ANDRE AND PIERRE LA BORDE
40 DAYS OF BROTHERHOOD
By Pierre La Borde
Newsday
March 4, 2001
Pages 34 and 35
The oddest thing about a collision at sea is that it should happen at all. When one considers the hundreds of square mile of empty ocean, minuscule is the chance that two vessels in all this vastness should end up trying to occupy the same space at the same time.
This is what happened to us one afternoon on Humming Bird III two days out of Bayona, Spain. There was a gale blowing outside, visibility was hazy and poor, and the seas were about ten feet high. I was in the cabin making ready to have another look outside when I heard voices shouting. Now with Andre, my brother and only crew asleep, shouting can mean one of three things - the wind is playing tricks on your ears; you are going mad; or you are about to experience some sort of trouble.
As I rushed to the steps, there was a loud crunching noise and Humming Bird came to an abrupt stop. Fortunately we were only doing three knots due to having reduced sail. Rushing to the wheel I saw what he had collided with a large steel trawler towing a net. Not content with one blow, Humming Bird then backed up, filled her sails and made good a second charge at the fishermen! Andre was already on deck now easing out the main sail so that we could be away to safety and so we did.
This was a new and almost surreal experience for me. The fishermen were angrily shouting at us and pointing to the side of their thick steel hull as if they had suffered the worst of the damage. In reality, I think we barely scratched their paint, while we had a bent pulpit, a twisted bow plate, crushed woodwork, two mangled anchors, and a badly sagging headstay endangering the security of the mast.
Through all of this there was a dog in the fishing boat snarling and barking vehemently at us. This for me added just right touch of absurdity to the situation, and to top it all off, as we were on the bow surveying the damage and trying to get over the shock of the accident, a school of dolphins appeared beneath us jumping and frolicking away seemingly trying to cheer us up, but then maybe just showing us up for what we really were - sorry looking humans out of our element.
Two nights later after having made temporary repairs, another violent gale blew up and we were almost run over by yet another trawler. Andre was on watch and had called me urgently out of my bunk. Coming on deck, I saw a vessel heading straight at us and not far away.
Andre then made a decision to bear away sharply shouting at me to let loose the mainsheet. Humming Bird barely gybed away in time as the fishing boat surfed past us in the big seas only a few yards away. We don't know if they ever saw us, or cared if they did, and as I watched them careen crazily away I thought loud music, flashing lights and empty rum bottles were all that were needed to make their scene complete.
The very next night the worst weather yet descended upon us - a full blown gale with forty five knot winds and crashing twenty-foot seas. We brought the mainsail down with a struggle, and rolled the canvas awning after one of its wooden supports broke in two. A ship appeared out of the darkness to pass perilously close to our bow in trying to get ahead of us.
Then at about 2.30 in the morning, when everything was really pitch black, all the hanks on the staysail blew out in one go like a giant zipper coming down. Surprisingly, the sail stayed up, filling lopsided to the starboard side.
I awoke Andre to watch me, then clambered forward with harness on, to try and tame this beast. After much difficulty of having to let it fall into the sea, and almost fill with water, I managed to eventually haul it inboard. There came an instant when I had to decide whether to release my harness, so as to better secure the sail from blowing overboard, or remain safely tethered but risk losing the sail. It is moments like this when the sea, the wind and a heaving deck are trying their very best to pitch you over the side that the real meaning crystallises in your mind. It is survival pure and simple.
Nevertheless, I took the chance and unclipped myself and did what I had to do to save the sail. I remember humming "Alouette" through some of this operation, which could only mean that I was beginning to enjoy, in some small way, this grand adventure.
The following day the gale was still raging with a turbulent seething sea but with clear, blue skies. We discovered that part of our self-steering system had been broken clean away by the big waves during the night. This meant that we would have to hand steer for the rest of the voyage. One of our new buckets had also been washed away out of the cockpit. We then made repairs to the staysail, put it up, and turned south.
This had been our fourth gale in six days, all against us, and was essentially our baptism of fire, as this was my own and my brother's first trip together across any ocean without our parents. I had thought once of turning back, or to the nearest port, but that would have seemed like admitting defeat, and we were very determined to make home on our own.
Apart from the aforementioned delights, we had also endured some mal-de-mer, a broken and leaking propane gas line, water continually filling the bilge through the damage to the bow, near freezing temperatures outside, perpetually damp clothes and wet bunks, torn sails, and sheer general tiredness. Being experienced sailors, though, these types of events were to be expected.
Things turned for the better in the following days as the weather became calm, and we did further repairs, cleaned up the boat, and started cooking decent meals of stews, soups, curries and casseroles.
A special bonus was the night sky where Venus reigned brightly in the west, and Jupiter had lodged itself in the constellation, Taurus between Aldebaraan and the Pleiades, with Saturn just a few degrees away. The moon became full on December 10, and gave spectacular orange and yellow moonrises and moonsets.
On Monday 11, my thoughts turned to home, as it was election day and I wondered which of the pretenders would be occupying the throne at the end of it all. I didn't hear any results on BBC radio the next day, but three weeks later did hear a story of controversial appointments to the senate and court action over the election results. Home, sweet home I thought - the Land of Bacchanal.
We had originally intended to stop at the Canary Islands to replenish stocks and to sightsee, for I had never visited them before. We were also to meet Ricardo Alayon, an old friend of my father's who had sailed to Trinidad some thirty years before, and who had been expecting us to visit with him. As we sailed down the west coast of Tenerife, I noticed colonies of tall commercial wind generators. Their long, slow revolving propellors looked like giant arms beckoning us inwards. As I had just read a book on Ulysses, I imagined them to be the sirens of Greek mythology calling us to have a rest and a good steak and some fine wine.
Like Ulysses we did not stop, for with the damaged bow we would not have been able to anchor properly. The engine also would not start, but I later traced that to a broken wire terminal. Also we were already set in our rhythm of watches and were anxious to come home, so on we continued as I looked longingly at the mountains before me.
In the days leading up to Christmas, we were plagued by light breezes or none at all. Puffy cumulus clouds would appear, and grey ominous stratocumulus would glide over, but nothing substantial blew. Aeolus delighted in playing tricks.
Christmas morning found me sixty-five feet up in the air. A week earlier we had accidentally lost a jib halyard up the mast, and there was only one way to retrieve it. Although it was a calm morning, there was still a sea swell, so at that height I was being tossed at least ten feet from side to side.
While it was exhilarating at first, I soon began to feel ill and so abandoned an attempt to remove a broken antenna, and asked Andre to quickly let me down. He had just baked some fresh bread in our stove-top biscuit tin oven, and that with a little butter proved to lift my spirits.
After a short nap and then having to change two dirty fuel filters on the engine, we had a Christmas lunch of stewed tinned port, rice, Spanish wine and marzipan for dessert.
A couple of days later, the real easterly trade winds came through, and I saw the first flying fish for the voyage. To commemorate this I rigged up a new fishing line with our old pink squid lure and set it out. The previous line had been taken a few days earlier with hook and sinker by a fish of unknown size. The very next afternoon, I landed a shimmering, golden young mahi-mahi of about seven pounds and three feet long. For the next two days we feasted on that delicious tender meat with Andre's fried bake, mashed potatoes, olives, and of course more wine.
The official start to the Third Millennium caught me relieving Andre of his watch at midnight. As I took the helm, I saw Jupiter shining brightly ahead, and inevitably started humming 'Also Sprach Zarathustra' from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Black Monolith, mankind needs you now, I mused.
I did my shift, slept three hours, and came back up to watch the first sunrise of he twenty-first century. The sky was clear and the breeze strong. Although I am of a secular nature, I was once an avid reader of Zen Buddhism, and I immediately resolved to compose something resembling haiku poetry but with too many syllables. It went:
The first dawn dispels the dark,
Insistent winds urge us on;
Ocean waters anoint my head while the flying fish abound.
A flying fish ha landed on deck one evening, and I heard him beating about frantically. Being too small for a meal, I threw him back into the sea to fly another day.
I sighted Tobago at 2.29 pm on Tuesday January 9. Passing down the west coast at night, we saw they were having electricity problems, so that the island looked like a huge Christmas tree with hundreds of blinking lights.
The breeze was very light on the last day, and as we motored towards the Boca, I reflected on what we had just done. We had traveled 3,700 miles non-stop from Spain in forty days. We were lucky to be in good shape considering our trials of that first week. Things could have been much worse. I had much to thank my brother, Andre, for, especially his seamanship abilities, his culinary skills and his companionship.
As any long-distance traveler knows, the end of any voyage often brings mixed emotions. There is the thrill of coming home, the relief of it all being over, and the sadness of not knowing if or when you may do it again. But as we made the approach to our berth at Humming Bird Marine, we saw our father look at us in surprise from the Voyager's Patio, and we looked forward to the telling of our adventures and sipping a cold beer.
Pierre and Andre La Borde are the sons of internationally famous seafarers
Harold and Kwailan La Borde who made this journey across the Atlantic on their own adventure.