Crossing The Bay Of Biscay

Book Extract

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
Alan Watts

 

We are innately drawn to water. Even I, with my uncertainty and reticence, am drawn to water. To me there has never been anything more beautiful than rivers, lakes and oceans, whether I wanted to be in them or not.

In my early teens it was to the clifftops that my mother would take us to watch lightning storms roll in up the Channel. And the clifftops were only a mile from our house. And, looking back, that’s always been the case.

Despite being an island, it’s still easy to live an inconvenient distance from the sea although almost impossible to do so from some water source. I always grew up within walking distance from the sea in three different houses and it was only when I first went to university that I made the unwise decision to leave it.

I didn’t go far from my childhood hunting grounds even though I’d always imagined I would. University was the escape on the horizon, my way out of a confusing youth. But I not only left the sea, but I left myself too, choosing to follow a boyfriend to Winchester and hemming myself in in more than one sense.

To the inlander it may sound preposterous, Winchester, after all, is not very far from the sea. But to someone who’s grown up walking to the churning ocean, it was an impossible distance.

I felt it more than I thought about it. I never thought, ‘the sea is far’. Instead I’d find myself on the willow-strewn banks of the Itchen as it chortled its way through the ancient city after another argument. But there was something lacking about the intrepid river as it disappeared round the bend into forests and fields. It didn’t have the expanse, the pull or the depth that the ocean gave me.

I felt claustrophobic in Winchester even though I loved its soul and beauty. History didn’t so much seep out of walls and buildings as flood. I lived on the high street opposite the 15th Century Buttercross statue and spent evenings running my hands along the stone walls of Winchester College, founded in 1382.

I love history. I love the endless, mesmerising depths of it and moreover, I love how easy it is to touch in England. In Winchester you could walk anywhere within the city walls and, if you stopped and reached out, you could touch something improbably old. You’d be walking near Roman walls, over medieval graves and above lost escape tunnels leading once upon a time from the castle.

 But Winchester was small and coddled and presumptuous about itself and its inhabitants. There was no escape. There was no ocean. Living inland was like living in a room without a window while living on the coast was having one of those walls knocked clean away.

I didn’t know I needed the ocean literally next to me until I went to explore Plymouth University in the summer of my first year. I stood on the Hoe, a ten-minute walk from student halls, and looked out to sea.

I went through the process of transferring from Winchester to Plymouth in time to enter my second year at my new university.  Winchester’s student welfare officer leaned forward in her chair, ‘are you sure you’re not running away?’ she asked me.

No. I had already run away, I thought, this is me going back.

The deep pull the ocean had on me from the cliffs was not the same effect it had on me as we sailed from Falmouth to the Galician port of A Coruña. I hadn’t done an overnight passage beforehand and this was my first, at five days long.

Biscay to me was the absolute test to overcome, the pinnacle of difficulty that, if conquered, would open up the entirety of Europe.

After all, once you’ve crossed Biscay, you can technically day sail almost all the way into the Mediterranean. We may’ve been heading for the Caribbean but I only had the capacity to worry about one offshore passage at a time.

Cold and afraid, I spent the first two nights offshore wearing as many clothes as humanly possible and scrunched up in the corner of the cockpit on my night watches.

It was a crash course in ship avoidance as not only did we straightaway have to deal with crossing the shipping channels of the English Channel, but we then had to either go inside or outside the channels off Ushant.

While over a year later we’d be freely sailing in empty Caribbean shipping channels, those in northern Europe were more akin in motorways. Weaving our way across them in the daylight was hard enough, at night it was exhausting.

With an AIS receiver, we could see the name, speed and heading of commercial shipping within a half to 16-mile radius depending on the waves and strength of signal.

Broadly speaking, yachts under sail have right of way against ships under power, but in the face of a Panamax doing 18 knots on a tight schedule, we ballet danced across lanes to stay out of their way.

On the third night we were into Biscay proper and, with hundreds of miles of space and multiple routes, the shipping lanes had eroded and lights on the horizon were fewer and further between.

Crossing the Bay of Biscay for the first time.

I was nauseous and chilled at 8pm. The incessant grey waves were chipping away at my enthusiasm not with rock hammers but with mighty pickaxes. It was almost time for me to go off watch for two hours and I’d just put down my bowl of rice after two spoonfuls.

We’re making progress, I thought, that’s all that matters. This will end.

The last 24 hours had been rough. A short, sharp chop had sprouted up from the beam and, despite Alex’s assertions that the waves were small, to me they felt and looked monstrous.

Alex put away the dishes and I stared out across the greyness. There was nothing out there, I thought, how would we ever reach Spain? We had hove-to to eat, not something we ever made a habit of but that evening it made cooking and eating much more comfortable. It involved the two sails to be set against each other, cancelling out any forward motion.

I closed my eyes and tried not to think about feeling sick. Was I even sick? Was it just worry? Was it the cold? I opened my eyes again and caught something in the ruffled sea. I saw things all the time, things that weren’t there. This was something that would continue for the entire voyage and something every offshore sailor can relate to. You hallucinate at sea, your brain constantly creating things out of spray and waves and haze.

I saw it again. A shot of black. I sat up a little, it really did seem real. Again. Not just one, but tens. Tens of dark triangles zooming towards us at impossible speeds, like distance and waves were nothing at all.

I gasped and pushed myself out of my corner and over to the port side of the cockpit. Alex leapt out, thinking something was wrong.

“What?” he said, prepared for anything.

“Dolphins!”

They were around us in moments, shooting out of the water and crashing down with the flair of circus performers. They were innumerable, leaping and spinning in twos and threes. Racing around us and rolling under the waves. I stared over the side, the sea less than a metre from my face as a dolphin swam along on its side, it’s right eye looking right back at me.

I clipped on and crawled to the bow, there’s even a photograph of me, sumo-shaped in countless layers and clinging to the pulpit – this was a time before I’d learnt to walk on deck at sea. I’m cold and exhausted but I’m grinning with unadulterated joy because beneath me are dolphins playing under the bow as we slop around in the chop.

It was only months later, when I’d had so many dolphin encounters that I began to understand their behaviour, that I realised this first, seminal incident was strange.

After that dolphins never came to the boat if she was doing less than 4 knots. If she was racing along at 6 they’d race alongside with us but if the wind dropped and we went to 3 knots, they’d get quickly bored and leave.

Dolphins never came to us when we were slow, they loved the speed and playfulness of the bow wave and the Aries fin on the stern. So out of character were the first Biscay dolphins, staying with us hove-to and continuing with us for a further hour of slow sailing, that I eventually concluded that they were either very bored, very hyper or had been sent to me by the ocean, the lifting of the first of many curtains.

I spotted land on the horizon in the early afternoon and the feeling was momentous. This wasn’t the Spain of my childhood; the Spain of 14-hour drives south from Calais. This was the Spain of the wilderness explorer, a wild, new land that could contain anything.

Firstly, I hadn’t been expecting what looked like mountainous green cliffs. I don’t know what I’d expected but I think much lower land, possible even beaches. Having only travelled to Catalonia and the Pyrenees before, my general impression of the rest of Spain had always been fairly arid.

But what I saw now was verdant and towering, only adding to the strange sense of exoticness that I felt. This couldn’t be exotic, I thought, it’s only Spain. But it wasn’t only Spain, it was a Spain I’d sailed to.

The swell grew throughout the day, transatlantic waves building as they reached land and the wind shot up as we neared the coastline.

I spent the afternoon in a heightened state of anticipation, always dancing on the edge between excitement, relief and fear.

I was forced to takeover from the Aries as we turned downwind to head down to A Coruña. The following waves threatened to slew the boat over as she rushed down the faces. These were the biggest waves I had come across so far and I rejected Alex’s offer to steer, I had to do it myself, I was simply too afraid to relinquish control.

As the wind hit force 6, we had just a scrap of genoa out and I was determined not to look behind me. The waves were likes walls rushing up on us and I plugged myself into my iPod, letting the music keep me believing that this was all okay, we were okay.

Every time I felt the stern being picked up I’d turn the boat down the face and wait for the whoosh and the wallow as she slumped back off the top of the wave and watched it roar onwards. Then I’d resume my course, slightly across the waves, towards the harbour entrance.

As the seabed shallowed towards in the entrance to the port, I genuinely feared for our lives. My inexperience was still at the stage where capsizing was often near the forefront of my mind, but I still remember those waves as being huge now, even with my subsequent experiences.

As I steered us past the first breakwater, heart in my throat, lips jammed together with tension and barely remembering to breathe, a trawler trundled out past us, smashing repeatedly into the oncoming waves. With its bow rising to the peaks and crashing off the backs, I was overwhelmed with relief that we were going in. A large part of me believed we would face those same waves whenever we chose to leave though.

The water was immediately and impossibly calm the moment we passed the breakwater. The difference was astounding and I laughed out loud at how frightened I’d been just moments before.

As we slid inelegantly into our berth that evening, I jumped onto the pontoon to tie on the bow line and skidded to my knees on the damp wood. But I was on land – as good as anyway – and that was all that mattered. No matter how far offshore you are when you spot land, it always takes hours more than you would’ve thought to reach the anchorage or berth. In good visibility, you might see the harbour 8 hours before you reach it and by the time we’d tied up in A Coruña, it was almost 9pm.

After a quick shower before the block closed for the night and ten minutes of customs paperwork in the marina office, we were sat outside a tiny shop clinking icy bottles of Estrella Galicia, the first of an Atlantic’s worth of local lagers.

 

© Not to be reproduced without written permission from Fernhurst Books Limited.

In Bed With The Atlantic is written by Kitiara Pascoe. Kitiara Pascoe was born and brought up on the south coast of England, but only came to sailing through her partner. She studied English and Creative Writing at Plymouth University and then worked in Exeter’s Waterstones for two years, ending up as head of travel. She now works as a freelance ghostwriter and content writer through The Literary Lifeboat. She has written for Yachting Monthly from the start of her trip and also been published in The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Matador, PopSugar and SurfGirl.