I’ve long thought that the most fascinating ocean voyages I like to pretend I have ever taken are those that I’ve planned while soaking in the bathtub.
Like yesterday’s: I took a quick imaginary spin across a stretch of western Scottish waters that I actually know quite well – the 40-odd sea-miles from Oban to Colonsay by way of the Gulf of Corryvreckan.
As I imagined it in the bath, the venture was unforgettably tremendous: the sea was torn white by massive overfalls, there were tidal rips in the gulf that could overwhelm even a well-found vessel, the strait between Jura and Scarba, notorious for its vicious caprices, very nearly drowned the engine that was doing its a-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa thing quite nicely until tons of watery green waves suddenly invaded the schooner’s little cockpit.
By the time the trick was over, I was so shattered that I had to turn on the cold tap for a good half-minute, the better to return to reality – after which I put the guide book that had told me all this back on the cork surface of the bath-side table.
For years my vade mecum for such bathtime reveries has been any one of the 78 books, the Sailing Directions – or “Pilots”, as they are more familiarly known – that are published every three or four years by the British Admiralty in Taunton, Somerset.
Officially they are for the masters and navigating officers of the ships that ply their ways around the planet’s coastlines. On the side, however, these blue-backed volumes, each one the size and heft of a decently solid biography, are revered by maritime Walter Mittys the world around – Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward, it is said, among them.
For in loving detail, and with the greatest accuracy, they tell all who dip into them the most prudent way to navigate around every rock and skerry in the world, and how best to sail through and across every strait and bay and estuary from Spitzbergen to the South Shetland Islands, from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the Bay of Bengal.
The directions are laid out – enhanced with a scattering of illustrations and maps – in the calm, unemotional prose of naval bureaucrats who have distilled centuries’ worth of marine lore on how best to get ships safely around the shores of the world. They make, as a result, and to susceptible addicts, the most compelling reading.
There are few greater pleasures I can imagine than to immerse myself in the warm suds late on a winter’s evening, sponge and rubber duck down by my toes, and picking up, say, Naval Publication No. 3, The Africa Pilot, South East Coast from Zambezi to Cape Agulhas – and reminding myself just how difficult it is to find a place of safety on the Transkei shore while in a force nine gale blowing up from the Antarctic.
Or else how best to discover – as is delineated in 10 terse paragraphs of NP 11, page 23 – the way to distinguish brash ice from growlers while making passage across the Denmark Strait in the dawn of an early northern spring.
Imagining or remembering such voyages, port to port, river to river, is all the greatest of fun, and if one’s skin turns to prune betimes and the bath water goes tepid, so be it – at least until one makes it safely in to harbour, or the call to dinner sounds from downstairs.
And yet, and yet. Navigating the world’s coastlines may be exhilarating – after all, the two things a mariner, bath-time or real-time, fears more than all else are other ships, and the presence of land – but there is one other kind of marine journeying that is even more romantically challenging. It is the kind of journeying that is amply covered in one further Admiralty volume that Walter Mittys like me treasure above all else.
This book is the Gutenberg Bible for the marooned, the stranded and the landlubber set: Naval Publication No. 136 – a slim, blue-cloth covered grail of a book called tersely Ocean Passages for the World.
Its existence reminds codgers like me that the 70-odd volumes of “Pilot” cover merely the world’s shorelines, and so are mostly designed just for dirty British coasters and seagoing wusses.
Ocean Passages, on the other hand, is for those of us who conduct our business in the truly great waters. It is for the steersmen on the world’s galleons and quinquiremes.
This is the ultimate perilpus for those of us who make our ventures around the planet by way of what they call the long sea. This is the ocean set down in hardcore. This is the book, in other words, for truly maritime Men.
Unlike all other Admiralty books, Ocean Passages has a dedication, the words of a Breton fisherman’s prayer: “Oh God be good to me, Thy sea is so wide and my ship is so small.”
After which there follows almost 250 pages of sage advice and precise direction on how to make best the longest and most arduous journeys imaginable.
Planning a sea journey in April from Bishop Rock to Delaware Bay, or next autumn from Durban to Rangoon? Or considering how best to make it from the Gamba Oil Terminal in Gabon to the oil dock (which happens to be beside the Ikea store) in Bayonne, New Jersey? NP 136 will have it all for you, concisely and bloodlessly, calm waters, hazards and all.
As with this – the directions for a sailing vessel trying to make its way westbound, around Cape Horn. “When passing Isla de Los Estados the usual course is E of the island but there is, off its E extremity, a heavy tide-rip which extends for a distance of five or six miles, or even more so, to seaward. When the wind is strong and opposed to the tidal stream, the overfalls are overwhelming and very dangerous, even to a large and well-found vessel. Seamen must use every precaution to avoid this perilous area.”
Or this, which the master of the Titanic might have cared to read. “Almost all the icebergs which menace the North Atlantic routes originate in the glaciers of the W coast of Greenland where they are calved at a rate of several thousand a year. They are carried S by the Greenland, Baffin Land and Labrador currents, and when they reach the shipping routes they may be several years old.
The bergs calved on the E coast of Greenland also drift S, and may be met off Kap Farvel, but they do not survive the generally warm waters of Davis Strait and are not a source of danger on the regular transatlantic routes.”
Occasionally what is left unsaid is the more eloquent. Advice is offered, for example, on sailing south along the west coast of Africa to Cape Town: “Leaving Ascension Island a vessel will fetch the coast of Africa, according to the season, at some point between Cap Lopez and Luanda ... a good vessel, sailing well, may make landfall S of the Congo River. Thereafter ... it seldom answers to work along shore.”
As well it seldom does: onshore winds and knife-sharp reefs here can cause one to wreck on the shores of Namibia where, for 300 miles, not a single river flows into the sea. There is no water: and so not for nothing is the stretch called the Skeleton Coast, feared perhaps above all other shorelines for the lingering death it threatens.
Usually by this point in the reading, if the bath was begun at a civilised time, it is just a few minutes to midnight. If the water hasn’t turned stone cold, and the Roberts radio is to hand, then it is time to turn it on and listen to – what else? – the shipping forecast.
For the marine addict is entirely agnostic: those of us wanting the latest sea area reports from North Utsira and Dogger, or the visibilities at Bell Rock or Malin Head, are as content to get our fixes in stereo as we can do so in print – and besides, anyone who has mugged up on NP 136 beforehand can easily fathom how best to sail from Wight to South East Iceland, or Humber to Fastnet, avoiding rocks, ice and tidal overalls, making the five minutes of forecast even more thrilling than normal.
And all the while, there is that damnable constant engine noise: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa...
Time to get the towel, and the slippers, and dream deep dreams of the faraway sea.
Simon Winchester is the author of several books including ‘The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary’ and ‘A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906’
