eyes-to-heaven grateful for it.

The colour of the sea is a deep midnight blue. It looks thick and glutinous. Along both sides of the hull we witness nose to tail slaughter: porpoise eat mackerel, mackerel eat sardines, sardines eat fry, all seemingly oblivious to what gaping jaws are following behind them. Carnage.

Despite feeling queasy and tired, we are getting our ‘sea-legs.’ An on-board routine begins to shape our days. Four small mackerel make a satisfying lunch though perhaps the salty air has spoiled the taste of tea. By the fourth day we managed to prepare Smash, dried beans, and corned beef. Our first substantial meal. A good sign that we are feeling better.

We stand well out from the notorious bay where Atlantic swell from deep waters meets the shallows that turn it into a giant’s Jacuzzi. Even sixty miles off the coastline, changes in sea state are rapid: frequent squalls followed by night mist. A massive tanker passes a few hundred yards away, during my watch. Startling to see it suddenly appear from the gloom, my neck hairs bristle.

A nub of anxiety remains with us. Our second hand auto-pilot and radar have both failed. It might be minor faults, but we cannot find out until we are anchored somewhere. At this latitude, nights are perceptively warmer but dehydration and fatigue still bring on the shivers.

Not another ship in sight for well over thirty hours. We allow ourselves the luxury of three hours of sleep each. Alone at the wheel, familiar daydreams come to mind: a soft, four-poster bed, hedgerow greens to rest our eyes, a bath. So far we have neither washed nor changed our clothes, sleeping just as we are, ready to leap into action.

Perhaps one day Imago’s crew will become relaxed and happy sailors. Those stories we have read make it all seem so easy-peasy… ‘encountered a lumpy sea at 3am. All turned to and put a couple of reefs in the main.’ The reality of that (unless a boat is equipped with in-mast furling/electric winches) is nothing less than an ordeal for both body and mind.

On we go. The horizon always higher than the bows, climbing a never-ending hill. But as we clear the bay, the weather becomes calmer, the waves assume a more predictable rhythm. As our spirits rise, our sailing improves, even the terminology is becoming more familiar. ‘On the starboard quarter,’ I cry, and it doesn’t sound contrived any more. New obsessions come into our lives: satellite fixes (infrequent in those days), barometer changes, knots per hour, distance run.

We decided to break the journey at one of our refuge ports, Cape Finisterre, before the run to one of our dream places, Madeira. For two days and nights we have, as they say, ‘seen no ships.’ Just us with Imago, on the vast ocean.

As we gazed at our first genuine port of call, through gritty, blood-shot eyes, I think some of the beauty was lost to us, but it really was superb. Rugged bronze and copper hills with patches of forest covering the lower slopes. At the coastline, houses stood grouped in dense interlocking patterns gradually spacing out into single dwellings perched like nesting boxes, high in the hills. We picked up a buoy among the fishing fleet. Desperately tired, ravenously hungry…but we had got here!

***

They let me ride with him to the nearest hospital in Bezier. Three hours later the same Doctor emerged from the emergency treatment room. When he took hold of both my arms before speaking, I feared he was preparing to tell me the worst.

‘Your husband is only sixty-six,’ he said. ‘A big, strong-looking man with good vital signs, he deserves a chance.’ He then showed me the scans pointing out the white areas where blood had seeped into Ken’s brain – so much blood that it was hard to discern any normal brain tissue. ‘It is serious, Mrs Gogay, but don’t despair.’ A kind vocational Doctor. I watched the helicopter leave as it transported Ken to the neurological intensive care unit at the University Hospital in Montpelier.

CHAPTER 4

WINDS OF CHANGE

Cape Finisterre. Known locally as ‘place of the winds.’ We are both desperately tired, almost to the point of despair. So far, every land mass and harbour approach had led to a series of novice errors, resulting in chronic chest-pounding anxiety. Attempting to cross the Atlantic in such a state of mind would be truly foolhardy, especially as we faced the prospect of helming all the way. The second-hand automatic pilot now lay at the bottom of the Atlantic. Tossed overboard in a pique of frustration by Ken. Despite such a brief stopover, we remember Finisterre in a very personal way. We were to leave