Crossing the Line
Expect the
unexpected when crossing 2,700 miles of open ocean and
the equator to become an official shellback.
By Terence Loose
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he swaying palms and
reef-rimmed islands of the South Pacific had been my wife Gayl’s and my cruising
dream for four years before leaving
The speaker, later dubbed Ben
There, a sailor who had made the journey twice and – for reasons no one dared
ask – was now a landlubber, verified that a successful jump demanded planning,
skill and, ideally, a fair amount of luck. This was because the route included
crossing the equator, or the “Line” as he called it in the tone an old salt
might say “the Horn.” This, he went on, meant a change in hemispheres, weather
patterns and the volatile confluence of the two. “Picture a big bowl of batter,
with two raging blenders churning it up on opposite sides,” he said. “Your job
is to get from one side of the bowl to the other.” I pictured
He went on. Specifically, he
said, there were three areas to worry about. First, we had to fight our way out
to the trades, which didn’t really get going until about 115 degrees west, or
600 miles offshore. He predicted either west winds or no wind for this first
part. “Bring a lot of diesel,” he cautioned.
Second, he said, after a nice
gentle week or so of north and northeast trade winds, we would hit the infamous
Intercontinental Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a notorious band of varied and
unpredictable weather which bulges and dances its way over hundreds of miles of
ocean just north of the equator. Its cause is the coming together of the
northern hemisphere trades and the southern hemisphere trades in an area of low
pressure.
My ears pricked up. In
preparing for this month-long bluewater passage no area worried me more than
the ITCZ. I pictured squalls with driving wind, pelting rain, and worst of all,
bolts of lightening. I pictured my 105-pound wife wrestling an angry Yankee in
lightening streaked darkness. I pictured the movie White Squall.
When I asked Ben about this, he
just chuckled. “No, no,” he said. “Your problem will be lack of wind. Bring a
lot of diesel.”
He moved on. Our final hurdle
in the journey to paradise, he said, was where to cross the equator. Cross too
early (too far east) and you risked getting caught in the ITCZ for a week or
more and being stuck east of the southern trades. Cross too far west and you
would lose your favorable sailing angle on the Marquesas, especially if the
trades swung to the south or became reinforced. Here, he interrupted himself to
share a few first-hand accounts of his single-handed battle with fifty-knot
reinforced trade winds.
He continued. Since the ITCZ
shrunk the further you traveled west, it was a tricky decision on where to
cross. Fortunately, however, Ben had it all worked out for us. “Sail with the
northeast trades west until you reach a nice narrow spot in the ITCZ or 132
degrees west, whichever comes first,” he said, holding a pointer to a large
chart. “Then, turn dead south and go until you feel wind from the southeast.
Simple.” He collapsed the pointer, signaling he was through and we could clap.
I was too busy writing his advice down though, conveniently leaving out the
word dead.
The next few days were spent
running around
Gayl came up on deck and looked
around.
“Are we a sailboat or a fuel
barge?”
She went back below.
It’s alright, I thought. She’ll
thank me when we’re motoring away from
Less than three days later, we
would find out just who the real sailor on
On day two, I got my chance to
use some diesel. I fired up the engine for a quick charge, only to shut her down
again twenty minutes later due to overheating. Gayl and I looked at each other
in disbelief: it was on day two that our engine had quit in our first ill-fated
attempt. And it had not started again until day 13, in a Cabo Marina slip. The
memory of two weeks at sea with no cabin lights, no refrigeration, no weather
information, and no power when the wind died took the blood from my knuckles.
This time, however, it was not
the fault of Big Blue (our name for
They were just passing
There was another problem. I
had fallen down the gangway two days before our departure, landing hard on my
hip. Now, my entire right leg was stiff and dark purple with a softball sized
red lump and infected abrasion at the point of impact.
As the sun began to sink – my
favorite time of day on land; my most dreaded at sea – my spirits sunk with it.
In the dimming light I could see only one thing clearly: Bigger forces were
conspiring against Gayl and me and our South Pacific dream. We clearly were not
supposed to be out here. Finally, with the night came the worst vision of all.
Hemmingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” infiltrated my mind. I imagined a
gangrene leg, a wounded boat and, worst, Gayl, a thousand miles offshore, alone
with the corpse.
I told Gayl all this and she
told me to get some sleep. As usual, I argued. And as usual, she let me have my
way.
I turned the boat around and
headed back toward
I held the tiller all night,
making good time back toward the safety of
I drove
I thought of Gayl and the
family we were planning to start after our season in the South Pacific. I tried
to imagine myself as a father, explaining that after a day offshore, I turned
my back on my dream and ran to safety. How would I ever be able to champion the
principles of discipline and perseverance? Or teach the value of chasing a
dream?
Gayl came up from below.
“I’m ready to turn around,” I
said. “Again.”
After breakfast, in a moderate
wind and sea, we hove-to. As
“Here’s your chance to get rid
of me,” I told Gayl.
“Don’t tempt me.”
Less than 20 minutes later the
line was free. And the job turned out to be more fun than fear. Floating in the
ripping current behind Tamarac II,
gazing down into an eternity of deep blue broken only by spiraling rays of
light, it was as free as a man could feel. In fact, the hardest part of the job
was climbing back aboard using the emergency fold-out steps on
At
The next 10 days were as
uneventful as life at sea can be. Except for the tanker we almost hit on day
seven, in broad daylight, in a shipping lane, our dream cruise was becoming
just that, a dream.
Gayl got in her share of diesel
barge jabs and pointed out that we had used just three of our 25
get-away-from-Mexico engine hours. I fired back with a half-hearted “All the
more for the doldrums of the ITCZ.”
But that thought died a
thunderous death on day 13, when Gayl and I finally entered the notorious
ITCZ. I say entered, but a more accurate
description of the event would be it overtook us. Something you learn very
quickly on an ocean alone is just how wrong 95% of the advice given on land is.
Case in point: Ben There’s claptrap about running west above the ITCZ until you
get over a nice thin spot, where you’re told to dart south across it into the
southeast trades. Totally logical, but about as helpful as instructing you to
buy a stock at it’s low point and sell at its zenith — looks good on paper,
ain’t gonna happen in this world.
Lets do some math. You are
traveling at six knots, max. The ITCZ is jumping, bulging and twisting like a
five-trillion-ton boa constrictor in a pen full of sheep (yes, you are a
sheep). I could show you high seas reports that track it moving over a hundred
miles north or south on a longitude within six hours. So in my opinion, this is
where the luck needs to happen.
And on the evening of April 21,
at 7 ˝ degrees north, 123 degrees west, our luck ran out: the beast curled
around us, and squeezed. We took in one of the most ominous sights a sailor
can: an absolutely black sky astern broken only by great flashes of lightening.
The flashes were directly upwind, meaning the thunderheads that fired them were
traveling approximately 10 knots faster then we were. Can’t
run, no place to hide.
We spent all night battling one
after another of the line squalls. It was frightening, frustrating work. The
lightening brought out the fear, and the darkness made it hard to predict when
to furl in the Yankee. But no words can describe the feeling of isolation a
couple feels steering a 45-foot-tall lightening rod through electrified squalls
1,000 miles from the nearest land. The term God’s bull’s-eye came up a lot. I
toyed with pointing out that my vision, and not “expert” Ben’s, was more
accurate, but this would mean actually looking astern and a possible White
Squall reference, so I decided to let it go.
After that first sleepless
night of being pasted, we had a lot of questions for our radio net friends. A
few friends about three days in front of us, told us
they had turned south when they hit the nasty conditions we were experiencing.
Their rationale was since the squall lines were guided by the northeast trades,
to continue southwest toward the ideal equator crossing waypoint only spelled
further trouble. That made since.
This advice was bolstered by
the reports coming in from boats further south, closing in on the Marquesas.
For days the fleet below three degrees south had been reporting 25- to 30-knot
southeast trades accompanied by 10- to 12-foot seas. And weather reports called
for more of the same well into the future. On our current route, that would
mean taking the seas directly on the beam—not a pleasant thought.
The choice was clear: head dead
south as long as possible. Of course, this would lengthen our route to Hiva
Oa—the rum line course was 1,425 miles on a bearing of 222 degrees true—but
then, distance to a sailor is as relative as time is to Einstein. With luck,
heading south would get us out of the ITCZ sooner and give us a better angle on
the predicted towering seas and reinforced trades.
But in addition to sound
advice, our morning net discussions offered something almost more comforting:
the knowledge that other boats had been where we were and lived to tell about
it. Not that we were continually picturing an exploding mast and a sinking
ship, but the fact was that Gayl and I had never sailed in squally weather, had
never experienced the terrifying thrill of the entire sky lighting up above
your mast. And, in fact, the last time we were stuck sailing defensively we had
no company and no radio contacts. Now, we discovered just how much impact
something as intangible as a human voice can be.
The next few days took on a
frustrating pattern. The days had heavy, overcast skies, but were not
violent—10-knot northeast trades were spotted with many rain squalls boasting winds
from 25 to 45 knots but lightening-free. But with afternoon came stacking
cumulonimbus monsters gearing up for their nightly feeding. The light trades
meant we needed a full Yankee to drive the boat, but squalls were so
prevalent—and big—that steering around them was futile. This forced a lot of
sail handling, which in turn forced exhaustion.
Going into the second night I
made a decision to run with a double-reefed main and the “Iron Genny”; Gayl and
I had not slept for 24 hours and burning diesel seemed much wiser than burning
energy on the Yankee. Besides, we needed to lighten up the rails. To this day I
think that’s one of the best moves I made as captain; on my off-watches sleep
came much easier against the rumblings of Big Blue than it did against the fear
of my 105-pound wife caught a little late in furling in the headsail.
We left our last electrical
squall astern around three degrees north on April 25, our 17th day
of the crossing, after enduring four nights of what weather reports had termed
“big, bad, ugly stuff.”
With the exodus of the
thunderheads, however, so went the wind. We had hit the doldrums.
“For this I am prepared,” I
yelled, and moved triumphantly toward the engine ignition. We motored on.
Four hours later, just above
three degrees north, we felt the first brush of southeast trades.
“Wow,” Gayl said as she
prepared to unfurl the Yankee. “I’m sure glad you got us through that.”
We kept driving SSE, eagerly watching
the GPS as our rum line to
As we passed four degrees south
the reinforced trades warnings were called off. This
both relieved and perturbed us: We liked the sound of 10 to 15 but hated that
we had wasted so much time sailing south.
It turned out that the effort
was not in vain, however. In our final push to the Marquesas, we racked up our
best day’s run numbers of the trip thanks to a fast west-setting current. With
our better angle, we sailed a comfortable six to six-and-a-half knots over
ground, posting 148 and 147 mile last days, respectively.
We pulled into