Hurricane

When Baltimore Friends School headmaster Byron Forbush retired in 1998 after 38 years, he was the longest serving private school headmaster in the country. The Baltimore Sun asked him, “which class was your most difficult?” It was no surprise to me it was mine, the class of 1970, and I’ll admit I had contributed to that reputation.

I didn’t start university until the spring of ‘72. Today it’s called a gap year but then it was called a, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’ll never go to college now, ya’ know!” year-and-a-half.

There were 52 kids in my class. 51 went straight to university. I was the 52^nd and a disgrace to the school. They so wanted 100% placement. It looks great on a brochure, but sorry, I knew I wasn’t ready.

It wasn’t that I had no idea what I wanted to do.

I had a passion for photography, sailing, diving, and the history of the sea. And when I was fourteen, a family friend, Father Felipe MacGregor, then president of the University of Lima in Peru, presented me with a box of pre-Columbian pottery shards and said, “See what you can make of them.” The half dozen pots and plates I re-assembled from the wreckage sparked my interest in archaeology. Finally, an inspirational social science teacher introduced me to anthropology and explained that in America, archaeology was a sub-discipline of anthropology, unlike elsewhere, where archaeology is subordinate to classics or history.

So, for me, it was a choice between photojournalism and marine archaeology.

After graduation, I went up to New York and worked for six months at a large commercial studio, doing catalog and print advertising shoots, learning lighting and composition, especially with large format cameras, the kind with seats and cranks to move you and the camera two stories up in the air under a forty-foot ceiling on the top floors of a Manhattan skyscraper.

Then in the new year I took my savings and flew to Amsterdam to reacquaint myself with a girl who had stolen my heart in 1969 when she was an exchange student in the States. She arranged for me to live on a houseboat named the Henry David Thoreau owned by artist Viktor IV, who the guides on the tour boats would describe as “The King of the Hippies” as they cruised along the Amstel. That was the signal for us to turn our backs on the tour boat and drop trow. A nice mooning is always good for a laugh. The Henry David Thoreau would become my home base for European travels and studies in the years to come.

My goal was to take photographs and to find an archaeologist willing to take me on. I went to a marine archaeology symposium in Bristol, England, to meet archaeologist Peter Throckmorton. We got on well, and I ended up joining his crew and working on a series of projects in Greece until, at the end of the year, I decided it was time to get serious about my education and enrolled as a freshman at Boston University for the spring semester of 1972.

Throckmorton, as it happened, was on the board of the Sailing Education Association. SEA had acquired the 125-foot German-built steel-hulled topsail schooner Westward to use as a sail training vessel. Throckmorton wrote me in May to tell me Westward was going to be in Boston for a re-fit and I should go down and check her out. She had already done two shake-down cruises and was getting ready for her first full complement of tall-ship cadets.

Well, I had just finished my first semester finals and had nothing else to do, so I took the T down to Long Warf and there she was! Big, elegant, graceful and powerful. I introduced myself to Charlie Rose, the captain, and volunteered on the spot to do whatever was needed.

I was put to work scraping down and polishing the cylinder linings of the gigantic M.A.N. diesel engine. Dirty, exhausting, and slow work. After that I cleaned out the waste plumbing system for the main head that had two stalls and two urinals and I replaced whatever was corroded or broken. Crawling around the bilges under the head, dismantling and cleaning out waste plumbing fittings, and putting it all back together was one of the dirtiest jobs I’ve ever done in my life. But I was glad to do it. And they fed me! Three meals a day; not insignificant for an unemployed student after the end of term.

On the last Sunday before Westward was due to leave Boston I invited Westward’s oceanographer, Pedro Castro from the University of Puerto Rico, to come diving with my friend Terry Vose and me up on Cape Ann. My biology professor had told me about a great dive spot and Terry, who I had worked with in Greece with Peter Throckmorton the year before, was game to give it a try. Even though Terry was a Boston native and an experienced diver, neither he nor I had ever dived New England waters. So the three of us headed north to Hodgkin’s Cove in Rockport. We had wet suits, but none of us had hoods, gloves, or boots. You just don’t need them in the Med or the Caribbean. I figured it would be colder than I was used to, but what the hell, we were tough guys, right?

There was a granite pier with about thirty feet of clear water to the bottom that looked like a good place to jump in. I was the first off the wall.

Dear God, the instant I hit the water, the agonizing pain in my head was unlike anything I had ever experienced, and my hands and feet were screaming bloody murder too. I was so shocked I stopped breathing, and sank to the bottom and lay there on my back, trying to make sense of what was happening. I started to see colorful sparkles and I realized I had to make myself breathe. I took a large gulp of air from my regulator, slowly exhaled, then clawed my way up the wall, got my head above water, and shouted back to Terry and Pedro, “Come on in, the water’s fine!”

Well, look, I was nineteen and full of pride. What can I say?

Terry pulled on his mask, put his regulator in his mouth, and jumped in. I put just the glass of my mask back in the water. I sure as hell wasn’t going to put my whole head in, you know? I saw Terry convulse and I had a clear view of his eyes as they registered the enormity of my betrayal. No bubbles came from his regulator. Like me, he just sort of drifted down to the bottom and wallowed there. Everyone looks the same in a wetsuit, so it was like a vicarious out-of-body experience, as if I was watching an instant replay of myself. Terry eventually took a breath and, glaring at me from behind his mask, swam to the surface, got his head above water, and shouted, “Crystal clear water Pedro. What’s taking you so long?”

We’re guys, yeah?

Pedro stuck his regulator between his teeth, jumped in, and we watched him clear his mask, look around, and take off along the bottom, enjoying the scenery. The guy who had never been diving anywhere but the Caribbean.

Terry and I climbed out of the water and spent the next half hour trying to get warm. When Pedro finally surfaced, he said, “Beautiful dive! What happened to you guys?” I won’t repeat what we said. It would sound too, well just too pathetic. I was still shivering when we got back to Boston.

A few days later the re-fit was done and Westward was ready to take on her cadets and sail away. Cory Cramer, the SEA director, came aboard and called me into the saloon. He said I had been a real sport. I had done the hardest and dirtiest jobs and had never complained, and that it had been a pleasure to have me around. They knew I had no money, in fact I found out later they thought I had been sleeping rough when I left every evening. I hadn’t. I had an apartment in Back Bay. And I didn’t have many clothes I wanted to get filthy dirty, so I tended to wear the same rags to the boat every day. I must have looked even grungier than I imagined. Anyway, Cory said he had applied for and received a tuition grant for me from the Johnson Wax Fund, and I could sail with Westward as a cadet on their first full cruise.

It was something I hadn’t asked for and hadn’t expected. In fact, it never even occurred to me I might be able to be a cadet. I did come from a wealthy family and all, but I was on the outs with my parents – completely cut off – and had been for a long time. Wow.

Of course, I said yes and thank you and no one could have been happier than I was when we cast off and headed out of Boston harbor for the open sea.

Our first port was Hurricane Island, Maine. The director of the Outward Bound school there was a friend of the captain and we were going to pay him and his staff a visit before their first summer session. We helped clean up and rig their fleet of whale boats and learned to sail and race them. Then, on our last day there, Pedro and I, now properly equipped with hoods, boots, and gloves, dove beneath Westward’s mooring and in a hundred feet of water found the bottom carpeted with scallops. We filled two gunny sacks in twenty minutes, well over a hundred pounds.

The school staff had a few strings of lobster traps out, so our farewell dinner was a lobster, scallop, and corn-on-the-cob feast, washed down with beer and cheap wine while Charlie Rose and second mate Jeff Kaufmann played guitar and one of the staff played piano. That was a good evening.

We set sail at dawn. The sea was calm and the air was heavy.  In the first light of day everything was some shade of grey and the sound of seabirds carried for miles in the stillness until they were drowned out by the clank of anchor chain and our own grunts as the we worked the windlass to raise the anchor. The wind picked up and we got busy setting every sail we had. We were soon screaming down the Maine coast, the leeward rail underwater, and all was right with the world. After a brief stop in Woods Hole to pick up some oceanographic gear we set course east, for the mid-Atlantic ridge.

We had eighteen cadets on board. Then there was the captain, three mates, one of whom answered every question about where to find something with, “Have you looked up your ass?”. We had an engineer, a cook, a French doctor, a German geologist studying plate tectonics, and Pedro the oceanographer, ironically perpetually seasick, and who was a very nice guy but sadly had to endure many of the cadets whistling “Everything’s free in America”, from West Side Story, as they holystoned the decks or worked on rigging.

We sailed a three-section dogged-watch, with eight crew in each watch, which meant one watch sailed the boat from 8 PM to mid-night, another midnight to 4 AM, and a third from 4 to 8. Then two watches of six hours each so that a different watch picked up the 8 PM slot the next day. You get used to it. The sailing was good, the crew developed into a skilled, well-running team, and we had some incredible moments, like sailing silently through a pod of eight sleeping sperm whale out in the Gulf Stream. We spent a week in the mid-Atlantic gathering data for the oceanographer and the geologist, while we cadets sailed the boat, learned basic oceanographic techniques, studied and practiced celestial navigation, and learned marlinspike seamanship. Everything was perfect, until we turned back from the mid-Atlantic and headed west-south-west for Bermuda. That’s when hurricane Agnes hit us full in the teeth.

Imagine being on the deck of a large sailing vessel, lashed to your seat at the wheel, poised on the crest of a seventy-foot ocean wave, then imagine the terrifying rush as the boat races down the face of the wave and buries itself in the trough. Try and feel the struggle of the boat as it strains to rise up and shed tons of white water rushing down the length of the boat, submerging you as you hold your breath, grip the wheel, and struggle to keep the boat on course. The water clears and now the bow is pointed up to the sky as you climb the face of the next wave and it all begins again, hour after hour, for two days. When you come off watch all you want to do is collapse into your bunk, but you can’t. You MUST get out of your wet clothes and into some dry ones and hang your foul weather gear up to dry. You MUST get some food and water into your stomach, preferably something hot. Only then can you fall into your bunk and get some sleep. Never mind you’re being tossed and tumbled around like a ping-pong ball in a lottery machine; when you’re tired enough, you will sleep. The hardest part is learning to trust the other watches with your life. You’re in their hands, and they are in yours when you’re on deck.

Things started to ease up on the third day, and my watch took over at noon. It was my turn to be cadet watch leader. I was in charge. The wind and seas continued to abate and word came up from the captain to make sail and save the engine. We got the main up but it didn’t feel right. We still had twenty foot seas and we were rolling beam to beam. I was standing on the pilot house trying to shout to the foredeck not to raise the foresail and was about to tell my crew to get ready to lower the main when the captain came up on deck, just up from sleep, and let loose the main halyard. I wasn’t ready. My watch wasn’t ready. The main came crashing down on the pilot house and the massive boom started swinging back and forth in a wide, destructive arc. I started shouting orders to get out of the way of the boom and take in the main sheet. I also ordered the first mate to take in the topping lift, all while dropping flat on the pilothouse each time the boom swung past, just missing me and dragging the mainsail across me.

I jumped up after the next sweep cleared the sail away and the first mate said, “Why do you want me to take in the topping lift?” The topping lift is a line used to raise the boom up a little when it isn’t being supported by the sail. It’s used to keep the boom from falling to the deck until it can be secured in its crutch when the sail is down. The geometry was clear to me: taking in both the main sheet and the topping lift would stabilize the boom sooner than just taking in the main sheet, and I had the manpower available to do it.

Well, it was the mate’s right to ask me whatever he wanted, but I really do wish he had done what I ordered first and asked me why later. Even more, I wished I hadn’t stopped to give him an answer. The next time the boom swung across the pilot house, it hit me square across my ribcage and sent me flying overboard.

An adrenaline rush is an amazing thing. Time slows almost to a standstill. Reasoning becomes purely analytical and unemotional. I was aware that I was in serious trouble, and I was thinking about what I should do when I hit the water. I was face down, looking at the water, and moving away from the boat. What I didn’t know was that the boom and sail, in their swinging back and forth, had knocked loose one of the boat davits on the port side near where I was. It was swinging around in its mount like the flipper on a pinball machine, and it hit me as I was passing over the side of the boat. I was knocked back on board, bounced against the side of the pilot house, and landed on the deck. I remember hearing the girl at the wheel shout my name, and then I passed out.

I don’t know for how long. I awoke in my bunk with a major headache and some cracked ribs, but I was back standing watch the next day. Sailing offshore isn’t a ride at Disneyland. You’ve got to do your job, and I was glad for it. Glad to be alive. We made Hamilton harbor and I was grateful for a fresh-water shower and a few days rest in Bermuda.

The sail from Bermuda to New York was uneventful, in the good way. As it happened, we arrived in New York on the 4^th of July. It was Westward’s first time in New York, and the fireboats came out to give us a water-cannon salute. And then we had an even greater surprise. Pete Seeger had sailed the Hudson river sloop Clearwater down to greet us, and was sailing circles around us as we came up the channel past the Statue of Liberty, and into the East river, heading for our berth at the South Street Seaport Museum. With the Clearwater and the water cannons, it was an amazing homecoming.

It seemed our captain, Charlie Rose, had been first mate of the Clearwater before taking command of the Westward, and Pete was a good friend. It was a nice thing for him to do.

It wasn’t the only time I’d had a Pete Seeger moment. Right out of High School, but before heading up to New York, I got involved with a group protesting the chemical and biological weapons research at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. We asked Seeger if he would come down and sing a few songs at a protest rally we were organizing, and much to our surprise, he said he would.

I was the only one who could get hold of a car, so I was given the job of meeting Pete at the airport, driving him to the rally, and driving him back to the airport when he was done. Remember, I was only 17, and I wasn’t the greatest driver. I remember Pete letting me carry his banjo case when I met him at the gate and my best memory of the rest of the time is his wide-eyed terror as I sped through and around beltway traffic to get to the rally. I seem to remember both hands gripping the dash and white knuckles. Sorry Pete.

I learned a tremendous amount about offshore sailing and tall ships in my time aboard Westward. It had such an impact on me that I went to Cory Cramer and floated the idea of structuring an academic program that combined classroom learning with a cadet cruise aboard Westward. With Cory’s approval I approached John Silber, my university president, who gave me his enthusiastic support. He put together a committee that included Harvard, Northeastern, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the SEA Semester was born and is still going strong after forty-four years. From time to time I meet someone by chance who went through the program, and I am always pleased to hear them say how much it had meant to them.

You know, thinking again about heavy weather sailing, there was one other time I thought I’d share. It was many years later, I think it was 1985 but it could have been a year either way. I was sailing from the Chesapeake Bay up to Block Island on my friend Tom Conner’s boat with a few other of Tom’s friends. The weather became increasingly unsettled, and by the end of the second day we were beating straight into the face of a full gale and were making no headway, barely holding our own. At least we thought so. This was before GPS navigation and the boat didn’t have Loran. We had zero visibility of the stars and we weren’t picking up any radio direction beacons, so we were navigating by dead reckoning using the compass, clock, wind speed and Tom’s knowledge of his boat’s performance. On the night of the fourth day the wind eased and changed direction for a while, and we made good distance in the right direction, then the wind disappeared completely and we were in a dead calm with light fog. The first real sign we were more or less where we thought came around one in the morning, when a boomer, a ballistic missile submarine, silently surfaced about 500 feet off our starboard beam, headed into the Thames river and the submarine base at New London. It was an eerie and awe inspiring sight. We drifted for another hour before the weather turned again, and the gale resumed its rage. But there was a difference. The cloud cover was solid but thin, with a flat bottom at a fairly high altitude. The moon was full above the clouds, giving the sky an even, cold-blue light. Visibility below the clouds was fairly good, but the wind was blowing a lot of spray in our faces and the seas were choppy. Based on our dead reckoning, we should have been able to pick up Montauk light off our port bow, and sometimes we thought we could see a light but we couldn’t maintain sight of it long enough to read its pattern with the waves and spray. It was frustrating.

Then I noticed something. Looking up at the bottom of the clouds, there were light areas and dark areas. It could have been because of varying cloud thicknesses, or it could be, I thought, because land doesn’t reflect as much moonlight as water, and it seemed to me I was looking at a chart of Long Island, Block Island, and the Connecticut coast from the bottom, that is, as if the chart were sitting on a glass table and I was under the table looking up through it.

Tom and the others thought I was nuts at first, but the more we compared the light and dark areas to our charts, the more real it seemed. So we used the cloud pattern to set course for where Montauk light should be, and sure enough, after two hours we had a solid, positive ID on the light and our first good position fix in four days.

There’s all kinds of magic out there on the water.