Duel by Sextant

Paul was one of the best hands I’ve ever had the pleasure of sailing with. He knew what he was doing and possessed boundless energy. Sadly, a couple of years back he was lost overboard while sailing the Indian Ocean in his steel schooner.

On one of our voyages, Paul and I were about two hours out of Antigua after a trans-Atlantic crossing when he produced a surprise bottle of champagne to celebrate the completion of the voyage. “Might be a little warm,” he cautioned, “but it’s be wet.”

Paul*

The thought of warm champagne brought to mind something my father had once told me: He’d been stationed in Borneo during WW2 and had not always enjoyed the luxury of refrigeration. When he and his mates wanted cold beer they would put the bottles in a sack, hang it from a tree and dribble gasoline over it. The evaporation, Dad claimed, cooled the grog to a surprising degree.

When I mentioned this to Paul, his eyes lit up and he darted below, returning shortly with an old pair of jeans and the sewing kit. In no time at all, he’d whipped up a bag from a severed leg of the jeans, stuck the champagne in it and hung it from the boom. Above this, he suspended a plastic bottle of alcohol (from the stove), the bottom of which he’d punctured.

In the twenty minutes it took for the alcohol to drip from the bottle, our champagne had cooled to the point that the outside of the glass was frosted. Inside was superb.

That was Paul—constantly looking for a challenging project. He was also extremely competitive:

I think it was around 1990 when I purchased a 33ft. Moody in Mallorca, Spain, and Paul volunteered to assist in sailing her to Gibraltar. We had a good nor-wester of around fifteen knots to skim us past Ibiza, but after that the winds turned fluky and our speed dropped to around four knots. But we were basically headed in the right direction.

At the time, Paul and I were purists who frowned upon the use of any navigational device other than a sextant. I can’t recall whether this attitude was of a philosophical nature or came about due to Paul’s mistrust of Russians. He was born in Hungary and had fled his country some time after the Soviets invaded it in 1956. I seem to recall him worrying that if we came to rely on GPS for navigation and the Russians gained control of the satellite system they’d perhaps send us crashing into uncharted Russian rocks.

At the time of the Majorca voyage, neither of us had done any sailing for a couple of years and were both kind of hesitant to go through the process of re-learning the sextant. You get rusty quickly when you’re not using the instrument on a regular basis.

We knew roughly where we were—or thought we did—so I wasn’t overly concerned about hitting any chunks of land. I’d been hoping to spot a lighthouse or pick up the mainland Spanish coast and just follow it to Gibraltar, but this wasn’t to be. Two and a half days past Ibiza, there’d been no sign of either light or land.

It was mid-afternoon of a hazy day when I figured it was time to take a fix with the sextant. Paul saw what I was doing and instantly came alive—fired with the promise of competition. “I’ll grab my sextant and we’ll see who gets the best position,” he joyfully announced.

So there we were, the two of us perched on the coach-roof peering through our eye-pieces at a hazy sun, scribbling down readings and times in our respective notebooks. I swear Paul was shielding his book with a hand lest I sneak a peek and copy his results.

Paul finished his sights first and with a triumphant bray, headed below for the almanac and mathematical tables to plot our position. He’d managed to turn the exercise into a race as well.

Leaving the wind-vane steering to keep us on course, the two of us sat at the saloon table working frantically on our figures. Again, Paul beat me. After close to an hour (remember, we were both out of practice), he let out another triumphant bark and grabbed the chart.

But somewhere along the line he’d erred. According to his plot we were a few miles off New York.

I was closer. I had us in Portugal. And when I say in I mean about twenty miles inland from Lisbon! Back to the almanac and tables.

Caught up in our competition, we’d kind of forgotten that we were sailing in an area where we might expect to encounter other vessels. Occasionally one of us would poke his head out the hatch, take a cursory glance around, then race back to his calculations. It was not what you’d call keeping a proper watch.

I was first to recalculate my position line and plot it on the chart. “Holy shit,” I exclaimed, racing for the hatchway. The haze had lifted a little to reveal, some five hundred yards in front of us, a beach packed with tourists.

And in our wake was a clustered group of small fishing boats. We’d managed to sail right through the middle of them. What a strange sight we must have presented to those fishermen—an apparently unmanned vessel cleaving blithely through their fleet.

*Paul worried that the Russians would drag him back to Hungary--maybe.

 ( Edited by Davina Chapman)