June 2024
By Don Street
For decades, prior to reliable weather forecasting, skippers delivering yachts in the fall from the U.S. East Coast to the Caribbean relied on a narrow weather window. Basically you had a month between the end of the traditional hurricane season in October and the gales that swept the northern half of the coast in December. In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, smart skippers seldom made two fall deliveries for the above reason. That said, in 1962, because I owed someone a big favor, I agreed to do just that: deliver two yachts to the British Virgin Islands in the span of a month.
On October 8 my late wife Marilyn and I picked up Catalina, a 1938 Casey-built ketch, in South Norwalk, Connecticut. An early season snow storm had left eight inches of snow on Catalina’s deck, but there was a great big Shipmate coal stove below, so I had the yard buy 50 pounds of good, hard Pennsylvania anthracite blue coal. We lit the stove and kept it running until we arrived in Morehead City, North Carolina, where I left the boat and jumped aboard Antilles, a 46-foot, Sparkman & Stephens-designed wooden ketch, as navigator. We had a fast trip doing 960 miles in the first five days, but then the wind died and we sailed or motor sailed to St. Thomas. Total time about nine days.
I immediately flew back to the States where I met the crew that I had lined up for the Catalina delivery. As I said, in those days there were no weather routers or reliable weather reports specifically for yachts, so for five mornings at 0200 I called the control tower at Norfolk International Airport in Virginia. This was a time when no flights were coming in or out. The man on duty was very happy to talk to me about our trip, and give me an unofficial weather report. On the fifth day he said it looked good, so we left.
The prognosis for the first 48 hours was positive. We followed the old sailing directions, “east-southeast until the butter melts, then head south.” On the evening of the second night one of the watches reported that there was a black cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon. We immediately doused the mizzen, dropped the jib and reefed the main. The wind was increasing but it was right up our backsides, so we were happy. Eventually the wind built to the point that we could no longer carry the main, so we furled it and stormed along under staysail alone. I don’t know how hard it blew, but the waves were big enough so that when we surfed down them the boat’s 40-hp gasoline engine turned over against the compression of the prop being dragged through the water!
Catalina was well-designed, with a full keel, so we had no trouble steering her. But at the end of a big surfing run she’d stick her nose into the back of the wave ahead of us, and water would rush the length of the deck into the cockpit. She had an adequate bridge deck, and her wash boards were in place, but poorly sealed foot-locker doors in the sides of the cockpit allowed water to pour below. Each time this happened the bilge would fill to the floorboards. One of the watch below would then crawl out of his bunk and work the handle of the big brass bilge pump.
This worked fine until the boat took a bad roll. The pump handle was in the up position, and one of the crew fell against the handle and bent the shaft. End of pump. Luckily I discovered that a half-gallon coffee pot was narrow enough to fit down into the bilge. Catalina’s galley sink was centerline in the boat, and the drain in it was at least two inches. Each time the bilge filled up one of the crew would bail like mad with the coffee pot for 20 minutes and then go back to his bunk.
This lasted about 36 hours. Then the wind started to ease and we added sail. Everything was soaked. All my clothes had been packed in plastic bags, so I pulled out my nice dry clothes while the crew suffered with their wet or damp clothes. Soon the wind died completely. No problem, as we had plenty of fuel thanks to six, five-gallon cans of gasoline we’d lashed on deck. Plastic Jerry cans did not come on the market until the ’80s. Prior to that, you stopped at petrol stations where they’d give you the five-gallon metal cans their motor oil came in. They were happy to have someone take them. We had done a good job lashing cans on deck, as none of them had gone missing in the storm.
After powering for about five hours, the engine overheated. An investigation revealed that the water pump had packed up, and we had no spare impellers. The engine was salt-water cooled, so I did some thinking and eventually rigged up a gravity water pump. I ran a hose from the salt-water intake on the engine to one of our empty gas cans lashed to the mizzen mast. We discovered that if we ran the engine at 1,200 RPMs, cruising at about four knots, the gravity cooling system used a bucket of water about every five minutes. So we stood watches one hour on, three hours off. Catalina didn’t have autopilot but there was enough friction in the steering gear that you could set the helm and readjust it about every 10 minutes. We ran this way for 57 hours.
This was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once or twice a day a plane would fly over, often wiggling its wings indicating that we’d been spotted. We were doing fine, except we were a little behind schedule as I had a charter to pick up in St. Thomas.
However, unbeknownst to me since we didn’t have a working radio, the storm we’d survived had either sunk or crippled the majority of yachts that had got caught in it. Because of this, when the Coast Guard didn’t hear from us, they presumed we’d gone down. It never occurred to them to check with the Navy, which was flying over us every day. So they informed the press that Catalina, skippered by Don Street, was lost with all hands.
Luckily my father spotted the notice in “The New York Times,” the paper he and my mother got at home, and cut it out of the newspaper. He often cut things out of the paper that interested him, so my mother didn’t realize we’d been declared lost and he didn’t tell her. My wife didn’t read “The New York Times,” and anyway, she was confident we’d made it through, telling my father not to worry about my delayed arrival.
We came sailing into St. Thomas. As we sailed alongside the dock, everyone was cheering. The men were handing out beers and slapping us on the back, and girls were kissing me. I asked, “What the hell’s going on!?” At that point they showed us the article that said we were missing at sea and presumed dead.
In January, when I showed up at the New York City boat show, everyone thought they were seeing a ghost. No newspaper had reported that we had arrived safely in St. Thomas. The lessons I learned from this trip: always have backup pumps, and never try to squeeze two trips from the States to the Caribbean in fall without weather-modeling data you trust.
Don Street, who just crossed the bar on April 30 of this year, cruised on his Iolaire, a 46-foot, 1905 engineless yawl for 53 years, chartering, exploring, charting, and writing about the Caribbean and the Atlantic Islands. His first book, in 1966, was “A Cruising Guide to the Lesser Antilles,” regarded as the text that opened up the Eastern Caribbean to cruisers and greased the skids for the bareboat-charter business. Charts and guides for the Caribbean and the North Atlantic islands followed.
