Incredible Voyage (eBook)

A BRAVE CONCEPT My sixteenth Transatlantic crossing under full sail was fairly uneventful, with the exception of glancing off a basking whale about six hundred miles to the east of Bermuda. I was in Arthur Cohen's yawl Barbara, a sturdy thirty-eight-footer, well found, Alden designed and steady as a tramcar. Her only snag was that having no dependable self-steering gear I had to take on a crew for the crossing, which meant a vastly increased food bill and more care on the water consumption. My crew were good sailors and excellent company, however, which more than made up for the drawbacks. Anton Elbers was a fifty-year-old Dutchman, an ex-Netherlands naval officer, while Dan Milton had been a first officer in the United States Merchant Marine. Both were members of the Corinthian Yacht Club, an organization which supplies amateur crews for sailing craft. Anton, Dan, and I left Westport, Connecticut, with no fanfares or other bullshit on 25 June 1969. Barbara was ostensibly bound for a cruise of the Mediterranean, actually her real destinations were much more exciting -- the Dead Sea and Lake Titicaca, for I was out to attempt nothing less than the vertical sailing record of the world. These two bodies of water, both remote, lie at an altitude difference of almost 15,000 feet -- the Dead Sea at 1,250 feet below sea level, Lake Titicaca at 12,580 feet above sea level, almost three miles up in the high Andes mountains of South America. The distance as the crow flies between the two bodies of water is about nine thousand miles. The distance as a small craft sails is much, much greater. Neither the Dead Sea nor Lake Titicaca had as yet ever been sailed in a seagoing vessel, neither had ever been reached by an ocean voyager and neither was properly charted. No one to whom I broached the subject had any idea how the voyage should be tackled, or which destination to make for first. After studying the problem for almost two years I decided to tackle the Dead Sea first. This was by far the easier of the two destinations, for the only natural obstacle to overcome, once Israel was reached, was the Negev Desert, over which by now excellent roads had been constructed. The political obstacles, however, were much more difficult, for there was the ever-present risk of war breaking out between Israel and her Arab neighbors. I decided that I would hover around in the Mediterranean, awaiting the opportune moment to tackle the haul across land. On passage to the Azores, Barbara had good winds from astern or on the starboard quarter and rolled along merrily, the only accidents being the breaking of the running poles twice and the loss of the taffrail log spinner, which was bitten off, probably by a shark or some other large fish. Apart from sighting three steamers en route, there was little else of note in the thirty-one-day passage from Westport to Setbal, a small fishing port about thirty miles to the south of Lisbon, which has the finest seafood in Portugal. Here, Anton and Dan left Barbara, while I continued on south to Gibraltar with Arthur and a friend, calling at Sagres and Cdiz. It was a fairly rough passage, a total of six days.